Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RICHARD MOTTRAM
The government faced quite an interesting challenge in relation both to CND and to, for example, the Greenham Common Peace women, because CND was led by people who were actually rather effective leaders, had considerable personal charm, were clever. I’m thinking here of Joan Ruddock and Bruce Kent, these sorts of people. And they represented a serious challenge, therefore, to government if it was going to deal with the arguments they were putting forward. And in relation to the Greenham Common Peace camp and so on, here you had a group of women who were naturally the sort of people most people would sympathise with. They were genuine sort of citizen protesters. And the government had the challenge, how could it deal with the intellectual arguments as well as the visual arguments? And that occupied a lot of government time because this was also a political-- this was both a strategic issue and also a political issue. And it came together because in 1983, there was going to be a general election, and there was partisan differences between the Conservatives and the Labour Party over these key issues. So for the government, this became a very, very big priority. And in fact, in the 1983 election, I think defence was the third most salient issue, which is a very unusual situation.
LUC-ANDRE BRUNET
By the early 1980s, however, it had become clear that the CND’s message was resonating with millions of citizens across the UK. And so the UK government and actually more specifically, the Conservative Party, resorted to other means to try and challenge the CND’s arguments. So the there was an organisation called the Coalition for Peace through Security, which was set up in the early 1980s and had strong ties with the Conservative government. The young Conservatives also set up a group called Youth for Multilateral Disarmament. And both of these groups issued a series of publications, posters, pamphlets, and so on, which engaged with the CND’s arguments to differing degrees. But really, they sought to discredit what the CND and the UK Peace Movement more broadly was arguing for. So they tended to depict the CND, typically, as a communist front, as really a front of the Soviet Union. And that if the UK were to back the CND’s position, it would actually be serving the Soviet interests rather than the British interests. And in some of their publications, they also likened the peace movement of the early 1980s to the pacifist movement in the inter-war period, particularly the policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. So I think all of these cumulatively did play a role in starting to discredit some of the CND’s arguments, at least in the eyes of some voters in the UK. And this was particularly crucial in the lead up to the 1983 general election.
BRUCE KENT
The UK government with CND was discreetly and politely hostile. If they could say anything unpleasant about us, they would do that, anything to marginalise us. In fact, they picked on one phrase, one word in many UN documents, ‘unilateral and multilateral’. Now if you look up the UN documents, the different steps towards disarmament, multilateral, unilateral, bilateral, general, and so on. But they were made as contrasting enemies. So if you were a multilateralist, believed in treaties, you didn’t believe in independent action. Nevertheless, the arms race went up by independent action, but it was a government split. So people would say to me, I’m a multilateralist, I’m not one of yours. That was the most effective bit. But that was sheer propaganda. There were also some very filthy things that went on as well, really disgusting abuse. I remember one right-wing think tank who put out documents saying that we were CND, Communists, Neutralists and Defeatists. That was a that was their slogan. And the people who authored that are now in Westminster parliament now today.
MARY KALDOR
Well, it was extremely critical. I mean, I think I had my passport disappeared and reappeared in a brown envelope. My address book disappeared. Both Edward and Thompson and me had big investigations into our tax affairs, which we both thought was because of silly mistakes. You always make silly mistakes. I forgot to declare something, but actually, the odd thing was it happened at exactly the same time.
KATE HUDSON
The government overall, but presumably the MOD had the most direct impact. I think it was noticed really that their initial approach towards CND in around in 1980 where the big demos first started after the announcement in 79 to kind of try and sideline CND and starve it of media coverage and attention, thinking that that was the way to do it. And that didn’t work. Because if something is so big and kind of popular, so to speak, from the people, then you can’t just silence it in that way. So after that, into the early 1980s, there was a concerted effort to kind of smear CND. And the main way in which that was done was by trying to suggest that it had funding from the Soviet Union. And then they produced materials at the time where CND meant Communist, Neutralists and Defeatists, and all this kind of things. So it was very much to try and suggest that we weren’t British, we didn’t love our country, we weren’t patriotic. We were agents of a foreign power, leaving Britain wide open to attack and all that kind of stuff. None of which, of course, was true at all.
MATTHEW JONES
The government’s view of CND is essentially that they are almost stooges of the Soviet Union, that they are naive followers of a line which will only give advantages to the Soviet Union in the Cold War and would lead to measures for disarmament, unilateral disarmament in the UK, which will give the Soviet Union very, very decisive advantages in the Cold War, in the second Cold War, which is emerging in the early 1980s. And that’s seen in government attempts to brand CND activists as essentially stooges of the Soviet Union rather than people who are genuine idealists or committed to a particular view of the way that they would see a safer world emerging, a safer, more peaceful and secure world emerging.