Base Lines

48 hours ago, Donald Trump was a supporter of the Chagos sellout that had been negotiated by James Cleverly and which would have gone ahead if the Conservatives had won the last General Election, in which case Labour would have voted against it. Even now, at Third Reading in the House of Lords, the Conservatives failed to table the fatal amendment that would have succeeded in killing off this Bill that was not in the Labour manifesto, and which indeed directly broke a commitment that was. Since the General Election, Keir Starmer must have fallen under the influence of Andrew Rosindell.

Joe Biden agreed, and until this week so did Trump. Might Rosindell also have a hand in ongoing developments? Twice in recent days, I have written: "Since 1951, the United States has been able to have as many military bases as it pleased in Greenland. There is only one left, but it is the Pituffik Space Base, part of the United States Space Force that Trump created and which is therefore especially close to his heart. A Danish flag is flown there, but Pituffik is 930 miles from Nuuk, with no regular flights and with even the irregular ones taking anything up to four and a half hours, often with stops. Might the US be offered Pituffik, although strictly that and nowhere else such as Qaanaaq, as a sovereign base, perhaps with its name changed to Trump?"

Yet it looks as if there are going to be several American sovereign bases on Greenland. Perhaps the others could be called Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany and Barron? And then there is Trump's insistence that America would not fight for anywhere that it did not own. At least 49 countries, including this one, need to prepare to cede sovereignty over at least 128 bases. Or kick them out while we still can.

Some of us said all of this more than 20 years ago, and of course a lot of people have been saying it a lot longer than that. What a price we have paid. Back then, our persecutors wanted to replace the United Nations, which did and does have plenty of faults, with an invitation-only body. Logically, and they did sometimes say this, the invitations could have been issued only by the White House. Now we do indeed have Trump's Board of Peace, complete with their great hero, Tony Blair, on it. Yet even without the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", and in the end probably without the Canadians whom they had always so despised for not wanting to be the Americans that they themselves longed to be, they spit on their luck. I sincerely do not understand.