Activist history

Veggies Catering Campaign started in October 1984, when two Nottingham animal rights activists decided to present the manager of a local McDonalds with a huge veggieburger ‘to represent an ethical alternative to the products of death and destruction sold there’ (see Pat’s history of Veggies in PN 2514, published for the 25th anniversary in 2009). Since then, the group has gone from strength to strength, including catering for Peace News Summer Camp from 2009 onwards. Since Pat’s…

GOALS
1) For Chevron to offer more employment opportunities to the local villagers, many of whom had their original livelihoods disrupted by the environmental degradation caused by oil prospecting.
2) For some of the oil wealth to be spent on infrastructure in the local communities, such as healthcare facilities, water and electricity systems, and schools.

SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC DEMANDS / GOALS: 6 / 6 points
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 2 / 3
TOTAL…

While nowhere near as famous as Martin Luther King Jr, James Lawson was one of the most important leaders of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, until his death in June, he was, without a doubt, one of the greatest living practitioners of radical nonviolence anywhere in the world.

As a young man, Michael Honey notes in his introduction, Lawson ‘didn’t expect to live to age forty.’

Committed to a ‘radical overturning of the systems that hurt and cripple…

In May 1944, the little Central American country of El Salvador electrified all students of Latin American affairs when it staged a revolutionary strike by nonviolent means and won a great popular victory.

For five months, the press and people enjoyed freedom and were apparently on the road to democratic politics. But, as observers (myself included) pointed out at the time, nonviolent methods require deep understanding and firm experience for consistent victories and cannot be…

PN worker Emily Johns is interviewed in a new 30-minute documentary about a First World War war resister who sheltered men avoiding conscription.

War on Lies: The Alice Wheeldon Campaign was made by young filmmaker Elizabeth McGlynn as part of her master’s degree at Birmingham university.

Alice Wheeldon, her daughter Winnie Mason and her son-in-law Alf Mason were jailed in 1917 on trumped-up charges of conspiring to shoot the prime minister, David Lloyd George…

Back in 2008, the 24-year old Plane Stupid campaigner Dan Glass was invited to Downing Street to receive an award and took the opportunity to superglue himself to the then-prime minister, Gordon Brown.

But Dan’s life as a campaigner neither began or ended with eco-activism.

Dan was a queer school kid who came out after Section 28 – which prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities – became law in 1988.

Dan writes about how he would ‘slink out on the…

Every now and then, I get sent a book to review which is a sheer joy from start to finish. Peace! Books! Freedom! is such a book.

A short gallop through the history of 5 Caledonian Road, the Kings Cross home of Housmans Bookshop, Peace News and many other radical organisations, it’s a great story of activism, resistance and community.

It begins with the generous donation by pacifist curate, Tom Willis that enabled Peace News to buy a building in…

From Che Guevara to Gandhi and Lenin, revolutionaries and historians of revolutions have tended to focus on so-called ‘Great Men’.

She Who Struggles is an admirable attempt to correct this imbalance, an edited collection highlighting women who played key roles in revolutionary, anti-colonial and socialist struggles during the twentieth century, including in Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Kurdistan, Mali and Palestine.

‘Within these movements, women’s liberation was often placed as…

I first joined Women in Black (WiB) after the pandemic when people were still cautious about gathering.

Every Wednesday, we stand for an hour at the foot of the Edith Cavell statue in Central London. The passers-by are tourists, school trips, commuters in suits, daredevil cyclists, people dressed-up for a night out, theatre-goers, street homeless.

A few, usually men, react strongly to our standing there, apparently affronted by our call for an end to militarism and war.

…

In September, there was a reunion in London of the nonviolent direct action (NVDA) affinity group ARROW, something like 20 years after the group folded. Folk who had not seen each other for decades came together to catch up; it was a wonderful afternoon.

For me, ARROW was where I learned how to work with other people in a non-hierarchical group, or a group that was trying to put equality into practice. ARROW was my peace movement university. We didn’t just do actions, though we did a…

By the end, my head was buzzing with new ideas, insights and possibilities. Should ‘care’ be the foundation for radical politics rather than ‘justice’? Is this another way of asking: aren’t relationships the foundation for (sustained and collective) action for change? (That made me wonder also about the relationship-based way of working common in community organising, and how much single-issue campaigning might have to learn from that.) How do submarines today seem normal when, at their…

Following the January 2023 mass trespass on Dartmoor, the 2014 – 2018 campaign to stop the felling of trees in Sheffield and the government’s 2011 U-turn on the privatisation of the forests, Saving The People’s Forest is a timely reminder that activists working today are part of a long line of popular struggles to protect public access to nature in the UK.

The book’s title refers to Epping Forest, on the border of Greater London and Essex. At 5,900 acres, it is the largest…

The death in January of Neil Collins has left a gap in my own and many other people’s lives.

Neil Collins was one of those individuals who, though involved in many campaigning groups and organisations over the years, was not someone who wrote all that much.

He was very knowledgeable about many aspects of the early history of the anarchist movement and the peace movement. I learnt a lot about this history and honed much of my radical political thinking while having long chats…

Could the anti-war movement have prevented the US-UK invasion of Iraq in March 2003? I think there was a real possibility, slim though it was.

In my view, the British anti-war movement came very close to halting British participation in the invasion – and derailing the war entirely.

Well, that’s not only my view. Just days before the war began, the British government told the US government that it might be forced to pull out of the invasion force. Britain’s ministry of defence…

Among the first books I read when I got involved in the peace movement in the late 1990s, three were by Michael Randle: Civil resistance (on the history, theory and practice of nonviolence), How to defend yourself in court (a useful instructional) and The Blake Escape (co-authored with Pat Pottle, their thrilling account of how and why they helped to break superspy George Blake out of Wormwood Scrubs prison and smuggle him out of the country).

Unhappily all…