Cabbages & Kings: Business is business

“‘Let a hundred flowers
bloom’, he said
Not caring that blooming
flowers fade
Or that raising Lazarus
from the dead
Was just a PR escapade...”
From Dhoka Cola by Bachchoo

The British ruling class can often seem shameless. I don’t just mean historical turning points such as Jallianwalla Bagh or the Suez War. They make shabby deals for shabby reasons with worse-than-shabby people. Britain today awaits news of the fate of Karl Andree, a 74-year-old British citizen who was arrested and jailed 12 months ago in Saudi Arabia for having bottles of homemade wine in the boot of his car.

Mr Andree was sentenced, in addition to being jailed, to 350 lashes. The sentence, if carried out, will in all likelihood result in his death as he has suffered from three bouts of cancer. His family have asked British Prime Minister David Cameron to attempt to have him sent back to Britain before he is thrashed to death. Mr Cameron says he has written to the Saudis but his office refused to disclose the content of this communication to the press so we don’t know whether Mr Cameron has expressed outrage at such a disproportionate and barbaric sentence, or whether he has gone cap in hand to beg for amnesty from his best client nation.

To be fair there are those in the present government who do have a sense of shame. A row has broken out in the British Cabinet over the case of Mr Andree and over the previous case of 17-year-old Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr who is sentenced to execution for having taken part in a demonstration against the regime. Michael Gove, the justice minister, whose brief extends to the governance of prisons, has demanded that the Brits cancel a £5.9 million deal with Saudi Arabia for providing support and guidance to the Saudi prison system — the arm of the state poised to execute Ali Mohammed and whip Mr Andree, probably to his grave. The foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, supported by Mr Camer-on was against cancelling the deal. Mr Hammond accused Mr Gove of being “naïve”. I suppose he took the line that moral considerations shouldn’t interfere with lucrative deals — a “business is business” attitude.

In the end Mr Gove, supported by the business secretary, Sajid Javid, the senior-most Asian in the government, won the argument. The deal has been cancelled. This deal is a molehill to the mountains of commercial transactions between Britain and the Saudis. The sale of arms, equipment and training brought in, it is estimated, £37 billion to the UK last year. Business is indeed business. And morality doesn’t and can’t enter the argument. Saudi royals misbehave and claim diplomatic immunity when they are caught, running back to the Holy Land in private jets. The world, it seems, is their playground. Let me count the cases: In Los Angeles recently a woman fled the house of Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud, of Saudi royalty, claiming that she had been raped and left bleeding.

Other women came forward with their own allegations of orgiastic violence at the hands of the prince. LA law didn’t arrest him. He claimed diplomatic immunity and merrily went off in his private plane. It is unlikely that he will return to face trial for these numerous sexual assault charges. The Indian case of the two Nepalese servant-women who were allegedly imprisoned by a sadistic Saudi diplomat and subjected to starvation, torture, rape and sodomy is well known.

In London, a Saudi member of the royal family has been questioned about a sexual assault on an 11-year-old-girl. In the Philippines, a Saudi diplomat was arrested on charges of human-trafficking. He was inducing Filipino women into prostitution and virtual slavery, sending them back home. In both cases the men were allowed to get away after claiming diplomatic immunity. Bottles of homemade wine are supposedly grievous violations of the law. Raping the young domestic servants from the Philippines or Kerala is acceptable behaviour from the debauched clique in charge of the Saudi state and its oil revenues. Why does the Western world, its ministers and governments, tolerate this hypocrisy? Only because of business deals? The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has complicated the scenario and extended it beyond the pure considerations of profit.

The Isis has announced its dedication to eliminating the Saudi regime and incorporating Arabia into the so-called Caliphate. The West is dedicated to securing the Saudi regime against the ISIS at any cost, as a fall of the House of Saud will result in chaos that will make the fall of Saddam, Gaddafi and maybe Assad in the future seem like supporting acts to the real thing.It’s no good pointing out the moral or immoral equivalence between the Isis, who enslave and rape women they regard as non-believers, and the Saudi princes and ruling class who do the same to defenceless women.

It is common knowledge that apart from oil and debauched princes, Saudi Arabia’s main export is hate-preachers who induce young men in London and elsewhere to terrorist acts. These acknowledged statistics and the reports of the rape-and-run behaviour of Saudi princes and diplomats all over the world didn’t stop Britain supporting the Saudi claim to membership of the UN Human Rights Council.Two weeks ago, leaked documents emerged of Britain’s lobbying to support this membership in 2013. UK must have known that this advocacy was like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Attila the Hun. But then, business is business!