There was a five-hour blockade of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Burghfield, in Berkshire, where British nuclear warheads are assembled, by activists from Trident Ploughshares. The blockade started at 6.30am on 24 October, the 73rd anniversary of the birth of the UN.
Blockader Jim Davies, a 70-year-old retired civil servant, said: ‘I’ve never been involved in an action like this before and…
On 17 October, three anti-fracking protesters were released after spending three weeks in Preston prison. Roscoe Blevins, 26, and Richard Roberts, 36, had been sentenced to 16 months in prison; Richard Loizou, 31, had been given 15 months inside.
The court of appeal replaced the prison sentences with two-year conditional discharges (no punishment unless you commit another offence within two years, in which case you will be sentenced for both crimes).
Lord chief justice…
Extremely late in the day, in mid-November, Britain finally put forward a draft UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in and around the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, and setting out a possible peace process. This was over two weeks after the US started calling for a ceasefire in Yemen.
As Labour shadow foreign…
Local residents and campaigners were jubilant on 20 September when the Planning Inspectorate upheld Caerphilly county borough council’s 2015 ruling and rejected developer Miller Argent’s appeal for an opencast coal mine at Nant Llesg.
The United Valleys Action Group (UVAG), local activists and residents worked with Friends of the Earth (FOE) to oppose the opencast mine. Haf Elgar, director of FOE Cymru, said it was a ‘historic victory’ for people power.
UVAG’s Alyson…
New climate direct action group Extinction Rebellion (XR) held three large civil disobedience protests in central London in October and November, as well as a number of smaller actions.
The group has received wide backing for its militant stand against runaway climate change. 100 academics wrote a letter of support on 26 October, including former archbishop of Canterbury,…
The campaign against two new nuclear reactors at Wylfa on the Isle of Anglesey is gathering force on several fronts. In the immediate vicinity of the site, local people are beginning to appreciate the vast scale of the development (about the size of Holyhead, the biggest town on Anglesey), the extent of environmental damage involved, the social and cultural impact of the invasion. They’re also beginning to realise that few of the promised flood of jobs will actually be local.
…
On 19 November, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar, which has become an international cause célèbre, ‘will be demolished very soon’. The removal of the village would enable the Israeli government to cut the occupied West Bank in two, making a Palestinian state impossible.
The Israeli security cabinet had delayed the demolition by ‘several weeks’ on 21 October to provide time for negotiations for an agreed-upon evacuation of the…
On 6 October, a plaque was put up at 3 Blackstock Road, North London, to honour the designer of the peace symbol, Gerald Holtom. It was there, in the PN office, in February 1958, that Gerald first presented sketches for the symbol to PN editor Hugh Brock and other organisers of the Direct Action Committee. They accepted the design as the theme for the first Aldermaston march for nuclear disarmament.
Climate activist group Ende Gelände described its occupation in late October as the ‘largest action of civil disobedience for climate justice that Germany has ever seen’.
On 27 October, 6,500 people took part in the action at Tagebau Hambach, a large opencast coalmine near Cologne, Germany, where highly-polluting brown coal (lignite) is extracted by German…
As PN went to press, the trial was continuing at Chelmsford crown court of the Stansted 15, activists who face years in prison for using lock-ons to ground a charter flight for 10 hours. The 15 prevented the deportation of 60 undocumented immigrants to West Africa on 28 March 2017.
The defence argue that their action was to prevent the human rights abuses that deportation charter flights involve.
The first defendant to give evidence, Benjamin Smoke, described his…
‘We are proud to have broken the power of the military authority…. It matters not whether we were in the Non-Combatant Corps refusing to bear arms, whether we took alternative service, whether we were in workcamps as part of the Home Office Scheme, or whether we were absolutist and remained in prison – all of us shattered the infallibility of militarism.’
100 years after a sick and emaciated Clifford Allen…
On 24 October, Aberystwyth peace activist Mary Millington travelled to Shrewsbury with messages for Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt and other MPs, writes Lotte Reimer. The locally-collected letters and petitions demanded that Britain sign up to the UN’s Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having picked up more signatures at stations along the way, handed over by local activists, Mary (pictured with her placard at Shrewsbury railway station) got on the ‘…
For the fourth year running, Aberystwyth held an act of remembrance at which red, white and purple wreaths were laid together.
The desire for better solutions than continual conflict was made manifest by the increased number of white wreaths that were laid, this year by Aberystwyth town council, Aberystwyth Peace and Justice Network, Aberaid (supporting refugees), Borth and…
The Friendship Inn in Borth, near Aberystwyth, was packed to the rafters on 8 September as people gathered for the potentially solemn purpose of raising funds in support of ‘Freedom from Torture’. This organisation dreams of a world free from torture but, until such time, it supports survivors of torture in rebuilding their lives and it works to bring perpetrators to account.
The vision for the…
In early August, the annual fast in remembrance of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings was held in seven countries.
In London, four people fasted behind the ministry of defence in Whitehall. They also held a demo outside Downing Street urging the UK to sign the UN global ban on nuclear weapons.
Long-time Scottish peace activists Janet Fenton and Brian Quail fasted in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In…
In the largest survey to date of the potential of rising renewable energy supplies, a new report from the Centre for Alternative Technology shows that clean energy can meet our electricity needs all year round at all times of the day.
Launched in the run up to the COP24 climate summit in Poland in December, the report, Raising Ambition: Zero Carbon Scenarios from Across the Globe, maps over 130 scenarios designed to meet the targets of the Paris climate accord at global, regional…
Welsh language campaigners called for free Welsh language lessons for migrants during this year’s Eisteddfod. While English lessons are funded by the UK Government for refugees and asylum-seekers in Wales, there is no provision for Welsh lessons.
Swansea University’s Dr Gwennan Higham commented that the Welsh government and the Home Office both downplay the importance of any language other than ‘superior’ English to the lives of immigrants in Wales.
Toni Schiavone from…
Following a massive wave of civil disobedience in May–June which led to 2,500 arrests (see PN 2620–2621), the new Poor People’s Campaign in the US has committed to a voter registration campaign in over 40 states.
Without endorsing particular candidates, the aim is to make poor people a significant force in the mid-term elections on 6 November. That’s when all members of the house of representatives, a third of senators, most governors and many local officials across the US will be…
The Great March of Return demonstrations at the Gaza-Israel border fence have not only continued every Friday since March, they are escalating. Protests now happen on other days of the week as well, after ceasefire talks between the Hamas government in Gaza and the Israeli government broke down.
During these demos, Israeli forces have killed over 130 unarmed Palestinians, including 29 children and three medics. Around 20,000 Gazans have been injured, nearly 5,000 by live…
On 5 August, Italian Ploughshares activist Turi Vaccaro was arrested near Niscemi in southern Sicily, and then imprisoned in the capital, Palermo. The barefoot campaigner will serve an 11-month, 27-day sentence in a maximum-security prison for nonviolent direct action against the MUOS military satellite communication system. MUOS is used to direct US drones, among other ‘mobile users’.
Italian special police attempted to arrested Turi at this summer’s annual ‘No MUOS’ protest camp…
