John Sloboda

Projects, activities, and reflections

Reflections on the UK 2024 General election

For me, and for millions, this election was only about one thing: Gaza

We campaigned and voted for candidates who unequivocally condemned the illegal actions of Israel, and campaigned for their immediate end.

So what are the gains?

As Peter Oborne points out in this article, there is now a small but highly visible cadre of MPs elected precisely on a Pro-Palestinian mandate, including the 4 Green MPs (this is so encouraging) and a handfiul of strong independents. One of them is my MP Jeremy Corbyn, who now - incidentally - becomes the Father of the House. This pro-Palestinian cadre will not be silent, and will use their parliamentary privelege to the full.

Keir Starmer saw his own personal majority in Holborn & St. Pancras deeply dented by a raft of credible opponents including the Po-Palestinian ex South-African MP Andrew Feinstein. He will brush it off, but everyone both in Britian and abroad will see this for what it is, a significant undermining of his personal credibility from day 1.

But these gains must be set against the fact that no-one can bring back the 38,000 people of Gaza that were killed. This evil was done, in our names, and can never be undone. And most former MPs who survive into the new Parliament are complicit.

On foreign policy - and so much else - Starmer's party has slipped effortlessly rightward into the position left warm for it by the Tories. He and Sunak had a clear pact to support Israel no matter what, and the immediate and odious congratulatory statement of Israel's President Isaac Herzog was, in effect, a veiled threat for Starmer to "keep with the program".

For me, and millions like me, the task is to continue to highlight every day the continual slaugher, the maiming, the destruction of homes, livelhoods, hospitals and health faciilities, and the casual ignoring of international law. Starmer is complicit in war crimes, as was his precedessor. Nothing can ever recompense for the destruction of a people that they enabled. Nothing can ever absolve Britain from its role. The irreversible damage is done and many will never forget or forgive this.

Two things are needed, in the short term, continual protest from those who have protested from the outset. The first opportunity for that will be tomorrow's march on Westmister which I will join as my solemn human duty.

In the longer term, Britain needs to make some amends by being at the forefront of rebuilding Gaza to the benefit of those Palestinians still alive. This will need decades of continual effort, and funding on a massive scale.

We need to hold successive governments to their obligations in this respect which will long outlive the present Parliament.

Of course Gaza is not the only thing that this government must attend to. But failure to attend to Gaza will, in both the shorter and the longer term, confound and compromise any good it tries to do elsewhere. Gaza is the suppurating wound that will spread all through the body politic unless it is decisively staunched.

July 5th 2024

February 2024

Documenting Gaza's human losses

This video shows, along with their name and age, some of the many children killed since Oct 7 in Gaza, drawing on pictorial tributes from their friends and family—the deeply felt public memorials depicting each child in the way that those who knew, loved and cared for them wanted them remembered.

In these images the childrens’ individuality is unmistakable, and moving. But what makes these memorials necessary is one brute fact: Israel’s eradication of their life and all that went with it—their entire world—in what it calls its war on Hamas. A destruction of life, and a whole way of life, that continues.

The video was made possible by a compilation of links to photographic tributes to Gazans of all ages, released by Iraq Body Count as an open-access spreadsheet at bit.ly/ibc4gaza. You will find there organised information about the age, gender, trade or occupation of 1198 victims, where they died, and who else in their family was killed alongside them. Adding to this list is an ongoing task for as long as needed.

The links will take you directly to each tribute, many of them expressions of the love they gave and received.The linked spreadsheet allows many other uses beyond our video.

Please use and share the spreadsheet and video responsibly.

This video and accompanying text was first released as an X (Twitter) post on Friday 9 February 2024, viewable at bit.ly/ibcGCvid

Letter sent November 2nd 2023, in the week of All Souls (Halloween, Todos Santos) where the all the human dead in history - both ancient and recent - are commemorated around the world.

Dear anglophone friends (mainly),

Forgive the impersonality but I am writing pretty much the same thing to a lot of people, and I feel some urgency about this.

I hope you are as well as current circumstances permit.

Alongside people around the world, I have watched horrified - as no doubt have you - as the events of October 7th onwards in Israel and Palestine have unfolded, ever more awful and heartbreaking, and seemingly unstoppable.

These events have affected me particularly profoundly for a number of reasons.

First, I personally know both Israelis and Palestinians who have suffered loss - and it always goes deeper when friends or colleagues have been personally affected.

Second, I have made the recording of war’s casualties my professional business for these last 20 years, through the work of Iraq Body Count, Oxford Research Group and the Every Casualty Project which grew out of it.

Thirdly, as someone of Christian heritage who has longed for reconciliation between three three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity), the territory in which the current horrors are unfolding is the precise location where such longings will either be fulfilled or dashed.

Fourth, because of the geopoltics of the region, the global stakes are enormously high, with the risk of the conflict spreading far beyond that tiny beleagured piece of land. I do fear for us all/

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Read the rest of this letter here

May  2023                          70 years ago, when I was just 3 years old, Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne. I cannot remember a time when she was not Queen. Whether I like it or not, her reign was a defining feature of my adult life, even though I never was face to face with a representative of the Royal Family until 2018 when the OBE was conferred on me by her grandson - and likely next monarch - Prince William. The citation was "services to psychology and music".

Now, looking back on a 50-year career within Higher Education and 55 years of leadership in amateur music, I am both proud and sad.  Proud that music psychology, which hardly existed when I began my career, is now a flourishing global sub-discipline.  Sad that in Britain, like so many countries around the world, high quality music activity and education is being increasingly marginalised, and it is increasingly difficult for the musically gifted to obtain the support and encouragement they need to allow society to be enriched through their gifts.  I am also sad that wars waged the name of the monarch have killed hundreds of thousands of people, mainly muslim civilians, in the last 30 years.

This personal website aims to be a place where I can both record and reflect on things achieved in the past, and also share actvities, projects, and thoughts in a more lasting and archival way than on social media (despite my active use of them). 

You can find here links and references to the organisations that I have been connected to, but also accounts of the things I do and care about as an individual, outside organisational frameworks.