In 1965, [Denis] Healey asked Sir Donald Stokes, the head of Leyland Motors, to enquire into the possibility of establishing a sales body for British weapons...

[Following Stokes’ feasibility study], Sir Henry Hardman, the top civil servant at the MoD, said: ‘Sir Donald Stokes had indicated that it was often necessary to offer bribes to make sales... The commercial technique was to gather intelligence on the right people who controlled sales and purchases. When the right person was found, effort would be concentrated on him and, in time, a sale would be effected. Sir Donald stressed that a great many arms sales were made, not because anyone wanted the arms, but because of the commissions involved en route.’

Western journalists entering the city in the wake of British forces reported thousands of looters carrying on in plain view of British troops... Mutlaq Kitab Hamud, a fifty-two-year-old cloth merchant with a shop in al-Ashar market, described the chaos of the first two days after British forces entered the city.

'I was in my shop because I was trying to protect it. The first day that the British came to central Basra, their forces stopped at the Ashar River. They were stopped on the other side of the river before noon. Their tanks were just waiting there. Then an hour or so after noon, they crossed the river and went through the streets of the center. At that time, there were two or three hundred people waiting in groups behind them. It was a big mob. Some of them had acetylene torches and welding masks, and they headed straight for the Rafidain Bank [a branch of one of Iraq's largest banking groups]. The British tanks were standing right in front, but they didn't do a thing to stop the criminals. They were even encouraging them, saying "Go in Ali Baba, go in."

President Suharto, who ruled Indonesia, had massacred over a million of his fellow citizens when he seized power in 1965. Over 30 years later, he was waging a vicious war against an independence movement in East Timor. (Foreign Secretary) Robin Cook said he supported the delivery of Hawk aircraft to Indonesia. He claimed that the Indonesian government had assured the Foreign Office that the planes were only training aircraft and would not be used against the people of East Timor. The Hawk was originally developed as a trainer but was also marketed by British Aerospace for use as a cheap ground attack plane. The Hawks were delivered to Indonesia and used to bomb villages in East Timor.

there are 4.8 million children in Iraq.
1 in 4 under the age of 5 is malnourished.
1 in 8 dies before the age of 5.
30% do not go to school.

The East India Company's 'CEO' was Robert Clive. 'Clive of India' looted, literally, Bengal's treasury of all its gold and silver and loaded it onto a fleet of more than a hundred boats. The 'profit' to the company was £2.5 million (more than £200 million today), of which Clive's cut was £234,000 (£20 million). The 'multinational' was born, conceived by a breed known as speculators, who in 1784 drove up the price of food beyond the reach of India's poor. 'Estimates vary', wrote Robins, 'but up to ten million people may have died of starvation'. In a country which, in the seventeenth century, was the 'agricultural mother of Asia and the industrial workshop of the world.', where the weavers of cotton enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts in England, life under British rule became a lesser commodity.

"The educational system in Iraq is destroyed and we are suffering all kinds of difficulties," said Hassan, a school headmaster in Baghdad who spoke on condition that his last name and the name of his school would not be used...

Teachers, like other Iraqis, have fled the country because of threats from sectarian death squads. Some were evicted from their areas and moved to others inside Iraq for sectarian reasons. According to Iraq's Ministry of Higher Education, as of February 2006, nearly 180 professors were killed and at least 3,250 have fled Iraq to the neighbouring countries. The situation has deteriorated severely since then.

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) 2005 Human Rights Annual Report identified 20 ‘major countries of concern’. In 2005, the UK approved arms export licences to 12 of these, including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Israel. Saudi Arabia has been the focus of UK arms promotion since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the UK has been Indonesia’s main weapons supplier over the past decade and Israel has received a steady flow of UK arms regardless of the situation in the occupied territories.

In 1990, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) wrote a report warning about the potential health and environmental catastrophe from the use of depleted uranium weapons. The health effects had been known for a long time. The report sent to the UK government warned "in their estimation, if 50 tonnes of residual DU dust remained ‘in the region’ there could be half a million extra cancers by the end of the century [2000]." Estimates of depleted uranium weapons used in 1991, now range from the Pentagon’s admitted 325 tons, to other scientific bodies who put the figure as high as 900 tons. That would make the number of estimated cancers as high as 9,000,000, depending on the amount used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the 2003 Gulf War, estimates of 2200 tons have been given — causing about 22,000,000 new cancer cases. Altogether the total number of cancer patients estimated using the UKAEA data would be 25,250,000. In July of 1998, the CIA estimated the population of Iraq to be approximately 24,683,313.

...over 11,000 slaving voyages left from English ports to Africa for slaves, carrying some 3.3 million enslaved Africans from their homeland to the Americas. The numbers of enslaved Africans carried by English ships represented up to a third of all the Africans forcibly carried to the Americas during the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

By the government’s own figures, 3.8 million children are living in poverty in Britain.

To halve UK child poverty by 2010 would need an investment, between now and 2010, of £3.8bn – and then the same sum again every year: a huge figure, unless one considers... that such a sum, amounts to less than two-thirds of 1 per cent of public expenditure. We shall spend £9bn on the London Olympics before 2012. Last year the nation spent £10bn on champagne and this year the City has found £14bn to spend on bonuses.