The Test of Gordon Brown’s Values

By Daniel Simpson

[This article is cross-posted here, with comments]

Of all the warm words clouding Britain’s “partnership of purpose” with America, four rang especially hollow this week: freedom, justice and human rights.

Far away from Camp David, and Gordon Brown’s choreographed coming out, one of history’s footnotes was picking holes in the Churchillian script about “a joint inheritance not just of shared history but shared values.”

In a letter to The Times, a man named Olivier Bancoult complained that:

“Calls for justice in the world are hollow as long as Britain denies justice to its own people.”

Readers could be excused for scratching their heads here, but the outrage of which he writes ought to be a national scandal: it’s as much an indictment of British subservience to Washington as the decision to invade Iraq.

Almost 40 years ago, Mr Bancoult and his compatriots were evicted from an old British colony in the Indian Ocean, where their coral-encrusted islands were turned over to the Pentagon. The largest, Diego Garcia, now serves as an American aircraft carrier and plays host, on occasion, to planes ferrying prisoners to foreign torture chambers.