SAUDI Arabia’s petulant attack on Jeremy Corbyn shows that the leader of the opposition is already changing Britain for the better.

The despotic kingdom’s ambassador to this country, Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz al-Saud — half-nephew of current tyrant King Salman — says that there has been an “alarming change in the way Saudi Arabia is discussed in Britain.”

If this means people are beginning to question our poisonous relationship with the uniquely repressive regime in Riyadh it can only be a good thing.

The prince’s article in yesterday’s Telegraph was disingenuous to say the least. Misgivings about an autocratic government which beheads, stones and crucifies its critics, defines atheism as “terrorism,” has rape victims flogged for “adultery” and still carries out executions for witchcraft and sorcery reflect more than “a lack of understanding and misconceptions.”

Many of the ambassador’s assertions are dubious at best. He claims his kingdom — which is not even a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees — has taken in 2.5 million displaced Syrians, but his own government last month put the figure at a wildly different 100,000 and that was in response to rights groups’ accusations that it has refused to help any.

At least we were spared the guff so often spouted by the Saudis’ Western admirers about the kingdom “reforming” or “democratising.”

Saudi Arabia is getting more repressive, not less — passing a law just last year that specifies the death penalty for bringing a Bible into the country. Presumably the nominally Catholic Tony Blair leaves his at home when collecting his paycheques.

Prince Mohammed was having none of the democracy nonsense either. “Our kingdom is led by our rulers alone,” he declares haughtily, before announcing that these rulers will not be “lectured by anyone.”

It is true that most Western governments’ talk of human rights is rank hypocrisy. Britain is an imperialist country whose foreign wars cause death and suffering on a scale few modern governments — with the exception of our more powerful ally the United States — can match.

At home David Cameron’s administration persecutes the disabled, is driving ever greater numbers of children into poverty and is implementing an all-out assault on trade unions’ right to stand up for their members. There is no reason other countries should take its criticisms seriously.

But in the case of Saudi Arabia British progressives cannot be silent — because our government is complicit in its crimes.

Corbyn successfully shamed Cameron into dropping a contract to provide services to the Saudi prisons system. But we remain deeply implicated in Saudi oppression of its own people and in the violence it spreads beyond its borders.

Britain’s College of Policing is still helping to train their counterparts in a Saudi security force notorious for torturing suspects and executing dissidents — a shameful association which has even Tory Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, who doubles up as Women and Equalities Minister in a government short on female voices, up in arms.

Saudi Arabia is our biggest arms customer. We continue to sell vast quantities of lethal weaponry to a regime which used its army to crush the democracy movement in neighbouring Bahrain and which is currently funding and equipping Islamist terrorist groups in Syria.

And Riyadh does not merely ask for “respect” for its rotten regime as the ambassador claims — not that there is any onus on us to respect a country whose “independent judiciary” does not even allow women to testify in criminal trials.

It actively exports the toxic Wahhabi ideology, funding extremist movements worldwide. No country on Earth is a more prominent sponsor of terrorism.

Britain’s “beneficial strategic partnership” with Saudi Arabia is a blood-soaked disgrace. If we can force Parliament to wake up to that fact then Prince Mohammed is right to be alarmed.