Strikes hit a record low

WORKPLACE strikes hit a historic low last year, with just 33,000 workers taking part.

The figure for last year – which saw the introduction of stricter laws on union strike ballots – is the smallest since records began in 1893. The previous low was 81,000, in 2015.

The ONS figures also showed a record low for the number of industrial stoppages, with only 79 strikes logged. Many were by transport workers, following a series of disputes over driver-only trains.

THE football World Cup in Russia begins in two weeks’ time. England play their first match a few days later. Quite soon, our boys will be flying to their luxury training spa near St Petersburg.

It seems to me that the absence of any questioning about our participation in this competition is as extraordinary as it is disgraceful. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a gangster state in which opponents of his regime — whether inside or outside the country — are routinely executed.

Yet we have become so football- mad as a nation, despite our limited prowess, that few commentators or politicians dare to raise a squeak of protest that we should be taking part in Putin’s propaganda extravaganza.

Murder

Will future generations look back and marvel that we should so cravenly and dumbly have involved ourselves in Putin’s circus — just as we now rub our eyes in disbelief at old newsreels of British athletes giving the Nazi salute at Hitler’s 1936 Olympic Games? I suspect they will.

Last week, an official international inquiry concluded that a Russian army missile was responsible for shooting down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in 2014, in which 298 people died. The pro-Russian fighters responsible almost certainly did not know that the downed aircraft was full of civilians, most of them Dutch. Yet they were nonetheless guilty of mass murder.

What amazes me is that the revelation that a Russian missile was involved — which had long been widely suspected — has caused little more than a diplomatic ripple.

Boris Johnson said the Russians must answer for their actions. The U. S. State Department intoned something similar, as did the Dutch government. Some other nations complained, including Australia, a number of whose citizens were on board the aircraft. Not much fury.

As for Putin, he continues to deny that Russia was in any way involved. It follows that no apology for this atrocity has been forthcoming from Moscow. Nor is one expected.

Isn’t the lack of outrage shameful? Particularly so, I would suggest, among the football authorities, including our own, who continue to make plans for the World Cup as though the state- sponsored killing of 298 people were not worth noticing.

Perhaps one could understand the lack of anger if the shooting down had been an aberration on the part of a country normally wedded to the rule of law. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yesterday morning, we were told a Russian journalist called Arkady Babchenko had been dispatched in the Ukraine, seemingly by Russian agents. It soon transpired that Babchenko is alive and well, and that his apparent murder was a carefully conceived stunt by the Ukrainian government to expose his alleged Russian assassins.

This apparently thwarted killing doesn’t exculpate Putin from the general charge that the Kremlin bumps off its enemies at home and abroad. The story was so readily believed because it seemed to form part of a familiar pattern.

Only last month, Maksim Borodin, a 32-year-old Russian journalist who had written critically of the Putin regime, died after ‘falling’ from the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment in Yekaterinburg.

And in April last year, a 73-year-old journalist who had attacked the Putin administration died in a St Petersburg hospital. Nikolai Andrushchenko had been set upon and beaten six weeks earlier.

According to the International Federation of Journalists, more than 300 journalists have been killed in Russia since 1993. Some of them were victims of the mafia, others of the Russian state. There is often little distinction.

And, of course, dozens of nonjournalists who were opponents of Putin have died in mysterious circumstances. These include opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, murdered in 2015; and Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire oligarch who had fallen out with Putin, and in 2013 was found with a noose around his neck inside a locked bathroom in his Berkshire home.

His associate Alexander Litvinenko was, in the considered view of a British judge after an official inquiry, poisoned by Russian agents with the probable approval of Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko died in a London hospital in 2006.

A veteran Putin critic (and British citizen) called Bill Browder was fortunate to be released yesterday by Spanish police after a Russian Interpol arrest warrant was judged by them no longer to be valid. We wouldn’t have heard much more from him if he had been spirited off to Moscow.

Needless to say, one of the most chilling examples of the lethal lawlessness of the Russian state was the recent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia — not to forget the brave British bobby who had rushed to their aid — in the normally peaceful cathedral city of Salisbury.

Prestige

How much more evidence do our football authorities need before they accept that their World Cup host in a few weeks’ time presides over a murderous regime responsible for the extermination of its enemies on an industrial scale — sometimes even on British soil?

Are they incapable of grasping how much prestige Putin has invested in this gruesome tournament, and how much damage would be done to him if only we had the guts to pull out?

I don’t draw any precise parallels between Hitler and Putin, since, for all the Kremlin’s sins, it doesn’t seem to be hell-bent on the domination of Europe. Even if it were, it lacks the military clout at the moment to bring that about.

But before the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler had largely confined his abominations to Germany. His agents had not attempted to assassinate people on British soil, and the German army was not responsible for the murder of 298 nonGerman civilians in a single incident in a foreign country.

No; in some respects Putin is in a class of his own. So why is the England football team travelling to Russia as though the Putin-hosted World Cup were as harmless as a five-a- side knockabout at a village fete?

A World Cup, it should be added, which was almost certainly awarded to Russia only after officials of FIFA, the world football governing body, had been deluged with bribes and backhanders.

Obsessed

We’ve become a frivolous people. It seems not to matter that we’re no longer much good at football. We are nonetheless still obsessed with our ‘national game’. Over the next week or two, the BBC and ITV will send hundreds of journalists to bring us pictures of Putin’s nauseating hoopla.

And during the ensuing weeks, I predict that virtually no mention will be made by bland broadcasters of the evil Russian regime, or of the numerous assassinations carried out in Putin’s name.

I accept that at this eleventh hour it is most unlikely anything will to be done to save this country’s honour. Our boys will go — and lose. We can only pray that by some miracle they don’t get to the final, in which case they would have to shake Putin’s blood-soaked hand.

There is not very much we can do about Russia — other than to increase our defence budget (along, one hopes, with the rest of Europe) so that we are in a strong position to defend ourselves if the Kremlin should become even more aggressive militarily.

But there something we could do now if only we were a principled country. What will future generations say? That we embraced and legitimised a dangerous monster, and all for the game of football.