Special Administrative Region?

Everyone knows that the British invented rubber bullets under the Labour Government of the late 1960s, but almost everyone seems to think that they did so in and for Northern Ireland. In fact, though, they did so in and for Hong Kong, where rubber bullets were used before they were ever used in Northern Ireland.

No, of course Hong Kong is not, nor has it ever been, "an island of freedom". Whatever else the two systems were ever supposed to have been, there was never the slightest suggestion that either of them was that.

Where have those British colonial flags come from? They were thoroughly unloved at the time. Clearly professionally produced, have people just had them in their houses all these years? Pull the other one. Someone is paying for all of this.

And notice that they are increasingly being supplanted by American ones. This is where the theory of the Anglosphere, the inventors of which went out of their way to keep the people of Hong Kong out of Britain in the 1980s, always ends up.

Except that these days, the Americans themselves are having none of it. Neoconnery about "islands of freedom" is not as out of vogue as some of us might have hoped that it would have been under Donald Trump, but he has at least had the wit to recognise that Hong Kong was "an internal Chinese matter".

Even if we wanted to, then there would be absolutely nothing that we could do about Hong Kong. However bad the regime in China may be, although we are closely allied to far worse and although the people who are being rounded up in Xinjiang would be rounded up in Bradford as well, even the most futile attempt at antagonising China would be the road to our own beggary by the middle of the present century. 

Such antagonism for the sake of some kind of lingering claim to a piece of territory seized during the Opium Wars, of all things, would be full-blown economic suicide. This is the real the world. Clearly, Trump is living in it. And so should we.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration. I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham even if I can raise only the deposit, which I could do by going pretty overdrawn, although that was not how I was brought up. Buy the book here.

I would still prefer to raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign, but I am no longer making my candidacy conditional on having done so. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.