Diary

1 October 2018Comment

How can we create strong and resilient communities that can change society?

Is it possible to change society? To put an end to capitalism and create a sustainable, liberated future?

When I was young, I thought it would be pretty quick – just tell people how they’re doing it all wrong and they’ll change and everything will be fine.

As the scale of the problem became increasingly apparent to me and my historical knowledge improved, there was a corresponding increase in my own pessimism.

I started to recognise my own limits and…

1 August 2018Comment

Solidarity is a threat, so the powers-that-be divide and rule ...

I hadn’t slept much, maybe three hours, after talking until 4am in the hostel. I planned to sleep on the train, and that prospect helped me haul my luggage across the sauna that is New Orleans. It helped me stay upright and emotionally balanced even when there was no train or any information, 20 minutes after departure time. It’s Amtrak after all.

It turned out the train was going to be at least three hours late and I was suddenly exhausted and grumpy.

I moved to a discreet…

1 June 2018Comment

Our Leeds cooperator visits the founding member of the (US) Federation of Egalitarian Communities

I stare out of Amtrak windows three times in a week, first watching the Virginia countryside, then the Washington DC, and then the Maryland countryside go by. This train journey from rural Twin Oaks Community to Red Emma’s anarchist bookshop in Baltimore sums up the contrasts of my tour and the contrasts of the USA.

I’m visiting radical co-ops and communities, people working to create fair and ecologically-sustainable economies. And I’m poking around to find out what works and what…

1 February 2018Comment

Claire Poyner calls for men to call-out men who call out (at women)

When I was a teenager, my schoolfriends and I would walk out from school past a timber merchants. Every time a lorry came in or out we’d get horns tooting and drivers leaning out and expressing their opinions on our bodies and what they’d like to do to them.

That’s the way it was in the mid-1970s. In my late 40s, I noticed that this was no longer happening. Great! Men had finally grown up and no longer felt the need to yell out invitations for a quickie in the car park.

Er, no…

1 December 2017Comment

Samra Mayanja reflects on a Radical Routes recent ‘Re-imagining Gatherings’

I’ve moved on average every three years across the country and the globe (unfortunately not as a result of my jet-setting lifestyle but because of parental separation and subsequent divorce, family feuds, university, a study abroad year and so on). It would be fair to say that there were many times when the situation was precarious. Times when it was physically, mentally and emotionally paralysing. But also times of immense growth.

The last move was to Leeds into a Radical Routes…

1 October 2017Comment

Esme Needham reflects on a divestment bus tour of East Sussex

The Divest East Sussex bus hits Crowborough. PHOTO: Divest East Sussex

On 23 September, 18 of us went on a bus tour across East Sussex to collect signatures for a petition asking the county council to divest local people’s pensions from fossil fuels. I was a little hazy on the details at first, but by the end I had heard the explanation of what the petition was about so many times that I’m probably still saying it in my sleep.

Equipped with T-shirts (just enough of us were…

1 August 2017Comment

Nikki No-Nukes on her recent trip to Coulport, where the nuclear warheads for Trident submarines are stored and loaded onto missiles.

Angie Zelter is cut out of a lock-on in front of Coulport nuclear weapon store in Scotland on 11 July. Photo: Trident Ploughshares

Thursday: We (a contingent from the south-west of England) arrived at the Trident Ploughshares Coulport Disarmament Camp late at night, having travelled straight from an action which was part of the July rolling blockade at the fracking front line: Preston New Road in Lancashire. We arrived tired but exhilarated having kept the drills at bay for nearly…

1 June 2017Comment

Ali Tamlit gets up close and personal with the things that hurt the most

On 28 March, I was part of the ‘End Deportations – Stop Charter Flights’ action by Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants and Plane Stupid at Stansted airport, which successfully prevented a mass deportation to Nigeria and Ghana.

We took this action in solidarity with the 57 people on board the flight who were being forcefully removed from the UK. We were in touch with some of these people and knew their stories and knew the potential fates that awaited them if they were deported.…

1 April 2017Comment

It's good to talk ...

Men talk in a cafe in Tigre, near Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 2003. Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com

After I shared a cartoon on Facebook recently, I had an angry response (several hundred words long) from ‘John’, someone I haven’t heard from in years. The cartoon, by New Zealand-based illustrator Toby Morris, shows two people, equally intelligent and hard-working, growing up in different circumstances, and ending up in very different situations in adult life. The…

1 December 2016Comment

US activist and trainer Nicole Marin Baena on waking up on the day after the US election

I had the fortune of being far from home when the election results came in. I’d had a pretty lovely evening, getting shown by a friend around his neighbourhood in Brooklyn and then bussing over to meet my friend Daniel at the place we’d be staying for the next couple of days.

On the bus, a sweet black girl, maybe about six years old, sat next to me and talked about the new house she and her mommy were moving to, and showed me the ‘I Voted!’ sticker she’d gotten from her daddy. Two…

1 October 2016Comment

Ali Tamlit surveys some of the trials and tribulations of squatted sites

For the past two years I’ve been living in a well-known squatted site of resistance. While people usually ask me about the legal situation, the threat of eviction isn’t one of the main challenges for me. One of the biggest challenges for me is the constant flow of new people coming with the assumption that it’s an ‘open site’ because it’s a squat.

‘At the end of the day yeah, it’s just a squat, so you can’t tell me what to do’, is a phrase that I hear irritatingly often. Not that…

1 August 2016Comment

A french activist liiving in Britain reflects on the aftermath of the EU referendum

Some of the thousands of people who gathered in Trafalgar Square, London, on 22 June to mourn the death of Jo Cox MP, was shot and stabbed to death on 16 June. Photo: Philafrenzy CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia

‘So, are you going to get married now?’ This seems to be the question everyone is asking me nowadays. Who would have thought that Britain voting to leave the EU would bring so much romance to my life?

On 24 June, I woke up in France, in Burgundy. I was on holiday, visiting…

1 June 2016Comment

Sometimes the journey can be as important as the destination ...

‘So will you now be organising a cycle ride to Ende Gelände, the mass action in Germany in May?’

Filled with emotions and exhaustion, 125 of us had just reached Paris for the climate negotiations in December after a five-day ride from London, and all I wanted to do was crash in a corner, and not think of any new project that involved ‘logistics’ or ‘meetings’.

After catching a little sleep and recovering some energy, we rethought that suggestion. We saw the need to…

1 April 2016Comment

Ali Tamlit reflects on his experience as one of the Heathrow 13

It was quite easy to decide to do the action. We knew that the Davis commission was due to make an announcement that would recommend a new runway somewhere in the South East, we just didn't know whether it would be Heathrow or Gatwick. The Davis commission was flawed from the beginning, asking where we need airport expansion, not if we need it – and clearly we don't need it.

Airport expansion is being driven by 15 percent of the population taking 70 percent of flights; this isn't…

1 December 2015Comment

Hope, despair and reading

This is my final diary for Peace News, and looking back, I can see the prevailing theme of my columns has been the struggle to remain hopeful at a time when there is so much to make me despair.

Following a discussion on Facebook last night, I’ve been thinking about the power of literature to help us make sense of it all. I’ve been particularly reflecting on the poetry of WH Auden, who featured in my first column. I fell in love with his poetry when I was 17. Back then, I…