Britain has lost an empire and found a role: to faff on about pirates and biofuels
Political wisdom coming from Robert Mugabe is hard to swallow. Nonetheless, I think the leathery old butcher might be on to something. ‘Gordon Brown,’ he said last week, ‘is a tiny dot on this world.’ From some people, that might be mere insult. Yet, when foul Bob describes Gordon Brown as a dot on the face of this world, one cannot help but consider that other unexpected dot, on the face of Robert Mugabe.
Is it a moustache, do you think? I’m not sure. Ask many professed Africa experts about Robert Mugabe’s moustache, and about half of them will say, ‘He hasn’t got a moustache, are you thinking of Daniel arap Moi?’ It’s a tiny thing, nestling in the dimple of his upper lip. It can’t be a birthmark, because he didn’t have it when he was younger. I reckon he grew it in the late 1980s, when he decided to give dictatorial tyranny a proper crack. A dictator needs facial hair. The full Stalin can’t be pleasant in a tropical climate, and the Hitler, that’s just derivative. Nobody wants to be just another Saddam, and the African gentleman may often struggle with the full Fidel. Bob needed something new.
Well, that’s my theory. It could be a wart or a melanoma, or it could be that he just always misses it. Whatever. He sees it every day. Some people might think it makes him look stupid, but Mugabe doesn’t give a damn. It’s just a dot.
Now, let us talk about pirates. I know, it’s a leap. I could have made a stylistic Bluebeardbased link, I suppose, but it would have taken the best part of a paragraph and you’d have lost interest. Just go with it. Pirates. As you will probably know, the Royal Navy has been instructed not to detain pirates, because doing so could breach their human rights (bits and bobs being chopped off under Somalia’s sharia law, in particular), and thus lead to them claiming asylum in Britain.
It’s a strange call, this, and I’ve spent a while trying to untangle the thinking behind it. So, here goes: 1) We might catch pirates. 2) If we do, we certainly don’t want to keep them. 3) But somebody else might not treat them very nicely. 4) So let’s not bother catching them in the first place.
Something has gone wrong here, hasn’t it? I’m thinking of what they taught me at school about the sabre toothed tiger — how it thrived because of its long teeth, but then ended up in a world where long teeth were a hindrance, not a help. It’s like we have climbed up to the moral high ground, and now that we can see everything, we are lost.
Or perhaps we are just being self-interested, not preachy. Or perhaps it is in our selfinterest to be preachy. ‘A civilised nation does not chop the bits and bobs off anybody, not even pirates.’ That sort of thing. Although doesn’t it look a bit odd? We’ll give the Chinese the Olympic Games and we’ll try our utmost to give the Saudis a free pass through our courts, but we won’t give Somalia a handful of pirates? If this was deliberately hypocritical, at least somebody would appear to be thinking about it. But it’s worse than that. It’s unnecessary. It’s weird.
Let’s leap again. Biofuels. Are you following that one? I’m trying. Two years ago, Gordon Brown was cutting tax on them, in order to save the world and curb our reliance on the Middle East. (That’s the Middle East dominated by the Saudis, of course, who are our friends, even though they have basically the same laws as the people we don’t like in Somalia. And, even though we don’t like their laws, sometimes our national interest dictates we should help them circumnavigate ours. Are you still with me?) But now Gordon thinks biofuels are bad, because they can lead to world hunger. Gordon doesn’t like world hunger. That’s why he has so much time for people like Angelina Jolie, and Bob Geldof, and Bono, because they don’t like world hunger either. And suddenly he’s worried he might have been causing it. So he has changed his mind. I think.
Perhaps, post-Iraq, this is to be Britain’s role in the world — as the proponent of vague, flailing gambits that are both self interested and well-intentioned, which have huge and disastrous repercussions that only occur to us later. Although even that, I suspect, would be too much like a direction.
Does the UK even have foreign policy any more? Beyond trivia, the government proposes nothing, and the opposition opposes nothing. Nobody even talks about Iraq or Afghanistan, and Zimbabwe generates mere frowns. Instead we faff on about biofuels and, apropos of nothing, say weird things about pirates. That’s Britain. In a world of black and white, we are suddenly just a bumbling force for grey. Gordon Brown is just a dot on this world. What are we doing out there? What are we for?
Backpacking in India once, I met three Swiss-German hippies who were travelling without a guidebook. In one sense, I was quite impressed. In another, I wondered what the hell they were playing at. Why make your life so hard, simply by not buying a book? You might as well cross the subcontinent doing the three-legged race, or pledging not to use your thumbs. These three had inadvertently come across from Burma without a visa, and were dodging policemen. They didn’t know how many rupees you got to the dollar or even, except in the most general terms, where they were. I admired the romance of it all, but I didn’t really get the point.
Thomas Kohnstamm, formerly a writer of Lonely Planet guides to Latin America and the Caribbean, has just written a book which he describes as an exposé of the world of budget travel writing. I haven’t read it yet, but according to reports he describes dealing drugs, accepting freebies, having sex with a waitress in exchange for a good review and utterly pretending to be in Colombia.
My experience of guidebook travel writers is limited, but I did once accompany one (disclosure: she’s now my wife) on a trip as she wrote a guide to Southern Africa. It may be a testament to her ethics, but the opportunities for graft were limited. Quite honestly, in a trip that lasted six months, the only freebie we enjoyed was one half-price night in a disused jail. Of Mr Kohnstamm, I am in awe.
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