My Take | Lords and ladies of Britain really need to get their facts right
- As London looks set to break human rights laws, privileged voices fall short of the truth on a veteran Hong Kong journalist and his detained wife
The lengths to which some British politicians and public figures will go for virtue-signalling and the shaming of Hong Kong are quite extraordinary. The problem is that the more frequently they cry wolf, the quicker they lose all credibility.
Last month, a cross-party group of 54 British members of parliament and public figures called for the release of detained former lawmaker Claudia Mo Man-ching so that she could visit her husband Philip Bowring, who was supposedly seriously ill and being kept in an intensive care hospital unit.
Most of those who signed the letter were the usual suspects from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong and Hong Kong Watch, the de facto British propaganda organs which focus on defaming the city, sorry, I mean fulfilling their historical moral responsibility as the former coloniser.
The groups are the British part of the global information warfare engineered in the Anglo-American sphere and led by Washington as part of a full-spectrum containment and encirclement strategy. Unhappily, Hong Kong has been sucked into this all-out Western propaganda war.
But you would expect the information warriors of this global disinformation campaign – people such as Lord Alton of Liverpool, last Hong Kong colonial governor Chris Patten, and former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind – to pay more attention to basic facts before jumping the gun over Mo and Bowring, who is also a former op-ed contributor to this newspaper. Lord who? It’s David Alton, a member of the British House of Lords; you know how those Brits are obsessed with their aristocratic titles.