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Last Sunday I was prompted to write about the double standards practised by Britain after reading reports of the lucrative arms trade she pursues with countries that have little compunction in turning the same weaponry against their own people or neighbours.

Those media reports mainly drew attention to arms deals with Saudi Arabia which is using British jet fighters and weaponry to pound Yemeni villages to the ground killing hundreds of civilian men, women and children in mounting air assaults that destroy what little vital infrastructure is still standing.

The sad irony is that Britain – and the US which also does a profitable trade – defends these arms deals while preaching lofty principles from their political pulpits to more vulnerable nations as though she is a paragon of moral virtue.

The current British Prime Minister Theresa May and her unpredictable Foreign Minister Boris Johnson have defended such arms deals implying that the British Pound has a higher moral worth than the aerial pounding of innocent civilians in remote villages.

When I wrote last Sunday I hardly expected to return to the subject of these moral pulpiteers abnegating the very responsibilities they vociferously demand that others should faithfully follow.

It happened last week at the annual conference of the governing Conservative Party held at Birmingham when both the Prime Minister and her secretary of defence laid into what Theresa May jeeringly called “activist left wing human rights lawyers who harangue and harass Britain’s armed forces.”

So what do the brave leaders of this right-wing Conservative Party do to save the men and women of “the finest armed forces known to man” from harassment by left wing human rights lawyers armed only with the law instead automatic weapons?

The current British Prime Minister Theresa May has defended arms deals implying that the British Pound has a higher moral worth than the aerial pounding of innocent civilians in remote villages.REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo

Why, that’s simple. Just tear a page off from their own ten commandments on human rights so liberally advocated for the greater glory of their former colonies which were systematically savaged during the long years of their occupation.

Henceforth in conflict, said May with her characteristic disdain for defenders of human rights, British soldiers will be exempt from European human rights laws, to thunderous applause of the faithful gathered in Birmingham.

Whether such applause was the natural reaction of like-minded party supporters to May and her faithful Fallon or was also to be seen as an open invitation to those brave men on active duty to go ahead and break a few more bones or join in the American sport of water- boarding of the perceived enemy, is not quite certain.

But then Theresa May does not seem particularly concerned whether she leaves a trail of ambiguity that would have even experts trying to unravel her linguistic mysteries. It was after she became Prime Minister that she came up with the celebrated remark “Brexit means Brexit.”

This might have earned plaudits for a clever coinage leaving Britain’s second female Prime Minister looking like an intellectual godzilly but to many including some of her ministers enlightenment is still to blossom.

Still others from Beijing to Belarus find it turning into a tired cliché. Things would have been much clearer if she simply said Brexit means exit – if that is what she meant. Right now she is turning on the steam with more rhetoric that borders on jingoism lite than clarity.

Rhetorical idiocy such as the “finest armed forces known to man” and “bravest of the brave” would no doubt further inflate the over-blown egos of the uniformed kind at the Ministry of Defence just as it did back in Sri Lanka with the much-trumpeted triumphalism in the days after the victory over the LTTE.

At least it might be said that the public adulation of our armed forces that was justified even if the political praise seemed more propagandist and self-serving. The Sri Lankan armed forces had defended their country against a vicious and ruthless enemy intent on dividing the nation and defeated it despite the many western political and military assessments which said that it could not be done.

But what have the “finest armed forces known to man” achieved in Afghanistan and later in Iraq? It has left the countries in even greater shambles than they were in, created social schisms and sectarian conflicts in the two countries whose sovereignty Britain violated defying international laws.

Moreover what does she mean by the finest armed forces known to man. Does she mean since the dawn of history or does this accolade cover more recent times? By finest does May mean the best combat forces or does she mean armed forces that also rigorously observe the rules of war and other international laws that protect captured enemy soldiers, civilians caught up in the conflict and the civilized treatment of suspects? All this is well set out in international treaties and conventions.

It surely could not be the latter-armed forces that observe the rules of war – that May meant when she praised British forces last week. For if that was the meaning May intended to convey then why derogate from the articles on human rights in the European Convention and exempt British forces engaged in future conflicts from the applicable human rights provisions?

What May and her faithful Fallon argue is that British troops cannot engage in combat operations with one arm tied behind. But this is what is expected when countries became signatories to various international instruments that set out how troops should conduct themselves in war and the states should behave as occupying nations.

This was precisely what Britain and the US were demanding of Sri Lankan forces and when these two countries led the charge at the UN Human Rights Council with resolutions demanding the condemnation of Sri Lanka and calling for the UN to put Sri Lanka in the dock.

Now they fear the mounting cases of human rights violations and abuses arising from the conduct of British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and are worried that they would end up before the European Court in Strasbourg.

To escape from the ignominy of having a stream of cases filed against British troops or the Ministry of Defence, the new Conservative leadership is blaming human rights lawyers for bringing frivolous suits to “harangue and harass” the gallant British soldiers, so gallant that they could not finish the tasks they set out to do in Afghanistan and Iraq to name just two.

But these arguments have been rubbished by retired or serving military officers some of whom had firsthand knowledge of the abuses and violence practiced by British troops. The fact that there were such honourable men and women among the troops, soldiers who stood by the rules of engagement and their commitment to follow them in battle, showed there were many good men standing who were not ready to sacrifice their principles to prop up political and military leaders who had lost their backbone.

Interestingly within a couple of days of Fallon and May trying to save their own posteriors by raising their patriotic escutcheon, a retired military officer who was virtually hounded out of the service by Defence Ministry tin hats trying to save their bloated reputations, rubbished the argument about leftist human rights lawyers rushing to file cases over abuses by the military.

Lt. Colonel (retired) Nicholas Mercer who was the most senior military lawyer at the start of the Iraq War wrote a scathing piece in the Guardian about the attempts of politicians and military chiefs to hide the truth from the public.

He wrote that the “idea that the claims are largely spurious is nonsense. The Ministry of Defence has already paid out £20m in compensation to victims of abuse in Iraq. This is for a total of 326 cases, which by anyone’s reckoning is a lot of money and a shocking amount of abuse. Anyone who has been involved in litigation with the MoD knows that it will pay up only if a case is overwhelming or the ministry wants to cover something up.

Second, allegations have been made about abuse of prisoners and civilians from the outset of the Iraq war in 2003. Three colonels in the divisional headquarters complained about mistreatment of prisoners within the first four weeks. In two public inquiries (into the deaths of Baha Mousa and Hamid al-Sweady), it was revealed that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – the most respected body in the world in matters of international humanitarian law – had complained about prisoner abuse.

Third, the complaints before the Ihat (Iraq Historic Allegations Team) are not just from lawyers. They are also from serving and former members of the armed forces with no financial interest in the outcome, concerned merely that the government abides by the rule of law. These cases are sub judice but they are likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Some witnesses are too frightened to speak.

Baha Mousa was beaten to death in a unit interrogation facility, with no fewer than 93 sites of injury over his body. Fifteen-year-old Kareem Ali drowned in front of British soldiers who had forced him into a canal, then stood back and did nothing. And in the case of Faisal al-Saadoon, currently in the court of appeal, it appears that an Iraqi was gratuitously shot in the stomach and had his car vandalised whilst his head was being smashed into a pavement. Are these cases really “spurious” or “vexatious”?”

Mercer goes on to say that some of these inquiries might lead to the very door of the MoD. The inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, a civilian working in a Basra hotel, heard that his military interrogators were using the so-called “Five Techniques” that subjects a suspect to physical and mental abuse, which Britain banned in 1978 and is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. The interrogators had said they answered to London and not to the chain of command.

If that is so then the fault lies with the MoD. The Five Techniques, Mercer says, now amounts to torture.

There is so much that could be said about the conduct of British troops in the past – in Ceylon, India, Africa and Northern Ireland to name a few – but is better left unsaid so as not to insult the best of them.

But one needs to say that it was not just last week that Theresa May and her loyalists thought up this idea of exempting British troops in times of conflict from human rights provisions so that they could go ahead using the “Five Techniques” (that could be explained at a later date).

Her predecessor David Cameron had been toying with the idea of withdrawing from the European Convention all together and coming up with a Human Rights Act of his own. Had he world enough and time his human rights act would have turned out to be a remarkable piece of human rights law. One has only to recall the crafty manner in which he acted with regard to media regulation voting for a Royal Charter in the stealth of the night.

As for Tony Blair there is no need to delve into his views. After all it is he who inducted British troops into Afghanistan and Iraq and started this mess from which he might get away free despite the Chilcot report strictures.