How can Britain be so stupid, sell arms to despots then bleat about democracy

The most shaming picture to have been published in a newspaper for some time appeared in yesterday's Mail. It showed a British-made armoured personnel carrier speeding past Libyan demonstrators.

Perhaps you will think that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the genocidal maniac still clinging on to power in Libya as I write, acquired this vehicle from a third party, and that its ominous presence in a Libyan street has nothing to do with Britain. I'm afraid you would be wrong.

In 2007, the British Government agreed a £5 million package with Libya which included armoured personnel carriers and water cannon. Since then we have sold arms worth tens of millions of pounds to Gaddafi's regime.



Arms trade: The British Government agreed a £5m package with Libya in 2007. That deal included armoured personnel carriers and water cannon. Tens of millions of pounds has been sold to Gaddafi's regime since then

It is certain that some of these weapons have been used against demonstrators over recent days. They may have served to keep Gaddafi in office so far.

As recently as last summer, the Coalition Government approved licences to sell products to Libya including 'crowd control ammunition' and 'tear gas/irritant ammunition'. Only a few months ago we shipped sniper rifles to Libya.

Like the water cannon and armoured personnel carriers, these could obviously be used against the Libyan people, and the Foreign Office should have known it.

My argument is not that we should never sell arms to autocratic regimes. If we followed that prescription, all of our arms sales to Middle Eastern countries ' which account for around half of total arms exports worth an estimated £7.2 billion a year ' would collapse, and many thousands of British jobs would be lost.

There are relatively benign autocratic countries, such as Jordan, and there are one or two malevolent, crazy regimes. Libya is the prime example in the Arab world. In sub-Saharan Africa, Zimbabwe is another.

Evil: Tony Blair's government sold arms to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe -->

And do you know what? Tony Blair's government also sold weapons to its deranged despot, Robert Mugabe. It agreed to sell arms to Gaddafi in return for his opening up his country to British businesses. But it cannot have sensibly believed that this mad, bad man had changed his spots.

He was the same tyrant who had committed atrocities against his own people, the same lunatic who had supplied the IRA with weapons in the Seventies and authorised the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988, which resulted in the deaths of 270 innocent people.

Of course I do not think that even Mr Blair, who had brokered the rapprochement with Libya in 2004, suspected Gaddafi would use British-made weapons against his own people with such ferocity.

But if he and our supposedly brilliant diplomats had thought about it for a moment, they should have concluded that it was at least possible that he would do so.

Zimbabwe is a depressingly similar case. In 1984, the Thatcher government sold Zimbabwe a large number of Hawk fighter airplanes.

If there was a justification, it was that Mugabe had not then been revealed as the monster he turned out to be, though there had been disquieting reports of the 'ethnic cleansing' of his enemies in Matabeleland.

By the year 2000, Mugabe had already embarked on the illegal seizure of productive white-owned farms, which led quickly to widespread malnutrition and starvation.

And yet in that same year, Mr Blair approved the supply of spare parts for the now ageing Hawk aircraft.

Labour had also carried on the sale of hundreds of armoured Land Rover Defenders at a cut price to the Zimbabwean government which had begun under John Major's Tory administration.

These vehicles were used by Mugabe's police as an instrument of oppression, just as British-made armoured personnel carriers are being deployed by Gaddafi.

In both cases, successive British governments have continued to succour very bad men. What makes this story more shaming still is that our statesmen have gone around the world celebrating the virtues of democracy.

They have no more dignity or plausibility than a philandering whisky priest who urges the merits of sobriety and chastity.

Mr Blair, of course, was a past master at preaching freedom and openness while ' figuratively speaking, of course ' concealing a couple of hand grenades on his person which he was happy to pass on to the most undemocratic of leaders.

I am sorry to say that David Cameron appears to be exhibiting some of the same traits.

 

Mr Blair, with Gaddafi, left, was a master at preaching freedom and selling weapons at the same time. Cameron, left, appears to be doing the same.

He began a Middle Eastern visit this week surrounded by a posse of arms dealers intent on selling their wares to various Arab potentates.

In fact, the main purpose of the tour seems to be to promote British weaponry. A separate delegation led by Defence Minister Gerald Howarth has made its way to an arms bonanza in Abu Dhabi.

Given what is happening in Libya, the timing was hardly brilliant. Nor does the attempt to sell expensive weapons to a collection of autocrats sit very happily with the Prime Minister's passionate endorsement of democratic values which he made in both Egypt and Kuwait.

Selling these people weapons is not going to make them any more democratic it is more likely to have the opposite effect and it is self-deluding to pretend otherwise.

As I say, it would be unrealistic to ban all arms sales to undemocratic countries in the Middle East because we would then have no arms sales in the region at all.

But a man who is flogging guns to such types is not the most impressive advocate of democratic values.



Mr Cameron was the first foreign leader to go to Egypt after its revolution. He was accompanied by representatives from eight arms manufacturers

So far as Libya is concerned, we should have never sold them weapons at all in view of Gaddafi's appalling record. Revoking arms licences to Libya, as the Coalition has just done, was obviously the right thing to do, but it won't prevent the monster using the many British weapons on his own people that he already has.

The indulgence of this horrible man which took root under New Labour is a depressing tale. Lord Mandelson socialised with his son and intended heir apparent, Saif.

Prince Andrew, who has visited Libya several times in his role as a trade ambassador and met Gaddafi, is a friend of Saif. Lord Powell, the former Downing Street adviser to Margaret Thatcher, is chairman of a company that has agreed a series of deals to build hotels and offices in Libya.

In the past few years, too many people have got far too close to Gaddafi and his regime. Selling him arms was obviously the worse aspect.

To those who say that if we had not done so, Russia and France would have stepped in, the answer is that it would not have mattered if they had. At least we would not have Libyan blood on our hands.

The former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen said yesterday that 'it was to our everlasting shame' if we had supplied weapons to Libya, though he seemed to be not absolutely certain that we had. I'm afraid there isn't any room for doubt.

We have sold all sorts of arms to Gaddafi over a period of four years, and he is using them, as that picture of the armoured personnel carrier attests. Even after the experience of Zimbabwe, I remain mystified as to how our rulers could have been so blind and stupid.