Stop the Shipment

I've just signed an on-line petition regarding the shipment of arms currently trying to get to Zimbabwe.

This ship carrying arms, including 3 million rounds of ammunition, bound for Zimbabwe is currently trying to find a way of delivering its deadly cargo. It is highly likely that these weapons will be used to fuel violence, killings and intimidation in Zimbabwe’s growing political crisis.

The Chinese ship, carrying 77 tonnes of arms and ammunition has been forced to leave the South African port of Durban after dockers refused to unload the shipment and a judge ruled that the weapons could not be transported across South Africa.

The ship is now trying to find another dock in order to unload its weapons and transport them to landlocked Zimbabwe. These 6 containers of arms must be offloaded from this ship and immediately impounded to stop them being sent to Zimbabwe. There is only a matter of days to stop this arms shipment. Please help stop this shipment.

Click here to sign the online petition to help stop the Zimbabwe arms shipment. The International Action Network on Small Arms will deliver the petition to the chairperson of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the governments of countries in the region with a port, including Angola, DR Congo, Mozambique, Namibia and Tanzania.

This shipment should never have been authorised in the first place. All governments must take action to strengthen controls on the international arms trade to prevent irresponsible arms deals such as this one fuelling conflicts, poverty and human rights abuses around the world.

Furry and other letterboxes

Way back in the day when I still cared about being a political activist my biggest bug-bear was letterboxes. Little letterboxes, low letterboxes, sideways letterboxes and most frustratingly of all - furry letterboxes that trapped your hand or made you smoosh your leaflets just to get the damn thing through. I am delighted that Tim Roll-Pickering has started a petition to encourage the PM to do something about this scourge on democracy.

The wording is:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to improve letter boxes.

Delivering to the public is an important part of political engagement. We call for legislation to make it easier for voters to be engaged by requiring all letter boxes to be:

*Located at a clear height
*Easy to post through
*Designed to allow leaflets to be posted without destroying them
*Designed to protect people's hands when posting
*Dog proof

In addition we call for doors to have the number clearly displayed and doorbells to be easy to find (with defunct doorbell buttons removed).

I have happily signed this and encourage everyone to join in.