Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

First Burnley in 1979, then Plymouth Devonport in 1983 against David Owen.

At around the same time, another issue was beginning to define her political convictions, CND and the campaign against Britain's nuclear deterrent.

In 1983, she joined Women and Families For Defense.

My name is Olga Meklent, and I'm the founder of Defense and Security Forum, which grew out of my campaign against CND called Women and Families for Defense, and it's in those days, in 1983, that Ann Widdecombe came very vivid part of our, my life as we got the campaign off the ground.

I was terrified of her when I first met her.

Um, she's very formidable, as you know, and even though in those days, back in '83, she was still in her mid-30s, she hadn't yet reached the public prominence of today, but she had a very clear idea about how things ought to be done.

That's typical Anne.

Reform MP Andrew Rosindall was a young man when he got involved in Women and Families for Defence.

In many ways, he was a remarkable figure and the magazine had assumed this sort of venerable status and it had played an important role in contemporary British political debates, including those at the time like the question of nuclear disarmament.

Indeed, it is in The New Statesman that J.B. Priestley publishes his famous article, Britain and the Nuclear Bombs, in which he calls for Britain to unilaterally renounce its nuclear weapons, which is seen as the article that is the seed of the campaign for nuclear disarmament.

And indeed, it's in Kingsley Martin's own flat that the first sort of proto-meeting of CND meets.

And John Freeman comes in in 1961 and basically says that This isn't realistic.

We can't be seen as this idealistic magazine that just talks about these grand, highfalutin ideals.

Welcome to the History of Punk Rock Podcast.

In this episode, we dig into how bands like Crass and The Clash turned the anti-nuclear movement into a DIY musical revolution, using benefit concerts for CND, self-made fanzines, and all of just venues to broadcast their protest across the punk community.

the late seventies were a time when the sky looked like a ticking bomb over every city especially after the cuban missile crisis had already left a scar in people's collective psyche and then the cold war dragged on for another decade So it makes sense that punk would splinter from the mainstream and get stuck at the front lines of this nuclear dread like a live-wired warning system screaming, you're about to blow yourself apart, while the air around London was literally choked with mushroom clouds in the minds of millions.

The music we call punk was born not only as an aggressive sonic assault, but also as a visual and political manifesto against that looming threat.

That was punk's first act of defiance, but it also laid the groundwork for more organized peace movements later on.

Fast forward to the early 1980s, when Britain was finally grappling with an absurd number of nuclear warheads stationed on its soil and in the Atlantic.

and a movement that had been quietly growing since 1957, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or CND, had reached a crescendo where punk bands suddenly saw themselves as part of an international political dialogue rather than just another noise scene.

The irony was palpable.

Everybody's going to die.

And if you look on the information leaflet that is Leeds and the bomb, Where it invites you to seek further information is basically all the contact details for the local CND branches.

Yeah.

Should we talk about nuclear-free zones and what actually they did and didn't do?

No officers, but elected members.

because it was seen that they would have a duty to survive and continue the work.

A lot of areas did point people towards CND.

They would help organise protests.

Feudal taxation to Catholicism, compulsory Catholicism to, you know, suffragettes protesting on racetracks and putting their lives in danger.

Like the coal miners, the CND people on Greenham Common.

Like we have always protested.

There's always been a kind of solidarity amongst people here.

And so throughout the, the decades, there was a, a Women's World Committee Against War and Fascism in 1934.

And then in the '50s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was set up.

I mean, my mum, in 1958, went on the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march from Aldermaston to London.

So I mean, women were, were involved as far as they could be.

You know, you've got to remember, you know, w- when the First World War started, women didn't have the vote.

We had a Black South African barrister who, who gave evidence about how uranium was mined in South Africa, uranium being obviously an important part of a bomb, a nuclear bomb.

We had the Bishop of Salisbury.

And, and in the back of the court was Tony Benn, the MP, uh, Bruce Kent, who was the head of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and it was just, the media were just all over it like a rash because at the end of the day, the magistrates were advised, I think by Mr. English, not to accept the, the defense.

He was subtler than that.

But there were sometimes subliminal messages in Taylor's lectures about the origins of the First World War, the origins of the Second World War, sort of kind of relating it to things like his passionate support for CND.

Uh, Taylor was, uh, like Michael Foot, a great, uh, campaigner for, uh, nuclear disarmament.

Anyway, Tim, uh, uh, yeah, well, your mother had some good time.

so resistance to this longer nuclear agenda began relatively early developing through the 1950s and 60s as sections of the left broke with the communist party of australia taking inspiration from the campaign for nuclear disarmament or cnd in britain activists in australia rejected the common idea at the time that nuclear weapons should simply be viewed through the lens of the Cold War, instead campaigning for unilateral nuclear disarmament.

According to one academic at the time, the 1960s saw small groups of students, white-collar professionals, and some middle-class activists start to form campaigns that were at the time exclusively focused on opposing nuclear weapons and technology.

And so you saw CND groups pop up in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth, in the early 60s, but soon as anti-Vietnam War sentiment and the campaign against conscription came about, that was overshadowed by that at the time.

When the high point of the anti-uranium campaign came about in the 70s, which I'll turn to, that had been off the back of a whole range of other social movements that that campaign intersected with.

And so these included the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's liberation movement, gay liberation, and Aboriginal struggles for land rights.