Keep on keeping on

I have been a peace campaigner more or less continuously since I was imprisoned as an unconditionalist conscientious objector from September 1954 to January 1955, and over nearly 60 years have learned the necessity of keeping on keeping on. Many in the peace movement fall by the wayside. Some – and this is particularly true of politicians – end up as enemies of the movement they once supported; others, perhaps even more inexplicably, without any change of belief, after a period of activity suddenly decide they have had enough, and are never seen again.

To ensure that this does not happen in your own case, you must pace yourself, decide what volume of activity you can sustain while still leading a normal life, and stick to it over decades. Otherwise you are likely to burn out.

Brian Haw, whose death has saddened me and, I am sure, many others as well, was unique in that only death could end his total commitment to working for peace no matter what the personal cost. That is why he was a great man.

Peace News is 75. Happy birthday! Today is another anniversary; it’s two years  since my Mum’s death so I’m feeling somber, remembering the failings in the hospital care she received and our struggle to get her home so she could die as well as she had lived: in peace, with her family, in familiar surroundings. Time was short, and when some of the things that should have happened to facilitate this did not and our questions met with poor excuses, we blew the whistle to get things moving. Although this had the desired effect and there was soon a proper package of support in place, we were treated with suspicion and downright hostility by some of the professionals involved and we know that their displeasure was communicated to Mum, causing her a lot of distress. It helps that the ultimate outcome was three months of excellent care at home before she died, but I’m still upset about the way it was dealt with.

I’m also reflecting today on the recent revelations of abuse at a Bristol care home, exposed last week in a BBC Panorama programme. The authorities had simply ignored the concerns raised by the care worker, which allowed the abuse to continue. I wonder about this unidentified whistle-blower’s future career prospects. I had a conversation about whistle-blowing recently with a work colleague who has been working in learning disability services for years. She said that in almost all whistle-blowing cases she was aware of, the person exposing the abuse had subsequently found themselves investigated: either fabricated allegations or a big fuss made about a small transgression. Without exception, they had been bullied, victimised, ostracised, made ill and eventually hounded out of their jobs, giving the lie to workplace whistle-blowing policies and ‘protection of vulnerable adults’ training which imply that the authorities will be grateful to have these matters, which workers have a duty to report, brought to their attention.

On 5 June 2011, the day after a Peace News 75th anniversary celebration was held nearby in North London, I attended a panel discussion at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. It was 90 minutes on “The Age of Dissent”, featuring Laurie Penny, Dan Hind and Dan Hancox. Despite the overarching title of the festival, the panel had practically no literary content (other than that the panel were writers and journalists), and only the most tenuous of connections to Stoke Newington.

In the seventeenth century, Stoke Newington was a village sufficiently beyond the bounds of the city of London so that nonconformists could legally worship (under the Five Mile Act, 1665), and thus later a home of Defoe and Quakerism. There is currently a quarter-of-a-million-pound campaign to erect a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft there. So I wondered: is it only in Stoke Newington you would get 150 random locals turn up on a wet Sunday afternoon to listen to a talk about the state of activism?

But the “age” it focussed on was very much the present, in particular the anti-cuts march of 26 March. The first Dan (Hancox) spoke about “kettling” [holding demonstrators in a pen for hours], and the effect of police tactics in stopping many people with families (or weak bladders) from demonstrating, but radicalising those who could afford to be less cautious.

I wasn’t convinced by his idea of turning kettles into “autonomous spaces”, feeling it could ignore the illegality of disproportionate detention and deprivation. (He also mentioned an attempt to start a local group via megaphone.)