Campaigners are sending the following open letter to the management of the Kingsland Shopping Centre. The intention is to collect signatures of councillors, trades unionists and other community figures, send it to the named individuals and then, since it is an Open Letter, to the editor of the Gazette.

To add your name please email David Holland.

Dear Gavin Vidler

Open Letter to the Management of Kingsland Shopping Centre

We are writing to you, as local residents and shoppers, about the opening of the army showroom in Dalston Kingsland Shopping Mall.

It is a matter of great concern to us that, at a time of rapidly rising youth unemployment, a shopping centre in Hackney should be chosen as the site of a pioneering new army recruitment showroom, featuring virtual battlefield simulators.

We are concerned because we are strongly opposed to the army’s involvement in the bloody and counter-productive war in Afghanistan. The net results of Britain’s occupation of Helmand province in Afghanistan has been an increase in the production of opium from virtually zero to a position of supplying 95% of the heroin that reaches the streets of Hackney and the dangerously destabilisation of neighbouring nuclear armed Pakistan.

We do not want our young men and women risking death and disability in an unwinnable and pointless war, or involved in the killing and maiming of people in Afghanistan or Iraq. As the local group Mothers Against Guns has pointed out, guns need no glamourisation to the young people of Hackney.

As business people you may feel that the decisions of our political leaders are no concern of yours. We think that when war and peace and therefore life and death are involved it is the responsibility of each and every one of us to take a stand.

We would like therefore to invite you to take account of the strong feeling of many customers of Kingsland Shopping Mall and review the decision to allow the opening of this controversial showroom.

Yours sincerely

cc Asif Aziz, Chief Executive, Criterion Capital
Chris Shaw, Head of Shopping Centres