Tallents, Jane

In the mid-1990s, we were excited to hear that Georgina Smith, a Greenham woman, had bought Peaton Glen Wood, a magical 14ha (34-acre) woodland right next to the Coulport Trident warhead store, from the MoD. Through the first Women’s Camp we held there and the many Trident Ploughshares disarmament camps held there, I came to know Georgina. She was clever, fun and full of integrity, never acting as if she owned the place or blowing her own trumpet about the many courageous and important acts…

Let’s be aware that our international friends might need our support in all sorts of ways during Brexit chaos.

Being convicted for peace actions may stop activists from the remaining 27 EU countries from continuing to live in the UK.

If they want to have ‘settled’ status and remain in the UK after Brexit, EU27 citizens will have to answer three ‘simple’ questions online, according to the home office.

People will be asked to: show who they are; prove that they…

When people discover that the huge trucks they’ve just seen on the road have nuclear bombs in them, they are often shocked and outraged. Not just because the convoys are a potential danger but often people are politically opposed to nuclear weapons, which are suddenly made very real when a convoy overtakes on the motorway or passes by their front door. In Scotland, where Trident was high on the agenda during the independence referendum campaign, the number of members of the public reporting…

In the mid-1980s, Faslane Peace Campers in Scotland began noticing big military convoys which passed by them on a regular basis. They worked out that these unique vehicles, the strangely-shaped eight-wheeler ‘Mammoth Majors’, were delivering nuclear warheads to the armaments depot at Coulport on Loch Long just over the hill from Faslane.

At the time, there was very little public information about how the warheads assembled at AWE Burghfield near Reading were transported to Scotland…

Trident Ploughshares affinity group 'Rise Up Singing' organised two days of tuneful protest at (and a blockade of) the Faslane nuclear submarine base on 16-17 September.

There was a busy day of workshops, singing practice and banner-making on 15 September.

The next day, more than 50 people headed to Faslane to raise their voices in protest against the Trident submarines housed there.

Two visitors from Bhopal described their campaign for justice for the…

TP die-in outside SNP HQ, Edinburgh, 9 August. PHOTO: Trident Ploughshares

Various stalls and ceremonies were held across Scotland over the first week-end in August to mark the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. On 9 August, Trident Ploughshares (TP) held a more pointed Nagasaki commemoration at the Scottish National Party’s HQ in Edinburgh.

TP wanted to challenge the SNP leadership’s ludicrous lack of consistency in declaring an absolute opposition to hosting nuclear weapons while…

The week of 6 June 2011

It’s mostly been a week of paper. Those who try and marginalise us as only interested in “action” have no idea just how much paper NVDA (nonviolent direct action) can generate!

I start the week helping Brian with preparing his international law defence for his court case for blockading the Trident refit area of Devonport in November last year. So it’s copying, collating, stapling and labelling new information found on the internet, while out of the…

Court support.

Showing up at court to help people through a court case is really important. Just by being there you make a difference. However, from feedback it seems that direct action campaigns keep people actively involved after going through the courts if they help make that experience more empowering than intimidating.
To do that you need to provide information that helps people plot some kind of course through the court proceedings.
Briefings sent out to people…

Faslane 365 – the year-long blockade of the Faslane nuclear weapons base finished on 1 Oct last year. However as the wheels of justice turn so exceedingly slowly, the resulting court cases are still trundling through the district court in Helensburgh.

It’s a good job that of the 1,150 arrests the Procurator Fiscal (PF) chose to take only 75 prosecutions.
Initially the PF, Andrew Miller, instructed the police to hold people overnight so that he could decide whether to bring…