McKenzie, David

The connections between the UK’s Trident nuclear weapon system and the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014 are both fiendishly complex and absurdly simple

Here are a few of the complications. It is partly a tale of two governments that have their own referendum agendas but that are also highly sensitive to the potential effect on the referendum vote of positions they adopt publicly. The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), conscious of the power of the old principle — ‘…

Two things are happening right now in relation to the question of whether an independent Scotland should be part of the nuclear-armed North Atlantic Treaty organisation (NATO).

It is obvious that within the Scottish National Party the defence spokesperson Angus Robertson is being allowed or encouraged by the leadership to promote a switch to a pro-NATO policy.

He has been publicly floating the idea for some weeks now and has not been slapped down by others in the leadership.…

Walker is reflecting on the 1969 moon landing and the planting of the US flag. The magic of that silver disk, with its message that there are places still untainted by human greed and malice, had been diminished forever.

Many of us have the same feelings about the sea, although the illusion of freedom from contagion is even more difficult to maintain, given the quantity of plastic debris that litters all our coasts, to say nothing of our knowledge of the huge and terrible changes we…

Doors continue to swing open for Faslane 365, the ambitious plan to blockade Faslane naval base continuously for a year. It seems to be catching the imagination.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this lively response is the fact that these days people working for social change are showing an increased readiness to express solidarity across a wide range of connected problems and injustices, such as war, debt, poverty, abuse of asylum seekers, arms sales, drugs, corporate scams,…

Trident Ploughshares activists, in the face of the failure of the British government to fulfil its promises to get rid of its nuclear weapons, undertake that responsibility themselves, by peaceful and nonviolent and accountable direct action. In the four years of the campaign there have been 1803 arrests, 398 trials, 1711 days have been spent in jail (not counting time in police cells) and fines totalling £56,490 have been imposed, though rarely paid.