Bruce Kent
This weekend London CND held our 2018 conference on the theme 'Living in interesting times: how the world's shaping up under President Trump.'
We began the day with a live skype call from Washington with Brian Becker, national co-ordinator for the ANSWER coalition, who spoke about worrying developments in President Trump's nuclear policy.
Our first plenary took the theme of 'the shape of things to come', and we heard from Costa Rican Ambassador Jose Enrique Castillo Barrantes, Catherine West, Labour MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, and Jim Hoare, first British representative to North Korea. Our speakers discussed the seismic changes to the global order which are beginning to emerge.
The second plenary, on 'facing the challenges', featured two excellent speakers, Sami Ramadani from the Iraqi Democrats and Kim Sharif from Human Rights for Yemen, who spoke with passion about the situation in the Middle East and how we should be responding.
We ended the day with a rousing session on 'action for change' in which our speakers Bruce Kent, Green MEP Molly Scott-Cato and Stop the War Coalition chair Murad Qureshi gave their suggestions for practical actions that individuals, campaigning groups and politicians can take to move towards a nuclear-free world.
As well as thoughtful and inspiring ideas from our guest speakers, we also had some wonderful comments and contributions from the audience, and we'd like to say a big thank-you to all who attended and made the day such a success!
More information:
You can find more photos from the day here.
London CND chair Carol Turner's conference paper