Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Pity the monks of Tibet who dare to hope that anyone will come to their aid

Rod Liddle is appalled by the appeasement of China, a country that now combines the most oppressive aspects of state Marxism with the most brutally rapacious aspects of capitalism.

issue 22 March 2008

I can’t remember what sort of foreign policy we have right now. When New Labour was elected we were told it would be an ‘ethical foreign policy’. A year or so later, Robin Cook altered this to a ‘foreign policy with an ethical dimension’, which is a rather different thing. I assume it is now something like ‘a foreign policy with no ethical dimension whatsoever’ or maybe, since about five years ago, ‘a vigorously unethical foreign policy’. In this, I don’t suppose we are very different to most other nations and one should at least be glad that the pretence otherwise has been long dropped. But watching those stolen images smuggled out of the fires of Lhasa this week, you do hope that the vestigial tail of a conscience is being tweaked somewhere within our government.

It is one thing to behave cravenly toward the appalling Saudis in order to ‘protect our security interests’; it is another to suck up to the even worse Chinese simply because they are bigger than us and we want a slice of their burgeoning economy.

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