Can you say more about that? Like, help us understand this private public and all that blurriness.

Sure.

Today, most of the world's arms makers are, in fact, privately owned.

And that usually means now that they're owned by financial institutions.

BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, and various others tend to be the biggest shareholders now.

But the extraordinary thing is that even when they're entirely privately owned, these companies have huge influence over government policy.

You know, in the United Kingdom, the senior executives of companies like BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Kinetic, and others have the same level of national security clearance as the defense minister.

I mean, one is the unaccountability that you've talked about, and the other is AI is in its infancy, and the primary way that the U.S. is putting public funds into that field is through the defense, through military, right? So how will it grow up as a technology if its birth is in this killing field? Andrew, do you want to add anything about the role of tech? Sure.

Andrew, this isn't really a question, but this means, correct me if I'm wrong, that I helped pay for the bomb that killed Ahmed's father, sister, brother, nieces, and nephews.

Unfortunately, the reality of the world that we live in is that the weapons makers, the defense companies, are the most heavily subsidized companies on the planet.

What I mean by that is that they receive more public money, more of our taxes, than any other sector of the economy, than any other companies.

Almost all of their research and development is paid for by us.

There is swathes of their staff that are paid for by us.

Their marketing teams are largely paid for by us.

It was estimated by someone you and I know very well, Bridget, Bill Hartung Who is, in my opinion, doyen of progressive arms trade researchers in the United States and has been for decades.

Okay, so what are the arguments that governments put forward to rationalize continuing to send weapons?

What do we see distinctly when we ask about the arms trade there?

What we see is an entity, the state of Israel, that is armed and funded by the West.

It is treated as an outpost of Europe.

You know, astonishingly, Israel plays in European sports competitions.

It's central to the Eurovision Song Contest.

But it's in the Middle East.

I don't see Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, et cetera, et cetera, participating in any of these as part of Europe.

I was a contributor as well.

So take the safety out of it, right? Take the, you know, lives and whether or not it makes the world better or worse, safer, less safe out of it, we're good for the economy.

This is the conversation I love.

Thank you for raising it.

So first of all, if one actually looks at economic research, and we did this in a book called Indefensible: Seven Myths That Sustain the Global Arms Trade, what the research shows overwhelmingly is that increases in defense spending are terrible for the economy with the exception of one country in the world, the United States of America, because of the predominance of the defense sector in its economy and because of the fact that it produces 40% of the world's weapons, so it has an economies of scale advantage Other than that, it is often a drag on GDP.

And I have lived through a very specific experience of it, where our minister for trade and industry, a longtime former trade unionist in South Africa, told the nation in words well echoed by Andy Burnham yesterday, I think, "We are going to build back South African industry on the back of this arms deal of higher defense spending." The calculation has shown that in the 18 years since, it has eroded between .3 and .8 of a percent of our GDP every year.

Why is that the case? Well, and I'll come back to the technological thing which is linked to this first point, the defense sector has terrible, and I'll put this in as non-economic terms as I can, linkages to other parts of the economy.

So it's not an industry where something you're making requires all sorts of other sectors involved to make that.

It's no longer a trolley problem at all.

We're good for the economy.

This is the conversation I love.

Thank you for raising it.

So first of all, if one actually looks at economic research, and we did this in a book called Indefensible: Seven Myths That Sustain the Global Arms Trade, what the research shows overwhelmingly is that increases in defense spending are terrible for the economy, with the exception of one country in the world, the United States of America, because of the predominance of the defense sector in its economy, and because of the fact that it produces 40% of the world's weapons, so it has an economies of scale advantage.

Other than that, it is often a drag on GDP, and I have lived through a very specific experience of it, where our minister for trade and industry, a longtime former trade unionist in South Africa, told the nation, in words well echoed by Andy Burnham yesterday, I think, "We are going to build back South African industry on the back of this arms deal of higher defense spending." The calculation has shown that in the 18 years since, it has eroded between .3 and .8 of a percent of our GDP every year.

Why is that the case? Well- And I'll come back to the technological thing which is linked to this first point.

The defense sector has terrible, and I'll put this in as non-economic terms as I can, linkages to other parts of the economy.

It's no longer a trolley problem at all.

Can you tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind that and how you went about, about it?

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, so I think you need to understand apartheid South Africa, um, had sort of a hierarchy of importance.

At the top was racism.

Next was rugby, then religion.

That was sort of the hierarchy.

I mean, and I make that point to try and express how important sport was to white South Africans, and still is to all South Africans today.

Indeed he does, and that's been the cause of all this ruckus is the fact that he chooses, he's actively chosen to represent Israel, as his father did as well.

Mm.

So there was this an economic imperative that Israel doesn't have towards the Palestinians, that what Israel practices as a system of apartheid is without question if one looks at the legality of the Rome Statute, and of course, the International Court of Justice has ruled accordingly.

But the other fundamental difference, and this is a difference, as a white South African, I don't even have a right to say this, but both Nelson Mandela and someone I was very close to, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who experienced apartheid in ways that I obviously [laughs] never did, but who also knew the reality of the Israel-Palestine situation, described Israeli apartheid as so much more brutal and worse than South African apartheid.

Why? Because it went to levels that ours never did, not just in the numbers of people slaughtered, the almost continual war against the Palestinian people.

I don't think it's just an occupation.

I think it's actually an ongoing war.

The efficiency of it.

Mm.