Rai, Milan

Rai, Milan

Milan Rai

1 February 2016Comment

Taking some action makes it more possible to take more action, argues Milan Rai

Photo: Time to Cycle

On the five-day Time to Cycle bike ride to Paris in December, it turned out that one of our fellow riders was James Cracknell, who we’d published in the last issue writing very pessimistically about the climate talks.

James sat at our dinner table and explained how, if he was to re-write that article, it would be different because he felt more enthused after riding for two days with 125 other climate activists. His understanding of the facts would be…

1 February 2016Feature

A worm’s-eye view of the ‘Red Lines’ climate action in Paris, or how I ended up at the front of a 10,000-strong illegal march

Angels protecting the Red Line demonstration in Paris on 12 December. Photo: Yann Levy

Friday started in an airy industrial squat just outside central Paris, with two men arguing whether the type of tear gas used by the French police has ever been implicated in the deaths of protesters.

The people being trained to form a human barricade practiced linking our arms through backpack straps (see p20), locking our legs together when sitting down, ducking our heads to minimise the…

1 December 2015Feature

Behind the scenes of two outstanding books about classism – the second part of our interview with Betsy Leondar-Wright

Betsy Leondar-Wright

I first came across Betsy Leondar-Wright through her book, Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists (New Society Publishers, 2005). An intriguing subtitle! In conversation with her, over Skype, I found out more about how that wonderful book came to be.

Betsy was then working at United for a Fair Economy (UFE) a US NGO based in Boston, Massachusetts. (‘United for a Fair Economy challenges the concentration of wealth…

1 December 2015Comment

We can only win climate justice by breaking the rules

On 9 November, 1,000 young people marched in the streets of Washington, DC, for hours, demanding justice on race, climate, and immigration. Photo: 350.org

Like global climate change group 350.org, we all need to look beyond the Paris climate talks and whatever protests we manage to organise there to the building of mass civil disobedience for climate justice in 2016. 350.org is talking about an escalation in May 2016.

Whatever comes out of the COP21 negotiations in December,…

1 December 2015Comment

Why British foreign policy endangers us all.

Noam Chomsky once observed that the dirty little secret of ‘national security policy’ is that ‘security is at most a marginal concern of security planners’. He was speaking of the United States, but the lesson generalises, certainly to the UK.

We can see this in the reaction to the ‘Islamic State’ terror attacks in Paris in November, which killed 130 people.

Policymakers in Britain, France and elsewhere are knowingly increasing the power of IS recruiters and commanders…

1 December 2015Feature

How two activists learned to code from scratch in order to build an online tool to support activist groups

Sky Christensen and Keira PatersonPhoto: eConvenor (timer photo)

About three years ago, two Australian campaigners were surprised and frustrated to discover that the next generation of student activists were making the very same mistakes in organising that they had made at university. Nothing seemed to have changed. A lot of people have had a similar realisation.

Unlike a lot of people, however, Keira Paterson and Sky Christensen decided to do something about it. ‘Sky had this…

22 October 2015Blog

The G8 summit in 2005, praised for 'Making Poverty History', was a cynical sham. How can we prevent the Paris climate talks following the same path?

The climate negotiations in Paris in December are shaping up to be an orgy of self-congratulation for the great powers, as they trumpet pledges to reduce their carbon emissions. There's a real risk that an inadequate - and non-binding - deal will nevertheless be represented as ʻsolvingʼ the problem of climate change.

Thereʼs an ominous parallel here with the 'Make Poverty History' campaign…

1 October 2015Feature

PN offers training for Paris climate actions

Around 1,000 people nonviolently occupied and shut down Europe’s biggest source of carbon emissions, a giant opencast coalmine in Germany, on 15 August. http://350.org/ende-gelande-wrap-up/

Do you want to be part of a rising movement for climate justice and a Just Transition to a decarbonised economy? The UN summit on climate change (COP21) is coming to Paris in December and mobilisations are gaining momentum.

PN is…

1 October 2015Feature

The first part of an interview with author, trainer and activist Betsy Leondar-Wright

Betsy Leondar-Wright, the programme director of Class Action on the south side of Boston, is a bright-eyed, sparkling, high-energy interviewee. She speaks faster than anyone I’ve ever had to transcribe before, and laughs throughout our 90 minutes on Skype, despite talking about some pretty challenging issues. She is candid about her own past shortcomings, and respectful to people she has disagreed with.

I can’t imagine anyone not liking her.

Betsy is especially excited…

1 October 2015Comment

On Saturday 12 September, we had a wonderful ideas day in London with 18 PN workers, readers and supporters, thinking about how Peace News can develop and grow and become more useful to the cause of nonviolence and to grassroots movements struggling for radical social change.



More power than we know

One of the interesting moments came at the beginning of the day, when we considered the question ‘When have I felt powerful?’ The answers to this were meant…

1 October 2015Comment

The UK Defence Secretary appears to have created his own new legal principle

The British defence secretary has given up on ‘innocent until proven guilty by a jury of peers’, and introduced a new legal principle: ‘innocent until the government believes you are likely to commit a crime’.

In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on 8 September 2015, Michael Fallon justified the killing by a British drone of two British citizens (Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin), and another unidentified man, by referring three times to the risk of a ‘likely’ terrorist…

1 August 2015Feature

Iranian offers which have been erased from history

Reprocessing facility at Natanz, Iran. Sketch: Emily Johns

The real story of the Iran nuclear deal is that, after over a decade of denial, the United States finally gave up on its attempt to stop Iran enriching uranium. This isn’t how the mainstream media in the Global North portrayed the agreement, but it’s the heart of the matter.

We can see this clearly if we look back at the history of Iranian offers and US rejections over the last 13 years. The US could have had a deal in…

1 August 2015Comment

On our way to a peaceful, stable world, we need Just Transitions to bridge the gap

How can we create a genuinely common agenda for the climate movement and the disarmament movement? It’s easy – and still important – to say that the money we spend on nuclear weapons could be spent on preventing climate change, but there must be more than that.

For us in the peace movement, it can be hard sometimes to see that climate change is already a reality today, it’s not just about what might happen two generations from now. We’re already seeing the impact of climate change…

1 August 2015Feature

PN considers broadsheet editorial reactions to July’s nuclear deal

Iran Airbus (detail) by Emily Johns

The British broadsheets varied in their scepticism about July’s US-led nuclear agreement with Iran – from the Financial Times and the Guardian (who respectively welcomed ‘a breakthrough’ and ‘a triumph’ for diplomacy’) through to the Times, which warned of ‘A Reckless Gamble’.

In another demonstration of the accuracy of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Propaganda Model of the mainstream media, the ‘quality papers’…

1 August 2015Feature

How Truman delayed the end of the war in order to use the atomic bomb

US president Harry S Truman (left) and secretary of state James Byrnes talk together on 28 July 1945. Photo: US National Archives

Many people justify the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago. Though brutal and indiscriminate, many people believe the atomic bombings shortened the Pacific war, and reduced the total number of lives lost.

In fact, there is a strong case that the US determination to use the bomb lengthened the war.

It is…