END in The UK
Thompson, Kaldor and others in the END group in the UK disagreed with Coates’s interest in winning the support of political parties and trade union leaders, and in 1983 there was a parting of the ways: Coates and his Nottingham-based Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation concentrated on the Convention process, leaving Thompson and Kaldor as dominant figures in the UK END group. From then on, the UK END group was very much a separate entity from the conventions, although it took part in them and was represented on the Liaison Committee.
Nationally, END only became a membership organisation in 1985, when the nuclear disarmament movement was ebbing, when it recruited only 500 members. However when the nuclear disarmament first grew in 1980 and 1981, in some localities local nuclear disarmament groups were founded as 'END groups': Hull END, for example, had hundreds of members throughout the first half of the 1980s. Nationally END played a major role in the British peace movement of the 1980s. END supporters, most notably Thompson and Kaldor, were the most prominent intellectuals of the movement, constantly in demand for public meetings and for opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines (The Guardian, the New Statesman and Tribune were always particularly keen). END also provided the main peace movement organisation, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with much of its leadership: (Bruce Kent, Joan Ruddock, Dan Smith and Meg Beresford were all END supporters).
END’s insistence on criticising Soviet militarism made it highly controversial in CND, where communists and pro-Soviet Labour leftists were a vocal though small minority – but it meant that it was taken much more seriously by the Labour Party, which had adopted a non-nuclear defence policy in 1980. More than 60 Labour MPs signed the END Appeal in 1980, and END supporters, among them Kaldor and Smith, served on Labour advisory committees on defence. END also had significant support among Liberals opposed to nuclear arms (although not among their allies in the Social Democratic Party) as well as among members of the nascent Green party. Even a few daring dissident members of the Conservative and Communist parties lent their support.
END also organised regular speaking tours and conferences on various disarmament-related themes.
Read more about this topic: European Nuclear Disarmament