The Bomb - how many Hiroshimas do we need?

Over 50 years ago, I pushed a large, old-fashioned pram on the long road from the Aldermaston nuclear weapons establishment to London with the CND Easter demonstrators. My baby daughter was in it and I was teaching her to sing "Please ban the bomb" to the tune of Three Blind Mice. I called in at a pub to ask for hot water to heat her bottle. She loved it, looking round at the other marchers who were smiling and liking her company. It wasn't a brave journey. We started long after Aldermaston and my husband and his mother picked us up in the car after the last big roundabout into London. But it was one I had to make.
Later, I made others, joining a march down Fleet Street to St. Paul's and Canon Collins, leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, while Yorkshire Post colleagues cheered me on from their newsroom balcony, and there were many Trafalgar Square demonstrations. Most famous of these were the ones which saw a multitude of arrests and figured famous names like the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the historian E.P. Thompson. This was the Committee of 100, more dramatic and law-breaking than CND.
The Cuban crisis over Soviet missiles sited there, seemed to make a war inevitable between the United States and the Soviet Union. A friend phoned me to complain that there were no government instructions on how or where we should shelter with our young children. I told her that shelters were useless anyway. Another friend said she had dug up stones in her garden and hidden tins of food under it in case of a poisonous nuclear explosion and clouds. I thought they were both naive. As I saw it then, along with many others, we were all doomed to a nuclear war and wouldn't survive the 'sixties. I started breaking every strict parental rule to give the children anything that would at least give them some happy years because there was no point in preparing them for the future.
Journalists exposed the hidden and secret nuclear shelters built for the government. The nuclear-armed submarines carried instructions about what to do if the UK disappeared under atomic bombs - four was the number required to wipe it out, according to Professor Patrick Blackett, the Nobel prizewinning atomic scientist who became a leading opponent to the bomb.
By the 'seventies, the fears had receded, I was back at full-time work as a journalist and a chance visit to a CND Easter demonstration showed that their supporters had dwindled completely. Because of this, I suggested to the Guardian features editor I should do an investigation about what had happened to the anti-nuclear movements. "Yes, but make it international," he said. So I did. And that was how I met my heroine, Petra Kelly, leader of the Green movement, anti-Communist and anti-capitalist, who got her party into the German Parliament and proceeded to educate me, not only about the Bomb, but on how to be a feminist. "Have you been to Greenham Common?" she asked. I hadn't even heard of it. But already there for some time were a group of women dedicated to keeping American cruise missiles away from the base that was being prepared for them there.
I went to Greenham, wrote about it and kept on writing. And the Cruise missiles were, in the end, stopped, after hard winters of endurance, arrests, beatings-up, lives given over completely to stopping the nuclear arms race. Glasnost had arrived. The Russians were able to come over and visit the site and the West went there in turn. The Greenham women are still around, leading figures now either protesting at the Yorkshire American spy centre, or engaged on academic research and anti-nuclear projects.
Now, anti-nuclear protest has gone into the background, as it did in the 'seventies. When did you hear about it in this election campaign, except as a desire by the Liberal Democrats for the updating of the Trident nuclear weapons programme to be included in the defence review? How many people know that the British stock of nuclear weapons is equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima bombs, as spelt out by the human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy? The Russian and American stocks, in spite of recent agreements to cut them, are large enough to blow up the planet many times over, yet we still are embarked on recyling schemes to "save the planet" in spite of the world being run by a powerful clique of nuclear armed governments and their arms salesmen.
If we seriously want it as a deterrent, why not have just one or two? Now British general have come out against the Trident warheads, saying they would rather have the billions needed to update it for conventional defence forces, because Trident is useless for any forseeable operation. What we are really concerned about is belonging to the "nuclear club" and being part of its economic and defence conferences - which is why other countries, like Iran, want to join. How sane is that?
A world governed by fear of plans to blow it up, in the hands of men who don't even appear to realise what they are handling?
But the protest movement is stirring again. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has been founded and is launching a nuclear weapons abolition day on June 5. The Flames of Hope carried along the south coast by the World Court Project which succeeded in getting them declared illegal, are going over to New York for the May meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty partners to remind them that they really have to stop the proliferation and possible use of the weapons.
Don't expect this to figure in the election campaign. It is the word that is not allowed to cross the politicians' lips. Don't mention nuclear weapons, is their secret rule, it might lose votes. I left the Labour Party when I heard Gordon Brown casually mention that he would, of course, keep the independent nuclear deterrent, in a speech to a City audience. It was the casualness of it that did for me. And Pakistan is nuclear-armed, with the Al Quaida supporters in easy reach of the weapons' location and doubtless with no qualms about using
one.
Things are better than the 'sixties. Or, given the chance of accidental use, might they just not possibly be just as dangerous?

Racism in the election.

The night train pulled into Waterloo Station and scores of black faces, tired but hopeful, looked out. We were the only ones to meet them - myself and the Daily Mirror's reporter, and we had less than half an hour to file our stories for the midnight editions.
The arrivals were from the Caribbean, shipped on boats normally carrying bananas, to work on London's Tube trains and buses. They had sold homes and parcels of land to get on the boats, answering advertisements from a London transport system in 1951 short of labour.
An arm clutched mine, and a young woman asked "How can I get to Birmingham?" Another appealed to me: "Can you tell me way to south London?" We were surrounded by calls for help and directions to places where the arrivals knew West Indians were already settled. Both the Daily Mirror and the Yorkshire Post carried front page stories about how no one from the government or the London Transport authorities were there to meet and guide the new arrivals.
Nearly 15 years later, Melbourne Good, a 45-year old immigrant from Jamaica, now with a house, job and family in south London, told me of the racist persecution he had endured to get there since those days. A general election was coming up, with Harold Wilson and the Labour Party hopeful of winning, but he said that most of his friends had torn up their Party cards and sworn they would never vote again. They had contracted out of English life. They said England was not only more deeply colour-prejudiced than most of America, but also more hypocritical about it, which made prejudice harder to fight.
"Harold Wilson has been cowardly and a coward can't win. He's tried to please everybody to catch votes, but he's ended by pleasing nobody. You have to fight for what you believe in, not be frightened of the consequences."
Now he had a shell so tough that no white rejection, no cry of "nigger" in the streets could move him any more.
Yet he had been reared in a climate of unquestioning patriotism in Kingston, where many had gone to defend Britain in the war and wore their medals proudly at every opportunity. Britain was the mother country. Unfortunately, it seemed the mother didn't love them any longer.
"My, what we thought of the British," said his wife. "Looking back, I can't believe it. They were everything wonderful to us." She pinches her arm and stares at it. "That bit of epidermis. Could you believe it would make so much difference?"
How much difference does it still make? It is now illegal to cry "nigger" in the streets, but the British National Party is having a relatively successful election campaign and guaranteed air time. White racism has been added to black, if immigrants come from eastern Europe or Asia. The white ones arrive with the same idealised notions of Britain as the former black immigrants had of the "motherland" and learn quickly how wrong they were.
Melbourne Good said he had learned to be careful, not to trust the English, and to keep out of their way. Now, thousands of others doing the street-cleaning, caring, hospital and building jobs others don't want to do, are learning the same. In the "illegal immigrant" detention centres abuse and neglect go on in our name, almost as little reported on as the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
The LibDem's forward-thinking election agenda calls for a review of the immigrant restrictions and a review of the system. But the Tory Party have made a major attack on their proposals. And the British National Party has a freedom and acceptance it could never have had in 1951, so soon after the war against fascism. Black people are stopped and searched far more often than white and a white immigrant mending a roof without the correct papers is arrested and sent to detention. We have not changed.



ends

No homes for the Election

" The single issue which could lose the Government the election is the failure of its housing policy....no Government will have so deserved a defeat.....Now we have a Cabinet with the Minister of Housing left out and a Chancellor who has said publicly that he thinks housing needs are of no more importance than education and other calls on his department."
I wrote that in a Guardian column in October, 1969. Has anything changed? No, except to become worse. Council housing has stopped, and there is no separate ministry to deal with housing any longer.
Houses are no longer regarded as homes, vital to a family's welfare ("hardworking" or not), but as a quick source of profit as the price of housing has gone out of control. In London, no one on an average salary can now afford to buy a house, and low family finances generally are crippled by high mortgage payments which in 40 years ago would not even have been procurable.
Then, the Labour government was promising 500,000 homes by 1979 - a target which was not achieved, but which at least was an aim.
Now, the Minister of State for housing and planning, who is allowed to attend Cabinet even if he is not a member, is suggesting only that there could be 100,000 new homes on surplus local authority land.
There is no air of urgency, as there was in the past, no prime place in the political speeches. Yet the lack of a suitable place to live is experienced by most people on low or average incomes in both the country and the city It is a matter of shame for recent governments , Labour as well as Tory. The high rise flats were often a design disaster of the 'sixties, but at least they represented a sense of urgency in getting people into a home with modern equipment which they could afford.
Housing shortage is a prime cause of poverty and bad living conditions. When shall we see an end to housing being simply a route to profitable investment instead of the provision of homes for all who need them?