Faslane Blockade

When you read this, a group from Kingston Peace Council will have traveled to Faslane to take part in the ongoing blockade at the home of the British nuclear weapon. As this type of non-violent protest goes, blockading Faslane is a fairly easy action. The Scots are more anti-nuclear than the English (and even here the latest polls show a majority of the people do not want to own a new-improved nuclear weapon). The police are as non-violent as the protestors themselves, and the general experience of those arrested is a stay overnight in a cell and then release without charge the next day.

Add to this, the protest puts real pressure on those with responsibility for our nuclear ‘deterrent’. If the May elections result, as seems likely, in a greatly increased number of Scottish Nationalists, the pressure for a greater degree of independence for Scotland will have increased, and the location of the nuclear base in Scotland will seem even more inappropriate. The protest has taken police from the streets of Glasgow, and so rightly annoys Glaswegians, but they are likely to lay the blame for this not so much on the protestors themselves as on the system that has chosen Scotland to for the locale of this unpopular weapon.

Protest continues here at home, of course. Mary Holmes gives details in this issue of the Block the Builders campaign at Aldermaston. But the Faslane blockade offers ordinary people an excellent opportunity to make a most effective anti-nuclear protest, and so is worth considering. The year-long protest is due to finish in October.

There will be an account of our experiences at Faslane in the next newsletter.

H.D.