Shared values
While the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was doing some early bonding with new baby Jacob, his colleague at the Foreign Office. Kim Howells, was talking about Britain’s “shared values” with Saudi Arabia.
And so I started doing some thinking about values. First, let’s define our terms. My handy online dictionary offers: “values -- the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard.”
So to which ideals and customs do both Brits and Saudis have an affective regard? When Gordon Brown became leader of the Labour party, he spoke of the values he grew up with: “duty, honesty, hard work, family and respect for others.” He also spoke of “shared British values of liberty, civic duty and fairness to all.”
Well, I expect King Abdullah is happy to sign up to duty, honesty, hard work, and family. (We could maybe debate “honesty” in a country with a long tradition of “commissions” being paid to middle men – but we seem to be as good at paying them as Saudis are at receiving them, so perhaps that is indeed a value we share.)
“Respect for others” is an interesting one, given that all Saudi citizens are obliged by law to be Muslim, and no non-Muslim is allowed to hold any public act of worship. And no woman is allowed to drive.
But are “shared values” an essential requirement when arranging State visits? What values did we share with President Mobutu of Zaire when he came to London in 1973? Or President Ceaucescu of Romania in 1978?
“Shared interests”, on the other hand, are something rather different. A strong trade relationship, prosperity, stability, security … all these may well be on the agenda of governments with which the UK has little else in common. And in the case of Saudi Arabia, maybe it’s true that whatever misgivings you may have about the House of Saud, if they were to fall, you’d have even more misgivings about what might replace them.
But I confess, I’d dearly love to be a fly on the wall at dinner, when Gordon Brown engages King Abdullah in a discussion about liberty. “The anthems that today celebrate our country have at their heart a call to liberty,” said Mr Brown last week. I wonder what the King would make of that.
It's not easy to make sense of the world when you are talking about them. We have to keep them happy for the oil..
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