Four 
million deaths – that’s the shocking figure for how many people would have died in the UK if we’d suffered the same proportion of our population being killed as has been killed in Darfur.
It makes ‘just’ asking another question or speaking at another rally seem rather inadequate in the face of this monstrous brutality. Which is why – I’m setting up a local group to help take more action. It’s the subject of my latest newspaper column (for the Ham & High this time):
Two and a half years ago, Tony Blair took a stand saying that ‘international focus on Darfur will not go away while the situation remains outstanding’. But that stand was only temporary – for last year, Salah Gosh – the Sudanese security chief who orchestrates the violence in Darfur – was twice “welcomed” to this country.
You can read the rest of the Darfur article on my website.
UPDATE: If you are on Facebook, please come and join my Darfur group.
Lynne Featherstone 
You’re talking to the wrong people going to Parliament. Britain has no power to change the situation so long as it is subject to the UN and obliged to abide by the consensus of players many of who have no interest in letting anyone play human rights policeman.You say things like “…then we need to get China and Russia fully on board” but with no hint of how you’re going to do that. What do you propose? Bribe them? Threaten them? Embarrass them? What?It will be the same as every other horror under the UN’s watch. From the Laogai and Gulag, Tibet and North Korea, Rwanda and the Congo, Saddam’s Iraq and Bangladesh and Kashmir and Palestine and all the others.You’re quite right, it isn’t enough. But I don’t think people here are ready yet to do what is necessary. If they thought Iraq was bad and already want to give up, I can promise you that this will be immeasurably worse and will take far greater determination. Think of Churchill’s ‘on the beaches’ speech and consider for a moment what it cost us.Do you really think Europe has that sort of spirit any more?
Frankly, Lynne, I think it is a shame you have to make the point in this manner. It’s as though the figure of 200,000 deaths is not enough to make the point.After Rwanda, the world’s leaders declared that such an atrosity would never be allowed to happen again.It has. The sooner that is accepted the better.
It may be a shame Tom, though I will admit it’s shocked me into realising I should do more in a way that the 300,000 and 400,000 figures I’ve vaguely read in the past haven’t shocked me. My fault perhaps, but I am now glad to have been shocked.