In what can only be described as a masterclass in theatrical hand-wringing, the British Foreign Office has today condemned a drone strike on a funeral procession in Sudan, issuing a statement so stern it practically curdled the milk in Whitehall's communal fridge. The strike, which reportedly turned a somber gathering into a scene of even more somber gathering, has been met with the full weight of London's disapproval, carefully calibrated to achieve absolutely nothing.
The Foreign Office, a department whose primary function appears to be generating press releases that sound like a disappointed headmaster's address, has 'unequivocally condemned' the attack. One imagines the diplomats, having sharpened their quills to a vicious point, penning a note so scathing that it would make a supervillain reconsider their life choices. Yet the words, however elegantly arranged, have roughly the same impact as a gin-soaked rag being waved at a hurricane.
Let us examine the timetable of this condemnation. At 11:32 AM GMT, a drone, likely operated by a chap who was probably sipping a flat white in a control room thousands of miles away, unleashed hell on a crowd of mourners. By 2:15 PM, the Foreign Office had convened, debated the correct phrasing (should it be 'deeply concerned' or 'profoundly alarmed'?), and fired off their epistle. The drone operator, presumably now on his lunch break, remains blissfully unaware of Britain's profound alarm. The mourners, many of whom are now beyond caring, are similarly unimpressed.
This is the modern art of diplomacy: a ritual dance where we pretend that words can undo deeds, where a strongly worded paragraph serves as a bulwark against barbarism. The Foreign Office statement likely included phrases like 'utterly deplorable' and 'must cease immediately,' all delivered with the stern countenance of a man who has just found a slug in his salad. But who, exactly, is meant to read this? The drone? The machine that carried out the attack, deaf to moral outrage but exquisitely sensitive to GPS coordinates?
Meanwhile, in the real world, the funeral procession was already a scene of grief before the sky turned into a harbinger of death. The addition of a few more corpses to the pile is, presumably, a statistical error in the grand ledger of geopolitical blunders. But we, the British, have done our part. We have condemned. We have expressed concern. We have, in all likelihood, scheduled a meeting to discuss scheduling a meeting about the issue.
And let us not forget the sheer, pantomime absurdity of it all. Here is a drone, a piece of technology that could be described as a 'flying toaster of doom,' piloted by someone who might be thousands of miles away, raining death onto people who were already crying. The Foreign Office's response is essentially a strongly worded letter to the universe, written in impeccable English, left on a park bench for the wind to read.
What would a meaningful response look like? Perhaps a cessation of arms sales to the offending nation. Perhaps a robust diplomatic intervention that goes beyond mere hand-wringing. But that would require actual effort, risk, and a modicum of political will. Instead, we have the safest possible option: a press release that will be filed away in the archives of forgotten outrage, alongside similar notes of concern about other atrocities in other faraway places.
So let us raise a glass of the cheapest gin we can find, toast the Foreign Office's boundless capacity for ineffectual condemnation, and shrug. For that, after all, is the British way: to deplore, condemn, and do precisely nothing, all while maintaining the polite fiction that our words carry weight. They do not. They are just noise, a brief flutter in the wind before the next drone strike, the next funeral, the next statement of 'profound concern.' Cheers.
