The meeting was organised by the Cambridge Socialist Forum (a loose collective of local leftish people with no obvious party affiliations) and had a speaker - Jo - from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. Jo had some interesting, if unsurprising stuff to say about how generally unhelpful the Arms Trade is to everyone except the big companies involved. The main focus of the talk and subsequent discussion was on the extent to which public bodies own shares in - and thus a degree of moral responsibility for - some of the big arms companies like BAE Systems.

This applies to many of the colleges in Cambridge and the University as a whole and also to our very own Cambridgeshire County Council. The meeting, which comprised roughly half uni students and half 'town' folk discussed ways in which pressure could be brought to bear on all these institutions to withdraw their funds from organisations which make their profits on the back of human suffering the world over.

Time was short and no firm plan was agreed upon to bring about the immediate dismantling of the military industrial complex or the downfall of global capitalism and war, but...

It was agreed that this was a campaign that could attract interest both within the Uni and the wider community and that it would be worth getting together to discuss how to progress it further. There will be a meeting (of what may become known as Cambridge Against the Arms Trade) on Monday 24th October at 7:30 to see where we go from here. Watch this space for details of the venue.


Some interesting links


 http://www.caat.org.uk/campaigns/clean-investment.php

 http://www.peopleandplanet.org/armstrade/ethical.investment.php

 http://www.caat.org.uk/information/press.php?url=300305prs

 http://www.srcf.ucam.org/pap/pp/jack/cam-camp-eth-invest.htm