Once again this year, Aberystwyth town council voted to lay a white peace poppy wreath at the war memorial. In truth, stalwarts on the council had a struggle getting their fellows to continue the tradition, which has a symbolic impact beyond the borders of Wales. Only two councillors, Mark Strong and Alun Williams, both of Plaid Cymru, attended the ceremony on 13 November.
Unless people lobby the council, the future of the ceremony remains uncertain. Once laid, the white poppy wreath…
Immediately after being fined £500 for blockading Faslane two women painted their judgement on the walls of the Dumbarton court building. Barbara Dowling wrote “This JP court does not uphold international law” on an interior wall while Janet Fenton painted “We want a peace court” over the brass plaque by the entrance. They now may face jury trial for an alleged £3000 worth of damage on vandalism charges.
The painting was an indictment of the Scottish courts’ persistent refusal…
The Scottish Resources Group (SRG), an umbrella company that includes Scottish Coal, has submitted an application for a “mixed use development” across a 230 hectare area which would include leisure and industrial expansion. The aim is to achieve “planning in principle” to make the land a more attractive investment to developers. The Happenden Wood Action Camp (THWAC) thinks the application helps to support opencast, for example the Coal Authority has stated that if the industrial development…
UN World Peace Day was marked in Edinburgh with the rededication of the Peace Pole at the city’s Peace and Justice (P&J) Resource Centre. The P&J Centre was celebrating its 30th birthday and friends gathered for the re-dedication and to enjoy a celebratory lunch. The centre, co-ordinated by Janet Fenton, supports all groups and individuals committed to issues of peace and justice. Later that day one such group, Scotland’s for Peace, launched their Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons…
Despite its other shortcomings, it was good to see that the UK government’s Public Expenditure Review has not allocated funds to the privatised military training college at St Athan. This seems to signal that the gargantuan Public Finance Initiative (PFI) will be reviewed and scaled down. The people of Wales have been misled about this project from the beginning. When it was first announced in January 2007, there were promises of thousands of jobs. In reality, the project was a job reduction…
On 28 September the Petitions Committee of the Welsh Assembly Government posted its official decision on the ambition for a Peace Institute (Academi Heddwch) in Wales. “The committee agreed to: undertake further work on a rapporteur/informal group basis to consider how a peace institute in Wales could be established; how they would be funded and the work which they could undertake.” On behalf of the project’s instigators, the civil society forum Cynefin Y Werin, Dr John Cox of CND Cymru is…
Fifteen members of the Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development (WYFSD), Gwerin y Coed (the Woodcraft Folk in Wales) and representatives of other youth organisations spent five days in the saddle, cycling from Machynlleth to Cardiff Bay to hand deliver a petition to Jane Davidson, Minister for the Environment, Sustainability and Housing. Delivered at the Welsh Assembly Government building on Wednesday 22 September, the petition called for better cycling provision in Wales.
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Part of the British “boycott, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) for Palestine movement attended the British Olympic ball on 24 September, to put pressure on the ball’s sponsor, BT, to cut its ties with Bezeq, supplier of telecommunications services to Israeli checkpoints, bases and illegal settlements.
Among the great and good in the world of sport and sports-sponsorship arriving at the red carpet at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London was a long pink stretch limo.
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The latest attempt to break the Israeli siege of Gaza was organised by Jewish groups using a Jewish-crewed catamaran. The Irene was stopped and boarded by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on 28 September en route to Gaza with a cargo of aid.
The passengers included 82-year old Holocaust survivor, Reuven Moskowitz; former IDF pilot Yonatan Shapira; and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli who lost her daughter in a Palestinian suicide bombing. The IDF claimed that it used “no violence of any…
Despite a spate of recent press reports regarding secret high-level talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban leadership, brutal US and British actions on the ground are undermining the prospects for a negotiated end to the war.
According to the Washington Post, the talks have involved “extensive, face-to-face discussions with Taliban commanders from the highest levels of the group’s leadership” – from both the Quetta Shura (the Taliban’s Pakistan-based governing body…
“This is not a rally, a demo or a march,” read the flier. “This is mass direct action that aims to disrupt the flow of oil into London. Welcome to the Crude Awakening.” Crikey.
Following a prompt early-morning rendezvous at Euston (the website had warned that we would be leaving immediately), half-an-hour of standing around waiting (which my affinity group utilized to staple-on our home-made polar bear masks), and some fun-and-games on the tube (“Like the badger mask mate!”),…
The “prospect of peace” in Afghanistan “poses a serious danger” to the burgeoning drones industry, according to a recent anonymous comment piece in Flight International, believed to have been authored by an industry insider.
Noting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been “the making of the unmanned aircraft industry”, the piece, entitled “Oh, What A Lovely War”, urges the industry to “persuade military decision makers to trust autonomous technology to make decisions at…
Iraq’s third annual Week of Nonviolence began on 10 October, organised by La’Onf (“no violence” in Arabic), a network of nonviolent Iraqi civilians and civil society groups.
The theme of this year’s actions was making the upcoming provincial elections safe, free, and truly democratic.
During the intensive week of activities La’Onf stuck up masses of posters, and handed out nonviolent literature to soldiers, shoppers, schoolchildren, police, politicians, youth and women’s groups…
A mass siege of the EDO arms factory in Brighton took place on 13 October.
The Hammertime demonstration effectively closed the factory for the day. However, with massive resources and the invoking of public order powers, the police kept control of the streets.
At the start, over 100 police surrounded the convergence centre, and demanded everyone go to a “designated protest area”. Protesters insisted on going to the announced start point, which the police had to…
Regular readers of this page will know that the Cynefin Y Werin network is pursuing a major project to establish a Peace Institute (Academi Heddwch), working with academics and others in Wales. The Peace Institute is likely to be based on the model of the Flemish Peace Institute. Delegates from Cynefin Y Werin have visited Brussels and speakers from the institute undertook a speaking tour of Wales. The Wales project has the rhetorical support of the Welsh Assembly government but the…
At the last general election, the only parties opposing nuclear new build on Anglesey were the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru. We all know what happened to Chris Huhne and the Lib Dems, but anti-nuclear campaigners have been keen to see how Plaid’s policy would shape up, as Plaid leader Ieuan Wyn Jones (assembly member for the island) had long been ambivalent on the nuclear issue in contravention of his own party’s policy.
At Plaid’s annual conference in Aberystwyth in September, a…
On 18 September, an aid convoy left to take much-needed medical equipment to the people of Gaza and draw attention to the inhuman blockade of this tiny strip of land.
UN officials have described the situation as a “medieval siege”. 70% of Gazan families live on less than a dollar a day per person. On 2 August, a Palestinian man was arrested for stealing a bucket of Israeli water.
Wales participants in the convoy left Newport for the long hard overland drive to Gaza, taking…
The vigil, authorised by the police under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA), started in May, when the anti-war Democracy Village was already camped in the square. The village was evicted by the greater London authority (GLA) on 20 July, and a high fence erected around the square apart from an enclave for Brian Haw’s round-the-clock anti-war vigil.
Though we had applied for authorisation for the Tuesday vigils up to December 2010, the police phoned Jim Brann…
There are similarities between the UK government’s attitude towards the poor and that in Canada. So said AJ, an active member of Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), on a visit to Glasgow and Edinburgh in mid-September.
AJ told me how people in Britain have a tendency to look upon Canada with affection when actually it is an “a***-hole of a country”. Later, at a meeting in Edinburgh’s Drill Hall, AJ drew comparisons between the UK and the experience in Ontario.
Back in…
The Climate Nine activists associated with Plane Stupid who closed down Aberdeen airport back in March 2009 have received their sentences. They were found guilty of a breach of the peace at Aberdeen sheriff court, where they had faced up to five years in prison, but instead received fines of up to £700.
Expert witnesses testified that urgent and direct action is necessary to stop runaway climate change and that the aviation industry, as one of the fastest growing sources of CO2…
