UK universities being integrated into military-security apparatus

 

UK universities being integrated into military-security apparatus

By
Thomas Scripps

28 April 2018

Rupert Murdoch’s the Times attempted a witch-hunt of UK academics who have questioned the government’s narrative on Syria. This scurrilous campaign, targeting Professor Tim Hayward (University of Edinburgh), Professor Piers Robinson (University of Sheffield) and Lecturer Tara McCormack (Leicester University) as “Apologists for Assad,” is a sharp expression of how universities have become battlegrounds in the global drive to war.

As the ruling class work to militarise society in accordance with the recently outlined Fusion Doctrine, higher education and research institutions are being transformed into appendages of British imperialism.

The process is well underway. Contrary to the Times’ ravings about universities being hotbeds of left-wing and anti-war sentiment, the institutions and their leaderships are already deeply integrated with the armed forces and private military contractors.

In 2007, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and Fellowship of Reconciliation used a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to reveal more than 1,900 military projects conducted at 26 universities between 2001 and 2006, worth a total of £725 million.

The UK Government’s military research establishment—the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Defence Evaluation and Research Agency and Atomics Weapons Establishment (AWE)—were involved in a quarter of these projects. Arms manufacturers, led by Rolls Royce, BAE Systems and QinetiQ, sponsored the remainder.

Between 2008 and 2011, according to research by the Huffington Post, the Russell Group of 24 elite British universities received £83 million from the same sources listed above….

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