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On CENSORSHIP

by John Papworth

see also 'Comments' from Peter Etherden

John Bunzl sends a letter to a large number of people explaining that he will not be attending the 'Radical Consultation' in Swindon Sept 14/15th because I am censoring his attempts to advertise his 'Simultaneous Policy'. I have neither the desire, the ability nor the intention to do anything of the sort.

Anyone is free to attend and to introduce whatever ideas they wish into the proceedings or even to set up a fringe meeting to advance their views, even if the Steering Group feel they have a responsibility when printing and circulating papers, to exercise some selectivity to ensure that entrance fee money received should be used for the purposes for which the event has been organised.

Which brings us to John's 'Simultaneous Policy'.

After I had read his proposals I wrote to him to explain that I had written repeatedly and at length suggesting that a major reason for the global crisis lay in the way ordinary people everywhere had been disempowered by the modern trends towards centralisation and excessive size.

I pointed out that this disempowerment meant that ordinary peoples' moral judgements on public affairs had been rendered largely irrelevant since morality is a function of personal relationships, whereas their relationship with public bodies is a power relationship. I further explained that whilst personal relationships were on a basis of equality, power relationships were decidedly unequal, especially in mass terms since power in mass societies inevitably accrues to the central controlling mechanisms.

I reminded him that Gandhi had argued pertinently: 'You cannot have morality without community', meaning of course that without a structure where personal relationships rather than power relationships predominated what did predominate was not morality but power.

I suspect that all this may have been a trifle too complex for John ... as indeed it is for most of us.

Anyway I pointed out to him that his 'Simultaneous Policy', just like peace, justice, democracy and all the other intangibles for which the soul of man hungers, was a moral objective and that in mass conditions the sheer size and centralised structure of modern political units made it inevitable that they should be dominated by power rather than moral imperatives, and proceeded to ask him how his policy proposal would or could take effect.

He responded by failing to even attempt to answer the question and simply raised other matters which had no bearing on the subject at all.

So there we are, another sweeping moral proposal which in itself is a superb project but one which simply fails to take any account of the power realities confronting us; so it will stir up a lot of attention, there will be meetings full of enthusiasm and idealism galore, perhaps a regular news bulletin indicating how others are similarly inspired as indicated at the last conference (Torquay? Blackpool? Swindon perhaps?), and, as the years roll by, the annual gathering of a dwindling number of aging devotees representing little more than a ghetto of sentimental futility in a world going increasingly to pot because the essential factors of the crisis of power have been either overlooked or inadequately challenged.

It is said that when Prime Minister Atlee was approached with any scheme for human betterment by an enthusiastic campaigner he would consider the proposal very carefully and always give the same reply: 'That is very, very interesting'.

Sorry to be hard on John's feelings; he is that unique combination of selfless idealism and rugged determination which helps to make the world go round, even if on this occasion he happens to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick…which is that his moral concern leads him to assume the world is governed by moral judgements; if only it were!

We already have a goodly number of 'Simultaneous Policy' efforts up and running; many countries are running armaments programmes simultaneously and to such a degree that a third world war is now waiting in the wings to happen. There is a similar simultaneousness about motorway building, car manufacturing, over-fishing, global warming, community destruction, finite resource squandering and so on and so on. If we had the power to simultaneously stop all this and a great deal more they would never have been started in the first place.

Attempts now to stop them by means that do not stem from the decision-making power of people in their localised, neighbourhood communities can scarcely fail to be part of the disease rather than its cure.

Another factor waiting in the wings of the insane, power-dominated, 21st century lifestyle to happen is fascism.

copies of notices on The Radical Notice Board may be obtained from

26 The High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com
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