Russia knows its best tactic is to use migrant crises to stoke nativist fears. “German government threw their country under feet of migrants like a rug, now try wipe their crimes under carpet,” tweeted the Russian embassy in London in 2016 as the Kremlin began a successful campaign to promote the interests of the chauvinists in Alternative for Germany. A bank close to Vladimir Putin loaned $10m to Marine le Pen’s anti-EU Front National. He encouraged the anti-immigrant Freedom party in Austria, the Lega Nord in Italy and Jobbik in Hungary. [...]
The report’s authors, Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell, bring together what others have already discovered and add details of their own. Although it is packed with information, including responses from Banks’s lawyers, the argument boils down to this. In 2013, regulators in Gibraltar discovered that Banks’s insurance business had reserves far below what it needed. Yet a year later the apparently embattled Banks was still able to pour money into the propaganda campaigns that took us out of the EU. He gave £1m to Ukip in 2014. He followed up that small fortune with £9.6m to Leave.EU and Better for the Country Ltd, along with additional cheques for Ukip as the referendum drew near. How did he afford it? [...]
For alongside the leaders of the pan-European far right, who RT welcomes into its studios, alongside anti-European Tories, the cranks, creeps and conspiracy theorists, sit the leaders of our own Labour left – and not only Corbyn and John McDonnell. Richard Burgon is Labour’s satirically named “justice” spokesman. He has never denounced the injustice Putin brings to Russia and the wider world during the nine occasions RT has had him on air. In this, he is symptomatic of a wider left that calls itself “anti-imperialist” but has nothing to say about Eurasia’s most voracious imperial power.
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