Death: at least make it profitable

Occasionally, you see a publicity stunt so inept, so tone-deaf, that you wonder how it got through the planning stage. Here's a humdinger folks.

This morning I got an invitation to the university's Macmillan Cancer Coffee Morning. I decided to  go along, if I'm free. I'm largely against death in general and I've had enough friends and relatives die of cancer in recent years for me to be against the misery and suffering of that particular diseases for me to want to support efforts to prevent or cure it.

Then this Tweet caught my eye:

Isn't that sweet? A massive engineering firm helping its employees contribute to curing cancer in a fun and cute way.

Hold on a minute. BAe Systems Air? I'm sure that rings a bell. I know that 'Systems' is a nice bland word that doesn't give much away but there's something nagging away at the back of my mind.

Ah, yes, that's it. BAe Systems is British Aerospace as was, and BAe Systems Air makes big fast stuff.

What kind of big fast stuff? Well, Typhoon fighter-bombers and Paveway IV bombs, amongst other things. Just for you students of Anglo-Saxon literature there's also a Beowulf all-terrain vehicle, described as 'poetry in motion': Auden apocryphally said that 'poetry makes nothing happen' but the Beowulf can insert heavily-armed killers into any crowd of pesky protestors in minutes.

And they don't just make this stuff: they 'support' their own customers just like football teams have sponsors. BAe Systems has picked the cutest underdogs in the league: the Sultanate of Oman, a violent dictatorship rated by Freedom House as 'not free'.

So that's BAe Systems. I guess their PR department knows that it needs all the love it can get, between the core business of providing mass death to any customer, no questions asked, and the awkward business of all those bribery and corruption allegations and convictions. A coffee morning for charity, heavily promoted on social media is just the ticket.

But what of Macmillan Cancer Care? I know it's hard to say no to eager volunteers, but did nobody at HQ wonder if a charity working hard to prevent suffering, misery and death might look a teensy bit hypocritical hosting an event and taking money from a company whose whole raison d'être is the aforesaid suffering, misery and death. Perhaps they had a big banner hanging above the coffee and cakes: 'Death From Above, Not From Within'. Perhaps they can have a little competition like the Great British Bake-Off?

Ah yes. The Bombe Surprise. It's hard to pick just one winner when your normal method is to kill them all and let God sort them out.

Oh look: double points for this one as it manages to promote the company, grovel to its customers and threaten death from above, all the while polluting the timeline of a cancer charity.

Perhaps there's a perfectly rational way of looking at it. From BAe's perspective, every cancer victim is a potential target lost. It is clearly not against premature and piteous deaths, it just wants to find the profit in it, and quite frankly carpet-bombing is far more efficient than cancer (and besides, quite a few munitions are subsequently carcinogenic to the inhabitants of the unfortunate lands visited by their customers). So if Macmillan cares to open an outlet in say Syria, it's guaranteed some repeat customers. Everyone's a winner!

Joking aside, this is a superb case study for PR students. For Macmillan a nice idea has become appropriated by a major arms manufacturer to whitewash its reputation: for both BAe and Macmillan it's an object lesson in giving a moment's thought to the credibility of your activities. If this story grows, they'll have a representative on the airwaves trying to normalise what it does, and claiming that events like the cancer coffee morning demonstrate what a good corporate citizen it is: we see the same thing when Labour MPs in places like Barrow defend the retention of nuclear weapons because it 'provides employment': in the short term, it does. In the long term, as Keynes put it, we are all dead, and I guess the survivors of a nuclear exchange can find fresh employment burying the remains and decontaminating the scorched earth.

As for me: I think I'll find a cancer charity that doesn't think it's OK to be used as part of a PR campaign. Though weirdly, this happened:

Top Gun…

Very tediously, the US state department accused the Russians of selling attack helicopters to Syria. Obviously, it's revolting that any country should be helping that regime kill its civilians.

But let's not think for a second that Hillary Clinton has suddenly become some kind of peacenik. This isn't about principle: it's about realpolitik and tactics. It's a sales dispute. Let's just have a look at the countries to which the UK sells arms in the area.

This is the 2011 report. It involves £500m sales to Iran. £200m to Saudia Arabia (which used UK military equipment to help the Bahrainis to crush the democracy movement), £70m to Israel, which ruthlessly crushes dissent in the occupied territories, lots to the previous dictatorships in Egypt, ammunition to the Syrian regime, and lots of other sales to the whole panoply of vicious dictatorships which sell us oil.

Talking of Bahrain, I wonder why the US had nothing to say about 70% of its population being denied any kind of political or economic freedom. Oh yes, it's because it's the main port for the US Navy fleet in the area. Which is why the US is still selling the regime weapons.

Like the UK, the US sells (and often just gives) weaponry to all these deeply unpleasant states. It's partly to keep the oil flowing. It's partly Keynesian economics: even US-funded weapons keep Americans in employment. It's also an economic trade-off which makes the flow of oil money to the East look slightly less imbalanced, and it's to some extent a trade-off for persuading these countries not to invade Israel… another recipient of American military largesse. The economic case is becoming more and more important, as these arms lobbyists and analysts demonstrate:

"US defence companies are definitely looking overseas as a market opportunity that may offset some of the reductions in the US military budget that almost everybody expects to be coming down the pipe. The supply is there coming from the companies, but that doesn't change the fact that there is also demand."
Brian Finlay, the director of the Managing Across Boundaries programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington, noted that US defence companies had formed a powerful lobby that has risen in prominence during the economic downturn.
"We're seeing arms producers across the country, and interests across the country really coalescing to form a pretty significant lobbying bloc, and to complete the perfect storm this is also happening at a time of fiscal restraint and a wider economic downturn here in the United States."
"Jobs are pretty hard to come by, and jobs that are available in these industries pay pretty well. They're good jobs. It makes it even a more potent political issue for the administration."

When nobody's buying cars, sporting goods or whatever else keeps an economy afloat, death's the only expanding market. There's always demand for things with which to kill people, and if demand does drop, you can always stoke up a little regional tension. Look at Greece, a country with no enemies but a vicious rivalry with Turkey, and spend over 4% of its budget on weaponry, the highest percentage in Europe. If they stop spending, you can expect Labour, Tory and Lib Dem MPs with military factories in their constituencies to start begging for Greece to be bailed out. Peace is very bad for the economy.

Arabs: our country needs YOU to go out and die for our marginal constituencies.

Everyone's a winner. Yay for democracy. When convenient.

You've got to admire Cameron's sheer chutzpah

Watching TV today, you'll see the Prime Minister in various North African and Near Eastern countries (Egypt yesterday, dictatorship Kuwait today) expounding his firm belief in democracy, peaceful protest and freedom.

Wonderful. Until you look at the people on the plane with him.

Ian King, chief executive of BAE Systems, will be the most senior figure on the trade delegation that also includes Victor Chavez of Thales UK and Alastair Bisset of Qinetiq. The 36-strong business delegation, nearly a quarter of whom come from the defence and aerospace sectors, will attend some, but not all, of the prime minister's three-day visit to the Gulf.

Other defence and aerospace manufacturers accompanying Cameron include Rob Watson, regional director of Rolls Royce; Charles Hughes, vice president marketing of the Cobham Group; Douglas Caster, the chief executive of Ultra Electronics; Andy Pearson, managing director of Babcock International Group; and Richard Barrett, regional director of Atkins.

Following on from his government's recent statements about not being 'ashamed' but 'proud' of the arms trade, and having ordered Britain's embassies to privilege trade above every other activity, Cameron's tour is actually a weapons sales roadshow, flogging anti-citizen devices as much as defence machinery. The UK sells huge amounts of weaponry to tiny Kuwait (not sure why: their armed forces ran away when the Iraqis visited in 1990) and is currently selling Eurofighters around the Gulf: there are several going spare as they're a bit rubbish and the UK can't afford its full order. The defence minister, Gerald Howarth, is manning a stall at a weapons fair featuring 93 British arms dealers flogging (no pun intended) everything an insecure despot might need, from tasers to riot control vans. 15 civil servants are there too, 'supporting' ADS, the British death-merchants' promotional body ('free cattle prod with every dungeon'). (If that site sickens you, take the antidote with CAAT).

So don't swallow Cameron's hastily arranged speeches whole: this is a sales trip with a lot of shadowy men who sniff opportunity.