Peace
campaigners from Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group joined the thousands on
Blackstone Edge on Sunday (6 July 2014) to welcome the Tour de France and to
promote their slogan, ‘Bikes not Bombs: Trikes not Trident’. They displayed
banners and flags from the moor near the junction of Turvin Road and the A58
and distributed leaflets headed ‘Pedal for Peace and Disarmament’. The group
asked, ‘How could we spend £100billion, if we scrap Trident?’ and answered with
the messages ‘Jobs Not Trident’, ‘NHS Not Trident’, ‘Homes Not Trident’,
‘Education Not Trident’.
Philip
Gilligan, on behalf of the Peace Group, said,
“It was great
to see the cyclists and to have an opportunity to thank the Tour de France for
sponsoring last month’s special race in Sarajevo marking the anniversary of the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In Sarajevo, in June 2014, Christian
Prudhomme, the director of the Tour told Reuters that the Tour de France “is an
event which gathers and unites the people, and the message we are sending from
here is the message of peace and unity" (see http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/22/us-ww1-anniversary-sarajevo-idUSKBN0EX0H620140622
). Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group is committed to promoting that same
message and to urging all political parties to recognise that the Trident
nuclear weapons system is an unnecessary waste of public money which exposes us
and the whole world to danger. Nuclear weapons threaten peace and unity and
divide our world. We need to scrap them now.”
“In 1914, the
Tour de France began on the same day as Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, but was
called off as Europe descended into a horrific and disastrous war. Forty-eight
of the Tour's former participants, including three who had been winners of the
event, were among more than 10 million soldiers who would die in WW1. In the
twenty-first century, we need no more wars and no more unnecessary deaths”, he
added.rochdaleandlittleboroughpeacegroup
