Songs of the People
Saturday 4th May 2024 marks eighteen months
until the 75th anniversary of the signing of the ECHR
In the countdown to November 2025 we are planning performances of Dreams of Peace & Freedom which will become more ambitious in scale. Each performance will be a celebration but while the present government’s policy corrodes freedoms and undermines the Convention it will also be a protest.
And we have a proposal as to how you may gently express your rejection of the Rwanda Plan,
the way it strips rights from refugees, and threatens the freedoms of us all.
Below we have assembled a three-track playlist. We invite you to listen to it over the coming week, and next Saturday at 12.15pm perhaps you could hum along. By Saturday 18th May you could open a window or
share your singing gently from your doorstep.
As the Rwanda plan takes shape, the government must know that far from being ‘the will of the people’ many of us profoundly disagree with them, that the end does not justify the means, and that they have got this wrong.
During the pandemic we saluted emergency workers from our own home for their selfless work.
Faced with this new crisis, and the strictures of the government, it would be great if we could express ourselves in our private places, and perhaps ultimately in our neighbourhoods. It’s just an idea.
The first track is Barry Manilow’s One Voice which is self explanatory.
The second is a track from our song cycle, based on a setting of a Rupert Brooke War Sonnet. Facing the terror of the First World War, and the anticipation of death, Brooke sought elemental safety, the kind that sees humans protected and governed by natural laws and beyond the grasp of the journeymen lawmaker. These are our universal human rights. Safety is woven with Maxwell Fyfe’s words stating his belief in human rights and fear at there-emergence of the ‘barbarian.'
The third is Concrete and Clay by Unit 4+2. We’ve been on the road for five years now, often sharing low-cost hotels with migrants.
Several times we have passed through Milton Keynes, a city of concrete. In the reception of the Travelodge Hub a couple sat framed by the window quite at peace. In their own country they would have been prosecuted and persecuted for their homosexuality. This is for them.
