Brighton Councillor Janio's Bid to Thwart Smash EDO Protest Backfires

Unusually amusing events originated from the stuffy Brighton and Hove City Council chamber last Friday in the latest attempt by the local military-industrial-Tory-councillor-complex to attack Brighton's own anti-arms trade protest group Smash EDO.

The first salvo of imprecise and misguided allegations came in a no-prize winning article from local rag the Argus, who last week published a sensational claim that Smash EDO planned to disrupt the Queen’s jubilee in Brighton. Never mind the Queen has no plans to come to Brighton during the jubilee, or that anyone else in Brighton is particularly interested in celebrating her hereditary supremacist being and nothingness, or protesting against it (least of all Smash EDO) - nonetheless this fictional tale of enraged anarchists with regicidal intent set on invading the entire city and upsetting children’s parties, was used as the pretext for Tory councillors Tony Janio and Graham Cox to propose a 'motion of condemnation' against Smash EDO's evil plans at the Friday council meeting.

Thanks to the Labour Party, who dropped all their principles (or at least forgot all the ones they dropped a long long time ago) and supported the Tory motion against the Green Party, the motion got passed.

In response Smash EDO issued a press release gently pointing out that proposer Cllr Tony Janio (previously well known for his racist outbursts in council meetings on the subject of travellers) had declared quietly in his register of interests last June that he was in fact an employee of massive international arms company Thales, a company EDO MBM - who Smash EDO have campaigned against for all these years - had direct business connections with through the Paveway 4 guided bomb programme.  Janio had somehow failed to mention this as he spoke in favour of the motion against Smash EDO.  Janio’s job, it appears, is in the maintenance of flight simulators for military aircrew training programmes for such fluffy civilian outfits as the Bahraini, Saudi Arabian, and Indonesian Airforces as well as US and other NATO forces.  In his defence Cllr Janio declared somewhat insensitively that he wouldn’t know a Paveway 4 bomb if someone dropped in on his head. Of course this is usually the case when bombs are dropped on peoples heads, as they rarely live to tell the tale and even when they do are unlikely to have been able to identify the exact marque of the particular munition used against them. Continuing this inappropriate theme, Janio defended military aircraft simulators as causing no harm to people whatsoever, unless they are somehow dropped on peoples heads as well. Dropping objects on people is something that like EDO MBM, Janio clearly has a particular interest in.

This revelation by Smash EDO caused an excitable Green party Councillor Ben Duncan to use the word ‘corruption’ in reference to the expose in his blog. He later pulled back implausibly from the word, like a true politician, denying that his use of the word implied he was alleging anything.

However Schnews is not so bashful and CORRUPTION is certainly ALLEGED, not least because, looking deeper into the story, we found out that the seconder of the Janio council motion to condemn Smash EDOs heretical anti-royalist antics is none other than Cllr Graham Cox, a recently elected Tory whose job till last year was as a Chief of Sussex Police and Head of Sussex CID.

Graham Cox sat on the Force Executive Board, agreeing to policy as Sussex Police supported  EDO MBM against the Smash EDO group, and even suggesting they take out a controversial injunction in 2005 that would have outlawed protests outside the factory gates with a five-year prison sentence for disobedience (see SchNEWS 492).

That CORRUPT attempt failed (see SchNEWS 531) costing EDO MBM a lot of money, and Sussex Police had to hide away all their documents showing collusion in unlawful arrests of activists in their CORRUPT attempt to build the case for it - but not before CORRUPT Graham Cox introduced the idea of a database collecting the movements of everyone who ever expressed an anti-military view in public and then selling the data to ACPO, experts of police CORRUPTION.

With their sordid backgrounds, Janio & Cox (it only sounds like a dreadful 80's buddy movie) have pulled a stunt that is just too BLATENT. CORRUPTION is of course quite a damaging missile to hurl towards supposedly democratically-accountable institutions, but nothing like as damaging as a Paveway.