In this episode, I’m speaking with Janey Starling about the campaign to stop women from having to give birth in prison. This award-winning campaign began in response to shocking cases and a growing recognition that prison is a dangerous place for pregnancy and birth. There were at least two devastating cases in recent years: the death of Aisha Cleary after she was born at HMP Bronzefield, and a second baby who was stillborn at HMP Styal, in Wilmslow.

The campaign helped push through important changes in sentencing guidance, and the recent changes include that the Sentencing Council has now made pregnancy, childbirth, and post-natal care a specific factor in sentencing. That is important because it means judges are meant to think much more carefully about the impact of custody on women and babies. From April 2025, the guidance went further, saying courts should avoid prison for pregnant women unless it cannot be avoided. In other words, pregnancy is no longer treated as a side issue, and it should now be a serious reason to look for alternatives to custody. The conversation extends beyond the policy changes that have happened, and Janey talks us through how the campaign developed, tactics and strategy, and what still needs to be done.

Janey is Co-Director at Level Up, which campaigns to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and new mothers in England through public pressure, legal action and solidarity. They work to ensure courts stop sending pregnant women to prison and choose safe, community-based alternatives instead.

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In this episode, we go back to the 1980s, to Greenham Common in Berkshire, where thousands of women built one of the longest‑running peace camps in history. They marched from Cardiff, set up camp outside a US nuclear base, and over nearly 20 years turned a protest site into a global symbol of feminist, anti‑nuclear resistance. From chaining themselves to the gates to “Embrace the Base” human chains of tens of thousands of women, Greenham rewrote what non‑violent direct action could look like. It was noisy, creative, and defiantly women‑led – the biggest women’s protest movement in Britain since the suffragettes.

To explore what Greenham meant then, and why it still matters for campaigns today, we welcome writer, performer and activist Rebecca Mordan. Rebecca is the artistic director of feminist theatre company Scary Little Girls and co‑founder of the Greenham Women Everywhere project, which has collected over 200 testimonies from camp veterans. She is the co-author of Out of the Darkness, Greenham 1981-2000. Out now in paperback.

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In this conversation, we talk about life at the camp, the tactics that made Greenham so powerful, and the 19‑year protest. We also look at what today’s climate and peace, and other campaigners can learn from Greenham’s mix of humour, disruption and community care.

Here are some resources

• Greenham Women Everywhere, interviewing Greenham Women, archiving and sharing their stories and holding events across the UK.
• The Greenham Effect for Radio 4’s Archive on 4, and a subsequent podcast series on the camp commissioned by Oxford Modern Art.
• A screening of Carry Greenham Home will transport you back to the early days of Greenham with Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson’s fly-on-the-wall masterpiece, shot whilst they lived at Greenham in 1982-83.
• Women Against the Bomb, Sonia Gonzalez’s prize-winning look at the impact of the Greenham Women, reflected through interviews and footage from women who took action and never looked back.
• Gentle, Angry Women, Barbara Santi’s coming of age documentary follows a new generation of young female activists as they embark on a journey of discovery, following in the footsteps of over 30,000 women who forty years earlier united in peaceful, liberating protest, the remarkable Greenham Common Women's Peace Movement.
• Mothers of the Revolution, Briar March’s tale of how a small number of Greenham Women made connections with their counterparts in the peace movement behind the Iron Curtain, travelling to the Soviet Union to advance peace and, eventually, contributing towards the end of the Cold War.

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Here is a tightened, clearer version that reads naturally as a podcast episode description and fixes the broken sentence. I have kept the tone measured and narrative rather than promotional.

This episode explores how a local campaign in a small corner of rural England helped reshape climate law far beyond it. The Weald Action Group began as a grassroots response to oil drilling proposals at Horse Hill in Surrey. What followed was a determined, citizen-led challenge to the idea that new fossil fuel projects could be approved without accounting for the climate damage caused when the oil is eventually burned.

Against long odds, campaigners took on local authorities, developers and the planning system itself, pushing the question of responsibility for carbon emissions all the way to the UK Supreme Court.

At the centre of the campaign was Sarah Finch, a community organiser and one of the claimants in the landmark legal case that now bears her name. Her work with Weald Action Group helped establish a crucial legal principle: that the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction cannot simply be ignored. Sarah joins us to reflect on how a local campaign grew into a legal precedent, what it took to sustain the fight, and what this case means for future climate campaigns in the UK and beyond.

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