BETWEEN July and September last year the UK sold missiles, rockets and bombs amounting to £1,066,216,510 to Saudi Arabia.
In the three months before that period, it was just £9 million.
We’ve sold them fighter jets, military vehicles and targeting equipment.
Just days ago we learned that British military advisers are in control rooms assisting the Saudi-led coalition staging bombing raids across Yemen.
They aren’t directly choosing the targets or typing in the codes for the bombs, the MoD says; they are just training their counterparts in doing so.
You may remember back just 12 days into the Blair Labour government there was talk of an “ethical foreign policy”.
“Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves,” said then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.
It was a remarkable speech.
One that told the mandarins in the Foreign Office that the old way of doing things was about to change.
And change it did for almost two months.
Right up until Cook had to decide if the UK should honour a contract to the Indonesian government to sell it £300m worth of Hawk jets.
Despite protests that the jets would be used to bomb East Timorese fighting for their independence, Cook signed off the sale, saying Suharto’s government had insisted the jets would not be used against civilians.
Now, some years following the fall of Suharto, the violence of 1999 and East Timor’s independence, we know that those jets were used – some say – on bombing runs.
Perhaps that whole episode showed the folly of an ethical foreign policy; maybe such a thing is not possible. To have a truly ethical foreign policy would mean ending the British arms trade and facing the job losses and the hit to the economy from losing billions of pounds worth of exports.
It’s worth noting that the the arms trade has a significant presence in Scotland. Many of those organisations have close working relationships with the Scottish Government.
But if we are to accept that a truly ethical foreign policy is impossible then at least let us aim for a truthful and open foreign policy.
Let us openly admit that we are selling arms to a Saudi regime where being gay can result in punishment, where women cannot drive and where horrific acts of violence are meted out by officials every day.
Let us be honest and admit that weapons supplied to the Saudi regime have played a pivotal role in the bombardment of Yemen.
And let us finally admit that we will take the money and not ever once criticise the Saudi government.
We will not criticise them for the indiscriminate targeting that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of civilians and, according to Amnesty, destroyed Yemeni homes, schools and hospitals.
We must accept that we are complicit. Despite what David Cameron says, we have provided the Saudi Arabian government with the weapons and the means to kill.
We are part of the coalition.
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