Lucas demands: Troops out of Iraq and halt Trident replacement
24 February 2007
THE Government must abandon plans to replace its Trident nuclear missilesand immediately withdraw all UK troops from Iraq, Green Party MEP CarolineLucas today told a central London rally today
Speaking at the 'No Trident/Troops out of Iraq' rally,where it is estimated some 60 000 people had gaterhered, Dr Lucas said:
"Replacing Trident would be illegal, immoral, counter-productive - andutterly irrelevant to the real security threats we face today.
"It would cost the British taxpayer an estimated £76bn over the next fewdecades - money that could be used to fund practical solutions to climatechange, the far greater security threat we face, as the recent UNInternational Panel on Climate Change has again made clear.
"It will put the UK in direct breach of the UN's Nuclear Non-ProliferationTreaty, and would increase the global supply of nuclear materials bylaunching a new nuclear arms race."
Veteran peace campaigner Dr Lucas is also a member of the decision-makingNational Council of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which has calledthe demonstration alongside the British Muslim initiative and the Stop theWar Coalition, and is a co-founder and Co-President of the EuropeanParliament's cross-party Peace Initiatives group.
She is currently awaiting trial for allegedly breaching the peace by takingpart in a peaceful blockade of the Trident nuclear submarine base atFaslane, Scotland, alongside MPs and elected representatives from around theworld.
"It is hypocritical in the extreme for us to be censuring Iran forapparently pursuing nuclear weapons whilst we in the UK are ignoring ourlegal and moral obligations to disarm ours, and are in fact doing preciselythe opposite, as International Atomic Energy Agency Director GeneralMohammed ElBaradei said earlier this week," she added.
