One that makes the attempts of many online Labour supporters to play partisan point scoring games and engage in conspiracy theories look so much worse in comparison.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/russia-jeremy-corbyn_uk_5aa46df6e4b07047bec712d4
Here are two facts. One: Britain has a long history of foreign policy errors, some of which have had catastrophic consequences. Two: The Russian Government is vicious, authoritarian and downright dangerous, and it was almost certainly responsible for the recent nerve agent attack in Salisbury. What I can’t work out is why so few people seem able to hold both of these opinions at once.
Having said all of this, I am not afraid to say that sometimes governments get it about right on foreign affairs, and that Theresa May’s reading of the attack on Salisbury is likely one of those times. There is a caveat here, and it’s an important one: I have no access to classified documents. Unlike ministers, and indeed senior members of the Labour frontbench, I am not on the Privy Council - so I have access to the same evidence as those of you reading this.
It is on that basis, and my reading of what happened with the murder of Alexander Litvinienko too, that I have concluded that the Government is probably right to say that the Russian state was, at the very least, complicit in the attempted murder of the double agent Sergei Skripal. The nature of the attack, the nerve agent used and the target point towards Putin’s Government - and their response doesn’t suggest they truly want to prove it wasn’t them. France, Germany and the USA have quite clearly pointed the finger at Russia too - noting that this is the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since World War Two.
In light of this evidence - I do believe that the Government are correct to say they will “get tough” on Russia - indeed I wish they had done much more. While I can’t say I have a problem with expelling diplomats I believe that we also need harsher action against those Putin cronies who have money stashed away in London, often in speculative property - why not hit them where it really hurts and confiscate their assets? The Prime Minister could have frozen the luxury properties of people such as Alisher Usmanov or Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s deputy prime minister, who has a flat overlooking the Ministry of Defence. She didn’t - and today her own Defence Secretary was left telling the Russias to “go away and shut up” - probably because he knows that the measures announced so far just aren’t enough. It might be a good time for the Tories to think again about accepting huge sums of money from potentially dodgy Russian donors, too.
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