 Well, thank you all for coming. Nice full lecture theatre. When you throw a party and you think, I hope people actually turn up. It really means a lot. Firstly, for Gilbert to be chairing, Gilbert was a superb supervisor. Not everyone gets a good supervisor and when you do, it makes such a big difference. He's a formative intellectual influence and I couldn't have done it without him, so thank you very much. Gilbert is chairing, it means a lot to be doing this here. It means a lot to be doing this here as well at Starrhouse, where I did my PhD, which is just transformative for me intellectually to study here and to teach here as well. I'm glad to see one of two of my old students are here as well. So it's good to see you all, it's good to see some familiar faces, particularly happy my mum's here as well. Obviously it's a big topic, it's in the news and since the Khashoggi thing kicked off about ten days ago, the whole relationship between the UK, Saudi and the Gulf States in general has been brought into question or come under scrutiny. If you look at the media coverage, a lot more searching questions and deeper questions are being asked than we're used to. So it really is a useful time to be talking about it as Gilbert alluded to. It's a shame that we weren't asking these questions in August when the Saudis dropped a £500 bomb on a school bus killing 14 primary school waste children. It's a shame that we didn't have this scandal right from the beginning of the war in Yemen when Amnesty International and Human Rights, what we're saying, from day one that the Saudis and the Saudi League coalition are hitting civilian targets, violating international law. We've heard news today which is particularly dramatic about the situation in Yemen. According to the UN, the country is facing the worst family in 100 years. It's not the worst family in Yemen in 100 years, it's the worst family in the world in 100 years. The UN official being interviewed by the BBC today talked about precedents like Ethiopia, Bangladesh, the USSR, the big famines of the 20th century and saying this is what's in prospect if the war carries on as it's going at the moment. And that humanitarian catastrophe, the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world is manmade as the aid agencies have been very clear about for the last three and a half years. Manmade humanitarian catastrophe largely caused by the blockade that's been imposed on the poorest country in the region by the richest countries in the region, principally the Saudis and the UAE. Most of the civilian deaths in Yemen are caused by coalition bombing, which bombing has been described by numerous UN studies, by the world's leading human rights groups, by major aid agencies. As indiscriminately indiscriminate up to and including possible war crimes. And the thing that I think is not sufficiently understood by British audiences is that this is going on with our assistance, not just with weapons we've sold. So we don't just sell jets and say here are some jets enjoy those jets see later. We enter into a relationship with the jets but also we provide on an ongoing basis the spare parts, the components, ongoing maintenance, training for the pilots, ongoing supply of bombs and missiles, logistical and technical support. Philip Hammond, who was a foreign secretary when this war started said we'll do everything short of engaging in combat to help the Saudis. The Americans provide intelligence, they provide refuelling for the jets as well. This war could not be fought without British and American assistance in terms of that bombing campaign that the Saudis are carrying out. I think that's really important to stress. The depth of culpability as I say is not fully understood so now really is a good time to be talking about this. As Gilbert has said by the books based on the doctoral thesis that I did here, looking at UK relations with the Gulf Arab Monarchy, it's all six. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE and Amart. I started this 2012 I think it was, just after the Arab uprisings happened. And what I was interested in at the time was why sort of ostensibly liberal, democratic Britain is supporting these some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. And I wasn't curious, as in I can't believe the West is doing such a terrible thing. You know, it wasn't that kind of naive shot but I wanted to get into precisely what was happening. You know, beyond the kind of platitudes and the things that we think we know, we think it's, we know it's about oil, we think we know it's about arms sales. I wanted to get into the concrete detail specifics of why that relationship exists. And what I was surprised to find is there was no comprehensive scholarly study of Britain's relationship with these states. You know, despite the fact that Britain had been their protector from the early 1800s up until 1971, at least in the case of not Saudi but the other five. Despite the fact that the big arms deals were the world's biggest at the time, the Al-Yamama deal in the 80s was the world's biggest arms deal. Despite this long relationship, there was no comprehensive academic study of the whole relationship. I couldn't really understand why that was. So that's the thing I've tried to provide, a systematic study and address that big gap in the literature. I completely forgot that I had slides if you're going to spend all morning working on slides. Might as well use them. So I structured the analysis and you'll see this in the layout of the chapters when you buy the book in terms of beginning with the military, with the imperial empire history, how these relationships developed through the imperial era from the early 1800s up until the present day. And then the analysis of the book itself focuses on the post-Cold War era, which I think is a recognisable epoch, distinct epoch in the history of international relations and international political economy. So the book's analysis begins in 1991 and comes up to as close to the present day as possible. And it looks at three main areas, oil and gas, trade and investment, arms sales and military corporation, oil arms capital or oil capital arms. Some surprises when I was researching it as I found out more about it, oil matters or rather the supply of oil matters a lot less than I thought it would. Arms sales are far less important economically than I thought they were. And investment is more important. I thought the trade and investment chapter would not be particularly important. It turns out it was massive and it's the thing that helped me crystallise in my mind what my analysis was going to be. Fundamental finding of the book is that Gulf wealth matters not just to Britain but to a particular kind of Britain. A second tier global military power which is trying to hang on to that status in the post-empire era. And a Britain, whose economy is one of the neoliberal model, is that specific kind of Britain that Gulf wealth matters to. What we're going to try and do now is just pick out some key points and address some popular misconceptions as well. So while we're having this conversation in light of the Khashoggi disappearance about the relationship, let's just pick out a few things, address a few misconceptions and myths and then you can write a book and see the rest for yourself. So the first myth says UK Gulf relations, there's a difference of values, there's a difference of culture here. We're like this with our western values, with our liberal democracy and all that, and they're authoritarian because we have our values and they have their values. I read a lot of my two select committees when I was researching this and these clichés kept coming up again and again and again. And the argument I want to make is that the Arabian Peninsula has its own characteristics just like every geographical region. But fundamentally, and also like every other geographical region in every country including like ours, it's contested socio-political space. There are different forces struggling for the trajectory of the country and the character of the country. And what's been happening over the past 150 or so years in the Gulf and since the formation of Saudi Arabia is that sustained British and an American support has been weighing heavily in favour of a particular kind of authoritarian rule within that socio-political contestation at the expense of other forces like the likes of Waith Badawi, like Jamal Khashoggi, like Arab nationalists in years gone by and so on and so forth. This is not the only factor that explains the persistence of authoritarian rule in the Middle East, but it's a significant one. And it's a bit much, I think, for British politicians to come along now after 200 years of this stuff and say, what can you do at their culture? It's a bit rich, I think. And this support has come through diplomatic support, arms sales, training of security forces through the crucial years of state formation. When the oil money was coming in and these states were being created, the British were right there building up the forces of coercion. This guy is Ian Henderson. Some of you will know who he is. This is the guy, I think he was from a special branch. He spent, I think, the 50s it was in Kenya helping with the British counterinsurgency there. If you've read Caroline Alkin's book then, you know, I agree with him, that was. He was then seconded or recommended by the British government to the Baroni regime. And in the 70s he helped set up the whole system of repressions, of violence, torture and what have you, which still weighs heavily against Baroni, Democrats and so on, even today. So we can't externalize this repression and divorce ourselves from it and say, oh, our values are different. If values are a product of our behavior then the history is much more to say about the history, and that's just the main point I wanted to make about it. And then oil and gas, obviously, oil and gas is a big, big, big deal with regard to the relationship. Again, I don't want to say too much, but I do want to say it's a myth that it's all about oil. I had the misfortune of having to go back on Twitter so I can publicize this book. I despise Twitter. And some people when I tweet something saying, or someone tweets something saying this academic is written a book explaining Britain's relationship with Saudi Arabia. There's always some smart ass who says, oh, we don't need an academic for that. It's all about oil. It's galling when you've worked so hard. But it's not all about oil, although oil is at the root of it. So it's not all about oil in the way you think, right? So you think oil imports will actually, only 3% of Britain's oil imports come from Saudi Arabia. And it's even smaller percentage from the rest of the countries. And Britain is only marginally an oil importer anyway. For a long time it was an oil, a net oil exporter, because we'll see oil. So it's not really about direct supply. There's a strategic sense in which Gulf oil and gas is important. I won't get into that now, but you'll see in the book. Gulf oil and gas is very important to two of the UK's leading firms, BP and Shell. So in Pricewaterhouse, Coopers do their top 100 firms in the world by market capitalisation. BP and Shell are two of the five British firms that get into that top 100. The picture is, what's the picture? The picture is the Pearl facility in Qatar, a gas to liquids facility. It's Shell's biggest asset in the world. They used enough concrete in the Pearl facility to build eight Wembley stadiums. They used enough steel to build 40 Eiffel towers. The Gulf States need this investment. They nationalise it with all industries sure in the 1970s, but they still need the investment in terms of the technical expertise, managerial expertise from the big international oil companies. So that's part of the relationship. Ultimately it's less about oil supply. It's more about the wealth that oil generates, that Gulf wealth that matters to Britain, as I say in the book title. Let's talk through some of that. I've got a few graphs because we all like a graph. I like a graph anyway. I like a graph. It comes from not being a person who did much quantitative research, and then got really excited when he started doing things with numbers. I feel like a proper person now. So here's the first graph. Oil prices in that period I've been talking about since 1991. I'll just pull this off the FT website this morning. You can see how this oil boom starts in early mid 2000s. I should have given you the zoom out because it's not dissimilar to the spike, the famous oil spikes that we saw in the 70s. It's like a slow oil shock in a way. The oil prices, there's a linear trend going from the beginning of the period I talked about today. But there's these big spikes around 2014, up to 2008, and then between 10 and 14. All the time this is happening, the Gulf states are absolutely coining it in because they are oil and gas export dependent in terms of their economies to a greater or lesser extent. This is income for those states. Next slide is the resulting current account surplices. The wealth that's accruing to these states. The unbroken blue line is the current account surplices for the Gulf monarchies. I've got two other lines there to give you a comparison. One's China, the red dots are China, and the purple dashes are Germany. In terms of current account surplices, remember in the years up to the financial crash people were saying big issue in the world economy is these huge current account surplices that China have been building up. All the Gulf current account surplices were right up there and comparable in that time. We're talking about a large amount of accumulated sovereign wealth in the world economy. At the same time as this is happening, the British economy is going through changes as well. And one of the chapters in the book is about how the two economies are a kind of fit, a kind of match in certain ways. This is Britain's current account deficit across the period that the book talks about, 91 up till today. So that's the deficit and income in terms of trade and investment income, things like that. So Britain's running this huge current account deficit. Current account deficit, which puts downward pressure on the value of your currency. How do you square that? How do you ensure that the value of your currency doesn't plummet despite the fact that you're running this big current account deficit? You do it by attracting wealth into your economy. You track money and investment in on the financial account. That current account deficit is an outcome of neoliberalism. You're in the unfortunate situation like Owen is having to do with political debate in the media with commentators who are unlike Owen not so good. You have this fascinating debate about neoliberalism isn't a thing, neoliberalism doesn't exist. See if you can spot where neoliberalism started. This is a graph showing Britain's current account deficit, Britain's current account balance from the Keynesian era and then into the neoliberal era. What's happening is the British economy is having its emphasis put more on financial services and less on exports. So it's building up this big trade deficit and that's having to be squared by attracting income. Where are you going to get all that income from? How about these boys? You see how these things match. Also because the Gulf States are booming domestically, they're hungry for imports of various kinds, goods services and again this is an opportunity for Britain, especially Britain which needs to boost its export industry in light of these structural changes that have been happening. It's a complementary capitalism if you like, Gulf rentia capitalism Britain, British neoliberal capitalism. That sovereign wealth we're talking about, we're talking about $3 trillion accumulated in the last figures that I saw. 40% of the world's sovereign wealth is from the Gulf States. So yeah, it's good for British capitalism in two ways. Number one, Gulf demand for goods and services helps to reduce the trade deficit. It's still massive but it reduces it. And Gulf capital inflows help to finance a current account deficit. Again, really important. So to give you a couple of figures just to make it more precise for you, Gulf exports to Saudi, including arms, are worth 1.3% of Britain's total exports, which may surprise you. So the value of arms sales, the value of all exports to the Gulf, it's not huge. 1.3% of Britain's total exports to the whole Gulf, exports to the whole Gulf are valued at just 4.1% of Britain's total exports. But Britain's current account surplus with those states, trade surplus with those states, matches 11% of Britain's worldwide current account deficit. So it reduces it by quite a significant amount. In addition Britain's net liabilities to Saudi are about 20% of Britain's net liabilities to the whole world. So in terms of the capital that's flowing in to finance Britain's current account deficit, a great big chunk of it comes from Saudi Arabia. So it's significant stuff, but in those terms, in those specific terms. Let's talk a bit about arms sales and military cooperation. Another myth, it's all about BAE profits. As I've said just now, all exports to the Gulf aren't that much, let alone arms sales. And there's all these other things we export as well. All these other kinds of goods, services, et cetera, et cetera. Income from arms sales for the UK economy is comparatively small. But the importance the income from arms export does have is that it helps to sustain Britain's domestic arms industry. You need a domestic arms industry if you're going to be a global military power. A serious global military power does not import all its arms from somewhere else, because you'll depend. To help sustain Britain's domestic military industry, which it needs, which industry it needs to be a global military power, it needs to earn money from those arms exports. Let me just give you another graph. The green dots are the value of British exports to the rest of the world, not including the Gulf. The blue dots are British exports to the Gulf, and this is in that Cold War period. Ignore the dots and look at the trend lines. The trend line is the value of British exports to countries that aren't in the Gulf is going steadily down, markedly down, the value of British arms exports to the Gulf is going steadily up. We're at the point now where about half of the value of British arms exports is accounted for by the Gulf states. Arms exports to the Gulf are important. If arms exports are generally important to making sure Britain stays a global military power, then arms exports to the Gulf are really important in that context. Not in the context of we need these arms exports for our economy, but we do need them for our arms industry if we care about Britain having an arms industry. If we care about being a global military power, you are free not to care about those things. In addition to the arms sales, the sale of these weapons systems, Britain has major commitments to the defence security of these regimes, not so much to the countries as the regimes, ultimately. It also has considerable privileges in terms of basing rights in Bahrain and naval base in Bahrain. There's also, as I alluded to at the beginning, the training of the internal security forces, including the kind of pretorian guards around the regimes that supposedly protect them from coups. So it's a shawing up of the Conservative regional order. We saw the outcome of this in Bahrain. Broad-based, peaceful, pro-democracy uprising at the beginning just calling for a constitutional monarchy, non-sectarian, put down with force by forces armed and trained by the British, and with the Saudis and the Emiratis coming in to batten them up. Again, forces armed and trained by the British. So it's helping to shaw up a Conservative regional order. And there's an increase in the value of arms sales around the time of the Arab uprisings and after, and a deepening of military ties. So that's a big vote of confidence in those authoritarian regimes in the context of the Arab uprisings. That's Britain's response to that historical moment. Okay, I'll try to keep it brief. It's the conclusion really kind of prompted by the discussion that's been going on in the last few days. Is it time for a change with regard to this relationship? Here's another one, a final myth. They've got us over a barrel. We'd love to challenge this relationship and it's all very difficult. So if you watch News Night and someone like Malcolm Riffkins, they'll say, well, it's all very complex, it's all very difficult. We can't just break out these relationships. Well, it is complex, but that doesn't mean it's complex and too difficult to challenge. I don't think it is. I don't think the balance of power in this relationship lies in Riyadh. I think it lies in London, ultimately. The way I'll describe it is asymmetric interdependence. So both sides need each other, but one side, we need them less than they need us. The British state and British capitalism need the Gulf regimes to sustain Britain's near liberal economic model and Britain's military power. It depends how you feel about Britain's near liberal economic model and Britain's military power. The Gulf monarchies need the British and other global north allies, particularly the US, for their survival. They need that investment. That investment that they're hemorrhaging at the moment because of the Khashoggi scandal, they need that investment if they're going to diversify and if their model is going to survive. They need British and American protection. They need those arms sales. So that's the asymmetry. Final point I want to make with regard to climate change. I really regret not developing this in the book at all really, but in light of the last few months, I feel it's really important. I'm going to start stressing it from now on. We've learnt in the past couple of weeks how serious the threat of climate change is and how little time we've got to deal with it. Most of the world's oil is going to have to stay in the ground. If most of the world's oil is going to stay in the ground, these petrodollars are going to dry up. So even if you love neoliberalism and you love British military industry and all that, it's a losing bet. This money is going to dry up or it has to otherwise. We've got problems. So now, I think, to put it mildly, will be a very good time to start reassessing these relationships. Climate change makes that a necessity. And I think this tragedy in Yemen, which we've allowed to happen for three and a half years, makes it imperative in any case. I'm going to try and zoom in a little bit at the micro level on the Yemen side of all of this. I'm not going to take history back all the way to David's timeline in his book of 1991 because I don't think I can squeeze that in in 10 minutes. I know there are plenty of faces in the room that know a lot about Yemen and certainly the conflict in Yemen. But for those of you who don't, the conflict in Yemen really started as a civil conflict, as a civil war in 2014. I know both myself as a journalist and my fellow journalist often refer to it being a war that started in March 2015. But that was, of course, when the Saudis got involved. But prior to that, the Houthis, who were previously only based really in northern Yemen, the governor that touches the Saudi border, took over Sana'a when I was living there in September 2014. But I think when the Saudis got involved to much people's surprise, certainly in the US and in London as well, nobody was really expecting this air campaign to be launched in March 2015. And it was the beginning of what we're now seeing of Mohammed bin Salman and his general response and foreign policy attitude, if you like, that we're now hearing a lot more about in the last couple of weeks, really. And, of course, Saudi Arabia went into this conflict very much as many other Western nations have before, thinking it would all be over within two weeks. And here we are three and a half years later. But the reason, or the reason the Saudis gave for intervening in the conflict in Yemen and creating this coalition of nations which stretched all the way from Senegal and Sudan, as well as to within the GCC, was Saudi's paranoia over Iran. And I think, particularly from a journalist perspective, there was a lot of talk for many years, including from Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president of Yemen, in the years before 2011 and the Arab uprisings, about the issue of Iran meddling in Yemen, about weapons being smuggled, but there was very little evidence to find on the ground, even when supposed shipments were coming from Iran and were being picked up by the Yemeni coast guard with the claims that they were coming to Yemen to arm the Houthis. As independent freelance journalists on the ground, we were never allowed access to see those boats. The state media was allowed to go in and film them. The US State Department then, on the only time they ever did it in sort of over four years when I was living in Yemen, contacted all the freelance journalists who were in Sonar at the time, the Foreign Press Corps, which was quite small anyway, and said, you should be covering this story, which kind of set all of our alarm bells ringing really. And that really sort of set it all. It was trying to push this narrative of Iranian meddling in Yemen. And that was Saudi's main reason, as they put it, for getting involved in Yemen, was the Iranian influence and support for the Houthis. It would go so far as to call them a proxy of Iran, as well as trying to restore the present haddie who was forced out of the country in March 2015 when the Houthis chased him down to Aden and he eventually escaped to Saudi Arabia and has been in Riyadh pretty much ever since bar a few visits to southern Yemen. But that is also a flawed narrative. Present haddie was voted in 2012 as the only name on the ballot paper in Yemen, and that was for a fixed two year term. We're now in 2018 and he is still referred by the international community as Yemen's legitimate president. Unfortunately though, this paranoia over Iran has become slightly self-fulfilling. It is now probably at the level that the Saudis and many others tried to claim it was before they became involved in Yemen and the conflict escalated in March 2015. And what we've probably all heard about most initially was and still is the bombing campaign. And this is not to say I should put this caveat out there now that there is a good side in this war. The Houthis have also been responsible for violations of international humanitarian law, disappearances of political activists, anybody who's outspoken against them, journalists, etc. But the big difference is they are non-state actors, they are not supported by our government or our taxpayers' money, whereas Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf nations who are part of the coalition very much are. We are therefore in a much more privileged position to be able to put pressure on politicians, whether it be here or in the US for American nationals, to bring some kind of barons on the coalition to push for an end to the bombing campaign or to push for the political process. Yemenis don't have that privilege. And there have been now, as part of the Yemen data project which collects the data on the air campaign, we are now at a stage of around 19,000 air raids since the conflict began. And when I say air raids, that doesn't mean airstrikes. That doesn't account for what we call double tap strikes, for example when a missile is dropped and then another follow-up strike is carried out quickly in succession. And in many cases that I've witnessed firsthand, you will have 14 bombs being dropped on a single target in the space of half an hour or less. And that is considered a single air raid in that data. So that gives you an idea of the kind of numbers we're talking about. A lot of that is happening, has happened in residential areas. And certainly from what I've seen from a journalist perspective, but also has been reported by human rights organisations, Moatana, who was the Yemen-based human rights organisation, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and many others. It has been clear evidence of a blatant disregard for civilian life at best, if not deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. As David already mentioned, the kind of now more infamous cases of civilian vehicles being targeted. That's not a new thing. That has been consistent over the conflict and in fact rising every year. Without wanting to jump on what Owen's possibly going to be talking about, but both the US and the UK have tried to mitigate that by saying that the coalition has improved its targeting process, is improving its methods and also has a supposed no strike list. But the data doesn't back that up. The number of strikes on civilian vehicles and buses, for example, has risen every year since the air campaign started in March 2015 and appears to be continuing to rise. The other tactic that there is evidence of as well, I don't know if anybody saw or has had a chance to read yet the report that Martha Mundy did that came out last week and she'd done previous research on this as well. I'd seen evidence of it on the ground from my own reporting. There is also clear evidence of Yemen's food supply lines, agriculture and being targeted in the air campaign in order to essentially prevent, it would appear, Yemeni's abilities to feed themselves and grow their own food. This is part of what's seen by analysts as well as by myself as a kind of tactic of economic siege on the country. This is materialised in what's generally called a blockade, although if you're being very specific, it's now regarded as a defacto blockade. There are still a minimal amount of imports that are allowed into places like Adada. Imports still going into Adenport, a lot of it coming over land. So there are goods coming into the country still going by your Baskin Robbins ice cream about 150 metres away from where children are dying of severe acute malnutrition. You can buy new cars, you can buy refrigerators. You can pretty much get anything into the country if you've got the money to do it. This has been one of the knock-on effects of the conflict, has been this vast war economy that has been created out of the conflict. That is making a lot of money for individuals across the Gulf, Yemenis as well. This is one of the biggest barriers actually to the peace process really now or to ending this conflict is the fact that as a result of the defacto blockade, the establishment of a sort of spider web, if you like, of routes in and out of Yemen to bring in both goods legally and illegally across the country, both on land borders and sea borders. It also means that when we talk about, as David already mentioned, this issue of the country being millions of Yemenis being so close to famine of children starving and dying of hunger, it's not actually what we would all imagine as a stereotypical famine. This is an economic famine. This is where you can go into the markets, whether it be in the north in Houthi control territory or in the south in coalition control territory and there will be food in the markets. There is flour, there is fruit, there is vegetables, but what's not there are the people to buy it. There are no purchases because people can't afford to buy food now in Yemen. Even before the war, Yemen figures put out around 80% of its food was imported. Hadeida, the western Red Sea coastal port where the fighting is now concentrated around was the main route in for those imports. And food was imported and paid for and still is in US dollars. The currency now, the Yemeni real, has depreciated so much that one US dollar was worth 225 Yemeni reals prior to the conflict. It's now at around 700-800 reals to the US dollars. So that food and those goods are being bought in US dollars and then being sold in Yemeni reals. That has resulted in what we now see as many millions of Yemenis being on the brink of famine, children starving to death, people not being able to afford food. And you talk to children and they start telling you about the dreams they have about the food they used to be able to eat. They dream about being able to eat chicken. They dream about being able to eat cake and dream about the days when they used to be able to buy chocolate when they went down to the local shop. And yet when they go to the markets, they can still see all this food but they just can't buy it. And that is the result of a direct result of the conflict and of the war. And it's only getting worse. I'm sure many of you saw the reporting by Oleg Arran last night on News at 10 that the BBC has been running today. And those are common sites but also what's not seen is the people that don't make it into the hospitals where a lot of that kind of filming is done. Many people can't get access to healthcare now. Less than 50% of the country's medical facilities are actually operating. And when you speak to people even who do make it to those hospitals with children, they've normally had to sell either land, in some cases their houses, in other cases their livestock in order to pay for the transport to get to a hospital. So I think even when we try and quote figures on this, it's very hard to get a real understanding of what that impact is because the communities of people who are struggling are scattered all over the place. They're not sitting in refugee camps or IDP camps. There are IDP camps around the country but the majority of people have been internally displaced to other villages or have left urban areas back into villages. The majority of the Yemeni population is still rural but those communities have grown as a result of the conflict. People have gone back to villages and when I say villages in the most densely populated part of Yemen, that's Highlands, that's up into mountains, many places that can only be accessed on foot. You can't even get vehicles up there. These are places that even if the aid agencies had all the money in the world and all the food in the world would really struggle to get to them. Never mind during a time of conflict. But as much as we will point the finger at Saudi Arabia, they are part of a coalition and a very important part of that coalition has been the UAE, the United Arab Emirates. I think we have generally a very benevolent attitude about the UAE. A lot of people spend their holidays in Dubai and transit through Dubai and enjoy their duty free shopping and nice beaches and see it as more of a holiday destination. But they are now the biggest plunder on the ground in Yemen. They have the most skin in the game as far as troops on the ground, certainly financial involvement in the ground conflict. Whilst the Saudis are very much eating the air war, it is the UAE that is leading the ground war. That is problematic in many ways. They now control a vast amount of Yemen's coastline from just east of Mokala all the way through now up to Hedadir. Nearly about 80% of the southern coastline or 75% of the most densely populated part of the southern coastline and the vast majority of the western coastline as well. They have engaged in what I can only describe as political cleansing in the parts of the country where they have been involved. They have their view of Yemen's Isla party, which is a political Islamic party that also incorporates the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen. Although they are on the same side as Isla in this conflict, they have been carrying out arrests of anybody who is linked or associated with pretty much Isla in the south at political activist level and higher political party level. They have backed militias and Salafi fighting groups who they know are directly opposed to Isla. That has resulted in internal fighting. I'm sure some people are aware and maybe slightly confused by some of the fighting that they may have heard of that has broken out between elements within the same side in Yemen on the coalition side. That largely comes down to the UAE backing militias and Salafi whilst Heddis has the Isla fighters on his side and those two elements coming to blows in places like Aden and in Tyreth. We've seen assassinations of Imams who are linked, many of them, to Isla. We've seen this policy also fueling really sectarianism. This didn't start as a sectarian conflict, but the sectarian element is a small part of it. Many of the Salafist fighters that the UAE has supported and armed and strengthened are being led by young men who had no power or position in the community before and now do. They, particularly in places like Tyreth, have become very powerful. They answer to the UAE even though technically now they've been integrated into the Yemeni or Hadi army. They are funded by the UAE. They answer to the UAE. The UAE has built a parallel army. This obviously includes the southern separatists who were supported by the UAE as well. That parallel army of somewhere between 50 and 80,000 fighters are funded by the UAE. They do not answer to the Yemeni Ministry of Defence. Most of these fighters who are now engaged in the fighting in Hedda are included in that, the vast majority of them. These are technically militias. They are not part of the Yemeni military. Those units are commonly called the resistance. They are not part of the Yemeni army. Those entires have been integrated into the army, but even when you speak to the army commanders, they say they don't answer to us. They answer to the UAE and to the UAE only. This has resulted in really fear now spreading across, which I noticed in my latest trip particularly in May actually, of even people who supported and still support, really, the coalition's intervention and their help, if you like, in fighting the Houthis. Many people have now come to realise that the UAE are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and that they have their own agenda. That agenda isn't always the same as the Saudis. That's not to put them in a scenario where they are going to be divided or openly divided with the Saudis. But they do have their own reasons for fighting, both strategically for this reason of having control of the coastline, but also this issue over the Isla part in Yemen. But I think we need to be much more aware about the UAE involvement in this conflict. And some of you may have missed, actually, with the news of Jamal Khatogig, is this issue with the British PhD student who has been locked up in the UAE in solitary confinement since May. That is only the tip of the iceberg in the sense of what I know from my reporting, thousands of people who have disappeared across UAE-controlled territory in southern Yemen over the last two and a half years now, three years, because of their either outspoken views or their opposition to the UAE's presence in Yemen. And all of this is going on, obviously, with UK support, US support, much of European support. And it's leaving a legacy. This is a legacy for a generation of children now who are going to grow up malnourished, many of whom are going to die. The knock-off effect of many years of malnourishment, lack of education, lack of health care facilities, a fragmentation of the nation in general when you're arming militias creating multiple groups now across the country that are all fighting for different reasons. You can drive around Yemen and you'll have to go through checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint. And a lot of the time you will have no idea who the men wielding the guns who are stopping at the checkpoint who they belong to. Sorry, yeah, I'm getting it. The one thing then I will try and finish on then which may pass off well onto what Owen is saying is the fact that we in the UK or the UK government and the US have been very reluctant to poke the bear, i.e. Saudi Arabia and the coalition in general and the UAE over the war in Yemen. We've now seen in the last few days what the private sector can actually potentially do and withdrawing either investment or their association with Saudi Arabia. But I do find it as David touched on in the beginning that it is slightly depressing that we've had to get this kind of awareness of tactics used by the Saudis to people now across the world as a result of one journalist certainly disappearing potentially being killed in Istanbul while tens of thousands of Yemenis have died. I know that Aklid guides are in the audience. The 10,000 figure that is often quoted by journalists including I have done in the past has not been updated since 2016 and the figures now even from 2016 are 50,000 from the data that Aklid collected from the conflict and that's just from the beginning of 2016 until now. So the figure is likely much, much higher than that from the beginning of the conflict. Yes, it's great that we're talking about it this evening but it is slightly depressing that it is, even as a journalist myself, the death of one journalist in Istanbul potentially or certainly the disappearance of the evidence has yet to materialise that still doesn't seem to build a ratio or qualify with tens of thousands of Yemenis dying and I think we all need to think very long and hard about that. First of all, it's a huge honour to be here. They've put together this fantastic book which could not be more topical. It's so important, not least because, as the book points out, there isn't an equivalent book of this scope whatsoever and he's done an incredible job so please give him another round of applause because it's been a pleasure. So what I'm going to focus on is the media, a critique I suppose of the way and the kind of wider lessons of how this is portrayed by the British media specifically and of course follows on from what you've just said there. I myself went to a Yemeni refugee camp in Djibouti back in 2015. I met young kids drawing pictures as small children tend to do but not of animals and swings but of people being killed lying in blood with missiles. These were seven, eight, nine-year-olds, little girls drawing these sorts of pictures and yes, the fact is taken, obviously the alleged murder, a heinous crime by the Saudi regime, a journalist formally linked to the regime who became critical rather than the deaths of countless kids blown up in school buses on the way back from school trips. You can see the footage on mobile phones recovered in August during that horrendous crime of kids laughing, joking as small kids tend to do before they were incinerated by Saudi warplanes with bombs supplied by the United States of America. It's taken the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth, millions on the brink of salvation and it's this which provokes this level of scrutiny which says all of course about how the British media and the Western media work. So just generally, just in terms of general critique of the media which I tend to talk about, I think it's necessary, just foreshadowing, we're often told we have a free press in a sense the government doesn't control the media, that's true, we're not North Korea, not an ambitious place to start. I know that's flippant, journalists are murdered and killed and tortured and persecuted in other countries for their work but we live in a society where the vast majority of the press are owned by a very small group of wealthy oligarchs who determine if you like the parameters of acceptable political debate in this country. We have one of the most aggressively right-wing media's press in the Western world other than perhaps Greece and you can see this in the domestic arena very clearly but we'll talk about the foreign policy arena. In terms of the BBC itself, what the BBC does is the news agenda on a daily basis is set by the priorities of that right-wing press and as a Cardiff University study found a few years ago the BBC was heavily weighted towards establishment voices, whether it be the financial crash, bankers interviewed not as witnesses rather than prosecuted for their role, they were impartial actors during an economic crisis of their making where business leaders are 19 times more likely to be interviewed than trade union leaders and so on. So that's on the domestic arena of course but in terms of foreign policy in the British media I would posit about the British media echoes the priorities, the objectives, the framing, the purported values of British foreign policy, that the hierarchy of villains which is arranged by the British media is not arranged proportionately on the basis of how villainous these regimes actually are but on the basis of how hostile or supportive they are of Western strategic and economic interests. We saw that of course very acutely with Saddam Hussein's regime, a regime which the CIA once privately described as he's a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch. The CIA once supplied in with lists of communists to murder in the 1970s as the Baptists were on the ascendancy when in 1988 when you got the sickening atrocity the gassing of Halabja which did not receive anywhere near the level of course of Western media attention that atrocities committed by regimes hostile to Western interests would have received where if you look at political debate you go through Hansard which documents British parliamentary debates you see very few voices indeed bringing up in 1988 the gassing of Kurds in Halabja other than one little known obscure backbencher called Jeremy Corbyn you might have heard of him who raised this and the ministers responded by talking about the strategic interests of British foreign policy and so on and so forth and yet of course in 2003, 15 years later where you were portrayed as a moral disgrace not to support the calamitous invasion of Iraq partly you were a moral disgrace because of what happened in Halabja in 1988 look at this sickening atrocity this is what he's capable of even though at the time of course he remained a client and ally of Western interests but that was used 15 years later so Saddam Hussein moved from a client of Western foreign policy to a demonic figure who all costs imminently had to be removed not least because of the treatment of his own people we see it in Afghanistan of course 2001 the treatment of their women the barbaric treatment of women again used as a moral basis for the war in Afghanistan and that point about just this hierarchy of death and the hierarchy of death is racist in terms of whose lives matter whether they're white so if there's a natural disaster and Westerners are killed even if the thousands of people in that country are killed obviously the deaths of Western we could go on we all know that and that's the same in our own country a white middle class young girl going missing compared to somebody from a BME background whose lives matter more and so on but also lives matter depending on who kills them and if we see for example Sabran Shitea the massacre in the 1980s by a phlangis militia for which Ariel Sharon he became the Prime Minister of Israel was found personally responsible by an Israeli commission and yet this for what in another scenario would have been used to justify Western military intervention Ariel Sharon was somebody who was fated and at his funeral wreaths were laid by the likes of Tony Blair that in terms of Saudi Arabia itself just in terms of framing this was a hostile state whether it be its role in the rise of the Taliban Al Qaeda the exporting of international extremism the fact the country where the 9-11 hijackies came from its oppression of women the lack of any political parties contested elections trade unions, democracy the beheading of dissidents refugees, witches the fact our own citizens have been tortured and raped by this regime let alone murdering a journalist all of these in a different scenario would have been used as pretext for the you know it would be a model disgrace not to support Western military intervention in such a scenario let alone Yemen this humanitarian crisis the world's worst humanitarian crisis now in terms of this it's a critique of the media if we look back because I've had one or two confrontations shall we say with journalists on this issue if this was proportionate to the calamity unfolding not least given our own direct involvement not just the arming of Saudi Arabia as previously discussed the billions of pounds worth of arm this is the logistics all the rest we are directly complicit this is partly a British war and an American war that this is a conflict which the vast majority of people in this country know almost nothing about let alone Britain's own involvement which is itself a damning indictment of the British media whenever this is raised I always get sent by BBC journalists and others examples of their coverage and I'm not saying there is no coverage whatsoever of the conflict in Yemen but the way it's framed it's rare often if you go through BBC online go through all the reports in Yemen as I've done the Yemeni war almost no reports on those BBC online even mention British military sales to Saudi Arabia or any British involvement you would read these reports BBC online being one of the most read online sources on earth and you would have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of any British involvement whatsoever in this conflict now if we go back to the Kosovo war the build up to that war on a daily basis you would get examples front page on every single broadcast news of the sickening atrocities being committed and yet clearly that isn't the case with Yemen it is a conflict which is very poorly reported except for brave reporters who have been on the ground despite the dangers and so on and it's very difficult to access and get to Yemen at the moment but even domestically British defence correspondence foreign policy correspondence the courage across the media is very limited and it's not framed on the basis of Britain being directly culpable and responsible for the unfolding atrocity now there are many reasons for that in terms of British foreign policy or establishment foreign policy journalism there's often a revolving door I remember Mark Laity the BBC defence correspondent during the Kosovo war his reports which he would say I have no reason to doubt NATO's account Mark Laity ended up a year later as NATO spokesperson official spokesperson he just made it official which was at least honest of him but the direct close proximity of mainstream British foreign of foreign policy correspondence of defence correspondence to the military industrial complex is very stark so I want to give an example of this which has come up in the last few days the telegraph defence correspondent is a guy called Con Coflin Con Coflin blessing so Con Coflin was the foreign editor of the telegraph and just before we dismissed that the telegraph wasn't all recently the most red broadsheet in the country it's now second most it's a respectable newspaper in the framing of these things it's journalists are fated they're well connected they're all the press conferences and so on and so forth so just to give background on Coflin because I think this just gives us a case study of how this works in 2000 an article revealed by Nick Davies former investigative journalist at the Guardian that Coflin was fed material for years which he just turned into telegraph news articles regardless of their basis one of them was a false story fed to him by MI6 which he falsely ascribed to a financial source about Saif Gaddafi which led to the Sunday telegraph having to apologise for liable other stories published by him include a front page splash terrorist behind September the 11th strike was trained by Saddam it was fed by a forged letter which was fed to him he went on NBC to remember that at the time George Bush's administration tried to link Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein's secularist tyranny on the basis of justifying the invasion of Iraq so Con Coflin was quite useful he went on NBC to say he was real concrete proof that Al Qaeda was working with Saddam in invaluable claim as Newsweek notes Coflin's story was apparently written with a political purpose no kidding to bolster Bush administration claims of a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime as his so-called story fell apart he said there's no way of verifying it it's our job as journalist to air these things and see what happens just throw it out just throw it out there great a book by the Pulitzer winning journalist Ron Soskin several years later claims the Bush administration just forged the letter and fed it to him Coflin that he says was a journalist whom the Bush administration thinks very highly of and was a favourite of the neocons in the US government he got the letter from the former CIA and MI6 agent the former Iraqi exile Ayad Alouy the 45 minute claim remember that claim well British intelligence services were quite embarrassed about this particular claim because it was bollocks but Coflin went to Iraq a few months afterwards and he found a source who claimed it was not 100% accurate 200% accurate and he said actually it wasn't 45 minutes the source said it was actually 30 minutes we would have done it I'm sure the British intelligence services were delighted now Coflin this is why I was interested in Coflin Coflin went to a natural history museum reception last week which was put on for the Saudi embassy the natural history museum justified it on the basis they got lots of money from the Saudi dictatorship lovely and he was one of the attendees along with Rory Stewart a conservative minister and Coflin so I was interested in Coflin because the next day he then posted a news report for the telegraph which he tweeted out on the basis of the dead sorry the missing journalist was actually a part of the Muslim brotherhood the implication being sort of had it coming and just echoed Saudi talking points so I did some digging and it's interesting if you look back at his background he conducted a ffawning interview with Salman Al Saud in March he described them as a human dynamo with this young's royal at the helm Saudi Arabia's future prospects clearly knows no bounds his history exclusively if you look through his articles he's just churning out Saudi propaganda Saudi talking points when Saudi Arabia's allies clashed with Qatar again he just repeated that verbatim here's an example of a report he wrote as Brexit nears and the government seeks new trade opportunities it's important Britain works out which countries are well disposed of its interest and those are hostile rather than offering to sell the Qataris your reply to warplanes British interest would be far better served by developing the strong and long standing ties it already has with countries such as Saudi Arabia these are exciting times for the Saudis the majority of whom are under 30 an economic and social revolution known as vision 2030 being driven through by the country's dynamic crown prince Mohammed bin Salman lucrative deals for British companies and so on but it depends on us choosing between countries like Saudi Arabia that are our friends and those that are not press releases for Saudi Arabia he writes for the national which is based in UAE which is owned by the UAE's deputy prime minister of the ruling family key Saudi allies almost every single report he writes is about the imminent danger of Iran and what I find interesting this was leaked to him he's married to Catherine Bergen who was a former son gossip columnist who suddenly started churning out after meeting him pro-Burrani propaganda for the Daily Mail and other newspapers she ended up working for lobbyist for Burrani's dictatorship propped up as we know by the 2011 Saudi dictator ship she has emailed journalists from a Burrani embassy email address so she's directly working for the Burrani's regime the shadow EPR firm she's part of apparently dissolved earlier this year it was founded by a former conservative councillor in 2014 he sponsored a £1,000 per head table at Tauri fundraising dinner the guests on the table included Philip Hammond who ended up foreign secretary his wife the Tauri chair of the all party parliamentary group for Burrani and the Saudi chief executive of the Arab British Chamber of Commerce he himself has a history of churning out pro-Burrani propaganda including blogs such as Why is Britain harboring Burrani's dissidents which is just a hatchet job on those dissidents he wrote this blog after attending a seminar paid for by Burrani's embassy he denounced a group of Islamic radicals who are trying to overthrow the Burrani government one of our key allies in the Gulf region and so on and so forth so he's a striking example of an influential journalist the former foreign editor turned defence editor of one of the main broad sheets in the country he was clearly a contact of the British security services somebody at the absolute heart of a massive concerted lobby in Gethra by Gulf foreign dictatorships who was uncritically regurgitated their propaganda and their talking points including justifying the calamitous disastrous war in Yemen and I've asked this point about the press because we often hear mobile panic about the canary, left wing blogs they're beyond the pale, they're a disgrace they're a threat to journalism what makes the telegraph better than the canary other than the veneer of respectability which has been conferred upon it because of its networks of influence and the people who back it that's that final point on that because this is something I'm very interested in looking at which is the Saudi lobby in this country which is extremely powerful very well networked with British journalists that's one example we've come up with a Saudi there's a, at the moment the independent newspaper which has been partly bought up by a Saudi investor they're now launching a independent branded website with Saudi money where the Tony Blair Institute has received millions of pounds worth of Saudi money where Saudi money is in terms of network, in terms of think tanks in terms of lobbyists in this country whether it be arts and culture, the natural history museum is not an exception various other museums and arts and culture in this country Saudi money has been plowed into them we need to start talking about this and unpicking that because there's been absolutely no scrutiny or no appropriate scrutiny of the networks of power and influence that the Saudi regime exerts in this country including over the media establishment and that's one of the reasons that we haven't had anywhere near the scrutiny necessary required for one of the worst humanitarian crises on earth which our own government is complicit in the deaths of every single child who will die either of starvation or western supply bonds so I think yes we have an opening now this terrible crime committed against the journalist it is tragic that it took this for us to get to this particular point that's why books like this are very important but however this opening happened we need to use it because this sorted alliance represents a grave risk well it's an existing threat of the lives of so many in Yemen and beyond it is a genuine one of the worst threats arguably to our collective safety so I hope that this is the beginning of a debate which we can use as progressives as critics of a western foreign policy responsible for some of the worst crimes committed in human history that we can use this opening to start ourselves inserting ourselves into the argument and the debate where we won't have a liberal critique which effectively attempts to stabilise this relationship but we ourselves build a movement that destabilises this vile alliance that exists between Britain, Saudi Arabia and the other states for the worst possible circumstances it is an opportunity we have to seize it for our own good and for the good of so many hundreds of millions of people as well thank you