The Times – 20 April 1985

When the GLC declared 1983 "Peace Year" and proceeded to use rates income to fund the activities of various unilateralist groups, our organisation – whose objective is peace through deterrence – decided to test whether the GLC's commitment to peace campaigning was politically even-handed by applying for a grant.

Since our prescription for maintaining peace differed from that advocated by the Labour Party, CND and its offshoots our application was refused consideration and we received not one penny, unlike the much-ridiculed "Babies Against the Bomb".

The Morning Star (April 17) reports that a "massive campaign to expose ... civil defence" has now been launched by the Labour-controlled GLC at a cost of a quarter of a million pounds to the ratepayers, including our organisation.

According to the GLC's half-page advertisements in The Times and other national newspapers (April 18), it is claimed that the following groups which campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament, and whose policies only the Labour Party endorses, are so dependent upon public money that they "may disappear" if the GLC is abolished – London Region CND, World Disarmament Campaign, Scientists Against Nuclear Arms, Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons. The advertisement further claims for these organisations that itif the GLC is abolished "the services they provide will be severely reduced". Services? For whom?

Surely it was never the intention of local government legislation to permit a local authority to divert ratepayers' money into the funding of political campaigning bodies which now maintain that they would not otherwise manage to survive and which in turn campaign at public expense for the continued existence of their political benefactor. An all-out campaign against such political corruption is long overdue.

Cllr TONY KERPEL
Dr JULIAN LEWIS
The Coalition for Peace Through Security
London SW1