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You see things differently when you are flat on your back under a nuclear convoy. Above I see the drive shaft, steering rods, the other various parts of the vehicle, beyond that the driver sits in his cabin, with the other 19 vehicles in the convoy all working together, the powers that control the death machine, governmental, departmental, political, the unseen high priests of Moloch and Mammon serving our Gods of Metal, the unimaginable power and might I am opposing - all seem quite different when viewed from the ground.

 

For a start the sheer absurdity of defying such power is overwhelming. But defy it I must. I do infinitesimally small things because that is all I can do. And no one ever made a bigger mistake than the person who doesn’t do anything because he can’t do everything.

 

So the police go through the regulation five stages before I am dragged out from under the vehicle, arrested and taken off to the cell in the police station. Precious time alone to pray and think.

 

Of all the thoughts that crowd into my brain, this above all: I would not be here if we had made the right decision in the referendum of 2014, because today Trident would not be here - or anywhere in Britain. The cosmic joke is that what the government of an independent Scotland would have to do, is, well, absolutely nothing at all. If the four subs stay tied up at Faslane they are not deployed, and if they are not deployed they can’t fire their missiles. They are, in effect, disarmed. The Scottish government then requests that the UK government remove its missiles. End of.

 

Since John Ainslie has shown in his masterly work “Trident - Nowhere To Go” there is no other place that Trident can operate from in the UK apart from the Faslane/Coulport complex, it follows that a nuclear free Scotland means a UK without Trident.

 

For me, the 2014 referendum was the Trident referendum. Either I voted for a Unionist party, all of which supported the continued deployment of Trident, or I voted for an independence party, all of which maintain a principled rejection of Trident. The referendum was about a moral issue of the utmost gravity.

All the Churches maintain an anti-Trident stance, so their position should have been clear. But was it?

 

Back at the start of the nuclear age, Albert Camus wrote “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest person. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.”

 

That referendum was about much more than the governance of Scotland. It had a clear and unambiguous moral dimension, on which the churches had in fact already taken a firm stance. One side wanted a constitution banning nuclear weapons from Scottish land and waters, the other supported the present threat to use H Bombs.

I don’t think this was addressed from the pulpits. Churches can’t tell people how to vote, but I believe congregations should have been reminded that they had a clear choice between voting for the removal of nuclear WMD, and supporting their retention, and that the churches had in fact already condemned these.

Our job is to speak truth to power, not to try to be all things to all men. The collective failure of the churches to raise a prophetic voice on this occasion was in my opinion a failure to give Christian witness.

With a second referendum a real possibility, I can only hope and pray that this time the Church would speak out with a truly prophetic voice, so that there is no doubt of their rejection of Trident. Because for me Trident is the worst thing in the world, the machine for the extinction of all life. It is the undoing of Genesis.

 

Brian Quail
August 27, 2017

8 million metric tons of plastic ends up in our oceans each year. This figure is only getting higher. Litter pollution affects wildlife, biodiversity and the proper functioning of the ocean – which means it affects us all as 50% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the sea.

One of the biggest issues is plastic pollution. Wildlife can eat plastic or become tangled up in it, plastic rubbish can smother habitats on the seafloor where fish spawn and we know that zooplankton eat plastic (watch this video proof), meaning that we are eating the plastic which has worked its way up the food chain right up to fish on our plates.

What's the solution? It can’t be said enough: reduce, reuse and recycle but there is something else we can do – clean the beach. Our solution is: Beachwatch.

Beachwatch: (not) a rubbish solution!

Beachwatch is the Marine Conservation Society’s UK-wide beach clean and litter survey programme and the Great British Beach Clean is the flagship event. This Citizen Science project has been running for over 22 years and we have used the beach litter data collected by our volunteers to shape campaigns and influence policy.

The Great British Beach Clean 2016

Last September our volunteers cleared up 286, 384 individual pieces of rubbish around the UK in a single long weekend. Looking at all the rubbish found, we built up a picture of what is happening around the UK – the full report is here.
We found that UK litter levels have dropped by 4% since 2015. This is great news but delve a little deeper and the situation looks less comforting. For example, we found 204.4 pieces of plastic/polystyrene for every 100m of coastline around the UK. Imagine walking along the beach and pacing out 100 steps and finding over 200 pieces of plastic within that area. This is the picture around our coast – more needs to be done!

Beachwatch data: a success story!

A commonly found item on our beaches is plastic bags. We cleaned, we collected and recorded and our data provided the evidence which helped bring in the 5p plastic bag charge.

Since 2011, when the first plastic bag levy came into force in Wales (soon followed by a levy in Northern Ireland (2012); Scotland (2014); and England (2015)) we have seen a 22% drop in the number of bags found on beaches – a measurable success. We are winning this battle against pollution in our seas! This is good news for marine life – whales and turtles mistake plastic bags for their favourite food – jellyfish! Sadly, the plastic becomes impacted in the animal's stomach and, unable to eat, they will starve. This problem is happening now – this is why data collection is vital – so we can actually change legislation and speed up behaviour change.

 

We can take heart from our plastic bag success – it's proof that our approach works but more needs to be done and we need your help! Beachwatch exists only because of our incredible volunteers and, right at this minute, rubbish is accumulating on our coastlines with every lapping tide, with every gust of wind more rubbish finds its way onto the coast, waiting for us to grab it with our litter pickers.

How can you help? Join us for The Great British Beach Clean 2017

Find a beach clean near you on our Beachwatch events page or contact our Team who can help you get started!

 

Get in touch with us
www.mcsuk.org/beachwatch
Email: beachwatch@mcsuk.org
Beachwatch Team:  01989 567807

I seized on Leon Uris’s chunky novel Exodus in my early teens and swallowed hook, line and sinker its version of the birth of a new nation. Politically immature, I wept my way through its 600-plus pages. I knew about the Holocaust and saw justice in the creation of a new country for its survivors. I willed the safe passage of the children being shipped in a rust bucket to the Promised Land.

 

With hindsight I see the book as a cowboy story with all the Jews wearing white hats and all the Arabs and British soldiers wearing black ones. It’s hard not to be harsh on my 15-year-old self.

 

Five years later when I heard that a neighbour had gone off to fight in the 1967 war between the Israelis and Palestinians, Uris’s romance was clearly still in my soul. I assumed the young man was on the side of the Israelis. Learning that he was fighting with the Palestinians, I scuttled back inside my shell of ignorance and started to do some serious reading.

 

How I wish I had been privileged to have the Rev Dr David Neuhaus SJ to guide me through Israeli-Palestinian history and relationships. But Fr David was a five-year-old in 1967 and few of us back then could get a handle on the ‘real’ situation.

That privilege had to wait until August 2017, when Fr David flew into Scotland to preside at a colloquium on Judaism entitled An Exploration of the Land at the invitation of the Interreligious Dialogue Committee of the Scottish Bishops’ Conference and the Conforti Institute.

 

Fr David is the Latin Vicar for Hebrew Speaking Catholics in Israel. His own story is fascinating (hear him talk about his life in this Youtube recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c4LzclyiqA ). In 1967, that five-year-old was growing up in South Africa where his Jewish family had fled from Nazi Germany. Sent to study in Israel, he lived with a Palestinian family and converted to Catholicism. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1992.

 

Today he teaches at Bethlehem University and is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Bethlehem University creates a safe haven in which Palestinians can study – although finding work commensurate with their qualifications can be frustrating for graduates. Supply and demand in the labour market means a school cleaner can earn more than a teacher.

 

In five generous sessions, Fr David – a slight, wiry figure with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Christian and Jewish texts – explored the issue of ‘The Land’. He told us bluntly that he was ‘not here as some kind of balanced neutral person who has it all sorted out’, but a session in which we explored the vocabulary we use in relation to the Israel-Palestine situation may hopefully help us enter interreligious dialogue with greater sensitivity.

 

Jews, Christians and Muslims have deeply emotional ties to the Holy Land, first encountered in the opening verses of the Old Testament. Historic tensions led to prejudices despite our shared heritage, but Fr David reminded us of the shift in attitude required of Catholics towards Jews and Muslims by the Second Vatican Council, and more specifically of the Nostra Aetate document that followed, which condemned anti-Semitism and confirmed the esteem in which the Church regards Moslems.

 

The situation in the state of Israel became an issue of justice and peace from the moment that Palestinians were deprived of the land on which they had lived for millennia in order to accommodate a persecuted people for whom the land was notionally theirs.

 

Fr David reminded us that Popes John Paul II, Benedict and Francis have pushed at the door that could lead to justice and peace in the Holy Land. As individuals, there is perhaps little we can do to influence the complexities of the bigger world picture other than to put our faith into action by relating sympathetically to our Jewish and Moslem brothers and sisters in Scotland.