Donald Trump Speech : John Bercow is right– if the special relationship means anything | Rafael Behr
Channel: Trump Speech
Date: 08/02/2017

Donald Trump Speech : John Bercow is right– if the special relationship means anything | Rafael Behr :

Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf teaches that it is not a good idea to fabricate dangers when there are none. But it doesn’t contain any practical advice for what to do when danger really arrives.

Put yourself in the shepherd boy’s shoes. He has already lost his reputation as a spotter of wolves. The villagers think him a liar. Then he sees the real thing. What option does he have but to cry wolf again? He is forced to use the only defence mechanism available. Or should he stay penitently silent, hoping the feral canine predator is, by some miracle, actually vegetarian?

You’ve guessed where this is heading. There have been sightings of incipient fascism in the actions of democratically elected governments for as long as I can remember. When Margaret Thatcher faced down striking miners, her leftwing antagonists weren’t shy of the F-word. When Tony Blair wanted to introduce mandatory ID cards, his liberal critics plotted the policy alongside anti-terror laws and antisocial behaviour orders, charting a gradient towards tyranny. Oppositions never seem to accept that democracy is on a horizontal axis. It must be on a slope – and a slippery one too.

The horrors that lie at the bottom are belittled by constant, casual hyperbole. There will always be someone on the left willing to decry western foreign policy as cold-blooded colonial expansionism. There will always be some conservative fanatic trying to draw equivalence between the European Union and the USSR.

But there is an essential difference between the current moment and past sightings of totalitarian shadows. When previous prime ministers or US presidents upset rival parties or affronted liberal sensibility, the alarm was mostly theoretical. A handful of paranoiacs might have believed that Tony Blair or Barack Obama were actual dictators. The more pertinent claim was that some legal apparatus was being created and should be resisted, lest the power one day fall into the wrong hands. With Donald Trump, the objection is not abstract: he is the wrong hands.

Willingness to grasp that distinction is a dividing line in the debate over how much deference should be shown to the US president when he visits Britain this year. On Monday the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, picked a side by saying Trump would not be welcome in parliament. The government sees his intervention as irresponsible diplomatic freelancing. Tory MPs have heaped scorn on Bercow, saying he has embarrassed the country and harmed its interests. Opposition MPs have mostly supported the Speaker.

Bercow has authority over parliamentary invitations to foreign dignitaries, so he was not overreaching in a technical sense. But he was pushing hard at the bounds of convention. The Speaker’s chair has not previously been used to launch accusations of racism, sexism and contempt for the rule of law at a US president. Then again, no US president has invited the charges so brazenly.

    Tory MPs say Trump’s flaws must be overlooked because of the famous special relationship

There may be a handful of Conservative MPs who admire Trump and would gladly see him caressed with the plushest pomp British protocol can muster. The majority Tory view is more nuanced. It is that intimacy with US presidents is an unshakable axiom of British diplomacy, made strategically urgent now that the country is preparing to quit the EU. Trump holds the office and so tributes traditionally paid to that office must be paid to Trump, whether you like him or not.

Besides, parliament has hosted any number of violent dictators and kleptocratic scoundrels. The Speaker has shaken blood-soaked hands before. His Tory critics see the sudden discovery of a pious veto on visits as self-aggrandising, hypocritical theatre. Even Bercow’s friends wouldn’t pretend that he is immune to vanity.

So Tory MPs say Trump’s flaws must be overlooked because of the famous special relationship, and buttress that opinion by noting that other leaders are not subjected to the same extreme moral vetting process. These look like two aspects of the same argument – varieties of realpolitik – but they are in contradiction. The reason we want a “special” relationship with America is that, historically, we share more than transient economic and military interests: there is a cultural affinity and an alliance based on common political ethics. And the reason to dislike Trump is that he traduces those values.


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Sources: http://edition.cnn.com/
                https://goo.gl/Luad6q
                https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump