Eco-activists and peace campaigners, dressed in funereal clothes and slowly pushing empty white prams to the sound of mournful music, staged a protest outside the Farnborough Airshow last Monday (July 18).

The campaigners said they sought to highlight “the threat that conflict and climate breakdown pose to the world’s children and to mark the suffering and death of children in the countries most affected by wars and the climate and ecological emergency”.

The protest coincided with the opening of the Farnborough Airshow and a visit by the prime minister Boris Johnson, and came in a week when the UK experienced its first ever 40C-plus temperatures.

Farnborough Airshow is one of the world’s largest aerospace and defence exhibitions, attracting thousands of exhibitors and visitors from all around the world.

One protester, Hannah Shelley, 32, an actuarial consultant from Farnborough, said: “Arms manufacturers are meeting in air-conditioned halls to sell their destructive technologies, as ordinary people here in the UK are sweltering in a heatwave which experts tell us is a wake-up call on climate change.

“We must invest in life, not the machinery of death.”