It’s always nice to have the Scandinavians around, to show us there’s a better way of doing things. The Nordic and Anglo-American models of capitalism sit at opposite ends of the developed world league table on inequality and, as a direct result, on a range of key measures of social wellbeing. Healthy, happy lives for them. Food banks and zero-hour contracts for us. Now, in another area of national embarrassment – foreign policy and arms sales – the Swedes have also demonstrated that there’s an alternative path available.

Our teachable moment began on Monday when Saudi Arabia blocked Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström from speaking about human rights at a meeting of the Arab League. On Tuesday, in the face of opposition from Sweden’s business elite and leading politicians, Stockholm tore up a long-term arms trade agreement with the Saudis which had brought in the equivalent of £900m in 2014 alone. The Swedish state itself may not have relished the decision, but pressure from the political left after the blocking of Wallström’s speech made the continuation of arms sales untenable.

So where does this leave the UK, a longstanding supplier of weapons, especially fighter jets, to the Saudi regime? The common view is that Whitehall holds its nose and sells arms to the Saudis because it needs to keep the world’s leading oil supplier on side, and because jobs (a political code word for corporate profits) depend on the trade continuing. But this is an incomplete and rather self-serving way of looking at things.

Certainly the export earnings involved are not to be sniffed at. The “al-Yamamah” deal signed by the Thatcher government, and its successor contracts, have been worth tens of billions over the course of their lifetimes. The coalition government has approved almost £4bn of arms export licences for Saudi Arabia over the course of this parliament, with the value actually increasing after the start of the Arab uprisings. This latter point is worth thinking about.

Britain has had a longstanding strategic commitment – under both Labour and Conservative governments – to the survival of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, irrespective of whether those challenging them over the years have been nationalists, democrats or Islamic fundamentalists. Control over the world’s main energy supplies is a key source of geopolitical power, which the British state is determined to see retained within the US-led conservative order in the Middle East. Gulf oil is also a source of serious wealth, directly for Britain’s fossil fuel corporations, of course, and indirectly for the City of London.

Finally, major arms deals with the Gulf monarchies help the UK to maintain the arms industry it requires to supply its own military and thus continue “projecting power” across the globe. The currently fashionable way to describe this imperial hangover is in terms of Britain remaining “internationalist” and an “outward-looking nation”, as though arming the world’s worst tyrants and getting involved in a string of disastrous wars were the last word in enlightened, freewheeling cosmopolitanism.

At any rate, it is to retain these dubious benefits – western geopolitical power, profits for big oil and big finance, and the continuation of British militarism – that the UK, unlike Sweden as of this week, continues to arm a regime that treats peaceful dissent as equivalent to terrorism. It probably also explains why British arms sales increased after the regional uprisings began in 2011. Democracy in the global south has long been a threat to British foreign policy.

What of the jobs that we’re told would be endangered if we adopted the exotic policy of not selling arms to despots? As my colleagues at Campaign Against Arms Trade (I’m a member of its steering committee) have shown in a recent report, the skills and resources involved in the British arms industry could easily be transferred to the design and production of renewable energy technologies, for which there will be a huge worldwide demand in the decades to come. And in terms of genuine defence needs (as opposed to state militarism), what greater known threat is there to human security than the prospect of runaway climate change?

One doesn’t have to hold up Sweden as a utopia to recognise that here we have an example to learn from, on economics and now on foreign policy. The thin excuses have long since run out. It’s time to stop arming Saudi Arabia, and rethink our role in the world while we’re about it.