Phil Hamlyn Williams

By Phil Hamlyn Williams pwilliams

I can’t remember the last time I wanted a year to end as much as I do this one.

It began for me in Lesvos, where I saw at first hand the plight of refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. They ceased to be numbers and became people, just like you and me. We provided dry clothes to those desperate enough to make the dangerous sea crossing from Turkey.

Those refugees and those who arrived before and since journeyed on to the Greek mainland and many thousands, including an estimated 40% who are children, are stuck there in tented camps in temperatures that are now falling to 3 degrees at night

At the end of the year we saw a large digital counter at the harbour front in Barcelona. This counter records the number of refugees who have drowned crossing to what they hoped was safety. In November it stood at 4,655; it will have risen since.

That number is but a tiny fraction of those Syrians who have died at the hands of their government, their Russian allies or the so called Islamic State.

That should be more than enough for a bad year, but you can add those caught in the cross fire in the Yemen. This list just grows.

So, what else? A couple of exercises in democracy, here in June and in the USA in November. Their result is, as they say, the result. What concerns me is the wave of hate that they unleashed.

It seemed that suddenly the racism and xenophobia, that we thought was on its way out, re-emerged with a vengeance. It seemed that suddenly people had permission to say what ever came into their head. Like my mum when she had dementia, only they haven’t.

Politicians receive hate mail in the social media. Judges, whose job it is simply to say what the law is, are threatened in daily newspapers. Once upon a time, that would have been contempt of court. Language on programmes like Question Time beggars belief.

Sadly there is yet more. Food banks. In the 21st century in one of the richest countries in the world, surely we should be more civilised than forcing significant numbers of people to rely on food banks.

Rough sleeping. There are more people than for many years who have no home. It is said that each of us is only two steps away from the streets. Well far too many people are many fewer than that.

What sort of a society have we become? Is this the sort of a society we want to be?

I caught a glimpse of that, the sort of society I want to be, last weekend. All sorts of people were in a vacant unit in the Waterside centre wapping Christmas presents for families in need. What I say all sorts of people, I mean pensioners, teenagers, mums and dads with their children. The same is true of those running the food banks, of those helping those without homes. Those young people volunteering in the refugee camps in northern Greece. Those standing up against hate.

So, does this balance out the bad bits?

Phil Hamlyn Williams is a writer and Chair of Trustees at Lincoln Drill Hall and the Lincoln Book Festival. He was Chief Executive of Lincoln Cathedral. He spent twenty five years in the accounting profession with ten years as a partner in Price Waterhouse. He then worked in management and finance in the charity sector.

By Phil Hamlyn Williams pwilliams

Magna Carta has been taken to the heart of freedom loving people across the globe. Most recently the UK Supreme Court decided in favour of the publication of letters by Prince Charles written to ministers. Whatever the merits of the letters themselves, it was a timely reminder that no one is above the law.

This is the essence of what Magna Carta has come to be about. It seeks to control the way in which power is exercised by those who hold it.

I recently read a wonderful little book by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on St Mark’s gospel, in which he argues that Jesus was the victim of abused power.

Good Friday is the day the Christian Church remembers the execution of Jesus at the hands of the Roman authorities. He was a man who could have so easily stirred up trouble and so history sees Pilate, the Roman governor, as pragmatically justified in what he did.

Take a step back though, and power is there abused time after time. A man is ratted on by one of his mates who had been put up to it by envious men in authority.

Once in the hands of these men, it is the world gone mad. The accusers can’t even lie consistently. The man is caught in a nightmare; the judge is the accuser and so the only certainty is that he will be condemned.

I remember a TV play some years ago with the wonderful Richard Griffiths playing William Beausire a British stockbroker with dual British and Chilean nationality, abducted while in transit in Buenos Aires airport in November 1974.

He is taken to a torture centre in Chile and never seen since. He was among the list of people deemed disappeared under the Pinochet regime. He was an innocent bystander. Today this is the pattern of life for many powerless people in countries like Mexico; they are at the mercy of the gangs who weald power.

Back to the events in Jerusalem two millennia ago, the religious authorities hand the man over to the secular governor who finds himself caught in the erie space between right and wrong.

He seems to know that the man is innocent of any offence, but he is equally clear that forces are bubbling way underneath the surface sufficiently vigorously for him to be certain of trouble. He is desperate to be let of the hook, to be saved from choosing between right and chaos.

He hands the man, or rather his destiny, to the crowd who are up for anything having been whipped into a frenzy by the religious men. The crowd demands crucifixion. The man is doomed. The crowd disperse.

False accusation, men giving way to pressure, the innocent caught in a world of madness where right has been blown out of the window; is this an inevitable part of being human? It works its way up from a seemingly unimportant abuse perhaps in the workplace to those falsely accused and executed. It matters.

Phil Hamlyn Williams is a writer and Chair of Trustees at Lincoln Drill Hall and the Lincoln Book Festival. He was Chief Executive of Lincoln Cathedral. He spent twenty five years in the accounting profession with ten years as a partner in Price Waterhouse. He then worked in management and finance in the charity sector.