The week of 6 June 2011
It’s mostly been a week of paper. Those who try and marginalise us as only interested in “action” have no idea just how much paper NVDA (nonviolent direct action) can generate!
I start the week helping Brian with preparing his international law defence for his court case for blockading the Trident refit area of Devonport in November last year. So it’s copying, collating, stapling and labelling new information found on the internet, while out of the…
I was 60 on world environment day – 5th June 2011 and a few days later took a 2-day hike along the Offa’s Dyke path, with panoramic views of the welsh borders, a contested area for so many centuries, I had time to reflect on years of campaigning for peace and environmental justice.
I often feel despair, and wonder what’s the point of all our protests when Britain is still threatening mass destruction by renewing its nuclear arsenal[1], still sells weapons to repressive regimes, still…
On Good Friday, I headed down to a sunny Sizewell Beach on the picturesque Suffolk coast. The nuclear power station, directly overlooking the beach, was, for the third successive year, the target for the annual spring weekend camp of the Stop Nuclear Power Network.
As usual, it was timed around the anniversary of Chernobyl – the world’s worst ever civil nuclear disaster (prior to Fukushima, at least) – which this year coincided with Easter…
It was back in November sometime when I discovered a phone message from someone at Charing Cross police events department asking me to return their call. Reluctant to spend money on a phone call which I didn’t really want to have, I called the number.
I found myself talking to a rather confused police officer who said they wanted to complete information for their files regarding an unauthorised demonstration I had co-organized back in October, and also the use of a megaphone in the…
To all intents and purposes, last Wednesday was a normal day. I dropped my husband, Chris Cole, in Headington and watched him walk away in the darkness to the London bus, as I often do. Then I headed back home for the usual morning routine of breakfast, sandwich making, and the school run.
But last Wednesday was different in one respect. For the second time in four years, Chris was returning to Westminster Magistrates to “wilfully refuse” to pay a fine he’d incurred during an …
We actually did it: No Borders Calais organised a successful week-long music festival (6-12 September 2010) in Calais, one of the shittest towns in Europe, in the teeth of the French police and the local authorities, with no publicity at all, a few hundred euros, and little of what you could call organisation. And some of us say it was just about the best party we’ve ever been to.
It’s safe now to let the cat out of the bag: anyhow there’s a crop of videos up on YouTube already, and…
“This is not a rally, a demo or a march,” read the flier. “This is mass direct action that aims to disrupt the flow of oil into London. Welcome to the Crude Awakening.” Crikey.
Following a prompt early-morning rendezvous at Euston (the website had warned that we would be leaving immediately), half-an-hour of standing around waiting (which my affinity group utilized to staple-on our home-made polar bear masks), and some fun-and-games on the tube (“Like the badger mask mate!”),…
25 June 2010, Steenokkerzeel by the airport outside Brussels, 60 people occupy the building site of the new 127 tris immigration detention centre, shutting down work for a day, taking direct action against the construction site, and upping the ante in a campaign of resistance against the border regime in Belgium.
Over the past year: successful blockades of most of the six existing detention centres, including the simultaneous blockade of Bruges and Vottem by over 150 people last…
Sometimes a place – it could be a town, a camp, a crossing, or some muddy field – becomes a concentration point, a sink, a trap, for all the latent evil of the system of power that surrounds it.
Calais is not just a symbol of the brutality of the European border regime, of the violence of colonialism turned inwards and compressed by “Fortress Europe”.
The repression and misery here is very real, every day. Calais is the only town where the French police division…
I’m neither a summit-hopper nor a pacifist, yet the plan for mass nonviolent action at the COP15 Climate summit in Copenhagen caught my imagination.
“Using only the force of our bodies”, went the call-out by the Climate Justice Action network, “we will overcome any physical barriers that stand in our way” to “push into the conference area and enter the building, disrupt the sessions” and hold a “horizontal” assembly.
Images of the raid on the Dharasana salt works, 21…
First prize in the Copenhagen Greenwash Awards must go to Siemens and Coca-Cola for branding the host city “Hopenhagen”. Siemens set up a faux city, brightly lit in a mendacious green, extolling unsustainable technologies including super-fast electric sports cars. Coke posters proclaimed the mega-corp’s sugar- and exploitation-suffused product as “hope in a bottle!” Hopenhagen makes you sick.
There was never any hope of mitigating climate change or attaining climate justice via…
The War Resisters International Triennial (now held every four years, in a cunning ploy to avoid police detection and repression) is being held here in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, at Gujarat University or “Gujarat Vidyapith”. Coming from the recent ice, snow and slush of southern England, Ahmedabad is jarringly hot – but not too hot, dusty but not too dusty. The university, which was closed down three times by the British authorities during the national freedom struggle, was founded by Gandhi…
According to the NATO Welcoming Committee’s website, at 10.30am on 13 November, text message alerts would be sent out disclosing a “secret” meeting place, from which we would march towards the NATO parliamentary assembly in Edinburgh.
By 10.45am, I’d made it to Edinburgh’s Forest Café, which was providing the convergence space for the event. These “closed” meeting tactics – the pre-planned action, text message alerts and a small hive of activity directing the bigger picture –…
