SOS for our NHS

In London on 4 March, there’s a demonstration in support of investment in our NHS and against investment in Trident: people from Hastings are attending and you’re invited to go along with them. Why are they participating?

“We are demonstrating because the NHS is at crisis point and the Government is considering ways of not funding parts of it rather than extending and improving services for the 21st century.” Rona Drennan from Hastings Against War has drawn the demo to HOT’s attention.

The national demonstration, Our NHS, has been called by Health Campaigns Together and is being supported by campaigners up and down the country: by trade unions, by the Royal College of Nursing and by British Medical Association (representing doctors) calling for no cuts, no closures, no privatisation and for a fully funded publicly owned national health and social care service.

NHS not Trident?

Rona Drennan from Hastings Against War says: “The Campaign  for Nuclear Disarmament’s latest report issued in January 2017, ‘Security Not Trident’, calculates the cost of a new system at £205  BILLION.  Most anti-nuclear weapons campaigners would call holding the threat of nuclear weapons over the world immoral, regardless of the cost, but this figure is appalling.  More so because, as CND argue, the Trident system is outdated and irrelevant in the face of current threats.

“The government’s National Security Strategy, published in November 2015, actually identifies the most urgent threats – and they are recognisable to all of us: tier one threats include climate change, terrorism, pandemics, cyber-attacks and resource shortages. The document has nuclear weapons firmly down as a level two threat, but bizarrely that doesn’t prevent the government from wanting to spend billions of pounds on new ones.”

Where and when?

Saturday 4 March 2017. The demonstration will assemble 12 noon in Tavistock Square, London. You can book a place on the coach; there are still a few places left. The coach leaves from Hastings Pier at 9am on the day of the march and will leave London at 5pm. To book a place, please contact Alan.Mathison@unitetheunion.org or phone on 07776397995.

Hastings Against War started in opposition to the impending war on Iraq and has continued to be a focal point for local peace activists to share ideas on events and action.

Also in: Campaigns