Anyone would have thought I’d stopped reading, given that it’s ages since I’ve written up a book review. Rest assured that’s not true. I’m just a little behind. Look to a flood of reviews over the next few days.
You’ve probably seen Mark Thomas on Channel 4. Well not latterly, since his brand of political humour seems to have disappeared. Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins are more likely to be presenting, with perhaps even Russell Brand.
Anyway, he still pops up from time to time. Last year Thomas presented an edition of Dispatches in which he got a couple of sets of school children set-up as arms dealers. Not because it was a good career path for them, but to explain all the various loopholes and legislative failures that let just about anybody sell anything they like to pretty much any country, irrespective of the regime.
I must admit that because I’d seen this film, I wasn’t too sure whether it was going to be worthwhile buying this book. It’d just cover the same ground wouldn’t it? Well, yes it does. But there’s much much more.
Certainly some of the stories related here are from Thomas’ various TV shows over the years, but there’s a lot more, and this book forms a really good backgrounder into how arms dealing and the arms trade in general works. It’s really really scary how easy it all is to do.
In places there are loopholes you could drive a tank through, but you just know that at the end of the day, even if it is illegal of me to directly ship, say, military trucks from India to Sudan while I sit on the end of an email address and mobile phone in the UK, unless someone finds out about it.
The tone of the book is typical Thomas – he is a comedian by trade after all. A good read.