This week there was a big change. Instead of saying implausible and impractical things about Brexit the leaders of the two main parties starting saying implausible and impractical things about Putin’s Russia.
May began by sounding quite plausible. She launched a good attack on the nature of Putin’s regime. It is bad enough that Putin’s opponents end up dead inside Russia. It is quite another when those opponents end up dead on the streets of Salisbury as a result of exposure to nerve toxins that aren’t widely available in the local Waitrose.
Unfortunately, after May provided a pretty good criticism of Putin and his motives, she then proceeded to put forward an utterly pathetic set of actions in response. Expelling Russian diplomats a few days before Putin’s election isn’t exactly harming him. Rather it has exactly the opposite impact inside Russia. Most Russians actually admire Putin if he manages to organise a secret attack on the health of a traitor. Most Russians will be proud that the only thing the UK can do about it is to expel a few diplomats. Most Russians will be more likely to turn out and vote for Putin if they feel he is keeping Russia strong and proud. That is almost certainly why murder was attempted in the first place. A good stand off with the UK plays brilliantly to a Russian audience and Putin badly needed the extra turnout. Internal opposition has been bullied into defeat and crushed so completely that the election has become boring and that could result in a low turnout. Picking a fight with an old traditional external enemy is the ideal way to spice things up and get the voters out.
May swallowed Putin’s bait, hook line and sinker. If she wanted to harm him she should have waited much more quietly until after his election campaign. Then she could have chosen to freeze regime assets squirrelled away in London. Something she wasn’t prepared to do because she has taken over £800,000 in campaign contributions from Russian exiles and it was just possible some of them might have been scared of a government seizing assets obtained by criminal activity.
Even that would have only had a minimum impact. Because every year the West sends large quantities of money to Russia to buy oil, gas and natural resources. Long term the most effective way of harming Putin’s far right robber capitalist regime is simply to stop sending him money to buy his oil and gas. This is what funds his popularity. This is the money he uses to modernise his nuclear weapons. May should have massively ramped up the UK’s alternative energy programme and persuaded our allies to do the same.
Without oil and gas funding the current way that the Russian economy is run has become utterly unsustainable. Putin has left Russia devoid of industrial competitiveness and weak in the service sector despite having inherited a fantastic education system and a very highly skilled population. The country is now living off extraction of minerals, ripping up virgin forests, and burning fossils. The sooner the world economy reduces its need for those fossils and those raw materials the sooner nasty far right leaders like Putin get exposed. Investing in a rapid move to free ourselves of an increasingly outdated technology is also a really good way to weaken a number of other even more unpleasant regimes. May’s Saudi Arabian friends come to mind.
In other words, May spoke out strongly and clearly against Putin and then did all the things that Putin wanted her to do and none of the things that he didn’t. No one could fairly accuse Corbyn of making the same mistake. He didn’t even bother with the bit about speaking out effectively in the first place. If you wanted a master class in how muddled and confused late 70s socialist thinking could be then his speech would make a first-class study. Does Corbyn seriously think there will ever be rock solid proof about who carried out an espionage mission? Can he really not calculate who gains from the action of trying to kill a Russian dissident using weapons only a secret service would have access to?
Incredibly there are still some people out there who think that Putin is running a regime that has something to do with the old Soviet Union and communism. Equally incredibly, given the millions of open minded people that Stalin sent off the camps, there are still people who think that the Soviet Union was some kind of socialist system with a few minor flaws. The truth is that Putin is a far right nationalist with almost identical politics to Donald Trump. The main differences is that Trump sacks anyone who shows the least sign of being a dissident whereas dissidents from Putin’s Russia have an unfortunate habit of ending up dead without anyone being able to prove who did it. Putin’s Russia operates on a form of robber capitalism where the state, private profit and criminal gangs intermix and ordinary citizens lose out.
Instead of distancing himself from very outdated left thinking on Russia, Corbyn sounded like he couldn’t quite believe a nasty far right regime could have emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. It is one thing to be a strong peace campaigner. It is quite another to be weak and naïve about foreign aggression.
I admire Corbyn’s stance on the Iraq war. He was one of the very few of us who stood out against it at the time. Opposing a bad war is never easy and you have to take a lot of very unpleasant accusations and face them down as you argue for the genuine long term interests of your country. It doesn’t help any of us to do this if we are seen to be utterly naïve and toothless against every act of aggression by a foreign power. Iraq didn’t involve an attack on a single inch of UK soil or a single citizen inside the UK and yet the vast majority of the Labour Party lined up behind Tony Blair to inflict decades of war and misery on that country. Russian dissidents have been dying mysteriously on the streets of Britain ever since Putin came to power and that does mean that a foreign power is committing atrocities on British soil. That is not something that the UK should turn a blind eye to.
The leader of the Conservative Party proved good at talking big and doing nothing helpful. The leader of the Labour Party wasn’t even prepared to talk big and offered not a single practical policy to response to a series of state sponsored terror attacks on British soil. You pays your money and you makes your choice.
Or better still you invest your money on modern fossil free technology and make a whole series of different and better choices so that you don’t end up powerless to resist the actions of horribly unpleasant oil states.