Monday 12 March 2018

Eastern Promise

Peter Hitchens makes a strong case that Russia has decided that if we want a war, then we can damn well have one. But if Russia wants you dead, then you are not still alive more than week after the attack. Done by Russians? Very probably. But done by Russia? No chance. And if Theresa May announced this measure or that sanction this afternoon, then Russia could just turn off its supply of gas to Britain. As, of course, she knows perfectly well.

Hitchens was also unimpressed with Collateral. I myself have a pitch for a television drama. One of an old GRU unit dies, and his brothers in arms reassemble for his funeral. As the vodka flows, the conversation turns to their old colonel who sold them out to to MI6, who received a suspiciously lenient sentence for it, who was sprung even from that as part of some spy swap, and who was living openly on a British pension in an English cathedral city. Vengeance is sworn in the name of the dead man.

Being the GRU, this plot rapidly gets back to that Directorate's subsidiary, MI5, which fully facilitates it out of loyalty to the GRU, out of hatred of MI6, in order to distract attention from the controversial visit of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to buy arms, and, because amazing numbers of people still think of Russia as the Soviet Union and so on, in order to discredit a left-wing Labour Leader who stands on the cusp of winning a General Election. But something goes wrong and, unprecedentedly, the target survives. Or does he?

The "Corbyn-Moscow" pub bores are the same people who shrieked like demoniacs when Barack Obama lifted the American blockade on Cuba, as had long been advocated by the paleoconservatives of whom they have never heard. Are they reacting in a comparable manner to Donald Trump's overtures to North Korea, overtures that are so reminiscent of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan? If not, why not?

The key third player in all of that is, of course, the single most powerful human being, certainly in the world today, and possibly in all of history, Xi Jinping. We are either part of the caravan along the New Silk Road, or we are underneath it, crushed in its inexorable path. Never mind the Customs Union. Never mind Trump's tariffs. We need a trade treaty with each of the BRICS countries, and we need the integration into the Belt and Road Initiative of each of the four parts of the United Kingdom, of each of the nine English regions, and of each of the British Overseas Territories and the Crown Dependencies.

You know what you have to do, brothers and sisters. You know what you have to do.

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