SchNEWS at ten
by Andy Worthington
[ bookreviews ]
For 10 years now, Brighton's SchNEWS collective of committed volunteers has been producing a weekly newsletter - printed in densely packed text on two sides of A4 paper, and latterly as a downloadable PDF file - which looks at issues of contemporary political relevance that are either ignored by the mainstream media or covered only in fits and starts.
This celebration of SchNEWS' 10th anniversary follows a format established over many years, whereby each year's reports are collected into hefty paperback annuals, augmented with hundreds of photos, satires on advertising, and cartoons, including the work of the talented Kate Evans, whose book Copse remains one of the highpoints of the literature of the road protest movement, and the long-running "If Ordinary People Behaved Like" series, in which the activities of corporations are placed in a domestic context (for instance, an oil executive urinates into a public swimming pool while declaring, "No one cares more than I do about the health and cleanliness of the pool we all share").
Introductory essays establish the roots of the current protest movements in the travelling free festival scene of the 1970s and 1980s and the road protest movement of the early 1990s, as well as running through the events - largely to do with the popular uproar against the Criminal Justice Act - that led to the setting up of SchNEWS in a squatted courthouse in Brighton "with people wearing silly wigs reading out the alternative news", and the establishment of the newsletter's regular features - the "CJA Arrestometer", which notified readers of the arrest tally in the early days of the CJA, the ever-popular "Crap Arrests" section, which continues to this day, and "Inside SchNEWS", an occasional column "offering news and updates about people we know about who are in prison and could do with support or at least a friendly letter".
The book's central sections contain detailed reports of the events of the last decade. In the UK, these include the road protest movement (and similar actions against quarrying and mining), Reclaim the Streets, the Trident Ploughshares anti-war activists, the Liverpool Dockers, the McLibel Trial, animal rights protestors, hunt saboteurs, the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and anti-GM activists.
After the first meeting of People's Global Action in Geneva in March 1998, at which SchNEWS activists were present, the collective also became part of the struggle against global capitalism, with campaigners sending front-line correspondence from the huge demonstrations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Summit in Seattle, the IMF/World Bank Summit in Prague and the G8 Summit in Genoa, as well as other gatherings in Washington DC, Melbourne, Nice, Davos, Naples, Quebec and Gothenburg. There has also been a series of 'Busman's Holidays' reports from British activists working with the Zapatistas in Mexico, running aid convoys to Kosovo, and campaigning in West Papua, Palestine and Iraq.
Recent stories confirm that the SchNEWS team's perspective on global politics remains as pertinent as ever. Since 2003, the newsletter has covered direct actions against the invasion of Iraq (with particular emphasis on protests by schoolchildren and the campaign at RAF Fairford), Foundation Hospitals, the DSEi Arms Fair in Docklands, the WTO Summit at Cancun in Mexico, the plight of Gypsies in the UK, and updates from the protest camps at Blackwood in South Wales, Nine Ladies in Derbyshire, and Scotland's Faslane Peace Camp, established in 1982 and still going strong.
The book concludes with another raft of additional worthwhile chapters - 'Behind the Scenes' at SchNEWS Central, where the reader learns, rather gratifyingly, that the newsletter is put together on a co-operative basis with no room for ego-trips ("if you are precious about your work being edited then this is the wrong place for you") and gets to share in the thrill of coming up with jargon-free copy and alternative tabloid headlines ("Police enter Dead Woman's Bottom" being perhaps the best, referring to a protest camp at a proposed quarry site in the Mendips). There are also some suggestions for 'Grassroots Resistance' at a local level, including examples of community initiatives in Brighton, Worthing and London, a punchy bibliography and a 'Yellow Pages' section containing a heart-warmingly long list of A-Z resources covering everything from anarchism to workers' rights.
