Small society

Something happened last week that brought to mind the Prime Minister’s continued efforts to explain his concept of the “Big Society” .

I was at the small parade of shops a street away from my home when I spotted a young woman, wearing the kind of long skirt favoured by Roma women, standing very close to an elderly man with whom she was deep in conversation. I didn’t think anything of it until I happened to look that way again and realised that I could see banknotes. Sometimes you just know that something isn’t right and as I was in the mood to take notice I walked up to them and asked what was going on.

By this time I was less than two feet away and could also see a substantial gold chain which I automatically grabbed to keep it where it was. I couldn’t tell which direction it was travelling in but in the seconds I had my hand around it I realised that it wasn’t the heavy gold necklace it appeared to be. I know metallised plastic when I handle it. The girl was startled and pulled it away from me but I had reached them in time to see that she had been taking more and more five pound notes from him. Over her shoulder I could see a man and another girl standing a few feet away, clearly worried at my intervention.

Something about the girl I was standing close to threw me, she seemed so frightened. I couldn’t work out exactly what was going on so I backed off and left them to it but by the time I had dealt with my errand I realised that I should have been firmer with her and told her to get lost. It was too late. All those involved had disappeared. I asked a shopkeeper if he had seen anything and was given one of those answers that makes me despair. Yes, some people had been trying to sell fake gold jewellery in the street, especially to pensioners. There was no point telling the police because by the time they arrived they would be gone. That was the mindset of every person I told in the minutes after it happened. When I mentioned it in another shop and said that I thought those involved might be Roma someone asked me what my nationality was. The suggestion was that to point out their ethnicity was to be racist, even though that is the sort of information the police would have asked for.

Looking at it now, days after the event, it occurs to me that what happened in the small space between the three of us brought up some really big issues. That young woman represented centuries of persecution and discrimination. As a citizen of the European Union she is of monetary value to her family in that she can be married off to someone who wants the right to live in the UK and is prepared to pay for a wife. She wouldn’t keep the money she was making by selling jewellery, it would be passed on to someone else, possibly along with any she managed to acquire through the benefits system and was actually entitled to.

The man being conned was clearly a veteran, of an age to have fought the fascists who murdered as many as 600,000 Roma. His reward was to be ignored because no one seemed to have noticed what was happening to him. Perhaps old soldiers really do fade away. The elderly, constant and uncomfortable reminders of what we will become, tend to be left to their own devices these days, their lives characterised by isolation and loneliness, their pensions worth less and less.

And there I was, unable to decide what to do or who to tell. Was it theft and therefore a police matter? Would I be wasting their time? Should I contact Trading Standards? Should I have just had the guts to shout at that young woman and scare her off, aware that she was as much a victim as the man she had targeted? So fearful of doing the wrong thing, of being drawn into something I might lose control of, of being accused of discrimination. My original urge to follow my instinct and intervene drowned in a sea of doubt and fear, undermined by the knowledge that I would probably be on my own with it, that no one else would help. In that small space between a young Roma woman, a veteran of World War Two and a forty something blogger, it was my responsibility to decide whose rights took priority at that moment but I had forgotten how to do it. I made the wrong choice.

It took me some time to realise that personal experience of dealing with the legal system influenced the way I reacted. The despair I felt at hearing the words “no point” came from understanding that those who spoke them were probably right. If the case was proved the pensioner would be unlikely to get his money back and the girl, a pawn in someone else’s game, would find herself in an even worse situation. In the hands of a sharp barrister a statement written in a hurry at the time could make the whole process pointless. If every person I had told about it had at that moment rushed up to deal with those involved we would have been called a mob. I want to make it clear that I do not believe the police are to blame for this, I am sure they are just as frustrated as I am at times.

Mention the “Big Society” and immediate reference is made to volunteering, or to the running of state facilities by charities, or to taking part in local government. That’s when I (and a great many others) switch off. The sad thing is that I think I understand what the Prime Minister is talking about. In some ways it is about being bigger than yourself, “ubuntu“, I am because we are. Have a conscience, give a damn, get your hands dirty. Well, a lot of us do that already. The postman who notices that a vulnerable pensioner is being targeted by scam mail . The neighbour who reports a child’s bruises. We need to make it easier and more socially acceptable to intervene in small ways, and back up those who do so. Somehow we need to develop more confident caring habits because until we do we won‘t be willing or able to move on to the bigger things that we are being asked to take on.

There are plenty of people out there who haven’t waited for someone else to fix a problem for them. There are probably even more who want to do that but are put off by the fear of being told off for doing so. We’ve protected ourselves through legislation to the point where we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, a lack of common sense in relation to child protection and volunteering has made it almost impossible to do something as simple as drive someone else’s children to a football match. At the same time it would be foolish to risk the kind of incident which brought that hard won legislation into force. I suppose those who promote the “Big Society” are asking us to take the risk of being found at fault in the hope that our motives will be understood by the majority, to rediscover self-reliance. It has reached the stage where too many of us believe that we longer have to be conscientious because we’ve paid others to do that for us. It remains to be seen whether we will recover from the atrophy that has developed as a consequence of being so well looked after, leaving some of us unable to think for ourselves.

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Eleanor Roosevelt