Kemi Badenoch says Trump’s Venezuela raid was ‘morally’ right – UK politics live

By Andrew Sparrow · The Guardian World

Conservative leader questions robustness of rules-based international order and says ‘the world has changed’ Labour will switch to an “incumbency first” model to protect MPs at the next election rather than targeting seats, the deputy leader, Lucy Powell , has told Labour MPs. Jessica Elgot has the story. Good morning. Over the last three days it has been hard to find anyone in British politics willing to defend the US raid on Venezuela leading to the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro. In the Commons last night, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, engaged in a delicate balancing act – stressing the UK’s support for international law, while doing her best not to criticise the fairly blatant US breach of it – as MPs from all the main parties lined up to demand a more robust pushback against Donald Trump. Venezuela was a brutal regime. We didn’t even recognise it as a legitimate government. I think that what’s happened is quite extraordinary. But I understand why America has done it. And the reason why I say this is because, where the legal certainty is not yet clear, morally I do think it was the right thing to do. I grew up under a military dictatorship [in Nigeria], so I know what it’s like to have someone like Maduro in charge. I know what it’s like to have people celebrating in the street. So I’m not condemning the US. As we all know, international law is what countries agree to. Once people decide they don’t agree, there is no international law. There’s no world police, no world government, no world court. These are agreements. And when we look at what the opposition leader, María Machado, said, she said Venezuela had already been invaded. It had been invaded by Russia, by Iran, by Hezbollah. Where were the people talking about international law then? The US has actually been saying this for a very long time. I remember as trade secretary, the US has basically walked away from the World Trade Organization saying that everybody else was breaking the rule…