For and Against

Never let it be said that the anti-Putin demonstrators are only telling us what they are against. No one watching them today can have been left in any doubt as to what they were for. No one, that is, apart from the BBC.

Rounding off a year of breathlessly reporting Arabs shouting "Allahu Akbar" when not flurrying the banners of some Marxist outfit or of the Syrian Social National Party, the BBC is today treating us to the same uncritical coverage of Russians waving either the flag of the Soviet Union or the black, yellow and white of Russian ultranationalism.

Neither the Caucasian Islamists nor the National Bolsheviks are in evidence, but the latter's flag - that of Nazi Germany, but with a black hammer and sickle in place of the swastika - has never prevented Auntie from paying them absolute deference.