I am hearing resolutions this year about a renewed search for peace and justice, and liberation. Resolutions made, in many cases with more determination than hope. One of the things we need if we are to take meaningful steps toward those celestial goals is memory.

In some cases, it’s just about remembering a year or two back – reminding ourselves we’ve spent most of our lives in a country where we weren’t walking around with a mental list of words we might get arrested for saying, wearing or writing on bits of card; a country where, before destitution set in, an all be it grudging state would offer some kind of grudging help. In other cases, it’s a longer term memory we need – knowing a bit of history. Take freedom of movement, for example.

Passports

What is a passport? I suspect most people think of them as documents we need in order to be allowed to travel. When did that start to be true? Passports evolved originally from letters of safe conduct which were not permissions, but protection. They were generally issued by kings, or other national authorities, they said ‘the bearer is one of our people, and we would thank you not to rob them, murder them or otherwise impede their movement.’

Passports as permissions to pass ports were formalised after the First World War. Only just over 100 years ago, so we need to remind ourselves that, if we didn’t mind taking our chances with robbers, murderers and so on, we did not always need special documents to be allowed to leave (or enter or re-enter) the country.

Nations and racism

Racism grew out of nationalism. Once people have got used to identifying with a specific country, stories accrete around national identity and train us to sort people into imagined categories – categories which then, of course, accrete the generalisations we can call ‘ethnicities’. You can write whole books about those – here’s a great quote Shlomo Sand uses to introduce his book The Invention of the Jewish People…

A nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbours. – Karl Deustch, Nationality and its Alternatives, 1969

Social contract

I grew up in the 20^th century when the people of the UK, and quite a lot of peoples in quite a lot of other countries, were working on what historians call ‘the post-war social contract’. For a while, we had this developing agreement that in return for quite a lot of us getting on and doing the necessary work, the government put on a fairly reasonable effort to keep water, electricity, transport etc running sensibly. Most of us mostly paid our taxes and mostly went along with the law, and the government mostly managed to oversee healthcare, education and all the rest of it in a passably decent way.

It’s broken now. Most of us recognise ‘the government’ as our enemy now. Keir Starmer and his team lied their way into government, and are now disbanding councils and cancelling elections they can no longer skew by lying. That’s because a government that tries to do its own thing and punish anyone who challenges them can’t keep winning elections. So far, I haven’t seen any politician acknowledge that the main point behind the actions of all the protesters they’ve been arresting is that the social contract is broken, and we the people no longer consent to their rule.

I wonder what will happen next? Lots of people know we’re on a mission for peace, justice and liberation. Apparently, the Rojava women, who’ve probably run the most successful experiment in democracy of our times, have dropped the goal of a Kurdish state now, having decided that idea was a mistake. They have moved beyond the idea of national identity.

Peace, justice and liberation: how far do we agree what those things look like, or how we get there? Ah well, let’s get the year rolling, and see how we get on.

Good luck with 2026 everyone – see you on the streets!

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