Letters

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Opened my Peace News this morning [4 December] and had to go and have a lie down.

It was little different from my slush pile of official party brochures complete with all the myths propping up the grand illusion of state democracy itself:

‘We must all vote’, ‘Use that vote’, ‘Your vote makes a difference’, ‘Grasp this opportunity’, ‘The most democratic way of sorting this out’....

I recall with some pride back in the ’70s pasting up Peace News’s famous posters: ‘Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them’. My, how the times change.

I write this one week in advance of the general election but I can predict with some world-weary certainty that the government will get in.

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Firstly, I owe you my life. My parents met selling Peace News outside the Ring O’Bells in Shipley, Yorkshire, during the war. My Dad was a CO [conscientious objector – ed], my mum would have been if she could.

I read your last paper with growing frustration.

During this election campaign, many parties are promising to address climate change by throwing money at it.

None of it will be enough. If all the campaigns are successful, they will not be enough.

The campaigns themselves know: it will not be enough.

There has to be, in the words of the ’70s, a ‘paradigm shift’. We have to work out now how to do this.

I am enclosing our first step.