Poyner, Claire

Peace News contacted folk around Britain to ask their opinions on the 12 December general election – people who’ve contributed to PN or helped organise Peace News Summer Camp. These are the eight campaigners who managed to meet our very tight deadline, giving their varied views on tactical voting, the Trident nuclear weapon system, climate, the arms trade and much else. (Unusually, we don’t have someone urging people not to vote, which has been a theme in past election…

Facts are facts! Or are they?

Maybe it’s just more noticeable in these days of the internet and social media.

Back in the day, I remember people (well, men mainly, but women did believe them) saying ‘feminists are all man-haters’ and the like.

Here’s another: ‘The socialists (meaning the Labour Party, more social democrats than socialist, but still) want to ban private property:…

I remember encountering a male brain/female brain questionnaire at a museum and not being surprised to find the results showing that my brain was somewhere in the middle. After all, I do tend to be a bit of a nerd about some things considered typically male.

However, it turns out that there is really is no such thing as a ‘male brain’ or a ‘female brain’.

It’s a myth – one of many myths about gender and the human brain that Gina Rippon explodes in this book, drawing on…

We’re all going to hell in a handcart!

Well, no, we’re not really, at least not in the way most people who say this mean it. Other similar sayings: ‘standards are slipping’; ‘young people nowadays have no manners’ and ‘don’t know how to talk proper (like what I do)’.

But still, who here is concerned with runaway climate change when young people nowadays persist in saying ‘LOL’ and ‘bruv’ and ‘sick’ meaning ‘great’? Or worse, when the older folks are copying them. Yes, I have…

I have a friend who used to write a column for an activist-led journal. If he didn’t have much in the way of ideas for the forthcoming column, he said he’d walk around his neighbourhood until something pissed him off enough to become the basis of the column. And that the tactic worked 100 percent of the time, as there was always something going on locally worth commenting on (and he’s the sort of person who does get pissed off easily, sorry if you’re reading this, mate, you know it’s true…

Caroline Criado Perez is the one who got a lot of stick for having the audacity to suggest it might be nice to have a famous woman on a UK banknote. Poor menfolk smelt the end of the patriarchy if they allowed this terrible idea to come to fruition, leading to her receiving a tsunami of abuse on social media, including threats of rape and murder.

But this book isn’t about banknotes. Rather, it’s about how the world is designed with men in mind (who knew?) and how women – even when the…

I started re-watching (for the fourth? fifth? time – it’s certainly been three times since watching as a child) Star Trek: The Original Series (‘TOS’ to Trekkies) when I was recovering from a knee operation.

I knew that TOS broke new ground in the 1960s. There you have, on the bridge (the starship’s command centre): an alien (well, a half-alien anyway); a Russian (in the middle of the Cold War!); a Japanese man, barely 10 years after the Second World War; a regular hunk who…

Years ago, I would on occasion have this conversation with my mother. ‘I think British troops should not be in Northern Ireland, clearly the north of Ireland is part of the island of Ireland and it should be one country’.

She would answer: ‘Ah, but you see the UK are in Northern Ireland to protect the rights of the women there to obtain divorce and contraception.’ She honestly believed that, and I didn’t know enough about it to contradict her.

I remember thinking it wasn’t…

Experts – who needs ‘em? One of my favourite pastimes is reading Facebook posts on vaccinations. It’s always entertaining. For the record, these are posts that are pro-science not anti. Quite why ‘anti-vaxxers’ would want to be following a science FB page such as ‘Neuroscience News and Research’, I can’t imagine.

Now don’t get me wrong, a healthy scepticism is essential.

Part of the difficulty is the healthcare system in the US. It’s a real profit-making industry, healthcare in…

This morning I was prompted by a post on Facebook to listen to LBC talk radio. My friend Caroline was advising friends that she was invited on to talk about cycle lanes.

I never listen to talk radio and I’ve even given Radio 4’s Today programme a wide berth after finding myself shouting at the radio so many times. I mean, I do have hypertension and this is not doing the blood pressure any good. I’ve long since stopped watching Question Time for the same reason.

Anyway…

Gender equality is one issue that doesn’t come up much when we’re talking Brexit. OK, fair enough, women’s equality is not nearly as important as trade deals and immigration, seeing as women are only 51 percent of the population.

OK, so how would, could, Brexit affect women? Well, for one, EU laws aim to protect maternity (and paternity) leave and seek to prevent discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace.

Also, rights for part-time, casual and agency workers (…

It’s hard to believe that a man who openly bragged about sexually assaulting women cares much about women’s rights (it’s even harder to believe that such a man should be elected president but there we are). So it comes as a bit of a surprise to hear of the Trump administration praising a growing women’s movement in Iran.

Women in Tehran have been protesting against the compulsory wearing of the hijab by publicly removing their headscarves and standing in a public place. Now…

Inevitably there’s been a bit of a backlash against the #MeToo movement, and sadly not just from the mainstream media, or from ‘Men’s Rights Activists’ either.

Some women who identify as feminist have declared that some of the ‘minor’ abuse women get shouldn’t be conflated with more serious charges such as rape. So some man had demanded a view of your more intimate regions of your body? Get over it! Grow up! That’s life! Don’t be a victim! Give him what for back! (Just a quick…

When I was a teenager, my schoolfriends and I would walk out from school past a timber merchants. Every time a lorry came in or out we’d get horns tooting and drivers leaning out and expressing their opinions on our bodies and what they’d like to do to them.

That’s the way it was in the mid-1970s. In my late 40s, I noticed that this was no longer happening. Great! Men had finally grown up and no longer felt the need to yell out invitations for a quickie in the car park.

Er, no…

Many a woman peace activist has been incarcerated in Holloway Prison. There have been many poor women imprisoned there, some jailed for non-payment of fines (being fined for not having a TV licence was once a speciality of the British judicial system). Holloway saw the suffragettes force-fed and Ruth Ellis hanged. Then there are the women who were imprisoned after killing an abusive partner, and the long list of women who were neglected by prison staff and died there.

Activists…