Members of the jury.
I’m going to try to summarise why we feel that we are not guilty, why we feel that what we did was right, despite the very proper laws against obstructing trains.
From what evidence we have been able to get across to you, with his honour’s indulgence, we hope that you can see that these facts [about coal and climate change] speak for themselves, and our actions, though harmful, were indeed necessary to try to stop a greater harm. And if you agree with that…
Four separate polls undertaken throughout July by the BBC/ Guardian, ITN, The Times and the Independent consistently showed that the majority of Britons want immediate or rapid withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Yet the sources largely downplayed their findings.
The ICM study, conducted 11 July for the Guardian, found that 42% of people want Britain to pull out now and 14 % by the end of the year – putting 56% of Britons in favour of withdrawal.
The Guardian, however,…
On 20 June, activists occupying a plot of derelict land beside Kew Bridge, London, held an “open day” for their planned eco-village. The site was taken by over 70 people on 6 June.
The campaigners say they were inspired by the example of the “Pure Genius” land occupation in Wandsworth, carried out by The Land Is Ours (TLIO) in May 1996 (see PN 2406), and the tradition TLIO traced back to the 17th century English movement known as “the Diggers”.
Local people have been very…
After the turmoil of the post-election protests and repression in Iran, we believe that the most important thing that outsiders can do to help the people of Iran is to push for a new relationship between the west and the Islamic republic. Massive protests flared up after the 12 June Iranian presidential election because of the strong indications of fraud.
While it is possible that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election, millions of Iranians do not believe he won 63% of the votes,…
On 5 June, Brighton magistrates court acquitted me of assaulting a police constable (PC) in the course of his duty at the “Carnival Against the Arms Trade” in Brighton on 4 June 2008. They upheld my defence of self-defence in the face of unlawful and excessive force by the police.
At the demonstration itself, a security breach led to a gate being opened, and protesters flooded into the car park. Massive police numbers were deployed in removing them. I was one of the last people to…
This is a list of six things I have learnt since leaving the world of conventional education.
1. Children want to learn. The children who came to Jürg Jegge, the [author of] Stupidity is Learnable, were desperate to learn, but had accepted their teachers’ view that they couldn’t. The street children who come to Butterflies, [a street school in Delhi] are so eager to learn that they are prepared to face the likelihood of being beaten or going hungry in order to attend lessons. Even the…
13 years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni human rights activists Shell was brought to court in New York for complicity with the Nigerian government for these state murders.
The Ogoni were to use US Alien Tort Statute but Shell settled with them out of court on 8 June with a payment of $15.5m (the equivalent of four hours profit for Shell), seemingly to prevent evidence about their corporate entanglement with the Nigerian military dictatorship reaching the…
As a CND poll demonstrates massive public opposition to US Star Wars plans, it seems the nuclear log-jam in Britain may be moving. On 17 June, the Liberal Democrats became the first mainstream political party to reject the replacement of the Trident nuclear weapon system with a similar nuclear submarine-intercontinental ballistic missile system.
After seeing estimates of the total costs of Trident replacement in the region of £100bn in 2009 figures (10% of the military budget), Lib…
Western Sahara, illegally occupied by Morocco 33 years ago, faces a mounting challenge to the integrity of its rich natural resources. While thousands of the Saharawi people struggle to survive in the Algerian desert, dependent for their every need on international aid, Morocco actually profits from its illegal occupation. Generals and politicians associated with the occupation reap the benefits of Western Sahara’s fishing and phosphate industries. Some of the richest fishing grounds in the…
Ed Miliband’s announcement that new coal power stations will only be permitted if 25% of their emissions are carbon-captured and stored hasn’t put a stop to the blossoming UK anti-coal movement – and rightly so, given the massive loopholes in the announcement.
Following the success of the Coal Caravan, which toured the north of England in April and May, five climate activists blockaded a coal conference at Chatham House on 1 June; the Surrey office of construction firm BAM Nuttall…
10 June: In Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea, in 1950, are described in this way:
“The planes always come… like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses.” The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came 20 days ago, on 20 May. A US drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4.30am, killing 14 women and children and two elders, wounding…
2 June 2009: Shortly after arriving in Pakistan, one week ago, we met a weaver and his extended family, numbering 76 in all, who had been forcibly displaced from their homes in Fathepur, a small village in the Swat Valley.
Fighting between the Pakistani military and the Taliban had intensified. Terrified by aerial bombing and anxious to leave before a curfew would make flight impossible, the family packed all the belongings they could carry and fled on foot.
It was a harrowing…
It is testimony to the spirit of trust and unity created by the organisers of the recent Anarchist Movement Conference in London that it was possible to take a photograph of the 200-plus people who gathered for the final plenary of the gathering. Given that many of those present seemed to be the kind of people used to masking up in public, allowing a mass photograph felt like a significant departure.
The 6-7 June conference, held at Queen Mary & Westfield College in east…
The declaration of a semi-closed, semi-open, no-blame inquiry into the Iraq war is said to be part of British prime minister Gordon Brown’s strategy to secure his position as leader of the Labour party.
Interestingly, the announcement also hampers any thoughts the Conservatives may have of initiating their own inquiry with a broader remit if they win the next general election (the most likely outcome at this point) .
More important than these power games is the opportunity…
Earlier this year, I was invited to take part in a discussion about “growing the radical peace movement” in Britain. I immediately turned to my esteemed co-editor, who suggested that “the radical peace movement” would to some extent not be able to take part in the discussion because it was out in Gaza, standing alongside Palestinians as they faced the might of the Israeli state and then struggled to recover from Operation Cast Lead.
Another long-term activist objected that many of…
Britain doesn’t need an Armed Forces Day, recently invented by Gordon Brown. We already have Remembrance Day. What Britain needs is an Unarmed Forces Day - when we can remember those people, like Tom Hurndall, Rachel Corrie, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, who dedicated their lives to nonviolent social change.
Unarmed Forces Day is a Peace News initiative. It is a celebration of the power of nonviolence, a call for real support for our damaged veterans,…
Unions and social movements have much to learn from each other. If we can combine the best of both, we can transform the world.
Unions and movements differ in recruitment, funding, means used to mobilise, and ways of achieving their goals. Most social movements, the peace movement included, recruit people based on their agreement with the movement's goals. If a social movement can get one percent of the population to turn out to a demonstration -- half a million people in Britain,…
At the beginning of April, as London preoccupied itself with the G20, and the Met was busy batoning and shoving over peaceful protestors and newspaper vendors, I travelled to Strasbourg, France, with nine other peace activists who had chosen instead to join NATO’s sixtieth birthday celebrations. Our ad hoc affinity group, “Odd Socks”, consisted of eight Brits (one Anglo-French), a German woman and two Belgian lads.
Five of us were members of the anti-nuclear nonviolent direct…
Ten days before the G20 events blew up a storm of public interest around the rights of protestors, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) published its report on “Policing and Protest” – to little media interest.
Whilst perhaps stating the expected (there are no “systematic human rights abuses”, but “the presumption should be in favour of protests taking place without state interference”), the report acknowledges that policing of protests has become “heavy-handed”…
Plans are afoot for CND to attend several festivals this year including Shambala, the Greenpeace Fair and Glastonbury. At Glastonbury, CND will have two areas – an information tent close to the Pyramid Stage and a campaigning tent in the Green Futures field. Our main focus this year is to raise awareness and get people involved in the “No Trident Replacement” Campaign.
The MoD’s first report on the replacement process (called the “Initial Gate”) is due in September this year – the…
