Malaysia must stop saying one thing and doing another

In his first year in office as foreign secretary, David Lammy has made an astonishing 47 trips abroad.

- JOHN WHITTINGDALE

One of the most recent stamps on his diplomatic passport is from Malaysia, where he attended the 58th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on 12 July. As the event was opened by prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, he underlined in the official communique the principle of “centrality” as ASEAN’s guiding message, emphasising the need to ensure that, as one international scholar put it, the southeast Asian organisation should be the engine which empowers “the evolving regional architecture of the Asia Pacific”.

While in Malaysia, Mr Lammy paid a separate courtesy call to the prime minister. Pleasantries and gifts were exchanged, while the prime minister tweeted his delight at the meeting, lauding the upgrade in relations between Malaysia and the UK. In the tweet, Anwar also commended the fact that the UK and Malaysia now benefit from a “strategic partnership”, and that the relationship was “increasingly mature and strategic, grounded in shared values - justice, the rule of law, and universal humanity”. Honourable and self-congratulatory those sentiments may be, but they are some way removed from the reality of Malaysia’s current politics.