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Remembrance Sunday always reminds me of the story told by an elderly relative of mine. Thelma died some years ago, having lived to be nearly 100. She told me of her early life, born in Scunthorpe just after the end of the first world war. Her young father had been called up to fight, and, when he returned from France, he was suffering badly from shell shock. According to Thelma ‘he had lost his nerves’. As a result, he was unable to work and spent much of the time upstairs in bed. The young family were desperately poor, and the only solution was for Thelma’s mother to go out to work. She found a job with a local grocer, but what were they to do about little Thelma, who would need to be looked after? There was no immediate family who could help, and the father was too poorly to look after a lively young toddler.
There has been a lot of conversation among Friends about the mass civil disobedience being organised by Defend Our Juries (DOJ). I see much misinformation around, some describing DOJ actions as violent or antisemitic. I would like to offer Friends my personal perspective, as someone active in the campaign, who has witnessed events first-hand.
‘I love being a peer mediator,’ said one of the participants at this conference, held in the Pierhead building, Cardiff Bay, on 15 October. She beamed across the table and showed me the peer mediation lanyard that she wears when on duty at her school. Along with almost 100 other pupils from across South Wales, it was the first time she would be meeting other children trained as mediators, and she was excited. The conference was the culmination of a joint project between Quakers in Britain and the Welsh Centre for International Affairs (WCIA), started in January 2024.
The House of Lords may seem an unlikely place to hear harrowing testimonies from persecuted human rights defenders, but the sumptuous surroundings seemed to outline the stark contrast even more – between the relative privilege and freedom of living in the UK, and the conditions that some people are escaping. With a recent name change to promote, the former Prisoners of Conscience group invited a group of donors and interested people to the fancy Lord’s Attlee and Reid Room to hear about the charity’s vital work supporting human rights defenders. As Gary Allison, director, later told me, the work is well supported by Quakers, including one or two trustees, and twenty Quaker Meetings, which have collections for the charity.
In his thought-provoking article of 10 October (‘Is peace possible?’), John Lampen looks at the implications for peacemakers of the breakdown of the international order. Is there, he asks, any chance of restoring the rule of law? He notes the current disregard for truth, and the critical need for cooperation. We may indeed feel impotent and hopeless in the face of the enormous task of turning around adversarial thinking and putting cooperation in its place, but we have to do that if the climate emergency is to be faced. Serious observers now see 3°C warming as a likely scenario; on present trends, humanity might only survive in small pockets.
By God I’d do a runner
for boots good as these
says a man from the streets
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