Sunday Best: Little trouble in big China
A round-up of Sunday's key stories and things you might have missed this week.
Image by KAI SONG from Pixabay
Welcome, fellow running dogs of Western imperialism (and wrestling dogs of bovine antagonism).
This is an experiment in an end-of-the-week round-up newsletter to see if it works/there’s any interest/I can find the time every week. If you have any thoughts, gripes, suggestions or snark, let me know in the comments.
Before we start, a few thoughts on China. It’s not been a great news week for the Communist Party. The lab-leak origin theory of Covid-19 is starting to get a hearing (despite being shut down by journalists and social media sites as a conspiracy theory last year). An unofficial tribunal on Beijing’s human rights abuses against the Uighurs got under way. Lady Hale announced she would be leaving her post on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal next month over the repressive National Security Law. And Chinese and Hong Kong democracy activists marked the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Boy, I bet President Xi’s worried about the polls ahead of the next election.
China is just too big, too powerful and too determined for a little Western hand-wringing to cause it any trouble. Beijing knows we’re not serious and so it treats us accordingly. I’ve been arguing for a while that Britain and the rest of the West need to get serious with China over Covid-19, the repression in Hong Kong and what the United States has recognised as a genocide of the Uighurs. That US recognition was a welcome step, as was the UK Government’s sanctuary offer to Hongkongers, the House of Commons’ declaration of a genocide in Xinjiang, and Liz Truss’s call for the WTO to get tough on the PRC on trade.
However, like the Line of Duty finale, it all seems a bit… meh. China is every bit as much a rogue state as Iran or North Korea and it’s time we started isolating it accordingly. This includes, unpopular though it would be, winding down our trading relationship until Beijing decides to become a responsible member of the global community. Unpopular, because doing so will make all those cheap goods that we’re so addicted to more expensive. In the long run, though, it makes sense.
At some point China, which is determined to dislodge the United States as the world superpower, will flex its commercial and economic power in more openly aggressive ways to shut down criticism and potential sanctions from the UK and other Western countries. (Of course, China isn’t doing half as much to undermine America’s place in the world as America itself.) We should be reorienting our trading alliances to India, the world’s largest democracy and a country which, imperfect as all nations are, at least broadly shares our values when it comes to democracy and the rule of law.
Progressives who oppose standing up to China claim doing so, or even talking about doing so, encourages anti-Chinese racism. Naturally, those making this argument apply it to their own calls for distancing the United States from Israel. Nah, just kidding. (Among the progressive media outlets amplifying this talking point is Politico, the same outlet which last year published an op-ed on terrorism against the French which declared: ‘France is paying a heavy price for its fundamentalist secularism.’) Just like the Western leftists who tried to stifle speech and policies unfavourable to their Soviet BFFs back in the day, today’s simps for Xi should be ignored. Okay, roundly ridiculed and then ignored.
China is a threat to us in the West just as it is to democrats in China and to Uighurs frog-marched into camps, and that threat comes from the regime in Beijing, not the Chinese populace, who are, as Donald Trump might have and probably did say, marvellous, magnificent people — the greatest. The regime is the problem and it is the regime that countries like the UK need a more robust line on.
Headlines
The top stories from across the media.
Prince Harry and Meghan announce birth of baby girl
Lilibet ‘Lili’ Diana Mountbatten-Windsor was born at a Santa Barbara hospital on Friday, weighing 7lbs and 11oz.
Tony Blair says the vaccinated should have no lockdown restrictions
The former prime minister’s Institute for Global Change proposes ‘health passes’ that would allow the UK Government to begin ‘removing certain restrictions for the fully vaccinated’.
Priti Patel tells social networks to take action as videos of migrants crossing Channel go viral
If only the Home Secretary had some kind of remit for stopping the events depicted in these videos from happening in the first place…
Kent Council threatens government with legal action over migrant children
Speaking of immigration, the Conservative-run local authority says its social services cannot cope with any more unaccompanied migrant children.
Sidelines
Stories that might have slipped your attention.
Stonewall 'exodus' begins as Ministry of Justice officials say it has ‘lost its way’
The UK Government is slowly disentangling itself from Stonewall after the gay and lesbian rights organisation’s hardline turn towards transgender ideology. Will other departments and public bodies follow suit and reduce the amount of taxpayer’s money flowing in Stonewall’s direction?
NFL to halt 'race-norming,' review Black claims in $1 billion concussion settlement
The US National Football League is ending the practice of ‘race-norming’ in deciding payouts for black players who suffer brain injuries. As Kenan Malik points out in the Observer, race-norming is a euphemism for making adjustments on the assumption that black people have lower cognitive functioning. If you’re thinking ‘sweet Jesus and the 12 apostles, that’s all kinds of racist’, Malik notes that it came about as a result of well-intentioned bureaucrats at the US Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who, in 1980, threatened court action against companies that didn’t adopt ‘race correction’. Another fine example of Being Racist To Stop Racism.
Battle lines
Stories to file under ‘yeah, there’s gonna be a row about this’.
Palace sends for Prince William to rescue Union (£)
The ill-advised Royal involvement in anti-independence politicking reportedly continues. I pointed out the problems with this two weeks ago, not least the potential for undermining the political neutrality of the constitutional monarchy. Short-sighted Unionists may bat such concerns aside because the Firm’s interventions seem helpful at present but they may come to regret the precedent being set. And all this because ministers refuse to stiffen their spines and take on separatism themselves.
G7 agrees 'historic' global minimum corporate tax rate
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has backed President Biden’s plan for a G7-wide floor on corporation tax of 15 per cent. Those who see the current system of tax competition between nations as a race to the bottom have welcomed the decision but the Adam Smith Institute calls it ‘a global tax cartel’ and says ‘Rishi has sold Britain short’. The ASI’s Matt Kilcoyne argues that ‘nobody voted to hand power over our taxes to Washington’s demands’ and that ‘the UK Government has signed away the primacy of Parliament in setting taxes for the British people’.
It’s a small world after all
News from the international scene.
Meet Naftali Bennett, Israel’s next Prime Minister (possibly) (£)
Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer has the definitive profile of the religious right-winger teaming up with secular left-wingers to oust Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden administration will no longer seize reporters' records for leak investigations
President Biden’s Justice Department will stop trying to get its hands on journalists’ notes when probing leaks from within government. Alternative headline: First Amendment To Resume After Unscheduled Absence.
ScoMo in poll blow but Coalition catches opposition
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s personal ratings have slipped over his handling of Covid but his centre-right Coalition appears to have caught Labor, with the two parties in a polling dead heat.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man
Op-eds, interviews, and general stuff that makes me go ‘ooooh’.
There's nothing civic about the SNP's brand of Anglophobic nationalism (£)
The Telegraph’s Madeline Grant punctures a favourite myth of the Scottish establishment: that its nationalism is the nice, welcoming variety.
Upheaval: The Journey of Menachem Begin
Broadcaster Jonny Gould, host of the excellent Jewish State podcast, talks to the director of a new biopic on Israel’s sixth prime minister.
Asking Utopians How: An Alternative Strategy for Defending Freedom of Speech
I’m late to this thought-provoking piece from novelist Ewan Morrison about turning the tables on the enemies of freedom of speech, but it’s worth your time. He challenges authoritarians to spell out exactly how their utopia would work.
Shameless plugs
Everything I wrote this week. Well, not everything. I don’t think you’d be interested in my Murder, She Wrote/Alf crossover fan fiction.
Where you see a ‘£’, it indicates the link is behind a paywall. Never fear, though: in the case of the Spectator you can read one article free as a guest, five if you register your email, plus you can subscribe and try a month for free.
Boris’s media critics are missing the real story (£)
Journalists are baffled as to why a string of scandals, semi-scandals and faux-scandals have failed to bring down Boris Johnson. I argue in the Spectator that they are part of the problem.
SNP-Green pact would threaten Covid recovery
My Scottish Daily Mail column on the risks to Scotland’s economy of Nicola Sturgeon and Patrick Harvie teaming up to run the Scottish Government.
Nicola Sturgeon updated Holyrood on Glasgow’s lockdown and efforts against the Indian variant— no, wait… the April 02 variant— scratch that… the delta variant. I sketched proceedings for the Scottish Daily Mail.
My sketch of new education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville’s attempts to head off another exams scandal.
Nicola Sturgeon wants to be friends
In which the SNP leader pledges to forgo ‘partisan politics’. (No laughing at the back.) The latest instalment of my weekly First Minister’s Questions sketch.
Does Google really understand racism? (£)
Google’s head of diversity was ‘reassigned’ earlier this week over his pronouncement that Jews have an ‘insatiable appetite for war’ and an ‘increasing insensitivity to the suffering [of] others’. Why do progressives, who lecture everyone else on racism, have such a blind spot when it comes to antisemitism?
Shameless pugs
This little guy is determined his brother isn’t getting a share of the biscuit action.
Yeah, that’s weird
Concerning further evidence that this timeline might not be quite right.
Pet monkey reunited with his owners after giving them the slip and being found at a Lanarkshire railway station.
Airdrie’s answer to Heath Robinson goes for a spin cycle on his propellor-powered bike.
A troika of tabbies with 12 extra digits have been discovered by residents of Bridgemary, Hampshire. This is the beginning of every movie that ends with either an exorcism or an apocalypse.