A British MP's plan to visit Taiwan has been calculated to inflame the crisis between East and West — so said a political pundit.
Sources revealed on Monday that Conservative backbench MP Tom Tugendhat would lead the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which he chairs, on an official visit to the island which China considers a breakaway province towards the end of the year.
The leak came 24 hours ahead of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's arrival in Taipei, ignoring warnings from Beijing that the move would force it to take unprecedented measures to prevent Taiwan declaring formal independence.
Pelosi's trip was not officially sanctioned by US President Joe Biden's White House, but she was nevertheless granted the use of an air force VIP transport, as well as an escort by F-15 fighters from a base in Okinawa and support from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.
Tugendhat, who was eliminated from the ongoing Conservative Party leadership contest in the third round, is an opponent of Britain's exit from the European Union and a vocal supporter of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's regime in its conflict with Russia.
Political analyst and former British National Party (BNP) member of the European Parliament Nick Griffin told Sputnik that the publicly-announced trip was born out of "the same self-harming foreign policy obsession as the UK elite's backing for the NATO puppet regime in Kiev".
Griffin said the "unseemly determination to confront first Russia and then China over issues which are none of our business," was "so pointlessly dangerous that it is very hard to work out the real motive".
He advised those puzzled by the move to "follow the money".
"The constant saber-rattling by Western leaders — and especially the upper echelons of the Conservative party — is providing their friends in the military-industrial complex with a perpetual jackpot of ultra-lucrative contracts," Griffin said.
But he added that there was a deeper, if no less avaricious, motive for provoking conflict with Beijing. "We also need to consider the oft-expressed desire of the World Economic Forum and various other powerful lobbies to 'reduce our carbon footprint', by which they do not of course mean their own as individuals, but that of ordinary people in the formerly industrialized West," Griffin said.
Hitting their self-defined emissions targets would mean "extreme restrictions" on the living standards people are now used to, he went on to explain.
"To be seen to crush public consumption in this way would be political suicide, but with the help of war propaganda from the compliant corporate media, they might just to able to persuade the public to accept energy suicide-by-Russia and consumption suicide-by-China," Griffin argued. "It fits perfectly with the policies promoted by their WEF sponsors and ideologues, so perhaps this explains the otherwise inexplicably insane rush to pile one crisis on top of another."
Griffin said Pelosi's provocative visit similarly illustrated how the UK has walked "in complete lockstep with Washington" for decades.
"The only question is over the precise nature of the relationship, since many of the most dangerous war propaganda lies — the poison gas false flag hoaxes promoted by the White Helmets in Syria, for example — originate with MI6 in London," he said. "The UK may be Washington's poodle, but its barking does at times seem to be used to prod the USA into action, rather than simply following in its masters footsteps".
THe former MEP also warned about the dangers of this rhetoric and the future visit, saying that Tugendhat's proposed visit had "eerie and worrying echoes of the summer of 1914 about it".
"With NATO piling provocations over Chinese Taiwan and Serbian Kosovo on top of its reckless interference in Russian Ukraine, it would only take one accidental escalation to plunge us into World War Three," Griffin warned.
Even if war does not break out between the nuclear powers, the consequences of the West's embargo on Russian energy imports would be "devastating for ordinary people in the looming ‘Deep Freeze Winter’," he added.
Asked why the UK was still stoking the fires of conflict even as the energy crisis bites, the former BNP leader said it would provide an excuse for the havoc wreaked by zero-carbon policies.
"When you have already decided to eliminate the 'over-consumption' of the people who elect and pay you, it is clearly an attractive option to be able to blame someone else for the fact that your 'green agenda' has destroyed their ability to heat their homes, go on holiday or afford decent food," Griffin said.
He said the motto of the ruling class was: "You'll own nothing and eat processed bugs, but blame Putin and China, not us."
Apart from Tugendhat, the Foreign Affairs Committee has 10 members: five other Conservative MPs, three Labour, one from the Scottish National Party and one independent in the form of Neil Coyle.
Coyle was elected as the Labour Party MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark in 2015, but was stripped of the party whip in February this year for making racist comments to Henry Dyer, a journalist of mixed British and Chinese descent in a Parliamentary bar.
The MP accused his Labour colleague Barry Gardiner of taking money from "Fu Manchu" — the fictional Chinese criminal mastermind — in a reference to the £675,000 he received in campaign donations from a Chinese-born, British resident lawyer from 2005 onwards.
When Dyer pointed out he was half-Chinese, Coyle said he had already surmised that "from how you look like you've been giving renminbi [the Chinese currency] to Barry Gardiner".