LAST YEAR a Conservative MP warned the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) that they “were risking the reputation of the charity.”

The RNLI, a volunteer emergency service which usually saves the lives of overconfident surfers or sunstroke-hit beachgoers, has dared to defend also saving refugees in the English Channel, as well as run an anti-drowning overseas aid programme.

In so doing they have wandered into the British political establishment’s periodic assaults on migrants. These have stepped up again as the British government rushes through its Nationality and Borders Bill, adopting a suite of measures that have caused chaos and misery elsewhere to “protect” the country from a handful of people in dinghies.

The government has nothing to say about cuts to legal support and staffing on top of botched outsourcing contracts that have actually made Britain’s asylum system a mess. This is all about rhetoric, not substance — and creating distractions from scandals regarding mishandling of the pandemic. Ministers are not concerned with compassion, but nor are they particularly concerned with preventing forced migration.

At the end of 2019, Britain was the world’s second largest arms exporter. The government has broken its own rules to allow British businesses to service and fuel Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen which has claimed a quarter of a million lives and displaced millions more. An expanded role for the industry is seen in Britain’s ambitious Defence Review. In short, Britain continues to drive displacement and disavow the consequences.

This is hardly just a British problem. Last month a former adviser to the EU’s Donald Tusk wrote a long and frank inside account of dealing with what he called “a crisis where European ideals collided with the realities of mass migration.”

Nowhere in this account was an attempt to interrogate what Europe could do to address the causes rather than the consequences of forced migration.

The EU and its member states pursued extreme measures, from criminalising search and rescue operations to cutting shady deals with known human rights abusers, to prevent migration. The possibility of a strategy that addressed causes as well as consequences does not seem to have been on the table.

The argument that arms sales fuel wars and wars fuel displacement is not particularly new — but now we have access to more information than ever. Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the UN’s Refugee Convention, the Transnational Institute (TNI) has published forensic analysis of open-source intelligence this week on the link between arms sales and displacement, turning a general argument into one about specific weapons.

From the Caucasus to Central Africa, they illustrate the journey made by weapons and military equipment from the assembly line in Europe to the homes that people are forced from.

In one instance, Italy granted its arms industry licences to sell attack helicopters to Turkey and permit Turkish manufacturers to produce them locally.

The T-129 ATAK helicopter is an impressive beast, comprising advanced avionics, electronic warfare, weapons and countermeasures systems bolted onto a workhorse of an Agusta Westland frame. Highly manoeuvrable and built for fighting in harsh weather and terrain, it sports up to 70 rockets, a brace of missiles and a 20mm three-barrel cannon.

TNI’s analysis demonstrate Turkish-Italian collaboration in the production of dozens of these machines until at least the end of 2019. In January 2018, T-129s were deployed into the region around Afrin in north-east Syria. Local sources noted the shelling of a poultry farm which hosted people who had fled fighting elsewhere, reportedly killing two adults and five children.

Within days, sources were reporting thousands on the move, soon rising to nearly 100,000 according to the UN agency OCHA. In a second operation in October 2019 involving heavy air power including the 129s, around 70,000 people were displaced. Turkey remains a Nato ally, although they have recently been removed from the ballooning F-35 joint strike-fighter project.

The report’s other case studies include the provision of machine guns and grenade launchers to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in spite of gross human rights violations, the provision of patrol boats to war-torn Libya which barely has a functioning government and the export of missile tubes and rockets to Saudi Arabia and the US which were later captured from Islamic State forces during the battles of Ramadi in 2016 and Mosul in 2017.

The European Parliament finally addressed the issue of arms leakage to Isis in 2018, by which time millions of people had been displaced, including many toward Europe.

When those people reach Europe, the same war machine awaits them, completing a circle of death. There is an increasing role for the military industrial complex in immigration control, with a roll call of the usual suspects from Airbus to Elbit to Thales in on the act, providing a complex array of weapons, logistics and technologies.

This is set to grow as Frontex, the EU’s border agency, receives a budget hike of billions set to make it the union’s most bloated department and the closest thing yet to European integrationists’ dream of an army reporting to Berlaymont.

At least one of the Italian boats sold to Libya was used as a gunboat in its civil war. Another was deployed in a 2017 operation in which at least 20 people drowned during an episode of extreme negligence, incompetence and callousness at sea. They join the tens of thousands who have perished in the Mediterranean in the last decades; two thousand last year alone due to the kind of “push back” operations that Britain is now legislating for.

Of course this situation involves the arms industry; it involves brutality comparable with plenty of wars. When Tusk’s adviser argues that Europe was mistaken to “indulge a brief moment of euphoria” by admitting refugees in 2015, these are the consequences he advocates without possessing the courage to make it explicit.

One might argue that these conflicts would happen with or without arms companies or export licences. Of course exports do not create wars and often they simply service the demands of states. But either there is an advanced destructive system like the T-129 ATAK in the field, or there is not.

When the belligerents in conflicts have access to such systems, it incentivises military over political solutions. TNI’s report demonstrating British and other involvement with bomb racks and thermal batteries in drones used in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is one such example; these are small states in a short conflict where every additional weapon adds in a host of grim possibilities.

We live in a new age of insecurity; of changing geopolitics, of extreme inequality, of climate crisis and of contested power. The sluggish pandemic response has demonstrated how ill-equipped we are to handle our interdependent world and how quick the powerful are to reach for solutions based on force and competition rather than collaborations.

Evidence such as that provided in the TNI report should be a wake-up call; governments must regulate rather than reward the arms industry, must provide safe passage to refugees and wean themselves off the habit of trying to solve every problem with guns and walls and must instead think about ways to provide real security for all.

And for as long as they do not, people and movements should demand to not be made complicit by the behaviour of their governments or the unwitting investment of their pension funds and assets in the war machine.

To return to the start; the RNLI received an increase in donations after it was attacked by politicians. Some people might want to abuse lifeboat operators rescuing drowning refugees — but most of us would rather learn to live together than continue to let people die alone.