An interesting story...
I wonder who in Downing Street briefed Barack Obama’s team on the wording
of his friendly warning to the British. Somebody obviously pointed out
that the population of this country retained a quaint obsession with the
Second World War, and would therefore treat any reference to the
glorious dead as irreproachable. So the President invoked the European
graves of those American servicemen who died to protect – well, what
exactly?
I thought it was the democratic
values and reverence for national independence that Britain shared with
the US. Did Mr Obama have any sense at all that what he was now urging the British electorate to accept
was precisely the surrender of those sacred principles of
democratically accountable government and self-determination for which
the combined American and British forces had made their ultimate
sacrifice?
Could this bizarre intervention
have been more cynical or wilfully misinformed? In the end, it seemed to
come down to trade advantages – to what might once, back in the day,
have been called the global interests of US corporate capitalism. Mr
Obama even made specific reference in his article in Friday’s Daily Telegraph
to the importance of current negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which would reduce barriers to US
business interests in the European Union.
On the same day, 38 Degrees – a front group for the more proactive
elements in the public sector unions – took out full-page newspaper
adverts campaigning against the adoption of TTIP
(“…no trade deal should give corporations more power than people”). If
the Labour Left were not in such disingenuous disarray, they could be
making a meal of this. In any event, unnamed US trade officials were
being ominously quoted as saying that, in the event of Brexit, the UK
would come very low on America’s list of priorities for new trade
agreements.
Read the rest here.
~~~~~~~
No comments:
Post a Comment