As Andy Burnham reportedly considers Saudi requests for military support in the Yemen war, new data shows that the UK government approved £464.8m of weapons exports to Saudi Arabia in the first quarter of this year.
This is one of the largest quarterly UK-Saudi arms sales on record. The vast majority of this figure is made up of air-to-surface weapons, raising concerns over their use in Saudi airstrikes.
Campaign Against Arms Trade and Transition Security Project have issued a new report. It calculates that BAE Systems and Rolls Royce made £3.9bn in profit from arming the 2015-22 Saudi-led intervention in Yemen.
The report sets out a funded proposal for the UK government, and UK arms companies, to pay reparations to Yemen for the war crimes they enabled the Saudi-led coalition to perpetrate. The report also calls for a full arms embargo on Saudi Arabia.
Yemen remains devastated by years of war. The Saudi-led coalition’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, coupled with a punishing air-and-sea blockade, are among the leading causes of what became the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the late 2010s.
Calculations set out in the report recommend a windfall tax on the profits made by two leading arms companies, BAE Systems and Rolls Royce, on the weapons and military services they sold to Saudi Arabia. Initial calculations suggest this could raise a combined £3.9bn.
The report proposes that the UK state matches this figure, funded from a UK aid budget restored to 0.7% of GNI. The report recommends that this reparations payment funds urgent humanitarian relief. And any remainder should go into an appropriate Yemeni fund for long-term reconstruction.