Friday 9 March 2018

The Sheer Nerve

David Dimbleby assured George the Poet that Question Time would be coming to the subject of Saudi Arabia later in the programme. But it never did.

Yet for a third day, there comes no denial from Theresa May or anyone else. Therefore, the words of Jeremy Corbyn stand on the record of the House of Commons, that British military advisers are directing the Saudi war in Yemen, and are thus complicit in the war crimes that are the cause of the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today. Why is there any other news than this?

We are told that our relationship with Saudi Arabia has saved hundreds of lives in Britain. Even when such claims are made about the United States, then some evidence is expected to be produced in order to back them up. Yet that wildly counterintuitive claim about Saudi Arabia, of all places, is expected to be taken on simple trust. The Leader of the Opposition can question that relationship at Prime Minister's Questions while the Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia is in London, but there will still be a media blackout.

It is Yvette Cooper who continues to be treated as the Official Media's Official Leader of the Official Opposition, this week to peddle the doolally theory that Vladimir Putin has murdered another 14 people in Britain, in between murdering (if he did) Alexander Litvinenko, a deeply dodgy character whom we should never have allowed in, and murdering three people who are still alive.

That gives 18 murder victims in all, although only 15 of them meet the previously basic requirement of being dead. By means of her Work Capability Assessment, Cooper has murdered far more than 18 people in this country, and all of her victims do meet that requirement. In their tens of thousands, they are all dead.

What if this country really is in the grip of Putin's killing spree as well as Cooper's? Why are the former's victims in Britain at all? Sergei Skripal was paid to betray his brother officers and his men for no ideological reason. We were under no obligation to include him in a spy swap in order to spring him from the rest of his extremely lenient sentence. We were certainly under no obligation to take him in, or to give him a pension. All that he has brought with him has been his enemies from back home. The same was true of Berezovsky. The same was true of Litvinenko. The same is true of all of them.

We are doing ourselves immense economic harm with this carry on. Never mind the Customs Union. Never mind Donald Trump's implementation of the protectionist platform on which he was elected while silly little Liam Fox blathers on about Russia's "near abroad" yet longs to be part of America's and seems rather hurt that that has never been an option, nor ever will be.

Amendments need to be tabled, and pushed to the vote, obliging the Secretary of State for International Trade to seek trade agreements with each of the BRICS countries and to seek the integration into the Belt and Road Initiative of each of the four parts of the United Kingdom, of each of the nine English regions, of each of the British Overseas Territories, and of each of the Crown Dependencies. This will require a new Secretary of State for International Trade. Thank goodness for that.

Another amendment that needs to be tabled, and pushed to the vote, is the one that would guarantee the United Kingdom's historic fishing rights in accordance with international law, namely 200 miles or to the median line. The Government has sold out completely on that one. Hardly anyone seems to have noticed, or at least to have been  given a platform from which to object, which says it all about who is or is not permitted to to be the public voice of pro-Brexit opinion. But, however little may have been done about it between 1997 and 2010, this has been official Labour Party policy for as long as the issue has existed. Now is the time to bring it to the floor of the House.

As for the Irish Border, the latest variation on "people never understood what the EU really was" is "people never understood what the Good Friday Agreement really was", the implication being that if they had, then they would have agreed with its handful of noisy opponents in the London media and the DUP. But as with the EU, yes, they had read it. Yes, they had understood. Yes, they did vote for it in that full knowledge and understanding, the only referendum on the Good Friday Agreement having been in Northern Ireland itself. And yes, it has delivered exactly what the people who voted for it wanted.

Even the DUP is now in favour of it. On numerous issues, including this one, Peter Hitchens speaks for hardly anyone even when he is right. Daniel Hannan, who knows almost nothing about this country, speaks for no one but himself on anything. The only mildly interesting thing about him now is which of the competing UKIP successor parties, of which my favourite is Henry Bolton's beyond-satirical British Racing Green Party, he will join, or whether he will set up his own. It would be fascinating to see his philosophy and programme put to the voters, and then to see the look on his face when no one voted for it.

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