Book Reviews

Bribing for Britain – Government Collusion in Arms Sales Corruption

By Tim Webb

Bribing for Britain is a well-timed, thoroughly researched documentation of the British arms industry including successive British governments’ collusion with British defence companies in selling arms to one of the most backward and repressive regimes in the world.

The Saudi Arabia regime is barbaric, corrupt, hypocritical and impervious to anything remotely resembling humanity. Ibn Saud founded the regime in 1932, slaughtering around 400,000 people in the process and imposing the extreme Walhabi version of Islam. Tim Webb, Stoke Newington resident and sometime editor of N16 Magazine, succinctly points out that from the 1985 Al-Yamamah agreement: ‘Governments turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, where beheadings, the hacking-off of hands, floggings and torture are normal practice. In 2002, 15 schoolgirls died when religious police stopped them from leaving a burning building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress’. Put it another way, it’s ok for Saudi princes to gorge themselves on prostitutes, casinos and whisky in London, subsidised by the British tax payer, while a woman who dresses ‘inappropriately’ in Saudi Arabia is likely to be flogged.

What is remarkable is that we allow British defence companies, heavily underwritten by UK tax payers, to sell arms to a regime whose main achievement has been to bestow Al-Qaeda on the world and whose international reputation has always been of a regime ready to pay funk money to terrorists. What is less remarkable is that a large section of the British chattering classes are apologists for similar religious sects straight out of the 10th century. At least, the British defence industry does it for money.

The modern British arms industry goes back to the post-First World War period; its current conception is a product of the Cold War. Denis Healey, Secretary of State for Defence in the 1966 Labour Government, quickly fathomed that the cost of Britain’s involvement in the Cold War was escalating and that the British economy, then in deep disorder, could not afford the toys for the boys. This resulted in the creation of the Export International Relations that ultimately became the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO) whose driving force was the hard-headed businessman Sir Donald Stokes, the Head of Leyland Motors.

DESO grew enormously from its inception in 1966, and by 2007 employed 400 people in London and a further 100 in other country. As Webb puts it: ‘British foreign policy had (and is) been restrained from criticising important customers – regardless of human rights abuses – and bribery was an integral part of this country’s drive for arms sales’.

Despite the fact of the welcome Government announcement in July 2007 to abolish DESO, this in itself ‘will not eliminate corrupt arms sales’. One of the most shameful episodes of the current Government is its suppression of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the bribery allegations surrounding the Al-Yamamah contract in 2004. Webb thoroughly documents this whole sorry episode. With Blair’s departure, some of us were optimistically hoping that the British Government would develop at least a mild flirtation with ethics but, apart from the closure of DESO, there has been little evidence to date.

The most depressing thing about the Blair years was a fickle vanity that seemed to encourage the Government to enthusiastically reside in Bush and the Neo cons colon. The post-Blair evidence, to date, is ‘plus ca change…’ Not that Cameron would be any better, but at least he could be enthusiastic about recent BAE developments. As Webb puts it: ‘BAE has started work on designing green munitions, lead-free bullets and rockets with reduced toxins’. Hey, we can kill people without leaving a carbon footprint.

Tim Webb’s excellent Bribing For Britain is essential reading for understanding British foreign and defence policy post 1945.

For further information and copies contact: CAAT, 11 Goodwin Street, London N4 3HQ. Tel: 020 7281 0297. E-mail: enquiries@caat.org.uk Website: www.caat.org.uk

Spoilt

By Terry Denby

When a review copy of Spoilt (with the helpful subtitle ‘Surviving a Childhood in Care’) arrived at N16’s lavishly appointed editorial suite (joke), it wasn’t entirely clear what local relevance the book might have.

But then it dawned. The words ‘east’ and ‘London’ figure, very tangentially. And Stoke Newington’s magazine of record fits into both demographics. So we copped a copy. And took full advantage of this opportunity to examine one of the more mysterious success stories of the publishing world – the misery memoir, elegantly compressed, in publishing speak, to the mismem. The words ‘surviving’ and ‘childhood’ are the clue here. They signal hardship, possibly abuse – if you’re lucky enough (a heavy irony here) – but also an indomitable will to survive, to triumph over adversity – and even to find redemption. This is the world of the misery memoir – the modern equivalent of the Samuel Smiles self-help manuals of an earlier time. And clearly, it’s a winning formula. It is also, I would argue, a deeply troubling and problematic one, raising questions about authenticity and veracity that the publishers themselves seem happy to ignore, for the most part.

The ‘mismem’ phenomenon  has been a publishing growth area for several years now, from the early (largely American) days of David Feltzer’s A Boy Called It, and its various spin-offs (up to and including books from author Feltzer’s brother, would you believe – a dysfunctional family is nevertheless a sharing family, clearly), to the controversies last year over James Frey’s fraudulent memoir, A Million Little Pieces. (When Frey was exposed as a liar, the book’s sales went up – obviously – although some earlier readers claimed and received a refund, on the grounds that they’d been misled into believing the work of fiction they had read was in fact a reliable memoir.) Elsewhere, family members have bitterly contested siblings’ miserabilist accounts of their shared childhoods, without in the least affecting sales. And editors everywhere – even when baffled by the genre – have chipped away at a rich seam of despair, hoping, as always, to find the mother lode: a childhood so profoundly miserable, vile and soul destroying that it literally beggars belief. How the tills would ring …

Terry Denby, it must be said, is nowhere near the top of the misery league table. He had a profoundly feckless mum, a non-existent dad, serial step-dads and too many half-sisters and brothers for this reviewer to keep track of. He was born in east London (as if that weren’t punishment enough) and then consigned to the none-too-tender care of various ‘Aunties’ (possibly malevolent lesbians – the author is unclear) in an Essex children’s home in the 1950s. Accused of carnal knowledge of the home’s dog – a truly innocent victim if there ever was one – he is eventually expelled, unskilled and ill-equipped, into the wider world, where he finally learns to fend for himself and, with the help of Bert Weedon’s teach-yourself handbook, to play the guitar – and eventually to earn a living. It was no bed of roses, to be sure, and his account sheds poignant but almost accidental light on how very different life was for children (and families more generally) in the spartan austerities of post-war Britain. But the retelling of this sorry if not entirely tragic tale begs many questions – not about what happened, but about the manner of its retelling. The author’s epilogue – in which he thanks his readers for the privilege of being allowed to tell his tale – is possibly the most painful, raw and honest part of his story, through no fault of his own. This is memoir as therapy – but for whom?

Hodder and Stoughton, £12.99

Review by Anne Beech

Reviewed by Trevor Jones