In this picaresque, the young innocent of the title embarks on a journey around the world with a certain Dr Pangloss. Pangloss was loosely based on the philosopher Leibniz, whose supposed view that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” Voltaire felt represented the worst possible example of blinkered, doctrinal fatalism masquerading as religious faith. After many misadventures, including being tortured by the Inquisition, Pangloss was driven to recant and accept that God’s hand cannot be discerned in every human tragedy.I can’t make great claims for myself as a latter-day Candide, and I certainly wasn’t accompanied by a Pangloss during the two months I spent making a BBC Correspondent documentary on the British arms export trade, but the parallels are there none the less. Like Voltaire, I felt driven to question our fatalism about political events, a fatalism that has been grotesquely exacerbated by a tragedy – in this case the terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent military retaliation. The way the majority of Britons have allowed themselves, thus far, to be press-ganged into serving under George Bush in his “war on terrorism” is one example of our unwillingness to take control of our own destiny. But behind this lies unquestioning acceptance of our own status as the world’s second-biggest exporter of arms.It seemed obvious to me that, while an egregious trade in death metal was still being carried out, talk of this diplomatic d?rche or that peacekeeping role was the worst kind of Panglossian persiflage.

Yet when I began to talk to friends about the ethics of Britain’s arms trade, I found that even those who were leftier-than-thou on all manner of foreign-policy issues became vague and unfocused. Yes, they acknowledged, we know Britain is a huge arms exporter; yes, they acceded, we’re aware that the biggest single arms manufacturer in the world is probably a British company, BAE Systems; and, yes, they, like me, also understood that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, often acts as a sales representative for them, together with sundry other high-ranking ministers and their officials.But somehow no one could quite bear to make the connection between guns and war. It was as if the euphemisms that so characterise the military arena had begun to inflict collateral damage on everyone’s psyche. So everyone actually believed this was all about “defence”, while “arms fairs” held on British soil merely featured exciting rides and state-of-the-art coconut shies. Behind this, meanwhile, lay the weary acknowledgement, on the part of these well-informed people, that the whole subject zone of arms manufacture and export is liberally strewn with anti-comprehension mines, while being submerged in an impenetrable miasma of secrecy, lies and statistics.While I was making the programme, the conflagration surrounding the proposed sale of a £28m BAE Systems air-traffic control system to Tanzania flared up, banked down, flared up again and then died down, without any resolution of fundamental issues. Meanwhile, in the background, the noises surrounding the £3bn arms deal with South Africa (a deal Tony Blair had interrupted his Christmas 2000 holiday in Mauritius in order to broker), continued to rumble on. This farrago, which includes allegations of vast payments being made to South African political figures and trade unionists to secure orders of British fighter aircraft, is just another stink wafting up from the same old open sewer of British arms exports.There is almost a text-book character to these mega-deals: they’re negotiated on behalf of now privatised arms manufacturers by officials and ministers of Her Majesty’s Government; they involve large ex gratia payments to middlemen, agents and the officials of the buyer regime (payments that are still tax-deductible in Britain); and they mostly then become the subject of allegations of kickbacks to our side of the fence.

The biggest example of this is the Al Yamamah deal with Saudi Arabia. Originally negotiated under Margaret Thatcher, this was described (by the Financial Times) as “the biggest [UK] sale of anything to anyone by anyone”. The smell surrounding the deal has been persistent, if not sufficiently noisome to penetrate the sensitive nostrils of British liberal opinion.Allegations surrounding kickbacks to people – including Mark Thatcher – have rumbled on for a decade and a half. It’s alleged that some of the massive sweeteners paid to Saudi middlemen ended up in the pockets of Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida. While we were making our programme, Harry Cohen MP, the veteran campaigner on this and related arms exporting issues, tabled a written question about Al Yamamah and received a typical knock-back from the Government, in the person of Robin Cook. What Cohen wanted to know was why the National Audit Office report into the deal, completed in 1992, remains unpublished to this day. Robert (now Sir Robert) Sheldon, head of the NAO at the time, having read the report in 1992, pronounced himself satisfied that it revealed no corruption or impropriety; yet it, unlike the thousand-plus other reports compiled by the office, remains unpublished.

Cook’s slightly mocking reply to Cohen’s parliamentary question was: “There is a long tradition of its [the report] not being published that he [Cohen] must displace.”It’s significant that it should have been Cook who laughed off the idea of the public being allowed to learn more about this multibillion-pound deal to supply not simply weaponry but an entire military infrastructure to one of the most repressive and corrupt regimes in the Middle East. For it was Cook, of course, whose much-vaunted “ethical foreign policy” was one of the first victims of the cold wave of global realpolitik that inundated New Labour on assuming office in 1997. The export licences for Hawk fighter jet spares for Indonesia were among the first items he found in his in-tray at the Foreign Office. He dithered about supplying this materiel to a repressive regime, then picked up his pen and signed. Arguably it was the death knell of every ideal he’d fought for during the long years of exposing the Tories’ complicity in the “arms to Iraq” scandal. (To this day, Cook claims he received legal advice that he would place British firms in breach of contract if he refused to sign the licences, although others dispute this.)Besides breach of contract, “client confidentiality” is the explanation that’s always trotted out to justify the obscurity within which the British Government is allowed to sponsor and subsidise gun-running.