Skip to main content

Opposing Russian aggression mustn't blind us to authoritarian dangers at home

Bans on RT and excommunications of anyone who criticises Nato will have long-term consequences in a Britain that is restricting protests and cracking down on free speech, argues BEN CHACKO

THE old saw has it that the first casualty of war is the truth, and tensions abroad all too often lead to crackdowns on civil liberties at home.

The disastrous consequences of right-wing policy are never acknowledged on the right. We’ve all seen the logic — if Labour loses an election it’s because it wasn’t right-wing enough, even if shifts right produce worse and worse results over time, as they did from 1997-2015.

The same logic applies to war. Twenty years of Britain and the US breaking international law to attack other countries, 30 years of Nato’s eastward expansion and massive military exercises on Russia’s borders are the policies which preceded Russia’s appalling invasion of Ukraine this week. But the warmongers at Westminster will not admit these policies might be at fault. 

No, the invasion is seen as proof that we must do more of the same — more sanctions, more troops to eastern Europe. And those who doubt it? Fifth columnists. Traitors.

The implications of the raft of authoritarian legislation passed at the opening of the “war on terror” 20 years ago — George W Bush’s infamous Patriot Act, Tony Blair torpedoing the ancient right of habeus corpus by allowing detention without charge — are still with us in the form of the overbearing surveillance state. They should remind us of the long-term consequences of decisions taken amid war fever.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries was asking regulator Ofcom to look at the RT channel’s broadcasting licence, accusing it of spreading Russian state propaganda, even before Russia attacked Ukraine. The fiercely anti-liberal Dorries is not popular on the opposition benches, but here she can bask in their approval. 

In Parliament this week Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called — not for the first time — for a ban on RT. “I can see no reason why it should be allowed to continue to broadcast in this country,” he sniffed.

The Scottish National Party is equally keen. Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has herself called for a ban. 

When the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford was mocked by Boris Johnson because the party’s own one-time leader Alex Salmond has a show on the channel, Blackford protested indignantly that Salmond nowadays has “nothing to do with the SNP,” with all the passion of Starmer denying Jeremy Corbyn. 

He added that the SNP did not allow any of its parliamentarians to even appear on RT, a curious case of the disease of no-platforming that paralyses much of the extraparliamentary left creeping into official politics. There was a time when the SNP opposed Nato membership, and indeed in Blair’s day it was a critic both of his foreign wars and his draconian legislation, but this is clearly ancient history.

There are a number of reasons why the left should strongly oppose any bid to ban RT, as the Chinese broadcaster CGTN was banned by Ofcom last year. And none of them require any sympathy with RT’s output.

One is that accusations of “propaganda” are hypocritical from anyone who does not level the same charge at Britain’s state broadcaster the BBC, or for that matter the country’s main newspapers. 

It is true that RT’s presentation of events in Ukraine is pro-Russian, but then the coverage in Western media has been just as one-sided over recent years.

Few references to the war in the Donbass that has raged since 2014 mention the fact that the uprising there was a response to the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government by US and EU-backed forces. 

Or that Ukraine’s front line in the Donbass was manned by explicit neonazis, complete with SS Wolfsangel and Totenkopf insignia.

Or that the US has organised massive military exercises along Russia’s borders on an annual basis for years — exercises a Ukrainian government spokesman described last year as a dry run for “the war with Russia.” But without this context it is impossible to understand the terrible events now unfolding in Ukraine.

Given the total absence of objective coverage, it is better that people have multiple sources of information with different biases than are restricted to narratives endorsed by British politicians.

A second reason concerns the politics of those calling for this ban. Starmer has called for this before.

It is a reflection of an authoritarian attitude that runs through his whole political project, one we saw on Thursday when Labour threatened to withdraw the whip from 11 MPs who signed the Stop the War Coalition’s statement on the Russian invasion, which condemned it but acknowledged Nato’s role in ratcheting up tensions. 

This week a prominent Jewish author quit the Labour Party in protest at the direction Starmer is taking it in. Among their complaints was an injustice that ought to make bigger headlines than it does, given that Labour is the largest party by membership in the country: the retroactive offence, where an organisation (say, Socialist Appeal) is prohibited and then members are expelled for having associated with it (including in many cases by having given interviews to it, or even liking its posts on social media) before the prohibition took effect.

This is happening on a wide scale within the Labour Party. It is an indefensible travesty of natural justice and due process. It is not “whataboutery” to bring up such matters when considering Starmer’s attacks on freedom of the press. 

For one thing, there is an obvious parallel between Starmer’s crackdown on free debate inside the Labour Party and what he is proposing for the country more broadly: this is about securing Establishment control of narratives and placing alternative views beyond the pale. 

For another, an assessment of a politician’s overall approach is relevant to how we interpret their specific proposals. 

The fact that Boris Johnson seems consistently indifferent to whether what he says is true or not — something Labour has no trouble grasping when it comes to domestic politics — should affect how seriously we take all his pronouncements. Starmer, a former chief prosecutor who seems to have a problem with the concept of the right to a fair hearing, is a dangerous authoritarian. 

The threat to MPs who signed the Stop the War statement is a bid to ban criticism of Nato within Labour. It is also a bid to excommunicate the Stop the War Coalition, which a 2021 survey indicated was the most popular single organisation among Labour members, barring trade unions. 

It is — as journalist Owen Jones has pointed out — “a grotesque, spiteful factional act” by Starmer’s team. This is why John McDonnell is mistaken in his view that “this is not the time for focusing on events in the Labour Party” because it must show a united front against Russian aggression. 

These “truces” are never observed by the right. The right is already using the crisis to intensify its attacks on the left and the peace movement and make loyalty to Nato a Labour article of faith. We do not help Ukrainians or the brave Russians protesting for peace, to whom McDonnell refers, by letting the right do that.

The startling unanimity at Westminster — with the Tories, Labour, SNP, Lib Dems and even Greens singing from the same hymn sheet on Russia — should not reassure but alarm us. 

Those who try to place recent events in context are accused of being apologists for Vladimir Putin’s right-wing regime, though those who took to the streets of St Petersburg and Moscow on Thursday night to condemn the invasion have more in common with our Stop the War movement than with the gung-ho Starmer demanding that Russia’s “ability to function [be] crippled.”

The same government that, at the opposition’s request, is putting pressure on a supposedly independent regulator to ban a TV network is pushing through a Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that drastically curtails the right to protest. It has already passed legislation giving state agencies sweeping rights to place their operatives above the law. 

Anyone blind to the direction of travel in British politics needs to wake up now. It is vital to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine. It is also vital not to suspend criticism of our own state and ruling class while we do so.

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 13,288
We need:£ 4,712
3 Days remaining
Donate today