Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Welcome to the Free World
.
IN THE JULY
17th 2003 edition of the
Guardian
, in an article headlined 'We are now a client
state', David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor set out the case for Tony Blair having fi-
nally surrendered to the United States of America most of the few remaining shreds of
British sovereignty.
They point out that Britain cannot target, maintain or fire its Tomahawk cruise mis-
siles without US authority, that this same restriction has applied to the Trident missile sys-
tem for the last decade and a half (so that Britain's 'independent' nuclear deterrent never
has been; basically the British taxpayer has been paying for at least one sturdy spoke of
the US's nuclear umbrella all these years), that Britain has already entirely and formally
given up sovereignty in various British mainland bases and several overseas ones, like
the Indian Ocean bomber base of Diego Garcia, where the native people were thrown out
30 years ago and left on the docks in east Africa, that we spend a fortune gathering in-
telligence at GCHQ, share all of it with the US intelligence services - those paragons of
vigilance who did such a brilliant job preventing the atrocities on September 11th - but
they are under no obligation to share all they know with our lot, that (and this is ongoing
through recent and envisaged purchasing and equipment standardisation decisions), Bri-
tain is tied into the US war-fighting machine to such an extent that it will no longer be
capable of fighting a war without the US's approval and connivance, while being, by ex-
tension, entirely expected to muck in with any American military adventure where such
participation will help make this year's invasion look less like the exercise in naked im-
perialism that it in fact is.
They also make the point that your individual Brit cannot any longer rely even on the
occasionally dubious protection of the legal system which we pay for through our taxes
and at least nominally control through the democratic system of the country we live in.
British nationals held in the fantasy counter-reality that is Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay
on Cuba - prop. George Sauron Bush, Esq. - have effectively been abandoned by the
Crown and government that is supposed to protect them (well, they haven't got even the
basic good sense to be white, they are self-confessed Muslims, Dubya says they're all
Bad People anyway so
of course
they don't really count).
Finally, it now turns out that back in March, while we were distracted by all that spiff-
ing fighting, British Home Secretary David Blunkett signed a treaty with the US which
