In her daily press conference on 5th April, the Russian
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, mentioned a quiet resentment and
fury that is building up amongst ordinary Russians over the way the Government
of the United Kingdom has handled the case of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Strange
though it may seem, I sense a similar feeling of anger and resentment building
up here in the UK, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the official
narrative has little or no connection with reality.
The
anger and frustration is increasingly being displayed on comment boards
underneath pieces reporting on the issue. And the feeling is not confined to
those who would normally be labelled “conspiracy theorists”. It appears that
even many of those who would not normally question official statements can see
that something is seriously wrong with all this.
More
specifically, from whence comes this feeling? Here are just 20 of the many
reasons for this growing anger:
1. It
comes from being asked to believe frankly outlandish claims – such as the one
that is central to the whole incident, that the Skripals, who are very much
alive and well, were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent with a toxicity
5-8 times that of VX.
2. It
comes from the way that our Government recklessly accused another country – a
nuclear-armed country at that – of committing a crime before the investigation
into the incident had established the most basic of facts.
3. It
comes from the fact that the UK Government has prejudiced and politicised the
investigation with their claims before facts, their verdict without evidence,
their sentence without proof.
4. It
comes from the fact that the UK Government refused to go through the
internationally established protocols for cases such as these. For instance, it
only wrote to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
on 14th March — the same day that Theresa May stood up in the House of Commons
and formally accused the Russian Government of culpability.
5. It
comes from the fact that the British Government, which repeatedly speaks about
what it calls “British Values”, discarded some of the most basic legal concepts
that have formed a part of real “British Values” for centuries, such as due
process and the concept of innocent until proven guilty.
6. It
comes from the way that the British Government has refused to allow those they
have accused to see any of the supposed evidence against them, preferring
instead to use spurious and circular nonsense such as the arsonist
shouldn’t investigate his own fire.
7. It
comes from the fact that the Government attempted to lead the public into
believing that the Skripals were poisoned by a substance that must have come
from Russia, because apparently only the Russians were capable of producing it
– a claim that is demonstrably false.
8. It
comes from knowing that Boris Johnson was quite prepared to lie to the public,
and instead of facing up to his misdeeds like a man and resigning, he has
instead behaved like the great
supine, protoplasmic invertebrate jelly he is – to borrow his own
phrase – slithering and twisting his way around his own actions by acting as if
nothing has happened, and that anyone who raises questions about his fitness
for office is working for the enemy.
9. It
comes from the labelling of those who have questioned the increasingly
preposterous claims as “useful idiots” or “Kremlin stooges” or even outright
traitors, for even daring to ask for clarification on the most basic points.
10. It
comes from the way that the media has marched lock-step in line with the
Government, refusing to ask the most obvious and basic questions, such as the
ones I set out here and here.
11. It
comes from the curious way that events seem to “happen” only after other events
appear to force them to “happen”, such as the announcement of Sergei Skripal’s
miraculous recovery from being in a coma, which came a day after the leaked
transcript of the telephone conversation between Yulia and Viktoria Skripal in
which Yulia stated that he was well.
12. It
comes from the way that attempts have been made to make “facts” fit the
narrative, such as the theory, first touted more than three weeks after the incident,
that the Skripals were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent at their front
door – an explanation which looks to be contrived in order to explain the
curious anomaly that Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was said to have become ill
after visiting Mr Skripal’s house.
13. It
comes from the fact that the Government and the media have refused to report in
any meaningful way on the connection between Mr Skripal and Pablo Millier, his
MI6 recruiter and fellow Salisbury resident, and on Mr Miller’s connection with
Christopher Steele – author of the Trump Dossier. The connection may ultimately
be irrelevant to the case, but it is surely of interest at present.
14. It
comes from the illegal and frankly immoral way that the UK Government has
repeatedly denied consular access to the Skripals, which it is obliged to give
under Articles 36 and 37 of the 1963 Vienna Convention and Article 35 (1) of
the 1965 Consular Convention.
15. It
comes from the way that Viktoria Skripal, who is quite obviously keen to see
her uncle and her cousin, has been denied a visa under some absurd pretence of
her application not meeting UK immigration rules.
16. It
comes from the way that the Skripals appear to be being denied consular access,
denied access to their relatives, and – so far as I can work out – denied
access to legal representation. In other words, it looks increasingly as if
they are being denied the most basic of legal and familial rights, and Yulia’s
comments in her conversation with her cousin on 5th April do not inspire any
confidence that this is not the case.
17. It
comes from the way that the existence of Mr Skripal’s pets was only mentioned
by the media on 6th April, and this only after Maria Zakharova asked a pointed
question about what had happened to them in her daily briefing of 5th April.
18. It
comes from the fact that the condition of the pets – a cat and two guinea pigs
– has been almost blithely reported in the media, despite the obvious truth
that they died through neglect whilst Mr Skripal’s house was effectively in the
care of the Metropolitan Police who are overseeing the investigation – did they
not even go in and check!
19. It
comes from the fact that despite culpability having been apportioned after a
few days, it is clear that the investigation has still not established the most
basic of facts, with no suspect being mentioned or hinted at, instead the
public has been fed a steady diet of increasingly outlandish and spurious
claims about the location of the poisoning – the bench, the restaurant, the
car, the suitcase, the flowers, the door handle, the buckwheat.
20. But
most of all, it comes simply from that feeling we are being taken for a ride,
and are being treated like utter imbeciles by a Government that feels it can
make extraordinary accusations and simply expect the public to “trust us”.
It pains me to say all that. But it is so. These are not the observations of some tin-foil hat wearing anti-Government anarchist. Rather, they are the sober reflections of a Burkean, small c conservative — one who firmly in free and responsible Government, in the rule of law, in due process, in innocent until proven guilty, and who hates anything like the whiff of anarchy in the air.
It pains me to say all that. But it is so. These are not the observations of some tin-foil hat wearing anti-Government anarchist. Rather, they are the sober reflections of a Burkean, small c conservative — one who firmly in free and responsible Government, in the rule of law, in due process, in innocent until proven guilty, and who hates anything like the whiff of anarchy in the air.
Yet
my fear is that as more and more of this sordid affair comes to light, and as
the bizarre and frankly reckless behaviour of the UK Government comes in for
serious scrutiny, that quiet sense of anger which has been building up amongst
a public that realises it has been repeatedly misled, is unlikely to go away.
My
previous pieces on the Skripal Case:
The Three Most Important Aspects of the Skripal Case so Far …
and Where They Might be Pointing
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