BYM sets out demands for politicians in election season
Britain Yearly Meeting highlights key issues it believes politicians should focus on
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has drawn up a list of key issues that it believes politicians should focus on for their general election pledges. The key demands, drawn up by the Quaker Peace & Social Witness team, include: climate justice; criminal justice; migration; peace and disarmament; and civil discourse. The peace and disarmament priority particularly includes the need for the UK government to sign up to the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to stop what it calls the ‘UK’s profit-led complicity with the international weapons trade’.
According to the post on the Quakers in Britain website: ‘The UK’s divisions have been made clear by Brexit. While they existed before 2016, they have only grown worse as politicians dismiss rises in hate speech and hate crime. We call on politicians to avoid hurtful language, and not allow the strength of your convictions to betray you into making statements or allegations that are unfair or untrue.’
BYM also co-authored a letter published in The Times on 29 November calling for finance and debt relief for global south countries hit by climate-related disasters. The letter was signed by nine representatives of British churches. It pointed out that there is currently no international agreement on how finance for this loss and damage should be provided, meaning the countries that have done least to cause the climate crisis are left to bear the burden themselves. It also called for the COP25 climate negotiations, which started on 2 December in Madrid, to ‘include and listen to communities in the global south, for whom climate issues are matters of life and death’.
With the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (WIM) being reviewed at COP25, BYM also joined around 150 organisations in signing an open letter pressing for a climate disaster fund, financed by wealthy countries, to support communities hit by the crisis. The letter also called an interest-free moratorium on debt for poor countries experiencing climate disasters. It notes that without ‘finance to help countries cope with climate-induced loss and damage, the most vulnerable parts of the world will sink deeper into debt and poverty every time they are hit by climate disasters they did not cause’.
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