Sarah Gittins: Seaweed could be cast as a heroine in a story about the ecosystem of Ullapool in relation to climate change. It has been found to be very effective in absorbing carbon, and if it is allowed to grow in abundance it could play an important role in mitigating the effects of climate change and ocean acidification. Seaweed is also a highly…
Features
Pro- and anti-Brexit demonstrators in Old Palace Yard, opposite parliament, London, 29 January. Photo: ChiralJon via Wikimedia Commons
Let’s face it. We’re divided.
People who share progressive or radical values in lots of ways – who oppose the same wars, who are equally passionate about stopping climate change, who would all unilaterally ditch British nuclear weapons, and so on – are divided on the hottest topic in British politics: our relationship with the European…
Students march against climate change on Rue de Treves next to the European Parliament in Brussels on 24 January 2019. Bence Damokos [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Burning fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) is the main driver of global warming. Just 100 fossil fuel producers – including Exxon, Shell, BP and Total – account for 71 percent of all global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since…
On 7 February, a radical new congressmember from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as ‘AOC’), introduced legislation into the US house of representatives calling for a ‘Green New Deal’. Fellow Democrat Ed Markey introduced the same resolution into the senate on the same day.
The importance of AOC’s resolution is not that it will lead to laws being passed and budgets being set. (It’s a ‘simple resolution’, a nonbinding congressional opinion, not a ‘bill’ or a ‘…
At the end of February, over 250 young people converged on US senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s office in Washington DC for a sit-in marking one of the latest escalations in the youth-led campaign for a Green New Deal.
The action, led by youth from McConnell’s state of Kentucky, was planned in direct response to what they saw as his attempt to quash a senate resolution on the Green New Deal by scheduling a premature vote. (The senate in Washington DC is the upper chamber of…
Photo: Manolo Luna [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Chelsea Manning, who bravely exposed atrocities committed by the US military, is again imprisoned in a US jail. On International Women’s Day, 8 March, she was incarcerated in the Alexandria, Virginia, federal detention centre for refusing to testify in front of a secretive grand jury. [In the US system of law, grand juries decide (in secret)…
Greta Thunberg, outside the Swedish parliament, 31 August 2018. Photo: Anders Hellberg via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]
Tens of thousands of children are school striking for the climate on the streets of Brussels. Hundreds of thousands are doing the same all over the world. And some are here today.
We are school striking because we have done our homework. People always tell us that they are so hopeful. They are hopeful that the young people are going to save the world…
The ‘Don’t Bank on the Bomb’ campaign for Scotland was launched at a public meeting in Edinburgh on 16 November 2015. Photo: Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre
In September 2018, the ‘Don’t Bank on the Bomb Scotland’ campaign group (DBOTB Scotland) published a guide for divestment from nuclear weapons entitled Stop Funding the End of the World – Working to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons Through Divestment: A Guide for Scotland.
The guide was launched as part of the Nae…
Great March of Return protest by the Gaza-Israel border, El Bureij, 6 July 2018. Photo: MinoZig via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]
Below is the official summary of the UN human rights council’s independent international commission of inquiry into the weekly demonstrations in Gaza, named ‘the Great March of Return’, that began on 30 March, 2018. It is followed by an extract on the events of 14 May 2018.
Summary
The Commission found reasonable grounds…
Noted historian Margaret MacMillan took war as her theme in five Reith Lectures she delivered for the BBC in mid-2018.
The overall title of the lecture series was ‘The Mark of Cain’, referring to the story in the Hebrew Bible of the first murderer. Cain, the oldest child of Adam and Eve, murdered his brother Abel, then denied his crime. According to scripture, God cursed Cain and put a mark on him – the Hebrew is not clear whether this was a physical mark on his body or some kind…
An October 2015 Sinn Féin protest at Stormont, outside Belfast, against a hard border in Ireland. Photo: Sinn Féin (CC BY 2.0)
‘Norn Iron’ is a colloquial, phonetic term for ‘Northern Ireland’ and there are certainly some ‘Norn Ironies’ about.
One is that the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) have done more for a united Ireland in the last couple of years than republicans have done in decades.
Another irony is just when more Catholics and even some Protestants…
Kathy Kelly and 10 other Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV) activists were arrested on 2 January for blocking the entrance to the US mission to the United Nations in New York city. This was part of a two-week ‘Fast for Yemen’ in New York and Washington DC organised by VCNV. A British participant in the liquids-only fast in New York was VCNV UK co-ordinator Maya Evans, a Labour councillor from Hastings, England.Photo: Felton Davis
4 December: Several days ago, I joined an unusual…
Noted historian Margaret MacMillan took war as her theme in five Reith Lectures she delivered for the BBC in mid-2018.
The overall title of the lecture series was ‘The Mark of Cain’, referring to the story in the Hebrew Bible of the first murderer. Cain, the oldest child of Adam and Eve, murdered his brother Abel, then denied his crime. According to scripture, God cursed Cain and put a mark on him – the Hebrew is not clear whether this was a physical mark on his body or some kind…
1 February 2019
Although in its infancy, the new climate direct action group Extinction Rebellion (XR) seems to be finding those rare people who are willing to form ongoing campaigns from a one-off protest. [See PN 2624–2625 for reports and a critique of XR. – ed] People who recognise that the type of social change needed to stop climate change simply cannot come from the top down.
Roads have been blocked in London, Middlesbrough and Oxford. Banners have been hung over main roads bearing the XR…
The biggest danger facing the left today is no longer a shortage of ideas or a lack of positive vision.
The biggest danger is lack of preparedness – that we are not yet ready for the hard work of turning that vision into reality. If the left has been unused to being propositional, it has been even less used to holding and wielding power.
If we are serious about fundamentally transforming our economy, we must rapidly build our understanding of the scale of the challenge…
Mouvement des gilets jaunes demonstration in Belfort, 19 January.Photo: Thomas Bresson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
At the beginning of January, 50,000 people flooded the streets of France for the first protest of 2019 organised by the yellow vests, or gilets jaunes.
This protest was a continuation of a national movement for economic justice that has shaken the country since November. While mainstream French and international media have largely characterised…
Noted historian Margaret MacMillan took war as her theme in five Reith Lectures she delivered for the BBC in mid-2018.
The overall title of the lecture series was ‘The Mark of Cain’, referring to the story in the Hebrew Bible of the first murderer. Cain, the oldest child of Adam and Eve, murdered his brother Abel, then denied his crime. According to scripture, God cursed Cain and put a mark on him – the Hebrew is not clear whether this was a physical mark on his body or some kind…
Women’s March, 21 January 2017, San Diego, USA. Photo: Bonzo McGrue (CC BY 2.0)
Protests are well known, and popular. The trouble is, when I look back on the one-off protests I’ve joined over the years, I don’t remember a single one that changed the policy we were protesting against.
In February 2003, I joined millions of others around the world on the eve of US/British war on Iraq. The BBC estimated that a million protested on 15 February in London alone. In the US,…