BBC Radio 4 20170812

Good Morning

Another Premier League Football Season began at the Emirates last night with Arsenal hosting Leicester City. But many long standing soccer fans are wondering whether football has finally lost the plot following Neymar’s 222 million euro transfer from Barcelona to Paris St Germain a few weeks ago.

Professor Stefan Szymanski, author of several books on the economics of football, made the interesting but controversial point this week that players at much smaller clubs feel that the transfer system has a huge impact on their ability to make a living: “The transfer system is nothing less [he wrote] than a global trafficking system in human labor” because of many players’ inability to make personal decisions about where they live and work.

His choice of language could not be more timely, following the conviction yesterday of a family for modern slavery offences and the revelation that hundreds of thousands of people across the UK could be locked into a human trafficking system of a very different kind.

One charity warned, as we go about our normal daily life this weekend, accessing goods and services in a legitimate economy, there is a growing chance we will come across a victim of modern day slavery across a whole range of industries: people who are exploited on an hourly and daily basis.

One vivid example was Aurel, interviewed on the BBC Website. He underlined his dilemma: a roof over his head, basic food with ￡140 wages for 4 months hard labour; he was not locked in, for sure, but he had nowhere to go: his life was laced with fear of retribution.

In Christian ethics, any discussion about the value of someone, how much someone is worth, begins with the notion of human dignity. It is, for sure, a vague term, which can too easily be bandied about.

But theologians usually start with the premise that human beings are created in the image of God and therefore are of inherent dignity and value - and should be treated with respect and be equal and free. The idea that each life has value isn’t something exclusive to Christianity but shares a lot in common with International Human Rights. But how to achieve this in order for people to flourish is more than a political or economic conundrum.

It’s surely just as much about the values we cherish which then form the building blocks for a society which really values people, where they come from and our relationships with them.

In the light of this week’s headlines perhaps now is the time to ask how detached we have become from this notion of human dignity which values every person equally.