Spokesman Books

Issue 130 of The Spokesman , 'One Belt, One Road', is now available. Among the books reviewed in this issue are two titles on pacifism and conscientious objection: The World is My Country , by Emily Johns and Gabriel Carlyle, and Refusing to Kill , by Oliver Haslam and PPU Publications Group.  Cranks and Kites Two peace-oriented publishers; two different approaches to presenting the lives of conscientious objectors and opponents of the First World War. The World is My Country calls itself a ‘celebration’, whereas Refusing to Kill is a more sombre appraisal, and pulls no punches. Read together, they prove there is room to remember both the anguish and the triumphs of this extremely diverse group. Refusing to Kill is primarily intended for use by teachers and students, as the layout and language indicate. It outlines the various forms of conscientious objection, such as non-combatant COs, who would drill and train but not serve; those who submitted to alternative l...

The Morning Star carried this review of Trident Undone (Spokesman issue 127) on Monday 11 May, by James Walker. Click the image below for a larger version. The review is also available online at https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-82d6-Laying-the-Trident-myths-to-rest#.VVDCPo5Viko

"agit8" was a live event held at the Tate Modern on the Southbank from the 11th June - 13th June, just ahead of the G8 summit, with the aim of inspiring the next generation of activists to 'get on their soapboxes' and pressurize the G8 to take action to help eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. We spent six weeks working directly with Richard Curtis and ONE to conceive and create 30 minutes of original content, which was projected on to the facade of the Tate Modern. The final product is part art installation, part documentary film and it involved working with a range of techniques and mixed media - incorporating music, speech, video, animation and motion graphics. Once we had the rough concept sketched out, the team went about enlisting some of the biggest names in music today, as well as actors such as Colin Firth and Chiwetel Ejiofor, to contribute protest songs and speeches that were then woven into the film. We also commissioned a number of artists, illust...

The Spokesman 119 Edited by Tony Simpson Ayse Berktay has been locked up in a Turkish prison since October 2011. She and some 200 others are, periodically, before Turkey’s Tribunal with Special Powers as part of the ‘KCK trials’. KCK stands for Kurdish Communities Union, which the Turkish government has labelled a ‘terrorist’ organisation, although the actual basis for this draconian claim is not at all clear. In December 2012, many Kurds, some Turks and various others gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels to consider ‘The Kurdish Question in Turkey’. The conference was sponsored by the United European Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) political group, with support from Greens and Socialists. It had the sub-title, ‘time to renew the dialogue and resume direct negotiations’. Notwithstanding attempts by the Turkish authorities to restrict Kurdish participation, the conference heard from many speakers of diverse backgrounds and nationalities. They included two prominent K...

Public meeting Mass Political Show Trials in Turkey 6.30-8.30pm Tuesday 18 September 2012 Garden Court Chambers, 57-60 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3LJ (nearest tube: Holborn) Chaired by Prof Bill Bowring , Birkbeck College, President of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (ELDH) and International Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers Speakers include: Margaret Owen OBE , barrister, member of the Bar Human Rights Committee Ali Has , solicitor Tony Simpson , Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; editor of The Spokesman Barry White , NUJ representative of the European Federation of Journalists Obsessively sensitive about its image, Turkey seeks to present a modern, liberal and democratic face to the outside world, but the reality for people involved in public life inside the country is far different. Repression is the regime’s inevitable knee-jerk response to those seeking to exercise their civil rights to ...

The cover picture of The Spokesman (no.117) was entitled 'Jeju Moon' by its photographer, Bruce Gagnon . Jeju Island, in the Korea Strait, is something of a paradise, as Esther Koohan Paik describes in this new issue. Paradise is threatened by the construction of a huge new naval base to provide port facilities for US Navy ships which carry the AEGIS ballistic missile defence system, a substantial additon to US 'Star Wars' capacity. In this issue, Bruce describes how, after repeated test failures, the US missile defence architecture is becoming more effective; a development which pressures Russia and China greatly as they feel increasingly encircled by US military facilities. However, the residents of Jeju Island have different ideas for the future of their island, as this new seven-minute video makes clear. Bruce provides his own commentary: http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2012/08/grand-march-report-with-music.html   *** Copies of The Spokesman 117 can be bo...

International delegation to attend trial of Ayse Berktay (Hacimirzaoglu) in Turkey During the past three years, the Turkish state has imprisoned some 8000 citizens under the guise of fighting terrorism. In a wave of detentions known as the “KCK operations,” it has targeted activists, academics, journalists, lawyers, students, elected officials, translators and publishers on account of their democratic activities in support of the rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. In particular, numerous members and supporters of the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party)—which has 36 elected representatives in the Turkish Parliament—have been criminalized and imprisoned on the pretext that they are alleged members of the KCK (Union of Communities in Kurdistan), a group which the Turkish state claims to be the urban branch of an armed organization known as the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). Professor Busra Ersanli is the best known of those who were thus imprisoned in 2011, together wi...

The new issue of The Spokesman includes Lord Byron's scintillating speech in defence of Nottinghamshire's followers of Ned Ludd, made 200 years ago. George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, was the ‘examplar’ of the aristocratic rebel, according to Bertrand Russell. At ten years old, after living modestly in Aberdeen, he suddenly found himself a Lord and the owner of Newstead Abbey, the Byrons’ ancestral home in Nottinghamshire. From there, he was to make a powerful impact on the wider world, which resonates to this day. In Greece on the 29 February, 2012 the Byron League is organising an international meeting to mark the 200th anniversary of the good Lord’s maiden speech against the Framework Bill and in favour of social justice. The Spokesman will be there . In 1812, a popular uprising swept across parts of the Midlands and North of England. The development of new machines for textile production was causing widespread distress. Independent manufacturers were being squeezed...

‘A nuclear explosion [dubbed ‘Little Boy’] was detonated some 600 metres above Hiroshima at 8.15 on 6 August 1945 … a second, over Nagasaki three days later, was a plutonium bomb, dubbed ‘Fat Man’. It is 66 years since those terrible experiments, which instantly killed hundreds of thousands of people, many of them civilians. Tens of thousands more suffered lingering deaths due to their injuries, caused by intense heat, blast, and radiation sickness … As the nuclear disaster at Fukushima continues to unfold, Japanese perceptions have probed more deeply. Sumiteru Taniguchi survived extensive injuries suffered during the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and, at 82 years of age, maintains a lively presence on behalf of the Nagasaki Council of A-Bomb Sufferers (or Hibakusha , in Japanese). He recently observed that ‘Nuclear power and mankind cannot co-exist. We survivors of the atomic bomb have said this all along. And yet, the use of nuclear power was camouflaged as “peaceful” and continued to ...

The Spokesman 110 Edited by Tony Simpson ‘Whilst still in opposition, in August 2009, the then Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, argued for what he called ‘progressive’ and ‘fundamental’ reform of public services. The alternative, according to the Chancellor in waiting, was ‘deep cuts in the quality of those services’. Praying in aid Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, who were by then advocating something similar, he said that what was true ‘in the years of plenty’ was doubly true in an age of austerity. Now installed, Chancellor Osborne has set about his austere task with a will. As the comprehensive spending review looks to slice further tens of billions from departmental budgets, the cuts are already scything through public services round the country. Local government workers in their tens of thousands have received Section 118 redundancy notices, as have their counterparts in the Civil Service and sundry quangos. Public service, and all its outworks, is being chopped hard. Osborne shows...

After Lockerbie - The Spokesman 106 Edited by Ken Coates "There has seldom been such unanimity in the British political class as has come about in the last half of August 2009 with the release of the Libyan prisoner, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, on compassionate grounds. This was announced by the Scottish Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, after medical reports forecast that the Libyan was at death’s door, having advanced prostate cancer which probably gave him a maximum life expectancy of three months. Megrahi had been sentenced by three Scottish Judges to life imprisonment, following a highly contentious trial in which the Scottish Courts sat in an American airbase in The Netherlands to hear the case of the Lockerbie bomb. A Pan American passenger jet had been blown up on the 21st December 1988, while flying over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie en route for the United States. The evidence showed that a bomb had been secreted in passenger luggage. It had exploded in mid...

THESE ARE THE TIMES – TOM PAINE REMEMBERED Readings and Discussion to mark the 200th anniversary of Tom Paine’s death 9 – 10.30pm, Monday 8th June 2009, Old Red Lion Theatre, Angel, London. With Tony Benn, sculptor Michael Sandle, publisher Tony Simpson, musician Elizabeth Green and Neil Sheppeck of Love and Madness Theatre, alongside contributions from actor and playwright Jack Shepherd and writer Mike Marqusee. * An intimate event, on the 200th anniversary itself of Tom Paine's death , to celebrate and discuss the enduring legacy of one of the most influential radical writers and thinkers in history, at Islington's Old Red Lion Theatre, where Paine actually wrote some of his profoundly important work The Rights of Man. Featuring a rehearsed reading, directed by and featuring Neil Sheppeck of Love and Madness Theatre, of Jack Shepherd’s play In Lambeth, imagining a meeting between William Blake and Tom Paine. * Tickets: £7, £5 (concs. Please provide or bring evidence when book...

‘The first King Herod was born in 73 BC and followed a military career, starting out as a general … his fame among present generations is attributable to the Gospel of St. Matthew, which tells us that the King sent for the wise men who famously came from the East to Jerusalem and asked them where the Christ should be born. They told him that He would arrive in Bethlehem of Judaea, whereupon Herod sent them to search diligently for the young child ‘that I may come and worship him also’. But the wise men were too wise to fall for that one, although according to Matthew they had the advantage of being ‘warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod’. Be that as it may, ‘they departed into their own country another way’. At this point, an angel told Joseph to take the young child and his mother ‘and flee into Egypt … for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him’. With his victims holed up safely in Egypt, Herod ‘was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the c...

Slump and War The Spokesman 102 Edited by Ken Coates The election of Barack Obama came as the culmination of a profound surge of optimism in the United States, and of hope against hope in large parts of the rest of the world. Widely detested, the Bush administration was the most unpopular in living memory. Obama had fought an audacious campaign, calling in question not only the war in Iraq, but the train of events which had brought the United States into contempt all around the world. The American military, far from exercising full spectrum dominance, was arousing full spectrum detestation. Its symbols were Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, water boarding and extraordinary rendition. As the American economy raced from recession to slump, Obama’s campaign seemed to gather momentum. Earnest crowds of young people were seen on television singing the anthem of Woody Guthrie: ‘This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to New York Island.’ Would that it were so. This land crea...

Democracy Growing or Dying? The Spokesman 100 This is the hundredth number of The Spokesman , so we are expected to have a birthday party. Nostalgia is in order at such events, and we have accordingly devoted quite a large part of this number to reproducing articles and features which involved us, with many of our readers, in a variety of campaigns to change things for the better. Sometimes these have succeeded, if only, say the sceptics, in provoking our old antagonists to find new ways to make them worse again. Sometimes they have failed, only to stiffen our resolve to try again, when times may be more propitious for their success. There are, of course, a number of key concerns which have continuously preoccupied us. There has been no possibility of forgetting, even temporarily, the desperate urgency of the struggle for peace and disarmament. It has been quite possible, but very regrettable, to forget the struggle for the widening and deepening of democracy, and this possibility has...

Steve Bell 's cartoons have brightened the Guardian since 1981. We have long admired his work, and were chuffed to bits when he let us use his cartoons for the covers of Common Ownership: Clause IV and the Labour Party and a whole string of issues of The Spokesman , beginning with The Third Way to the Servile State . On Sunday 22nd June he will be at Lowdham to give an illustrative talk about his work. The Lowdham Book Festival is in its ninth year. It runs from Friday 20th to Saturday 28th June 2008 and features a whole host of guest speakers, musicians and workshops. On Saturday 28th the largest book fair in the county will be in full swing and we at Spokesman Books will have a stall selling a range of our titles including many issues of The Spokesman which feature Steve Bell's cartoons. For further information on the Lowdham Book Festival please visit www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk . We hope to see you there!