I’ve been writing songs and poems (often the same thing) since the mid-’60s but have never been prolific. Nearly two years ago, I told a friend that once I’d only written five or six in an entire year. The friend immediately set me a target: write a poem a week for a year.
I was apprehensive as I set to, but the first arrived on 15 November 2016 and I never missed in 52 weeks.
I found it challenging at first but as the year wore on I began to look forward to writing the next…
The US-North Korea nuclear summit in Singapore on 12 June was met with a wave of criticism and ‘disappointment’ from Western commentators, including from sections of the peace movement.
On the day, there was criticism from Beatrice Fihn, director of ICAN, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its role in securing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Fihn tweeted: ‘We support…
I hadn’t slept much, maybe three hours, after talking until 4am in the hostel. I planned to sleep on the train, and that prospect helped me haul my luggage across the sauna that is New Orleans. It helped me stay upright and emotionally balanced even when there was no train or any information, 20 minutes after departure time. It’s Amtrak after all.
It turned out the train was going to be at least three hours late and I was suddenly exhausted and grumpy.
I moved to a discreet…
Goals: University autonomy, the right of all university parties to elect university professors, modernisation of the curriculum, university education to be available and affordable for all, and secularisation of universities
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC GOALS: 6 points out of 6
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 3 / 3
Increased prosperity and the expansion of electoral rights at the turn of the century in Argentina precipitated significant growth of the middle class and broader…
Sun hangs over London, as if she’s stalking me. The lawn
has burnt patches, like a blister which won’t heal. The weather
forecasters are excited. The weather forecasters are lying.
In the arctic, a mammoth iceberg hunches its shoulders, splits,
topples over. The cast-off, a small country, floats towards
the warmth, its watery cargo melting.…
On International Women’s Day this year, I was singing: ‘Sister, my sister, she’s walking with me, walking for equality, she’s walking with me…’, a song that was sung in the 1970s women’s liberation movement in the USA.
This song is a zipper song – just a word or phrase is changed to create a new verse, making it really useful for singing on marches and enabling people to join in. We added our own verses, singing to…
A couple of years ago, I went to an international peace gathering in Sarajevo. Because of the place, there was a much greater proportion of people able to attend from Eastern Europe and from further east than is often the case in gatherings held further west in Europe. This was a great learning opportunity for me because I am used to being in ‘international’ spaces that are still dominated by Western culture.
When I am choosing songs to help bring many voices together in concert or…
Goal: The repeal of the First Employment Contract (CPE) law.
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC GOALS: 6 points of 6
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 3 / 3
TOTAL: 10 / 10
January 2006 in France was a tense time. Economic growth had been unexpectedly poor. National unemployment was at nearly 10 percent, totalling more than 2.5 million people. People under 26 suffered a joblessness rate of 22–23 percent nationwide and 40 or 50 percent in France’s poorest communities. Urban riots…
Something odd happened a few weeks ago. Britain, France and the United States sent their planes off to bomb targets in Syria. None of those countries had been directly attacked. It was a punishment raid for the use of chemical weapons, allegedly by Syria.
About 100 missiles were launched and at first the claim was that no one was killed. Then a single casualty was mentioned. No one else. I’ll believe that when I see pigs flying.
Where did these three get the authority…
Dear readers, I’ve belatedly made the acquaintance of a remarkable US writer who died a month after I was born. I wish I’d encountered him years back but here’s a quote and you’ll see why he immediately endeared himself to me: ‘When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: “Whose?”’
Don Marquis, novelist, poet, newspaper columnist, playwright and (I insist) philosopher, was born in 1878 and in 1916 he began a famous column in New York’s The Evening Sun…
Inevitably there’s been a bit of a backlash against the #MeToo movement, and sadly not just from the mainstream media, or from ‘Men’s Rights Activists’ either.
Some women who identify as feminist have declared that some of the ‘minor’ abuse women get shouldn’t be conflated with more serious charges such as rape. So some man had demanded a view of your more intimate regions of your body? Get over it! Grow up! That’s life! Don’t be a victim! Give him what for back! (Just a quick…
US president Donald Trump has taken steps towards war with China and Iran, even as he seeks peace with North Korea. But things may not be quite what they seem.
At the beginning of May, the Trump administration declared trade war on China.
The US gave China a punishing list of economic demands, including a reduction in the US-China trade imbalance by $200bn by June 2020. (This would require the Chinese government to effectively take over the economy, when the US has been saying…
I stare out of Amtrak windows three times in a week, first watching the Virginia countryside, then the Washington DC, and then the Maryland countryside go by. This train journey from rural Twin Oaks Community to Red Emma’s anarchist bookshop in Baltimore sums up the contrasts of my tour and the contrasts of the USA.
I’m visiting radical co-ops and communities, people working to create fair and ecologically-sustainable economies. And I’m poking around to find out what works and what…
Writing the legacy of my family history, based on my own experience, has been an illuminating and a painful journey of enquiry. For it is difficult to write about oneself when there’s an emotional turmoil, a disaster that turned upside down, a people, a history and a culture. For second-generation African/Asian/British kids, like our family, we were like branches without a trunk, with no roots, no reference point to the earth or to the four directions, no framework from which to begin a life…
Goals: A wage increase of 35 percent to cover ‘dearness’ (cost of living) for textile labourers. Or to reach agreement with the Mill Agents’ Group to settle the dispute through arbitration.
Success in achieving specific demands: 6 out of 6 points
Survival: 1 / 1
Growth: 3 / 3
A heavy monsoon season in 1917 destroyed agricultural crops and led to a plague epidemic claiming nearly 10 percent of the population of the city of Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat. During the…
A few nights ago, I watched on TV the house of commons discussing the attempted murder of the ex-Russian spy and his daughter. I am not naïve and have no illusions about what states will get up to. We British helped to kill over 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because we insisted on Japan’s unconditional surrender. Even now we supply Saudi Arabia with the bombs which have enabled them to kill tens of thousands of people in Yemen.
But as I watched the debate I wondered…
Is it some kind of sign of the times, or merely a candle in the wind, that a record shop has opened in Stroud selling nothing but vinyl? Sound Records opened in March and it stocks second-hand records and maybe new vinyl too for all I know. I wasn’t at its opening gala but James and David – front man and guitarist respectively of the poetic punkish political rockanroll band, ‘The Red Propellers’, which I’ve often mentioned here – performed in the neat and compact (well tiny) shop which I’m…
In February and March, there was a strike for pension rights organised by the University and College Union (UCU). Put very simply, extortionately high wages are being paid to small numbers of people at the very top of the university tree, while it’s being proposed that pensions (delayed salary pay) for the majority of workers be significantly cut. The UCU voted for strike action to prevent this from happening.
The pickets have been extraordinarily strong in Edinburgh, and my…
Organising: organisers invest in two-way relationships with, and give power to, people they recruit, who then go on to recruit other people in the same empowering way.
Are you a lone wolf, a mobiliser or an organiser? And does it make any difference to how much social change you make? I’ve been chewing over questions like this after attending two very different movement events in the last few weeks.
The first was ‘Can we unite for peace?’, a conference in London put on by ‘…
Since I am writing this piece in early February, between the hundredth anniversary of the granting of the first and partial voting rights for women in the UK (6 February 1918) and International Women’s Day (8 March), there is only one obvious subject. So here come a few words about three great and strong peace and justice women among so many who have inspired me.
The first is Olive Gibbs, commemorated in Oxford Town Hall on 6 February itself – which would have been her 100th…
