Coventry Peace House is a housing co-op, a shelter, a base for community projects in Coventry, and a centre for campaigning. Coventry Peace House came out of the peace camp at Alvis Tanksin Coventry, when Penny and others wanted to start a community focused on nonviolence.
Ideally, members of the housing co-op (which is a member of the Radical Routes network) work part-time, so that they can pay their share of the rent and also have time to contribute to CPH work. The group chose…
I arrived in this country from Hungary in 1947 to three feet of snow in London and very little electricity.
The scars of war everywhere, bombed buildings, unheated rooms, horses and carts, very few cars, but a very efficient transport service, on buses and underground. The sounds around me were chirpy cockney, now rarely heard in London.
Alien registrationI had to register my movements and was issued with an identity card and a ration book for essential items. Books were…
From the first, the Quakers have taken a clear stand for peace and against military action. In 1660, soon after the movement’s founding, Margaret Fell, the Mother of Quakerism, gave her testimony: “We are a people that follow after those things that make of Peace, Love and Unity.”
The Quaker Tapestry, displayed in the Quaker Tapestry Exhibition Centre, tells the history of Quakerism. A new exhibition, Weapons of the Spirit, has been created in a small space within the main exhibition…
The idea began at the Friends Meeting House in Taunton in 1981. 11-year-old Jonathan Stocks felt the room where they held the children’s meeting needed cheering up. Anne was a professional embroiderer who had recently studied the Bayeux Tapestry. She had a vision of a Quaker embroidery - a series of panels each illustrating one event or idea from Quaker history. Each panel would be made (researched, designed and embroidered) by a different Meeting or group, but she would oversee the design…
Action On 1 December, put aside at least one hour and write at least four cards to prisoners; Get your peace group or class or place of worship to organise a card-writing session; Set up a stall in your town centre, perform a bit of street theatre, or do whatever else it takes to attract attention and interest.
When, in summer 2001, War Resisters' International decided to highlight the situation in Israel and Palestine for this year's Prisoners for Peace, there was no 11 September, no “war on terrorism”. There was “just” a completely stuck peace process, and increasing violence: from both the occupying Israeli forces, and in the Palestinian response to this occupation. And there was a slowly growing movement of conscientious objectors in Israel. More than enough reasons for a Prisoners for Peace…
In August 1998, Sachio Ko-Yin and Dan Sicken entered a nuclear missile silo in Weld County, Colorado, USA, and proceeded symbolically to transform death into life.
How shall I talk about doing support for a Plowshares prisoner? First, the excitement of the action and the post-action high (“They didn't shoot us! I talked to the FBI about Thoreau!”); the rush of speaking engagements and attendant press prior to the trial; trial preparation; then the night before the trial, that time-…
During his first days of imprisonment, Ossi received up to 100 letters a day. He felt that the prison walls were tumbling down. He was in a cell and still he was in contact with so many people nationally and internationally. “This motivated me very much. I tried to answer all letters and I was spending my whole day in the cell writing letters. Fortunately I knew from my lawyers and from replies that my letters had actually been dispatched”.
Many people write short postcards or…
Thirty-two people is a small number. A demonstration with thirty-two participants would hardly be worthy of the word. But since October 2000, thirty-two people were imprisoned or otherwise penalised in Israel for refusing to perform military duty on conscientious and political grounds.
Thirty-two may not be such a small figure after all. It is even rather large if we compare it to the figure for the preceding year - only three. It is also not that small because it actually represents…
The extraordinary artwork that you see here was created in the most difficult of circumstances: inside Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London between 2001 and 2005 by one of several individuals who were at the time interned without trial on secret evidence.
All the men are innocent of any involvement in “terrorism” yet have been subjected repeatedly to proceedings based on secret, closed “evidence” that denies them any real opportunity to defend themselves. This brings…
People from across the spectrum of the British peace movement are meeting for a weekend of exploration, celebration and empowerment – learning from other movements, struggling with challenging issues, and creating greater cohesion and solidarity in a segmented peace movement.
Workshops will be reflective (learning from recent activist initiatives in Gaza, Copenhagen and Calais), strategic (for example, developing plans to counter the war in Afghanistan) and practical (planning…
I claim that the most effective contribution which Britain can make to world peace at this juncture is a declaration to end its own imperialism and to sacrifice its monopoly powers.
Thus should we convince the victims of Fascist tyranny of our sincerity and win their co-operation for the ending of Fascism.
...This country is entering upon war without ideals and without vision. Imperialism is to remain, and thus power politics.
And what is this imperialism for which the…
“It is our duty to future generations to build nuclear power stations.”
I think I've heard that before. Perhaps when I was a little boy and the Queen opened a plant producing plutonium for British nuclear weapons at Calder Hall (part of the Windscale complex) and emphasised the contribution of its side-product, electricity. Or perhaps it was in the 1970s when I worked on Peace News and we began to campaign against civil nuclear power.
All my life nuclear power has…
The first-ever Peace News Summer Camp was held at Westmill Farm near Watchfield in Oxfordshire from 23-27 July. Over 120 people came to take part in discussions, trainings and debates on topics as varied as nonviolence (does it protect the state?), education (can education be libertarian?), and the fate of the anti-war movement (who’s more to blame for our limitations, the Stop The War Coalition or the anti-authoritarian wing of the movement?).
Fuelled by wonderful (vegan) food…
A brief chronology of the key moments in the history of Peace News
1935, autumn: Humphrey Moore brings together group in Wood Green, north London, to plan pacifist paper 1936, 22 May: Peace Pledge Union, launched in 1934, becomes formal organisation 1936: Peace News publishing office set up at 59 Waterfall Road, London N11 1936, 6 June: Peace News Group publishes first issue of Weekly Newspaper serving all who work for Peace 1936, 25 July: PN adopted as paper of the PPU 1937:…The Peace Pledge Union was formed in 1934 in response to a letter to the national newspapers from Dick Sheppard calling on the population to “renounce war and never again, directly or indirectly... support or sanction another”. By the outbreak of war in 1939 about 86,000 men and 43,000 women had signed this peace pledge.
SOCPA ’39
In the winter of 1939 PPU women throughout Britain marched against the war calling for negotiations. Resonant of today’s SOCPA laws, the Commissioner…
There were torrents to the right of them and torrents to the left of them, but Peace News Summer Camp 2010 was remarkably free of rainfall, despite the weather forecasts and the downpours in surrounding districts. The weather was warm and pleasant, and so were the 120 participants!
Among the 43 workshops, there were three whole-camp discussions this year: first “How has the world changed?” about what had happened in the world and in the UK since Summer Camp 2009 (most people…
In the mid-1930s there was a ferment of pacifism in Britain. The First World War was a recent memory, and with the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and the whole of Europe rearming, there was a popular yearning for a real way to peace.
One group who decided to do something about this was led by Humphrey Moore, a journalist in Wood Green, north London. He and others, including a young activist named Harry Mister, first met in late 1935 and decided to bring out a…
Sadly our Utopian tour has ended. We’ve been back in London a few weeks and most of our friends have (quite expectedly) asked “So, how was it?”
We never thought that answering this simple question would be so difficult. And yet, how to relate, describe, depict an experience that has changed our lives? How to, without talking our interlocutors into boredom or sounding a little like one has been touched by some “revelation”, express the inspiration, the hope, the energy, the motivation…
May Day has been celebrated as International Workers’ Day since 1890 when it was instituted as a day of commemoration for the Haymarket Martyrs, anarchist labour organisers who were hanged amongst anti-radical hysteria in Chicago in 1888.
It is celebrated with varying levels of enthusiasm and popular involvement across the globe. In every town and city in Spain it remains a day when the libertarian labour movement holds marches, rallies and fiestas; in Moscow numerous reconstituted…
