WRITTEN ON July 3rd, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board, What do we want?

I don’t think government should help sell more weapons – it should invest everything in peace. Clearly a government that helps sell weapons to regimes with dodgy human rights records is far from ideal. So here’s an excellent Gershon-agenda objective: shut the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO).

Here’s how DESO sees itself:

Our Mission: through export success, to make the maximum contribution to defence objectives.
Our Vision: a DESO highly regarded by overseas Governments, exporters and MoD alike.
Our tasks:
* Giving assistance to company-led marketing campaigns, by way of:
o Nurturing relations with key decision-makers in overseas Governments;
o Harnessing other parts of MoD, the Armed Forces and Whitehall to support industry’s efforts;
o Negotiating and supporting Government-to-Government agreements;
* Supporting MoD’s defence diplomacy efforts
* Advising DTI and Industry on export licence applications; and
* Making sure that Government policy on defence exports is reflected in MoD’s work on acquisition and other policies and activities; and vice-versa.
Our Key Values
– Complete integrity.
– A proactive and positive ‘can do’ philosophy at all times.
– Maximum teamwork.
– Clear objectives and priorities.
– A responsive and efficient service to all our customers.

The Campaign against the arms trade (CAAT) says 75% of UK arms exports would not happen without DESO, and that DESO appears unconcerned about the conflicts it is fuelling. Also that 200 civil servants are working on selling arms to Saudi Arabia (have we gone completely nuts?) CAAT sounds like a marginalised bunch of people who get bullied when they protest at arms fairs. But it’s quite clear that what they’re doing is both ethical and wise (and they’re entirely non-violent). So let us hope that in due course their stance will be mainstream and the norm, and that we will all reflect with the same sort of shame on the arms trade as we have for some time on the slave trade.

CAAT campaign aims include to shut DESO and close the revolving door

Wibbi:

1. CAAT won (probably by persuading the Tories, tho that seems a long shot even for Cameron) and DESO was abolished. It would then be as “efficient” as the famous hospital-with-no-patients in Yes Minister. Better, in fact because as well as 100% reduction in manpower and other costs it would stop doing harm as well as saving £17m a year.

2. Or, if the 500 staff insist on doing something similar Wibbi we had a DESO that saw its aims more like:

Our Mission: based on a clearer vision of the world’s priorities, to contribute to world safety based on long-term peace and better understanding of long-term threats such as imminent climate chaos.
Our Vision: a DESO which people in Britain can take pride in (as well as highly regarded by overseas Governments, exporters, MoD etc).
Our tasks:
* Letting companies get on with it
o Putting away our nurturing man-breasts
o Not harnessing anything really
o Engaging good science and technology with world safety issues via commerce
* Letting the FCO DfID and NGOs do the diplomacy and make friends overseas
Our Key Values
– Integrity that takes into account the consequences of our action, and not the phoney integrity that one can get away with a “key values” statement (which just means “we dont give or take bribes really”, and even that sounds a little optimistic: how can you be involved in the international arms trade and not deal with corrupt people?)
– Wisdom and a desire to do the right thing instead of waffle about “proactive and positive ‘can do’ philosophy”.
– A responsible and efficient service which helps everyone and does not screw the innocent victims of repressive regimes.

Hey, I feel a consultancy contract coming on…

CAAT relies entirely on voluntary contributions – you can support it at www.caat.org.uk . Remember – closing DESO is efficient as well as good!