Fair Comment In The Public Interest

Carole Cadwalladr is practically being carried through the streets in triumph. This is despite, or because of, the legal discovery that she had obtained her story about Arron Banks, who may yet win his case, from "a contractor to the UK security services".

That could only have been either the Institute for Statecraft, which runs the Integrity Initiative in which Cadwalladr has been an enthusiastic participant as a spooks' sewer, or Christopher Steele, to which she has connections through his company, Orbis. By the way, Orbis also has ties to Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergei Skripal.

What a thoroughly unedifying spectacle, to rank even with the award of the Pullitzer Prize to Cadwalladr for a story that the Information Commissioner found to be totally false. There was absolutely no link whatever between Cambridge Analytica and the Leave campaign.

Against Banks, Cadwalladr is not even running a defence of truth, but only a defence of fair comment in the public interest. If it is a real journalist that you want, then be outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand from nine o'clock tomorrow morning, to wait for the ruling at 10:45 as to whether or not Julian Assange would be permitted to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Making Colleagues Uncomfortable

"Muslimness" is not a word. But if Mark Spencer considers that Nusrat Ghani has defamed him, then he ought to sue her.

And it says a very great deal that the Government thought that this ought to have been the subject of an internal party inquiry. It no longer sees any distinction between the party and the State.

Something Profoundly Decadent

"There is also something profoundly decadent about Britain's obsession over a party that took place in May 2020, when more than 100,000 Russian troops are massing on the Ukrainian border, Chinese fighter jets are probing Taiwanese airspace, and Iran has reportedly returned to enriching uranium for a bomb that, with the right delivery systems, could reach the UK."

Massing how close to the Ukrainian border, which as the Russian border has 120,000 Ukrainian troops right up against it? And how is any of this our problem? Probing how, and what Taiwanese airspace? Since when did Britain recognise a country called Taiwan, much less have any obligation to defend it?

Iran has "reportedly" been enriching uranium since time immemorial, and "with the right delivery systems" a bomb could reach Mars, but there is absolutely no evidence that either any such bomb or any such system exists in actual fact. Again, though, even if they did, then what would that be to us?

Why is Andrew Roberts so desperate to save Boris Johnson? Whichever potential alternative he fears sounds just the ticket. We know that that cannot be Liz Truss, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Penny Mordaunt, or indeed Keir Starmer. Whom does that leave?

Between Bread And Freedom

Extremely recent Nazi officers were prominent among the founders of NATO and of what is now the EU. The publications of the former, in particular, depict Russia as having always been the enemy, and therefore glorify the "freedom fighters" who were in fact the collaborators with the Third Reich.

The explicit successors of those collaborators have queued up to join both NATO and the EU, and they have been welcomed with open arms, so to speak. At least until Brexit, we were subject to the legislative will of numerous of them in the Council of Ministers and in the European Parliament. We remain signed up to defend them.

One searches in vain for when or where we signed up to defend the ones in Ukraine, but here we are. Through Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the Azov Battalion, and all the rest, NATO and the EU intend to acquire another vast territory, but one that needed to be purged of its eight million ethnic Russians, an intolerable presence inside those bodies. 

When  it came to getting rid of them, and of anyone else who might prove inconvenient, then no one could be more efficient or effective than the literal swastika-wearers who paraded the images of Stepan Bandera, Symon Petliura and Roman Shukhevych. They make no attempt to disguise who or what they are. We should take them at their word. They have certainly been as good as it, as they still are.

And yes, of course Vladimir Putin is also awful. But we are quite rightly not arming him, much less are we sending our Armed Forces to train his militias as a cynical tripwire to oblige us to join in a war that did not need to concern us in the least, what with our coal, our oil, our gas, our lithium, our nuclear power, and our renewables.

In Return

Peter Hitchens writes:

If Vladimir Putin is stark, staring mad, then he will invade Ukraine. But I have seen little evidence he is. He is nasty, cruel, sinister, intolerant and many other things. But you do not remain in power in Moscow for so long if you are a lunatic.

If there is one single action which would be bound to destroy his regime and wreck Russia’s long-term hopes of recovering its position in Eastern Europe, it is an invasion of Ukraine.

So why are so many yelling that such an invasion is about to take place? In many cases it is because they know nothing of the issue, could not find Odessa on a map and are joining the crowd because they feel safe doing so. For these days, if you don’t join such crowds you will be accused of being a ‘Putin apologist’ and worse.

In other cases it is because of the tragic spread of ‘Munich Syndrome’. Sufferers from this incurable complaint believe every foreign crisis is an exact repeat of September 1938: a certain chosen foreign despot is Hitler; last time this was Saddam, now it is Putin.

Anyone who proposes a peaceful way out is a modern version of the doddering weakling, Neville Chamberlain. And the politicians who want war are modern versions of Winston Churchill. Such simple-minded piffle.

Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia. Putin is not Hitler or Stalin. He has no ideology, racial or social. He has been complaining for years, using every peaceful means, against the expansion of Nato into Eastern Europe. He has asked, quite reasonably, who it is aimed at.

Nato was set up to deter aggression by the USSR, an empire which ceased to exist 31 years ago. Russia is not the USSR. Keeping Nato in existence is like maintaining an alliance against the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman Empires, which vanished a century ago – a job-creation project.

He rightly points out that Moscow (mostly without violence) let go of vast tracts of Asia and Europe, and unwillingly permitted the reunification of Germany – something Margaret Thatcher was pretty reluctant about as well.

In return, the then leaders of the West said they would not expand Nato to the east. A huge archive of documents at George Washington University in the US confirms this.

The greatest anti-Soviet diplomat of the era, George Kennan, warned against doing any such thing. He said: ‘The expansion of Nato right up to the Russian borders is the greatest mistake of the post-Cold War period.’ 

So did Russian liberals of the sort we claim to support. Yegor Gaidar, admired in the West for his economic reforms, contacted Canada’s ambassador, Chris Westdal, in Moscow in 2004, to say he had come ‘to beg, to plead’ to advise Ottawa against further Nato expansion which would, he warned, ‘bring out the worst of Russian instincts’. And so it has.

If you poke a bear enough with a sharp stick, he will attack you. When he does, you should perhaps not blame the bear.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 99

Liar. 

I have never heard of you, and I was not in Durham that Thursday evening. Or any evening in that period. I was on a tag.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Adam Langleben Watch: Day 99

Liar.

I have never heard of you, and "JLM" sounds like a pop group, although not one with which I have ever communicated.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.