Britain goes full Orwell accusing Putin of imperialism
Tarik Cyril Amar | Foreign Secretary David Lammy launched into a weird rant against Russia, accusing it of the crimes Britain has committed | There are intriguing and disappointing – though not surprising – continuities between Great Britain under the conservative Tories and the current iteration under a hardly less rightwing version of the Labour party. Crony corruption scandals that reveal the British political elite as comically greedy and petty are already erupting again. Ordinary people still face an unforgiving search for “austerity”; indeed, given recent Labour moves on the budget, for instance on the winter fuel allowance, affecting over ten million frequently vulnerable pensioners, the so-called “Left” is now outdoing the Right in cruelty toward the common man and woman. And the fairly new prime minister, Keir Starmer, is already as deeply unpopular as his predecessor Rishi Sunak was when he called the elections that predictably finished him off. [...] Politically, this is just another way in which semi-smart people fool semi-simple people. But there is a more serious, moral dimension as well. It is a truly and abjectly colonial and imperialist move to exploit the massive suffering – almost exclusively at the hands of the West – as well as the hard-won insights and hard-fought resistance of what we now call the Global South so as to feed them into the cheap propaganda that the West now uses to sell its geopolitics-101 proxy war in Ukraine as an issue of ‘rules’ and ‘values’. And yet that is precisely what David Lammy has done. What a disgrace.