Three billion pounds 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 found 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.
Telling it like it is.
ReplyDeleteThe only way I know.
Delete“Like Prince Andrew, China is the least of our worries.”
ReplyDeleteWhat an extraordinarily stupid statement. China is not “the least of our worries” it’s flagrantly breaching its agreement with us to maintain the civil liberties we bequeathed Hong Kong, to the extent we’ve had to grant hundreds of thousands of its people asylum from China’s police-state repression. As for “yellow-peril nonsense” name a single Gulf kingdom that has locked a million people in gulags-one in twelve of the entire population-as China has done with one in every twelve Uighurs. China is currently menacing its free democratic neighbours from Taiwan to the Philippines and trying to claim international waters for itself.
Frothing at the mouth stuff. I mean, even if it were true, and some of it is just plain mad, it would not be our problem, there would be nothing that we could possibly do about it, and in any case we let China own anything it wants in Britain.
DeleteYou don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Everything I wrote is of course true-China is the reason we’ve had to take hundreds of thousands of refugees from Hong Kong, fleeing from precisely the police-state repression China promised it wouldn’t inflict when we handed it back, more than a million Uighurs have been held in political prison camps (one in twelve of the population) and China is menacing the free democracies in its neighbourhood from the Philippines to Taiwan.
ReplyDeleteAs for “there’s nothing we can do about it” funny to hear you suddenly, selectively discovering realpolitik when it comes to China but not the Gulf monarchies you mention above. If you don’t care about human rights in the context of the Uighurs, the people of Hong Kong, or the rest, then don’t pretend you care about human rights anywhere else.
Time for your nap. The grownups are talking.
DeleteWhy, exactly, are you so worried about human rights in the Gulf monarchies yet happy for us to cosy up to China’s police state, a worse regime than any of them? I’d love to know…
ReplyDeleteI am not in favour of cosying up to anyone.
DeleteThe notion of handing Chagos, a strategic British asset, to a Chinese ally was always mad. As all the Tory and Reform MPs who spoke against this sellout said, how can we defend the right to self determination of the people of the Falklands and Gibraltar if we don’t assert the right to self determination of the Chagos Islanders too?
ReplyDeleteIt is not a British asset. If you doubt whose it really is this side of Chagossian self-determination, then consider that we have not even been allowed to give it away.
DeleteI assume you've seen Christopher Montgomery's article, "We can't even give them away"?
Deletehttps://thecritic.co.uk/we-cant-even-give-them-away/
I have now. Very many thanks.
Delete