Absolutely right.
As a ‘former’ Lib-Dem Candidate and someone who once held the post of Senior Parliamentary Researcher for the Party back in the 1990′s – I am appalled by much of what the Lib-Dems have done in the last two years – and this is another example of their absolutely inability to hold the excesses of the Tory right in check.
There is something deeply immoral and illiberal about selling arms abroad and it makes me thoroughly ashamed of being British and someone who voted Lib-Dem at the last election.
I expand on this in the following article:
http://www.allthatsleft.co.uk/2012/04/cameron-selling-arms-to-indonesia-is-simply-shameless/

libdems aren’t angry because they like being in government. have they made any statement about the formula 1 race in the bahraini dictatorship? of course not. the scam of politics is say one thing in opposition then do the opposite in government. all parties are the same.

I would be interested in who was in the “tourist” entourage with Cameron in Burma. Given that it is too early to judge whether the democratic transition will continue, I would hope that this was not an attempt to circumvent EU sanctions that remain in place. But the current Coalition government is following the trajectory followed by Labour. There is a consensus that the arms industry, which has a negligible economic benefit to this country, should be supported by subsidies, the full weight of the diplomatic corps and senior political salesmanship. To what end? Retaining some shred of relevance through the war machine.

C’mon, shall we dig into those arms deals nurtured by Tony Blair with Libya and Saudi Arabia?

The fact is that Britain has regularly been in the top half dozen of international arms exporters. BAe Systems was Britain’s largest manufacturing company through most of the New Labour government until it was recently overtaken by Tata manufacturing, an Indian owned company, which famously now owns Jaguar LandRover, a group of companies that is currently doing extremely well with export sales to Asian countries.

Labour governments and the trade unions love arms manufacturing because the industry can afford to pay well as sales contracts are usually negotiated by political contacts, not in open competitive markets.

Because of WW2, the engineering and electronics companies of Germany and Japan were severely restricted on research into, and production of armaments so the companies were obliged to operate in internationally competitive markets instead of the politically cushioned markets of arms manufacturers. The result was that the engineering and electronics companies of Germany and Japan flourished in response to the competitive pressures. But you’ll seldom hear Labour politicians admit to this.

Funny watching all these corporates who bang on about getting govt out of the way piggy backacking onto Er, oh yes govt to help them.

Smell that corporate welfare.

As for the lib dems, they don’t exist any more.

Looked at from the detached, non-partisan setiment of the ‘speak truth unto power’ perspective, the British political scene is not only immensely depressing but there is no glimmer of light ahead in the tunnel. One result has been the historically low turnout at the last three general elections so I doubt that my assessment is anywhere near uniquely held.

We can applaud the current public debate about ministers publishing their tax returns and Cameron’s daily expressions of concern about the civil strife in Syria but there are few signs of recovery of the economies of Britain and the Eurozone. As George Soros puts it in his reflections on the Eurozone in Thursday’s FT:

The only way to escape the trap is to recognise that current policies are counter-productive and change course.

IMO we need more focus on fundamentals and fewer distractions by political froth.

Bob B you conveniently forgot to mention how Mark Thatcher became a multi millionaire selling arms to middle eastern tyrannies using his mothers contacts. Don’t be so sensitive ,everyone knows the tories and new labour are /were up to their necks in the arms trade to dodgy regimes . The libdems always claimed to be morally superior in British politics. Thats the point of this article, no one expects/expected Cameron/Blair to have morals concerning the arms trade.

@4 Bob B

What Tony Blair did is just as bad as what Cameron is doing now. But what was wrong then is still wrong now, so what’s wrong with criticising Cameron for it? Does every criticism of him have to include criticism of everyone else who did the same bad thing before him?

C’mon, shall we dig into those arms deals nurtured by Tony Blair with Libya and Saudi Arabia?

Please do – I have no intention of defending Blair! But I distinctly remember Libdems criticising Labour for not having an ethical foreign policy in the past. This actually directly contradicts a conference resolution as far as I can see

@7: “Bob B you conveniently forgot to mention how Mark Thatcher became a multi millionaire selling arms to middle eastern tyrannies using his mothers contacts.”

My intent was certainly not to exonerate Conservative governments but to emphasise that: “The fact is that Britain has regularly been in the top half dozen of international arms exporters.”

I’ve a distant recollection of attending a Fabian Society meeting in the early 1970s where the lead speaker was Brian Walden. One of the points in his talk was that the international arms business had the moral attributes of the opium wars and trade in the 19th century.

IMO the economic factors under-pinning Britain’s international arms sales and the implications are more interesting and significant than playing the standard political blame game which is repetedly invoked to distract attention from the fundamental issues about why Britain became such a prominent arms exporter, why a country with a population of 61 million has the fourth largest “defence” budget, and as to why Britain’s economy should have become so dependent on financial services.

I can’t recall New Labour doing anything constructive about any of those issues but please correct if I’m wrong.

Unless you think someone’s defending Labour’s record (hint: read Sunny’s reply saying he isn’t) – saying that Labour did it too doesn’t change anything.

Wyatt: “Unless you think someone’s defending Labour’s record (hint: read Sunny’s reply saying he isn’t) – saying that Labour did it too doesn’t change anything.”

Absolutely, although I was under an impression – evidenlty mistaken in retrospect – that New Labour was striving afresh to project a new “ethical foreign policy”.

I doubt that many, including Labour voters, were ever clear on what that was supposed to mean but it was certainly a surprise to learn that not only did an ethical foreign policy encompass those arms deals with Libya and Saudi Arabia but the Iraq invasion as well, launched despite the absence of approval by the UN Security Council. For all Blair’s deep religious convictions, the meaning of “ethical” was amazingly elastic. Satan herself could hardly have asked for better.

It is priceless when people attack the left for Tony Blair. Nobody hates Tony Blair for what he did than many on the so called left.

I think it is quite clear that Blair like Clegg is a tory. So pile on all you like.

maybe his constituents want to eat?

“I think it is quite clear that Blair like Clegg is a tory. So pile on all you like.”

But Labour went along with his “strong” leadership. In the early years of the New Labour government, it was sickening to hear the endless sycophantic references of ministers to Tony Blair in interviews as though he was the charismatic font of virtue and beauty.

Blair has inflicted great damage on the credibility of the Labour Party.

Before anyone claims that I’m ignoring the failings of the Conservatives, I rather liked that piece by Prof Anthony King a few days ago in the FT: It is time the diletantte PM got a grip.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7f1680b0-7f0e-11e1-a26e-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=published_links/rss/comment_opinion/feed//product#axzz1rre5DGcE

I have been unable to establish how much our arms industries have in recent years benefitted from Export Credit Guarantees (now UK Export Finance) – about ten or so years ago it was worth £12k a year to each and everyone employed in the business.
It’s nice work if you can get it – you sell some stuff to a degenerate third world crackpot, who’s happy enough to trouser the bung but can’t find the readies to pay for his ‘crowd control equipment’ – no probs’, in steps the ever generous British taxpayer and stumps up the mullah to cover his obvious embarrassment at the bounce factor in his cheque.
The budget for this used to come from ‘Overseas Aid’………………………………….
Why wouldn’t a New Lab/Lib/Con want some of that?
If they weren’t wasting taxpayer’s money there it would be spent attempting to buy votes elsewhere.
And people pretend voting makes any difference.

“I have been unable to establish how much our arms industries have in recent years benefitted from Export Credit Guarantees (now UK Export Finance)”

I don’t know the answer to that but since most authorised arms sales are to foreign governments or their agencies, I suppose the risk of non-payment is officially considered much less likely than with sales to foreign commerical operations.

Whatever else historically about the Soviet Union and its sequestration of foreign direct investments, the Soviet government made almost a fetish of being sure to pay for debts incurred for approved imports, most likely because it appreciated it might otherwise find it difficult to purchase essential imports.

As it was, all sorts of exports of technical products were banned by NATO countries as the products were deemed to be of potential military use. In the late 1980, I recall a colleague telling me of the time he spent in rejecting export licenses for computer chips when staff from the Soviet embassy could go along Tottenham Court Road in London and buy any number of a variety of home computers, take their purchases back to the embassy, remove the chips and post the chips back home in the diplomatic bags. That way, the chips were more expensive than wholesale prices but the chips, especially microprocessors, were obtainable.

For comparison, check out this news item from 1986 about how US President Reagan authorised grain sales to the Soviet Union after it had suffered a succession of harvest failures in the early 1980s:

Reagan Authorizes Sale of Subsidized Grain to Soviets : Overrides Pentagon, State Dept.
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-01/news/mn-19174_1_soviet-union

“Why aren’t the Lib Dems angry?”

Er… because when they agreed to sell out their voters and become “Nick Cleggeron’s New Model Fib Dems” in May 2010 and prop up a reactionary Tory govt they put such childish trifles as integrity, decency and honour behind them?

See also tuition fees, NHS and school privatisation, the decimation of social security, etc etc etc.

(To be fair, there are some Lib Dems fighting a rearguard action against this horror – e.g. Liberal Left).