FRIDAY was International Day of Peace. Here, Alison Phipps reflects about the day her foster daughter, a refugee, gave birth and how hospitals are a place of refuge in an often hostile world.
I WOKE up this morning wanting to sing a song of praise to a young person. Her name is Elin Ersson and she saved a life. She used careful, clear, non-violent direct action to halt the deportation of an Afghan back to Afghanistan from Sweden. The live stream video she made has gone viral, and with it the images of what courage looks like.
SO, Amber Rudd has resigned as Home Secretary. She misled Parliament at the Home Affairs Select Committee. The evidence in a letter to the Prime Minister of what she authored and what she knew has directly contradicted what she said she knew. But let’s be clear, she has not resigned because she was the successor architect to Theresa May’s policy of creating a hostile environment when she was Home Secretary. Oh no.
I’VE been attending protests and picket lines for as long as I can remember and they have never been so well fed. The University strike over the radical axing of staff pensions has now entered its third week and yet the picket lines are stronger than ever. Outside the main gates of the University of Glasgow, on University Avenue, the fire engines, and buses, lorry drivers, taxis, Glasgow city council land services – all of them honking away on their horns in support to great cheers from the picket lines. And it’s cold. Temperatures barely above zero, with blizzards last week and freezing rain this. We’ve all learned that there is no such thing as too many layers on the picket line.
IT turns out that books are not all that easy to burn. Bending over the ashes of a place I’ve called a home, a refuge, I find the pages of one or two books still intact, fragments of ash-flaking pages surrounding discernible text. It’s a moment bright with sadness, or perhaps sad with brightness. I’m still not sure, for the feelings are new to me, and still settling in, making their home in my life, as something which has happened to me too.
THEY left her in a room on her own with no food or water for four hours. An officer gave the following reassurance, she later told us: “Don’t worry about Dungavel – it’s just like a big disco or big cinema.” That wasn’t how she described it when she was returned to us.
‘ALISON”, she says. It’s close to midnight. I am sitting with one of my oldest friends, my penfriend from German school exchanges, at her kitchen table. She had just picked me up from the airport. We are both bubbling with the happiness of being together and the gratuitous amazement that this short visit has been possible. “Alison. I have something to tell you.” she says, with a seriousness, “my life has changed completely in the last two months.”
TODAY the greeting at breakfast in the guesthouse, was “Euer Brexit ist eine Katastrophe” – Your Brexit is a catastrophe. Then: “Schottland muss in Europa bleiben. Der einziger Weg fuer die Demokratie.” – Scotland must remain in Europe. It’s the only democratic way.
IN the climate of panic that serves only the security industry and further erosion of democratic freedoms, we are being told that those held in connection with – not yet tried or convicted – the most recent act of terrorism in London, were also in foster care. I expect they used toothbrushes, drank Coca-Cola and wore training shoes on a daily basis too.
