Opposing the DPRTE Arms Fair in Cardiff

Two anti-militarists are up in court this coming week, having been accused of disrupting last year’s DPRTE arms fair in Cardiff. The pair are due to stand trial on Tuesday 6th January 2015 at Cardiff Magistrates Court and could potentially face custodial sentences.

They are accused of damaging the luxury goods of DPRTE arms dealers -including a £400 suit and a £200 pair of designer shoes - with childrens play paint.

According to it's website, DPTRE (the Defense Procurement, Research, Technology and Exportability exhibition) is the "UK’s Premier Defense Procurement Event" and is now being hosted annually at Cardiff Motorpoint arena. Their first time hosting the arms fair in Cardiff was on the the 8th of October 2014, with exhibitors at DPRTE include BAE Systems, the world’s 3rd largest arms producer with a very special relationship with the UK government & Saudi dictatorship. BAE also supplies Israel with the tools to wage war on the Palestinans and after the horrors seen perpetrated by Israel over the summer, from bombing a UN school to the killing of children playing on a beach, there is no doubt that BAE systems is complicit in these crimes through it's arming of the Israeli state.

Anarchist Welsh translation and language attitudes

When I moved to Cardiff, I went to all sorts of meetings by various different leftist groups. From Socialist Appeal to Socialist Party, from The Communist Party to the Socialist Workers Party; I tried to be open minded. Every group I came across felt as if it had no place for the Welsh language in it. The Communist Party was an exception; I guessed this was because prominent members are current or ex-Welsh language activists like Gareth Miles; therefore it is due to influential members in the upper hierarchy of the party that meant that they work bilingually.

I think that fundamentally, as the Socialist discourse lacks the libertarian aspect essential for democracy, and manifestations such as the use of Welsh are being used only if ‘leaders’ advocate it, is an inevitable symptom of this. Anarchism is partly about building new worlds in the shell of the old and not waiting for ‘after the revolution’ before taking matters into our own hands. We cannot wait for legislation or even a spontaneous revolution to undo the damage capitalism and globalization has done to the environment, people and minority languages and cultures, as well as everything else! In the case of Welsh, after campaigning for years with Cymdeithas yr Iatith Gymraeg, a group that was quite focused on linguistic legislation, I concluded that Welsh speakers need to create the linguistic landscape around them themselves, rather than wait for the government and multinational companies to do it for us.