Cone joker shone a light on the issue of how to stop war

Published: 22 September, 2011

• AS an ex-Camden resident can I say how delighted I was to see that some joker had put a traffic cone on top of Richard Cobden’s statue.

At least that is one way of getting Cobden, a forgotten peace-maker and internationalist, into the news.

The lettering on the statue mentions only the Corn Laws. Important though getting rid of them was, that was only one of Cobden’s many projects.

Just as significant was his opposition to the Crimean War.

That we have a European Union is due, in some part, to Cobden’s belief that economic mutual involvement made war, between states so connected, at least unlikely.

Today he would have been a candidate for  a Nobel peace prize.

There are, of course, two such prizewinners with Camden connections.

One is Randal Cremer to whom, in some part, we owe the International Court of Justice who is now, forgotten in a Hampstead cemetery and the other Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to refuse to work on the atomic bomb when he realised that it was to be used on undefended cities full of civilians.

Camden has a rich peace history and it ought not to take traffic cones on statues to make us realise it.

BRUCE KENT
Vice-President,Movement for the Abolition of War
Venetia Road, N4