Proving and Reproving

Madeleine Albright is dead, so there is that. Her description of the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of sanctions as "worth it" is being held up as evidence that she was a psychopath, but are those not supposed to be charming?

Julian Assange has today married Stella Morris. Other good news is that Hunter Biden's laptop has turned out to have been real, raising the question of why there was any other news at all, and that Laura Murray has humiliated Ian Austin, opening the way for Jeremy Corbyn to sue the next person to call him an anti-Semite as he has already wiped the floor with someone who had called him a terrorist sympathiser. Would that he had done all of this in 2015.

The Biden case is a fascinating piece of background to the softness on child pornography that has been displayed by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who cannot define a woman. The protection of Jimmy Savile by Keir Starmer's cervix springs to mind. They can, however, define a woman in Afghanistan, where girls are once again being prevented from going to school. 20 years of war for absolutely nothing.

So, you see, we can be proved right if we either wait long enough or, preferably, fight hard enough. Far from making the case for NATO, which traditional conservatives used to despise, the war in Ukraine is daily proving that the Russian military threat does not exist. A Russia that cannot conquer Ukraine certainly could not conquer the whole of Europe. We have been trying to tell you this for decades.

There is no evidence that he would be, but if Vladimir Putin would indeed be willing to launch a nuclear attack, then how would that make him any different from Starmer, who was on record to that effect? Like all Conservatives, Boris Johnson has never been asked the question.

We are being softened up for a false flag operation in Ukraine. Victoria Nuland has publicly confirmed the existence of the American biolabs there, yet all official media are still insisting that they do not exist while warning darkly about "a chemical weapons attack" and hoping that most people would think "same difference" between chemical and biological weapons. There is no evidence that the Russians have chemical weapons in Ukraine, where we know for a fact that the Americans have biological weapons, because they have said so.

But what if even the false flag were never hoisted? Just as there was nothing remotely pro-Saddam about the entirely correct opposition to the Iraq War, so there is nothing remotely pro-Putin about an anti-war movement that is more and more being proved correct about the Zelensky regime. Roma children are tied to lampposts and beaten, recalling Child Q, and very much in the spirit of what will soon be our own Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act.

The Ukrainian Government has seized control of all broadcast media, and 11 more political parties have been banned. They cover a wide spectrum, and most are tiny, which raises the question of why they were worth banning. But one has 43 MPs, having expelled a forty-fourth for not having condemned the Russian invasion. Anything that dissents from global liberal capitalism and its imposition by force of arms, including in time-honoured alliance with the Nazis and the jihadis who are both now active in Ukraine, is being criminalised as "pro-Russian", "Russian-backed", and "Russian-funded". This will not be confined to Ukraine. It already is not.

Yet in Britain, where it looks as if the Cambo oilfield is going to be revisited, the political tendencies that have consistently advocated all-of-the-above energy independence, not least from Russia, are precisely those which have been, are being, and will be branded treasonable in this way, even though Britain is not in the war in Ukraine. Think of Nigel Farage, or Alex Salmond, or George Galloway. While we waited for that decades-long harnessing of the power of the State, then these will be the same voices that will be calling for a deal with whichever of the bad sides had won, since as in most wars there is no good side, so that our people did not have to shiver in the dark or go cap in hand to the far worse regimes in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf tyrannies. Therefore, those voices have to be silenced preemptively.

We all know about grain from the Ukrainian breadbasket. Our people will rightly refuse to do without it. Even our fish and chips will soon be hugely expensive, since 60 per cent of our white fish comes from Russia. By sanctioning Russia, we are sanctioning ourselves. But since when did we have to buy our white fish from Russia or anywhere else? Well, thank the EU for that. Yet it is the pro-Brexit side that is something to do with Putin? This is what the young people call gaslighting. Some of us remember other words for it.

If the next General Election is indeed going to be in 2024, then that is far enough in the future for us to have been proved right yet again. The rest of you will pretend that you never supported, that perhaps you never even knew about, the bans on the works of Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky, unparalleled during the Cold War just as German and Austrian works had not been banned during either World War. Or the stripping of honours from Yuri Gagarin. Or the calls for internment. Or the demands that Russian artists and sportspeople denounce Putin in acceptable terms, regardless of the safety of their relatives at home.

Putin should declare a public holiday to celebrate the departure of Anatoly Chubais, who would be welcome to contest North West Durham in the Labour interest, since no one else wants to. The man whose privatisation programme created the oligarchs might find both Starmer and County Durham's remnant Labour Party a bit right-wing for him, but even so. Not even Alexei Navalny can find anything good to say about Chubais, although I would love to know how Navalny tweeted from prison. You could not do that here, where you will soon face a 10-year stretch for demonstrations of the kind that Russians were holding against the war.

Not that anyone in Russia has ever heard of Navalny, whose record has been thoroughly whitewashed in the West. The principal opposition party in Russia is the Communist Party. New Navalny is the politician that the neocons wish that Russians would like, or even notice. Of course his trial was a farce and an outrage, because Russia is as bad as Ukraine. But one or other of those is going to win. We are going to have to deal with whichever of them it was. This time next year, everyone will be claiming to have thought that all along.