The decision by Vince Cable, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, to boycott the state visit of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz al Saud may win plaudits from the supporters of gesture politics. But gesture politics will not alter the fact that Saudi Arabia is Britain's largest trading partner in the Middle East and the single biggest customer of its arms.

Nor would it change the strategic reality that the kingdom sits atop a quarter of the world's oil reserves or that the West needs Saudi co-operation to uproot the Islamist terror, a monster they both created before becoming its joint victims. The truth is that we need to maintain close ties with the country while encouraging its still tentative, fragile attempts to reform itself.

Saudi Arabia's critics level three key charges against it. The first is that it has used its enormous oil income to finance Islamic groups that, in turn, produce and sustain jihadists in a global campaign of terror. According to this criticism, Saudi largesse produces a system like the Russian matryoshka dolls, in which large Islamic charities act as covers for small well-hidden terrorist outfits.

There is some truth in that charge. During the 1980s the kingdom, in tandem with the United States, helped to finance the Mujahidin in Afghanistan who, in turn, gave birth to terrorist groups from Algeria to the Philippines. Even after the 9/11 attacks, the kingdom refused to close charities with questionable aims.

Disturbingly, some Saudi school textbooks preached militancy and hatred of Christians, Jews and non-believers. However, that begun to change in 2003 when the kingdom itself became the target of attacks by al-Qaeda. Taken by surprise and lacking the personnel and technical means to respond to terrorism, the kingdom had to suffer many deaths before it started to fight back. Since then an estimated 800 al-Qaeda terrorists have been killed or captured and many more put through “retraining courses” designed to deradicalise them and weave them back into normal life.

Over the past four years the Saudi offices of at least 20 groups suspected of terrorism have been closed and their assets seized. (Ironically, some of these groups have transferred to Washington DC.) Saudi Arabia has also started a revision of its schoolbooks that, though not complete, has already done away with some of the most obnoxious texts.

The second charge is that women are treated shoddily — Saudi Arabia, for instance, is the only country where the female of the species is not allowed to drive a car.

This glaring injustice, however, should not hide other facts. For example, that women account for 55 per cent of all those in higher education or that the share of wealth owned by Saudi women is higher than that of women in most EU countries.

The third charge concerns democracy. Today Saudi Arabia is the only Arab country not to have a form of elected parliament. However, that does not mean that Saudi decision-making is less broadly based than it is in, say, Egypt or Syria. While there is no democracy without elections, one could have elections without democracy, as is the case in many other Arab countries. In any case, the kingdom has already taken its first timid steps towards elections by allowing half of the members of municipal councils to be chosen by male voters. There is also talk about extending the system to the Consultative Assembly, an appointed parliament that has grown in power and prestige since its inception in 1993.

The chiaroscuro of Saudi life could be better understood if we remember that the kingdom is not ruled by a monolithic elite. The Royal Family, believed to number more than 10,000, including the more distant members, is as divided on most issues as society at large. Also associated with decision-making are tribal chiefs and business leaders. More recently a number of “councils” have been set up to advise the king on social, cultural, economic and human rights issues. These too are steadily gaining in power and prestige.

A number of professional associations, where the leadership is elected by secret ballot, are also securing a growing say in how the country is governed. An ambitious reform plan for the judiciary is under way with the aim of basing the kingdom's legal system on the values spelt out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

One reason for the slow pace of reform has been the absence of a sizeable middle class to seek political rights that match their economic clout. Until just a decade ago whatever the kingdom had in the form of a middle class was limited to the Hijaz, a cosmopolitan area on the Red Sea with a tradition of relative liberalism. The rest of the kingdom, a country the size of Western Europe, was almost frozen in traditional, often tribal, structures.

However, that, too, is changing with the presence of almost six million foreigners — of which 25,000 are British — compared with a native population of 12 million, as well as the quadrupling of the number of those attending higher education. A new, increasingly wealthy and self-confident middle class is taking shape in all parts of the kingdom, including the long-neglected south, where most jihadists come from. In the years to come, this new middle class is certain to provide the social base for more ambitious reforms.

To be sure, Saudi Arabia is not likely to become a Western-style democracy any time soon. And there is no evidence that a majority of Saudis would want such a system. But the fact remains that the kingdom can and must be pressed to do away with those aspects of its social structure that King Abdullah himself describes as outdated.

As the Arab proverb has it: the camel is not the most congenial of travel companions, but it is the most trustworthy.

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