I first heard the song ‘Bread and Roses’ sung by Edinburgh folksinger Eileen Penman. In 2009, we were collating a booklet of songs as part of the ‘Gude Cause’ project celebrating 100 years since the first women’s suffrage march in Edinburgh. ‘Bread and Roses’ was one of the songs she brought to the table, a song that strongly connects women’s movements with labour movements.
James Oppenheim wrote the poem ‘Bread and Roses’ in December 1911, possibly after reading a speech by Chicago…
Cherry Potts says she started Arachne Press, just over 10 years ago, out of a fit of rage with her then publisher: ‘I’d worked out on the back of a fag packet how much she owed me and it was about three grand. And it clearly was never gonna come. So I withdrew my books from her and said: “You may not continue publishing them.’’
Since then, she has published more than 50 books, mainly short stories, poetry, a few YA (young adult) novels and a photographic portrait book.
Potts…
Usually when I sit down to write this column I try to scrape up ideas and make connections between completely random things happening in my life and then shoehorn in some kind of significant observation or realisation.
But this month there are just too many exciting things to tell you, all filling my brain with new twists and turns and deadlines, leaving no space for reflections and ponderings.
We bought a skate park!
One of our new communards, who joined us via Bentley…
There are two different ways I am disabled. There is what my body, my individual biology, does that no one can change. I will always have chronic fatigue and I will always have pain. My medical team and I do the best we can to ameliorate both, but they are inevitable.
Then, there are the ways in which I am disabled by society: lack of accessibility, lack of support, lack of knowledge and rampant ableism, to name a few. These are far from inevitable.
The cost-of-living crisis is…
You can’t really know a person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. So they say.
There was this TV show (called Backstrom) where a detective would try to imagine what a perpetrator or a victim might be thinking, in order to get to the solution. He’d say: ‘I’m a 16-year-old drop-out and have just been to see the local drug-dealer.…’
So. You’re a 15-year-old living in Albania. Your parents are not well-off, dad drives a taxi and mum takes in washing. Grandma needs meds so…
Image John McDonnell. Image: Rwendland, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Dear John McDonnell,
I’m sure every reader of Peace News is aware that you are a man of principle with an impressive record of standing up for peace and justice – and that your are an outstanding Labour MP.
I’ve read your long, thoughtful statement explaining why you support the British government arming Ukraine.
Putting aside the fundamental…
This note is addressed to the many people who are gathering in London in April, brought together by Extinction Rebellion (XR), hoping to contribute to positive action to tackle climate change.
In promoting this event, XR suggested that: ‘Gathering peacefully in such large numbers at the nation’s seat of power will create a positive, irreversible, societal tipping point.’ They referred to ‘the power of people power’, as shown by the success of nonviolent mass demonstrations in the…
For the last few months, I’ve been getting up early to join striking nurses as well as postal, BT, rail and ambulance workers on their picket lines in Hastings. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:
1) Claps don’t pay the bills
These groups are all essential workers. And now is the moment that they really need our support.
They are all being asked to take real-term pay cuts, at the same time as corporations are paying out vast sums to shareholders (or even – as in…
In my work as a community musician and singing teacher, I am a member of the Natural Voice Network (NVN).
As a community of teachers, we believe that everybody has the right to use their voice, that sound and movement are innate expressions of the human animal, and that it is the constrictive societal structures and attitudes surrounding us that prevent many people from feeling able to exercise this right.
We teach songs from all over the world, sharing in the oral tradition of…
Time and time again, history has shown us that the language politicians and the media use when talking about vulnerable groups can have dangerous consequences, says Julia Tinsley-Kent, policy manager at the Migrants’ Rights Network.
An example she gives is home secretary Suella Braverman’s description of ‘an invasion’ for the people who are making dangerous journeys, in rubber dinghies and small boats, across the Channel, in an effort to reach Britain so that they can claim asylum.…
Back in November, I finally stopped paying rent to Cornerstone Housing Co-op in Leeds and moved my remaining things to a rented house in Bentley (Doncaster) – rented not by me, but by A Commune in the North. How did that feel? Well, having dragged it out for nearly a year, moving over in dribs and drabs and staying in Bentley for days or weeks at a time, it didn’t feel like a big deal – much more like a relief that my crap has all finally been cleared out (well, you know, mostly).
But…
You know what I would really enjoy, readers? I would enjoy being able to write a column that doesn’t involve having to have a rant about Tory policy in one way, shape, or form. Alas, today is not the day for that.
Since PN last went to press, ambulance workers and nurses have been on strike, with further dates coming. Junior doctors are voting on whether to strike. Postal, railway and bus workers have all withdrawn their labour, again with further dates coming. The…
Nostalgia, as the old joke goes, ain’t what it used to be.
I was reminded of this a while back when I read a Guardian ‘Long Read’ on nostalgia, or as they called it ‘binmenism’. I’ll explain that in due course.
There are a few nostalgia Facebook pages with posts urging people to ‘share if you remember this’. ‘This’ being random things such as wicker shopping baskets on wheels (my Yorkshire Nana had one), four fruit salads or black jacks for a penny (an old penny), and…
Do I support mobilising large numbers of people to join in the climate protest in Central London taking place on 21 April, organised by Extinction Rebellion (XR)?
Yes.
Do I think it will have a positive effect on the political debate in Britain and maybe elsewhere?
Yes.
Do I agree with how XR are describing and explaining this protest?
No. Definitely not.
I think that XR has taken ‘talking big’ to a whole new level that is damaging to their own…
What has anti-racism got to do with nuclear weapons? They seem to belong in different worlds.
When we hear the word ‘anti-racism’, we might think about police violence, like the fatal shooting of Chris Kaba, the unarmed black 24-year-old killed by the Metropolitan police in South London last September.
Or we might think about brutal anti-immigrant policies, like the way the government crowded 4,000 asylum-seekers into Manston detention centre, built for 1,600 people.
…
In October 2014, Second World War conscientious objector Godric Bader was awarded the Gandhi Foundation’s International Peace Award, in recognition of the alternative business model he and his family created for their industrial manufacturing company, the Scott Bader Commonwealth.
Scott Bader has been and continues to be a successful industrial manufacturing company. Being owned by its workers did not stop it reaching sales of £270mn in 2021 (with gross profits of £76mn).
…
In Iran since the 1979 revolution, women have been banned from singing solo in front of men who are unrelated to them. This is just one of many restrictions forced upon Iranian women during this time.
In September, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in custody after being arrested by the ‘morality police’ because her clothes were judged to be ‘revealing’. Just a few threads of her hair were visible outside the edge of her hijab.
At Mahsa’s funeral, thousands…
‘In everyday life it’s very easy to see the borders at the edge of a nation. It literally says: “UK Border Force”. But when somebody is not going into Piccadilly Gardens [in central Manchester] because they’ve been told: “You shouldn’t go in there because you have an Afro [Afro-textured hair] and people will assume you are a drug dealer,” that’s something difficult to visualise. Photography allows us to see that. It allows us to visualise often invisible borders.’
That’s Jo Biglin, a…
I was just at my last annual Cornerstone party as a tenant member of the co-op. After my dark comic (and very middle-aged) contribution of Victoria Wood and ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ by Tom Lehrer, other younger people came on who spoke very seriously indeed.
One Colombian talked about the pain and damage of the cocaine industry on their people and how they felt about people around them disregarding that for their own pleasure.
I felt so weird – I felt like it was the…
There are a lot of things I could say, write, and otherwise communicate, about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
But let me start with the most obvious, or at least the most obvious to me, an almost life-long sufferer.
Having PTSD fucking sucks.
There. I said it. I think a lot of my fellow sufferers would agree. It sucks all day long and twice on Sundays. It sucks long, hard, wide and sideways. It sucks upside down and inside out. It even sucks at night.
It…
