Well, lots of contenders for this week's award but in the end it goes to the man, who if opinion polls are correct, will be the next British Prime Minister.
Peter Hitchens, writing in the Mail on Sunday, explains why:
I like Georgia. I like Georgians and their superb hospitality. I have several times travelled to that beautiful country. But I wouldn’t lift a finger to save it from the Russians.
What cause would we be serving? Democracy? Ha ha.
This Olympically corrupt statelet is not a law-governed democracy. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s nauseatingly named Rose Revolution was a putsch achieved by an orchestrated mob, followed by an election so shamelessly one-sided that our supposed hero got 96 per cent of the vote. The only excuse for this was that previous elections had been rigged, too, which of course they had……..
Do we really want young men from the Midlands of England and the Lowlands of Scotland fighting and dying for years to come to save this dubious creature from his own unhinged, wilful conflict with the Kremlin?
You might think not, but David Cameron is all for it. In an amazing demonstration of unfitness for office, the Tory leader last week wrote one of the daftest articles I have ever seen.
He wants Georgia to be allowed into Nato, so committing this country to come to Georgia’s defence if it is attacked. He wants to do the same for Ukraine.
Will someone send this man an atlas and a history book? When will our political class stop trying to grow hairs on their teenage chests by starting wars and deploying forces we no longer have?
Why should we get entangled in this? What business is it of ours if Russia wants friends and allies on its borders, rather than a weird Nato alliance, kept on life-support long after it triumphantly achieved its purpose. What is Nato for now? Does anybody know? If they know, will they say?
Britain has no interests in following American adventures in the Caucasus, let alone taking sides over the dangerous future of Ukraine.
You can read what Peter calls "one of the daftest articles I have ever seen", here.
And the excellent blogger Mick Hall writes, a propos of Dave the Bear-Baiter:
"When David Cameron claims Margaret Thatcher is his role model, he is not being entirely truthful, his real hero is Tony Blair. For like his mentor, Cameron could have just as easily joined the LP and vice versa. Neither man has a political conviction beyond gaining power and once it is attained never placing themselves even a millimeter out of step with what they regard as the supreme power on this earth, the President of the USA."
What's clear from this week's events is that Dave, as I pointed out in my Guardian article of October 2005, is in hock to the neocons. The neocons were terrified that Ken Clarke, a man who had scoffed at the WMD 'Iraqi threat' nonsense, would become Tory leader three years ago, so threw their lot in behind the MP for Witney as the ideal 'Stop Clarke' candidate. Prime Minister Dave would be Tony Blair Mark Two, so if you want a real change from Nu Labour (and who doesn't?) don't be fooled that voting Tory will mean a change in Britain's disastrous foreign policy.
3 comments:
When he first became Tory leader he went to look at a glacier in Norway thereby proving he was "on message" with the media about all the glaciers melting. Now he visits Georgia proving that he is in message that the Ossetia genocide vigtims are unpersons. In our media one photo-op is better than a thousand facts.
The point that Cameron is essentially a neocon cannot be made often enough (I wrote a long reply about this last night but it doesn't seem to have got through). There seems to be a delusion on both sides that he represents a return to pro-European, pro-Arab Toryism of old, based purely upon his background (which means nothing these days, especially because the class he came from abandoned most of its original values so as to stay on side with Thatcherism). In truth, as you pointed out before he even became leader, he represents quite the opposite.
The one good thing is that I think his becoming PM would herald the end of the United Kingdom, and the new states of Scotland (and quite possibly Wales) would take a much more European social democratic stance.
neil: sadly what you say is true.
robin: I don't know what happened to your previous comment- I only received this one. I couldn't agree more with what you say. I think I was the first journalist to highlight Cameron's neocon links in October 2005 in the Guardian; in all the carefully choreographed euphoria about 'that speech' at the Tory conference that month, no one had really bothered to see who was really behind Cameron. The neocons were desperate to 'Stop Clarke'- they all started writing their oped pieces saying why Clarke would be a disaster etc- and they decided that the only candidate who could possibly defeat 'The Beast' would be Dave. It was essential that in order to defeat Clarke, 'Dave' was presented as a 'moderate', but if you read the small print there is nothing moderate about him at all, certainly not his foreign policy!
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