There’s not a lot of things that have been important to me throughout my life, since I was 16. That was in 1982, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, next to the Berlin Wall.
I first bought, and started selling, Peace News when I was at school. Its vision of revolutionary anarcha-feminist nonviolence has had a deep and lasting impact on me.
It has been an enormous honour to have been co-editor, with Emily Johns, and then the sole editor of PN. Emily, you’re a star. 17 years have flown by.
It has also been an honour to be the first sole editor of colour.
I’m so glad to have carried the banner of revolutionary nonviolence alongside Emily, Emma Sangster and Gabriel Carlyle and, earlier on, Claire Poyner, Rebecca Dale, Nik Górecki and John Mcallister. I’m grateful to Ippy and to all the previous PN staff for having built the paper and for having kept this show on the road.
I’m enormously grateful to those who’ve stepped up to be PN directors or advisors over the years, especially Eve Wedderburn, Henrietta Cullinan, Leslie Barson, and Muzammal Hussain – and Ernest Rodker and Emily and Emma.
I want to thank all the contributors who’ve made PN as rich and broad and deep as it has been, especially to columnists Penny Stone (nine years!), Cath, Claire, Rebecca Elson-Watkins and Virginia Moffatt, – and Ambrose Musiyiwa. Thank you also to David Polden, Lotte Reimer, Kelvin Mason and Sarah Young for being news, Wales and Scotland editors.
Honestly, the things that we’ve published since 2007 that most reflected classic 1980s PN, in my eyes, have been the startling, mysterious images from Tony Telford and magical letterpress-printed poetry by Dennis Gould (the former PN promos worker). Thank you, Tony and Dennis, and everyone who’s allowed us to feature their paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, posters and lovingly-handmade placards.
Hundreds of people have contributed to the many wonderful PN special projects over the years, including: the amazing Rebellious Media conference (which I think may have been the largest event PN has ever organised); the transformative Training for Change activist trainings; and the ground-breaking ‘Exploring Class’ anti-classism workshop with Betsy Leondar-Wright.
There will always be a special place in my heart for those who made Peace News Summer Camp possible for so many years, especially Beth Ash, Chris Bluemel, Gabriel Carlyle and Rebecca Dale. I hope there will be a final camp next year, where we can celebrate our community and honour campers we have lost: Howard Clark, Jon Lockwood, Peter Le Mare, and Roy St Pierre.
Thank you, readers, thank you everyone who has sustained Peace News over these years. I’m very grateful to you all. I did the best that I could. As one athlete said about her performance in the 400m hurdles final in the Paris Olympics: ‘The effort was there, and the heart was there. That’s all I could ask for.’