I’m not saying that DISARM are wrong or anything but you’ve got to be aware that people find their passions in different avenues. Some people aren’t interested in the impersonality of politics and would rather make a difference on a more personal albeit small-scale level. You have no right to judge them on that.

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I agree with your first comment concerning the pension fund, a profitable pension fund will be beneficial to the University, DISARM have never claimed otherwise, but instead wish the University to invest in one of the many other highly profitable organisations around that don’t happen to be one of the world’s most corrupt arms companies.

The belief that BEA is an ‘incredibly safe investment’ is misled and incorrect. Share prices in BAE have dropped since last year, due to the Serious Fraud Office’s investment into the legality of BEA’s corporate activities, and also because arms companies, to make vast profits, require as many people to buy ammunition as possible, and luckily less people decided to do that last year.

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Additionally, I know the money is for pension funds, but ultimately the better the University pensions, the better the staff, the better our education. Would you not admit that if BAE do well, as a company, the benefits can be very fruitful for our education? I’m under the impression that BAE is an incredibly safe investment.

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Regarding the comment by an ‘unassociated second year’, the vigil was one of the most peaceful and moving demonstrations I have ever experienced, the claim that DISARM need to ‘calm down a bit’ is absurd. By wishing movements against companies such as BAE, you are advocating the lives of not only innocent civilians but British service personnel. Sure, the Uni is unlikely to disinvest from BAE in the near future-this is not a reason to abandon all hope, it is exactly that defeatist, apathetic attitude which justifies inaction towards every humanitarian crisis and genocide witnessed in the contemporary world.

Dan, it is true that most major banks invest unethically, however, you have missed the point entirely. Nobody is infallible, and nobody in DISARM claims to be so. All of your ‘wit’ regarding pots, kettles and hypocracy, are all very well, but I urge you to please abstain from this failed rhetoric. At least members of DISARM (and the 200+ who in two hours signed postcards) are making an effort, however small or hypocritical it may be, to do what they believe is right.
It would be impossible for a small group of students to change evry ill of the world, we are merely doing our best to make the small difference that we can and at the moment this involves focussing on the uni investment. We cannot do everything at once, we are all only human. If hypocracy meant that any attempt to do the smallest good in this world should be abandoned then so be it-we can all burn together.

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Also good on DISARM for maintaining pressure on the University to end the immoral and unethical investment in BAE. Regardless of the amount that has been invested, the university is made complicit (and some would argue makes every one of us complicit too) in supporting regimes such as that of Mugabe.

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