LONDON: Four years after pledging to clean up its weapons export trade, Britain, one of the world’s top arms sellers, now faces a tough choice between money and morals, experts say.

The government’s critics have accused it of paying lip-service to the need to reform the arms business while at the same time backing arms deals with countries with poor human rights records or where there is a threat of war.

Already dedicated to an “ethical foreign policy”, Britain’s Labour government made its commitment in July 1998 to tidy up the industry after a damning report into Britain’s sale of arms to Iraq in the 1980s.

In the report, Richard Scott, one of Britain’s top judges slammed the country’s arms export control system and its continued application of export legislation dating back to 1939.

Critics say the measure has been watered down and that reform of the arms export business will still need government vigilance if it is to be meaningful.

“The government will have to weigh up the economic benefits of defence exports against the growing feeling that we should be reining them in because of the increasing proliferation of weapons,” one British defence analyst said.

“It is very important that Britain has a defence export market. Forty per cent of the UK’s defence industrial output is defence exports. That’s about five billion pounds (7.12 billion dollars). Clearly there is a need to protect that,” said the analyst who declined to be named.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in October that Britain was the world’s second biggest arms exporter, with 17.4 per cent of the market. The United States accounted for almost half of global exports.

ETHICAL V/S ECONOMIC?: Shortly after Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party took power in 1997, the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook declared a new era of “ethical foreign policy,” and said that in the future Britain would impose tough criteria for weapons sales.