Should Britain break off relations with Saudi Arabia over the proposed flogging, apparently to death, of a 75-year-old businessman for having home-made wine in his car? Or should it take whatever money is going and remark that internal affairs are a matter for the regime?
Nothing in the compromising world of diplomacy has been as hypocritical as Britain’s dealings with the Saudis. Money has trumped everything, dirty money, corrupt money, vast quantities of money.
There may be hot competition for the most barbaric of regimes, but Saudi comes near the top of the list. We don’t care.
The imprisonment and proposed 350 lashes sentence on Karl Andree has led to “inquiries” by the Foreign Office. May they be fruitful. The British government can argue, with brute justice, that Andree had lived in the country for a quarter century, knew the law and took a risk. This is a place where women are repressed and stoned and men butchered and amputated for political and religious offences.
Milton Keynes it is not.
The British government was eager to close a £6m contract with Andree’s prison authorities for something called a “training needs analysis”. Whether this is American for extreme punishment we are not told. Either way it seemed bizarre to sell prison gear of any sort to a country whose penal code is so brutal. Thankfully this contract has now been cancelled.
The reality is that we sell the Saudis anything they want. We build their cities. We sell them buy-to-leave houses in London. We trade them whisky. Then there was the notoriously corrupt Anglo-Saudi al-Yamamah scam, for jets to gather dust in the desert while everyone on both sides walked away rich. The jets that are usable are now bombing archaeological sites in Yemen – to which we carefully take no exception.
I am in favour of free trade. I think it does have a liberalising “nudge effect” in reducing poverty and keeping lines open to those who one day may foster change in a country. That is why sanctioned regimes have proved the most entrenched and unchanging in the world. Trade may involve holding one’s nose, or that cliche of ministers “raising human rights issues” before carrying off billions of someone else’s money.
Why then do we refuse to trade with Russia, Iran, Burma and other states with which we also claim to have “human rights issues”?
In those cases the argument is the precise opposite, that economic sanctions will indeed yield internal change and “bring the regime to its senses”.
The answer is that we have one policy for countries with whom we have “forged close links” in the cause of money, and another for countries against whom politicians choose to pose as tough. This makes no sense. It is hypocrisy.
