A group of protesters have been camping for the last three nights near to Menwith Hill.
It has been ten years since protesters last took up residence in the lay-by on the A59 from Harrogate. It was lead by CND Yorkshire and the Occupy Britain.
The aim of the protest was to once again bring to the public’s attention what they see as the issues and problems surrounding the Menwith Hill base.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has run a long standing campaign world-wide advocating the abolition of Nuclear armaments.
The event went off without incident, both the Harrogate Police and the MOD Police from the base itself took a very accepting approach towards the protesters. They were allowed to walk part of the perimeter fence from their temporary camp on the A59 to the main gates.
The culmination of the action was yesterday evening (17 April 2012) where a statement was read out by Dominic Linley of CND asking, amongst many things, that the British money be spent more wisely and the American’s vacate the base. The statement was then handed over to the British Commanding RAF Officer at the base.
Dominic Linley from Yorkshire CND said:
We thought it was important to set-up an occupied camp at Menwith Hill as we believe it important to raise questions once again with what is happening at Menwith Hill, as these are questions not being answered by our own Parliament.
We are looking for answers to what degree the base is used for surveillance and information-led warfare.
We came up with a statement and the message we wanted to hand over to the base and we were hopeful in giving that to the US forces, National Security, but the Commander was not available so we passed it to the RAF Commander instead.
The statement was essentially asking how is the base and surveillance helping us in the UK.
Today is the global day of action on military spending and we are asking why is all this money being pumped into a system that allows monitoring across Europe and an almost instantaneous military strike when we don’t have money to found NHS or Eduction. It just seems the priorities are completely wrong.
