100 campaigns that changed the world by Steve Tibbett

Our guest is on this episode Rebecca Gowland, the executive director of Patriotic Millionaires UK, which is a network of British millionaires, from multiple industries and backgrounds, from across the UK, to use what they call the ‘voice of wealth’ to build a more just, stable, and inclusive economy, and their aim is the end of extreme wealth. They have a profound concern about the destabilising level of economic and political inequality. And they want to see more economic and political equality. In the U.S., the group was founded in 2010 by Erica Payne under the name "Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength". It was initially formed to advocate for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts during the Obama administration.

The guest on this episode is Shaista Aziz, one of The Three Hijabis—a powerful anti-racism campaign that began with a viral tweet in 2021. What started as three British Muslim women watching England play in the Euros soon became a national movement, after racist abuse targeted Black players Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka. Their petition to ban racists from football for life gained over a million signatures in just 48 hours, forced government action, and sparked a global conversation about inclusion in the sport. With 12 million petition views and a lasting impact on football culture, their story is a testament to how activism can challenge hate and reclaim spaces for everyone. Amnesty crisis response campaigner, working on gaza. 

The guest on this episode is Dawn Astle. Dawn is the daughter of Jeff Astle, who played football for West Bromwich Albion in the 60’s and 70’s. At the age of 55, Jeff was diagnosed with dementia, and he died four years later. The pathologist who officiated Jeff’s death said his brain looked like the brain of a boxer. Dawn has been campaigning since then for a change in the rules about heading in football. She has also helped win significant victories, notably with a ban coming into place in youth football this year and next year. But there is a lot more to do.

In this opening episode of Season 3 of 100 Campaigns that Changed the World, I speak with Duncan Green – one of the most respected thinkers and practitioners in global development and social change. Duncan is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB, Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics, and author of the widely read blog From Poverty to Power. His influential book How Change Happens has shaped how campaigners and policy-makers think about power, systems, and transformation. Drawing on decades of experience in international advocacy, Duncan reflects on what it really takes to create lasting change – and what campaigners today can learn from the past.

An expert panel of seasoned campaigners who have dealt with disinformation and falsehoods, our first live panel event sheds light on how campaigners can navigate the issues and counter conspiracy theories, lies and half-truths. The panel consisted of

Dr. Kush Kanodia is a multi-award-winning campaigner on disability rights and is Sheila Mackechnie Foundation’s Campaigner of the year. His own disability has fuelled his lifelong commitment to social justice. He shifted from a successful investment banking career to focus on disability rights.

The Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen movement wants the city of Berlin to transfer real estate into public ownership, expropriating the city’s large corporate landlords: those who have more than 3,000 units (an estimated 11% of the city’s housing stock). Launched in 2018 but dating back to 2010, the initiative focused on increasing rents and poor-quality housing in a city where 85% of people live in rented accommodation.

The Corn Laws were a series of trade restrictions and tariffs on imported grain (wheat, oats, barley and rye – not corn) that were in effect in the UK from 1815 to 1846. The Passed by Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in response to a strained post-war economy, they were intended to favour domestic agriculture by making it more difficult to import grain. Campaigning on the laws focused on the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League. The goal of the League was the ‘immediate and total abolition’ of the Corn Laws, the wording deliberately echoing the successful anti-slavery agitations, but the broader aim was to promote global free trade. Free traders used abstract reasoning to argue that their policy was in the national interest. They also used masive public petitions. One further outcome of the campaign was the founding of The Economist magazine.

The guest on this episode is Laura Coryton, a British campaigner, feminist activist and author who started the "Stop taxing periods, period" campaign in 2014, while she was still a student. The campaign sought to abolish the 'tampon tax' in the United Kingdom by making menstrual products exempt from VAT. The campaign and petition on Change.org successfully pushed the UK Parliament into establishing the Tampon Tax Fund in 2016, through which almost £100m was donated to female-focused charities. Her campaign finally succeeded in 2021, when the tax on all period products was axed. Loads of great insights from a campaigner who started from scratch and changed something important through determination mixed with strategic direction.

Lynx began their anti-fur campaign back in the mid 1980’s. By using innovative advertising and media campaigns such as the famous David Bailey ‘Dumb Animals’ poster and cinema commercials, consumer attitudes towards the wearing of fur in the UK changed dramatically. Most department stores used to have fur salons and fur could be found almost everywhere on the high street. More and more department and high street stores started to adopt ‘fur free’ policies such as the Fur Free Retailer programme and the wearing of fur is no longer seen as acceptable. Partly thanks to the campaign, fur farming has been banned in England and Wales since 2000 and in Scotland and Northern Ireland since 2002

In a really fascinating example of litigation-led campaigning, a group of senior women in Switzerland argue that - because they suffer more from frequent and intense heatwaves - Switzerland must do its bit to keep global heating below 1.5ºC. KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz (Senior Women for Climate Protection) is a group of elderly women in Switzerland, initially formed by a group of 40 in 2016, but now numbering more than 2,500. After exhausting all national options, they took their case to the European Court of Human Rights. The Court’s decision this April (2024), has set a crucial legal precedent that establishes States’ human rights climate change obligations..

Stop Funding Hate is a pressure group which asks companies to stop advertising in, and therefore stop providing funds for, certain British newspapers that it argues use "fear and division to sell more papers". It was launched in August 2016, by a group of people who came together online to highlight how some British newspapers were using hate and division to drive sales. This was a time of unprecedented amounts of negative headlines about migrants and refugees in newspapers: particulary the Sun, Daily Mail and the Express.

Yaseen Aslam is a great example of a 'lived experience' campaigner. He started working as a private taxi or ‘minicab’ driver in London in 2006 and moved to taxi firm Uber when the company launched its Uber X service in 2013.

This spisode features an interview with Angela Madden, the Financer Director and Chair of WASPI - the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign.

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 spearheads the End Child Food Poverty Coalition which consists of a group of more than 30 organisations supporting the call from Marcus Rashford for the Government to improve the diets and food access of children in low-income families.

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 presented to the inquiry revealed this therapy was given as part of clinical trials.

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.

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 counters at bus stations in Alabama, South Carolina and other Southern states. Along their routes, the freedom riders were met with violence and confrontation by police and white protestors (many of whom were members of the Klu Klux Klan. The protest drew international attention to the civil rights movement and was a pivotal moment in the wider civil rights struggle.

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 politically weaponised in recents months.

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 Jubilee campaign became very high profile, getting noticed by world leaders and finding media coverage through celebrity engagement, and combined that with mass mobilisation, policy and evidence. We pick out some lessons for campaigners and reflect on what worked and some things that didn't.

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.

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 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.

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.

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. 

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 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/

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 Inquiry under retired judge Sir John Mitting.

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. 

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.

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 the families of the 96 set against parts of the British establishment, especially the police, who have been shown to have spread misinformation on a grand scale. 

The Tax Justice Network is an independent international network launched in 2003. Their mission is to ‘change the weather’ on a wide range of issues related to tax, tax havens and financial globalisation. We push for systemic change. 

In this pilot episode recorded last year I talk to David Hillman, who cut his campaigning teeth on the anti-Apartheid campaign before going on to work on the hugely successful effort to ban landmines and drop developing country debt. He is currently director of Stamp Out Poverty, working for a number of years on new sources of finance for development and leading UK campaigning for a Financial Transaction Tax. In 2010 he also helped create the Robin Hood Tax campaign, a network of more than 100 UK charities, trade unions, faith organisations and green groups pressing for a tax on financial transaction.