Starmer is right to condemn Assad - But his Gulf allies are no better

9 December 2024, 13:05 | Updated: 9 December 2024, 13:19

While Syrians celebrate the fall of the dictator Bashar Al-Assad, Keir Starmer is on a trip to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, seeking to deepen UK ties with the two monarchies.

Starmer has welcomed the demise of the Al-Assad regime, even as he extends British support to similarly corrupt, repressive and violent ruling families in the Gulf.

During the “Arab spring”, the Saudis and Emirates were no less committed to violent counter-revolution than the Syrian dictatorship. The domestic scene in the UAE and Saudi Arabia was different from that in Syria because the regimes had the wealth to buy off popular discontent, with any remaining dissidents silenced by force.

But mass liberation movements elsewhere in the region were regarded as threats and treated accordingly. In 2011, the UAE and Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain to support the brutal crushing of a popular pro-democracy uprising. In 2013 they bankrolled a bloody military coup that ended Egypt's nascent democracy.

In the Syrian civil war, Al-Assad sent his air force to indiscriminately bomb rebel-held areas while imposing sieges that created a humanitarian catastrophe in the country. In 2015, Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened in the civil war in Yemen, spending the subsequent years waging a military campaign that was also characterised by indiscriminate bombing and blockade. The resulting humanitarian disaster soon supplanted that in Syria as the world's worst at the time.

As a consistent supplier of arms and military support, Britain has long been an active enabler of authoritarian rule in the Gulf, from the colonial era to the present day. The Saudi and Emirati troops that supported the Bahraini counter-revolution were armed by the UK and its Western allies. Typhoon military jets supplied by the last Labour government played a key role in the devastating Saudi-UAE campaign in Yemen.

Under the Starmer government, we can expect the UK to continue providing the means of violence to human rights abusers and likely war criminals in the Gulf. This is what it means when media reports say that Starmer seeks to "deepen defence and security partnerships" on this week’s visit.

Starmer will play up the benefits of Gulf investment into the UK, and of British exports to the Gulf, making big claims about the jobs that will supposedly be created. This can give the impression that supporting these regimes is a necessity rather than a choice.

But it is the Starmer government's refusal to implement wealth taxes or raise taxes on high incomes and high corporate profits that has denied Britain alternative sources of public investment. And it is the Starmer government’s refusal to substantively revisit the UK’s economic relationship with Europe that stands in the way of its most lucrative and promising export market.

Whatever Britain’s economic needs in 2024, the lives and rights of the peoples of the Middle East should not be treated as a price worth paying.

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Dr David Wearing is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex and author of "AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain".

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