Georgia's PM drops by the Tory conference

David Lindsay

Did they howl him down for his eye-watering corruption and his total lack of legitimacy (ninety-six per cent of the vote, indeed)?

Did they scorn the egging on his warmongering by John McCain as the mouthpiece for the treason of Randy Scheunemann?

Did they echo yesterday’s exuberant celebration of the Abkhazian national day?

Not a bit of it.

So the hall, no less than the platform (about which we knew anyway) is replete with people who are simply not conservatives at all.

Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh have never been governed in practice by post-Soviet Georgia, Moldovo or Azerbaijan. Nor were they ever part of pre-Soviet Georgia, Moldavia or Azerbaijan. Do they want, as Kosovo did and as Chechnya does, to join globalisation, European federalism, American military-industrial hegemony, and the militant Islam to which those forces pretend to be opposed but are in fact closely allied?

After all, look at 1980s Afghanistan, at 1990s Bosnia, and at today’s Kosovo, Chechnya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Look at how a bulwark against Islamic militancy has been taken out in Iraq, with all the predictable consequences. Look at how the global capitalist economic system depends on mass migration, not least to the West from the Islamic world. And look out for Xinjiang.

Do the people of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh want into this? Or do they want out of states moving in that very direction? The latter. They therefore deserve full recognition and every possible support.

Russia is leading that recognition and support. In common with all the Slavs, Russia is the gatekeeper of the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is the real West, not the secularised, consumerised, de-historicised, borderless, culturally debased, morally bankrupt pseudo-West, a wasteland without an Eliot, aimlessly waiting to be incorporated into the Dar al-Islam.

Furthermore, the South Ossetians, at least, are Russian-speaking Russian citizens. Whereas what have we ever done for the world’s peoples of English speech, British descent, or both? We did nothing to protect them, first from the Boers’ revenge republic, and then from the hopeless Mbeki, never mind the repulsive Zuma. Thatcher refused to recognise the Muzorewa Government, instead holding out for the Soviet-backed Nkomo as if he would have been any better than the Chinese-backed Mugabe. And so forth.

Russia’s pride is Britain’s shame.

And today, it is very much the Tories’ shame.

Arthur

But by arranging this little visit they are not acting like a government-in-waiting at all. Instead, they are playing politics with delicate international issues.

No matter what the rights and wrongs are of the Russo-Georgian conflict, they are slighting Russia and endorsing Georgia.

The opposition has no business doing this and playing at international relations on such a significant issue. They are not elected ministers and they should have a care to stay out of business that, constitutionally, should be left to elected ministers and FCO officials.