Marcus Rashford is a professional footballer who plays for Premier League club Manchester United and England. He has launched and been involved with quite a few campaigns, most notably on child food poverty. in this episode we talk with Jo Ralling, who helped to run the feed the future and the #EndChildFoodPoverty campaigns for the Food Foundation, where she is head of campaigns. She previously worked with Jamie Oliver on various food campaigns including Sugar Smart. The Food Foundation...

In the 1970s and 80s, 4,689 British haemophiliacs were treated with blood products contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C. More than half of them have died. At the time, the medication was imported from the US where it was made from the pooled blood plasma of thousands of paid donors, including some in high-risk groups, such as prisoners. If a single donor was infected with a blood-borne virus such as hepatitis or HIV then the whole batch of medication could be contaminated. Official documents...

The British Anti-Apartheid Movement was at the centre of the international movement opposing the South African racial segregation system, Apartheid . By the late 1980s the UK Movement had unleashed a number of campaigns and branches and become one of the most powerful international solidarity efforts in history. In this interview we feature three prominent UK anti-apartheid activists and organisers from the time: Chitra Karve, who was an Anti-Apartheid Movement staff member from 1986 to 1989...

Emilye Crosby, professor of history and the coordinator of Black Studies at SUNY Geneseo, and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor for the History Department in the Ohio State University, reflect on the tactics and strategies of the Freedom Riders. The Freedom Rides were a key part of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Riders rode buses through the American South in 1961 to protest against segregated bus terminals. They tried to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch...

Tackling air pollution in a city like London is a big and important job. Mum's for Lungs founder Jemima Hartshorn explains how setting up and running a community-based, grassroots campaigning organisation on a part-time basis is both inspiring and challenging. Crowdsourcing campaign ideas and operating a parent-friendly model are some of the ways in which Mum's for Lungs stands out. Jemima also reflects on issues like the ULEZ (London Ultra Low Emmissions Zone) and how the issue has become...

Jubilee 2000 was an international coalition movement in over 40 countries that called for cancellation of poor country debt by the year 2000. The campaign was hugely successful, leading to large quantities of debts being cancelled. Here I speak with Adrian Lovett, formerly Deputy Director of Jubilee 2000 and leader of the successor organisation, Drop the Debt. Adrian, now CEO of Development Initiatives, which seeks to harness the power of data and evidence to end poverty, talks about how the...

Together for Yes is an abortion rights campaign group in Ireland. It campaigned successfully for a Yes vote in the 2018 referendum to remove the Eighth Amendment's constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland. In this episode I talk with Ailbhe Smyth, an Irish academic, and the founding director of the Women's Education, Resource and Research Centre at University College Dublin. As well as being involved in campaigns on women’s liberation in the 1970s and on equal marriage she was named as one...

This episode is on the campaign for equal marriage in the uk, sometimes referred to as gay marriage. The interviewee is Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK. Andrew was very much involved as a leader of the campaign which led legislation to allow same-sex marriage in England and Wales. The legislation was passed by the UK Parliament 10 years ago, in July 2013. In England and Wales, the first major campaign for same-sex marriage was Equal Love established by Peter Tatchell in 2010....

In this episode, long-time friend and collaborator Chris Stalker and I look back at some of the previous campaigns that the podcast has covered and try to tease out some common lessons and insights for campaigners and people interested in campaiging think about. Chris lives in Brooklyn, New York and has over 30 years of experience working in the non-profit sector having conducted close to 100 campaigning evaluations as well as working in senior advocacy roles at Oxfam, Amnesty International...

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...

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  See...

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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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. 

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...

This podcast features back to back interviews with two experts on the slave trade and the British campaign to end it: Dr Richard Huzzey, Associate Professor of History at Durham University and Dr Richard Benjamin, Head of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. the two Richards talk about aspect of the campaign to end the slave trade, and what lessons there are for modern campaigners.  As a side note, Richard Huzzey is a co-author of a report commissioned by Friends of the Earth about...

in the 2000s AIDS campaigners took the issue of access to free drugs for HIV and AIDS global ... and won. With Kirsty McNeill and Simon Wright from Save the Children UK.

Episode 5 contains an interview with Kumi Naidoo, the South African Secretary General of Amnesty International, and well known campaigner on global poverty, climate justice and human rights. He covers and touches on several campaigns including Make Poverty History, Anti-Apartheid and climate change campaigns. Kumi speaks frankly about the current state of civil society, progress being won and lost and how he keeps motivated in the face of external and internal challenges.  

This interview is with Fiona Weir who is talking to me today about the Ozone layer campaign which led to phase out of most products that deplete the ozone, such as aerosols and air conditioning coolants with chlorofluorocarbons. Scientists first discovered a hole in the ozone layer hole in 1985 and attributed its appearance to the use of CFCs. Friends of the Earth along with other organisations quickly mobilised to get an international agreement which saw CFCs being phased out. It is widely...

This episode features Margaret Aspinall, chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group. The Hillsborough disaster led to the campaign for justice for the 96 Liverpool fans who died in a crush in Hillsborough stadium during a football match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. There is a lot of information to be found about the disaster, for instance a very good BBC film from 2016. The Hillsborough justice campaign has been one of the most high-profile campaigns in the UK, which has seen...