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Anna Stavrianakis

Anna Stavrianakis

Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex and Director of Research and Strategy at Shadow World Investigations, expert on the global arms trade and UK arms export policy.

Sep 22, 2026

5:05
What do you make of, what is he actually, what are Britain actually doing here?
5:10
Thanks, Owen.
5:11
I think for all those reasons, I find it particularly disappointing that the new Burnham government is now actively collaborating with Saudi Arabia in its failed war on Yemen.
5:23
Because what they're doing essentially is resurrecting a strategy that doesn't work.
5:28
So Saudi Arabia, since 2015, has been fighting in the war in Yemen and it has primarily been using air power.
5:37
It's been using airstrikes with its fighter jets and bombs that are supplied primarily by the United States and the United Kingdom and other European states to try to bomb the Houthis into submission.
5:52
The war in Yemen has its own local, national, but also regional and international dynamics.
10:35
But it goes beyond that, doesn't it? I mean, what we're talking about, what kind of British involvement, which people won't know about, I would say, probably, in terms of Yemen,
35:03
How much evidence or proof do we have that politicians are often being bought and paid for by these same arms companies?
35:09
So there's definitely evidence that politicians are taking money from arms companies.
35:12
There's the register of interests.
35:14
There's the freebie trips that they run.
35:17
There's the APPGs that they sponsor, and there's the invitations to the arms fairs and so on.
35:23
One of the interesting pieces of research that's come out in the last couple of years is from Campaign Against Arms Trade, who take this idea of the revolving door, which listeners and viewers are probably familiar with, this idea that people move from government into arms companies and they move from arms companies into government, and it's a mutually enriching, a mutually enforcing relationship.
35:42
The metaphor that they came up with was the revolving door isn't enough because it still assumes that they're two separate buildings.

5 MINS LATER

41:05
Could you outline what's going on in there and what's our, as in Britain's, complicity in that or active participation?

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