Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group took its ‘Cut Trident Save Services’ message to the Budget Day demonstration outside Rochdale town hall on Tuesday evening, 22 June 2010.
Philip Gilligan carried the group’s mock Trident nuclear missile on his back, displaying a price tag of £97bn (£97,000,000,000). He said,
“Today’s budget is a major assault on local jobs and services. The coalition government says that they need to ‘reduce the deficit’, but they are ignoring the cost of the unnecessary and dangerous Trident nuclear missile system and refuse to even include Trident in their review of defence spending. Greenpeace estimates that the cost of ‘Trident Replacement’ will total £97billion. Based on population, Rochdale’s share of this would amount to a staggering £300million; six times the £50million cuts, now, threatened in next year’s Rochdale Council budget. This is money that could and should be spent on the jobs and services which the government is now cutting. Trident “is a system we simply cannot afford”. We need to cut nuclear weapons of mass destruction, not the public services we need.”
