Edinburgh Quaker Management Committee Cancel Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge Edinburgh can no longer hold meetings at the Quaker Meeting Hall.

The following blog is not an attack on any individual or body of people and certainly not on Quakerism as a religion, whose values we respect, or the Edinburgh Quakers as a congregation. It is an opinion of the author which attacks a decision by a representative committee and the context of that decision. Everyone can be wrong, Common Knowledge and the author not excluded, which is why listening to other voices and other reasons are important. Free speech’s true merit lies not in being able to say anything, but in being able to say things that others do not want to hear yet are vital to our values. We are a free speech community and therefore try to platform the viewpoints that otherwise might not receive a hearing. We do this in alignment with the values laid out in our own Constitution: love, courage, freedom and a pro-human future.

As always, the points made in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of Common Knowledge, but we support the right to write them. We appreciate the use of the Quaker Meeting Hall over the past year and are saddened that our relationship ends on these terms, although we respect their legal right to do so. We wish them well and hope they understand that a better, peaceful, accepting society is what we are aiming for too. But it has to be real.

Our bookings with the Quaker Meeting Hall in Edinburgh have been summarily terminated under the following clause of their room letting policy:

"[W]e reserve the right to refuse bookings from any organisation with aims contrary to Quaker values, which include a commitment to peace-making and against militarism, to equality (including social, racial and gender equality), to truth and integrity, to simplicity and to respect for the earth and all life upon it."

This is in response to our meeting in which two speakers described their travails as they tried to hold a public meeting in Portobello on Gender Ideology being taught in schools and the continued censorship to which they were subjected. The irony is not lost on us.

The Quaker Management Committee (QMC) stated that they were not prepared to have the sort of language that was used at the meeting in their building as it could not be reconciled with their commitments to equality and diversity.

The video of the talk and the Q&A session that followed will be available soon enough and people can judge for themselves, but as an attendee, I struggle to recall what language could be referred to by the management committee - there was certainly no swearing or heated exchanges. Furthermore, the speakers made clear on more than one occasion that the criticisms they were making were not of trans-people but of an ideology or, at most, the actions of those people who suppressed debate in the name of that ideology, many of whom are not Trans but are self-styled ‘social justice warriors’.

In this light, it is hard to understand the thinking of the representatives of the QMC who were at the meeting - attending for the purpose of re-affirming their stance on equality and diversity publicly but, no doubt having an accompanying task, to supervise the content of the presentation and our discussion - who would have reported that offensive language was used, nor was there any incitement or unwarranted criticism. I think most people would agree it was fair comment to cite a local councillor’s public criticisms regarding the speakers themselves and refute it as prejudiced. Boundaries were never advanced further than that by the speakers; a couple of members of the audience, who are entitled to their own sentiments, highlighted the harm of the ideology and its role in a wider agenda.

Subsequently, the QMC have decided that they do not want us to hold our meetings at their venue in the future and thus join the long list of groups and individuals who want to suppress freedom of speech and individual truth. This will be a surprise to many Quakers, but their position is, truly, indefensible in this regard. It is probably relevant to note that the first meeting objected to was one concerning two covid vax-injured men, both medically diagnosed as such, speaking about how the Scottish Government and the NHS has turned their backs on them. The reason given was that it was an event spreading ‘misinformation’.

The QMC, in my opinion, have fallen into the trap of allowing others to define words, and through that, take possession of their values. The ‘diversity’ that Common Knowledge is being criticised for not respecting is a diversity of sexual proclivity and an identity based on that proclivity. Common Knowledge, like many others unfairly maligned on this topic, has never criticised people’s identifications, sexual or otherwise, but have merely allowed speakers to state their reasoned point of view. A perspective, usually, it has to be said, that is ‘gender ideology critical’; but does rest on a trident of common sense points, such as: there is no scientific basis for a person being ‘born in the wrong body’ - one may emerge in the future - but, currently, no scientific grounds exist to conclude this definitively, or even convincingly; the second point is that the teaching of sexual identity and education is occurring at too young an age and is adding to confusion, anxiety and is contagiously infecting incipient mental health issues caused by other unacknowledged factors and corralling these problems of the psyche into the monolithic, labyrinthian identity issue that embeds permanently ongoing confusion and troubles in the lives of those individuals and the wider community; and thirdly, there has been no recognition or attention paid to the impact on women’s rights, safety or their concerns in general; specifically, how these rules can be exploited by persons who masquerade as victims but are, in fact, predatory. (It is worth remarking that there has not, as yet, been a satisfactory, rational, evidence-based response or rebuttal to any of these points concerning gender identities from the Trans-movement or any individual supporter.)

These are legitimate points to raise and they are ethical points to raise. Sympathetic though we are to minority groups, some of us are not prepared to unthinkingly join the chorus of voices chanting that ‘Trans Rights are Human Rights’ and ‘Love Wins’ without questioning the basis for these assumptions and what they require of society at large. Perhaps to give some, the loudest, Trans-activists what they want endangers the health and well-being of many and reaps a harvest that is far more poisonous than having a few live with the frustration of not getting everything they demand; unreasonably, on some topics. The QMC do not seem prepared to countenance that a possible result from a balanced, public debate is that a healthier middle ground is reached without antagonism, backlash or bitterness; instead they prefer, in refutation of centuries of their own tradition, to be jingoistic. They have rejected genuine diversity of opinion - the true challenge for a tolerant society - for a superficial diversity of who finds who sexually attractive.

Equality, being the other pole of criticism, we believe, is not served by suppressing the truth of others. Again, with blithe disregard for centuries of Quaker practice, the QMC have tossed away the equality that underlies their entire theology, preferring, as mentioned before, to allow others to ‘own’ the word and define its meaning. The speakers who we provide a platform to in order to speak their truth possess a truth given to them, in the Protestant Christian cosmology, by God. Whether we agree with it or not, it is their truth. Exactly in the same way that a Trans-person or a Trans-activist possesses theirs. Silencing either of these voices, silences their individual Conscience and, following this logic, to some degree frustrates the intention of God.

At no point has Common Knowledge or any of its speakers tried to prevent someone else’s voice being heard to my ken. (In the recent speakers’ experience of censorship, they began by inviting local Trans groups to a public debate but this was rejected by the Trans groups themselves.) Yet the rights we, the free speech advocates, acknowledge others have are not in turn acknowledged by them with respect to us, the people with whom they disagree. We are cancelled; they are not. We are not victims in this, it’s just a simple point of fact: a veracity that challenges the notion that many Trans-activists, and now QMC, are upholding the oft-espoused ideal of Equality.

‘Treat equal things equally’ is a maxim of justice. By privileging, one story and set of rights over another, the QMC have determined that Common Knowledge and its speakers’ opinions, deeply held in all cases, and neither inspiring malice or espousing hatred, are unequal to others. This flies in the face of Christian teachings, needless to say, but, Quakerism, where the direct relationship with God means that each individual is equally capable of divining God’s Truth for themselves as it applies to them alone, finds itself particularly culpable to charges of theological incoherence and contradiction. The QMC should treasure varied opinions, just as we all should, since they have been sifted through the emotional individuality and reason given to people by God and are underpinned by a universal equality that no right-thinking, honest Christian should contravene.

To take the argument one further step, the functioning of all these myriad truths is, as the great English poet John Milton, himself attracted to the Quaker form of Protestantism, explained: our divergent individual truths, like a wooded temple with timbers pushing and supporting in all directions, here buttressing, there pressing, in another place fixing, are necessary in constructing a more beautiful and understandable Whole. Perhaps Common Knowledge only has a small beam of Truth chiselled in its public events, but this splinter of truth is locked together with other truths in partial agreement, disagreement and even hostile opposition to benefit the whole of mankind in framing sturdily thought and reason; freedom and understanding; future progress, and ultimately, the beholding of a greater Truth through the presentment of its structure.

We believe that, as individuals, the Edinburgh Quakers are decent, good individuals, therefore it is sad to list the Edinburgh Quakers as a whole, since the QMC is representative and decides their policy, as another of the congregations and institutions that has, during these Testing Times, strayed from what they would claim are devoutly held principles; misled by perceiving, through the lenses provided by the government and media, legitimate criticism as dangerous ‘misinformation’ or ‘hate speech’ .

It would be fair to say that our vaccine-sceptical Twitter account provoked a fear that they were hosting ‘Anti-Vaxxers’ with the associated caravan of bigoted opinions that follow in its train. (A media-led association, repeated exhaustively to suit their paymasters’ agenda - a matter of public record that vaccine-promoting-interested parties have funded our media with tens of millions over the past three years.)

To this we can only ask the Quaker Management Committee, do we not have the right to be openly sceptical, even oppositional? For instance, why, after almost three years, do we still not know what is in the vaccines which have been injected into millions of people in this country? Doctors do not know. MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) will not say. After all this time, we are still ignorant as to all the adjuvants in these shots. The ingredients have been withheld from scientists and laboratories the world over. What we do have knowledge of is that for over a year excess deaths in England and Wales are at over two thousand a week. Scotland has had excess deaths for three years and has now excess deaths of excess deaths as the rate of death averaged over a five year period increases. We are highlighting established, government-released facts and asking simple questions. But, it seems, that is wrong.

These urgent points, beside asking important questions about gender, are taking diversity too far for some. It is to set ourselves against the mass of opinion as engineered by the corporate state. As an intellectually and socially marginalised population, exactly as the Quakers were over four hundred years ago and have been periodically since, some understanding or solidarity would have been appreciated, rather than seeing independent third party organisations bow to the behemoth of the state and shut the door of the Inn to us, to turn a phrase - another reason why the Quakers should have at least some sympathy for our cause: the state, yes, the one habitually at war or funding war, has never been the friend of Quakerism or individual conscience.

It is not to be. The freedom movement of Edinburgh will learn from this and that it is, for the most part, to be completely reliant on its own members and endeavours, at least until it becomes so patently obvious that there is an attack on a free humanity and its most treasured values in progress, values the Quakers hold dear too, and that even the smokescreen of comfort-giving and virtue-assuring utterances such as ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’, words scorched of any true meaning in present, government-approved public discourse, cannot obscure the fact any longer.

MW