Many A Line Crossed

When you have been both morally and politically outclassed by Matt Hancock, then you really are finished. Hancock was notably called "My Right Honourable Friend" by Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister's Questions, as they both heaped obloquy on Andrew Bridgen.

The people who think that the vaccine is positively lethal may or may not be the outer fringe of those who had to be cleared out for the coming lockdown, but that clearance has begun. This may be a year of two Prime Ministers, but they would be two of the three politicians most associated with the lockdowns, the third being Hancock. The present pestilence will be blamed on having lifted the previous restrictions, which would therefore be reimposed as the cover for settling the strikes. I predicted that six weeks ago.

You do have the right not to be vaccinated. Other people then have the right not to employ you, or not to have you in their homes or on their premises. Like all identity card schemes, including voter ID, vaccine passports are an intentional attack on the working class, on ethnic minorities, on sexual minorities, on political dissidents in general, and on peace activists in particular. Within 24 hours, nightclub bouncers were referring to a £50 note as a "vaxpass". But the basic point still stands. Your right to be an idiot is my right to treat you as one.

The people who are most enthusiastic for voter ID are anti-vaxxers who want to subject refugees to forced X-rays and MRI scans on the entirely fanciful basis that such procedures could determine their ages. As so often, race and class mirror each other. For at least six years, people who were used to unlined faces at 50 have insisted that refugees who looked like the mostly white teenage boys round here, and those had not been in a war zone, must in fact have been far older. And politically black boys always "look older" to those white people who are determined to be frightened of them. These tests would tell one only that the subject had reached certain biological stages that were typically reached at this or that age, but even in those terms how recently were they updated? Many of my contemporaries' teenage sons are strikingly tall, deep-voiced, and hirsute.

Since no one believes in the existence of his "consultant cardiologist", Bridgen belongs in the same intellectual category as Lee Anderson, who imagines that it is possible to feed oneself on 30p per day, and whose status as a Labour councillor until 2018 ought to come as no surprise. Anderson and Steve Bray should be packed off to wherever we were going to send Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg, who like many female truants has entered her twenties already possessed of the ability to tell a man's penis size from his face. We all remember her, just as we all remember an 18-year-old Tate, but we should be markedly less indulgent of one who was twice that age. Away with the pair of them, to the same place as Anderson, Bray, and the Markles.

Bridgen's reference to the Holocaust is to be expected in the present culture, to which Hitler is the only point of historical reference. There are many contenders for the title of "the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust". Let Gordon Brown take stock of that when he calls for a Nuremberg-style tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, where we pretend not to notice the Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel, the streets named after Stepan Bandera and the stadium named after Roman Shukhevyc.

Yes, there are also Nazis on the other side. The Wagner Group recruits them, as it recruits among the insalubrious in general, and strong traces of that have entered its culture. But that son of a Jewish father, Yevgeny Prigozhin, did not found it as an expression of Nazism. It is not Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, or any of the rest of those.

Having taken possession of the vast salt mines at Soledar, will Prigozhin give up control of the territory that his private company, largely staffed by dregs, had captured from NATO in Ukraine, where it was casually admitted last month that British troops had been for a year, since long before the Russian invasion? There is also gypsum in the area, and with Soledar is coming Bakhmut. Captured, not by the Russian Army, but by a "private military contractor".

These men's statues will one day be torn down, because their statues will have been put up. As the French and French-backed non-governmental organisations are expelled from Mali, Wagner Group arms and ammunition, up to and including four Mil Mi-17 helicopters, have arrived there. A base has been built near the airport of the capital, Bamako, a city of 2.8 million. The Group has also taken over the former French bases at Gossi, Kidal, Tessalit, and Timbuktu.

Africa has been Wagner country for quite some time. The Group provided bodyguards to several candidates in the 2018 Presidential Election in Madagascar, even including the winner who had been favoured by China and the United States, thereby guaranteeing the Russian takeover of Kraoma, Madagascar's national chromite producer. The Wagner Group had also been guarding the chrome mines themselves. Its involvement in Mozambique has been extensive. Its participation in the never-ending Libyan Civil War remains so. Ignore anyone who tells you that that war is over.

More than anywhere else, however, the Wagner Group's African operations have been, and continue to be, in the Central African Republic. Again, that is in the French sphere of influence, although the Group originally went in there, in 2018, to fill the security vacuum that had been left by the French military withdrawal, in 2016, following the loss of three quarters of the country's territory to rebel control. By all accounts, it is guarding the diamond mines in regime-controlled and rebel-controlled areas alike, as it also takes a great interest in the diamonds, gold, uranium, and thus government of Sudan.

There has lately been an operation to take down cryptocurrencies, not that I am any fan of those, after the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in the CAR had posed a threat to the CFA franc, itself pegged to the euro and so on. The CAR is a front line in the Great Game as it is being played in the present age. There are anything up to 2000 Wagner Group personnel there, if not more, and it has a firm grip on a number of government institutions, including the General Staff, such that it supervises or directly commands most of the units of the Armed Forces, including at least one EU-trained battalion. Known as Black Russians, hundreds of Centrafricans, former UPC rebels who surrendered, are now fighting for the Wagner Group in Ukraine, or are awaiting deployment there from Russia.

All this, and Soledar, too. Shades of the British and Dutch East India Companies. Or of the Crusader military orders, one of which still exists as a sovereign entity 924 years after its foundation, even without the territory that the Wagner Group is coming to control. With its huge commercial interests, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps may yet become something similar. With its forced labour projects, the SS might have done so. But unlike the Wagner Group, which even as a first principle runs itself, the Revolutionary Guard needs a Vali-ye faqih, although it might need to act decisively to obtain the one that it wanted, and the SS needed a Führer, although it might have had to have acted decisively to obtain the one that it had wanted.

The official line today is that that might have been Bridgen. Sunak as good as called him an anti-Semite in reply to Hancock. This is how it works. This was what they did to Jeremy Corbyn, who refused to fight back. He had called the bluff of the commentators who had always pretended that they would have been prepared to have paid more tax for a fairer society, and he had frightened the life out of the people who had always assumed that any politician who had said that would in any case have had no popular appeal. A campaign was launched the effect of which is that it is impossible, if not illegal, to criticise the regime that has just desecrated the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, where the local Anglican diocese maintains it on behalf of its British owner.

And this very day, at the Tower of London, Britain has signed a Reciprocal Access Agreement, allowing the two countries to station troops on each other's soil, with Japan, which is run by people who believe, "that Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers; that the 1946–1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate; and that killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated," as well as that the comfort women were not coerced. The first of those, at least, has been a widespread view in several of those countries at the time and since. Indonesia, as such, is a direct product of it, since the Japanese-backed rulers of the Dutch East Indies simply declared independence under that name at the end of the War. 

The founder of Taiwanese nationalism, Lee Teng-hui, was a volunteer Second Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army until the very end of the War. He always regarded Japanese as his first language, and Tokyo as the cultural capital of his wider civilisation. The dictator of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, Park Chung-hee, had been an officer in the Japanese Manchukuo Army that had occupied Manchuria. These are the heroic Asian Tigers of successive generations of the same neoliberals who have always lionised Augusto Pinochet. Their economic system neither requires nor upholds democracy.

The India to which both main parties in Britain are so keen to cosy up is run by the heirs of Mahatma Gandhi's Nazi-linked assassins, and it has always recognised among the fathers of the nation the likes of Subhas Chandra Bose, who raised an army in support of Japan. He has featured on stamps six times, and on coins three times. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport is the aviation hub for the whole of eastern and northeastern India. There is also a Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Island. Yes, an island. Of course the regime in China is atrocious. That does not make its enemies good. The defence of India in terms of economic progress is also applicable to China, and vice versa.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.