A Savage Sentence on CND Members

The spirit of Christmas cheer got shut out in the cold at the Marylebone Court last Tuesday, when magistrate Sir Laurence Dunne clapped six members of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War into prison for two months.

Charged with issuing leaflets which prosecuting counsel Mr. Oliver Nugent said 'were an incitement to the public to invade Air Ministry property,' seven defendants were found guilty of inciting the public to commit breaches of the peace. Six of them, including the Committee's field organizer Pat Arrowsmith and its secretary April Carter, refused to be bound over on their own recognisance of £100 to keep the peace and instead accepted their jail sentences.

One of the leaflets asked members of the public to protest against nuclear armaments and asked them to join a non-violent protest against nuclear armaments. The second leaflet set out a plan which referred to scaling the rocket site and pitching tents to camp there.

In court, Detective-Chief Inspector Statton, who had made the summons, agreed that the movement had abstained from any form of violence. Nevertheless they were found guilty and jailed.

The Socialist Labour League has had, and will continue to have, many differences with the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War. We do not believe that individual acts of heroism and personal demonstrations of devotion and sacrifice can stop capitalism manufacturing nuclear weapons. Nor do we believe that such acts, sincere as they are, can of themselves inspire the working class to fight against nuclear weapons.

The Hydrogen Bomb, nuclear warheads and all the other fiendish weapons are products of the capitalist system. To remove their threat it is necessary to convince the working class that the same class that threatens their jobs with its profit-hungry system is also the same class that threatens their lives with its war plans.

That task can only be accomplished by a socialist programme which unites the working people and brings them into action against the Tory government.

Capitalism answers the appeal to reason and the turn-the-other-cheek attitude, by force and violence. It uses its police force to remove demonstrators from the rocket sites. It uses its courts to jail its opponents.

Labour must act now

Despite our disagreements with the Committee's methods we absolutely condemn the unjust and vicious class sentences meted out to the six defendants. The Labour M.P.'s should shake themselves from their Parliamentary slumbers and raise hell in the House of Commons.

Instead of conducting a witch-hunting inquiry into unofficial strikes, the knights of the Trades Union Congress should organize a trade union protest meeting against the sentences.

It is incumbent upon every socialist to protest against these sentences not piously and in pleading tones to the Tory Home Secretary but with militant meetings and demonstrations.

Now they open the prison cells to receive the pacifists, but they are preparing to attack other sections of the movement. For this reason alone, Labour cannot afford to keep quiet.