THE PORTRAITS

Jeremy: “What a tricky moral question is thrown up when our governments debate whether they should use their power for good - we can only hope - to liberate people under tyranny in other parts of the world. When we have done so, as in Iraq and Libya, disaster has ensued, although clearly the altruism of both of these actions by western forces has to say the very least been called into question. When we haven’t intervened, as in the example of Syria, the despotic leader has continued their reign of terror unabated, propped up by their minority of nonetheless extremely powerful international friends. I’ve long thought that if the UN’s peacekeeping division were set up correctly it would kick into action automatically the moment a country transgressed a certain list of clearly defined criteria such as showing itself unequivocally to be torturing or ethnically cleansing its own people. In the absence of such a set up we rely on the Security Council to make its decisions in its own time and according to the interests and biases of its deciding members. And all the while the children of Syria watch the chemical weapons rain down upon them and wonder if anyone will come to help. As a father of a young son, when I wrote the words to ‘Come Today’ I pictured my boy saying to me, as he often does, ‘it’ll be okay, Daddy – things will work out alright in the end.’ And I transferred that onto the image of some of the children lying in the streets of Douma in April 2018 as medics rushed around them desperately clearing the acid from their eyes. Those same children might have asked their parents that morning whether anyone would come and save them. And as children do, probably they’d have tried to console their desperately worried mums and dads. Children are children, wherever they are in the world. They are born free of prejudice and hatred and have an innocence that we should ensure this world doesn’t get to annihilate.”