Saturday 17 March 2018

Realism About Russia

Some old gangster got bumped off. That happens. In London, it has been par for the course for a very long time. Hating the Government that put you away for fraud, fraud on a phenomenal scale, does not make you a political dissident. Look at the people who are refused political asylum, and then consider that it was granted to Nikolai Gushkov. 

Whose decision was that? Whose decision was it to let in the 23 Russian spies who have apparently now had to be kicked out, leading to symmetrical retaliation by Russia? Whose decision was it to let in Boris Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, even granting citizenship to the latter? What had any of Gushkov, Berezovsky and Litvinenko ever done for Britain? What did any of them ever do for Britain, apart from bringing to our shores their enemies from back home?

The same is true of Sergei Skripal, whom we had already paid for his treachery of purely financial motivation. There are people in Britain who weep when a British drone extrajudicially kills a British citizen who is fighting for al-Qaeda or for the so-called Islamic State. But, for good or ill, there are very few such weepers. Yet even jihadis do not do it solely for the money.

We are governed by a party that is awash with Russian money, as well as being up to its neck in the bloods-soaked soil of Saudi Arabia, directly imperilling British national security. That party resisted Labour's Magnitsky Amendment for over a year, until this week. It has repeatedly watered down sanctions against Russia. It is led by the politician who blocked an inquiry into the death of Litvinenko until her hand was forced by the High Court.

Yet our State propaganda broadcaster photoshops the Leader of the Opposition against a mock-Soviet backdrop, even altering his hat. Indeed, this whole story proceeds on the assumption that everyone still thinks of Russia and Uzbekistan as the same country, a country that has not in fact existed in a generation.

Nevertheless, the polls show a lot of Don't Knows about Theresa May's approach, and a very large number, more than 40 per cent, about Jeremy Corbyn's. Headline figures factor out Don't Knows. But they are there. The masses are not as stupid as the powers that be assume them to be. At some point, they might even ask what use either NATO or Trident has proved as a deterrent to the activation of a weapon of mass destruction on our streets. If, that is, any such activation has really taken place.

May claimed that her approach to Russia had consensus support across the backbenches. But only around 20 Labour MPs, one in 13 of the total and all of them the usual suspects, have signed the Early Day Motion in that tone. Yet May was not lying. Opposition sincerely bewilders and affronts her, so that she assumes its absence until it becomes absolutely impossible for her to do so, and then she lashes out.

She called a General Election because Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish Nationalist  MPs were daring to vote against her. During that campaign, her idea of an interview was to appear on The One Show with her husband and talk about putting the bins out. She had a kind of breakdown live on air, screaming, waving her arms and everything, when even very tame, invited journalists gently suggested that she had U-turned on social care.

She cannot comprehend that Vladimir Putin has failed to meet her deadline even though she had given him a very specific instruction, and she struggled to remain within the bounds of decency when the Leader of the Opposition presumed to ask her any questions about that abject humiliation. A humiliation as great as her capitulation to the European Union, a capitulation unopposed by any Conservative member of either House of Parliament.

Let both humiliations be brought to the Division Lobbies of the House of Commons by means of these four amendments, for an extra £350 million per week for the National Health Service, for the restoration of the United Kingdom's historic fishing rights of 200 miles or to the median line in accordance with international law, for a trade agreement with each of the BRICS countries while remaining thoroughly critical of all five of their current Governments, and for the integration into the Belt and Road Initiative of all four parts of the United Kingdom, of all nine English regions, and of all of the British Overseas Territories and the Crown Dependencies. 

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