Britain's
largest peace movement organisation is going through a difficult patch. Paul Anderson reports
It has
not been the best of years for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Last
autumn, despite all its efforts, it proved incapable of turning public
opinion against the use of force to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Once the
war started, CND was marginalised and incapacitated by the political wrangling
among its supposed allies in the anti-war movement.
In the
spring, it only narrowly missed severe political embarrassment when it went
ahead with plans to hold its annual Easter demonstration in Barrow-in-Furness,
where Britain's new Trident nuclear missile submarines are being built, within
a fortnight of the announcement of massive job losses at the town's VSEL
shipyard.
Since
then, CND has made the headlines less for its campaigns than for losing Neil
and Glenys Kinnock as members and for being short of cash. Amid accusations of
financial incompetence, its monthly magazine, Sanity, has been shut
down. Staffing at every level of the organisation has been drastically pruned.
Last week came the news that CND had lost the Glastonbury Festival to
Greenpeace, the environmentalist pressure group.
But
perhaps none of this should come as much of a surprise. CND grew in the
eighties in response to a spectacular increase
in tension between the two superpower-dominated blocs, in the wake of the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan and, crucially, Nato's December 1979 decision to
station new intermediate-range nuclear force (INF) missiles (ground-launched
cruise and Pershing II) in western Europe.
On the
crest of a wave of popular opposition to the plans for cruise bases at
Greenham Common and Molesworth, the campaign's national membership grew from
3,000 to more than 100,000 within a year of the Nato decision. But through the
late eighties the international tensions which revived CND slowly disappeared.
Under
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union, wilting under the pressure of military
spending, made concession after concession to the United States to secure detente
and arms control. The 1985 Geneva summit between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev
broke a little ice; by the time of the Reykjavik summit a year later, the
thaw was well and truly under way. In 1987, the United States and the Soviet
Union signed the INF Treaty, agreeing to scrap all ground-launched INF
missiles. Commentators began to say that CND's work had been done.
At
first, CND responded by emphasising how much had not changed. Nato was still
committed to an aggressive nuclear war-fighting strategy and was planning
"modernisation" of its non-INF nuclear systems in Europe
(short-range ground-launched missiles and artillery and air-launched and
sea-launched weapons); Britain was still insistent on building Trident.
True
as all this was, however, it was increasingly unconvincing. CND seemed out of
touch with popular sentiment: for most people in Britain, as elsewhere in
Europe, the new detente meant that the threat of nuclear war had passed. The
high-profile celebrity and intellectual supporters drifted away to other
causes. CND's membership slowly but inexorably declined.
The
campaign's influence in party politics went the same way. The peace movement,
ineffective during the 1987 general election, was powerless to prevent Labour from dropping unilateral nuclear
disarmament in 1988-89. By the time that the 1989 revolutions overthrew the
Soviet Union's client states in eastern Europe, the core message of the
early-eighties peace movement seemed strangely obsolete even to many who had
turned up on the big Hyde Park demonstrations.
In the
face of all this, CND could have simply decided to contract and bang away
regardless on the same old themes. Instead, perhaps over-impressed by the share
of the vote taken by the Green Party in the 1989 European elections, it attempted
to broaden its agenda, away from nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy and
towards more general peace and security themes: the "peace dividend",
low-flying military aircraft, the future of Europe after the collapse of communism
and the Warsaw Pact, the arms trade, the Middle East.
The
result was a much better magazine – Sanity was at its best in its last months – but an increasingly confused and
directionless campaign which did not seem to know its priorities. Morale in
the campaign's head office reached an all-time low.
The
international crisis that followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August last
year changed all that at a stroke. CND suddenly found a sense of purpose in
opposing military intervention in the Gulf.
Unfortunately,
however, not least because it never managed to get its arguments for sanctions
against Iraq to be heard above the din of Trotskyist calls for Iraqi victory
against the imperialists, that sense of purpose failed to make any impact on
British public opinion.
After
some impressively large demonstrations before war broke out, CND and the rest
of the anti-war movement was sidelined during the conflict, its
representatives reduced to claiming that the demonstrations would get bigger
when the body bags started coming home. The rapid collapse of Iraqi resistance
in Kuwait after the land offensive began left the argument in tatters and CND's
credibility badly damaged. The Kurds’ rebellion saw CND as
dumbfounded as George Bush. Since the end of the Gulf war, CND has drifted, its
energies sapped by a burgeoning financial crisis and staff morale sinking ever
lower as political differences have deepened.
Meanwhile,
Greenpeace (which employs several former CND staff) has effectively taken over
the CND campaign on the safety of Britain's ancient Polaris submarines. Other nuclear
weapons issues are increasingly dealt with by former CNDers working independently,
notably the British American Security Council (BASIC), which has cornered the
market on radical research into NATO. Unlike the environmentalist pressure
groups, CND now does little original research.
CND's
annual conference this weekend in London is likely to see the fiercest argument
for a decade over the campaign's direction. Essentially, the choice is between
retrenchment on CND's traditional anti-nuclear weapons platform and
endorsement of a much more general anti-militarist perspective.
The campaign's chair, Marjorie Thompson, is in favour of
broadening, the agenda. "Trident, non-proliferation, the arms trade – all these issues, as well as beginning to right the wrongs
perpetrated in our own lives by racism and violence, form the basis of CND
coming of age as a movement for peace and justice,"
she wrote recently in the New Statesman.
Others
are sceptical about the desirability and feasibility of such a process,
pointing to CND's perilous financial circumstances and to the unfinished
business from the campaign’s traditional agenda: Trident, the surviving
elements of Nato’s nuclear modernisation programme, particularly
the tactical air-to-surface missiles that are still planned to replace the
alliance's stock of free-fall nuclear bombs. Why bother to duplicate the work
of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and anti-racist organisations, they ask.
As is the way with conferences, a neat
resolution of the argument is unlikely to take place this weekend. Unless CND
gets its act together, however, it is difficult to believe that the future of
the campaign will be anything but bleak.
