Arms trade

29 October 2017Blog

Andrea Needham reports on the recent trial of Sam Walton and Dan Woodhouse in Burnley

Poor old British Aerospace. Not only were the first group of people to break in to their Warton site in Lancashire to disarm a warplane acquitted, now the second lot have also been found not guilty. It's curious how difficult it appears to be to convict people for acting peacefully to prevent war crimes.

The first such disarmament action took place in January 1996, when a group of women (myself included) broke in and disarmed a Hawk warplane being sold to Indonesia for use in their…

1 October 2017News

Campaigners blocked the set-up of the London DSEI weapons fest

Die-in at DSEI arms fair, East London. PHOTO: Diana More.

Over the course of seven days in early September, thousands of activists from across the country descended on East London in a vibrant and colourful show of strength, solidarity and unity – to try to stop the set-up of the terrible DSEI arms fair.

Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) is one of the biggest arms fairs in the world. This year, it brought 1,600 arms companies to London and put them together…

1 October 2017News

Campaigners plead not guilty

Some of the folk pleading not guilty on 21 September at Thames magistrates court. This was one of many days of plea hearings (18 September – 9 October) for the 100 activists arrested for disrupting the set-up for the DSEI arms fair in East London.

PHOTO: Sarah Lasenby

1 October 2017News

Welsh Borders join arms fair protests

Welsh Borders join the Arms Fair protests. PHOTO: Richard Stafford

Not yet dawn. 10,000 dead in Yemen. (Drink and a blanket). One million homeless. (Packed lunch, cake?) £3.3 million spent by Saudi Arabia since 2015 on British weapons. (Remember the banner). 22 of us, mostly from a choir based in Presteigne in the Welsh borders, board our coach heading for the ExCeL centre in East London where Britain hosts its biennial international arms fair. We are coming to support the blockading…

1 August 2017Feature

Art the Arms Fair aims to make the DSEI arms fair this September the most-talked-about arms fair ever.

Life & Death by Amy Corcoran, 2017, watercolour and pen. Donated to Art the Arms Fair

Artists can participate by sending in digital images of their work, by donating physical art works for the auction, and by taking part in a mass outdoor art event on 9 September. All art and artists are welcome, from painters to performance artists, and from sculptors to satirists. Come with your canvases, clay and…

1 August 2017News

Campaigners to appeal high court verdict

While the high court in London ruled on 10 July that arms exports to Saudi Arabia are ‘lawful’, Campaign Against Arms Trade remains confident in its legal case. We are challenging the verdict and hope that the court of appeal will overturn its ruling.

If the verdict is allowed to stand, government will regard it as a green light to keep arming human rights abusers and repressive regimes around the world. Even worse, Saudi forces will see it as a green light to continue in their…

1 August 2017News in Brief

On 14 July, the high court in London overturned the acquittal of eight anti-militarists for disrupting the set-up of the DSEI arms fair in East London in September 2015.

However, the court also ruled that none of the activists should be re-tried or face costs – partly because all defendants were previously of good character.

The eight had been acquitted in April last year by Thames magistrates court of obstructing the highway on an access road to the ExCeL Centre, home…

1 June 2017Review

Zed, 2017; 256pp; £12.99 

Those who support the arms industry often seem to forget that its business is to manufacture items intended to harm and kill. It’s therefore validating for activists to read the evidence for the claims that the arms trade involves practices that are illegal, unjust, absurd and wasteful of tax payers money – including causing instability in developing countries.

This book also explains how defence spending since the Cold War has contributed negatively to economic growth, and examines…

1 April 2017Feature

On 29 January, a Methodist minister and a Quaker activist entered BAE Systems’ Warton site in order to disarm warplanes bound for Saudi Arabia.

Sam Walton (left) and Daniel Woodhouse, holding a replica Seeds of Hope Ploughshares hammer, before their Ploughshares action on 29 January 2017. Photo: Warton Ploughshares

This is a statement carried by the pair when they were arrested inside BAE Warton on 29 January.

Today we intend to enter BAE Warton, to locate warplanes bound for Saudi Arabia, and disarm them. We take this action in order to prevent the export of weaponry that will almost certainly be used in…

1 February 2017News

Activist gear up for arms fair protests

On 14 January, campaigners from around the country got together in the beautiful Ecology Centre in Islington, London. The aim? To get people trained and ready to give great workshops on stopping the DSEI arms fair before it opens its doors.

Every two years one of the world’s largest arms fairs comes to the UK, and the countdown to the next one is on. This September, Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI, pronounced by some campaigners as ‘dicey’) comes to London…

1 December 2016News

High Court to scrutinise UK arms exports

On 11 July, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) handed in a petition to Downing Street, London, against British arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Photo: CAAT

‘No one questions that these people are terrorists, but their presence in that city cannot justify an assault on 275,000 innocent people, still less the imposition of a siege, which is, by its very nature, a wholly indiscriminate tactic.’

These were the words of British foreign secretary Boris Johnson during a speech in which he…

1 December 2016Feature

An interview with the co-founder of the women-led US peace group CODEPINK.

CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin at a protest on Wall Street, 2008. Photo: Thomas Good/Next Left Notes [GFDL] via Wikimedia Commons

Having become one of the most prominent US anti-war activists protesting against the US-led ‘war on terror’, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the group CODEPINK, has now turned her attention to her nation’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia.

‘I’ve been doing a lot of work around the Middle East conflicts since the 9/11 attacks’, Benjamin, 64, tells…

23 November 2016Feature

A direct action PN booktour around Britain

Andrea Needham

On 30 July, 20 years to the day after the Seeds of Hope acquittal, I found myself once again in the back of a police van with Jo, one of my co-conspirators. We’d been at Peace News Summer Camp at Crabapple community in Shropshire, and had been out for a walk with Emily and Lyn, two of the other women in the group. As we were strolling along a public footpath, three police dogs rushed round a corner and surrounded us, barking madly. One of them had bitten me – hence a…

1 October 2016News in Brief

British arms sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended until there is an independent inquiry into possible Saudi war crimes in Yemen. That was the verdict in mid-September of two parliamentary select committees (business and international development). The British government has licenced over £3bn-worth of arms exports to Saudi Arabia since the conflict began.

Later in September, it emerged that Britain had stopped the EU setting up an independent international inquiry into the…

1 August 2016News

3-day investigation to take place next February

The high court was silent on 30 June when judge Andrew Gilbart announced that he would be granting a judicial review into the legality of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia. It was only decorum and tradition that stopped us from cheering or breathing a big sigh of relief.

Our claim calls on the secretary of state for business, innovation & skills to suspend all current licences – and to stop issuing any more arms export licences to Saudi Arabia for weapons which could be used in…