The COP26 Coalition has called a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice for Saturday 6 November, halfway through the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow.
They are calling on people to either come to Glasgow for a national demonstration or to take action nearer to home.
There will be a People’s Summit for Climate Justice from 7 – 10 November.
The COP26 Coalition is a UK-based civil society coalition of groups and individuals mobilising around climate justice during…
England is entering a dangerous period. British prime minister Boris Johnson is knowingly creating the perfect conditions to breed stronger variants of COVID-19 that can overcome the vaccine.
A group of experts warned in a letter to the medical journal, the Lancet on 7 July that the complete lifting of almost all COVID restrictions in England on 19 July was ‘dangerous and premature’.
One of the concerns of the expert group was the long-term health of the millions of…
Nearly everyone I talk to is feeling a bit weary just now. Weary with the pandemic and all that it means, weary with the chipping away of the welfare state and the lack of honest and compassionate human behaviour demonstrated in Westminster.
Weary with the upsurge of overt racism that Brexit has brought us and weary with fear and anger for the future of the planet and its people, flora and fauna.
It’s the same old stories: divide and conquer; keep the rich getting richer and…
With some of my friends, for the past eight Decembers, I have been co-organising the week-long Leicester Human Rights Arts and Film Festival. We believe that festivals and the arts have an important role to play in creating, maintaining and defending a culture of human rights.
Through its seven days of poetry, music, performances, film, art, talks and discussion, the festival creates a forum for engaging with human rights issues at home and abroad.
With the support of local…
Today was weird. On whatever untrained basis, I ‘mediated’ two people from another housing co-op for six hours. A really overwhelming sentiment was the disappointment, disillusion and disengagement created by other people’s apathy.
It’s hard to hold a neutral space and encourage creative, open thinking when you’re hearing your own cynical and depressed thoughts repeated back to you.
So what I need now is to celebrate all the joyous, proactive, connected, determined, adventurous…
As I write this, BBC News is reporting the fatal stabbings of a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old in different parts of South London, within hours of each other. Another 15-year-old child has been arrested for one of the murders.
So far, 21 teenagers have been murdered in London in 2021.
As we ease out of lockdown, our old social problems are resurfacing with a vengeance.
Personally, I think the blame falls…
I’m not much into football, though I do live with a football ‘fan’ and it’s sometimes on TV when I am in the room.
I’m usually reading or playing a game on my phone. Sometimes I get the headphones on and watch something on the iPad.
Same goes for the cycling: Tour de France, etc.
I’ve never been sporty and it’s not something I generally take much interest in.
This latest England team, though.
I’ve taken a bit more interest in the matches (in between reading…
Find your way to the roof of Gloucestershire,
beyond the handsome stone of Painswick,
past mellow Sheepscombe, pretty Miserden,
through avenues of beech and larch
to the back-of-beyond,
and you may stumble on a onetime white road,
on either side shacks and bungalows
dumped anyhow.
This was The Colony.
And so it is still.
Gathering all conditions of folk,
from university to able seamen,
and many women too,
…
For climate campaigners, Penny was best known for supergluing – she glued herself to the revolving doors of lastminute.com’s HQ as part of a Plane Stupid action, she glued herself to a shelf in Boots because of their accounting practices, and she famously glued herself to the gates of the Heathrow Climate Camp to stop the police entering the site, earning enormous gratitude and respect.
But this was really the tiny cherry on the enormous cake of her life’s work to mitigate climate…
Although she balked at any form of public recognition, Penny Walker had influence, power and the kind of respect that preceded her into meetings. The public grief and sadness there has been at her death is unsurprising, though Penny would’ve been embarrassed by all the fuss.
I met Penny at Coventry Peace House in 2004, a housing co-operative she set up with Becqke and John, fellow Alvis Peace Campers from the ’90s.
A founder member of the Coventry Refugee Centre, she and Alan…
As the world reflects on the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks in Washington DC and New York, we face a choice. We can try to understand what motivates people to carry out jihadist attacks, which might give us a chance of preventing them from happening again. Alternatively, we can close our eyes and refuse to discuss possible causes, which rules out the possibility of effective preventive action – which means more people will die.
Here in Britain, there is a sort of secret…
Yemen continues to suffer the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the UN, with half the population going hungry and hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine.
A dramatic fall in the value of Yemen’s currency, the riyal, has only worsened the situation, while peace negotiations drag on without an end in sight.
Britain’s response to Yemen’s suffering has been to worsen the crisis, not just by supporting but by joining in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.…
I’m writing this as we’re approaching the first anniversary of the killing of George Floyd, and I’m thinking about racism and anti-racism and solidarity.
There’s a thing that a lot of activists call ‘being an ally’ or ‘allyship’. What this means is that you’re not the target of a particular oppression, but you want to challenge that oppression and be actively on the side of people who are the direct targets of that oppression.
So, for example, there was a wave of solidarity…
Large parts of 2015 were dominated by images of people packed into wooden fishing boats and rubber dinghies trying to get to Europe by crossing the Mediterranean.
There were images of people, including unaccompanied children, making impossible journeys on foot.
There were images of people climbing over razor wire in Europe, and police forces in different countries using batons and teargas against people at the border.
Months before the image of Alan Kurdi’s body on a…
i
After his success with mustard gas at Ypres,
Fritz Haber’s wife killed herself.
To be precise, she took his service pistol
and shot herself through the mouth.
Her husband had betrayed the ideals of science.
‘It makes no difference.’ he insisted, ‘It for
the fatherland.’ She was the first woman
in Germany to take a doctorate in chemistry,
her husband’s field. They had taken the same vow
to work for moral good. Now he was the…
‘Mawtini, Mawtini…’ ‘My homeland, my homeland / Glory and beauty, sublimity and splendour / Are in your hills, are in your hills’
I first visited the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem in 2009 when I was working as a human rights observer with EAPPI (the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel).
We visited the area because Palestinian residents had been evicted from their homes and Israeli settlers had moved in.
Israeli settlers,…
Money is power, money is message, money makes the world go round. Time is money. Every little counts. It’s all about money.
Credo: I want to see a world without money, where people give according their ability and receive according to their needs, where power is collective and resources are shared.
In the meantime though….
As I go to sleep thinking about money for this article, Liza Minelli and Joel Grey* are shimmying, pouting and grimacing across my mental…
We need to talk about death. Even as I write this sentence, I can almost hear PN readers groan ‘what, more?! Haven’t we talked about death enough in the past year?!’ But, yes, we must talk about death. We must talk about death on both micro and macro scales.
On the micro scale, the past year has painfully reminded many people, including myself, that the only two things we are assured of in life are death and taxes. I have come to the conclusion that we have absolutely nothing…
Free speech and ‘cancel culture’.
Yes, it’s another of those current buzzwords/phrases, along with ‘woke’ (which appears to have replaced ‘PC gone mad’, ‘snowflake’ or ‘triggered’ (the latter always seems to require that quote from The Princess Bride: ‘You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means’)).
Universities in particular have also been accused of curtailing free speech by ‘no platforming’ resulting in ‘cancel culture’.
I cannot…
I found my body parts at the
bottom of an editor’s bin
loose rinds of the lips
my mother gave me
a yanked tooth
the bridge of my brow
wilted laugh lines
shredded coils of hair
the scrunched petals of my nose
fistfuls of plump
shades of my skin
seeping out of the sides
until there was light, so much light
and I think…
