Friends hear Alternative Security Review findings
A representative of Rethinking Security spoke with Northern Friends Peace Board in July
Quakers in Darlington heard key findings from the upcoming Alternative Security Review last month.
Jo Frew, the outreach coordinator of Rethinking Security (RS), spoke to a Northern Friends Peace Board (NFPB) gathering at Darlington Meeting House. ‘Attendees were surprised to hear that results of a survey identified corruption, actions by the UK government and pandemics as the biggest threats to national security,’ Philip Austin, convenor of NFPB, said, in the NFPB newsletter. ‘Climate change and financial security were also important. Positive contributions to human security were a lot more important than state security to young people, we learned. On the other hand, the largest political parties had just finished several weeks of campaigning that often saw a commitment to nuclear weapons and to increased military spending being portrayed as proof of their security credentials.’
In two surveys by RS, over one-fifth of respondents stated that living in the UK did not give them the security they desired. This proportion was highest among twenty-five to thirty-year-olds (over thirty percent), and slightly higher among young men than young women. Respondents under thirty from minoritised ethnic groups were also nearly fifty per cent more likely than white British respondents to say they lacked this secure life.
At the Darlington event on 6 July, NFPB members discussed ‘the implications of prioritising human security over national security in how we might engage with new MPs and the government, as well as the wider community’.
RS had been planning to publish the report from its three-year Alternative Security Review in June. The report will be released in September but some findings are already available on the RS website.
