Jeremy Corbyn, left, and Andrew Feinstein at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town

WILL international law ever solve issues around the globe – or are we faced with a never-ending spiral of expensive arms as the only language countries will listen to?

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the USA’s realigning with the Putin regime, the clamour for ever bigger defence budgets is being met in the UK and Europe.

But is the answer to Russian aggression solely writing ever larger cheques to arms manufacturers?

Understanding the roots of the Ukrainian conflict – and the multitude of other wars raging – means delving into the machinations of the one group who benefit from the slaughter, according to a new book, The Monstrous Anger of the Guns.

This series of essays considers the secretive world of arms trading, its impact on those lives blighted directly by bombs and bullets, and the hidden costs to economies.

Contributors with a range of experience cast light on an industry mired in murk. Politicians, activists, economists and academics consider how ongoing conflicts have one thing in common: the group who are always victorious are the arms manufacturers. They have a particularly, perversely evil interest in humans killing one another.

Former Labour Party leader and Islington North independent MP Jeremy Corbyn has contributed a preface, and at a launch event this week at the Owl Bookshop, Kentish Town, he explained how rearming was not a cure-all foreign policy.

Mr Corbyn said that as well as standing up to aggressor states like Russia, a longer-term view meant exploring how the industry could be converted to civilian needs. “Dismantling the arms trade means using the skills to do something else,” he said. “I explored these ideas in the manifestos of 2017 and 2019. I met people at BAE. The idea was to keep the factories open but make something else. I thought I would get pushback but instead they said: ‘We can do anything if you give us the order to do it’.

“I am not naive about what Russia has been up to, nor about wars elsewhere, but no one will convince me that constant, never-ending rearming everyone will bring about a peaceful outcome.”

Editors Rhona Michie, Andrew Feinstein and Paul Rogers have brought essayists that find a common thread.

Mr Feinstein, who stood at the last general election in Holborn and St Pancras, was a South African MP.

His eyes were opened to the extraordinary sums of money coupled with the widespread corruption military spending created.

“When I was elected in 1994, I knew nothing about the arms trade,” he said at the launch. “My focus was economics and running a public accounts committee.

“Our auditor general sent us a report that said there was evidence of corruption in a $10bn arms deal the ANC had embarked on.

“This was £10bn spent on arms we had no need for. At the time, our president Thabo Mbeki claimed we could not afford to provide life-saving anti-retroviral medication for the six million South Africans living with HIV and Aids. This policy choice meant over 360,000 people died annually and more than 36,000 babies were born with HIV. We could afford to spend £10bn on weapons that would never be used, but not mother-to-child-transmission treatment.”

Andrew’s status as an MP allowed him to delve further – and what he discovered was sickening.

“$350 million dollars of bribes were given to senior politicians in the ANC, officers in the South African Defence Force and sadly the ANC itself. The bribes were part of the money spent on the second election campaign in 1999.

“It was through this deal with South Africa and BAE Systems that I started to see how this happens all around the world.”

The University of Sussex’s Professor Anna Stavrianakis offers a timely overview: she considers how arms sales impact on public policy.

“In 2021, military expenditure passed the $2trillion mark for the first time,” she reveals.

“Despite a financial crisis, a global Covid pandemic and the climate emergency, governments continued to devote massive amounts of their resources to preparing for war.”

And while these figures alone are shocking enough, Professor Stavrianakis says the arms trade has carte blanche for corruption.

“The trade is marked by secrecy and obfuscation, veiled behind a toxic combination of national security, commercial confidentiality and masculinist assumptions about what it means to be powerful and strong,” she adds.

“And the trade in weaponry is never just about the hardware. Arms sales are accompanied by engineering and logistics support, military training, diplomatic support and wider economic projects, often corrupt.”

The UK is a major player.

“In the UK, the arms industry is officially private, but the government holds what is known as a ‘golden share’ in the largest companies such as BAE Systems and Rolls Royce,” she says.

“While the British arms industry is not subject to official state direction, in practice it operates together with the state as an integrated whole, sharing assumptions about the economic, political and military benefits of arms exports. For example, government and industry share the assumptions that arms exports are good for the economy and an effective way of promoting national and global security, both of which are contested.”

Of the many telling arguments the essays put forward for a reconsideration of its real impact, nothing quite sums up the intellectual and moral bankruptcy than the example of Dick Cheney.

Cheney was defence minister under George H W Bush and invited a private company, Halliburton, to look at the Pentagon and recommend what elements could be sold off to private contractors.

Halliburton saw a risk-free way to make millions for its shareholders.

Cheney left Washington after Bush was defeated at the polls – and slipped seamlessly behind the desk at Halliburton as its chief executive.

When his son George W Bush took office in 2001, Cheney was his vice-president – and the most tubthumping of the warmongers when it came to the invasion of Iraq.

The war saw Halliburton handed $40 billion-worth of contracts – netting Cheney $10m personally.

“In every conflict there are multiple Dick Cheneys pulling the levers of power, ensuring the descent into ever bloodier wars, and banking the proceeds of the carnage,” the book adds.

As the essays reveal, arms are not solely about self-defence in a messy world of geo-politics, but are a corrupt and dangerous trade, bankrolled by tax-payers who are kept firmly in the dark as to what their hard-earned money is really being used for.

• Monstrous Anger of the Guns: How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It. Edited by Rhona Michie, Andrew Feinstein and Paul Roger. With Jeremy Corbyn. Pluto Press, £12