During the late 1950s and early 1960s MB became involved with several political causes. She joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and was arrested and roughed up by the police on a demonstration of a thousand people outside the airforce base at Ruislip. She sent a long letter to Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee on 8 July 1958 (later in the year CND was founded), asking them to clarify their position on nuclear disarmament. She was also elected to the general council of her union, the Association of Cine and Television Technicians , and she went as their delegate to the Women's Labour Party conference at Blackpool. She was, however, opposed to holding a separate women's conference, and believed that after forty years of suffrage women should feel free to speak while standing shoulder to shoulder with men. She also became a member of the Married Women's Association and the Six Point Group , which she later chaired. It is therefore a mistake to suppose that she did not belong to any explicitly feminist organisations or networks. She also made her feminist opinions plain in both her life and her writing. After her second marriage she became an increasingly active campaigner for women's rights, and an ally of Edith Summerskill in attempting divorce reform.

PF involved herself seriously in the work of CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ). The British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics holds a collection of her papers in this connection.

Though ML held left-wing political opinions, she described herself as not a good socialist (meaning that she shaped her opinions for herself, not adhering to a party line). She cared more for the generally humanist aspect of socialism than for a specific political agenda. In the 1950s, during the Cold War, she belonged to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) (founded on 17 February 1958 with Bertrand Russell as its first president, still campaigning in the early twenty-first century for nuclear disarmament and for non-damaging alternatives to nuclear energy).

Though politics bulked much less large in her childhood than religion, it had some presence. Her mother was a snob about class, but an ill-defined pacifist, who later wore a CND badge and donated money to Peace News. The family interest in Christian missionary activity, though no doubt condescending on the part of her parents, gave the very young Pat a clear perception of a multi-racial world, as depicted, for instance, on the cover of the children's missionary magazine The Round World. She learned about Nazi atrocities early through contact with Jewish refugees. When aged fifteen, at the end of the second world war, she and a friend saw a newsreel of the opening of concentration camps. She was concerned to find that since she had heard about it all beforehand, she was left hardened against feeling undue horror, but she wrote in her diary that such hardening of young people may point to the fact that when they are grown up & hold the reigns [sic] of government in their own hands, they will be fitted to deal with all wrongs, cruelties & injustices, ruthlessly & with a cool lack of emotion which might go a long way to stamp them out. Being hardened, she felt, might make for more effective political action than being emotional idealists. She did not react strongly to the atom bombs on Japan, and by the time of the postwar general election her political consciousness had not developed much further than a generalised willingness for change.

She has been a feminist from the time that the women's movement began, and also a passionate campaigner against war, particularly nuclear war. She writes of these forces of destruction as a third parent / a godfather at every baby's christening from the time that she was born, unconscious of all this, during the second world war. For some years she was a regular on the Easter marches of CND to the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. She calls herself anti-militarist, anti-establishment, out to change society and reshape the role of women.

By her late teens she herself was a socialist. She was a member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and later of the associated Committee of 100 .

This novel deals rather briefly with the social and commercial success constructed for himself by Gordon Hammond (a self-made builder), then in more detail the flying apart of this apparently stable construction and the re-assemblage of its parts in more fluid, contingent, and unexpected configurations. The early, upward stages of Gordon's life are charted by their background in public events: the CND marches, the dream of Martin Luther King . Gordon builds a substantial Tudor-style house for his wife and his three daughters, who attend private schools, grow up, and settle down. Then Gordon falls in love with a nurse, April, and leaves his wife, whereupon not only her life but those of the daughters and grandchildren fall apart. Gordon's daughter Louise (the rich one with a venture-capitalist husband) suffers through her two children. Her horsey daughter, Imogen, gets pregnant by the sexy local blacksmith and supposes she is running away to be happy with him when she realises she is just one among his many other women; meanwhile Imogen's brother Jamie gets involved with a gang of car-thieves. Of Gordon's other daughters, Prudence (the intellectual university graduate) finds herself committed by her male, married lover to a three-in-a-bed orgy, while Maddy (the lesbian youngest) leaves her female lover, who is a self-obsessed, best-selling writer. Their troubles bring the estranged sisters back together to confront their problems with shared panache. In a climactic scene they grab the microphone at a horse show and broadcast a satirical account of the doings of the blacksmith as a stud, inflicting serious humiliation on him. When their father, Gordon, dies (of a heart attack brought on by keeping up with April on the dance floor), their mother marries again in her sixties, while the sisters set up house together, drawing into their orbit the needy child Allegra (daughter of Maddy's lover), Allegra's Indian father Aziz (who appears perhaps to have something going with Prudence), and Imogen with her baby. The happy ending represented by this mostly-female, baby-sharing household irresistibly recalls E. M. Forster 's Howards End.

By 1981 she became a committed anti-nuclear protester and CND member.

ZF sees information as critical to understanding and politically aware action, and her work highlights aspects of contemporary living and of women's experience in ways which inform judgement. She seeks to explores tensions between feminist awareness and practical survival in an exploitative society, and to raise awareness of socialist and anti-nuclear issues. She has supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and published polemics in support of that organization, of women's studies, and of the housing charity and pressure group Shelter .

Not long afterwards, she and her friends in London were pursuing street politics to the left of the Labour Party , like mounting a carnival float at a CND festival to represent and caricature Real Women as glossily produced and sexily displayed to attract and to pleasure men. This was the carnivalesque and amusing side of feminism. The female house-mates launched a consciousness-raising group which still lacked a vocabulary for many of the subjects it wanted to discuss. (Sex was a harder topic than the fact that straight men didn't dream of doing housework because it was women's work; lowly work, a problem many revolutionary men refused to discuss.) After other women joined the group, a couple of husbands stalked in and yanked their wives away.

Thomas was an Anglican clergyman, an English speaker who taught himself fluent Welsh and supported a strong Welsh nationalistic political position as well as such movements as CND . The title poem of this volume had already appeared in the TLS. His later volumes include Laboratories of the Spirit, 1975, Frequencies, 1978, Mass for Hard Times, 1992, and No Truce with the Furies, 1995. By the time of his death in 2000 he was very highly regarded and had been nominated for the Nobel prize.

CND, or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , was founded at a public meeting in London; it held its first march that spring, at the Easter weekend.

CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ) held its first Easter march from London to Aldermaston in Berkshire, site of the British army's chief nuclear research establishment.

She had stood unsuccessfully against Lady Tweedsmuir of Belhelvie for Aberdeen South in 1955. CND politics occupied much of her early career. She went on to serve as a Cabinet Minister under Harold Wilson and to be (briefly) first joint chair of the Women's National Commission .

A crowd of about an equal number of people was awaiting the marchers at their destination. The police acknowledged that this third annual march staged by CND was the largest demonstration ever held in Trafalgar Square.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) suffered particularly large-scale arrests of its supporters.

JK 's adoptive mother (my mum), Helen Kay , was (like her husband) a white Communist Party activist. She came from Lochgelly in Fife, where her father was a miner, and where in 1945 she was chosen to be the Queen of Peace . . . and was driven in a lorry down the main street. In New Zealand, where she met her husband, she had worked as a waitress and in a factory—where she nearly lost her job for getting up a petition for the restoration of Paul Robeson 's US passport (which had been confiscated because he was a Communist). Her parents emigrated to join the young couple, and remained in New Zealand after the Kays returned to Scotland. Later Helen was the Scottish secretary for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); on at least one occasion she was jailed for demonstrating. She taught in primary schools, and travelled extensively under Communist Party auspices.

Six members of the Committee of 100 (an anti-nuclear group recently founded as an offshoot of CND) were sentenced to imprisonment for conspiring to enter a US air base.

The final stages of CND's annual Aldermaston march were marred by outbreaks of disorder.

The Committee of 100 (a disarmament group with which Pat Arrowsmith was associated, offshoot of CND ) held a demonstration at the RAF base at Marham in Norfolk.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) demonstrators numbering about 150,000 protested against America's war in Vietnam.

In 1981 the event lasted three days; a permanent stage was built, which doubled in winter as a barn. This time the Festival, costing eight pounds and attended by 18,000 people, raised £20,000 for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , CND. Highlights of later history included continuing enormous growth in size, various legal problems and confrontations with local authorities hostile to such disruption in normal life, and torrential rain or seas of mud in 1982, 1997, 1998, and 2005. Feminist groups like Shakespeare's Sisters have appeared at the Festival, and it has become associated with causes like wind power and recycling, as well as campaigns like Make Poverty History.