The Natural History Museum is one of London's best loved attractions. Generations of visitors have lingered before its cabinets of curiosities. Visit any week day and you will find the famous central hall filled with school parties. On weekends it is family groups. Every day tourists marvel at...

As the UK gears up to celebrates the Diamond Jubilee, amid street parties, parades and flotillas, it is timely to take a closer look at one of the less edifying aspects of the royal family - the links between royalty, the military and the arms industry.

The ties between the...

Last year, I joined thousands of other visitors to the National Gallery to watch artist Ben Johnson at work. What drew the crowds was not just the thrill of seeing his giant painting emerge from an elaborate graphic but the subject. Johnson had chosen to depict...

Mention the arms trade - making, marketing, buying and selling deadly weapons - and most people feel uneasy, especially when they see weapons being sold to undemocratic, repressive or unstable regimes. But how do we find out what weapons are going where?

This is one of the problems facing

The procurement choices of the Indian air force rarely make the UK news. Not so the announcement of 31 January that the Indian government had selected the Rafale jet fighter in preference to the Eurofighter Typhoon. The decision was reported widely, often emotionally, in UK print and broadcast...

The UK government makes a great deal of its support for the democratic awakening of the Arab Spring, yet continues to support repressive regimes through arms sales and trade missions.

By April 2011 the UK government had officially revoked over 160 military licences (i.e. for arms and weaponry) to Bahrain,...