Rebecca Elson-Watkins
The United Nations will host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow from 1–12 November, COVID-19 permitting. Climate emergency activists and campaigners up and down the UK are planning actions to take advantage of the fact that the biggest climate summit since the 2015 Paris Agreement is happening on their doorsteps.
Greenpeace UK told us that they were going to be …
It’s not often a work of televised fiction comes along that I would call important.
Watching Russell T Davis’ new five-part miniseries, It’s A Sin, for me, ‘important’ was the only word to describe it.
The series focuses on the lives of a group of young, gay men and their friends, in London during the height of the AIDS crisis in Britain. It’s A Sin is, unsurprisingly given the topic, tough viewing; I am not ashamed to admit I wept.
I was born in…
On 6 January, something happened in Washington DC that has not happened since the US-UK War of 1812. The Capitol building, that instantly-recognisable symbol of US democracy, was stormed by Donald Trump supporters.
I watched, agog, as many of the same people who called peaceful BLM protesters ‘thugs’ donned assault rifles, gas masks and body armour, and attempted to reverse the results of a legitimate federal election.
Rhetoric has consequences.
Just like the ‘Stab in…
I’m going to say it – I love vaccinations. I was among the first generation of my maternal bloodline that did not have someone contract tuberculosis. The addition of the BCG vaccination to the British vaccination schedule in 1950, and the herd immunity it resulted in, is most likely the reason my peers and I were spared.
My grandmother, ‘Mam’ to me, suffered polio as a child. I grew up hearing stories of how her childhood was spent in calliper-style leg braces, her life a whirlwind of…
From 9 – 12 October, Migrants Organise, Kanlungan and many other groups joined together for a weekend of action against the home office’s ‘hostile environment’.
The ‘hostile environment’ is a web of immigration controls forcing NHS staff, employers, landlords and others to make life unbearable for undocumented migrants.
The weekend of action was exactly 10 years since the deportation-murder of Jimmy Mubenga, who an inquest said was ‘unlawfully killed’ while being restrained by…
I was in the room when, at 12.33am on 7 September, my godson Nathaniel Thomas Riches was born.
It was one of the handful of moments in my life that I will never forget. Due to COVID-related restrictions on ‘visitors’, I wasn’t able to be there as his mother, my best friend of 25 years, Ellie’s labour was being induced.
It had felt entirely alien to leave her after I visited her in the hospital grounds when she was having relatively mild contractions four hours earlier.
I…
The UK is facing a health and social care emergency, and COVID-19 has made it painfully obvious that this government couldn’t care less for those who require full-time residential care.
It is estimated that, despite care home residents being only one percent of Britons, they account for approximately 40 percent of UK COVID-19 deaths.
Researchers at the LSE calculated at the end of June that you are 13 times more likely to die of COVID-19 in a care home here than in Germany.…
There is one thing to be said for Donald Trump: he keeps international relations ‘interesting’.
That is not a compliment — I use the word ‘interesting’ in the supposed curse sense of the phrase ‘may you live in interesting times’.
We are living the chapter of the history books that the school children of 2100 will find both interesting and baffling.
For anyone who avoids traditional media, early January involved a drone strike, threats of war crimes against cultural…
Militarism. The word means nothing to much of the population, but it's everywhere; almost every place in the UK has a war memorial,
During Remembrance, you can't avoid it: red poppies, cenotaphs, the 'Last Post', and cadets everywhere. These scenes open War School, a film by Mic Dixon about the battle for the hearts and minds of Britain's children, a battle that is fought with militarism.
'There is no remembrance. Opposite of remembrance. Concealment.…
Although in its infancy, the new climate direct action group Extinction Rebellion (XR) seems to be finding those rare people who are willing to form ongoing campaigns from a one-off protest. [See PN 2624–2625 for reports and a critique of XR. – ed] People who recognise that the type of social change needed to stop climate change simply cannot come from the top down.
Roads have been blocked in London, Middlesbrough and Oxford. Banners have been hung over main roads bearing the XR…
In November, PN reporter Rebecca Elson-Watkins wrote to 53 British peace groups with a Brexit questionnaire. She received four responses. Peace groups may be unsure or divided on Brexit or perhaps unaffected by it. Here are the responses we received, in the order they came.
Welsh Anti-Nuclear Alliance
1) Your name and group: Richard Bramhall, Welsh Anti-Nuclear Alliance chair/Low-Level Radiation Campaign secretary
2) Has your peace organisation made any…
In some ways it is hard to believe it has now been over a century since the guns of the First World War fell silent. The 'war to end all wars' is so deeply engraved on our national consciousness that even now, when there is no living memory of the conflict, people gather to speak, remember and reflect on that awful, bloody war.
…
There are a lot of things I could say about Harry Leslie Smith. He was a husband, a father, and the son of a coal miner. He was a writer, activist, and defender of the working classes. He was a vocal campaigner for the rights of refugees. He was a survivor of poverty…
It is the case of Henry Rivett Albrow that forms much of the plot of Devils on Horseback. When he is called before the tribunal he is erudite and eloquent in his impassioned defence of his conscience, calling himself a ‘dissident Christian’ – mainly because he cannot reconcile ‘love thy neighbour’ and ‘thou shalt not kill’ with the church’s acceptance of warfare. He is berated mercilessly by the members of the tribunal, with the usual nonsensical questions that are asked of…
In a tucked away corner of Rotherhithe, down a little cobbled street oozing with history, stands Sands Film Studios. Well-known amongst lefties and radicals, this unique corner of London was the perfect place to hear from a unique, leftie and often radical character, Kerry-Anne Mendoza.
Mendoza began by talking about the namesake of the lecture,…
