Activism

24 March 2011Blog

How to deal with police "kettling" tactics

I’m currently in training for the London Marathon (more details here), a slightly mad endeavour which means putting myself through increasing long runs in and around Oxford. I tend to find I do a lot of musing as I run, and it crossed my mind the other week that my experience actually might be be of use in the event of getting caught in a kettle. Since there’s a rather big protest coming up this weekend with kettling…

3 March 2011Comment

Strongest experience of women’s solidarity? God, I probably think of doing stuff in Ireland. I was involved in Women in Ireland for a really long time. It wouldn’t have been about women’s issues, women’s rights. It was to do with the British occupation of Ireland, British soldiers on the streets.
We would go and stay in people’s houses in a very working- class area of West Belfast and then we’d all go on the International Women’s Day marches outside the prisons where there were women…

3 February 2011Comment

PN has permission to quote long-term anarchist organiser Ian Bone, a key figure in Class War in the 1980s: “I’ve never knowingly met a police spy, but we had loads of journalists trying to infiltrate Class War. They stood out a mile. The journalist would always be the first to buy a round.”

A letter appeared in the Guardian in January from a Philip Foxe: “The late Tony Cliff, leading light of the SWP, had a clear position on undercover police infiltration. He used to say: ‘It’s…

3 December 2010Comment

As it is the season of New Year Resolutions, we asked some people around the movements about their experiences of trying to change themselves, live more in accord with their values, or become better activists.

Wow. I’m just trying to think. Lately I’ve been developing…. I’m a complete newcomer, I’m more of a spectator at things, rather than taking an active role in things. I kind of see things in a critical eye. I don’t feel I have a place yet in society, well I do, but I’m…

3 November 2010Comment

I don’t like the term unemployment because it is negative and stigmatising. Deliberately choosing not to be in conventional employment is a liberating choice, but there is not really a term for it.
The difficulty about not having a conventional job has been about having self-discipline with regards to paid work. Choosing to be in a state of low employment is about valuing time. I wouldn’t have been able to do Climate Camp or Bicycology if I hadn’t withdrawn from conventional…

3 July 2010Comment

I’ve never been to a festival. I don’t like big crowds.
Woman activist, Oxford

I used to go to Glastonbury, it looked like the Third World War at the end, all the mud, and it was a bit dispiriting. I prefer the smaller festivals like the Big Green Gathering. Some of them are really good meeting grounds for networking. Glastonbury already has facilities for campaigning so you can add your bit.

And some peace groups have jobs at festivals, like doing the lock-…

3 June 2010Comment

Sometimes I’ve been working with people, friends, who have very different ideas. For example, people who might say, sort of jokingly, but maybe they’re serious, that it would be fine if all people who worked in corporations disappeared. Angry anarchists; people who identify themselves as anarchists, I mean.

For me it’s not about the people, it’s about the systemic influences on people.

When I was abroad last, I worked together with people and we could agree on what had to be…

3 May 2010Comment

“This era saw PN publishing an anti-election manifesto in September 1974. ‘Don’t vote, it only encourages them,’ was the paper’s advice at the time of the earlier, February, election that year. PN’s disenchantment with electoral politics wasn’t new however.

“Back in the 1970 General Election, for instance, PNer Roger Moody has stood against Labour Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart in Fulham, as a protest against the government’s support for the Federal Nigerian government’s…

3 April 2010Comment

We had a reunion recently after 20 years.

What was interesting was on two levels: people reflecting on what brought them into the action, into activism, the spark that brought us together; and then, 20 years later, seeing the different arcs those sparks drew in different directions and dimensions.

We were all drawn together for a moment from different paths and we all worked together, were active together, and then people went off in very different directions.

There…

3 March 2010Comment

I don’t think I would label any of the emotions I have in relation to activism as “hatred”. But there are things that come close.

When I think of Tony Blair, it makes my blood boil, and I feel sick, but is “hate’ the right word? Maybe “hate” is too bland a word to capture my emotions towards people like that! Ah. There are people I really, really hate!

Bono. And Bob Geldof.

I don’t feel disgust towards them, like I do towards Blair, I actually hate them! Because of their…

3 February 2010Comment

I did meet my partner while we were organising a demonstration and we became close during that process. That was very important because we identified something that was very important to know about your partner: that we shared a vision of right and wrong and a willingness to do something about it – though probably more in his case.
They’re both similar things, activism and romance: they excite passion and commitment and you have to keep going at it even when you don’t feel like it!…

1 February 2010News

About 50 people braved the melting snows in mid-January to come to the first-ever Peace News Winter Gathering, at the Sumac Centre in Nottingham. The gathering was followed by street theatre focussed on Nottingham arms traders Heckler & Koch.

Gathering participants heard the legendary Keith McHenry, co-founder of Food Not Bombs; the equally legendary George Farebrother of NETLAP and World Court Project UK; as well as workshops on “Killer Drones” (by Chris Cole of FoR and Jim…

3 December 2009Comment

Other people go to Glastonbury; I go to Raise Your Banners. Instead of going to Glastonbury, and spending lots of money and seeing a CND stall on the side, I go to support a festival of political song.

There are sort of two parts to the festival. There are a number of political choirs, so in one part of the festival there’s a showcase for them, and so there was the London Socialist Choir, and Red & Green, and then all the northern choirs.

This year the festival was in…

3 November 2009Comment

When I go, I feel revitalised, and reawoken, and really stimulated. I used to think maybe it was a bit lifestylist, and fetishist, but actually the level of debate and discourse I reconnect with when I go is really inspiring.
It’s actually more inspiring than any other forum I go into. I learn a lot. It could be more focused, but ultimately I feel I’m back with “my gang” and my mates. It helps keep things real and radical.
It reminds me to not make compromises, to keep…

3 June 2009Comment

It was a long time ago that I read The Women’s Room, nearly 30 years ago now. Another time in my life, almost like another life. Sometimes life can be like that, the feeling of having lived a number of lives in one life, like a snake shedding its skin and starting renewed.
I was given a copy of The Women’s Room by a woman who lived in a flat downstairs, I read this book that proclaimed to “change lives” when I went into hospital to give birth to my first child. At the time I had been…