Last Thursday, the Metropolitan police broke into Westminster Friends’ Meeting House to arrest six women members of the pressure group Youth Demand, which ironically probably helps to publicise them and encourages people to join their cause. Although their plans for action are interesting, I want to focus on another aspect of this situation and also compare it to the child abuse allegation farce which took place in the Orkneys at the end of the 1980s CE. Before that though, I want to talk about the place of Friends’ Meeting Houses and the Quakers in my life, mainly the one in Leicester.
The first time I darkened the doors of Leicester Friends’ Meeting House on Queens Road was in autumn 1986. At the time I had recently joined the Green Party and was also involved in hunt sabbing, animal liberation and the university Green group Leicester Environmental Action Force. It was dark and around 7:30 pm on a Thursday evening, and I was walking behind my friend Vicky whom I probably shouldn’t have been behind at that time of night, but you live and learn. At this point, she was for some reason constantly surprised when I turned up to this kind of thing, possibly because her image of me had been dominated by how I’d been over the previous year. Both she and I were on our way to a Supporters Of Greenpeace Leicester meeting, the first of many groups I’d be involved with there over the coming years. Other groups included Friends of the Earth, Leicester CND and, a few years later during the 1991 Gulf War, the Stop The War Coalition. As well as all that, we got married there in a humanist ceremony (well, sort of humanist – long story), went to a complementary medicine taster group, attended Yoga sessions, a parent and toddler group (abortively) and also Leicestershire Education Otherwise. I can’t quite remember, but I don’t think the Green Party or the animal welfare groups I was involved with ever went there, but it was a pretty central part of the alternative scene in Leicester, and particularly Clarendon Park, at the time. It was a venue used by lots of groups, with a tendency towards peace, sustainability, socialism, Green issues and to some extent anarchism. In general, the approaches taken by such groups accords with the Quaker world view. The donkey coöperation cartoon was outside on a board for many years, which seems to me to be pretty much in accordance with these organisations.
There was conflict, even aggressively so, within these groups. In particular the Stop The War Coalition was rife with friction because it involved peace groups and splinter communist groups trying to work together and soon after the end of the first Gulf War it fell apart. That was quite a shouty group, with the overt aggression largely coming from the smaller communist parties. There were members of the main Communist Party of Britain in the group, though, who were generally quiet and in fact didn’t advertise their communism. CND has many of that variety of communists within its ranks, but also people of a more spiritual bent. Supporters of Greenpeace Leicester was merely a fundraising body and in fact we got into trouble for trying to do more, so on the whole the same people worked within Friends of the Earth instead, meeting in the same place. There’s a conversation to be had about this, but not here. FoE also have their issues. Sarada and I concur in the opinion, also expressed by many others, that the more peace and well-being groups could do with being more politically-aware and the more overtly political groups could benefit from being more spiritual. Now I look back on it, the other stuff going on in Leicester at the time didn’t tend to organise from the building, and CND also had its own office, where I was office manager for a while, among other things. Leicester CND was slowly winding down over the whole period I was involved with it, which was from 1991 to about 2011, and was dominated by older people, mainly women. I preferred CND to the other organisations in the ’90s because of their spiritual tendencies. The revolution starts from within. It really helps the world if you become a better person.
That, then, is the kind of group you might expect to meet in a Friends’ Meeting House. Many Quakers don’t have their own premises for various reasons: there aren’t enough of them to afford one or it becomes a case of property ownership in the same way as many churches are saddled with expensive buildings which eat up the money which could be used to benefit the community and the vulnerable in Europe and beyond. That said, it’s a nice thing to have, and although they’re not Quakers themselves there is often quite an overlap in their memberships. In particular, Leicester CND had a lot of Quakers in it, which is not surprising because of the latter’s commitment to pacifism. CND is not a pacifist group although it does contain many such individuals. Quakers also tend to be older, as do members of many religious communities in Britain. Incidentally, I’m talking about Quakers in the “U”K here. What happens elsewhere is probably different. For instance, American Quakers often have what are called “programmed meetings” with singing and they don’t sit in circles.
The reason I’m saying all this is to put the incident in Westminster in context. It’s possible that Youth Demand has Quaker members but not inevitable. However, their witness and mission to pursue peace, justice and sustainability accords closely with the Quakers, and they belong under their umbrella. At a guess, Youth Demand probably don’t overlap with membership just because they’re young. Hence it’s an organisation using the centre, with whose aims the Quakers are likely to agree, but it isn’t a Quaker organisation. The situation is therefore that a place of worship hosting a planning meeting by a non-violent group was invaded by the police and their members were arrested.
I may have some of the details wrong but there is a page on the incident here from the British Quakers themselves which is worthwhile for cutting through the verbiage and spin of the mass media, although it has to be said also that the actual mass media coverage is quite sympathetic to the Quakers themselves. There were twenty police officers and six women were arrested for planning a now-criminalised Non-Violent Direct Action. Several aspects of this come to mind. One is the question of whether the police would’ve done the same thing with other places of worship. I heard someone yesterday claim that they wouldn’t have done this with a synagogue or a mosque. I personally think they would’ve done it with a mosque but the fact that synagogues are often guarded and have turnstiles would have made doing it in such a place difficult regardless of how it would’ve looked. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have done it to an Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, URC, Roman Catholic or Orthodox church. Regarding gurdwaras, they did actually use a SWAT team in Leicester to my knowledge because they thought the lives of the people within it, who were being held hostage, were in danger. I have no idea how heavy-handed they were. Bearing in mind the direct child abuse and murder which occurs in some churches, for instance when exorcisms have been performed on children, I would expect and in fact hope that they would intervene in such cases. So it isn’t completely out of order to do this, although the provocation would’ve probably been stronger. It’s also not proportionate, and it’s at least interesting that it seems to have been a woman-only group. The implication is that this action would’ve been sufficiently serious and reprehensible to warrant such a response, possibly partly as a deterrent to others.
I mentioned incidents of child abuse within churches. Although this usually calls to mind child sexual abuse, which is indeed a serious problem, I actually had exorcisms in mind. I have actually tried to help someone access exorcism, which they wanted for themselves, and it was difficult to do so due to their lack of association with any particular church. It doesn’t seem easy to get this service within the Episcopal Church. Without this milieu, however, things are sometimes different because some other churches are less reserved or cautious. A fifteen year old boy was drowned during an exorcism in Newham in 2012 and a two-year old was hit fatally in Wolverhampton more recently. It isn’t clear whether either was part of a church-sanctioned process, but these things do happen and the potential victims need to be protected. However, the separate issue of child sexual abuse linked with a general suspicion of Quakers was also called to mind by last week’s events.
This seems to have been almost forgotten today, which may be a good thing except that forgetting history risks repeating it, which in a sense is what’s happened here. You may, though, remember the Satanic panic of the ’80s and ’90s, which is how this was able to take place. I can remember the first time I noticed this in about 1979 when my mother showed me a list of what the London Healing Mission regarded as Satanic activities, including of course Yoga, which I was very keen on at the time. I wish I was still that keen. This initially included heavy metal music and roleplaying games, as in Dungeons And Dragons. Much more recently it included Harry Potter although that’s faded considerably nowadays. By the late ’80s, the focus was on the idea that communities were being infiltrated by Satanists who were engaging in widespread ritual abuse including child murder and sexual abuse. No evidence was ever found, but that didn’t stop a training course for the police being devised. The claim was meanwhile made of fifty thousand murders per year with expert disposal of the corpses. To put this in proportion, this is on the scale of the casualties of a major international war. All this was happening in North America. To quote some of the promoters of these claims, “no evidence can be evidence” and “the most dangerous groups are the ones we know nothing about. . .They are the real underground”. It was eventually concluded that the children involved were being interviewed in a manner which would encourage them to make up stories about being abused due to the poor quality of the questioning techniques, such as closed questions, and in therapy false memories were also created. Because children often deny being abused during interviews, the approach was to keep repeating the question, and it’s fairly simple to recognise even as an adult that that repetition is akin to Hitler’s technique of repeating a lie often enough for it to be accepted as true, a technique currently in use in the US. However, it beggars belief that anyone could have accepted that the process was taking place on such a gigantic scale. It’s the reverse of Holocaust denial in some ways: where are all the relatives of the Roma and Jewish people who were murdered in the Holocaust if they weren’t murdered? Conversely, how could there be tens of thousands of victims of systematic serial murder whose bodies are never recovered and whose absence is never noted by anyone? There were allegations of injuries which would’ve required emergency treatment but no evidence for them either.
In February 1990, the McEwen family in South Ronaldsay was almost broken apart by a dawn police raid on their home where four children were removed and taken into care on the Scottish mainland. A worker in the NSPCC had made the claim that in Britain four thousand children were murdered through Satanic ritual abuse annually. What had happened was that there had been conferences on Satanic ritual abuse in Britain, notably in Nottingham in connection with a genuine incest case in Broxtowe. Ten adults were jailed for this having been found guilty, but no suggestion of a Satanic element had been made at that time. This connection was made by a group of psychiatrists, social workers and an anthropologist specialising in occult rituals in Afrika. This was happening at a time of growth of evangelical Protestant churches in Britain, which led to the production of a training video called ‘Christian Response To The Occult’. Workers in children’s foster homes and foster parents recorded claims made by the children, which while beginning with accounts of their abuse in relatively prosaic terms tended to veer off into accounts of ritual abuse. There were attempts to explain this in any other way possible, because of the uncanny similarities between the claims. The social workers concluded that they’d uncovered an organised network of ritual abuse in Broxtowe. A checklist was used which contained a large number of non-specific signs of indicators such as bed-wetting, and the foster parents and others had used this as the basis for the interviews, so they’d ended up guiding the process through leading questions. While there was no factual basis for these claims, the fear of not listening to children when they report genuine abuse leads to swinging too far the other way.
By 1994, an inquiry had established that there was no evidence at all for the claims. It’s worth noting that this sounds very like Pizzagate. Now I have a problem. I’ve ransacked the internet for fair accounts of the situation regarding the Ronaldsay Quakers without any success, so I’m going to have to try to reconstruct this from rather ancient personal memories. What I can remember is that someone of national significance among the Quakers was contacted by a worried member of the meeting who expressed her concern that police action was liable to bring the meeting and the wider Quaker movement into disrepute without any firm basis for that. She was reluctant to say more, but in the end she talked about how the police suspected them of Satanic ritual abuse. In particular, she said that the police were suspicious of the Quaker practice of sitting in circles and waiting for the Holy Spirit (as I put it – many Quakers such as atheists and Buddhists would probably disagree with this characterisation but it’s hard to think of a personally authentic way to describe it more diplomatically) to move them to give ministry. This was apparently something the police and many of their associates were unfamiliar with and attributed evil intent to. Putting my evangelical Protestant hat on, something Quakers would disapprove of, I’m familiar with the claim that allowing silence and emptiness of this kind is liable to give Satan a way into the group, and I wonder if this was their take on this. I honestly don’t know what happened in much detail, and I’m finding this quite frustrating right now.
These two incidents, the Westminster invasion and the Orkney Satanic panic, to me both have elements of othering by the authorities, something with which the Quakers will be very familiar as they’ve endured it for centuries. The very heart of Quaker practice, of sitting in circles and waiting to be moved by the Spirit, was attacked by the establishment back in the early ’90s, and last week the general Quaker ethos was attacked in the same way. I’ve long since shed the illusion that the current Westminster government is worthy of being described as Labour and I note the extreme keenness and conformity with which they applied the Tory law introduced in 2022 to enable this kind of thing to happen. But it’s the Tory party which is supposed to be about God, King and Country, and by extension the Anglican church, which is after all also a broad church, much of which would back the actions of the pressure group in question, but the question arises of why a party founded partly by Methodists would decide to persecute Quakers for supporting peaceful protest against the global suicide (yes, it’s a moral crime in this context, but not usually, so it’s “suicide” for the purposes of this paragraph) pact. Why are we in a situation where a group renowned for its non-violence and tireless work for peace is repeatedly treated in this way? And why haven’t we made progress on this since Thatcher’s time in office?
But there’s more.
Quakers seek to see the spark of God in everyone, and they mean that in a positive way which anti-theists may find hard to perceive. I think it was Viktor Frankl who said that the line between good and evil runs down the centre of the human heart. We all have within us the potential for peace and violence in his view. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the fact remains that this situation is likely to provoke anger in those who have been persecuted, directly and indirectly. There is a potential antidote to this, because the very police officers and social workers involved in these incidents are human, and as such there’s that of God in them too.
It reminded me of two other incidents, and again I’m having to rely on somewhat shaky memories. One is of an incident regarding the peace movement and the police, possibly on Menwith Hill or Faslane – it’s vague. A group of people were trying to project peaceful and healing energy to the police force involved in this conflict. The metaphysical basis for this may be questionable but bear with me. One of the male police officers involved in protecting the base burst into tears in this incident, and it was found later that he’d been at Hillsborough, where the fatal crush had happened in the football ground and after which South Yorkshire Police spread false stories criticising the fans, as did the Sun newspaper. Whatever his involvement in that, he had been emotionally traumatised by what he witnessed because guess what, police officers are also human beings. The other incident was much more recent and involved another police officer who was guarding a fossil fuel facility of some kind – I’m having to dredge my memory here, sorry about any mistakes. One of the protestors mentioned to her that Just Stop Oil, if it was them, were among other things trying to protect her children’s and other descendants’ future, and once again, she was in tears. I don’t know the details of this incident. It could’ve been to do with a family tragedy, some other experience or maybe the interpretation given is correct. It was in any case a remarkable incident, once again revealing what might be called the humanity of police officers. Because there is that of God in everyone.
But there is also a police officer in everyone. By this I don’t mean a “bobby on the beat”, although maybe there is, but someone more like a member of the Special Patrol Group or the Carabinieri. We all have an inner fascist boot boy too, and we need to be conscious of it.
I was sitting in a sociology lecture once about the 1981 inner city riots, and suddenly had the thought that the police were not just Thatcher’s Army but also ordinary human beings with romantic relationships and families, and the thought had such a profound affect on me that it literally gave me vertigo. It made my head spin. I feel bad about that incident because it clearly means I was seriously objectifying the people concerned, but of course it’s true. When the Met broke into the Friends’ Meeting House in Westminster the other day, what they did was reprehensible and bizarre, but after it they presumably went home to their families, read their children bedtime stories, did the vacuuming, made love to their spouses and watched telly with them. They are also human. It shouldn’t need saying, but we need to have the mental reach to recognise the temptation to other and behave like them in ourselves and condemn and work against that in us as well as in them, and also to do what we can to see their divine nature, and this is very difficult.
I feel like this is a bit of a platitude, sorry.
A Box Of Chocolates 