Putin is a handy bogeyman for the bitter Remoaners
HERE comes the bogeyman. Panic stations, another Kremlin scare is under way. The British establishment has now gone into overdrive in its determination to portray Vladimir Putin’s regime as a threat to our democracy and liberty.
Russia is said to have wielded its cyber muscle in trying to influence the outcome of last year’s EU referendum. According to this charge, Moscow spewed out a deluge of propaganda on the web and on social media in support of Brexit because Russia wants to destabilise the EU.
A study by Swansea University asserted that 156,000 Twitter accounts based in Russia pumped out such material in the days up to the vote, while another investigation held that at least 400 Twitter accounts had been created in a single troll factory in St Petersburg. “Analysis suggests that the tweets were viewed hundreds of millions of time,” reported one newspaper, a truly alarming suggestion given that such a colossal total is far bigger than the entire population of the United Kingdom.
But this whole saga smacks of another bout of orchestrated hysteria to undermine Brexit. The charge of Kremlin interference is used to denigrate Brexiteers and parade the moral superiority of the Remainers.
EFFECTIVELY it implies that Leave voters were all gullible idiots, easily manipulated by Moscow. This is just another version of the snobbish elitism from the selfregarding Remoan camp.
Equally damningly, claims about the huge impact of Russian online manoeuvres make no sense. Young people are by far the most enthusiastic users of social media yet they are the very people who are overwhelmingly pro-Remain, so Russian trolling, if it really occurred on a major scale, does not seem to have exerted much influence on its biggest target audience.
The Remoaners are also laughably hypocritical. As Project Fear so gruesomely demonstrated they indulged in their own extreme propaganda as they peddled desperate tales of Britain’s economic collapse in the event of Brexit, all of which turned out to be false. Furthermore they were quite willing to involve foreign leaders in the campaign. Nothing from the Kremlin ever came close to matching President Obama’s infamous outburst that post-Brexit Britain would go “to the back of the queue” for any trade deal with the USA.
The story of Russian involvement is just a comfort blanket for the Remoaners because they failed so miserably to make the case for staying in the EU. Like Hillary Clinton in the USA, who uses the Russian scare to explain away her defeat by Donald Trump, they wallow in the self-delusion that the election was “stolen” from them. But even worse they want to taint the result so badly that the cause of Brexit itself is invalidated. Just as with their antics in court and Parliament, they are indulging in another attempt to overturn the decision of the British people.
The appalling irony of this saga is that the greatest destroyer of European civilisation is not Moscow but Brussels. It is the EU that shows utter contempt for democracy. The very existence of the Brussels empire is a rejection of nationhood and sovereignty. The worst bullying against Britain at present comes from the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier and his fellow unaccountable oligarchs.
The case against Russia sounds deeply sinister. But the
THE truth is that Russia has little to do with the huge problems that modern Britain faces. It was not the Kremlin which decided that the annual rates of mass immigration should reach more than 600,000-a-year, imposing an intolerable burden on our civic infrastructure, justice system and welfare state.
It was not Putin who decided to lavish £13billion a year on foreign aid while our Armed Forces are starved of funds. British officialdom rather than Russia decided that the quest for diversity should become the fundamentalist creed of our society, even at the expense of obliterating tradition, patriotism and free speech.
Our establishment bleats about Russia’s imperialist policy in the Middle East but look at the disastrous recent record of overseas interventions by our government, which have resulted in bloody chaos in Iraq and Libya. Just as great a folly was perpetrated in Syria, where Britain tried to bring down the Assad regime by supporting the Islamist rebels. That only fanned the flames of jihadism and the gargantuan refugee crisis. With far greater wisdom and success, Russia concentrated on smashing IS.
What we are now witnessing is the politics of distraction, with Russia as a cover to hide institutional failures. But, contrary to what the Remoaners think, the British people are not so easily misled.
‘Absurdity of current anti-Russian frenzy’