Pip: If you’ve ever wondered how a government squares “we stand for democracy and the rule of law” with “also, here are some more weapons” — welland2 has been to a festival that asked exactly that question.
Mara: This episode covers talks from the Festival of Humanism: UK foreign policy in the Gulf, and a debate between an Israeli and a Palestinian that was so in demand it had to be repeated in a bigger hall. Let’s start with what those festival talks said about conflict, hypocrisy, and who gets a seat at the table.
Festival Talks On Conflict
Pip: The through-line across both festival sessions is a single uncomfortable question: when Western governments talk about human rights and the rule of law, are they describing a principle or a brand?
Mara: Dr David Wearing’s talk at the Festival of Humanism set that up directly. The post captures his framing of Britain’s governing class this way: he made “the distinction between ‘we’ meaning them and ‘we’ meaning the population at large.”
Pip: That distinction does a lot of work. It means the arms sales, the training of security forces, the quiet financial entanglement with Gulf monarchies — none of that was put to a public vote. It happened in the gap between those two “we”s.
Mara: Wearing traced the history back to oil — Britain establishing protectorates around the Arabian peninsula primarily to secure supply — and argued the logic never really changed. The post notes he pointed out that “we would find it difficult to support our arms industry without the sales to the Gulf states.” The economic interdependence runs deeper than arms: legal services, accountancy, sovereign wealth funding the UK deficit.
Pip: The self-deception angle is what lands hardest. He describes RAF personnel actively involved in supporting Saudi forces during Yemen, while a senior army figure talked about the “rules based international order maintaining peace and prosperity.” That’s not a gap between rhetoric and reality — that’s a chasm.
Mara: The post calls it “an almost baffling lack of awareness.” And Wearing connects it explicitly to a colonial mindset — one that made it easy to view the region as backward, which in turn made it easier to look past the death penalty, the imprisonment of journalists and activists, the denial of women’s rights.
Pip: His book AngloArabia is flagged for anyone who wants the full argument in print.
Mara: The second session — the Israeli-Palestinian debate — and drew such a crowd it had to be repeated the following day in a larger hall. A British-Israeli software engineer and a British-Palestinian paediatrician spoke together, and the post deliberately doesn’t attribute individual points to individual speakers. The point being that some of the positions would surprise you about who held them.
Pip: One of those positions: “the conflict was about land — religion was very much a secondary factor.” Another: “armed resistance has made life more difficult for those it seeks to support.” Neither of those is a fringe view from outside — they came from inside the room, from people with direct stakes.
Mara: The post closes on a note that connects back to Wearing’s argument: outside interference — the Gulf dynamics, the arms flows — is “a factor in the perpetuation of violence.” The two sessions sat together, and they did.
Pip: And if the governing class won’t have the conversation, apparently a humanist festival in Bournemouth will.
Mara: The same logic — who gets heard, who gets excluded — runs straight into the questions the group is raising closer to home.
Pip: Two festival sessions, one through-line: the distance between what governments say they stand for and what the money actually does.
Mara: And the argument that ordinary voters are largely excluded from that gap. Worth watching what the group surfaces next.
Amnesty in Salisbury & South Wiltshire 