The modern day tyranny that is made in China

THOSE of the immediate post-war generation and the next had our lives distorted by the 43-year Cold War. We thought that ended with the collapse of the gigantic and hostile USSR in 1990.

Well, it is clear a new one has started and the huge and aggressive monolith pitted against us all is China.

Our defence and intelligence chiefs warn us daily that at every level, from cyberspace to the open seas, the aggression out of Beijing never stops.

It is all funded by China’s staggering wealth. Yet that wealth derives not from equally enormous natural resources but from cheap manufacturing and our purchases. With every purchase of a cheap article with a tiny “made in China” label we Westerners fund our own main aggressors. Are we bonkers? It is a very false economy.

If we could pay a little more at the shop counter we could save trillions in lower defence costs. The Romans got it right: whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive insane. To operate free trade principles in the face of a slave-labour practising tyranny is certainly a form of insanity and not even humane.

Consider the misery of the Muslim Uighurs, a million of whom toil in labour camps until they die – so that you can have a cheap T-shirt. We turn a blind eye – but only at our own future peril. In 1945 at Nuremberg we put on trial monsters who ran slave-labour camps. Have we learned nothing?

BY THE BY, lest any of you think the old codger has lost what used to be his marbles, it is now revealed from reliable sources at the heart of power that there really is a small claque of bureaucrats at the centre of the Cabinet Office dedicated to making lockdown and its successor the pingdemic permanent.

The aim has nothing to do with your safety or health – that is the pretence. The Covid-19 Task Force, headed by ultra-mandarin Andy Helliwell (inset), is only concerned that your subservience and obedience to officialdom shall also remain permanent.

It is largely this cabal that has ensured the magnificent triumph of our scientists in creating the AstraZeneca vax has been frittered away. Your and my Liberation Day is still over the horizon while Europe surges back to normality but bans our tourists.

Was ever a nation worse served by its civil servants than we have been during this emergency and why is Boris Johnson too scared to get rid of them?