From the town hall to Moscow: G8 summit
From Never Again
History says: Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme
- Seamus Heaney
I've been privileged enough to hear hope and history rhyme once already in my life. The front page of The News of the World on July 3rd 2005 read '5 billion people can't be wrong'.
This 5 billion were those watching the Live8 concerts, while 130 million people marched, emailed and petitioned to send world leaders a simple message: you can stop 30,000 children every day from dying and because you can, you must.
I've never been involved in something where the stakes were so high, literally life or death, but one banner made me realise that we could win. It said 'You are G8. We are five billion'.
The subsequent G8 promises - to double aid, treat AIDS and educate all children - certainly aren't all that is needed to end extreme poverty. But they are enough to leave me absolutely convinced that it isn't naÔve to invest hopes and dreams in the peaceful struggles over resources which we call politics. In fact, it's the very best place that our hopes and dreams can go.
It was this reinvigorated sense of the potential of politics that spurred me to become a Labour councillor this year. The move from being an activist on the streets to a decision-maker in the Town Hall hasn't changed my assessment of how change happens. From both vantage points it seems that progress only comes about through struggle and solidarity.
Struggle because progress isn't inevitable. After the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide it is impossible to believe that the increasing knowledge and wealth of humankind will always protect our fundamental humanity or lead inexorably to improvements in our societies. Only struggle can do that; slow, painful and continual struggle to debate, to organise and to allow ourselves to be changed by the different world views we encounter.
Solidarity because everything we achieve we achieve together. On a local level as a councillor, that means letting the family who suffer in overcrowded accommodation know that I am on their side, no matter what. On an international level, it means taking strength from knowing that although there are powerful vested interests standing in the way of the long walk to justice, our voice will ultimately be louder than theirs because we are many and they are few.
A vision of a new humanitarianism unites both parts of my life. The stakes in a local election are very small, but I love the electoral process because of the way we are all humanised by it. We give our neighbours the greatest gift we can, that of saying 'You are different to me, but I trust you. I put my fate in your hands and take yours in mine'. The stakes in the global work we do in Never Again can be very high, but we should never be overwhelmed by the scale of our ambition. In whatever we do, we can approach it in a way that seeks both to see and to value the uniqueness in each person we encounter. We can take that struggle for a new humanitarianism from Southwark Town Hall to the US Senate to the Security Council to the highest levels of the African Union and back again to our homes and schools and workplaces. Then maybe the world can say and mean 'never again' and hope and history will rhyme one more time.
- Kirsty McNeill
