This week Gordon Brown and David Cameron (prime minister and leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition respectively) will welcome the leader of one of the worlds most vicious dictatorships to Britain.
At taxpayers expense a sumptuous series of bankquets will be held for Abdullah al-Saud who will ride in a golden carriage with the Queen to Buckingham palace.
"The torture chambers in Saudi Arabia were not created for me. These rooms where like a human abatoir. There was years's worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean. It was all over the walls. We were lucky we survived but there are countless Saudi people who we never hear about who dont survive these chambers"
The British Foreign office describes Saudi Arabia thus:-
"Women are subject to discrimination. Prisoners suffer maltreatment and torture. Captial punishment is imposed without adequate safeguards and often executed in a cruel way and in public. Amputations are imposed as corporal punishment...We also have concerns about freedom of expression, assembly and religion".
Independent wrote:The truth is that the British Government - and all Western societies - are so addicted to Saudi Arabia's oil that they feel they can't speak back. They are terrified of seeing the petrol that lubricates our economy (or the arms deals that butter it) being turned off, as it was in 1973 oil cricis. It is only by making a rapid transition away from our dependence on fossil fuels that this depraved relationship with a tyranny can be unpicked - but the Government shows no sign of doing this, preferring to stick to the old exchange of sycophancy, arms deals and crude oil