Rochdale
shoppers admired colourful paper cranes on the Rochdale and Littleborough Peace
Group stall in Yorkshire Street on Saturday morning (23 November 2013) where
local campaigners were asking passers-by to sign a letter confirming that they
want their taxes "spent on decent health and social care services, not the
Trident nuclear weapons system" and where they distributed Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament leaflets asking, "What if we had over £100bn to spend
on healthcare, transport, housing, education and energy"?.
The
cranes were made by children and peace campaigners
from across Japan and were some of the millions gathered during the 2013 Peace
March from Tokyo to Hiroshima to mark the 68th anniversary of the
dropping of the first atomic bomb. Since 6 August 2013, 'Gensuikyo', the
Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs has been sending boxes of
cranes to peace and anti-nuclear groups throughout the world, including
Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group.
On behalf
of the Peace Group, Philip Gilligan said,
“There
are many reasons why our taxes should never be spent on nuclear weapons. The
people of Japan know better than most the horrifying and indiscriminate
destruction that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought in 1945. They
remind us that nuclear weapons threaten to destroy our world. We were delighted
to receive the gift from our fellow peace campaigners in Gensuikyo. The cranes symbolise our united call
for all countries to scrap their ever-more dangerous nuclear arsenals and
inspire us to repeat our demand that politicians in Britain recognise the need
to scrap the Trident nuclear weapons system, immediately. This is a campaign
which must succeed; for the sake of us all and for generations to come..
At a time when the government claims to have no money, it is spending £95 every
second of every minute of every day on nuclear weapons. That's £8 million of
our taxes wasted every day on something which former chief of the defence
staff, Field Marshal Lord Bramall and Generals Lord Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh
Beach denounced in 2009 as "irrelevant" and "completely
useless" (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7832365.stm
). Scrapping the Trident nuclear weapons system would save around £100 billion.
This is money which could fully fund all A&E services in hospitals for over
40 years into the future or be used to build 150 new state-of-the-art hospitals
or to pay the wages of 150,000 extra nurses for the next 30 years. That would
save lives, instead of threatening humankind's very existence."
"We
and the cranes will be visiting other parts of the borough over the coming
months. We trust and hope that many more people will join us in demanding that
our taxes are spent on the services we need, not squandered on nuclear weapons”,
he added.
