 Hello, and welcome to Navarra FM Broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, London's most sidereal of radio stations. I am James Butler. Three weeks on from the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and the Teflon Prince Mohammed bin Salman appears to be in a crisis. But why has this killing among so many others stuck? And what is the nature of the Saudi state? And perhaps most importantly here, what is Britain's relationship to the Gulf monarchies and its role in the war in Yemen? Joining me to discuss these questions is David Wearing, author of Anglo-Arabia Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain. And let us begin then just by recapping the reaction both in Saudi Arabia and internationally to the Khashoggi killing. One from the Saudi regime to their western backers has got the incentive to, they just want this to go away, right? They want this issue to just disappear and for it all to be smoothed over. And if you track the response, someone should do a timeline of how responses have changed and how tones changed since the guy disappeared, which is the second of October. So this has really gone on there. This is three and a half weeks of this story. It's a big story. I think what you find if you track the responses is that they've gone from dismissive or not dismissive, but low key to increasingly stride from the west. And every juncture, they've tried to be like, okay, so that would do the Saudis have given us, you know, a statement, which is, you know, a good first step. And then the Turks will get some information. And then two days later, you know, the day after Trump will say something completely, you know, something much stronger or may also say something much stronger. And the Saudis have really been forced in the kind of farcical way to go from total denial to coming up with weird stories about how Khashoggi was killed in the fight, like a fist fight between a 60 year old journalist and a 15 man hit squad on the command of a bonesaw. And we've now got to the point where largely due to leaks from the Turkish government, the Saudis have admitted that the guy was killed and well first had to admit, yeah, they had to admit that he was killed at all because first they were saying he just left the consulate and they came out some, they used some body double to convince people it's someone. Yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe listeners don't know about this, that they got someone to dress up in his clothes with glasses and a fake beard. And then go sightseeing in Istanbul. Yeah, they didn't mention anything about this, but they're obviously hoping that the Turkish authorities would see this on CCTV and say, oh, well, he's fine. Look, he went sightseeing and then he disappeared. It's like a carry on film. Yeah, by Jean Le Carré. Yeah, it did. It felt sort of carry on up the boss for us and carry on assassinating or something like that. Yeah. And the guy was wearing the same trainers as when he walked into the, you know, the Saudi body double. He looked nothing like him. He looked nothing like him. It's amateurish. A lot of this is, but there's a lot of amateurishness in this. In the way the Saudis have handled the story has been ridiculous. Yeah. And almost designed to make themselves look worse and worse and worse. The denials, the aggression at one point saying if you mess with us to the west, we're all like, we've got ways of hitting back here, which they immediately had to backtrack very quickly. Other officials had to come out and say, no, you can trust us as responsible producers of oil and all the rest of it. I think all the way through, they've been getting an object lesson in where power lies. It strikes me as the behavior of absolute monarchs who are used internally to be able to do whatever the hell they want to whoever they want. And particularly now a crown prince who has been very aggressive in the last couple of years and never had any pushback domestically or from Saudi's international backers and got the idea that he could do whatever he wanted and got the idea perhaps he had the West where he wanted them. But clearly not. I think they are learning now in really stark terms just where the power lies. So that's how things have unfolded. I think the Saudis have gone from belligerence to backtracking quite quickly. And now they're at the point where they're saying, okay, we are coming to the conclusion it was a premeditated murder. And their big problem is that it seems very clear to me from the evidence we've seen so far that it was premeditated and ordered by the crown prince himself. This is their big problem. It's very hard for them to see how they can come up with a convincing story that says it wasn't the crown prince. And if they can't do that, it's hard to see how the Saudis reset their relationship with the rest of the world and with their Western backers upon whom they're dependent without getting rid of them. The problem being that he's the son of the king and he's the favorite son of the king who the king has always doted on apparently. And his appointment would reflect badly on the king that the king's not willing to get rid of them. And if the only way to reset the alliance with the West is to get rid of them, then potentially they'll be Saudi princes who'd be thinking, well, they've both got a go then. So we'll see how things pan out, but it's still up in the air. It's still developing. The role that Turkey are playing is really important. Should we say something about that? So why are Turkey behaving the way they have? If you'd asked me this two weeks ago, I would have said Turkey has its price. And at some point they'll engage in it. They'll collude in a cover up or smoothing over with this in return for something like reset their relationship with the United States, which has been poor recently, and perhaps a large injection of Saudi petrodollars to deal with their economic problems, which have become particularly acute the last few months, including the currency crisis, which would be nicely offset by Saudi petrodollars coming in. That's what I thought three weeks ago. And yet that moment when they say, okay, it's all fine, we'll smooth it over, has not come on the contrary. They have kept leaking information at every point when the Saudis have put out a new story, the Turks have put out more information like the day after contradicting it. The Saudis have been backing down in the face of that, and the British and Americans have been backing down in the face of that. So for example, the other day when the Saudis said it was a rogue operation, and the Turks put out new information showing it couldn't have been, the West went from saying, thanks Saudis, that's a good start to a couple of days later saying, okay, this isn't good enough, it's not credible. So every point when the West have tried to quieten the story down, the Saudis tried to quieten it down, the Turks have kept it going. So why after three weeks are they still doing that? If it's just money and the reset of their relationships that they want, I think there's a geopolitical aspect to it. Well, I'll say, I think a few people have come to the conclusion that there's a geopolitical aspect to it. If you think about international relations in the Middle East at the moment, people always talk about Sunni and Shia, which I think is incredibly facile and essentializing to the point of being racist. I bet this is one of the divides. I don't want to substitute one simplification for another, but perhaps a more relevant divide is between the Saudis in the UAE and the Egyptian president perhaps as well, as being forces who are against what I would broadly describe as political Islam or, you know, conservative political Islam, so like Muslim Brotherhood and forces like that. And the UAE and the Saudis don't like forces like the Muslim Brotherhood because they represent a republican form of governance, which is legitimated by Islam. And that's scary to the Saudis who are on an article system, legitimated by Islam, because it's effectively saying, for the religiously legitimated rule, you do not need kings. You can have a republic. It's the same reason the Saudis are scared shitless of the Iranian Revolution, which has nothing to do, I don't think, with Shiaism. It's more to do with the fact that this is a kind of republican form of government, which is a threat to theirs. So you've got a dividing line between the Saudis, the UAE, and General Sisi in Egypt on the one hand, anti-Muslim Brotherhood kind of access one of a better word. And then you've got Qatar, who've always backed the Muslim Brotherhood as being their kind of soft power strategy responding to the Arab Spring. They thought when there was Arab Spring plays out, Muslim Brotherhood partners will be in power all over the Middle East. Our links to them will make us give us strategic depth. And the Turks who are the AKP isn't Muslim Brotherhood, but it's similar, you know. And I think this is Turkey as part of that side of the divide, trying to weaken the anti-Muslim Brotherhood or anti-political Islam side of the divide in the Middle East. Because Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince, is one of his big geopolitical priorities was pushing back against his Muslim Brotherhood type access or political Islam access, so the blockade against Qatar and all the rest of it. So I feel like Turkey's basically trying to use this to weaken the Saudis and if possible topple the Crown Prince. So I mean it also comes I think at a difficult time, particularly for the Saudi state because it's at a moment where it's looking outside of itself, because it needs to diversify its source of income from oil. And now this has been part of MBS's big project, the Saudi Aramco stuff and move away from reliance on oil, looking where the world is going. So how does that play into what's going on at the moment? This is a disaster for that, it's a big, big disaster for that. So their issue is that still 80 years, 90 years after the kingdom was first established, the economy is still basically very reliant on oil and they urgently need to diversify. Partly because of climate change partly because of renewable technology, electric cars and things like this are terrifying to them because people stop needing oil because there's now a more efficient cheaper form of transport available as well as the fact that people are starting to realise we've got to deal with this climate emergency. They're in trouble. Look at China putting huge amounts of money into renewables partly because their energy poor and dependent on the energy impulse particularly from the Gulf and that's a huge strategic weakness for China. The majority of Saudi oil exports go to East Asia. If East Asia decarbonises, that's their source of income cut off. So they're trying to and also increasingly they need a higher oil price for their budget to break even because in the big oil boom during the 2000s they splurged all that money and now they've got themselves to a point where oil has to be worth at least 80 dollars a barrel and a lot of the time it isn't. So yeah they're trying to diversify. How do you diversify? You're diversified by attracting foreign investment into different areas of the Saudi economy that are underdeveloped from you know entertainment to high technology to whatever and you're attracting in with investment from from the West not because you need the money you've got money but you need the technical expertise and you need the managerial expertise like you don't know how to set up an entertainment industry you've never done that before but all these Western companies like Vue cinemas and what have you will do that because they've just opened cinemas in Saudi at last after a couple of decades of having them shut. Well now all these companies are pulling out you know Vue just cancelled their you know the contract that they were entering into. There was a big investment conference in Riyadh earlier this week and they just hemorrhaged guests like big CEOs of major firms major Western firms were pulling out left right and centre. Why? Because the Crown Prince is toxic and if you've got to choose between on the one hand doing business in the Saudi market which is yeah it's big in global south terms it's not that big certainly not big in global north terms you've got to choose between doing business there or you know destroying your reputation and if you do that you destroy your reputation amongst global north consumers what you're going to choose I mean it depends where your business is calibrated if you're BAE and if you're a total like an oil company or something then yeah okay you'll take the reputational hit in the west because you need the Saudi market but if you're anyone else the big firms that they need to come and invest you know you don't want to be seen dead with Ben Salman at the moment because of what everyone thinks. So this is all part of his kind of vision 2030 stuff this is his name for it right and I'm right in thinking isn't it that McKinsey had a substantial part to play in developing this there was a big input from the sort of management consultancy people how you know how to how to run a sustainable a sustainable economy post oil it's they want to sell off I think it's five percent of Aramco the big kind of state-owned company and that requires floating it somewhere that's right yeah that looks like a problem now that's a big problem in fact that was a problem before and a problem which is perhaps insurmountable so on top of the fact that big western businesses don't want to deal with the Saudis anymore because they're so toxic they're problem with Aramco which is the nationalized oil firm which was originally set up by the Americans by Chevron and one other American company's name I forget in the in the 40s the Saudis nationalized it in the early 70s it's not because they really wanted to because Arab nationalism was a big thing at the time and they would try not to look terrible in front of their population many of them were sympathetic to Arab nationalism so they nationalized the oil company it's now a huge firm in global terms but it's not listed on the stock exchange why because you need to be transparent because people buying shares want to see your books they want to see what they're buying into and the big problem with Saudi Aramco is it's not a proper company it's a piggy bank for the Saudi royal family it's not run in the way that a more transparent western PLC might be run so to get on to a western stock exchange you need that level of transparency and clearly western stock exchanges would love to see a multi-billion maybe trillion dollar flotation on their stock exchange think of all think of all the fees for accountants and lawyers and everyone down the food chain it'll be an absolute bonanza but how do they justify getting it on the stock exchange and what the British Stock Exchange did was create a new category of investor so that basically I mean they didn't you know say openly but it was basically tailored to get Saudi Aramco on to the British Stock Exchange at this point the Institute of Directors and you know various people representing British capitalists said look you're completely undermining the credibility of British capitalism we need for our for this system to function for it to be a degree of credibility about the sort of firms that are listed and you've just you know driven the coaching horses through that by letting these people come in so there are full of talk that there is about oh we're desperate for Saudi petrodiles and we're desperate for the Saudi wealth there is disquiet within the we'll talk about this more there is disquiet between the ruling within the ruling class if you like about this yeah and there are plenty of people in the British American ruling class who think this isn't worth it you know including big business whenever the issue of Saudi corruption comes up with oil deal without sort of arms deals there are people in the city of London saying to the British government stop covering this stuff up you're undermining the credibility of British capitalism and British markets you know um but yeah that's another big problem they've got they can't float their oil company they can't attract Western investment um this is going downhill fast for them and when that when they ran that investment conference earlier in the week goes reading the FT coverage the few people who did go were saying quite openly to the FT these guys are not running their country properly they're making it impossible for us to do business with them and they've got to sort it out so all this all this disquiet about Ben salmon is well out in the open now yeah I mean it's so it's one of the things when people talk about the Saudi state I'm always hesitant about some of the stuff that gets reported there's sort of exotic element to it you know the sort of orientalist view on the part of a lot of Western reporting nonetheless I mean stuff like the kind of simply the family budget the you know the stipendiary nature of what it means to be part of the house of sold yeah like that that is really striking I mean the budget for it I think there's a there was a us cable in WikiLeaks so there was something like you know the the overall um budget for the the family was something like two billion dollars it's 1996 yeah yeah probably increased substantially now yeah um but I think one of the things that's maybe useful for listeners to hear is a bit about how these the the kind of monarchies of the the Gulf Cooperation Council how these kind of oil monarchies arose and in the context specifically of of sort of British involvement in the history of British involvement in the Arabian Peninsula yeah so in my book I talk about this a lot and this is one of the points I try and stress um that yeah let's connect with that orientalist point you made a moment ago because the way people talk about the way Western politicians talk about Saudi Arabia is often when they try and justify Britain's support for it is well they've got their culture and we've got ours and theirs is a very different culture with a different set of values um and that's the explanation for what it's an authoritarian regime and we're just working with what we've got and the point I try and make in my book is that look when you trace the the the process of state formation in the Arabian Peninsula over the last 200 years the way these monarchies came into being and entrenched themselves um you find the British there every step of the way every step of the way um helping influencing and guiding that process of state formation to ensure that these monarchies were entrenched often against forces that were frankly you know progressive to a greater or lesser extent that Arab nationalism or democrats and yeah you know small old liberal democrats in the outskirts um so it's not a case of oh we just turned up and there they were you know we turned up with our exalted western values of liberal and liberalism and democracy which we're really serious about and we found these you know we found these easterners with with their you know cultural sort of antipathy to our western liberal democracy it's not like that at all Britain's been colluding an authoritarian rule for a long time and entrenching it against prospects of democracy so if you trace it back to the early 1900s um britain first goes into the gulf um in an attempt to create a kind of court of sancia around the second british empire in in india so to try and protect india some constant from the french and russians um so it does deals with the local monarchs and these these are just shakes who are who are not well-fed not necessarily particularly well entrenched along the coast of the european peninsula um like so did you know the shake of barraine who recently renamed himself king uh yeah why not um the mirror of kata um but our family in q8 but these are fair i mean these are very very weak local rules compared to the might of the british arm of the british empire and british britain enters into a series of treaties with these guys protectorates so as usual have no foreign policy except through us basically and that continued until 1971 from the earth from the mid-1800s to 1971 these were vassals you know that's probably overstating their power they were clients they were subjects of british of british power um and throughout that period as they gained wealth through oil and as they became states in the modern sense they were under british tutelage and british officials were there in their governments you know in their judiciary and their civil service and their military system in their security system acting as quote unquote advisors to these to these monarchs the british were there building these states you know um up until the late 70s you had british um people were you know making up the top brass of the umani military was british people um the guy who set up the system of the whole system of torture and repression in baray which has recently been used to crush a useful broad-based pro-democracy movement the guy sat that all up was a special branch officer former special branch officer codian henderson who came fresh from britain's gulag in kenya in the 50s was then seconded or recommended by the british government to the barania authorities in the 70s turns up creates a system of surveillance and torture and repression which has kept the barani monarchy in place um so it's just a bit rich i think for british politicians to say oh we just turned up and found them like this you know everywhere across the global south people fought for democracy against the west this stuff about western democracy versus eastern values they fought for democracy itself determination against the west and is one place where people weren't successful one of the main reasons is because the west made such a successful effort to build up authoritarianism um similar with saudi arabia saudi arabia has created very late in the day it's a case of a kind of basically uh you know people who are advocates of a very austere extreme form of islam breaking out breaking out of the central arabian desert conquering as much of the arabian peninsula as possible and subjecting the diverse populations to their particular brand of quite unfamiliar autocratic world including uh sheer in the east of eastern of um the arabian peninsula and the population of the hijaz along the west including mecca and medina which because of its interlinks with the rest of the world because of the pilgrimage were actually quite liberal and quite cosmopolitan they had bought something bordering on a free press which was just crushed by the Saudis when they conquered the arabian peninsula um yeah so this this process of state formation has been one where the west have colluded for a long time to ensure the dominance of authoritarian rule and relatively weak authoritarian rule rule i've seen is more useful uh in that sense because it allows you know it or it necessitates a kind of dependency right absolutely absolutely and that's what you have that was um an approach by the europeans throughout from the british and in iraq back in the sunni minority the french in lebanon with the maronites the french in syria with the alawites pick a dependent pick a minority build them up make them dependent on you and that's that's that's that's divided rule and if we understand it in a more sophisticated and accurate way that's what it looks like in practice and these monarchs with their lack of um their lack of broad popular legitimacy um what will i do yeah dependence so what happens when you get the end of empire in in that sense what happens when the british start to withdraw and why does that happen right so the british they're into a 71 and you know if you know anything about sort of british post-war economic history you know it's a series of balance of payments crisis a series of currency crisis and the forties and then in the 60s um and in the 60s the currency crisis 67 leads the wilson government to say look we just can't afford empire anymore it's too much of a too much of a cost which we can't bear um and so they decided to withdraw british forces from their permanent presence east of sewers if anyone you know any of you listeners read about that we've drawn from east of sewers that's what that is so we're going to stop our permanent and end our permanent presence in the far east and in the gulf as well so we will not be the protector of the gulf regimes and the hegemon there and there's huge resistance to that from the gulf regimes don't leave us for god's sake you know and frankly if it hadn't been for the fact that israel just smashed up arab nationalism in less than a week in 67 the british might not have wanted to do it but because they felt that arab nationalism was at least weakened they felt they could just about get away with pulling out provided they built up the um the local rulers a bit more the americans didn't like it either they said look we're busy with vietnam we needed you to kind of look after this part of the world on behalf of uh western capitalism you know to stop it falling into the hands of arab nationalists or someone else so but yeah wilson's retort to obj was basically look we can't afford it so that's it you know and what they did afterwards in the 1970s and this current science of the oil crisis when these gulf regimes suddenly became very rich as a result of nationalizing their oil reserves and jacking the price up they spend all that money on western arms as in this is where the new relationship takes takes place so you've got um huge oil revenues flowing into the gulf regimes um the massive sort of surplus of petro dollars what we're going to do with all this money well say the west we've got some ideas you could invest it in our economies um and you could buy our arms with it and you could build yourself up with our arms you could help us sustain our own arms industries through exports and that would in turn give us the capacity to continue projecting military power which protects you as well um so it's a great deal all around um and yeah the relationship has basically been about that since then my book is called yeah anglo-arabia why gulf wealth matters to britain and the argument i'm basically making is that it's not so much about oil it's about the money that comes from oil as far as the british are concerned how do you get that money into your economy using your old imperial relationships built up over 200 years to um you know sustain your military industry finance your current account deficit blah blah blah because it is an interesting question because as you were saying you know in global north terms yeah these economies are you know you know they're substantial but they're not you know earth shattering no important yeah and one of the things that i found most striking about your argument is that you know so one of the things that happens on the left is like any kind of global conflict you'll have someone going well it's all about the oil yeah um but and it may or may not be sometimes it is um it often is yeah but the question of why oil matters i think is is the question you raise and you talk about it in two two senses one one of power and one of money and you put power first analytically so you delve into that a bit yeah yeah so oil is the lifeblood of the world economy to put it do you know i was about to say to put it crudely and then it sounds like some dad joke doesn't it i say the older i get the worse my jokes get so um yeah it's it's structural power it's a lifeblood of the world economy the world economy as we know it can't function without oil hopefully can in the future or screwed but at the moment for the last hundred years or so that's been the way it is and oil is not just about um the cost of running your car it's about the cost of transport and that means the cost of transporting not just people but goods so anything that has to come get from A to B to be in the shop for you to buy the price of oil affects the price of that you know price of oil affects the price of food price of goods um oil um is also at the root of plastics petrochemicals fertilizers you know all these things are important for feedstock for various industries so the price of oil has knock on effects on on the price of everything um and so you know that that global power that sits on the oil heartlands of the planet has huge structural power in the global systems if you were if you want to think about it in a kind of the Hawthorne McKin the geopolitical kind of way of looking at the world if you want global hegemony as a big power whether you're the british um you know six or seventy years ago or the americans more recently you've got to be sitting in that part of the world and have your allies allies right there now that was a question for the british and the americans at the end of world war two we must be controlled this oil we must sit in that part of the world and dominate it um it's as britain's british powers declined it's those those questions are now above its pay grade to a certain extent it but it's committed to american efforts to remain dominant in the middle east um because it's committed to american hegemony so the questions for the british now are more let's complement american hegemony in the middle east for those big structural reasons um and for us let's um let's focus on the more commercial aspects as well as the economic aspects that you know i've mentioned a minute ago so yeah i mean it's it's funny you're quoting the book the the other uh uh foreign secretary so in lawyers we must at all costs yeah keep control of this oil i think it's it is really striking um i wonder then you know what role these kind of petrodollars play in the british economy because obviously it's one of the ways in which britain britain is no longer the imperious hegemony i mean that's true um it's nonetheless obviously is just uh allied very closely yeah with america yeah but where britain has a distinctive advantage is in having this enormous uh financial center um right at the heart of its economy yeah how do they how does that flow of petrodollars work right so um an argument i made guardian article yesterday where i'm trying to bust all these myths that sustain britain's relationship with saudi um despite people's disquiet when the arguments i make is that look saudi arabia isn't important to britain per se it's important to a version of britain the current version of britain and in one sense that's a neoliberal britain why is that well has britain adopted neoliberalism from the early 80s onwards um that had an effect on the balance of the british economy obviously in terms of de-emphasis on manufacturing industry and increasing emphasis on financial services and the effect of that is that britain develops a trade deficit we're buying more from the rest of the world than we're selling to them particularly in goods obviously um and when you develop a trade deficit um and i talk about it more broadly in terms of the current account deficit so it's all kinds of money coming in and out um deficit on investment income as well when you've got a current account deficit that weighs downwards on the value of your currency right because um there's more demand from you for other people's goods which you're buying in their currency then there is from for your goods and services which people are buying in your currency so your currency is weighed down by this current account deficit now what saudi petrodollars do is two things to do with the current account deficit because if you if you just have that current account deficit you'll you know you've potentially run into problems with the value of your currency and we now have weak sterling is at the moment we've had a effective devaluation since brexit which is really important so how do you do with that um one you try and find areas of the world where you can develop a trade surplus and that's going to narrow the trade deficit narrow the current account deficit and two you try and attract investment income from the rest of the world and what britain's been able to do to make this current account deficit sustainable is use the power of the city of london to attract foreign capital into the british economy and that capital comes from all over the place a huge amount of it comes from united states also from europe um but one of the big sources of net capital inflows 20 the way i calculated it um was from saudi um because they have these this huge surplus of um of capital coming from the from the oil boom now that's drying up still um the saudi capital coming into the british economy plays quite a big role um in financing the current account deficit and the other benefit of the saudi of these gulf petrodollars is that because their economies have been booming up at least up into recent years their economies are growing and their big net importers of goods and services like building up their infrastructure and diversifying or trying to diversify their economies so um british providers of goods and services have found a big export market in global south terms and that means that britain's been able to develop a trade surplus a precious rare trade surplus with the gulf i think britain's trade surplus of the gulf i'm going for memory but it's my book so i should be able to remember it um i think britain's trade surplus of the gulf saudi and the gulf of the gulf monarchies is equivalent to or negates its trade deficit with france and japan right so although the gulf monarchies or the gulf market is not that bigger deal in terms of the raw value of british goods and services exported there in terms of the surplus that's a big that's a big deal that that addresses the deficit of two global major global economies and the net capital inflow from saudi arabia is is just a big deal not just on global south terms but generally um so that's the role that they play so you've got on the one hand you've got the renter economies of the gulf with their big capital surpluses and on the other hand you've got the british neoliberal economy with its thirst for capital inflows and its desire for um of any work that can provide a a trade surplus and the two fit together in that way this is a really striking vision of like the you know neoliberal british economy and these these kind of ultra-reactionary monarchies yeah sort of awful human centipedes like just profoundly attached to each other endlessly circulated yeah locked in this kind of symbiotic embrace of complementary capitalism so i i yeah i mean and i think that's maybe one of the things that that often isn't emphasized in in these discussions is exactly the way in which like versions of capitalism are instantiated in each of these states and the way in which they complement each other rather than looking at it just as a whole sort of system that the there are specific versions of capitalism which come from in each other totally totally and what's worth adding to that just briefly is this is not just a question of economics it's political economy and it's imperialism in in in global economics because these economic relationships are forged in empire you know and one of the reasons they send this money our way is to buy in our support you know and one of the reasons they're there to make these decisions is because the british helps set up those monarchies or at least help them control that they will and acts as their protector today against other forces a bit forces from below or or threatening neighbors yeah i mean it is i think worth pointing out that britain um uh was uh you know provider of enthusiastic training for many of these states during or prior to um the various kind of uh arab spring absolutely uprisings yeah buraine in particular yeah yeah so the you know broad-based peaceful pro-democracy movement in Bahrain at the beginning they weren't even calling for the end of the monarchy they're calling for constitutional monarchy and they were violently crushed by you know which is not to say that Bahraini democrats have disappeared they're still there but that uprising was crushed in early 2011 by Bahrain security forces backed up by an intervening force from the UAE and Saudi um and these were forces armed and trained by the British you know doing their job so that's a good point to segue i think or why you talk about Saudi intervention maybe we can talk and we'll come to the war in Yemen just first about that relationship and you know again they're interlinked about kind of british arms manufacture yeah um and these Gulf monarchies not just Saudi um about how you know how how interdependent they are yeah yeah yeah so let's take that step back to that post world war two it's helpful i think to think of british foreign relations in the context of the sweep of history and with the background of empire very much in mind and britain trying in the post world war two era to see how it could hold on to as much of its power as possible given the reality of imperial decline and eclipse by the united states um and a decision that well okay the US are going to run the show they're going to run global capitalism from now on i guess we'll have to live with that that's probably the best of all possible worlds from our point of view um they all want a kind of liberal and financialized capitalism because their capitalism is a bit like ours so okay great but within that we're going to be as powerful as possible and one way we're going to be powerful is to be a power that projects uh military strength in the world you know on an intercontinental basis so we don't just um you know use our military for defense is about projecting power and policing this world system with the americans helping them to do it um so that's why british britain has aircraft carriers and all these other other things that you know we don't have them to protect ourselves in case of french invade or something like that it's for policing the world um but how are you how are you going to how are you going to support that financially you know because you can attacks the population at some huge amount are you going to spend 10 percent of your gdp on on the military ideally not especially if you want to maintain that stance politically you don't want to arouse public opposition so how can you make it work economically one way you can do it is by having arms export industry so instead of setting up a production line to make you a load of fire jets and then mothballing the whole thing and sacking all the workers until 20 years later when you need a new fleet of fire jets why not maintain those production lines maintain those skills and maintain those jobs and just sell the latest gear to other people in between times that way you earn a lot of money you make your military industry um economically viable you need an independent domestic military industry to be a proper military power a proper military power is not dependent on other powers to provide its weapons you know people who can pull the plug yeah if they don't like what you're doing so this is crucial to that and the reason that's become particularly potent in the case of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is that since the end of the cold war all the big arms markets have started drying up and I just graph in my book which shows a very steady decline of British arms exports to places in the world that aren't the Gulf and a very steady increase in in arms sales to places in the world that are the Gulf mainly Saudi Arabia in the post-cold war era to the point where now in the last 10 years exports to Saudi alone account for 42 percent of British exports of arms so if you need arms exports to maintain your military industry and you need the military industry to maintain yourself as a global military power you need arms exports to Saudi Arabia to maintain yourself as a global military power so that is a big sense in which Gulf wealth matters to Britain or at least this version of Britain yeah I mean it's it's worth I guess saying that these these companies companies like BAE you know they're very strange companies in in one way or other because they're so deeply bound up with the politics of the British state that I think you know it's it's it's worth thinking of them as an extension of the state rather than as independent entities definitely definitely and so I want to come then to the war in Yemen because I got just under 20 minutes to talk about it yeah cool which I think is important it is definitely and I you know it's one of the things that has been pretty awkward actually I think for for the British state in particular during the the kind of aftermath of the Khashoggi affair maybe it's best to start just with how the war in Yemen started yeah because I think I don't think it's often very clear yeah in conversation about it yeah so I wrote an article for a new socialist which really tries to expand on this um so people can maybe look that up um trying to talk about you know the historical background to it I'll try and do it quite you know briefly and obviously I'm gonna you know miss bits out it's gonna be a bit simplified but if people want more detail they can they can go to that article and it's got a long reading list in the end so people wouldn't really get into it they can I hope they do because it's really important um I mean the the basic simplified version is like the rest of the Middle East there was an uprising in Yemen in 2011 and it was an uprising against an entrenched regime led by a guy president Salih who'd been there since the 60s um and was there from the moment of Yemeni reunification after the Cold War and Salih sat atop a state structure which was driven by kind of tribal and regional kind of divisions um again you know Sunni Shia doesn't help us understand these things there's all sorts of things going on Salih is threatened by this uprising and at the point where the uprising happens the regime splits between Salih and people within his regime who are a bit concerned that he's trying to replace himself with his son this goes on all the way through the Middle East like long-term rulers try to groom their son to take over from them they piss off their rivals and their rivals start to move against them um big element of what happened in Egypt so at that point when the uprising happens the regime splits between Salih and forces her against them the Gulf states think we can't have a civil war in our backyard and we want the Yemeni states to endure and so let's get rid of Salih but maintain the state and this I think was the response of the Gulf monarchies and the west to a whole bunch of different uprisings in the Middle East basically we'll try and maintain our ally for as long as possible if we have to concede you know that the ally goes because of the strength of the uprising let's at least preserve the state so we preserve the basic status quo and we kind of get the impression an uprising has happened successfully so they replace Salih with his deputy Hadi who wins a famous victory in an election in which he's the only candidate and he's a transitional president for two years that's the idea from 2012 to 2014 and there'll be a national dialogue which set which will arrive at a new settlement for Yemen that doesn't work for various reasons Yemen's a very complex very divided country um also all all countries are heterogeneous Britain now Britain's a country of all sorts of complexities to it but it holds together for various reasons but when you're a country which is driven by foreign intervention it's the poorest country in the Middle East that people who rule are incredibly corrupt um that put stresses and strains on the divisions of inner society if Britain had those problems it would break up as well so um the national dialogue doesn't work and President Hadi is challenged by rebels from the north called the Houthis um who are who hate the Saudis because the Saudis have been trying to convert them all to this extreme version of Islam that the Saudis sign up to and so the Houthis hate them the Houthis sign up to a kind of weird opportunistic alliance with President Saleh who's stepped down but who doesn't accept the fact that he should step down at all he wants to get back on the throne um when he was presently fought all sorts of short wars with the with the Houthis but now they've they've got together opportunistically they overthrow the transitional government and take control of the capital and then the transitional government which is backed by the Gulf states um flees to aid and in the south of the country with the Houthis and Saleh in hot pursuit now at this point they're overextending themselves they can control the north they can't control the whole country um and the Saudis and the Emiratis intervene at this point this is March 2015 to drive the Houthis back up to the north and ultimately get rid of them and put Hadi back on the presidential throne if you like and the war's been in stalemate ever since March uh ever since March ever since sort of later on in 2015 they they drove the Houthis back from southern Yemen um and now the the Houthis control broadly what used to be called North Yemen and the rest of it is there's a loose coalition with the Saudis and the Emiratis at the top and then various extremely disparate forces on the ground who don't like each other and of course this transitional government which the west says is the legitimate government but frankly no one supports them on the ground um so that's the kind of mess they're in at the moment um we could perhaps get on to the humanitarian yeah i think that's it yeah i think that's important so um i think the the UN figures it's 80 percent of the population uh is in need of humanitarian aid and there's lack of food lack of clean water lack of medicine yeah um half a million cases of cholera yeah why is that yeah so okay you've got Houthis-Saleh forces on one side and the Saudi-led coalition on the other trying to restore the so-called legitimate government um the Saudis and the Emiratis have fought their war in two ways one because they haven't got much reliable ground presence they placed a huge emphasis on aerial attacks aerial bombing um they have got a ground presence they do control land but you know um this is their big advantage the Houthis don't have an air force the Houthis-Saleh forces don't have an air force so it's been just an attempt to win the war very quickly i think Muhammad bin Salman who was the defense minister at the time the war started thought he could win a quick war um so just pulverized Yemen at the beginning they ran out of bombs very quickly um in terms of the point where they went to the British and said look we've run out and the British said to Raytheon the British government said to Raytheon who make these big 500 pound paved way laser guided bombs you know that batch of bombs you guys were making for the Royal Air Force put that to one side and please rush these bombs to the Saudis because they've got lots of you know hospitals and school buses that they need bombing so i'm sure they didn't really say that well maybe they did well i mean you know that's what was that's effective yeah no i mean that is literally what's happening yeah yeah um so the Saudis from day one were hitting civilian targets the first the very first reports from Amnesty International days after the war started said the Saudis hitting civilian targets hitting them indiscriminately not taking due care to avoid civilian casualties so violations of international humanitarian law within months of this really intense bombing a panel of experts reporting to the UN Security Council at the beginning of 2016 reported quote widespread and systematic attacks on civilian targets they gave scores of examples of this happening including one where people were running away from an attack and they were chased and shot by helicopters it's a really brutal stuff and if you look at the reports coming out of Amnesty International Human Rights Watch the world's leading humanitarian uh UN um uh human rights organizations who have had people on the ground investigating this in a very very careful forensic way reports from UN experts reporting to the security council reports from um the humanitarian NGOs let's say the children they are all saying the same things the Saudis are hitting civilian targets schools hospitals clinics cancer displaced people um funerals weddings warehouses um the British government the American government have been trying to make out like these are mistakes or targeting errors which can be rectified with British and American assistance three and a half years no one can see any change in the pattern of attacks the last UN report to the Security Council said we can't see any evidence of the warring parties showing any any real attempt to to mitigate civilian casualties I should point out that the Hufi and Saleh forces now just the Hufi forces because Saleh tried to switch sides so the Hufis killed him so now it's just the Hufis they are not the good guys they are no better they've been fighting the war brutally but I'm focusing on Saudi Emirati crimes for the simple reason that the we are complicit in them and it would be pretty hypocritical of us to focus on other people's crimes when we're when we're complicit in these let's talk about that complicity yeah and the role of British companies and just spell out yeah exactly how involved we are so I think people have the impression that we just sell them some jets and then say okay see you later enjoy those jets nothing to do with us absolutely not how it works so what we provide people have heard presumably um of the big deals that were done by Thatcher in the 80s you know your mama deal and then Blair and Brown in the 2000s the Al-Salam deal to provide fleets of fighter jets right and these are the jets of military jets these are the jets that are bombing pulverizing Yemen now alongside American jets now those deals involve not just jets but that they are them their government government military memorandums of understanding which say we'll provide you with these jets scores of them whole fleets of jets and we'll provide you with all the support and infrastructure that you need to operate those jets we will provide technical and logistical support we will provide components and spare parts we will provide upgrades on those jets whenever we develop them we'll provide bombs and missiles we'll provide all this stuff on an ongoing basis we'll have operatives on the ground in your country in large numbers this is BAE operatives helping you to sustain the operation of this air force we will provide maintenance like deep maintenance the more serious forms of maintenance rather than there's more superficial stuff and yeah whenever you run out of bombs and missiles we'll provide them so and Philip Hammond was very open about this at the beginning of the war when I thought it was going to be a quick war Philip Hammond was foreign secretary at the start of the war and he said all of what I've just said openly and proudly we have a huge infrastructure this is virtually folks with quotes the actual quotes are in my book we have a huge infrastructure and extensive infrastructure supported in the Royal Saudi Air Force and we will provide that support we'll provide every form of practical support short of engaging in combat so when the British government says we're not participant in this war that's false British are not combatants in the war British personnel are not engaging in combat but the British are participants because they're sustaining the Saudi war effort just as American the Americans are doing the same with the planes that they provide now the arms that Britain provide isn't it's not a minority of what the Saudis have got it's a huge proportion of it you know it's virtually balanced between the Americans and the British Bruce Riddell who's a longtime CIA analyst he's now at the Brookings Institution absolutely impeccable establishment credentials said early on in the war basically that the British and Americans could pull the plug on this war anytime they like because the Royal Saudi Air Force can't operate for any length of time without British and American support I think this is what people fail to understand that we are sustaining this bombing campaign which we could stop when we're wronged and it's worth stressing as well this argument that says oh we could just you know they could get their arms from the Russians and the Chinese no they couldn't you can't just replace a fleet fighter jets mid-war on top of all the support sustained the sustained those operations perhaps you could replace it in the medium to longer term it doesn't help you fight this war so the war can be you know the Saudi bombing campaign can be stopped immediately whenever the British and Americans want to but I don't want to so in a sense I guess that's my final question for you really is this the Khashoggi affair and the sort of PR crisis surrounding the regime yeah and this kind of structure of mutual dependency is this an opportunity or would it be an opportunity could it be an opportunity to begin to change that yeah yeah so what the point I've tried to argue is as I say is that Saudi Britain per se does not just need Saudi Arabia but this Britain does a Britain that is a neoliberal economic model which needs as a current account deficit that needs financing and it needs export services with where it can find them and a post-imperial Britain is trying to hold on to its role as a global military power second tier global military power now if your listeners like neoliberalism and like British military power then they will value Britain's relationship of Saudi Arabia if they don't there are alternatives um you can have an if you have an industrial strategy um you and you rebalance your economy away from financial services to export industry you can close that current account deficit obfieting the need for capital inflows and reducing the need for export services with wherever you can find them because you'll be building up your exports generally um if you don't feel that Britain's role as a kind of you know global policeman on behalf of US led capitalism is a good thing that makes people safer um and you might you know you'd be reasonable and come to that conclusion then um why would you need an arms industry because the arms industry doesn't support the British economy it's not massively so important to the British economy British exports to all British exports to Saudi Arabia in the peak year of arms sales of 2015 were 1.3 percent of British exports worldwide virtually a rounding error and half of that was military so less than 1 percent so we don't need it economically for the economy as a whole it's needed for the arms industry if you don't think we need the arms industry fine we don't need Saudis we don't need the arms exports there um if you're going to have an industrial strategy hopefully it's a green industrial strategy you'll be looking for personnel and skills and resources well why waste all these skills and resources in the British arms industry where we could take those people and the resources that subsidize the British arms industry and put it into the development of green technology you know so there are all these alternatives absolutely readily available to us and hopefully someone within labor is doing the policy work to plan out how all this happens people in think tanks should be doing that work likes of IPPR should be including this this kind of transition away from arms exports in their work on industrial strategy and stuff like that so all of this is you know we are not forced to do any of this you know some teaching weak dependent monarchy and the global south is not making us do bad things we're choosing to do these things and we can choose to do other things and you know when at a point when the blockades that the Saudis and the Emirates are imposing on Yemen the richest countries in the Middle East blockade in the poorest country in the Middle East at a point when that blockade is now has now placed 14 million people on the brink of starvation with the UN and the aid agencies now warning of the worst family in a hundred years comparable to Ethiopia and the A is the USSR these you know huge biblical famines of the modern era at that point when our relationship with the Saudis has helped to cause something like that I can't think of a better point for us to say well let's look at this relationship and we have to change it how do we change it that's all we have time for this week thank you so much to David for joining me this has been a via FM on resonance 104.4 FM we will be back at the same time in the same place next week bye bye