Our fake patriots

[CHIMO]

Britain is fast becoming Bush's doormat - so why isn't the British right saying a word?

George Monbiot
Tuesday July 8, 2003
The Guardian

The prediction was not hard to make. If Britain kept supporting the US government as it trampled the sovereignty of other nations, before long it would come to threaten our own. But few guessed that this would happen so soon.

Comment
Our fake patriots

Britain is fast becoming Bush's doormat - so why isn't the British right saying a word?

George Monbiot
Tuesday July 8, 2003
The Guardian

The prediction was not hard to make. If Britain kept supporting the US government as it trampled the sovereignty of other nations, before long it would come to threaten our own. But few guessed that this would happen so soon.

Long ago, Britain informally surrendered much of its determination of foreign policy to the United States. We have sent our soldiers to die for that country in two recent wars, and our politicians to lie for it. But now the British government is going much further. It is ceding control to the US over two of the principal instruments of national self-determination: judicial authority and military policy. The mystery is not that this is happening. The mystery is that those who have sought to persuade us that they are the guardians of national sovereignty are either failing to respond or demanding only that Britain becomes the doormat on which the US government can wipe its bloodstained boots.

A month ago we discovered that our home secretary had secretly concluded an extradition treaty with the US that permits the superpower to extract British nationals without presenting evidence before a court. Britain acquires no such rights in the US. The response from the rightwing press was a thunderous silence. Last week, we learnt that two British citizens held in the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay will be denied a fair trial, that they may stay in prison even if they are found innocent, and that they will not be returned to Britain to serve their sentences. There were a couple of muted squeaks in the patriotic papers, offset by an article in the Sunday Telegraph which sought to justify the US action on the grounds that one of the men had been arrested before. The story was spoilt somewhat by the fact that he had been released without charge.


Could someone explain to me what is happening?
Is there something in the drinking water in over there?

[Maple]

1. I don't know

I don't understand it either.

Friendship is one thing, but subservience quite another.

And I fail to see what Tony or the British are getting out of this beyond a good deal of humiliation.

The UK can't even get it's own citizens out of Gitmo. Some thanks that is!

[bluestateguy]

2. The irony

Conservatives say they are promoting "democracy" in Iraq, yet they piss and moan when other democracies around the world choose not to blindly follow the United States. In other words, they want the UK, France, Germany, etc. to be just like Eastern Europe was to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

[CHIMO]

3. Forgot the Site

Location of the article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,993465,00.html

[T_i_B]

4. It's the hypocrisy stupid!

In case you are wondering the UK right is forever bitching & moaning about how the EU is taking away all our soverignity yet they are the first to cheer when the US does just that.

The EU of course is more regulatory and the US more free market so your political ideology does tend to determine whether you support the EU or the US, although remarkably few will admit that.

Personally I'd like to think we could be a bridge between the two, but Blair is more of a doormat. Blair talks about being a bridge but his bridge is simply a one way street for US corporate interests. If we were serious about that role then we would be standing up to $hrubya a lot more often.