Thursday 23 May 2013

Butter not guns

There was a story recently about the problems being faced by General Dynamics UK, which will probably lead to a number of job losses in Wales.  I, no more than anyone else, want to see Welsh people short of jobs; we have enough of a problem in that respect already.

But General Dynamics is, of course, an armaments company; they refer to some of their products lovingly as ‘combat systems’; their business, ultimately is in the field of warfare and killing.
Calls to find ways of helping the company and retaining the jobs seem to me to be the wrong response to this particular situation.  I will never shed any tears over any job losses in the armaments industry.  And I’ve never been one for the idea that we should take any jobs at any price; expending time and resources on the production of weaponry is not something that I could or would support.
The question we should be asking is not how we keep these jobs but how we replace them – and all other jobs in the “defence” industry – with more useful and productive activity.  I don’t understand why so many of those amongst Wales’s politicians who claim to support the peace movement aren’t saying the same thing.

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