The ‘Special’ Relationship
The storm erupting over the apparent snubbing of Gordon Brown by Obama is threatening to rumble on into the Labour conference. It now appears that a desperate Numbeer 10 asked the White House for a meeting between the two leaders on five separate occasions. The requests were turned down, despite Number 10 claims that no such requests were submitted.
Some have suggested that Obama’s team know that Brown is not going to be around for a while and so it’s not worth while meeting him. However, it goes much further than that. The White House it not stupid and they clearly saw straight through the game Number 10 were playing. If Gordon Brown could have a meeting with Obama then potentially it would give him some good headlines. This operation had nothing to do with serious talks about serious matters, it was more about a photo op, a press release and hopefully some less than career ending headlines on the evening news.
Putting Number 10′s aims to one side, it is quite clear as to why the White House have ignored London – Megrahi. We knew when the Lockerbie bomber was released that Obama was less than satisfied with the decision and remember that he also has to reflect the views of his own electorate, an electorate which is not completely on his side at the moment. Whatever the legal situation in the UK is which lead to Scotland making a decision with foreign policy consequences it is a decision which have outraged many across the pond.
The Americans do not care whether London had no right to intervene. For them, devolution is our problem. Their problem is the decision. It was said at the time that letting the Scottish Justice secretary make a decision by himself was silly at best. London should have seen further than the actual decision and intervened. I acknowledge that justice is a devolved matter, but this decision has foreign policy implications which is not a devolved matter. If we are going to let politicians decide the fate of dying prisoners we need to ensure that the right people make the decision. The release was not just going to affect relations between London and Edinburgh, but also Libya and the US.
I said at the time of the release that this decision proved that devolution, or at least the extent of it that we have is bad for politics and I have just been proved right. New Labour created devolution because they thought it would be good for Scotland and it would silence calls for independence. In reality, the Scottish Parliament now wants more powers and with the Lockerbie decision, the disaster of devolution is now biting Labour back.
Of course the only man who is laughing now is Tony Blair – the man who did most of the constitutional demage to this country managed to jump ship just before the country went completely tits up.
Back to the US. This term the ‘special relationship’ has been used over the last decade or so to describe the relationship between the US and the UK. Clearly, it’s not so special now, but as Lord Heseltine said on Question Time last night, the US has never seen it as a special relationship. They have a special relationship with Israel, but not the UK. It is my opinion that Bush saw an opportunity to influence Tony Blair and Blair used it to try and show that he had some sort of direct line to the US President. It worked for both parties because Bush got what he wanted and Blair made himself look very important.
I don’t know what the future is of relations between the US and UK, but I think a change at Number 10 will have an impact. The US has a new regime after 8 years of no change and we will probably get a new regime after over a decade of no change. Clearly the US is using it’s first opportunity to protest about the Lockerbie decision to make a point, but at the end of the day it is Labour who is to blame for this latest chapter.
They have yet again proved their complete inability to run the country. What the masses thought was fantastic in 1997 has now been shown up for what it is and the damage that Labour have down to the country is now very obvious. Once again it falls to the Tories to fix the country.
The term ‘swings and roundabouts’ comes to mind.
