BAE boss lectures on ethics – a bad joke?

Cordula Biera describes how a CAAT protest took on a comic theme to highlight the absurdity of an arms company boss speaking on ethics.

On a cold and wet Thursday evening, 12 November 2009, supporters of Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) gathered outside Savoy Place in central London to have a good laugh. What happened?

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) invited BAE Systems’ Chairman, Dick Olver, to give its annual Mountbatten Memorial Lecture on ethics. The head of a company which is being investigated in several countries for alleged corruption and bribery and yet still denies any wrongdoing. So, naturally, we were really interested what he had to tell us about ethics.

CAAT supporter Dan, dressed as Dick Olver, gave people a warm welcome and invited them to come inside to listen what an arms dealer might have say about ethics. His announcements were met with hysterical laughter. Close by a sad clown was weeping  – what future would he have as a comic with the BAE boss bagging all the laughter?

Some CAAT supporters joined the audience inside to listen to Dick Olver’s presentation. In fact, his lecture was rather unexciting.  He talked a lot about ethical leadership and the crucial role of engineers in solving major global challenges. He mentioned various examples of ethical dilemmas engineers might face, but failed to mention any ethical dilemmas when selling deadly arms to countries in conflict or with great development needs.

Dick Olver called on universities, professional bodies, governments and companies to work together to solve ethical dilemmas. He didn’t acknowledge that civil society might also be interested in defining what is ethical and what is not.

After his speech the audience members asked questions about corruption, the Nimrod scandal and the ethics of arms trade in general. Unfortunately, the time for questions passed much too quickly. So we will have to wait until the next opportunity presents itself to question Dick Olver.

A warm thank you to all the CAAT supporters who protested outside and asked critical questions inside!

Clarion call from “The Spirit of Christmas”

 

Clarion's ideal of "The Spirit of Christmas"

Dan Viesnik explains why CAAT supporters dress up for the Spirit of Christmas and the message they are bringing to visitors.

Members of London Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), East London Against the Arms Fair (ELAAF),  the London Catholic Worker and Trident Ploughshares  met vistors outside  the Spirit of Christmas Fair at London’s Olympia,  on 7 November  2009. 

This was the second year running they had descended upon this area of west London. Why? Was it to spread Christmas cheer among prospective visitors?

Hardly. Rather, they were there to  alert visitors to the fact that the organisers, Clarion Events, are the owners of five international arms and security fairs, including one of the world’s biggest, the euphemistically titled Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi), held biennially in London’s Docklands. DSEi 2009 took place in September, attracting both hordes of arms dealers and much publicity.

Campaigners dressed as Santa, pixies, and a “weapons inspector” in a white overall and gas mask. They wore a various other festive hats and adornments and displayed humorous placards.  They sang festive tunes with appropriately modified lyrics and handed out leaflets to visitors outside the exhibition centre.

Many of the visitors, and also some exhibitors, were shocked and surprised to learn of Clarion’s involvement in the arms trade and expressed support for the action.

Clarion’s idea of the “Spirit of Christmas” seems to involve facilitating arms sales by and to repressive regimes with lousy human rights records and/or urgent development needs, including Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Indonesia, Colombia and Angola – all of whom were either represented or officially invited to DSEi 2009. Earlier this year, Clarion joined the Defence Manufacturers’ Association, underlining its commitment to the arms industry.

The company has a rather diverse product portfolio: as well as arms fairs and the Spirit of Christmas Fair, they also organise The Baby Show, which UNICEF and sponsors Bounty withdrew their association from last year when alerted to Clarion’s links with the arms trade, and the International Horse Show.

In 2008 Clarion took over ownership of DSEi and a number of other international arms fairs from Reed Elsevier, who were forced to sell the events after intense pressure from campaigners, senior academics, customers and shareholders. Campaigners say they will won’t give up and will continue to act to draw attention to Clarion’s involvement in the arms trade.

Green markets or gun markets

David Watson from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) writes on weapons, wars and climate change for Blog Action Day on Climate Change – 15 October 2009.

On 14 October, BBC’s Newsnight asked the question “Can you be green and capitalist?”

Simon Retallack, associate director at the centre-left think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, was asked how best to fight climate change. He rejected an approach based on changing people’s values, saying: “I worry that the [anti-consumerist] approach gets in the way of putting in place some consumerist approaches to solving some of these problems that doesn’t (sic) entail trying to engineer changing people’s values.”

The interviewer didn’t ask Retallack if not changing our values meant we could continue to support wars and military occupations in strategically important locations.

Neither did he offer an opinion on whether this meant that the UK and the US could carry on spending so much of their stretched budgets subsidising their arms industries. Subsidising the arms industry, perpetrating wars and (in the USA) allowing liberal personal ownership of small arms are all totally incompatible, not only with the ethics espoused by our leaders, but are deeply damaging the fight against climate change.

We should at least mention the astronomical waste of financial resources that could be used in providing real security for everyone. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in economics, says that a conservative estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be $3 trillion. And that is only the sum for the USA.

Although we know how many of our own armed forces have died in Iraq (179 UK troops and 4,331 US troops) and Afghanistan (221 and 796 to date), we have no idea how many of the indigenous people in those countries have died. Rather than spending all this money paying our armies to destroy these countries, could we not have spent money on developing technology for renewable energy?

Some may dismiss such pleas as facile, but they are not looking at the real long-term picture. Our resources on this planet are finite, and as we needlessly spend energy and resources manufacturing arms and killing people (mostly in their own countries), we are exhausting those resources while the arms manufacturers laugh their way to the bank.

Enormous resources are spent manufacturing weapons that can destroy bridges, power stations and other types of infrastructure. We know that lucrative contracts are given out (usually to Western firms), to rebuild the countries once they have a “co-operative government” in place. Nobody counts the carbon cost of these rebuilding projects either.

Meanwhile at home, governments are all ears to the pathetic pleas of arms manufactuers for more subsidies. Government-backed insurance, government-sponsored R&D and generous military procurement policies – all underwritten by hard-pressed taxpayers. United Kingdom Trade & Investment (UKTI) even has a separate department, the invidiously titled Defence & Security Organisation (DSO) whose sole purpose is to promote British arms exports.

It would seem, however, that our governments’ own advisers also agree that our leaders have a warped sense of priorities. Sir David King, the government’s own adviser on scientific matters until 2008, was explicit in the threat posed by climate change, and so too, even more remarkably, was the Pentagon, who have predicted a state of anarchy if something is not done to stop it.

On the Newsnight programme, the Conservative party’s Zak Goldsmith declared: “the market is absolutely fundamental, I don’t think you can have a solution that doesn’t involve the market.”

Newsnight’s presenter, Emily Maitlis, neglected to ask him if he supported the Conservative party’s recent proclamation that they will give the UK arms industry more support.

If the Pentagon is correct in its predictions and our leaders fail to take the necessary measures to preserve the planet, a hundred years from now, our great-grandchildren may be asking not what terrorism is, but what markets were.

Clown Army descend upon BAE careers fair!

Battlefield dispatch from General Whitewash and his brigade of rebel clowns:

Today at 1700 hours a highly militarised clown battalion laid siege to the BAE Systems stand at the Edinburgh University Careers Fair on Chambers Street. In a bid to disrupt the recruiting efforts of the world’s third largest arms company these brave clowns performed great feats of surrealist mayhem.

Their daring-do extended to other stalls when they were alerted to the presence of such villains as Shell, RBS and Procter & Gamble, all of which futilely attempted to conceal their misdeeds – which range from massive environmental and social degradation (here’s lookin’ at you Shell and RBS) to the routine torturing of animals for cosmetics’ testing (hello Procter & Gamble!) – behind nice and shiny PR smokescreens. Good thing these clowns come fully equipped with bullsh*t detectors!

Back at the BAE stand, company reps were definitely not overheard explaining to students how the company equips F-16 warplanes used by the Israeli army to reduce Palestinian and Lebanese villages to rubble. Like lightening clowns were despatched, heavily armed with sarcasm and fluorescent clothing, to make sure potential graduate employees were fully educated in the glorious history of BAE’s deadly dealings. 

Thus, in the same week the government’s Serious Fraud Office has decided to pursue charges against multi-billion-pound BAE Systems for multiple counts of international corruption, the company was hindered, if only temporarily, in its attempts to ensnare graduates by these excitable, conscientious and non-violent rebel clowns. 

One clown, identified as General Whitewash, commented “Clowning is the most effective way of getting our message across. It is a parallel response to the plainly ridiculous idea of giving this prodigiously unethical and possibly criminal company a platform to recruit on our campus. Honk, honk.” 

You can contact the clowns on: rca.edinburgh@googlemail.com

Links:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/02/bae-systems-global
http://www.caat.org.uk/press/recent.php?url=20091001prs- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8284073.stm- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8284549.stm

DSEI video blog

On the 8th of September the DSEI arms fair opened in East London.  I spent the day meandering around CAAT’s demonstration outside the offices of UKTI DSO talking to all and sundry.

I wanted to see the range of reasons why such a large group of people had gathered to fight actions our government deems to be legal. The range of passionate and articulate responces are collected in the video blog below, and stand as a testament to those who wish to stop British companies from profiting through war.They will surely rank with those who have fought such accepted abberations as the slave trade in the past.

It was a great day to feel part of such a positive movement for change, and I would encourage all who are inspired by the film to become an active part of CAAT in the future.