There are better ways to make a living than selling death

We could agree to only give defence aid to formally allied countries, and not epauletted psychopaths

THE MEN in shades will be here again soon. In Chertsey, near the Thames. Above their black moustaches and thin lips, their invisible eyes will evaluate the goods on display. Over there is a superb tank, its long gun guided by the most precise aiming system in the world. And this, gentlemen, is a cluster bomb to die for. All made in Britain, and, yes, we take MasterCard. Now, can I show you the aircraft?

In a fortnight's time, our comrades from the Indonesian armed forces will (unless they have withdrawn diplomatically) come together with shades- and braid-wearers from a host of other countries, at the Defence Systems Equipment International 1999 exhibition, or DSEi 99, and give the latest defence goodies the once-over. Then, we hope, they will all decide that British defence technology is simply the best, and place orders that will boost our country's arms industry. And, if these Colonels and Generals are anything like me when I visit a branch of Waterstone's, they will hardly be able to resist.

Naturally, there will be demonstrations. And although these can be mildly embarrassing, they have - over the years - achieved almost nothing in terms of reducing Britain's prominence as one of the great arms-dealing countries of the world.

Just as pacifism seems impossibly high-minded in a world full of dangerous men, so campaigning to stop the arms trade appears to be a way of impoverishing our own nation, while doing little in reality to stop wars. After all, not even the trade unions want to scale down the arms manufacturing business, do they? Try tabling a resolution at the forthcoming TUC Congress, and find out what the brothers and sisters say.

It's hardly surprising. One-fifth of the defence technology exported across this peaceful planet of ours originates in Britain. When it comes to supplying foreign armies with what they want, we are among the top seeds. If you're ever involved in a war, and something very nasty happens to come your way at great speed, there's a 20 per cent chance that it began life on a production line in Winchester or in Glasgow.

Yesterday I watched a tape of BBC2's series, The Mayfair Set, which dealt with the way the arms trade in this country grew in the Sixties. And there was old footage of Woodrow Wyatt arguing that, if Britain did not supply the Nigerian government with plenty of bang-bang for the Biafran civil war, then the Russians would, and West Africa would rapidly become a Kremlin protectorate. Plus, we'd have lost lots of jobs.

Twenty years later, Alan Clark was even franker about Iraq. The Cold War might be over, but where was the advantage of allowing the French to corner arms sales to Middle-Eastern countries? The weapons would still get there, only Toulouse would be happy and Uxbridge an industrial desert.

Foreign policy, Clark said, was best when it was clearly motivated by national self-interest. Fortunately, the Conservatives lacked the courage of their own convictions. According to Clark's argument, we could at least have got some money back out of the Northern Irish disaster by directly selling weapons to the IRA ourselves, instead of letting all the profit go to American gangsters.

Clark's was a level of cynicism that the new Labour government was not prepared to accept. For a start, there is an unusually large number of practising Christians in this administration, whereas many Tories have always had a greater affinity for the likes of Sir Francis Dashwood and the Hellfire Club. So, if we were going to continue to supply BAe Hawk aircraft to the Indonesians (albeit to a slightly better lot of Indonesians than before), then their use would be girded with conditions. With a gross of these planes ordered, and 50 already delivered, we might revoke the export licence should any Hawks be used against civilians, such as the secession-hungry population of East Timor.

One day, of course, we shall be able to fit Hawks with a device that detects any undesirable anti-civilianism, and promptly ejects the offending pilot into the Java Sea. But until then we have the word of the Indonesian government - no, better than that - of the Indonesian military, the guys in shades themselves, that no more Hawks will be flying over East Timor. Oh, good.

There's a very bright and able woman at the MoD who currently holds down the job of Minister for Defence Procurement. Baroness (Liz) Symons was quizzed about Indonesia on the radio yesterday, and established a "Third Way" for defence sales. Should we debar the Indonesians from attending the Chertsey sales? No, she said. Under the UN charter, countries have a right to self-defence. Now (she didn't need to add), how can you defend yourself without weapons and stuff? Therefore (she implied), to refuse to allow the generals from Djakarta to peruse the hardware was effectively to seek to deny them their international rights. However, if they don't behave, then we are not obligated to sell the goods. "We have the right to decide," she said, "whether or not to grant you [the Indonesians] a licence."

I am not totally opposed to hypocrisy. It really can be "the tribute vice pays to virtue", and I would rather have a government that knows it ought to be embarrassed by the arms trade, than one that is unashamed. But I can see no moral reason why this country should be obliged to be one of the biggest sellers of weapons to other nations - regardless of whether they have the right to self-defence - and plenty of moral reason why it should not. Why do we have to sell any arms to Indonesia? If we didn't, then we would not have to worry about revoking licences. Come to that, why must we have a DSEi at all? Finland doesn't.

We could, after all, agree that we should give defence assistance only to countries with whom we were formally allied, or by specific resolution of the House of Commons. True, this would mean a smaller and less profitable arms industry, but it would minimise the risk of our supplying weapons to epauletted psychopaths.

Consider this. If, 30 years ago, when the dangers of pesticides and chemical spraying were becoming apparent, we had decided to invest in promoting organic farming, this country could now be exporting organic produce to the world. Instead, we are importing it. Such a policy would have cost us agricultural jobs in those early years.

Some time in the near future, a human disaster - or the sensibilities of our children - will mean a contraction in our arms exports. At that point we are going to wish that we'd taken steps to reduce our reliance on marketing death to the world. Imagine that there will never be a DSEi 00. Wouldn't that be an achievement to stick in the Millennium Dome?