AS he cosied up to China at the G20, was Keir Starmer aware that Beijing was doing exactly the same with its REAL friends from the Kremlin?
“A strong UK-China relationship is important for both our countries,” declared our PM . . . quite the reversal given his total condemnation of the Chinese from the comfort of opposition.
And how wide-eyed it sounds, with them also glad-handing Putin’s odious lackey Sergei Lavrov.
“We are at an unprecedented stage in the development of our strategic relations of a comprehensive partnership,” said Lavrov — a statement far more significant to Beijing than whether Labour lets them build a new London embassy.
How impotent too the PM’s protests to President Xi over Hong Kong look with 47 democracy campaigners jailed there within hours.
Our Government sees Chinese money as crucial for growth. But there is a naivety to befriending a genocidal regime which simultaneously has Putin’s back against our own allies, Ukraine.
It won’t have been lost on Xi either.
THE Government cannot beat the farmers. It should rethink.
Its justification for this ruinous inheritance tax change, that it would help fund the NHS, is ludicrous.
The health service would burn through even the most wildly optimistic estimate of its proceeds, £520million, in just one day.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed is left pretending this betrayal of farmers was made inevitable by the Tories’ “£22billion black hole” — a Treasury myth debunked by the OBR and mostly comprising Labour’s own ideological choices.
The thousands massed alongside Jeremy Clarkson in London yesterday were not the rich landowners caricatured by Labour’s urban elite and their sniggering cheerleaders, apparently enjoying a class war against rural communities.
They are ordinary farmers producing our food, often barely scraping by yet facing impossible bills if their family business is to pass down the generations.
The public backs them. And even a Government with a huge majority cannot afford to expose us to the spectre of Christmas food shortages.
It must not mistake stubbornness for strength.
HE was an illegal immigrant, rejected for asylum, his deportation thwarted by air hostesses refusing to fly him to Africa.
So Anicet Mayela stayed in Britain — and later raped a 15-year-old virgin, making her pregnant.
We wonder if that Air France crew ever reflect on that day in 2005:
The predator who benefited from their fashionable compassion. And the child whose innocence he took by force.
