Beale, Albert

Beale, Albert

Albert Beale

1 July 2006Feature

There was a mood of celebration - and also relief - on the well attended Critical Mass cycle ride in central London on 30 June, following a High Court ruling a few days earlier that a police attempt to declare the event “unlawful” should have “had the benefit of sounder legal advice”.
Participants in the Central London ride last September - when they met on the South Bank at 6pm on the last Friday of the month as usual - were handed letters by the police saying that the event was not…

1 June 2006News

As reported in last month's PN, `twas the season for AGM-related protests. Here's a quick roundup of protest at three of the worst companies' annual junkets:

BAE Systems

Albert Beale writes... The AGM of Britain's biggest purveyor of armaments - BAE Systems - was as usual a target for anti-arms trade activists, both inside and outside the meeting on 4 May.

The Campaign Against Arms Trade's street theatre outside, showing members of the government as poodles…

1 May 2006News

It's spring - and a young activist's thoughts naturally turn towards... company AGMs. Yes, it's that time of year again, when most of the major corporations hold their shareholders' meetings, and when the most probing questions at these events always seem to come from the smallest shareholders.

Rio Tinto

This year's Rio Tinto AGM, at the high-security Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster on 12 April, saw a group of nominal shareholders challenging the company about…

16 April 2006Feature

Norman Kember, the British pacifist released after being imprisoned in Iraq for almost four months, has returned home to face a predictable lack of understanding of his pacifist stance - just as his captors in Iraq themselves showed little sympathy towards his pacifism.

He had been one of four activists from the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) network who were abducted in Iraq on 26 November (see the cover story in December/January's PN), whilst there to support human rights for…

16 December 2005Feature

Candle-lit vigils for the four peace activists abducted in Iraq were held around the country on the evening of Friday 2 December - including ones in Oxford, Bradford, Evesham, Derby and on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square, London.

The four - including Briton Norman Kember - are all genuinely long-time peace campaigners, who were in Iraq in connection with the work of Christian Peacemaker Teams, an international religious peace network active in anti-war…

1 December 2005News

Five hundred people - a mixture of anti-militarists, anarchists and nationalists - demonstrated in Sofia on 12 November in protest at plans to build US military bases in Bulgaria. They called for a national referendum on whether Bulgaria should compromise its sovereignty and host the bases.

Following an initial agreement by the government - as long ago as 1999 - to host US forces, there have been recent reports that the US wants to send several thousand troops to the country, and is…

1 December 2005News

On 24 November, six members of Military Families Against the War applied at the High Court in London for permission for a full judicial review of the government's refusal, last May, to order an investigation into the legality of the 2003 attack on Iraq and the subsequent UK military action there.

At the hearing - for which they had had to appeal for donations because they were refused legal aid (see the front page story in the November PN) - Judge Collins reserved judgement…

16 November 2005Feature

Inspired by “Camp Casey” in Crawford, Texas - the protest camp initiated by Cindy Sheehan whose son Casey was killed in Iraq last year - on 18 and 19 October relatives of British soldiers killed in Iraq set up camp outside the Ministry of Defence, opposite Downing Street.

Sheehan had met Rose Gentle at the end of September in the US during three days of anti-war protests - attended by Gentle and other members of bereaved British families. Cindy Sheehan is expected to return the visit…

1 November 2005News

After more than a decade of informal, monthly, collective assertions of the delight of cycling around a city in the company of lots of other cyclists, the Critical Mass bike rides in central London have suddenly been targeted by the police.

Critical Mass rides, which take place in many parts of the world, are a traditional way to show that if bikes outnumber cars for a change, rather than vice versa - hence the name Critical Mass - then the safety and pleasure of public spaces can…

3 June 2005Comment

Ceremonies to mark International COs' Day on 15 May are becoming more widespread in Britain, having taken place in at least seven cities this year. The day was established by War Resisters' International in 1982, and has since been a focus of anti-militarist events worldwide each year.

In Edinburgh, a ceremony involving both Green and Scottish Socialist MSPs included reading a list of Scottish COs who had suffered for their principles in the last two World Wars.

In the…

1 March 2005News

A lengthy legal struggle by two campaigners has been vindicated with a final victory in the the European Court of Human Rights: on 15 February the ECHR ruled that the McLibel 2 - Helen Steel and Dave Morris - had been denied freedom of expression and a fair trial when they were sued for libel by the multinational junk food giant McDonald's.

In other words, officialdom has caught up with what the rest of the world knew more than 10 years ago.

What's wrong with McD?

McDonald'…

1 December 2004Review

Rodale / Pan Macmillan, 2004; ISBN 1 4050 7735 2; Hb £18.99; 600pp

It was a pleasure to be given this to review - it's a book I'd want to buy if I could afford it.

Rex Weyler has written a history of a major part of this movement, assessing many of the personalities, and narrating some of the dramatic stories. (See interview p10-12.)

Lots of this has been told before, but this might be the first attempt to pull so much of this history together by someone so close to it. It is a pity it concentrates on the 1970s, though that means it gives a…