Is Keir Starmer’s silence on Venezuela a mistake? What history tells us |
It is unlikely that within the first few days of a great global event – one moreover triggered by its closest ally launching a coup and kidnapping a head of state – a British government has said so little. It took 16 hours for it to say anything at all, and then, not much. And it has said not much thereafter.
So little said, at such length: the prime minister, in his Sunday morning BBC TV interview; James Kariuki, chargé d’affaires in the UK Mission to the United Nations at Monday morning’s Security Council emergency session; and Yvette Cooper, foreign secretary, for over two hours in the House of Commons on Monday evening.
This is both explicable and arguable. For Britain, Venezuela is not particularly significant. There are trade interests but it is far away, of foreign tongue; absent from domestic political discourse. The last time a British prime minister and a Venezuelan president met – Tony Blair and Hugo Chavez – was in 2001.
However, other than in times of actual war (1812) the nadir in US-UK relations concerned Venezuela. A long-forgotten crisis was triggered in 1895 by a dispute over the border between it and British Guiana. The spat elicited the equally forgotten Olney corollary – a proposition from the US government which nonetheless repays reacquaintance in light of recent developments: “Today the United........