Political Correctness, Homeless, Sinful Artists

                                        Modern Thinking

Giles Coren has a house in Gloucestershire which he rents out and everything was fine until the letting agents got in touch with him saying that some recent guests had been “made to feel uncomfortable” by some of the interior décor.

“Oh, dear. Was it the stuffed duck? The old British naval flag in the dining room? The John and Yoko album in the stack of old records by the gramophone, where they have no clothes on and are quite shockingly hairy?

Nope. It was the golliwogs. Six tiny Robertsons’ marmalade statuettes each playing a musical instrument…Very embarrassing. Not okay. David Lammy will be on Twitter about it for weeks. I said I would apologise personally. Except it wasn’t just the golliwogs.

“Even more upsetting,” the agents told me, “was the antisemitic caricature in the study.”

'An Israelite Indeed', William Etty (1787-1849)

Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

Eh?

“The stereotypical old Jewish man with hooked nose and a baby in his arms and some sort of devil animal at his feet.”

“That’s me and my dad and our cat, Percy, drawn by the American cartoonist Arnold Roth as a gift to my parents when I was born in 1969.”

“Well the client thought it looked antisemitic.”

“It’s a deeply loving cartoon by a Jew of two Jews and a cat! Look, I tell you what. The golliwogs go on the fire immediately but the Jew stays unless there is a second complaint. Deal?”

“Okay. Deal.”

“Great,” I said, and put the phone down. The Gloucestershire Oskar Schindler.”

(The Times, 2019)

Why did you burn the golliwogs after just one complaint? Shame on you.

The Homeless

Homeless, Hugh Oswald Blaker (1873-1836) Photo Credit: Worthing Museum and Art Gallery [CC BY-ND]

Rising homelessness is an issue that is met with equal measures of frustration and compassion by the British public. Frustration because there seems to be no end in sight to this upward trend, and compassion because there is a real desire to help.

We’ve seen the latter in the capital, with Londoners rallying behind Mayor Khan’s efforts to tackle rough sleeping. They’ve volunteered in their thousands for outreach centres. Volunteers generosity cannot be understated and it needs to be matched and exceeded by central government willing to deliver the sea change required to eradicate homelessness once and for all.

(Tom Copley, The i, 2019)

Fine words but what about the practicalities? Can we, in the UK, learn any lessons here from Finland? We rarely hear about how other countries are trying to solve similar problems.

Homeless Housing Policy in Finland

…When the policy was being devised just over a decade ago, the four people who came up with what is now widely known as the Housing First principle – a social scientist, a doctor, a politician and a bishop – called their report Nimi Ovessa (Your Name on the Door).

“It was clear to everyone the old system wasn’t working: we needed radical change,” says Juha Kaakinen, the working group’s secretary and first programme leader, who now runs the Y-Foundation, developing supported and affordable housing.

“We had to get rid of the night shelters and short-term hostels… everyone could see they were not getting people out of homelessness.”

As in many countries, homelessness in Finland had long been tackled using a staircase model: you were supposed to move through different stages of temporary accommodation as you got your life back on track, with an apartment as the ultimate reward.

“We decided to make the housing unconditional,” says Kaakinen. “To say: ‘Look, you don’t need to solve your problems before you get a home. Instead, a home should be the secure foundation that makes it easier to solve your problems.”

With state, municipal and NGO backing, flats were bought, blocks built and shelters converted into permanent homes – among them the Rukkila hostel in the Helsinki suburb of Malminkartano…

Housing First’s early goal was to create 2,500 new homes. It has created 3,500. Since its launch in 2008, the number of long-term homeless people in Finland has fallen by more than 35%. Rough sleeping has been all but eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains.

…But Housing First is not just about housing. “Services have been crucial,” says Helsinki’s mayor Jan Vapaavuori, who was housing minister when the scheme was launched.

“Many long-term homeless people have addictions, mental health issues, medical conditions that need continuing care. The support has to be there.”

At Rukkila, seven staff support 21 tenants. Saara Haapa, an assistant manager, says the work ranges from practical help navigating bureaucracy and getting education, training and work placements to activities including games, visits and learning – or re-learning – basic life skills such as cleaning and cooking.

…Finland has not entirely solved homelessness…But public sector planning and collective effort have helped ensure that as a way to reduce long-term homelessness Housing First is a proven success.

(The Guardian, 2019)


Sinful Artists

Madonna and Child, 

Eric Gill (1882-1940)

Photo Credit: Glastonbury Abbey [CC BY-NC]

…In Leaving Neverland, Dan Read’s new documentary about the singer Michael Jackson’s relationship with young boys…The question is: what do we do with the knowledge? The fashion today is to dissociate not just from the person of the artist but from the art itself.

…Does the person nullify the art? ...Can I appreciate the poetry of Ezra Pound and forgive the work for the poet’s attachment to facism?

…Then there are the racists and anti-Semites…Richard Wagner…TS Eliot and Hilaire Belloc.

…Much closer to the case of Michael Jackson was that of Eric Gill, one of Britain’s finest sculptors…A deeply spiritual man, Gill was admired in uncomplicated fashion until a biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, discovered diaries that detailed his incestuous relationships with his young daughters. Relationships? Actually, we’d now call it rape.

…If there is to be a rule, then mine would be to condemn the sin but to applaud the art.

(David Aaronovitch, The Times, 2019)

                Much more in an interesting and thought-provoking article.

*Sir, David Aaronovitch is surely right (“We can’t airbrush over every sinful artist”, Comment, Mar7). Quality resides in the singing not the singer; in the writing, not the writer; in the composition, not the composer; and in the acting not the actor.

By the same token it surely makes no sense for charitable and other institutions to reject or return donations from dubious sources. The quality of the donation resides in the good it can do, not in the probity of the donor.

(Richard Overton, Bridgewater, Somerset, The Times, 2019)