LONDON — United Kingdom Foreign Secretary David Lammy has been lambasted in the British media and elsewhere after making a remark in his first post on his new blog titled “Progressive Realism” on the website Substack that “Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s” – namely Nagorno Karabakh.
The Financial Times quoted Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, from X that Lammy appeared to be “contradicting long-standing UK policy” in a way that was “totally inappropriate and throws into question the foreign secretary’s judgment.” Associate Fellow at the London-based thinktank Chatham House Laurence Broers weighed in too, calling them on X “poorly informed remarks” and proclaiming, “It’s a real gaffe by the foreign secretary.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, Congressman Brad Sherman, again on X, called Lammy’s remarks “a stain on UK foreign policy” and an endorsement of ethnic cleansing.
The UK Foreign Office in turn clarified on Friday, September 20 that Lammy’s comment did not mark a change in the UK government’s stance on Nagorno-Karabakh, though the Armenian government formally is seeking further clarification from the United Kingdom, according to an Armenian official cited in the Financial Times.
Azerbaijan’s Ambassador to the UK Elin Suleymanov, not unexpectedly, approved of Lammy’s statement, declaring: “I don’t understand why there’s so much response to this blog by the foreign secretary, because what [Lammy] said is absolutely true.”
