What a pleasure it was to read about what one bold cardinal has been up to in Rome.
Apparently, in May [2019], the electricity was cut off for a building occupied by 450 squatters – about 100 of them children. Many were refugees.
Cardinal Krajewski (Polish – you guessed) decided on a bit of very direct action. He lifted a lid set in the ground, climbed down to remove a seal, and switched on the electricity.
Light and hot water restored. If there’s a fine, the cardinal…
I hope all readers had as good a time as I did on Saturday afternoon, 6 July. A trip to the Faringdon Peace Fête is not to be missed.
So, as soon as you get next year’s diary, make sure you put in ‘Faringdon, 4 July 2020’.
Why this enthusiasm? Faringdon can’t take the credit for the sunshine but it can for almost everything else that makes the day a success.
The peace group are old hands at this. It was the 38th such summer fête they have organised, which takes us back,…
What a pleasure it was to read about what one bold cardinal has been up to in Rome.
Apparently, in May, the electricity was cut off for a building occupied by 450 squatters – about 100 of them children. Many were refugees.
Cardinal Krajewski (Polish – you guessed) decided on a bit of very direct action. He lifted a lid set in the ground, climbed down to remove a seal, and switched on the electricity.
Light and hot water restored. If there’s a fine, the cardinal said he’d…
I still have a scar on my left hand. It is a reminder of a school fight that took place many long years ago. The street knife violence of today comes out of the same stable.
In my area of north London, criminal violence is far from unknown.
There was a row on a bus some years ago between older boys from two different schools. One boy got off the bus not far from his home. But another boy followed him up the street and stabbed him to death. His companion escaped…
We all have to thank, if that is the right word, the late Ernest Bevin for getting us into our nuclear weapons mess. He was late for a meeting called by the then British prime minister, Labour’s Clement Attlee, in October 1946. Attlee wanted to discuss whether to plan for a British nuclear weapon or not.
Bevin, the foreign secretary, went to Downing Street to discover that Attlee’s meeting had started and the general consensus was not to go for a British atomic bomb. Too expensive…
It is now well over a hundred years since czar Nicholas II of Russia invited other states to come to The Hague, in the Netherlands, in 1899, to discuss possibilities for world peace. It is almost 20 years since thousands of individuals and peace groups came also to The Hague, in 1999, for an event to plan progress in the direction that the first Hague pointed to. I still have the booklet with ideas that came from that centenary meeting.
In 1999, we believed that we could challenge…
What I was doing on 5 July 1948 I can’t remember. Marching up and down on parade in Aldershot I imagine, as a national service conscript.
I certainly did not notice that on 5 July 1948 something remarkable happened. Health minister Aneurin Bevan, in a Manchester hospital, launched the National Health Service. A very progressive step forward for the country. Bevan’s announcement came only a few months before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, agreed in December 1948 by the…
Something odd happened a few weeks ago. Britain, France and the United States sent their planes off to bomb targets in Syria. None of those countries had been directly attacked. It was a punishment raid for the use of chemical weapons, allegedly by Syria.
About 100 missiles were launched and at first the claim was that no one was killed. Then a single casualty was mentioned. No one else. I’ll believe that when I see pigs flying.
Where did these three get the authority…
A few nights ago, I watched on TV the house of commons discussing the attempted murder of the ex-Russian spy and his daughter. I am not naïve and have no illusions about what states will get up to. We British helped to kill over 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because we insisted on Japan’s unconditional surrender. Even now we supply Saudi Arabia with the bombs which have enabled them to kill tens of thousands of people in Yemen.
But as I watched the debate I wondered…
Since I am writing this piece in early February, between the hundredth anniversary of the granting of the first and partial voting rights for women in the UK (6 February 1918) and International Women’s Day (8 March), there is only one obvious subject. So here come a few words about three great and strong peace and justice women among so many who have inspired me.
The first is Olive Gibbs, commemorated in Oxford Town Hall on 6 February itself – which would have been her 100th…
At this end of the year, the conflicts of the world can be seen in our small north London back garden.
The birds are hungry and our swinging seed feeder is getting a lot of attention. But then comes the arrival of the large and powerful – the green parakeets from Hampstead. Colourful they may be, but greedy they certainly are. The small ones – robins, wrens, finches, and the like – get driven off. Or they would get so driven if I did…
It is nearly 70 years since I began my two years of conscripted military service.
Having been to a boarding school, it was not much of a shock. Despite some class differences we were all in the same boat and got shouted at in the same way by various corporals and sergeants.
In 1947, the cold war was just starting, and it was to faraway places like Malaysia and Korea that some of my contemporaries were sent. At least one, my friend ‘Tubby’ Maycock, a year below me at…
What an odd world of priorities we live in. Any more about Brexit – important though it is in so many ways – tends now to produce a yawn.
Yet the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has not even started to be a priority. We must all make it one.
It was passed with the support of 122 countries at a UN conference a couple of weeks ago. Only the Netherlands voted ‘No’.
The nuclear weapon countries, including our own, took no part. In fact Michael…
I’ve never before heard of a paper called The Weekly Dispatch but it was clearly doing well in 1917. In September that year it published a furious piece headed ‘Traitors in the Parks’.
It was all about the anti-war rallies being held in Finsbury Park and Hyde Park – ‘long haired strapping youths... using language about Cabinet ministers which horrified all decent people’.
It got much stronger in the next edition. ‘Sedition mongers and their dupes – insidious…
Robert Hinde would be surprised to find his obituary in Peace News. But he more than deserves a mention though I very much doubt if he, academic and ex-RAF coastal command wartime pilot, was a regular Peace News reader.
He died just before Christmas at the age of 93. Many of us have lost a very good friend, a wise advisor and one of the most modest men I have ever met. Professionally, Robert Hinde was a distinguished zoologist, a former master of St John’s…
