Some things in UK foreign policy never change. For over 70 years the UK has given powerful backing to the prodigiously repressive House of Saud, rulers of Saudi Arabia. This has been part of a longstanding policy of supporting dictatorial Mid-East rulers to ensure the West’s access to the region’s oil. A prime beneficiary of this policy has been the UK weapons giant BAE Systems. Since 1966 BAE Systems has largely run the Royal Saudi Air Force through a series of massive government-to-government deals for arms and military services (substantially in exchange for oil). These have been crucial to BAE Systems’ growth into the world’s fourth largest weapons manufacturer. From the beginning the deals have been surrounded by allegations of substantial corruption, from the involvement of middleman Geoffrey Edwards in the late 1960s, to the recent “slush fund” allegations surrounding the massive and ongoing Al-Yamamah deal.

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