Features

At the beginning of January, I joined farmers, growers, crofters, economists, policymakers, lawyers, scientists, researchers, journalists and community activists in Oxford town hall for the eighth annual Oxford ‘Real Farming’ Conference (ORFC).

First held in 2010, the ORFC was co-founded by Ruth West and Colin Tudge. It aims to explore ‘what the world really needs, and what’s possible, and to show what really can be done’ to make our food and farming system more just. These…

The great advantage of home education has been to open up different kinds of education. If we are to save what is groundbreaking, trailblazing and effective about home education then we need people to wake up to their continued conformism.

Most of us think we know what education is. The room is set up with someone who ‘doesn’t know’ sitting down with pen in hand. There is someone in front of them who ‘knows’ about a…

This summer, PN is planning to bring Betsy Leondar-Wright to the UK to lead sessions at Peace News Summer Camp and other events. Betsy has been leading workshops on class and classism since the 1970s, and is a senior trainer with Class Action, based in Boston, Massachussetts. In this article, written in 2011, Betsy paid tribute to Felice Yeskel, a Class Action co-founder and close friend who had died recently.

Working in the…

Based on my own experience, the content of the letters pages of newspapers and journals is manipulated to ensure that certain views and even facts are not published.

For some months, for example, in connection with the 2001 conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, I tried to point out the significance of the fact that Scots law had three possible verdicts (‘guilty’, ‘not guilty’, and ‘not proven’) and that the Scots court in Holland had not…

Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

1) Please explain your aims or purpose in about 25 words

Challenge the legitimacy of the presence and role of the US visiting forces and their agencies with the ultimate aim of the total removal of the US bases from the UK.

2) What’s your organisation’s budget for campaigns in 2017?

[No reply]

3) Do you have paid staff? If so, how many full-time and part-time? Otherwise, how many…

The fulcrum of the southwest Florida town of Immokalee is a dusty parking lot called by the old residents ‘The Pantry’ after the tienda (shop) located there. This is Immokalee’s labour…

Yemen may be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with twice as many ‘food insecure’ people (14 million) as in Syria (seven million). A naval blockade led by Saudi Arabia has been a major factor in creating the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ (Red Cross spokeswoman Marie Claire Feghali, April 2015) in Yemen, where over 18 million people need…

Having become one of the most prominent US anti-war activists protesting against the US-led ‘war on terror’, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the group CODEPINK, has now turned her attention to her nation’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia.

‘I’ve been doing a lot of work around the Middle East conflicts since the 9/11 attacks’, Benjamin, 64, tells me…

The Lucas Aerospace plan was developed in the mid-1970s by workers who wanted to move the aircraft manufacturer away from military production towards socially-useful production, in order to make their jobs more secure and more productive.

Lucas Aerospace had 18,000 workers spread out over Britain in 17 different factories, making collective action a real challenge.

The workforce was also divided into 13 different trade unions, adding to the difficulty of…

Here’s the good news from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) – from a Scottish internationalist campaigner.

The decision to hold the conference was taken at the annual meeting of the first committee of the UN general assembly, which deals with disarmament and international security.

The vote on 27 October supported the holding of a conference to ban nuclear weapons by 126 countries to 38. There were 16 abstentions, including China, India and Pakistan.…

Though it is written for a US audience, George Lakey’s new book has much to offer progressive activists in the UK concerned about the ongoing imposition of austerity measures and the political settlement that will come out of Brexit.

According to Lakey, the economies of the descendants of the Vikings ‘have a sixty-year track record of delivering increased freedom and equality’ – a political reality he believes is within reaching distance for the US. A visiting professor for Issues of…

Wait and see... and act

One of the worst aspects of the election of Donald Trump is the feeling of helplessness which it engenders in the general public and also in members of peace and environmental groups. When Trump’s policies and proposed actions become clearer, I hope that there will be an opportunity for discussion, debate, and increasing membership of groups in order to take action, raise money, and argue the case against whatever happens to make the world less safe.
…

Late in January 1975, soon after my arrival at Peace News in Elm Avenue, Nottingham, where the magazine was then produced, the more established members of the editorial collective travelled down to London’s Savoy Hotel to collect the ‘What the Papers Say’ Scoop of the Year award. The scoop in question was the exposure of a secret organisation, GB 75, being built by the retired colonel David Stirling, best known as the founder of the SAS.

The purpose of GB 75, a kind of…

Faced with unsustainable rent increases at the end of 2015, and the threat of eviction…

On 30 July, 20 years to the day after the Seeds of Hope acquittal, I found myself once again in the back of a police van with Jo, one of my co-conspirators. We’d been at Peace News Summer Camp at Crabapple community in Shropshire, and had been out for a walk with Emily and Lyn, two of the other women in the group. As we were strolling along a public footpath, three police dogs rushed round a corner and surrounded us, barking madly. One of them had bitten me – hence a…

The sun shone on our corner of Shropshire, and 120 of us at Peace News Summer Camp enjoyed five lovely days of reflecting, re-connecting, recovering, and recharging our batteries.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

The highlight of the camp was definitely the joyous celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Seeds of Hope Ploughshares…

We had arranged to meet up at the Manhattan Gourmet Restaurant [in New York city], a glorified deli at 57th and 6th, right above the F Train station, with the Chase bank looming across the avenue. We carried our toad heads in a big sack.

It was a working-class place with a lunch crowd shouting their orders, lots of laughter. The folks were service workers, spiffily dressed…

A black woman spoke up from the audience at a public meeting held earlier this year, to launch a new issue of Race and Class, the journal of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). She was a teacher, struggling with the new legal duty on teachers to monitor and report signs of ‘nonviolent extremism’ among their students. Children were becoming frightened to express their opinions. What was she…

In my early teens I picked up a book from my sister´s shelves and quickly appropriated it as my own. Unknown to me then, it was to become a profound influence on diverse aspects of my life.

At that age I was already very interested in how things worked, and in dismantling and rebuilding anything that fell into my hands, from televisions to music boxes to steam engines. The book was all about alternative technology, full…