David Cameron’s speech in Kuwait today did not take on his hosts in the way that Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech did. But it was a still fine, liberal speech.
The key argument of the speech was that:
”As recent events have confirmed, denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability, rather the reverse. Our interests lie in upholding our values – in insisting on the right to peaceful protest, in freedom of speech and the internet, in freedom of assembly and the rule of law. But these are not just our values, but the entitlement of people everywhere; of people in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar Square.”
This is the crucial point: crude realism is not realistic. If Britain, and the West more broadly, chooses to put itself on the side of autocratic — or as Cameron euphemistically called them ‘highly controlling regimes’ — it is just storing up worse problems for another day.
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