Chinese Whispers

You whined for years about a few hundred thousand Poles (who are still here, by the way), but now you want to let in three million Cantonese, whom you went to enormous lengths to keep out when it mattered. And they are still not going to come.

China has not "crushed freedom" in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has never been free. The demonstrators there were often born after the handover, and they are almost never old enough to have lived under British rule as adults or as politically conscious teenagers.

Moreover, they are divided among themselves in a very important way. Some of them want an independent and democratic Hong Kong, while others want a democratic China. But none of them has any interest in the British tyranny, which was at its worst under the Labour Government of the late 1960s.

And they might want to go to the United States, especially the culturally East Asian cities of the Pacific Coast, or to the culturally East Asian and Pacific Islander cities of Australia, New Zealand, and the West Coast of Canada. But they have no interest in coming to Britain. Why would they want to do that?

There is nothing that Britain can do, anyway. Whereas when it comes to the forced sterilisations in Xinjiang, Britain has been funding the Chinese population control programme for as long as that has existed. 

In the way that people suddenly seem to have noticed the war in Afghanistan now that they can contrive an anti-Trump angle, so they suddenly seem to have noticed this, and only a small part of it at that, because it suits this week's news agenda.

But is Britain going to stop funding the Chinese population control programme? What do you think? We throw a tantrum where and because we are utterly impotent. Yet where we could at least do something, we do nothing. Of course.