After thinking long about what my last piece of work for Ekklesia might be, I gathered up my courage and decided that it would not be prose.

So, here is my last comment and first poem on this site. In our troubled, beautiful, fierce world, may we all, ‘religious’ or not, keep company with the work of faith.

Abraham and Isaac

Heat stood on the mountain track, clubbing
them with unseen mass,
clinging to their faces,
dragging dry at their lungs
as they strained against the gradient,
bent beneath bundles of brushwood.

No air moved on the stones they piled.
Only the quickness of a lizard disturbed the dust
and they were silent.
What ground here?
What could hold them now?

What,

What?

What…

could be formed? Here, in terror time,
made out of looselaid, shifting, dwindling land
crumbling to despair?

…nothing.

Then the flash, arcing between the dark
of the knife and the light
of the promise,

the vertiginous work of faith.

————

© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post And finally – a poem appeared first on Ekklesia.

ELECTORAL MATTERS were simpler in 1882. “Every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive/Is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservat- ive!” Simpler, but far less democratic and carrying nowhere near the potential and challenge now unfolding.

The words which WS Gilbert put into the mouth of Private Willis in Iolanthe held reasonably good for a long time. Change began after the 1914-18 war, accelerated by the rise of a third party and eventually, universal franchise. The administrations in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales with their varying degrees of devolution have opened up representation, while the old demarcations of class are less dependable identifiers. I have fond memories of campaigning for Labour in a solidly Conservative seat in 1997 with a retired Vice Admiral. Every inch an officer and a gentleman, he caused some bewilderment among older voters but even then, younger people were seeing this as a glimpse of the new political horizon at which we have now arrived.

Add in a succession of increasingly incompetent and morally squalid Conservative administrations, Brexit and its disastrously managed aftermath, a pandemic, a war in Europe, the slaughter in Israel-Palestine and its fall-out among parties and electorate, the rapid growth of identity politics in these early years of the 21st century, and the political terrain across which we are travelling becomes almost unrecognisable from that of a decade ago.

No Westminster seat has fewer than five candidates on the ballot paper and among the reasons for this is the sharp increase in independent candidates, many of whom have been deprived of the Labour whip through protest at the rightward shift of their party. They will undoubtedly take votes from Labour, as will an increasingly impressive Green Party, while Reform plc is fast becoming a stopping off point for disgruntled Tories. The Liberal Democrats are significantly repairing their fortunes and appear likely to be an important  part of a progressive presence in the new parliament.

The diversity on offer is a serious and democratically valuable counter-balance to the status quo – the fact that both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are facing high profile challenges in their own constituencies is unheard of in recent times.

This volatile and fissiparous electoral climate challenges us all. Although it seems right now that the only question between today and the final counting of votes is simply one of how big Labour’s majority will be, there can be no doubt that we will be looking at a very different political and parliamentary landscape by the end of the week.

The future of the First Past the Post electoral system will come under greater scrutiny than we are accustomed to. Both its beneficiaries and those who will have reason to be aggrieved will be loud in defence and attack. And the split is not gong to fall neatly within the progressive and conservative silos of political allegiance.

An influx of new MPs who are less rooted in the old two-and-a-bit party hegemony will be interesting. Some of them will be self-seeking and obtuse: we may hope that most will will not. Many will have read the mood of an electorate deeply wearied and angered by the moral failings of too many politicians in recent years. Voters, looking for more change than Keir Starmer may have anticipated, will be not only receptive to, but also demanding of, far higher standards in public life, such as the seven steps laid out by the Institute for Government.

Green benches populated by men and women less willing to believe (and promulgate) six impossible things before breakfast, will surely change the weather of government as they grow in confidence. Much of what we have known for decades may fall away in this new climate. This has been an election period dominated by polling, and although polls are by no means always accurate, it is significant that the Conservatives have been unable to make any inroads on the Labour lead and there is at least a possibility that they may no longer be the official Opposition on 5 July. We really are approaching uncharted territory.

Of course, Gilbert’s observations on the immutability of political allegiance depended upon an assumption that everyone inherits their politics and therefore outcomes and expectations are generally predictable. But an election in which an East Anglian shire county (Reader, I live in it), represented by a Conservative sitting on a 16,000 plus majority has become a three-way marginal in which 36 per cent of voters are now recorded as intending to vote tactically, probably marks the end of that concept.

The sense of possibility in the air is invigorating and challenging. “Change your opinions, keep to your principles, change your leaves, keep intact your roots”. Victor Hugo has it.
————

© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post A volatile electoral climate and a sense of possibility appeared first on Ekklesia.

“MY CHANGED LABOUR PARTY”. Keir Starmer has used that phrase many times in recent months. All parties must evolve – failure to do so means sclerosis and death. But the more boldly inclusive and consensual that process is, the better the health of the party and of our democracy will be.

It is the possessive pronoun which gives rise to concern. That a politician should wish to make a mark on the party which has chosen them as its leader is right and natural. But it is also right that this course should be pursued with some humility and a sense of the manner in which a party’s historic mission should inform its future in a time of rapid, and arguably unprecedented change.

The next general election is at most eight months away. It is very likely that Keir Starmer will be our next prime minister. As the effects of the past few days of electoral excitement bed down, it is beyond doubt that this Conservative administration is in terminal decay and that the country is desperate for change. But Starmer is not the owner of the Labour Party. Like any democratic leader, he is his party’s custodian and to forget that would be to betray his trust.

Over the decades, the Labour party has been often described as ‘a broad church’ and where it has stumbled to electoral defeat, it is because its various factions have turned upon each other in a way which made ecumenism impossible to sustain. It has always been at its best when socialists and social democrats have managed, in pursuit of common goals, to make creative compromises and see clearly who it is that would divide them into impotence.

Occasions of ugliness are driving away many who desperately need a just, compassionate and redistributive government. Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting, sneers at those who do not share his views on private sector involvement in the NHS as “middle-class lefties” – a puerile insult which indicates a damaging ignorance of the nuanced relationships between origins and beliefs. Rachel Reeves, who will be the chancellor in Starmer’s administration, has declared her belief that “Labour is not the party of people on benefits”.

Labour needs to widen its ethical horizons far beyond this. If it is to be the party of equality and justice, it must recognise the many-layered inequalities and injustices which play so large a part in making life wretched for millions. If it is not to be that party, choosing instead to deny just and empathic action for those outside its exclusive demographic of ‘working people’, it can only be a slightly less cruel version of the neo-liberal Tories who have created despair among the very people who have, historically, and in the present, looked to Labour for hope.

My hope is that Labour in government will put equality and justice at the heart of its policy making. This must be the yardstick against which all is measured. It should not fear to take and promote the ‘preferential option for the poor’: for the powerless, sick and disabled, for the old and the young, the in-work, the unemployed and those unable to work.

It must build council houses and spend into public services and benefits. It must develop a foreign policy which prioritises conflict resolution and move to a mindset alert to the seeds of future conflict, realising that foresight and prudence may gradually reduce our dependence on military solutions. It must embrace the internationalism which grew out of the the two global wars of the 20th century and the institutions of the rule-based order which which underpin democracy.

Above all, it must strive for that justice which is the foundation of peace: fear and favour have brought us to some very dark places indeed. This will need the strength to exercise a spirit of courage which is not yet apparent in the tendency to anxious authoritarianism which characterises the present leadership.

If the government is to play its part in sustaining a liveable planet for all people, it will also need to find the courage for an unwavering commitment to green technologies and resistance to the global corporations and fossil fuel giants who have the power to hold vacillating nation states captive.

To do all these things, Labour will need to fight its fear of, and subservience to, much of the media. This will demand a steadfastness in the truth which will not fear to own mistakes, and an end to the equivocation and outright deception which has disfigured politics for too long.

There is a sense that the time may be right for all this to begin. The electorate is becoming both more aware and more cynical. Trust has been badly damaged and repair may initially prove a very rough ride indeed. However, compassion and hope has the power to do far more than does self-serving caution. Build it, and they will come.

Counsels of perfection, you may say. Simplistic, some will sneer. No. Simplicity is never simplistic nor is it easy. And the devil may well be in the detail. But if Keir Starmer can cast off his possessive desire to control the Parliamentary Labour Party in every aspect of its thinking, and permit the growth of a courageous and sometimes disputatious government in a courageous state, then a clear-eyed view of those things which make for equality, peace, truth and simplicity will give the Fiend much less room for manoeuvre.

————

© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post Starmer’s challenge: a courageous government in a courageous state appeared first on Ekklesia.

WAR, violence, a climate crisis. Cruelty, deceit, self-interest, division and corruption. There is a great deal of darkness in our world. There is much to make us despairing and cynical.

It is easy to lose a grip on hope, to cease to believe that there may be goodness and justice; that politicians, even if they seem incapable of governing well, might occasionally do something unconnected with their own advancement. In short, that humankind really is stuffed.

Well, on Saturday something showed me that this is not true. The occasion was a Memorial Meeting to remember and celebrate the life of a much loved Friend. Nic died in December from an illness which developed with shocking speed. We had gathered, Quakers, non-Quakers and a lifetime’s collection of workmates, to remember him ‘after the manner of Friends’.

The Meeting Room was packed to its legal capacity. It was moving to have so many there who had connected with the family through work and worship over many years and had travelled from far and wide to be with us.

Nic lived with integrity, love and warmth. He had an eccentric streak and could be challenging. But he was equally ready to be challenged and was never defensive or pompous. It was my great privilege to work with him on a media committee for several years. There was always laughter and enlightenment. No one could be complacent around Nic for long, but nor could they have ever felt unvalued or unloved.

He was utterly dependable. What was promised, was delivered. He was unfailingly conscientious in all he did, bringing unshowy expertise from computer problems to statistical analysis, via management of the Meeting’s accounts and of a recorder ensemble.

In retirement, Nic worked as an advisor at the local Citizens Advice. He loathed injustice and inequality and these virtues, combined with a natural empathy for distress, were transformative in the lives of many who had not known where to turn.

Some people invest in stocks and shares. Nic invested in the hearts of his family, his F/friends and the communities where he lived. He was not simply a man with good attributes, his whole personality was one of goodness.

In sharing our memories in the uniting stillness, we were able to make a restorative space among the growing dis-ease of our society. Because integrity and love do not make headlines, provoke outrage on social media or make large sums of money for the greedy and unscrupulous, let us never forget that the memory of people like Nic will always be a blessing. And blessings endure.

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© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post Remembering a good man and a blessing that will endure appeared first on Ekklesia.

A CENTURY AGO this week, the first Labour government took office. This administration lasted for nine months and Labour was not really to establish itself as a parliamentary force for another couple of decades

This should not surprise anyone. Power arranges matters for its own survival. However, though this was a short lived government, Labour had proved it could be effective in bringing about change for working people, building council houses, planning better schools and improving benefits and pensions. The political landscape had been changed.

In 1924, the distinction between capital and labour was clearer than it is today and the Russian revolution was only seven years in the past. The influence of these two factors have survived into our own times. There are still plenty of ill-informed people who can be spooked by mutterings about ‘Commies’ and ‘Bolshies’, perceiving any questioning of the vast inequalities of wealth and therefore of power and influence, between those who have generational wealth and those who have only their labour to sell, as dangerous, divisive and rooted in envy.

One hundred years on, it is worth looking what has changed and what has remained. We no longer have what Ramsay McDonald’s contemporaries would have recognised as an ‘industrial proletariat’ – arguably because we have a much changed and diminished concept of both industry and class, neither of which now serve as clear indicators of poverty or deprivation. We still have a strong strand in the media that is ready to attack individuals and organisations who seek to challenge the comfortable and complacent. It is not surprising that it was the Daily Mail who published the Zinoviev letter just days before the general election of 1924.

Class war is as destructive and futile as any other form of warfare. Its categories fuel venom but do nothing to heal its casualties. A plumber may easily earn more than a doctor; the average day rate of most teachers is lower than that of a builder. These are all essential occupations and comparisons should be seen neither to denigrate nor exalt. But they do serve to suggest questions about the manner in which past metrics are not only pointless, but obscure injustice and inequality.

In 2015, Rachel Reeves, then Shadow Work and pensions Secretary, displayed a shocking inability to comprehend how much society has changed when she announced that Labour is “not the party of people on benefits”. She went on to say “We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, [as] the party to represent those who are out of work.”

It seemed that Ms Reeves was unable to look beyond her party’s name to its purpose. I have read nothing in the intervening nine years to indicate that the woman who is now Shadow Chancellor has changed her views, nor that the current Labour front bench may dissent from those views.

Ignoring those who are unable to work through age, disability, or chronic sickness is both callous and blinkered: if Labour is to have a future distinct from that of the discredited Conservative administrations of the last 14 years, it must think deeply about its purpose and its duty to those who bear the heaviest burdens of today’s inequalities.

Richard Tawney described that purpose thus: “While… natural endowments differ profoundly, it is the mark of a civilised society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as have their source, not in individual differences, but in its own organisation.” Harold Wilson believed that “the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.” An Irish saying runs “it is in the shelter of each other that the people live”.

As Labour enters its second century, it should have these maxims at its heart and must examine every policy formulation and enactment with a simple question: does this increase or decrease inequality?

————

© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post Labour’s second century: where the purpose, what the vision? appeared first on Ekklesia.

“A HARD TIME we had of it”. The gripe which TS Eliot put into the mouths of Persian astronomers, travelling during the dead of winter to search for a newborn in a distant land, seems to sum up much of the modern Christmas experience in our culture.

This hard time though, is now largely of our own making – a journey in search of the illusion that rushing around to the point of utter frazzlement in search of the perfect Christmas, is somehow indispensable to our well-being and happiness.

At this time of the year when our physical resources are at a low ebb and the hours of daylight at their shortest, the advertising and retail industries take an extraordinary and debilitating hold on our lives. The strain of queueing, parking, purchasing, and preparation mounts. So does anxiety and irritation

It is reasonable to ask what is the driving force here, particularly during a cost of living crisis which is leaving many people cold, hungry and even homeless. A longing to somehow reclaim childhood Christmases seems the common factor.

The casts of our past Christmases are changed by so many factors – loss, distance and time shape all realities and to fail in acknowledging this is to risk the deformation of sentiment by sentimentality. The Nativity narrative tells of the fragility of being human. None of it makes sense without that central truth.

Making this understanding our own may be painful. The challenge of trying to live in our own present rather than in a half-remembered nostalgia, surrounded by the all too present fantasy world of advertising, is difficult. But it does offer an invitation: to take the first steps away from expensive, self-inflicted strain and the weariness of body and spirit which come with it, by attending to what is here and to what may yet be hidden elsewhere. That might be found over the next 12 days or in an as yet unseen future.

The Nativity myth – that is, a story told about truth – invites me to reflection on the Love “that moves the sun and other stars” and its strange transformative presence within the much loved and often abused story. It is an invitation to keep this time with greater simplicity and to be open-hearted and open handed.

Peace be with us.

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© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post Christmases past, present and future: the challenge appeared first on Ekklesia.

REMEMBRANCE-TIDE is over and now, the space for further reflection. A time to stand back from the division and anger engendered by the former Home Secretary and to consider what it may mean in these harrowing, divisive and contentious times to remember the dead of so many wars.

On Remembrance Sunday, the Quaker Meeting of which I am a member laid a wreath of white poppies at the town War Memorial. We always do this after the official ceremony has dispersed. There is no disrespect or exclusion implicit in this decision: it is taken so that 30 minutes of silence may be at the heart of our gathering.

In this undivided and undistracted silence, we mourn all lives taken by war, in all nations. Lives of servicemen and women, and – as the gates of hell opened in Israel-Palestine remind us anew – of civilians. We honour their courage, we shudder for their suffering. We repent the failures which make for war and renew our own commitment to searching for the gruelling roads to peace.

Each year, the group of us whose task it is to organise this contemplative, penitent gathering, spend careful time in selecting the short passages of prose and poetry which are read and of the message we wish to convey through these and through the local media. This year, our wreath bore these words, “Remembrance is the beginning of working for peace.”

Two weeks later, that concept is beginning to evolve for me and for other Friends involved. After a few days, I wondered if it should have begun: “Remembering well…” Now, I think the better representation would have been: “Remembering well is the beginning of peace: Let us remember with integrity.”

We all have people to remember, whether they have died in the horrors of armed conflict or quietly in their beds, surrounded by love. But when the language of remembrance for those killed by war is formalised, it risks slipping over that edge which divides the dignified from the clichéd and the tendentious. This is understandable. Familiar words bring comfort to many who are there to grieve partners, parents, children, siblings and friends. But do they move us to repentance, to a grief which may in fact go unconsoled as it stands on the edge of the abyss, acknowledging the terrifying futility which is war? The indispensable condition without which there will never be peace?

I recently read some thoughts from a serving soldier remembering a friend killed in Afghanistan. The pain was in the plainness and it moved me greatly. My sense is that ‘the fallen’ who ‘will not grow old’ may not cut it when the heart is clenched in raw grief. Surely ‘my mate’, my dad, ‘my sister’, ‘me wee lad’ is the register which points us towards truth.

In Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen asks:
“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.”

And concludes:
“The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.”

There will be endless slow dusks in the lives of people who mourn and this also must never be forgotten. This is the time when the eye of the heart may be clearest and the inward vision made pure. Do we permit war – at least in part – by exalting its sacrifices through a long unquestioned form of rhetoric? Is this a kind of inadvertent dishonesty camouflaged in a century of rituals?

Maybe we could begin to consider a way of conducting Remembrance renewed in humility. To freeze something so essential in a ‘tradition’ which does not permit evolution or examination may just step a little too close to idolatry.

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© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post ‘Slow dusk’: remembering with integrity appeared first on Ekklesia.

MICAH the prophet: “Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly.” A focus for this time of renewed war and suffering.

It may seem far too inward-looking in such terrible days to be dwelling on the challenge which the situation in Gaza poses to the pacifist/non-violent conscience. But because my faith family have held a Testimony to peace and to a refusal to bear arms for over 350 years, I believe it necessary to look straight in the face of the question: how do we respond?

Peace – of greatly differing depth and duration – has long been sought through the projection of military force and it is reasonable that many will ask what other solution we have to offer. But the point of crisis, when the destruction seems greatest and hope naive, is the time to do whatever we may to begin reflecting on such a solution, on how we came to this place and on how we may do better for future generations.

William Penn’s words, “Peace can only be secured by justice; never by force of arms”, are a good place to start. In all armed conflict, the horror of the immediate blinds us to its long antecedents. What is unfolding in Gaza did not begin on 7 October and justification by backtracking tends to stop at a point convenient to the justifier. Its fruits are ‘whataboutery’, escalating rage, hatred, division and a drive to revenge. An eye for an eye soon becomes a war crime for a war crime.

This cycle, driven by the reactions of profoundly wounded people, whatever their ‘side’, will be broken neither quickly nor easily. Injustice, dispossession and violence hand hatred down the generations, creating acts of vengeance which in turn, perpetuate more of the same. This is where Micah’s second stricture challenges us. The lashing out of desperately ill-used populations and individuals demands that the exercise of mercy be not dissociated from some awareness of responsibility: “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

From the Balfour Declaration to the Nakba; from the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the further dispossession of so many Palestinians by illegal settlement on the West Bank; to the present horrors unfolding day by day on our news bulletins, injustice has sent out its tentacles, choking each generation with hatred. Where might there have been intervention? What should the powerful have seen which they did not see, or chose not to see? War and its attendant cruelties never come from nowhere. It is always the outcome of failure and self interest, of a foundational lack of vision and of opportunities missed.

Many pacifists will have had the experience of being asked what they ‘would have done in 1939’. The question – especially for those of us born a generation or more after WW2 – is not only meaningless as a ‘gotcha’ – it cannot be answered without asking more questions that may tease out the trail of causation and disintegration. This entails working back through the rise of Nazism, nourished in the dysfunction of the Weimar Republic, itself an outcome of the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty which ended WW1, and the originating rivalries, jealousies and self-interests of the 19th century which brought the clashing imperial egos of European monarchies into armed conflict in 1914. It is too late now to unwind any of these contributions to the second global conflagration of the last century. But it is not too late to consider what we might learn from them by the exercise of humility.

When new states or regional administrations are carved out in the aftermath of conflict, there are always signals and warnings of further flashpoints which are the inevitable outcome of historic and present inequity. The century which has passed since a European power thought it acceptable to give away a country, has seen the unfolding of the current horror in Israel-Palestine. Victors not only write the histories, they draw the maps too. The imperial mindset which considers religion, ethnicity, custom and location to be indices of worth has again shown itself unequal to discharging these responsibilities with discernment. And whilst hindsight is well known to be a wonderful thing, if it does not inform foresight, then it is difficult to see how we are ever to escape from the cycles of futility and destruction which make for war.

In the years which followed the last World War, men and women who were determined not to be trapped in the perpetuation of such cycles, began to found the organisations which provide the foundation of what we now describe as the international rules-based order. The Nuremberg Trials, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the scores of human rights treaties, which are now applied at global and regional levels, are an earnest of what can be done by humankind to end recourse to war. It is a matter of grave concern that many politicians are now looking to undermine, ignore or even to seek abolition of many of these hard won protections. Those who would do this in the name of ‘sovereignty’ must be challenged to think hard about the consequences of  too narrow and damaging an interpretation of specific interests.

The making of peace in Israel-Palestine, its keeping and flourishing, will be a medium to long term undertaking. In the still longer term, this is the time for nations, international organisations and politicians to reflect with humility – the third component of Micah’s exhortation – on these words of the Quaker scientist and peace campaigner, Kathleen Lonsdale: “No considerations of national or international prestige should prevent the correction of error when it is realised. This is a sine qua non in the search for truth, and is evidence of strength and not of weakness of personal or of national character, even when it means temporary humiliation.”

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© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post Justice, mercy, humility: a timeless response to the horror of modern war appeared first on Ekklesia.

ULEZ. The oddly euphonious acronym has shown itself central to the combination of misrepresentation and fear which has come to characterise so much of current political discourse.

That the air quality in our capital city is an ongoing cause for concern is well known. The Ultra Low Emission Zone which is to be extended across all London Boroughs at the end of this month (29 August 2023), has an essential role in protecting the health of Londoners. It has already reduced toxic nitrogen dioxide pollution in central London by almost 50 per cent. The verdict of the Coroner on the heartbreaking death in 2013 of nine-year-old Ella Adoo Kissi Debra, whose family lived in Lewisham, close to the South Circular road, raised popular awareness of the need for further action.

But first, the framework in which which to place these facts.

The plans for an Ultra Low Emission Zone, initially in the area of central London, where the Congestion Charge was already in force, were introduced by the then mayor, Boris Johnson, in March 2015 and was intended to come into effect in September of 2020 when a standard daily charge of £12.50 was to be levied on non-compliant vehicles. Johnson’s successor as mayor, Sadiq Khan, brought the date forward to April 2019 and the matter of its extension beyond central London has been subject to claim and counter claim as to the political processes behind these decisions.

Boris Johnson’s resignation as an MP in June 2023, following the findings of the Privileges Committee that he had misled parliament whilst prime minister. created a by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Of the three polls which took place on that day, Uxbridge was the only seat not to be lost to the government – the Tories retaining it by a majority of 495 votes. Anxiety and resentment over ULEZ was presented as a significant factor.

The initial anxiety was understandable. But what seems to have been widely missed is that most vehicles would already be ULEZ compliant. Petrol vehicles registered after 2005 and diesel vehicles registered after 2015 would not be affected. Classic cars registered before 1 January 1973, motorcycles and mopeds registered before 1 July 2007 and vehicles with a disabled persons’ badge up to  October 2025 (why the limitation?) are also exempt.

Which is not to deny that compliance could well be difficult for people on low incomes, who are most likely to be drivers of older vehicles. This is where economic justice must be exercised in order to achieve environmental justice. If residents of Uxbridge – which does not have the public transport advantages of inner London – are to be able to continue to use their vehicles for work, leisure, care and other family purposes, a clear and fair programme of financial assistance should have been made available. To offer a generous scrappage scheme and low or interest-free loans and to ensure that this was widely publicised would have been the action of a reasonable government.

As changes to our lifestyles become increasingly necessary if we are to avert climate disaster, politicians will not only need to have a vision, they will need to act with much greater awareness of the costs this imposes on people already struggling with a cost of living crisis and for whom choice in financial decision making is severely restricted. Uxbridge and South Ruislip is a seat which Labour could have been expected to win. That the Conservatives were able to play on understandable but largely ill-founded fears does not promise well for democracy, for our common health or for the environment.

Rishi Sunak’s government is in retreat from the environmental and climate policies embraced at COP26 in Glasgow, less than two years ago. The Conservatives are weaponising division and promoting a ‘culture war’ approach to significant and often difficult changes which will have to be faced and managed with justice and equity if we are to find our commonality and believe that politicians will be with us in the endeavour.

However, the populist approach in which the Conservatives are presenting themselves as the motorist’s friend, makes the opposition parties, by default, the motorist’s enemy. The dangerous area between fear and fact has been exposed by muddying the waters and, to put the most charitable interpretation on the lack of clear information as to the categories of non-compliant vehicles, by a failure to address the very real anxieties of voters. It was common to hear complaints on the lines of “£12 every time I take my car/van off the drive!” It seemed, strangely, to suit both the main parties not to to correct the misconception, nor to reassure those who most needed help that they would receive it.

The strong and empathetic state appears to be out of favour, whatever colour of rosette is worn by its political representatives. We have to do better.

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© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post Fear and loathing in Uxbridge: we can do better than this appeared first on Ekklesia.

YESTERDAY was Armed Forces Day. A difficult day for those of us committed to active non-violence, pacifism and objection to what is defined as ‘militarism’. I do not dissent from this last term, but I acknowledge its ambiguity. At present, this concept is part of my thinking but as I hope that this piece will make clear, subject to evolution.

Three pieces of wisdom inform my current position. The first – as might be expected – is from the tradition of the Society of Friends (Quakers), the second from a serving soldier with whom I am grateful to be developing a mutually respectful online friendship, and the third from an American theologian.

Firstly, then, this is from the Public statement of the Yearly Meeting of Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1987: “We do not have a blueprint for peace that spells out every stepping stone towards the goal that we share. In any particular situation, a variety of personal decisions could be made with integrity. We may disagree with the views and actions of the politician or the soldier who opts for a military solution, but we still respect and cherish the person. What we call for in this statement is a commitment to make the building of peace a priority and to make opposition to war absolute.”

The second is from Sgt Maj Denis Tingay, formerly a combat medic and now an army welfare practitioner, whom I quote with his permission: “Most soldiers I know, and all of their loved ones, are pacifists. Not armchair pacifists who believe that their freedoms were given to them by the elves and pixies, but normal folk who understand pacifism at an existential level. Knock on any door in the family quarter of a military base and it will be answered by someone for whom pacifism is a deep, abiding and fearful value. If history teaches us anything, it’s that peace and freedom come at a wretched cost.”

So, with these words in mind, I move to what it is that disturbs me about Armed Forces Day. I value the courage, skills and committent of the men and iwomen of our Armed Forces. I will venture to say that all Quakers will join with the view that we desire wholeheartedly  to keep them from harm.

But the presentation of Armed Forces Day as family entertainment troubles me deeply. Young children, who can have no concept of the horrors of war, nor of the generational trauma, deformation and hatred it causes, are invited to sit at the controls of weapons systems as though they were computer games. Excitement without responsibility is immoral and destructive. Keep in mind that the UK is the only European nation which permits military recruitment under the age of 18. That children are “wax to receive, and marble to retain” confers a huge responsibility. There is a similar working upon unexamined feelings to be found in the military pageantry which is on display during this day and which we admired during the coronation. Conflicting perceptions cannot be pushed aside. They must surely provide prompts for ongoing discernment as to outward display and its unintended consequences.

It is realistic to say that humankind has not yet developed a rational response to armed conflict. I sense that this will take a long time and that the process is not helped by the lack of imagination cited here by the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas: “As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.”

So, let us try to exercise the imagination of greater investment – both financial and ethical – in those alternatives of peace education, diplomacy, dialogue and above all, of courage and discernment from politicians to recognise and seize those critical moments in which a different path to that of armed force might be followed.

There is too much at stake, for civilian populations and for the military personnel who pay such a high price for failure for us to be seduced by “the easy speeches which comfort cruel men.”

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© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen

The post Thoughts on Armed Forces Day appeared first on Ekklesia.