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Here are two examples from what was a long-running column on this page. Oldies but goodies.

On 17 September, the department of health announced that it had identified nine personality types of heavy drinkers who are at risk of liver damage and other alcohol-related illnesses. By pure chance, on that same day, Peace News announced that it had identified nine…

Some years ago, I recorded my best friend’s grandad, Stuart Gilbert, talking about his experiences as a conscientious objector and of doing voluntary work at home and overseas with Service Civil International (SCI).*

I asked Stuart why he refused to participate in national service in 1948. The most common reasons for conscientious objection to military service were either religious or connected with a specific political ideology.

For Stuart, it was something different. ‘You…

I’ve decided to begin this arts column by talking about the Netflix series, The Crown, which has recently ended. Though I’m an ardent republican and had to be persuaded to watch it by my husband, Chris, this is such compelling drama, I quickly overcame my loathing for the Windsors and became hooked.

It begins in 1947, with king George VI (Jared Harris) coughing up blood in the bathroom, as he prepares for the wedding of his daughter Elizabeth (Claire Foy) to Philip (Matt…

It’s late and I’m sitting in a lovely big bedroom, in a (mostly) old farmhouse. As I write I can hear the sound of young communards and commune visitors training in the shed across the yard – the rhythmic sounds of the punchbag getting hit and then the whoops and laughs at the end of the exercise.

My new partner-in-crime is reading in bed: Black Against Empire, an analysis of the Black Panthers. And although the church bells mysteriously stopped ringing the hours some days…

The phrase ‘two-tier society’ has become a fairly commonplace one. We hear it in reference to healthcare, housing, education, and the North/South divide. But the phrase is wrong. British society has at least five tiers. Which tier of society you experience comes down to one thing in modern Britain. The same thing it has always come down to: social class.

We have the Ruling Class, the monarchies, the elite of the Conservative Party, we all know the sort. Unaccountable and untouchable;…

Recently, a politician moaned about something or other, calling it ‘the nanny state’. It got me wondering. When does a particular policy get to be called (some might say ‘dismissed as’) the nanny state? Who gets to decide? Is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Does nanny actually know best?

‘The nanny state’ suggests that a government or its policies are overprotective, like a nanny towards their charges.

NB: by ‘nanny’, I mean a person employed to look after children, and not a…

Sometimes the song is silence.

In the context of radical singing, I’ve only felt this once before, during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020. At that time I felt that sharing my voice in song wasn’t the right element to bring to some of these protests and gatherings; that as a white person my job in that moment was to shut up and listen, and then to amplify the voices of black people at home and internationally, alongside participating in conversations within…

Language is important. It’s one of the things, particularly written language, that sets us, as a species, apart from the animals. Having done a little wordsmithing in my time, of course I’m going to think that. But the science backs me up.

When I Google ‘the importance of language’ there are 3.6 billion results. When I narrow my search to ‘the importance of language in propaganda’ I get 61 million results.

The way propaganda uses language is both insidious and dangerous. It can…

I have spent most of my adult life engaged in solidarity and justice work with and for Palestine, and alongside the small yet vital Israeli peace movement. I have mostly lived and travelled around the West Bank, but the last time I saw Gaza, I was standing beside the border with hundreds of Israeli and international peace activists protesting a heavy Israeli bombardment of that small place and the people in it.

I don’t have the words to even begin to understand how it must feel to be…

Readers may have noticed that I am no longer PN administrator. So, how’s retirement? Thanks for asking! OK so far, not bored yet.

I now have plenty of spare time to indulge in a little art appreciation, organised by the Mary Ward Centre in London. A little group of us go round small art galleries; from tiny ones in posh places like Mayfair (which I would never have thought of visiting because, frankly, they do look a bit intimidating) to the community- or charity-run…

Bill Hetherington, who was at the centre of pacifist activism in the UK for more than half a century, has died at the age of 89, after playing key roles in the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and in War Resisters’ International, of which the PPU is the British section.

Bill took part in many nonviolent direct actions from the 1960s onwards, at military bases and events.

He spent time in prison in 1975 as one of the BWNIC 14, people tried for ‘incitement to disaffection’ for handing…

Pat Arrowsmith was a force of nature. Among her many contributions to peace and justice, Pat took part in a nonviolent ‘interposition’ delegation to Indochina during the Vietnam War. The group tried to enter North Vietnam to share the dangers of bombing (they got to Cambodia and also protested at a US base in Thailand). This experience later inspired her to call together the Gulf Peace Team (GPT) in 1990, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The GPT brought 73 peace activists from 15…

Our long-serving and long-suffering news editor, David Polden, has decided to hang up his PN keyboard. He’s been writing news items for PN regularly since 2007!

David, thank you so much for your dedication and your hard work over the years. You have contributed so much to the paper, with your keen sense of what was happening around the peace movement.

David will continue to produce the CND Non-Violent Resistance Network (NRVN) newsletter.

Radicals excluding radicals because they have the ‘wrong’ ideas on trans rights is nothing new.

I was surprised, however – surprised, saddened and shocked – when I learned at the Anarchist Bookfair in London that the organisers of the bookfair had excluded a group not because it had the wrong ideas about trans rights, but because it had not expelled members who had expressed the ‘wrong’ ideas about trans rights in an internal discussion. (See p5 for the story.)

I don’t see how…

The world’s attention is fastened on Gaza at the moment. This issue of PN is almost completely taken up with Palestine.

At the same time, there is an important opportunity right now for British peace activists to help bring an end to another devastating war, and another horrifying humanitarian catastrophe.

As I write, the internationally-recognised Yemeni government has just called on the US, Britain and other Western governments to designate the Yemeni rebel movement…

‘“Peace, peace,” they cry’ – Jeremiah

‘The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart’
– Dorothy Day

On Armistice Day, I joined the march for Palestine as it snaked round Victoria. I sighed, I sat down on some steps, looked at the last yellow leaves left on the trees and on the ground and renewed my conviction that at heart I am an anarchist.

Given all that’s written on the subject, how am I qualified to count myself in that…

After many decades of selling Peace News (and a few books) on his street stall in Stroud, Gloucestershire, notorious poet-activist-letterpress-printer-footballer Dennis Gould is hanging up his boots/books. To mark the occasion, we’re reprinting most of an article Dennis wrote for PN in December 1973 (PN 1953) based on his experience of running ‘Books and Things’, a bookshop in Cornwall.

George Orwell wrote a classic article on ‘Bookshop Memories’. Descriptions of…

Last month, I sang Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time as part of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. It is a large choral and orchestral work that was sparked by Tippett’s reaction to the Nazi pogrom of 1938 called Kristallnacht, and which he described ‘as an impassioned protest against the conditions that make persecution possible’. It was informed by Tippett’s complex personal history, exploring deeply at different times Communism, Socialism and pacifism.

One of…

The Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes are currently at the centre of the fight over artificial intelligence (AI), where US-based writers and actors are trying to stop their work from being replaced by AI systems.

Here at PN, we’re wondering about our own resistance to the new digital overlords.

You may be surprised to hear that AI played a big role at the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) conference that was taking place in Gothenburg, Sweden, as we…

One thing you have to do if you’re setting up a commune (especially a big one) is to meet a lot of people. Not just meet them, but meet them, really engage – compare what each other loves, what makes each other angry, dazzle them with the brilliant idea, ask about their financial and family situation, share some vulnerabilities, find out what makes them tick in time with your clock (or doesn’t).

We’ve just had one of our quarterly (there, I’ve said it in print, it is…