Under Cameron the Foreign Office has become the marketing department of Great Britain Inc. He has decided that Simon Fraser, permanent secretary at the Department for Business, should be the next head of the diplomatic service and run it on commercial lines. He envisages a future when corporate hotshots and CBI bureaucrats can become Her Britannic Majesty's ambassadors to far-flung lands the better to cut deals with the natives. Labour's ethical dimension to foreign policy, such as it was, is history. Cameron tours the world not as statesman or democratic leader but as Britain's head of PR, whose job is to suck up to potential customers until they buy a nuclear reactor or Hawk jet. If alert listeners catch a direct falsehood in his sales patter, aides are on hand to explain that he "misspoke" or was misunderstood.
David Cameron, Head of PR, Great Britain Inc.
But so intent was he on securing access for British companies to the Turkish market, he lacked the courage to be a candid friend. He could not add that Turkey's progress had halted, and until it restarted, Europe cannot and should not allow it into a club whose first task was to confront the horrors of Nazism and communism the better to overcome them. He did not dare say that the supposedly "moderate" Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is disinterring all the ghouls from Turkey's past, as he grows ever more reckless in his denial of atrocity and indulgence for mass murderers.
Erdogan refuses to join the EU in supporting the charges of crimes against humanity in Darfur the International Criminal Court has levelled against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. On the contrary, he has invited the blood-soaked brute to Turkey. He has his own culturally determined, not to say historically demented, grounds for knowing Bashir is innocent. "No Muslim could perpetrate genocide," he said.
"Who now remembers the Armenians?" asked Adolf Hitler as he ordered the extermination of the Jews. Not David Cameron, who could not even remember that Britain fought Hitler alone in the Blitz as he sought to suck up to Obama by declaring that Britain was America's "junior partner" in 1940.
His wilful amnesia makes his denunciations of Pakistan seem simultaneously accurate but devious. We did not need documents on WikiLeaks to tell us that elements within the Pakistani intelligence services are on the Taliban's side. But he ought to know that the Taliban has also murdered thousands of Pakistani civilians in atrocities that the western media barely bother to cover. For Cameron to say that Pakistan was exporting terrorism without acknowledging that Pakistanis were also victims of terrorism, was simply playing to the prejudices of his Indian listeners the better to persuade them to cut deals with the throng of eager British businessmen he had brought in his wake.
Watching him tour the world, I feared that our new centre-right government thinks it can take a holiday from history and concentrate on the lucrative and agreeable business of finding new contracts for BAE and markets for Tesco instead. History has a habit of teaching people the hard way that there is no easy escape from political and moral responsibility. If you do not seek to mould the world, the world will most certainly seek to mould you.
Adapted from an article by Nick Cohen in the Observer
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