If we want to understand why tens of millions of people are displaced across the globe, more than at any time since the Second World War, we are encouraged to look almost anywhere except where the answer most obviously lies. Politicians point to poverty, to climate change, to instability that seems, in their telling, to arise spontaneously from distant lands. What is discussed far less openly is the extent to which that instability is manufactured, fuelled, and sustained by the very countries now debating how to keep refugees out.
War does not simply happen. It is supplied.
And in that supply chain, the United Kingdom is not a bystander but a participant of consequence.
The numbers alone should give pause. In 2024, UK arms export licences, at least those we are allowed to see, rose by 86% to a record £9.2 billion. The largest recipients included the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Ukraine. Yet even this figure is partial, a carefully framed glimpse rather than a full account. A vast portion of British arms exports flows through so-called “open licences”, which impose no meaningful limit on volume or value. According to estimates from the Campaign Against Arms Trade, these opaque channels may account for roughly half of all exports. The real figure, then, is not merely large, it is deliberately obscured.
This matters, because the destinations of those exports are not neutral. They are not abstract markets or benign trading partners. They are active participants in some of the most destructive conflicts of our time.
The UK continues to supply weapons to Turkey, a state engaged in sustained military operations against Kurdish groups across multiple borders. It arms Saudi Arabia, whose campaign in Yemen has been associated with widespread civilian suffering. It maintains defence relationships with the United Arab Emirates, a key actor in the war that has torn apart Sudan. And it continues to licence military components to Israel as it conducts devastating operations in the Gaza Strip.
These are not unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise principled policy. They are the policy.
The language used to justify this trade is familiar: strategic partnerships, national security, economic benefit. British defence firms—foremost among them BAE Systems—are presented as engines of prosperity, supporting skilled jobs and technological innovation. Government ministers speak of influence and alliances, of maintaining Britain’s role on the global stage. All of which has a certain logic—until one considers the human consequences that unfold at the other end of the transaction.
Because weapons do not simply sit in warehouses. They are used.
They are used in Yemen, where airstrikes have driven millions from their homes. They are used in Kurdish regions, where civilians are caught between insurgency and state retaliation. They are used in Sudan, where a complex web of external support has helped sustain a conflict marked by atrocities and mass displacement. And they are used in Gaza, where repeated bombardment has created one of the most acute humanitarian crises in the world.
The people who flee these conditions do not arrive in Europe as geopolitical abstractions. They arrive as refugees, often recast in domestic debate as a problem to be solved, a burden to be managed, or a threat to be contained. Their journeys are dissected, their motives questioned, and their presence politicised. What is rarely acknowledged is that their displacement is not an accident of history. It is, in part, the foreseeable outcome of policy choices made in places like London.
Nowhere is this contradiction more stark than in the case of the F-35 fighter jet. Around 15% of each aircraft is manufactured in the UK, making Britain an integral part of its global supply chain. Israel operates dozens of these jets and has deployed them extensively in its military campaigns. Faced with mounting concern over the humanitarian impact of those operations, the UK government has taken a characteristically cautious approach: suspending a limited number of export licences while ensuring that the flow of F-35 components continues indirectly via the United States.
It is a manoeuvre that preserves both the appearance of restraint and the reality of supply. Officially, the rules remain intact. In practice, they are quietly circumvented.
A similar pattern can be seen in Sudan. The conflict there, complex, brutal, and increasingly catastrophic, has been fuelled in part by external arms flows. The Rapid Support Forces, accused of grave abuses, rely heavily on supplies linked to the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, in turn, is a significant customer of British arms. Evidence has emerged suggesting that UK-origin equipment has found its way into the Sudanese theatre through these channels. Yet rather than prompting a reassessment, arms exports to the UAE have continued—and even increased.
This is the reality of the modern arms trade: a network rather than a straight line, a system in which responsibility is diffused across layers of intermediaries and alliances. It allows governments to claim adherence to legal frameworks while enabling outcomes that those frameworks were ostensibly designed to prevent.
The problem, ultimately, is not simply one of policy inconsistency. It is one of political will. The UK’s export criteria, which are supposed to prevent the sale of arms where there is a clear risk of misuse, are only as strong as the willingness to enforce them. Time and again, economic and strategic considerations have taken precedence over human rights concerns. The result is a system that functions less as a safeguard than as a justification.
None of this is unique to Britain. The United States remains the world’s largest arms exporter, deeply entangled in conflicts across multiple regions. Other major powers play their part. The global arms trade is vast, lucrative, and deeply embedded in international politics. But acknowledging its scale does not absolve individual countries of responsibility. On the contrary, it underscores the need for accountability.
Because the link between arms sales and refugee flows is not theoretical. It is immediate and tangible. Weapons intensify conflicts. Intensified conflicts destroy infrastructure, fracture societies, and render ordinary life impossible. People flee not because they wish to, but because they must. And when they arrive at the borders of wealthier nations, they encounter a discourse that treats their presence as inexplicable, as if the forces that displaced them were entirely external, entirely beyond our control.
They are not.
The uncomfortable truth is that the refugee crisis is, in part, a domestic policy outcome exported abroad and then re-imported in human form. It begins not on a small boat in the Channel, but in a licensing decision, a defence contract, a diplomatic calculation. It begins in the quiet normalisation of an industry that trades in the means of destruction while insisting on its own neutrality.
If we are serious about reducing the number of refugees in the world, we cannot confine our attention to borders and deterrence. We have to look upstream, to the conditions that force people to leave their homes in the first place. That means confronting the role of arms exports—not as an unfortunate necessity, but as a central driver of the very crises we claim to lament.
Until that happens, the pattern will continue. Weapons will be sold. Conflicts will escalate. Civilians will flee. And the same governments that facilitated the first step will express concern at the last.
We cannot continue to arm the world’s conflicts and then feign surprise at their consequences.
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