(TibetanReview.net, Oct22, 2015) – Many MPs in the United Kingdom were reported to be upset by Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to deal with awkward issues such as Tibet and democracy behind closed doors. Paul Flynn, a veteran Labour MP remarked that Britain was behaving “like a supplicant fawning spaniel that licks the hand that beats it,” said a Financial Times report posted on cnbc.com Oct 21.
And among those most annoyed by the government’s posture towards China was John Bercow, the House of Commons Speaker. The report said his irritation with what he saw as Mr Cameron’s grand kowtow had became highly visible on Oct 20.
The first signs of Mr Bercow’s annoyance came in the morning as he chaired a session of the Commons, when one MP raised next month’s visit to London by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. The report said Mr Bercow, Britain’s most important “commoner” and representative of the chamber to the Queen, said pointedly: “And of course the Indian prime minister is the representative of a great democracy.”
And while welcoming the Chinese president in parliament, Mr Bercow was reported to have recalled how Westminster had recently welcomed four Asian leaders but only found time to mention just one of them, Burmese democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi. And he proclaimed that the Burmese politician was “an international symbol of the innate human right of freedom”.