Image: Casey.B.Bassett CC-BY-SA-3.0
via Wikimedia Commons
As the longest running sci-fi show in the world, the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who was always going to be a big event. It could have easily fallen flat on its face, but luckily ‘The Day of the Doctor’ did not disappoint. Steven Moffat’s excellent story was brilliantly acted, had real heart and the right balance of comedy and seriousness, nods to the past and a marvellous set-up for the future. It…
Last September, when the biannual DSEi arms fair came to East London, I took part in a blockade of the ExCeL centre the day before the exhibition opened, hoping to stop the unloading of weaponry for display and sale.
Along with others in the blockade, I was arrested, and charged with obstruction of the highway. When my case came to court, I had to decide whether to plead guilty or not.
It might seem obvious that I would plead guilty. After all, I was lying…
I went recently to a public meeting about the government’s proposed ‘gagging’ bill. It was packed and angry and Stroud’s Tory MP found himself trying to defend the indefensible. He’d been very badly briefed by his own party, couldn’t cope with the well-informed questioners, and was driven to a position whereby he feebly asked us to take his word for it that ‘this bill is well-intentioned’. Cue jeers of derision.
In fact, we all know the bill is a dangerous assault on freedom of speech…
It’s still unbelievable that he has gone. Howard Clark has been a key figure in Peace News for several decades – as a co-editor, collaborator, contributor, (re-)organiser, trustee, director, defender. His 1971 essay Making Nonviolent Revolution, which we re-published as a pamphlet two years ago – over his modest objections – with a new, very valuable afterword by Howard, remains one of the most important explanations published of the liberatory politics that PN aims to…
This is one segment of the outstanding 24-foot-long drawing by Joe Sacco of the first day of the battle of the Somme from his concertina book The Great War: July 1, 1916 (an illustrated panorama with an essay by Adam Hochschild. Jonathan Cape, 2013, 56pp, £20). At first, the mass of figures shuffling through trenches appear to be Where’s Wallys, then peering closer you see that they are all…
Howard's sudden death has left us shocked and bereaved, and with an irrational sense of outrage that he has left us so unexpectedly. He was only 63 and in the middle of helping organise next summer’s WRI conference in South Africa. He leaves a gap which others must strive to fill. It will be difficult, and the following overview and appreciation of his life as a peace activist, organiser and researcher will give some indication of the scale of the challenge.
But before reviewing his…
We remember the lunch counter sit-ins that electrified the civil rights movement in the US in 1960. We remember the dignity and persistence of the hundreds of young African-American who asserted their right to be served as equals, day after day, despite repeated beatings and arrests.
The direct action of these Black students achieved desegregation of many businesses within weeks, and dramatically escalated the confrontation with institutional white racism. Many of the students…
The recent leaks about the arrival date of American cruise missiles at Greenham Common were followed last week by a series of transport planes bringing related equipment – though not it seems, initially, the missiles themselves. But even before the first planes arrived, nuclear disarmers were stepping up their opposition.
October 29 saw 1,500 women taking direct action at Greenham Common, where parts of the perimeter fence were cut down. On Monday October 31, the day of the…
I was taken from the court to the cells below, waving goodbye to friends and supporters at the back of the court. My pocket were emptied and everything in a bag. After several hours, I, with some male and female prisoners from other cells, was taken to a bus lined both side with small cells each capable of holding one person. I was able to see our progress through the tunnel and the streets of Liverpool, just an ordinary bus to the public gaze. Eventually, we arrive at Walton prison....…
I have written here before about The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds because, in darkest times, it gives me inspiration and hope. Life is pretty dark at the moment but it’s as well to remember that growth doesn’t stop because it’s winter time and the renewal of spring doesn’t come from nowhere:
Walls will come down
the prisons are burning
under cold ground
warm worms are turning
The unexpected destruction of the Berlin…
A friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day that she was feeling a bit low. I know that a friend of hers is seriously ill, and I thought it might be because of that. But when I rang her a couple of days later, she said she had been down in Gloucester looking out for badgers at night, and that she always feels a bit blue for a couple of days when she gets home from being out on anti-badger cull duty. ‘I think it’s because I’ve been out in the dark and the cold, squinting through a night…
In the months since the Torness demonstration in May and the London anti-Windscale demo some kind of anti-nuclear movement has appeared. Discussion of how nuclear power can be opposed is shifting from isolated actions to the development of campaigns. The Torness Alliance is an attempt (experimental and perhaps inevitably frustrating) at developing mutual co-ordination of the efforts of local autonomous groups.
That development will be very difficult without a growth and…
Everything looked so different, with trees and bushes grown taller, paths diverted and gates moved. I drove straight past Orange Gate where I had spent many weekends and holidays during the 1980s, sitting round the smoky camp fire, planning actions, cooking vegetable stews, singing songs, getting stoned.…
I finally found my way back to the gate, of which only a metal fence post…
We are of the generation who came of age in the 1980s, terrified that the world might end at any moment through nuclear holocaust. In the decades since then, the people of the world have grown less frightened of a nuclear war.
The risk is still there, as the number of nuclear weapon states increases, and conflicts continue around nuclear tinderboxes, but the fear has declined.
Recent studies suggest that even a ‘small’ nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each…
I took part in an exercise recently. I was told to imagine that I had come from the future, in fact seven generations or 200 years into the future. All we knew about this future world is that the systems on Earth are life-sustaining enough to hold some amount of humanity.
I was to imagine that in the time I lived – the year 2213 – there was a lot of talk about what the world was like back in 2013. The future ones knew that there had been massive change on Earth at that time, and I…
Known by Greenham Women and Cruisewatch as Jean Witney, this tiny woman of towering strength brought love, determination and common sense to her work as another peace woman extraordinaire. In an Oxford Mail interview, Jean once said: ‘Going to Greenham was a seminal point in my life. I don’t know what it was about the place, but you got a great positive strength from being there and…
I am very unhappy that you have asked me this question. I used to believe that if you weren’t miserable, you weren’t politically conscious. So I used to make myself even more unhappy than I was in order to make myself more politically right-on.
Thankfully I can now just allow myself to be depressed.
Man
I don’t know. Perhaps activism is a way of keeping your unhappiness at bay. You can cultivate an image of being a great activist while actually being extremely…
When I gave birth to my child, there he was, he was a boy! So different from me. If he had been a girl, I would have looked ahead at his childhood through the template of my own. I remember thinking: ‘Oh no, I don’t like football, I’ll need to get to grips with boys’ interests and needs’. I nevertheless gave him my dolls’ house furniture and found that he was his own person, didn’t like football anyway, and we did pretty well on gender, power and politics over the next 18 years.
But…
I do think swimming in the sea is remarkable. It’s the only time you’re inside an organism, but I don’t think that’s political. It may be spiritual.
Woman, St Leonards-on-Sea
Well, actually, when you say ‘activism and swimming’, the first thing that comes into my head is Jeju [island in South Korea, where villagers are resisting the building of a massive naval base] when I jumped into the water when I first arrived. When I saw the police were stopping the SOS kayaks, I…
No Dash for Gas spent months planning an action camp called ‘Reclaim the Power’ at the new West Burton gas power station near Nottingham, the power station we occupied for a week last autumn.
Then, just two weeks before the event, we made a momentous decision to change the venue and indeed the focus of our camp.
We realised that now is a crucial time for climate and fuel poverty campaigners to show solidarity with the people of Balcombe in West Sussex, and others around the…
