Gentlemen's Agreements

Well, thank heavens this sort of thing couldn't happen here. The Swedish foreign minister, a second-class human being according to the dictates of Allah as revealed to the House of Saud, claims that Riyadh blocked her speech on women's rights and achievements. The Saudis are also annoyed at her for speaking out against the sentencing of a Saudi blogger to a thousand lashes and ten years in prison for "insulting Islam". The Swedish coalition is in the middle of an argument over whether it should renew a memorandum of understanding on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia; the business community, with its usual ethical delicacy, has already ordered that the arrangement should be continued, while a former right-wing defence minister has lamented Sweden's lack of soft power among the Middle East's various dictatorships, theocracies and apartheid rogue states. Nevertheless, there is actually some debate as to whether the memorandum will be renewed, despite the notorious conditions of deprivation and poverty in which arms dealers live the world over. Evidently the Swedes have little conception of the more civilised arrangement used in the UK, whereby all exported weapons are stamped Not to be Used for Internal Repression, and that takes care of the human rights angle apart from a bit of tut-tutting.