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I went to Egypt the other week, which was activism and a holiday combined. I went to the Cairo Conference, a post-revolution event organised by the Socialist Renewal current, with various leftist groups in Egypt. So there was activism and building links with people involved in the revolution, and also a holiday!

Last summer, I went to Palestine and travelled around the West Bank. We made the decision not to stay anywhere in Israel. Unfortunately, we did have to fly into Tel Aviv. We…

A few years ago, we both took part in a “radical peace movement” gathering. Two of the main issues at the gathering were the thorny question of whether there was such a thing as a “peace movement”, and, alongside that, what it meant to be a “radical” peace activist.

It’s clear that there is a traditional strand of peace organisations and activities, which has persisted for decades. Quaker activities (the Religious Society of Friends began in the 1640s), the pacifist Peace Pledge Union…

75 years on, what is the future for Peace News? One thing is clear. As activism, and life in general, become more and more digital, Peace News will have to develop its presence online, and find new ways to be useful to new generations of activists. The new website we’re launching this summer is just the start of a broad range of major digital PN projects.

Having said that, and despite our reliance on phone conferences for organising PN activities, we remain firmly committed to old-…

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In Charing Cross Road in London in the 1950s, there used to be an elderly woman selling Peace News who stood on the pavement saying: [uses frail voice] “Pacifist paper. Pacifist paper.” And it put me off! Although I was interested in the peace movement and remember going to a big anti-bomb meeting in Hornsey town hall addressed by Alex Comfort among others, before CND was formed, to buy the paper seemed uncool, although I wouldn’t have used the term then. Of course I regret it now!
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PHOTO: Fred Chance

I was going to belatedly write about the London demo against cuts but have been waylaid by a novel written by HG Wells in 1913. The World Set Free is one of his prophetic screeds in which – by the 1970s – everything is produced, manufactured, and propelled by nuclear power. In his preface to the 1921 edition, he claimed, with uncharacteristic modesty, “the misses in the story far outnumber the hits”. I found his novel unreadable but his preface had this to say about his…

In February, “Unite for Peace”, a group of (mainly) Christian peace activists affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, gathered in Derbyshire for our twice-yearly meeting. This weekend was particularly special as it was our tenth anniversary – an opportunity to step back and think about previous gatherings and what it is that keeps us together.

We all live in different parts of the country and have busy jobs, and some of us have families too. It’s an effort to take time out…

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 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 house on our own, and they got their own back. Stuff thrown at the door,…

The deaths of Western war photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Misrata in Libya on 20 April sparked considerable reflection in the British press. Many voices were raised saluting the courage – and recognising the social importance – of front-line photo-journalists, who take extraordinary risks in order to connect the global public with the reality of war.

Few have done more in this regard than Tim Hetherington, the videographer and co-director of Restrepo (2010) a worm’…

This topic of having to define yourself is something that’s not just worth exploring but something necessary for us to explore. In a way the census is a blessing because it forces us to have conversations that otherwise get pushed to the back of the cupboard.
Conversations around: “What is this thing called identity?” Personally, this is something I’ve found extremely debilitating, the fact that you have to choose between identities. It’s debilitating in activist movements, even in…

A bit of autobiography. Bear with me, there’s reason.

While recuperating from a bicycle accident, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Letters to Sartre – in particular those written during the immediate run-up to the German occupation of France in 1940. My mum told me of her dread when, on 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Libyan mothers must be in even more dread now their country has declared war on itself.

My dad, a sheet metal…

How quickly wars happen. One month, we see grassroots nonviolence toppling dictators. The next month, we see a civil war. The month after that, we see cruise missiles and war planes in the air. Former Respect MP George Galloway pointed out on 4 March that no one proposed a no-fly zone over Gaza during Israel’s assault in 2009, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed.

If British, French and US governments genuinely based their foreign policy on humanitarian need, these countries might have…

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…

Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s justification for the Iraq war is now that, for all the devastation it caused, launching the invasion was better than leaving dictator Saddam Hussein and his sons in charge of the country for decades to come. The peoples of Tunisia and Egypt have delivered a comprehensive rebuttal to this colonialist argument, overthrowing two entrenched dictators in the space of a month.

Two central factors in both countries were uncontainable popular rage…

The UK nuclear future

The current UK nuclear force involves maintaining only one submarine at sea at any time, equipped with half its maximum quota of missiles. This situation worries France because it allows for the real possibility of a disarmament process in the UK.

This is not only a matter of warheads but also a matter of doctrine. The policy of nuclear deterrence dictates that the “security” of the country is to be preserved thanks to the ability to make an instant…

May's cabinet reshuffle and, reportedly, tearful sacking, can't hide the fact that the Labour government is in freefall, with an increasingly desperate and messianic-looking Blair at the helm.

Out went Clarke - for all the wrong reasons, and out went Straw - the loyal functionary who stayed the course as foreign secretary during the most unpopular conflict Britain has ever perpetrated. “Two-jags” Prescott kept his perks, but lost some of his official power - this parody of authentic…

Last year, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne announced that any replacement of the Trident nuclear missile system would have to come out of a reduced MOD budget. CND responded with the report Trident, Jobs and the UK Economy which argued that Trident replacement would therefore lead to the loss of other defence sector jobs. Peace News praised the report (PN 2526) because it recommended the conversion of Aldermaston and Barrow to work on disarmament and production of…

Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s justification for the Iraq war is now that, for all the devastation it caused, launching the invasion was better than leaving dictator Saddam Hussein and his sons in charge of the country for decades to come. The peoples of Tunisia and Egypt have delivered a comprehensive rebuttal to this colonialist argument, overthrowing two entrenched dictators in the space of a month.

Two central factors in both countries were uncontainable popular rage…

The most memorable film I saw in 2010 – at the cinema or on TV – was Julien Temple’s visionary TV documentary Requiem for Detroit.

The most memorable book I read was Richard Mabey’s Weeds. The two are linked. Both produced a surge of hope within me which ran contra to a generalised feeling of despair against which I was battling. Still am. Both works are concerned with – to put it crudely – the survival of the natural world in the teeth of our man-made conspiracy to…