In 2005, the UK licensed the sale of £29.5m worth of “military transport aircraft” to the colonel; and in 2009 and 2010 licensed the sale of “bombing computers” and “military aircraft ground equipment” too.
In addition, between 2005 and 2007, sales of armoured all-wheel drive vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, night vision goggles and water cannon got the go-ahead.
The biggest shipments (and most alarming ones, given how Gaddafi’s forces are repressing the population) suggest that the exports didn’t even help boost British manufacturing. In 2007, for example, a job lot of “anti-riot shields, body armour, anti-riot guns, crowd control ammunition, smoke ammunition, tear gas/irritant ammunition, smoke hand grenades & CS hand grenades” were licensed for export to Libya by UK businessmen.The materials were from Serbia.
In 2005, a £41m package of battlefield weapons, including heavy machine guns, armour for tanks, day and night sights for weapons and military image intensifier equipment, originally from the Ukraine, was also licensed.
The oddest export, however, was licensed between July and September last year when the Foreign Office approved the sale of what it describes as “spacecraft”. Perhaps this offers a possible way out for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Mad Dog chum.
BUFFING UP BAHRAIN
ELSEWHERE the Foreign Office appears to be showing a little more concern for how British arms exports might be used. It isn’t merely advising Britons against travelling to troubled Bahrain, for example, but it has now also revoked a series of defence equipment export licences to the kingdom (see the last Eye).
According to one Paddy Clanwilliam, aka the Earl of Clanwilliam, however, this is a terrible over-reaction. In a recent interview on al-Jazeera, he twice asserted that Bahrain was a “beacon of democracy” – despite the fact that political parties are banned and the police had just opened fire on crowds of protesters, killing two people.
Clanwilliam blamed the deaths on an “inexperienced police force” and said there was nothing but “a hundred or maybe a thousand people there… this is the vociferous minority, the malcontents… who want to change the nation from the tolerant society at the moment.”
So who exactly is this British fan of the tolerant al-Khalifa family, who have subsequently introduced martial law to their kingdom and welcomed 1,000 troops from Saudi Arabia?
He was coyly introduced as a “member of the British House of Lords” who “also advises the UK Bahrain All-Party Parliamentary Group”. In fact this peer doesn’t actually sit in the Lords. But could he be related to the Paddy Clanwilliam who founded Gardant Communications, a consultancy and lobbying firm which works directly for the Bahraini embassy (see Eye 1283)? Why yes he could! Thanks To The Eye for this.
Interesting to see "Paddy" Clanwilliam quoted here. He used to be a Spad at the FO. Since those days he's kept company with some pretty dodgy business people propping up some pretty dodgy regimes. He is what my grandfather would have described as a "bit of a wrong'un".
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