100 Campaigns that Changed the World

The start of season 2!

I speak with Paul Afshar who is spokesperson for the campaign end our cladding scandal. The scandal in the UK started to come to the fore after the grenfel tower fire. In June 2017, a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in west London,. 72 people died, two later in hospital, with more than 70 injured. It was the worst UK residential fire since World War II. The fire was started by an electrical fault but This spread rapidly up the outside of the building -accelerated by dangerously combustible aluminium composite cladding and external insulation.

Nearly five years after Grenfell, millions remain trapped in unsafe buildings, facing life-changing bills they can’t and shouldn’t have to pay.

The End Our Cladding Scandal campaign is a bottom up, resident-led campaign and a collaboration between Inside Housing, UK Cladding Action Group, Manchester Cladiators, Grenfell United, and many other resident groups. It calls on the Government to lead an urgent, national effort to fix the building safety crisis exposed by the Grenfell tragedy.

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Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice is a campaign that has called for accountability for the UK Government Response to Covid and for the lessons to be learned so that mistakes are avoided in future pandemics. In this episode Campaign Director Nathan Oswin tells us how the campaign has been successful, and what the challanges were.

You can join here: https://covidfamiliesforjustice.org/ and there is also a Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/covidfamiliesforjusticeuk 

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Blair McDougall explains the success of - and the stories around - the Better Together Campaign which set out the case for staying in the UK during the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014. 

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I speak to Hugo Tagholm from Surfers Against Sewage who have been campaiging UK government and water companies to end sewage pollution in rivers and the ocean.

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Joe Blott talks about the campaign to stop the European Super League proposal, which included some of Europe's biggest clubs and collapsed within 72 hours after widespread criticism from fans, players and governing bodies and politicians.

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My guest is Helen Pankhurst, women's rights activist and great grandaughter of Emily Pankhurst, and togther we examine the Suffragette's role in the campaign for women's suffrage.

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Peter has been campaigning since the 60s on issues of human rights, democracy, LGBT freedom, and global justice. From the late 70s onwards, he proposed a single, comprehensive Equal Rights Act to harmonise the uneven patchwork of equality legislation. This proposal was eventually secured with the passage of the Equality Act 2010. In 1994, he named 10 Anglican bishops and urged them to “Tell The Truth” about their sexuality; accusing them of homophobia and hypocrisy. Four years later interrupted the Easter Sermon of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, in protest at his opposition to gay equality. In 1999, in London, he ambushed the motorcade of the Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, attempting a citizen’s arrest on charges of torture. A repeat attempt in Brussels in 2001 resulted in him being beaten unconscious by Mugabe’s bodyguards. He coordinated the Equal Love campaign from 2010, in a bid to overturn the UK’s twin legal bans on same-sex civil marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships – helping win same-sex marriage but, not yet, opposite-sex civil partnerships. He is Director of the human rights organisation, the Peter Tatchell Foundation https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/

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The Windrush scandal erupted in 2018 when it emerged that many British people who arrived from the Carribean before 1973 were being wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in some cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Guy Hewitt exaplains how the campaign to get justice for the affected was a kind of campaigning 'perfect storm' and how his heterodox background helped him play a leading role.

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Clive Stafford Smith is the founder of Reprieve and the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center and in this episode we talk about his role in the long running campaign to close the prison on the US military base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. To date, Clive has helped secure the release of 69 prisoners from Guantánamo Bay (including every British prisoner) and still acts for eight more and he talks candidly about the challenges he has faced and how he and other overcame them. 

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In November 2015 London's Metropolitan Police was forced to apologise to seven women "tricked into relationships" over a period of 25 years by officers from two undercover police squads. The officers involved - just some of 140 officers who took part in such operations - had eventually vanished, leaving victims feeling as if – in their words - they had been subject to "psychological torture". The disclosures led to the closing of the units concerned, and the setting up the Undercover Policing Inquiry under retired judge Sir John Mitting.

One group representing at least 30 victims of such practices, which my interviewee in this episode is associated with is Police Spies Out of Lives who work with other groups and jointly operate a campaign called Spycops, which aims to bring out the truth and get justice for the victims to ensure that such activities never take place again. 

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