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My Take | The sun has already set on the nation they call Great Britain

  • Neither Asia nor the rest of the world needs British input to right itself. Instead, people nowadays debate whether it is a failed or failing state

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Britain’s national flag and European Union flags flap in the wind at EU headquarters in Brussels. Photo: AP

When your own house is on fire, would you ignore your own very real existential crisis and instead, keep lecturing how someone else should run his own household?

Do British lawmakers really think they matter to the world? This week they issued a report that describes Taiwan as “an independent country” for the first time. Published by the cross-party British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, it coincided with British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s visit to Beijing.

The report repeats the same claim, even the vocabulary, of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and her secessionist Democratic Progressive Party that the island “is already an independent country under the name Republic of China”.

It also criticises the Chinese Communist Party – note the nomenclature – but not China or Beijing, for threatening peace in the region.

British politicians don’t seem to realise the rest of the world doesn’t care what they think, because for most of us, the debate is whether Great Britain is a failed or failing state. Photo: dpa
British politicians don’t seem to realise the rest of the world doesn’t care what they think, because for most of us, the debate is whether Great Britain is a failed or failing state. Photo: dpa

Two Chinas? Presumably that’s not the position of the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak. Otherwise Beijing wouldn’t have received Cleverly, but would have recalled its own ambassador.

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