Bloackading Stories
Ella Sprung, Warwick University
I'm Ella, and I went to Faslane for the first time with a singing group from London in November, then for the second time in February with a group from Coventry, where I'm from.
We were a group of about 35 people, with a large contingent from Warwick University. My mum, dad and sister were all there, which kind of made us the mafia of the group..... We had various bits of equipment for lock ons, but didn't plan exactly what we were going to do until we got there and checked out the choices. We decided in the end to split the 'arrestables' into two groups, one to block the road between the South and North Gates, and a second the road near the North Gate. We didn't blockade in front of the gate, as we thought we wouldn't have time to get into position there and lock on.
I was in the first group. We did our blockade at about 6.45am, jumping out of our minibus on a pretty deserted road and locking on asap with plenty of people in hi-viz jackets helping to stop traffic. That was the scariest part actually, as my sister almost got run over my a car that wouldn't stop. Fortunately we were all ok, and had been lying down across the road for a few minutes before the police turned up. While we were being cut out, other people from our group filmed, took pictures and shouted supportive things! For our part, the people on the road sang Bella Ciao (in pretty bad Italian.....). We blocked the road for about 45 minutes (and heard a great announcement on the tannoy to the effect of "there has been an incident on the A814... could personnel please avoid this route". Yey, our disruption of the killing machines is official!
We were arrested (12 of us in all, including my mum!) and dragged into the police vans. We were in custody for about thirty hours. We were all released with a 'complaint' which meant that we will have to appear in court. We were the first (and at the time of writing only) group to be charged en masse. We all pled Not Guilty and will be appearing at court in Scotland over the next few months.
Personally, I didn't find the time in the cells too bad; I sang, read a book and drew on the walls (don't tell my mum!). In the evening I was put in a cell with two others from our group, so that was nice. My mum was three cells down! We were also able to pass notes to each other, via the officer on duty!!
There are plenty more things to say about my experience, but seeing as you are probably bored of reading it on a computer screen, come ask me more in person at the summer blockade (shameless plug!) Or indeed have the experience for yourself if you haven't already, it's cool.
PS Video of the Coventry group's escapades at http://www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/content/articles/2007/02/26/video_nuclear_feature.shtml
Jo Tyabji, 2nd year English undergrad, St Catz college Oxford
Nitin Sawhney's song 'Beyond Skin' opens with a sound clip of an American man saying 'On july 29th at 5:29 am the gadget turned the pre-dawn sky as bright as the sun as the first atomic mushroom cloud rose above the horizon... A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita... Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.'
Take a second to understand what it means for every single warhead of the 48 on a Trident submarine to be 8 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. For me, it is a short leap from understanding to acting. I have never been on a march or a protest for the sake of the exercise, understanding has always been central to what I say and do. In the case of Trident and Faslane 365, that understanding has had a long incubation period. I remember first learning about nuclear weapons, what they are, what they did in Japan, what they can do, when I was seven. Then the Cold War and the Cuba Missile Crisis at GCSE, how close we came. Then an article come across during A Levels written by a US General who had been personally responsible for selecting targets within the USSR, and stopped because he couldn't in the end say why this town rather than this, annihilation for these, radiation sickness and slow death for those. The independence movement in India as an extended essay led to a greater understanding of non-violent direct action, that threat answered with threat perpetuates an unstable paradigm of 'peace' because it is based on impending but continually delayed war. And then an American woman met on my GAP year who had sat on the tracks in the path of a train carrying nuclear weapons, and succeeded in turning it back. So much civil resistance that doesn't go into the history books, still so many voices going unheard.
The January blockade was pivotal for me in that it convinced me that direct action of this kind is not just a symbolic act, but a tool. Gandhi new that, great soul as he was, he was no hippy but an astute politician. Sitting chained to my mates in the road was taking my convictions and making them tangible, but beyond that is a world of conferences and commons debates which I need to take my conviction into, from the gates to the seat of power.
I got stage fright just before we went onto the road, imagining burly Scots policemen rushing us in an attempt to stop us locking on, but they stood by and let us do it. We grumbled with each other, protesters and police, about Tony Blair and poor pay, Top Up Fees and the £76bn to be spent over the lifetime of the next nuclear weapons. Over my lifetime. 50 years. I'll be a grandma when this chance comes round again. I thought about that more sitting in my cell, and felt not weak but... slow. I could imagine a whole lifetime stretching ahead of me in which I chipped steadily away at the fallacies surrounding the policy of deterrence, then stood back at 70 and saw the Prime Minister (in my head he still has big ears, and is still a he, but maybe this is too pessimistic) make a speech about how nuclear weapons are integral to our security. I drummed on the wall with my heels, and got an answering knock from the next cell Hans Blix where are you? We've got nukes you know we do, going round in my head. I slept well, got let out hours before I thought I would, and was bopping along the corridor full of the pent up intensity of sitting, thinking, reading, with the world turning around me. Its a funny feeling being compelled to stay somewhere. The duty officer escorting me to the desk had dried my wet clothes. 'Will you be coming back to Faslane do you think?' she asked. 'Oh yeah, definitely, well, unless Tony Blair has a sudden change of heart...' We laugh, I go, we whoop and sing 'its the sound of the police' in the minibus home.
Dominic Williams 1st year physics student at St Catz
It's hard to pin point the exact reason that made me decide to go to faslane and get arrested blockading the nuclear submarines. I have been against nuclear weapons for a long time I can remember when I was 11 or 12 going to an exabition showing some of the horrors caused by nuclear weapons in Japan; the images of total destruction of the city along with terrible personal testimonies. The one that sticks with me most is that of a child who was in a swimming pool at the time. As the building burned up around them they only survived by going underwater to shelter a bit from the heat. For ages after I often thought about this when I went swimming. This has made me feel nuclear weapons are always wrong and nothing can possibly allow there use. To people who think I am naïve and say in this world we need the weapons to defend ourselves I say if that really is the case doesn't that something terrible about the world we live in and that maybe something better is possible. If we can all agree it is unimaginably terrible to use these weapons why do we need them. Maybe another world is possible. The reasons for acting probably come from my experience in the antiwar movement. The feeling of solidarity that it developed when together we managed to block roads and let people know that Blair was taking the country into war without the consent of its population. The feeling that another world is possible.
When we were actually in Scotland, before the blockade happened, I was really scared that we would not be successful. Something was bound to go wrong. We wouldn't get the nerve to walk past the police lines. The police would physically stop us from going on the road. They would arrest us all in two seconds and the only achievement would be spending the night in a police cell. As it happened none of these scenarios happened. The actual moment of us all walking into the road was very calm. Someone said after that a silence fell over the gate. I was really tense inside at that moment and couldn't concentrate on anything except sticking near the person I was meant to be locking on to. The police didn't move at all the whole time and were prepared to let us onto the road. The academics then completed their seminar as we chained ourselves together to prevent our easy removal.
Later we broke into song to keep our spirits up. Great songs such as "we don't like the trident submarines" to tune of yellow submarine. Fun was had trying to work out verses that fitted, none of them too successfully. As it started raining we covered ourselves with large tarpaulins. Creating a tent so good I had to take several layer off as it was too hot. I wore nine layers that day as I knew it could get cold. The good thing about being locked together on a road is lots of people try and give you food and drink. The bad thing is you have to be careful not to drink too much tea as going the toilet when chained together at the waist would be rather difficult.
After five hours when it became clear to the police that we were not about to leave by ourselves and would stay the night to greet the MSPs due the next day if they let us, they decided to start arresting us. However as there were still 40 of us on the road and it takes two police officers to arrest someone they quickly ran out of police. They then decided to call in the MoD police from the base along with specialist cutting teams to remove the chains. An hour later after closing the base for a faslane365 record of just over 365 minutes the last people where removed. We then had to queue for an hour to get processed, luckily the police were friendly. After having difficulty shutting the door of a police minibus one officer remarked "Why do they want to spend £76 billion on trident when they can't even get us a decent van". The night in the police cell, in the supposed knife crime capital of Europe, wasn't fun but I suppose it was never meant to be. The next morning though after release there was a great feeling of happiness. I suppose that was the feeling of freedom and of having been part of a process of changing the world to make it a wonderful place to live in where no one makes threats of mass murder, a world where war and poverty has indeed been made history.