Campaigners oppose Welsh Government’s participation in ‘arms fair’
Martin Shipton
A coalition of anti-war, human rights, climate, faith, Welsh independence and student groups is gearing up to protest what campaigners have branded the “Welsh Government Arms Fair”.
The protest will rally outside ICC Wales in Newport at 8am on Thursday, September 3, as the Defence Security Resilience Cymru summit gets under way.
Co-sponsored by Business in Focus, the Welsh Government, ADS Group and General Dynamics Land Systems, the summit is billed as a networking event to strengthen Wales’s role in Britain’s defence sector.
Opponents are demanding the Welsh Government withdraw and support its cancellation, citing the involvement of major arms companies supplying Israel and Saudi Arabia including General Dynamics and BAE Systems.
Adam Johannes, from Cardiff Stop the War Coalition, said the protest was about more than opposing the summit. Campaigners were also challenging the economic thinking behind it.
“What is particularly troubling is the idea that a Plaid Cymru Welsh Government should see arms manufacturers as a route to economic regeneration. After decades of underinvestment and an economy that has struggled to provide enough secure, well-paid work, is this really the best they can offer?
“Should Wales really tie its economic future to an industry that profits from permanent war, soaring military spending and the relentless arms sales around the world? Wales deserves better than an economic strategy that waits for the next defence contract to come along.
“But saying no is only part of our argument. We want to make the case for a green economy that improves people’s lives. This is not about fewer manufacturing jobs. It is about creating more secure, well-paid work by investing in the things Wales needs most.
“Wales has brilliant engineers, technicians and skilled workers capable of making sophisticated things. Imagine what we could achieve if that ingenuity was directed towards socially useful production, building the things Wales needs rather than the weapons other countries want.”
“We should be using Welsh talent to build Wales’s future, not waiting for someone else’s war economy to decide what that future looks like.
Public investement
A new CND Cymru report, Sustainable Proposal for Wales: Beyond the War Economy, calls for public investment to be redirected towards tackling the climate emergency and building resilient communities.
CND Cymru National Secretary Dylan Lewis-Rowlands said the Welsh Government had a chance to break with what he called the “war consensus” of the past 40 years.
“Militarism is damaging to communities, people, and our economy. Why build plane turbines and not wind or tidal turbines? Why spend millions and billions giving preferential treatment to nuclear and arms companies when you could be investing in socially valuable work, like health, education, care, housing and renewable energy?
“War spending diverts capital and opportunity away from the things that ultimately keep us safe: clean water, good food, safe housing and sustainable energy production. We must have an economy and politics that sustains peace, not manufactures war.”
Cymdeithas y Cymod – the Fellowship of Reconciliation – has also opposed the event, criticising the wider “militarisation of society and economy” under Westminster’s rearmament programme.
It called instead for Wales to put military skills and industrial capacity to peaceful use: “Far better and more in tune with Cymru would be to utilise the skills of arms industry workers in humanitarian industries.”
Farnborough Air Show
Last week Cardiff Stop The War Coalition criticised Enterprise Connectivity and Energy Cabinet Minister Adam Price for attending the Farnborough Air Show, where three Israeli weapons companies were showcasing their wares.
Responding to the criticism, a spokesperson for the Welsh Government said: “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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As a person who first joined y Blaid 56 years ago, I have to say I am disgusted by Rhun and the Welsh government for taking part in this! Gwynfor must be turning in hiz grave. He, like most of us, was a. Staunch pacifist, who would find Plaid’s stance disgusting. Rhun, please think again, its not to late
As a pacifist how would you advise the Ukrainians to act in their struggle with the far-right, nationalist forces of Putin?
Conducting any business with companies that readily supply weapons of death and destruction to an evil zionist regime and a brutal authoritarian Arab one is being just as culpable in their brutality.
Putin doesn’t do borders, he marches over them.
Sector is worth around 40bn to the UK economy. We can’t just let the other home nations have that. We have no economy and need the jobs. Furthermore, not only do we need weaponry to defend ourselves (and the latest advances too), countries such as Ukraine also desperately need them in their fight for freedom. Hopefully Adam Price and the rest of the WG will be all over it. If not, the only winner is Putin and Welsh spear makers.
And we need to get off US arms. And Trump is threatening to nuke countries.
This is not the 2000s. Europe potentially faces a dual threat from both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA. One has invaded a sovereign country, while the other is threatening to annex European territory. Both have a combined nuclear arsenal that could wipe-out humanity 10 times over. I agree we should not be supplying arms to Israel, but we also need to face reality. Some think the answer is pacifism, while others think the answer is to remain as the USA’s poodle. Neither is a serious long-term strategy. Europe needs develop its own independent security deterrent. It’s easy to advocate pacifism… Read more »
The root cause goes back to NATO rejecting Gorbachev’s advocacy of a ‘common European home’, instead expanding eastwards towards Moscow making eventual conflict inevitable.
and so says Nathan Gill and many others on the far-right in Britain.
Socialists have been warning about the dangers posed by NATO expansionism for a long time. It is the willful ignorance of those who support this expansion that has left a gap for the far right to exploit, knowing that reckless militarism is unpopular.
Really, no. This is what putin wants put about.
Always best to check facts. The principle of enlargement was adopted by NATO in 1991. By 1996, Clinton was pushing it, and in 1999 the first former Warsaw Pact countries joined. Putin did not become Russian President until 2000.
NATA isn’t the problem. Really.
In the late 1990s, George Kennan, architect of the postwar US policy of containing the Soviet Union, warned against NATO expansion, predicting that it would provoke Russia into responding. He was right. His generation, who had lived through the war, had an understanding of geopolitics that eludes those leading us towards disaster today.
I love the use of “resilience” in the fair’s title: our masters’ current favourite meaningless all-purpose abstract noun. I’m surprised they didn’t work in “wellbeing” as well: after all, the arms industry does lots of good work supporting the wellbeing of politicians, and providing meaningful jobs for otherwise unemployable ex-politicians. It’s telling that, in the summer when the true threat to our security finally became obvious for all to see, our politicians are too busy fighting an invented one. Still, I guess you can’t argue with success: in the 27 years of the Senedd’s existence, the Russian army hasn’t invaded… Read more »
They have been waging a war on us for over a decade. Just not with soldiers.
See Nathan Gill.
So we should not have any defence force to protect ourselves and we should help countries such as Ukraine?
Do you remember what happened in 1938 I think you need to look back in history
Look further back. The pre-1914 arms race did not sustain peace.
As much as we need jobs, this trade right now is not about national defense. There is AI drones out there with little thought, AI is driving up everyone’s costs. If we are actively seen supplying drones to murder anyone either for a genocide or other reasons , we are for the first time generating legitimate targets on our back that Cymru has avoided compared to other parts of the UK. The threat is not worth it. Plus I morally oppose.
It’s about both. It’s about our defence and being a world leader in technologies that help countries such as Ukraine.
It’s the nature of the beast unfortunately. Somewhere down the line, politicians do have to make the decision to turn women and children into flying mince to keep the money flowing and our billionaire rulers happy.
It’s also handy having Wales and Scotland to dump the military targets in, so that England doesn’t get destroyed when retaliation occurs.
The other thing is to make Wales and Scotland more dependent on the Union, because having jobs tied to the British defence industry means those jobs could disappear after independence.
I hope they reconsider their decision. To have the moral high ground and a conscience is paramount. Deal in democracy rather than death.
Yes let’s virtue signal, be pure in our beliefs and live in a fantasy world. Sadly Ukraine has to live in the real world