Government Slams Woke Defunding of Defence Industry
The Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has hit back at the defunding of the defence industry in the name of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations, saying it threatens peace and security.
In a joint statement with the Treasury in answer to a Parliamentary Question today, Shapps said: “Defence companies are being excluded from access to debt and equity capital,” a policy which “fails to recognise that the U.K.’s defence industry is essential to protecting our way of life”.
Here’s how it begins.
I wish to make a joint statement with HM Treasury, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government.
The Government is clear the U.K.’s defence sector has an integral role in supporting the first duty of Government: to promote and protect the United Kingdom’s core national interests: the sovereignty, security and prosperity of the British people. That includes supporting allies and partners and contributing to broader international security.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Ukraine – where we continue to have a leading role in providing our Ukrainian friends with our support and with vital military aid to resist President Putin’s illegal and brutal war.
Our defence industrial base underpins our Armed Forces, maintains our continuous-at-sea nuclear deterrent and safeguards our critical infrastructure. The private sector is essential to our national security whether in peacetime or times of emergency. The ongoing maintenance of critical industrial facilities, skills and intellectual property onshore, and the approach we take to sustain these, gives us confidence that we can continue to operate independently, in defence of the country’s interests, without external political influence and protecting the sensitive technologies that underpin our military capability.
Despite this, defence companies are being excluded from access to debt and equity capital, citing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) grounds. This not only threatens an important part of the economy that, through MOD expenditure alone, directly and indirectly supports over 200,000 jobs, but it fails to recognise that the UK’s defence industry is essential to protecting our way of life. Such divestment also threatens to increase the cost of procurement, diverting taxpayers’ money away from other defence spending and from public services. The industry’s value to us as a key strategic asset is only increasing at a time of global uncertainty. …
Whilst investors must always be free to make their own choices, they should do so on the basis of the facts, and those seeking to inform those choices through providing ESG ratings should be clearer on their methodology and more prompt to correct errors when these are pointed out. Defence spending helps prevent war and helps support the British way of life, and those of our NATO allies and partners. …
This Government believes that the important values within ESG should not undermine capabilities developed to help us preserve peace and security, without which sustaining those values would not be possible.
While Shapps repudiates this element of ESG, he is at pains to stress that the defence industry is otherwise fully compliant with ESG values, so the statement is hardly a fulsome rejection of ESG. But I suppose the move would fail completely if it wasn’t diplomatic.
Will the Leftist ideologues behind the ESG movement listen to anything a Tory Defence Secretary says? We can but hope.
Read the full statement here.
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Now, that starts to become interesting. Who could possibly have an interest in seeking to disarm European countries using ESG values as pretty thin pretext?
One should also note that Shapps is basically begging for someone higher up the food chain to let him continue to run the MoD and the UK armed forces provided they do their very best to do so in a way which doesn’t harm the climate, rectifies general social injusticies, never refers to female human beings as woman as That’s Just Not Right™ etc etc etc.
Quo vadis, United Kingdom? A sovereign country it obviously ain’t. Sovereign countries are in control of their own armed forces.
Never thought I’d see the words ‘woke’ and ‘armed forces’ in one sentence but it seems the social contagion has infected all sectors. Nowhere is immune. This is the threat not chuffing PsyOp19.
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1699778175285289034
Well when we’ve got the head of British army stating that he aims to have all army vehicles electric by 2030, you know we are comprehensively f*cked.
No problems, as long as a charging station is nearby, I’m sure any opponent equipped with ICE would certainly wait while we plug in
‘it fails to recognise that the UK’s defence industry is essential to protecting our way of life’.
I’ve recently retired after 42yrs in the UK Defence Industry.
Shapps is a hypocrite.
This government has done more to undermine the industry than any other.
Scrapping Nimrod. Awarding FRES to America. Its ‘anyone but BAES’ policy. Killing off Tornado and Harrier. Running down the Navy. An army that can’t mobilise a war. Reams of red tape, micro-management, about turns, changing requirement.
And ESG is a poison of its own making with its government sponsored wokism.
Sickening.
“The Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has hit back at the defunding of the defence industry in the name of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations, saying it threatens peace and security.”
The very first paragraph and at the end of it my conclusion:
…aye, aye, he’s lying.
Make that moron, maybe hypocritical moron: Someone who only realized that he wasn’t ever in control of what he believed to be exploiting for his own benefit when it was suddenly turned against him.
Khan has just announced a 20 mph speed limit for all of London! He’s antagonising people on purpose now, he wants a riot to point at to back his c40 plans!
He has a sense of humour. Average traffic speed in London is 10 mph.
What defence industry is the government talking about…..the one offshored due to Blair/Brown domestic regulation?
Most of our Allies buy from elsewhere. Kuwait bought their Typhoons from Italy, their SP artillery from China. UAE buys from France, Turkey, Russia.
Go woke, go broke….
You can regulate, preach or you can de-regulate, create jobs.
You cannot do both.
Don’t be fooled, the man has no principles, he will say anything and do the opposite, remember what he did to us during Covid, he was one of the cheerleaders for othering and discrimination against the non injected, he then has been a big supporter for net zero and taxing us all to hypothermia. This is a snake in a nest of vipers in the swamp that is Parliament, he doesn’t give a damn about the military personnel, and he doesn’t give a damn about the defence industry he cares about one thing, himself. Don’t be fooled, don’t forget what he has done.
Govt, at best, asleep at the wheel for 13 years (and probably actively undermining our interests), suddenly woken up when the wheels fall off. You and your chums own this, Schapps, so cut the whingeing. I’m sure your surprise “look who I’ve bumped into” visitor will have a $uggested $olution.
I wonder if Schapps knows whether tanks and fighter jets are any good. because when he was Energy Security and Net Zero Minister he was asked if heat pumps are any good and he said “I don’t know”. —————Let me just repeat that. The Energy Security and Net Zero Minister was asked if heat pumps are any good and he replied —-“I DON’T KNOW”. But he was prepared to force Net Zero and heat pumps on us all whether they are any good or not. ——–This is the parasite class of politician now controlling every aspect of our lives all for our own good ofcourse and there is no tyranny worse than the one that terrorises us for your own good.