Amazing what you think of when you start turning over rocks...

For those of you that are not aware, I am a pacifist.  My opinions on the arms trade are irrelevant here and should not be addressed, but suffice to say that I am not a fan.  It got me thinking, however, how many councils in Wales have had contact with arms dealers\manufacturers.  To be honest when I started to look into this, I thought that it would be a futile gesture and that there would nothing on it.  Well…  Let's move on…

It then came to pass that I asked ALL councils in wales the same question:

Please can you tell me if you have made any meetings, hospitality, or made any contact with the following companies:

Lockheed Martin

Boeing

BAE Systems

Raytheon

Northrop Grumman

General Dynamics

EADS/Airbus Group

United Technologies Corporation

Finmeccanica

Thales

Each one of these companies has a very long reputation with weapons making and trading (You can find out about it from other sites). So wouldn't it be interesting to see if there was anything there?  

Caerphilly, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd, Anglesey, Neath Port Talbot, Powys, Swansea Torfaen, Vale of Glamorgan, Wrexham, all said no (I am still waiting for Pembroke, but I will assume no for the time being).  So what about the ones that I have left out?

Cardiff has shares in some of the companies for their pension fund (Which they would not release the details of, which is fair enough). Monmouth met with them because BAE system has a factory there, again nothing major.  RCT has shares in Raytheon and Northrop because of pensions.  Newport met with Airbus to discuss traffic during the Nato conference in 2014.  What made me so surprised was that the councils with the shares in for their pensions disclosed this information.

Fair enough; Case closed.  No scandals here.  Or had I dug enough?  All local council in Wales report to the Welsh Government, so maybe there might be something there or maybe even the National Assembly for Wales?  The National Assembly of Wales said no (which is fine), BUT the Welsh Government, on the other hand, said yes…  Which gets me thinking, why and what about?  

To expand on this question I thought that I would ask the Welsh government about each company - as individual FoI requests - of they can tell me how many meetings - and when they were - the Welsh government has had with [company name here] since 01/01/2010.  Here's the response. Too much information to gather…  What I did next on this one is another matter for another post…  I am working on it, however :-)

Now there is also a section on www.whatdotheyknow.com called Research Councils.  You can see the full details on the link above.  The interesting thing is that, other than the Arts & humanities research council, they have all had dealings with them (Except the Medical Research council who are trying to make this more specific…  Your guess is as good as mine).  So the next question is why?  Another question for another day…

I started doing this purely as a way of seeing what would pop up.  Turns out that when I turned over one rock another rock was there to turn over. Amazing to think that these companies are everywhere.