Manchester’s Afzal Khan, former Lord Mayor of the city and current MEP for the NW of England, has received thousands of messages asking him to reject the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Khan told local campaigners last Friday he was still undecided on whether to vote for or against CETA, the controversial Canada/EU trade deal, when its fate will be decided on the 15 February in the European Parliament.
The full story on The Meteor:
The grim reaper explains the benefits of this profit seeking, whilst WDM Manchester collect cards in St Ann’s Square to send to HSBC CEO saying that this is disastrous for this child’s future. Use legislation to stop bankers addiction
Follow link to the newspaper and join us outside The Unicon Supermarket in Chorlton at mid day Saturday 4th May. We recently did something similar on Grand National Saturday – we collected a sack full of signatures but did not save any gamblers on the horse. Let’s work to make sure the story is different for the addicted bankers.
Knutsford- believed by some to be named after Cnut/Canute- might not be Paris but did provide GJ Manchester and supporters with a significant venue for a solidarity demonstration at the end of the COP21. It seemed our social media announcement had been picked up by the Police as we were met by a modest presence of PCSO and constable who just happened to be standing around in the rain for no obvious reason.
Difficulties finding an iconic and relevant target where there would be significant foot-fall on the right day in Manchester led us to decide to invite others to come out of town with us to where George Osborne has his constituency office with a message asking him to recognise as Canute did that you can’t ignore or boss nature- though you can mess it up with fracking, subsidies to fossil fuel companies, and irresponsible corporate exploitation.
Some participants dressed in red and had produced their own placards whilst others dressed as businessmen to oppose them and turned up in continuous rain which put a damper on deploying our giant prop, the “grim reaper”.
George wasn’t in when we called- though a couple of eastern European cleaners were getting the Conservative Club ready for a letting that evening so we focused on being seen by passing traffic. We were also seen by enthusiasts for high-performance sports cars who were gathered across the street at the McLaren showrooms where some rather expensive machines were being shown off. We resisted the temptation to pick a squabble and stayed on message- being rewarded by Stavros Lynch from Ireland who had come to see the cars.
He shot a spontaneous film and interviewed three of us, subsequently posting it on his facebook page (Stavros969) and letting us know where to find it. (It can be seen on facebook.com/GlobalJusticeManchester/.) This was great as the expected photographic support hadn’t shown up and we were scratching to get materials with a couple of us having to come out of the protest line-up to take snaps.
There were few pedestrians near us so we offered copies of the COP21 Times to drivers stopping at the roundabout and after a couple of hours packed up to go home, dropping a copy of the paper through the Constituency Office letterbox.
+’s:
-’s:
Moral: If you don’t get it right, do what you can, and have another go afterwards, learning from the experience!
Kindling Conference on Solving Inequities in the Food Production
The ‘Making Food Fair’ conference, hosted by the Kindling Trust, took place on Saturday 22nd November, bringing together a fantastic range of speakers with over 70 people to explore the inequities of the current food system.
The event provided an opportunity to explore how we can make our food system fairer and more sustainable across the whole food supply chain.
This broader perspective opened up the discussion to consider how our food system is perpetuating poverty for UK farmers as they struggle to make a living, whilst at the opposite end of the food chain, many families are unable to afford healthy food.
With our food system continuing to fail so many, it is essential that we continue to discuss ways in which we can work towards a more equitable system.
Making Food Fair provided a brilliant platform on which to do just that. The broad range of perspectives covered by the speakers, alongside the diversity of those attending the event, made for an exciting and inspiring exchange of ideas in the afternoon group discussions.
The presentations from all of speakers were filmed on the day, and will be posted online soon.
In the meantime, to get a snapshot of the day check out #makingfoodfair on twitter, or to find out more about how The Kindling Trust are working to make food fairer in Manchester, visit www.kindling.org.uk.
