Campaigners criticise Adam Price for attending arms fair

Martin Shipton

Anti-war campaigners have raised concerns after it emerged that Welsh Government Minister Adam Price attended an air show where Israel’s three largest arms firms were among the invited exhibitors.

Mr Price, the Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy, was at the Farnborough International Airshow in Hampshire a fortnight ago. The Israeli firms present were Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries.

In June, Ellie Kamio, 30. Whose mother lives in Swansea, was one of four Palestine Action activists jailed for causing £1.2m of damage when they broke into Elbit’s drone factory near Bristol. She received a five-year sentence after the group were sentenced as terrorists. Their defence was that they were seeking to save the lives of innocent people in Gaza targeted by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Palestine Action was proscribed by former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. Thousands – many elderly and disabled – have been arrested for holding notices reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Cardiff Stop the War Coalition is calling on the Plaid Cymru Welsh Government to pledge that it will not attend arms fairs. The group’s spokesperson Adam Johannes said: “Farnborough is not a neutral trade exhibition. It is one of Britain’s biggest arms fairs and has repeatedly attracted protests over the human rights records of governments and companies represented there, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Turkey. If the Welsh Government is serious about ethics, it should stop treating arms fairs as respectable networking opportunities. It should commit to staying away from them.”

The event was protested by groups including the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

CAAT said more than 1,000 arms companies exhibited at Farnborough this year, describing the event as a major international arms fair run by a company entirely owned by the arms industry’s trade body, ADS Group. They said the event takes place every two years, alternating years with the DSEI arms fair in London.

CAAT spokesperson Kirsten Bayes said the UK “should never host such a depraved group of suffering-profiteers”, describing the event as a “veritable horror show” of companies linked to “genocide, man-made famine and authoritarian repression”.

She added: “The companies exhibiting include the who’s who of the F-35 ecosystem, a fighter jet whose use in war crimes – from Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Venezuela – is so systematic that it has been rightly dubbed the genocide jet.

“So many of the companies exhibiting, from Elbit to Rafael, are mired in the Israeli military’s deliberate killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, as a UN Commission of Inquiry recently found.”

During his visit to Farnborough, Mr Price met Lee Bruce, a senior figure at ADS Group. After meeting the minister, Bruce said the pair discussed “continued collaboration between the Welsh Government, industry and ADS”, including work on the £50m Wales Defence Growth Deal.

The Wales Defence Growth Deal is designed to increase investment and employment in Wales’s defence sector, while making it easier for Welsh small and medium enterprises to secure contracts from the Ministry of Defence. The agreement will expand military testing in Wales, including drones and autonomous military technologies capable of operating with little or no human control.

Ethical implications

Campaigners have raised concerns over the ethical implications of such weapons.

Mr Johannes said: “Autonomous weapons capable of selecting and engaging targets with limited human oversight raise an obvious moral question over whether decisions involving life and death should legitimately be transferred to machines.

“Yet Wales is being positioned as a centre for developing and testing these technologies without any comparable ethical debate in the Senedd. The question is whether Wales should become ever more integrated into the global arms trade, and whether that is a future people in Wales have had the opportunity to debate.”

The row comes ahead of planned protests at the Defence Resilience Security Cymru summit in Newport next month, which campaigners have branded an arms fair. The Welsh Government is listed as a co-host alongside ADS Group, Business in Focus and General Dynamics Land Systems, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, one of the world’s biggest arms companies. Its weapons have been used by Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Keynote speaker

Adam Price had previously been advertised as a keynote speaker at the Newport event, but later was reported to have said he had not confirmed his attendance and declined the invitation.

A spokesperson for the Welsh Government said: “Farnborough Air Show is an important trade event for civil aerospace, which is an important employer in Wales. The Minister met with several aerospace companies, including Airbus, as well as ADS, who are a key trade association for aerospace.

“We will continue to engage with the aerospace, defence, security, and national resilience sectors to support the thousands of high-tech, well-paid jobs in Wales, while promoting respect for human rights and international law. An ethical defence framework is being developed, informed by discussions with Scottish Government and Northern Ireland Executive counterparts, and will guide future engagement with the sector.”

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