Madam,

As Assembly prospective Labour Party candidate for Dwyfor Meirionydd, I am proud to be a member of our constituency which is in the vanguard of the movement to stop Trident renewal and am honoured to be one of the delegates taking our excellently worded resolution to this year’s Welsh Labour Conference in February. Trident is ridiculously expensive. That amount of money spent should provide the things we need: housing, hospitals, schools, safe energy production systems, rail infra-structure, not a ‘never-to-be-used’ weapon system merely profiting the investment banks and the arms manufacturers.

Sadly, use is contemplated as a punishment to non-nuclear powers of whose policies we disapprove, as a pre-emptive first strike against nuclear powers whom we ‘believe’ are planning attacks and in tit-for-tat exchanges hoping for an adversary’s surrender. The leading theoretician for nuclearity believes a nuclear war can be ‘won’ (H Kahn On Thermonuclear War.) This madness looked unstoppable in the 1980s. It was only Greenham Women with their unilateralism who prevented the holocaust.Every Labour member who rejects Trident adds to the critical weight of Labour MPs needed to make rejection not only the policy of the party but of the Parliamentary Party. With enough support among Labour MPs, support for this hideous weapons system in the Parliamentary Labour Party will collapse. One Plaid MP agreeing, valu-able and welcome as it is, is just that, one MP. An extra Labour MP agreeing brings support in the Parliamentary Party closer to that critical mass that secures the policy for the PLP and then for Parliament itself. The quality of that opposition to Trident in the PLP is undeniable. The Shadow Secretary for Wales, Nia Griffiths, is strongly against the weapon.Those extra MPs are our targets. Dwyfor Meirionydd’s motion will send the message that ordinary Labour voters and members will not endure another Benn-Eagle betrayal of Labour’s tradition of seeking peaceful solutions. These weapons are beyond morality. They are a part of the world’s barbarity. A part it is in our power to dispense with.

First Dwyfor Meirionnydd, then Welsh Labour, then the country. We shall win for peace and humanity.

When Trident is cancelled the people of Wales will benefit to the tune of £1.5 billion, the people of Gwynedd about £60 million, of expenditure on socially necessary projects here.

Trident is an issue for the Welsh Assembly. It must and will campaign to get the appropriate percentage of the cost savings, usually estimated at about £30 billion in all, to Wales and to Gwynedd.

Yours etc,Ian MacIntyre,Arthog Terrace,Arthog.