There can be only one high tech manufacturing sector in which a substantially deindustrialised Britain still claims world leadership in export terms, and here’s a clue; it isn’t advanced medical equipment.

It is rather – as the government proudly revealed yesterday – production of the means of destruction, as the FT reports:

Britain became the world’s largest arms exporter last year, according to government figures released yesterday, overtaking the US which normally occupies the top slot.

The UK won £10bn of new defence orders in 2007 from overseas, giving it a 33 per cent share of the world export market, according to figures released yesterday by the Defence and Security Organisation, set up to promote Britain’s defence exports. Export orders totalled £5.5bn in 2006 …

Lord Jones, trade and investment minister, said: “As demonstrated by this outstanding export performance, the UK has a first class defence industry with some of the world’s most technologically sophisticated companies.”

So it is worth asking exactly how this ‘outstanding export performance’ has been achieved, over a period which saw the assembly lines of Britain’s last remaining large domestically owned car plant were taken apart and sent to China, while the largest vacuum cleaner factory relocated from Malmesbury to Malaysia.

The answer is, to a large extent, state support. As of 2005 – the last year for which I have the stats to hand – arms manufacturers picked up state subsidies of about £990m, enough to build ten hospitals.

In addition, no other UK industry has such a sizeable number of public sector employees devoting their time 100% to promoting its wares on a government-to-government basis worldwide, effectively working as an extended adjunct to the sales and marketing team of BAE.

As of last year, some 450 civil servants were employed by the Defence Export Services Association, at a cost to the taxpayer of some £13m.

In July 2007, Gordon Brown – perhaps in response to pressure from the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and around 30 NGOs – announced that DESO was to be closed down.

And so it has been, only to be rebadged last April as the D&SO, the group that published the export figures yesterday. What precisely constitutes the point of the changing one letter in the acronym remains unclear.

Can there be any justification for extensive state involvement in times when all other industries are left to prosper or flounder according to the market? Why the throwback to 1970s-style dirigisme?

The argument is often advanced that the making weapons provides employment. This is patently spurious; military exports sustain just 60,000 jobs, around 0.2% of the UK workforce.

In employment terms, that puts it roughly on a par with kebab shops. Moreover, the skills of these workers are directly transferable to socially useful applications, and could be better used elsewhere.

Another important moral issue is exactly to whom Britain is selling its deadly kit. In 2004, UK arms export licenses were granted to 13 of the 20 ‘major countries of concern’ identified by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in its 2005 Human Rights Annual Report.

The truth is that, without being propped up by the state, British arms manufacturing would not be viable, and its collapse would be a good thing at every level. Yet this isn’t going to happen, because no political party would countenance any move against its strategic interest.

As Blair’s personal intervention to get BAE off the hook when the Serious Fraud Office was ready to file corruption charges against it illustrates, the arms industry doesn’t even have to observe the same laws as everyone else.

Time was when forward-thinking sections of the labour movement and the left put forward plans for converting arms plants to peaceful purposes. This is an idea that could usefully be revisited.

LINK: Campaign Against the Arms Trade

About the author
Dave Osler is a regular contributor. He is a British journalist and author, ex-punk and ex-Trot. Also at: Dave's Part
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