Merchants of death

As the company itself puts it so poetically, its Land and Armaments unit "continues to benefit from operational requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Well, bully for the company and its shareholders who can sit back and wait for the profits from war to land in their laps, while British troops and the civilian populations of both Iraq and Afghanistan count the cost in death, destruction and injury.

All in all, it's not been a bad week for the merchants of death, with the Law Lords having ruled on Wednesday that normal rules on investigating bribery and corruption do not apply to the arms industry or to its partners in the venal autocracy of Saudi Arabia.

Britain's arms-trafficking industry already enjoys a privileged position over the rest of our country's manufacturing sector.

The government guarantees, through its export credit and guarantee department, payment for contracts tied up with some of the most dictatorial and unstable regimes in the world.

And when criticism erupts from either peace campaigners or civil libertarians, Cabinet ministers launch into a long diatribe about the contribution that arms sales make to the economy and to employment in the vital export-oriented engineering sector.

What they do not explain is why this industry needs feather-bedding rather than, say, cars, shipbuilding, rail rolling stock, motor bikes, steel or a raft of other sectors that have been allowed to decline, become extinct or be bought up at knockdown prices by competitors in other countries.

In each case, government - it doesn't really matter of what stripe since their responses have been uniform - has simply cited the inexorable power of market forces.

But market forces do not seem to apply to an industry that is geared to annihilation rather than peaceful development.

Trade unions will, of course, welcome the ongoing employment of their members, even though the numbers in the arms industry are in steady decline.

Unions are also correct to insist on the preservation of collectives of highly skilled engineering workers and the maintenance of existing research and development teams.

But it is a perversion of their skills and training that they should be restricted to production in the cause of death rather than life.

We do not have to go back to the example of the Lucas shop stewards committee three decades ago to understand that the skills of arms industry engineers can be put to better civil use.

The Scottish TUC and Scottish CND have done excellent work together in identifying alternative projects relating to tidal power and other renewable energy possibilities to take the place of the ridiculously expensive and dangerous Trident submarine white elephant.

There is no reason why the government could not give its blessing to similar initiatives across Britain.

The main reason that it does not do so is its servile attitude to the US, which demands backing for its various criminal overseas wars and insists on a war-based economic model.

Reversing that militaristic approach would help the cause of international peace and Britain's economic position.