If you want a clear sense of the character of the modern Conservative party, and to grasp the full extent of the damage it has done during its latest period in office, there are few better places to start than Yemen. By the late 2010s, Yemen was the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, according to the United Nations.
This was no natural disaster. It was human-made, created in no small part by the British government’s allies, with the British government’s help. The war and Britain’s role in it rarely hit the front pages. But in terms of sheer human cost, it was the worst episode in UK foreign relations since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By rights, it should have been a national scandal.
In 2015, a coalition of states led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched a war against a Yemeni insurgent group, known as the Houthis, which had toppled the internationally recognised government the previous year. The then UK foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, promised that Britain would “support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat”. This meant a constant supply of ammunition, components, logistical support and maintenance to the fleets of British-built military jets that form a major part of the Royal Saudi air force. This indispensable sustenance kept those jets operational in the skies over Yemen for several years. The consequences were devastating.
From the start of the war, human rights groups, humanitarian NGOs and UN bodies compiled mountainous evidence of the Gulf coalition’s “widespread and systematic use of indiscriminate airstrikes”, including the bombing of schools, medical facilities, weddings, funerals, markets, civilian residences and essential infrastructure. A punishing air and sea blockade was imposed, immiserating the general population in what was plainly a campaign of wholesale collective punishment.
In 2018, Save the Children estimated that up to 85,000 children under the age of five may have died of extreme hunger in the first three and a half years of the war, with the coalition’s war tactics cited as a key cause. In 2021, the UN Development Programme estimated a total of 377,000 conflict-related deaths by the end of that year, with 154,000 people killed directly in the violence, and the rest claimed by the human-made humanitarian disaster. Alex de Waal, a leading expert on starvation, described Yemen as “the defining famine crime of this generation, perhaps this century”, with responsibility going “beyond Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to London and Washington”.
The Tory government’s role in the Yemen war complemented its wider Middle East policy, which coincided with the wave of pro-democracy uprisings that swept the Arab-majority world from the winter of 2010-11. While the Houthis cannot be regarded as a part of that movement, they represented a threat to the conservative regional order just the same. And notwithstanding David Cameron’s opportunistic support for the uprisings in Libya and Syria, Britain’s fundamental policy across the board was to double down on its traditional backing for the authoritarian status quo.
In Bahrain, a peaceful pro-democracy movement was violently crushed by the monarchy, with British support in the form of arms supplies and diplomatic apologia. London also provided arms and diplomatic support to the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi after he snuffed out the country’s nascent democracy in a military coup in which hundreds were massacred in the streets. Right across the region, the Tories gave a major, strategic vote of confidence to the full panoply of pro-western authoritarians and human rights abusers, including the state of Israel. Arms sales to those regimes almost doubled in the five years from 2011, military cooperation deepened substantially, and economic deal-making flourished.
At the heart of this regional state system lie the fossil fuel rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf. For successive British prime ministers, the prize for maintaining the status quo in the Middle East has been the uninterrupted inflow of Gulf “petrodollars” into the British arms industry, the financial services industry and the British economy as a whole. For the monarchies, this is a small price to pay to retain ties with their former imperial patron, and a western ally that continues to support their security, even their survival. But petrodollar inflows can scarcely be regarded as a safe or sustainable bet for Britain as the global climate emergency unfolds.
The Conservative government’s consistent privileging of the strategic interests of the British state and British capital over the rights and lives of the peoples of the Middle East has contributed significantly to immeasurable suffering and loss of life, and left the region in a state of profound instability. And given the evidence available, there is little reason to expect substantive change from the incoming Labour government.
The pledge Keir Starmer made when running for the party leadership in 2020 to “stop the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia” has predictably been diluted to an intention to merely “review the situation”. When the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, says that “you have to be prepared to work with partners like Saudi Arabia [and the] UAE, [though] your values may not be entirely aligned”, he is repeating verbatim the familiar Tory line of the past 14 years, and indeed of the preceding New Labour government, which originally sold the Saudis the fleet of Typhoon jets that were later used to pulverise Yemen. The fact that Labour also refuses to rule out continuing arms sales to Israel, despite clear and and mounting evidence of the latter committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Gaza provides a bleak but clear indication of what to expect in the coming years: business as usual, no matter the human cost.
David Wearing is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex, and the author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain
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