Activist history

1 April 2017Review

Verso, 2016; 512pp; £25

Don’t be deterred by this book’s hefty appearance or its purely historical premise. Using archival research, Sheila Rowbotham has retraced the lives of six US and British radicals in the late 19th century. Her commitment to mingling the personal and the political results in a fascinating mosaic of stories.

In the decades that Rowbotham reconstructs before our eyes, women could still not speak in public without ‘odium and ostracism’. Divorce and contraception were highly…

1 April 2017Review

Verso, 2014; 240pp; £9.99

'Bohemians have occupied a semi-subversive status in modern society without being, in any consistent way, political-minded or even organised', notes Paul Buhle in his insightful introduction to this wonderful collection of comics.

Featuring almost 30 separate stories, artwork by over a dozen different artists, and with a a timeframe spanning over 100 years (one of the first stories tells the story of the New York-based Unitary Household, who practiced free love and critiqued gender…

1 February 2017News

Secret cabinet office papers reveal impact of nuke sub protest

A protest action in 1988 in which Phill Jones, Chipper Mills, and Tony Vallance from Faslane Peace Camp managed to get into the control room of one of the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines left British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ‘utterly horrified’, according to secret cabinet offices papers published by the National Archives on 29 December.

The papers describe how, at 1.15am on 10 October 1988, the three successfully broke into Faslane naval base north of Glasgow, climbed into…

1 February 2017Feature

Paying tribute to an amazing working-class Jewish lesbian thinker and activist

Felice Yeskel Photo: Class Action

This summer, PN is planning to bring Betsy Leondar-Wright to the UK to lead sessions at Peace News Summer Camp and other events. Betsy has been leading workshops on class and classism since the 1970s, and is a senior trainer with Class Action, based in Boston, Massachussetts. In this article, written in 2011, Betsy paid tribute to Felice Yeskel, a Class Action co-founder and close friend who had died recently.

Working in…

1 February 2017Letter

Reports of different forms of action around the world give ideas about replicating them at home.

Also, they can remind us about fairly similar action in our own areas. Rev Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (PN 2598–2599) gives an example of well-planned, effective NVDA [nonviolent direct action].

In 2000, during the year-long care workers’ strike, in Ashton, Greater Manchester, we performed a nonviolent ‘invasion’. Tameside Care Group were forcing new…

1 February 2017Comment

Eggs, boredom and more!

Being a Muslim

We have the EDL [right-wing English Defence League] coming to a nearby town this weekend and I’m really torn about going to the counter-demonstration because we came very unstuck campaigning against the BNP [right-wing British National Party] in the elections. My young son and I managed to ‘intimidate’ the BNP candidate into not attending the hustings at the local town hall, which was great, and very thrilling.

Then we went home to our little council…

15 December 2016Resource

A visual celebration of the people and movement that opposed the First World War. 

As part of its First World War centenary project, The World is My Country, Peace News produced a series of ten colour posters and eight poetry / song broadsheets, celebrating key figures and events from the First World War anti-war movement. These can be viewed here.

We also produced a 100-page booklet…

1 December 2016Feature

Celebrating a powerhouse of women’s archiving and activism since 1975

150 people gathered for a ‘read-in’ of feminist books outside Southwark council budget-setting meeting on 24 February to support the Feminist Library, threatened by eviction. (GHARWEG, a threatened tenant in the same building, was originally for refugees from Ghana, but in 1997 became an Advice, Training & Careers Centre for all black and minority communities.) PHOTO: FEMINIST LIBRARY

Faced with unsustainable rent increases at the end of 2015, and the threat of…

1 December 2016Feature

Former PN worker Andrew Shephard sets out the background to his new novel

Late in January 1975, soon after my arrival at Peace News in Elm Avenue, Nottingham, where the magazine was then produced, the more established members of the editorial collective travelled down to London’s Savoy Hotel to collect the ‘What the Papers Say’ Scoop of the Year award. The scoop in question was the exposure of a secret organisation, GB 75, being built by the retired colonel David Stirling, best known as the founder of the SAS.

The purpose of GB 75, a kind of…

1 December 2016Review

Jonathan Cape, 2016; 144pp; £16.99

When I started this graphic novel I had never heard of the French revolutionary Louise Michel and, after a somewhat dull start, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to continue finding out. I’m glad I did.

Michel’s story is told by three people who meet on the day of her funeral, 22 January 1905: her friend Elianne, Elianne’s daughter Monique, and the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the famous science-fiction novel Herland.

Michel took part in the…

1 December 2016Comment

Long-time PN columnist Sybil Morrison restates some pacifist truths, including in the context of the then-recent Suez Crisis.

The large number of hypothetical questions addressed to pacifists is due to the fact that in the last resort the reliance upon muscular strength rather than argument, upon some kind of force rather than reason, upon military weapons rather than upon negotiation, is commonly accepted by almost all the people of the world – and that any moral stand against it immediately rouses fear and a corresponding resistance to the idea.

The fact that the use of force only settles who is the…

23 November 2016Feature

A direct action PN booktour around Britain

Andrea Needham

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…

1 October 2016Comment

Two members of the Pacifist Youth Action Group, hitch-hiking to India to spend a period at a Gandhian project, stopped en route to join an international workcamp undertaking post-war reconstruction in Italy. Then, as now, such work both deals with some of the legacy of war and also – by its international co-operative nature – helps to undermine the causes of future wars. They sent back a report to Peace News.

Construction – not destruction – is the battle-cry in Affile.

Service Civil International has invaded Affile, 80km from Rome, but this is an invasion with a difference. Affile, which was once a battlefield, is now being assaulted with bricks and shovels, sledgehammers and barrows. Construction not destruction is the new battle-cry as young people from many nations set forth with heavy boots and light hearts.

The founder of SCI was Pierre Ceresole of Switzerland, who…

1 April 2016Feature

An excerpt from a brilliant new direct action memoir

Andrea Needham, Jo Blackman, Angie Zelter, Lotta Kronlid during action planning, 1995. Photo: Seeds of Hope

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.

1 February 2016Review

Verso, 2015; 240pp; £14.99

Dorothy Thompson, who died in 2011, was a leading historian of the Chartist movement - the popular working-class movement, active from the 1830s to the late 1850s, which agitated for universal male suffrage and parliamentary reforms such as a secret ballot, payment for MPs and equal-sized constituencies. In addition, both she and her husband, the labour historian EP Thompson, were leading members of the Communist Party until 1956, when they left in protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of…