CND's conference came to Yorkshire!
Posted: 19th October 2022
On Sunday, Yorkshire CND and MHAC (The Menwith Hill Accountability Campaign) hosted a day of action for the second day of national CND’s conference. The first half of the day was at Otley Courthouse and included a range of workshops, ranging from Peter Burt (from Drone Wars) on US military bases in the UK, to Tom Unterrainer and Sophie Bolt talking about the plans of National CND e.g. the upcoming demo at Lakenheath.
In the afternoon, we visited RAF Menwith Hill for a walk around the base. During our walk we engaged in conversations about the base, whilst holding our banners with pride in protest against the presence of this base in Yorkshire. Following that, Cath Bann (Yorkshire CND) led a discussion on ‘Ideas for the Future’. This discussion included debates around what links we should be building moving forward, and the impact those links might build.
It was clear that attendees want to re-build the image of CND in the public eye, to move beyond the often misunderstood view that our logo purely means peace, but the route to that is not a day’s work away. Indeed we obviously want peace, after all we are peace activists, but the desire for a clear message (that being nuclear disarmament) is something we agreed needs to rebuilt. That does not necessarily mean we need to separate ourselves from engaging with other actions, quite the contrary. Rather, we need to see the links between campaigns (climate justice, social justice etc.) and, moving forwards, perhaps consider contacting those suffering abroad to bring about an international dimension to our campaigning e.g. to highlight how the mining of uranium disproportionately affects indigenous communities or via campaign slogans like “No Climate Justice, No Peace”.
We all agreed that showing the links between how we can achieve climate justice via disarmament is possible (highlighted particularly well by GCOMS) but there was debate around whether our solidarity campaigns with groups, like Just Stop Oil, that take direct action disengage potential supporters. We want our movement to be a broad alliance and that’s not easy, but through more discussions like this we hope we find new ways to build momentum so that nuclear weapons are never used again.
Our next big action will be at RAF Lakenheath, so please join our demonstration to protest this extremely dangerous and destabilising development. As you may know, we had to cancel our planned demonstration at RAF Lakenheath last month due to a train strike. We’ve now set a new date in conjunction with Norwich CND – so we hope to see you in Suffolk on Saturday, 19th November to protest against US nukes coming to Britain.
If you are interested in coming to RAF Lakenheath with Yorkshire CND, via minibus or otherwise, please let us know: [email protected]