Tweaking the testimonies

Richard Seebohm has enjoyed delving into the QCEA archive

Not long ago I spent a week in the cellars of Quaker House in Brussels. This was to take stock of the archive of the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA), starting when it was set up in 1979. What I found myself focusing on was the first four years, when Pat and Brian Stapleton were the representatives in post.

The files cover mainstream issues that have dogged QCEA over the decades, such as: conscientious objection, the arms trade, migrants and development assistance. Many of the stories in them, however, are specific to the time. Some of these resonate with our testimonies and have a surprising relevance for the present day.

Peace

In 1982 QCEA sent Friends to a Council of Europe seminar on violence in schools. The final report stated that when a conflict had been resolved, ‘there should be no continuing feud after the remedy has been applied’. I see this message as relevant to all conflicts, whether local or at the national level. Friends have played notable parts in peacemaking and peacekeeping. Peacebuilding, however, perhaps over generations, can be a more exacting task. QCEA over a number of years tried to set up a European Peace Agency, but the outcome, with now thirty-five peace and development NGOs as members, is the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office – look for its website.

Truth

A QCEA group went to East Germany in 1981. They found defiant but isolated Quakers. An official said to them that Lech Wałęsa, the Polish trade union leader at the time, was a tool of intellectuals and Jews. The Northern Friends Peace Board went to Moscow and came back speaking of the system as full of moral purpose. They then noted, almost in passing, after hearing that several Jewish communities were flourishing, that this was far from the case. Nowadays, while the inheritors of the Soviet system flood the internet with falsehoods, it is fanatical campaigners in the civilised West who also bring a calculated disregard for truth into their discourse. We as Quakers think we speak truth to power. What we should also be doing is speaking of truth to power.

Equality

Partnership for Productivity was an American NGO which backed development projects in Africa. It was run by Quakers. They came from business backgrounds, but it was not a capitalist plot. Their focus was on leadership, in that a locally managed project would fail unless it had a ‘get up and go’ leader. What mattered, though, was that the leader should subordinate his interests to the interests of the people he served. (1981 was too early for gender awareness.) This concept is seldom seen in present-day public life. We should welcome more of it in the worlds of commerce as well as politics. John Spedan Lewis, Ernest Bader and Clement Attlee come to mind, and their example might even stir our own consciences as Quaker activists.

Simplicity

The Scandinavians were, at first, unhappy about the idea of QCEA. They saw the European Community (as it then was) as a rich man’s club. If a Quaker voice was to be offered, it should deal with wealth distribution, access to justice and the consequences of producing unnecessary goods. We have seen since then that GDP, the sheer volume of transactions, is widely regarded as the most important measurable measure of national wellbeing. We perhaps hanker after smallholdings as the future of agriculture, but ‘farmers’ markets’ are too often overrun by those offering scented candles and craft jewellery. I am not disparaging art, which Quakers rejected for so long, nor do I think that a craving for decoration is a sign of moral weakness, but objects as status symbols, the more costly the better, are not what we need.

What the testimonies do not, exactly, cover is the way we live as social beings. Geoffrey Hubbard was an educational polymath who chaired QCEA in its early years. (Quaker committees had chairs then, not clerks as now.) In 1981 he wrote a paper on The Impact of the New Technologies. This was before the Internet was even imagined. He predicted that manufacturing jobs would be lost to robots or to developing countries. Everything pointed towards more output with fewer people. (I don’t think he imagined the scale of current pressure to cut middle management posts as well as the shop floor.) But he saw that you couldn’t readily turn miners into computer programmers. The remedy of ramping output up and up was not an option. No one will want to buy a new washing machine every month. The public would rule out the idea of forcing pay down to a subsistence level to be globally competitive, though perhaps the ‘gig economy’  – a labour market characterised by short-term contracts or freelance work rather than permanent jobs – now almost amounts to that.

The only answers that governments have found is to maintain the jobless with transfer payments – unemployment benefit and pensions. The alternative Geoffrey Hubbard saw was to absorb them in non-market services such as education, healthcare and social work. In the absence of market signals the choice is political. But the choice between ‘benefits’ and socially useful employment might not be as economically one sided as at first it seems. He did not focus on the socialising aspects of a workplace. It provides the community support that we now seem to lack.

For the expansion of non-market services, politicians should be sensitive to what people actually wanted. It would take better education to articulate and recognise their needs for this to work. Geoffrey, Hubbard even then, thought that ‘new technology’ might help people to communicate and be listened to. Even here, the market was not wholly out of place. A profit maximising private prison was ‘an intriguing idea’ – for 1981!

Finally, he thought that European Union institutions were better placed than vote-conscious national governments to take on the communication task of enabling people to understand what was going on and what was at stake. He therefore hoped that QCEA could start this ball rolling. Current politics, to my mind, reveal exactly the aspirations and tensions that Geoffrey Hubbard was seeking to tap into.

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