The crude Dick Cheney-style xenophobia against the French over the past few years has been disgusting – but that shouldn’t inhibit us from criticising the role of the French government in this deal. And the British government’s response? We kept on arming Indonesia to the hilt. So much for our “regulatory framework” and “strict rules”.It seems that our government has a neat policy for this battered chunk of South-east Asia. Cry for the people of Aceh when they are massacred by a tsunami – and arm their murderers when they are massacred by the Indonesian government.And Britain’s arms policy is just about to get worse.

Three years ago, the heroic Indonesian human rights group Tapol took photographs of British-supplied tanks and weaponry being used by the Indonesian military to incinerate Acinese civilians, including children. Their crime? They had declared they want independence from an Indonesian government that has plundered, tortured and trashed their home-province for decades. Whatever happened to the Labour government’s lofty words on arms policy? Tony Blair declared unequivocally a few years ago: “We don’t sell arms that could be used in human rights abuses. We have one of the strictest regulatory frameworks in the world.” Although they might sell to dictatorial regimes, the Government would ensure they were used only for “legitimate purposes” and “not internal repression”.
Tell that to the people of Aceh, a South-east Asian province that washed to the world’s attention on Boxing Day and is now ebbing from our minds again. The question is whether democracy is as universally applicable as so many of us believed. Iraq may yet illustrate something more complicated: we recognise democracy when we see it, but universal suffrage as the defining standard may be doomed.m.dejevsky independent.co.uk
More from Mary Dejevsky.

Yet in any country where the disparity between high and very low earners is growing, a time can be seen when the rich minority will resent policy being determined by those who pay almost nothing in taxes and ask if justice and democracy are really the same.Such an eventuality has been neatly circumvented in the United States by the primacy of money in politics, which speaks through the myriad lobbyists, and by shameless gerrymandering. Even when the voting machines work impeccably, how far does such a system justify its claim to be the acme of representational democracy?All these strands are now in play in an impassioned debate on both sides of the Atlantic, largely outside the party political arena. Every citizen may have a vote, but the value of that vote is reduced by the power of money in the system and the number of constituencies whose boundaries have been manipulated – by the democratically elected majority, of course – to guarantee Republican or Democrat victories in perpetuity. But is that de-coupling still valid? The strength of opposition to Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax suggested that a groundswell of opinion believed it was.

Or perhaps we should interpret apathy as simply a vote by other means: a mark of mild approval of the status quo, rather than a personal boycott or a sign of disillusionment.Another is the principle of universal participation. In this age of mobility, is it right that one person, one vote generally means one citizen, one vote? In 19th century Britain, de-coupling the right to vote from financial status and the obligation to pay taxes was hailed as progress. It is rather an argument about whether, in the long-term, universal suffrage will produce the desired, representational, effect.Nor is it just at the level of “beginners” – Iraq or Afghanistan – that the shortcomings of one person, one vote are apparent. In the Western world, too, the flaws of the system are becoming increasingly clear One is apathy.