Hypocrisy, thy name is Uppal!

My mediocre MP managed to get his pennorth in the parliamentary debate on bombing Libya. Oddly enough for a man with a formal post in the All-Parliamentary Group on Saudia Arabia (main activity: justifying one of the most savage and ruthless regimes in the world), he's posing as a liberal interventionist when it comes to Libya.

I know that there might be charges of hypocrisy and that people are asking why we are choosing Libya and not Bahrain, why we are not addressing the situation in Yemen and why we are choosing to act in this specific situation, but we can only deal with the situation as it is presented to us.

All this shows is - of course - that politicians are devoid of principle: they can see which way the wind is blowing and adapt their rhetoric accordingly. What Uppal says (amongst the habitual reference to how heroic his family is and suspiciously apposite quotes) is utterly meaningless. The 'situation' in Bahrain is that 70% of the population is shut out from economic and civic society by a ruling class which looks only after itself. Now it's called in Paul's Saudi friends to crush the population. That does make Paul a hypocrite because he's in favour of liberation in Libya now that Gaddafi's no longer wanted, and simultaneously in favour of massive repression in Saudi Arabia and neighbouring countries because… well, as far as I can see, because he like rich, repressive regimes. The Saudis buy guns (to use on their neighbours' civilians) and sell oil. We don't want to disturb that little carousel.

Some poor sixth-formers had the misfortune to be accompanied by Uppal on a trip to Auschwitz. I wonder if he managed to refrain from plugging his self-interested views on taxation and from handing out Conservative propaganda. Uppal's feeling about the experience is heartfelt:

On reflection, there were many lessons to learn about that journey but one thing was more pertinent than anything else in my discussions with those sixth formers-they wondered how we had let that tyranny and oppression come to fruition

Yes, that's right. Tyranny and oppression are bad. Unless it's your Saudi paymasters and their friends. How have these things come about? Because unintelligent and selfish Conservative multimillionaires prefer to sell weapons to tyrants who'll do their realpolitik bidding.

Not his finest moment.

BAe v Libyan civilians: the big showdown

Now that the UN has voted to bomb Libya, let's have a look at what Gaddafi will use to fight back.

The US, UK, France, Bosnia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Colombia, South Africa and Portugal voted to take action. China, Russia, Brazil, Germany and India abstained.

Curiously enough, they're the ones that exported a lot of weapons to Libya. Then again, so did all the western countries that voted to take action. Clearly this is going to be a brilliant sales opportunity for FN rifles of Belgium, BAe, France's Mirage jets and a myriad of other suppliers: pages 160 and 161 of this EU report tells us that pretty much every EU country except for Ireland bunged the Libyans some kit in 2009-10, to the tune of billions of Euro. With all sides armed by the West, we'll really see what stuff functions well in these 'heightened circumstances' and what doesn't.

What has Britain sold them? £200m of stuff just in Jan-October 2010, according to the Guardian:

However, equipment listed as cleared for export to Libya last year include "teargas/irritant ammunition" and "training teargas/irritant ammunition", "military cameras" and components for "surveillance equipment and targeting equipment".

Other items cleared for supply to Libya were "accessories" for military small arms training, and technology for "military communications equipment", small arms ammunition, weapon sights, sniper rifles, "command and control vehicles", radio jamming equipment and what is described as "civil explosive detection/identification equipment". Also listed as cleared for export to Libya is "command communications control and intelligence equipment".

Private Eye says the UK has also flogged them £30m of military aircraft and 'bombing computers', APC's, water cannon, heavy machine guns, lots of anti-civilian weaponry and 'a spacecraft'. All this while the PM goes round calling for democracy.

In our story at the beginning of the week headed Bomber release 'will lead to contracts' we mentioned that BAE Systems could be one of the beneficiaries of the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi as contracts to upgrade Libya's defence equipment began to come into the UK.

We mentioned in the piece that MBDA Missile Systems, partly owned by BAE, was reckoned to have recently signed a contract to supply Libya with anti-tank missiles and that the former chief operating officer of MBDA Guy Griffiths went to Libya with Tony Blair in 2007.

We also mentioned in the piece that we had asked BAE to comment on our story but they had not come back to us. This wasn't to suggest that BAE was avoiding the issue, of course, and indeed it appears the reason we had no immediate response was simply down to key people being away during the summer break.

BAE has now given defencemanagement.com its response and it is as follows: 

"Regarding future business with Libya, BAE Systems, like all defence companies, would only consider business within constraints of UK and US defence export licensing policies."

My guess is that if you've been on a sales trip to Libya with the Prime Minister (this was 2009: David Cameron took a planeload with him a couple of weeks ago), then the 'constraints' are pretty relaxed. 


If you want to ask British Aerospace what they've sold Gaddafi, you can e-mail them. Rather helpfully, they've got a special address: 
libya@baesystems.com 
for quick ordering.

Outrageous spin of the day

David Cameron meekly proposed banning Libyan Air Force flights over Libya to protect civilians (despite not saying a word when the Saudis crossed into Bahrain to use British weaponry on peaceful protestors). In any case, the rest of the West jeered and told him to shut up.

Unless you're the Foreign Secretary. Apparently Cameron's thinking-aloud has miraculous powers:

Hague also says that the talk of no-fly zones has affected the way Gaddafi has used air power. It is possible that Cameron has "saved many lives", he says.

Of course it has. Well done Dave.

Parliamentary Pantomime

It's Prime Minister's Question Time again - the weekly ritual of smartarse point-scoring which unfailingly persuades citizens that their elected representatives are both dim and petty. David Cameron's by far the worst: instead of substantively discussing issues, he relies on an Eton/Oxford debating club wit which mostly consists of snide put-downs and deliberate misquotes.

One question caught my eye today.

Robert Halfon, a Conservative, asks if it was wrong for British universities to engage with Libya.

Cameron says universities should ask themselves some "searching questions" about what they did.

Now, I've slagged off the universities who've got into bed with dictatorships on this site, and I stick to that. Universities should be held to a higher standard, quite frankly, because we're more intelligent, although I'd make a distinction between the executives and academics on this point.

However, I won't be lectured on this subject by a Tory: they ruined the university sector last time they were in government and forced universities to beg borrow or steal funding from anywhere. The whole point of Thatcherite economics is that the pursuit of money is the highest venture, and that morality is a question to be discarded in favour of efficiency and free markets. The universities didn't wake up one day and give Gaddafi a call: they were forced to abandon morality amidst a greedy free-f0r-all established by the Conservatives. They created the market: they can't then preach to people forced to shop there.

Finally: it's a incredibly rich for him to claim that universities should be feeling bad while his government has consistently sold the Libyans massive amounts of weaponry. Sheer hypocrisy.

Time's swift chariot

In the old days, it took years before a new Prime Minister started invading Arabic and Islamic countries.

Although Thatcher 'let' the Americans use their UK airbases to bomb Libya (a mere three years after the Yanks had invaded the British dependency of Grenada without even mentioning it to her) in 1986, she didn't actually invade anywhere. She planned the Kuwait operation, but was booted out (after 11 years) before UK forces replaced the Iraqi dictatorship with the previous dictators. So although John Major technically did invade within a few weeks of taking control, it was already a done deal.

Blair of course invaded as many countries as he could find, but I guess Kosovo was the first part-Muslim one he dropped in on - 1999, two years after he was elected, and he left it until 2001 and 2003 to invade Afghanistan and Iraq respectively. He took a very different approach to Libya, as we all know.

So Cameron's record of getting the SAS into Libya within a year of reaching power is pretty impressive. The only way Ed Miliband can top that is to invade Oman now, before he even wins an election. Seriously: it's a small and undemocratic regime which has alienated its people ripe for liberation.

Just like New Labour.

Boom Boom.

It's an ill wind…

Certainly Britain's doing very well out of the Middle East's revolutions.

The most unequivocal message since the election was made by Peter Luff, the defence equipment minister, who told a defence show in June: "There will be a very, very, very heavy ministerial commitment to arms sales. There is a sense that in the past we were rather embarrassed about exporting defence products. There is no such embarrassment in this government."

It's not embarrassing selling crowd control missiles to Bahrain and Libya at all.

As the Campaign Against the Arms Trade notes on Bahrain: in 2010, equipment approved for export included teargas and crowd control ammunition, equipment for the use of aircraft cannons, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and submachine guns. No requests for licences were refused.

In the third quarter of 2010, equipment approved for export to Libya included wall-and-door breaching projectile launchers, crowd control ammunition, small arms ammunition and teargas/irritant ammunition. No requests for licences were refused.

On the other hand, if the Arabian oiks win, they might start looking at the receipts and lose their warm fuzzy feelings towards Britain. But for now, I suspect Britain's arms factories can't churn out the anti-civilian ammunition fast enough for their favourite clients. No wonder the recovery is export-led.