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Campaigning Activities
We have continued our campaigning activities throughout the summer and autumn of 2023. As well as holding stalls at many of the Reading Festivals, we campaigned in Broad Street on national event days such as ‘Make Polluters Pay Loss and Damage’ outside Barclays bank in September and ‘Make Amazon Pay’ in November. In December a few of us went to London to join the COP 28 march.
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November 8: ‘Pharmanomics’ RISC 7.30 pm
We were lucky to have Nick Dearden (Director, Global Justice Now) come to Reading for the launch of his new book. Pharmaceutical companies make billions of pounds in profit while billions of people are left without essential medicines. In his book, Nick exposes the current problems and shows a pathway to a fairer, safer system of producing medicines for all. Nick says he is genuinely optimistic about the future because he has seen very promising developments around the world.
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Wed 27 September ‘The debt crisis: building solidarity, winning justice’. RISC 7.30 pm
Heidi Chow, Executive Director of Debt Justice, was our speaker. She explained how the rules of our economy are based on the interests of wealthy individuals, governments and corporations, who have turned people’s needs into a source of profit. Debt extracts high rates of interest from those who can least afford it. Heidi went on to show that a more just system requires radical system change to redress this exploitation.
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Autumn Dates for your Diary
Sunday 10 September: A stall at Reading Cycle Festival. Please let me know if you think you will be able to help.
Saturday 23 September: ‘Make Polluters Pay Day’
7.30pm Wednesday 27 September: meeting at RISC
7.30pm Wednesday 8 November: Nick Dearden will be speaking about his new book ‘Pharmanomics’ that will be published in October. (Please note that this meeting has been brought forward by a couple of weeks)
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We left our previous meeting inspired by Jason Hickle’s talk on ‘degrowth’ so we continued the theme at this meeting.
Some members gave short talks to start us to think about ways we could ‘degrow’ our economy and about countries or groups that are already managing well with less. Then we broke into groups to continue the discussion.
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‘How to Save the Planet: Degrowth vs Green Growth?’
Film and Discussion
Wed 24 May 7.30pm at RISC, RG1 4PS
How do we secure a thriving future for humanity and the rest of the living world? Green growth and degrowth proponents take very different stances but they agree that changing the current economic growth model is necessary.
In this video Prof. Samuel Fankhauser and Prof. Jason Hickel went head to head on one of the biggest questions of our time and gave us an interesting introduction for a discussion. The discussion, in small groups with feedback at the end, ranged from criticism of growth to those pressing for urgent action to curb growth. The contributions were lively and the small group format encouraged more to share their views.
We’re part of Global Justice Now, a democratic membership organisation which campaigns against inequality and injustice in the global economy. We want to see a world where ordinary people control the resources they need to live a decent life, rather than corporations and the super rich calling the shots.