According to a letter signed by 100 Labour MPs and peers, weapons manufacturers should be reclassified by regulators and financial institutions as “ethical”. The letter, drafted by MP for Aldershot, Farnborough, Blackwater, Hawley & Yateley, Alex Baker, argues that this reclassification will encourage investment and drive the production of missiles to help support Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. This remarkable intervention reveals a great deal about the convergence of the green and security policy agendas but also sheds light on the abolition of thought and fact from Westminster.
“We must rethink ESG mechanisms that often wrongly exclude all defence investment as ‘unethical’,” explains Baker’s letter. “There can be no more ethical investment than giving the Ukrainian people every ounce of support that can be mustered by their allies.” According to this claim, ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance – rules have held investment back. The problem for Baker is that this isn’t true – there is no evidence of investors’ reluctance to invest in defence companies. I asked Google for the share prices of the largest defence companies based in or active in the UK. All of them are booming.
An April 2024 report by the Government found “a 69.9% increase in UK defence exports, increasing from £6.6 billion in 2021 to £11.2 billion in 2022”, and that “a third of turnover came from international sources in 2022”. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been great for weapons systems manufacturers the world over, including Britain’s. With or without ESG influencing investors’
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And talking of the useless c*nt, Carney has just been elected as leader of Canada’s fascist Liberal Party and is therefore now Prime Minister even though he has not stood for election as an MP. His anti-Trump stance over tariffs has seen the Liberals rise in the polls when a victory for Poilievre looked most likely. If they vote the runt Carney in then you have to conclude that the people are more stupid than you think.
Man inflicts misery on man all the time and even violently all the time. War is no special case but just another manifestation of the general hostility of people towards other people. It’s – that’s one of my pet theories – just a case everyday bullies are especially afraid of because their everyday bullying skills would buy them nothing in this situation. They mean to inflict harm and not to suffer it.
Yes, our political system has been invaded by “liberalism”.
ESG is just a symptom of it.
Russia didn’t cause the rise in energy prices.
It was the liberal Wests sanctions against cheap Russia fuel that created the rise.
In the same way that Covid didn’t cause a near collapse of society.
It was the response from liberal governments to a flu like virus that caused the near collapse.
Liberals are the enemy.
He wants to give “every ounce of support that can be mustered” to Ukraine.
I assume he will, if not already,, be on the front line.
It might just be me but I can hardly see Two Tier Never Here – loather of Britain and its people – inspiring the troops as was done in the past by the likes of Henry V, Lord Nelson etc.
If Britain wants to restrict immigration, it must deregulate international trade.
Returning to the Agency Laws of the 1990s would be a good start. That will give Britain more economic and political clout in areas generating ‘asylum seekers’.
Increased defence spending will permit more military training teams to operate overseas, training local militaries to interdict illegal people smuggling operations currently dominated by Russian paramilitary agencies.
What is the evidence that “Russian paramilitary agencies” are behind it?
‘….the paper concludes that ‘weapons of mass migration’ do exist. As in the case studies, migrants and refugees were created, manipulated, and exploited by these two (Russia, Belarus) regimes’
https://research.library.fordham.edu/international_senior/98/
The paper was written by a student under the guidance of Ukrainian Olena Nikolayenko.
A totally biased narrative with no basis of fact.
Olena Nikolayenko is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Fordham University. She is also an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto and held visiting appointments at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, the Project House Europe at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany), the Center for Belarus and Regional Studies at the European Humanities University (Lithuania), the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland), the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University (Sweden), and the Department of Sociology at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). Her research interests include comparative democratization, contentious politics, civil resistance, and political behavior, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe.
Gosh Munro, you are so clever at cutting and pasting. Do you actually have any views of your own?
PS If I was you I would answer yourself since you don’t seem to have the orbs to do it directly to me or CGW.
‘Last week at the Old Bailey, a jury found three of the group – Katrin Ivanova, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev – guilty on espionage-related charges.
Over many weeks of court hearings, the jury heard how the trio were part of a group that travelled to Vienna and other European locations to surveil Grozev.
Plans were developed to kidnap and deliver him to Russian operatives, which ultimately were never implemented.
The plotters’ ideas were sometimes more bluster than substance, and occasionally prompted laughter from the jury……
“They have come across as muppets”….’
‘Just over half (52%) of those surveyed believe the UK has provided about the right amount of support to Ukraine (+6 pp from November 2024). 14% feel more support is needed and 18% think too much has been given.
All groups are on balance supportive of the UK’s assistance to Ukraine, though 35% of 2024 Reform UK voters think too much support has been given (50% still think it has been the right amount).’
IPSOS Feb 2025
Not surprising when the people of the UK are only given one side of the story.
If sage dissenting voices are given a platform the British people would have a better understanding that Russia were “provoked” and “justified”.
The UK media are fed their stories by the Kiev dictatorship and is on a level with the Hamas-loving BBC pushing the story that Israel attacked a hospital. The latest incident has been the claim Russia attacked a building and killed civilians. Nowhere is there any mention of it being full of mercenaries and foreign military advisors and thus a legitimate target. There have been the sports centre attacks where the truth is that they are arms stores.
Yes indeed.
I have been bombarding the msm facebook pages for the last 3 years correcting their false stories.
While I agree fully with your comment regarding Russia, did BBC mention that Israel attacked a hospital? Did they mention there are no hospitals left to attack? Did they mention all the chief surgeons being beaten and tortured daily in Israeli jails? Did they mention all the health workers that have been targeted in Gaza? Nurses shot by snipers while treating people? Surely you have heard by now the story of Hind Rajab, the small girl killed by a tank which also blew up the ambulance sent to rescue her (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/18/hind-rajab-israeli-state-atrocity)?
Whereas I am convinced (hopefully correctly) that Russia will never intentionally target civilians, there is overwhelming evidence of Israel doing exactly that wherever Arabs walk the earth.
So weapons manufacture, and investment in it, becomes ethical. By extension, so does the purchasing of said weapons by the government (funded ‘ethically’ by you and me) to kill people in a war that should never have happened. Furthermore, Baker’s ethical ‘initiative’ will prolong the war indefinitely, a war unsupported, I suggest, by the majority of Brits (that’s unsupported morally, not financially). Meanwhile we can’t drill for gas which would provide cheap, reliable energy to promote the prosperity of individual and industry. There’s something rotten…..
This just illustrates a point made in the article: Ethical means following principles¹. But principles some people follow aren’t necessarily principles other people would follow as well and what some people believe to be a universal good isn’t necessarily universally held to be one.
¹ Somewhat strained here because the principle these people follow is the principle that their own policy choices must always be suffered by everybody else which isn’t principle at all but might makes right badly disguised.
So a bomb can be ethical depending on who uses it.
I never thought of the Iraq war as an ethical crusade, but then all crusades were ethical – isn’t religion a wonderful thing.
I wonder how people balance the shelling of the people in the former east of Ukraine by the Kiev regime with their ethics.
For every acronym, there’s another acronym. ESG – Evil, Sociopathic, Grotesque.
That’s what an energy policy driven by the myth of man-made climate change is.
“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity.”
Michael Crichton (1942 – 2008)
War is a racket, in which the sons of the poor pay with blood and taxes the self-aggrandisement of amoral political elites.
……. and bankers!