Comment

I am from a large and close family, and while most are supportive of our peace work, there have been occasions of conflict. I hate falling out with anyone, but in particular with people I am close to. So when one family member told me I shouldn’t be taking our small children on a large anti-war demo, I was very upset. We had a painful discussion about it, I stood my ground, and later I was touched when that person came to a vigil I was organising. She still disagrees with me, but I think we…

A “Transition Initiative” is a community working together to address this BIG question: “for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?”
An Initiating Group raises awareness, connects with existing groups in the community, builds bridges to local government, forms groups to…

Climate Camp has rightly been described as both “the world’s most organised protest” and “the most important protest of our time”. The severity of the climate crisis that is looming is not easy to imagine. If we do see a temperature rise of 4C above pre-industrial levels, up to half the world’s species could die out, and our descendants will face apocalyptic consequences.

The Camp is the confluence of several streams of organising going back decades. It demonstrates, among other…

In September we are inevitably reminded of 9/11. The frustration of the US regime at its inability to punish dead people has resulted in a desire for revenge that appears insatiable. Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and then the “war on terror” seem to threaten everyone, anywhere in the world. We must not forget the Americans who were bereaved on 9/11 who pleaded that their grief should not be used as an excuse to cause the same to others, or the jailed military refusniks or the American anti-…

This content has been removed from the website on request of the author.

There were many acts of remembrance around the country when the hundredth British soldier was killed in Afghanistan, names of the dead were read out. The occasion highlighted the enormous importance of Iraq Body Count’s work in collecting the names of non combatants killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. There are in contrast so few names of Afghans killed, there is no one doing an Afghan body count. Uncounted Afghan’s have lost their lives, and without their names who knows if they ever…

This content has been removed from the website on request of the author.

We – Pat V T West, Dennis Gould, Jeff Cloves – first performed together as RiffRaff Poets in St Ives in 1970. The reading was in a pub where Pat’s performance was sexually provocative, verbally explicit, and unfazed by boozy male hostility. In short she was sensational and no one who was there that can ever forget her. So, it was with great sadness we learned of her anticipated but precipitate death in a Bristol hospice on 14 June. Our friend and companion poet at so many RiffRaff gigs has,…

This content has been removed from the website on request of the author.

It was good to read, in the Broken Rifle insert in last month’s Peace News, the informative article by Andreas Speck about the present and possible future changes to the situation of conscientious objectors in Europe.

I was reminded of the outraged response I have often encountered in War Resisters’ International (WRI) gatherings by suggesting that the UK system is more oppressive than conscription in Western Europe.

Throughout the 1990s the UK sent MOD officials all over…

Published four years ago, Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: the year that rocked the world is an engrossing and stimulating general history of a time “when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world.”
Kurlansky, 20 years old in 1968 and heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam war protests in the US, uses an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, including interviews with key participants and illuminating…

When I was in my teens I feared I wouldn’t be alive for my 21st. I wasn’t alone in such dread. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was our nuclear fate and it drove many of my generation to join the Aldermaston March.
What I never anticipated was that nearly 50 years later, I’d again be on a coach going to Aldermaston and that politicians across the world would still believe in “nuclear defence” and still believe that they could only cut it as significant leaders if they brandished…

I would like to dissent from the celebration of May ’68.

In 1968, I was an editor of Freedom, the anarchist paper, at a time when the anarchist movement was growing rapidly. Anarchists were exploring the potential of nonviolence

Both the Committee of 100 and CND had moved a lot of people towards an understanding of what the state was doing secretly such as the regional seats of government which were placed to rule over the country in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

In…

A Fairtrade Town is a community that makes a collective commitment to Fairtrade and achieves Five Goals developed by the Fairtrade Foundation. The movement began in April 2000 when Garstang in Lancashire - uniting local shops, businesses, schools, campaigners, councillors and faith groups - declared itself “the world’s first Fairtrade Town”. Since then over 350 towns, cities, counties, villages, boroughs and islands from Glasgow to Guildford have achieved Fairtrade status and added their…

This content has been removed from the website on request of the author.

This content has been removed from the website on request of the author.

Elsewhere in this issue we report the significant progress made by government propaganda in relation to the war in Afghanistan. Public support for the war is growing, despite - or because of? - the intensity of the conflict.

More people still oppose the war than support it, but the trend is worrying if the “Harry effect” is a lasting one.
Over the past two years there has been a conscious, systematic and well-resourced attempt to re-legitimise Britain's armed forces (and…

For many years I have been concerned about the human rights, or rather the lack of rights, of people in the armed forces. That may seem a very strange preoccupation for a pacifist.

In 1972, I thought I was very brave giving out leaflets to soldiers in Belfast. The leaflets called for the withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland. One day a soldier took a leaflet and asked for more so he could give them out. I thought it was probably a trick and that he would just destroy them, but I…

This content has been removed from the website on request of the author.

I heard the words “conscientious objector” on the news the other day and they immediately grabbed my attention.

However, the item turned out to be about doctors exercising their conscientious objection to performing abortions. I grew up with the term in a specific context, because my uncle Bert was a conchie during WWII and had two - maybe three - stretches in Wormwood Scrubs.

He was an absolutist who refused all alternatives to military service. I've been thinking about…