It’s official – We haven’t got your back

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land - dealing with thuggish regimes

Here’s a bit of advice which, lamentably, is totally useless because it’s impossible to cease being British just because you are unfortunate enough to find yourself in a totalitarian regime which denies freedom of speech and engages in state gangsterism by taking foreign nationals hostage.

While other countries are serious about protecting their nationals, the Brits pride themselves on not engaging in prison swap diplomacy and not being  frazzled when it comes to getting their own people out of jail and out of danger.

Few gangster regimes are more gangsterish than Putin’s Russia. Right now the British/Russian journalist and political activist Vladimir Kara Murza is languishing in jail on trumped up charges and stands in danger of sharing the fate of Alexei Navalny, who also bravery  returned to Russia despite threats to his life.

Bill Browder, the indefatigable campaigner against the crimes of the Putin regime, recently went to the Munich Security Conference to lobby participants on Mr Kara Murza’s behalf and to call for stronger sanctions against the regime.

He reported that a large number of nations were prepared to help Mr Kara Murza should the opportunity arise by way of a prisoner swap. The British however insisted that they would do no such thing because of a firm policy against hostage diplomacy.

Meanwhile another high profile British citizen, Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher, is on trial in Hong Kong on similarly trumped up charges of subversion and collusion with foreigners. The outcome of the trial is not in doubt and Mr Lai faces the prospect of a lifetime in jail or worse, being sent over to a Chinese Mainland jail where political prisoners have a habit of dying in custody.

Mr Lai has largely been denied consular access and the British response to this elementary diplomatic courtesy has been, as always, silence. Worse still successive foreign secretaries, until the arrival of David Cameron, refused to meet Mr Lai’s son, Sebastien, fearing it would damage Sino-British relations.

Following unrelenting pressure Lord Cameron finally met Sebastien Lai but it took a lot of  unrelenting pressure, echoing the efforts of Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe’s husband when she was held in Iran on another set of spurious charges. Before this happened the danger to her life was exacerbated by the careless stupidity of the then Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who blithely described her as being a journalist, thus feeding the mendacious Iranian narrative of what she was doing in the country.

Fortunately the pressure in her case, following the dreaded Mr Johnson’s departure, reached a level where Britain’s proclaimed policy of no hostage diplomacy crumbled and she was freed in return for a payment of money owed to Iran.

So, the claim of no hostage diplomacy is palpably false but the mindset of the grand Foreign Office mandarins and their house trained ministers is that the marvels of British diplomacy work best under a canopy of silence and low profile activity.

This is nonsense and other countries who take the protection of their citizens overseas more seriously have consistently proved it to be so.

Aside from the astonishing arrogance that propels British policy there is a gem of veracity in the idea that engaging in hostage diplomacy is counter productive because it only encourages thuggish regimes to take more hostages. This assumes that they need encouragement.

The reality is that thuggish regimes, in other words bullies, are like bullies the world over, they back off when someone stands up to them and have nothing but contempt for the weak.

When Chinese diplomats flagrantly beat up a protestor in full public view outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester the British government meekly allowed the diplomats to be posted back to Beijing without so much as an agonised whimper. When the security services openly accused the lawyer Christine Lee of being a threat to national security as a result of her activities in parliament and elsewhere on behalf of Beijing, the Brits bravely took no further action and Ms Lee remains at large and indeed is still operating her business.

How they must laugh back there in the People’s Republic of China when they know that dealing with the Brits is such a piece of cake, the kind of cake you can have and eat, Boris Johnson’s preferred version of cakeism.

Dealing with autocratic regimes is never going to be easy or nice and means doing things, such as prisoner swaps, which are repulsive. The problem is that the alternatives are worse and can be literally fatal