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Sunday 7 September 2008

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Britain has lost an empire and found a role: to faff on about pirates and biofuels

Something has gone wrong here, hasn’t it? I’m thinking of what they taught me at school about the sabre-toothed tiger — how it thrived because of its long teeth, but then ended up in a world where long teeth were a hindrance, not a help. It’s like we have climbed up to the moral high ground, and now that we can see everything, we are lost.

Or perhaps we are just being self-interested, not preachy. Or perhaps it is in our self-interest to be preachy. ‘A civilised nation does not chop the bits and bobs off anybody, not even pirates.’ That sort of thing. Although doesn’t it look a bit odd? We’ll give the Chinese the Olympic Games and we’ll try our utmost to give the Saudis a free pass through our courts, but we won’t give Somalia a handful of pirates? If this was deliberately hypocritical, at least somebody would appear to be thinking about it. But it’s worse than that. It’s unnecessary. It’s weird.

Let’s leap again. Biofuels. Are you following that one? I’m trying. Two years ago, Gordon Brown was cutting tax on them, in order to save the world and curb our reliance on the Middle East. (That’s the Middle East dominated by the Saudis, of course, who are our friends, even though they have basically the same laws as the people we don’t like in Somalia. And, even though we don’t like their laws, sometimes our national interest dictates we should help them circumnavigate ours. Are you still with me?) But now Gordon thinks biofuels are bad, because they can lead to world hunger. Gordon doesn’t like world hunger. That’s why he has so much time for people like Angelina Jolie, and Bob Geldof, and Bono, because they don’t like world hunger either. And suddenly he’s worried he might have been causing it. So he has changed his mind. I think.

Perhaps, post-Iraq, this is to be Britain’s role in the world — as the proponent of vague, flailing gambits that are both self-interested and well-intentioned, which have huge and disastrous repercussions that only occur to us later. Although even that, I suspect, would be too much like a direction.

More articles from: Hugo Rifkind | this section

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