Johnson defends arms sales to Saudi Arabia

BORIS Johnson has claimed other Western countries would “happily supply arms” to Saudi Arabia without the same protections should Britain suspend its sales.

The Foreign Secretary warned that suspending arms sales would “at a stroke” eliminate Britain’s diplomatic influence on the Yemen conflict, in which the Saudi Arabian-led coalition has been accused of war crimes.

Labour and the SNP have called for an independent UN-led investigation into the allegations, while there have also been calls for Britain to suspend arms sales to Saudi.

Speaking in an opposition day debate on the crisis in Yemen, Mr Johnson said it was right that Saudi Arabia did its own investigation first as he resisted calls to suspend arms sales. He told the Commons: “To those who say, as apparently they now do in this motion, that we should simply disregard those legal procedures, be in no doubt that we would be vacating a space that would rapidly be filled by other Western countries who would happily supply arms with nothing like the same compunctions or criteria or respect for humanitarian law.

“And more importantly, we would at a stroke eliminate this country’s positive ability to exercise our moderating, diplomatic and political influence on a crisis where there are massive UK interests at stake.”

The SNP’s Tasmina AhmedSheikh said: “I simply cannot understand, though, why the Government is so averse to an independent UN-led inquiry into what is happening.” IT is The Herald’s policy to correct errors as soon as we can and all corrections and clarifications will usually appear on this page.

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