‘...in a very tough neighbourhood, Saudi Arabia has been seen as a close ally’
POLITICAL leaders have described the stomach-churning fear they feel before Prime Minister’s Questions but I don’t think this is Theresa May’s least favourite event of the week.
At a time when her authority is under attack, it’s one time in the week when her cabinet team are obliged to file into the Commons and cheer her on.
For around three-quarters of an hour, she stands at the despatch box and parries with the Leader of the Opposition, just as a Prime Minister is supposed to do.
Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t appear to strike fear into her, and the questions from backbench MPs allow her to put her stamp on myriad issues.
But there are rare occasions where something like a flash of genuine unease seems to cross her face. I may be reading too much into it, but sometimes, when questioned about the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, you get the sense that she is troubled both by the scale of the horror unfolding in this country at the tip of the Arabian peninsula – and by the suggestion that Britain has contributed to this tragedy.
Saudi Arabia, a key ally and client of the British arms industry, is a leading player in the conflict there which has left 22.2 million people in need of assistance, according to the United Nations.
UN officials are not known for hyperbole or for being easily shocked. After all, they document disasters on every continent, so it is striking when they describe the events unfolding in Yemen as the “worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time”.
If the disaster truly is “man-made”, a British PM will want to be sure that none of this country’s men (or women) were involved in making it.
Answering that question would involve asking some uncomfortable questions.
Human Rights Watch this month called on the Government to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade claims that “since the bombing of Yemen began in 2015 [the] UK has licensed £4.7bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia”.
If the UK fell out with Saudi Arabia the consequences for British weapons manufacturers could be profound. House of Commons Library research shows how the industry in 2016 had total exports of £5.9bn – around 49% of which went to the Middle East.
It notes that “between 2007 and 2016 the UK was the world’s second largest defence exporter” – but it’s not hard to imagine the UK falling down the rankings if Saudi Arabia and its allies decided to shop elsewhere.
You can see why any British PM might look at the Saudi war in Yemen – a conflict which has led to a child under five dying every 10 minutes of preventable causes, according to the UN – and see a political crisis looming which poses ethical, economic, diplomatic and security dilemmas.
It’s not just that UK jobs in the defence industry are at stake; Mrs May claims that cooperation has “saved the lives of potentially hundreds of people in this country”.
However, the nightmare facing the children of Yemen isn’t the flashpoint that has forced ministers to look again at its relationship with Saudi Arabia
Rather, it’s the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
On Sunday afternoon the UK, France and Germany issued a joint statement condemning the killing “in the strongest possible terms”.
They also – in a sentence that looks as if it was worked on for some time by lawyers and diplomats in the three countries – stated that the “quality and significance of the relationship we have with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia also rests with the respect we have for the norms and values to which the Saudi authorities and us are jointly committed under international law”.
Is there really a deep sharing of “norms and values”?
Amnesty International stated in its 2017-18 report on the kingdom that “security officials continued to torture and otherwise ill-treat detainees with complete impunity”.
The European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights reported that 146 executions were carried out in 2017, and a host of basic human rights that are taken for granted in Britain have yet to appear here.
Nevertheless, in a very tough neighbourhood, Saudi Arabia has been seen as a close ally and Britain has taken pride in providing key pillars of its military infrastructure.
Neither Mrs May or any of her predecessors has considered it in the UK’s interests to alienate an oil-filled kingdom that is a powerful counterweight to Iran and could play a pivotal role in supporting a future peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.
As recently as March, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came to the UK for a three-day visit during which he met the Queen, the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cambridge, the PM and even the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Despite his reputation as a ruthless operator at home, he has inspired hope that he would prove a reformer who would open Saudi’s shutters to allow in, if not winds of change, at least a breeze of modernity.
Britain had so many incentives to hug the Crown Prince close.
Ahead of the visit, the UK Government briefed out that since 2010 Saudi Arabia had been the third fastest growing market for UK exports, and that the average spend for Saudi travellers to the UK was £2,370 per visit.
If the Khashoggi crisis does lead to a chilling of relations, a loss of arms contracts and diminishing trade, ministers and civil servants may look back at decades of efforts to woo the leaders of this state and wonder if all that time, talent and energy could have been invested more profitably and more strategically.
In their private moments, they may wonder if Britain might have done much more to stop the children of Yemen being dragged into a nightmare.