A Minister for Peace: Satish Kumar's episode

By Sandy Glanfield

There's a small, striking moment in this week's conversation with Satish Kumar. At 90, still full of energy, he tells me he has written to Andy Burnham, our likely next prime minister, with a single request: create a Minister of Peace.

It sounds almost too simple. But the more I've sat with it, the more I think that simplicity is the point.

Because here's what Satish notices. Every one of the world's 194 countries has a minister of defence, an army, a navy, an air force, whole departments and budgets devoted to preparing for war. Not one has a minister of peace. We have built elaborate machinery for the thing we fear, and almost nothing for the thing we say we want.

And I keep thinking about how much of our public life runs the same way. We are so fluent in what we're against. We call out what's wrong, and who's doing the wrong, in an endless loop. So much of it feels personality-driven, a daily sorting of who to blame. What we're far less practised at is saying, plainly and out loud, what we actually want instead.

A Minister for Peace is Satish doing exactly that. Not protesting the latest thing, but naming the world he wants and asking someone to build towards it.

It reminds me of something Michael Macy said when he joined us: that we need to put peace first. Not peace as the quiet we hope for once the arguing stops, but peace as the thing we start with, up at the top of the agenda, resourced and led for, the way we currently resource and lead for defence. Imagine if the machinations of government began there. If the first question wasn't how do we answer this threat, but how do we build the peace we say we're for.

Maybe we've had the order backwards. We wait for peace to arrive at the end, after the tangle of conflict and retribution has run itself out, and it never quite does. What if it went first?

This, for me, is where our golden rule quietly comes in, treating others, and our planet, as we'd wish to be treated. Because a minister of peace is really just that idea given a desk and a budget. It looks like a country choosing to ask, of another country, what would we want if we were in their position, and starting there, rather than reaching first for the response that guarantees the next round of harm. It's the difference between a world organised around good enemies and one organised around good neighbours, to borrow Satish's lovely phrase.

None of this means ignoring what's broken. It means refusing to let the list of what's wrong be the only thing we ever say. Satish has spent ninety years insisting we can name the world we want and then walk towards it, sometimes literally. His letter to Andy Burnham is just the latest step.

So perhaps that's the small invitation from this episode. Next time we're tempted to only call out what we're against, to ask the harder, better question. What are we for?

Photo by Carles Rodriguez Marin