Arms trade
On 23 August, two Smash EDO activists were found guilty by Brighton magistrates court of aggravated trespass at the EDO MBM arms factory in Moulsecoomb.
Jessica Nero and Gavin Pidwell used superglue to lock themselves to the gates of the factory on 26 April, causing 100 lost hours of work, according to EDO managing director Paul Hills.
After several days of legal argument and evidence-giving about EDO’s breach of the Cluster Munitions Act (2010), magistrates fined the…
The Muriel Lesters affinity group visited the corporate headquarters of Lockheed Martin in Cunard House, 15 Lower Regent St, near Piccadilly Circus, London, on 6 June. Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms manufacturer, is one of three companies running the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston (on behalf of the British government), where they are designing and building a new generation of nuclear weapons. The Trident Ploughshares affinity group will be visiting again at…
We didn’t think we’d get in. The UKTI DSO Symposium is the biggest event of the year for Britain’s arms exporters – so you’d think they’d have better security.
(UK Trade & Investment or UKTI is the government department that promotes all of Britain’s exports, and DSO is the part of UKTI that promotes arms sales. Arms make up only 1.2% of UK exports, but more…
These are the findings of a new report, Don’t Bank on the Bomb, the first to survey global investments in nuclear weapons producers. More than 300 financial institutions, including RBS, fund companies that build nuclear warheads or the missiles, bombers and submarines used to deliver them.
Co-author Tim Wright, from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which conducted the research, said: ‘RBS…
Deborah Glass-Woodin
Deborah Glass-Woodin was an active member of the Green Party and served on the city and county council in Oxford, where she still lives. Deborah had her pre-trial hearing on 2 February and her full hearing is scheduled for 14 May at Reading magistrates’ court.
After spending many years as an active member of the Green Party, she has become a green activist. In 2008, she was arrested during a protest against treefelling in Oxford. The charges were later…
On 16 January, Chris Cole, 48, a peace activist from Oxford, appeared before Westminster magistrates’ court in Marylebone Road, London, to be tried for a protest at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEi) arms fair in September 2011. Chris was arrested for spraying “DSEi Kills” and “Stop the arms trade” at the entrance to the fair, as delegates queued to enter.
Chris, who has pleaded “not guilty” to charges of criminal damage, was prepared to argue that he was acting…
At least 400 people across the UK are being prosecuted for not completing last year’s national census. Many of them refused on grounds of conscience, protesting against the involvement of US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin in data capture and processing.
On 17 January, Derek Shields, 57, from the Wirral, was found guilty of not completing the census and was fined £75. He has announced that he does not intend to pay the fine.
John Voysey from Herefordshire, who was a…
Thank you for the article on the fate of those who refused to fill in the 2011 census forms. (PN 2540-41).
The statements they will make in their own defence will be very interesting and helpful. I hope you can print some of them in an issue of Peace News.
Small events in small towns happen everywhere in UK plc but they’re worth recounting nonetheless. At times it’s easy to believe that nobody cares about anything and nothing can be done anyway. Usually the arrival of PN is a corrective to such negative thinking on my part but occasionally there also occur what Tory prime minister Harold (Supermac) Macmillan once described as “events, dear boy, events”, and the world takes on a slightly rosier hue.
Events here in the People’s Republic…
Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade has been a long time coming. Anyone with more than a casual acquaintance with the arms industry will be well aware of its arsenal of libel lawyers, and the alacrity with which they descend upon all but the most cast iron of assertions against it. In this day and age it takes a brave publisher to put out such a book as Feinstein’s latest tome, and it is little surprise…