Britain at a standstill over Brexit as funeral homes milk poor relatives
What you need to know:
It is a time when people are at their most vulnerable – and don’t the funeral firms know it!
Charges of up to £5,000 for arranging the final rites for a loved one are not uncommon, as mourning families have learned to their cost.
A study for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau in Scotland last year found that more and more people were getting into debt over funeral expenses.
When Theresa May took over as prime minister from David Cameron in 2016, she painted this shocking picture of Britain: “If you are born poor, you will die nine years earlier than others; if you are black, you will be treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white; if you are a woman you will earn less than a man; if you are young, you will find it harder than ever to own your own home.”
POLITICAL CRISIS
Mrs May has now announced her resignation and it would only be an optimist who would suggest any progress was made in the intervening three years to correct the burning injustices she set out then. Indeed, with Parliament and the civil service obsessed by Brexit, it is unlikely such problems have even been looked at.
Britain has been at a standstill since Mr Cameron put our continued membership of the European Union to a national referendum. By a narrow majority, the decision was to quit. Cameron resigned and Mrs May took over. Now, having failed to persuade MPs to agree on the terms of departure from Europe, she has given up and a successor is to be chosen from her Conservative party.
To say the nation is angry with its MPs is an understatement. In an election for representatives to the EU (yes, bizarrely, we still have to take part), the two leading parties, the ruling Conservatives and opposition Labour, both received a sound drubbing. Previous no-hopers like the Lib Dems and the Green party soared above them in many individual polls.
The plain truth is that whoever receives the poisoned chalice of PM will face exactly the same problems that defeated Mrs May and if MPs maintain their refusal to compromise, the political crisis the country faces can only worsen.
The injustices which Mrs May outlined back in 2016 will still be there, in addition to the global problems of climate change, mass migration and the rise of far-right nationalism, which our nation ignores at its peril.
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It is a time when people are at their most vulnerable – and don’t the funeral firms know it! Charges of up to £5,000 for arranging the final rites for a loved one are not uncommon, as mourning families have learned to their cost.
A study for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau in Scotland last year found that more and more people were getting into debt over funeral expenses.
A woman named Jo told a national newspaper that she asked for a low-cost funeral for the cremation of her partner’s father, but was still charged £4,000. She examined some of the items: £150 for flowers which a florist would likely sell for £40; “service stationery” costing £76, consisting of 20 copies of the funeral hymn; £66 for an aluminium urn for the ashes – who knows the real costs but surely not £66?
The biggest charge was £2,865 for storing the body, providing the cheapest coffin, driving it to the crematorium and paying four men in black suits to carry it inside.
Now the government has acted. Companies which use high-pressure or bullying tactics may in future face fines and criminal charges. Providers breaching the new regulations could also have their authorisation revoked.
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Zanzibar-born Lubaina Himid became the first black woman to win the Turner prize, the leading honour in the British art world, when she triumphed in 2017. But last week she disclosed that it was a “bittersweet” moment after many years in which black women were overlooked.
Speaking on the popular BBC radio programme, Desert Island Discs, Ms Himid said that at the start of her career, black women artists “were not on television or in the newspapers and the notion of black people being artists was completely alien to the British art world.
“Someone actually said to me, ‘Black people don’t make art.’”
Ms Himid is professor of contemporary art at Central Lancashire University. Her work focusses on colonial history, racism and institutional invisibility.
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The British seem to be an unusually absent-minded nation if the number of items left behind in Uber taxis is anything to go by.
The most commonly forgotten articles are mobile phones, wallets, purses and keys. But the following objects have also been discovered by drivers on passenger seats: A fake skull, a smoke machine, a painting of the Last Supper, five toilet rolls, a cat and 45 pieces of fried chicken.
That said, we are not the most forgetful nation in Europe. Ireland, the Netherlands and France are all woollier than we are.
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True story: An absent-minded gentleman came in from the rain and went to his bedroom to change his wet shoes. Wondering why he was taking so long, his wife went to investigate and found her husband in his pyjamas.
It seems that in taking off his shoes, his nightly routine took over – shoes, socks, trousers, shirt … and so to bed.
