One of Britain's biggest customers for weaponry, the Indonesian military, is disgracing itself in East Timor. The Indonesians did not take up their invitation to attend the arms fair. Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, is in a particularly awkward position. Under the guidelines introduced by Mr Cook, Britain is not meant to permit the sale of arms to regimes which might use them for internal repression, external aggression, or abuse of human rights. In theory, this represents a clear tightening of the stated policies of Conservative governments.
Reality is more complicated.
Until September 11th, when it announced support for a European Union embargo on new arms contracts with Indonesia, the government was still licensing defence exports to that country. Since the Tories refused to release statistics of this sort, no comparable figures exist for the period before 1997. Under Labour's policy, what counts is not so much the importing country's record on human rights, but whether an individual export might be used for internal repression. But given Indonesia's abysmal history of human-rights abuses, in East Timor and elsewhere, it was always likely that British weapons would be misused. In its defence, Tony Blair's government says that many of the most significant export licences were approved before it came to power.