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…
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…
On 26 November, a wide range of groups are organising a Lucas Plan 40th anniversary conference at Birmingham Voluntary Service Council. It is 40 years since the workers at the Lucas Aerospace arms company proposed making alternative socially-useful products, while retaining jobs.
The conference will both celebrate the achievements of the Lucas workers and, we hope, reinvigorate a movement for arms conversion and democratic control of the economy. The Lucas Plan showed that traditional…
Brexit hasn’t just been a shot in the arm for people on the Right, it’s kicked a lot of Greens, anarchists and socialists into positive action. The vote on 23 June to Leave the EU has energised progressive people in a lot of places around the UK to put renewed energy into tackling racism…
On 12 June, a gunman used an assault rifle and a semiautomatic pistol to shoot dead 49 people during a Latin night at a gay nightclub, the Pulse, in Orlando, Florida, USA. It was the worst attack against LGBT people – and the worst mass shooting – in US history. Longtime gay rights activist and nonviolent revolutionary…
I woke in time for the 7am news and switched on the radio in nervous anticipation, knowing that – while I slept – others had been busily reckoning Britain’s choice. I heard the pips then the familiar voice of John Humphrys: ‘After 40 years of membership, the people of Britain have voted to leave the European Union.’ My heart sank, but my heart rate rose,…
The Rural Organizing Project promotes a community-building culture where food, children and our friendship circles are all a part of our social justice efforts.
Relationships of trust are a priority especially at a time of wedge politics, where topics that people are less familiar and thus comfortable with are used to divide. A core part of our work is talking about the most polarised issues of the day....
Establishing a culture of trust, though, is not that easy. Where…
With hundreds of volunteer leaders and 65 member groups across Oregon, the Rural Organising Project is a powerful example of a statewide social justice organisation with a statewide strategy. At the centre of their work for peace, justice and democracy is an organising strategy to develop anti-racist politics, leadership, and action in rural white…
It is unwise to generalise too much as why people voted the way they did.
As elsewhere in the UK, the Remain vote was highest among the middle classes and the young. Nationalists were most likely to vote Remain; middle-class unionists were more likely to vote Remain than working-class…
What did we learn from Chilcot? Among other things, that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was indeed a war for oil.
The day after the long-awaited Chilcot report into the Iraq war was published, the energy editor of Financial Times, Andrew Ward, explained how documents released as part of the report ‘lay bare the desire of UK companies for a share of the spoils from the opening of Iraq’s oil and gas fields once Saddam Hussein’s regime was…
Content note: rape, sexual assault, sexual violence
In social justice movements, we often encounter forces of the state who seek to quash radical dissent. The police, as agents of the state, are called on to contain and disperse demonstrations and protest camps, infiltrate and surveil our movements, profile activists, evict and shut down occupations.
This can take a distinctly gendered approach.
Several studies have indicated that women are at an…
After the Brexit vote the view is suddenly full of huge new sprouting things, like Jack’s overnight beanstalk, but I want to look back a bit to the immediate aftermath of the Scottish parliament elections in May.
In the Scottish Scrap Trident coalition, we noted that the new Holyrood had a marked increase in MSPs belonging to…
In this issue, we are offering some resources for campaigners struggling for peace and justice in post-Brexit Britain. Here is an excerpt from Linda Stout’s invaluable book, Bridging the Class Divide – and other lessons for grassroots organising. In this book, Linda explains how she, a white woman who grew up in poverty in rural North Carolina, founded and built up…
It has been right under the media’s nose, but they have decided not to follow up one of the most politically-explosive aspects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, something that I exposed back in 2002 using publicly-available sources, and which has now been verified by Chilcot’s declassified documents.
The single most attention-grabbing aspect of the Chilcot report into the war and occupation was the personal note the then-prime minister…
UN weapons inspectors were not sent into Iraq in 2003 in order to find out the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). As far as US president George W Bush was concerned – and, for most of the time, British prime minister Tony Blair – the inspectors were sent in to help set the stage for war. If they could be helpful in this role, they were to be supported. If they got in the way, they were to be undermined and, eventually, destroyed.
…
This linocut print shows a table of people gathered to make origami cranes. They are located within a landscape derived from pictures of the area around Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945. The cranes relate to the story behind the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima.
The monument shows a Japanese girl called Sadako holding up a crane. Sadako died from leukaemia as a result of radiation from the bomb. While she was in hospital, she set about making…
Liz Fekete is director of the seven-person Institute of Race Relations in central London. She is one of Europe’s leading authorities on racism, heading one of the most respected advocacy groups in the UK, a body which has published a rigorously radical journal, Race & Class, since 1974. That could sound intimidating. In person,…
Norman Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the political legacy of the Nazi Holocaust. Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust.
His 2000 book, The Holocaust Industry became an international bestseller and touched off a firestorm of debate. But Finkelstein’s most recent political intervention came about by accident…
When the Icelanders heard that their leader socked away money in an off-shore account in the Virgin Islands, 10,000 of them packed Parliament Square in Reykjavik on 4 April to demand his resignation. That’s partly because prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had been urging his people for years to show…
