PN Staff

On 21 October, the first day of the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, Peace News held a vigil outside the new US embassy in south London. We stood in solidarity with the seven US Catholic peace activists who broke into a US Trident base in Georgia, USA. The seven were found guilty three days later on all counts: trespass, ‘depredation’ and destruction of government property, and conspiracy. See here for a court report.
 

On 10 November, Veterans for Peace UK marked Remembrance Sunday by walking to the Cenotaph in Whitehall, in central London, behind a banner saying ‘Never Again’. James Florey read a poem: ‘Suicide in the Trenches’. Jim Radford sang ‘1916’.

Ben Griffin, the outgoing national co-ordinator of VfP UK, laid a wreath of white poppies saying ‘Never Again’ (pictured).

Hundreds of students and activists marched to Jakarta city hall in the capital of Indonesia as they joined the 20 September Global Climate Strike. The demonstrations started in the Pacific islands (‘We are not sinking, we are fighting’) and Australia, where 300,000 took part in 100 rallies. They spread across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, involving over four million people in total. A week later, two million people…

Large-scale unarmed anti-government protests in Iraq have been met with lethal force from the security forces, leaving over 330 people dead since the beginning of October.

While the main focus of popular anger has been corruption, unemployment, poverty and the lack of public services, there have also been a number of protests at symbols of Iranian interference, including Iranian consulates.

On 26 October, to take another example, protesters set fire to dozens of offices…

1 December is Prisoners for Peace Day, when activists are encouraged to write to people imprisoned around the world for refusing to fight or for campaigning against war.

This year, we have highlighted the imprisonment of US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

At risk

As we went to press, there were reports that Julian Assange’s health was deteriorating rapidly.

More than 60 doctors wrote an open letter expressing their fear…

Here are the Peace News peace scores for the manifestos of the major political parties in the UK for the 12 December election. We’ve listed them in descending order of peacefulness, according to the peace issues that we thought were most important.

The top scorer was the Green party with 5.5 points out of 10 (largely because of their commitment to getting rid of Trident), with Plaid Cymru close behind with 5 points (again, mainly because of their anti-Trident position), and…

Life-long anarchist cartoonist Donald Rooum will perhaps be remembered best for his Wildcat cartoons about anarchism and the anarchist movement – and for the quick-witted actions that led to the exposure of the corrupt London police officer, Harold Challenor, in 1963 (see our last issue for details).

Born and raised in a working-class family in Bradford, Donald came across anarchism during a day trip to London, at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, in the summer of 1944.

He bought…

This page is a tribute to our very wonderful cartoonist, the life-long anarchist Donald Rooum, who sadly died as this issue was being prepared.

We will publish an obituary in the next issue.

Donald has been drawing cartoons for PN since 1962. We asked him to produce this graphic retelling for the 50th anniversary of the Challenor case in 2013 (PN2558).…

These are the winners and the shortlisted books for two British radical book prizes given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers.

The Little Rebels’ Children’s Book Award is a radical fiction award for readers aged 0–12. This year the award has been administered by Letterbox Library and Housmans Bookshop.

The winner for 2019, announced on 10 July, is Freedom by Catherine Johnson (Scholastic): ‘There’s no escape – even when you escape. Where can a slave like Nat…

A Faslane peace camper was in prison as PN went to press, following a day of action at the Faslane nuclear submarine base in Scotland.

Faslane, 20 miles west of Glasgow, is the home of the UK's Trident nuclear missile submarine fleet.

On 7 July, a total of five peace activists were arrested after 'reclaiming' the base on the second anniversary of the UN adopting the Treaty on…

On 12 July, 29 campaigners from climate action group Extinction Rebellion (XR) had their first court hearings at City of London magistrates' court. They were facing public order charges arising from XR's 11 days of mass action in London in April.

Two courtrooms have been reserved at Westminster magistrates' court in Marylebone Road to process 50 activists every Friday for 19 weeks.

1,130 arrests were made in April; only 79 people were charged at the time, XR reports.

On…

More than 6,000 activists from the Ende Gelände anti-coal alliance blocked parts of a giant opencast coalmine in the Rhineland, Germany, over 21–23 June. Hundreds cut off Germany’s largest coal-fired power station from its coal supply by occupying train tracks for over 24 hours. Thousands also entered the Garzweiler mine and stopped huge coal excavators. Police detained some activists for more than 13 hours, denying them food and water for hours. Photo: Jens Volle (CC BY 2.0)
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On 15 May, Haringey First World War Peace Forum unveiled a hand-carved plaque to remember the North London borough’s 350 First World War conscientious objectors. The plaque was installed where outdoor anti-war meetings were held during the war, outside the Salisbury pub (back then, the Salisbury hotel) on Green Lanes. Actor Jim Broadbent, historian Cyril Pearce and local councillors Mark Blake and Emine Ibrahim joined 150 people for the ceremony. The plaque was funded by a…

On 9 May, Renfrewshire council passed a resolution urging the Strathclyde Pension Fund to stop investing in businesses involved in the construction and development of nuclear weapons.

The fund, managed by Glasgow city council, has £89m invested in 11 such companies, according to Don’t Bank on the Bomb Scotland. (See PN 2545, 2588–2589,…

The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) is waiting to hear the results of a major appeal, on its legal case against British arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen.

In mid-April, the court of appeal in London heard legal arguments from CAAT that an earlier judgement in the high court should be overturned. The government should be banned from allowing such sales, CAAT believes.

Since the bombing of Yemen began in March 2015, the UK government has licensed £4.7bn worth of arms…