As the world’s largest arms fair promoter, Clarion run ‘defence and security’ events around the globe including the bi-annually controversial Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), a massive get-together for weapons manufacturers and their customers which they’ll be setting up in London this September.
Then, after they’ve finished helping to flog missiles to some suspect regimes, they’ll simply move down the road to the Baby Show and help flog pushchairs to some unsuspecting customers.
Sponsors pull out after arms trade revealed
The two events are less than 11 miles and five weeks apart, a proximity that may have proved too close for comfort for a large number of the Baby Show’s sponsors. After all, if your clothing range is being targeted at young families, you probably don’t want to be associated with guided missiles that are being aimed at them as well.
Of the 18 companies originally billed as sponsors or partners of the event just nine remain after we asked if they knew and were happy about Clarion’s ties to the arms trade. Losing 50% of your backers has got to hurt especially as they include high-profile names like Boots the chemist who were due to sponsor the talks on the live stage at the show.
Ticket holders had also been promised the chance to attend a sleep well clinic but that has been dropped from the show’s schedule after apparently losing both of its sponsors (Baby Central and Nanit).
Not surprisingly many partners of the Baby Show weren’t keen to go on record about their involvement or why it had suddenly ended. Preferring just to cut ties without comment.
Immediate Media, publishers of magazines including the Radio Times, whose Made For Mums is the largest parenting review site in the country, reacted to information about Clarion’s less child-friendly activities with a rapid change of heart and the bluntest of statements making it clear they are “no longer partners of the Baby show”.
A marketplace in death and destruction
If sponsors are running for cover quicker than a democracy activist facing a water-cannon, it doesn’t surprise the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) who will be protesting outside the DSEI.
Emily Apple, CAAT’s media coordinator stated that:
“Clarion would probably prefer it if the Baby Show sponsors and exhibitors didn’t know that its other venture is organising one of the world’s largest arms fairs. But it’s time for Clarion to face up to reality. It cannot provide a marketplace in death and destruction alongside events such as the Baby Show, and once sponsors know the truth about its other business interests, they will pull their support from the show”.
Nobody from Clarion events responded to our requests to hear their side of things. Perhaps they were too busy dusting off the red carpet previously rolled out for such valued customers as Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other regimes the Foreign Office described as provoking human rights concerns before the government handed them VIP invitations to the last DSEI.
And busy they are bound to be. The sad fact is there’s no post-Covid slump at the arms fair, the trade in weapons has never been more lucrative. Indeed, analysts are predicting a bumper year for arms manufacturers, it seems if you make land-mines or cluster-bombs business is literally booming.
Since Clarion bought the DSEI in 2008 it’s estimated that 1.5 million people have been killed in armed conflicts around the world with last year breaking a tragic record for the 21st century with over 238,000 lives ended.
Human cost of arms trade
The generically banal slogan this year’s event is using to advertise the weapons that caused these deaths – Powering progress, Defining your future – might leave you wonderingif the exhibitors simply don’t realise what their products are used for.
However, no one could be better placed than Clarion and its clients to understand the human cost of the arms trade or to profit from the price paid by those on the receiving end. After all, whether you sell nappies or bullets you want them to be used as often as possible so you can sell more.
And if the reality of their business model slips their minds, the government unit dedicated to supporting the UK’s weapons exporters will always be on hand to confirm the facts and figures. Like how 90% of war time casualties are civilians, or that every day 9,000 people die from conflict-driven hunger.
This same government unit will claim that they only allow exports to approved regimes. But that hasn’t stopped Britain flogging weapons to nearly four-fifths of countries subject to arms embargos, trade sanctions or other restrictions. History tells us that today’s good guys are tomorrows axis of evil and UK-made armaments have a nasty habit of turning up in the wrong hands, just ask the women of Afghanistan. Right now, there are missiles falling on Ukraine that contain technology made by some of the same western companies who will be exhibiting at the DSEI.
Tragic irony of Lidl’s sponsorship
So, it’s hardly surprising if firms hoping to appeal to new mums and dads aren’t keen to be linked with an industry that routinely creates widows and orphans. If your idea of an effective pacifier is a rubber dummy while theirs is a rubber bullet, you probably don’t want to be roped in as their unwitting accomplice.
Perhaps more surprising is that Lidl have bucked what looks like a trend and remain as the headline sponsor of Clarion’s Baby Show. Aware that their commercial partner makes money from guns, they seem determined to stick to theirs.
Lidl told us they were happy to work with the Baby Show, but didn’t want to talk about arms fairs. It’s easy to see why they’d rather be associated with the softest of soft markets, can we call it nappy washing? However they must know that, like supermarkets, other parenting shows, are available.
The tragic irony is that it’s been known for years that the negative effects of the arms trade disproportionately affect mothers and children. But then as CAAT make clear, the promoters of that trade don’t do irony.
“Clarion Events organising both the Baby Show and DSEI is totally incongruous”, they told us. “The Baby Show celebrates new life while the weapons sold at DSEI end people’s lives; children are killed by the weapons sold at DSEI.”
