Ethical foreign policy and that damn torch!

Ethical foreign policy and that damn torch!

The desperate spectacle of the Olympic torch being paraded in a scrum of police and track-suited Chinese security thugs through closed-off London streets did not reflect well on anyone – least of all our prime minister, who was pictured cowering outside No 10 behind said Chinese thugs.

It is, of course, scandalous that London’s streets should be closed and millions in costs incurred for such a non-event – to which the BBC added insult to the licence payer by televising the whole shambles live. Luckily, the pro-free Tibet protesters made it all a touch more interesting.

I can at least understand sportsmen and women carrying the torch. But Vanessa Mae? Tevor Macdonald? I’m surprised they didn’t co-opt Ronald Macdonald too. Maybe the Golden Arches didn’t pay enough sponsorship – oh, sorry, they’re doing our Olympics, so that’s a future delight, no doubt.

Denise van Outen was there – Gary Glitter’s squeeze in her much younger days and 1999 ‘Rear of the Year’. But then come to think of it, Coke are one of the Olympic sponsors.   

Comedienne Francesa Martinez, at least, had second thoughts and belatedly decided not to join the tacky parade of torch-wraiths. Or did her publicist think there was more mileage in her pulling out?

Excuse my cynicism, but it’s odd that it took 100 plus deaths in Tibet to remind Francesca and others that China has occupied this once independent country for more than half a century - and that China itself has no democracy, no human rights and slaughters around 5,000 of its citizens a year often for relatively minor crimes. But then Francesca is a comedienne.

Not that I have much time either for those who say we should boycott the Olympics, but ignore the fact that we do £17bn of trade with China (£13bn in imports and £4bn of exports). There’s no logic in banning sporting contact but not trade.

In fact we should neither prevent our sportsmen and women from going to Peking  nor embargo trade.

Trade embargos usually end up hurting the weakest - innocent businesses and their employees should not have to pay for the excesses of governments they did not elect and rarely have any control over.

As for sport, that lady had long been entwined in a perverted embrace with the lascivious monster, politics, and there’s not much we can do about that. We certainly should not prevent people who have trained for years from competing.

What we should do is have a touch more taste and judgement than our prime-minister and his Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, who diminished themselves and our country by kow-towing to the Chinese in allowing the self-aggrandising and ultimately farcical parade - and themselves becoming part of the sad spectacle.

But then we all know we have to be nice to the Chinese. They have a huge and powerful economy, so we make allowances for little inconveniences like Tibet and public executions of common thieves. We save our moral outrage for places like Burma. We can bomb the Serbs out of Kosovo. But in truth, there’s not much we can do about the Chinese. Just too many of the buggers. 

What did someone once say about having an “ethical foreign policy”? Easy to say in opposition. Bit harder to do in government, eh Gordon, Tony?      

Phillip Oppenheim