Last time we had one of these, the protesters blocked the car park with a pink tank. I hope we have similarly surreal protests this time.
As ever, the hypocrisy and double think knows no bounds. This week our friends have a small internal governance problem so we'll happily sell them defensive/offensive arms that are by coincidence quite useful for internal control. Next week, they'll be a despotic regime that needs major force from our government forces to protect their civilian population. And the only winners are the arms industry who are one of the UK's biggest exports.
ps. With apologies to +Thomas Morffew who posted the link first and had to turn off comments due to an outburst from me. I was incensed by a poster that made reference to WWII and tried to turn this into a discussion about US Gun laws. I'm heartily sick of a certain type of US commenter who twists every discussion into a discussion about the USA. Unfortunately my reaction was classic Ad Hominem. Ah well, so it goes.46-71 Trinity Rd, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 7
I posted the link mainly about the arms show as the Military-Industrial complex shows off it's weapons of destruction and the protests around it. There's only a small part of that which is about weapons for social control in repressive regimes and that's mainly an issue of hypocrisy. The arms industry will happily take money from people like Bahrain or Libya, Egypt, Tunisia (till last year) in the full knowledge that some of those weapons will be used against their own people. In some cases like Egypt, related governments will even give them money to buy those armaments.
The UK in particular has a lot of experience from our own civil war in N Ireland around suitable weapons for a police action. Most of the West has similar experience either as part of UN peace keeping forces or direct actions like Iraq and Afghanistan and there are a whole lot of devices that are sold to other governments based on that experience. But thankfully, these tend not to get used in our own countries except by specialist SWAT teams.
LifeNeutral (tm) is genius.