China’s the Empire that alarms me
ONCE upon a time reading, not TV or computers, was still the best way into the past, the future and the remote places of the Earth. In those days, I used to read Jules Verne’s 19th Century adventure novels with wide-eyed, boyish pleasure.
I loved the solid, stable world he described of steamers and railways, quieter and more secure than ours. So I really ought to look forward to the new BBC serialisation of Around The World In Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg’s great fictional journey. But its main actor, David Tennant, wants us to know he disapproves of Verne’s world, moaning that ‘in many ways Phileas Fogg represents everything that’s alarming and peculiar about that old sense of British Empire’. It’s a weird thing to say anyway.
But why are modish people such as Mr Tennant so anxious to condemn the British Empire which, for good or ill, vanished long ago? If he dislikes empires, surely the Chinese one is the thing to worry about, trampling as it does on poor crushed Tibet and the Uighurs of Sinkiang. It also murders its own people, a crime for which we loudly condemn other nations but which we ignore in Peking. It is both alarming and peculiar and it is here now.
BEGUILED by assurances from the US government that they will not be too horrid to Julian Assange during the decades of hard prison time he faces in America, our judges on Friday allowed his extradition. A pity.
This is a totally political case that ought to have been thrown out on sight by the British courts. Mr Assange is, in the end, a journalist doing his job, and if he can be dragged off to some Federal dungeon then any UK journalist who unveils embarrassing facts about the American state is not safe from this sort of thing.
Our Prime Minister is himself a former journalist, and there may still be enough of the trouble-making spirit in him to see that this is plain wrong. I do hope so. When Theresa May rightly blocked the court-approved extradition of Gary McKinnon to the USA in 2012, the American government did not take elaborate revenge on us. They muttered and grumbled, but in the end the Americans respect nations that stand up to them rather more than they respect those that bow down to them.
The Prime Minister should refuse to allow Mr Assange to be sent to the US, and he should be released from the ridiculously harsh, cruelly prolonged imprisonment in Belmarsh, which he has endured for far too long.