Government promotes ‘a culture that glorifies violence’
Date: 18 August 2011
Last week David Cameron condemned a “culture that glorifies violence” in our inner cities. Yet next month, from 13-16 September, his government is co-organising the world’s largest arms fair in London.
During the 1990s WDM worked on a variety of arms trade issues, often with Campaign Against Arms Trade. This included a campaign to stop the use of export credits to support arms trading. The campaign led to a ban on the use of export credits for ‘unproductive’ expenditure – which includes arms sales – for over fifty low income countries in 2000. We also called for a stronger EU code of conduct on arms sales and published research which exposed the investment of Britain’s high street banks in financing the arms trade.
With other organisations, our campaigns and research on the arms trade highlighted the links between aid and arms in Indonesia and the scale of the Exports Credit Guarantee Department’s support for arms sales in Nigeria.
However, despite these few advances the UK government’s support for the arms industry is as strong as ever. Weapons sales over the past year include the sale of armoured vehicles, crowd control equipment and tear gas to countries such as Bahrain and Libya where the weapons were used to suppress protest. In addition to arming repressive regimes, the UK government is helping to run the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEi) arms fair.
This year, with over 1200 companies exhibiting, and military delegations from all over the world, DSEi, which is taking place at the Excel Centre in East London, will be bigger than ever.
The devastating impact of the arms trade on developing countries is clear: as well as being riddled with corruption and squandering valuable resources that could be spent on health and education, the sale of weapons and weapons systems exacerbates conflicts and increases social unrest and poverty.
The government’s continued support for the arms trade doesn’t only affect the people in countries where the weapons are being imported and used. At a time when the government is pushing through devastating cuts, rather than using taxpayers money to pay for public services, the government is spending millions of pounds supporting the the DSEi arms fair.
As a place where anything can be sold to anyone including cluster munitions in 2005 (despite the organisers claiming they had been banned), DSEi epitomises the profit-oriented, international bent of the arms trade. Like a self-justifying crack dealer, the UK government has always insisted that if UK companies didn’t benefit from the arms trade, someone else would just step in to fill the gap. It’s time to say that selling hardware designed to kill and main is not a business we should be subsidising.
Visit the Stop the Arms Fair website to find out more about actions taking place in the run up and during DSEi.
