Posts Tagged ‘progress’
How do we deal with Russia?
1. Russia is a business, not a functioning constitutional, let alone democratic nation-state. There is no distinction between political and business life, between state employees and those who run enterprises of any shape. From the collapse of communism onwards, politics has been paid for by the parastatal and private sector enterprises principally based on energy, raw materials and construction. The deals are written by lawyers, many of them working for big City firms with some experts reckoning that as much as a quarter of the City’s income comes from Russian related dealing.
2. The old communist nomenklatura have converted themselves into Russian Plc, a kind of giant John Lewis where everyone expects a share. Appeals to Russia to conform to European norms or deal with the west as a responsible geopolitical partner are talking to an empty room. If there are material advantages for Russia from Putin down to junior elected officials, then a deal is possible. Asking Russia, for example, to hand over Syria, one of its favoured arms clients, to Saudi-controlled Wahhabi Sunnis spells an instant loss for one of Russian most important export markets.
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Cameron Council of Europe Visit a Waste of Air Miles
The Prime Minister’s flying visit to the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly today is mission undeliverable, even if many may feel Cameron has a good case. But the way he has pandered to the worst atavistic elements of the Europhobe right and the clamour of the off-shore press for retributionist punishment of prisoners means he will hardly get a hearing.
A simple solution to the issue of prisoners voting rights, for example, would be to do what the French do which is to empower judges to add an additional sentence of loss of civic rights for those imprisoned for serious crimes. This is in conformity with ECHR judgements. Switzerland, the dream nation for anti-EU Tories, has allowed its prisoners to vote for 40 years as have all the more civilised European nations.
Britain has eight, just 8, cases before the ECHR but the real problem is the 100,000 plus cases from Russia. One answer may be to suspend Russia as it was clearly an error to let Russia join the Council of Europe in 1996 when the country had made no effort and still makes no effort to introduce rule of law. The death of Sergei Magnitksy, lawyer of a British firm, in gruesome circumstances in a Russian prison highlights the contempt Russia’s kleptocratic rulers have for legal norms.
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Exposed: the ugly face of Putin’s Russia
In a powerful documentary on Putin’s Russia made by Norma Percy to be shown on BBC2 on 19 January there is an extraordinary moment when the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky confronts the recently elected President Putin. On film he tells him that Russia is so corrupt up that to 10 per cent of national wealth is disappearing into the hands of the post-Soviet bureaucracy. So much so that all the best and brightest graduates leaving college want to be tax police. That’s where the money is to be made, complains the owner of Yukos, as tax shakedowns were the most common form of getting rich quick.
At the time, in 2002, the sleek, jowly Khodorkovsky was still Russia’s top oligarch. As he confronts Putin the Russian leader’s eyes narrow and he taps his pencil with irritation on the table as he rebukes the oligarch at a business leaders’ council held in the Kremlin which was filmed and remains an electrifying moment in the documentary. Stalin also used a pencil rather than a pen to initial or tick lists to be sent to the Gulag. Khodorkovsky today finds himself in prison where those business leaders who did not pay their dues to the Putinocracy have found themselves if they did not flee to exile in time.
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