The Canary Workers' Co-op

I am a first-generation immigrant of Pakistani origin, now living in Birmingham, UK. Born and raised in the UAE, I grew up witnessing a racialised hierarchy of migrant workers. Experiencing the less-privileged end of a deeply unequal society has served to build in me a lifelong commitment to anti-capitalism and anti-racism.

I’ve been an English nerd since I was a child and initially completed an undergraduate degree in English via distance learning. I also later obtained an MPhil in Religious Studies from the University of Birmingham. I have a background in academic project management and research, with a focus on Islamophobia, racism, and intersecting oppressions.

I’ve been writing for online media since 2012 and have since contributed to a number of progressive outlets. As a Muslim woman writer and researcher, I’ve tried to write about issues that affect my community in a way that defies the western gaze. My commitment to critical thinking, combined with a relentless pursuit of truth and justice, is something I try to bring through in my writing.

I joined the Canary as a writer in 2018 and became an editor in 2020. In my current role, I’ve dedicated myself to ensuring the delivery of journalism that is as rigorous as it is radical, in an environment where my co-workers can thrive. I’m also a parent, foodie, and ardent binge watcher of TV shows from several parts of the world.

I started working at the Canary early in 2022 as a copy editor, though since then I’ve also written articles and trained as an editor. My work tends to focus on treatments of LGBT+ individuals – particularly trans people – in UK media and politics.

My previous academic work has focused on Anglophone representations of non-binary identities – I received a PhD in English literature from the University of Sheffield in 2021. I have written and edited creative and non-fiction texts on queer issues for publication over the last 5 years.

All of my work is informed by my lived experience as a non-binary transfem living in an increasingly hostile Britain, and by seeing mainstream media choked with worsening transphobia every day.

I come from an activist background and spent several decades working on animal rights, environmental, and social justice campaigns. I used film extensively throughout this work as an important way to communicate ideas and information, and it is something I continue to value and do in my role as video editor at the Canary.

I’m interested in finding ways to dismantle power structures and hierarchies, especially as our current political system isn’t fit for purpose. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I find being somewhere in nature – walking in woods, hiking up hills, or swimming in rivers – is the best medicine.

I am a democratic socialist who focuses mainly on economic inequality and the failings of legacy media.

We are at a crossroads with multiple crises staring us in the face, yet no mainstream political party or media organisation is capable of dealing with them.

We have forgotten to imagine a better world and are now even struggling to defend our basic rights.

I didn’t have a private education akin to most mainstream pundits; I don’t have a plethora of decorated qualifications in journalism – I just had a burning injustice of our political and economic system and wanted to do something.

I have been providing political commentary for the Canary for over a year, an organisation that amplifies working class people like me who yearn to make a difference.

Our transition to a workers’ co-op empowers us all to democratically decide our organisation’s direction and shows we are not talking the talk, but that we mean business.

I’ve been a Canary writer since 2019. I’m from a dilapidated seaside town where working class people were led to believe we could never become journalists.

My path to writing was through activism, surrounded by amazing people who were producing their own leaflets and articles, talking about why we should oppose the arms trade, or how we can create a future beyond capitalism. Along with others, I started researching the corporations that I was opposing, and I was taught the skills needed to become not only a writer, but a researcher, too.

I believe in an anarchist utopia: a world without hierarchy and borders. My writing covers a diversity of topics, from state repression to fox hunting.

I’m co-author and editor of a number of books and reports, including Struggles for Autonomy in Kurdistan and Interviews with Radical Palestinian Women.

My writing and my activism are intrinsically linked. I became a journalist through my activism. I believe in the power of words to change, persuade and inform. But I don’t believe the pen is mightier than the sword. Both are necessary because we live in a corporate capitalist world that needs dismantling if we’re ever going to save this beautiful dying planet. I’m an anarchist who wants to see workers and communities reclaiming their lives, empowering themselves to look after each other and organising themselves collectively.

As a result of my beliefs and actions, I’ve been arrested repeatedly, faced police harassment and violence and been betrayed by supposed friends who were corporate and police spies. I’ve been harassed, assaulted, labelled as a domestic extremist and had two breakdowns. But I know my experiences are nothing compared to the brutal and racist policing faced by marginalised communities on a daily basis. This is why so much of my recent work has been around policing and dismantling the colonialist carceral state that represses so many of us.

I’m a multi-platform journalist, author and staff writer at the Canary. Before becoming a journalist, I served in the UK military for six years in Afghanistan, Kenya and the UK. I’ve written across the media and make regular appearances as a commentator on foriegn policy war and defence issues.

My documentary film work has covered CIA kill teams in Afghanistan, the legacies of war in the north of Ireland and press freedom in the UK.

The experience of modern-day imperialism made me a socialist and the Canary gives me a platform to report on issues of power, injustice and hope.

I’m a journalist and editor. I grew up in Lancashire, and now call Sheffield home. I completed a PhD on the representations of South Asian Muslim women that looked at the gaps in mainstream trauma theory. I’ve had my work published in various edited collections and online outlets.

All my work, whether academic or otherwise, comes from personal experience. I’m a disabled Muslim woman from a working class background and these experiences inform my thinking and writing. I believe in radical anti-racism and community activism. I know electoral politics won’t save us, and I’m committed to building new worlds that make life safe for minoritised communities. Abolition is important to my understanding of the world, and I’m passionate about abolition as applied to prison systems, education, health, and more.

I started writing for the Canary in 2020, and I’ve since begun work as an editor. I tend to cover Islamophobia, policing, health inequalities, and racism. When I’m not writing, I’ll be recovering from the above.

I am a cartoonist, environmentalist and reformed misanthrope.

I am a journalist and community organiser whose work focuses on racism, state violence and anti-racism in education, policing, and the justice system. In particular, I try to shine a light on the harmful systems of punishment and surveillance that target marginalised children and young people in the UK.

I wholeheartedly believe that the abolition of police, prisons, and all systems of punishment, incarceration and exploitation is necessary for our collective survival. My hope for a future in which we can all thrive doesn’t lie in the state and its institutions, but in the grassroots activism of communities working in solidarity to build new infrastructures of care and healing.

I’m a journalist and broadcaster. I left school at 16 with no formal qualifications in media, working in the hotel industry for many years. I was brought up in a very political household, with my late father being a prominent member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and both parents being active trade unionists via their factory jobs. But I didn’t embrace politics until the 2010s. Having spent many years on and off social security, in 2014 I began blogging as I couldn’t afford to physically get to protests. This led to my work being picked up by the Independent – for which I ended up covering Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on a weekly basis – as well as openDemocracy, the Morning Star and New Internationalist. In April 2016 I joined the Canary.

My work focuses on issues affecting the poorest people in society. My own lived experience of being reliant on social security since the late 2000s has led to my reporting on the welfare state, which has reached millions of people and was used by Philip Alston in his UN report into UK poverty. I also feel strongly about the toxic effects the corporate media has on society, the sham that is the Labour Party as well as mainstream economics, and the system and society’s discrimination against, and marginalisation of, chronically ill and disabled people. Aside from political journalism, I also work in the music industry, being a writer on reggae, dancehall and afrobeats for publications such as Reggaeville and Pauzeradio.

Hi, I’m Tom. I’m an anarchist organiser and writer, and have been working for the Canary since 2018.

My first experiences of organising were in the mass movements against the UK’s involvement against the ‘war on terror’ twenty years ago, and in support of the Palestinian anticolonial uprising that was going on at the time. When the government invaded Iraq in 2003, refusing to listen to the millions of us that were on the streets, me and some comrades set up a militant anti-arms trade campaign in the city where I lived, as a way to take direct action in solidarity with those on the sharp end of the ‘war on terror’. The state’s response was to try to put us all in prison – and it was watching the way a private company, the cops, the local council and the attorney general worked together to try to stamp out our dissent that confirmed me as an anarchist.

I never had formal journalistic training. The first political texts that I wrote were statements for grassroots campaigns. Later on I got involved in anarchist media collectives and began to write more.

Right now I’m involved in organising solidarity with those arrested after Bristol’s 2021 uprising against police violence. I’ve seen the effect of state repression on me and my friends, and I’ve lost comrades along the way as a result of it. Much of my writing at the moment aims to amplify the voices of those experiencing state repression, and about the need to build stronger radical infrastructure to support them.

I first became politically active in the mid-1970s, when I got involved in the anarchist movement and helped put out Black Flag. I soon began to write and then edit it.

It was the time of the anarchist ‘Persons Unknown’ trial. For almost 12 months I put up one of the defendants – who was out on bail – in my rented house. I was also a member of the ‘Persons Unknown’ support group, organising publicity and fundraising, including benefit gigs by UB40, Poison Girls and Crass. Of those prosecuted who pleaded their innocence, all were acquitted.

At the time I broke a number of stories, including a) an unredacted page from the banned Spycatcher book by Peter Wright, which named Sir James Goldsmith as a member of the coup plot against Harold Wilson, b) how Lord Chalfont funded a far-right surveillance agency that spied on environmental protesters (including Hilda Murrell, who was murdered) and c) how Rupert Murdoch co-funded the MI6-managed ‘British Briefing’ bulletin that specialised in smears against Labour and the left.

As a writer and editor of Black Flag I also had the opportunity to meet up with Black Cross activists across Europe, including Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Russia.

I was also a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Solidarity Federation, and attended IWA congresses as a delegate. During the 1984/5 miners’ strike, I and other comrades provided weekly support to the miners, often travelling to Yorkshire to stand on picket lines or to deliver food supplies.

In the late 1980s I commenced an investigation into the work of the Economic League (EL), a 70-year old blacklisting agency. A few of us formed a group called League Watch, with the aim of exposing the EL’s subscribers, its activities, etc, so as to see it closed. We were in luck and were passed hundreds of EL files, including the bulk of their blacklist, including tens of thousands of names. We infiltrated the EL’s AGM, and it soon became obvious that the organisation was coming to an end.

My journalistic interests range from class war, blacklisting and whistleblowing, to intelligence matters more generally.

I am also a painter, working mainly in oils and acrylics. And I’m an author of novels using another name.

My name is Tracy and I’m based in the south of England. I started writing for the Canary back in 2015, when it launched, and that was my first foray into journalism. I’d written creatively for many years, and my later plays, like one called Prime Cuts about austerity during the coalition years, tackled current affairs. 

In 2020, I decided to solely focus on environmental reporting. This is partly because I’m head over heels in love with the species we share this world with. There’s no shortage of environmental crises – biodiversity, climate, ocean, pollution – in need of concerted media attention right now too. I also hope my reporting can play some role in fixing the broken relationship many of us have with the rest of the natural world, whereby we see everything and everyone outside of ourselves as lesser or simply a ‘resource’. That’s the sort of thinking that got us into the existential mess we’re in. It must and can change.