Global Day of Action on Military Spending
This month has been the Global Day of Action on Military Spending and we took online actions on April 27th to coincide with the release of SIPRI’s figures on UK military spending. In 2019 the UK’s military spending was a massive £47bn. That’s the equivalent of 22,000 hospital beds or 9,400 ventilators. We know what we would rather the UK government spent the money on. In time of a global pandemic, it is become starkly clear that the massive amounts of money spent on the military has been at the expense of other more pressing concerns. Just think how different this crisis could have been if we had spent money on preparing for a pandemic, as the government were warned last year about the risks of such a pandemic and did not implement the recommendations in the briefing.
We did a series of posts about this and asked people to sign CAAT’s/our petition calling for a global ceasefire. If you’ve already signed this, you could write to your MP about it too. We also highlighted the International Peace Bureau’s petition calling on the General Assembly of the United Nations to reduce military spending in favour of healthcare and all social and environmental needs.
Shocking increase in arms sales to repressive regimes
The government have just released the 2019 figures for UK arms sales and there was a £1bn increase on sales to repressive regimes compared with 2018. This is an increase of 300% and once again shows the government putting profits before human rights. They even ignored their own advice and sold £849m worth of arms to states on the Foreign Office list of countries having human rights issues, an increase of 390% from 2018. They sold £1.3bn worth of weapons to 26 of the 48 countries that are classed as “not free” by a US government-funded pro-democracy institution. These sales show a flagrant disregard for the human rights of the civilians that will be on the end of these weapons and the government must abide by its own frequently stated ‘robust’ arms export controls. You can read more about these figures here.
Online activism
As you can see from above, we have taken our activism online. With that in mind, we have written a blog post with some tips on online activism and about how to run meetings online. You can read the post here and hopefully you can find some useful tips in there. We have moved our meetings online (they are still the third Tuesday of every month at 6.30pm) – if you want to join them, please send an email to londoncaat at riseup.net