6 days ago
If modern Britain is so great, why didn't Lammy bring Vance to Tottenham?
It's intriguing that out of all the places in Europe he could have chosen to spend his August holiday, Vance chose Britain.
Like a 19th-century gunboat sailing into the port of some troublesome satrapy, there's almost the sense that the US vice-president was here to concentrate some minds within the Labour Government, and to remind them that they are being watched by the imperial metropole.
If Labour is so convinced that all is well with the modern Britain they're building, why not show the vice-president themselves, and force him to concede the error of his ignorant prejudice in front of the cameras?
That would shut cranks and the Russia shills up. Rather than have him cloistered away among the provisional wing of the lanyard classes in the Cotswolds, perhaps have him enjoy a traditional English seaside break at Bournemouth?
Obviously, the Government would have to find him a private house to stay in, seeing as the resort's main landmark hotels have been used to house illegal immigrants. Watching rival gangs of London 'roadmen' fight it out on the promenade would surely be a more exciting spectator sport than 'Dance for Vance'.
Or, rather than drag the veep all the way down from the Cotswolds to Chevening in Kent, the Foreign Secretary could have met him in the middle, in the traditional seat of one of the Home Counties; Bedford perhaps?
There, he could have seen the fruits of Labour's far-sighted decision to decriminalise vagrancy, and joined some of the city's new arrivals from around the world in wandering aimlessly about its shopping precinct.
Despite their political differences, by all accounts David Lammy has built genuine personal rapport with JD Vance. So when he visited London, why didn't he take his guest to visit his own constituency in Tottenham? Or maybe, the vice-president could have come away reassured by Britain's unity after a visit to Birmingham or Tower Hamlets, and an encounter with one of several exciting new political parties that have proliferated to challenge Labour among some of its ethno-sectarian client groups.
Given all of these possibilities, it seems disappointing that JD Vance has only been allowed to see the handful of places that still resemble the stuffy, boring old Britain of American tourists' imagination. All in all, it was a missed opportunity for the defenders of contemporary, multicultural Britain to confound their paranoid naysayers.
The parlous state of Starmer's Britain is becoming a favourite subject of Americans in Vance's political milieu.
As far as they are concerned, we are a country collapsing into criminal disorder, drowning in migration, and chafing under a government whose response to it all is a sneering assault on free expression and the imposition of vindictive two-tier justice.
The term 'anarcho-tyranny' is one they increasingly use to describe a system under which basic law and order is allowed to degrade, but in which the authorities will come down like a ton of bricks on anybody who even thinks about doing anything about it themselves.
Mr Vance's visit has coincided with a concerted attempt, not only by the Government, but also by defenders of the previous government, to insist that Britain's structural problems are being massively overblown by Right-wing cranks on both sides of the Atlantic.
Official statistics show that crime is actually coming down, and that GDP has generally been rising; and of course, non-immigrants still heavily outnumber immigrants as perpetrators of crime.
Just don't look too carefully at any of the base-rate figures underneath those numbers, or ask why an increasing number of goods in supermarkets have to have special anti-theft protection. Labour MPs have even been accusing those with misgivings of working for the Russians.
