by John Ward
The people at the centre of the Skripal farrago are Amber Rudd, Boris Johnson, MI5, Federica Mogherini and an EU desperate to stop Brexit. Only a madman would believe anything they have to say.
The British Government has backed itself into a corner over the Skripal case: yesterday it blocked a UN resolution calling for a “civilised investigation” into the incident – HMG’s “explanation” of which is now unravelling by the hour. Sources widely reported in the local police, at the local hospital and in the Foreign Office are fuelling not just doubts about Theresa May’s statement to the Commons last week….they are blowing the lid off an obvious propaganda scam:
- The “uniformed” policeman described by Amber Rudd as “dangerously ill” after being “first on the scene” now turns out to be fully recovered and a senior CID officer. Why was he at the scene?
- A senior FCO source has confirmed that secret service officers tried to pressure Porton Down scientists into saying that novichok is a “Russian produced nerve agent”. The Russians have never produced it, Porton Down does not believe novichok is involved, and in fact at least some scientists there think no nerve agent was involved at all.
- A senior medic at Salisbury hospital has flatly denied there are “any cases at all of nerve agent poisoning among passers-by involved in the incident”, which seems odd given that HMG said there were such cases, and one CID officer was “dangerously ill” while others are not.
- We still have no proof at all as to the condition of the Skripals. Two weeks after the incident, not a single interview with either father or daughter has been allowed.
What we are seeing here is, in reality, several David Kelly style experts – in chemical warfare, medicine and the diplomatic service – saying the story is nothing but IABATO* hokum.
But still the Establishment media and Western leaders insist on pushing hard on the “Putin done it” angle. In the face of growing scepticism, police have now released details of Mr Skripal’s car along with their latest theory that “the nerve agent was planted in Ms Skripal’s suitcase before she left Moscow”. This has now popped up in a Telegraph story “quoting unnamed sources”, so of course that seals it. Obviously.
Which perhaps explains why Trump weighed in yesterday to say, “Well, it certainly looks like the Russians were behind it”, Boris Johnson told BBCNews, “We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his [Putin] decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the Second World War”, and significantly French President Macron said, “Since the start of the week, Britain has kept France closely informed of the evidence gathered by British investigators and of elements demonstrating Russian responsibility in the attack.”
Now there’s a thing: here we are having a barney with Macron the anti-Brexit hardliner, and there he is warming to the British cause. Note in particular the collective security overtones of Macron’s closing words:
“France shares Britain’s assessment that there is no other plausible explanation and reiterates its solidarity with our ally”.
Right, so let’s be clear then: it certainly looks like, and is overwhelmingly likely that, and in fact there is no plausible explanation other than that, um, the Russians did it. Hence the new emphasis on Skripal Jr having just flown in from Moscow, which as we all know contains the Kremlin and good God, that nails it, what?
Bit by bit, some pieces of this liars’ jigsaw puzzle are starting to fall into place. From Day One after the Brexit vote, I began – along with many in UKIP – to seriously doubt Boris Johson’s real commitment to the Leave campaign: he only jumped at the very last minute, and Michael Gove confided to friends within four days that he found Johnson’s behaviour following the vote “suspicious and yet inexplicable”.
Johnson gave a press conference the afternoon after the referendum, and it bears reviewing: he is hesitant, desperate to suggest that “this all needs to be considered in the round and requires much time and thought” – and then goes off for a long weekend of cricketing piss-artistry with his chums. A well placed Tory MP told me the following week, “Boris was stunned by the result…he felt sure that the Remainers would win, but he would’ve been seen to have done his bit. His support for Brexit was always odd given his preponderance of supporters in the City”.
As Foreign Secretary, BoJo is in the prime position to get heavy and speed things up….or even demand that we walk away from the negotiations. In fact, his promotion has done nothing for the Leave cause: we are still months behind schedule, and negotiators confirm his negligible (and negligent) attitude to the process.
But now, here he is at the centre of proof-free claims about devilish Russian ambition, and lots of emphasis on collective security: Putin, he insists, “has underestimated the resolve of the NATO powers”. He is pushing the fear harder than any Remainer tried to during the campaign. And let’s be real, he is a known bully, sexual philanderer, liar and perverter of the course of justice: he tried to squash Hackgate, and he succeeded in sqashing the Elm House enquiry. He is not batting for Brexit, and he probably never was.
Last week, I posted to suggest as follows:
But the mentions of NATO, the support from Macron, the bombastic language adopted by Johnson, and the strategic insistence of CIA Texas Pentagon that Britain must not leave the EU suggest to me that – certainly on this side of the Pond – scuttling Brexit may well be the dominant motive behind this skullduggery. This feels more and more like a EUNATO-security services Black Op.
Why, for instance, choose Britain as the ‘scene of the crime’? There are literally dozens of double-agents in the US, Syria, Ukraine and Crimea – why not there? What motive did Putin have to pick a fight with the UK….already well on the way to leaving the EU and thus sounding the death-knell for NATO’s civilian wing in Europe?
The answer is “none”: on the contrary, he would prefer to end the incestuous EUNATO axis. He just is far too clever to have pulled something as dumb as this as the “punishment” of an obscure and largely forgotten traitor.
He had as much motive for doing this as Assad did for “nerve gassing his own people” and “making bomb attacks on Turkey”. He had as much motive for doing this as Sadam did for “developing missiles to attack Europe”.
Enter NATO’s point girl in the EU, High Comissioner for Foreign Affairs & Security Federica Mogherini. Let’s examine what’s been going on in this delightful lady’s life of late.
She’s now the leading light in the European External Action Service (EEAS) an EU organisation nobody voted for or about, but which employs 5,000 people and has a budget slightly under a billion euros. Why an essentially trade-oriented and defensive Union has any need for such a thing is an excellent question; but while UK Remainers refused to recognise the inevitability of an EU Standing Army, Federica spent much of 2017 saying it was indeed, er, inevitable. This from last November:
“Today we are building the European Union of Security and Defence. It is not a plan anymore, it is not a dream anymore, it is reality coming true. The dream of our founding fathers and mothers is finally coming true – more than sixty years later…..today, security challenges are too big for any of our Member States alone. And we know it….when our founding fathers and mothers tried to create a European Defence Community, back in the fifties, their project was quite simple, even if very ambitious. They had in mind a European army and a European Defence Minister….today, we are doing something that is even more ambitious, much more ambitious…. a single command centre, here in Brussels. European military training is now a concrete option, already in place.”
Federica Mogherini wasn’t even born when the Franco-German coal agreement was signed in 1955. So let me set her straight: it was designed to ensure that those two nations would never go to war again. It was in its intentions entirely pacifist: not only did they not have in mind a European army, the Germans were forbidden the right to have one.
Rarely in the field of IABATO have so many historical facts been twisted to suit the needs of one megalomaniac on behalf of the few. But you have to hand it to Federica, she is if nothing else unswervingly consistent.
Just last week, she sent her Special Advisor Dr Nathalie Tocci to speak at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. We don’t know what she said there, because RUSI is a secretive lobby close to the British military establishment, a cypher for MI5, and a prolific provider of sources, tips, leaks and pro-NATO message lines to the BBC. RUSI is also virulently anti-Brexit and a serious player among those desperate to derail the UK electorate’s decision to quit the EU. On February 26th last, its deputy director Malcolm Chalmers wrote as follows:
‘The UK’s vote to leave the EU could have serious consequences for future security cooperation between the UK and its European neighbours…..there will be a strong mutual interest in developing new mechanisms for consultation and coordination, for example in relation to sanctions. But these are likely to be significantly weaker than those currently in place while the UK remains a member…. If the UK leaves the Single Market and the Customs Union at the end of the transition period, it could have a significant effect on the cross-border supply chains of defence and security companies.’
While Tocci’s speech to RUSI remains a private one, two days later her boss Mogherini issued this statement:
“The European Union does not recognize the holding of elections by the Russian Federation in the Crimean peninsula. The European Union remains committed to fully implementing its non-recognition policy, including through restrictive measures. The EU calls again on UN Member States to consider similar non-recognition measures in line with the UNGA Resolution 68/262.”
This is of course an exact rehash of UK/NATO line, but then that’s Federica’s job: nobody is in any doubt which team she’s bowling googlies for. However, Signora Mogherini has much form when it comes to pressing the Russiaphobe security button in the Brexit debate:
“Let me tell you that to me all member states are important, equally, because one can be contributing more on some policies than others. But I think our British friends will lose more than what we lose…use of Soviet-era nerve agents in Britain is shocking, and the European Union stands ready to offer support if requested”.
Jolly decent of her, that’s what I say. But what I say doesn’t really matter. Because now ex DDR Jugendfuhrerin Geli Merkel has weighed in too, asserting that “it’s up to Russia to quickly provide answers to the British government’s justified questions and to heed the call to completely and immediately lay bare the relevant chemical weapons programme to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons”.
Meanwhile, here comes the view from the High Net Worth City chaps so adored by Boris. The influential super-rich wealth management advice site Spear’s offered this bit of classic jingoism yesterday:
‘Amid the terrible seriousness and reckless human horror of the Skripal affair, there is one silver lining. For quite apart from bringing Anglo-Russian relations to a new post-Cold War low, the attempted assassinations in Salisbury have reminded Europe what it’s about.
Through sheer hubristic aggression of the Russian state — and the poisonings of Colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and a policeman, with the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury — Vladimir Putin has managed to get Europe’s leaders on the same page.
Spear’s readers with longer memories will know that the European Union wasn’t only created to prevent war between European nations or seek to add extra hundredths of percentages to quarterly GDP growth figures. It was also conceived as means of helping Western Europe forge a democratic bulwark against the aggression of the Soviet Union — an aggression that saw Russia impose it rule over Eastern Europe for 40 years. For this reason, the EU and its predecessors have been generously supported by both the US and here, even by those who were nonetheless sceptical of UK’
This is, to say the least, somewhat fast and loose with the verité. Almost no public recognition of ‘a democratic bulwark against the aggression of the Soviet Union’ has ever been cited as the raison d’etre of the EU….especially not during the 1975 EEC membership referendum in the UK. Also missing from this neocon drivel is any recognition of the fact that the RF is not the USSR.
But what’s clear is the imputation there: better in than out.
The UK Government doesn’t want any Hans Blicks on its lawn. It cares not a fig for citizen statements on the ground that directly contradict its ex cathedra assertions. It is instead garnering support from the very Union it claims to be leaving. And that Union – along with NATO – is yelling “full ahead both” into the engine room of the SS Russophobia.
The short term objective is to drag Britain back into the tent. The medium term objective is the marginalisation of Russia, and the formation of a NATO-backed EU army. The long-term objective is to secure American control over every energy source on the planet.
We do not need to get involved in any of this. As I’ve said from the outset, the primary need is for Britain to be unaligned and hopefully – one day – a trusted peacemaker.
We have been duped before, and this is a thinly-disguised attempt to con us again.
We must not let it happen.
