PN

Well the first I'd say is that when I started going to protests as such, I wouldn't have considered myself to be 'an activist'.
The first protest I went on was on the night of the student fees vote in parliament. I'd never been on a protest before and I thought it'd be quite peaceful and quite orderly.

It didn't turnout that way – we got kettled by the police. It was not a pleasant experience, but I met great people and I wanted to get more involved.

There was a moment…

Heavily kettled

'Saturday's Committee of 100 demonstration, held despite a ban from the Ministry of Works, lacked real effectiveness…. [The demonstration ended up at the US embassy.] The police were there in force and were obviously determined to be rough. A police bus charged some demonstrators at 30mph. The police first stopped the demonstrators by cordoning them off, and then charged them, pushing and kicking in the process. The arrests made at this point were made with extreme roughness…

PHOTO: Hannah Daisy

At the end of July, women restored missing hair to statues of women in central London to promote a month-long campaign of body-hair-growing. Armpits4August aims to combat ‘a physically-, socially-, and mentally-damaging image of what is “natural”’. The group said: ‘by growing our body hair we are working towards having pride in our body hair, not shame.’ The group also raised money for Verity, the charity for women with polycystic ovarian syndrome.  

Considering nonviolent revolution at the PN Summer Camp. PHOTO: Beatrice Kabutakapua

This year’s Peace News Summer Camp was, as promised, bigger and better than ever before. The skies cleared and the ground dried out to give us a gloriously sunny five days (26-30 July). Mysteriously, the heavens opened after our camp, raining on the Earth First! Summer Gathering, which came immediately after us, also at the wonderful Crabapple Community.

We had over 220 people attending over the five…

In July, Peace News organised a speaking tour for US activist and author George Lakey (we also re-published his excellent book Toward a Living Revolution, available from us for only £15 post-free). George travelled all the way from Brighton to Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as spending five days at PN Summer Camp in Shropshire.

Here’s one report from one stop along the way.

Lucy

George Lakey made a visit to ‘Take Back the Land’, an action camp held in South Lanarkshire,…

There had been an ‘issue’ in our group, so I had to talk face-to-face with someone. We figured out the best chance of us meeting was when he came to Aldermaston for an action camp (against nuclear weapons).

I showed up; he’d volunteered to be a decoy, so we walked around the base, talking about who said what and who did what and why he felt the way he did.

At the main entrance, he said he was going to walk straight in –as a decoy. I joined him – we were both expecting to be…

I know someone who became a committed, full-on activist because of his experience of consensus decision-making. A demo was happening and he tagged along, and it wound its way into a student union or something, and everyone sat down and they had a decision-making meeting and he was completely blown away and thought: ‘This is it! This is how things should be!’

What’s attractive is the sense that everyone is being listened to, everyone’s opinion counts. After my experiences of school and…

I used to belong to an affinity group whose motto was ‘fun and effective’. Every action was supposed to be both effective in advancing our cause, and fun for those of us carrying it out.

We did do some very amusing things. The most bizarre of which was when we were campaigning about East Timor, which few people had ever heard of, and British arms sales to Indonesia, which was then occupying the tiny country. (I still find it hard to believe international pressure forced Indonesia out…

In May, East Cheshire’s new mayor was criticised after trying to stop a local resident voicing her opinion during a council meeting.
On 23 May, Charlotte Peters Rock, 66, obtained permission to address the council for five minutes to protest against the closure of a local respite centre for people with dementia.
Having checked the rules to make sure it was not banned, Mrs Peters Rock launched into a protest song. The mayor ordered her to stop, switched off the microphone, and…

In late May, the government of Saudi Arabia announced that it had awarded a £1.6bn training contract with BAE Systems. The order includes the purchase of 22 Hawk trainer/fighter jets from BAE (to be supplied in 2016) and 55 aircraft made by a Swiss company.

The aircraft will be used to train Saudi pilots to fly 72 Eurofighter Typhoons made by a European consortium including BAE. The Typhoon order, signed in 2006, was worth more than £6bn.

The latest deal has saved 278 jobs at a…

The queen’s speech, delivered on 9 May, revealed details of the government’s plan to give the police and security services access to every UK phone call, email and text message, without requiring a warrant.
The Justice and Security bill, announced in the same speech, will allow ministers to declare evidence in civil trials to be too sensitive to be made public, and only to be revealed in secret court sessions, secret even from the litigant and their lawyers. Such secret evidence may…

On 14 May, 18-year-old Israeli Noam Gur was exempted from further military service, soon after she finished her second 10-day prison sentence this year for her conscientious objection.

Noam said in April: ‘I refuse to join an army that has, since it was established, been engaged in dominating another nation, in plundering and terrorising.... the Palestinian people have been increasingly choosing the path of nonviolent…

In mid-May, the government of Morocco said that it had ‘decided to withdraw its confidence’ from UN envoy Christopher Ross, who it accused of giving ‘biased and unbalanced guidance’ on the issue of Western Sahara. Morocco invaded Western Sahara in 1975 and has illegally occupied the territory since then.
Morocco also criticised a UN report, published in April (see PN 2545), which suggested Morocco had been spying on MINURSO, the UN monitoring body for Western Sahara.
In response,…

PN went to press just after the six-year Nepali peace process was meant to have been finally resolved. It wasn’t.

As widely predicted, Nepali political parties failed to meet the 27 May deadline for agreeing a new constitution. The original deadline set in the interim constitution of 2007 was 28 May 2010 – there have been four extensions, even though the first was judged unconstitutional by the supreme court. The supreme court ruled just before the deadline that extending the…