Angie Zelter is cut out of a lock-on in front of Coulport nuclear weapon store in Scotland on 11 July. Photo: Trident Ploughshares
Thursday: We (a contingent from the south-west of England) arrived at the Trident Ploughshares Coulport Disarmament Camp late at night, having travelled straight from an action which was part of the July rolling blockade at the fracking front line: Preston New Road in Lancashire. We arrived tired but exhilarated having kept the drills at bay for nearly…
What an odd world of priorities we live in. Any more about Brexit – important though it is in so many ways – tends now to produce a yawn.
Yet the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has not even started to be a priority. We must all make it one.
It was passed with the support of 122 countries at a UN conference a couple of weeks ago. Only the Netherlands voted ‘No’.
The nuclear weapon countries, including our own, took no part. In fact Michael…
A baking summer day in the early 1960s. I’m in my pushchair, trundling along the road to Aldermaston with my CNDing parents, and somewhere on the fringe of my toddler’s consciousness, there’s a Cheshire cat smile, floating in the heat haze.…
Peace News is here to encourage grassroots movements for justice and peace, and to champion revolutionary nonviolence. In the face of all the turmoil in the world, what does the title of PN Summer Camp 2017 really mean? ‘Surviving Politics – self-care, skill-sharing and community-building when nothing seems to make sense.’
Nuclear boundaries
British governments have always rejected unilateral disarmament in favour of multilateral disarmament. Now that…
Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Citizens’ Income has been around a long time on the fringes of politics. It’s now become a hot topic among some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet.
UBI has an image as an ultra-left demand maybe associated with the Greens – give everyone an unconditional regular cash payment without means testing or any work requirement.
So why did the Swiss Green Party vote No in the referendum on UBI there last year? Why is the Ontario Public…
Three documents are sitting on my desk right now. Pope Francis’ message for this year’s 1 January World Day of Peace is one of them. The next, a lengthy message from him to the diplomatic corps for 9 January 2017. The last – a merciful mere three pages – is his representative’s message to the Vienna conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in May 2017.
One thing is quite obvious. Francis has been reading Peace News. It is all there. No to violence, war and…
Throughout a long association with Peace News I’ve known that PN readers are not necessarily pacifists – though I’d hazard most are. Maybe some are internally debating whether they are or not.
I’ve known gay men and women personally and also read their thoughts variously and they commonly assert that they knew as children that they were gay.
In my own life, there’s a parallel. I think age 7 – 8 I knew I was a pacifist and I’ve never had any doubts since.
I have just returned from a trip to Palestine with my solidarity choir, San Ghanny (‘We Shall Sing’ in Arabic) where we visited a farming community in the South Hebron hills called At Tuwani where we learned about their everyday lives and accompanied them in planting olive trees.
We planted olive trees on land owned by the community and immediately next to a fence marking off more land that used to be owned by the villagers, but has been stolen by the illegal Israeli settlement next…
On 28 March, I was part of the ‘End Deportations – Stop Charter Flights’ action by Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants and Plane Stupid at Stansted airport, which successfully prevented a mass deportation to Nigeria and Ghana.
We took this action in solidarity with the 57 people on board the flight who were being forcefully removed from the UK. We were in touch with some of these people and knew their stories and knew the potential fates that awaited them if they were deported.…
I’ve never before heard of a paper called The Weekly Dispatch but it was clearly doing well in 1917. In September that year it published a furious piece headed ‘Traitors in the Parks’.
It was all about the anti-war rallies being held in Finsbury Park and Hyde Park – ‘long haired strapping youths... using language about Cabinet ministers which horrified all decent people’.
It got much stronger in the next edition. ‘Sedition mongers and their dupes – insidious…
After I shared a cartoon on Facebook recently, I had an angry response (several hundred words long) from ‘John’, someone I haven’t heard from in years. The cartoon, by New Zealand-based illustrator Toby Morris, shows two people, equally intelligent and hard-working, growing up in different circumstances, and ending up in very different situations in adult life. The…
In 1972, the Staple Singers sang ‘Respect Yourself’, indicating that instead of (or as well as) complaining that ‘the president won’t stop air pollution’, we could, should, take personal responsibility.
It’s a song that always pops into my head whenever I read or hear the words ‘air pollution’. Of course, covering your mouth when you cough won’t lower the current high levels of…
There are a couple of vehicles regularly parked down our street which always raise my eyebrows. Firstly, because they park with their kerbside wheels wholly on the pavement and I have to walk in the road because I can’t squeeze past, and secondly, because of their names.
The Land Rover model is a ‘Defender’ and the camper-van is a ‘Trident’. There are other less offensive Land Rover model names such as ‘Discovery’ and ‘Freelander’ and even the mysterious ‘Evoque’ but these two…
In May 2007, just after I started editing PN, we ran a front-page opinion piece by Dan Clawson, a US union activist and academic, on what trade unions and grassroots movements could learn from each other. He’d written a wonderful book about this, called The Next Upsurge.
Clawson gave an example of the new unionism he favoured: the…
Class and classism are becoming more and more important issues for all sorts of movements, especially as we try to deal with the rise of racism, Islamophobia and authoritarianism at home and abroad. It’s important that these efforts don’t themselves become oppressive to working-class and poor people, and that we find class-inclusive ways to work on these issues.
Peace News…
In common with most people seeking positive change in the world, I have been struggling these past few months to keep hopeful about humanity. It feels very overwhelming and disempowering to hear the news every day. But there are always small things that can help us to keep on keeping on.
As the New Year turned, I turned to Pete Seeger to help me re-find some of my optimism and hope. And he did not let me down. So I would…
Going to Cuba, for me, is a journey both in space and time. It’s 45-odd years since I wrote a thesis on Fidel Castro and the revolution as part of my certificate in education – the 1970s were definitely a more liberal age!
Over the decades, travel to Cuba has been on ‘my list’ and at last I go, prompted by the accounts of Unite the Community Union comrades.
Like them, I join a tour with ICAP, the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples, an organisation that…
Being a Muslim
We have the EDL [right-wing English Defence League] coming to a nearby town this weekend and I’m really torn about going to the counter-demonstration because we came very unstuck campaigning against the BNP [right-wing British National Party] in the elections. My young son and I managed to ‘intimidate’ the BNP candidate into not attending the hustings at the local town hall, which was great, and very thrilling.
Then we went home to our little council…
Marc Hudson: Born in Hulme, Manchester, Deyika Nzeribe was a poet and and the chair of Commonword, which supports new and aspiring writers. He was also a co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, which works against police harassment; a trustee of the Manchester Environmental Education Network; and an organiser of the Pan-African PAC45 Foundation conference. While always concerned about environmental matters, Deyika became involved…
Robert Hinde would be surprised to find his obituary in Peace News. But he more than deserves a mention though I very much doubt if he, academic and ex-RAF coastal command wartime pilot, was a regular Peace News reader.
He died just before Christmas at the age of 93. Many of us have lost a very good friend, a wise advisor and one of the most modest men I have ever met. Professionally, Robert Hinde was a distinguished zoologist, a former master of St John’s…
