Should We Separate Military From Security? | Anna Stavrianakis

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1:56today. International law, it used to feel like it was important to most politicians. But in the last few years, both in the United Kingdom, but particularly the United States, and all around the world, it just feels like it was a nice-to-have that people used to dress up as a costume, but never really believe in. It feels like our world's becoming an increasingly dangerous place. There's lots of questions around the arms trade, around our complicity and enabling of the act of genocide in Gaza, but also with the Saudis in Yemen. So today's guest is an academic, someone who's been working in this space for over 20 years, who can present and talk about things that are quite radical, but in ways that are also based absolutely in credibility, evidence, and research.

2:40This is my conversation with Anna Stavrianakis.

2:53forward slash bold. Anna, welcome to the show. You work in international relations at the University of Sussex and you're also part of Shadow World, which is Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein's operation. You're here very much today to give your own views though, so that's just the disclaimer there. I think the place I want to start is the conversation that inevitably happens anytime we talk about defence, which is about defence spending. Should we be increasing defence spending? Should we be sticking to a certain percentage of GDP? I know I have my thoughts about this that I often say, but I'd just be really interested to hear how you'd answer those questions?

3:22I think the first thing to say is that we should really be talking about military spending and to be clear about the difference between spending on the military and what we might actually need for defence, because I think that's one of the big things that's really getting lost in the conversation. The second thing is that we seem to have this national obsession with percentages of GDP in ways that I think are quite unhelpful for ordinary people and also quite meaningless without a sense of what it is that we're spending this money on and to what end? What is the threat or the risk to which we are seeking to respond?

3:59So I think it really feels to me that we are stuck at the moment in a slightly hysterical non-debate in which the majority of mainstream political and media commentators are continually haranguing the government for not spending enough on the military. When the UK has the world's sixth largest military budget, military spending is higher than at any point since 1980, which was the height of the Cold War. And this idea of spending an extra 15 billion pounds on the military comes at a really direct cost to other forms of social spending, because there's going to have to be cuts from every single other government department to pay for it, in particular transport and energy.

4:46And we've not really been told to what end. What's it for? You know, you have these, again, sort of faintly hysterical claims that, you know, the Russians are going to be marching down British streets. I'm not sanguine about Russia's role in world politics. I think the question of where diplomacy has gone, what hard power the country might need to protect against what sort of Russian threat, against whom? Are we talking about a threat to the British homeland? Are we talking about supporting the Baltic states? They're quite different things. And the thing that upsets me is that the political and corporate and media elites really are taking the public for a ride.

5:27They're whipping up this fervor. They're whipping up this fear that we're not spending enough on the military, but without explaining why we need it, what exactly is the threat? What is an appropriate response to that? Where does diplomacy fit in? and how are we going to pay for it? And the conversation I've certainly been pushing, but I know lots of other people have too, is around looking at defence. And I really appreciate that distinction between defence and military. You'll hear me using it from now on and everyone will know where I got it from. But actually, we need to also be talking about cyber security, resilience against pandemics, the climate crisis.

6:01Now, I know when I say this to journalists, some of them will say it more politely and some will say it very directly. They'll go, oh, but that's not really military spending, is it? How do we frame this idea of how important is military spending compared to wider issues of security? I think we need to reinterpret what we mean by security. So if you ask ordinary people where their everyday sense of security and insecurity comes from, the first thing that people say is cost of living crisis. Other things they say often includes things like migration, and it includes things like healthcare. So I think this question about who gets to define what counts as security is really important.

6:42We have a culture of deferring to a particular type of expertise, a particular type of military and corporate expertise that is usually older white men with military corporate linkages who are allowed to go on air and say things unchallenged. And that's just taken as read. And there's very little pushback, A, on their own interests, the perspectives that they come from, sometimes the interests that they may benefit from, from increased military spending. But what's really missed out of that is this question about what is it that makes people feel secure or insecure? We're in our third heatwave of this summer alone.

7:22We know that climate change is exacerbating the effects of something like El Nino and of a heatwave. The idea that we're going to take money away from the Department for Energy, the idea that we're going to take money away from transport when after this wet winter, all anybody would talk about was potholes. Those are the things that affect people's everyday life. Now, when you say to people, but you can't have any of those things if Russia invades, or you can't have any of those things if they cut the undersea cables. I think the question is, what has the UK government been doing to try to enable a diplomatic engagement with Russia?

8:03What do you think Russia wants? What do you think hostile actors want? What do you think the people that are labeled as terrorists want? Where is the room for engaging with them and addressing the issues that come between them? And I was asked recently, I think I'm probably paraphrasing on the Today program, how concerned was I about the threat of Russia or Putin? I think I said something like I'm concerned about any threat towards us. I think if I'd been able to carry on, the real question I'd want to ask back though is how do we determine how much of a threat someone like Putin is? Are the things politicians should be calling for?

8:37Is there more transparency that we need? We obviously know that he's invaded Ukraine. I think that's rightly and should be condemned. But how do we determine what he plans to do next? It's very difficult without being in his brain. I think I might start at the other end, which is about trust in public institutions here at home, because there is such scepticism now about what the intelligence services say, what political and military elites say, that even if they were to be right, people would be unlikely to believe them. We know that a lot of countries were sceptical about US intelligence, about what the Russians were doing on the Ukrainian border because of the lessons of Iraq and the false WMD claims.

9:25Those things carry legacies. I think that the broader problem of the breakdown of trust in public institutions, in the media, in politics, in corporate behaviour, means that actually that's where we have to start as a country, that we have to hold those elite actors to account. And they need to start treating us as the electorate with a little bit more respect. Now, that's not a quick fix. And that's one of the really difficult things with military and defence issues is that they are always accompanied by this sense of urgency, by this sense of secrecy, by this sense of, you know, to wage peace, you have to prepare for war.

10:04Now, that last bit is not a premise that I actually agree with, but it's when everything is taken with this sense of urgency, it becomes very difficult for ordinary people to ask the simple question of, well, why? And in terms of the defence spending, NATO comes into the conversation here too. How much leverage do you think we have with NATO in terms of the percentage of GDP? And what do you think the government could be doing in relationship to NATO? I think we have a general and historic problem of claiming to have leverage and then not using it. So I think the immediate answer would be the UK actually has quite little leverage with the United States, which is not a stand-in for NATO.

10:49But in terms of responding to US demands, like we've seen it over controversies with the arms trade, if the United States says that's not going to happen, then the UK just doesn't do it and says it will just be too difficult. But I think if the UK and other NATO allies, members, are serious about it being an alliance rather than simply a tool of US power, then they have to start thinking seriously about how they are going to negotiate relations between them as an alliance. And why do you think this conversation about NATO so often becomes so totemic? As in it's often seen whatever politicians say on it or a commentator say on it that feels like things you're allowed to say and things you're absolutely not allowed to say.

11:36You're not even allowed to discuss it. It's just become one of those things that are so taken for granted that it's impossible to challenge it. And that's, again, part of this broader ecosystem, if you like, of ways that we have of talking about politics, about security, about defence. I think it's a combination of a fairly prosaic fact of it just becomes received wisdom, but it's also deeply entrenched in terms of military interests, military industrial interests. I don't explain support for NATO through the profits of arms companies, but the reverse is true, that it's very handy. It's a way for the organisation of military spending, of the interests of arms companies are very much in favour.

12:26And the arms companies have at national level, at European level, at NATO level, they have really privileged access in ways that just no other sector of industry would have to leaders and decision makers. And so they have between them, they have this kind of shared understanding that is completely agreed that, well, obviously Russia is a threat, obviously China is a threat, and it becomes a completely siloed echo chamber. That's probably too many metaphors, but they're literally not hearing and they're just not interested in hearing any other perspective because it just doesn't suit them. Finally, on this section, I suppose nuclear weapons for me also comes into this box too, of a place where it feels we can really have a sensible conversation.

13:10I think probably the height of this was in, I think it was 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was kind of lambasted because he wouldn't agree to hit the red button. And I thought, how have we got to the circumstance where killing millions of people potentially, as someone seen as they can't be a leader unless they said, oh no, that's something I'd be willing to do at a moment's notice. I agree. I think nuclear weapons, it's a type of weapon that has a symbolic power. It's not above and beyond its actual power as a weapon because it's the most destructive weapon that would literally wipe out billions of people.

13:43It's a very masculine way of thinking about what it means to wield power, that if I've got simply the most powerful weapon in the entire world, and if I press the button, I can wipe everybody out. Donald Trump comparing himself to North Korea and saying, you know, my button's bigger than his. I mean, you don't, you know, we've had decades of feminist critique about that. And, you know, he literally just says it out loud. it's just become entrenched as a normal everyday symbol of what it means to be a great power but the reality is it's really expensive it ties us to the united states we have no the uk has no independent agency on nuclear weapons it lines the pockets of arms companies we've just agreed to buy a whole load more of f-35 fighter aircraft that can be nuclear armed and we have absolutely no meaningful debate about whether nuclear weapons keep us safe or not.

14:35My own view is that they don't keep us safe at all. I think the risk of accident, the risk of miscalculation, I think the human and ecological costs of using them, they blow out of the water any kind of rational cost benefit analysis that you can do. And I think the way that Ukraine has responded to Russian threats of being willing to use nuclear weapons. I think what we've seen happen to Iran, who were in negotiations about their nuclear program and were deemed not to have a nuclear weapon. I think you've also seen countries in the global south see what happened to countries like Libya. The actions of the West are part of what makes other countries want to have nuclear weapons, and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

15:21But we also mustn't forget that the nuclear powers, most of them have signed up to non-proliferation. But what's the UK doing? It's spending more and more and more on nuclear weapons. I just read a book last week. It's a new book called 89 Seconds to Midnight by Carlo Ravelli. And it breaks down the deterrence argument, essentially. It talks about how could it possibly be a deterrent when you only have a few minutes to respond as another country. What is your response to critics or people who support nuclear weapons and say, well, it's a really effective deterrent? I think I would ask questions of an order of magnitude.

15:52The first would be, even if it is an effective deterrent, is it worth it? And I think that's one of the things that really gets lost, that somehow gets dismissed as idealism or being a peacenik. I want to mainstream the idea that it's okay to talk about being unhappy with the prospect of wiping out entire ecosystems and entire human populations. that we've normalized that doesn't speak well of us as generations. So the next layer down is how can it be a meaningful deterrent when it is so bound up with the risk of accident, the lack of knowledge, you can never properly make an informed decision.

16:34And I think, again, that might be this thing about masculinity, this idea that we can be in control, we can make quick decisions, we can respond decisively. the counter to that is, wait, what if we needed more time? What if we needed to have more sources of information? What if we needed to check we weren't making a massive mistake? And so I think those things about how decisions are made are as important as what's actually done. Beautifully answered. It's not your job to answer the kind of attack lines that people use, but they'll often say, well, say that to Finland or say that to Ukraine. Do you kind of have a response for those arguments.

17:08So I agree. We're not Finland. We're not Ukraine. Every country needs to have this argument differently, depending on where they're located geographically, what their history is with their antagonist. I think with the issue of nuclear weapons in particular, I think the sheer scale of the destruction that they wreak and the sheer cost, cost both in terms of financial cost but also in terms of material cost you know one of the things that we never talk about with nuclear weapons is the costs that have already been imposed on the places where we mine for the minerals where the testing is done these tests were done on places that were described as empty places but of course they weren't empty they weren't uninhabited they were inhabited by indigenous populations who were wiped out who were left with cancer rates off the charts, these weapons have a history and they have a history of harm even before they're used, as well as these fairly unimaginable harms after they're used.

18:15So if you were Finland or Estonia or Ukraine, the question of whether nuclear weapons would protect you, I think, I'm not sure that's the right question. One of the things that I'm quite interested in is how debates now in places like Ukraine, Estonia, Finland, on the one hand, you've got the argument, well, obviously, we have to increase our military spending. And in one sense, that seems really obvious. Yeah, Russia is on your border. I mean, it's obviously a direct threat to Ukraine. It's a potential direct threat to places like Estonia, Finland, and so on. But there are also debates within those countries about the opportunity costs of military spending, the corruption involved in military spending, the unevenness of who pays for military spending, because it's not shared evenly.

19:04The costs, the way that the economy runs in any country is set up differently, but military spending often then imposes a bigger burden on those who are lower paid. What's happening to health and education infrastructure? What's happening to care for veterans, both in terms of the money that goes on looking after them, but also on who's picking up the slack. And those are always really gendered. We've got women who are now having to do more work in the home because they're not only having to run the household, raise the family, but they're also caring for veterans. They're caring for injured soldiers or they're surviving without a partner who's died in the war.

19:40So I think even in those countries that really are on the frontline in a way that we in the UK just aren't, there are really serious questions about who wins and loses in an impossible situation. I'm not saying that there is no easy answer for what to do if you're Ukraine or Finland or Estonia. But these things always come with costs and trade-offs. And I think the more voices that can be heard at the table of decision-making, the better. And I've asked you a few questions there about Putin and Ukraine deliberately. It won't have escaped anyone's notice, though, that we've got other threats like Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

20:13How has it come to be that we call our alliance with the United States a special relationship, despite the fact that I think there's not been a moment where they haven't been at war. I can't remember what the stat was, but certainly in the past few decades. I'm hoping that Trump's second presidency might be the death knell for the term, the special relationship. When I've been in closed door meetings with people who operate in government, I think the furthest I could say we've got is this idea that obviously it's far from ideal, but we somehow still have to maintain the relationship with the United States, kind of separately from the figure of Trump, that there will be another president after Trump.

20:54And I find that quite telling because for a lot of people, Trump has taken the United States on a different path, that he has bastardized what America stands for, that he has taken the US down this authoritarian and right-wing route. Now, he has obviously accelerated all of those things. But if you are somebody who has grown up in the global South, the idea that the United States is the beacon of freedom and democracy is a joke, is a dirty, nasty joke. The American support for the dirty wars in Latin America, American support for Israel and its occupation and apartheid of Palestinians. This idea that it's Trump who is signaling the end of this rule-based international order after the Second World War where we all lived in peace and harmony.

21:43I mean, go tell that to the Palestinians. Go tell that to the people who've been on the receiving end of overweening US military might tell that to Afghanistan and Iraq. It's both a moment for us to recognize the violence and the domination that is really quite central to US foreign relations. I mean, also it's domestic relations in terms of US race relations. But we mustn't mistake Trump for the aberration per se. I think there's a much deeper reckoning with what the United States stands for in global politics and through that, who the UK thinks it should be. So I think when I hear the phrase British values, I either cringe or shout.

22:27So what values are they? What British values are what? Material support for a genocide in Gaza, material support for war crimes in Yemen. I don't think that's what people are referring to when they talk about British values. But if we look at the actual history of British foreign relations just in the last decade, the last 25 years, what's the UK been doing? It participated in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. International crimes, not mistakes, not misadventures, crimes. The UK has materially facilitated and diplomatically supported Israel's genocide in Gaza through arms sales, through military collaboration, two-way military collaboration, through diplomatic support.

23:16That's an international crime. The UK has materially supported the Saudi-led coalition's war on Yemen, where we know that there were violations of international law by the coalition. Again, the UK has materially supported crimes. We've got UN experts saying that arms company executives and American and European, including British politicians, risk complicity in international war crimes. If only we could have an international and national legal systems that would hear the evidence fairly. The information is there. So I think when we talk about Britain's role in the world and how we relate to the United States, I think there's a very different story that if we were just honest with ourselves about the historical record of what's happened, I think we'd have a very different conversation.

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25:49I want to come on in a moment to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which listeners might be less familiar with. I imagine almost all listeners will be very familiar with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We've got this interesting moment where we now know that there was a minister in government who was calling it out as war crimes behind the scenes. And we have a prime minister now who's said that they've got it wrong on Gaza. What needs to happen next, though, in terms of the arms trade and in terms of accountability? There needs to be a two-way arms embargo on Israel. So that means no arms exports, no dual-use exports, no export of any technology that can have military or surveillance or coercive application in Israel.

26:29because we know even the UK government has been forced to admit that Israel is not even committed to complying with international humanitarian law. And so if it's not even committed to the idea of complying, that means you can't just send some officers on another training course. You can't just ask them to give some more assurances. The UK hasn't accepted Israeli assurances about how it will use British-made weapons for 20 years. So no more of these half measures. There needs to be a ban on all arms exports to Israel, but there also needs to be a ban on imports from Israel. So Israel has arms factories in the UK.

27:10So Elbit, for example, is Israel's largest arms company and has a series of factories in the UK. And they make weapons and equipment for things like drones, not restricted to those, but things like drone technologies that are used both by the Israeli Air Force, but are also used by the British and American armed forces. And so there are some in the British military who would say, well, we can't possibly do that because our soldiers might end up in harm's way if they haven't got that superior Israeli technology. To which I would say, but if that technology is road tested on civilians, then it's a dirty technology.

27:48And if you're serious about saying that the British military adheres to the highest standards, then you would not use a technology that has come about and been tested by being used on the Palestinians. So I think the first thing would be this two-way arms embargo on Israel. I think the second would be to end all other forms of military collaboration. So for example, we know that the UK has been using RAF Akrotiri, which is in Cyprus. So Cyprus, obviously an independent country, but pockets of Cyprus, which was colonised by the British, pockets of Cyprus are still British territory. And so there are two air bases at Dekelya and at Akrotiri that are RAF bases that have been used by the UK military for conducting surveillance flights.

28:36Now, the government insists that it was just for looking for hostages and that they were somehow able to guarantee that any intelligence that were shared with the Israelis wouldn't be used for targeting, I find that completely implausible. If you share any intelligence with a military that you yourself have said is not committed to complying with international law, why would they not use it? So if you're serious about having got it wrong, which I think is an understatement, it's a crime, but if you're serious about having got it wrong, then you need to stop all forms of military collaboration with Israel.

29:10And that's not just to counter any, oh, why do you have a go at Israel in particular? That's not an anti-Israel point. It's a pro-international law point. It's pro the standards that you claim to set for yourself point. As soon as Israel stops committing war crimes, stops the occupation, stops apartheid, then you can resume military collaboration. I mean, that is kind of pie in the sky thinking because that's a very long-term vision, But it's important to also set out that roadmap of what it would look like for Israel to come back into the international community as a normal member. And where did Palantir sit in this?

29:48In many ways, right at the heart. And Palantir and the other companies like that who make software and technology for things like targeting or for data collecting more generally, they are embedded in a lot of the military systems that Western militaries use. And I think the rise of AI and tech companies is interesting and frightening in a number of respects. One, because it accelerates practices that are already entrained. So, for example, when the Israeli military uses AI systems, So the Lavender, Where's Daddy, these AI systems that enabled them to track and target Palestinians that they thought might could be potentially suspected militants.

30:37It speeds up, it accelerates, and it also widens the number of people that Israel is able to kill. Which isn't to say that Israel wasn't targeting civilians beforehand without the use of AI, but the use of AI amplifies it. Two other things on top of that are that the AI and tech companies love to talk this language of speed and agility. And they position themselves against the big arms companies who they say are lumbering and monolithic. And, you know, why can't we ever get procurement? Right. It's because everything's so bureaucratic. But if you partner with us, we'll be agile and our software and systems will enable you to do everything at speed.

31:15So AI is all about speed. And they talk in ways that are, in one sense, very neoliberal. They're like free industry from the regulation of government. Let's free industry from bureaucracy. But really what they want is a slice of the defence budget. To be able to make these claims about the military necessity of AI gives you a direct tap on the state budget. And those state budgets. That's our money. It's taxpayers' money. So it's enabling a small group of people to get extremely rich very quickly under the guise of democracy, protecting freedom, and so on. The final thing I would say about companies like Palantir is that they also affect us directly here at home.

32:01So there's been some news coverage about Palantir and NHS data. So that ability to collect data to either surveil and track and target people is the same data and management systems that enables you to track people's health data, the progressive stories that it will enable them to identify cures and remedies and things that will help people get better. But it's also a way to understand people's intimate health profiles and to identify and sort them in various ways. That software that is used abroad to kill is also being normalized. Well, it's also being pushed back against in terms of the NHS, which is a way to opening the door to the further corporate profiteering from ordinary people's health.

32:48And actually you've sparked off a thought there. So the only thing we know for definite in terms of Andy Burnham's policy around defence is he wrote an article in the Times talking about the fact that we need more hard power. And he talked about defence being part of industrial strategy. And we often hear this argument about defence being important for jobs. How true is that? I mean, very leading question. How false is it? Is the real? So the argument about military spending and jobs has a power above and beyond how true it is. So military spending is important for some local and regional communities that have been made through political and economic decisions over the decades dependent on military manufacturing.

33:32But overall, at a national level, military spending is not good for the economy. It's not a good generator of jobs. In fact, military spending is one of the worst ways to create jobs. If you want to pour money into some form of public spending in order to create jobs, you'd pour it into education, health and renewables. Because those are things that generate more, better, socially useful jobs. And the irony of what's happening with the defence investment plan is that by cutting the budgets of other departments to pay for the 15 billion increase over four years in defence spending, that will actually, according to some number crunching that the Transition Security Project have done, will end up costing around 10 ,000 jobs.

34:24We're actually going to lose jobs because of increasing defence spending. So this argument about, they call it a defence dividend, if we spend more in the military, we'll get more high-tech STEM jobs. Honestly, this is definitely the academic term for it. It's guff. It's political rhetoric to serve a political objective. One of the things that I think it would be good for people on the left to have a conversation about is how we think about the relationship between state power and corporate power. So people rightly talk about corporate profiteering. Corporate profiteering is definitely a thing.

35:01So we know that arms companies in the UK are increasingly owned by asset management firms. Our tax pounds go into the defence budget, which goes to arms companies, who when they make their profit, it goes into the pockets of the shareholders of State Street, BlackRock and so on. So that money, it's the exact opposite of trickle-down economics. Our tax pounds are going into the pockets of the super uber wealthy rich. And what I felt was particularly egregious about the idea of jobs was from looking at Chem's research from a transition project, it was saying that there was 20 ,000 jobs in energy and transport that we were cutting.

35:38And the government went out and said, we're creating 10 ,000 jobs in defence and didn't make that point that we'd actually be net minus 10 ,000 jobs. because it serves a political purpose. That's what upsets me about the quality of public debate in Britain. I think it's absolutely right to accept that politicians always have an angle. Politicians are going to do politics. But that's why I think it's the responsibility of the media to enable a wider range of views to point out the obvious factual discrepancies in what is being said to enable people to make up their own mind. I think that's the problem that I have with the level of public debate that we have in the UK.

36:22And just to respond to that, I interviewed Ian Dale recently talking about vested interests and he said he felt it was overcooked the idea that politicians take money from corporations or indeed arms trade companies are the example I would give. How much evidence or proof do we have that politicians are often being bought and paid for by these same arms companies? So there's definitely evidence that politicians are taking money from arms companies. There's the register of interests. There's the freebie trips that they run. There's the APPGs that they sponsor. There's the invitations to the arms fairs and so on.

36:55One of the interesting pieces of research that's come out in the last couple of years is from Campaign Against Arms Trade, to take this idea of the revolving door, which listeners and viewers are probably familiar with, this idea that people move from government into arms companies and they move from arms companies into government. And it's a mutually enriching and mutually enforcing relationship. The metaphor that they came up with was the revolving door isn't enough because it still assumes that they're two separate buildings. Actually, it's an open plan office. And I love that metaphor because what it gets at is the idea that there's this totally fake and rubbish partition between them.

37:29You've just got to pop your head over the top, be like, oh, hey, pal, just get me the figures for that thing, will you? And what I think that captures much more evocatively is this idea that the state, government and arms companies are actually really deeply embedded with each other to the point where they might as well be the same thing. Now, in the UK, the arms industry is officially private, right? BAE Systems is a private company. It's not directed by the government. It's not controlled by the government, although the government does hold what's called a golden share in major UK arms companies to prevent a hostile foreign takeover.

38:06But the arms companies, they're not under state control. They're not owned by the state. They're not directed by them. But the arms companies and the political elites share the same assumptions that at the end of the day, military force is the right way to resolve things, that we need to sell a lot of arms to maintain our alliances and to exercise power in the world and to punch above our weight, that we have to procure expensive, wasteful military platforms whilst soldiers and their families don't have proper housing to live in. There's a shared set of assumptions and a shared set of interests that I think the revolving door idea, it can show you how sort of any individual person has personally been enriched by that relationship.

38:50So I would say to someone like Ian Dale, you haven't got it wrong, you haven't even gone far enough that actually the state and arms capital go hand in hand. And that's one of the things that I think the left could have a better conversation about is the interests of the state. I think all too often we reduce things to corporate profiteering, that it's because the corporate sector has captured the state and that they're buying us off. But when we look at in particular things to do with foreign relations, that really underestimates the interests of the British state itself in exercising violence, in exercising dominance.

39:29the UK doesn't support Israel purely because of the Israel lobby or the arms lobby they're quite obviously in descriptive terms there is an Israel lobby they're called things like Labour Friends of Israel they're called things like Conservative Friends of Israel there are arms lobby groups I mean just empirically that's true but they're not the thing that drives it because if you took them away it's not as if the UK state is suddenly going to be pro-Palestinian or suddenly be pacifist because the state itself historically has been interested in power, control and influence. And so that's one of the things that I think if we had a properly functioning education system, a properly functioning media ecosystem, we could have those conversations.

40:13I think there's lots of scope for nuance and disagreement in charting where are we and how did we get here? And I just don't think we have that at the moment. And it's interesting. I don't know if this is your area of expertise, and feel free to say if it's not, but I wonder sometimes about public sentiment and narrative. So, for instance, when the United States and Israel started their illegal war with Iran, I remember on that first day going out on TV and radio and condemning it, but also feeling the bravery of needing to do that in terms of I'm going to be going against now a mainstream narrative that will be whatever's going on, they were asking for this and they deserve this.

40:56And knowing that although the arguments I was making, I was making with moral clarity, otherwise I wouldn't have been making them, knowing that some of the audience wouldn't agree actually. And do you think that's fundamental and intrinsic in people that we want to feel secure? So ideas of fear are very powerful kind of narratives that the media can push. Or do you think it's because of misinformation or probably a combination of both? I think it's a bit of both. Certainly as an educator, I think being able to address students' fears of being called out, of getting things wrong, is really important.

41:33I think if we are to have a politically literate population who can have meaningful debate and disagreement, we have to acknowledge the role of the fear of being wrong as a very powerful inhibitor. I think that fear has been amplified, in some ways manufactured on certain topics. It's manufactured the idea that, oh, you can't say anything. That has been, I think it is manufactured. And that's why I think these things are, again, always down to the question of who benefits, who's making these decisions, how do they stand to benefit either financially or politically from doing so. And so I think, again, that's why it's on the media ecosystem to empower a wider range of voices so that ordinary people can hear that there are multiple views about a particular topic and that we have to navigate a way through those things together.

42:30A while ago, and then I got distracted because you were saying all sorts of interesting things, I said we were going to come back to Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Could you outline what's going on in there and what's our, as in Britain's, complicity in that or active participation? So between 2015 and 2022, a Saudi and Emirati-led coalition got involved in the civil war in Yemen. They internationalized it. And the Saudi and Emirati militaries are supplied with weaponry predominantly from the United States, the United Kingdom and other European states. and they very quickly generated a track record of excessive civilian harm.

43:11So they were doing things like hitting hospitals, hitting schools. There were two incidents in particular that generated controversy. One was an airstrike on a funeral. This was a funeral for a Houthi leader, but there were obviously going to be hundreds of civilians there as well as Houthi members. and there was an airstrike on that funeral, killing civilians as well as fighters. And then another incident that became very controversial was an attack on a school bus of children who were going on a school outing. And when those incidents would happen, the Saudis said, oh, we have a panel called the Joint Incident Assessment Team.

43:53And they always said either the incident didn't happen, somewhat unbelievably, or they said it was okay to do that because there was a Houthi weapons depot nearby, again, ignoring the rules of international law, which are about it's got to be proportionate to the military gain that will be got from it. Or in a very small handful of instances, they said, oh, it was a mistake and they paid compensation to the families, but without actually changing how they were going about things. The United States is far and away Saudi Arabia's largest military supplier, but the UK is very much second and has a long historical relationship with Saudi Arabia selling weapons to it.

44:32Now, UK arms export rules say that if there's a clear risk that weapons sold abroad might be used in a serious violation of international humanitarian law, the laws of war, then the UK government won't issue an arms export license. They won't allow it. And very quickly after 2015, reports started to come in of excessive civilian harm, suggesting that there indeed was this clear risk. But the UK government fell over itself to explain a way to justify, to minimise what the Saudis were doing in order to keep selling weapons. Partly in the interests of the arms companies, but also partly to support Saudi Arabia, who's a partner in the region and so on and so forth.

45:13What then happened was that there was a legal challenge to UK arms sales. And in the first round, the high court found in favour of the government. They said that it's not up to the court to decide whether the decisions made were good ones or not. They just had to be legally defensible. And because the UK has a lot of process and it can point to this department, that department who assessed this information and that information, the judges said that, well, that's the Secretary of State's prerogative. As long as they had some process, it was OK. The legal challenge went to the Court of Appeal, which found actually that the government hadn't assessed whether there was any past pattern of violations.

45:58And so because it hadn't made that assessment, how could it possibly know if there was a future risk? And so there was a temporary suspension of arms exports to Saudi Arabia while the government had to basically go away and retake its decisions and reform its arms export licensing system. But then that's a system of basically marking your own homework. They come back and they say, oh, they weren't patents, they were just isolated incidents, and therefore actually it's fine for us to carry on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. And so now we're kind of back to the beginning. But what was interesting about it was the lengths to which the UK government would go to not only continue arming a military friend that is engaged in war crimes, but also at the same time insisting that the UK has one of the most robust and rigorous arms export control regimes in the world.

46:48That's the mantra. As someone who's been observing UK arms export policy for 20 years, it's literally the first and only thing they say. They say it in response to media stories. They say it in response to parliamentary questions. They say it in response to any form of criticism. The UK has one of the world's most robust arms export control regimes in the world. The war in Yemen, which was relatively invisible in public debate, started to chip away at that because the legal case, some negative media coverage forced the government to spend time and resources justifying itself. Fast forwards to the genocide in Gaza and the wheels just come off for the government because it's laughable.

47:30For the UK government to make that statement about having a robust control regime is laughable. They still try to do it because they make great play of this partial suspension of arms exports to Israel. Again, as someone who's been observing what the government does for 20 years. This is straight out of the playbook. So what do you do? You conduct a review because hopefully by the time you've conducted the review, people will have stopped listening. But with the genocide, people weren't stopping listening. It got to the point where the UK government in September 2024 was forced to admit that Israel wasn't even committed to complying with international law.

48:07That by definition then means that its arms export rules have to kick in Because if Israel isn't even committed to complying, then there's obviously a risk that they're going to be misused. Now, that admission in September 2024 was both extremely significant because it was the first time the government has made that admission, but also a fig leaf. Because what they did off the back of that was said, OK, we'll suspend 10 % of arms export licenses for Israel for weapons that are for direct use in Gaza. that is the most mealy-mouthed minimal thing that the government could have done to even remotely have stuck to the letter let alone the spirit of its own rules because if Israel is not even committed to complying with international law then to my mind you should then be an embargo territory because what is Israel doing in the West Bank fine the genocide is happening most directly in Gaza but weapons are still being used in the West Bank they're still being used to enforce the illegal occupation of land.

49:12They're still being used to enforce apartheid. The government also didn't suspend licenses for trainer aircraft because they said, well, they're not using the trainer aircraft to bomb Gaza. No, but they're using the trainer aircraft to train the pilots who will go into the fighter jets to bomb Gaza. And the government says, oh, but the training cycles are too long. If we suspended parts for the trainer aircraft, The genocide might be over by the time those pilots coming through the training system go on to graduate to fly the actual F-15s and F-35s and so on. But we also know from Israeli news reports that actually that training cycle is pretty quick.

49:48So we know that since, I think it's since September 2024, over 100 pilots have graduated from training on a trainer aircraft that is supplied, we know with parts from a factory in Wolverhampton, the Moog factory, supplied with parts from there. over 100 pilots have gone on to active service to bomb Gaza. And then there's the biggest loophole caveat of all, which is that whilst direct exports to Israel of weapons that might be used in direct combat in Gaza are no longer permitted, the export of parts to the United States and to the global pool of spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, which is one of the jets that Israel is using to bomb Gaza, they're exempt.

50:33And the reason the government gave was because the risks to, no kidding, I quote, international peace and security, which is a code for Ukraine, overrode the actual and existing risk of harm to Palestinians. And that, it sort of goes back to your question about NATO. The reason the UK felt that it couldn't do anything more about that global supply chain issue was, I'm not sure they even really tried, but was basically the United States would say no. Because once parts go into that spare parts pool, they become US property. So the UK loses all leverage. We don't need to create a false artificial optimistic ending.

51:18It just feels like that's very, very stark. I'm genuinely interested in, do you feel like these things are going to get better because more people are paying attention and more people are going to say no? I'm really glad you asked that because on the one hand, it feels like everything is getting worse. On the other hand, personal anecdote, I have never had more people be interested in the arms trade. And I think something is shifting. And I think when you look at the range of activism that is happening from labour organising in trade unions, from strategic litigation, legal cases that are being brought against arms companies and against governments, to direct action against arms companies, to the knock-on effect of the government's, frankly, ludicrous prescription of Palestine action as a terrorist organisation.

52:11We now have hundreds of people who've been arrested, who've done civil disobedience, to the point where they've now changed the demographic figures of who is a terrorist. The most dangerous person is now a white 60-year-old woman in the UK, according to the statistics. I think those things have a reverberating effect. And when people ask me, give me a story of hope, the first thing I remind them is that it's not a level playing field. we whoever we are either the population the activists people on the left people of conscience you know i like to cast that net wide we are up against state and corporate interests that are deeply invested in violence we're not supposed to win and i think when we shift our understanding of what it means to win without being naive or without being idealistic, but being realistic about history and about politics and economics.

53:10I think there are real grounds for hope. When we look at the trade unionists, when we look at the strategic litigators, when we look at these mostly young people taking direct action to stop the arms trade at its source, I think there are reasons for hope. Really felt that thing to have you lay out in such credible and resourced ways how desperate everything is. But then at the very end of the podcast to say, actually, when we reframe what challenging back or what winning looks like, then actually we can do this. If people want to find out more about you or more about your work, how might they find out?

53:43So I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter, and I'm on Instagram as the Arms Trade Prof. And you can find my profile on the University of Sussex and Shadow World Investigations websites. Thank you so much, Anna. Thanks for having me. This episode was brought to you by CrowdFunder. What's your bold idea? Start it at crowdfunder.co.uk forward slash bold.

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