Alex Garland’s latest film Civil War opens with an address from the US president (Nick Offerman) to the nation, reassuring his citizens that the rebel forces are close to defeat and the war will soon be over. However, the speech is intercut with images that tell a different story: explosions, fierce battles, government under siege. Rather than offering reassurance, the president looks frail and exposed.
This beginning, and the setting in the US, at a time when the country is…
As I write, I am sitting in a museum garden, with a hundred different plants used for textile-dyeing, cooking, beautifying, wellbeing, healing, smelling sweet and even pest control. The sun is hot and there’s a reassuring amount of buzzing in the flowers around me. As always, I’m learning, thinking and planning.
Every year, I spend a week in a cathedral town, singing choral music and chilling out. This year, despite the physical and emotional pleasure of singing in a glorious acoustic…
As I type these words, I do so with a heavy heart; this will be my last column for PN. I would have written to and for you, PN readers, until the end of my days, but circumstances beyond my control are forcing me to step back.
Please know I do so with immense gratitude to every single one of you for reading my words over the past six years. I must also express my immense gratitude to my colleagues; Milan Rai, Emily Johns, Gabriel Carlyle, Emma Sangster and Claire…
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. This is the end. My only friend, the end.…
And all the other songs bidding adieu.
Yes, this is my last column for Peace News. Probably.
I started, I think, in 2017 with a column on air pollution and, somewhere along the way, the column got the header ‘Poynted Remarks’, probably because I was definitely pointing a finger at motorists polluting our air, or was it men who tolerated misogynist comments…
There’s not a lot of things that have been important to me throughout my life, since I was 16. That was in 1982, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, next to the Berlin Wall.
I first bought, and started selling, Peace News when I was at school. Its vision of revolutionary anarcha-feminist nonviolence has had a deep and lasting impact on me.
It has been an enormous honour to have been co-editor, with Emily Johns, and then the sole editor of PN. Emily, you’re…
Over the years, I’ve written this column about a myriad of genres of music, many that would call themselves radical, and others that might be surprised to find themselves included here. But there are so many different and beautiful ways in which people use music to agitate for social change, to energise activists and to support communities of oppressed and marginalised people.
For some musicians, simply singing in your native language can be a radical act.
For others, posting a…
Netpol has published an important investigation into the policing of recent Gaza protests, which shows that racism is one cause of over-aggressive policing.
The stories of two women being arrested for carrying a placard with Arabic writing on it, and a man being arrested for wearing a green headband with Arab writing on it, are shocking (see p6).
This is partly about racism against people of colour and partly racism against Muslims.
There is, quite rightly, great public…
As I write, there’s a lot that still isn’t known about the assassination attempt – especially about the motivations of the shooter.
Many commentators believe that the events of 13 July in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, have sealed the deal for the Republican presidential candidate.
The bullet that clipped Donald Trump’s ear, and which so very nearly killed him, will energise his supporters, bring undecideds in his direction, and make his opponents hesitate. The image of his…
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…
Radical music is so often about the core message. We think so carefully about the words we choose to communicate something we feel is important.
We find musically-wrapped words that help us as a community of humans to process many painful injustices in the world around us. But there is a bigger thing that music, and singing together in particular, can bring us and that is somewhere we can hold and experience emotions that are simply too big for words.
Even as a campaigner and…
In what appears to be a bit of a theme in these columns, I was again late to the party on Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts. I did clock it in 2021, when I saw an article about a comedy about a female Muslim punk band and thought it looked good, but for some reason didn’t get round to watching.
It wasn’t until the second series came out this May and our eldest daughter Beth recommended it, that we finally watched. And, of course, we loved it immediately, because it’s great.
…
My new passion is wandering around with my partner, getting to know plants. We are overwhelmed with the scent of privet and meadowsweet, delighted by the delicacy of hop clover and Yorkshire fog, surprised by vetch’s black seed pods, enthused by the possibility of acanthus (bear’s breeches) healing our house-mate’s dislocated shoulder.
Oh, the wonder of the Flora Incognita app.
We’re trying to develop a worldview of being in a peer-relationship with other…
A week is a long time in politics. Ha! I promise I don’t need to be investigated by the Gambling Commission, PN readers! Couldn’t make it up.
For those wondering what I’m wittering on about, my last column two months ago urged readers to get out there during the election and make a difference, whenever it was called. Then, the election was called as we went to press.
Now, it’s the first Monday morning of a new government.
Our first Labour government since 2010’s…
I’m afraid I missed out on this year’s ‘Portillo moment’. (In May 1997, Conservative MP Michael Portillo tried to hide his shock at losing his seat to Labour’s Stephen Twigg, and almost succeeded.) I would have loved to have seen the look on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s face but perhaps he decided to take a nap instead, as he famously did in the houses of parliament, and was snapped lounging on the seats, inspiring dozens of memes.
Will Labour’s success make much difference to the average person…
In the mid-1990s, we were excited to hear that Georgina Smith, a Greenham woman, had bought Peaton Glen Wood, a magical 14ha (34-acre) woodland right next to the Coulport Trident warhead store, from the MoD. Through the first Women’s Camp we held there and the many Trident Ploughshares disarmament camps held there, I came to know Georgina. She was clever, fun and full of integrity, never acting as if she owned the place or blowing her own trumpet about the many courageous and important acts…
We are now taking orders for a new four-page A5 PN briefing setting out the facts about Churchill’s belief in 1944 and early 1945 that a Japanese surrender could be gained without an atomic bomb being dropped and without the Allies having to invade Japan (PN 2667).
Churchill believed by July 1945 that there were two diplomatic tools which could end the Pacific War, especially if combined.
In September 1944, Churchill pleaded with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to…
Gardening brings out the aggressor in me – I root out bindweed and thistles with a focus and single-minded determination lacking in all other parts of my life.
The simple judgement call of getting rid of things we don’t want (in that place) is easy to repeat.
I rest my decision-making brain and follow the roots beyond the vegetable beds, gaining more pleasure the more root I get out, shouting out to other humans when I pull out particularly deep or long roots.
I find it…
Well, it wasn’t a May election. Given that I’m writing this on 20 May, I can say this with some certainty!
Another six weeks of this end-stage-capitalism, this dystopian nightmare that Britain has become under the Tories.
We have patients in hospital corridors. We have people drowning in the Channel. We have profoundly disabled people being told they are ‘fit for work’. We have little kids, barely more than babies, dying in mould-infested flats that are not fit to house sewer…
Look, I realise that recycling won’t save the world and all.
Personally, I usually (nearly always) put stuff that can be recycled in the recycling bins even though we have to go to the effort of taking them 100 metres or so to the communal bins on our estate (rather than the doorstep collection enjoyed by people not living on a social housing estate).
I add random plastic bags to the supermarket bags to be collected by the grocery delivery people.
I take dead batteries…
Anne Randle was one of the four people who, in 1966, helped Soviet spy George Blake escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison and flee to Russia.
As a young woman, Anne Parr was active in the Committee of 100 which organised mass civil disobedience against nuclear weapons, starting in February 1961. This is where she met Michael Randle, the man who became her partner and husband for 61 years and the father of her two children, Sean and Gavin.
Michael also helped Blake to escape, along…
