A new foreign policy?

Rhoda Klapp

I am agog to see the list of powers that we will be repatriating from the EU. There IS a list, isn't there?

Mycroft

Labour may have been active in Europe, but it was always pretty inept in its dealings with the EU and European countries; there is something really amusing in the thought that the Conservatives (in coalition of course) may make a far better job of this, after all the warnigs that Labour people were giving about them wrecking our relations with Europe. It helps that Cameron and Hague, backed up by the multilingual Clegg, are evidently good people for the Europeans to deal with, after the appalling Brown and the neutered Foreign Secretaries of that era.

Neil Turner

I compare your statement....

"Hague’s and Miliband’s condemnations of the Gaza flotilla killings were almost verbatim"

with a quote from Melanie Phillips' new book The World Turned Upside Down...

"It is not an exaggeration to say that the position an individual takes on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs is a near-infallible guide to their general view of the world"

When it comes to the existance of Israel, New Labour = ConDems

This tells me all I need to know about our Foreign Policy

Widmerpool

I hope this is not code for Dave going soft on the EU!
At present it is disunited at Sark/Merk level, suffering from the Club Med Banking problems, not to mention Greece.
No wonder the self serving Brussels Bureaucrats are leaking that Dave is going soft on Treaty Revision and hoping the Belgian nonenty will get his way on the EU approving the UK budget. These guys are running scared of Dave and Hague and they should keep up the pressure.

Can the UK change the useless Ashton and maybe put Paddy Ashdown in her place; after all Labour shuffled the pack of Eurocommissioners when they had to shift Lord Mandy out of the UK because he was becoming embarrasing did'nt they?

Fatbloke on tour

DB

I fear Dave the Rave will have to cosy up to Europe as his relation ship with BO looks terrible. Patronised to the nth degree and treated like the vacuous, PR driven lightweight that he is, the pictures didn't look good.

I fear BO will be handing out lots of invitations so that he can be seen to kicking Limey, effete, posh boy on a regular basis.

At least Wee Liam is keeping the true flame burning with the right wing neo-con wacos.

I fear his outbursts will become more frequent and strident as he realises Dave the Rave is getting very lonely sitting on the International Naughty step.

Anyway, how about some more economics articles?
Scared of dealing with the coming Sniffy disaster?

Vulture

Widmerpool - (I do hope you aren't such a shit as your fictional nom-de-plume).

Your post leaves me puzzled. How can Dave go 'soft' on the EU when his solidity has never been firmer than a blancmange left out in the midday sun?

And although I'm with you on replacing the world's ugliest woman in Brussels on grounds of national pride, how can you possibly suggest replacing her with that pompous twerp Paddy Pantsdown?

I've always doubted those self-aggrandising stories that this prune-faced fool can kill with his bare hands etc. Old Pants can certainly be lethal - he is capable of boring to death for Britain. Is this what you had in mind when recommending him for the EU job?

Ben Martin

"Homeland security"? Didn't we used to call this "domestic security" at one time, before we all started wishing we were American?

yank

How wise the previous Tory stalwarts were... to avoid the flypaper of that horrid euro common currency.

Now, in time of financial trouble, there and elsewhere, it is possible to execute discrete action, driven by effected voters, rather than waiting for unelected bureaucrats and beancounters to determine the fate.

Further, British words carry much weight and have a disinterested validity, when they come in counsel to those chained to that common currency, which has also necessarily entangled those countries' foreign policies and relationships. France and Germany... the oldest of rivalries... both governments have to tread lightly, and both governments risk popular wrath at home as they so tread. So then, their governments are placed on the Brussels anvil for a good hometown smash. I like the smashing in Parliament much better, and it's a lot more entertaining, too.

Widmerpool

Vulture old chap.

The thinking behind sending Paddy to Brussels was to get him out of the way and stop him making a nuisance of himself with the Lib Dems!

lescam

Fatbloke on tour

"I fear Dave the Rave will have to cosy up to Europe as his relation ship with BO looks terrible. Patronised to the nth degree and treated like the vacuous, PR driven lightweight that he is, the pictures didn't look good.
"I fear BO will be handing out lots of invitations so that he can be seen to be kicking Limey, effete, posh boy on a regular basis."

Don't disagree with this. Obama pretty obviously hates Brits, and will take any opportunity to humiliate us and Cameron that he can get. Beginning with chucking back at us Churchill's bust from the White House, treating Brown like s..t, refusing to back Britain over the Falklands, and now behaving like the school bully over BP. I thought at the time of Brown's visit that it was just dislike of Brown (and no-one could blame him for that, we all hate Brown's guts), but it is now apparent that Obama loathes all Brits and will do everything in his power to denigrate us.

Well, two can play at that game. Cameron should promptly withdraw all troops from Afghanistan NOW and let Obama stew in his own juice. We have been treated like dirt by his administration long enough.

Verity

Vulture - "How can Dave go 'soft' on the EU when his solidity has never been firmer than a blancmange left out in the midday sun?" Quite. He has never made an unequivocal statement about the EU.

Ben Martin - The English (not necessarily the British) have always wished they were American. They're always first in with the latest American catchwords. At least the stalwart Aussies come up with their own terms and catchwords.

Mycroft

All this stuff about Obama having it in for Cameron is utter nonsense, he is clearly making some effort to put relations with the British government on a better footing, and things eem to have got off to a good start.

David Lindsay

Britain's involvements with Russia, with China and in Latin America go back a lot further than most people realise, although they are fully aware of both their good and their bad aspects in Russia, in China and in Latin America. In many cases, William Hague is pushing at open doors there, often a lot more open than those either to the Continent or to the United States.

Within the general, if rather unspecific, emphasis on the Commonwealth, the reiteration of the relationship with India is most welcome. India has been looking to America of late, but not to very much effect. It is Britain that, for example, supports India's pursuit of a UN Security Council seat.

Britain's longstanding ties to the Arab world are for some reason less well-known in the population at large than used to be the case, whereas a word has been abroad that we have particularly close links to a country set up by anti-British Marxist terrorists and with which we have only the most limited economic or cultural dealings. But the Arab ties are still there, and it was interesting to hear the Foreign Secretary name the United Arab Emirates specifically.

No teenage British conscript was photographed being hanged with barbed wire by those seeking the independence of the Trucial States, and relations ever since have reflected that. With Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the UAE was a Clinton campaign backer on whose instruction she therefore promised to nuke Iran. But the Emiratis' bonds to Britain are older and stronger. And the Emirates would make for a much less difficult or demanding outpost of British influence than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are outposts of American influence.

As for Japan, we used to have a very close alliance with Japan. It was naval, and it was destroyed by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, under which, having just fought a World War more than anything because we refused to concede naval parity to any foreign state, we conceded naval parity to a foreign state. The rest really is history. It would be wrong to sit and wait for everyone with an outstanding grievance against Japan to die, but it looks as if that is what is happening. At any rate, it is more than welcome that we are taking up where we were bullied into leaving off in and after 1922. Perhaps swallowing something unsavoury will just have to be endured to that end.

After all, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as much anti-British as anti-Japanese acts, intended in no small measure to prevent any British re-conquest of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific, quite probably accompanied by an annexation of the Dutch East Indies that the Dutch were not then in any position to take back, so soon after the British Pacific Fleet had been cheered into the Sydney Harbour that was to have been its base for the prosecution of the War against Japan by precisely those means.

All this, plus withdrawal from Afghanistan, restoration of the link between pensions and earnings, abandonment of identity cards, the prospect of electoral reform, an inquiry into the last lot's complicity in torture, and a renewed emphasis on a manufacturing-based economy diffused throughout the country. This Government is and will be ghastly in many, many, many ways. But it is not uniformly or exclusively so. It certainly has its good points.

yank

So, Mr. Lindsay, after finally immolating itself and lowering the flags of colonialism all over the world, the Brit Empire is to be resurrected from whence its interlopers were lastly disgorged... the Arabian Peninsula? ;-)

Perhaps you should settle for hanging on to the Falklands this time 'round. There's a good lad.

Dorothy Wilson

Vulture: Widmerpool is actually a village near where I live and a very nice one too. Please don't insult it.

Avudale

Verity, "The English (not necessarily the British) have always wished they were American. They're always first in with the latest American catchwords."

Watching trendy BBC programmes doesn't give one the fullest breadth of understanding of contemporary colloquialisms and slang words or usage.

Any time spent in London will nullify your absurd statement.

Verity

Avudale to me: "Any time spent in London will nullify your absurd statement." If I won the lottery, which I won't as I don't buy a ticket, I would go to London to pick up my winnings. Otherwise, "any time spent in London" will not happen.

Kennybhoy

Regarding David Lindsay's post above.

Standard Young Maister Lindsay commentary. Starts of rationally and coherently enough. First and second paragraphs unobjectionable with a wee touch of genuine insight there in respect of Indias’s relationship with the United States. Real lethargy there on the part of the cousins, possibly resulting from India’s previous links with the old USSR...? Anyways. Our opportunity.

And then in paras 3-4 we descend rapidly into Young Maister Lindsay’s defining trope. Obsessive Jew hatred. You just can't help yersel’ can you Lindsay? The country which Lindsay cannot even bring himself to name is of course Israel. The murdered British soldiers , to whom Lindsay will grant neither the dignity of the names their parents gave them nor the military rank their country saw fit to grant them, were Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice of the Intelligence Corps , God rest them . They were barbarously murdered and their corpses desecrated by Irgun terrorists in 1947 during the latter days of the British Palestine Mandate.

Israel was not “set up” by Irgun.The mainstream Zionist armed forces during the mandate regularly fought and killed them. One of the first acts of the new state of Israel was to designate Irgun and other such groups as terrorist organizations. The domestic politics of Israel are envenomed by this history to this day. Oh and the idea that Irgun was Marxist would be ROTFLOL funny were the present matters under discussion no’ so serious. David Ben Gurion characterized them as Nazis, and he was not being rhetorical.

In respect of paragraphs 5-6 regarding Britain’s historic and present relations with Japan.

Just let me get this straight. The murder of British soldiers at the hands of a Zionist faction in the Palestine mandate constitutes an ineradicable stain on the name of Israel, is to be described in pornographic detail, and should play a determinant role British foreign policy to the present day? But the crimes of Imperial Japan against her Asian neighbours, European colonial civilians, and Allied servicemen can be euphemistically glossed as “a grievance? And the sooner those with such “an outstanding grievance against Japan” on this account just die off so that we can return to the happy state of affairs that existed pre 1922 the better?

Mr Lindsay, I beg of you in God’s name, seek spiritual counseling. I will remember you in my prayers.