Want to Change the World? Then Change Your Life

Thursday, 3 March 2011

Want to Change the World? Then Change Your Life

"I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief," Mrs Betty Williams told school children at Brisbane City Hall in 2006. "It is our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life."

Since winning the honour with Mairead Corrigan in 1977 (for the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize), her career has become the embodiment of the truth that if you want change to come you have to be prepared to change your life first, even at the risk of being disowned by those who claim to love you.

The former Belfast receptionist changed her life in more ways than simply divorcing husband Ralph and marrying James Perkins. She persuaded Protestants and Catholics alike to come out on to the streets in their thousands and protest against sectarian violence. The IRA said she was a "dupe of the British".

She travels the world lecturing on the subjects of peace, justice and equality, a trinity of values some find as hard to swallow as atheists would the Eucharist. Justice and equality before the law are still widely subjugated to cultural values more in keeping with nomadic desert tribes than the urban reality of 21st century Western life.

For instance, forced marriage (for males and females) and honour killings. Here are some statistics from Jaswinder Sanghera, whose charity Karma Nirvana campaigns on these issues in the north of the UK.

. At least 12 so-called honour killings occur every year although the Crown Prosecution Service thinks there may be many more.

. The Home Office's Forced Marriage Unit deals with 5,000 calls for support annually and 400 cases of repatriation a year, a third of which are for under-16s.

. South Asian women aged 16 to 24 are two to three times more likely to commit suicide or self-harm.

Jaswinda told me recently: "I am perceived as a threat by people who have a mindset, who operate in an honour code, who don't want their children to integrate or have choices. They see me as a cultural threat.

"What I deem culturally unacceptable is when they abuse their child to maintain their own idea of what's right and what's wrong...Professionals know what's happening, but have been disarmed when dealing with other communities. They fear getting it wrong and being called 'racist'.

"The perpetrators of forced marriage and honour killings are gaining power through using the race card."

There is still much work for the likes of Jaswinder Sanghera and Betty Williams to do.

Monday, 21 February 2011

When Great Beasts Fall

The lesson for us, watching events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Iran and remembering the fall of 1989 when Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and the red glacier of the USSR, went the same way, is this: everything changes and passes.

In England, when it was manifestly a sovereign state, I watched the years of Wilson follow the "thirteen years of Tory misrule" into the diaries and published histories of former Cabinet ministers. The years of Thatcher, the years of Major Major (can't help but think of the former PM as a character out of Catch 22) the years of the Blair Brown Project, changed and gone.

The Dodo had its day in the sun and vanished. Ditto the dinosaurs. The great beasts who appear over the edge of the world, like one of Goya's flesh devouring Titans, cast a shadow over mankind and then, on an inconsequential day, like the day described by W H Auden when Icarus fell from the sky, they're gone.

I'm telling you nothing you didn't already know, of course. However, I am in lyrical mood tonight, as one tends to be in the midst of calm between storms. In the darkness thousands of miles beyond my windows, ordinary people are making extraordinary things happen, with a little help from the books of Dr Gene Sharp, the US academic who specialises in writing self-help manuals about how to, non-violently, make dictators topple and fall.

Closer to home, the great upholders of democratic accountability who rule us had better be wary, lest the citizens they have cheated for so long decide to undermine their systems of control - the spinning, the spying, the rat-fucking, the lying.

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

We Are Biased...

Today the funeral took place in Langworth, Lincolnshire, of Arnold Hadwin OBE, editor of the Telegraph & Argus newspaper, Bradford, from 1973 to 1984.

For the record, he was 82 when he died in January, on his way to a meeting at the Village Hall. In his active retirement, he took to planting hundreds of daffodils round the hall, maybe thousands.

Far more than the number of irate union health workers who surrounded the offices of the T&A back in the early 1980s, irked by a column I had written on the scandal of hospital patients dying in the back of police vans while ambulancemen went on strike for more money.

Egged on by political militants, they tried to invade the building. Mr Hadwin, a former Royal Marine Commando, went downstairs and persuaded them to clear off, peaceably.

His name is known from Darlington to Africa. Committed to the ideas of democracy and freedom of the press, he travelled all over the world in his later years promoting them.

He ardently believed that all good newspaper journalism was journalist-led. The current notion of reader-led journalism was anathema to him, like political parties formulating policy according to focus groups rather than argued principle.

A local newspaper should take care of its readers - canalising their aspirations, making more articulate their demands, expanding their horizons, he once said. In this respect he was a regional Harold Evans, who expected his journalists to take risks, get under the skin of events and current affairs; basically lead from the front.

He gave a memorable example of this on May 7, 1976. Following local elections in which the National Front had attracted thousands of votes in Bradford, he wrote an editorial in response to an NF accusation that he and his newspaper were biased.

After a general introduction, he launched into his argument like a series of D-Day landing craft. Eight paragraphs began with the phrase, We are biased. In the ninth he wrote: Most of all, we are biased against a political philosophy derived from the degenerate, diseased and disgusting minds of Hitler and his sycophants.

QED, he and the Telegraph & Argus were beyond contradiction biased against proto-fascist parties and their beliefs; and we would be ashamed if we were not.

As I write this, his service at St Hugh's Church, Langworth, is almost over. But what Arnold Hadwin stood for, as a man and as a journlalist, will never be over, no matter how dumbed down and stupyfying the world gets; no matter how much celebrity displaces ability.

He wasn't universally admired, few editors worth their paper's printing ink ever are. But he was good to me and good for me.

I was a 28-year-old student placement at the paper when he asked me if I had ever considered journalism as a career. I told him I had not. Would I consider it, he asked. How did he know I'd be any good at it? I said, really wanting to know. "I think you can leave that to my judgement," he replied.

Thank you Arnold.