Saeed Pourreza Press TV, London It is a decision that’s outraged the British opposition and campaigners, who’ve called it morally indefensible. There is not a clear risk that the export of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law.

The resumption of arms sales to the royals of Riyadh also comes against the backdrop of the British government imposing sanctions on 20 Saudis over human rights violations just a day earlier.

That campaigners say speaks to the hypocrisy at the heart of the British government, and that weapons are not the solution to the war in Yemen.

Britain is Saudi Arabia’s second largest arms dealer after the US, providing military exports worth billions of dollars.

A case in point, UK arms dealer BAE Systems, which according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, made £2.5 billion from Saudi Arabia in 2019 alone and £15 billion between 2015 and 2019.

The brutal civil war in Yemen has already claimed more than a hundred thousand lives and left 13 million people on the brink of starvation.

A situation compounded by the covid-19 pandemic.

As the world continues to fiddle, Yemen continues to burn.

And selling arms to Saudi Arabia, campaigners say, is a hard drug for western governments to give up