Coventry Coach for RAF Brize Norton Demo

A coach will leave this Saturday at 10am for the Stop the War Coalition demonstration at RAF Brize Norton.

The protest has been called by Bristol Stop the War Coalition, Oxford Stop the War Coalition, Oxford CND, Swindon Stop the War Coalition and CND, and Faringdon Peace Group. It's being supported by the national Stop the War Coalition, CND and the Green Party.

Brize Norton is Britain's biggest military base. It's the transport hub for all British troops going in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also where soldiers killed or injured on active service are returned to the UK.

The coach from Coventry will leave the Swimming baths at 10am. Tickets will be £7/£4 unwaged. To reserve seats, please email Andy Pettit (apettit@macunlimited.net), or call him on 07732 030231.

For more info, go to: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/BrizeNorton.htm.

As well, George Monbiot had an interesting column this week about the UK's military industrial complex:

In the white paper that the MoD published at the end of 2003, it admits that "there are currently no major conventional military threats to the UK or Nato ... it is now clear that we no longer need to retain a capability against the re-emergence of a direct conventional strategic threat ... [the purpose of the armed forces is to meet] a wider range of expeditionary tasks, at greater range from the UK and with ever-increasing strategic, operational and tactical tempo". It wants to be able to fight either three small foreign wars at the same time or one large one, which "could only conceivably be undertaken alongside the US". In other words, our "defence" capability is now retained for the purpose of offence. Our armed forces no longer exist to protect us. They exist to go abroad and cause trouble.

A report published by the Oxford Research Group this summer argues that our defence policies are self-defeating. They concentrate on the wrong threats and respond to them in a manner which is more likely to exacerbate than to defuse them. The real challenges, it contends, are presented by climate change, competition over resources, the marginalisation of the poor and our own military deployments.