The Dark Reality of India depicted in the film Jawan

 

The Shias are winning in the Middle East – and it's all thanks to Russia

Robert Fisk in The Independent

The Shias are winning. Two pictures prove it. The US-Iranian photo op that followed the signing of the nuclear deal with Iran last year and the footage just released – by the Russian defence ministry, no less – showing Moscow’s Tupolev Tu-22M3 bombers flying out of the Iranian air base at Hamadan and bombing the enemies of Shia Iran and of the Shia (Alawite) regime of Syria and of the Shia Hezbollah.

And what can the Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia match against this? Only its wretched war to kill the miserable Shia Houthis of Yemen – with British arms.

Poor, luckless Turkey — whose Sultan Erdogan makes Theresa May’s political U-turns look like a straight path – is at the centre of this realignment. Having shot down a Russian jet and lost much of his Russian tourist trade, the Turkish president was quickly off to St Petersburg to proclaim his undying friendship for Tsar Vladimir. The price? An offer from Erdogan to stage Russian-Turkish “joint operations” against the Sunni enemies of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Turkey is now in the odd position of assisting US jets to bomb Isis while ready to help Russian jets do exactly the same.

And Jabhat al-Nusrah? Let’s remember the story so far. Al-Qaeda, the creature of the almost forgotten Osama bin Laden, sprang up in both Iraq and Syria where it changed its name to the Nusrah Front and then, just a few days ago, to “Fatah al-Sham”. Sometimes allied to Isis, sometimes at war with Isis, the Qatari-funded legion is now the pre-eminent guerrilla army in Syria – far eclipsing the black-costumed lads of Raqqa whose gruesome head-chopping videos have awed the West in direct proportion to their military defeats. We are still obsessed with Isis and its genocidal creed. We are not paying nearly enough attention to Nusrah.

But the Russians are. That’s why they are sprinkling their bombs across eastern Aleppo and Idlib province. Nusrah forces hold almost all the rebel areas of Syria’s second city and much of the province. It was Nusrah that fought back against its own encirclement by the Syrian regime in Aleppo. The regime kicked Isis out of Palmyra in a short and bloody battle in which Syrian soldiers, most of whom are in fact Sunnis, died by the dozen after stepping on hidden land mines.

But Nusrah is a more powerful enemy, partly because it has more Syrians among its ranks than Isis. It’s one thing to be told that your country is to be ‘liberated’ by a Sunni Syrian outfit, quite another to be instructed by the purists of Isis that your future is in the hands of Sunni Chechens, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Saudis, Qataris, Egyptians, Turks, Frenchmen, Belgians, Kosovars and British. Isis has Sunni Saudi interests (and money) behind it. Nusrah has Sunni Qatar.

As for Turkey – Sunni as well, of course, but not Arab – it’s now being squeezed between giants, the fate of all arms smuggling nations as Pakistan learned to its cost. Not only has it been pushed into joining Moscow as well as the US in waging war on Isis, it’s being politically attacked from within Germany, where a leaked state intelligence summary – part of a reply to a parliamentary question by the interior ministry – speaks of Turkey as a “central platform for Islamist and other terrorist organisations”. State interior secretary Ole Schroder’s remarks, understandably stamped “confidential”, are flawed since he lumps Erdogan’s support for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas with armed Islamist groups in Syria.

The Sunni Brotherhood, prior to its savaging by Egypt’s President-Field Marshal al-Sissi, did indeed give verbal approval to Assad’s Sunni armed opponents in Syria, and Sunni Hamas operatives in Gaza must have cooperated with Isis in its struggle against Sissi’s army in Sinai. But to suggest that Turkey is in some way organising this odd triumvirate is going too far. To claim that “the countless expressions of solidarity and supportive actions of the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) and President Erdogan” for the three “underline their ideological [affinity] to their Muslim brothers” is going too far. “Ideological affinity” should not provide a building block for intelligence reports, but the damage was done. In the report, the Turkish president’s name was written ERDOGAN, in full capital letters.

Someone in the German intelligence service – which regularly acts as a negotiator between Israel and the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon, usually to exchange bodies between the two sides – obviously decided that its erring Sunni NATO partner in Ankara should get fingered in the infamous “war on terror” in which we are all supposed to be participants. So Erdogan offers help to Russia in the anti-Isis war, continues to give the US airbases in Turkey – and gets dissed by the German federal interior ministry, all at the same time. And the only Muslim state in Nato, which just happens to be Sunni Muslim, is now being wrapped up in the Sunni-Shia war. What future Turkey?

Well, we better not write it off. Just as Erdogan has become pals with Putin, the Turkish and Iranian foreign ministers have been embracing in Ankara with many a promise that their own talks will produce new alliances. Russia-Turkey-Iran. In the Middle East, it’s widely believed that Tehran as well as Moscow tipped Erdogan off about the impending coup. And Erdogan himself has spoken of his emotion when Putin called after the coup was crushed to express his support.

The mortar to build this triple alliance could well turn out to be the Kurds. Neither Russia nor Iran want independent Kurdish states – Putin doesn’t like small minorities in nation-states and Iran’s unity depends on the compliance of its own Kurdish people. Neither are going to protect the Kurds of Syria – loyal foot-soldiers of the Americans right now – in a “new” Syria. Erdogan wants to see them crushed along with the dreams of a “Kurdistan” in south-east Turkey.

Any restored Syrian state will insist on national unity. When Assad praised the Kurds of Kobane for their resistance at the start of the war, he called their town by its Arab name of Ein al-Arab.

It is, of course, a paradox to talk of the Middle East’s agony as part of an inter-Muslim war when one side talks of its enemies as terrorists and the other calls its antagonists apostates. Arab Muslims do not deserve to have their religious division held out by Westerners as a cause of war.

But Saudis and Qataris have a lot to answer for. It is they who are supporting the insurgents in Syria. Syria – dictatorial regime though it is – is not supporting any revolutions in Riyadh or Doha. The Sunni Gulf Arabs gave their backing to the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan, just as they favour Sunni Isis and Sunni Nusrah in Syria. Russia and America are aligned against both and growing closer in their own weird cooperation. And for the first time in history, the Shia Iranians have both the Russians and the Americans on their side – and Turkey tagging along.

Chemical export licences for Syria – just another UK deal with a dictator

Britain is in no position to lecture on human rights when Vince Cable's authorisation follows a long history of arms sales

• 
• • Nick Dearden
  • theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013 15.30 BST

Defence Systems and Equipment International arms fair at the Excel Centre, Docklands, London. Photograph: Rex Features

The latest revelations about the authorisation of chemical exports to Syria proves that British ministers should avoid two things – lecturing the public on personal morality and lecturing the world on human rights. Both will come back to bite them. While Nick Clegg commented on the pages of the Guardian earlier this year that the UK was a "beacon for human rights", his business secretary was authorising companies to sell chemicals capable of being used to make nerve gas to a country in the middle of a civil war.

Clegg almost certainly knew nothing about the potential sales, and indeed the sales themselves might have been quite innocent, but our history should tell us that precaution is the best principle. If the companies had got their act together to ship the goods to Syria, they would probably have received government support through a unit of Cable's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, called UK Export Finance. This unit has sold weapons to some of the worst dictators of the past 40 years – and had a role to play in the most serious chemical weapons abuses since the Vietnam war.

Jubilee Debt Campaign has released new information which confirms that the British government effectively armed both sides during the Iran-Iraq war – one of the Middle East's most bloody conflicts.

Britain had been happily selling weapons to Saddam Hussein, our ally during his war against the new Islamic Republic, in the early 1980s. The UK government also allowed the sale of the goods needed to make a chemical plant which the US later claimed was essential to Saddam's chemical weapons arsenal, with the full knowledge that the plant was likely to be used to produce nerve gas. Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and against civilians within his own country in 1988, killing tens of thousands.

This is old news, but we now also know that until the fall of the Shah in 1979, Britain also sold Rapier missiles and Chieftain tanks to Iran's autocratic regime – weapons that were undoubtedly also used in the Iran-Iraq war.

Both sets of arms were effectively paid for by the British taxpayer, as both Iraq and Iran defaulted on the loans given by Britain, and they became part of Iraq and Iran's debt. Though Iran still "owes" £28m to Britain, plus an undisclosed amount of interest, this didn't stop Britain guaranteeing £178m of loans to Iran to buy British exports for gas and oil developments in the mid 2000s, thus breaking its own rules.

This new information adds to a litany of such cases – supporting arms sales to the brutal General Suharto of Indonesia, both Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt and military juntas in Ecuador and Argentina, the latter using its British weapons to invade the Falkland Islands.

In opposition, Cable railed against the use of taxpayer money to support such sales, and his party promised to audit and cancel these debts and stop the sales. In power, he behaves the same way as his predecessors. While regularly claiming such deals are a "thing of the past", Cable has signed off £2bn of loans to the dictatorship in Oman to buy British Typhoon fighter aircraft, the sale of a hovercraft to the highly indebted Pakistan navy and an iron ore mine in Sierra Leone which has not even been assessed for its human rights impact.

Cable has ripped up Liberal Democrat policy to keep on supporting the sale of dangerous goods. He continues to insist on the repayment of debts run up by the UK selling weapons to now deposed dictators. Far from being a beacon for human rights, the UK has little legitimacy around the world when it comes to taking sides in wars – a fact that parliament recognised in its welcome vote last Thursday.

Next week, Britain's true role in the world will be on show in Docklands – when the world's "leading" military sales event meets in London. As war and the aftermath of war still rage across the Middle East, one way we as citizens improve our country's damaged reputation is to protest against such an appalling expression of Britain's role in the world. Authorising the export of chemicals to Syria is simply part of a long trend of support for dangerous technology which undermines this country's legitimacy when it comes to speaking about human rights.

The extraordinary range of people using offshore tax evasion hideaways

Records represent the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organisation

• Gerard Ryle
• The Guardian, Thursday 4 April 2013

The British Virgin Islands, the world's leading offshore haven. Photograph: Lars Ruecker/Getty Images/Flickr RF

The secret records obtained by ICIJ lay bare an extraordinary range of people using offshore hideaways.

They include US dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families of despots, Wall Street swindlers, eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian executives, international arms dealers and a company alleged to be a front for Iran's nuclear-development programme.

The leaks illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has aggressively spread around the globe. The records detail offshore holdings in more than 170 territories; this represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organisation.

To analyse it, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from the Guardian and the BBC in the UK, Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other international media partners.

Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used both hi-tech data crunching and traditional reporting to sift through emails and account ledgers covering nearly 30 years.

"I've never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed," said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor at Queen's University in Canada, during an interview with CBC.

Offshore's defenders say that most users are legitimate. Offshore centres, they say, allow people to diversify investments, create international ventures and do business in entrepreneur-friendly zones without red tape.

"Everything is much more geared toward business," David Marchant, publisher of OffshoreAlert, an online journal, said. "If you're dishonest, you can take advantage of that in a bad way. But if you're honest you can take advantage of that in a good way"

The vast tide of offshore money can disrupt economies. Greece's fiscal disaster was exacerbated by offshore tax cheating and in the Cyprus crisis, local banks' assets were inflated by waves of cash from Russia.

ICIJ's 15-month investigation found that, alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world appears to allow fraud, tax-dodging and political corruption to thrive.

Anti-corruption campaigners argue that offshore secrecy forces citizens to pay higher taxes to make up for vanishing revenues, while anonymity makes it difficult to track the flow of money. A study by James S Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company, estimates that wealthy individuals have $21-$32tn tucked away in offshore havens – roughly equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined. The offshore world is growing, said Henry, who is a board member of the Tax Justice Network, an advocacy group critical of offshore havens.

Much of ICIJ's analysis focused on the work of two major offshore incorporation firms, Portcullis TrustNet and Commonwealth Trust Limited (CTL). Trustnet was founded by Mike Mitchell, a New Zealand lawyer who worked as the Cook Islands' solicitor general in the early 1980s, built up offshore business in Hong Kong, and sold out in 2004 to Singapore lawyer David Chong, as Singapore became a favoured financial hideaway for clients from Asia.

Canadian businessman Tom Ward and Texan Scott Wilson set up CTL in 1994 in the British Virgin Islands. They specialised in attracting Russian and east European money. Regulators found that CTL repeatedly violated the islands' anti-money-laundering laws between 2003 and 2008 by failing to check out its clients. "This particular firm had systemic money-laundering issues," a BVI financial services commission official said last year.

Ward said CTL's vetting procedures had been consistent with local standards, but that no amount of screening could ensure that firms won't be "duped by dishonest clients".

In relation to the second firm, Trustnet, ICIJ identified 30 of their US clients accused in lawsuits or criminal cases of fraud, money laundering or other serious financial misconduct. TrustNet declined to answer our questions.

In the 1990s, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development began pressuring offshore centres to reduce secrecy, but the effort ebbed in the 2000s as the Bush administration withdrew support, according to Robert Goulder, former editor-in-chief of Tax Notes International. A second "great crusade", Goulder writes, began when US authorities took on UBS, forcing the Swiss bank to pay $780m in 2009 to settle allegations that it had helped Americans dodge taxes. David Cameron has now vowed to use his leadership of the G8 to help crack down on tax evasion.

But despite the new efforts, offshore remains a "zone of impunity", says Jack Blum, a specialist lawyer and former US Senate investigator: "There's been some progress, but there's a bloody long way to go."

Gerard Ryle is director of the ICIJ, a Washington-based independent network of reporters. See icij.org
------

 How many UK companies are run from overseas havens?

More than 175,000 UK companies have been controlled from countries linked by campaigners to offshore secrecy – but where has the most?

Tortola, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, sometimes referred to as the offshore capital of the world. 17,000 UK companies have been controlled from the BVI. Photograph: Neil Rabinowitz/Neil Rabinowitz/CORBIS

Among the latest revelations from the Guardian's Offshore Secrets series is a sense of how many of the three million companies registered at Companies House are controlled from offshore territories.

A first sense of the scale of such offshore control of British businesses is given in the Guardian's new story today:

More than 175,000 UK-registered companies have used directors giving addresses in offshore jurisdictions, the Guardian has established. This raises fresh concerns about the scale of Britain's involvement in offshore secrecy arrangements.

Data obtained from the corporate information service Duedil reveals 177,020 companies have listed directors in jurisdictions such as the Channel Islands, British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Dubai and the Seychelles.

More than 60,000 of those companies are listed as currently active on Companies House, the official register of UK businesses.

Having directors in offshore jurisdictions does not indicate a company is doing anything illegal, or that a director is necessarily a sham. British expats who retain directorships of their business would feature in this data, as do "personal services companies" based in the Isle of Man, which help self-employed people incorporate themselves as a limited company.

What's also telling, however, is breakdown of which territories have the most directors of UK companies, posted below.

The scale of company ownership in some of these territories is huge: in the British Virgin Islands there are three UK companies for every four citizens. In the Isle of Man there is a UK company registration for every two people.

In Sark the situation is still more stark: counting now defunct companies, there are 24 UK companies registered on the island for every person there.

Below, using data gathered for the Guardian by DueDil, we've listed the number of companies registered in 13 different territories.

We've split the list in two different ways: companies listed as 'active' on Companies House (the official UK register) versus 'inactive', and also split between directorships which are still current and ones which have been resigned.

If you've got any comments or thoughts on these activities, leave a comment on our main news story today, or (if you'd prefer to comment confidentially), email me at james.ball@guardian.co.uk.

UK companies with offshore directors

Territory	Active companies	Inactive companies	Current directorships	Former directorships
Isle of Man	22366	24795	13757	33973
Guernsey	12024	11588	6799	17079
Cyprus	7609	18836	4082	22484
Jersey	8685	10818	3108	16560
Dubai	4937	6164	2611	8573
BVI	5329	12630	1943	16169
Seychelles	2693	4322	1773	5258
St Kitts and Nevis	1700	4460	832	5343
Mauritius	715	980	445	1260
Cayman Islands	558	414	330	644
Sark	1851	12923	209	14632
Vanuatu	136	246	92	292
Turks and Caicos	55	186	27	214
Total	68658	108362	36008	142481

Britain And India: A Convenient Scapegoat In A Time Of Economic Crisis

By Colin Todhunter



07 November, 2012

Countercurrents.org



India is likely to be told this week that Britain plans to slash its 280 million pounds a year aid to it following growing domestic pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to stop funding emerging economic powers such as India at a time when Britain is in serious economic crisis.



International Development Secretary Justine Greening during her visit to New Delhi is expected to discuss a timetable for winding down British aid commitment to India. She is expected to make it clear that the UK’s commitment to India will change radically at the end of the current eight-year 1.6 billion pound programme which lasts until 2015.



The idea to cut aid has been building for some years and has received added impetus from recent events. In 2011, Cameron led one of the largest-ever business delegations to India, comprising six cabinet ministers and around 60 business leaders. He lobbied heavily in favour of supplying India with the British built Eurofighter. But in 2012 as Britain seemed destined to lose the contract for 126 fighter jets, the knives came out in Britain – both for Cameron and for India too.



Instead of the British media attacking the sordid nature of the heavily taxpayer-subsidised arms industry and the way its massive profits are made by stoking tensions and war, it saw better mileage from cashing in on fear mongering by telling the public that the apparent loss of the contract to the French company Dassault, which makes the Rafale fighter, could jeopardise thousands of British jobs. It would have been much more constructive for the media to have regarded the loss any jobs in the arms sector as an opportunity to reinvest arms industry subsidies in more socially useful ventures, such as renewable energy.



As a backlash over India’s decision, however, sections of the public and various self-appointed opinion leaders took it on themselves to also apportion blame to India by linking the loss of the contract to the issue of aid. They were quick to point out that the British Government’s aid package is around 15 times larger than what France sent to India in 2009.



They asked, “Where is the trade dividend?” – especially in light of former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell saying that the aid relationship with India is very important and its focus included seeking to sell Typhoon jets. He made it clear that aid was linked to trade. In order to get the government off the hook, this stance (and claims that aid was being used as a bribe) was soon being strenuously denied by various members of the government in light of the French seemingly bagging the prize.



Public pressure has subsequently grown over sending aid to India, especially at a time when massive public sector job losses and slashes to services are being made in Britain. The issue has certainly struck a chord with sections of the British public.



Egged on by politicians and the media, sections of the public began to ask why should the overburdened British taxpayer give aid to a country with 300 billion dollars worth of foreign reserves and year on year growth that has been over 8.5 per cent? It did also not go unnoticed that India has funds not just for its own aid and space programmes, but for nuclear weapons too, while Britain itself has no space programme and has been debating scaling down its own nuclear weapons systems.



Many in Britain also questioned why aid should be given to India, which has an economy on course to overtake Britain’s in the next ten years, and that, according to financial advisers Merrill Lynch, has 153,000 dollar-millionaires – a number that grew by 20 per cent in just one year, compared with Britain’s own increase of less than one per cent.



The argument proceeded along the lines that India might do better to scrap its space programme, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and its huge aircraft buying programme worth billions and redirect all those funds to invest in improving the plight of the poor.



And then there was the matter of giving money to India being a waste anyhow, seeing that rich Indians and politicians have salted away billions in Swiss bank accounts since independence. The accusation is that much aid money to India is thus chewed up by corruption and fraud. The lavish spending of India’s rich has been targeted too, with much focus on multi-storey Mumbai penthouses, Formula 1 and the like.



Cut through the tabloid-type hysteria and the media’s agenda, and there is indeed a certain logic behind many such criticisms. But what has often been ignored during this tirade against India is that, as a strategy for poverty alleviation and within the broader context, the impact of aid is minimal at the very best.



There is no denying that, despite India’s rising power on the world stage, poverty remains rife and the country is home to a third of the world’s malnourished children. India’s annual average income per person is around 2.5 per cent of Britain’s.



However, much of the hardships are today fuelled by rising inequality brought about by neoliberal economic policies. Inequality in India has increased significantly since it opened up its economy in the early 1990s (1). India’s rich elites have benefited enormously, and this has often been at the expense of the poor. Look no further than the real estate speculators and the land grabs from the poor, the rising obesity levels and the persistent malnourishment, the corporate rich and the theft of natural resources in the tribal areas and the high GDP and the low poverty alleviation statistics. Aid is like using a plaster to stem a burst dam.



Regardless of whether India even wants this relatively small sum of aid in the first place from it’s former colonial oppressor, which so many Indian politicians have openly stated it patently does not, it’s a pity that sections of the British media and certain politicians do not highlight the fact that the sum given by Britain to India is anyhow only less than one per cent of Britain’s debts – hardly a drain on the British economy as it is too often made out to be. It’s also a pity that they don’t focus more on the real drain placed on the British economy via the hundreds of billions that are being picked from the pockets of ordinary Brits via bank bail outs, corporate subsidies and fraud and tax avoidance and evasion by the rich.



According to economics professor John Foster (2), the aggregate wealth of Britain’s richest 1,000 people was in 2010 some 333 billion pounds. In 2010, Britain’s aggregate national debt was half that amount. In 2009, the top 1,000 increased their wealth by a third, meaning that the amount they actually increased their wealth by in just one year was half of the national debt!



But that is a taboo issue. It’s not up for public debate or scrutiny. It’s not to be questioned. The dirty machinations of capitalism are to be hidden away – preferably in an offshore bank account.



Much easier to point the finger at India in order to divert attention from the predatory capitalism that continues to fuel Britain’s economic woes and exacerbate poverty in India. Much easier to use aid to India as a convenient whipping boy.



But can we expect much better? Not really. The British press, politicians and establishment mouthpieces have been using welfare provision within Britain itself as a convenient scapegoat for capitalism’s failings for decades!

The UK's Protection racket in the Middle East

The Gulf protection racket is corrupt and dangerous folly

Sooner or later the Arab despots David Cameron is selling arms to will fall, and the states that backed them will pay the price

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 6 November 2012 22.20 GMT

Illustration by Helen Wakefield

On the nauseating political doublespeak scale, David Cameron's claim to "support the Arab spring" on a trip to sell weapons to Gulf dictators this week hit a new low. No stern demands for free elections from the autocrats of Arabia – or calls for respect for human rights routinely dished out even to major powers like Russia and China.

As the kings and emirs crack down on democratic protest, the prime minister assured them of his "respect and friendship". Different countries, he explained soothingly in Abu Dhabi, needed "different paths, different timetables" on the road to reform: countries that were western allies, spent billions on British arms and sat on some of the world's largest oil reserves in particular, he might have added by way of explanation.

Cameron went to the Gulf as a salesman for BAE Systems – the private arms corporation that makes Typhoon jets – drumming up business from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman, as well as smoothing ruffled feathers over British and European parliamentary criticism of their human rights records on behalf of BP and other companies.

No wonder the prime minister restricted media coverage of the jaunt. But, following hard on the heels of a similar trip by the French president, the western message to the monarchies was clear enough: Arab revolution or not, it's business as usual with Gulf despots.

The spread of protest across the Arab world has given these visits added urgency. A year ago, in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, it seemed the Gulf regimes and their western backers had headed off revolt by crushing it in Bahrain, buying it off in Saudi Arabia, and attempting to hijack it in Libya and then Syria – while successfully playing the anti-Shia sectarian card.

But popular unrest has now reached the shores of the Gulf. In Kuwait, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including Islamists, liberals and nationalists, have faced barrages of teargas and stun grenades as they protest against a rigged election law, while all gatherings of more than 20 have been banned.

After 18 months of violent suppression of the opposition in Bahrain, armed by Britain and America, the regime has outlawed all anti-government demonstrations. In western-embraced Saudi Arabia, protests have been brutally repressed, as thousands are held without charge or proper trial.

Meanwhile, scores have been jailed in the UAE for campaigning for democratic reform, and in Britain's favourite Arab police state of Jordan, protests have mushroomed against a Kuwaiti-style electoral stitchup. London, Paris and Washington all express concern – but arm and back the autocrats.

Cameron insists they need weapons to defend themselves. When it comes to the small arms and equipment Britain and the US supply to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Gulf states, he must mean from their own people. But if he's talking about fighter jets, they're not really about defence at all.

This is effectively a mafia-style protection racket, in which Gulf regimes use oil wealth their families have commandeered to buy equipment from western firms they will never use. The companies pay huge kickbacks to the relevant princelings, while a revolving door of political corruption provides lucrative employment for former defence ministers, officials and generals with the arms corporations they secured contracts for in office.

Naturally, western leaders and Arab autocrats claim the Gulf states are threatened by Iran. In reality, that would only be a risk if the US or Israel attacked Iran – and in that case, it would be the US and its allies, not the regimes' forces, that would be defending them. Hypocrisy doesn't begin to describe this relationship, which has long embedded corruption in a web of political, commercial and intelligence links at the heart of British public life.

But support for the Gulf dictatorships – colonial-era feudal confections built on heavily exploited foreign workforces – is central to western control of the Middle East and its energy resources. That's why the US has major military bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Oman and Bahrain.

The danger now is of escalating military buildup against Iran and intervention in the popular upheavals that have been unleashed across the region. Both the US and Britain have sent troops to Jordan in recent months to bolster the tottering regime and increase leverage in the Syrian civil war. Cameron held talks with emirates leaders this week about setting up a permanent British military airbase in the UAE.

The prime minister defended arms sales to dictators on the basis of 300,000 jobs in Britain's "defence industries". Those numbers are inflated and in any case heavily reliant on government subsidy. But there's also no doubt that British manufacturing is over-dependent on the arms industry and some of that support could usefully be diverted to, say, renewable technologies.

But even if morality and corruption are dismissed as side issues, the likelihood is that, sooner or later, these autocrats will fall – as did the Shah's regime in Iran, on which so many British and US arms contracts depended at the time. Without western support, they would have certainly been toppled already. As Rached Ghannouchi, the Tunisian leader whose democratic Islamist movement was swept to power in elections last year, predicted: "Next year it will be the turn of monarchies." When that happens, the western world risks a new backlash from its leaders' corrupt folly.

The Muck and the Top Brass

MoD lobbying claims: 

The fact that some of Britain’s leading ex-servicemen were prepared to lobby the Ministry of Defence on behalf of foreign arms companies is just the latest example of the cosy but compromising revolving door between Whitehall and the private sector, says Andrew Gilligan.

By Andrew Gilligan

6:45AM BST 15 Oct 2012

199 Comments

For the British people, the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance is a chance to honour the men and women killed and maimed in our name. For the Legion’s president, Lieutenant-General Sir John Kiszely, however, it is also “a tremendous networking opportunity” which “commercial people can get in on”.

The general’s tongue had been loosened by a £110,000 offer from South Korean arms dealers, who wanted his help selling their products to the Ministry of Defence. His Legion role, he told them, was “extremely useful for all these contacts”. As he explained: “If I tried to book in… to have a meeting on behalf of a company, I probably wouldn’t get past the door.” But “with Andrew Robathan [the Armed Forces minister], I would get into his office by saying, 'As president of the British Legion, you know, it’s time’… and that’s when you sow the seed.”

To the same generous Koreans, Admiral Sir Trevor Soar, ex-Commander-in-Chief Fleet and self-proclaimed “MoD warrior”, offered to “target” his former subordinates and “get them interested”. Sir Trevor, who only left the Navy this year, is still covered by the two-year lobbying ban commonly imposed on retired officers, but told his would-be clients that the restriction had “no legality” and he would “just basically ignore it”.

General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the Army during the Iraq War, offered to “dangle a fly in the waters” on the Koreans’ behalf. General Lord Dannatt, another ex-chief of the general staff and former adviser to David Cameron, boasted about how he’d avoid anti-lobbying rules by “targeting” an old school contemporary who happens to be the MoD’s permanent secretary. For a “reasonable” £100,000 for 24 days’ work a year, he’d set up lunch with the chief of defence procurement, Bernard Gray. Air Chief Marshal Lord Stirrup, former chief of the defence staff, told the South Koreans he would “grill” former colleagues and ministers on their behalf over private dinners at his house in London. “When do we start?” he asked.

This morning, amid the ashes of several distinguished reputations, the question is: where will it end? The chequebook-ready Koreans were, of course, undercover reporters from The Sunday Times. Of the eight senior former officers they approached, only two refused their blandishments completely. And for the Ministry of Defence, the implications are particularly seismic. The department is notorious throughout Whitehall for signing colossally expensive contracts that deliver poor value for taxpayers. Can there possibly be any connection between this and the fact that so many of its people go on to work for defence contractors? 

One of the most heavily criticised recent contracts is for the Royal Navy’s two new aircraft carriers. These will cost taxpayers more than £6 billion, even though one will be immediately mothballed and the other will carry no aircraft until 2020. At least four top officers and ministers involved – including the heads of the Navy and the RAF, the vice-chief of the defence staff, and the defence procurement minister, Baroness Taylor – went on to join companies involved.

Then there is the contract dubbed the “worst deal in history”: to give the Air Force 14 new Airbus A330 transport/tanker aircraft. Bought by a civilian airline, A330s cost as little as £85 million each, or £1.2 billion for 14. But the MoD is paying £10.5 billion – for aircraft it will not even own, but lease. Nor did the price include standard military fitments such as flight-deck armour, meaning that the jets were unable to fly into any war zone.

Roughly half the price, according to the National Audit Office, comprises financing costs and profits for AirTanker, the PFI consortium that actually owns the planes. Over the last few years, more than 30 MoD officials, including some directly involved in negotiating the deal, have moved from the ministry to the companies concerned. As Paul Flynn, a Labour MP who has campaigned on the issue of defence procurement, told me: “I am not suggesting misconduct by any individual here, but the prospect of retirement work is potentially corrupting.”

All this is known as the “revolving door”. In 2009/10, the latest year for which full figures are available, 326 officers or MoD officials were cleared to join the private sector. Of these, 240 went to defence companies. Fully 20 were generals, admirals or air marshals.

The problem is not confined to the MoD. At the Cabinet Office, John Suffolk has moved from the highly sensitive post of chief information officer to become global cybersecurity officer at Huawei, a Chinese company accused by the Pentagon of having “close ties” to Beijing’s military. Lord Hunt, the former Labour health minister, joined Cumberledge Connections, a health lobbyist run by a former Tory health minister. Baroness Smith of Basildon, once the minister responsible for information technology, has joined Vertex Data Science, a computer outsourcing firm.

The body supposed to regulate all this is called Acoba, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, part of the Cabinet Office. When they leave public service, ministers and senior officials must ask the committee to approve any jobs they’re offered (more junior staff, including the vast majority within the MoD, are dealt with at departmental level). But Acoba seems extremely reluctant to place its foot in the revolving door. In fact, over the past 15 years, it has not vetoed a single application. According to its annual reports, it considered 944 applications between 1996 and 2011. Of these, 412 were approved with conditions and 532 unconditionally. None was rejected.

Even where conditions were imposed – typically a ban on lobbying former colleagues – none has ever lasted for more than two years. Acoba’s chairman, the former minister Lord Lang, told MPs that longer prohibitions would be a “restraint of trade” and against applicants’ human rights. And, as Sir Trevor told the undercover reporters, even the existing bans have no legal or contractual standing. Acoba itself has no powers to police them: Mr Suffolk, the Huawei employee, has been told he must not “draw on any privileged information” from his time at the Cabinet Office, but that condition seems almost impossible to enforce. Last year, 13 former ministers, officials and military officers – including the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord O’Donnell – did not even bother to approach Acoba before taking new jobs.

Lord Lang has insisted that the committee “works extraordinarily well”. But in 2010, rather more extraordinarily, he was himself filmed by undercover reporters – this time from Channel 4’s Dispatches – offering his services to a fake lobbying company, though he told them he would do no lobbying personally. Mr Flynn says that the Commons’ public administration committee wanted to veto Lord Lang’s appointment to Acoba, but could not do so because it had already been announced. Instead, it has this year published a report calling for the entire organisation to be scrapped.

This week’s scandal seems sure to hasten that event. But replacing Acoba will be complicated. Those exposed yesterday have enjoyed careers for life and lavish pensions – one more reason why their conduct is so questionable. But younger civil servants and officers no longer have such luxuries. If they are to be able to support themselves, any new system must allow them to transfer between employers without penalising them for their periods of public service.

More broadly, yesterday’s disclosures might trigger a wider reappraisal of Britain’s reverence for its top military officers. The brass are among the few senior public servants still relatively immune from public criticism, with the monumental failures of Iraq and Afghanistan customarily blamed on dishonest politicians or cheese-paring officials. In fact, many of the most pig-headed mistakes were made by Britain’s military leadership.

Yet old generals can also be a vital check and balance in the system: protesting against defence cuts, criticising the Government when it strays off course. Ministers will love it if they are banned from the MoD’s precincts, as the current Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, suggested yesterday, but the Forces may well come to regret it. Still, should that happen, the generals really will have no one to blame but themselves.