Spalpeen

The British National Party’s membership list got leaked. For people not familiar with the Party, it’s an extreme-right wing group that is based around racist policies (they only allow whites as members, and want to kick everyone of any other ethnicity out of the country). You can download the BNP Membership list over at Wikileaks.org.

I’ve been poking around the list, and found some interesting figures about the members. At a brief count, there are the following numbers of people in “important professions” on the list.

-1 currently employed Police Officer.

-1 currently employed NHS Doctor.

-17 former or retired Policemen, including one detective, one inspector, and one who claims to be a “human rights lecturer” which I don’t quite understand.

-15 people currently employed as full or part-time teachers, or with teacher qualifications, including secondary school teachers in subjects like Maths, English, and Physics.

-12 former or retired teachers.

-114 ex-servicemen. Army, Navy, RAF, Intelligence, MoD Police. 

-18 current servicemen. Army, RAF.

Check the Google Maps mash-up of the BNP membership.

UPDATE: this post previously mentioned Shell as one of the companies International Alert is advising on the potential consequences of their programming in countries like Iraq. Shell is one of many companies that International Alert is advising. Also, the information on “costs” comes from a document called Red Flags: Liability Risks for Companies Operating in High Risk zones (Warning: PDF link).

I’m at the 2nd Hull Peace Conference (Warning: PDF link) where Aurelien Tobie from International Alert just finished his talk on the training and skills required for “Peacebuilding”. An interesting anecdote came when I asked him about lobbying, and how the organisation would like to influence Governments and policy makers.

International Alert works with a variety of Non-Governmental Organisations and corporations across the world’s hotspots, including a variety of large international corporations. Some of these companies apparently want to go back to Iraq, which is an extremely dangerous area to get involved in. Inevitably a corporate presence there would result in deaths, due to the grave security risk out there.

Instead of telling these companies that it’s wrong to engage there because your presence will result in killings because of the security they’d have to employ, they tell them that it would cost them a lot of money if their presence did result in killings. They often cite cases where corporations have been successfully sued in similar scenarios, which has far more impact on the corporations than mere threats that human beings might die.

Business ethics? Pah!