Back in November, I finally stopped paying rent to Cornerstone Housing Co-op in Leeds and moved my remaining things to a rented house in Bentley (Doncaster) – rented not by me, but by A Commune in the North. How did that feel? Well, having dragged it out for nearly a year, moving over in dribs and drabs and staying in Bentley for days or weeks at a time, it didn’t feel like a big deal – much more like a relief that my crap has all finally been cleared out (well, you know, mostly).
But…
You know what I would really enjoy, readers? I would enjoy being able to write a column that doesn’t involve having to have a rant about Tory policy in one way, shape, or form. Alas, today is not the day for that.
Since PN last went to press, ambulance workers and nurses have been on strike, with further dates coming. Junior doctors are voting on whether to strike. Postal, railway and bus workers have all withdrawn their labour, again with further dates coming. The…
Nostalgia, as the old joke goes, ain’t what it used to be.
I was reminded of this a while back when I read a Guardian ‘Long Read’ on nostalgia, or as they called it ‘binmenism’. I’ll explain that in due course.
There are a few nostalgia Facebook pages with posts urging people to ‘share if you remember this’. ‘This’ being random things such as wicker shopping baskets on wheels (my Yorkshire Nana had one), four fruit salads or black jacks for a penny (an old penny), and…
Do I support mobilising large numbers of people to join in the climate protest in Central London taking place on 21 April, organised by Extinction Rebellion (XR)?
Yes.
Do I think it will have a positive effect on the political debate in Britain and maybe elsewhere?
Yes.
Do I agree with how XR are describing and explaining this protest?
No. Definitely not.
I think that XR has taken ‘talking big’ to a whole new level that is damaging to their own…
What has anti-racism got to do with nuclear weapons? They seem to belong in different worlds.
When we hear the word ‘anti-racism’, we might think about police violence, like the fatal shooting of Chris Kaba, the unarmed black 24-year-old killed by the Metropolitan police in South London last September.
Or we might think about brutal anti-immigrant policies, like the way the government crowded 4,000 asylum-seekers into Manston detention centre, built for 1,600 people.
…
In October 2014, Second World War conscientious objector Godric Bader was awarded the Gandhi Foundation’s International Peace Award, in recognition of the alternative business model he and his family created for their industrial manufacturing company, the Scott Bader Commonwealth.
Scott Bader has been and continues to be a successful industrial manufacturing company. Being owned by its workers did not stop it reaching sales of £270mn in 2021 (with gross profits of £76mn).
…
In Iran since the 1979 revolution, women have been banned from singing solo in front of men who are unrelated to them. This is just one of many restrictions forced upon Iranian women during this time.
In September, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in custody after being arrested by the ‘morality police’ because her clothes were judged to be ‘revealing’. Just a few threads of her hair were visible outside the edge of her hijab.
At Mahsa’s funeral, thousands…
‘In everyday life it’s very easy to see the borders at the edge of a nation. It literally says: “UK Border Force”. But when somebody is not going into Piccadilly Gardens [in central Manchester] because they’ve been told: “You shouldn’t go in there because you have an Afro [Afro-textured hair] and people will assume you are a drug dealer,” that’s something difficult to visualise. Photography allows us to see that. It allows us to visualise often invisible borders.’
That’s Jo Biglin, a…
I was just at my last annual Cornerstone party as a tenant member of the co-op. After my dark comic (and very middle-aged) contribution of Victoria Wood and ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ by Tom Lehrer, other younger people came on who spoke very seriously indeed.
One Colombian talked about the pain and damage of the cocaine industry on their people and how they felt about people around them disregarding that for their own pleasure.
I felt so weird – I felt like it was the…
There are a lot of things I could say, write, and otherwise communicate, about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
But let me start with the most obvious, or at least the most obvious to me, an almost life-long sufferer.
Having PTSD fucking sucks.
There. I said it. I think a lot of my fellow sufferers would agree. It sucks all day long and twice on Sundays. It sucks long, hard, wide and sideways. It sucks upside down and inside out. It even sucks at night.
It…
One of the ‘pleasures’ of the Peace News office location is Caledonian Road. Right at the junction with Pentonville Road at Kings Cross. So, busy. We’re right by the lights. Among the regularly-heard sounds is ‘this vehicle is turning left’ (to warn cyclists who might think it a good idea to undertake – overttake on the left at the lights).
On 10 November there was a Tube strike, so everybody who has a car decided to get in it and drive into central London. And, just to make…
Don Sutherland, Quaker, pacifist, conscientious objector from 1939 and a campaigner on human rights issues, died peacefully at his home in Lincoln aged 103.
Born in Coventry, Don was a member, along with Roy Broadbent (father of the actor Jim Broadbent), of the farming community at Holton-cum-Bickering and later at Bleasby, in Lincolnshire, during the Second World War.
When Ian Sharp’s play Conchies, about these pacifist communities, opened in 2017 at the Broadbent…
‘The deepest power is that of determining what people consider normal,’ British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Financial Times on 13 November.
The next day, British prime minister Rishi Sunak condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with these words: ‘There can be no normalisation of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s behaviour, which has no place in the international community.’
Perhaps Sunak was referring to the massive waves of Russian missile attacks on…
For the last few months, I’ve been getting up early to join striking postal, rail and BT workers on their picket lines in Hastings. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:
1) Claps don’t pay the bills
Like the nurses, who will be striking this December, all these groups are essential workers. And now is the moment that they really need our support.
They are all being asked to take real-term pay cuts, at the same time as corporations are paying out vast sums to…
SeaChange Sussex is a private not-for-profit company which has received tens of millions of pounds of public money to ‘regenerate’ Hastings in East Sussex. Andrea Needham has been monitoring it through Seachangewatch.
I’ve been plugging away trying to expose SeaChange for many years now. And, finally, it feels as if I’m not on my own.
For years, I read minutes of meetings, put in Freedom of Information requests, wrote blogposts, and posted them on my website. I sent out press…
In 1923, my granny went to study at the Royal College of Music to be a piano teacher. She loved to play the piano more than almost anything, and when she married my grandfather she had to give up working. She carried on playing, but there was always a thread of sadness that she wasn’t allowed to teach. My mum was also a beautiful pianist, though for pleasure rather than profession, and she trained first as a librarian and later as a person-centred counsellor.
Before she died, I…
‘We should have really serious discussions about how we legalise drugs in a way that is safer and more consumer-friendly, on the one hand, but also provide safeguards for people that want to use drugs and to minimize the harm,’ says Dr Jamie Banks, a Wellcome Trust early career fellow at the University of Leicester.
Such a move would be in line with the trend currently taking place around the world that is seeing a growing number of countries move towards the legalisation, regulation…
‘I did not come into politics to be a member of the Kamikaze Pilots’ Association.’
Yes, that is a Tory MP responding to the disastrous political impact of an unpopular and destabilising budget announcement from a Conservative government.
No, it’s not from September 2022.
It’s from March 1981.
Those are the words of liberal Conservative MP Cyril Townsend, making clear his opposition to chancellor Geoffrey Howe’s economy-shrinking, austerity budget. Inflation was…
Every time the US has increased its military support for Ukraine, Russia has responded by escalating in some way.
We’re approaching a very dangerous point now, where a Russian nuclear attack starts to become a real possibility (see p7), with catastrophic consequences not just for Ukraine, but almost certainly for the world.
However, as Noam Chomsky recently pointed out to Truthout: ‘The impact of the war goes far beyond: to the millions facing starvation with the…
As the hecticness of summer recedes, the autumnal ‘new projects’ feeling has taken a real hold, despite the monarchical brake being applied. Festival stalls and workshops have generated relationships and ideas to follow up and enquiries to answer, while projects that were on a summer go-slow have risen to the top of the urgent list.
The world seems to be speeding up, and society finding it a little harder each day to hold the panic at bay. Or maybe it’s just adjusting back to life…
