Funeral Eulogy – Bill Williamson
Eulogy for Pat McIntyre
Pat was well known. She is remembered as a mother, a wife, a sister and a grandmother. She is remembered as a Labour activist and political campaigner, as a parishioner of St. Joseph’s, a good neighbour, a teacher, a writer and much more. She is remembered by her many friends and leaves them all with many unique memories of their contact with her. It is hard therefore to say anything new or previously unknown about Pat to everyone gathered here today.
I knew Pat as a friend, as a student who I taught for a while – learning much from her in the process – and as a political activist. Like everyone here, I knew she had been unwell but news of her death came as a shock. It is hard to imagine a world without her.
It struck me immediately, however, that her passing – a terrible, negative event – must be turned into something positive. Today, we can all take the first steps in making that happen. We can celebrate her life and think about how to carry forward the values on which she built it in ways that translate into the politics of hope that she lived for.
Chou en Lai, Mao Tse Tung’s comrade was once asked what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution. His reply, given sometime in the early 1970s – almost two hundred years after the event – was that it was too soon to tell. I think we can say the same about the values that gave shape to Pat’s work and thinking. It is too soon to say what impact she had but we all know she represented an ideal of political engagement that inspired many people.
That revolution of 1789 was of world historical importance. It set the fracture lines of global politics that have defined the world we live in today.
Its guiding ideals were liberty, equality and fraternity – which we must now call solidarity – and as Michael Foot once pointed out, these ideals came bundled together. The message is clear: you can’t have any one of them without the other two. Countries that have privileged liberty – like the USA – did so at the expense of equality. Countries that prized equality – like the USSR – did so at great cost to liberty. And there’s no good end to this story, for countries which have prized solidarity have done so to the detriment of both the other two ideals. Nazi Germany valued the solidarity of the German people above all other values. Das Volk – the people – did not include, of course, Jews, gypsies, Slavs, mentally ill or handicapped people and certainly not critics of the regime. In the name of Soviet Communism, Stalin incarcerated and killed off millions of ordinary Russians in the gulags.
In the world today, there are still strong echoes of these distorted, exclusivist and always violent views of solidarity. The slogan of the current right-wing group in Germany – Alternative fur Deutschland – is: ‘Wir Sind Das Volk’, ‘We are the People.’ The National Front in France with its sister parties in Holland, Austria, Denmark and the UK, campaigns against immigrants and in the USA there are millions of angry, white Americans who think their enemies are liberals, gay people, black people, Muslims and poor people who will not work hard. They are fed on a diet of fear and resentment and can be easily provoked into strong feelings of hate for whatever ‘other’ riles them the most. Behind them, of course, there is a much more sinister force of people with power who control the resources of mass communication and shape the lives of millions for their own ends.
Pat fits into this sad tale because she knew it well and she was determined to challenge it. She discovered that she needed to understand it in order to build a better world. As a child in Stockton she learned about poverty and poor housing. As her mother’s army allowance was reduced as soon as her husband was killed near Dunkirk, and couldn’t afford Pat’s school uniform, she was made acutely aware of the injustice that compounds deprivation. As a 13-year old schoolgirl in Middlesbrough she was told off by the Head Teacher for preaching communism on the bus going to school. All she had done was to explain to a friend that, as they advanced through China in the Civil War, Mao-Tse Tung’s communists had organized schools to help peasants learn to read and write. And wasn’t that a good idea? The Head explained that she had spies on the bus who had reported this heresy.
In stories like this we can see the seeds that grew in Pat’s imagination into political values and campaign plans to change the circumstances that damaged people’s lives.
She left school aged 17yrs to work in ICI – a job she hated – but as a thoughtful young person growing up in post-war Britain she engaged with the big political issues of the day, but always from her own unique, human perspective and value base.
Pat’s English sense of solidarity drew on roots deeper than those of the European Enlightenment and communist experiments of the twentieth century. The strongest of them was in a sense of injustice about poverty and inequality – both of which she knew first hand. Pat’s concerns were always with people and not simply or exclusively with ideals. She drew on her religious faith, if not always on the politics or teaching of the Catholic Church. And she was by instinct a democrat because she knew from her reading what the opposite of democracy looked like and she knew too that, given the chance, ordinary people could engage creatively in the political life of their society.
The Britain of Pat’s teenage years during the Attlee government must have strengthened in her the belief that democratically elected governments can build a better world. Lord Beveridge had produced his plan for the Welfare State. He looked ahead to a better Britain but saw five giants blocking the road to reconstruction: Idleness, Want, Squalor, Disease and Ignorance. Full employment, social security, health care, new housing and education could remove them. Just like the three ideals of revolutionary France, these objectives are interlocked. You cannot have any one of them without the other four.
Pat was keenly interested in politics as a way of making people’s lives better, especially the lives of children. That explains her interest in becoming a teacher but also her growing realisation that schooling was not enough to build the kind of fair society she believed in. Ignorance was only one of the giants to be slain.
This period from the late 1940s through the 1960s provided the issues and problems of politics that drove and consolidated Pat’s political imagination. It is also the period during which she took up with Vin who, as we all know, had similar values and ideals! The issues that mattered to them both were those that Beveridge had not dealt with. They concerned international politics, especially the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Pat was an early supporter of CND and the campaign against nuclear weapons continued for her alongside other campaigns well into the 1980s to oppose the siting of American cruise missiles in the UK. Peace Action Durham is one of the lasting legacies of her and Vin’s work on this front.
She knew, even if she didn’t put it this way, that Beveridge had only given the five giants a bloody nose. He hadn’t killed them off. In fact, we have all underestimated how clever they were. We did not realise that there were others and that they all could metamorphose into new manifestations. These included racism, misogyny, underdevelopment and apathy and indifference. Before it was properly named there was homophobia. Each drew nourishment from an unequal, materialistic society and a dysfunctional international order that had not brought the peace that millions of people – just like her father – had died for.
If her children ever get round to writing a biography of Pat, these years will figure prominently to describe her as a mother. We only need to note that we all learn a lot from our children and that they test our values to the limit but in ways that sharpen them up.
Pat did not retreat into home-centred domestic bliss. She carried on with her politics. There were battles to be fought over South African apartheid, the Pinochet coup d’état in Chile, and about the blighting of Palestinian human rights after the Six Day War that led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Then there was the suppression of a democratic revolution in Nicaragua to oppose. There were battles, too, within the Labour Party to define a stronger socialist agenda and to make its policy development much more democratic and open.
In her forties and with her efforts to learn more about her world, she went back to college to study social science and this led later to her PhD based on her study of the role of women in the 1985 miners’ strike. This was not a piece of disinterested scholarship. It was a project driven by Pat’s values and her activism as a campaigner.
Andrew used an expression that captured what was driving all this. He told me that it was ‘endless empathy’. Vin added that it was love and a concern for the welfare of other people, whatever their colour, creed or class. Andrew went on to tell the story of how one day, at a Middlesbrough match – attendance at which exemplified Pat’s concern for the underdog! – news came through that Sunderland had lost their match. The crowd shouted with glee but Pat insisted they should think about the poor Sunderland fans who would be so disappointed.
Pat liked people, children especially, and felt acutely their needs. Recent television images of children in Syria or on boats in the Mediterranean were a kind of torture to her. Typically, as was the case during the build up to the war in Iraq in 2003, her concern was pragmatic: what can we do about it? In the Iraq case, she and Vin organized a web page that went viral to demand of the warmongers that they explain how they would avoid civilian deaths.
It did not stop the war and that left Pat with a new challenge, especially within the Labour Party: how to campaign more effectively for policies that will lead to a Labour government that is successful, democratic, focused on fairness and justice and works hard for human rights and a peaceful international order.
Such a party cannot just appeal to the now hallowed centre ground of public opinion. That way, as successive Labour governments have discovered, does not challenge the status quo; it sustains it. A better society cannot be built on the values and aspirations that drive this one. A society fit for human beings to flourish in had to be imagined and discovered through the kind of civic engagement only democratic debate can guarantee.
The election of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership excited her and she was really pleased to be the oldest member of the local Momentum group and to be listened to by its young and admirably radical young members.
Throughout the years of her illnesses, she did not stop her political work. She blogged. She wrote letters, speaking the truth to power. She joined demos and attended meetings and demonstrations. She knew that there were still giants blocking the path to a better world. New ones have appeared: religious fanaticism, new forms of inequality and hopelessness related to the ruthlessness, anonymity, greed and austerity of globalized capitalism.
These are all abstract words but for Pat – and this surely is her message to us – is that they can all be translated into the unmet human needs of millions whose lives are part of ours.
It is typical of her that her choice of a charity that we might contribute to in her memory is Medicins Sans Frontieres. Its work to meet health needs in the world’s worst situations of war and famine is a fine symbol of practical, humane and international solidarity – the values that guided Pat’s whole political life.
We have to find better ways in the politics of this country to give expression to the endless empathy, which is Pat’s take on the meaning of solidarity. Get that right and we’ll slay the giants and their modern reincarnations for good.
Two literary thoughts and a political comment on the Labour Party on which to end for Pat was a great reader and had a vivid imagination. The Labour Party was, of course, a lifetime commitment with all its failures, deceptions and compromises.
Firstly, the literary comment: the epigram at the beginning of E.M. Forster’s novel, Howards End, is ‘only connect’. It means connect the prose to the passion, the self to the other; it is an injunction to build bridges across the class divide and its stilted relationships to nurture the richer human lives everyone deserves and is capable of. Pat would have understood that better than most; she could connect with people.
Secondly, in Andre Malraux’ novel, Days of Hope, his account of his experiences during the Spanish Civil war (in a country Pat loved), a fighter, a man from a poor background, explains to Malraux, his captain, that people like him don’t really know about ordinary lives. But those’ bellyaching Frenchies’ who went on about liberty, equality and fraternity did. They knew, he explained, that the opposite of the humiliation people like him experienced was not equality, but solidarity. Pat would have agreed with that, too for a decent human life required more than money; it demands friendship, dignity, understanding, love and belonging.
The political comment is about the Labour Party and comes from R.H. Tawney in his great book, Equality, written in 1931. Under the dark shadows of economic crisis and fascism, he showed that Labour had to be the party of equality and democracy; that these ideals were not inconsistent but inextricably linked. In pursuit of its convictions it had often been too timid. ‘It soothes the dog with caresses, when it ought to be educating him to know burglars when he sees them, and to fly at their throats,’
He went on: ‘It must treat electors not as voting fodder to be shepherded to a polling station and then allowed to resume their slumbers, but as partners in a common enterprise’ – which in Tawney’s view was the building of a socialist commonwealth.
The work must go on! There are dark shadows over Europe and, indeed, the world. Knowing what happened in the years after Tawney’s book first appeared, we cannot afford to be complacent about the future or timid in our responses to the global threats we face.
That’s a good point on which to end. It signals a way forward to discover together a new kind of politics which is what Pat would have expected us to do.
At times like this it would be normal and expected for someone like me who has just given a speech to urge us all to raise a glass to the memory of the person whose life we have been recalling. Pat’s family don’t want that. They’re not opposed to drinking in her memory but prefer singing. There’s always an opportunity to drink but not often, in the words of the Internationale, to ‘unite the world in song’. We’re all invited now to sing in solidarity a hearty version of the Red Flag. That’s what the family would like and that’s what we’ll do!
Prof. Bill Williamson
(with thanks to Vin and Andrew for their help and to the family for the privilege of being asked to give this address)