SO INDIA HAS BOUGHT FRENCH. Whatever possessed them to sign a £13 billion contract for the French made Rafale fighter in preference to our Typhoons? I can have a good guess. Firstly, the Indians do not like us, as one time colonisers of their country. Secondly, by awarding the contract to the French, they saw it as a perfect way to rub our noses in it; knowing as they do the state of our current relationship with Sarkozy. Finally, they must have found it immensely pleasurable to imagine the odium that David Cameron must suffer from his critics after handing over £1 billion in foreign aid. Aid which they do not need, and can do without; for why else would they have behaved as they did? Unless, of course, they believe that they will continue to receive this aid, no matter what? Which is most likely.
This is the second time within a month that the French president has got the better of Cameron, and he must be enjoying, what he perceives will be of benefit to him come the French election.
If I were Cameron, I would come down hard on the Foreign Office (FO). No doubt these Rolls Royce brains, which we are told they have, have been working overtime to help secure this contract; and no doubt advised the prime minister to continue with the aid, on the basis of such lucrative defence contracts being awarded to the British defence industry as a consequence.
It would not surprise me if some senior civil servant at the FO, is at this moment on the phone to Paris congratulating the French on being awarded the contract - in deference to the FO’s predilection for going native with whatever country (apart from their own) they have contact with.
WHEN WILL OUR politician’s learn? We are not liked in many parts of the world because we either colonised parts of it, or defeated other parts of it at one time or another. Yet, presumably because of this, we feel some obligation toward those countries we have, shall we say, had a shared intimacy with?
India is gaining in confidence, as she should. She will, along with China, become the ascendant economic force that will dominate the last third of this century. While we in the West will sink in our decadence.
The £1 billion we give annually to India may seem generous to us; but to the Indians? Well…they say…if they want to give us their money, then we would be fools not to accept it.
Has it not occurred to those effete platinum brained fools in the FO that our annual stipend, is nothing more than that, to the Indians. They do not care for our lowly contribution to their national coffers; they are on the way up and we in the West, as a whole, are on the way down.
Their time has come and ours is in the process of passing. Our only consolation as far as this rewarding of a military contract to France is concerned; is that they are as contemptuous of France as they are of us. For France was also a colonial power. India has rewarded one ex-colonial power with a few crumbs, at the expense of the colonial power that governed them.
This contract, with all its technical superiority over the French, is only important to us. As far as India is concerned, her only potential enemy is her neighbour, Pakistan; and as far as Pakistan is concerned, the French Rafale fighter is quite sufficient for the purpose.
THE LESSON THAT MUST come out of all of this is that we must take a long hard look at the foreign aid budget, which, you will remember, David Cameron ring-fenced when he came to power. It was the one department of state that was guaranteed to escape any cuts to its budget; and indeed, it was part of the planning to actually increase it.
We are buying business under the guise of foreign aid, and this must stop. For, as we have seen with the Indian contract, it can cause a great amount of embarrassment to the British people. This may not bother our politicians who are sufficiently thick skinned enough to go cap in hand and beg from a foreign power; which is what the £1billion annual contribution to India amounts too. But as far as the British people are concerned, it is a wake-up call.
Our country must reassert its confidence; if it fails to do so; as in my darker moments, I fear it might, then we are truly finished as any kind of power in the world worth speaking of.
We, as a nation, must look inward; we must above all else hang on to our sovereignty as a nation. We must no longer apologise for our colonial past, and we must no longer offer what amounts to bribery under the guise of aid.
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