By Max Anderson
LONDON — On October 29, a day marked by constant drizzle and the occasional heavy shower, thousands of people marched from the Temple tube station on the Embankment to Trafalgar Square, where a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) banner was placed on Nelson's column.
The irony of this juxtaposition of Britain's imperial and military past with a potentially peaceful future was lost neither on the crowd nor on the variety of speakers and musicians who entertained it for three and a half hours.
The first speaker, Labour left-winger and former energy minister Tony Benn, proclaimed, "We want to live in a world where technology is used to support life, and not cause death". He noted the stupidity which resulted in Britain having "the best defended dole-queues in the world", and called this "a time when the case to end nuclear weapons is overwhelming. They tax the poor to buy Trident, and as I discovered when energy minister, nuclear power was always about nuclear weapons".
Benn also commented on the over-policing of a totally peaceful demonstration, in the best tradition of CND. Anxiety about police power has been rising partly as a response to the passing of the Criminal Justice Bill, which gives the police wide powers to curtail a range of protest and other collective activities.
The growing sentiment against this legislation, and against the Conservative government, was picked up by the Liberal Democrat MP for Bermondsey, Simon Hughes, who said, "There's a sea-change going on in this country. People are beginning to be politically interested again, and are out on the streets campaigning. The anti-nuclear campaign itself has its best opportunity for 25 years ... People won't tolerate the establishment spending money on irrelevant equipment."
One of the loudest cheers of the day was reserved for the appearance of Michael Foot, a former leader of the Labour Party and a veteran of antiwar demonstrations from as far back as the 1930s. The current government, said Foot, "is conniving at the spread of nuclear weapons in many of the most dangerous parts of the world. Nothing is more scandalous than the arms race in poor countries."
Foot was followed by MP Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party. He said, "The SNP will never desert unilateralism. There's no defence reason for Trident; for some people in parliament, it's about Britain's prestige. For this movement, the test of a society is the quality of its public services, and we have to challenge the morality that puts bombs before bairns."
Scepticism about the intentions of the next Labour government and its leader, Tony Blair, was expressed by Michael Mansfield, the radical barrister who has been active in opposition to the Criminal Justice Bill, and deriding the official Labour Party's abstention on the third reading of the bill. That bill, he said, is "designed to eradicate the kind of mass statement we're making today, the only kind of democratic voice left in this country".