“Browning High Power 9mm pistol…safety off, pull the slide back and you’re good to go, sir”, the young British soldier said to me before handing me the pistol.

Of course it was unloaded and the event was a private briefing in the British camp in Kabul where the “VIP” at the centre of attention behind me was a diminutive British Asian figure in a grey suit with an open neck, who was making the soldiers and even his own entourage cringe as he donned army fatigues and a helmet.

The British MP was really quite underwhelming and the army sergeant who gave the talk had the expression on his face when he looked across at me as if to say “where do they find these people?”

The MP was of course Sadiq Khan and it was the spring of 2008 which found me the guest of these fine young men and women risking their lives going out on night patrols ON FOOT to take on the Taliban, being dropped off in flimsy Land Rovers which could not sustain roadside bombs.

But to my surprise Mr Khan had little to say about the bravery or the stellar work of the Cold Stream Guards who had even hosted him. I set up my camera and gave him twenty minutes of tape. But all he could harp on about was supporting “mooslims” as he called people there. It all felt a bit odd and his presence all the more incongruous. Was he there to support the people of Afghanistan but not British soldiers fighting the Taliban?

I remember being seriously underwhelmed with him and his patent lack of confidence and wondering how much money must have been spent on getting him and his sycophants who worked for him out to Kabul, which was the most dangerous place in the world at that time. Just a few days after I flew back to Dubai, a sports stadium which hosted the President and a league of high profile dignitaries was blown up in a horrific terror attack which killed many.

Mr Khan was embarrassing to all of us as we stood around him in the army tent as he donned the fatigues that day in April 2008. His people struggled to fill the long pauses. He smiled awkwardly at them in silence. They smiled back in silence before one of them finally said something nervously. It was all really very awkward.

The soldiers didn’t even know who he was and so were not fussed. And the whole event felt terribly disingenuous at best, probably set up for him to fly the “mooslim” card back home with his constituents. From what I can remember, he didn’t plan on going south down to Kandahar where British soldiers were being killed in the fight against terrorism.

Looking back, it leaves me wondering if he could play the race card then in 2008, then is he also playing a similar nefarious game in London now as he heads for the polls? The rejection of a perfectly civil debate with Laurence Fox, who he pigeon-holed somewhat ludicrously as “right wing” was not very convincing. Many Londoners, like Laurence, who do not sign up to the woke left, might argue that he has squandered money left, right and centre and will soon bankrupt the office which serves him leaving anyone who is voted into take his place with the bills and a mess.

Has he really done so much for Londoners? From a distance it would seem that his record on violent crime and London transport aren’t very impressive. For Londoners I would guess, these are huge subjects. And new levies he is proposing for motorists entering central London seem to be very unpopular. The lesson we have all learnt by Mr Khan’s period in office is surely that any fool can spend money. Spending money wisely is much harder.

London motorists generate half a billion pounds in taxes for the government to spend on infrastructure around the country – which Mr Khan fervently opposes. He would like it pumped into his office for him to spend as he sees fit as the debt of his own department heads beyond the £5bn mark.

Mr Khan’s point blank refusal from Laurence Fox should not surprise us. He doesn’t seem to be a great fan of accountability and facing tough questions, but rather prefers to dodge the real issues.

His justification is preposterous as, even if he genuinely believed that Fox was “right wing”, that should be the very justification for debating with him. Khan has shown the world what a truly backward country Britain has become as now it has become the norm for politicians to dodge any scrutiny, even from opponents who have perfectly valid questions, let alone the press.

In my interview with Mr Khan in Kabul, which was well over 20 minutes, I couldn’t get him to answer a straight forward question. He dodged every one and just kept repeating the “mooslim” messages. I didn’t even use 10 seconds of it in my final 8 minute report. It seems not much has changed in 13 years. Mr Khan desperately needs media training as he needs solid policies as cheap PR stunts is all he seems to be capable of even today. But playing the race card to wriggle out of a debate with Laurence Fox? It should tell you all you need to know about him and where the woke republic of London is heading come the 6^th of May. Don’t Londoners deserve more bang for their buck?

The pompous ass in London, billionaire Woody Johnson, was interviewed by Sky News in June 2018 and cast an intriguing light on his expertise concerning his host country. When he was asked the nature of his relationship with Sadiq Khan he replied “with whom?” The interviewer then told him that Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London, whereupon Woody announced that “My relationship is very good.” Then President Trump informed London’s Sun newspaper that “You have a mayor who has done a terrible job in London. He has done a terrible job.”

There’s not much joined-up diplomacy in the Trump Administration, but although these examples are mildly amusing and show the people involved to be the fools they are, there is a most serious side to the international diplomatic devastation created by Trump, the man so well described by dismissed White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as “tawdry, cruel, vindictive.”

The disconnect was highlighted on August 13, the day before Pakistan’s Independence Day, when US Secretary of State Pompeo messaged “On behalf of the Government of the United States of America, I would like to extend my best wishes to the people of Pakistan as they celebrate their independence day. For more than seven decades, the relationship between the United States and Pakistan has rested on the strong foundation of close ties between our two peoples. In the years ahead, we hope to further strengthen these bonds, as we continue to look for opportunities to work with the people and Government of Pakistan to advance our shared goals of security, stability, and prosperity in South Asia.”

This supposedly friendly greeting was sent to a country about which Trump had tweeted that “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”

“Strengthen bonds”, anyone? Washington must be unhinged (to employ the title of the Omarosa book) to imagine that a few clichés about “shared goals” might in some way cancel out Trump’s malevolent insults.

Not only this, but Washington has made one of the gravest diplomatic errors of its many with Pakistan by suspending the US International Military Education and Training (IMET) programme. This doesn’t sound much, but it is probably the most serious setback in Pakistan-US relations thus far in the Trump regime’s fandangos of international incompetence.

The most important part of IMET was the annual training in the US of some 60-70 Pakistan armed forces’ officers, including at the US Army War College (one of the most professional — that word again — military academies in the world). It cannot be emphasised too much that this sort of hosting pays enormous dividends. Not only is participation in specialised discussion and mixing with people of different views most beneficial to students and hosts, but personal contacts build trust and expand horizons. It cannot be valued in money. You simply can’t put a price on it, which I found an enormous and indeed insuperable hurdle when I was trying to convince pointy-headed Australian bureaucrats that hosting foreign students and sending our people abroad would pay dividends in the future.

Not for nothing is the motto of the US War College “Prudens Futuri”, which is usually translated as “Be provident for the future.” But at the moment, Washington’s thinking about the future appears to be limited to the mid-term elections and (appalling thought) the re-election of Trump in 2020.

Meantime, Pakistan suffers from US bullying and intimidation, with the “bond-strengthening” Pompeo making threats about what might happen as a result of a loan to Pakistan by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He issued a warning that an IMF credit would be conditional on a promise that none of the money is used to repay Chinese debt, which is a weird way of trying to “advance our shared goals of security, stability, and prosperity.”

Pompeo told CNBC that “Make no mistake. We will be watching what the IMF does. There’s no rationale for IMF tax dollars, and associated with that American dollars that are part of the IMF funding, for those to go to bail out Chinese bondholders or China itself.”

But the arrogant assumption that Washington can dictate everything to the world doesn’t intimidate China, Russia or Pakistan. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project linking China’s western provinces through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea is worth $62 billion, and other economic and defence links with China are commercially, politically and socially of much more importance to Pakistan than its tenuous and increasingly fragmenting connections with the United States. There are some who scoff at CPEC, like Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington and CIA asset, who, according to the Washington Post, “quipped that the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor . . . actually should be called “Colonizing Pakistan to Enrich China.”

Washington’s growing arrogance doesn’t intimidate Russia, either, and in the light of increasing confrontation by the US-NATO military alliance it is apparent that a new era in Moscow-Islamabad cooperation has dawned. For a start, as reported by Voice of America on August 8, “Pakistan has wrapped up a ground-breaking contract with Russia that would, for the first time, open doors for Russian military training of Pakistani army officers. The rare deal comes amid deteriorating relations between Islamabad and the United States, which has resulted in the halt of all military exchange programs with Pakistan and left a void that Moscow has stepped in to fill.” Washington will rue the day it closed the doors of professional colleges to Pakistan’s military officers.

Not only that, but Russia has provided Mi-35M combat helicopters to Pakistan, and the two countries’ armies have held two counter-terrorism military exercises, while their navies “recently participated in joint antidrug exercises in the Arabian Sea. The latest naval collaboration took place last week in St Petersburg, where a Pakistani warship participated in the major Russian Navy Day parade.” Their cooperation will develop and expand, to their mutual benefit.

Pakistan is wise to engage with China and Russia, and should ditch the Washington Empire.

Prudens futuri.

In October the British Home Office reported that the number of racist hate crimes in the country had increased by 41 per cent in the month after the June referendum about UK’s membership of the European Union, the so-called ‘Brexit’ vote. The Equality and Human Rights Commission noted that «the figures make it very clear that some people used the referendum result to justify their deplorable views and promote intolerance and hatred» and there were other expressions of regret and revulsion — but not from many of the mainstream media outlets, because several newspapers rejoiced in the rush of intolerance that they had done so much to encourage.

The reasons for lack of regret, alas, are that many Britons are inherently racist and most of the print media play on that appalling aspect of the British character in order to attract readers and make money. In the facile and attractive guise of patriotism the papers seize on instances of supposed non-Britishness to encourage their readers to engage in hatred and contempt of foreigners. It is unlikely that any writers of such fascist hokum are familiar with the works of one of the greatest English essayists, poets and moralists, Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote so perceptively that «patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel».

Britain has had a race problem for many years but of late it has become severe because of a spiteful nationalistic campaign to leave the European Union, an organisation that is bureaucratically absurd but seeks to benefit Europe’s citizens by promoting free trade and freedom of movement, protecting human rights, encouraging harmonisation of legal processes, increasing effectiveness of counter-terrorism cooperation, and promoting economic and social progress.

These objectives are considered abhorrent by a surprising number of Britons who believe that alliance with the other 27 nations of the European Union helps movement of undesirable people to their country and that European legal covenants, agreed by their own governments during the past forty years, are inimical to the British way of life. They claim that leaving the European Union will save vast sums of money, especially in health care, while preventing abuse of ‘British Law’ by continuing to abide by European human rights standards.

It is the contention of those who wish to leave the European Union that future trading arrangements to be negotiated at an unknown date with potential but unnamed countries will be of more financial benefit than continuance of existing European Union agreements with current trading partners. (The hastily-arranged November trade-promotion visit to India by Prime Minister Theresa May — a civilised person — was sadly barren. As reported by India’s Financial Express, she returned ‘Empty-Handed.’)

The seeming rise in anti-European fervour was taken into political account by former Prime Minister David Cameron who announced in February 2016 that a referendum would be held in June to ask the simple question: «Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?» It was made clear that the referendum result would not in any way oblige the country to leave the European Union, because the Parliament did not specify legal consequences of a vote either way. It was an «advisory referendum», and the British Parliament was and is in no way bound by any law or precedent to accept the result as mandatory for the country to ‘Brexit.’

It was intended that the referendum result would be an expression of the non-binding feelings of the British people and that the elected members of Parliament would take due notice of this when debating the complex matter in due course.

There are 46,501,241 people of voting age in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Of these, 17,410,742 voted to leave the European Union. Another 16,141,241 voted to remain within the European Union. Let me repeat that in a plebiscite of 46 million people, 17 million — 37 per cent — voted to leave the EU and that their choice was in no manner or by any interpretation of law an instruction to the government to do so.

The laws of Great Britain are determined by its members of Parliament. Many of both may be stupid, but no matter: Parliament is sovereign and its decisions are binding. Some of those who objected to the stance that the country should immediately leave the Union without Parliament discussing the matter took the matter to the High Court where three distinguished judges ruled that Parliament must vote on whether the country can begin the process.

Then Britain’s media sprang into action. The Daily Mail, whose editor, the foul-mouthed vulgarian Paul Dacre, received «£88,000 in subsidies from the European Union for his country houses in Sussex and the Scottish Highlands in 2014» ordered his minions to produce one of the most disgusting front pages in the long history of British journalism.

Even more despicably, the newspaper emphasised that one of the people who brought the High Court action was a coloured citizen of Britain (who was sent threats of rape and murder for her actions), and one of the judges was «openly gay». It declared that two of the judges had sat on the European court of human rights, one being ‘fluent in several languages’ and the other ‘steeped in EU laws and tradition.’ One of them — shock, horror! — had ‘worked for a Hamburg law firm shortly after leaving Oxford.’

These spiteful, malevolent and thus most effective tirades were straight out of 1930s Germany, and there was not a shred of criticism of the newspapers by the government.

Other garbage newspapers, such as the formerly admirable Daily Telegraph, carried headlines such as ‘The Judges Versus The People.’ The Mail removed one abusive headline from its vulgar website, but the damage had been done and the bigots of Britain had been given yet more backing to express their hatred of foreigners, which extends to the media’s relentless anti-Russia campaign, intended to portray President Putin and the Russian people in the worst possible light.

One declaration of President Barack Obama that will be remembered is his wise warning that in the United States «we are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude sort of nationalism, or ethnic identity or tribalism that is built around an US and a THEM».

In Trump America it is possible that this crude nationalism might become dominant. But in Britain it seems it already rules. The ‘niggers’ and ‘Pakis’ and those judged (no irony intended) to be ‘different’ in any way to native Anglo-Saxons are considered to be undesirable. This has been so for very many years, unfortunately, and, as recollected by one young person so affected in the 1960s, it was insulting, when looking for lodgings, to «find notices galore that said ‘No Irish, no coloureds’».

Although repulsive racist prejudice and casual bigotry are far from new in the United Kingdom, it had been thought that in the New Millennium there might have been some advance towards tolerance and acceptance of minorities. The Race Relations Act was supposed to eradicate racism, and had some mild success, but its aims have been set back or even destroyed by the bigots of Brexit who won their dubious victory largely because they appealed to all that is most base in mankind : the idea that superiority depends on race and especially colour.

The country is going down the drain.