Chinese Takeaway?

Those of us who know Richard Burgon know that he is anything but stupid. The insistence that he is, in which case no one would care about him, is a variation on the insistence that the Left is a few thousand adolescents, economic illiterates, anti-Semites and general cranks on the Internet, in which case no one would care what we said or did, including how we voted or refused to vote.

The campaign against Richard is the latest stage in the campaign that began with the withdrawal of the whip from Jeremy Corbyn. Neither Richard nor anyone else has resigned it in solidarity, and I am afraid that they are now rather reaping with they have sown.

See also the fact that only the Alba Party's MPs have signed Early Day Motion 698, welcoming the release of Craig Murray and deploring his imprisonment. At the very least, all those who have signed EDMs in support of Julian Assange ought to do so.

As for Richard's specific views on China, "genocide" is a slipperier concept than you may think. In 1993, the former Bolivian President, García Meza Tejada, was convicted of "genocide" for the deaths of fully eight people. Those may or may not have been the only people whom he killed. But they were the only victims of his "genocide".

The word is best avoided if at all possible. People who would deploy it in relation to the Uyghurs and cite in evidence their collapsing birthrate should consider that births to British-born women were now irretrievably below replacement level. There are those who would claim that that was a "genocide", but one would presumably not yet count, for example, contributors to CapX among them.

The awfulness of the Chinese regime does not make any better the Islamist insurgents and terrorists in Xinjiang, or the people who would return well over 90 per cent of the population of Tibet to their ancestral serfdom, or the Falun Gong cult, among others.

And those of us who most certainly do not defend the British economic policies of the last 40 years are entitled to criticise on other grounds a regime that has, in the midst of it all, raised 800 million people out of absolute poverty during the same period.

But those who defend those policies have rather less claim to any such entitlement. Especially since those policies have handed over to the Chinese State key British assets that they absolutely insist must no longer be owned by the British State.