I have no hope that the Labour government will change anything

I have no hope that the Labour government will change anything.I doubt if we can have a direct effect on the arms industry I'd like to think that it will now consider what it's doing But the whole basis of its being is profit. Obviously, if you're selling arms you really have little concern about morality or human rights or issues like that. We've had a lot of support from local trade unions (though not the unions within British Aerospace) and Labour Party MPs and members Unison is part of the Anti- Hawk Coalition. But nationally, Labour has been as bad as the Tories.I wrote four letters to Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, asking what Labour's policy was on this He never replied to any of them I wrote to Labour's defence spokesman, David Clark. He said that as long as they're not being used for internal oppression, everybody has a right to self-defence; if there was any evidence that these Hawks were being used in East Timor then we wouldn't allow their sale, he said His letter could have been written by a Tory. They had said this before the trial without coming to us and asking: "Did you have a lawful excuse for your actions?" - which of course we did.

I feel that, of all institutions, surely the church should be the one to uphold morality.Our experience with the Labour movement was similar. They were overjoyed with the verdict.On the other hand, the Archbishop and Bishop of Liverpool wrote to John Major a couple of weeks ago to call for a complete arms embargo and yet in the same letter they said that our action contributed to lawlessness and condemned it outright. There's a Carmelite monastery, a totally enclosed order, they live in silence They've been praying for us throughout the trial I went to see them this morning, and it was wonderful. When we told them what it was all about they were almost without exception very supportive.For them it was straightforward: the plane was going to kill people, you stopped it. On the last day of the trial, they said in a really nice way: "Now don't come back this evening." Meanwhile, the Home Office was saying we were a security risk.We've had a lot of support from Catholics in Liverpool. We felt that it was such a serious crime that we were trying to prevent We would probably only have one chance.

We couldn't risk getting it wrong.Support for our action has come more from ordinary people than from national institutions All these people can see the morality of it For example, our fellow prisoners at Risley. It's not good enough just to stand by and to say, "There's no blood on my hands". We had to physically stop them ourselves.It was easy to find out things like serial numbers of aeroplanes from looking at military magazines Then we spent days sitting in fields watching the site. We wanted to see where the Indonesian Hawks were put away so we would know the particular hangar.

It was very clear that they weren't about to cancel the deal - for 24 Hawks. The anti-Hawk Coalition had been going a year and thousands of people were involved. But there was not the slightest sign of movement from BAe or the Government. They persisted on the same old lines: Indonesian guarantees that they're not being used for internal repression, Hawks are just training aircraft, Indonesia is improving its human rights record and so on All nonsense. In our case, we identified a Hawk military jet that was going to Indonesia, where it would have been used to kill people There was also the imminence of the crime. We felt that we had to act then, 29 January, because as far as we knew that plane was about to leave the country We started planning it in April last year By then, I'd been campaigning for two and a half years. Our action was not just a protest, it was a very direct action to prevent the crime being committed This was central to our defence. The argument for reasonable force to prevent crime has probably been used in hundreds of peace protest cases but normally there isn't such a strong link.