IN AUGUST all four members of staff at Peace News — Gabriel Carlyle, Emily Johns, Milan Rai and Emma Sangster — resigned in protest at how they have been treated by the activist newspaper’s parent company, Peace News Trustees. 

Five members of the Peace News board also resigned. The group’s resignation letter noted the staff had experienced a “tidal wave of intimidation, harassment and threats” and a “relentless bullying campaign” from some of the trustees. The Morning Star’s National Union of Journalists chapel kindly published a statement of solidarity with the #PeaceNewsFour.

Like the Morning Star, Peace News has a long and fascinating history. First published in 1936, it was the official paper of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union until 1961, and from 1990 to 2004 was co-published with War Resisters International. Early contributors included Vera Brittain, Mahatma Gandhi and the Labour Party’s George Lansbury.

In the post-war period, Peace News has stood in opposition to British colonialism, nuclear weapons, and British and US militarism and wars. In the early 1970s it played a central role in launching the British Withdrawal from Northern Ireland Campaign.

Rai and Johns began co-editing the paper in 2007, with Carlyle and Sangster joining the team in later years (Johns stepped back from editing in 2015).

I first became aware of this group in the early 2000s, when I signed up to the mailing list of Voices in the Wilderness UK, a group founded by Rai in 1998 to oppose the deadly US-British-led economic sanctions on Iraq, before switching to campaigning against the US-British invasion and occupation of the Middle East nation. 

After I moved to London in 2005 I occasionally helped out with stuffing envelopes for their mailouts organised by Carlyle above Housmans Bookshop. (If you are interested in the US-British occupation of Iraq, and if you can find them, the Voices in the Wilderness UK’s briefings are an absolutely essential resource — far more informative than any mainstream journalism on the topic, I would argue).

Then, in 2008, I began writing book reviews for Peace News, as well as contributing occasional feature articles, something I continued to do until the last issue was published in August 2024.

Building on the paper’s distinguished history, under Rai and Johns Peace News worked “for a non-violent world — where war had been abolished and the roots of war pulled up, including the silent, routine violence of hunger, oppression and ecological devastation,” according to its mission statement. 

They have provided an important public service by promoting the work and ideas of key thinkers and practitioners of nonviolent struggle. This list of luminaries includes Gene Sharp, George Lakey, AJ Muste, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming and the Catholic Worker’s Dorothy Day.

But while the masthead proclaimed “For Revolutionary Nonviolence” and the editors’ own politics are, I think, libertarian anarchist, their Peace News supported reformist campaigns with limited objectives, reporting on anti-war and peace activism in Britain and beyond, with contributions from a wide range of writers and organisations.

Taking a Chomskyian view of international affairs, Rai and Johns published exemplary, highly critical coverage of the US and Britain’s post-September 11 2001 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and the so-called war on terror. 

Rai has repeatedly made the connection between the July 7 2005 London terrorist attacks and British foreign policy, highlighted how Britain’s threats to use nuclear weapons amount to nuclear terrorism, and explained how the anti-war movement came very close to stopping British participation in the Iraq war on “Wobbly Tuesday.” 

Other than Media Lens, I can’t think of another publication that has produced such sharp analysis of how the British media invariably produces de facto propaganda when it comes to British foreign policy.

Along with the Morning Star, Peace News is one of the few British publications that highlighted Britain’s involvement in blocking peace talks to end the Russia-Ukraine war in spring 2022. It also reported on how Mark Milley, then the chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, “mounted a sustained public campaign for a negotiated end to the war” in late 2022.

In recent years the paper rightly increased its coverage of the climate crisis and climate activism, with several articles from Carlyle constructively criticising Extinction Rebellion’s strategy and tactics, and some of the wilder claims made by Roger Hallam about the climate science.

More broadly, as well as putting out the 24-page newspaper every other month, the staff organised speaking tours, training workshops, a huge two-day Rebellious Media Conference in 2011, nine summer camps and several exhibitions. They also published a number of books on non-violence and protest, including my 2013 book The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003.

Peace News, then, has been a hugely important voice in the anti-war and peace movement. For me personally, reading and writing for the paper since 2008 has been an education, a privilege, and incredibly inspiring too.

As well as the uncertainty now faced by the four members of staff who have resigned, the future of the Peace News itself is doubtful. 

If it does return it may not be as a newspaper (its worsening finances were one of the sources of conflict between the staff and trustees), and almost certainly won’t be produced by Carlyle, Johns, Rai and Sangster.

A huge, irrevocable loss for anyone interested in a more just and less violent world.

To contact the former Peace News staff members and contribute to the Peace News Staff Solidarity Fund visit https://j-n-v.org. Back issues of Peace News, going back to 2001, can be searched and read at https://peacenews.info.