‘War and peace’: Joe Jones watches the Salter Lecture 2024

‘We need to know when to move on.’

There was an impish mood among the Friends who gathered to watch this year’s Salter Lecture. The Quaker Socialist Society (QSS), which hosts the lecture, had been asked to move the event away from Friends House, because of what Yearly Meeting Agenda Committe (YMAC) had decided was a repututional risk. In 2020 an Equality and Human Rights Commission report had found the Labour Party responsible for ‘unlawful’ harassment and antisemitic discrimination during Jeremy Corbyn’s term as leader; this persuaded YMAC to distance itself from his appearance. Many Friends in the room – in Hamilton House, a few hundred yards from Friends House – were obviously not in unity with the decision: Corbyn received a rapturous welcome as he walked onstage, before Sheila Taylor of QSS was able to remind Friends that applause was not the traditional Quaker response. She didn’t seem too upset.

First up, though, was Paul Ingram from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. Paul has spent many years working for nuclear disarmament, and was the originator and developer of the ‘Stepping Stones’ approach that underpins the Stockholm Initiative of non-nuclear weapon states. The world is in a bad place, he began, but: ‘There are many dangers in keeping our attention too long on the negative and the oppositional. We need to know when to move on.’ For him, Friends’ Peace Testimony was ‘far from being a simple idealistic expression of moral judgement about wars far away’. Modern society was too ready to cast people into opposing sides. The world and its people were complex, and he had created a rule of thumb for himself as he approached that complexity: ‘If an action divides or isolates, it damages the prospects of peace. If it brings diverse people together and encourages communication, particularly when it’s difficult, then it’s positive.’ Very few people were convinced by argument, he said. Instead it was about relationship: ‘We need a politics that involves true listening.’

Jeremy Corbyn agreed. His peace positions were well-known to those in the room, but new were his recent attempts, after winning his seat as an independent MP, to stimulate engagement in his constituency through citizen-led open processes. This was the way to build active peace within our own communities and enrich relationships across cultures, backgrounds and experiences, he said. 

The audience was perhaps most engaged by the question-and-answer session. Paul and Jeremy tackled issues such as the use of violence in liberation movements, and how treating particular nation states as bullies was not helpful. Interested parties needed to find a way out of the bully-victim-rescuer  cycle. Friends’ minds were obviously on Gaza, Ukraine and other countries affected by violence. Those in the UK needed to understand their own country’s role in historical injustice, but also how it was not acting for peace internationally today. 

Friends endorsed the message, still bemused by the decisions that took them outside Yearly Meeting. ‘That's what's damaged our reputation’, said one, ‘the other peace organisations now think we're part of the witch hunt’. 

Joe edits the Friend. See the lecture at https://bit.ly/JeremyCorbynSal....

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