Peace Group responds to Osborne's insult to Parliament over Trident

Mai Chatham and Patricia Gilligan, Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group

Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group responded quickly to George Osborne's announcement last week that the government will soon be spending another £500,000,000 on preparing the Faslane naval base for new nuclear-armed Trident submarines, despite the fact that Parliament has yet to even make a decision on whether the existing Trident nuclear weapons system will actually be replaced.

On Saturday morning (5 September 2015), members of the peace group asked people in Littleborough to sign the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's petition calling for the existing Trident system to be scrapped and not to be replaced.

On behalf of the Peace Group, Philip Gilligan said: "Nuclear weapons will not keep our country safe and secure. George Osborne has his priorities all wrong. He should be funding the public services we need, not squandering £100 billion on a new generation of nuclear weapons.

"The Chancellor should not be wasting money on Trident when people are dying within our benefits system. Osborne is cutting essential services and benefits for the vulnerable, while effectively making them pay for weapons of mass destruction. His government is giving obscene amounts to the nuclear weapons industry for outdated weapons of mass destruction at the same time he is hitting ordinary people with welfare sanctions and forcing them to exist on stagnant wages."