This site uses cookies to store information on your computer.
Some cookies on this site are essential, and the site won't work as expected without them. These cookies are set when you submit a form, login or interact with the site by doing something that goes beyond clicking on simple links.
We also use some non-essential cookies to anonymously track visitors or enhance your experience of the site. If you're not happy with this, we won't set these cookies but some nice features of the site may be unavailable.
By using our site you accept the terms of our Privacy Policy.
Anyone who has ever been on a SPEAK day of action will be familiar with the excitement of it all – The crowd raising their voices against injustice, an imaginative and colourful demonstration, and a procession to that most prominent site of UK politics, the Houses of Parliament, where a group of young and conscientious activists will lobby their MPs on issues of global poverty.
After decades of indifference, it seems strange that the West should now so suddenly develop a conscience concerning the welfare of Libyan civilians. Libyans have long suffered the tyranny of Gadaffi’s dictatorship, well-armed as it is by companies based in the ‘developed’ world. So why is it only now that those arms sales licenses have been cancelled?
Gertruida Baartman is a single mother of three from StellenBosch, South Africa. She works for a farm that supplies Tesco supermarkets in the UK, picking pesticide-treated pears, apples and apricots with her bare hands for 38 pence an hour, ten hours a day.
