Sorry, but it’s Ukraine again today.
Once again (just as with Syria) Putin has run rings round our useless, pontificating, hot-air-spouting leaders. His relaxed press conference yesterday was masterly. Here was a man looking like a true leader, comfortable with his actions and completely firm and clear about his intentions. He’s dumped Yanukovich for being too corrupt, but is still insisting on protecting Russia’s strategic interests. Meanwhile the idiotic Obama, Kerry, Cameron and Hague bellow and threaten and rush around like headless chickens.
What worries me is not what Putin does or doesn’t do. He’s not going to overstep the mark. It’s how our pathetic leaders will react when they realise that Putin has outmanoeuvred them yet again as he did with Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons. As our masters are once again made to look like posturing fools by Putin, they’ll have to ramp up their threats against Russia to try to save face. Therein lies the danger to the world economy and stability.
Please don’t think I’m an apologist for Putin. I understand that Russia is a corrupt, undemocratic kleptocracy. But there are few perfect countries in the world. Russia has always been a huge, chaotic, corrupt, anarchic mess (I spent some time there as I studied Russian at university) and Putin has worked miracles bringing some kind of order and prosperity to the country. Go to any tourist resort or skiing destination nowadays and it will be full of Russian families with money to spend – a situation unthinkable even ten years ago.
And anyway, why are our masters so keen on bringing democracy to the faraway Ukraine, when they’re doing everything they can to destroy democracy in Britain by handing over control of our country to corrupt, wasteful, unelected kommissars in Brussels? As Mikhail Gorbachev is reported to have said: “The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of western European leaders to recreate the Soviet Union in western Europe“.
Oh, and here’s what a senior British civil servant wrote in a memo in 1971 which was kept secret for 30 years: “Of course this is the end of British democracy as we have known it, but if it is properly handled, the people won’t know what has happened until the end of the century. With any luck, old boy, by then I’ll be dead”.
(By the way, any chance of some kind soul buying a copy or two of GREED UNLIMITED? No? Hey ho, I guess that’s the way it goes)
Oh, and for some light relief – is “Keith” the stupidest person on the Internet? I’ve just been reading a piece on Yahoo about the Californian couple who found loads of old gold coins on their land. Apparently there has been a suggestion that these coins could have been the ones stolen in a bank robbery in 1900. One of the readers, Keith commented “I reckon they were probably the robbers themselves. They just decided to lie low for a bit until the heat was off“. So, if I understand Keith, the robbers’ dastardly plan was to do the robbery, then lie low for 114 years and then, after the 114 years had elapsed, to start selling the proceeds of the robbery they did 114 years earlier. Great plan, Keith!
I cannot understand William Hague, always beating the war drum when we are
drowning in a sea of debt!