I kind of asked myself this question already today in my previous post.

Some further reading on the background to Liam Fox’s curious friends, which makes me want to revisit the original question, has, however, come my way this evening – and can be found here tonight at the Observer.  As one politician is quoted as remarking in relation to the issue under examination:

Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshot said: “Dr Fox is a spider at the centre of a tangled neocon web. A dubious pattern is emerging of donations through front companies. We need to establish whether the British taxpayer was subsidising Fox and his frontbench colleagues. What steps did they take to ensure Atlantic Bridge didn’t abuse its charitable status?”

And as Jim Murphy, the Labour Shadow Defence Secretary is quoted as pointing out:

“With each passing day there have been fresh allegations of money and influence and it appears that much of the source was the Atlantic Bridge network and its US rightwing connections. We need to know just how far and how deep the links into US politics go. This crisis has discovered traces of a stealth neocon agenda. For many on the right, Atlanticism has become synonymous with a self-defeating, virulent Euroscepticism that is bad for Britain.”

Let us say, then, and I’d like to underline that I’m simply engaging in a thought experiment here, that those prominent Tories involved in the Atlantic Bridge – Fox himself, William Hague, George Osborne, Chris Grayling and Michael Gove – were actively pursuing, from within a UK governing party, the interests of another nation.

Even where this nation was our close friend, the USA.

Wouldn’t this be something skating so very close to treason too?

British politicians acting in the strategic interests of certain political lobbies with established political movements located on the soil of a foreign power?  Think I’m exaggerating?  Try reading this from the Observer piece:

Fox’s organisation, which was wound up last year following a critical Charity Commission report into its activities, formed a partnership with an organisation called the American Legislative Exchange Council. The powerful lobbying organisation, which receives funding from pharmaceutical, weapons and oil interests among others, is heavily funded by the Koch Charitable Foundation whose founder, Charles G Koch, is one of the most generous donors to the Tea Party movement in the US. In recent years, the Tea Party has become a potent populist force in American politics, associated with controversial stances on global warming.

Doesn’t this sound just a little like early 20th century spy novels of a most disagreeable and unhappy sort?  You know the sort of stories I mean: where clever and moneyed gentlemen make themselves rich on the backs of the poor who are sent to war.  Or where ingenious and megalomaniac individuals drive the world to the edge of destruction.

Anyhow.

Enough of my literary digressions.

In the light of all the above which the Observer regales us with tonight, here is my very simple question – a question I reiterate just in case you still ain’t asking it yourself: just how far can influential and serving British politicians get involved with the politics of another country without their integrity and loyalty to their mother country being called seriously into question?

And aren’t such behaviours, where the political interests of another country are being plainly prioritised before the interests of homegrown politics in Britain, the kind of activities which could legitimately require us to require them to prove their loyalty – not only to the Crown but also to the wider British voting public?

As I say.

Maybe not treason.

But so pretty damn close it should really make them feel ashamed.

It does me.
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Footnote: all this also makes me wonder how we haven’t till today had to reconcile the blessed virtues of globalised politics on the one hand – where nation reaches out unto nation – with the legal requirement to fight one’s own corner and protect the interests of one’s own country and state.

Perhaps we never noticed before.

Or perhaps that is what’s really at the heart of the long-standing kerfuffle over Europe.

Or maybe what’s different in this particular case is that it isn’t a matter of nation reaching out unto nation any more – but, rather, the wealthy and already powerful working out ways of carving up planetary real estate.  A much less seemly activity than striving to prevent war and conflict on a continent with a long history of the same … don’t you think?
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Update to this post, Sunday 16th October: New Statesman does an apposite round-up of what the newspapers are saying this morning.  And what the newspapers are saying is not pretty.

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