Rochdale peace campaigners in Trafalgar Square

peace group members, Thomas Gilligan, Kate Crawford, Peter Underdown Pauline Devine, and Tom Jones with the new banner in Trafalgar Square.

Members of Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group showed off their newly made banner in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 24 February. They had joined tens of thousands of other peace activists from all over the country who were calling for an end to the Trident nuclear missile system and for the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq.

The Rochdale Peace campaigners had travelled from outside the Town Hall early in the morning to join a huge national demonstration organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Stop the War Coalition and the British Muslim Initiative. They cheered as speakers condemned Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s plans to spend as much as £76 billion on upgrading the Trident system and calling for this money to be spent, instead, on health and social care.

Philip Gilligan, on behalf of the group said: “Nuclear weapons are a route to the annihilation of the world and a route to the destruction of all of us who live on it. We, like most thinking people, want our money spent on saving lives; not on threatening to destroy them.  We believe that Trident is illegal, immoral and a waste of resources. It does nothing to increase world security and undermines all international efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. That’s why people are protesting at the Faslane base, every day of the year. That’s why we were demonstrating in London and that’s why we need to ensure that, next month in parliament, all our local MPs, including government minister Phil Woolas, vote against Trident replacement.”