What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
ONE of the cornerstones of Britain is the time- honoured phrase: Innocent until proven guilty.
It’s why much of the civilized world has embraced and copied our legal system. It works because it’s decent. Because the burden of proof ALWAYS lies with the prosecution.
But in the case of Prosecutor-inChief Theresa May, the evidence that the Russian state is behind the sickening attack on double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter is at best flimsy and at worst non-existent.
Of course, it’s easy to point the finger at the Russians, for obvious reasons.
Sergei Skripal was once a Russian agent. He then betrayed his country, who jailed him as a traitor, released him to live in the leafy English city of Salisbury, and, if we’re to believe what we’re told, waited eight years to try to kill him on British soil.
Why here? Couldn’t they have bumped him off in a Siberian gulag and blamed it on a fight?
We’re also told the deadly nerve agent Novichok used in this attack could “only” have come from Russia as that is where it was invented – some 40 years ago.
There are many reasons why the Russian state may indeed be behind this attempted assassination – and let’s not forget the brave British cop who fell ill after going to Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia’s aid.
But there are also reasons why it may NOT be.
As much as it’s painful to admit, Jeremy Corbyn might just have a point.
Because we have been here before, haven’t we?
Our MI6 and America’s CIA supposedly gave Tony Blair and George W. Bush solid, “cast-iron” evidence that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.
That was all that was needed to give the green light to a coalition of nations to go and bomb the hell out of Iraq, kill hundreds of thousands, at a cost of untold billions, and to then leave behind one almighty mess.
Our intelligence services also told us that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in the remote Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan.
Which gave us the excuse to go and bomb the hell out of that sovereign nation, remove the Taliban, then back off, let the Taliban quietly back in again.
Enemies
And not find Bin Laden, because he was hiding in plain sight in an entirely different country – Pakistan, as it turned out. And leave behind another almighty mess.
Then there was Libya, where… OK, you get the picture. So let’s call a spade a spade. It was fake news – much of it peddled by that delightful man Alastair Campbell, Blair’s one-time bully-boy henchman.
All of this make-believe is bad for business, too.
With Brexit looming, the UK frankly needs as many friends it can get – not be making enemies on flimsy flights of fancy to make Mrs May look popular.
The truth is, we don’t KNOW what the truth IS anymore because experience tells us that what a Government presents as fact may well be fiction.
There’s a reason why many countries have similar nuclear arsenals, and it’s a very simple one: We all nick the mechanics off each other through the work of our spooks and their contacts.
So there is, at present, nothing to confirm that this Novichok nerve agent actually came from Russia.
There is nothing to confirm that a sinister servant of Russian President Vladimir Putin is lurking in the bushes carrying a fizzing bottle of the stuff.
Who’s to say this poisoning wasn’t a set-up by one of Putin’s rivals back home who wanted him to suffer sanctions?
Especially as TODAY he faces an election?
At the moment, all we actually know is that anyone could be behind this, with a name not necessarily ending in “ski”.
Yet we’re kicking out a load of diplomats and imposing yet more sanctions upon a country that is not exactly backward in coming forward.
Mrs May is seriously poking the Russian hornet’s nest. Is that in any way sensible without proof?
One thing we definitely DO know is that unlike Saddam’s Iraq, Russia DOES have nuclear weapons.
Between Vladimir Putin and Theresa May, who do you honestly think would blink first?