Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office — the country's most senior Foreign Office official — told MPs that his department had sidelined human rights work in favour of global trade agreements (the same agreements that allow sovereign wealth funds from the world's most brutal, oppressive states to buy huge swathes of the UK's public institutions at knock-down prices in the Tories' great sell-off of public assets).
It's called the "prosperity agenda" — promoting business at the expense of human rights. For example, Chancellor George Osborne just conducted a trade-mission to China where he didn't raise human rights issues at all, because "we have different political systems."
It used to be that globalists argued for liberalised trade with criminal states because it would somehow lift their populations out of forced labour, mass incarceration and totalising surveillance. Now that these values have been exported to the "free" world, the pretense of a human rights agenda for global trade has been abandoned. Now we're told that the spice must flow because it will make the country rich (just don't look too hard at who in the country is getting rich).
Sir Simon made his remarks to Mr Blunt's committee when he was questioned about how his department was prioritising resources. Asked whether human rights were now one of its "lower-priority activities", Sir Simon replied: "Well, answering as Permanent Secretary, I say that although it is one of the things we follow, it is not one of our top priorities." He added: "In a more constrained environment, the need to concentrate on Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, and the Middle East has supplanted it to an extent."
While Sir Simon said human rights was part of that work, he also admitted it was secondary also to the need to promote British companies abroad.
"I would not dispute that right now the prosperity agenda is further up the list [of priorities]," he added. h basis of the mutual respect of our two great nations."
Human rights are no longer a 'top priority' for the Government, says Foreign Office chief
[Oliver Wright/The Independent]
(via Reddit)
(Image: Lady of Hats, public domain)
