FFS the muppet is on another one. Please don’t listen to it.

Blocked it but it has come back.

Lodo, please don't get involved. Stick to what you're good at.

Half year report.

https://www.londonstocke...alf-year-report/15223344

Grouping tobacco and defence systems in the same decision making process is naive at one level, and downright dangerous at another.

BAe Systems for example do a great deal in terms of cyber defence, keeping us all safe from the industrial-scale state-backed hackers in North Korea and elsewhere, and without these companies we would be extremely vulnerable to denial of service attacks in our key national infrastructure.

Denying them access to capital for future development is very fashionable, but short-sighted and foolhardy in the extreme.

The whole ESG bandwagon is a mess, and I say that as someone who has direct professional experience of it.

Recently we had Serco pulling out of a tendering exercise to provide managed services to the Atomic Weapons Authority because if it won the deal, the shareholders would have been worse off than if they'd withdrawn (due to being blacklisted by major fund managers for fear of upsetting ESG investors).

To quote a recent article:

Of course, we all understand the drive towards ESG investing. People don’t want to put their pension fund or savings into companies that are wilfully destroying the environment, or which rely on virtual slave labour to keep their supply chains intact, or discriminate against women or minority groups when promoting people.

Nor does anyone think that selling arms or policing gear to dictatorships is a great idea. That is perfectly reasonable. Everyone is entitled to decide where they want their money to go, and if companies work to make the world a more diverse, inclusive and greener place then so much the better.

Here’s the problem, however. There isn’t anything unethical about defending yourself.

In fact, without robust defence, the environment would be in far worse shape, minorities would have far fewer opportunities, and slave labour would be commonplace.
The Soviet Union had the worst record on the environment of any major nation in history - just ask anyone in the Chernobyl area - but the ESG crowd would have frowned on the nuclear build-up that protected the world from its empire-building.

Likewise, presumably they wouldn’t approve of manufacturing the weapons needed to combat the Taliban, despite its despicable views on women’s rights, or indeed anything else.

New threats to Western values of tolerance will inevitably keep on emerging. They will only be kept at bay by robust armed forces capable of protecting and defending the West’s values and interests. And yet self-appointed ESG police will do their best to make it is as hard as possible for that to happen.

That matters. Private companies have always been crucial to the defence capabilities of the UK, and of all our major allies.

The kit is developed, and manufactured, by outside contractors, and always has been.

It is serviced, maintained and improved by those same companies. If they decide it is no longer worth the hassle then two things will happen.

The resources and skills available to our armed forces will steadily start to decline. And with less and less competition for contracts, everything will become a lot more expensive - and defence equipment is rarely cheap to start with - reducing the resources available to the armed forces. Either way, our defence capabilities will be significantly weakened.

In truth, the ESG movement has become far too powerful. It may have started with the best of intentions. But much of it has turned into the kind of platitudinous virtue signalling that even a student union might be embarrassed by.

Right now, it is forcing companies to pull out of anything that might incur its wrath without any form of reflection or debate.

Without strong private sector involvement, the West’s defences will crumble. And it is hard to see anything ‘ethical’ about that.