Great Rolling Clouds

Peter Hitchens writes:

I really was brought up to believe that, in this country, nobody could be seriously punished without a jury trial. I was told that governments were in general fair, that a free Press and a benevolent Crown kept us safe from tyranny.

When I read the famous Franz Kafka novel, The Trial, about a man arrested and prosecuted by a power he cannot reach, for a crime that is not named, I thought it was about those dark, tyrannical foreign lands to our east, where such things have always happened.

Now I know that all this may once have been true [an interesting turn of phrase; he is there, but he cannot yet say so in print], but now it certainly is not. What is worse, and this fills me with actual rage, hundreds of my fellow journalists could not care less that a British citizen has had his life ruined, and is forced to live in exile, on the basis of a decree issued by a minister long out of office.

Every one of them is, as a result, in danger of being treated in the same way by some future government that does not like them. Only a major fuss will alter this. Only a tiny few, including most notably Toby Young of the Free Speech Union, can see the danger and have lifted a finger.

The English civil courts will not help. The fabled Strasbourg Human Rights Court, supposed friend of the underdog, knows of this man’s plight and does nothing. When he recently appealed to the King for aid, he was told to take his problems elsewhere. (You might note at this point that the powers of the Crown were used by the Blair government to pardon 16 Irish Republicans between 2000 and 2002.)

Now the European Union has joined in the state-sponsored bullying. The main effect of this Brussels intervention is that the man involved now cannot legally get home from the town in Russian-occupied Ukraine where he lives in destitution.

The European superstate has banned him from entering EU territory or airspace, so it is hard to see how he could get back even if he had the money for a ticket.

Last week he was told by the High Court that he must pay council tax on his London home, even though he is legally banned from paying anyone anything, and is stuck nearly 2,000 miles away. If he does not, the council can send in the bailiffs to seize his belongings. If he was in prison, and convicted of a crime, they could not do this.

He is totally unique. He is the only British citizen, holding no other passport, who has been subjected since July 2022 to the unending sanctions which forbid him to pay for anything or be paid for anything. There is no end date for this treatment. Even armed robbers know when their punishment will end.

You might think he must be a money-launderer or an arms dealer, or a recruiter of mercenaries, or an official in a tyrannical government. But he isn’t. You can look him up. He isn’t very nice and he isn’t very wise. But he is not some sort of international mastermind of evil. If he were he’d have another passport and the sanctions wouldn’t really bother him.

He is called Graham Phillips. I don’t like him at all. I have no desire to meet him. But I am obliged by my heritage, my background, my upbringing and everything I believe in to urge that he be freed from this spider’s web of despotic treatment which insults our national tradition of liberty and justice.

Mr Phillips did some rather stupid things while trying to work as an amateur journalist in the midst of the Ukraine war. You can easily research them.

I don’t defend them. On the contrary, I condemn them. But I won’t go into them, as no criminal charges have ever been made against him. Honestly, if they had been, I wouldn’t object, and nor would I try to help him.

The sanctions against him are not even imposed because of these actions but because of a vague catch-all charge worthy of a police state. It says he is ‘a video blogger who has produced and published media content that supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilise Ukraine and undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine’. Ukraine seems to have survived somehow.

But I have observed the flat, cold hard face of the state turned towards him for some years now, and I am sure that they see a precedent in this case.

Let them get away with using these powers to inflict ruin and exile, without charge or trial or verdict, and nobody is safe. So, my fellow scribblers, why don’t you do or at least say something?

And:

Great rolling clouds of burning oil rise over Russian cities. I think we may be sure that there will be many more such raids and fires.

Ukraine, a poor, weak country without advanced technology or especially good spies, has somehow become a major power and is credited with these pinpoint attacks, whose long-term aim is obviously to bring about regime change in Moscow. Will we one day find out about all the help Kiev has been getting?

If this plan succeeds (and Vladimir Putin’s stupid invasion made it possible), let’s hope the regime change goes better than it usually does. For there are people in Russia far worse than Putin.

Europe, which in the joyous 1980s and early 1990s was suddenly reunited after decades of Cold War, is now more severely divided than ever. Real hard war has come to us again and may spread here if not very carefully handled.

I can see why some rather dim but powerful political interests in the USA might have wanted all this. But why Britain should be involved in it, I really cannot tell.