Refugees and Migrants

Janine sonnet, Another Country, is included in the anthology Poetry and Settled Status for All, published by Civic Leicester.

It is reviewed in Cambridge University's Varsity.

Artillery rounds
and a barrage of shellfire
It looks and it sounds
like extending an empire

Bombing and shooting
civilians slain
Expansionist Putin
invading Ukraine

Threatening nukes
and rain hell from the skies
Dismissing rebukes
with chauvinist lies

Conscripts uprooting
and sent in to 'train'
Murderous Putin -
get out of Ukraine!

Janine performs her poem 'Babyface' in Cambridge in 2016.

Published in RMT News, July/August 2021

RMT members have helped to win justice for Osime Brown, a young, black, autistic, learning-disabled man. The union saw this as an issue that deserved our support and solidarity. Janine Booth, Secretary of RMT’s Disabled Members’ Advisory Committee, explains why.

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A version of this was published in Solidarity 568:

This story of colour bars in the UK railway and bus industries begins after the Second World War, when Britain had a labour shortage and people moved to Britain in increasing numbers from Caribbean countries and elsewhere.

NUR Opposes Racism

Speaking at an online meeting of rail workers in September, Janine Booth tells the story of the period after the end of the Second World War when black people came to Britain but met opposition from some white workers, until the 'colour bar' was defeated in 1966.

Janine addresses the protest in support of Osime Brown outside the Home Office on Friday 4 September - includes the poems Free Osime Brown and Bearing Down.

Please sign Osime's petition here.

• published in Solidarity 564

British courts’ application of ‘joint enterprise’ is unjust, and criminalises black and working-class youth.

‘Joint enterprise’ is a common-law doctrine that allows courts to convict not only the person who carried out a crime, but others who helped them to do it. In principle, that sounds reasonable. But since 1984, British courts have used it to convict people who they think knew the crime was going to happen, even if they did not help carry it out.

Published in Solidarity 562:

To see the roots of poverty

the plight of the have-nots

Don't look at little dinghies

but at massive super-yachts