Why Arson, Not Terrorism?

Has the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich fired warning shots at a British yacht 20 nautical miles south of the Isle of Wight, and therefore outside British territorial waters, causing neither damage nor injury? The Police could not find any evidence to support last night’s Panorama, and the Ministry of Defence, which hates Russia, will find nothing to back this up, either. A warning against what?

El Money spoke both Russian and Ukrainian. Most Ukrainians can speak Russian, but very few Russians can speak Ukrainian, so El Money was as good as certainly a Ukrainian. According to the BBC, he was posting on Telegram long after the three suspects had been arrested, sharing pictures, identity documents, and details of his father’s work. As spies do, of course. Still, this is yet another reason to have no fear of Russia, which cannot capture more than a small corner of Ukraine, and which attacks Keir Starmer’s former homes and former car by hiring Ukrainian rent boys, who were acquainted with those targets, to set fire to them while spraying the white spirit all over their own shoes. Oh, well, we had already been expected to believe that the GRU itself was given to coating door handles with Novichok. In the rain. As Paul Knaggs writes:

If the Russian government were behind the arson attacks on Sir Keir Starmer’s properties, why were the men in the dock convicted of arson, and not terrorism?

The question is not mine alone. By Monday’s verdict the press had already settled the matter: this was a Russian attack on the Prime Minister, and the BBC published its own investigation that morning declaring the fires part of a Russian campaign of sabotage and lies. And yet, in the courtroom itself, no evidence was put before the jury that the handler known as El Money worked for any state at all. Counter-terrorism police called it an attempt to cause unrest. No terrorism charge was laid. The headline said Russia. The indictment said arson. Only one of those had to be proved.

The state’s own conduct tells the story. Counter Terror Command investigated it. The Counter Terrorism Division prosecuted it. The Crown Prosecution Service filed it under “Terrorism.” The Prime Minister called it an attack on our democracy. By every operational signal the state itself sent, this was treated as an act of terror. And then it was charged as arson.

The official account asks a great deal of our credulity. We are invited to believe that a foreign power, reaching into the capital to strike at the Prime Minister, did so by recruiting an indebted young man from a Ukrainian jobs group on Telegram, walking him up from fly-posting to firebombing, and settling the bill in cryptocurrency. If that is genuinely how a hostile state now operates on British soil, the threat is graver than the verdict suggests, and nobody in authority appears to be examining it. If it is not how a hostile state operates, then we are being handed a story, and a story always has an author.

Either way, the charge tells the truth the rhetoric conceals. A terrorism prosecution, brought under the National Security Act written for precisely this, would have forced disclosure. It would have dragged the question of El Money into the light: who he was, whose work he was doing, what the state already knew. An arson charge forces none of that. It convicts the hands and closes the file. Whatever the reason for the downgrade, and there may be a lawful, unglamorous one, the effect is the same. The one trial that would have compelled a public reckoning was the one trial that was never held.

When the state declines to answer, it should not feign surprise that others rush in. The vacuum at the heart of this case is the state’s own making, and a vacuum is always filled, often with the lurid and the false. We have seen the theories already, peddled outside the court and across the internet, and they are baseless. But the appetite for them is not created by cranks. It is created by official silence. The cure is not a better rumour. It is disclosure, and disclosure is on offer from no one.

So we are left with the harder fear, the one you cannot guard your door against. What this trial reveals is sabotage with the glamour stripped off. There is no man in an ushanka, and no James Bond sent to stop him. There is a jobs group on a phone, a few thousand in crypto, and young men far from home willing to take the money and set fires on the streets of the country that took them in. A British state that would rather secure a tidy conviction than confront what it found is a danger of a different order, because it is the watchman, and it has chosen not to look. We are forever told to fear the enemy abroad. This trial suggests the more pressing failure is the one at home: not a state that cannot find the answers, but one that has decided it would rather not have them.

That is the mismatch. Here is the scandal. Two miles west, on the very same morning, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision to brand Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. The act at the root of that ban was the spraying of two military aircraft with red paint at RAF Brize Norton. No one was hurt. Nothing was set alight. Yet membership of, or support for, the group now carries up to fourteen years in prison, and since the ban came into force more than three thousand people have been arrested across the country. Among them, a retired vicar of eighty-three. Their crime, in many cases, was to hold a piece of cardboard reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

The headline said Russia. The indictment said arson. Only one of those had to be proved.