The UK claimed to be taking a backseat on the war in Iran. Here's why that's rubbish
The UK wants none of the backlash with all of the material benefits, which is why their position is so inconsistent.
The UK Government says it has one of the most ‘robust’ export controls in the world
After the US used UK-made Tomahawk missiles in strikes on Iran that killed schoolchildren in early 2026, the UK government was asked whether it would review its arms export regime. It declined. Instead, it repeated the same line it always repeats, that the UK has “one of the most robust export control regimes in the world” (Declassified UK, 2026).
This phrase gets trotted out every time someone asks why the UK is still arming states accused of war crimes, and it works because it sounds like somebody is checking. But when you actually look at what happens with UK arms export licences, the phrase stops describing a policy and starts functioning as a shield, something the government hides behind to avoid being held to account.
What the suspension actually looked like
In September 2024, Foreign Secretary Lammy told Parliament that the government had found a “clear risk” that UK arms “might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law” (Hansard, 2 September 2024). That sounds like the system catching a problem and responding to it.
But at the time, the UK had 368 active export licences to Israel, covering 177 military items and 191 dual-use items (House of Commons Library, 2025). The suspension covered 16 of them. The remaining 352 kept operating. That’s less than 5% of active licences affected by a suspension that was presented as a serious moral and legal intervention.
And then in the three months after the suspension, between October and December 2024, the UK approved £127.6 million in new military export licences to Israel, which was more than the previous three years combined (House of Commons Library, 2025). By June 2025, UK arms exports to Israel hit a record high (Middle East Monitor, 2025). So the government announced it was suspending arms to Israel, and then immediately started exporting more than ever. That is not a system constraining itself. That is a performance of constraint, while the material reality goes in the opposite direction.
The F-35 exemption
The most telling part of the September 2024 suspension was what it left out, which was F-35 components, the single largest category of UK military exports to Israel.
The UK is the sole Tier 1 international partner in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme. It has invested $2.5 billion in development. BAE Systems builds the rear fuselage and electronic warfare systems, Rolls-Royce makes the engine lift system with no alternative supplier in existence, and UK industry overall produces about 15% of every F-35 built globally, worth over £368 million per aircraft. The total projected value of the UK’s involvement in the programme is £45.2 billion by 2046, and over 20,000 UK jobs depend on it (Campaign Against Arms Trade, 2024; House of Commons Library, 2025).
Israel operates 45 F-35s and has 30 more on order. If the UK suspended F-35 components going to Israel, it would effectively mean pulling out of the global programme entirely, because you can’t selectively cut one customer out of a supply chain that runs through every single aircraft. The government knew this, and so it exempted the biggest category of weapons exports from the very suspension it was publicly announcing as evidence of moral seriousness.
Samuel Perlo-Freeman of the Campaign Against Arms Trade put it well when he said it was “a bit like saying you’re going vegetarian except for bacon” (Al Jazeera, 2024).
When the exemption was challenged in court in June 2025, the High Court refused to overturn it. The government’s argument was that suspending F-35 exports posed “immensely serious and imminent risks to international peace and security.” The judges accepted this, ruling that the risk to the F-35 programme was “immediate” while harm to Palestinian civilians was “uncertain.” Anna Stavrianakis, the leading academic researcher on UK arms export policy, pointed out that the court had decided “un-evidenced potential future risks were deemed more catastrophic than the actually-occurring harm” (Stavrianakis, 2025). The court didn’t resolve the contradiction between the government’s stated commitment to international law and its material commitment to the F-35 programme. It just made the contradiction official.
This keeps happening
In 2019, the Court of Appeal found that UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia were unlawful under the same legal test, Criterion 2c, which asks whether there is a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law. The government lost in court and was forced to change its assessment process. It then introduced what it called a “revised process” and resumed exports (Campaign Against Arms Trade, 2024).
Same criteria, same type of violations, same outcome. A brief interruption and then back to business. What Stavrianakis calls the government’s “myth of the robust control regime” is not a case of the system failing. It is the system working exactly as intended. The process of risk assessment and legal review creates the appearance of scrutiny while consistently arriving at the same conclusion, which is approval (Stavrianakis, 2025). The process legitimises the arms flows by making them look considered and careful, when the result was never really in question.
What “robust” is actually protecting
The government’s own assessment found a “clear risk” of IHL violations and then exempted the biggest weapons system from the suspension. The same criteria that found Saudi exports unlawful were applied to Israel and produced a completely different outcome. Starmer gave his speech to Parliament about UK involvement in the Iran war on 2 March 2026, which was the day *after* he had already approved US use of UK bases for strikes (Hansard, 2 March 2026). None of this looks like a system that is protecting civilians, or legal consistency, or parliamentary accountability.
What it does protect is the £45.2 billion F-35 programme, the 20,000 jobs tied to it, the £4.5 billion in Saudi arms contracts, and the defence-industrial relationships that keep the UK positioned as a major player in the global arms trade. That is what is actually being kept safe by the phrase “robust export controls.” The robustness is real, it’s just not pointed at what the government says it’s pointed at.
And honestly, that’s the part that should make you angry. Not that the system is broken, but that it is working. Every time the government says “robust export controls,” what it is really saying is that the defence industry’s profits and the UK’s geopolitical positioning matter more than the lives of the people those weapons are being used on. The system isn’t f*cked because it’s failing. It’s f*cked because it’s succeeding at exactly what it was built to do.
References
Campaign Against Arms Trade (2024) *F-35 briefing update*. Available at: https://caat.org.uk/app/uploads/2024/10/CAAT-F35-briefing-update-v4.pdf (Accessed: 12 April 2026).
Declassified UK (2026) ‘UK role in US-Israel strikes on Iran’, *Declassified UK*.
House of Commons Library (2025) *UK arms exports to Israel*. CBP-9964. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9964/ (Accessed: 12 April 2026).
Middle East Monitor (2025) ‘British arms exports to Israel hit record high in recent months’, *Middle East Monitor*, 7 October.
Stavrianakis, A. (2025) ‘When “Peace and Security” Means Arming Genocide’, *The Political Quarterly*. doi: 10.1111/1467-923X.13575.
Stavrianakis, A. (2025) ‘Debunking the myth of the “robust control regime”’, *Global Policy*.