QTIG contribution to Yearly Meeting 2024: https://files.quaker.app/sb79zx
Feedback from Exploration Session
Title of Session: Truth and Integrity in Public Affairs – Creating Empathy and Engagement
Facilitators: Martina Weitsch, Lesley Grahame, Fran Hicks
Time: 2.30 pm (27 July 2024)
The Quaker Truth and Integrity Group was formed in response to the falling standards of conduct in politics; particularly, we were responding the to the increasing levels of untruths that the public was being fed by politicians, and my both legacy and social media.
To quote Hannah Arendt: This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore’.
As a group, we are committed to democracy because it is the only form of government that can, if it is a healthy democracy, reflect equality; and because it allows everyone to be part of the debate, to be open to new light from wherever it may come and to recognise that other people’s beliefs and opinion, even if they differ from our own, may not be wrong.
It is on this basis that we seek to engage with elected politicians. The public needs to know what the politicians are doing and the politicians need to know what the public think.
We reflected on different ways of engaging, as individuals, as meetings, as wider groups in which Friends can lead or contribute; Friends, because of our testimony to equality do not defer to people and we do not condescend to people. This puts us in a good position to contribute or lead on such initiatives.
It is important that such approaches are differentiated. Quiet diplomacy may be possible and necessary to allow politicians to engage with views that may not be popular; wider debate may be more appropriate when solutions to really difficult choice are required.
We learned that Citizens UK is a broad community-based approach to this and how we can become involved locally in that. Politicians will benefit from input from those with both lived experience of the issues that need to be addressed – housing, migration, and others; they will also benefit from analysis of these issues by academics and others. Community involvement can ensure that these voices are fed in. This applies at local level as much as at national level.
We considered what a complex and varied job being an MP is: be the voice of constituents, follow the party whip, be everything to everybody, listen, be a turbo-charged Citizens’ Advice service; we also considered the range of pressures that are exerted on them that they have to deal with and that are relevant to their work: constituents, media, party, business, interest groups, and following their own conscience. As ever, it is important to ‘follow the money’; who is supporting decision-makers financially and how?
We spent time to consider specific examples of difficult issues (housing, migration, climate crisis) and explored how the different pressures might play out.
We need to work at constituency levels because that is the level at which MPs engage; this may make engagement more difficult for meetings and area meetings that straddle constituencies; but this allows choices to be made about where we can be most effective.
We need to become aware of our own – and others’ – tendency to become confrontational when we disagree. Seeing common ground (where can we agree) and trying to make space for expressing where views (or words) come from will help to mitigate this; but we also need to acknowledge that we will make mistakes and deal with them.
Many of our MPs are new; new to their constituency and new to Parliament. Finding out what would help them, how we can be supportive to their goals may be a start for a more open conversation.
MPs may have bold and radical ambitions to do the right thing and they may have much pressure on them to ‘tone down’, ‘toe the party line’, ‘not to rock the boat’, and not to attract negative media attention. Where they are pursuing political objectives we support, it might be helpful to let them know.
Underlying all of this is the need to see MPs as people, as human beings, and not as ‘other’ – even, or especially if we disagree with them.
We were reminded how thin the political education of young people in schools is. We underlined the necessity to address this. One possible way of addressing this was for there to be voter registration information in a prominent place in our Meeting Houses; this could be highlighted when there are school visits from older secondary school students.
Young people need someone outside their family and outside their school to talk openly about politics. Is there something Meetings could do to provide some of that via the provision for teenagers, for example?
There was much support for Citizens’ Assemblies; supporting those, speaking to MPs about them, and creating local fora where policy issues can be debated on a kind of citizens’ assembly basis would be a good start. Meetings can contribute by providing resources for such broader community initiatives.