Friday, 23 July 2010
The Second Fiddle Agenda and World War II
The prime minister's laughable exercise in sycophancy in the USA has reached a whole new level of idiocy. In his desperate desire to suck up to the Americans the PM has already announced that we are the monkey to the US organ grinder in the so called "special relationship".
He has been taken for a ride by US Senators up for re-election and desperate to divert their voters' attention from their own short comings, and by a US President whose satisfaction ratings are less than that of Richard Nixon at the same point in his Presidency.
So we are playing second fiddle that’s official!
And the properly elected and constituted Government of Scotland (that he has started aping Gordon Brown by calling an “executive”) was wrong in its administration of Scottish justice. And he wants to be the prime minister of the entire UK?
I think he will find that Scots are not keen on being used as a political football in his toadying tour of the USA. Of course we didn't vote Tory so he probably does not care all that much. However, last time that we had Tories (that we did not vote for) running roughshod over us, we got devolution. This time who knows?
So much for that 10 week "respect agenda". Might be a bit awkward to push Scotland away like that. The USA may have all the power and can keep his seat on the Security Council, but Scotland has even more of that worthless oil now that they have inconveniently found a whole bunch more. So doubtless we will have to pay for the recession as well.
It would seem that there is just nobody the PM won't piss off to make sure that the UK continues to “punch above its weight” on the international scene. All the better for that self important blow-hard to strut around the world pretending to be important. When in actual fact the entire world sees him as a US poodle doing tricks for scraps from their table.
And now he has trumped all that by showing that, despite the benefits of the most expensive education in the world, he does not know his arse from his armpit with regard to history. Not only do we play second fiddle to the USA at the moment but apparently we did during the Second World war and in particular in 1940! Of course the USA didn’t actually join the war until after the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, but that's a mere detail.
What a vile insult to all the UK, Commonwealth and Empire servicemen who resisted Nazi aggression from 1939-1941 (December). There we have oily Dave paying his respects at Arlington Cemetary to US dead of the second world war while trashing the memory of our own. Disgusting! What a repulsive display of a creeping quisling.
What could trump that? Well maybe if Nick Clegg got up at PMQs and said the Second World War was illegal too.
Why doesn’t David just go the whole hog and say that we have been playing second fiddle to the USA since 1776.
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Its amazing how the UK has the second prime minister in a row who is not fit for office.
ReplyDeleteThis pathetic sycophant showed his true colours in Washington when he managed to make even Blair look diplomatic.
No common sense, very little brains but can crawl to order for his president. What an advert for UK politics.
Much has been made of the fact that Mr Clegg had the audacity to answer PMQ from a Liberal perspective (Iraq war being illegal). But he would have looked pretty dim had he said otherwise given his party's stance (along with the SNP) at the time. Nonetheless, he has been ridiculed for it by people who fail to understand what a coalition is about.
ReplyDeleteMr Cameron has done little but put his foot in it since he left the UK to fawn and toady to Mr Obama.
Not a success.
The advantages, it has been said, of having old Etonian prime ministers is that they know how to behave, which fork and knife to use at state dinners, and they know their history; they are probably even related by family to much of it.
Well, all we need to know now is that this fool slurped his soup!
And isn't Patrick Mercer enough to make your milk curdle? Own up Paddy, he’s a nob!
Dubbie: Yes who would have thought that we would have a PM we hated as much as Gordon Brown. Well I do for one! It seems that all I said about the nasty party riding roughshod over the Scots is coming true. Not just the Scots though History as well and Britain’s place in it. A small price to pay for a seat on the security council?
ReplyDeleteTris: yes Mercer was specially repulsive. Not even a good apologist.
ReplyDeleteI think the illegal war comment from mini-PM was intended as a cheap jibe at Straw, and not a statement of Lib Dem policy (whatever that is).
ReplyDeleteLets face it Lib Dem policy is a bit blike the Scottish weather, if you don't like it wait 5 minutes and it will change.
No Munguin. As I recall it the Liberals were always against the war and declared it illegal at the time when Chic Kennedy was leader.
ReplyDeleteYes but in the instance mentioned it need not have been said at all and was done solely to embarass Jack Straw but succeeded in embrassing the senoir fiddle players in the coalition as well.
ReplyDeleteI hardly condemn Cameron for arguing that the UK is the junior partner - do any of you intend to argue that the UK and USA are equals?
ReplyDeleteIf anything that is laughable.
Besides, I do not intend to pick up on a genuine mistake - Cameron nakedly meant since 1941, and US entry into the war...which again is a fair comment.
Dean
ReplyDeleteJust when should the UK get off it knees?
Do you think the people of Canada, Australia or New Zealand to name but a few think "they are the junior partners" People from every other country in the world take justifiable pride in their nations, but in the UK it is ok for our senior politician (god help us) to grovel at the feet of an American president.
Just as an aside why are unionists in Scotland happy to see their country trashed by someone who was elected to defend the whole UK?
Presumable these same unionists would have no objection to the UK political and legal systems being trashed by the EU and USA, now that cowardly Cameron has set the precedent.
Want a country to trash Mr President, come to the UK, better not try with other countrys they might have some national pride and some backbone.
Respect, Cameron does no know the meaning of the word, and that is why the toxic torys are today even more toxic in Scotland than they were last week.
P.S. Dean do you think Churchill is turning in his grave at the comments of his spineless successor?
Dubbieside,
ReplyDeleteThe UK is the junior from geography to military capacity.
That is the reality of the transatlantic relationship, and a damn good argument for the UK to draw closer to the EU; where we can play a leading role.
I think he will find that Scots are not keen on being used as a political football WTF !!!
ReplyDeleteITS WHAT THEY ARE BEST AT god almighty you can tell the Scots any porkie and they will believe it
here is one, [the oil is running out]!!!!
Dean
ReplyDeleteTry telling that to the families of any soldier who died in the Second World War.
Oh we were the junior partner.
Do you think that Churchill thought we were the junior partner.
Dubbieside,
ReplyDeleteThe UK was the junior partner. Its historical fact.
Economics, USA had higher output, higher industrial capacity, sustained less damage, are larger geographically ... the UK doesn't have an empire anymore ... time to get over it and realise the UK and Europe is the future: time to rebalance our relationship with the USA, through a federal Europe.
Dean
ReplyDeleteAnswer the question.
Would Churchill have thought that we were the junior partner? Maybe his speech should have been " never in the field of human conflict have so few junior partners Etc"
Would he think his current successor was man enough for the job.
By the way I would like Scotland out of the UK never mind the EU. Time to stand on our own two feet, far from any tory interference.
Dubbieside,
ReplyDeleteYou are asking me to read the mind of a dead genious - you will forgive me for no answering. I have left my psychic powers elswhere ...
But you want Scotland to leave the UK, and the EU do you? So your policy is to distance ourselves from our largest economic partners?
I cannot support that. And if that is SNP policy, alongside NATO withdrawal, it smacks of isolationism, and I want no part of it.
Anon: Not another anonymous Englishman that does not want to stand up and be counted are you? Thanks for taking a bit of the post out of context and using it to score your cheap point. Bet you had a snigger over that for quite a while. Well I have to admit you really put us all in our place. Well done!
ReplyDeleteDean: I wont intrude on your discussion with Dubbie. But would be very interested to surmise what you would have said a year ago had Gordon Brown said we were the junior partner. No doubt it would be you jumping to Churchill’s defence instead of Dubbie.
ReplyDeleteWhat a load of garbage by Dean. So leaving the UK and EU will leave Scotland isolated will it.
ReplyDeleteFunny how most countries in the world manage to survive and trade with the rest without being run from another country or group of countries.
Just what every other country needs is £millions being wasted on politcians being in another country doing nothing but interfering in that other country's affairs like we have here in Scotland whilst or own parliament struggles to help its people because that other country is holding on to the powers and resources that Scotlands government needs to create the jobs and wealth that these other countries can already do themselves.
Independence mean standing on your own two feet and competing, and trading, with other countries for the benefit of your own people. Other countries can and do do this - so can we.
Competition creates jobs - strange argument for a Tory who wants to waste £millions on unemployed useless MP's and MEP's and wants to keep Scotland living on handouts instead of standing on its own two feet.
Dean
ReplyDeleteLooks like the likes of Switzerland have isolated themselves and distanced themselves from their largest economic partners. Just how do they manage to survive?
Maybe they should contact Westminster and beg to be made part of your wonderful union. Maybe then they could be as strong and as powerful as Scotland is.
Just think of the benefits Dean, no need for diplomats, no foreign embassies, its a wonder they have not thought of it.
They could ask Cameron to tell the USA all these years of neutrality were a mistake and he profoundly disagrees with them.
Magnum
I am not jumping to Churchills defense, I do not think he needs defending. I think it is sickening that Camerons comments belittle the UK war efforts. I do think though that you are correct, Dean would have surely "been able to read the mind of a dead genius" and give a reasoned comment, if, as you said, Gordon Brown had made the junior partner remarks.
Come on guys, sucession from thr European Union is unthinkable!
ReplyDeleteIt makes complete and total sense for European member-states to integrate together in a highly competitive, globalised [increasingly small] world.
Turning away from supranational harmonisation oin favour of 19th Century nationalism is terrible, regressive and I and my fellow pro-Europeans shall never stop fighting against any advocate of it.
The EU is yhe single greatest advance in human history, Scotland - if it ever became independent - must play a part in that.
... you don't want to end up like Iceland do you? Having to negotiate entry into the EU at a time not of our choosing?
Dean:
ReplyDeleteIceland only got into the same sort of mess taht the UK got into. It is already pulling itself out of that mess.
Membership of EFTA along with Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway sounds like a good deal. I'd swap my living standards for theirs in a minute!!
I've always thought it interesting that the special relationship forged in the cataclysm of World war II, and personified by the relationship between Churchill and FDR, endures to this day (at least in name.)
ReplyDeleteThere are many ironies. Not least the recent jaw-dropping statement by your Head of Government that Britain is a "junior partner." While it may reflect some economic and military realities, it's simply not the sort of thing a national leader should say....or maybe even think.
Of course we always have the Americans who claim that militarily powerful America is the benefactor of the world, and was nothing less than the wartime savior of Britain. Americans conveniently forget that if the RAF had not defeated the Luftwaffe in that dreadful Summer and Fall of 1940, then America would have been confronted with the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.....and without the British army, navy, and air force.....between them and Hitler. (In 1944, it was hard enough to get across the Channel, much less the wide ocean.)
So Britain held the line....and FDR wrestled with an isolationist-minded public and Congress. By some political miracle, he got Congress to approve lend-lease for Britain and her allies in early 1941 (even as the Neutrality Act was still the law of the land.) There was not much evidence of a special relationship back then. (Other than the distant colonial past.) Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador to Washington, was famously heard to say "I have never liked Americans." And Joe Kennedy (JFK's father), the American Ambassador to The Court of St. James, was sacked by FDR for making a statement during the Battle of Britain to the affect that Britain was finished. As for Churchill, some of the British aristocracy were always certain that his most irritating habits.....the arrogance and the showmanship.....were surely American traits inherited from his mother. The young FDR, then an Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had met Churchill in London in 1918. FDR didn't much like him, thinking him arrogant and talkative.
In the end, it all came together (but with Russia and China taking almost 90% of the allied battle deaths in the war, compared with about 2% each for Britain and America). Britain had valiantly held the line while FDR struggled with an isolationist Congress. But on the night of the Pearl Harbor attack, with his mother's country finally in the war, Churchill wrote (in Volume 3 of his "Second World War") that he went to bed and "slept the sleep of the saved and thankful".
So given the intensity of the struggle, maybe it's not surprising that the afterglow of the wartime alliance endures in some form. But some historical perspective (notably on the American side) might aid in mutual understanding of the term as it applies to the modern world.
Danny: I know it was pretty bad for Cameron to creep in that way and to then belittle the efforst of everybody but the USA in the second world war. No offence but the USA did not win that conflict single handed, I think you are right China and the USSR deserve a lot of credit as do the Brits for 1940. Just as you say.
ReplyDeleteAs usual Danny... an intelligent, even-handed, and eloquently expressed piece which seems to leave nothing out...
ReplyDeleteIt could be that the war in Europe would never have been won if Hitler hadn't made the same mistake that Napoleon made in the run up to 1812.
The Russian winter seems to defeat even the hardiest of souls.
Tris...Absolutely so! Britain and America had a hard enough time on the Normandy beaches, and during the months that followed, even as a good part of the German army was bogged down on the eastern front. People sometimes forget that the huge majority of the allied casualties (nearly 2/3 of the deaths) in the war with Germany was suffered by the Red Army.
ReplyDelete