Downstream: Who Profits From Genocide? w/ Andrew Feinstein

**Ash Sarkar** (0:08)
A new consensus has emerged in Westminster, seemingly overnight. We need more defense spending, and we need it yesterday. But the Ministry of Defence has a record for waste that would put Tony Soprano to shame. At least £13 billion down the drain since 2010
Aircraft carriers which come in wildly over budget, many years too late, and then are beset by mechanical failures. Millions spent on outdated IT systems. And all of this, we're told, can't even do the job of keeping us safe.
No other government department could possibly get away with it. But the arms trade spends billions of dollars on greasing the wheels of political consent. They employ armies of lobbyists, produce reams of favourable analyses. They bribe politicians the world over with sums of money that would make your eyes water.
And all of this isn't just a crisis of corruption, it's a threat to our survival as species. Andrew Feinstein is a former minister in the South African government, and a turned investigative reporter. He is the executive director of Shadow World Investigations and is on the board of Declassified UK. And real heads amongst you might remember that he stood against Keir Starmer in 2024 in Hoban and St Pancras. He joins us on Downstream to lift the lid on how the arms industry really functions and to share with us his political journey. I hope you enjoy the interview. Andrew Feinstein, welcome to Downstream.

**Andrew Feinstein** (1:55)
Thank you so much. It's lovely to be here.

**Ash Sarkar** (1:57)
Before we went live, we were having a conversation, I guess, about morality. And something that's always struck me about you, reading your work, reading interviews with you, is that you have a very, very strong sense of right and wrong.
Where did that come from?

**Andrew Feinstein** (2:11)
I think the first thing to say in that, because it can sound horribly pretentious, is that to have a sense of right and wrong or to have a sense of morality, it's important that you don't assume you're sort of better than other people. There's just certain things you can't do.
And I don't know why.

**Ash Sarkar** (2:32)
So what's in the list of can't do?

**Andrew Feinstein** (2:34)
Well, the big thing for me was, I was in parliament in South Africa, in our first and second democratic parliaments. And I was the ranking ANC member on the Public Accounts Committee, the main financial oversight committee, huge corrupt arms deal undertaken by our government came to the committee and it was horrible. I mean, about half a billion dollars of bribes, including to the ANC itself. So it was devastating for someone like me, young, very idealistic, had been involved in the movement from a young age. And at one point, my colleagues on the committee, my ANC colleagues, because the leadership wanted us to bury this thing. And my colleague said to me, we've got to bury it. And I've been pushing exposure. And the Speaker of Parliament appallingly organized a media conference for me and gave me a statement to read, which was that, oops, sorry, we got this whole thing wrong. There was no corruption.
And I read it.
Leave the media conference, driving to a workshop the committee was supposed to be having on the other side of Cape Town. And I hear myself on my car radio. And I just burst into tears. And I get to where the workshop is supposed to be held, and I call another media conference. So all the poor media have to follow me. And I say to them, sorry, I was wrong. This is what happened. This investigation is continuing. And it's a matter of, I thought to myself, I just physically, psychologically, intellectually, I can't do this. We had two young children at that time. And I thought to myself, if I did this, I'd have, you know, I was promised a glittering political career for as long as I wanted if I quashed this thing. And I was young then, I was sort of 30-ish.
And I thought to myself, how do I actually ever face my children? And say to them, you know, I've done this, I've done that. If you're in a situation like this, I'm going to give you advice to do A and not B. I could never do it. And I think where it comes from is my mom was a Holocaust survivor. She was Austrian. She survived the Holocaust in Vienna itself, lost dozens of her family, mainly in Auschwitz.
She wasn't very well educated. She only had education until the age of 12 then as a Jew. There were no more schools and obviously she wasn't supposed to be there.