Empty Vassals

As God told Tony Blair and George W. Bush to invade Iraq, so God has told David Lammy to abolish trial by jury. Blair was not yet there, Lammy is still not yet there, and Bush may never be, but Follow Peter. What would Lammy say if the Lords Spiritual voted against his scheme? What does Keir Starmer say about this apparent basis of it?

The Spirit of 2003 is strong today, what with that, with premature triumphalism over Venezuela, and with questions of "Where next?" and "Whatever happened to national sovereignty?" Now as then, we are being told the hitlist, only this time in the Americas rather than in the Middle East and the Islamic world. Now as then, regional states that strongly disliked the overthrown regime are nevertheless queuing up to express horror at the intervention. Now as then, the likes of Chevron and Halliburton are cashing in. And now as then, ludicrous lies are being put about. People with prestigious media and political positions remain on record that the weapons of mass destruction were hidden in secret tunnels under the Euphrates, presumably to this day. Is the Cartel de los Soles hiding in secret tunnels under the Orinoco?

Then again, who cares? Donald Trump has stated bluntly that this is about the oil, and that "we", whether the United States or the Trumps, will be running Venezuela for the foreseeable future. Specifically, they will be running it through the Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, sworn in by Jorge. This regime change has been nothing more than a change within the regime, internally arranged, as such things have to be, by and for the family that was passed over when Hugo Chávez died. Why are its supporters not penning articles and being interviewed? Why is the platform being given instead to the supporters of the irrelevant María Corina Machado and Edmundo González?

Yvette Cooper castigated Richard Burgon for having previously given qualified support to Nicolás Maduro, who was "now being investigated for crimes against humanity". Yet her own unqualified support for Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also being so investigated and more, is supposed to bother no one. That is the rules-based international order. It always has been. There has only ever been one rule, the one that allowed the United States, and by extension Israel though nowhere else to anything like the same extent, to behave in absolutely any way that they pleased. The Israelis have always said that out loud. Now the Americans do, too. In its way, that is a welcome development.

Within and under that order, Starmer's "Hands Off Greenland" rhetoric is as much for internal consumption as Delcy Rodríguez's professions of abiding loyalty to Maduro. Such have so often been the effusions of colonial satraps. Emmanuel Macron is the same, and there is no NATO without the United States much less against it, so when it came to the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council, then Denmark, and the wider Nordic and Baltic world, would have to fall back on Russia and China. China might be bought off, and what has any of those countries given Russia to inspire its affection?

If Maduro did not really win his third term, then how would that distinguish him from Trump, who maintains to this day that he won in 2020, or from Volodymyr Zelensky, whose term of office expired on 20 May 2024? If Starmer is indeed Zelensky's closest ally, then that would explain the widespread cancellation of elections in Britain this year. Starmer's and Rachel Reeves's attitude is also encapsulated by the remark of Zelensky's new economic adviser, Chrystia Freeland, when she was Canada's Minister of Finance, that those struggling with a cost of living crisis should "cut that Disney+ subscription".

Freeland's grandfather, Michael Chomiak, edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi paper in occupied Krakow, printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper. Just after the War, showing your SS tattoo was a guaranteed way of getting into Canada, because it proved how anti-Soviet you were. As late as the 1990s, old Nazis whom the Americans wanted to deport simply moved to Canada, which let them in, and where they carried on drawing their German military pensions.

In Mark Carney's party and into Carney's adult lifetime, Justin Trudeau's father protected thousands of those people as Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984. In Ottawa, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism could not be unveiled in November and will now feature no names of specific individuals, since it had originally borne those of numerous Nazi collaborators and war criminals. And if it is not Canadian Liberalism, then it is the Danish Social Democracy of Shabana Mahmood's beloved "parallel societies" and of Mette Frederiksen's prostration to Trump, begging to be left alone on the perfectly accurate grounds that Denmark was already an American vassal state. It is, and it will not be. Think on.