Nicholson, Patrick

At the end of September, a new local campaigning group calling itself 'Combe Haven Defenders' staged a weekend camp on the site of the proposed Bexhill-Hastings Link Road on England's South Coast. The temporary camp brought together 200 people with a shared concern for saving the valley and a willingness to explore the possibilities for action.

It also attracted a lot of media attention, including the Sunday…

The Tricycle Theatre, ‘Britain’s leading political playhouse’ according to The Times, is running a packed season of events examining nuclear weapons and the nuclear debate.

A centrepiece of this season is an ambitious two-part, five-hour sequence of 10 new short plays exploring nuclear issues, the performances punctuated and complemented by verbatim readings, archive footage and images.

The 10 plays explore nuclear weapons from a refreshingly diverse range of perspectives, from…

The Bomb: a partial history, in two parts. Directed by Nicholas Kent. Tricycle Theatre, London, 9th February – 1st April 2012. www.tricycle.co.uk

The Tricycle Theatre, “Britain’s leading political playhouse” according to the Times, is running a season of events examining nuclear weapons and the nuclear debate. A centrepiece of this season is an ambitious two-part, five hour sequence of ten new short plays exploring nuclear issues, the…

In late January this year there was a very well-organised and dynamic anti-GM meeting in London called Gathering Momentum which attracted well over 100 participants, including farmers, scientists and activists, from all over Britain and Ireland. This very useful little booklet, distributed at the meeting, is essentially a print copy of the Stop GM website, but it reads very well in its own right. It provides a very clear and grounded rationale for opposition to GM and brings the reader…

Wobegone is the third solo album by former Chumbawamba member Danbert Nobacon. Chumbawamba were (indeed still are, in their current acoustic incarnation) unique in UK popular music in combining a radical anarchist analysis and action with a creative trajectory that showed the same integrity as their politics.

Never afraid to experiment, their music was, at times, hit-and-miss but some of it was astonishingly, ecstatically good – all the more impressive when you think of the band’s…

The book is not a guide to collectives, or facilitation, or consensus. It presumes a certain prior knowledge and experience of all of these, and is for those who want to understand, and better deal with, the problems and pitfalls of working within collective structures.

The authors’ use their first hand experience to look at the realities of power and personality dynamics in supposedly egalitarian groups. This includes things like manipulative and coercive behaviour (both in…

Wade Allison is an academic physicist who writes about the science and safety of radiation. His main thrust is that radiation safety limits have been set irrationally high due to unrealistic fears and misunderstandings of the dangers of ionising radiation. He claims that recent evidence confirms that the dangers of low level radiation are much less than was thought earlier, and may even be beneficial in some circumstances.

Even if you disagree with where Allison takes his arguments,…

Filmed in 2003, this DVD records a fascinating extended conversation between veteran anarchist Colin Ward and writer/film-maker Roger Deakin. Sadly both the protagonists are no longer with us, making this film especially poignant and valuable.

It’s more of an interview than a true conversation, with Deakin asking the questions and Ward speaking at length, always with energy and lucidity and barely a pause for breath.

Topics covered include Ward’s introduction to anarchism…

I enjoyed David MacKay’s book unpicking energy issues and exploring the realities of the tough choices we face.

It’s had favourable reviews from influential quarters, including those in political power here in the UK. MacKay, a Cambridge physicist, has essentially made a book out of lots of back-of-an-envelope calculations, pulling them together to see, for example, whether potential UK renewable energy sources stack up against our energy consumption.

He’s done almost…

The UN COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen in December was a shambles. The little that was agreed reads like a paltry preamble to a treaty that never was – global average temperature rises should be held below 2oC; carbon emissions must be cut, but in a way that does not hinder economic progress of the developing world; a fund should be established to help poorer countries adapt to the threat of climate change (with an initial annual outlay of only $8bn, or about a third of what Shell…

These two books offer criticisms of capitalism from very different perspectives.

Shutt, a left-leaning economist, argues that the ongoing crisis within capitalism has arisen from the growing redundancy of capital since the 1970s. With too much capital sloshing around, the rich have found it increasingly hard to find investments that can deliver the profits they expect, resorting to taking high risks that make the whole edifice increasingly fragile.

Shutt attacks the laissez-…

Between the summer of 1918 and the following spring about 230,000 people died in Britain from a deadly strain of influenza, popularly called Spanish Flu. The toll worldwide may have been as high as 100 million. This book describes the pandemic in Britain making use of unpublished testimonies of survivors and the memoirs of doctors, soldiers, and civil servants.

The title comes from a rhyme sung by children at the time: “I had a little bird / Its name was Enza / I opened the window /…

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and embarked on a four-year reign of terror and genocide. During this period, over 14,000 so-called “traitors” were processed through the secret prison S-21 set in a former school, with confessions extracted under torture. As part of the process, captives were photographed prior to execution.

S-27 is a play inspired by these real events. May’s job is to take the photographs. We follow her as she begins to question what she is doing,…

I liked the Transition books the moment I saw them – they are well-designed and produced, and look and feel great. In a way they mirror the Transition movement itself, rolling together a mass of related ideas into an attractive package that promises a way out of the looming dead end that is peak oil and climate change. So they look good and offer much, but do the books deliver? And can the Transition movement itself deliver on its promises?

The Handbook is split into three sections –…

The clever young things at Plane Stupid recently came up with a great idea for forging closer links between environmental activists and concerned residents threatened by the proposed third runway at Heathrow. The idea was to twin residents up with existing affinity groups, and for each affinity group to support their resident in their fight against the new runway, ultimately helping them defend their homes if necessary.

To get the campaign off the ground, an initial group of activists…