ALDERMASTON 50 YEARS ON.....

This blog is now a year old and one of my first posts concerned the anti-Trident vote last March- in which over 100 MPs rebelled. It was a false dawn in many ways politically as the sheer weight of numbers gave us reason to hope that a post-Blair Government ,oght have a different attitude to nuclear disarmamaen and leave options open for the future. It also suggested 100 MPs woukld not give Brown carte blanche to be Leader without some kind of debate on policy.
Since then, the Government has announced support for the US "star wars" mossile system, the use of Menwith Hill to facilitate that, and a new generation of nuclear bombs is being built.
Which is why protestors were today at Aldermaston to mark the 50th anniversary of a march to the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) there.
The first march was held at Easter in 1958, shortly after the formation of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). I was not even one year old.
But throughot those 50 years nuclear weapons have cast a shadow over our lives.
I hope today's protest went well. Kate Hudson, chair of CND, has a piece in today's CiF and those on the march allegedly included fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and CND's 84-year-old vice president and Labour NEC member Walter Wolfgang.
In 1958, he was one of some 10,000 people who marched from London to Aldermaston in protest at Britain's first hydrogen bomb tests 50 years ago. AWE now provides the warheads for Trident - the submarine-launched missile system that constitutes the UK's nuclear deterrent. Activists from as far as Aberdeen and Penzance were planning to surround the base, which produces the warheads for the Trident nuclear weapons system.
The demonstration comes in the wake of recently-imposed Ministry of Defence by-laws restricting the right to protest on land surrounding Aldermaston. But police agreed to lift the bylaw for the event. A delegation of survivors from the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were also marching to Aldermaston from the former US Cruise Missile base at Greenham Common, 10 miles away.
Update: Apologies to Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Jon Cruddas who were alll also at Aldermaston which of course got bog all mainstream media coverage. People have been saying why only so few but to be honest I knew little about the event..... ( might have gone otherwise) .the crowds should have been bigger and the left needs to start getting its act together.Big-style.....

BAN THE BOMB REMEMBERED

There is a lovely interview with Walter Wolfgang in today's Independent recalling the heady days of the first Aldermaston marches and the founding of CND in 1958. Not something i recall, being only one year old at the time. But in my youth I went to Greenham Common and various events , inclufing a "die-in" at Barrow In Furness and the big anti Cruise Missile marches ofthe 1980's. In the days before e-mail, CND had "telephone trees" which involved letting each other know of the movements of nuclear convoys and events at Greenham. I lived in a house where the phone was clearly tapped by MI5.

Labour, in those days, was of course unilateralist. As were people like Gordon Brown.

Now the world has changed. But that does not makes nuclear war LESS likely, indeed it's far more possible now than it ever was.At 84, Walter Wolfgang may not be standing again for the NEC. But he's proudly marching on under the CND banner. Here

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/walter-wolfgang-we-saved-the-world-780418.html