Fair or Proportionate?

Three billion to Ukraine every year "for as long as it takes", with no definition of "it", but not a penny for the WASPI women. Yes, they do have a pronounced streak of Boomer entitlement. Yes, having found themselves unemployed while of what had become working age, then they could just have got another job, or signed on. And yes, the pension is a benefit, so they were not robbed.

But all the worst people are happy that the WASPI women are not going to be compensated. As on, say, Syria, if you are siding with those, then whatever the faults of the other side, you are on the wrong one. What a pity that Esther Rantzen has never taken up the WASPI cause.

Or, for that matter, the cause of self-determination for the Chagossians, for whom a window has opened following the new Mauritian Government's dismissal of David Lammy's deal with its predecessor. Notice the re-emergence of Yellow Peril nonsense. What influence does anyone imagine that Prince Andrew has ever had over anything? No self-respecting spy would cultivate anyone so insignificant. When it came to associates of Jeffrey Epstein's, then the politically important one in Britain has always been Peter Mandelson.

Prince Andrew may have kept some unfortunate company, but if he did have sex with the then Virginia Roberts, and there is no evidence that he did, then not even she suggests that he broke the law, since she claims to have been 17, the age of consent then as now in New York, while that age in Britain was and is 16. If even that would still make Prince Andrew so deplorable, and I quite agree that it would be distasteful, then what is so sympathetic about Lammy's constituent, Marcus Fakana, whose as an adult had sex with a 17-year-old girl in Dubai, where it was illegal to do so?

We do not normally question the Gulf monarchies at all, but something about teenage sex trumps all other considerations where our political and media class is concerned. We also have a foreign state in that region bullying, blackmailing and bribing that class to carry on arming a genocide and the invasion of two neighbouring countries. Like Prince Andrew, China is the least of our worries.