University’s sham ethical investment funds war
Financial before ethical concerns of the university reflect those of arms industry-government collusion, says John Prebble
This University, through its investment in arms exports companies, even with its ethical policy complacently “in place”, is involved in the widespread financial and political support of the arms export industry.
Involved are a host of corporate-friendly public bodies and a government with close ties to the arms industry, even in forming its foreign policy similarly touted as ‘ethical’.
To see the products of such funding, a trip to the September arms fair in London, in distinguished ministerial company, would have advertised the various products now available for defending and killing people.
Yet anti arms trade literature, such as that of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), is not full of morally emotive rhetoric. Rather, it provides thoroughly investigated details of the cumulative situation of, not so much a world geared for war, but of the arms trade’s integrated influence, a lens through which to view government’s official, insubstantial rationales.
Ministry of Defence Procurement Minister Lord Bach states: “the government’s prime justification for supporting defence exports has always been to help maintain a strong defence industry that underpins our own security and to contribute to the security of friends and allies overseas.” This admits only to an extent the mutually profitable proximity between the MoD and arms corporations.
Corporately-peopled advisory bodies, lobbying companies, Labour party funding, outsourcing of MoD core duties: government and MoD’s blurred institutional boundaries are breaking down. To say this has been achieved by way of these government-industry partnerships understates their place at the heart of military policy-making.
CAAT states, ‘the arms trade…fuels war’. Of course. But the order of the statement hints at the dominance of the former in a cycle of global production of aggression. The PR engulfed “friends and allies”, should not be trusted as a euphemism for ‘customers’. As well as imposing expensive arms deals on poverty-stricken countries, government’s unstated foreign policy goals are executed in dealings with repressive regimes and conflicting countries – and, amongst all this, the US.
War is a risky business. And if the cost of uncountable human lives seems too ethical to be dealt with, economic costs, including the vast subsidies paid to the arms industry – discount the myth of arms exports as a vast money-earner for the UK. Professor Keith Hartley, Director of the University of York’s Centre for Defence Economics, has looked at the increase in support an underfunded public sector would benefit from with a reduction in military expenditure, most recently, “the cost of the Iraq conflict for the UK [which] was £1.5 billion over only three months. That would build 25 hospitals in this country.”
But, as we know, such public bodies – Local Authorities, religious organisations, health organisations, universities, trade unions, and charities – are themselves contributing to the arms industry’s privileged economic position, secure as long as it held there by those who finance it and its self-perpetuation through promoting conflict.
As the government fears losing political currency if it alienates corporate partners, so those public bodies’ finance committees fear a possible diminishment in the financial returns of their beneficiaries. Though a legal consideration, it is easy to hide a policy’s responsibility behind formalities, satisfying minimal ethical criteria.
Again, at investment level, it is with economics before ethics, or rather, the financial health of a ‘clean’ investment, that CAAT encourages change. The six major arms companies accounted for less than 1.4 per cent of the FTSE All-share index in late 2004 – hardly ‘must have’ investments.
But, as the government’s military policy seems increasingly driven by publicly undisclosed and unaccountable corporate influences over public opinion, it is imperative that those who oppose, on ethical grounds, their university’s investment policy, should attempt to make their influence felt
John Prebble
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