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Putin’s Tories: welcome to the Vlad and Dave Show

Denis MacShane

Wednesday, 9th January 2008

Denis MacShane says that the Conservatives’ refusal to align themselves with other centre-right parties on the Council of Europe has driven them into a shabby alliance with Russia

As Vladimir Putin moves seamlessly from being president to prime minister of Russia, amid mounting worry that Russia is slipping its democratic moorings, there is a group of 21st-century fellow-travellers the Kremlin can count on: the Conservative party. Tory MPs are now toeing the Russian line in the new battlefield for democratic rights located in Strasbourg. Not the European Parliament, where no Russians sit, but the Council of Europe, where Putin loyalists work in close collaboration with Tory MPs to promote the Russian line, including a bid to place Putin’s man as head of promoting democracy and human rights on the Continent.

The Council of Europe was set up after Winston Churchill’s famous 1946 Zurich speech calling for a ‘United States of Europe’. Harold Macmillan and Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, led high-level British delegations in the 1940s and 1950s at a time when Labour refused to be contaminated by anything European.

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EyeSee

January 10th, 2008 9:48pm

Can't say I know much about the Council of Europe so I don't know the validity of much of this. However Denis McShane is a faultless barometer; whatever he says, the opposite will be true/common sense. Also, it can't be happening at all because we have had a Labour government , for over ten years, IN POWER. Our national parliament is supreme is it not Denis? Difficult to keep making your stories fit together, isn't it? Need any more evidence of the pointlessness of 'European politics'?

Mr Angry

January 11th, 2008 2:51am

Better to be in bed with Russians whose motives are clear,apparent and nothing like as bad as the perpetually paranoid about Russia Scandic and Baltic countries want to believe, than with quisling euro federalists, all too willing to betray their own nations and national interests in hot pursuit of the "european project".

Dr. Ilya Perelmuter

January 24th, 2008 1:55pm

To seek cooperation with modern Russia, a really police state headed by a dictator, and to close eyes on antidemocratic practices of Putin's government - that is the policy of the greatest European powers. Nothing new! They have been betraying democratic movement in Russia for years and years.

Herbert Thornton

April 6th, 2008 10:37pm

Reading this is enough to make me wonder if - perhaps - the Tories may not be entirely bad.

What next? Will the Tories actually concede that problems similar to (and potentially worse than) Russia's in Chechnya also exist in Britain?

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