Press release
The Peace News staff
30 August 2024
IMAGE 1: https://tinyurl.com/resigningstaffandboard. CAPTION: The resigning PN staff and board (left–right): Leslie Barson, Gabriel Carlyle, Emily Johns, Muzzamal Hussain, Milan Rai, Emma Sangster, Henrietta Cullinan, Eve Wedderburn. PHOTO CREDIT: Erica Smith
IMAGE 2: https://tinyurl.com/PN2674frontcover. CAPTION: The front cover of the special issue announcing the resignations and the reason for them.
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ENTIRE PEACE NEWS STAFF RESIGN IN PROTEST OVER 'TIDAL WAVE OF INTIMIDATION, HARASSMENT AND THREATS' FROM PARENT COMPANY
Question-mark over future of eighty-eight-year-old peace movement paper
The entire current staff of the long-running peace movement newspaper Peace News (PN) have resigned in protest over what they describe as a 'tidal wave of intimidation, harassment and threats' from the paper's parent company, Peace News Trustees.
In a special issue of the paper published online today [1] and mailed out to print subscribers yesterday (Thursday 28 August) the paper's editor for the last seventeen years, Milan Rai, writes:
'On 14 August, all four current Peace News staff (Emily Johns, Emma Sangster, Gabriel Carlyle and myself) resigned from our jobs at PN, in protest at how we and our board members have been treated by our parent company, Peace News Trustees, over the last year or so. Five members of the Peace News board also resigned as directors on 14 August: Emily Johns, Eve Wedderburn, Henrietta Cullinan, Leslie Barson and Muzammal Hussain.
'A resignation letter was sent to Peace News Trustees (PNT), the company that owns Peace News Ltd [PNL], signed by Emily and sent on behalf of all eight resigning staffers and directors. It said: "The tidal wave of intimidation, harassment and threats that we have experienced over the last year has been extremely stressful and exhausting. We tried to create a more healthy relationship between PNT and PNL, based on consent and mutual respect, protecting a space for private conversation and discussion without PNT surveillance or micro-management. Unfortunately, that attempt has been unsuccessful. The relentless bullying campaign we have experienced has been led by [PNT chair] Glyn Carter and aided and abetted by Albert Beale, Ian Dixon and Andrew Rigby."’
Key aspects of that campaign are documented in the issue [2].
The issue also notes that: 'The PN staff expect to be fired immediately, without notice and without any form of redundancy, as a result of publishing this issue. We have given up the possibility of receiving these payments in order to be able to tell you, our readers, the truth as we see it about what has happened to PN.' [3]
The resigning staff believe that the current chair of Peace News Trustees constitutes an existential threat to Peace News and to Housmans Bookshop. [2]
Published since 1936, Peace News is the UK’s only grassroots newspaper covering the full spectrum of peace and justice issues. It works for a nonviolent world where war has been abolished and the roots of war pulled up, including the silent, routine violence of hunger, oppression and ecological devastation [4].
Based in London's Kings Cross since 1959 and owned by the same parent company (PNT), Housmans bookshop is 'the longest continuous-running radical bookshop in Britain' as well as the paper's sister project. [5]
NOTES
[1] https://peacenews.info/issue/2674-2675
[2] https://peacenews.info/node/11063/peace-news-close
[3] https://peacenews.info/node/11064/what-will-happen-now
[4] https://peacenews.info/about
[5] https://housmans.com