Comment

People's Climate March 2017 in Washington DC. Marchers with sign, "There are no jobs on a dead planet." Author: Dcpeopleandeventsof2017 c/o Wikimedia Commons.

There has rightly been a huge celebration of the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 and the first parliamentary election votes for some women in Britain (not counting landowners pre-1832).

This has stirred up again the valuable debate about how much this victory owed to the direct…

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…

Connie Mager, peace activist, has died aged 97. Born in Lambeth in South London, Connie served in the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War. After the war, she became a teacher of the deaf and moved to Hastings in East Sussex. Connie was a supporter of CND, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the WEA and the Labour Party. She was active at Greenham Common in the 1980s…

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament nearly put itself out of business right at the beginning of its life.

CND started near St Paul’s cathedral, London, on 16 January 1958 at a meeting of the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapon Tests (NCANWT) and an invited group of national figures. NCANWT willingly handed over its office, its funds, its files, its paid organiser, and a public meeting it had organised for 17 February, to the new ‘Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament…

When I was a teenager, my schoolfriends and I would walk out from school past a timber merchants. Every time a lorry came in or out we’d get horns tooting and drivers leaning out and expressing their opinions on our bodies and what they’d like to do to them.

That’s the way it was in the mid-1970s. In my late 40s, I noticed that this was no longer happening. Great! Men had finally grown up and no longer felt the need to yell out invitations for a quickie in the car park.

Er, no…

What songs were women singing 100 years ago when they were campaigning for full access to our democratic system?

At the beginning of the 20th century, the folk songs that have always been sung were being sung all over the country. Women were still singing while labouring – milking, spinning, waulking (beating) the cloth and such like. They were singing lullabies to help soothe the babies and themselves, and singing ballads telling of love and loss.

Songs of war were everywhere…

Goal: Suffrage for women of Kuwait
Success in achieving specific demands: 6 out of 6 points
Survival: 1 / 1
Growth: 3 / 3

The country of Kuwait acquired independence from the UK in 1961. Women seized the moment to seek further liberation. As an act of defiance, many women burned their robes, rejected notions of female dress. A year later, the Kuwaiti parliament passed new election laws that limited the electorate to men over the age of 21, whose families lived in Kuwait…

Main goal: Prevent wage cuts
Secondary goal: Stop strikebreakers from working

Successes:
In achieving specific demands: 3 out of 6 points
Survival: 1 out of 1
Growth: 3 out of 3
Overall success: 7 out of 10

The campaign achieved its secondary goal of ending the use of strikebreakers. It also prevented further governmental and military intervention into labour conflicts in Sweden. However it is not clear if the strike prevented wage cuts. For that reason…

Diversity is Beautiful (right) is just one of the rich posters and prints to come out of the new Cato Press in Easton, Bristol. The community-run studio puts on courses for all in printmaking. It makes huge, collectively-cut prints and places itself firmly in the political printmaking tradition of José Guadalupe Posada and the Mexican Taller de Gráfica Popular (and also the…

As I write, it is Remembrance weekend; a difficult one for many of us. For anyone who has lost family and friends to war, whether soldiers or civilians, it is important to have space to remember those people as well as the circumstances of their loss. Unfortunately, the pomp and circumstance surrounding our annual remembrance ceremonies based around the ‘victory’ of the First World War can be troubling for peace activists such as myself.

Most years I am involved with alternative…

I’m not finding it at all easy writing about what’s happening in Catalunya (Catalonia) right now. It feels very complex and complicated both at a social and a political level. And it’s also touching me emotionally in a very deep way.

The most worrying aspect is the fragmentation in the social fabric, this is a very exhausting and traumatic time for very many of us. Insults, threats, accusations in every direction. Catalan families divided over independence and families all over…

Helen John, midwife turned feminist peace campaigner, was best known as a founder of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, but her extraordinary life of commitment and peace activism went much further.

After joining a 10-day protest walk from Wales to US air force base Greenham Common in August 1981, Helen chained herself to the fence on 5 September, demanding a public debate about NATO’s deployment of cruise missiles. When that was ignored, she led the way in setting up the…

I’ve moved on average every three years across the country and the globe (unfortunately not as a result of my jet-setting lifestyle but because of parental separation and subsequent divorce, family feuds, university, a study abroad year and so on). It would be fair to say that there were many times when the situation was precarious. Times when it was physically, mentally and emotionally paralysing. But also times of immense growth.

The last move was to Leeds into a Radical Routes…

When I was 15 or 16 I saw a film which has remained a favourite with me – and millions of others I suspect. An American in Paris (1951) starred Gene Kelly, the debuting Leslie Caron, and Hollywood’s fantasy version of Paris. A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem, ‘Confessions of a teenage narcissus’, and it contains these lines:

I wanted to look like Gene Kelly
I wanted to be
that American in Paree (Paris)
I wanted Gene Kelly’…

'People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there. I worry about what we might do to each other in here.’ – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, on 28 October.

A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women. A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded…

’Biktub Ismak Ya Biladi, ‘al shams ilma bit(a)gheeb
La mali wala wlaadi, ‘Ala Hubik mafe Habib.

I will write your name oh my country, above the sun that never sets.
Not my children nor my wealth, above your love there is no love.

I first heard this song at a demonstration in Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, Palestine, in 2012. I was in the village to participate in a demonstration with my choir and, as is their tradition of…

Ghost scene, woodcut, 1932, by Taninaka Yasunori.

Taninaka Yasunori was born in 1897, in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, Japan, spent his childhood in Seoul, Korea, and died in September 1946. He was a Japanese woodcut artist with often surrealistic content, a poet and a magazine editor. In 1930, Taninaka began publishing the magazine Black and White. He participated in exhibitions of the Japanese…

Goals:

The union leaders achieved their main demand to increase wages. They were partially successful in pressuring the government to agree to delay and review their austerity measures and plans to privatise state companies, though they did not receive…

It is nearly 70 years since I began my two years of conscripted military service.

Having been to a boarding school, it was not much of a shock. Despite some class differences we were all in the same boat and got shouted at in the same way by various corporals and sergeants.

In 1947, the cold war was just starting, and it was to faraway places like Malaysia and Korea that some of my contemporaries were sent. At least one, my friend ‘Tubby’ Maycock, a year below me at…

While arms companies have been at the top of the peace agenda recently with the DSEI arms fair, their involvement in education in the UK is less well known. Many of the top names have a presence – BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Babcock, QinetiQ, Chemring. Some are big players, forging the way ahead, others have a smaller role.

A ForcesWatch report on military interests in education (out soon) will detail the extent to which this has developed and why. It looks at how the armed forces,…