Nick Davis | This House Believes The British Arms Industry Should Be Taken to the Hague

Nick Davis speaks as first proposition in the Debating Chamber on Thursday 14th March, 8:00pm

This IS the Presidential debate, the motion of which is proposed by the outgoing Union President. With so many high-profile guest speakers, it is guaranteed to be a highly-charged and timely debate with some fascinating speeches.

The British Arms Industry may lead the way commercially, but it is not without controversy. £12bn worth of arms exports flowed from Britain in 2022 alone. Some of this export has been the subject of more positive news, such as those to Ukraine. But there are many who believe the British Arms Industry have serious questions to answer. Britain’s exports to states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel has been under growing scrutiny. The exports to Saudi Arabia have been of particular concern in recent years, with human rights groups strongly protesting the UK government’s sales and determination that human rights violations in Yemen were “isolated incidents”. Should the continuing production, sale and profiting from these weapons be deemed a warcrime and should those responsible face jail time? Or are we demonising an industry, that whilst perhaps unsavoury, is necessary to our national defence and are we misusing the language of war crimes for political ends?
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[Music] good evening folks thank you so much for coming along today um for the presidential debate of term this is the last time tonight that I’ll be addressing the chamber as your president for Lent 2024 and um it’s been a mad wild ride um some particular highlights have been the boxing Lindsay hoil Union play access membership change but what I’ve Loved particularly has been the audience participation because it’s you that make the debates not just as passive participants but as active stakeholders who shape the Direction with your incisive points of information and never let speakers off the hook when a dubious point is made I hope you’ll afford me that same level of scrutiny tonight um but it’s now time for the um presidential Handover where us the lent team we’ll be handing over to the Easter team who will take over um for the next presiding term of events um and I’m very much grateful to welcome them so starting off our social events officer Simon ciki is going to be replaced by Joshua Lim Joshua please take [Applause] I’m delighted to welcome that Jess Spearman will be here as our equalities officer replacing anush K car Louie Davidson will be taking over from alesio diangelo a speaker officer [Applause] Felix AER will’ll be taking over from Sammy McDonald’s debates officer and for the appointed roles Alesia latche will be taking over from Johan nof [Applause] Mark Wy our brilliant Communications officer will be taking o we’ll be giving up the um we’ll be giving up um his role tonight to ISA [Applause] Patel leonus pal will be taking over from Liliana w as vice president and I’m delighted to announce our new president for Easter 20234 Easter 2024 taking over Nar paie good evening everyone um as Nick mentioned this is the presidential debate tonight so there is a lot of sappy things to get through um but firstly I just want to thank the entire lent team led by Nick um for all their hard work over putting on an absolutely brilliant time event but in particular I I’d also like to thank three people who have been working over the past 15 years um sorry 15 months not years at the union um Mark Lily and Johan are outgoing appointed officers um I don’t think the union would have been able to survive without the three of you so thank you so much and for all your hard work and for one more time can we put our hands together for the outgoing Lent 20240 um but tonight so moving on from all the sappy kind of part of the event um tonight we debate a very timely motion um given the current state of world affairs the motion before this house is that this house believes the British arms industry should be taken to the hake and we are honored to be joined by some very wonderful guests um proposes propos proposing the motion tonight um Andrew Feinstein and Dr s Sam Perlo Freeman are joined by Nick Davis meanwhile speaking in opposition of the motion tonight Ambassador John Bolton and Dr Leon cellos jenovich are joined by student speaker Julia Sosa so could we please give a warm welcome to all of our speakers and thank our debate conveners Iman and Josh Lim um who helped organize this speech so just a quick reminder um Ari uh floor speeches and the format so each paper speaker tonight has 10 minutes to make their case between each round of paper speakers there will also be time for speeches from the floor in proposition opposition and exstension of the motion as usual can I please emphasize that if any member wishes to make a point of information they must be kept short paraphrased as a question and it is the speaker’s complete right um to refuse to take them I really do encourage all of you to make contributions through points of information because as members this is your chamber but please do keep in mind that it is the speaker’s time and though pois are not a time like are a time for you to challenge the speaker it’s also not a time for back and forth so if you do have something that you think is a really valuable contribution in the debate but you think it’s going to take more than 10 to 15 seconds um and it’s not a question I do really encourage you to make those points via flaw speeches which will happen at at the end of each kind of round of paper speakers but getting all of the kind of format and technicalities out of the out of the way um we move on to the first Speaker for the proposition so opening the debate tonight is Nick Davis Nick is the outgoing president at the Cambridge union he is a final year undergraduate reading hsps at homon college and he was also previously co-chair of the Cambridge University labor Club he personally selected this motion due to his long history of activism against the British arms trade especially relating to the conflict in Yemen and the supply of Weaponry to Egypt Nick you have the floor [Applause] thank you and thank you to everyone for coming this e coming this evening on this important motion this motion tonight concerns something which should shame our nation our British government pays billions of taxpayers money to Arms companies like BAE Systems to manufacture export weapons sold to commit some of the worst atrocities am man imaginable yet collectively we behave as if this is not a threat to the rules-based international order we profess to hold there as if this is not an affront to any coherent notion of a shared Humanity far from being treated as criminal we treat this industry as invisible and through its invisibility we normalize the abject Madness of it and it’s important to make this clear that private arms corporations canot absolve themselves of responsibility for war crimes by claiming all they do is fulfill a contract and deliver a service like the deliver if you’re a CEO of a private corporation which knowingly equips governments with planes bombs and bullets used to commit indiscriminate Massacre you a complicit in a war crime and I want to be precise I’m not a pacifist the sale of certain arms in particular contexts is absolutely necessary and right I believe it’s perfectly legitimate to arm Ukraine to fend off Russian aggression there that’s perfectly within our rights but it should be all the more concern for non-p pacifists in this room like me to make sure that the laws of war the Geneva Convention the hay convention are observed look at the arms we Supply to Saudi Arabia and Yemen the aerial bombardment that took place there unabashedly and indiscriminately targeted civilians more than 370,000 are dead in s years the country blockaded 2/3 of civilians killed directly in this war were by indiscriminate Saudi air strikes and we licensed 20 billion worth of arms to the Saudi regime knowing that they’d used those weapons in a way where which was systemically and unambiguously paid no heed to the law of War as the civilian death toll mounted we were told that our influence through the arms trade could mitigate civilian casualties in the first two years of the war they doubled absolutely we should make crimes like this domestically accountable but there’s little appetite for the British government to prosecute companies which it has a vested interest in rendering in without in rendering productive without impunity there’s sustained political interference that a government with a majority of the commons has at its disposal and when domestic courts fail to hold these kind of crimes to account it’s incumbent on us to bring the case to the hag when British arms fund war crimes in Yemen and it’s important to nail the most egregious and unambiguous lie told in defense of the arms industry and maybe the most sustained and that’s if we did not sell to the arms to these war criminals someone else would so why surrender our relationship with war criminals and bite our and blight our national interest if it happens to be something which is geost strategically sound people who use this narrative like to think of themselves of Steely hard-nosed thinkers who understand the realities of international politics and can make tough choices while we’re naive and unrealistic unable to face up to the Bleak truth of international politics but in actuality I think it’s the other way around the comfortable lie the easy thing to believe is that ba arm systems don’t arm sales don’t really make a difference that either way war crimes would be committed that we can’t do anything the comfortable lie is to performatively throw your hands in the air at the bleakness of the world and then Proclaim all we can do is profit from it it’s a self-serving narrative that denies the agency of these corporations have in creating the international reality we inhabit to believe the world can change requires the inverse of naivity it requires we see the criminal horror of the arms trade for what it is an act to prosecute the argument that some Arms company cannot be held responsible for the arms they sell because someone else would is bankrupt because would that be sufficient to excuse human traffickers of their criminality or is it permissible for these traffickers to grant their services because there’s a gap in the free market do we not condemn these human traffickers because they choose to be the ones to degrade and dehumanize not because they do something that simply would be replaced by another willing human human trafficker we need to dispense with this fiction that arms companies are somehow not responsible for the arms they sell and to make war crimes unacceptable we have to prosecute them fueling war crimes puts the break on any conceivable moral progress towards protecting civilians in war the use of mustard gas landmines biological warfare child soldiers have all been vastly limited precisely because we can regulate war no organizers of war crimes would ever have been prosecuted the IC never created the international tribunal against Yugoslavia the international tribunal against the Rwanda and genocide airs they’d never have been held if we rested on the comfortable lie that war crimes are an inevitable immutable feature of international politics and all that International politics can be is an inevitable race to the bottom we do not make excuses when Russia sells weapons which Assad uses to bomb and choke civilians there we do not use make excuses for Putin when he massacres civilians in Kev and KV we do not make excuses for the Iranian regime when it denies women basic rights and massacres of them on the street so what so why are we granting impunity to our nominal allies if we bury our heads in the sand we’re complicit in the most abject of hypocrisies which undermines the rule-based order that great poers proclaimed to protect but it would be remiss of me if I did not mention an elephant in the room tonight which will feature in this debate and that’s Gaza and that’s that 85% of the population are forcibly displaced the United Nations telling us that 30,000 civilians are killed yet according to the US almost 29,000 of the strikes which occur in Gaza are done by unguided dump bombs which are indiscriminate by their very nature which by their very nature can’t observe the laws of war and Israel within Gaza too often reaches for 200b bombs which are four times greater than any that were used by the United States against Isis and Iraq they obliterate anything within a 30 m radius and if you’re using those regardless if any horrific terrorist organization which you’re operating against you make yourself complicit in war crimes and unfortunately despite this type of Weaponry being sold BAE Systems has decided to manufacture the main body of planes which are used to dump these weapons coming out of the UK which is why ordinary minded people in Glasgow Brighton and Lancer are blocking Bae factories blocking them not out of any ideological High flown thought against it but out of basic common human instinct seeing acts which shock the conscience so they can identify the need for corporate accountability and in this house we should tonight it’s appealing us for us to buy the lie that criminal arm sales are necessary and can never be prosecuted because we can then sit back and say collectively it’s not on us we don’t really want to believe These Arms companies are fundamentally complicit because we don’t want to believe that boring intelligent Suburban middle class Oxbridge graduates could be complicit in war crimes that those who live who work in well lit offices and live in leafy parts of London suburbs or war criminals because it hits too close to home if you take Charles Woodburn the CEO of BAE Systems he’s a self-professed cycling in Enthusiast from s he did his PhD an undergraduate here at St John’s Cambridge yet he also runs an Arms Company which is responsible for the most bombs which are dropped on Yemen in the most indiscriminate fashion we can’t reconcile that in our heads so what we need criminal justice to do is to reconfigure the way we frame these people the way they’re narrated the way our International politics thinks about them and when I last spoke at the union I talked of Empire and the need for Britain to face its past tonight more than reflection we need action we need to cast off the veil face the mechanical clanging of the cold assembly lines and the rattling of the ighter Plains because if we don’t we’ll have to face the shame that in the 21st century with our unprecedented access to information with our unprecedented capacity to connect and empathize with our fellow human beings that we did nothing that we let companies complicit in war crimes get away with this and then there will be nothing left to do but memorialize these crimes tell ourselves there is nothing that could be done and then by then it will all be for show to half convince the people around us to half convince ourselves and we’ll be living in ba systems delusional world and gladly living in it thank you [Music]