Opening speech made at the International Conference of the Council on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament: “In a Dark Time the Eye Begins to See”

I want to begin by saying how strongly the title of your conference speaks to me.  I have always been an optimist.  I am part of the luckiest generation born in Britain, a baby boomer who got the free orange juice, the Welfare State, full employment and, for girls, massively enhanced opportunities in education and work.  I always knew I and my generation were lucky and living at a good time in a peaceful place, but I thought if we worked together to spread justice across the world, life would invincibly get better for all.

But I now feel pessimistic.  I am very shaken by the lies over Iraq and the failure of the UK, the EU and the US to stand for international law and justice in the wider Middle East.  And the very idea of a “war on terror” is of course a complete counterproductive nonsense.  The wonderful opportunity of that short period of hope for a new and more just multilateral order between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the declaration of the war on terror has now been completely lost.  And on top of this we face the enormous threat of the strain on the world’s environmental resources with a world population rising from 6-9 billion within the next few decades.  On top of this, humanity in the developing world is urbanising very fast and likely to become angrier as global communications contrast the riches available in the OECD countries to the terrible poverty of their own.

I am afraid I expect more and more trouble in the Middle East with nuclear proliferation enlarging the dangers.  And we now live at a time when the world’s climate scientists tell us that human civilisation is unlikely to survive beyond a few centuries if we fail to take radical action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

And thus for me, this time is the darkest hour of my lifetime.  And what it leads me to see clearly is that the only way we can ensure that humanity survives the challenges we face is to make the world more equitable.  It is only on this basis that we will be able to reach a binding agreement to cap carbon dioxide emissions.  To achieve this, the way of life of the OECD countries has to become more frugal and less materialistic because our present model, which is currently spreading in China and India, is completely unsustainable.  There is not enough oil, forests and capacity to absorb pollution on the planet to enable our way of life to be extended to all humanity.

And thus we need to create a new civilisation and if we do not we face growing catastrophe.  I fear that things will get worse before they get better.  But if we are to survive we must insist that our foreign policy is driven by the values of our development policy and it is not seen as an optional extra.

The challenge of all this to the great faiths of the world is to speak up for these values that are at the core of all their teachings and not be sucked in to the new clash of civilisations which is a falsity invented to serve the interests of the military, industrial complex.