Social struggles

As PN went to press, the French government was expected to try again to evict la ZAD (‘the zone to be defended’), a huge occupied site near Nantes in western France.

As reported previously, the French government officially abandoned plans to build an airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in January, but confirmed that it wanted to clear the ZAD. (PN 2616–2617)

A massive eviction operation failed in April (as it did in 2012), though more than 300 zadistes…

Ian Sinclair writes: My new Peace News article ‘The biggest fight of our lives’ includes comments from George Lakey, Matt Kennard and Alex Nunns. Due to space considerations I could only include a small portion of the commentary each of them sent me in the article itself. Below are their full comments.

Why is Jeremy Corbyn seen as such a threat to the British establishment?

Matt Kennard, author of…

Aberystwyth residents stand together on 18 June, one of 120,000 events around the UK to remember murdered MP Jo Cox and to show that ‘we have more in common than divides us’, a view expressed in many tongues. Photo: Marian Delyth

On 27 April, US radical website AlterNet listed ‘The Top 10 Resistance Victories in Trump’s First 100 Days’ (written by John Cavanagh, Sarah Anderson and Domenica Ghanem).

Among other things, AlterNet pointed out that the massive Women’s March in January ‘changed everything’.

Newly-elected Democratic Congress member Jamie Raskin told them: ‘When we first got sworn in on 3 January, a lot of the Democrats were saying that we had to give Trump’s agenda a chance and confessed to…

Leon Fleming's new play concerns a brother and sister growing-up and living in Birmingham trapped in the clutches of an uncaring welfare system. The story is told with flasback scences from their childhood, mixed with the contemporary tale of two people being processed by The System TM and trying to survive. It is a grim tale, but not without moments of comedy, but those bittersweet moments come from the past rather than the relentlessly grim present of our protagonists. Their lives now…

I’ve written a play, Kicked in the Sh*tter. Sounds a bit grim, but it's pretty funny.

It is.

That’s the plug over.

When I first wrote this play, I had no idea what I was writing. Or why.

But I soon realised I’d been writing about a world I know well; albeit one so much darker now, than it was when it was mine. The two characters are people I have known. More than that though; they are me, a lot of me; more than I would usually allow. That frightens me…

What, if anything, links Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate in the US, and Jeremy Corbyn, just re-elected Labour party leader here in the UK? There has been a string of articles in the mainsteam media connecting the two men – with distaste – as ‘populists’.

Back in July, Telegraph columnist Janet Daley trumpeted that ‘Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are warning signs that something terrible is happening to politics’. She…

On 12 June, a gunman used an assault rifle and a semiautomatic pistol to shoot dead 49 people during a Latin night at a gay nightclub, the Pulse, in Orlando, Florida, USA. It was the worst attack against LGBT people – and the worst mass shooting – in US history. Longtime gay rights activist and nonviolent revolutionary…

Reviewing Noam Chomsky’s first book in 1969, Robert Sklar wrote in The Nation that the importance of American Power and the New Mandarins lay in its power ‘to free our minds from old perspectives, to stimulate new efforts at historical, political and social thought’.

Chomsky’s latest book, Who Rules the World? is at least as powerful in ‘freeing our minds’. Chomsky is not a sloganeer – in his very first sentence he admits that ‘The question raised by the…

Every now and then, Peace News sends me a book which I absolutely love from start to finish. Despite the clunky title, this is one of those books. It’s a terrific read that tells you everything you need to know about why austerity is prevalent, what it does and some pointers on how to resist it.

The book is in two parts: the first, ‘Demolition’, deals with the causes of austerity and its impact on all areas of society. The second, ‘Austerity and Democracy’, charts its…

Austerity, exploitation and inequality go hand in hand and there is a rising anti-austerity movement throughout Wales, with numerous grassroots groups springing up across the country.

On 20 June, as more than 250,000 people protested in London, hundreds marched in Aberystwyth, led by the inimitable, battle-scarred red dragon Y Ddraig Goch of Faslane fame. Marching to singing and drumming, marchers demanded…

In the first four years of the coalition government, there was a 16 percent cut in real terms in children’s services in Britain (in terms of spending per child), as local government spending has been squeezed by national government.

Over 150,000 older people have lost access to care at home since 2010 because of government ‘austerity’ measures, amounting to a 28 percent cut.…

The overall majority gained by the Conservatives took a lot of us by surprise. Many were expecting a minority Labour win, with some support from the Scottish National Party. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats had the worst election night since their formation.

There’ve been many attempts to analyse Labour’s failure to win the election – were they too left or too right? Is he ‘Red Ed’ and a ‘class war zealot’ or middle-of-the-road ‘austerity-lite’? Was it the media that ‘won it’? It…

Cameron remains in Downing Street, now with a majority (having successfully cannibalised his former LibDem partners). A lot of people are understandably depressed by this, and now to top it all off Nigel Farage hasn’t even resigned as leader of UKIP.

FFS politics, give us a break.

We don’t have much say in what policies they try to force upon us – after all we had ‘Vote Tory for capitalism and austerity’ and ‘Vote Labour for the same, only a bit less and our heart isn’t…

The debate about why the Labour party lost the Westminster election matters to everyone struggling for social change in Britain. How this fiasco is understood affects our confidence and our strategies (more on this below) – whatever our attitudes to the Labour party.

If it was true that Ed Miliband’s pale blue austerity-lite Labourism was too radical…