International Blog Action Day - speaking out against Inequality

A break from my usual blog updates, I'm taking part in the International Blog Action Day, an event which aims to unite the world's bloggers by posting on the same day about the same issue; so that awareness can be raised positive action is triggered.  The issue being focussed on this year is Inequality.  This could mean gender inequality, or wage inequality; but there's something that has been weighing on my mind a lot recently, something that applies to my own country as well as many others.

I've supported charities and campaigning groups for almost 15 years now - I was originally moved to do so after reading about how workers in developing countries like Bangladesh, who make products we buy here in the UK at premium prices (like sports trainers), are paid pittance to work long hours in horrendous conditions.  Over the years there have been events like 2005's G8/Live-8 intending to highlight poverty and inequality around the world; but following this there has been an apparent global recession - millions have lost money, jobs and homes, even, as a result, around the world.

However it has not escaped my attention (nor many other people's, for that matter) that during this period the gap between the richest and the poorest has grown ever wider, with the richest individuals controlling more wealth than many countries!  When I first started supporting charities focusing on poverty and inequality, everything seemed to be about other countries where these were most keenly demonstrated.  Yet in recent years these issues are having a negative impact on my own home country, the United Kingdom - something I for one never thought would be the case.

In the UK the gap between the richest and poorest has grown in recent years - despite the government repeatedly telling us that the economy is recovering and living standards are improving, increasing numbers of people are turning to Food Banks because they literally cannot afford to feed their families.  Housing poverty is on the increase, with more people unable to buy a home, or even rent suitable, affordable and decent housing.

In the UK we're always being told of the necessity to drive down the country's economic deficit - whenever anyone tries to point out the negative effect that the current government's austerity measures have had on some of the poorest and most vulnerable in our country, the government keeps reminding us that cuts are necessary.  There are some people in this country as well who try to support the cuts by arguing that a great deal of people on benefits are fraudulently claiming these, and that there is millions and millions of pounds of Tax Payer's money being wasted to benefit fraud.  The same people also like to point out that apparently asylum seekers and immigrants are sponging off the state, taking housing and benefits away from people that need it, and also creating another fraudulent waste of Tax Payer's money.

Such is the impact of these opinions that a recent survey shows the public have adopted this view - that people believe there is far more benefit fraud taking place than there actually is, that more money is spent on benefit fraud than is actually the case, and that there are far more immigrants and asylum seekers in the country than there actually is.

Source:  Britain Furst

Yes, benefit fraud exists, and yes, it does take Tax Payer's money away from where it should be.  However, the reality is that these views are inaccurate.  And yet there are many people still putting these views forward - especially this country's tabloid press, who most fervently bang the 'Benefits Fraud' and 'Sponging Immigrants' line.  These newspapers even go as far as to often demonise the poorest in this country who are dependent on benefits, labelling them 'scroungers'.

But when you look at two figures - the actual figures of benefit paid out (including  pensions, which is about half of the total, disabled and social) are less than the amount of money which is calculated to be LOST in tax that could be paid.  This becomes even more significant when you consider, for example, that the people who own the Daily Mail - notorious for banging the anti-benefits and immigrants line - keep their £Billions in wealth away from the UK tax in off-shore bank accounts.

There are ever growing wealth inequalities in the United Kingdom, but the media is manipulating the public to blame the wrong people - it is the wealthiest that should first and foremost be made to pay their fair share of tax.  It's estimated that the NHS could be funded alone on unpaid tax!  I think the time has come for the people of the UK to stop looking for easy answers - blaming outsiders (immigrants) and the powerless (the poorest) for the problems this country faces, and to start to urge our Politicians to begin to create a fairer, just and more equal country.  Sorting out Tax laws so that the richest pay their fair share is a good start!

Source. Go to this site for a detailed breakdown of benefits payments, the extent of fraud/overpayment, and the cost of tax avoidance.

There are organisations and charities that are campaigning against inequalities in the UK - I urge you to head to their websites, find one of their campaigns/petitions, and add your name to the list that will hopefully put enough pressure on the government to act:

- http://www.shelter.org.uk/

- http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/

- http://www.barnardos.org.uk (campaigns highlighting how pverty & food poverty is affecting children in the UK)

- http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/our-work/poverty-in-the-uk (Oxfam has recently started campaigning on and supporting UK poverty issues, such as Food Banks)

Inequality exists all around the world, and supporting charities like Oxfam, Action Aid, Christian Aid or Save the Children - either through donating or signing one of their petitions - will enable them to work to make things better.

At the start of November I will be raising money for Save the Children, alongside two other charities, by playing at a gig with my friends from High School (we're reforming our band for a one-off charity event).  I chose Save the Children because of their work to support children who have fled conflicts like that in Syria; and also because of their 'No Child Born to Die' campaign, to improve maternity and post-natal care in developing countries.  If you're in the vicinity of Woodbridge, Suffolk, please come along and help us raise money for this, and our other charities.

If you live near Woodbridge, Suffolk, and can make it on 1st November, please come and help us raise money for charity!

This has been a much heavier article than usual - but I hope it has prompted reflection, and even some action from at least one person.  Thanks for reading it!

Update - it's been 18 months, so...

If you want a TL;DR version of this latest instalment of my blog, then basically everything is sort of on hold due to a fairly large change in our life at the moment.  If you want to know the full details, then read on!

As it's 18 months since I started this blog (which means it's 2 1/2 years I have left to achieve these stated goals, aagh!), I thought an update is in order.  As a reminder, here's my 'To Do' list:

1) Write a film script.

2) Write... something else.

3) Improve my career prospects.

4) Buy a house.

Unfortunately, there's not huge progress to report, but I feel there's pretty good reason for this.  It's having an impact on my being able to fulfil the first two things on my 'to do list', has implications for the fourth, and has effectively put a halt on the third item.

Basically, after a few months of hard work supporting my wife in achieving her dream of completing training to become a Health Visitor, we are now 'officially' homeless; the owners of the house we have been renting over the last two years have sold their property and we had to move out at the end of August.  I say we are 'officially' homeless, in so much as we're registered homeless with the local council, but we're actually staying with my dad temporarily (until we get a new home).

You see, after 6 years of renting, and having to move almost as many times in as many years due to landlords either wanting to sell their property or wanting it back, as a family we're getting fed up of this.  And after a misadventure involving living in France, and getting my wife through 5 years of training in order to do her dream job, our coffers are pretty empty.  This writes out getting a mortgage due to the requirement of getting a loan - and as banks are a lot more strict about things like debt, they won't touch us (we've had to get a few credit cards to help support us during my wife's training).

So we have decided to follow the route of applying for a council house.  At the moment there is no small amount of stigma attached to people relying on 'social accommodation' from certain sections of the media (but really, people need to ask themselves when they see a headline demonising people on benefits, what are the tax-avoiding, wealthy owners of the newspaper benefiting from at the expense of the rest of us, which they don't want to have the public's attention drawn to?)  But the reality is, in the current climate, it's not 'jobless scroungers' ((TM)The Daily Mail, etc) that need this type of housing - it is people like my family, who are working in reasonably paid jobs, and yet are still unable to get mortgages, who are now looking at the council house option.

We registered a few months ago when we found out about the imminent sale of our previous rented property, and now we're 'officially' homeless we have a higher priority for a suitable house - however we're still at the vagaries of chance, basically the unknown quantity of when said accommodation becomes available.  Could be weeks, could be months.  In the meantime my Dad has very kindly let us stay with him, while we await rehousing.  But we feel doing this is worth it if only to get the stability of what will effectively be a permanent home (without worry of being given notice to vacate on the whim of a landlord).  It might be that we do decide to save for a deposit and eventually buy a property, so renting from the council at a cheaper rate than the public sector will give us the opportunity to do that.  Or we may just stay with the council.  But either way, the fourth item on my list doesn't seem such a big ask now.

On top of this, our current housing situation is having practical implications for the first two items on my list - basically, I've not had time to progress with these.  We now live about 45 minutes from our home town, so out commute now includes a round trip to get children to school.  As I was doing most of the writing on my film script on my (admittedly short) train commute, as I'm no longer doing that I've not had the opportunity to carry on with that.  Due to having to vacate our former home I've had no time to go to the cinema or write anything for my Film Blog, either.

But it's not all bad news on these counts.  Firstly, I had been working on an outline for the film script (actually, not so much of an outline, but a pretty detailed description of everything that happens in it!) and was very nearly about to start writing the final act and finish this.  It's all there in my head, pretty much, once things have settled down I will be able to sit down and finish this (if not by the end of the year, then certainly by next spring).  Then all I need to do is wrestle that down to a more manageable 2-3 page treatment, and a then an actual screenplay...  Secondly, as we're less busy now we're out of our former home, more cinema trips are on the horizon, which means I'll be back to posting reviews and articles on my Film Blog in the next week or two.

There is still one more item on the list, and obviously with everything else that's been going on I've just not had time to do even think about job hunting or training.  But now my wife has finished her training and won't need any further support with that, I'm in a position to start thinking about any potential training I could do.  I'll spend the next few months giving it some more thought, so watch this space...

Off topic - when it feels like music is keeping you sane...

You might be wondering where the latest update with progress on my in-development film script is; if you do, bless you, you’re very kind.  Work has taken a temporary pause due to everyday life getting so busy I’ve had little time to do anything.  However, better news is that I have been working on an outline (or, in my case, literally describing everything that happens in every scene of the film), which is between two-thirds to three-quarters complete.  When I have finished that I will post details on my Blog.

What 'pressure' looks like, apparently...

In the meantime, as I have suggested, things have been very hectic of late, and there’s been all sorts of work and real life related stresses.  And it looks to continue for the next two months at least – but hey, that’s the light at the end of the tunnel, and though it seems a way off, it’s still there.  Until I (and my family) are out the other end, it’s full pelt at the moment, and I rarely feel like I’ve time to come up for any air.

During this time I’ve noticed that I keep being drawn to the music of two particular bands, and I think that during times of particular duress, music is one of a handful of things which basically keeps me sane.  So I just wanted to highlight the music of the two particular bands that have been keeping me sane in recent months.

Firstly, towards the end of last year and around March of this year, during some times where there were a few pressures in my life, I found myself compulsively listening to two albums by a band called Hammock.  The first is an epic piece of work entitled ‘Departure Songs’ – almost two hours of mostly instrumental post rock/ambient hybrid music.  The song titles would leave you to believe that it’s a pretty bleak album – ‘10,000 Years Won’t Save Your Life’, ‘Let’s Kiss While All the Stars are Falling Down’ – but it’s a beautifully life affirming piece of work, which seems to have an underlying message that every moment of life should be embraced, every opportunity should be grabbed.  I found myself listening to the latter track over and over again – the way it sounds to me is how I imagine jumping out of a plane at great height must feel.

Their other album which I listened to almost as much is their most recent release, ‘Oblivion Hymns’.  Much more ambient than their previous album, it features no percussion, and strings and choirs are brought to the fore.  It contains a particularly striking piece called ‘Then the Quiet Explosion’, which I found myself listening to over and over.

And right now is another time of stress and pressures, and I’ve been listening to the music of Explosions in the Sky almost compulsively.  If you’re a film fan you’ll have heard their work at one time or another, perhaps without even realising – their tracks have been used in various films and trailers, most prominently on the ‘Friday Night Lights’ soundtrack.  They rightly have a tremendous fan base and reputation amongst music fans, as their instrumental post-rock has symphonic qualities, and their guitar riffs an almost lyrical, very expressive quality.  They have several albums behind them, they’re probably best known for ‘The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place’, and it is a wonderful album.  My favourite piece from it is this one, ‘The Only Moment We Were Alone’, which feels like it walks a tightrope between euphoria and heartbreak.  Perhaps I keep listening to it so much of late because I’m feeling I could go either way at any moment…

I’ll leave you with this track of theirs, form their most recent album ‘Take Care, Take Care, Take Care’.  Like the last track, it shares a similar sentiment of simultaneous joy and sorrow, but is in its own right a gorgeous piece of music.  This music has given me a bit of solace and comfort in recent months; I suppose it connects with unspoken feelings and thoughts, acknowledging the hopes and fears that are always at the back of my mind during times of pressure.  It might not affect other people in the same way, but I am certain that at some point or other, everyone has felt there has been a favourite band whose music has helped them through a difficult time.  Right now these bands have been doing this for me, and I’m very grateful.

6 months??!? I better post an update then...

It's now been a year since I started this blog, and it's fair to say that progress to achieve my ambitions before I turn 40 is a bit, well, non-existent, if I'm honest.  Actually, that's not entirely true - I am still chipping away at the film script, but progress is really, really slow.  Like, measured in glacial epochs slow.  But!!! I have reasons for this.  So here are several legitimate* reasons why I have not got very far writing the script for 'The Harrowed Man':

1) I bought a Tablet PC to work on it during my daily commute - but then my commuting pattern changed...

I don't want to outright blame my wife, but it kind of is her fault: she recently changed jobs and as she works in the same town as me I get a lift in, rather than the train.  This means that I now only get a train four days out of every fortnight.  I do use the time, but as my train journey is only just over 10 minutes I'm only able to do a few lines each journey.  Still, every little helps...

2) We got addicted to 'Breaking Bad'...

Actually, this isn't much of an excuse as we'd already started watching this before I started working on 'The Harrowed Man'; however we recently got on to Season 4, and it sort of snow-balled from there.  Anyone who's watched this series will tell you - aside from it being absolutely brilliant - that it's pretty compulsive viewing from the end of Season 3 onwards, right through to the finale.  But watching this has kept my attention away from my script, which hasn't helped my writing process is really slow anyway...

3) My creative process would make a sloth look like it's got ADHD...

It's not so much that there's no motivation (alright, sometimes that IS an issue!), but just that my ideas don't develop when I'm forcing them.  Let me employ a gardening analogy (probably incorrectly): it's like tending to a plant which not only grows slowly, but flowers and produces fruit after a long period of time.  So each scene is like a vine or branch of this plant, and each time I go back and think about it, a new detail will come to mind - like it's very slowly developing from a bud in to whatever kind of flower it's going to be when it finally blooms.  Or something like that.  To counter this, I'm now basically writing the outline as linear piece, before I truncate it down to become a treatment, and then finally a script.

4) I've been writing my Film Blog... quite a lot actually

I know that one of my other ambitions was to write something else - a blog about movies wasn't quite what I had in mind!  I do have other ideas of what I could write, I just need to settle on one particular thing to write.  However, if nothing comes of any of these other concepts at least I can use the Blog to say I've fulfilled that ambition!  The other side of that however is the time and headspace this requires, which takes from that which could be spent on the script.  I've managed to separate the two things though, so I'm able to be strict about when I can work on the script, and when I can write an entry for the Blog.

Anyway, despite all this, I'm still committed to getting this script done - just being very slow about it.  And as for the other ambitions - well plans are afoot.  But those are long term things which may take a year or two to come to fruition, so watch this space...

I apologise for the lack of pictures on this latest blog post.  To compensate, here's a picture of a sloth, seeing as I mentioned one earlier.  He looks a friendly fellow, doesn't he?

* Actually, I think they're more like excuses than legitimate reasons...