100 Campaigns that Changed the World

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.In this episode, we discuss three successful disability rights campaigns which he has played a leading role in. One of these targeted the Premier League and the number of wheelchair-accessible spaces in stadiums which didn’t accurately reflect the needs of disabled fans, a second was on parking charges for disabled people at NHS hospitals and a third was on the London Ultra Low Emissions Zone. find him at https://kushkanodia.com/

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. Campaigners uncovered a mechanism under the constitution to hold referenda. 7% of those eligible to vote were needed to sign a petition and some 171,000 signatures were collected. A referendum was held in 2021, with the campaign winning 59.1% of the vote, gaining over a million votes. Campaigners are now planning a new, binding referendum.One prominent activist within the movement is Polish-born Joanna Kusiak, who the guest in this episode. Joanna lives in Berlin and works at the University of Cambridge where her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen. Joanna describes both the campaign and some of the tactics and strategies it employed, with the legal-constitutional strategy at the heart of the effort. 

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.Our guest in this episode is Dr Henry Miller, Vice Chancellor's Fellow, Northumbria University. He is an academic historian researching and teaching on modern Britain and is an expert on the Corn Laws and the Anti-Corn Law League. Henry offers some interesting and surprising observations and lessons for current campaigners from the League's operations nearly 200 years ago.Image courtesy of East Lothian Museums / Creative Commons.

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 2002In this episode we speak with Lynx co-founder Lynne Kentish, who recalls the campaign, what made it successful and also how it was brought down by the industry that it helped bring to an end.

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..The interview is with KlimaSeniorinnen's Elisabeth Stern, a retired ethnologist who worked at the Pestalozzi Foundation Children’s Village for intercultural education. She taught ethnology at the University of Zurich, worked as a research associate at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare and as a Senior Lecturer for intercultural management competence at the University of St. Gallen. She was the co-director of an environmental company for the financing of environmental projects.

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. The guest in this episode is Richard Wilson who is the Director and co-founder of Stop Funding Hate. He previously worked for Amnesty International UK and the Child Poverty Action Group, and has been involved in human rights campaigning since 2001. Richard is the author of two books – Titanic Express (2006) and Don’t Get Fooled Again (2008).Richards highlights some important lessons about what the campaign has done, its effectiveness, what success looks like and also about the campaigns longer term plans.

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. Between 2015 and 2021, he and other Uber drivers campaigned to ensure that the company treat its drivers as “workers” which entitles them to more rights than independent contractors. Uber had a position that the drivers were self employed 'contractors'. They maintained this position throughout years of legal proceedings and appeals that took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Eventually, in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Uber drivers and allowed them the entitlement to a basket of rights such as the minimum wage, working-time protections and holiday pay. As a result, the company has been forced to announce new benefits for drivers including a pension plan and holiday time.