I was at the demo as well ( I went up from Manchester), and I thought that although it was good fun and bits were exciting, the whole demo was too safe and scripted. The police knew exactly what we were going to do, they got workers into the base from another entrance, arrested those who wanted to get arrested and left the others alone.

I've never known police on a demo to be so restrained and "friendly", but that was because they knew there was no threat to them or to anything else, and were prepared to play along.

I don't want to be the boring bloke who stands up and moans when things are going well, but I do think that in order to be more effective and achieve something, the anti-Trident protests need to find new forms of action, and try to be a bit less predictible. All other organisations who participate (including Earth First!, SWP, Reclaim the Streets) seem to have accepted the CND's "auhtority", and fully comply with the strict non-violence restrictions. It seems to me that to have any hope of actually closing the base for any amount of time, and of threatening the base, then groups need to resist arrest, and try to enter the base or damage the security etc...

I don't think Strathclyde Police would know how to handle a full scale riot! Many (believe it or not) would actually sympathise with the cause (Scots stick together.) Maybe that's why their not wading in...it could be THEIR granny! The government would soon bring out the military if protesters seriously threatened the base! Get in there! Where's the spirit of Wallace?

The beauty of this is that protesters can't be labelled as 'anarchists' or 'extremists' or 'eco-terrorists' (nukes are the real terror!) People from all walks of life are united and determined in this. It's time the Scots got off their freezing butts to show us the sterner stuff they're made of! Remember we are WARRIORS, untamable, unconquerable...rise up!

different actions need different approaches.
one of the beautiful things about this day was the range of people involved. if we turn up and throw bricks at the security guards then grannies and kiddies just aren't gonna turn up. neither will church leaders or mps. most people at faslane on monday were peace protestors and into n.v.d.a.
everyone else who turns up should respect that.
that doesn't rule out more spontaneous and imaginative autonomous actions though.
i thought it was a gorgeous day (partly cos of the rare sunshine) and a really chilled out atmosphere, with a serious message. we did shut it down until lunchtime, and next year it'll be longer.
one group of women arrested, including me, were strip-searched on arrival at a police station 20 miles out of glasgow. we were the only group to get this treatment (the Freak, rubbergloved, stylee) and we're gonna kick up a fuss about it.

Next year? Time is not of the essence here...you have to do this every week...a daily vigil even. Don't fancy the anal probe though, but it's for a just cause!

its true that the non-violent nature of the event brings together people who wouldn't come otherwise, but its also true that they don't acheive much once they've come together.

What were the cops looking for up your butt Annie? A cruise missile? Or were you just taking this opportunity to smuggle crack, into Kirkintilloch?

I wasn't there yesterday as my partner is one of those foreigners flocking to the UK and we are currently going thru' stuff with the Home Office to stay here - getting arrested wouldn't help and I didn't trust myself to stand quietly on the pavement.

In response to Ben, there is a daily vigil at Faslane - its called the Faslane Peace Camp, and important and good as it is, it doesn't get one tenth of the publicity that demos like Monday's did. Most of the people that went to Faslane on Monday made a huge effort to get there - taking a days' holiday, child care etc. We can't all be full time protestors and a weekly event like that just isn't practical.

I think the tactics on Monday of non violence peaceful resistance were totally correct in that situation. I'm not a pacifist and I would also support other actions at Faslane, eg. breaking into the base etc - but that tends to be stuff that small numbers of committed activists can do - its hard to do if you've got 1000 other people milling around, and its hard to do if you've got to be at work the next day.

Incidentally, I have very, very rarely seen the Scottish cops wading in to any demo - possibly the Timex strike in Dundee in the early 90s being the worst. Certainly nothing on the scale of the Met or the special response mob in Liverpool during the Docker's strike.

What is needed is not William Wallace-style bloodshed - its mass resistance to Trident. Monday's events aren't going to get rid of Trident on their own, but they're an important part of the struggle.

Bunch of Police Seize Elected Representatives
by P Layton, London 9:12am Tue Feb 13 '01


Superintendent Bunch has reduced our fake democracy to a non- democracy by arresting Mssrs Sheridan and Galloway. (and a bishop).
I didnt get to Faslane, but the most serious indicator of our times has scarecly been touched upon...
As Woody Allen might say: 'You cant DO that; its not ALLOWED!' and indeed it would NOT be allowed in most conventional democracies to arrest George Galloway (of Westminster), Thomas Sheridan (Scottish parliament) or indeed senior churchmen.
Whilst anarchists and socialists understand the limits of electoral politics, here at last is PROOF POSITIVE of who runs the show, and who commands who. In most places, MP's and senators are usually granted political immunity which acan only be over-turned BY the same parliament, and Galloway & Sheridan would normally (in our hypothetical democracy ) be giving orders to the police, NOT vice versa. Think about it...
The true nature of the British state has been exposed, and it must be placed on the record for our IMC comrades overseas to see the magnitude of the British descent into quasi-dictatorship.

Police State
by Quasimodo 11:36am Tue Feb 13 '01

There's nothing 'quasi' about it, this is the real McCoy...will Mr. Blair defend the integrity of his Ministers or denounce them as yobs?

What if they pulled a Coup and Nobody Noticed
by Coup Watcher 12:48pm Tue Feb 13 '01


The photos of Galloway & Sheridan being dragged away are giving me nightmares. Will parliament allow this affront to go unchallenged ?
We've been here before, in about 1640 or so if I recall correctly. But the truth is that what has happened in Faslane has gone far, far beyond an anti- nuclear protest and has provoked a constitutional crisis... or would have done, if anyone in the Commons had cared to notice.
A dictatorship by default in a crisis of monarchical decay appears to be in the offing if this attack is not rebuffed immediately. It may be in the form of a "directorate", a "soft" dictatorship, but it will do the job nonetheless. What happened to Galloway puts me in mind of the case of Matteotti in Italy. 1924, I think it was...

As a matter of urgency, the Commons must declare its sovereignity over the establishment with a view to the founding of a republic. By establishment I mean, Min of Defence, Crown Offices, Lords, Bank of England, and all the rest, oh, not to forget the police. The Commons must summon Supt Bunch to the House and sack him forthwith for usurpation of power.

I doubt whether it will happen. It may also be of interest to note that the police as considering banning any protests in London in early May according to The Times today. Check the article right next to the photo of Galloway...

The Big Blockade was a tremendous success. The base
was closed for five hours at least with both gates
blockaded continuously from 7am to midday.

850 people filled in registration forms at the start
of the protest and we estimate that at least another
150 people were there who hadn’t filled in the forms
making the total number of people taking part was at
least 1,000 people. People had travelled from Ireland,
Denmark, Belgium and Holland, France and Spain to take
part.

There was major disruption inside the base. We have
heard that canteens were shut all day and that many of
the 6,500 or so people who work in the base (roughly
3,500 naval personnel and 3,000 civilian workers) did
not get in to work that day.

Most of the workers who managed to get into the base
arrived before the blockade started at 7am. The Navy
have been quoted as saying that only 200 people were
ferried into the base by boat. They used three jetties
in Helensburgh and Greenock to ferry workers.

At about 10am base traffic trying to get into the
north gate was sent away and told to come back at
midday.

Some of this traffic was sent to the fuel depot next
to the base to wait and the Manchester Earth-First
affinity group blockaded that entrance as well.
There is no access into the base from the fuel depot
so we are confident that traffic going into the fuel
depot was not getting into the base.

385 people were arrested during the blockade which
finished at the north gate at midday and at the south
gate a couple of hours later.

At the south gate the blockade started very early at
roughly 1.30am when a group from Faslane Peace Camp
managed to get a twenty foot high tripod in place
despite a large police presence. 18 people were
arrested when the police started to remove the tripod
but the south gate access road has not been opened by
the time the sit-down blockade had started. The base
had trained a group to take down tripods paying them
£100 extra in danger money.

After the blockade had finished six people from the
Belgian ‘Titanic Trident’ affinity group managed to
break into the base and walk down the main road inside
the base, passing sailors and base personnel, before
getting to the entrance of the Trident jetties where
they were arrested.

We have since heard that news about the Blockade was
broadcast all over the world with coverage being
shown, among other places, in Australia, Spain and
Italy. Several documentary film crews were following
members of the Big Blockade Team in the run-up to and
during the event. These will be broadcast later on
Channel 4 and by the Scottish TV Eikon series.

Everyone arrested was released from police stations by
4am on Tuesday morning except for four people who were
taken to court the later that morning.

The police had to use more police stations than they
had originally planned - sending 10 women to
Kilmarnock police station - as well as using Baird
Street, Govan, Maryhill, Clydebank, Greenock and
Stuart Street police stations. At Baird Street they
had to use seven police vans parked outside to hold
prisoners as they did not have enough space.

Three of the four people taken to court were released
from custody after giving their details. One woman was
held on a warrant for unpaid fines from a road protest
in Essex over a year ago. The court tried to give her
extra time to pay but she successfully argued that she
would never pay the fines so she was sentenced to 14
days in prison. Letters of support should be sent
to:
Jenny Gaiawyn
HMP Corton Vale
Cornton Road
Stirling
FK9 5NY

Jenny should be out of prison by next Tuesday.

We would like to compile video footage of the day - if
anyone has footage of TV news coverage or footage they
took on the day please could they send copies to
Scottish CND, 15 Barrland Street, Glasgow G63 1QH. We
will return any original material.

There is some lost property left at the different
venues or in vehicles.
Please contact either SCND, Trident Ploughshares or
the Legal Support number if you think you left
anything.

If you were arrested and receive notice that you are
or are not going to be arrested please don’t forget to
contact the Legal Support Team so they know and can
organise court support or legal advice for you.

The Big Blockade Team would like to thank everyone who
helped to make the Blockade such a success and to
thank everyone who took part. It was amazing to see
people from such a wide range of backgrounds and
beliefs working together to disrupt work on the
mega-death Trident system.

Scottish CND is holding street stalls to recruit new
members in Glasgow on Saturday 24th February.

Trident Ploughshares activists are facing trials
continuously at Helensburgh District Court. The next
Trident Ploughshares Camp is at Aldermaston from
11th to the 18th May. Contact  tp2000@gn.apc.org for
more details.

The Lord Advocates Reference ruling on the legality of
the Trident system and on the rights of ordinary
people to take action to uphold international law is
due to be issued soon.

On June 2nd Scottish CND jointly with many other
political, environmental and Third World development
organisations are holding a ‘Love The Planet -
Trash Trident’ Peace Carnival in Glasgow.

Thanks again, stay in touch and see you at the next
action!

The Big Blockade Team

The Faslane base was completly closed for five hours on Monday. The south gate was shut by a tripod put up by Faslane Peace Camp despite a large police presence at 1.30 in the morning which stayed in place until the sit-down blockade started at 7am. The South gate was shut until about 2 pm in the afternoon.
At the main gate - the north gate - the blockade was started at 7 am and lasted until midday. We deliberatly targetted the main gate as the main focus of the action.
Six people from Belgium managed to cut into the base after the blockade and walked down the middle of the main road of the base, passing base workers and navy personnel before being arrested at the entrance to the Trident jetties.
The total number of arrests was 385 people.
At about 10am a long line of traffic was directed from the north gate to park in a fuel depot next to the base. There is no connecting gate between the fuel depot and the submarine base so the workers did NOT get into the base. They were parked up and told to try and get in again after midday. People involved in organising the blockade have been protesting at Faslane for almost two decades - we are serious about getting rid of nuclear weapons. If we thought the blockade was being broken we would have done something about it.
The MoD have reported that only 200 workers were ferried in by boat. Next time when there are more people we will target the jetties that were used as well.
There is a long history of dialogue and liaison with the police at Faslane. Both TP2000 and Scottish CND have to keep to keep some sort of communication going with the police going otherwise the actions we try to organise would be crushed. It might seem a cop-out by people who want everything to be contested but we do not have the resources to out-match the police (yet). We also gained important information from the police about which police stations were going to be used, what time they were going to be on duty and how they were going to respond to the protest. That meant we could have lawyers at each police station to get people arrested out, we knew when the tripod had to go up with any chance of success and we could make sure that no-one got seriously hurt. We did not have a set finish time and the blockade finished when people at each gate decided to finish it.
The Blockade was not a one-off event but was a follow up to one last February which was a follow up to one the year before. There will be bigger and better blockades at Faslane in the next year or so so please start organising into autonomous affinity groups to build on what happened on Monday.
We successfully disrupted work in Faslane on Monday and information from friendly base workers suggest that it had a real impact - all the base canteens had to be closed for the day, for example.
About 6,500 people work inside Faslane and £2000 a minute are being spent on running the Trident system in the UK. We are still a long way from being able to totally shut the base. We hope that the next action will be even more successful with us closing the base for a full day instead of the five hours on Monday.
I think you would be surprised at how much work was needed to organise Monday's action and something close to £8000 was spent on it.
Those of you who think the action was too controlled or stage-managed are perhaps mistaken. The action was called to do something specific - we had clear aims and objectives, to peacefully shut Faslane for as long as we could. We negotiated with the police both before and during the action to ensure we achieved what we wanted to do without people getting nicked blocking a snack van being driven to Arrochar which had nothing to do with the base.
Apart from the ten women who were strip-searched at Kilmarnock police station - a police station that was used at the last minute by the police because we had filled the six police stations the police had planned to use - no-one was hurt and we got everyone out of the police stations by 5am except for four women who were refusing to give their details or were kept on outstanding warrants.
One woman, Jenny Gaiawyn is in HMP Cornton Vale, Stirling, FK9 5NY until next Tuesday, for unpaid fines from the road protest in Essex last year.
Because of the huge backlog of court cases from previous actions at Faslane (and at the nearby Trident nuclear weapons store at Coulport) we expect hardly any of the 385 people eventually arrested on Monday to go to trial.
If anyone is seriously interested in damaging the Trident weapons system they can get involved with the Trident Ploughshares campaign, Scottish CND or Faslane Peace Camp.
Faslane Peace Camp is facing renewed threats of eviction and need as much help as possible to build up defences.

Just one more thing. Everyone who was involved in organising the Big Blockade is serious about using direct action to get rid of Trident. We are not going to organise events that are compromised. We are going to keep on building a broad based mass movement that empowers and liberates people so they can challenge the crimes of the State. That means organising so that everyone can get involved including people with disabilities and pensioners (the oldest person arrested was in her eighties) as well as young activists. That means we are not going to compromise on nonviolence either. We don't mind the State's property getting damaged (Trident Ploughshares activists have personally damaged over £200,000 of Trident related equipment already as well as thousands of pounds worth of base fencing and razor wire) but we ask anyone who thinks the only credible political action involves hurting other people to stay away.
Monday was an amazing day because of the huge range of people working together united by a common aim. Don't mistake nonviolence as passivity. If you are frustrated by what happened - don't agonise, organise! (To qoute Emma Goldman) Make the next Faslane action bigger and better!

In respose to Pam: "What is needed is not William Wallace-style bloodshed" Whose blood was shed there? HIS! He was defending the principle of freedom from colonial tyranny. We are now defending ourselves against a greater tyranny...called Globalisation.

Law of Freedom in a Platform [*]
by Coup Watcher 11:55am Wed Feb 14 '01


Following on from the Galloway- Sheridan incident at Faslane I want to suggest a united platform for Mayday.
It sounds so soft, initially, that it'll have both RTS and SWP rolling around with laughter, but I'm serious.

"FOR THE SOVEREIGN RULE OF THE ELECTED PARLIAMENT"

As things stand, the 'Commons' has clearly failed to protect its own members, regardless that Galloway is of the party in office. How can MPs expect us to believe that they can act in our interests, when they cannot even defend themselves ? We must demand they do so. The arrest of the MP's has also shown us that power does not reside in the 'chamber' but in almost any unelected ministry in or around Whitehall.
A declaration of this style will be a direct challenge to the crown, police and all the other creeps who REALLY run things at the moment. It would, of course, be a mere prelude to a genuine revolution, but a vital first step.
Above all, we cannot let the 'Galloway incident' fade from view. Its far to significant for that.


[*] A title orginally by Gerrard Winstanley. I think he'd be with me on this one.

How do people think we will ever get the "mass civil disobedience" we need to get rid of Trident if a demo is not safe and non-violent?
Although sometimes there might be no other solution then violence, in Scotland (nowadays) there is no need for it.

And if we don't want nukes because there are many other ways of dealing with conflicts, how can one then use violence to achieve that goal?

To respond to Ollie who suggested new forms of action: we already do many different actions like: cutting fences, reclaiming base land, damaging equipment, etc.
Last Monday's blockade was just one form of protesting.

And to everyone: if you're serious about getting rid of Trident, why don't you contact Faslane Peace Camp: 01436-820901,  faslania@faslanepeacecamp.org
(Also to be put on our eviction and/or convoystopping phonetree)

Olie argues that the action was "too scripted" and should be more direct, like breaking into the base. Other people argue that this would exclude a lot of people who were there on Monday, and whose presence was obviously a massive step forward. I understand both views, but I think it's wrong to counterpose mass involvement and effectiveness in this way.
No demonstration by itself changes anything fundamental. A ruling class that's prepared to risk blowing up the whole planet won't change its mind because of any number of people on a demo. Whether those people are more or less militant doesn't matter so much - unless someone can think of a way to actually dismantle all the missiles or make them harmless.
The point of actions like Monday is that they bring people together and give us confidence. I thought the great thing was firstly the new unity between veteran peace campaigners, trade unionists, students and everyone else, and secondly the way lots of people were confident enough to quickly get in front of the cars when the cops diverted traffic. It showed people don't just want to register their protest, they think they can make a difference.
The key thing isn't how much physical damage you do on the demo but what you do afterwards to tie your protest into wider social forces. Look at how they stopped the Vietnam war. Monday was part of a movement against the system that's growing all over the world - all of us in the movement need to think how we can carry on forging links with the majority of people who have no interest in this system either.

Well now, it looks like my fears are confirmed. What happened at Faslane went far beyond a mass arrest (bad enough in itself of course) and into a matter of constitutionality. The police seem to have done the impossible and effectively torn up an unwritten constitution. (There is a written constitituion of a kind, in both statute and precedent, but uncodified).
But please answer one point for me: if parliament is the seat of power, how come the cops were able to do what they did ? Doesnt hold up, does it ?

Another point about this protest is, it gives others, who are not aware of the critical current global situation, a jolt. People start to see through the propaganda and hype and protest in their own way, even if it's just, not voting, for the first time!