 What's the worst thing that the British government is doing right now? Well believe it or not it isn't austerity and it isn't Brexit. Now putting aside the failure to deal with climate change which is so bad it belongs in a separate category altogether, the worst thing that the British government is doing today is supporting the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen's civil war. Now here Britain's given crucial material support to a bombing campaign that's indiscriminately killed thousands of civilians and has now triggered humanitarian catastrophe that threatens the lives of millions of people. It should be a national scandal but at the moment it isn't even an election issue. Now I've just completed a PhD on Britain's relationship with Saudi Arabia in the smaller Gulf states and in the next few minutes I'm going to try and explain what's happening in Yemen and how our government is directly complicit. So in March 2015 a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen's civil war to restore the former President Hadi. Now Hadi had been overfroamed by rebels known as the Houthis who were acting in alliance with forces loyal to the former President Saleh. Now the coup against Hadi was a legitimate but leading scholars on Yemen warned when the Saudis intervened that this would only escalate the conflict and have a devastating humanitarian impact. The last two years have proven them 100% right. Well over 10,000 people have been killed since the Saudis intervened and this includes a bare minimum of 4,600 civilians. 60% of those civilians have been killed in Saudi bombing and those bombs have hit schools, have hit hospitals, double tap strikes have been reported and the double tap strike is where a second bomb drops when the emergency services arrive. A panel of experts reporting to the UN Security Council accused the coalition of the quote widespread and systematic use of indiscriminate airstrikes and quote of targeting civilians and civilian objects and that reflects a consensus amongst all the humanitarian and human rights NGOs reporting from Yemen on how the Saudis are behaving. Now the humanitarian situation in Yemen was very bad even before the war began but it's now become perhaps the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world including Syria. Both sides are accused of preventing aid getting to the people who need it but given that Yemen is massively import dependent it's the Saudis aerial and naval blockade that's having really bad effects. 17 million out of 27 million Yemenis are food insecure, 14.4 million people don't have access to safe drinking water and sanitation, nearly half a million children under the age of five are severely malnourished and almost 7 million people now reportedly teetering on the brink of famine. And notwithstanding the underlying problems that Yemen has this is fundamentally, as Oxfam have said, a man-made catastrophe. Now often when authoritarian regimes in the Middle East bomb civilians indiscriminately, trigger humanitarian catastrophes and fuel the kind of chaos on which jihadi groups flourish there are calls for the West to intervene and in the way the British and the Americans have intervened by providing crucial material support to the Saudi campaign. British arms sales to the Saudis have dramatically increased since the war began with the government licensing £3.3 billion worth of arms transfers in the last 18 months compared to 147 million over the preceding period and we're talking here about the replenishment of Saudi stocks of bombs of missiles and other supplies for their air force and all this is part of two of the biggest arms deals in history signed by the Tory government in the 80s and labor in the 2000s under which Britain has not only equipped the Saudis with fleets of tornado and typhoon military jets but has also committed to provide maintenance, training, components, ammunition on an ongoing basis. As the Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond the then Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said at the start of the intervention we have a significant infrastructure supporting the Saudi air force and will support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat. Now US support for the Saudi coalition under Obama and under Trump has been highly important as well but make no mistake the British role here is not trivial. If the considerable assistance that our government is providing to the Saudis were to be removed it would seriously impede the Saudi war effort. And that's why Amnesty International Human Rights Watch Oxfam saved the children one leading NGO after another as called for the British government to stop harming the Saudis and they've been completely ignored by David Cameron's government but Theresa May's government. The Labour leadership has joined these calls for Britain to stop harming Saudi but when the Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Formbury brought a motion to the House of Commons to that effect a large number of her own back benches either abstained or stayed away. The Guardian reported at the time and I quote it is understood some Labour MPs who opposed the motion were orchestrating deliberate abstentions and discussions with some conservatives about the chances of defeating it. So what can be done about all of this? Well one thing you can do is support the many NGOs that I've said have tried to raise the alarm about this issue Amnesty, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch saved the children and the group that I'm involved with campaign against arms trade. A campaign against arms trade believes that the arms sales are not only immoral they're also illegal and that's why we brought a judicial review against the government's decision to continue harming Saudi Arabia and that court case was heard in the higher court in February and we're awaiting the verdict. According to emails that were disclosed as part of the court case even the government's senior civil servant in charge of arms export controls told ministers that these arms sales should not be going ahead while the conflict was going on in Yemen but we can't wait for the court to reach its verdict and because this isn't just a narrow legal issue it's a moral issue and it's a political issue. We're in the middle of an election campaign there's no better time to put pressure on politicians of all parties ask them what their stance is on Britain's role in the bombing of Yemen ask them what they've done about it in parliament don't take platitudes for an answer and ask newspapers and broadcast news channels why they haven't given this story the prominence that it clearly deserves given the severity of the situation in the country and given our government's role importantly. Take encouragement from this 62% of people in this country according to one recent poll think arming Saudi Arabia is unacceptable 71% think that arming a promoting arms sales to any state that's violating international humanitarian law is unacceptable. The problem is that only 49% of the British public have even heard of the conflict in Yemen as opposed to 84% of the public with regards to Syria and that number drops to 37% when we're talking about people aged 18 to 24 so the real issue is raising awareness. As I say with the exception of the failure to deal with climate change this is the worst thing that the British government is doing today measuring the cost of human life and a Yemeni life is worth no less than a British life. This should be a national scandal at the moment it's not even an election issue but we can make it one.