Iain Dale:
"Sixty Minutes from now, the Chinese government will kill a mentally ill British citizen.Really..?
Wars have been started over less."
We'd start a war with China over them topping a drug smuggler caught bang to rights?
I think not...
The odious Clive Stafford Smith:
"Belmonte's pictures of an unshaven Akmal, sitting on a bench in a crumpled white suit and staring despondently across a homeless shelter, tell the story more eloquently than any lawyer could."When even this man is reduced to whining about how pitiful the victim is rather than how he was innocent, you know the case against him is pretty watertight.
And not forgetting Gordon Brown:
"...appalled and disappointed that our persistent requests for clemency have not been granted. I am particularly concerned that no mental health assessment was undertaken. "Of Shaikh?
Or of Gordon, thinking he had the slightest chance of influencing China to do anything?
7 comments:
If you go to a foreign country, commit a crime against their laws, you take your chances, mentally ill or not.
I guess they wouldn't lend us the money to pay them off and have this manic depressive (whose depression was so severe it made him smuggle 4 kilos of drugs into a country which notoriously carries the death penalty for drug trafficking) released. Good for them. We'd only fritter it away on things we didn't need any way.
This should be a keen reminder to those who still don't quite understand how little weight we carry as a nation on the world stage, or indeed, anywhere outside the islands. It's all over save the crying now.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
Looking around at the UK's inner cities and the benefits lifestyle, crime culture that dominates it, the Chinese can teach us a few things about law and order.
Dale is right, we have gone to war with China in the past to defend the rights of Britons to sell dope to the Chinese.
Well at least it stopped Mr Dale from posting endless and utterly boring lists of the best of this and that for 2009. Mind you he was back doing it again soon afterwards. How I hate these end of year 'customs'. As for the dead Briton? He must have been mad to do it...in China...but then again you can be mad AND bad. I suppose Gordon and Milliband are SO angry that they'll break off diplomatic relations with China over it? Naaaaaaahhhhhhh!
The faux outrage over what has happened to the unfortunate Akmal Sheikh is overdone because it was never likely that the Chinese would take lectures from liberal Europeans on this issue(look at how they kept the same hand wringing Europeans out of the loop at Copenhagen !).
The final nail in Akmal's coffin (literally) was probably the decision of the EU, taken just before Christmas, to extend for another 15 months the imposition of 16.5% import duties on shoe imports from China. To the Chinese, the UK of the present day is just a province of the EU, while the UK of 150 years ago was the country that humiliated it more than any other (via the Opium Wars). Neither encounter was likely to make the Chinese tender hearted towards a deranged New Brit drug smuggler.And the idea that they would pay any attention to the protestations of Gordon Brown or the FO was simply delusional.
"This should be a keen reminder to those who still don't quite understand how little weight we carry as a nation on the world stage, or indeed, anywhere outside the islands."
Indeed. Calling in the Chinese Ambassador yesterday must have had them really shaking in their shoes. Not.
"I suppose Gordon and Milliband are SO angry that they'll break off diplomatic relations with China over it? Naaaaaaahhhhhhh!"
Didn't stop them attending the Beijing Olympics, did it?
"The faux outrage over what has happened to the unfortunate Akmal Sheikh is overdone because it was never likely that the Chinese would take lectures from liberal Europeans on this issue..."
Only in Brown's delusional mind is Britain still a 'great power'...
"The final nail in Akmal's coffin (literally) was probably the decision of the EU, taken just before Christmas, to extend for another 15 months the imposition of 16.5% import duties on shoe imports from China."
Good catch!
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