A variety of high-powered machine guns were in sale

CNJ reporter IZZY ROWLEY takes a peep inside the controversial Defence and Security Equipment International arms fair to see what’s really going on

THE first thing you hear is a brass band rattling out a rendition of Elton John’s I’m Still Standing.

There’s not a whiff of irony among the true survivors as they march on in to the biennial Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) arms fair. The musicians play in front of a gigantic rocket launcher marvelled at by hundreds of (mostly) men in business suits and soldiers in uniform. They move from stall to stall hearing about the latest missiles, guns, cyber warfare, and not to forget the untrackable submarines.

The fair, in the ExCel Centre in Royal Victoria Dock, is where “national governments are meeting with equipment suppliers every day this week,” said Major General Roddy Porter, the spokesman for DSEI.

Everything in the hall is about selling the most dynamic, exciting weaponry experience, so each killing machine in turn is shown off like a shiny new toy. Thing is, they are all real.

On Friday, there was an IT company which helps defence companies with “secret level data” but found here running a competition which gave visitors the chance to win a Lego Ferrari if they could guess the correct number of jelly beans in a jar – like the summer fete at your kid’s school.

Some stands have glamorous staff who look like they’re at a cocktail party, not selling weapons, while nearby a new kind of machine gun can be tried out in a makeshift range.

Ryan Boyce shows off an untraceable submarine and, below, a band welcomes guests to the weapons marketplace

Then over casual conversation, a tin of cider and maybe a glass of wine, salespeople explain just how many rockets their kit can fire in a minute.

The good news, the most enthusiastic explain, is that it only takes 40 seconds to crank up one launcher and 40 seconds to put it away allowing it – as the sales pitch says – to “leave quickly and avoid the counteroffensive”. Another reminder then that this is not a chat group for teenage Call of Duty fans preparing for a big night in front of a games console.  These vehicles will be used one day in real life warfare.

Mr Porter described the fair as being concerned with the “tensions in the South China Sea, the concern over the security of Taiwan for example, and the malign hand of Iran in the Middle East and the destabilisation of that region.”

It was reported elsewhere that Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Investment was spotted paying a visit, despite the country being accused by the United Nations’ human rights council of committing war crimes in Yemen.

When asked about protests around arms fairs, Mr Porter said: “This is an exhibition of national and international significance, dealing with some of the most complex, and the most potentially dangerous situations around the globe and trying to seek security solutions to them so that actually the majority of our planet can live in peace… I think that’s fundamentally important and fundamentally overrides more peripheral issues or smaller issues about what people might think about warfare.”

This truck can fire 72 rockets in 40 seconds

He added: “Protest is fine, and we accept it as part of the democratic process. But, we are onto a different level of capability, development, and understanding here.”

The DSEI fair leads to millions of pounds worth of deals but it’s relatively little-known beyond groups of activists who try to convince anybody who will listen that a meeting place to buy and sell weapons shouldn’t go ahead in our city. Not many newspaper inches were dedicated to a protest in Trafalgar Square last week, but it did happen.

In any case, the UK would struggle to say no to such an event, as its own military are there with some of their own kit to flog. Lance Corporal Wilkinson, for example, was at the fair to “promote” a tank called The Boxer.

To get the spec right, it has “a heavy mechanised gun, a general purpose machine gun, and an anti-tank javelin” which is essentially a spear which fires out at another tank.

Like the consumers who wait all year for a release date for the latest iPhone, Corporal Wilkinson explained it will not “come into play” until December.

But at this fair, if you want to, you can climb into the tank and “get hands on with it”.