“Rubbish!” cried a man in the audience. The scene was a public meeting against the war in Afghanistan. What prompted his outburst was a reference to the results of an opinion poll conducted there last December.
Official statistics of British forces fatalities in Afghanistan obscure the fact that it is younger people from poorer backgrounds who are suffering most from the increasing intensity of the fighting there.
At 6.40am on 22 February, anti-nuclear power activists from the recently-formed “People Power not Nuclear Power Coalition” began a blockade of Sizewell nuclear power station.
On 5 March, to mark the International Week Against Racism, the weekly Friday march from the Palestinian village of Bil’in to Israel’s apartheid wall was led by demonstrators dressed as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela.
Nelly Maes, president of the Flemish Peace Institute, spoke at the David Davies Memorial Institute (DDMI) in Aberystwyth on 24 February to an audience of students and local people.
A four-week inquiry into the £12 billion privatised military training establishment due to be based at St Athan, Vale of Glamorgan in Wales, ended in early February 2010.
The attempt by the Scottish Defence League (SDL) to stage a rally in Edinburgh on 20 February was the mother of all damp squibs, as the “patriots” were confined to a couple of pubs in the vicinity of the Royal Mile.
On 13 March, Edinburgh appeared to host two manifestations of popular nationalist sentiment on the same Saturday, one considerably larger than the other.
Five years ago, I went to visit [the former Labour Party leader] Michael Foot, when I was writing a history of CND. He was kind, witty and utterly committed to nuclear disarmament.
