Peter Selby – COMMENTS AT THE AGM

The President of CCMJ, Peter Selby, spoke with twenty five members and supporters on the morning of Saturday 31 October 2009.

He said that, having heard reports and descriptions from those in the hall, the problem was the range of activities of those involved. These were a kaleidoscope of beautiful bits of glass which became a wonderful picture as a whole. People who actually ran things had no interest in such a kaleidoscope, only in running things and people who had levers of power benefited from it.

The technique of those in control was overloading, disintegrating others passions, and debt. One major source of preventing radicalisation was debt. Peter Selby recalled the radicalisation of students and protests in 1968. To overcome this in the future, debt for students was introduced.

In speaking of the BBC television programme Question Time in which the British National Party leader Nick Griffin appeared, Peter Selby said that nasty moments developed whenever the issues of immigration and racism were raised when the whole audience was united in opposing the views of Mr Griffin. However when someone asked about Islam, and Mr Griffin replied, no one shouted at him and there was an ominous silence as there seemed to have been activated a fearfulness in the room. The fear of Islam and the hatred of it, Peter Selby said, needed to be connected to the issue of money.

There was a strong suspicion that the birth and rise of Islam had occurred because of the failure of the Christian church to take the economic gospel seriously. The roots of Islam confronted economic failure and the preaching of Christianity.

Peter Selby said money was the driver of the incarceration industry and he illustrated this view with examples of people locked up not only in prison.

All of us, he said, were very busy confronting the debilitating symptoms of the manifestations of the monetary industry.

The problem we all had was that the group assembled were highly busy people confronting the issues of monetary injustice so that there was little time for CCMJ.

Tarek el Diwany commented that the themes which Peter Selby raised were all there in the Muslim world. The issue to be resolved was how to bypass the establishment and get to the people and influence them.

In response, Peter Selby said that there were issues capturing the imagination, but which did not go below them to find the symptoms. The grip of those in power is enhanced as the energies of people are dissipated across hundreds of causes. CCMJ had great difficulty in persuading people to dig below the surface.

Peter Selby is the former Bishop of Worcester, now President of the National Council for Independent Monitoring Boards. He is the author of the re-issued book Grace and Mortgage, described as exposing the delusions and fantasies that underpin the world’s economic system Grace and Mortgage published by Darton, Longman and Todd-ISBN 978-0-232-52774-2.