Month: March 2014

Take arms firms out of the Big Bang Fair

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Letter signed by over 100, including ForcesWatch

As engineers, health professionals, educationists and others who believe in the power of science and engineering as a force for good, we are writing to condemn the continued sponsorship of today’s Big Bang Fair by BAE Systems and other arms companies such as Thales, Selex ES, Doosan, Rolls-Royce and Airbus. It might seem like a joke: the UK’s largest youth science and engineering education event, named the Big Bang Fair, is sponsored by companies who make very big bangs indeed. Except the arms trade isn’t funny. All of these companies have a track record of supplying countries with appalling human rights records. Doosan is involved in cluster bomb manufacture.

The casual and unquestioned way these companies are allowed public relations space at educational events reflects a serious problem at the heart of modern British science. We need programmes which offer young people unbiased spaces to learn about science and engineering as it is currently constituted – including environmental and human rights concerns – and what it could look like.

If the government is serious in its support of science and engineering – not just a few choice companies associated with them – it must invest more fully in education so the Big Bang Fair 2015 need not be reliant on sponsorship which so narrows its scope.… Read more

FUTURE ARMY 2020: Defence Committee increases pressure to MoD to raise enlistment age to 18

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The Defence Select Committee has increased the pressure on the MoD to stop enlisting minors, in a report published today.

The report, which follows a major inquiry into the MoD’s Future Army 2020 plan, called on the MoD “to respond in detail to the argument that the Army could phase out the recruitment of minors without detriment to the Army 2020 plans”.

The Future Army 2020 report highlighted evidence presented by campaign groups Child Soldiers International and ForcesWatch that raising the enlistment age to 18 would save around £94 million per year on training costs and increase the Army’s operational effectiveness.

The Committee’s challenge over enlistment age comes just a few months after church groups across the UK, including the Church of Scotland and the Bishops of the Church in Wales, wrote to the Minister for the Armed Forces calling for the enlistment age to be raised to 18. Recent research has shown that those who enlist below this age are at higher risk of injury in training, suicide, bullying, sexual harassment, mental illness, alcoholism, long-term unemployment, and violent offending than recruits who enlist as adults.

Following the Defence Committee’s previous challenge over the recruitment of minors in its report on the Education of Service Personnel last year, the MoD instructed the Army to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the policy.… Read more

Disaster militarism

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The country’s military institutions must not be seen as deserving of special consideration. Once the ethos of public service has been smashed and discredited by neoliberal restructuring, the danger is that it will take more than an army to bring it back. By Vron Ware.

For some time now, Up in Arms has been drawing attention to the process of militarisation taking place in the UK. This has meant tracking the changing profile of the armed forces in civil society, ears pricked for anything that suggests that military norms and values are inherently superior and therefore worthy of unquestioning support. It can be hard to distinguish the long term shifts from the immediate gear changes, and to know how seriously to take some of the ‘information’ that makes it into the public domain – particularly if it emanates from unnamed ‘senior’ officials in defence departments or cranky media pundits with an interest in military welfare.

Take the use of soldiers in Britain’s recent flood disasters. Following their successful deployment as security guards for the London Olympics, the MoD could be more confident that the public would accept their role as a reserve body of odd-job men who by their physical strength and numbers alone could be put to work in a civil emergency.… Read more

Gove’s Troops To Teachers ‘A Costly Flop’

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Michael Gove’s scheme to train ex-squaddies as teachers was labelled an “expensive flop” yesterday after it was revealed the Tory Education Secretary mustered just 132 recruits.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal 322 former soldiers applied for teacher training between March 2011 and April 2013

Despite just 132 being accepted, Mr Gove has now thrown £10 million in public funds at a new two-year Troops to Teachers scheme.

If the latest scheme enlists the same low numbers, the maximum cost of getting each new recruit ready for the classroom could be a stunning £75,000.

A Department for Education spokeswoman insisted yesterday that the £10 million is the maximum available for the programme over the next two years.

But National Union of Teachers North England regional secretary Mike McDonald is among campaigners to have raised concerns over Mr Gove’s latest “vanity project.”

He told the Star: “He’s very austere when it comes to things like teachers’ pay, pensions and conditions but when it comes to his pet projects such as this, free schools and academies it seems money is no object.

“It’s just one waste after another.

“I’m not against the training of troops to be teachers but to spend this amount of money on it and for it to yield such a poor result is quite appalling, particularly with all the cuts affecting public services.”… Read more