February. Sylvia Boyes and Mary Millington cut a fence and painted peace slogans at Faslane naval base and hung on the base perimeter a banner asking “Disarmament – if not now, when?”.
February 2013. TP joined other campaign groups in Scotland in a submission in response to the Scottish government’s response to the report of the Working Group on a Future of Scotland without Nuclear Weapons.
March. Muriel Lesters group demonstrated at the London HQ of Lockheed Martin. The arms company is part of the consortium that runs AWE Aldermaston.
April 2013. Scrap Trident Blockade of Faslane. TP was a key member of the Scrap Trident Coalition which is organised the Scrap Trident weekend in the spring. Most of the TP effort went into the blockade of Faslane naval base on Monday 15th April at which 47 people were arrested, including lots of young folk and people from all over the UK and beyond. Check out the great photos from the day. In Scotland an important context for our activity was the September referendum on independence. Since the SNP government has a clear anti-Trident policy Scottish TP members saw the vote as the best chance for ridding Scotland of weapons of mass destruction. Such a move would also most likely mean that the UK as a whole would have to abandon nuclear weapons and this would be a huge spur to worldwide disarmament.
April 2013: TP Letter to Alex Salmond: Keep Scotland out of NATO
TP played an active part in the Action AWE campaign. Action AWE (Atomic Weapons Eradication) was a grassroots campaign of non-violent actions dedicated to halting nuclear weapons production at the Atomic Weapons Establishment factories at Aldermaston and Burghfield. Groups and individuals took autonomous actions and events from February 2013 onwards to raise awareness of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons.
July. Ten TP activists blocked the main entrance to the Burghfield site for almost three hours.
August. A two-week TP peace camp was set up near Burghfield.
August. Two TPers took part in a fast at AWE Burghfield from Hiroshima to Nagasaki day .
August. Blockade of AWE Burghfield by people from all over the UK and from Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands on September. There were 22 arrests on the day.
September: “SCOTLAND YES, TRIDENT NO” message, formed by members each holding a single large letter of the legend, had its first, and well-received, outing at the Edinburgh independence rally.
September. Sylvia Boyes and Mary Millington were admonished after being found guilty in the Dumbarton JP court. The following January Three Faslane Peace Campers had the charges against them dropped after bureaucratic blunders by the court and members of the Muriel Lesters affinity group had a similar result after showing that the “highway” they were alleged to have obstructed was not a public road.
October Helen Swanston was fined £50 for her part.
30th November. On St Andrews Day the SCOTLAND YES, TRIDENT NO banner was hung from the highest wall of Edinburgh Castle.