Students's Blockade Reports

Over 90 students have participated in the Strident Tent State over the past week, exploring nuclear non-proliferation through discussions, workshops and speaker sessions. Following the incident in Glasgow on Saturday, our blockading plans were thrown off course. Having liaised with the police, the Strident students agreed not to take direct action on either Coulport or Faslane for the duration of Sunday, to prevent Strathclyde police from being overstretched while pursuing their investigations. This decision was made in order to maintain an open dialogue with the police and local residents. Both police and residents had already voiced their gratitude for the way in which we had approached the organisation of Strident and our cooperation when the police asked us to leave our lawful protest outside the North Gate of Faslane as soon as they heard about what happened in Glasgow on Saturday. On Sunday we continued to have a presence at the gate of Coulport, with an assurance to the police that we would not require arrest. A tea party with delicious scones was accompanied by samba, acro and queer politics workshops, with more workshops including Plane Stupid and a vital and exciting direct action project aimed at preventing the destruction of Europe's largest wilderness in Iceland (www.savingiceland.org).

The Strident Tent State has come to a consensus decision to assure the public and police that there will be no direct action to disrupt the daily running of Faslane or Coulport for the whole of Sunday 1st July.

We got up quite early but it turned out to be a good idea because it meant that we could sleep in cells as we had plenty of time to.
To be honest we did feel very unprepared as none of us had done a NVDA before and we had not really practised putting on our lock-on tubes.

Mid-afternoon on Wednesday around twenty of us were fortunate(?) enough to be there as a Trident submarine made its way through the tight spot at Rhu Point to dock in Faslane. Determined to be seen and heard we headed across to hold up luminous pink banners and large placards calling for Peace Now!