100 signatures reached
To: Microsoft UK
Minecraft say no to National Highways indoctrination
Minecraft, owned by Microsoft, can be an inspiration for children, letting them build worlds from their imagination. They should not be teaming up with UK National Highways (NH) to encourage children to value destroying things rather than creating them. Minecraft should dissociate itself from NH.
Why is this important?
Minecraft have combined with National Highways to launch a game to indoctrinate children into believing that it is acceptable to build hugely damaging road schemes. It specifically works to “gamify” the building of the Lower Thames Crossing, the biggest carbon-emitting project in the UK and major contributor to the air pollution that kills 40,000 people per year. And it makes a game of the destruction of large parts of the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge. UNESCO now threatens to put Europe’s premier prehistoric site on to the endangered list if National Highways goes ahead with this scheme.
Minecraft thus allies itself with one of the worst generators of carbon emissions in Europe and associates itself with the kind of Philistinism that western democracies criticise in other parts of the world, for example in the destruction of the ancient city of Palmyra.
Our children and grandchildren will be the ones that will suffer most from the future that National Highways is building for them. Minecraft should not mock that future by making games of it.
How it will be delivered
By email to CEO Microsoft UK (Clare Barclay)
