Frame of Reference

They never cared about the Uighurs before, of course. And they enthusiastically support the Chinese population control programme in general, as they always have. But liberals and people with Trotskyist backgrounds are reprising in relation to China their old act in relation to the Soviet Union. 

The nostalgia for the Soviet Bloc across many of its former parts truly infuriates them. But they will never grasp that, as is massively the case in China, "We used to be dirt poor and now we are at least less poor" has a potency that "We've never been free and we still aren't" can simply never approach.

The economic shock treatment of the immediate post-Soviet period had a devastating impact on the lives of huge numbers of people. Gorbachev's name is as abominated in much of his own country as Thatcher's is in much of hers, for very similar reasons, obviously among far more people, and arguably with an even greater intensity. And as for Yeltsin's.

Even in North Korea, people know nothing about life in, most obviously, South Korea. What they know is that their own lives are better than life on the same ground was during the Korean War or under the Japanese. We know that their lives are worse than ours. But that is not their frame of their reference.

And even in Britain, well-heeled Remainers bang on about how Brexit "is going to make you poor". To which the areas that swung the referendum reply that, "We are already poor, although we wouldn't have been if incomes round here had kept pace since 1972."

"You'll get poor" will never cut it with the poor. Nothing that might happen in the next 18 months or so will make the people whose votes decided the referendum any worse off than they already were. That was why they voted Leave in the first place.