They set the way for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to be the candidate next year rather than former Vice President Joe Biden, the only figure who has a hope of beating incumbent President Donald Trump next year. Polls still show him beating Trump, especially the crucial Midwestern swing states that decided the 2016 election.

The third debate on Tuesday, July 30 heightened the Democrats;’ dilemma. Polls conducted right after it showed Warren edging further ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders, though Sanders is a lifelong Independent who only formally joined the Democratic Party in March this year.

According to a poll conducted by the New York Post, the runaway most popular Democrat in the July 30 debate was not Warren but Marianne Williamson, a 67-year-old former cabaret singer and New Age psychotherapist who advocates reparations to be paid to African Americans for slavery which ended more than a century and a half ago.

What is happening is that the most obscure Democratic presidential candidates are being given equal time with the handful of serious ones and they are all tripping over each other.

In one of the first Democratic presidential debates on June 30, Senator Kamala Harris of California humiliated and savaged Biden. But her victory was a Pyrrhic one: She lost vastly more than she gained.

Labelling Biden as an old fogey and a racist makes him anathema to the young ultra-liberals and left wingers who dominate the activist wings of the Democratic Party. Thanks to Harris, he has already lost them.

Yet polls have consistently shown Biden far and away the most likely candidate to woo Middle America Heartland voters – especially moderate so-called Yellow Dog Democrats and Independents who loathe Trump. Heartland audiences have been reacting well to his speeches alleging how “outrageous” Trump allegedly is.

Biden, given time for more than sound bites, is a superb debater and simply eviscerated Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan in the 2012 election debate between them. Four years earlier, he made the late John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin look like a tongue-tied, blushing little girl.

The Democrats’ “Dream Team” for 2020 would therefore have been the experienced, elderly, reassuring but still dynamic Biden paired with the young, feisty progressive standard bearer Harris – a black woman from liberal California.

However, Harris herself has destroyed that possibility. Polls show that after her attack on Biden he retained his durability and popularity among mainstream Democratic registered voters. But now the young, energized future of the party – a generation that fading Progressive icon Bernie Sanders brought in during his 2016 campaign – have soured on Old Joe.

Nor did Harris rise in popularity as she expected. All she succeeded in doing was making a lasting enemy out of the one person who could have made her Vice President of the United States while torpedoing his chances.

The apparent beneficiary of Harris’s attack on Biden was the candidate President Trump most wants to run against next year – Senator Warren of Massachusetts.

Yet Warren is the worst of all worlds for the Democrats: She is incapable of turning out the massive African-American and Hispanic block votes that propelled Barack Obama to two landslide victories in 2008 and 2012. Nor can she appeal to white working class older men and rural communities the way Biden can. And she has a plodding boring popular style that makes her reminiscent of Britain’s at last thankfully departed Prime Minister Theresa May. She could prove strikingly vulnerable to Williamson who makes a living as a charismatic popular lecturer.

Also, unlike Harris she does not come from the most populous state in the nation, California, but a much smaller one: Massachusetts.

Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988, Senator John Kerry in 2004 and former Governor Mitt Romney in 2012 all went down to humiliating margins of defeat.

I covered the presidential campaigns of all three men and was astonished at how ignorant and deaf they were about every region of the United States outside their own state. None of them had a clue: They all imagined they were doing well in until the results came in.

Warren carries all this baggage and much more. She won a prestige position at Harvard University by claiming – either falsely or with wild exaggeration – Native American ancestry, which not a single Native American nation has accepted. She therefore embodies the example of an elitist raised to unfair privilege because of her (probably bogus) racial background. This makes her electoral poison to white, working class, Heartland America. The US media elites of course love her.

Democrats usually choose to be stupid rather than to win. They have had only two re-elected presidents (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) in the past three quarters of a century since Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945. During the same period, Republicans have had four (Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush).

Biden who will turn 78 after the November 2020 election, is the only Democrat who carries national credibility. He is the last of a long line. And his party’s remaining national credibility will fall with him.

Meanwhile, watch the rise of Marianne Williamson and prepare to be entertained.

As I documented on March 9 on this platform in my article “What Makes Gavin Run?” Williamson knows no shame or integrity and is the living embodiment of the repulsive, two-faced backstabber, intriguer and liar Sammy Glick in the great writer Budd Schulberg’s legendary 1941 novel of Hollywood “What Makes Sammy Run?” So he is a natural fit for Johnson, whose entire career has been dictated by similar shameless, reckless lies, opportunism and crass incompetence.

No one gets every, or usually most, professional predictions right, and in the news business sensible people make the best of their brilliant insights – or lucky guesses – when they can. But I have seldom hit a hole-in-one prediction that came true as quickly as my column on Williamson did.

On March 9, Williamson, after only a decade in the UK main chamber of parliament, the ancient House of Commons was still riding high and making a fool of himself insulting major nations from Russia to China and also the UK’s badly-needed European allies as the most incompetent defense chief in the modern history of his nation.

On May 1, less than two months after my article appeared – and with no causality that I could see – Williamson was humiliatingly sacked by his benefactor, Prime Minister Theresa May after being accused of leaking highly confidential national security information to the media.

Williamson immediately turned on his long-time benefactor Mrs. May savagely and helped drive her from office – which was admittedly long overdue. She resigned on June 7, just over a single month after sacking him.

Williamson then joined May’s arch-enemy, former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who had relentlessly schemed to topple her for years and joined Johnson’s own campaign to win the leadership of the rapidly disintegrating Conservative Party and thence become prime minister.

At the time of writing, Johnson remains far in the lead in the contest to replace May as prime minister despite repeated attacks on his character, utter lack of political consistency, convictions or achievement and his entertainingly squalid private life.

Johnson is twice divorced with neither marriage lasting longer than five years and he is now being accused of screaming rows with his 20-years-younger girl friend that may or may not have involved him hitting her, which he naturally denies.

Through all this Williamson, who like Johnson himself does not lack for energy in the service of his own ambition, has been rounding up support for his new master among Conservative Party Members of Parliament.

According to many UK media reports – which Williamson understandably denies – his most effective weapons are bullying, bluster and threats. These are patterns of behavior which those who have worked for him or who have bothered following his career over the years find extremely convincing and in character (or, rather, lack of it).

Reports are also circulating in the UK media – which are usually well-connected and informed on such matters – that Williamson is holding out to be reappointed as the UK’s defense chief or as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland is my native land and is tiny in size. But over the past century and more it has repeatedly displayed an infinite capacity for generating wars, embarrassment and catastrophe for both Ireland and the UK, which otherwise get along easily and well.

Putting Williamson in charge of such a delicate, nervously balanced and ultra-sensitive province is like appointing a Sith Lord as head of the Jedi Knights in “Star Wars” or putting the late Boston underworld mass murderer Whitey Bulger in charge of the FBI.

Therefore it will probably happen.

Because like attracts like, competent honorable people in any country and culture seek to promote and advance others with the same qualities and empty, shallow sociopaths and confidence tricksters similarly admire and advance people exactly like themselves.

On Monday, June 24, without mentioning Williamson once, one of the UK’s most experienced and respected journalists, war correspondents and historians, Sir Max Hastings wrote a scathing article in the liberal “Guardian” newspaper entitled “I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfitted to be prime minister.”

Therefore Johnson will re-elevate Williamson, either to drive Northern Ireland back into civil war or destroy the remaining security of the entire UK as defense secretary once again. And Williamson will remain loyal, until he in his turn sees the chance to stab Johnson in the back and briefly rule as prime minister until he in his own turn is politically knifed and toppled by one of his own hand-picked sociopaths.

And Sammy Glick will rise again – on the suffering and smashed lives of everyone else.

It’s ironic is it not that the Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, so close to the security services should get caught by the very surveillance services the state has been denying any knowledge of. Craig Murray, former UK ambassador makes an excellent point when it comes to Williamson’s downfall, that America did not want Britain to build 5G infrastructure using Huawei technology – and got its way, irrespective. As for Britain – unable to make even basic decisions without controversy is just another indication of the sheer ineptitude of government the nation is suffering from. Nothing like taking back control eh!

By Craig Murray: Theresa May almost certainly sacked Gavin Williamson not just on the basis of a telephone billing record showing he had a phone call with a Telegraph journalist, but on the basis of a recording of the conversation itself. It astonishes me that still, after Snowden and his PRISM revelations, after Wikileaks Vault 7 releases, and after numerous other sources including my own humble contribution, people still manage to avoid the cognitive dissonance that goes with really understanding how much we are surveilled and listened to. Even Cabinet Ministers manage to pretend to themselves it is not happening.

The budget of the NSA, which does nothing else but communications intercept, is US $14.2 billion this year. Think about that enormous sum, devoted to just communications surveillance, and what it can achieve. The budget of the UK equivalent, GCHQ, is £1.2 billion, of which about 10% is paid by the NSA. Domestic surveillance in the UK has been vastly expanded and many taboos broken. But the bedrock of the system with regard to domestic intercepts is still that legal restrictions are dodged, as the USA’s NSA spies on UK citizens while the UK’s GCHQ spies on US citizens, and then the information is swapped. It was thus probably the NSA that harvested Williamson’s phone call, passing the details on. Given official US opposition to the UK employing Huawei technology, Williamson’s call would have been a “legitimate” NSA target.

Mass surveillance works on electronic harvesting. Targeted phone numbers apart, millions of essentially random calls are listened to electronically using voice recognition technology and certain key words trigger an escalation of the call. Williamson’s call discussing Huawei, China, the intelligence services, and backdoors would certainly have triggered recording and been marked up to a human listener, even if his phone was not specifically targeted by the Americans – which it almost certainly was.

Williamson, of course, is relying on the security services’ secrecy about their methods to maintain his protests of innocence, secure in the knowledge that the recording of him would not be produced. The existence of the recording – of which I am extremely confident – is the only possible explanation for May’s degree of certainty and swift action against one of her very few loyal allies.

All of which of course throws into stark relief the stunning hypocrisy of those who are worried that Huawei will be used for electronic eavesdropping when they are up to their ears in electronic eavesdropping themselves. One of my heroes is the great Richard Stallman, who put it this way six years ago:

RMS: Well, it’s perfectly reasonable suspicion to me. I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.

RSS: I was just going to bring this up exactly, so I was saying that the NSA recently received notifications about the zero-day holes in advance and [incomprehensible] the NSA and the CIA to just crack PCs abroad for espionage purposes.

RMS: Now, [incomprehensible] that this proves my point, which is that you have to be nuts if you were some other country and using Windows on your computers. But, you know, given that Windows has a universal back door in it, Microsoft would hardly need to tell the NSA about any bugs, it can tell the NSA about the mal-feature of the universal back door and that would be enough for the NSA to attack any computer running Windows, which unfortunately is a large fraction of them.

All the major western tech companies cooperate with the western security services. In Murder in Samarkand I gave the first public revelation that the government can and does listen through your mobile phone microphone even when the phone is ostensibly switched off, a fact that got almost no traction until Edward Snowden released documents confirming it six years later. China is full of western devices with backdoors that are exploited by western intelligence. That the tables turn as Chinese technology advances is scarcely surprising.

Personally, I do not want the Chinese, Americans, Russians or British eavesdropping on me, or on each other, and I wish that they would stop. The spy games will, of course, continue, as they make money for a lot of well-connected people. But for any side to claim moral superiority in all of this is just nonsense.

truepublica.org.uk

Last Wednesday, Senior U.K. Cabinet ministers were hauled before a leak inquiry to determine who was responsible for the unprecedented reporting of highly secret discussions concerning national security.

Gavin Williamson was found to be guilty by an investigation of Theresa May’s instigation. Her letter to Williamson was not unambiguous – it categorically stated he was guilty. There was no margin for misunderstanding. As Williamson heads to the backbenches, May has made a new enemy – one who was a party whip – with all the secrets that role comes with.

“There is another potentially culpable: former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Through reforms that he institutionalized, Cameron has inadvertently brought the American political culture of leaking highly classified information into British politics. Britain’s NSC is the “holy of holies.” Attended by a small core of politicians and the heads of the intelligence, security and military services, it is the ultimate decision-making forum in Britain’s national security architecture.”

It’s also a little-remarked fact that, unlike many British arrangements, the NSC is a relatively recent innovation, for which Cameron is responsible. Cameron argued in 2010 that Britain needed to formalize its national security decision-making after the freewheeling “sofa government” of Labour’s Tony Blair.

By appointing a national security adviser and instituting the NSC, partially modelled on the U.S. equivalent, Cameron gave structure to what had previously been the province of informal groups largely composed of officials. By instituting a formal entity of which he was the chair (of course), Cameron not only increased the power of the prime minister’s office in the process but brought senior Cabinet ministers into the heart of national security policymaking, giving them access to sensitive intelligence, therefore significantly raising the prospect of leaks.

The National Security Council (NSC) discussed the role of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei in Britain’s future 5G telecoms network and concluded some months ago that the Chinese company should be allowed to be involved. As for the mainstream media, the leak and end of Williamson’s role, that is the end of the story.

However, there is more information about this story that is worthy of note. These dots may or may not be connected, the point being, there’s more to understand about the motivation of Williamson’s demise.

Dot One. Since stepping down as PM after the Brexit result in 2016, David Cameron now has the role of putting together a $1bn investment fund between Britain and China. The idea was to formalise a closer working relationship between the two countries. The fund was formally approved of by both Westminster and Beijing.

Dot two. Back in 2011, former government Chief Information Officer John Suffolk joined China-based IT company Huawei as global head of cybersecurity. Read those words again – former Tory government Chief Information Officer now works for Huawei as head of global cybersecurity. Suffolk was the most senior civil servant to have access to sensitive matters of government, particularly as he was also head of security risk. It was Cameron who gave Suffolk his blessing to join Huawei.

This should not have happened. It is simply too sensitive a role for someone at the heart of government and the civil service to be loyal to a foreign state business with access to the most sensitive information regarding Britain’s cybersecurity. At the time, a Cabinet Office spokesman was keen to add that an “unprecedented number of conditions” were attached to Suffolk’s appointment – as if that means anything in today’s ruthless geo-political cybersecurity environment.

In the meantime, Suffolk has been defending Huawei to the hilt who said about the cybersecurity risk to Britain just two weeks ago that – “There’s no such thing as a zero-risk connected business.”

Dot three. Some months earlier in 2011, Sir Andrew Cahn stepped down after five years in charge of UK Trade & Investment, the government department that promotes exports and attracts foreign direct investment. He is currently a non-executive director of Nomura. Sir Cahn also just happens to be the Chairman of the UK Advisory Board of Huawei – a very ‘comfy’ connection between Huawei and the British government.

Dot four. Despite concerns about Huawei that included America forcing other ‘five-eyes’ nations to abandon plans to allow Huawei access to critical infrastructure projects, the UK decided to forge on ahead with Huawei. However, a recent government report concluded that Huawei’s “basic engineering competence and cybersecurity hygiene was poor, which could be exploited further down the line.” It went further – the HCSEC (Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre) continued to find serious vulnerabilities in the Huawei products examined. Several hundred vulnerabilities and issues were reported to inform their risk and remediation in 2018. Some vulnerabilities identified in previous versions of products continue to exist.”

Dot Five: In 2012, TechRadar magazine spoke to Derek Smith, a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office, who explained that the UK government has no concerns about Huawei at all. Since then Smith has become part of the National Security Council [NSC] Head of Counter-Terrorism, Security &Intelligence Communications. He was David Cameron’s Senior Press Officer on foreign policy and defence and was promoted to his current role by Cameron. Smith also disclosed in that interview – “The long-standing relationship the UK government has with Huawei, and the continued work between the two parties, means the Cabinet Office is confident that there are no security concerns.”

Dot Six: In 2009, America’s spy agency the NSA hacked into the Huawei router network in a programme called ‘Shotgiant’ which was unearthed by the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. The project was designed to spy on the Chinese government and other companies there. In the end, the NSA was itself trying to find out how it “could exploit the equipment to spy on end users.” Britain’s GCHQ was involved. At the time, BT routers in the UK extensively used Huawei products and Britain’s GCHQ set up a special facility for testing Huawei equipment to make sure it wasn’t quietly offering access of some kind to Chinese spies and hackers. Unbelievably, GCHQ was found to have allowed “The Cell” to be staffed by Huawei employees!

Dot Seven: The UK’s recent implementation of the so-called ‘porn-block’ was a contract that was originally given to Huawei, which would have allowed it to control the “Homesafe” filter, which David Cameron praised back in 2013 during his push for tighter controls on adult content. The BBC discovered that UK-based Huawei employees were able to decide which sites were blocked on the service and that even users who opted out of Homesafe would have their internet usage data routed through Huawei’s system. Even if that system is now served by another company, the point is that the government wants access to the information of who is accessing porn.

Dot Eight – In the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks, it was revealed that the British security services GCHQ in Cheltenham had Huawei constractors working on its networks (Image above). The file wording stated – “oddly enough, has Chinese Huawei contractors operating on their networks.”

Dot Nine: A senior Conservative politician has emerged as one of Huawei’s leading advocates in Brussels. Some dodgy dealings have recently emerged including hiding payments made by Beijing for many business class trips and luxury hotel stays along with ‘subsidence’ payments.

Conclusion

The point about these individual bits of information is this. The mix of ex-senior ministers, members of the national security council, counter-terrorism officers, GCHQ, America’s NSA, senior members of Britain’s ‘establishment’ with deep connections into the Huawei top brass, including David Cameron himself who is currently promoting a Beijing/UK trade collaboration and MEP’s being bought off all sounds very ‘muddy waters’ when considering the nature of Theresa May’s motivations for Williamson’s sacking. We must also consider that British spooks have been working very closely with Huawei and their employees.

Williamson has strenuously denied the leak. He has encouraged on multiple occasions a police investigation. He has even sworn on his children’s lives he is innocent – a genuinely suicidal thing to say from a career point of view if caught lying.

You don’t have to like Williamson to defend him. This whole matter which has elements of the government, unaccountable security services, the decidedly murky world of geopolitical cyberwarfare and the current political conflict that Britain finds itself in – smacks of something other than we have been told. Is Williamson simply a convenient ‘patsy’ to demonstrate Theresa May’s fortitude and power at a crucial time or is there something more insidious going on?

If Williamson is guilty of serious breaches of national security, the argument that the law has not been broken is nonsense. That is the sole reason he has been fired. Why has he not been thrown out from politics completely given the seriousness of the crime? Surely, if he was guilty of breaching national security as defence secretary he would be charged or silenced, not put back on the benches. Why has Theresa May repeatedly refused to release a copy of the findings of their investigation to Williamson himself?

There’s more to this than we’ve been told.

And why would anyone believe Theresa May?

truepublica.org.uk

Where do all these ludicrous little armchair heroes come from? Are they all Marco Rubio’s clones? Does the CIA clone them at Langley?

In Paris, pretentious President Emmanuel Macron splashes out millions of euros to surround himself with a splendor more worthy of Louis XIV than a democratically elected 21^st century leader. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands continue to rock the nation in Yellow Vest protests at the harsh austerity regulations he continues to impose on the French people.

In London, Secretary of Defense Gavin Williamson insults leading figures from France and Germany to Russia and China while the United Kingdom disintegrates around him.

Juan Guiado continues to farcically claim he is President of Venezuela despite the political groups he claims to represent receiving only one fifth of votes in the most recent elections.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has had to take a break from lecturing the rest of the world on the supposedly democratic values they should follow because of an embarrassing and sordid political influence scandal that has led to two angry resignations from his Cabinet.

And in the United States, Senator Rubio, poster child of the Boy Toys exposed his true colors with an ugly, even obscene threat to legitimately-elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro threatening him with murder by the anal insertion of a broken bottle if he did not step down and make way for Guiado.

There is an astonishing element of similarity to all these figures. They are all in their forties, except for Guiado – the true child among them at only 35. They could all pass as teenagers. They all project an attempted air of wholesomeness and earnest idealism which their records reveal as utterly fraudulent.

None of the Boy Toys has any record of distinction in international affairs or in promoting constructive progress in their own nations. Yet every one of them is eager to foster civil strife around the world, or to impose policies that would tear their own countries apart (Macron, Williamson and Guiado).

Every one of them seeks to present an unconvincing image of firm, dynamic and courageous leadership yet all of them pathetically rely on the armed forces of the United States or the willingness of the US government to intervene shamelessly in their own domestic affairs to uphold their positions and policies.

It is sometimes difficult to forget that Rubio is only two years out of his freshman term in the US Senate. He already seems to have been with us forever.

Williamson in the UK, Macron in France and now Guiado outside Venezuela were all plucked from nowhere, all on the basis of nothing more profound than their willingness to swallow the same internationalist, liberal, free trade party line they were all required to.

All the Boy Toys most resemble, in the wonderful words Alice Roosevelt Longworth used to dismiss 1948 US presidential candidate Tom Dewey, the little toy man on top of a giant wedding cake.

It is this image even more than the earnest, fake sincerity all of them seek to project like the most unscrupulous second-hand auto salesman that reveals the inner emptiness of all these ludicrous-named “leaders.”

They represent the last days of the liberal consensus of the West three quarters of a century after its great moment of triumph in 1945: A victory that in reality was won through the lives, blood and sacrifice of millions of Soviet soldiers.

Is there any significance to the rapid simultaneous rise to eminence and fame of the Boy Toys across the Western world? I believe there is.

A quarter of a millennium ago, Edward Gibbon, the great historian of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” noted that when ruling establishments had lost every remaining vestige of decency and confidence in public scrutiny, they turned to appointing nonentities as public figureheads, as the only figures weak enough not to threaten them with any hint of independence.

Rubio and his legion of not-quite-convincing Boy Toy contemporaries fit this requirement perfectly. They are the natural successors to Romulus Augustulanus, the ludicrous last legal emperor of Rome (for less than a year) in 475-6 AD. As Gibbon said, “Suspicious princes often promote the last of mankind.”

Photo: Flickr

Williamson has needlessly insulted the leaders of France at European conferences, and his bearbaiting and insults towards Russia and ridiculous posturing of the UK’s miniscule military capabilities in Eastern Europe have provoked open derision in Moscow.

Now, as if all that was not enough Williamson is boasting about putting China in its place by sending Britain’s new aircraft carriers, the already obsolete behemoths Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales to East Asia to supposedly deter China in its own home waters of the South China Sea.

Who is this mighty, fearless titan who bestrides the world like a colossus – at least in his own imagination? Is he a seasoned formidable veteran of Britain’s fabled Special forces? Is he an experienced diplomat with decades of efforts to solve the thorny problems of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa? Perhaps he is a brilliant scholar whose dazzling articles on strategy and deterrence have dazzled experts from the Munich Security Conference to the annual Shangri-La gathering in Singapore?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Williamson comes from a humble working class background in England and took an average run-of-the-mill degree in Social Sciences at the University of Bradford. His true passion was feverishly getting on in the world and the ladder he climbed to rise in the world was the numbing minutiae of provincial politics in the British Conservative Party.

Williamson finally hit the big time – so to speak – in 2015 when he supported dark horse candidate Theresa May against favorite Boris Johnson in the race to succeed David Cameron as Conservative Party leader and UK prime minister. In reward, she made him her Chief Whip in charge of the party’s parliamentary majority in Parliament.

Adept at flattery to a colorless, inept mediocrity of a prime minister who was widely regarded with strained tolerance, he rose rapidly in her esteem and shared in her catastrophic decision to call a general election which she almost lost. As a reward for such awful judgment he was further promoted to be defense secretary and has since won the universal derision of his service chiefs, serving officers and troop and professional administrators.

At a time when, as my Strategic Culture Foundation contributor Brian Cloughley has pointed out, the entire British Army, with a paltry 77,000 troops has less man (and woman) power than its artillery forces alone did 60 years ago, Williamson has eagerly sought cheap headlines by insulting longtime UK allies and formidable major global powers alike.

He enthusiastically supported the Saudi Arabian-led military intervention Yemen that has cost tens of thousands of innocent civilian lives and now threatens hardship and famine for millions. He has told Russia to “go away and shut up.” He has accused China of acting “in a malign way” – again without any real evidence to back up his nasty allegations.

On February 11, he proposed sending the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth to the Indo-Pacific region, a boast that led the government of China to immediately cancel trade talks that an ominously isolated UK desperately needed to offset its looming chaotic Brexit departure from the European Union.

In less than a year and a half in office, Williamson has already established himself as the most farcical and inept defense chief in British history.

His incredibly fast rise reveals a hollow little two-faced charmer and conman straight out of that classic 1976 study “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence” by Norman F. Dixon and Budd Schulberg’s famous novel about sociopathic little hollow influence-peddler and social climber Sammy Glick in “What Makes Sammy Run?”

Both Dixon and Schulberg recognized the phenomenon of what the great poet T S Eliot called “The Hollow Men” – Individuals without self-worth or any inner moral compass. As Dixon and Schulberg both understood, such empty creatures like Williamson seek to over-compensate for their inner emptiness by trying to rise up the social leader by any means – flattering, lying, betraying and backstabbing along the way. Such people join every mob and are in the forefront of an every witch hunt.

Such people, in Dixon’s unforgettable study always fawn to superiors and are usually harsh or uncaring to inferiors – exactly Williamson’s reported conduct to his “Great Lady” Mrs. May and to the staff unfortunate enough to serve him.

Such people, Dixon says, ignore people and facts which do not conform to their world view, learn little from experience and cling to external rules, applying them even when the situation demands other approaches.

Hence Williamson’s blind faith that the big bully he truly reveres and wants to serve – the United States of America – will always back him up and send the appropriate overwhelming military force enabling him to make good on all his childish boasts and his threats.

But when war or crisis comes, Dixon methodically documents how all such little blowhard phonies end the same way. They sit still like terrified and paralyzed zombies until disaster overwhelms them – and those foolish enough to trust in them.

It should be no surprise when this fate comes – soon – to Williamson: It is already written in his (lack of) character.

Which brings us to the Secretary of State for Defence of the United Kingdom, Mr Gavin Williamson, who is an oddball who likes paintballs and thinks it would be a good idea to fire the things at Spaniards, at least to begin with.

Britain and Spain disagree about the status of Gibraltar, the tiny British Overseas Territory jutting into the Mediterranean close to the southern tip of Spain. Both countries act childishly, and Spanish vessels have on occasions zoomed in and out of what the UK considers to be its territorial waters. Defence secretary Williamson strongly objects to this, and at a London meeting of senior military officers in December he came up with a solution. The Spanish vessels, he proposed, should be paintballed. As reported by the Independent newspaper, Gibraltar residents “would be asked to ‘splat’ Spanish navy and police vessels should they enter the waters illegally, which has become an increasingly regular occurrence on the southern coast of Spain.”

Those present when Mr Williamson revealed his scatty idea said nothing, and the strategic concept was laid to rest. But it wasn’t the first time Williamson had expressed colourful views on important matters, and won’t be the last. This is the man, after all, who was reported as having “raised eyebrows at a Nato meeting in Brussels” last year when he declared “What’s the point of listening to French politicians?”

The eyebrow-raising was not surprising, because Williamson was referring specifically to President Macron, which is not exactly what diplomacy and international relations are all about. But Williamson is not content with insulting and threatening Britain’s allies in the European Union. He goes further afield, even further than when he declared last year that “Frankly, Russia should go away and should shut up.

In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute on February 11 he rejoiced that Britain’s Brexit calamity provided an opportunity to demonstrate military prowess. He told his audience that “Brexit has brought us to a moment. A great moment in our history. A moment when we must strengthen our global presence, enhance our lethality, and increase our mass.”

Williamson has decided that Britain’s armed forces will be sent around the world because “the UK is a global power with truly global interests” and “wherever I go in the world I find that Britain stands tall.”

The uncomfortable but incontrovertible truth is that Britain is not a global power, or anywhere near one, and that if Williamson imagines that Britain “stands tall” around the world he has a serious problem with comprehending height and foreign sentiment.

It’s what might be called the paintball mentality.

It is no pleasure for me to write that internationally, Britain is regarded with amused derision tempered by compassion for its dithering and inchoate approach to the Brexit fiasco. Domestically it is incapacitated. As Deutsche Welle reported, “the UK government has spent the past two and a half years in a bubble that has left it paralytic and unable to tackle the domestic problems that haven't magically disappeared into the Brexit vortex.” Its domestic troubles are countless and include a failing Health Service (due in large part to the departure of foreign nurses, apprehensive about Brexit); a disastrous railway network, prisons that are an utter disgrace, and a parliament that is more like a comic opera than a dignified debating forum. As one ruling party politician said on February 15, it is questionable “whether in fact the government is able to operate in the national interest at all. We are facing a great crisis and we are not really looking at all the options for trying to resolve it.”

It has to be faced that the UK is in a parlous state, and the last thing it should be doing is confronting countries with which it has no territorial disagreements. Neither China nor Russia presents the slightest military threat to Britain. All they want to do is manufacture, trade and prosper without other countries trying to menace them in their own backyard.

But in his speech on February 11 Gavin Williamson declared that “today, Russia is resurgent — rebuilding its military arsenal and seeking to bring the independent countries of the former Soviet Union, like Georgia and Ukraine, back into its orbit. All the while, China is developing its modern military capability and its commercial power.”

The man is a fool. There is no kinder word to describe him. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, recorded in its 2018 Report that “At $66.3 billion, Russia’s military spending in 2017 was 20 per cent lower than in 2016” while “total military spending by all 29 NATO members was $900 billion in 2017, accounting for 52 per cent of world spending.” The UK spent $47.2 billion — and Williamson wants more, which he won’t get.

Then Williamson proudly declared that “We are a leader in NATO, this year hosting the Leaders Meeting here in London. Alongside this we have sent a Battle Group to Estonia to support NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence. We lead multi-national maritime task groups in the Mediterranean and defend the skies over the Black Sea and the Baltics.”

As noted by the UK’s satirical magazine, Private Eye, the thought of Britain enhancing NATO’s forward presence is unlikely to disturb or agitate Russia or anyone else, but of course it’s the thought that counts.

Private Eye 2017

And it was Williamson’s thought that also counted when he included China in his diatribe and even threatened the Eastern Dragon. As the Financial Times (FT) noted, he had “signalled a more aggressive stance . . . confirming that aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth would be sent on its maiden operational mission to the Pacific. Britain was prepared to act against those who “flout international law”, said Mr Williamson, in what was seen as a reference to China’s expansion in the South China Sea.”

On February 16 the FT reported that Philip Hammond, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer — the finance minister — “has cancelled a planned trip to China”, although he “had been expected to visit Beijing in order to meet senior figures including vice-premier Hu Chunhua.”

Unfortunately, “preparations were disrupted when the defence secretary Gavin Williamson suggested that Britain would send a new aircraft carrier to China’s backyard. Mr Hammond’s meeting with Mr Hu was cancelled, leading the UK to abandon the trip altogether.”

If Britain wants favourable trade terms with China after exiting the European Union, it would be advisable to seek them through dialogue rather than by announcing its intention to send an aircraft carrier to “stand tall” in the South China Sea.

Militarily, however, China need have no fears about Williamson’s sabre-rattling. Because the most lethal things he’s got in his arsenal are paintballs.

Photo: Flickr

When Gavin Williamson, Prime Minister Theresa May’s ludicrous little boy-toy secretary of defense recently visited Washington he pathetically displayed his military and strategic illiteracy by boasting at public events on how the Queen Elizabeth, at 65,000 tons (50 percent heavier than the Titanic) by far the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy alongside its sister vessel the Prince of Wales, would enable Britain to project power around the world, second only to the US Navy.

Williamson gloried in how this capability would make both the new British aircraft carriers worthy partners for the US Navy, keeping Britain as America’s trusted partner in running the world.

Or, as a senior political adviser to Prime Minister Thatcher memorably once boasted to me: Britain’s enduring role in the world is being the loyal sidekick to the hero in a Western movie or TV series, being the Native American partner Tonto to America acting as the world’s global policeman, or “Lone Ranger.”

The reality could not be more different: Far from Britain once again boldly strutting across the world stage as America’s partner, it is trotting along as America’s poodle, her little pet dog.

Like every British prime minister in the past 80 years starting with the revered Winston Churchill, Mrs. May has eagerly accepted Britain’s role as Airstrip One to America’s globe-strutting Oceania in George Orwell’s darkly prophetic classic novel “1984”. (I suggest future editions, at least within Britain, be called “2024” in tribute to the ever increasing power of the British as well as US Deep States and the unending passion of British leaders for stirring up unnecessary wars around the world).

Even as a floating, mobile accessory to Airstrip One, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, as Russian and American naval experts recognize (but are usually too polite to say publicly) are ludicrous jokes.

For while Britain busted its defense budgets for most of a decade to build the two carriers at 3.1 billion pounds ($4.6 billion) for each ship, it could not afford a penny more to build the aircraft they are designed to carry or the screening task forces they desperately need to survive in any full-scale war.

The Queen Elizabeth has at last finally carried out operational flight trials off the East Coast of the United States. But the US Marine Corps had to give the Royal Navy a squadron of its own ultra-expensive, problem-plagued and far too few US-built F-35B VTOL Lightning II Joint Strike Aircraft to operate. They had absolutely no aircraft of their own left that could do the job.

Also, if it came to any war against a significant power, the Royal Navy cannot afford to project around the world long range anti-submarine warfare (ASW) forces adequate to protect its new carriers from the fleets of lethal, fast and difficult to detect (and also cheap to build and buy) diesel submarines that powers from India to Israel now operate.

And against an opponent like Iran, the British carriers would have to operate from well over 1,000 miles, or around 1,700 kilometers offshore to be safe from land-based anti-ship missiles that could destroy them.

How then, can Britain safely and effectively operate these enormous obsolete white elephants? There is only one way: They will have to be integrated into US carrier task forces to augment their striking power and it is highly debatable if the US admirals will even want them.

For US super-aircraft carriers are nuclear powered and they do not need to be constantly refueled as the old-fashioned oil-turbine powered new British carriers do.

Far from augmenting Anglo-American ties, the new British carriers look certain to erode them by repeatedly displaying to the US Navy how much smaller and more obsolete the British vessels are. Ironically, they will revive experiences of “Special Relationship” naval cooperation – and lack of it – 74 years ago.

In the closing days of World War II, the British Pacific Fleet was unable to keep up with the far more numerous, more powerful and far bigger and faster US Essex –class aircraft carriers and their battle groups in the later naval operations against Japan, generating operational difficulties that endlessly outraged US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King.

Mrs. May and Defense Secretary Williamson (who eerily echoes US Senator Marco Rubio in his “boy toy” characteristics and utter ignorance of serious military affairs) remain oblivious to all such issues. The victims of their pride and incompetence will likely be the 3,200 Royal Navy personnel that crew the two leviathans.

Like the vote for Brexit – for Britain to leave the European Union – the building of the two new aircraft carriers was a decision by the British to embrace ancient dreams over sober contemporary realities.

The British Empire is dead. The 100- mile-long line of warships off Spithead that honored Queen Victoria at her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 has been scrap iron for more than a century. It is time for Airstrip One to wake up and recognize its real place in a very different world.

To lend the madness some popular appeal, British media reported that “Prince Harry will join one of ­Britain’s biggest war exercises against Russia in 20 years, as a warning to Vladimir Putin over his continued aggression.”

Harry (34), the youngest son of heir to the British crown, Prince Charles, is said to be privy to secret battle plans taking place in Norway over the next 12 weeks “as the marines practice drills in a show of strength against potential military strikes by ­Moscow.”

Russia’s embassy in Britain dismissed the exercise involving the young royal as a PR gimmick to fire up public enthusiasm for what is otherwise a hackneyed ploy of provoking tensions with Moscow. “Apparently, the authority of politicians and generals is no longer enough to ensure public support for this policy,” it said.

Indeed, a PR stunt is surely what it is going on. And the British media are showing themselves once again to be the disgraceful pro-war stenographers that they are by churning out official assertions of “Russian aggression” and “potential military strikes”.

But what’s also going on here is a wider and more disturbing pattern of Britain increasing its militarism towards Russia. Not that Russia is quaking in its boots over Britain’s threatening conduct, but the reckless snarling attitude of the British bulldog nevertheless adds to increasing international tensions between NATO powers and Moscow. That implies an increasing risk of a military confrontation.

A significant factor here is Britain’s intensifying Brexit chaos as it splits from the European Union. The deadline for the EU divorce comes on March 29 when Britain is set to leave the bloc after more than four decades of membership. If Britain crashes out of the EU without a trade deal, which looks increasingly likely due to internal British political squabbling, then economic and social chaos is expected.

Given the high stakes, it seems that the British establishment is seeking to distract from the Brexit debacle through ramping up tensions with Russia.

As a recent Washington Post article put it: “Britain clings to imperial nostalgia as Brexit looms”.

Britain’s Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson has been a key figure in fingering Russia as a “threat to Europe” and positioning Britain as a “defender of Europe against Russian aggression”.

There are, it seems, a few calculations in the works. One of those is that Britain has been continually trying to make itself relevant to Europe in a post-Brexit era owing to supposed British security and military assets. Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May has repeatedly talked up how Britain will always remain an important security partner to European allies even after it quits the bloc.

When her defense minister Gavin Williamson first announced the new deployment of British forces to the Arctic back in September, he said it was to “protect Europe’s northern flank” from “increased Russian aggression”. Thus, by ingratiating itself as a “protector” of Europe, the British state is endeavoring to use that purported role as a bargaining chip in order to extract more concessions from the EU on the terms of a future trade arrangement.

Premier May this week is pleading with EU leaders to relent on improving divorce terms. It is therefore important for the British to amplify their “security role” for Europe in order to try to wheedle better divorce terms. The corollary of that cynical calculation is for the British to demonize Russia further as a threat to Europe, thereby giving the British a seemingly valuable purpose of “defender”.

No doubt the recently exposed British government-funded media network, the Orwellian-sounding Integrity Initiative, has been working overtime in propagating the anti-Russia narratives as part of the Brexit strategy.

Another calculation is that as Britain leaves the European Union, it is prone to take on a greater role in the US-led NATO military alliance. Post-Brexit Britain will inevitably have much less influence on European capitals. As America’s historical cipher in European affairs, Washington and London will need to boost the role of NATO as a way to exert more influence over European policy. This would explain why Britain has over the past two years since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 taken on a more aggressive attitude towards Russia. Realizing that the bulldog will be outside the European gate, Britain seems to have upped its NATO role, by barking more at Russia.

More generally, the Brexit process has unleashed British notions of former imperial glory being revived.

Williamson told the rightwing Sunday Telegraph recently: “This is our biggest moment as a nation since the end of the Second World War, when we can recast ourselves in a different way. We can actually play the role on the world stage that the world expects us to play.”

Increased militarism is a crucial part of this British role-play on the world stage. Britain has greatly boosted its sales pitch for weapons exports since the Brexit referendum, wooing the Saudi and other Gulf Arab regimes in particular. It is planning to build, or has recently built, new military bases in former colonial territories in the Persian Gulf, Caribbean and Southeast Asia.

Britain’s launching of two new “super aircraft carriers” is specifically aimed at working with US naval counterparts and the American F-35 fighter plane. As the BBC reported, the new “gunboat diplomacy on steroids” is for the British rulers a “statement of intent and global ambition as well as a very visible projection of military power.”

In the economically challenging times for post-Brexit Britain, the British state is resorting to militarism as in the days of its Victorian empire. That militarism is seen as essential by the British state as a way to give itself badly needed relevance and influence over international relations. Especially because post-imperial, post-Brexit Britain is a shadow of its former self.

However, from Russia’s perspective, this desperate British nostalgia is potentially baleful. Britain is evidently using Russia as a pretext to justify its new militarism and to burnish a supposed role of “defender”. As the Brexit repercussions become ever-more severe for Britain, the danger is that the British bulldog snarling at Russia may become rabid. It needs to be muzzled before someone gets hurt. Or better still, put down.

Britain has a special relationship with Israel that is little recognised in the mainstream media but unmissable in light of the killings in Gaza. With more than 110 protesters dead, Britain is in effect defending Israeli actions. The British government has not, as far as I have seen, actually condemned Israel for the killings. Rather, it has simply “urged Israel to show restraint” while recognising its “right to secure itself” and also blaming Hamas for the violence.

When British Prime Minister Theresa May phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 10 May, by which date 40 Palestinian protesters in Gaza had already been shot, it appears she did not even raise the issue. Meanwhile, the government infers it will not even review UK arms exports to Israel after the Gaza massacres which have only been discussed once in the British cabinet.

That Britain is supporting Israel over the Gaza killings is true to form. The UK’s relationship with Israel is special in at least nine areas.

Diplomatic support

Theresa May says that Israel is “one of the world’s great success stories” and a “beacon of tolerance“. To Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, Israel is a “light unto the nations” whose relationship with the UK “is underpinned by a shared sense of values: justice, compassion, tolerance”.

These gushing words translate into consistent British support for Israel internationally, helping to shield it from ostracism. Britain abstained on the recent UN vote to authorise an investigation into the Gaza killings because it would not also investigate Hamas; instead, the UK supports Israel carrying out its own inquiry.

Last year, the Foreign Office refused to sign a joint statement at the Paris peace conference on Palestine, accusing it of “taking place against the wishes of the Israelis”.

Arms supplies

Britain has approved arms sales to Israel worth $445m since the 2014 Gaza war and there is little doubt that some of this equipment has been used against people in the occupied territories. UK drone components are exported while Israel uses drones for surveillance and armed attacks.

The UK exports components for combat aircraft while Israel’s air force conducts air strikes in Gaza, causing civilian deaths and destruction of infrastructure. The government admits it has not assessed the impact of its arms exports to Israel on Palestinians.

This policy follows the knowledge that Israel promotes an “increasing pattern” of deliberately shooting Palestinian children and that Palestinians generally are “increasingly killed… with impunity” by Israel, as a 2015 Home Office report noted. Since 2000 Israel has killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians not taking part in hostilities, around one-third of whom are under 18.

Airforce

In May 2018, Israel became the first country to mount an air attack using the new generation F-35 stealth warplane, hitting targets in Syria. While F-35 production is led by US arms company Lockheed Martin, British industry is building 15 percent of each F-35, involving companies such as BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.

Nothing is allowed to interrupt the “very close defence… cooperation” between Britain and Israel. British military pilots are even being trained by a company owned by Israel arms firm Elbit Systems.

Nuclear arms

Israel is believed to possess 80 to 100 nuclear warheads, some of which are deployed on its submarines. The UK is effectively aiding this nuclear deployment by supplying submarine components to Israel. According to the commander of Haifa naval base, General David Salamah, Israel’s submarines regularly operate “deep within enemy territory”.

Britain has a long history of helping Israel to develop nuclear weapons. In the 1950s and 1960s Conservative and Labour governments made hundreds of sales of nuclear materials to Israel, including plutonium and uranium.

The contrast with British policy towards Iran is striking. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson states that the UK is “adamant that a nuclear-armed Iran would never be acceptable” and thus maintains sanctions against Iran. At the same time Britain refuses to adopt any sanctions against Israel, an actual nuclear state.

In 1995, the UK and other states agreed to a UN resolution to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. It is not known whether Britain has ever seriously pressed Israel on this.

Navy

This week British and Spanish warships, part of NATO’s forces, docked in Israel’s Haifa port to conduct a joint NATO-Israel naval exercise. This follows naval exercises between Britain and Israel in December 2017 and November 2016. Through its blockade, the Israeli navy restricts Palestinians’ fishing rights, even firing on local fishermen.

The blockade of Gaza is widely regarded as illegal, including by senior UN officials, a UN independent panel of experts and Amnesty International, partly since it inflicts “collective punishment” on an entire population. Britain is failing to uphold its obligation “to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law”.

Intelligence

Little is known of the intelligence relationship between the UK and Israel. There have been differences such as in 1986 when prime minister Margaret Thatcher ordered a freeze in relations with Mossad after a female Israeli agent lured Mordechai Vanunu, who was trying to reveal Israel’s nuclear secrets, to Rome where he was kidnapped.

Former MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove recently said that British intelligence did not always share information with Israel “because we could never guarantee how the intelligence might or would be used”. But the Telegraph reports that the relationship between MI6 and Mossad has become closer in recent years with both concerned about nuclear proliferation in Iran.

The director of the British spy centre GCHQ says the latter has a “strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals intelligence” and that “we are building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of Israeli bodies”.

Documents from 2009 leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show that GCHQ spied on the Israeli military, defence firms and diplomatic missions. But they also revealed that GCHQ monitored Palestinian communications, including the phone calls of President Mahmoud Abbas and his two sons. The interceptions took place just three weeks before Israel’s offensive on Gaza in January 2009, suggesting that they may have helped Israel gear up for the offensive.

Trade

The UK is deepening trade with Israel “as we leave the EU” and has established a joint trade working group. Britain completely opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and rejects imposing even the most basic sanctions on Israel, such as travel bans on those involved in expanding illegal settlements.

Indeed, the government appears to be helping Israel counter the BDS movement. In September 2017, then communities minister Sajid Javid met Gilad Erdan, Israel’s “strategic affairs” minister in charge of combating the BDS movement, to discuss “steps to counter anti-Israel delegitimisation and BDS”.

Rather, the UK wants trade relations to go from “strength to strength“, bolstering the UK’s position as the primary Israeli investment location in Europe.

Illegal settlements

The UK is aware that there are more than 570,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied territories and its formal position regards the settlements as illegal. Yet this is meaningless in light of actual British policy, which is never known to press Israel strongly to end settlement building or the occupation.

The UK simply calls on Israel to “ease” restrictions on Gaza, and rather than demand an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights, Britain only calls on Israel to “uphold its obligations under international law”.

Trade from illegal settlements

Israel’s policy in the occupied territories has been described by human rights body B’Tselem as an “unbridled theft”. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods produced in these settlements are exported internationally each year, including oranges, dates and spring water.

Yet Britain permits this trade and does not even keep a record of imports into the UK from the settlements. Indeed, Boris Johnson has explicitly said that it is the “policy of the UK” to trade with the illegal settlements and that this will continue. This policy violates UN Security Council resolutions which require all states to “distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”.

What explains British policy?

Britain has a long history of supporting Israeli aggression. As the mandatory power in Palestine from 1920 to 1948, Britain enabled the gradual takeover of Palestine by the Zionist movement. When the Arab revolt against Britain and its Zionist proteges broke out in the late 1930s, the British army brutally crushed it. The UK supported Israel’s brutal takeover of Palestine in 1948 and also aided Israel’s 1967 war, having furnished Israel with hundreds of British tanks.

Two reasons are clear in explaining current British policy. One is commercial: arms exports and trade are increasingly profitable to British corporations. The other is that UK policy towards Israel is to a large degree determined in Washington and by London wanting to curry favour with the US and not challenge its closest ally.

But British policy goes beyond this. Gavin Williamson has said that the UK-Israel relationship is the “cornerstone of so much of what we do in the Middle East” while former international development secretary, the neocon Priti Patel, noted that “Israel is an important strategic partner for the UK”.

Patel was forced to resign last year after it was revealed that she held secret meetings in Israel with key officials, including Netanyahu. Most significantly, she visited Israeli military hospitals in the Golan Heights where Israel treats anti-government fighters involved in the Syrian war, including members of the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra, which Israel is seen as effectively supporting. Patel even wanted to give British aid to the Israeli army.

Britain effectively backs Israeli military policy in the Middle East while it has carried out more than 100 clandestine air strikes inside Syria against government, Iranian and Hezbollah targets. Israel is seen as an ally against Syria and Iran – Britain’s two main enemies in the region.

London increasingly regards Israel as a strategic asset, especially now that the old Arab-Israeli conflict has largely disappeared, meaning that Britain can more easily back both Israel and its despotic Arab allies at the same time. The Palestinians are the expendable unpeople in this deepening special relationship.

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