Jack Strocchi very kindly sent me a link to this story by Denis Shanahan in The Australian which canvasses both the extent of support for Labor on IR issues (higher than the maximum recorded during the Accord – and despite Beazley’s low approval rating) and opposition from a number of quarters to WorkChoices.
cs previously noted in a post that Howard’s IR changes had just about the whole community up in arms over issues to do with work/life balance and the colonisation of time by work. Howard very memorably said some years ago that work/family issues were bbq stoppers. He now seems to want to stop Sunday bbqs full stop.
Jack’s take on it is as follows:
But the Opposition Leader called on the Government to “back off” and shred the reforms because “these industrial relations changes of the Government – the extreme changes – will be ruinous of lives for many families”.
It is fascinating and remarkable that the IR debate is being framed as a conservative cultural war, rather than progressive class war, issue – by the labor movement no less!
It seems that both the Cultural Wets and Economic Dries are in political decline, and for the same reason. People want a home life.
There’s something in this observation about the framing of the debate, but I don’t agree that the desire to have both a private and a community life outside the demands of work is necessarily a conservative cultural one, even though it may pick up on conservative sentiment from Churches and the RSL. I think actually what’s being attacked by the symbolism of totally subordinating time to work is the Australian settlement – whose last remaining pillar is the award and arbitration regime. I think one motivation for the invention of the institutions of arbitration was the sense that private time was equally as productive for a national ethos and national progress both privately and publicly as work time.
It’s fascinating that after a decade or more of both the seepage of work into personal time (through technology, corporate values moulding the person, and many other phenomena) and an unprecedented secular increase in average working hours, that there is clearly a community sentiment to rebuild these barriers. Historically, in terms of the ideology of work, aristocrats always distinguished themselves by leisure, and the middle classes sought to democratise leisure. The further dissemination of the idea that people should be free to pursue their own private or communal pursuits outside work is really a long term consequence of a class strategy – beginning with the movement for the Eight Hour Day – which has been successfully hegemonised as a cultural norm. When you reflect on it – the long term historical move away first from feudalism and then from long hours of paid labour is a great civilisational gain in terms of freedom and democracy expressed through the privacy of time and the freedom to choose how to spend one’s time. An unforseen consequence of WorkChoices may be to bring both the value of personal time back to the forefront of our culture and also to attack the competing norm of endless productivity, in favour of some more humanist and grounded values. Weberians and other ironists, if this analysis is correct, will enjoy the feeling that much political action has unplanned results, and a dialectic that may move against a culture of neo-liberal productivism.
the ALP is merely going back to its roots for this battle.
Those old methodists, catholics ( that’s right CL) and even sydney Anglicans would appreciate this.
I certainly support them in this but I can’t see how people such as yourself leftwing social liberals have any show!!
I think that was kinda what I was getting at yesterday, only you said it better than me.
Homer, how do we leftwing social liberals not have any show? I don’t get it.
Possibly we don’t have the time in between work demands to interpret Homer’s puns, Kate!
Jack is making the point that the IR fight is becoming part of the cultural wars.
Usually the ALP boofheads are on the other side this time they are running full speed with the cultural conservatives.
Howard on the other hand is running the other way against his usual convictions in this area. ( He is putting a very bad form of economic liberalism ahead of his natural cultural conservatism).
Jack is implying the ALP is on a winner and I agree.
All you leftwing social liberals are on the wrong side as you oppose we cultural conservatives.
now without any shame at all you will wish to embrace a unity ticket.
Shame on all of yoos!
If I was global capitalism I’d try and get around this crisis by trying to fudge the clear distinction between work and leisure hours—encouraging workplace sport, corporate games, loyalty buying schemes, office affairs, and so on—and trying to create identity bound up to employment. I understand Henry Ford, like a bunch of nineteenth century industrialists, had a go but fucked it up for various reasons, not the least a total lack of self-restraint in meddling in his workers’ lives.
Fordism, on the other hand, could be well put to use in squashing the distinction between work and play.
I guess it’s just as well I’m not global capitalism. Huh. Back to work for me…
Homer – what’s puzzling me is that I see no reason why “left wing social liberals” should not support the struggle for personal time free of work pressures – as I’ve tried to show in the post, it’s actually a quantum jump historically in freedom for all, and therefore pre-eminently a liberal objective.
Homer, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Trade unionists, early socialists and lefty liberals of all stripes have been into non-workplace conditions—as Jack seems to have realised. The real point of this whole stoush is that social conservatives like yourself are only just realising that some people’s work intrudes greatly on their ‘home’ life.
The Fabians of old were absolutely fixated on ameliorating spiritual, as well as material, poverty. So should we all be.
…
Of course the distinction between ‘workplace’ and ‘home’ is, as any parent will tell you, bollocks. The personal is political. Amen.
How so, Homer? It’s entirely possible to side with conservatives, say the Church, for instance, in some issues and not others. I don’t feel a great schism in my being by being able to say: “I agree with George Pell on IR and not on abortion”.
The rest of your comment makes my head hurt. Can you try and be less opaque, perhaps?
I think there are some organizations that are already doing this in Australia, though usually it is a disguised form of time off for the middle and upper level staff.
my previous comment was in relation to Liam’s about workplace sport, etc.
Wow, Homer is deluded. It is in fact the cultural conservatives who have been brought around to the left-wing point of view, since the early movement for an eight-hour day. Initially, the churches were concerned only to secure enough time off for attendance at a place of worship to pay your weekly tithe. But the labour movement (“the folks who brought you the weekend!”) won significant victories and turned public opinion — as mark points out, they hegemonised the principle of reasonable working hours.
DJ: I had a friend whose office used to organise “Friday Afternoon Cocaine Long Lunches”. I’m not sure that’s exactly what George Pell and Peter Jensen have in mind.
I suspect Brother Nabakov might have it inserted into his next contract, though.
There is one loosely relevant point, however, and this is that Howard will have to rely on an ‘activist’ High Court bench to have the deal upheld under the Corporations law in the High Court.
I could take issue at length with your comment Liam but I’m running late for a game of Riemann Surface Tennis.
The interesting thing about Howard’s IR reforms is how they’re now throwing into clear relief two questions I bet more and more people are now asking themselves.
“Isn’t the economy there to serve us, and not the other way around?”
“Why does it increasingly take two incomes to support a middle class lifestyle?”
I think he’s unwittingly reignited a debate in our society that’s gonna go in a direction he won’t much like at all.
“Brother Nabakov might have it inserted into his next contract, though.”
Wrong orifice mate.
Take an issue, any issue. The idea is to produce and destroy as many as possible in the shortest time.
I’m a Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy fan.
Are we sure Howard isn’t some kind of deep-deep-deep cover Trotskyist of the ‘make it so bad that they’ll look to us as the vanguard of the proletariat’ school?
What Mark said in the opening post.
Also, as I wrote to Jack Strocchi in reply to his original posting to Mark, myself and a few others, I think it is more true to say that cultural conservative supporters of traditional families and cultural progressive supporters of feminist/egalitarian families have found ourselves in a tacit alliance against a neo-liberal capitalist agenda which, by seeking to appropriate our waking hours for the labour market at the expense of relationships and the reproductive/domestic economy, is hostile to family life in whatever form.
In reply to Homer’s comments, I’d refer Homer and anyone else who’s interested to Marilyn Lake’s chapter “A Question Of Time” in Moving Left by David McKnight (1985), which is a socialist feminist case for reclaiming time for family *and* enabling women and men to participate equally in both the “productive” and reproductive economies by shortening the working day. It is a myth of the anti-feminist Culture War Right that feminists insist that all women (and men) should be working full time, earning and consuming to the max and consigning the kids to creches and the care of nannies.
Paul, when I was at Macquarie Uni, before 85, the women on the politics faculty argued with a straight face ( no pun intended)that only lesbians could be feminists because heterosexual sex involved violence!!!
I think you wil find the Jensen argument resonates from a much earlier period.
A book on Sydney Anglicans will confirm this. Thats why the Methodists have been instinctive regulationists.
Still I love reading all these social liberals attempting to reclaim the family unit.
Cultural issues can become ‘hot’ issues as party ‘strategists’ will tell you ie they can change votes.
Homer, some feminists hold that view, which is a little more nuanced than you make out, but I can’t see how it’s all the relevant to this discussion. Please argue the points, not what happened over twenty years ago at uni.
Also, I’m not *trying* to reclaim the ‘family unit’. Liberals have always recognised the ‘family unit’ but we see that it can be, and is, more than just a heterseoxual couple with 2.5 children. Gays have families, single people have families, and so on.
For my final point, just because I’m not married and don’t have kids doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate my time outside work. This isn’t an issue purely for people in conventional relationships or with children, it’s an issue for everyone.
Oh, and what Rob said. We can thank the unions for the after-work time we do have.
What Kate said. Very clearly – although I’m not married and have no kids – I like spending time with my partner, friends and indeed my parents and siblings and sometimes other rellos – and doing all sorts of other stuff like seeing bands, blogging, watching films and dvds, reading, and going to Mass, Homer. It’s a strange view of the world that sees personal time as either time with the spouse and kiddies or unrestrained sinful delight (hmmm, on the other hand…).
Well put, Kate. I’m sure Tanya Plibersek, Jenny Macklin, Sharan Burrow, Kerry Nettle and Natasha Stott-Despoja would be bemused and amused at the suggestion that their opposition to the IR package makes them white picket fence conservatives.
The bottom line is that feminists, socialists, social democrats, liberals and Greens are able to unite with church people and traditional conservatives in resisting capitalism’s cannibalisation of our time and commodification of our leisure. It would be a shame to put this at risk by any one of these constituencies trying to claim exclusive ownership of the issue or condescending to the others.
First off, who the FUCK is that bloke wearing Haiku Hoges’ berray?
Secondly, on the more trivial point I can’t see this as a “cultural” battle. I suggest it’s damn near impossible to see this reform package as anything other than the most blatant class – i.e. employer vs. worker – conflict we’ve seen under the Howard government. “Culture” has feck-all to do with it. Unless of course you want to conflate everything with culture [yes, I'm looking at you, Auntie Jack], in which case I’m going to dub this a yoghurt battle.
P.S. please stop verbalising “hegemony”. You know who you are. Just. Stop. It.
Fyodor: why, that’s Papa Ratzi, of course. Oops, wrong gravatar!
cultural fyodor because it involves the very working hours we work.
This as Jensen said affects our relationships.
You can’t get aanymore cultural than that.
More to the point, how did Liam sneak in a gravatar change when the systems been down with no logins allowed?
He did it through the secret Larvatus Prodeo gravatar system. It will only affect this blog.
…But it’s strictly © Flop Eared Mule/Fashioncam Photography.
TV’s Mr Flute’s not been the same since you cast out his demons.
PM me Liam, we’ll talk royalties.
Isn’t it necessarily to make two distinctions in relation to uses of time? First there is the work/leisure distinction which most people would be familiar with and where leisure is understood as the primary me-time of the worker that used to be expressed through participation in socio-cultural institutions. However we have clearly moved beyond this to work, leisure, and non-institutionalised leisure. The churches and RSL clubs are scrabbling to combat the erosion of leisure time from the ‘institutionalised leisure’ perspective. While the non-institutionalised leisure (or should that be not-quite-yet institutionalised leisure) are all the different saturday, sunday, pre- and post-working day activities that are not associated with what would normatively be considered a social institution. Here I am thinking of weekend markets, sport, shopping, ‘doing coffee’, ‘having a beer’, hanging out in car parking lots checking out fully hektik cars… Representatives of the other social institutions which overlap with the leisure institutions are also up in arms: here I am thinking of ‘Family First’, unions, and so on. The non-instituionalised leisure activities (which may in fact become institutionalised under the right conditions, ie Weber’s ‘rationalisation’) are primarily expressions of cultural practice. Weekend markets and ‘doing coffee’ for the inner-city bourgies, having a beer and getting out sick modified-cars for the bogans, shopping and sport for ‘youth’ and perhaps their families and so on.
Home life or ‘domesticity’ is certainly not what all people want. To be generous I think this is an expression a bit of a middle-aged, middle-class sentiment. I live in a shoebox that also serves as my office. What people _do_ want, however, is the capacity to engage with and participate in those activities which they enjoy and find meaningful, be they enabled by (conservative) social institutions or not. By increasing the precariousness of workers by eroding job security, much of the power to self-determine the meaningful activities in one’s life are also being eroded.
The response from Howard that you can just go get another job somewhere else makes me so fucking angry. Is he aware of how much it cost to find another job? No, because he has had the same job for 10 years. What an absolute fucking idiot.
I see Howard’s IR package as a reaction against people who collectively self-valorise their own cultural practices. What it essentially is doing is setting up a system where there are two sets of workers; those with the skills that they can use as bargaining chips in the economy and those workers who only have their labour to sell and hence rely on either collective bargaining or being told what they are worth by bosses and the like.
The logic of the free marketeers is that this will eventually lead to a more skillful labour force becuase people will be forced to (re)train in those skills that the economy needs. Everyone else besides the free marketeers can see the utter stupidity of this move. Firstly, because of the absolute injustice for those left behind. Secondly, because you place the determination of the way people lead their lives not in theri own hands or even in the hands of a social institution, but in the hands of an abstract system at the heart of which is essentially a risk calculus measuring confidence. The irony is that I certainly have zero confidence in the system. Don’t know about other people…
Does anyone else think that Howard has a split personality on some of these issues? It seems that he always goes the cultural conservative line except when it comes up against economic liberalism, then it’s all about economic reform (or killing unions, you know, cause they are obviously evil).
Does he believe that the true path to maintaining social norms (and abusing the hell out of the word norms here – I really am not a sociologist) is via economic liberalism? Does he believe that ‘improving’ the economy is equivalent to improving the quality of life in Oz? What does history tell us? Does forging ahead with the economy always maintain social conditions? I would argue that an advancing economy normally brings about social upheaval, not cultural conservatism…
The Asiatics work for a dollar a day.The white man cannnot beat that.Our decline is inevitable.And slow,,,,oh soo, slow,,it will be.And it will hurt.War is our only answer?
[This is your first and last warning, Larado. Racism like this will not be tolerated here. I was particularly unimpressed with an earlier comment you made, that cast racist aspersions against a respected regular LP commenter, and which I was forced to moderate. If you continue posting comments of this nature, you will lose your commenting privileges. ---RC.]
We do not need skillful people,we need cheap labour.We are an advanced society.We are all smart,we just wont work for eight dollars an hour.You people will not get around this fact.But it will haunt us.
Good points Glen. Most of us work, at least partly, so we can take part in the leisure activities we enjoy (and have big mortgages also, I think). As I pointed out, having time away from work isn’t merely the province of people with children. We all want that perfect (mythical) work/life balance.
Mick, one of the odd things — in my eyes, at least — about many social conservatives/economic (neo)liberals is that they seek to regulate people’s private lives (ie, who you can marry, value, blah blah) yet they get all worked up about de-regulating th economy.
My position is amply summed up by ‘Il Cattivo’ Tuco: “If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?”.
By creating an employment environment where the big fish eat the little ones, you effectively put everyone under perpetual pressure to maintain their position, every second of the day, which will invariably creep over into other aspects of their lives. This is to say nothing of fostering yet more resentment between ‘skilled’ workers with perks and staying power and the vast sea of temps with no safeguards at all.
Mark, if LP were to fold because of spam,and other irritations, we would miss your posting of what is now the hot button topic, but strangely given its the significance it now assumes in political discourse not during the election. Hopefully, you will keep going.
Kate, it does seem somewhat paradoxical. I’ve tried to write a half-decent comment about this for the last 10 minutes… but each time I do I just end-up demonising both philosophies as being inconsistent. In the end the only conclusion I can draw is that you probably have to support economic liberalism if you are a true social conservative. It’s economic liberalism that has underpinned angloish economic advancement over the last few hundred years. In some sense, it is a core element of our societal structure.
Big mortgages,what a joke,this is Australia darling.For goodness sake ,think out side the square.This is a big country,,,wow its big.Its vast,,,,and ours?.But its the country,that I seek.I will Quote Juvenal,
Men do not know what to pray for,
Most men pray for things that will bring about their ruin,
Military Glory,Wealth,beauty and a long life.
Military glory comes at the expense of others,
Wealth will bring you many enemies,and jealousy.
Beauty is temporal,
And old age will see you watch all your relatives and all your friends die.
What is there left,a sound mind in a sound body.
And above all virtue.
Thank you for sharing, Larado.
For a second there I thought you wrote, “Thankyou for sharing Larado” — without a comma — and was about to vigorously disagree!
It’ve always imagined Larado’s unorfodox punctuation as as a kind of written stutter a la Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
You’llhave to s,,,,,,peak up sir he”””’s d,d,d,deaf,andmad sir!
///C//c//crucifixion’s toogood, forthem sir!
Ah well Ill just battle on,Leinard.Im an Aussie boy,we just do the best we can,sorry if its not good enough for you.
Fyodor says: October 13th, 2005 at 4:43 pm
Fyodor, in his characteristicly vulgar and ignorant way, construes the argument completely ass-backwards. I have never argued that there is no class aspect motivating the legislation. I am, FWIW, as critical of the class-dominating Economic Dries as I am of the multicultural Cultural Wets. (Both ideologies are bad in that they reduce the flow of sympathy between individuals.)
I am arguing that both (class) sides of the dispute would prefer to frame the issue in cultural, rather than class, conflict terms because this has more political resonance nowadays. This is because the new political conflict (over work balance in the familial household) seems to be much more cultural than the old political conflict (over the class structure in the industrial firm). The cultural conflict overlaps the class conflict because the new IR issues are more about time than money.
Howard is a class warrior alright, but would prefer to frame the IR issue as a cultural conflict between aspirational workers versus union collectivists. And the labor movement is obviously a class organization but would prefer to frame the IR issue as a cultural conflict between pushy bosses v embattled families.
And it seems that the “family values” side – in this case the unions – has the upper hand in the political frame game. I think that their sucessful re-framing of the issue shows that most people want more space and time to give to their loved ones (typically kin). This is the kind of association that cultural conservatives, such as the Church, heartily approve.
Perhaps, as Paul Norton suggests, this is not conclusive evidence of my “Decline of the Cultural Wets” thesis. But it is a solid sign of the “Incline of the Cultural Dries”.
The
I guess that’s one way of reading it Jack, and I think there is something to the way you sketch Howard. On the other hand, the union campaign can be seen as simply a contemporary representation of class conflict – you appear nostalgic for 19th century blue collar blokes on a Wobbly campaign “over the class structure in the industrial firm.” Rise up Joe Hill.
The union campaign (and union campaigns have always been about time and money, and more) is squarely on workers’ relations to production in a range of contemporary settings. I suspect you have been fooled by the unions playing smart, not sterotyped, class politics.
Robert says: October 13th, 2005 at 3:05 pm
In Australia, right up until Mannix died, the cultural conservatives within the churches split their political force along sectarian lines. The Irish Catholics gravitated to the ALP & DLP and Anglo Protestants to the LP/NP/CP. The Micks tended to support a fair go for the working mans family. There is some evidence that the ALP’s social ideology was derived from Catholic social justice principles, or at least Irish Catholic argy-bargy. Certainly Methodism rather than Marxism is what inspired the BLP (see Tony Blair).
The Poms and Jocks wanted everyone to put their noses to the grindstone. Or at least to make sure that there were no idle hands for the devil to make mischief with.
This meant that Australia had no unified and dominant religious party, such as the Catholic Centre or Christian Democrat party, taking a stand on social issues. So the Labor movement, rather than the Churches, took the lead in the stuggle for fair working conditions, decent pay and protecting the dignity of the worker.
But most members of the labor movement were cultural conservative of one sort or another because every normal person was a cultural conservative ie supported God, King and Country. The ALP was founded and run by men, such as Watson, Hughes & Calwell, who would occupy the right wing of the One Nation party were they alive today.
So it is conservative to support the retention of the old IR system. And the old IR system owed much to conservative social preaching by populist clergymen amongst their patriotic, god-fearing and law-abiding unionists congregations.
We should not be suprised by a conservative/left alliance on this or other issues – historically, both are reactions against liberalism. The left’s threat to appropriate the private wealth of conservatives sent the latter into alliance with liberals. That’s much less of a threat now, making the danger of alliance with the left lower. As liberalism started to renew itself in the 1960s, the alliance with liberalism began to look less attractive for conservatives. Things are generally more fluid, as the left (despite a puritan group coming out of feminism) still generally supports liberal personal and sexual freedoms against conservative control, though rejecting economic freedom.
Shorter Jack Strocchi: I am “a pompous, hectoring bore with a maddening bee stuck in his bonnet”. I also like to tell people what I am and am not, as I’m afraid they’ll make up their own minds. For example, I’ve been fooled by “cultural” spin over simple class-conflict.
Fyodor, grow up.
Jack you are a bit harsh on Calwell.
most of this probably comes from his speech introducing the immigration bill when he said two wongs don’t make a white.
It was in fact a reaction from a certain Mr White a Liberal Part MP.
The ALP like the other parties at the times was a racisr party.
Any decent biography of Curtin shows his feelings on this issue as very unliberal but very much a social conservative.
The ALP like the British Labor party got their social conservatism from their founders who were principally Methodists and Catholics
Grow up? Whatever for?
We should not be suprised by a conservative/left alliance on this or other issues – historically, both are reactions against liberalism.
Pretty cute Andrew. Liberalism once was ‘the left’, in opposition to conservatives, with the social democratic left emerging as a response to the evident inequalities produced by liberal capitalism. From this historical perspective, the neo-liberal i/r proposals are deeply conservative and deeply reactionary, aiming to roll back the social democratic safeguards installed in the labour market in the 20th century to reinstall 19th century employer perogative. Over reach? We’ll see.
Jack, if you can’t see that the sectarian divide in Australia was largely fuelled by class conflict rather than a deep theological divide, then…
Robert says: October 14th, 2005 at 9:54 am
There a little bit of truth in that, but it is far from the whole story. Bob Gould gives the Mick spin on Australian labor history. But there has always been alot of self-mythologising by Irish Catholics, especially when they take it upon themselves to write the history of the Australian working class. A bit of the old blarney to embelish a good yarn.
Its true that, as I stated above, that in the early days of settlement Irish Catholics formed a sectarian core to Australia’s working class movement. And it is also true that nowadays upwardly mobile lapsed Catholics have now joined forces with the lapsed Protestant establishment to put workers in their place. It was Gough who dissolved the sectarian dispute in the sixties, by arguing for the quasi-nationalisation of Catholic schools. This gave Catholics access to the middle class education and took alot of the sting out of sectarianism.
But class conflict crossed over the sectarian divide in the formation of the labor movement. In those days the correlation between class bolshiness and Irish Catholic sectarianism was not all that strong. Most of the working class leaders and much of the rank and file were not Micks. William Spence, William Lane, Chris Watson, Andrew Fisher and Billy Hughes were the major Labor leaders and were all more or less Protestants. Many of Australia’s most militant trade unionists have been “bolshie Scottish shop stewards”.
Moreover sectarian conflict crossed over the class divide. The Anglican Establishment could chew gum (wage class warfare) and walk (fuel sectarian conflict) at different times. So they had no problem with keeping uppity Catholic under the thumb whatever their class. Wealthy Catholic families still faced social discrimination in the UK and AUS until after the War. And Menzies was happy to look down his nose at Catholics even as he worked to dissipate class conflict by enlarging the middle class.
There are now massive class divisions opening up in AUS. And there is a also a resurgence of class-based cultural conflict, at least on the political stage. Yet there have been precious few outbreaks of sectarianism in Australia. Apart from the totally gratuitous bits created and celebrated by our brilliant cadres of multiculturalists. And that form of “theological divide” is guranteed to “fuel an [under]class conflict”.
If you can’t see that, well…
Most of the working class leaders and much of the rank and file were not Micks. William Spence, William Lane, Chris Watson, Andrew Fisher and Billy Hughes were the major Labor leaders and were all more or less Protestants,
Covenient Jack. The original labo(u)r leaders mainly came from the older unions – primarily craft but also occasionally the big industry unions (mines, wharves and wool) – privileged working class positions still denied to lowly Micks at that stage in history. You have to try to drop down from your elitist perspective (and also take into account regional differences) to get a faithful class analysis of this period, and particularly to get the Catholic-labourer picture (strongest in Qld and NSW, weakest in Vic), which at that stage was merely begining its rise through the ranks – more often through the leadership of the more radical labour ranks at the outset, until the splits in the mainstream workers’ party gave them their chance.
OT (as usual): Anti-catholicism (light hearted and less light hearted)is one of the last remaining bastion of acceptable overt bigotry left in Australia. You only have to wind me up on Keating, the ARM and the High Court to see that. Speaking for myself it is sectarian because I have nothing against upstart working class prods. But the idea of class is more complex than that isn’t it? A working class prod looking down their nose at a catholic neighbour is not sectarian at all in the final wash up.