Clean slate for the year 2000?

The Chairman of the Clean Slate Campaign, Edward Peters, is quite precise about the date on which the idea struck him--15 March 1998. But if the concept of a campaign came as a bolt from the blue, the process which gave birth to it had been going on for some months.

`Various things had happened to me in the previous year in terms of getting freed up to be myself,' says Peters, who lives in Oxford and works with MRA's Foundations for Freedom programme, which trains young people, mostly from Eastern Europe, in the values underlying democracy. `I had three or four working relationships which I wasn't happy about, where I had felt hurt by people and had then responded in a way which had hurt them. I decided to write or talk to each of them and apologize for the particular episode which had caused offence. They responded generously--and I re-experienced the simple inner freedom that comes when you try to deal with the blockages in your life.'

He had also been through a period of spiritual enquiry. `I had never been able to understand where the angry side of my personality came from. As I began to understand why I behaved in this way, I found I was becoming less aggressive. My approach to the spiritual life began to shift a bit: I came to regard freedom and joy as the natural state of affairs. What stops it is my wrong attitudes, relationships and behaviour--and, rather like water blocked by leaves and dirt in a gutter, when I deal with the blockages, something is released.'

So when he discovered that a friend had held a grievance against him for 15 years he was both contrite about the pain he had caused and thoughtful about the burdens people carry around with them. `I wrote and apologized,' he says. `But I thought that if only we could all let go of these things it would release something, some bubble and spirit, joy and naturalness. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if we could have a Clean Slate Campaign before the new Millennium?'

The way to do it, he reckoned, would be through a simple pledge, which anyone could sign and act upon: `I promise to take at least one practical step during 1999 towards cleaning my slate.' There would be no obligation for anyone to tell anyone else what they had done--and the steps could range from tidying a cupboard to burying the hatchet with someone or deciding to kick an addiction.

Peters began to discuss the idea with friends and was encouraged by their response. `I meet regularly with a group of Christian men in Oxford,' he says. `When I tried the idea out on them, one said he would pay for a website for the campaign (www.cleanslate.org/). Another said, "Whatever happens about a national campaign, each of us can go home tonight and think of something we can do to clean our own slates."'

Another church friend, a lawyer, inspired an expert on charitable law in his firm to offer his services free of charge, so that Peters and his colleagues could set up the legal framework to put the idea into action.

The idea was also taken up by Youth with a Mission, an evangelical Christian group which is one of the participants in the Reconciliation Walk. They put Peters in touch with Christopher Morgan, a marketing consultant of 30 years' standing. `The idea grabbed me immediately,' he says, `because of its simplicity--some of the best ideas are the simplest ones--and the fact that it is open to everybody. I could see people who don't go to church, don't believe (or say they don't) thinking, "I was a bit of a so and so to someone a year or two back, why don't I give him a ring?"'

The plan is to build up a groundswell of interest through the first half of 1999, climaxing in the autumn. A number of public figures have agreed to sign the promise and become patrons--including the Chief Rabbi; the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Hume; the Anglican Archbishop of Wales; the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain; the President of the National Council of Hindu Temples; and the veteran footballer Sir Bobby Charlton.

The next step will be to build up a network of `ambassadors' who will take the idea to their family, street, place of work or worship, school or college. `We don't have the resources or the time to create a centrally driven campaign,' says Peters. `All we can try to do is to inspire hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people to take the idea and use it in whatever way they like. We will back them up by providing them with leaflets, stickers, badges ...'

Peters is emphatic that this is a `free' idea, which people can respond to at whatever level they wish. `It is nondenominational and not the property of any group or tradition,' he insists. The only condition is that it should focus on what `I' and `we' can do, not on what `you' or `they' should do. `Suggestions about how others should clean their slate are outside its ethos.' But he hopes that some will take it beyond their personal lives into the social arena. `What about an amnesty for petty criminals who want to make a new start?' he suggests. The campaign's publicity material will include information on where to get help for those grappling with problems of addiction or marital conflict.

One of those helping to launch the campaign is Kumar Raval, who is giving three months between finishing his dissertation and embarking on an internship in an American law firm. `My role is to put forward a non-Christian perspective and get young people involved,' he says. `I think my fellow Hindus will respond to the Clean Slate idea because we recognize that the world is a small place where whatever we do affects someone else. In India both the Hindu new year, Divali, and the calendar new year are seen as an opportunity to start anew. There is an image of putting off old clothes and putting on new ones.'

The Clean Slate Campaign is modest in its aims--after all, people are only being asked to put one thing right, and it's up to them to decide what it is. The hope of its organizers is that the experience will give those who try it a taste for new beginnings--and that living with a clean slate will become the habit of a lifetime.