Old Friends and Older

Britain's involvements with Russia, with China and in Latin America go back a lot further than most people realise, although they are fully aware of both their good and their bad aspects in Russia, in China and in Latin America. In many cases, William Hague is pushing at open doors there, often a lot more open than those either to the Continent or to the United States.

Within the general, if rather unspecific, emphasis on the Commonwealth, the reiteration of the relationship with India is most welcome. India has been looking to America of late, but not to very much effect. It is Britain that, for example, supports India's pursuit of a UN Security Council seat.

Britain's longstanding ties to the Arab world are for some reason less well-known in the population at large than used to be the case, whereas a word has been abroad that we have particularly close links to a country set up by anti-British Marxist terrorists and with which we have only the most limited economic or cultural dealings. But the Arab ties are still there, and it was interesting to hear the Foreign Secretary name the United Arab Emirates specifically.

No teenage British conscript was photographed being hanged with barbed wire by those seeking the independence of the Trucial States, and relations ever since have reflected that. With Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the UAE was a Clinton campaign backer on whose instruction she therefore promised to nuke Iran. But the Emiratis' bonds to Britain are older and stronger. And the Emirates would make for a much less difficult or demanding outpost of British influence than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are outposts of American influence.

As for Japan, we used to have a very close alliance with Japan. It was naval, and it was destroyed by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, under which, having just fought a World War more than anything because we refused to concede naval parity to any foreign state, we conceded naval parity to a foreign state. The rest really is history. It would be wrong to sit and wait for everyone with an outstanding grievance against Japan to die, but it looks as if that is what is happening. At any rate, it is more than welcome that we are taking up where we were bullied into leaving off in and after 1922. Perhaps swallowing something unsavoury will just have to be endured to that end.

After all, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as much anti-British as anti-Japanese acts, intended in no small measure to prevent any British re-conquest of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific, quite probably accompanied by an annexation of the Dutch East Indies that the Dutch were not then in any position to take back, so soon after the British Pacific Fleet had been cheered into the Sydney Harbour that was to have been its base for the prosecution of the War against Japan by precisely those means.

All this, plus withdrawal from Afghanistan, restoration of the link between pensions and earnings, abandonment of identity cards, the prospect of electoral reform, an inquiry into the last lot's complicity in torture, and a renewed emphasis on a manufacturing-based economy diffused throughout the country. This Government is and will be ghastly in many, many, many ways. But it is not uniformly or exclusively so. It certainly has its good points.