When Inclusion Becomes Erosion — Revised

 

Inclusion without capacity isn’t compassion — it’s abandonment. When the state hollows out, communities are left to carry tensions they never chose. Here, I have written about how Britain’s outsourced systems are turning welcome into erosion.

I take my cue from Anoosh Chakelian’s 'How Britain Lost Control' New Statesman cover story this week. The article offers a vivid, unsettling portrait of a country where the state has hollowed itself out, outsourcing its responsibilities to private contractors and leaving communities to absorb the consequences. Her reporting from Wigan — of overcrowded HMOs, fraying neighbourhoods, and a government that has lost the capacity to enact its own ideals — illuminates the very dynamics I was trying to name.

This revision is an attempt to place my earlier reflections within that wider, more concrete frame. The erosion I wrote about  in the abstract is visible in the streets, houses, and lives Chakelian describes. To speak of inclusion today is to reckon with the structures that make it possible — or impossible. And so I have rewritten this piece to acknowledge the lived realities that now press upon it. Realities  about which many  folk living comfortable privileged lives for example, continue to parrot abstract banalities.

There are moments when a society’s virtues begin to fray not because they were wrong, but because the institutions meant to hold them have grown too weak to bear their weight. We speak easily of inclusion, hospitality, openness. These are good words, necessary words. But they depend on a moral architecture  and when that architecture weakens, even our best intentions can become sources of strain.

In recent years I have found myself returning to this question: What happens when a society tries to welcome more people than it can meaningfully care for? Not because the newcomers are unwelcome, nor because the locals are unkind, but because the state that once mediated between them has abandoned the business of leadership and lost the ability to understand a nation which daily witnesses a tolerance of injustice and unfairness and which shows a lack of empathy for justified concerns.

Anoosh Chakelian’s recent reporting from Wigan offers hard detail. She describes Darlington Street — a long terrace of redbrick houses, once home to mill workers and miners — now transformed into a symbol of Britain’s political and moral drift. “Every other house has been taken up as an HMO,” one MP tells her, as private contractors pack asylum seekers, ex‑offenders, and the homeless into the cheapest streets they can find. The result is not hostility so much as exhaustion: neighbours who no longer know who lives next door, communities that feel transient, and a quiet sense that something once solid has begun to dissolve.

This is not the fault of those who arrive, nor of those already there. It is the consequence of a state that has outsourced its responsibilities to companies whose duty is not to the common good but to the contract and it's financial drivers. Serco, Mears, Clearsprings — names that hover at the edges of public consciousness — now run vast tracts of what used to be the work of government. They house asylum seekers, manage detention centres, operate speed cameras, run NHS catering, and even maintain the radar stations that watch the skies. They are, as Chakelian puts it, the “shadow state”: indispensable, unaccountable, and largely unseen.

In such a landscape, inclusion becomes a slogan rather than a practice. The state disperses vulnerable people into the cheapest corners of the country, leaving local councils to absorb the consequences without the means to respond. Residents feel policies are being done to them, not with them. Asylum seekers live in houses where toilets go unfixed for a year, where four mattresses are pushed into a single room, where the weekly support payment sometimes fails to arrive and where easy money is to be made by property speculating go-betweens who can buy up properties and sell them on as risk-free investments as a Serco- managed packages. And all the while, the political class speaks of compassion and control as though either were still within its grasp.

This is the erosion which should concern us all: not the erosion of values, but the erosion of the structures that make values possible. A society cannot meaningfully include newcomers if it cannot house its own citizens. It cannot preach neighbourliness while leaving neighbours to negotiate overcrowded streets, rising rents, and the slow unravelling of local trust. It cannot ask communities to carry burdens that the state itself has deliberately laid aside.

The tragedy is that everyone suffers. The asylum seeker who fled war only to find him/herself in a broken house and hostile, suspicious neighbours. The lifelong resident who watches her street change overnight and feels she has no voice in the matter. The council officer who knows what needs to be done but lacks the budget to do it. The politician who promises reform but inherits a system too entangled to unwind.

Inclusion, in such a context, becomes a fragile thing. It requires more than sentiment. It requires capacity — the ability to build homes, to plan coherently for education and employment, to mediate between competing needs, to hold communities together rather than leaving them to fray. 

Without that capacity, inclusion becomes erosion: not because we welcomed too many - though as an island nation losing  vast tracts of productive land for food security or for breathing space away from crowded cityscapes this also can be debated - but because we built too little, planned too little, cared too little at the level where care must be organised.

We need a  recognition that compassion without competence is a brittle virtue.

In the end, the question is not whether we should be an open or a closed country, generous or guarded, welcoming or wary. The deeper question is whether we still possess the civic and moral power to hold the tensions that any real society must carry: the tension between neighbourliness and change, between compassion and capacity, between the needs of those who arrive and the needs of those already here. 

A state that has hollowed itself out cannot hold these tensions; it leaves communities to absorb them alone, and then wonders why resentment grows. If we are to rebuild anything worth calling a common life, we will need a politics that can bear disagreement without panic, and a public realm strong enough to mediate between competing goods.

Our country needs to be governed — not managed, not outsourced, not placated — by a government that understands inclusivity and understands that dissent needs to be part of that inclusivity, not judged by any arbitrary virtue‑signalling standard.

 

 

Bob Dylan, Faith, and the Language of Darkness

I was looking at two songs by Bob Dylan. The first is "Gotta Serve Somebody" from his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, which was one of 3 (I believe) issued during a time when he committed himself to a belief in Jesus Christ, in a charismatic, evangelical environment, and so made that leap of faith known to Bible believing Christians.  

Gotta Serve Somebody https://share.google/qdKHTmB00Y348j3hk

The second is Not Dark Yet from his 1997 album Time Out of Mind. Looking at the lyrics of these two songs, and also understanding from later interviews that Bob Dylan is still a man of faith, I thought I might explore the differences in the language and themes of these two songs, and think about Bob Dylan's development and use of lyrics in those intervening years, which might also reveal changes in his approach to his faith. This is what emerged.

Not Dark Yet https://share.google/npqK5oXCa3ujm09Bx 

Gotta Serve Somebody  is direct, declarative and prophetic. Its message is clear: every human being ultimately serves either God or the devil. The lyric proceeds with the certainty of a sermon. Social distinctions are stripped away, and the listener is confronted with a spiritual choice. The voice is authoritative, reflecting the confidence of a recent convert who believes he has discovered a fundamental truth about existence.

Nearly twenty years later, Not Dark Yet presents a very different voice. Here there is no proclamation, no doctrine, and no explicit reference to Christ or salvation. Instead, the song inhabits a mood of weariness and mortality. The famous refrain, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," evokes aging, decline, and the approach of death. Rather than offering answers, the lyric dwells within a state of consciousness.

Some Christian listeners have viewed this change as evidence of a weakening of faith. From an evangelical perspective, life "in Christ" brings assurance, hope and spiritual renewal. The New Testament proclaims victory over death and despair through Christ's resurrection. If this is so, why should a believer continue to speak in the language of darkness? Why contemplate suffering rather than transcend it through prayer and trust in God?

This objection seems to me to raise an important question, which can only be answered by highlighting the distinction between faith and art. Faith seeks to proclaim truths and offers answers, and indeed lives within them. Art often seeks to describe experience in all its complexity, even when no resolution is immediately apparent.

Going down the route of art, we find for example the literary critic Christopher Ricks who draws attention to the affinities between Not Dark Yet and John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. Both works explore weariness, mortality, and the attraction of release from suffering. Neither arrives at a final conclusion. Instead, each remains suspended between life and death, hope and uncertainty. The power of Dylan's lyric lies partly in this refusal to define precisely what the approaching darkness means.

At the same time, Not Dark Yet can be understood within a religious tradition older and broader than post-Lutheran evangelicalism or the preoccupations of the English Romantic poets. The voices of Job, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms all find expression in darkness, lament and questioning. These texts are not records of unbelief but of faith wrestling with the realities of human existence. They remind us that religious life has always contained both confidence and anguish.

What emerges, is not necessarily a contrast between faith and doubt, but rather a contrast between two modes of spiritual expression. One mode emphasises certainty, redemption and proclamation. The other emphasises contemplation, mystery and the honest acknowledgement of suffering. The first finds its natural home in preaching and testimony. The second often finds its home in poetry and song.

This distinction helps explain why Not Dark Yet continues to resonate with listeners of many beliefs. The song does not argue for a doctrine. It gives shape to a universal human experience. In doing so, it occupies a space shared by biblical wisdom literature, Romantic poetry, and modern existential reflection.

The journey from Gotta Serve Somebody to Not Dark Yet may therefore be understood not as a movement away from spiritual concerns, but as a movement from proclamation to meditation. The 1979 Dylan speaks as a witness. The 1997 Dylan speaks as a poet. One announces a truth; the other explores what it feels like to live in the shadow of mortality.

Whether one views this development as a loss of certainty, a deepening of wisdom, or simply an evolution of artistic voice will depend largely on one's own understanding of faith. Yet the enduring fascination of these songs lies precisely in their ability to sustain a meaningful contemplation, inviting us to consider whether faith abolishes darkness or teaches us how to live within it.

Voyages Through Time: Rose of Nevada

 

Today I caught up with the movie Rose of Nevada.  I came away with that familiar feeling  with movies of this genre,  that a coherent meaning was obscured  from view. As  a consequence it was difficult to find sympathy for the characters and their relationships in each time frame. Without some kind of signpost we find ourselves using much of our mental and emotional resources just to piece together and grasp a narrative. 

I found myself finally able to accept this technique, but by then my feeling was disinterested detachment from character, and I looked more at the surface techniques, including the extraordinary realism around the storm. It is the kind of movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer or Memento, where time slicing is a vital part of the narrative. So, a second viewing becomes more enlightening and the experience becomes richer.

Such  films that fragment time ask us  to do significant intellectual work, but there is usually an emotional anchor that keeps us invested while we solve the puzzle.

 In Memento, it is Leonard's desperate search for meaning; in Oppenheimer, it is Oppenheimer's moral and psychological journey. Even when the chronology is fragmented, the emotional trajectory remains relatively clear.

Rose of Nevada seems less interested in such emotional identification. It works around atmosphere, memory and place. The characters often feel like discrete, disconnected figures in a folk tale or legend rather than fully developed psychological individuals. That may be intentional, but it comes at a cost. We expend  energy simply trying to establish "where" and "when" they are. For me at least, not a lot left over for  empathy.

So, "disinterested detachment" sums up my initial response. Maybe this mirrors the way the film is crafted?  I have learned after viewing (I tend not to read reviews before seeing a movie)  that the movie was shot without sound, and all the sounds – voices as well as all else, were dubbed in afterwards. Oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape, and the fragmented timescales all placed  a layer of distance between me and what was in front of me.

The storm sequence is perhaps the clearest exception to this direction of trvel in the film. Here, narrative uncertainty becomes irrelevant in these isolated action snapshots. The sea, the boat, the weather, the physical peril—these are immediate and comprehensible. Here, the technique adds to  the experience rather than obscuring it. I found these sequences, and the business of catching, gutting and storing the fish,  among the most compelling for exactly that reason.

So yes, a second viewing of Rose of Nevada  is for the best, though I think there is an important distinction with Rose of Nevada compared, say, to a  second viewing of Memento. Here, a second viewing (I haven’t tried it yet) should reveal how meticulously the narrative has been constructed. We expect the  puzzle pieces to click together, because that is the story, and the story lose ambiguity and brings a clarity by its end. With Rose of Nevada, I am not entirely sure that a second viewing would lead to that kind of resolution. Rather, it would just help me to stop worrying about the puzzle and attend to other things: the imagery, the sound design, the symbolism, the sense of Cornwall as a place haunted by its own past. And all that.

So , thinking on awhile, Rose of Nevada  has something in  common with modernist literature than with puzzle-box cinema. For example, reading The Waste Land for a second time – or even umpteen times -  does not necessarily “solve” it; instead, once we are  less anxious about understanding every reference, we begin to notice patterns, echoes and moods. The experience deepens without becoming entirely transparent.

That raises the question of what kind of satisfaction a film owes its audience. I suppose over these years of looking at  traditions around  modernism through art cinema and modernist poetry, we know that ambiguity and uncertainty are watchwords. But for me anyway,  ambiguity works best when there is still something solid to hold onto—character, emotion, theme, image, or story.

So for me,  Rose of Nevada is too ambiguous. It asks  too much of the audience before it has earned an emotional investment. It’s not just me saying  "I didn't understand it."  The film’s  artistic method and  ambitions compete with, rather than support, its human drama.

I will see it again: I am confident my opinion will shift, like those gutted fish on the trawler's deck!