Artist Alex Tsander has created a piece of artwork about Nottingham-based arms company Heckler & Koch. The North Somerset-based artist is exhibiting a series of images incorporating QR codes – two-dimensional bar codes. One of the images depicts a young woman holding a H&K rifle. When decoded, the QR code in the picture yields the address of a page on the website of War Resisters’ International, which contains information about the unethical nature of H&K’s business.

This is not the first time that Heckler & Koch has appeared in contemporary art. Earlier this year, German artist Johannes Kreidler released a video showing music generated by corporate stock charts during the global financial crisis. A jolly tune generated by H&K’s stock chart showed the company in the ascendant even as other stocks tumbled, thanks in part to the arms company’s contracts with the forces illegally occupying Iraq.

You can see Alex Tsander’s QR code artwork at the Amoeba bar in Bristol throughout October 2009.

Once every two years, in the London Docklands, the world’s biggest arms fair takes place. It’s spelt DSEi, it’s pronounced “Dicey”, and this year it took place from 8^th-11^th September. Joining over 1 000 arms companies from around the world were a couple of outfits from Nottinghamshire, catering to opposite ends of the small arms market.

Heckler & Koch

As followers of this blog will know, Heckler & Koch is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of small arms, with millions of its weapons in use in over 90 countries around the world. These days H&K styles itself as “the world’s premier small arms system company”. Its high-quality products, as used by human rights abusers from Iraq to Georgia to Sri Lanka, were laid out for display on its stand at DSEi:

Heckler & Koch has a long history of using licensed production deals to evade arms export controls. Basically, if the government or the EU forbids H&K from selling weapons to country X because of some dodgy situation there, then H&K does a deal with country Y so that country Y can make H&K’s weapons and sell them on to country X.

One of the countries that H&K licenses to make its weapons is Pakistan. This long-standing relationship has allowed H&K weapons to reach various embargoed conflict zones including The Philippines, Sudan and Sri Lanka. The Pakistan Ordnance Factory even offered to sell 200 H&K submachine guns to Zimbabwe when asked by comedian Mark Thomas. At this year’s DSEi, Pakistan’s gun cabinet was stuffed with H&K weapons, including a gold-plated submachine gun:

Global Sourcing & Supply

Elsewhere at the arms fair, another Notts-based company was catering to the “budget” small arms shopper. Global Sourcing & Supply is a rather grand trading name for Easy Tiger International Ltd – a one-man import/export business based in Cotgrave.

One of GS&S’s lines of business is buying guns from Europe and Asia to be sold in the US by American Tactical Imports (which co-incidentally is being sued by H&K for selling rip-offs of its designs). Now it seems that GS&S has acquired some 40 000 Kalashnikov assault weapons and 500 grenade launchers, which company director Guy Tinsley was seen trying to flog at DSEi:

The AK-47 and its variants seen here are the most widespread and worst regulated weapons in the world. They have been used by child soldiers, insurgents, criminal gangs and terrorists to massacre, maim, rape and rob in every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and even in Britain.

In case you’re thinking a British company wouldn’t be allowed to sell weapons to bad guys, consider this: Among the 25 000 visitors to DSEi were delegations from repressive regimes and conflict zones including China, Colombia and Angola that were actually invited by the British government! Furthermore, due to a lack of effective controls, guns that begin in the legal arms trade all too often end up being trafficked into warzones or in the hands of criminals. And once those guns are out there, they will remain in circulation causing death and destruction for decades to come.

The registered business address of Easy Tiger International is 10 Kingston Drive, Cotgrave, Nottingham NG12 3LL – a detached house in a quiet residential estate. I wonder if the neighbours know about the arms dealer next door…

If you would like to do something about the issues raised in this post, you can get in touch with other activists through Notts Anti-Militarism. There is a already a local campaign against Heckler & Koch called Shut Down H&K. Check the events listing for the next demo or meeting.

Peruvian security forces armed with Heckler & Koch rifles and submachine guns have killed dozens of indigenous protesters near the northern city of Bagua.

Indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon have been protesting against new “Free Trade” laws that would open up their ancestral lands to drilling for gas and oil.  Since April 2009, indigenous protesters have stepped up their protest, blocking road and river transport and shutting down oil and gas pumping stations.  On June 6, Peruvian President Alan García ordered in the troops, and police opened fire using live rounds on a crowd of protesters.

Peruvian police armed with H&K rifles take up positions in Bagua

The shots came from rooftop snipers and a hovering helicopter as well as ground forces.  A representative of Save The Children reported that children as young as four years old were wounded by indiscriminate police shooting.  The bloody crackdown continues, with some estimates putting the death toll in the 80s.  There are eyewitness reports of the Peruvian police hiding bodies by burning or dumping them in the Utcubamba river.

The Peruvian armed forces are only one of many deadly actors employing H&K’s tools for killing and repression in the world today.  Two other conflicts that have been in the news lately are the bloody conclusion to the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which government forces were armed with H&K submachine guns, and the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan’s Swat district, in which both Taliban and government forces are armed with H&K rifles and submachine guns.

And to whom do the armed forces of Peru, Sri Lanka and Pakistan go in order to keep their weapons serviced and maintained?  Could it be the Nottingham office of Heckler & Koch, which according to the company’s own website is responsible for “international customer sales and customer services outside NATO”?

Make no mistake about it:  Heckler & Koch is not a respectable company.  It is a purveyor of the tools of murder and repression, staffed by people without a conscience, owned by crooked millionaire playboys, and it needs to be shut down.

An anti-arms-trade campaign in Nottingham has discovered that Bournemouth-based company LV= is knowingly profiting from the arms trade.  LV=, formerly known as Liverpool Victoria, is a financial services company that sells insurance, savings and investments.  Nottingham-based campaign Shut Down H&K discovered that LV= is the landlord of none other than Heckler & Koch – the world’s second-largest manufacturer of small arms.

Describing itself as “the world’s premier small arms system company“, Heckler & Koch makes assault rifles, submachine guns and pistols. Their weapons are used around the world, and have been responsible for an estimated 1.5 million deaths.  H&K weapons have armed repressive regimes in Burma and Indonesia, and been trafficked into warzones in Bosnia and Darfur.  The company’s recent customers include Georgia, Thailand, Lebanon, and the notorious private military company Blackwater.

Kopassus, the notorious Indonesian stormtroopers, marching with H&K weapons

All of this seems shockingly incompatible with LV=’s friendly, caring image.  The so-called “friendly society” has a Corporate Social Responsibility programme that aims to raise awareness of “everyday safety and good citizenship,” and its website proudly proclaims that “Our focus is on doing the right thing”.  However, it turns out that LV= owns a small business park on an industrial estate in Nottingham, on which is an unmarked warehouse that serves as H&K’s UK office; responsible for international sales and customer service to non-NATO countries.

When the campaigners learned of this, they wrote to LV=, explaining the nature of H&K’s business, and asking LV= to consider not renewing the arms company’s lease, or at least making a statement condemning the arms trade.  LV= replied unequivocally.  Not only are they “pleased to have invested,” they have “no wish to disinvest” in Heckler & Koch and they are not prepared to make any statement that may be seen as “victimising” a business.  They also rebuffed the campaigners’ offer to meet with them.

This position is shockingly hypocritical:  In order to avoid “victimising” Heckler & Koch with harsh words, LV= is prepared to turn a blind eye to the Janjaweed “victimising” Darfuri villages, Indonesian armed forces “victimising” Papuans, and the Georgian army “victimising” South Ossetian civilians, to name just three of the many armed conflicts around the world in which human-rights-abusing aggressors have been armed with Heckler & Koch guns.

The Shut Down H&K campaign is now calling for a public boycott of LV=, with the aim of securing from the company a commitment to disinvest from the arms industry. This press release is for UK-wide distribution.

Saturday April 4^th is the 60^th anniversary of NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance.  The NATO summit in Strasbourg will be attended by mass demonstration and resistance, and there will be local protests throughout NATO member countries.  So what’s wrong with NATO?

• NATO is militarising the world. NATO promotes the idea that militarism guarantees peace, and its members currently account for 70% of the world’s military spending.  From its origins as an ostensibly defensive alliance, NATO has developed a strategy of military intervention in order to expand its sphere of influence, as tested in 1999’s unjustified and tragic high-altitude bombing campaign against Serbia.
• NATO threatens nuclear war. As part of NATO’s arsenal, hundreds of US nuclear weapons are sited across Europe, in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. NATO rejects a “no first use” policy, meaning that it reserves the option of a pre-emptive nuclear strike.  Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons are assigned to NATO, and could be used against any country perceived to be threatening a NATO member.
• NATO sponsored terrorism. From the 1950s to the 1980s NATO operated a network of clandestine army forces across Western Europe, codenamed Operation Gladio.  These secret NATO paramilitaries carried out terrorist attacks for which they framed communist groups in order to frighten populations into voting for right-wing governments.
• NATO is a tool of the “War on Terror”. The September 11 attacks provided the casus belli that NATO’s masters were waiting for.  Under the banner of a Global War on Terrorism, NATO immediately militarised the Mediterranean and went to war in Afghanistan.  Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed already and NATO forces are killing more every week in this expensive, bloody and unwinnable war.
• NATO is provoking a new Cold War. NATO was established to oppose expansion of the Communist Bloc.  However, far from dissolving after the Cold War ended, NATO expanded to the East, adding many former Warsaw Pact countries. Now NATO’s plans to place missile defence systems near Russia’s border have provoked Russia to aim its own missiles back at Europe.

NATO is not a benign force for peace, security and democratic values; it is an engine of war working to expand the domination of Western interests through military means.  It is an obstacle to global nuclear disarmament and world peace.

NATO’s expansion must be halted, its foreign interventions brought to an end and its military bases and nuclear weapons decommissioned.  NATO should be dismantled and its resources used to achieve a nuclear-free, less militarised and therefore more secure world.

Four activists from Nottingham travelled to Germany to take part in a demonstration against arms company Heckler & Koch at the company’s international HQ in March.  H&K is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of small arms, and its guns are used throughout the world; from Darfur to Iraq, from Nigeria to Nepal.  The company has long been opposed by peace campaigners in Germany, and since 2008 its Nottingham office has been the target of a local campaign called Shut Down H&K.

In 2009 Heckler & Koch will be 60 years old.  In order to pre-empt the company’s birthday celebrations, German peace groups organised a protest with the slogan 60 Jahre Heckler & Koch: kein Grund zum Feiern (60 Years of Heckler & Koch: No Cause for Celebration).  The Nottingham activists were invited to a March 7^th demonstration by the peace groups RIB, ORL and DFG-VK, who also funded their journey.

In Germany, the damning case against Heckler & Koch was laid out in a lecture by the country’s leading anti-arms-trade campaigner Jürgen Grässlin.  Speaking on the eve of the demonstration at a hall in the town of Rottweil, Grässlin talked about H&K’s history of arming repressive regimes.  He showed the audience slides of  H&K rifles in the hands of genocidal militias, and presented a pair of flip-flops he had taken from a Sudanese mass grave of people executed with H&K guns.

Then it was the turn of the Nottingham delegation to speak about their campaign and how H&K has used its UK operation to evade arms embargoes and supply guns that were used in human rights abuses in countries like Bosnia, Sudan, Ecuador and Indonesia.  The German audience was genuinely shocked to hear about the tactics used by Nottinghamshire Police to suppress the campaign.  The audio and transcript of the speech are available here.

Heckler & Koch’s global HQ is in the picturesque South-West German town of Oberndorf am Neckar, far from the misery inflicted by its trade.  The theme of the demonstration was Maskerade des Todes (Masquerade of the Dead) signifying the estimated 1.5 million people who have been killed by H&K weapons.  Some 200 demonstrators gathered at the railway station in the midday sunshine and listened to music and speeches before setting off on a march into the town centre.

Many of the marchers were dressed all in black, their faces covered by white deathmasks.  Some bore crosses with the names of countries in which people have been killed with H&K weapons, while others carried signs saying “I am a soft target” – a reference to the euphemistic description of human beings in H&K’s marketing brochures. Still more marchers were dressed as soldiers, arms industry execs or bankers, and a lone clown played the funeral drum.

The marchers gathered around a cobbled square and watched as a piece of street theatre played out before them.  First the board of H&K toasted their booming business with champagne and then none other than Death himself took centre stage, praising H&K – his favourite company – for sending him so many souls.  The Grim Reaper personally congratulated the CEO of H&K, who offered to replace his ageing scythe with a more efficient, modern tool – a Heckler & Koch assault rifle.  Death was pleased!

Next Jürgen Grässlin delivered a powerful denunciation of Heckler & Koch, listing the company’s many shameful dealings – a history that gives no cause for celebration.  Finally the Nottingam delegation stepped up to speak, thanking the German campaigners for inviting them, and delivering the message that opposition to the arms trade must be as global as the arms trade itself.  In an overwhelming show of solidarity, the German campaigners had an impromptu whip-round that raised €270 for the UK campaign.

The British activists were struck by the differences between this demonstration and the demos against H&K in Nottingham.  First of all, the police presence was nowhere near as oppressive.  There were about half a dozen German police who maintained a respectful distance, and very little police surveillance.  By contrast, every Nottingham picket has been attended by numerous riot vans with at least one policeperson for every demonstrator, and constant and oppressive surveillance, despite the fact that these demonstrations have always been peaceful.  The second difference is that the Heckler & Koch HQ in Oberndorf is well signposted, as opposed to the Nottingham depot, which is completely unsignposted, hidden in an unmarked warehouse as if ashamed of its business.

The demonstration was reported favourably on German TV news and in local newspapers and was filmed for a documentary about Grässlin.  The collaboration between the German and British campaigns has been a boost for both, and they will continue to work together in a spirit of international solidarity against the arms trade.

The Notts Indymedia photo report has more pictures of the speeches in Rottweil (part 2) and the demo at Oberndorf (part 3 and part 4).  Monthly demonstrations against Heckler & Koch in Nottingham will continue with a picket on Tuesday April 14^th and a special campaign anniversary demo on Monday May 11^th.

Four Nottingham anti-arms trade campaigners are visiting the German town of Oberndorf-am-Neckar in early March to attend a major protest at the international headquarters of arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch, whose British branch is based in Nottingham.

The Nottingham delegation

The Nottingham activists will be joining their German counterparts to protest about Heckler & Koch’s role in supplying arms used in murderous conflcts around the world. It has been revealed that H&K guns have been used by the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, by Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, by the Georgian army in South Ossetia, and by criminal gangs in the UK.

The four will represent a Nottingham-based campaign called Shut Down H&K, which has been building friendship links with German organisations who also oppose the arms trade. A German peace group caled the Armaments Information Office (RIB) invited them to attend the demonstration and offered to pay their travel expenses.

The March 7^th protest has been organised by German campaign groups to pre-empt H&K’s 60^th anniversary celebrations. The theme of the demonstration will be “Masquerade of Death” and the marchers will be split into two columns – one mourners dressed in black to commemorate the victims of war, and one dressed as arms dealers celebrating their booming business. There will also be a rally at which the delegation will deliver a speech about the Nottingham campaign against Heckler & Koch.

Making a killing: Heckler & Koch guns in the hands of an African child soldier, a Taliban fighter in Pakistan, Serbian special forces, a Nepalese soldier and a Palestinian militant

press release in PDF

A small demo was held in Market Square on Thursday 22^th January to raise awareness and spread the word about the campaign against arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch. Hundreds of flyers were handed out to passers-by with the aim of raising awareness that Nottingham is home to the international sales headquarters of a multinational arms company. Conversations were had with Nottingham residents not only about the presence of H&K in their city but also about the arms trade in general, creating an effective space to engage in dialogue with the public. For more details and pictures, see Indymedia.

Shut Down H&K campaigners raising awareness in Market Square (photo courtesy of Tash)

There will be further demos in Market Square every fourth Thursday of the month, as well as continuing demos outside the headquarters in Lenton industrial estate every second Monday.

Bondmania is back! Everyone loves Bond, especially since the franchise’s gritty 2006 reboot, fronted by a brooding, steely-eyed Daniel Craig. As with recent Bond films, Quantum Of Solace is being used to sell various lifestyle products. Big name brands pay handsomely to be associated with Bond, and Quantum Of Solace has racked up £50 million pounds for product placement. Let’s take a look at what the film is selling.

Promotional tie-ins for Quantum of Solace include Heineken lager, Smirnoff vodka, Coca-Cola, Ford cars, Virgin Atlantic airline, Sony TVs, National Lottery Scratchcards and The Sun newspaper. Launching a new perfume, Avon claims that “through this unique partnership, every woman can feel like a Bond Girl – smart, empowered, confident, and sexy,” while package holiday company Orbitz tells us “you can’t do it better than Bond, but you can certainly travel like him.”

If some of those promotions make you feel slightly queasy, hold on; the best is yet to come. The new Bond films feature product placements for, yes, you guessed it, Heckler & Koch firearms. In Casino Royale, Bond defeats the villainous Mr White with a H&K UMP9 submachine gun – a weapon that he carries on using in Quantum of Solace.

Promotional graphic for Quantum of Solace showing James Bond wielding a Heckler & Koch UMP9 submachine gun

But why would Heckler & Koch spend money widely promoting a weapon that is only available to military and police forces? Perhaps because H&K also sells guns to civilians in the USA and Germany, including one based on the UMP.

The US civilian firearms market is huge: A staggering 4.5 million new firearms are legally sold in the US every year. Naturally H&K wants to maximise its profit from this lucrative market, but US and German gun laws prevent the company from selling the fully automatic UMP to the public. To get around the laws, the company designed a semi-automatic version called the USC.

Advert showing USC fully converted to UMP9 (silencer not included)

Since the Bush administration failed to renew the Assault Weapons Ban in 2004, private owners have been able to legally convert the USC to the UMP by switching to a larger magazine and a shorter barrel, thus making the weapon less accurate but easier to conceal.

Bond’s iconic use of the UMP9 has undoubtedly stoked consumer demand. The weapon is discussed on various online gun enthusiast forums, with one contributor saying “I’ve wanted to build one out of a USC ever since I saw Casino Royale.” Wannabe 007s can pay for a USC to UMP conversion, and if they can’t afford that they can buy a conversion kit and follow the instructions on YouTube.

So far so bad, but Bond films are not unique in this regard. Heckler & Koch weapons have appeared in many other films and TV shows, including 24, Bad Boys II, Terminator 3, Die Hard 4.0 and V For Vendetta. The Interbrand movie product placement database lists half a dozen other films under Heckler & Koch, with a link to Amazon.com, where loyal customers can by H&K books, T-shirts, gun accessories and knives.

But there is something else that Bond is selling – something more insidious than cars, phones and guns: Since his first film in 1962, James Bond has been selling the UK Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6.

The Real James Bond

The fictional Commander Bond is by far the world’s best known SIS agent. His glamorous adventures driving sleek sports cars, seducing beautiful women, and dispatching diabolical villains are the best propaganda the British establishment and its secret service could ever dream of. The SIS exploits 007’s recruiting potential on its website: “Staff who join SIS can look forward to a career that will have moments when the gap [between truth and fiction] narrows just a little and the certainty of a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond’s, will be in the service of their country.” So just how wide is that gap? Let’s take a look at the real MI6.

James Bond has battled a series of megalomaniacs wielding stolen nukes or laser satellites, but for the real SIS the biggest enemy has been socialism. Driven by a fear of the Red Menace, the SIS has a long history of supporting right-wing politics and undermining the left. In 1924 agents forged the Zinoviev Letter, which was instrumental in ending the UK’s first Labour government and restoring power to the Conservative Party.

After World War II, the SIS helped Nazi war criminals to escape justice in order to recruit them, including Walter Rauff, the inventor of mobile gas chambers, and Horst Kopkow, who was responsible for hundreds of executions. In Albania the SIS recruited Nazi collaborators for its plan to overthrow the communist government, and in Germany the SIS employed the leader of the country’s most notorious post-war neo-Nazi party.

In the 1950s the agency plotted to overthrow or assassinate leaders of countries that dared to nationalise their assets out of British control. The SIS tried to kill Egypt’s President Gamal Nasser in retaliation for nationalising the Suez Canal, and collaborated with the CIA to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in order to keep the country’s oil in the hands of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP).

Throughout the Cold War the SIS helped the CIA to overthrow left-wing governments around the world. They replaced the Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister with dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who went on to become the most corrupt African leader ever. And in Indonesia the SIS armed insurgents in order to oust President Sukarno, thus paving the way for the military dictatorship of Suharto, who immediately set about slaughtering a million suspected communists.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the SIS was left purposeless, without an arch-enemy… until the War On Terror that is! In order to shift public opinion in favour of invading Iraq, the SIS planted exaggerated stories about Saddam Hussein’s WMD in the British media. The agency has since been implicated in the abduction, torture and “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects around the world, as well as the use of “intelligence” obtained through torture.

This then is the work of the real secret agents of MI6. Perhaps a more authentic movie could show James Bond feeding pro-war propaganda to the press, or wiretapping, kidnapping and beating Muslim radicals before handing them over to the CIA to be flown to Guantánamo Bay.

Of course Quantum Of Solace is an entertaining film, and many people will take no more from it than that. However, those who want to see the film may want to find a way to do so without paying, so as to avoid supporting a global marketing platform for some very dodgy brands.

On Monday 20th October the annual AISEC Careers fair commenced at Nottingham University, featuring many organisations with despicable or at least dubious ethical credentials and social-responsibility records, including BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Qinetiq, E.On, BP, RBS, MoD and the army. The fair also featured some student activists and Grim Reapers who had made an appearance in order to remind fellow students of the deadly consequences of working in the arms trade or climate change industry.

AISEC claim to be ‘the international platform for young people to discover and develop their potential so as to have a positive impact on society.’ The organisation also claims to envision “Peace and fulfillment of humankind’s potential.” Despite this, at Nottingham, the organisations’ main endeavor appears to be to give a platform to arms dealers! For more see: http://www.aiesec.org/

Concerned about the presence of such unethical corporate entities and the glaring hypocrisy of AISEC, a group of students came together with the aim of raising awareness of the unethical nature of many of the companies at the fair and oppose the general presence of mechanisms of the capitalist death machine.

The morning began with fliering at various stalls, collecting of shiny corporate merch, and using up the representatives time. Nottingham University Security were being their usual oppressive selves and tried to prevent the students from fliering near the glossy corporate stalls. Threats of calling the police were also issued. The students also had a permanent stall next to the army (courtesy of One World Week) from which alternative information about companies, personal discussion and careers guides could be disseminated. When the army rep left his stall, a couple of students kindly stepped in to fill his role and invite students to ‘join the imperial death machine’.

In the afternoon four Grim Reapers appeared and went to pay a visit to the stalls of BAE and Rolls-Royce, much to the amusement of passers-by and bewilderment of corporate representatives. Simultaneously, a rather unambiguous banner was dropped in the main access stairwell of the building reading ‘BAE KILL’. The four reapers loitered at BAE and Rolls-Royces stalls for an hour or so handing our fliers and chatting to students and reps, before doing a mini-tour of other dubious corporate outfits in Portland Building (E.On, BP, Qinetiq). University Security reacted initially with ‘you lot have to leave or we’ll call the police’, one BAE rep intervened to assure security “it’s cool, they’re Ok”. Security later changed their line to ‘please take off your masks it’s causing intimidation’, and finally, meekly asked ‘can you please stop filming’, before eventually leaving the students to do their thing. A combination of knowledge about basic rights and the fact that they were armed with a video camera successfully protected the protesters from any silly games that security may have wished to play. Thankfully, this time, freedom of expression and the right to protest prevailed.

Some interesting discussions were had with some of the representatives. One BAE rep was heard to proclaim ‘Free Palestine’, despite working for a company that has provided parts for Israeli military equipment (notably electronics for the F-16 fighter aircraft) and also subcontracted work to Israel. The same rep also confessed feeling slightly guilty about working for BAE, despite being at the Careers fair precisely with the purpose of trying to convince others to do the same thing! A Qinetiq representative admitted that he felt the student protesters were doing a good thing, and was ultimately somewhat envious of the passion they clearly had for this issue. He also suggested that the student s should be targeting Airbus and the MoD additionally.

An eventful time was had by all, especially BAE’s reps! E.ON were the only company to actively complain about the student protests (as far as we know), the moody gits! Clearly various teddies were thrown out of various power-stations. On Tuesday, the second day of the fair, the vast majority of the REALLY immoral companies were not present.

For an awesome video of the action see: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VfJ8geHkaRk

See Indy article for photos: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/10/411386.html