THE CAMPAIGN for Nuclear Disarmament are planning a national demonstration against replacing Scotland-based Trident which it believes will echo its biggest ever protest against nuclear missiles 32 years ago.
It has been revealing its plans during what it bills as the most important CND conference since the Cold War over the weekend focussing on how to win the fight to halt the replacement of Trident weapons systems based at Faslane on the Clyde.
CND says the Stop Trident Decision Time march and rally planned for noon on February 20 in London would be expected to attract hundreds of thousands of protesters.
The anti-nuclear weapons campaigners say they have plans to organise an earlier emergency demo if ministers hold the crunch vote on renewing the nuclear deterrent before Christmas.
It is thought in some quarters that the "main gate" vote could be brought forward to highlight Labour divisions and prevent the issue becoming a defining one in the May Holyrood elections. The Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon, would be expected to campaign against replacing the submarines.
The vote on proceeding with a like-for-like renewal had been expected in the middle of 2016, allowing time for new submarines to be built before the existing fleet is taken out of service in the late 2020s.
Before the vote can take place the Government must complete the Strategic Defence and Security Review, looking at the threats facing the country for the years ahead.
That is expected soon after the Chancellor delivers his Autumn Statement on November 25. A vote on Trident could then take place before December 17, when the Commons rises for Christmas.
Ian Chamberlain of CND said: "CND are calling a Stop Trident national demonstration. This could be one of the largest mobilisations against nuclear weapons this country has seen since the 1980s.
Team of @AngrySalmond's visited us today supporting #ScrapTrident #SNP15 pic.twitter.com/uTK2tDNoi1
— SNPCND (@SnpCnd) October 17, 2015
"The idea is to have a massive demonstration before the parliamentary decision on replacing Trident, which some are hinting is going to be earlier than February, but we are still confident that it will happen after February.
"Our sense was that it was probably suggested as a way of undermining any opposition. As an organisation we will be ready to call an emergency demonstration if the vote happens earlier."
While it has been many years since its Cold War heyday, the stirrings of a revival of CND have become apparent in recent months as the debate over replacing Trident becomes more audible.
There are now 35,000 paid-up members of CND. The growth in membership has gone from 30 per month to 200 a month since the campaign to have Jeremy Corbyn elected leader of the Labour Party began in June.
The growth rate has continued to increase since Corbyn, who is to become vice-president of CND, was elected Labour leader on September 12. In the past week alone CND, which was launched in 1958, gained 100 new members.
While membership numbers are a fraction of CND's heyday in the mid-80s when membership reached as high as 100,000, leaders are encouraged by recent increases.
Mr Chamberlain added: "We’ve noticed an increase in interest since June because Jeremy raised Trident at practically every hustings event he did, alongside austerity. Those two issues were the central planks of his campaign."
Seems to me there are rather worse causes for a party leader to espouse than CND. Like chucking more bombs into the Syrian firestorm.
— ruth wishart (@ruth_wishart) October 17, 2015
The initial rise of CND was helped in no small measure to one of the most famous anti-nuclear protests in August 1981, when a group of women set up a peace camp at Greenham Common base, where cruise missiles were due to be sited.
Then, the cause was unilateral nuclear disarmament, the argument that getting rid of Britain's arsenal would lead to others following suit. But critics poo-pooed such protests describing them as naive, while some even denigrated them as a tool of the Soviet Union.
Government papers released by the National Archives, show how senior Conservative ministers were worried that they were in danger of losing public opinion over the deployment of Cruise missiles.
While Labour took up the nuclear disarmament cause in its 1983 manifesto The New Hope For Britain, they were annihilated at the ballot box as Margaret Thatcher secured a second election victory.
The manifesto was famously dubbed "the longest suicide note in history" by Gerald Kaufman, a member of Michael Foot's shadow cabinet.
But it did not prevent CND from holding its biggest ever protest against nuclear missiles in 1983, at the height of its powers, with an estimated million people taking part. The protests were held to show lack of support for the movement of Cruise and Pershing 2 missiles to sites across Europe from the United States.
February's protest will focus on saying No to buying a new system at a cost of up to £100 billion.
The UK's deterrent currently consists of four Vanguard-class submarines, each capable of carrying up to 16 Trident II D-5 ballistic nuclear missiles.
At least one submarine is constantly on patrol, while one undergoes maintenance and the other two carry out manoeuvres. The missiles are capable of hitting a target up to 7,500 miles away.
However, the Trident missile system, which was launched in the 1990s as a replacement for the predecessor, Polaris, is due to end its service from 2028. It takes about a decade to build and prepare a new submarine for service.
A vote in favour of replacing Trident would authorise ministers to negotiate the best deal for replacing the submarines from military manufacturers.
But while Corbyn has nailed his colours to the Scrap Trident mast, his Labour colleagues have become far more reticent.
While SNP MSP Christina McKelvie called for MSPs of all parties to support her anti-Trident motion earlier this month - just three out of the 38 Labour MSPs backed it, Neil Findlay, Malcolm Chisholm and Elaine Smith.
Lothian MSP, Findlay is a close ally of Corbyn, who sparked a row in the final hours of Labour's conference in Brighton by saying he would never deploy weapons of mass destruction.
.@NicolaSturgeon: "The SNP will stand against Trident, today, tomorrow and always." #SNP15
— The SNP (@theSNP) October 17, 2015
Edinburgh North and Leith MSP Chisholm has a history of backing the SNP's calls to scrap nuclear weapons. He resigned from former Labour first minister Jack McConnell's cabinet in order to vote with the SNP in a previous motion condemning the renewal of Trident in 2006.
Coatbridge and Chryston MSP Elaine Smith is also a Corbyn supporter.
Among those who did not back the motion was Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale.
An early day motion calling for the cancellation of the replacement of Trident tabled in July by Corbyn has so far attracted 61 signatures, of which 15 were Labour MPs.
The remaining signatories included 40 out of the 55 SNP MPs, two Plaid Cymru MPs, two Social Democratic and Labour Party Mps, one Green Party MP and one Liberal Democrat. No Tory MPs committed pen to paper.
But CND believe there is a growing consensus amongst the general public against Trident that is not reflected in Parliament at the moment.
Our chair @ArthurWest7 speaks in favour of a motion calling for more resources for Scotland to #scraptrident #cnd15 pic.twitter.com/ZPZSsnULWK
— Scottish CND (@ScottishCND) October 17, 2015
"What has changed is at the grass roots," said Mr Chamberlain of CND. "If you were at the Labour Party conference, there was a sense that people who perhaps had not taken a position before on Trident, that because of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership are now taking a position. And he was elected on a huge mandate on an anti-Trident ticket.
"We think the demonstration would attract hundreds of thousands of people. There is such an appetite for this now. A lot of people will mobilise because for Jeremy Corbyn to carry this policy through, there needs to be pressure from the grass roots."
Janet Fenton of Scrap Trident Coalition Scotland will on Sunday be co-hosting a workshop into organising effective and creative protest at the CND conference, said: "We are looking at ways to resist Trident and also to make clear the democratic deficit in putting such a thing in Scotland.
"It is our elected representatives that are gung ho for Trident replacement, not the ordinary people of the country.
"There are an awful lot of people who just feel they can't do anything, they can't engage politically, they can't have their voices heard. Our main objectives are to ensure that everybody is crystal clear on the information and getting people prepared to go out on the road and protest."
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