Trident Nuclear Weapons: Blair fails his own party

Firstly, I would like to start by showing my respect to those who have resigned as they are unwilling to support a government that wishes to perpetuate global instability, a trajectory of violence and not champion the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Jim Devine, Stephen Pound, Nigel Griffiths and Chris Ruane have all resigned over the government’s intension to spend £14 to £20 Billion on replacing Trident Nuclear Weapons.

Tony Blair was only able to win this vote with the support of the Conservative Party. Blair seems to have reached yet another low and continues to degrade himself and those who once supported him in his party. This also reveals that the supposedly new, more compassionate, Conservative Party is truly a marketing ploy and has no real substance. The truth is that David Cameron supports violence, in-fact he is known to engage in killing animals for pleasure, one so called 'sport' he engages in is 'deer stalking' and it is boasted that he can kill two deer before the first reacts. This is kept quiet by his party as they know the harm it could do to the claim that he is compassionate.

Party politics and this weak shadow we call democracy continues to draw as further and further from true and lasting peace. In an email yesterday Margaret Beckett and Des Browne claimed that we cannot disarm, that we need our deterrent, yet much of the world lives happily without fear with no Nuclear Weapons. Peace is attainable and is a process that many are actively undertaking on a social and personal level, we must keep reminding each other that fear of a fret must not dominate our thoughts or actions.

See the map below for information on other countries nuclear weapons policies.

Tabloid Tactics

Like thousands of anti-war protestors I bought a copy of the satirical song entitled 'War! What is it good for?’ designed to mock as well as draw attention to the violent actions of the present British government under Tony Blair. Also like many I spoke to I felt a distaste for this tabloid approach to gaining publicity for an extremely important and valuable message. The single should have entered the charts at number 6 and made a big media impact, yet it was pushed out to number 21, according to The Stop the War Coalition "This was due to the outrageous decision by the chart compilers to invalidate thousands of sales because some people bought more than one copy by mobile phone text message, the first time this method had been used for sales." They went on "So the Blair spoof was just outside the top 20. How convenient that this avoided the widespread media coverage that would have followed a top 20 placement. That said, over the previous week it was a featured item on most of the main TV news channels, and the record still made chart history by being the highest entry ever by an act unsigned to a record label." Somehow this approach reminded me of the tactics of PETA within the animal rights movement who use celebrity media culture regularly within their campaigns. I feel torn by all this, on the one hand I know that the principles of peace and non-violence are rarely championed in our society, yet I cannot help but wonder if these methods really help establish a society that has any greater understanding than before. I feel more and more that we need to lift our standards and look to the intelligent and dignified example of say Martin Luther King, Jr., not the vacuous world of media entertainment for our approach.