And The Clocks Are Striking Thirteen

Enjoy your £350 per month to take in a Ukrainian refugee. That would not even cover the food and fuel price increases that had started before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This will amount to renting out a room, or in some cases a house or a flat, and charging it to the Social. Standard practice, of course. Except that asylum seekers are banned in law from renting property. Unless, apparently, they "look like us".

Outside the fantasy world of the bizarre Priti Patel, everyone looks like us. Britain is ethnically diverse down to every ward, it is home to people from every inhabited territory, it has a large and growing population of mixed ethnic heritage, and it is therefore the world centre of the liberation struggle of the Global South against the central role of the City of London, and of its network of tax havens under British sovereignty, in the oppression of the Global South.

Just because media outlets that mention the first aspect are closed down by the second does not mean that the things that they report are not happening. There is a reason why Jeremy Corbyn is to be one of the guests of honour at the inauguration of President Gabriel Boric of Chile. Corbyn, of course, has been right all along about Vladimir Putin and his circle, while everyone from Boris Johnson to Peter Mandelson has been wrong, not in the sense of being ignorant of the facts, but in the sense of being morally reprehensible in their approach to them.

Removed from the American-run banking system, Russia has simply joined the Chinese one instead. China and India are both now trading with Russia in currencies other than the dollar. The recent mass abstention when the UN General Assembly condemned the invasion of Ukraine should have alerted the West, but did not, to the existence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and to the fact that Africans did not necessarily regard the North Atlantic bloc as the bastion of liberty, nor did they necessarily think of the Soviet Union when they were told that there used to be an Evil Empire. 

Economically, moreover, if China is now this close to Russia, then so are they. Much the same will increasingly be true of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. A desperate United States is now in talks even with Nicolás Maduro, whom less than a week ago it insisted was not the President of Venezuela at all. Whatever happened to Juan Guaidó? Once again, Corbyn was right all along. His great failing was that he did not stand up for himself. Next up, an attempt to clutch Iran, which joined "liberated" Iraq in abstaining, to the bosom of Uncle Sam. Expect that in the coming hours. Behind the scenes, it will already be going on. Of course, it may not succeed. But it is being attempted.

In appealing to China for military assistance, Russia declares that it needs it. There was no Russian Bear. There is no basis for a New Cold War with Russia, at least. Nor has it anything to do with liking any particular regime to say that Eurasia is rising, and that superdiverse Britain, hitherto a great success, risks economic, social, cultural and political disintegration by the end of the century if it continues its present approach to that fact of life.

That approach is directed by people such as are now back in control of the Labour Party, such as are now in control of the SNP, and such as have always been in control of the Conservatives and of the Liberal Democrats. They believe in all seriousness that the very word "Eurasia" was invented by George Orwell. Look out for that one.