The Peace News strategy review (2023 – 2024): Project Theta

Milan Rai
This is a note to explain how the directors and staff of Peace News reacted to the financial crisis that Peace News Trustees (PNT) began revealing to us in mid-2022.

We put together a strategy review that came up with a wide range of possible options for a new version of PN. We tried to be true to the purposes set out in the founding legal document of Peace News as a company. They are very varied and not tied to the publication of a magazine.

You will see listed here a number of Options that we were about to start discussing and shortlisting in August 2024, when the aggressive and uncompromising behaviour of Peace News Trustees forced us all into resigning instead.

If PNT had instead taken the olive branch we offered in mid-August, of a compromise agreement and a gradual transfer of power and control to them, there would have been a shortlisting process to produce a plan of action to be carried out in the summer of 2025, with a new very-slimmed-down PN nonviolence project (maybe a publication, maybe not a publication) alongside a fundraising effort to create something more ambitious (again: maybe a publication, maybe not a publication).

Options (works in progress)

01 The PN Community [a major radical nonviolence organising project inspired by the Movement for a New Society]
02 Art of/for Activism [a focus on nonviolence and creativity]
03 Start Again (Led by Young People) [letting young people set the agenda for the new version of PN]
04 The Platform Model [art, research and political action]
05 This Land is Our Land [buy some land as a base for activity]
06 Peace News Media Institute [annual radical media training sessions]
07 The Voice of Pacifism [pushing nonviolent perspectives into the mainstream media]
08 Full Spectrum Digital [a focus on online work]
09 Skilling Up [a focus on activist training]
10 Elders [activist training focused on the over-50s]
11 Holding Pattern [maintain the website until a big grant comes in]

Plus: 12 Paper – Some Options for Keeping PN a Physical Magazine
This was a paper I wrote privately for the PN Board in June 2024 explaining some of the difficulties we faced as a physical paper magazine, and some of the ways we could continue as an actual, hold-in-your-hands paper product. (Because it was written for the Board, some of it is not immediately understandable: it needs footnotes.)

Project Theta: the long version

After the news broke in mid-2022 that Peace News Trustees (PNT) had lost £100,000 and then, at the beginning of 2023, that PNT’s financial support for Peace News would be cut drastically, it was clear that Peace News would have to have a strategy review.

PNT announced in August 2023 that it would lead a strategy review of the whole group of companies: Peace News, Housmans Bookshop (one of London’s few remaining radical bookshops, housed on the ground floor of the Peace News building, 5 Caledonian Road, not far from Kings Cross in Central London), and PNT itself (PNT owns 5 Caledonian Road and rents out office space in it to organisations and individuals).

The Peace News staff began preparing to take part in the PNT strategy review, writing papers and so on. The Peace News Board, however, decided we should not take part in the PNT-led strategy review.

The four non-staff members of the Peace News Board felt that it would be wrong to enter a PNT-led review when the relationship between Peace News and Peace News Trustees was so bad. The Peace News directors felt that, unless this relationship were repaired, we (Peace News staff and directors) would put a huge amoung of effort into coming up with new ideas, only for them to be shot down by PNT in the end. PNT was being so oppressive and dismissive and negative towards Peace News that taking part in a PNT-led review would be a waste of all our time.

The Peace News Board, led by the non-staff members, decided that we should only take part in a strategy review with PNT after we had established a healthy and mutually-respectful relationship with them. (The two staff members of the Peace News Board at this point were Emily Johns and Emma Sangster.)

The Peace News Board then put a huge amount of effort into what it called ‘the Relationship process’, a kind of mediation effort involving three Board members (Muzammal Hussain, Henrietta Cullinan and Emily Johns) on the Peace News side, and Glyn Carter on the PNT side. Muzammal explained how that process went in the last issue of Peace News.

Starting the process

After a while, the Peace News Board decided that it made sense for us to start generating ideas for the new Peace News, even without a good relationship with PNT. We would try to do the two things in parallel: improve the relationship with PNT while also trying to make sensible plans for a new version of Peace News.

One of the first things we did was hold an Away Day in North London where we studied the Articles of Association and the Memorandum of Association of Peace News Ltd, the company.

We started by focusing on the ‘objects’ or aims of the company when it was set up. We realised that these were very broad, including education and training, peace research, and organising conferences.

All sorts of things were specifically mentioned as possible activities of the organisation as it tried to help build ‘a pacifist society’. The aim was not just to publish a magazine. (Of course, in 1936, when Peace News was founded, they couldn’t have imagined all the ways we now have of ‘publishing’ a ‘magazine’ with news and comment in it – podcasts, blogs, online video, substack email newsletters, PDFs posted on the internet, paywall websites and so on.)

After looking at the aims of Peace News Ltd, we felt very freed up to have wild thoughts about how Peace News could develop and we played a game to generate ideas.

A small group was asked to go away and develop some proposals for a new Peace News, based on the suggestions generated at the Away Day, and also suggestions from people around the peace movement. The small group of Henrietta Cullinan, Gabriel Carlyle and Milan Rai was called ‘the Dream Team’. It was Henrietta’s idea to call the strategy review ‘Project Theta’ because the Greek letter ‘theta’ doesn’t mean anything in particular to people in Britain today. (After the Board agreed to this name, we discovered that theta was associated in ancient times with death, because theta was used as an abbreviation for ‘thanatos’ or ‘death’. The letter theta was used in the same way we now use a skull-and-crossbones: to indicate death.)

The Dream Team interviewed activists in Scotland, Wales and England and held open consultation sessions in Edinburgh and Manchester. We also appealed for suggestions in the pages of Peace News.

Options

The Dream Team then turned these conversations and suggestions into a number of Options. Some of these options have been written up. Some suggestions were not written up but were going to feed into the strategy review conversation.

For example, one possible focus suggested was ‘good governance’, which would have meant suspending Peace News for a while to allow people from Peace News, Housmans Bookshop and Peace News Trustees to create a better organisational structure and culture for PN and Housmans to sit inside and be supported by. (One idea that had been put forward years earlier by a chair of Peace News Trustees was for all the companies involved to be turned into co-operatives, linked together in a larger ‘secondary’ co-operative.)

Another option that was not written up fully was to focus on new uses of the building, 5 Caledonian Road. It was already clear that there would have to be substantial work on the building soon, because of new environmental standards due to come into force for commercial buildings in 2030. The thought behind this option was to see this crisis as an opportunity to reimagine the building and how it might serve the peace movement. Effort and money would go into that, rather than into Peace News, for a while, was the idea.

There were other options that were not written up that were more central to Peace News itself, including suggestions for how Peace News could continue as a paper publication. As the conflict with PNT got worse, the Dream Team did not have the time or energy to investigate or cost these options in detail (some of them are in Options 12 ‘Paper’).

As we were drawing up Options for the new Peace News, we tried to put them into two categories: Core Work and Ambitious Projects.

‘Core Work’ mean activities that Peace News could carry out with a very reduced level of PNT financial support. These were ideas that could be put into practice from our own funds (and what we hoped readers/supporters might be willing to contribute).

‘Ambitious Projects’, on the other hand, could only go ahead if there was a big fundraising push, bringing in a lot of money – maybe on a permanent, ongoing basis; maybe every year for a set number of years; maybe just as a one-off donation.

Options (works in progress)

12 Paper [some options for keeping PN a physical magazine]

Between two stools

Some people in PNT and in Peace News believed that the magazine might be seen as a cornerstone of the peace movement, like Seeds for Change/Navigate, the activist training collectives, or Drone Wars UK, and receive long-term funding for core costs. Others were more sceptical, given the large number of activist magazines and newsletters that exist.

If Peace News was going to carry on at the same scale it had been for many years, that would be an Ambitious Project, needing either a significant chunk of outside funding on top of PNT support, or a huge amount of volunteer labour. Red Pepper has been a major activist magazine for decades with its editorial, layout and admin work done by volunteers (and with one or two paid staffers doing political outreach and co-ordinating the volunteers). For many years, Freedom, the anarchist magazine, only had one paid worker, the layout person. (Freedom is now online only.)

Peace News has been in an uncomfortable halfway house for decades, not big enough or well-funded enough to be a New Internationalist or New Statesman, but also trying to have a professional paid staff, unlike most activist papers.

What kind of budget would the new Peace News have? What did ‘Core Work’ really mean? In recent years, PNT’s financial support had run at around £35,000. The loss of the £100,000 meant this would have to drop by at least £10,000 a year.

The then PNT Treasurer indicated in early 2023 that it would have to drop by a lot more, because PNT needed to rebuild its financial reserves. The exact amount Peace News would receive after ‘the transition’ was not made clear, despite repeated requests.

Finally, in mid-2024, the chair of PNT said PNT financial support would continue to be the same as during the transition: £21,000 a year.

In Peace News, we were dubious. There were no signs that PNT had a clear financial plan for the future, and it had not even begun to assess how much it would cost to bring 5 Caledonian Road up to the strict environmental standards required by 2030.

Our Core Work suggestions were based on £21,000 a year as a working figure, but we thought this was optimistic. This was a drop of £14,000 or 40 percent from the £35,000 of earlier years.

The rest of the timeline

If we hadn’t been driven to resign by PNT threats and bullying in August 2024, the next phase of Project Theta would have been for the Dream Team to circulate its list of Options to the Peace News Board for the Board to begin making a shortlist of possible Core Work and Ambitious Project Options. (When I say ‘the Peace News Board’, I mean the Board minus the two Peace News Trustees directors who had been imposed on the Board without its consent.)

The shortlist of Options would then have been put in front of PNT at its meeting in November, for Peace News Trustees to say whether any of the shortlisted Options violated the nonviolence mission of Peace News, or if any of them posed a financial risk to the organisation.

Whatever Options survived this scrutiny by PNT would then have gone back to the Peace News Board to be investigated further and debated to create a shortlist of two Core Work ideas and two Ambitious Projects. This would then have been whittled down to one Core Work and one Ambitious Project in January 2025.

The staff would then have begun preparing to put the Core Work project into action in the summer of 2025 (almost certainly involving redundancies for most of the staff) and the staff and Board would have begun creating a fundraising strategy and writing grant applications for the Ambitious Project.

It might have taken years to raise the funds for the Ambitious Project. During that time, the Core Work project would have continued making a small positive contribution to nonviolent grassroots movements for social change.

The Options were each written up by a single member of the Dream Team, with some input from the other two. We tried to be faithful to the wide-open blue-skies thinking of the Away Day in January 2024 that really started off the process.

The overriding message that came out of that Away Day was that Peace News should not lock itself away as an insiders’ club, but that it should make the strongest efforts to reach out and include as many different strands of thinking and action as it could, with an emphasis on resisting patriarchy.