The tide is turning against Saudi arms sales
January 23, 2017
For decades, there has been a high-level, two-party consensus that arming Saudi Arabia is right for Britain’s security. From the late nineties onwards, when the left-wing Labour Party was hijacked by centrist liberal Tony Blair, the future business associate of both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi contorted himself to accommodate the British arms industry. Infamously, Blair called off a Serious Fraud Office investigation into Gulf arms sales in 2006, which would have quite probably implicated powerful members of the Saudi royal family. The cringeworthy David Cameron bent himself further, to the extent of commissioning a politicised investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to keep the arms flowing during his term of office. Both men were, as is so often the case in British politics, copying Margaret Thatcher, the grand old lady of Saudi arms sales, who was described by her own officials as “very oily to kings” because of her ever-so-slightly slimy appreciation of the House of Saud.
As the war in Yemen rages on, however, from next month the status quo may become substantially different. For the first time, a true progressive alliance is building against this establishment position.
MEMO has revealed previously that the army officer assigned to investigate alleged Saudi war crimes in Yemen played a key role in the 2011 crackdown on Arab Spring protesters in Bahrain. This was subsequently picked up by the Independent newspaper, then by the human rights charity BIRD, and was finally raised by the shadow defence secretary Emily Thornberry on the floor of the House of Commons earlier this month. She accused the government of being “naive or extremely negligent” in allowing Colonel Mansour Al-Mansour, whose primary legal experience has been in convicting hundreds of peaceful protesters, to be the sole source of moral authority upon which the British government assures itself that no war crimes in Yemen are being committed.
MEMO’s contribution to all of this has been exceptionally modest, however, compared to the extraordinary (and very brave) research conducted by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have entered Yemen to document human rights incidents on the ground; the UN has also sent teams in. All have reached the same conclusion; that there is enough evidence of war crimes to warrant at least an arms suspension and proper independent investigation, not run by a compromised Bahraini military lawyer but by an international body such as the United Nations. Most important of all is that, early next month, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, along with Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, will be using all of this evidence to convince a judge rather than MPs. They are taking on a landmark judicial review case aimed at suspending arms sales until a truly independent investigation has ascertained whether arms sales will be permitted, on the grounds that to continue to do so would be illegal. If the judge rules in their favour — which is more than likely — the case against the government will be watertight.
