Simon Hughes address Tibet Foundation Day 2009

The following is a slightly abridged transcript of the address given by special guest Simon Hughes, MP for North Southwark and Bermondsey.

Gary, professor, ladies and gentlemen, it is really, really good to be here. It is good to be at SOAS, which is a fantastic institution. I’m a great fan of SOAS, and a great fan of the work it does, not just with its Buddhist studies but generally, and it is good that we are recognising that by being here. But I’m even more pleased, Gary and professor, to be here to mark this occasion and to be part of your celebration. I have been a Member of Parliament for between 25 and 26 years - I lie, between 26 and 27 years - and that means I am just older than the Tibet Foundation. But we’re both very youthful! Still! Buddhism helps that, too.

I want to pay tribute firstly to the Tibet Foundation because it is really important that we continue to spread the message of the character of Tibet - of its history, of its identity, of its special spirituality - far and wide. And that’s something that many of my Parliamentary colleagues, with me, try to do in our little way so that the world may understand the contribution that Tibet wants to make and can make and should be able to make. And there’s a whole political victory with a small ‘v’ yet to win, in order to allow that liberation of Tibetan people, Tibetan spirit and Tibetan character.

I’ve been privileged on several occasions to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he has been in Britain. He’s one of the magical, spiritual people of our age. I always put it, when I describe him to people, and people see a picture of me with His Holiness and realise that I have met him and they ask what he’s like, that the other person who comes to mind—who has the same wisdom and spirituality and humour —is Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. They’re entirely different characters but they combine fantastic wisdom-—great, great depth of wisdom—and prayerfulness and topicality, complete interest in the activities of the world but with an engaging character that makes you really delight in every moment you spend with him. And I have been privileged to spend time with him not only last year when he came to Parliament, but on previous occasions—when he came for a meal in Parliament and of course when he came to Southwark. And he came to Southwark following the tradition of great spiritual leaders. He came to Southwark to open the Peace Garden 10 years ago this year.

And the Peace Garden, I’m sure all of you, well, I hope all of you will have been. Many of you will have been many times but I hope you will continue to visit the Peace Garden, which is on land given by the Borough of Southwark. As you know, it was dedicated by His Holiness, has that beautiful mandala in the middle, has the reminder of the Himalayas all around it in the plants and the flowers, and remains every day as a haven of quiet and contemplation in the heart of the largest city in Europe.

I’m an MP for South London, so I will seek an apology in advance to those of you who live in North London. Of course people have to live in North London, I understand that, and whenever you have a river people live on both banks; I understand that too. And given that people probably came to this country from the south, and the west, they probably came first to the south bank and then were inquisitive to know what was on the other side, so they crossed. And some of them stayed. But if you look at a map of London you’ll see that the Elephant and Castle and the location of the Imperial War Museum is at the centre of a fan; of a hub. And to the north east is the City of London with all the business activity and to the northwest is the political corner with Westminster, but south of the river is where I always argue real people have lived and they have done the things that people do when they’re not trying to govern or to pursue commerce. They’ve both prayed and lived life to the full in different ways, either contemplatively or collectively, either personally or together. One of the buildings on the south side of the river is what is now called Southwark Cathedral, which was built in 606 (the original building), so has been there witnessing for over 1400 years—it was their 1400th year anniversary recently. It’s also not irrelevant that the Peace Garden is in a location which is important for two other reasons.

It’s in a piece of land which we celebrated the bequest of this year. It was land privately owned until 75 years ago and it was given by a rich family, for public use, to the Local Authority. And it was given by a woman—an Irish woman, in fact—who had married into the British aristocracy. She had become widowed with young children, and understood the difficulty of finding space for recreation for young families in the middle of a busy city. And so this land was handed over, together with the building behind it (which used to be a mental hospital), for the public.

And so the significance, the third significance (the first is that this is land publicly owned and blessed by His Holiness; the second is that it was land handed over in order to provide recreation for young people, as well as older people - rest and refreshment where otherwise there was pressure, by a very wise and generous benefactor), but thirdly it is outside what was originally a mental hospital, where people were confined for life (it became called Bedlam, which was where people who were regarded as lunatics were put—many of them weren’t lunatics at all, but they were condemned and then they were locked up there) but which has been transformed into the Imperial War Museum. And the Imperial War Museum title suggests that it is all about war. It is, in a way, about war, but it is as much a peace museum as a war museum. It is there to remind people of the folly of war; of the sacrifices of war.

And the third part of the garden has now got in it a memorial to the Soviet war dead; those who died from the Soviet Union as it then was, in the Second World War, of whom there were 20 million people who died. Can I just linger over that figure—20 million deaths. We forget sometimes the absolutely extraordinary sacrifice—the level of the deaths in Europe. We remember the deaths of the Poles, we remember the deaths of the Jews, but the Soviets lost 20 million people in all the Soviet countries (now many of them independent countries, like Ukraine). So the Peace Garden is a wonderfully symbolic and appropriate place. We are hugely privileged to have it. And we’re hugely privileged that it’s a place not only blessed by His Holiness, not only at the centre of the hub of London but to which people can go easily, but also here on land given for public refreshment and near the Imperial War Museum (previously the mental hospital).

But I want, if I may, to take this opportunity and the privilege of being here to just say one or two other things which I hope will encourage you all. The first is that we’re very privileged in Southwark, as in many places in London, to have Buddhist temples. And in South London between Westminster and the Elephant and Castle area there have been two traditionally - one just near St Thomas’s hospital and one which is now located in what used to be Manor Place baths in Walworth, just off the Walworth Road – a beautiful temple. I pay tribute to the Lama and her colleagues who have made it such a wonderful, wonderful place of rest and refreshment. That temple is going to move; not far away, but it’s going to move next year to Bermondsey, also in my constituency, also in Southwark. And it’s going to move into a building that was the library - the municipal library - and it’s been bought by the temple. And a wonderful opportunity presents itself. It’s going to go into a beautiful building. It’s going to go into what will be one of the civic centres of the borough. It will be at the centre—it will be next to the old Town Hall site. And the community just last week announced how they were going to open their doors to everybody of all faiths and none, to benefit from all that Buddhism can teach.

But the one thing that they are able to continue is—they will continue to offer a library. And I believe it will be a wonderful complement to the Peace Garden and the Imperial War Museum if we build with our Buddhist friends in that library, as the core collection, a peace library—because one of my eminent predecessors, and many other people who have done my job in Southwark as Members of Parliament, have been either pacifists or have been campaigners for peace. The most famous of whom to whom I pay tribute is somebody called Doctor Salter, who was the Member of Parliament from 1922 to 1923 and then again from 1924 to 1945. And in my view he was a Quaker; he was the most wonderful predecessor one could wish for. And I think there’s a real opportunity to have, in the same borough as the Peace Garden, a library for peace. So that the next generation, and the present generation, can realise what the roads to peace are, through both spirituality and through other means. And I will formally, after our meeting today, be talking to the Lama and her colleagues to see if they would, with me, agree that when the building is opened by them as the new temple, that could be dedicated as one of the purposes of the building.

But I want to say one further thing to encourage you along. I think the worldwide movement for peace is growing, and growing more strongly. There’s an academic institute in Sweden, and there are others, which seek to monitor and report on how many conflicts are in the world every year. And the good news, although we still have terrible conflicts and terrible tension, is that the number of conflicts currently is less than it has been in many previous years and decades, and I can refer people (and probably the professor will know) to the academic source for this argument and this proposition. And as a result of that, people are understanding that conflict prevention is a really important political objective.

The good news follows that in our British Parliament we now have an all party group on conflict issues, which I co-chair with a Labour colleague and a Conservative colleague. I’m a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, so it gives an all party representative nature. And we are seeking to advance at all times the case for conflict prevention in Government as policy - in the Ministry of Defence, in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and in the Department for International Development. And we would love it if, at some stage in the near future, we could work with the Tibet Foundation to find a way of you coming to contribute to one of our regular monthly meetings which we hold when Parliament is sitting, to talk about the Tibetan view and the Buddhist experience and the contribution that can be made to conflict prevention.

But it’s not just in Britain that this is happening. We have founded, last year, under the auspices of something called the east west foundation, an international network of Parliamentarians committed to conflict prevention, and that body is now at work. I am privileged to be a founder member. We founded the organisation in Brussels. It has regular members from Australasia, from the Middle East, from Latin America, from Africa and from Europe and increasing numbers of members also from Asia. We had a telephone conference just this week. And we are seeking to identify areas of the world where there is not actual conflict but the risk of conflict, in order to seek to work to prevent conflict rather than just react to it. And as an example, two of the pieces of work which we have committed ourselves to do now are :

• Work to identify where conflict might arise from the battle for water - the battle over the limited resource of water in parts of the world. For example, there is a prospective conflict between Bangladesh and India over the water supply that Bangladesh relies on, that comes through Indian national territory.
• And we’re also currently engaged in trying to prevent further conflict between Russia and Ukraine over what is principally the battle over energy supply and gas and oil which Ukraine needs to come through Russia to be supplied, and which has been turned off.

So there are various people now in increasing numbers of Parliaments of the world who see their job as being peace-building. Not just peace-building on the ground, step by step, as people do all the time in the Middle East, in Israel and Palestine, for example (and I’ve been with peace builders in Palestine), but institutionally.

And one or two countries have recently changed their Ministry of Foreign Affairs or their Ministry of Defence to be a Ministry of Peace. Which changes the whole of the cultural assessment of what Government is about. And there is a campaign, as many of you may know, for us to similarly have a Ministry of Defence and a Ministry of Peace. And I think there’s an argument for all of us to seek to persuade government that that’s actually what we should be seeking to do. And of course peace only comes through justice; you don’t have peace without justice. And so there has to be all the time a campaign for justice as well.

But I wanted to end by saying there’s one other encouraging seed of the prayers for peace that His Holiness and others have planted. And that is that people are beginning to realise that the way we define economics and success and growth has not been very satisfactory. We have defined economics and success and growth by what has been called in economic terms Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product—how much do you make; and how much do you sell? But of course you can be economically active doing rather stupid things. You can be economically active building a car which then is involved in a collision, which is then reduced to scrap, which is then built into a new car and so on, and the world is really no further advanced as a result. Several years ago (people have argued for longer than 20 years, probably) but people in the Netherlands in particular argued that we should redefine how our society moves and grows. It’s most commonly thought that the country in the world which has formally sought to do this is Bhutan, which has begun to say that the way in which they judge how successful they are is not by Gross Domestic Product or Gross National Product or whether inflation goes up 1% or 10%, but by Gross Personal Happiness. I would perceive to have a basket of characteristics which give a much better indication of how well you are doing—of wellbeing, if you like—and there are increasing numbers of people around the world who are looking at wellbeing and the characters of things like infant mortality, infant morbidity, relationship breakdown, mental health breakdown, all those things as well as simply economic growth. And that’s an encouraging sign, too, that people are beginning to realise.

And we have a huge ecological crisis, environmental crisis and we’ve had a huge economic crisis. They are not accidentally happening at the same time. They are happening, in my judgement, because the world has encouraged selfishness and greed and people have been seeking to exploit the resources of the earth too much for their own use and they have over collected, and over stretched themselves and acquired too much debt. And they have also forgotten that they’re stewards, that we are stewards of the planet, and unless we are responsible, not just for our generation, but for the next generation, then it’s not surprising that the ecological crisis is now upon us, that pollution is too much for our wonderful planet to bear.

And so, there is a great challenge in the politics of the world, and politics is not a place where people of spirituality should fear to tread. Some of the best politicians in history have been people of peace in politics—have been Quakers, have been Hindus, have been Buddhists, have been Christians, have been Jews, have been Muslims, have been people of faith and other religions, Zoroastrians and others—who have come to their political activism through faith. People like Ghandi are self evident, for example. There are still issues to win. And I end by saying—as we think about the opportunities for Tibet to influence the world—they start on the doorstep; they start in Tibet itself; they start in the way that we produce a new settlement between Tibet and China (which is what the Dalai Lama has always said he wanted—not independence but self government); they start in the region. In my view they need the Buddhists of Sri Lanka, for example, to be much more understanding of the other faiths of Sri Lanka and the other peoples in Sri Lanka, where there’s been terrible, terrible civil war and many people today, tonight, are in camps - internally displaced people. And then it spreads from that part of South Asia to the rest of the world.

But I am really grateful that you have your presence here. I am very grateful that you have landed as it were, and taken a little safer bit of earth in South London. I am grateful that that is a blessing every day and every week and every month and every year to the people who come here. I am grateful that it is so beautifully looked after. I am grateful that it now shows that this is not a city of only one faith or no faith, but a city where Buddhism has its proper, central part. And I look forward to working with many of you in the temples south of the river and north of the river and in other places for the advancement of the principles of Tibet, of non violence, of the love and respect for our planet and the principles of Buddhism, which I respect hugely and have benefited from greatly.

Thank you for the privilege of being with you. Happy 10th birthday for the Tibet Peace Garden, happy 24th birthday for the Tibet Foundation; and that seems to me to suggest that next year it may not be a big anniversary for the Peace Garden, but it’s an opportunity for another big anniversary for things to do with Tibet because of the 25th anniversary of the Foundation.

Thank you very much, look after each other and work and pray and think and meditate in the cause of peace and the prevention of conflict. Thank you very much.

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