Needham, Andrea

As a non-motorist by choice, I found much to like in this slim book, once I’d got past its very dull title. It’s written by a Swedish group whose name – Planka.nu – translates roughly as ‘fare dodge now’. To my mind this would have been a very much snappier title.

According to Wikipedia, ‘Planka Nu is a network of organisations promoting tax-financed zero-fare public transport...The campaign has received much attention because [it] encourages people to fare-dodge, aiding its…

On 30 July, 20 years to the day after the Seeds of Hope acquittal, I found myself once again in the back of a police van with Jo, one of my co-conspirators. We’d been at Peace News Summer Camp at Crabapple community in Shropshire, and had been out for a walk with Emily and Lyn, two of the other women in the group. As we were strolling along a public footpath, three police dogs rushed round a corner and surrounded us, barking madly. One of them had bitten me – hence a…

On my computer at home, I have dozens of photos of Hollington Valley on the edge of Hastings in East Sussex. Taken through the seasons, they show a small, tucked-away site, a green lung bounded by roads and warehouses. A stream runs down the middle of the valley; tall oaks stand at the eastern edge; a copse of younger trees surround a large holm oak on the west. There are meadows and willow beds, bramble scrub much loved by dormice, a spring rising at the top of the site. One photo is taken…

Nobody in my early life – myself included – would have suspected that I had a future as a troublemaker ahead of me. Growing up in rural Suffolk in the 1970s, the youngest of four siblings, there didn’t seem to be much wrong with the world. I don’t recall my family discussing politics, and although my father listened to the news every day, I never paid it much attention.
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On 29 January 1996, Jo Blackman, Lotta Kronlid and Andrea Needham broke into a British Aerospace factory in Lancashire and used household hammers to disarm a Hawk warplane bound for Indonesia. They were arrested, charged with £2.4m of criminal damage, and sent to prison to await trial. A week later, Angie Zelter joined them, accused of conspiracy. After six months in prison, all four were acquitted by a Liverpool jury in a court case that effectively put Britain’s arms trade on trial.…

On 7 July, the Hastings anti-roads group Combe Haven Defenders received an urgent message on our Facebook page: a big tree was being chopped down in Hollington Valley. I immediately jumped in a taxi, headed to the site, and sat under the tree.

The tree-fellers had to stop work, the police were called, and thus began a five-hour standoff.

The planned fate of this particular tree…

When Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) discovered that one of their staff members, Martin Hogbin, had been spying on them for years on behalf of British Aerospace (BAE), British comedian/activist Mark Thomas flatly refused to believe it. Martin, CAAT’s campaigns co-ordinator, had worked closely with Mark and become a close friend. This was a man, Mark says, who had pied Dick Evans, the former chair of BAE. How could he possibly be a spy?

This show tells the story of that…

Judge Crabtree warned us that while judgements in magistrates’ courts usually take between 45 minutes and two hours, this one was likely to take considerably longer. He was right; his judgement took three-and-a-half hours. But it was a judgement worth waiting for.

Six activists were being prosecuted for ‘aggravated trespass’ for occupying trees along the route of the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road in January 2013 (see PN 2554, 2566).

The first two hours or so of the hearing in…

On 17 September, 5,000 people arrived in the financial district of Manhattan in New York, bearing banners, tents and sleeping bags. They had been drawn in by the idea, originally mooted by the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, of occupying Wall Street and demanding economic justice. The proposed occupation was described as “a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain”, making clear that it was inspired by the Arab Spring, and in particular the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt…

He has been on hunger strike since 23 August in protest at his conviction in March for violating article 184 of the Egyptian penal code, which criminalises any criticism of the military.

Maikel had published an article exposing the role of the military during and after the revolution, for which he was sentenced to three years in prison in a trial in front of a military court and without a lawyer. His appeal was scheduled for 4 October, but then adjourned because a file was missing.…

He had been convicted of “wilful disobedience” after he asked not to participate in the training as he had applied for conscientious objector status. He was given 7 months detention, stripped of his rank as leading medical assistant and dismissed from the service.

On 13 October three judges sitting at the court of appeal rejected the challenge to his conviction and also dismissed his appeal against his “manifestly excessive” sentence. Last December he applied for dismissal on the…

Brimar – a Manchester-based weapons manufacturer – is the latest armaments firm to feel the heat from campaigners. 17 October saw the launch of a new campaign “Target Brimar” with a colourful procession and Critical Mass bike ride to the company’s factory in Chadderton, where there were speeches, music, food and a children’s playspace.

Two of the EDO “decommissioners” – on bail for damaging equipment at the Brighton EDO weapons factory last January, during the Israeli attack on Gaza…

On 18 January 2009, as Israeli bombs – many of them containing British-made components – rained down on the people of Gaza, six people entered the EDO arms factory in Brighton, and proceeded to carry out a people’s decommissioning. Equipment used to make weapons’ components was smashed, and computers and filing cabinets were thrown out of windows. EDO claimed they had suffered £300,000 of damage – no mention, of course, of the damage being caused by their weapons in Gaza. All six were…

Kate Evans’ Thank you Greenham (Laughing Moon Press; 2008;ISBN 978-0956006103; 100pp; £7) is an account of her visits to Greenham in the early ’80s, with a particular stress on “how difficult it was to be a part-time activist”.

Interesting, it’s often hard to read: it’s a very honest account, brutally so at times. The experience seems to have damaged the author emotionally, yet she still manages to make the book a positive read, looking at Greenham as part of a wider struggle against…

A plaudit for this book calls it “proof that you don't have to stop rockin' once you become a parent”.

Having never started rockin', I'm perhaps not the intended audience but found it an interesting addition to the panoply of parenting books I've read over the past four years. The book started life as columns for US zine Maximum Rock and Roll, on the theme of “punk parent[ing]”, and much of the content reflects this origin.

There is some useful stuff here, not covered in other…