Little Helpers

It looks as if Wee Nicky's moral compass has been doing the swirly thing again. In August the Independent reported that British banks are being left to regulate themselves when it comes to investing in the arms industry, and that RBS, of which the Government owns eighty-three per cent, has put more than a hundred million pounds of taxpayers' money into the likes of Lockheed Martin and in the dystopically-named Alliant Techsystems, which makes rocket motors for cluster bombs. Wee Nicky proclaimed at the time that he was "totally opposed to cluster bombs of any description", evidently in much the same sense as Wee Nicky is totally opposed to raising tuition fees, privatising the National Health Service, imprisoning children and illegally blowing up Arabs.

Today the Independent reports that Daveybloke's Cuddly Coalition is backing the United States and its fellow global paragons - Russia, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and the inevitable Israel - in an attempt to overturn the international ban on cluster bombs which for the past two years has been subjecting some nice people's profits to non-friendly fire and unhumanitarian detrimentisation. According to a spokesbeing for the Ministry of Wogs, Frogs and Huns, the aim is to bring "the world’s major suppliers, producers and users of cluster munitions under international regulation", by being very nearly as rigorous with them as Vincent Cable has been with the banks. Somehow or other, the report omits to state whether Wee Nicky's opposition to cluster bombs has managed to survive the past couple of months; and if so, how total it is these days.