EVERY year arms firm Raytheon holds a Burns Night supper in the House of Lords, so the missile-maker should be serving haggis again on January 25, when this column appears.

Raytheon is a US arms firm which makes billions selling bombs to the Saudis. The Saudis use Raytheon’s weapons to blow up men, women and children in the Yemen war.

Its arms sales are so important that President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, overruled advice from his officials to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the Yemen war to preserve a $2 billion Raytheon deal. 

Raytheon have Trump’s ear. It also needs to get close to the British government — Raytheon makes weapons in its British factories, so it doesn’t want the British government stopping the export of these weapons to Saudi Arabia. It also sells its very expensive kit to British armed forces.

Raytheon’s annual Burns supper is part of this lobbying. For the very English among our readers, a Burns supper celebrates the January 25 birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s best-known poet, usually with haggis, whisky and bagpipes.  

Burns is a source of national pride because he wrote about ordinary Scots people, often in their own voice, with lyrics in Scots dialect.

Burns was also radical democrat, sympathising with the underdog, and enthusiastically behind the French Revolution. 

Burns responded to the revolution with the poem Why Should We Idly Waste Our Prime, saying we should not waste our best years under royal oppression:

’Tis said that Kings can do no wrong 
Their murderous deeds deny it
And, since from us their power is sprung,
We have a right to try it.
Now each true patriot's song shall be: —
“Welcome Death or Libertie!”

Burns praised the overthrow of kings to instal the reign of “peace and liberty” when:

The Golden Age we’ll then revive:
Each man will be a brother;
In harmony we all shall live,
And share the earth together.

Raytheon is not holding a Burns supper so it can read poems about overthrowing horrible monarchs to stop their murderous deeds and create a world of peace. Not while they are selling arms to the horrible, war-like Saudi monarchy.

I got Raytheon’s invites to its recent Burns suppers, using freedom of information. They show Raytheon got Armed Forces Minister Mark Lancaster along, accompanied by a brace of Ministry of Defence top brass, to Burns suppers in 2017 and 2018. 

Raytheon says it “celebrate[s] Robert Burns’ birth each year in recognition the industrial presence the company has had in Scotland since 1960, and it is our principle social event of the year.” 

It has a big factory in Glenrothes, Scotland. It says: “The evening will be attended by a mixture of Raytheon’s UK customers and suppliers, local Scottish and UK government officials and politicians.”

The invites say: “The evening will commence with a reception at 1830hrs, followed by dinner at 1930hrs and carriages at 2200 hrs” and that “dress code is dinner suit or traditional Scottish dress.” 

The dinner happened in the 150 seat Cholmondeley Room and Terrace, the largest room for hire in the Lords. 

Presumably Raytheon won’t be reciting Burns’s poem On the Seas and Far Away where a young woman worries:

How can my poor heart be glad, 
When absent from my Sailor lad

Her biggest wish is: 

Peace, thy olive wand extend, 
And bid wild War his ravage end, 
Man with brother Man to meet, 
And as a brother kindly greet: 
Then may Heaven with prosperous gales 
Fill my Sailor’s welcome sails; 
To my arms their charge convey, 
My dear lad that’s far away.

Which would return her love from overseas, but would of course put Raytheon out of business.

The failure of People’s Vote leader Roland Rudd

THE campaign for a second referendum on Brexit is probably facing a final failure. 

Labour MPs for a second referendum rallied, and it turned out only 82 — a third of the party — signed their letter. 

Only 36 actually turned up at their event. For over a year the second referendum crowd have been bluffing about how many MPs backed them. 

But a substantial minority of “moderate” Labour MPs positively don’t want a second referendum, and the majority are unconvinced. 

They went along with the bluff, thinking “second referendum” pressure was taking the shine of Corbyn with some Labour members. 

Now it is crunch time, they are dropping the bluff. They don’t want a second referendum, not least because many think Brexit would win again.

Many Morning Star writers are happy enough we are leaving the EU, seeing it as a “capitalist club” that restricts nationalisation. 

I think that is true to a point. But we are actually being asked to join an even worse capitalist club: a low-tax, low-regulation island that treats migrants even worse — so I argued Remain in the referendum. 

We now should try to stop post-referendum Britain following the “Singapore option.” For me, moderating Brexit via Parliament was the best option. 

A rerun referendum didn’t seem a great idea. But if the People’s Vote campaign could have proved me wrong, I would have been pleased.

But they haven’t, and just to cap it all People’s Vote leader Roland Rudd showed why: Rudd, a corporate PR boss, and brother of current Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd, made a big intervention, promoting a People’s Vote from Davos. 

A City grandee, brother of a Tory minister, calling for “people power” from the “Glastonbury Festival” of the international business elite shows why the second referendum campaign failed — a top-down campaign, obsessed with knocking Corbyn, dubious opinion polls, media briefings and overclever branding has not changed either public opinion nor persuaded enough Labour MPs.

Roland Rudd has a ridiculous lack of self-knowledge. He runs Finsbury Public Relations, one of Britain’s leading “reputation management” and “crisis communications” companies. Yet he could not see how he was crashing the reputation of his own campaign. 

Mind you, Rudd even shows himself up on his biography on his own company website. Rudd boasts he is a “trustee of the Garden Bridge” — that is, he backed Boris Johnson’s failed £40 million vanity project to build a bridge with trees on it over the Thames. 

From the Garden Bridge to the People’s Vote, Rudd is a model of Establishment failure.