UK universities with arms trade links
Extensive investment, research and consultancy connections highlighted
British universities are increasingly beholden to financial arrangements with arms firms due to Brexit and government cuts, an author who specialises in the arms trade has asserted.
Writing in the Morning Star on 23 July, the writer Elliot Murphy detailed how his new book Arms in Academia: The Political Economy of the UK Defence Industry claims a large number of major British universities have ‘extensive investment, research and consultancy connections with companies such as BAE Systems, QinetiQ, Rolls-Royce, along with major internal defence firms’.
He writes: ‘As other sources of funding disappear – partly due to Brexit, with the EU being the source of numerous scientific funding programmes, but also due to government cutbacks – university science and engineering departments are becoming beholden to the needs of their defence funders and sponsors’.
From 2015-18, fifteen universities with leading engineering departments received nearly £40 million in grants from arms contractors, the author maintained, adding: ‘As these links begin to impact research criteria and even modules taught to students, a distinct lack of ethical context is provided… Many of the firms involved are often engaged in publicly beneficial aerospace work, but many others are not.’
The writer argues that these partnerships have helped arms companies avoid scrutiny, develop ‘a humane, scientific public face’, and ‘present themselves as being concerned with quirks of engineering and the wonders of the universe, rather than securing sales to many of the world’s most authoritarian states’.
The article goes on to cite financial links between the University of Bristol and Boeing (manufacturer of the Apache attack helicopter), which funds scholarships and internships for students, and BAE Systems and the University of Portsmouth.
Other establishments to have had financial links he said include the Imperial College of London, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the University of York and the University of Glasgow.
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