Bill Carmichael: Don’t join up if you won’t fight

ON a visit to a Meeting House run by the Society of Friends, I fell into conversation with an elderly gentleman who was one of the guides.I’m not a Quaker, but an open day at a building that has been in continuous use as a place of worship for more than 300 years was too good to miss.

I’m not a Quaker, but an open day at a building that has been in continuous use as a place of worship for more than 300 years was too good to miss.

It turned out my guide was something of an authority on Quakerism in Yorkshire, and he told me of the terrible persecution suffered by Friends, which was only partly mitigated by the passing of the Act of Toleration in 1689. He was about the same age as my father, so I plucked up the courage to ask him what he did in the war. Unsurprisingly, he answered that he’d been a conscientious objector.

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I admired the strength he gained from his faith, but couldn’t help thinking that at a time of national peril, you can only afford to be a pacifist if you are prepared to accept someone else fighting on your behalf.

After all, if all young Britons had declared themselves unwilling to fight in 1939, we’d have all ended up speaking German and looking on helplessly as our Jewish neighbours were dragged off to the gas chambers. Perhaps he read my thoughts because he said: “It wasn’t an easy decision, you know. We were well aware that even the bread in our mouths was put there as a result of violence.” At the time Hitler was trying to starve Britain into submission, and the Royal Navy was hunting U-Boats, and sinking them where it could, to allow safe passage for the grain boats from Canada.

Although I disagreed with him, I couldn’t but help to admire and respect the moral seriousness with which he approached this difficult dilemma.

I’m afraid I can’t say the same for Michael Lyons, the Royal Navy medic jailed this week for refusing rifle training on moral grounds. The big difference is that Lyons wasn’t conscripted – he joined the Navy of his own free will. What did he expect to be doing there? There is a big fat clue in the phrase “Armed Forces”. It couldn’t have come as a complete surprise to him to be asked to pick up a rifle.

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In fact Lyons served for six years without a problem until, shortly after being posted to Afghanistan, he decided he had a moral objection to bearing arms, on political, rather than religious, grounds.

There are perfectly good arguments to be made in favour of pacifism, and the Quaker conscripts of 70 years ago were forced to make agonising choices.

But for people like Lyons in modern Britain the choice is far simpler – if you don’t have the stomach to defend your country, then don’t join the Royal Navy.

Crossing the line

More evidence that Clipboard Man is alive and kicking; members of the Women’s Institute have been banned from tending the flower beds on a roundabout – in case they get knocked over.

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Spelthorne Borough Council in Surrey decided to scrap the floral display on the Shepperton war memorial as a cost-cutting measure. So members of the Upper Halliford Women’s Institute stepped in and offered to draw up a rota to keep the flowers tended at no cost to council tax payers.

But Conservative councillor Robin Sider – yes I’m afraid Clipboard Man infests the Tory party too – decided it was too dangerous and turned down the offer on health and safety grounds. Julie Bloomfield, president of the local WI, pointed out that her members were capable of looking both ways before stepping off the pavement and that they “don’t all have Zimmer frames”.

Quite right. In my experience, WI members are competent, and occasionally formidable, characters who wouldn’t be deterred from tackling something they felt needed doing by the difficulties of crossing a road. And aren’t their public-spirited actions exactly what David Cameron’s Big Society is all about? Not while Clipboard Man can help it, it’s not.

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