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This week’s guest writer of the introduction to the Mark Thomas Product website is Mr. Mark Thomas. The Problem 
This week the rotund but nonetheless attractive Mark Thomas goes on a crazy whirlwind weekend romance with some arms dealers, in a hilarious, irreverent and often off the wall comedy half hour. In the 1980’s the Conservative MP’s didn’t just collect money in brown paper envelopes for asking questions, they did a lot of work to help their friends in the arms industry too. Although in all fairness, some of the people in the arms industry thought that the Tories were just helping themselves. After a series of scandals culminating in the “Arms to Iraq affair” an inquiry was launched into the arms business lead by the fox hunting inquistor Lord Justice Scott. In 1996, in a bid to limit the damage to the Government the Tories only allowed Labour access to the final report, which ran at about 1,000 pages long, three hours before the report was debated in the House of Commons. In many ways the debate was a watershed moment in British politics. The Tories were up to their necks in sleaze, economic incompetence and had been caught flogging weapons to the very people the UK had fought against in the Gulf war. This was to be the moment when Ministers like William Waldergrave had their jobs and careers hovering in the balance. Robin Cook made his name that day by organising a team of researchers to break down the contents of the report in those three hours and leading the Opposition response. New Labour pledged to reform the system for the exporting of arms when it got into power. Now, just seven years later, New Labour are finally getting round to introducing new legislation. Unfortunately, like much of New Labour’s promises of reform, what they are offering falls far short of what is needed. This week Mark and his fantastically talented team look at two of the problems that New Labour fail to deliver on in reforming the exporting of arms:- Licensed Production Export Control and End Use Monitoring. Licensed Production Many British arms firms license the production of their “goods” to other companies in other countries. Once made the arms are not subject to UK export controls and can be sold to whichever nations the host country allows.This is not the case for US companies; no matter where the arms company is in the world, if the license comes from the US the final products are subject to US arms controls. Sadly, this extension of regulation doesn't happen in the UK and, despite years of campaigning and vociferous lobbying on the issue, it is not addressed by the Export Control Bill. End Use Monitoring Purchasers of British arms are required to supply a certificate of 'end-use' which theoretically allows the UK government to ensure that they do not issue export licenses for arms that will end up in the wrong hands.The system has long been criticised by NGO's who have claimed that scant attention is ever paid to the end user certificates with the result that arms end up in disreputable and often unknown hands. The system is also criticised since the 'end user' has often been in reality a transit point for the arms to be sent on to a destination which the UK government would not directly grant a license for. The Scott Report illustrated this in striking detail by showing how British arms with seemingly innocuous end user destinations such as Singapore actually ended up in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Heckler & Koch Heckler and Koch are owned by Royal Ordnance, who are in turn owned by BAe Systems, the UK arms firm famous for selling Hawk jets to Indonesia during its occupation and brutal repression of East Timor. Heckler and Koch make a sub-machine gun called an MP5 which is used all over the world. In fact you’ll often see British police forces with them, particularly at airports or in the City of London. The MP5 is also licensed for production in Pakistan, Turkey and Iran. So a British-owned, German-based company is licensing the production of its guns in countries that have completely different systems of export control. In short, an MP5 sub-machine gun made in Iran could be sold to places that a Heckler and Koch original gun would never legally get to if it came from Europe.
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