COVID-19: FOR HOW MUCH LONGER?

In this weekend's FT TIM HARFORD THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST ASKS 'COVID-19: HOW CLOSE IS THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

'IN THE UK, Margaret Keenan receive a first dose of vaccine on December 8, but it needs a couple of weeks to prove much protection. She and her fellow first-day vaccinees were much safer by Christmass...The UK had vaccinated (with the first dose) about 1 per cent of its population by Christmas, but funeral directors will not notice the effect of that until Valentine's Day.'

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Russian police detain over 450 at protests over Alexie Navalny's jailing

Protesters chant "Putin is a thief"

by Tom Balmforth and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber 5 hrs ago Reuters

Police detained more than 450 people at rallies in Siberia and Russia's Far East on Sunday as supporters of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny took to the streets to protest his jailing, despite biting cold and the threat of arrest.

The rallies, also set to take place in Moscow and other cities later on Sunday, follow large protests last weekend and are part of a campaign to pressure the Kremlin into freeing President Vladimir Putin's most prominent opponent.

The opposition politician was arrested on Jan. 17 after returning to Moscow from Germany where he had been recovering from a nerve agent poisoning in Russia last summer. He accuses Putin of ordering his murder, which the Kremlin denies.

Police have said the protests have not been authorised and will be broken up, as they were last weekend. Over 4,000 people were detained at those rallies, according to OVD-Info, a protest monitoring group.

In the far eastern city of Vladivostok, where a protest began at 0200 GMT, police prevented protesters from accessing the centre, forcing them to relocate to the waterfront and the frozen waters of the Amur Bay.

Video footage showed protesters chanting "Putin is a thief" as they linked hands and marched on the ice in temperatures of around -13 Celsius (8.6 Fahrenheit).

In Tomsk, the Siberian city that Navalny visited before suddenly collapsing on a domestic flight last August, demonstrators gathered in front of a concert hall and chanted "Let him go!" and held up Russian flags.

OVD-Info said police had so far detained 465 people, including 108 in Vladivostok.

Dozens of people in the east Siberian city of Yakutsk turned out in temperatures of -42 C (-44 F).

"This is the first time I've come to a protest. I'm just fed up with the total lawlessness of the authorities," said Ivan, a protester who declined to give his surname.

The protest is a test of Navalny's support after many of his prominent allies were targeted in a crackdown this week. Several, including his brother Oleg, are under house arrest.

"If we stay quiet, then they could come for any of us tomorrow," Yulia Navalnaya, the Kremlin critic's wife, wrote on Instagram.

METRO STATIONS IN MOSCOW

There was an eerie quiet in central Moscow under falling snow after police took highly unusual steps to seal off the planned protest location to pedestrians and closed some metro stations. Officers could be seen turning people away.

Police deployed in force before the rally due to start at 0900 GMT. The measures prompted Navalny ally Leonid Volkov, who is outside Russia, to move the protest location to a site on the Garden Ring road that circles the city centre.

Protesters had planned to gather near the Kremlin administration and the headquarters of the FSB, the KGB's successor, where during the Soviet breakup protesters in 1991 famously pulled down a statue of the secret police's founder.

Navalny, 44, is accused of parole violations which he says are trumped up. A court is due to meet next week to consider handing him a jail term of up to three and a half years.

The West has told Moscow to let Navalny go and his allies have appealed to U.S. President Joe Biden to impose sanctions on 35 people who they say are Putin's close allies.

Seeking to galvanise supporters at home, Navalny put out an online video this month that has been viewed over 100 million times, accusing Putin of being the ultimate owner of a sumptuous Black Sea palace. The Kremlin leader has denied this.

On the eve of the protests, Arkady Rotenberg, a businessman and Putin's former judo sparring partner, said he owns the property.

(Reporting by Tom Balmforth, Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, Anton Zverev, Polina Ivanova, Maria Tsvetkova and Polina Nikolskaya; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Frances Kerry and Raissa Kasolowsky)

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Navalny ally vows to press for his freedom despite crackdown

by DARIA LITVINOVA January 26, 2021 AP NEWS

MOSCOW (AP) — A top ally of Alexei Navalny vowed Tuesday to keep up the fight to free the jailed Russian opposition leader and his battle to influence this year’s parliamentary election despite a government crackdown on nationwide protests and its attempts to create a climate of fear.

U.S. officials said President Joe Biden raised concerns about Navalny’s arrest in his call Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the G7 foreign ministers also criticized the jailing of Navalny and the demonstrators demanding his release.

Lawyer and politician Lyubov Sobol told a news conference that Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and his team’s regional offices will continue to operate even amid the “arrests of our followers and allies, open criminal probes (and) criminal probes that are yet to come.”

Sobol, herself under investigation on criminal charges of trespassing that she insists are bogus, said she is not afraid of being arrested and doesn’t plan to leave the country.

“It would be hard to say that I’m prepared for it, but silence, fear and indifference are more dangerous,” she told reporters.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic, was arrested and jailed earlier this month after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had spent nearly five months recovering from a poisoning with a deadly nerve agent that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities deny the accusations.

The politician faces a prison term, with authorities accusing him of violating the terms of a 2014 conviction for fraud, a prosecution that he says was politically motivated.

On Saturday, nearly 4,000 people were detained across Russia during nationwide protests that drew tens of thousands demanding Navalny’s release, according to OVD-Info, a human rights group that monitors political arrests.

Authorities launched 20 criminal investigations in different regions in the aftermath of the protests, mostly on the charges of violence against police, Russia’s Investigative Committee said.

Dozens of Navalny associates in various cities were detained before the protests, including Sobol, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh and longtime ally Georgy Alburov. Sobol was released within hours and ordered to pay a fine, while Yarmysh and Alburov were jailed for nine and 10 days each.

“Putin is trying to stop people from protesting and fighting for their rights through fear and criminal probes,” Sobol said. “We can only continue our work in these circumstance"

The crackdown continued to bring international outrage. The top diplomats of the United States, Britain, Canada, France Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as the high representative of the European Union, condemned the “politically motivated arrest and detention” of Navalny and said they were “deeply concerned by the detention of thousands of peaceful protesters and journalists.”

The Kremlin had earlier dismissed Western criticism as interfering with Russia’s internal affairs.

Navalny’s team has called for more demonstrations on Jan. 31 and Feb. 2, when a court is scheduled to consider motions to convert his suspended sentence into a real prison term.

Even if he is sent to prison, his supporters won’t be deterred, Sobol said, citing the political goals of stopping the Kremlin’s party, United Russia, in the upcoming parliamentary balloting.

“There are lots of plans and tasks for the nearest future, (as well as) midterm and longterm (ones), and everyone understands what needs to be done both tomorrow, and a month from now, and half a year from now,” Sobol said. “One of the main goals is to ... destroy the monopoly of United Russia in the parliamentary election that will take place this September.”

Navalny has launched a campaign known as “Smart Voting” that is designed to promote candidates who are most likely to defeat those from the dominant ruling party.

In 2019, the project helped candidates backed by Navalny win 20 of 45 seats on the Moscow city council, and regional elections last year saw United Russia lose its majority in legislatures in three cities.

Analysts believe Navalny is capable of influencing the parliamentary vote, a key for the Kremlin as it will determine who controls the State Duma in 2024. That’s when Putin’s current term expires and he is expected to seek reelection, thanks to constitutional reforms last year.

On Thursday, a court is scheduled to hear an appeal on the ruling to jail Navalny. When asked about a possible outcome, Sobol said that “we do live in an unpredictable country; what will happen next and tomorrow is literally unknown.”

She cited an example of police officers unexpectedly showing up at her home 10 minutes before the news conference.

Almost proving her point, an official interrupted the event minutes later, trying to serve a subpoena to a Navalny ally who wasn’t there.

“I (didn’t do it) on purpose, they come on their own,” Sobol said with a chuckle.

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Home Secretary Priti Patel sets out details of the Government’s new forced quarantine policy

HOME SECRETARY Priti Patel set out the details of the Government’s new forced quarantine policy for arrivals into the UK yesterday. Kate Andrews in the Spectator has the details.

Arrivals from 22 “high-risk” areas will soon be forced to quarantine in a hotel when they arrive in Britain. There will be no exceptions to the rule, and travellers must stay put for 10 days, even if they test negative for COVID-19. The “red list” of countries include Portugal, South Africa, Brazil and Cape Verde.

This crackdown was a long time coming. When Denmark found a mutant strain of Covid last autumn amongst its mink farms, the UK became the only country in the world to close its borders to anyone from there. Did the fast response acknowledge regret among ministers about not being stricter on the border last spring? Quite possibly. This time, the Government has been much clearer about the reasoning behind this decision. Priti Patel told the Commons:

“The Government’s focus is on protecting the UK’s world-leading vaccination programme – a programme that we should be proud of. And reducing the risk of a new strain of the virus being transmitted from someone coming into the UK.“

The details of this quarantine scheme are still up in the air and it is not yet clear when it will come into effect. But despite these tougher measures, it seems that some in the Cabinet wanted the Government to go further. Had Patel had it her way, the measures would have extended to everyone arriving in Britain. Boris Johnson stopped short of this for now. But once the infrastructure is in place, it is easy to see how arrivals from any country, with no advanced warning, could be affected.

Is this an attempt to emulate Australia and New Zealand? Except their strategy was to wait in splendid isolation for a vaccine. But we’re closing borders after the vaccine has arrived because we’re worried about new vaccine-resistant variants. The problem with this is that the logic seems permanent – after all, there will always be a risk of some new mutant variant emerging. As Kate says: “Britain will be one of the first countries to close its borders to countries based on a hypothetical scenario – the possibility of a mutant Covid strain that can evade vaccines – rather than an immediate threat.” Such excessive caution bodes ill for the future and a return to normal." *

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Men, Women, Covid and Risk by Les May

A RECENT article on the BBC news website was headed; ‘Covid: Teachers "not at higher risk" of death than average’. But buried within it was a more interesting take on who in the working age population, that’s 20 to 64 year olds, are at the greatest risk of death from Covid 19.

The ONS looked at death rates from coronavirus in England and Wales between 9 March and 28 December 2020. It found 31 in every 100,000 working-age men and 17 in every 100,000 working-age women had died of Covid-19. This equated to just under 8,000 deaths among 20-64-year-olds. (Which you will note is rather higher than the ‘Anti-lockdown brigade’ would have us believe) Two-thirds of these deaths were among men.

The same pattern emerged among teachers when primary and secondary staff were taken together. There were 18 deaths per 100,000 among men and 10 per 100,000 among women. These figures are of course both less than for the whole population. Breaking that down by role, the figures for secondary school teachers were 39 deaths per 100,000 people in men and 21 per 100,000 in women. These figures are of course both more than for the whole population.

Amongst nurses the same pattern appeared, 79 male nurses per 100,000 and 25 female nurses per 100,000. For care workers it was 110 men per 100,000 and 47 women per 100,000.

Even if secondary teachers were at higher risk than some other professional jobs where few or no deaths have occurred it is nothing like the risks faced by non-professionals.

Per 100,000 men aged 20-64, the figures were 119 restaurant and catering staff, 106 metal-working machine operatives, 101 taxi drivers and 100 security guards. These compare with a figure of 31 per 100,000 for the working age male population as a whole. In approximately comparable roles for women the figures per 100,000 were 27 retail and sales assistants and 22 cleaners. In summary people working in insecure, low paid have suffered a higher death rate than ‘professionals’ and amongst them men have been significantly more at risk than women.

There’s nothing new in this. This is what I wrote in an article for Northern Voices last June with the title Levelling The Gradient. ‘There is little appetite in the UK for recognising the effects of our very unequal society on the lives of our citizens, irrespective of their skin colour. Even when studies to examine the impact of inequality are done, their findings are ignored. And it’s not just the Tories who are wilfully blind. In February two of the candidates for the Labour leadership felt that a Jewish pressure group and a ‘trans’ pressure group needed their public support, but when the Marmot review which looked at differences in health outcomes appeared later in the month it had zero impact on the campaign.

The media gave prominence to only one finding; that 'Female life expectancy declined in the most deprived 10 percent of neighbourhoods’ and ignored both the large disparity in life expectancy (LE) between people of higher and people of lower economic and social status, and that, irrespective of economic status women tend to live longer than men. (see page 18, Figure 2.4) reported in the review. (my emphasis).

http://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/marmot-review-10-years-on/the-marmot-review-10-years-on-full-report.pdf

These disparities also exist with regard to the disability free life expectancy (DFLE), i.e. the number of years of life someone will have free from disability. The review referred to these differences as forming a ‘social gradient’.

What the review showed was that in England, the difference in life expectancy at birth between the least deprived 10% of the population and the most deprived 10% was more than 9 years for men and more than 7 years for women. Life expectancy at birth for men living in the most deprived areas in England was 74 years, compared with 83 years in the least deprived areas; the corresponding figures for women were 79 and 86 years in 2016-18. (see pages 15-17, figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3) in the review.’

The British Left has become obsessed with ‘Institutional Racism’. I would like to see more attention paid to ‘Institutional Inequality’.

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The Scum Always Rises by Les May

A FRIEND of mine got an e-mail with the subject: Book and Appointment using the NHS e-Referral Service - NHSVaccination

It had the sender as: noreply@nhs.gov.uk on behalf of NHS digital which superficially looks genuine until you look at the end of the line.

On one of my machines I am able to safely 'peep' at where the link in this e-mail takes you to if you click on it.  It is an attempt to put malicious software on your machine which will corrupt it.

I circulated the above to friends and family. This morning I got the following response from one of the recipients:

Hi Les, Thanks, I have forwarded it on to rest of the family.

As I told you I had my injection Tuesday last week, on Saturday two people came to the door. One was in a dark blue sisters uniform the other was dressed in navy trousers and white nurses top. Both females. Coats over top but clear enough to see uniforms. As it happens S--- put me a chain on my door the day before so I can open it a few inches to speak.

They asked had I had any injections and I said yes. Wanted to know if I had one or two. Told them I had had my first one. As it happened they had some spare ones in a FREEZER BAG and they could give me my second one for £175. I just got my phone out of my pocket and said do you mind if I just double check with surgery who will probably get in touch with the police. They just disappeared!

Caveat emptor!

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Common-sense and Covid 19 by John Wilkins

OUR politicians hide behind following the science to escape criticism when things change for the worse. How about some plain, old fashioned common-sense?

Testing: Far too late in being implemented and even over last few months has only been stepped up at air ports. A friend, early last year, had been working in Venezuela training young doctors in his specialism, orthopaedic surgery. Deciding he needed to return to the UK he had to travel through three airports to get home. In three poor Latin American countries he was tested in each one, even though one was a temperature check. Yet he strolled through the airport here with NO test whatsoever!

Preparedness: Latest figures I could find showed the UK had less hospital beds per capita than most of Europe with only Sweden slightly worse. Significantly Sweden had far more doctors per capita whereas only Poland and Slovakia had less than us. We were low down on the list for critical care beds with just over half of those in Italy less than a quarter of those in Germany. As for our NHS the UK has by far and away the greatest number of private hospital beds in Europe.

Outside of Europe it is interesting to note that S. Korea has the second highest number of hospital beds in the world having been one of only a handful of countries to increase capacity in recent times. It is not surprising then that we have not coped well with this pandemic yet S. Korea has been one of the best to do so.

Clarity and leadership: Many people have complained about the lack of clarity about lock down rules and lack of common sense in formulating them.

So we have walkers targetted in the wilds of Derbyshire yet the PM's adviser, Cummings, dashed off to Barnard Castle to he claims to have an eye test with impunity. Boris Johnson contracted the virus shortly after leaving a meeting with several other people less than two metres apart and not wearing masks. Having experienced the illness he has been more careful since.

His father visited Greece "on essential business" to ensure a property he rents out was "Covid-proof". Baloney! At the time Greece had banned flights from UK there which Joe Johnson got around by flying in from Bulgaria.

Our PM could do with a course in leadership from New Zealand's leader, Jacinda Ardern. She brought unity after the horrendous attack on a mosque and carried the country with her in their lockdown. How? The people had respect and therefore trust in her.

Injections: Like Trump our Government were quick to pat themselves on the back for a) developing a vaccine and b) in the UK for being one of the first to use it. We are all grateful to the world's scientists for working collaboratively (not a word which can often apply to politicians) to create the vaccine.

The Government's job is how to deliver it and many have reservations about how it has been done. Although the expertise behind the Astra Zenica vaccines scientists at Oxford University the main production hub is at a vaccine factory in Belgium run by its partner Novasep. There have been recent problems there which might slow deliveries down across Europe.

As I got an invite to have the injection (Pfizer) some time ago I felt guilty as I am only 76 and in good health but especially so when the PM warned it might be up to twelve weeks to get the second dose.

I thought the plan was to get as many over 80's, people with underlying health conditions and key workers vaccinated first.

Now a report from Israel has raised concerns that the effectiveness was only 52.4% between the first and second dose if spaced just 21 days apart.

My concerns have been shared by Baroness Joan Bakewell who has threatened the Government with legal action over delays to the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Also Alejandro Cravioto, chairman of WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization, said the two doses of the Pfizer jab should be administered within 21 to 28 days.

Time for yet another U-turn Mat Hancock.

Following the rules: Hot topic after guests fled from a Jewish school when police arrived. The organisers faced a £10,000 fine for breaking lockdown rules and five guests were issued with £200 fixed penalty notices, according to police, out of about 150 present. Whilst I am not usually in favour of more offences resulting in prison, I am when the public's health is put at risk. The organisers deserve a custodial sentence or at least community service and more fines should be handed out.

In general people are obeying the rules but when shopping outlets say mask wearing is mandatory then make it so. People need to have more confidence in using forms of transport if we are to get more people into work safely. People are entitled to their opinions on the way the virus is tackled but our cherished freedom of speech does not mean anti-vaxxers can pedal false news and protest outside hospitals where NHS staff are putting their lives on the line. Take note Piers Corbyn and his acolytes!

Their activities have resulted in a drop in trust of vaccination particularly in the BAME community who have been shown to be most at risk of the virus.

We used to be admired as a nation for sticking to rules but not any more perhaps.

Postscript: Since I wrote this the EU look like playing 'hardball' over distribution of Pfizer vaccine from European plants.

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Russia’s Vladimir Putin denies he owns opulent Black Sea palace

AS OPPOSITION URGE MORE PROTESTS

Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed claims by opposition leader Alexei Navalny that he owns a luxury property on the Black Sea worth US$1.35 billion, as the opposition urged fresh nationwide demonstrations. Courts around Russia started handing down short jail sentences to demonstrators arrested during nationwide opposition rallies last weekend, while the foreign ministry accused US diplomats of encouraging Russians to join the protests.

Navalny’s aides urged his supporters to take to the streets again next Sunday ahead of a court case that could see Russia’s most prominent Kremlin critic put behind bars for more than three years.

The 44-year-old campaigner was detained just over a week ago when he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had been recuperating from exposure to a Soviet-designed toxin.

He called on his supporters in dozens of cities to rally last weekend and released a two-hour investigation into the palatial seaside property to spur allies to demonstrate.

The rallies saw a record number of arrests, and Putin on Monday denied having anything to do with the property in Navalny’s video, which has now been watched 86 million times.

“Nothing that is listed there as my property belongs to me or my close relatives, and never did,” Putin said during a video call with Russian students.

Navalny’s report - his most-watched anti-corruption probe by far - claims the property is worth US$1.35 billion and features everything from an underground ice rink to a casino.

Leonid Volkov, a key aide to the Kremlin critic, urged Russians to take to the streets again on January 31 “or fNavalny’s freedom, for freedom for all, and for justice”.

Saturday’s rallies saw clashes between police and protesters, 3,700 of whom were detained according to the OVD-Info monitoring group.

Putin said on Monday that Russian citizens have the right to express themselves but that they must do so “within the framework of the law”.

Putin also said minors should not be encouraged to join the rallies, referring to a claim repeated by authorities that the opposition had encouraged young people to protest.

“That’s what terrorists do. They put women and children in front of themselves,” Putin said.

Political analyst Alexei Zakharov, who cited polls conducted at Moscow’s rally, said on Facebook that demonstrators were on average 31-years-old, while only 10 per cent of participants were 18 or younger.

The Russian foreign ministry on Monday repeated claims that US diplomats had encouraged Russians to participate in the rallies, and said it had lodged a “strong protest” with the American ambassador.

That allegation followed earlier claims by the Kremlin that the US embassy was interfering in Russian affairs by publishing protest routes ahead of the rallies.

An embassy spokeswoman said that it was “routine practice” for diplomatic missions to issue safety messages to their citizens abroad.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would probe American tech companies over “interference” related to the demonstrations.

Ahead of the rallies, Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor ordered social media platforms including YouTube and Instagram to delete calls for demonstrations posted on their platforms.

Navalny’s arrest was met with widespread condemnation in the West, with the European Union saying it was considering new sanctions on Russia - although EU ministers decided at a meeting Monday that this was “premature”, according to one European diplomat.

That allegation followed earlier claims by the Kremlin that the US embassy was interfering in Russian affairs by publishing protest routes ahead of the rallies.

An embassy spokeswoman said that it was “routine practice” for diplomatic missions to issue safety messages to their citizens abroad.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would probe American tech companies over “interference” related to the demonstrations.

Ahead of the rallies, Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor ordered social media platforms including YouTube and Instagram to delete calls for demonstrations posted on their platforms.

Navalny’s arrest was met with widespread condemnation in the West, with the European Union saying it was considering new sanctions on Russia - although EU ministers decided at a meeting Monday that this was “premature”, according to one European diplomat.

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A HISTORY of PUSHKIN SQUARE: 1967 to 2021

In Moscow, last Saturday, an estimated 15,000 demonstrators gathered in and around Pushkin Square in the city centre, where clashes with police broke out and demonstrators were roughly dragged off by helmeted riot officers to police buses and detention trucks. Some were beaten with batons.

Navalny’s wife Yulia was among those arrested. Police eventually pushed demonstrators out of the square. Thousands then regrouped along a wide boulevard about a kilometer (half-mile) away, many of them throwing snowballs at the police before dispersing.

Some later went to protest near the jail where Navalny is held. Police made an undetermined number of arrests there.

Perhaps it would bee helpful if we compare what is happening now under Vladimir Putin today with what took place in Pushkin Square in 1967 in the Soviet Communist Era when a demo took place in protesting the arrests of some then political dissidents and the use of Article 70 of the then Criminal Code with regard to its use conflicting with the constitution.

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OVER 50 years ago on the 22nd, January, 1967 at 6p.m., a group of twenty to thirty young people gathhered in Pushkin Square carrying banners calling for the release of four prisoners and calling for the revision of Article 70 of the Criminal Code. As they unfolded their banners men in plain clothes rushed up from all sides of the square, seized the banners and arrested several people. Most of the others scattered, and among the small group remaining one shouted 'Down with the dictatorship! Release Dobrovolsky!' All the prisoners were taken to the HQ of the Komsomol. After some hours' questioning, two were released (Gabay and Delaunay) and two others (Kushev and Khaustov) taken to the KGB investigation centre* at Lefortovo prison.

Later on the 25th and 26th of January 1967, Gabay and Delaunay were re-arrested and another demonstrator was taken into custody. The houses of all the prisoners were carefully searched; the police were particularly interested in samizdat manuscipts** and confistcated most of them. Some hundred witnesses were questioned by the Prosecutor's Office and the KGB.

SPEECH FOR THE PROSECUTION ***

'Comrade Judges! This year is a great date for us - it is the 50th year of the Soviet Regime. The struggle for the maintenance of public order continues throughout the country. In Moscow, the maintenance of public order is particularly important. We have largely been sussessful in this respect. Imagine, in the circumstances, the astonishment and indignation of the citizens who witnessed what occurred in Pushkin Square on the 22nd, of January 1967. The place which these self-syled demonstrators chose for their activities - the vicinity of a great poet's monument - is a placewhich everyon holds sacred. Their gathering might have attracted large crowds - not, of course, of like-minded citizen but of curious onlookers. Had the Druzhinniki not put a stop to it straight away, it might have led to a large disturbance.'

* * KGB: translated in English as the Committee for State Security, was the secret police force that was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until 6 November 1991, when it split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.

** samizdat manuscipts: The remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union is called samizdat: The word is a play on Gosizdat, which is a telescoping of Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo, the name of the monopoly‐wielding State Publish ing House. The sam part of the new word means “self.” The whole samizdat—translates as: “We publish ourselves”—that is, not the state, but we, the people.

*** The Demonstration in Pushkin Square by Pavel Litvinov (1968).

Rochdale's Reputation for Cover-ups

ON Wed 18 Mar 2015 a former editor of Rochdale's Alternative Paper (RAP), John Walker, wrote a piece in The Guardian entitled 'Our Cyril Smith story came out in 1979. What followed was a 36-year cover-up':

'Finally the hunt is on to nail those responsible for aborting police inquiries into the child sex abuse allegations against the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith and other – as yet unnamed – establishment figures from the 1970s and 1980s. But his abuses have been covered up and ignored for over 35 years. Why should the victims feel that anything much has changed in recent days'...

'I write as co-editor of the Rochdale Alternative Paper, which in May 1979 published a 2,000 word article, quoting in graphic detail from the testimonies of boys Smith had sexually abused a decade and a half earlier. The article was cleared legally by three prominent lawyers, on a pro-bono basis. They went through every word with a view to potential libel pitfalls. On legal advice we sought Smith’s comments prior to publication. We received none directly: only a bungled “gagging” writ, which failed to prevent publication...

'Rochdale council made Smith a freeman of the borough, named a room in the town hall after him and, in a ceremony attended by the current MP Simon Danczuk, put up a blue plaque in his honour – now taken down, apparently to prevent vandalism. More rubbing the noses of many victims in their misery, on their home patch.'

The conclusion John Walker came to in 2015 was:

'Smith had got away with it. He increased his parliamentary majority and, emboldened by his escape from justice, possibly continued his abuse of pubescent boys for two decades. Action in 1979 could have stopped him in his tracks, and prevented abuse and misery for future victims. Files on Smith’s child abuse were passed around police forces and the security services in the 1970s and 1980s – with no prosecutions. More covering up and inaction, instead of an end to his abuse.'

On that occasion following the emergence of the first Jimmy Savile revelations in 2012, Northern Voices and Paul Waugn then of the Politics Home site (now of the Huff Post) interviewed several of Smith's victims ultimately resulting in Channel 4’s Dispatches programme running an episode on Smith. Which Walker says 'did justice to the subject, but was allotted a ludicrous graveyard airing slot'.

Editorial Observation:

In recent times the case of the self-confessed electoral fraud Cllr. Faisal Rana and his surprising rise to power on Rochdale Council, has followed a pattern parelling the cover-ups involving Cyril Smith. A former CID officer told me that a report on Smith had been sent to the then Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) but had come back as 'Not in the Public Interest'. Similarly complaints have been ongoing about Cllr. Faisal Rana and it seems that the Rochdale police may have toned-down their report to the CPP and have failed to emphasis that it may have involved postal vote fraud which would require a prison sentence.

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Protests erupt in over 60 Russian cities today

By DARIA LITVINOVA and JIM HEINTZ on AP NEWS

Protests erupted in over 60 Russian cities on Saturday to demand the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent foe. Russian police arrested more than 850 protesters, some of whom took to the streets in temperatures as frigid as minus-50 Celsuis (minus-58 Fahrenheit)

.

In Moscow, about 5,000 demonstrators filled Pushkin Square in the city center, where clashes with police broke out and demonstrators were roughly dragged off by helmeted riot officers to police buses and detention trucks. Navalny’s wife Yulia was among those arrested.

The protests stretched across Russia’s vast territory, from the island city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk north of Japan and the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatures plunged to minus-50 Celsius, to the Russia’s more populous European cities. The range demonstrated how Navalny and his anti-corruption campaign have built an extensive network of support despite official government repression and being routinely ignored by state media.

The OVD-Info group that monitors political arrests said at least 191 people were detained in Moscow on Saturday and more than 100 at another large demonstration in St. Petersburg. Overall, it said 863 people had been arrested by late afternoon in Moscow.

Navalny was arrested on Jan. 17 when he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from a severe nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin and which Russian authorities deny. Authorities say his stay in Germany violated terms of a suspended sentence in a 2014 criminal conviction, while Navalny says the conviction was for made-up charges.

The 44-year-old activist is well known nationally for his reports on the corruption that has flourished under President Vladimir Putin’s government.

His wide support puts the Kremlin in a strategic bind — risking more protests and criticism from the West if it keeps him in custody but apparently unwilling to back down by letting him go free.

Navalny faces a court hearing in early February to determine whether his sentence in the criminal case for fraud and money-laundering — which Navalny says was politically motivated — is converted to 3 1/2 years behind bars.

Moscow police on Thursday arrested three top Navalny associates, two of whom were later jailed for periods of nine and 10 days.

Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on Aug. 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a Berlin hospital two days later. Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.

Russian authorities insisted that the doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was airlifted to Germany found no traces of poison and have challenged German officials to provide proof of his poisoning. Russia refused to open a full-fledged criminal inquiry, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned.

Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, who purportedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up. The FSB dismissed the recording as fake.

Navalny has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for a decade, unusually durable in an opposition movement often demoralized by repressions.

He has been jailed repeatedly in connection with protests and twice was convicted of financial misdeeds in cases that he said were politically motivated. He suffered significant eye damage when an assailant threw disinfectant into his face. He was taken from jail to a hospital in 2019 with an illness that authorities said was an allergic reaction but which many suspected was a poisoning.

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LABOUR Cllr JAILED for 17 months After Committing Fraud To Win His Seat

By jaybeecher Posted on January 20, 2021

CHAUDHARY Mohammed Iqbal, 51, told election officials that he lived in Ilford so that he could trick them into thinking he met the legal requirements to run for a seat in the constituency. In doing so, he committed electoral fraud.

Mr Chaudhary then broke the law yet again after his questionable election win in 2018, by continuing to hold that seat of office based on his lies, and to collect thousands of pounds in expenses payments.

When police began to investigate, Iqbal encouraged his tenant Kristina Stankeviciute to lie on his behalf and tell officers that he lived in a converted living room at the Ilford property.

Miss Stankeviciute has since left the country and a European warrant for her arrest was issued in December last year.

Iqbal had given multiple false addresses in his attempts to run for local office and successfully sat as a Labour councillor for more than two years, claiming more than £18,000 in expenses and allowances.

The former councillor pleaded guilty to three counts of making false statements in candidate nomination papers and one count of perverting the course of justice.

Iqbal, who has since moved to Preston, appeared at Southwark Crown Court earlier this month and was sentenced to a total of 17 months in prison.

He was also ordered to pay prosecution costs of £10,422.54, compensation to Redbridge Council of £10,000 for the by-election costs and compensation to Redbridge Council of £18,368 for the allowances paid to him and will not be allowed to run for office for at least five years.

EDITORIAL FOOTNOTE:

A Fashion for Fraud: How many more cases?

This case seems to have some similarities to the Rochdale case in which Faisal Rana was cautioned in 2018 for voting twice in the local elections. Some feel that the now Rochdale Labour Councillor Rana was let off lightly by the authorities. His party and the Rochdale council allowed him to remain in office despite the scandal.

At the time, in 2018, Councillor Rana told Sky News:

‘I have accepted a police caution for an electoral offence, which relates to me casting separate votes for two different wards in two different Constituencies (Spotland and Falinge, and Norden Ward) in the local elections earlier this year.

‘I legally registered my votes by providing my genuine national insurance number, date of birth and addresses and when I received these through the post I thought it would have been OK and that is why they issued me two ballots for two constituencies. ‘I did not realise this was an offence and misinterpreted the rule that says it is possible to vote in two different electoral areas. ‘As soon as this was brought to my attention I went for a voluntary interview at local police station and co-operated with police fully in this regard.’

The trouble is that Faisal Rana obtained postal votes which involved him in a seemingly illegal application, and this may yet still come back to bite him. Indeed compared to CHAUDHARY Mohammed Iqbal who has now moved to Preston; Cllr. Faisal Rana has had a charmed life rising to the top in the Labour Party despite admitting to election fraud. But then againn Rochdale's authorities overlooked the the ashortcomings of Cyril Smith for decades.

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'Free speech for presidents' by Philip Dickens

by Philip Dickens Comment, on the FREEDOM PRESS WEBSITE Jan 12th

Editorial Note: We are publishing below a post by Philip Dickens from the anarchist Freedom Website. In it Phil Dickens mocks the blog 'Spiked' edited by Brendan O'Neill as representing the 'reactionary fringes of the mainstream discourse'. It is worth noting that not only the American Civil Liberties Union has warned about the unchecked power of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to remove people from the forum of everyday discourse. I say 'everday discourse', but of course many people, including me, do not use either.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Mr. Dickens sneeringly jumps up and down announcing: 'Predictably, this led to #thisis1984 trending on Twitter, with the right decrying the ban as Orwellian.'

And yet Dickens is right to argue that there is a 'legitimate debate about the impact of corporations on freedom of speech and expression, but it doesn’t rest on the right of a US President to Tweet'.

Nor is this a novel problem of the internet era. Indeed, Orwell noted in 1946 in his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' that: 'Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his [sic] integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the conceration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nealy every writer to earn part of his living by hack work, the encroachment of official bodies like the Ministry of Information and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions... Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling the whole of the truth.'

Dickens knows all of this, as he himself suffers from earning his living as a tax inspector. At one time the left were the main advocates of free speech, but because of the cancel culture campaigns etc. this ground as the novelist Margaret Atwood has recently argued, has been largely surrendered to the right. The FREEDOM WEBSITE despite its anarchist pretentions has in the last two decades fallen short as a defender of liberty or free speech; its current editor in 2016 even put up a blacklist of four people he didn't like who had the audacity to apply for positions on the FRIENDS of FREEDOM PRESS committee. Dickes approach suffers from being too simplistic as shown were he writes that 'private ownership by the capitalist class is protected from dissent by the state and its monopoly on violence.' Dividing politics into a left / right dichotomy is of questionable application today, especially in relation to Trump who was generally recognised to be an unconventional president.

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'FREE SPEECH for PRESIDENTS' by Philip Dickens

FOLLOWING the short-lived occupation of the US Capitol building, Twitter and a number of other social media platforms have banned US President Donald Trump.

Predictably, this led to #thisis1984 trending on Twitter, with the right decrying the ban as Orwellian. Brendan O’Neill of Sp!ked – the publication which leads the advance of terrible opinions from the reactionary fringes into the mainstream discourse – declared this “a chilling sign of tyranny to come.” This is, he says, “a very significant turning point in the politics and culture of the Western world” as it sees “exceptionally wealthy and aloof elites determining which elected politicians may engage in online discussion.”

This isn’t a position confined to the right, however. A member of the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative counsel has said that “it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”

There’s a legitimate debate about the impact of corporations on freedom of speech and expression, but it doesn’t rest on the right of a US President to Tweet.

Yes, a few companies in Silicon Valley control the whole social media landscape and have undue influence as a result. That’s not a unique or historically unprecedented phenomenon though: it reflects the balance of power and ownership in both the traditional media and physical spaces.

What O’Neill calls the “powerful, unaccountable oligarchies of the internet era” are mirrors of the media barons who dominate print and broadcast news. However, the almost unmoderated right of reply that exists in social media is absent, and instead the discourse both reflects and directs the ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable opinion – with what is acceptable defined not by popular or democratic will but by who owns the press and by the fact that it doesn’t sell news to an audience but an audience to advertisers. In other words, just as O’Neill says tech companies are doing, media owners and advertisers have long been “exploiting their monopolistic power to dictate what political opinions it is acceptable to hold and express.”

In physical spaces, from the workplace to the public square, private ownership by the capitalist class is protected from dissent by the state and its monopoly on violence. Anti-strike legislation limits the extent to which workers can stand up to their bosses, whilst a tangle of laws serve to restrict the conduct of protests and criminalise protesters in a myriad of ways.

The media commentators who see unprecedented totalitarianism in Trump’s Twitter ban have no qualms over any of the above. Instead, they view any kickback against that monopolisation of discourse as the real threat to free speech. This is why they have been vocal in opposition to the Stop Funding Hate campaign, which seeks to redirect advertising influence towards making (for example) media demonisation of migrants unprofitable. It is why all of the furore around ‘cancel culture’ is centred on the defence of those with a considerable platform and privilege from any consequences for their words yet they will say nothing when Julia Hartley-Brewer, a member of the Free Speech Union’s PR/Media advisory council, threatening to get a man sacked for challenging her Covid-denying propaganda against the NHS.

In other words, they’re concerned about defending the free speech of the powerful from efforts by the powerless to resist that through free association and action.

So it is with Twitter. The platform is genuinely guilty of arbitrary and questionable banning decisions – more often than not against small voices who challenge the powerful or the genuinely dangerous. That, under immense pressure, it is occasionally forced to follow its own rules and look at safeguarding and risks of incitement isn’t the problem. Rather, the fact that under other circumstances the power and influence those accounts hold would protect it and see instead the less influential who challenge them banned is the problem here.

Private monopolisation of what should be public spaces is the key issue. Within that, the fact that (just like in real life) the powerful are protected from the consequences of their actions except in the most extreme circumstances is the crucial point.

Anarchists recognise that genuine liberty and equality go hand in hand, and that we cannot have either if we fail to address questions of power.

Alongside formal hierarchies, such as those embedded in the institutions of the state and capital, this includes invisible hierarchies that inevitably grow out of supposedly ‘structureless’ environs. In a group without a formal leadership, those with the most confidence and the loudest voices dominate with no democracy to rein them in. In a meeting without a chairperson, the most brash can speak unhindered – but the consequence is that others in turn are silenced.

That’s why our primary concern isn’t the right of US President to a massive platform and untold influence, including the ability to incite (amateurish, incompetent) coup attempts.

Those whose only demand is that those already with a platform and influence are never deprived of that do not stand for free speech. They stand in defence of a fundamentally unjust status quo in which free expression is directly linked to power.

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Alexei Navalny's probe & Vladimir Putin's 'palace'

Diana Magnay Moscow correspondent @DiMagnaySky

He may be behind bars, but the Kremlin has not succeeded in silencing Alexei Navalny.

On his first full day in Moscow's Matrosskaya-Tishina prison, Mr Navalny's team have released a huge video investigation into the construction and alleged slush fund behind what is known as "Putin's palace", a £1bn private residence on Russia's Black Sea coast.

Calling it "Putin's biggest secret", Mr Navalny and his team reveal new details about the sprawling complex near the resort town of Gelendzhik which has long been rumoured to belong to the Russian president.

Drone footage over the grounds, which the team says are 39 times the size of Monaco, shows an underground ice hockey complex, 2,500 square metre greenhouse, and underground tunnel leading out to the Black Sea.

Architectural floor plans secured from a contractor shocked at the extent of the luxury reveal a lavish indoor theatre, fully-fledged casino and purple-tinted "hookah bar".

It is "the most expensive palace in the world", Mr Navalny says in the narration. "A new Versailles, new Winter Palace."

Mr Navalny says the idea for the investigation, which he presents from Germany, came during his time in intensive care.

He travels to Dresden to trace Vladimir Putin's path from lowly KGB operative on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain to the pinnacle of power in the Kremlin, showing how the friends he made in the 1990s have remained the principle beneficiaries of his kleptocratic regime to this day.

"Putin's personal money is kept by those he met 30 years ago", the investigation says. "In search of sponsors for the most corrupt ruler in the history of Russia, you need to go to his past."

He calls the Gelendzhik property the "biggest bribe in the world" and claims to have uncovered a scheme by which money for its construction is funnelled into offshore accounts by Mr Putin's cronies as payment for lucrative state contracts he has handed them over the years.

"The standout for me is how bizarre and cuckoo-in the head our president is," says Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of Mr Navalny and executive director of his now disbanded Anti-Corruption Foundation. "Why do you need a billion dollar palace which you would never really use, as president?"

The Kremlin has denied that Mr Putin owns a palace in Gelendzhik.

The almost two-hour video investigation ends with a plea to the Russian people to go out and protest. "If 10% of those who are disaffected take to the streets, the government will not dare falsify elections," Mr Navalny says.

It is a call he repeated in a video message from a Moscow police station on Monday, shortly before he was taken to jail.

In a hastily convened court session inside the police station, a judge ruled that his detention should be extended for 30 days, until 15 February.

On 2 February, a court will decide whether to convert a three-and-a-half year suspended sentence he was serving for an alleged embezzlement charge into a custodial sentence on the grounds that he violated the terms of his parole whilst convalescing in Germany.

Mr Navalny says all the various charges he has faced over the years are politically motivated.

His team are calling for a nationwide day of protest this Saturday. Mass gatherings are banned in Russia because of the pandemic and so far in Moscow, just two thousand people have registered as going on the Facebook page.

"The message about Putin's property will reach people in different formats and different channels," Mr Ashurkov says.

"It's unlikely that the regime will change tomorrow and we'll see hundreds of thousands of people on the streets but it's a campaign of constant pressure and history teaches us that the only constant throughout the decades is change."

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Alexei Navalny: a modern-day Lenin?

HITLER and the Nazi Party soon decided that gasing the Jews was cheaper and more efficient than shooting them. In Russia, Lenin prefered poisoning what he considered enemies of the State.

Thus,the Russian opposition activist, Alexei Navalny, is merely the latest Kremlin critic suspected to have been poisoned in dodgy circumstances. Over the last century a series of political opponents have fallen mysteriously ill. Many have died. All have seemingly been victims of Moscow’s secret poisons laboratory, set up by Vladimir Lenin in 1921.

Its purpose was to deal efficiently and mercilessly with perceived enemies of the state. Some were domestic, others troublesome exiles. According to Stalin’s former spy chief Pavel Sudoplatov, the KGB concluded long ago that poison was the best method for eliminating unwanted individuals. The KGB’s modern successor – the FSB – appears to share this view.

During the cold war, the KGB exterminated its adversaries in ingenious ways. In 1959 an assassin killed the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera using a cyanide spray pistol hidden in a newspaper. In 1979 another hitman murdered the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov as he waited for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London. The weapon: a poison-tipped umbrella.

In the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, exotic murders stopped, at a time of cooperation between Russia and the west. Once Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, however, political killings stealthily resumed. There was speculation that the poisons factory – identified as a squat, gloomy, beige research building on the outskirts of Moscow – was back in business.

Possible victims included Roman Tsepov, Putin’s bodyguard in 1990s St Petersburg, who died after drinking tea in 2004 at a local FSB office. The same year, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya fell ill on a domestic flight to Rostov, losing consciousness after sipping tea on the plane. She survived. Two years later a gunman murdered Politkovskaya outside her Moscow flat.

Up to now the most notorious poisoning of the century took place weeks later. The target this time was Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned vehement Putin critic. Two Moscow assassins – Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi – met Litvinenko at the Millennium hotel in London. He swallowed a few sips of green tea laced with radioactive polonium, dying three weeks later.

The murder led to a long and acrimonious period in British-Russian relations. It also threw up a grim question: whether Putin signed off on state hits, or merely set broad policy parameters for his spy chiefs to interpret. A 2016 public inquiry in the UK ruled Putin had “probably” approved the operation, together with the then head of the FSB. Some government evidence remains secret.

In March 2018, another pair of Kremlin hitmen flew into London from Moscow, in much the same way Kovtun and Lugovoi had done 12 years earlier. Their target was Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent who had spied for MI6. The assassins were colonels in Russian military intelligence, working undercover: Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.

According to the British government, Mishkin and Chepiga applied a Soviet-era nerve agent – novichok – to the front door handle of Skripal’s home in Salisbury. He and his daughter, Yulia, collapsed hours later on a city centre bench. They survived but another woman, Dawn Sturgess, died two months later after spraying novichok on her wrists. The UK and its allies expelled more than 150 embassy-based Russian spies.

Evidence of Putin’s personal involvement in poisonings remains circumstantial. We do not know how much he knows or the chain of command. But the large number of victims, at home and abroad, suggests the Kremlin views such episodes as an unpleasant but necessary evil. They send a message to society. It says that dissent has its limits, and that unbridled opposition to the state may carry a terrible price.

The immediate problem for Putin is how to handle Alexei Navalny's popularity as currently the most serious oppostion figure in Russia. Does he risk turning turn Navalny into a martyr by locking him up and throwing away the key or does he let him go and look weak? Hitherto, Putin has tried dismiss him as unimportant but this is harder to do when the facts on the ground seem to contradict this claim.

Even the manner of arrival of Navalny in Moscow last Sunday gave rise to historical comparisons with that of Vladimir Lenin's triumphant return to his home country on April 16, 1917*. Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station marked a turning point in Russian history. From this point, Lenin would go on to take the revolution into his own hands — and by early November (October O.S.), the Bolsheviks would seize power in what is today known as the October Revolution, setting the stage for the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Since his arrival last weekend the jailed anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny has called on Russians across the country to take to the streets.

“Do not be silent. Resist. Take to the streets – not for me, but for you,” Navalny said in a short video statement released after his hearing held in a police station, where an impromptu court had been set up a day after he was detained at Sheremetyevo after he arrived home from five months in Germany.

It is believed that Navalny appears to be hoping for a repeat of the 2013 demonstrations where thousands of people gathered outside the Kremlin walls to protest against his arrest at that time. On that occasion the Kremlin backed down and released him, but this time round the stakes are a lot higher.

On the same day as Navalny was arrested, Amnesty International officially named Navalny a prisoner of conscience.

At the same time, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, flew home with her husband and was with him, and in the camera’s focus, up until the point he was led away by police.

One scenario would be that Navalnaya stands for election in the September Duma elections in her husband's stead, copying opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya's decision to do the same in the Belarusian election.

After her husband’s arrest, Navalnaya went out on to the street to address the waiting crowd.

“Alexei is not afraid. I’m not afraid either and I call on you all not to be afraid,” she said over chants of “Yulia!”

Navalnaya has been playing an increasingly public role since her husband was poisoned. She rapidly flew from Moscow to Omsk, where he had been hospitalised in a coma in August and publically berated the doctors who were refusing to let her see her husband, after they asked for proof that they were married.

She then co-ordinated the effort to get an ambulance plane from Germany to transport her husband to Berlin, as well as fielded questions from the press corps that quickly arrived on the scene.

In perhaps her boldest move, she directly addressed President Vladimir Putin, requesting permission to let them bring her husband to Berlin. The Russian authorities dragged their heels on releasing Navalny to the waiting plane for as long as they could, but with the high tech, well-equipped plane standing on the tarmac and Navalny in a critical condition they could not refuse. Navalnaya can take a large amount of credit for forcing that decision through.

The poisoning saga represented her “moment of transition from an accompanying figure to an independent character,” said Alexander Baunov of the Carnegie Center in Moscow as cited by the Moscow Times. “Now that Alexei is arrested Navalnaya will act independently.”

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* After 17 years of exile in Europe, Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin staged a triumphant return to his home country on April 16, 1917, with aims to seize power from the Russian government and install a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” His return journey would change the course of world history in ways that are still being reckoned with.

Arriving at the Finland Station in Russia’s former capital of Petrograd (modern-day St. Petersburg), Lenin climbed atop an armored train car to address the thousands of his followers who had gathered. In a now-historic speech, Lenin argued that the Bolshevik Party must use armed force to seize control from the provisional government that had been formed after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication.

“The people need peace; the people need bread; the people need land. And they give you war, hunger, no bread. … We must fight for the socialist revolution, fight to the end, until the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!" he cried that night.

Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station marked a turning point in Russian history. From this point, Lenin would go on to take the revolution into his own hands — and by early November (October O.S.), the Bolsheviks would seize power in what is today known as the October Revolution, setting the stage for the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Alexei Navalny in Russia amid arrest threats

Fierce Kremlin critic and political campaigner Alexei Navalny headed back to Russia on Sunday, despite being warned by Russian authorities that he will be arrested upon his arrival.

Navalny left Berlin on a flight operated by Russian airline Pobeda and was scheduled to land at Moscow's Vnukovo airport. Just minutes before his arrival, however, Pobeda airline said the smaller airport was closed for arriving planes. The screens at Vnukovo then showed the flight as being diverted to Shermetyevo.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), founded by Navalny, confirmed his arrival to Shermetyevo and invited people to "come meet him."

"You might still make it!" they wrote on Twitter.

While reasons for switching airports were not immediately clear, Russian authorities have threatened to arrest Navalny upon return. On Sunday, Moscow police detained several of his aides at Vnukovo and cleared the crowd that gathered to welcome him at his scheduled destination. Security had been tightened around the Moscow airport awaiting Navalny's arrival. The 44-year-old called on his supporters to meet him there, but authorities warned against unauthorized rallies on the premises.

'What bad thing can happen to me in Russia?'

Before taking off from Berlin, Navalny told reporters he was "very happy" and was "sure everything will be great."

He dismissed the fears he would be arrested upon arrival.

"Arrest me upon landing!? That cannot be done," he said.

"What do I need to be afraid of? What bad thing can happen to me in Russia?" he told reporters, saying he was innocent of any wrongdoing and felt he was "a citizen of Russia who has every right" to go back to his native country.

Police in Moscow detain Navalny aides

While Navalny was in the air, however, his close ally Ivan Zhdanov reported that several of Navalny's associates were detained in Moscow while waiting for the politician's plane to land.

The Russian authorities detained dissident and anti-corruption lawyer Lyobov Sobol as well Navalny's assistant Ilya Pahomov, along with several others, according to Zhdanov, who leads Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). Navalny supporters posted this video from inside the airport, claiming that it showed the detainment of Sobol, Navalny's brother Oleg, and FBK official Ruslan Shaveddinov.

The news on Sobol's detainment was also confirmed by Russia's Dozhd TV. The independent broadcaster published a video of a man flying a Russian flag and chanting Navalny's name while at the same time calling President Vladimir Putin a "thief" at Vnukovo. The man was later detained, according to Dozhd.

Soon after, Dozhd reporter Eduard Burmistrov was also briefly detained while broadcasting live.

"Police officers literally grabbed me and are now dragging me somewhere," he said in the video posted on Twitter.

Earlier on Sunday, Sobol posted a video on her channel where she said she "went through [airport security] as usual."

The 33-year-old activist said she brought a special backpack with her because she had expected to be detained while making her way to the Vnukovo terminal.

Sobol added that "this is how it usually goes."

"I'm very happy that made it through the airport, that I'm sitting here and I'm very much hoping I would be able to meet Navalny and that there would be no provocations from the government," she told Russian Novaya Gazeta.

Navalny's wife makes movie reference before takeoff

"I'm flying home," Navalny posted from the tarmac.

The tweet links to a short video posted on his Instagram channel, which shows Navalny sitting in the plane next to his wife Yulia. He and his wife are seen taking off their face masks, with Yulia then saying, "Kid, get us some water, we are flying home" in reference to a final scene of the popular Russian movie "Brat 2." The 2000 film ends with a male and a female character taking a flight from the US to Moscow.

One of Putin's main rivals, Navalny was flown to Berlin in August last year after surviving an assassination attempt from the Novichok nerve agent.

Authorities intend to put the activist behind bars

The Russian federal prison service FSIN said on Thursday that it would take all actions necessary to detain him and had requested that his suspended sentence be upgraded to jail time.

Navalny was convicted in 2014 of fraud charges that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled unlawful.

"In theory, they can detain him as soon as he arrives [in Russia] but initially only for 48 hours," said Vadim Kobzev, one of Navalny's lawyers.

Moscow has denied all allegations of poisoning the anti-corruption activist although scientists in Germany, Sweden and France, as well as tests from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons all confirmed traces of the Soviet-era nerve-agent found on Navalny.

The activist also recorded a phone call with the agent who allegedly poisoned him admitting to his actions. Moscow has rejected the recordings as fake.

Navalny's poisoning and later treatment in Germany have been a source of contention between Russia and the EU.

Late last year, the European Union imposed travel bans and bank account freezes on several Russian officials over the incident, including the head of Russia's FSB intelligence service.

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Collision course: The Return of Alexei Navalny

Collision course Moscow: The Return of Alexei Navalny Five months after he was poisoned, the opposition leader is headed back to Russia. By Eva Hartog in POLITICO January 15, 2021

MOSCOW — The last time a plane carrying Alexei Navalny landed on Russian soil, the Russian opposition leader was unconscious and pilots had to make an emergency detour to save his life.

Five months later, after a miraculous recovery, a lucid Navalny plans to board a flight to Moscow this Sunday that will bring him back to the country where he suffered a near-fatal attack.

“I ended up in Germany, in an intensive-care box, for one reason: They tried to kill me,” Navalny said in an Instagram post announcing his arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport this weekend. “Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, I miss it.”

For Navalny, his return to Russia from Germany where he underwent treatment for poisoning from the military-grade nerve agent Novichok is at once a personal risk and a political boon. Notably, he is choosing to fly back with the airline Pobeda, Russian for “Victory.”

For the Russian authorities, however, his return spells nothing but trouble at the start of an important election year — trouble they were hoping to avoid by piling on the legal hurdles for Navalny and his entourage.

Most recently, in January, Russia’s penitentiary service asked a court to rule Navalny had breached the terms of his suspended sentence by staying in Germany. In a statement on Thursday, a day after Navalny’s Instagram post, it vowed to do “everything possible” to detain him upon his return to Russia.

It had all the semblance of a last-minute warning: Stay put, or else.

Pointing at Putin

That warning — or threat — seems to have fallen on deaf ears. As Russia’s No. 2 politician after President Vladimir Putin, Navalny has built his brand on refusing to be cowed. If anything, the poison attack has made him redirect his arrows at the very top of Russia’s pyramid of power.

From the moment he woke up from a medically induced coma in Berlin’s Charité Hospital in September, Navalny has accused Putin of personally being behind the poison attack (which the Russian president has denied). And he hasn’t stopped there.

Last month, building on an investigation by the journalism collective Bellingcat, Navalny prank-called a man whom he claimed worked for the FSB, tricking him into admitting the supposed involvement of the security services in his poisoning. A YouTube video of the call has been viewed more than 22 million times.

“No one has humiliated the FSB in this way in a long, long time — if ever,” said political commentator Konstantin Gaaze. “His return will be interpreted as an explicit challenge, there’s no doubt they will want to put him away.”

There are other reasons than revenge to want Navalny sidelined.

This autumn, Russians are set to vote for a new parliament to serve during the so-called power transition in the run-up to the end of Putin’s presidential term in 2024. Pundits are unsure about what will follow — will Putin hang on to the presidential seat, or appoint a successor while maintaining his grip on power? But whatever the preferred option, the Kremlin will want full control over the process.

Ahead of that election — and amid an economic downturn because of the coronavirus pandemic — commentators have pointed to a tangible tightening of the screws against dissent, including the hurried passing of a law late last year that allows individuals to be labeled as “foreign agents.”

Navalny’s “smart voting” strategy against the ruling party United Russia, which coordinates protest votes in challenges to their biggest contenders, and his ability to organize large street protests threaten to throw a spanner into the works.

Conspiracy theories

Russia has a tradition of dissidents returning to their homeland. Sometimes — as with Vladimir Lenin’s train ride in 1917 — they have triumphed. But then there is also the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, who returned to Russia in 2003 only to disappear behind bars for a decade.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has been a flood of speculation as to how the Russian authorities will thwart Navalny’s arrival.

Theories have ranged from the conventional (Navalny could be refused boarding on the pretext of COVID restrictions or detained on the runway and placed under house arrest) to the outlandish (the air carrier could be shut down, his flight canceled or a freak snow storm be used as an excuse to divert the plane).

Rather than a rich imagination, the speculation reveals a general sense of lawlessness after a summer that included a controversial vote on constitutional reforms which will allow Putin to stay in power beyond 2024 and Navalny’s brazen poisoning.

“If before we understood that Navalny could be jailed at any moment, now the scenario we have in mind is that he could be killed,” Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician and a close ally of Navalny’s told the Dozhd television channel.

Moreover, most commentators agree that political unrest in the United States ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden plays into the Kremlin’s hands by drawing international attention away from Russia.

Touchdown

Presumably in an effort to prevent his immediate arrest, Navalny has called upon his supporters to meet him at the airport on Sunday. A large turnout could convince the authorities to hold back — temporarily at least.

Then again, a low turnout could backfire and convince the hardliners in government that punitive measures against the opposition politician will go largely unprotested.

A poll by the independent Levada Center late last year showed that fewer Russians believed the Kremlin was behind the poisoning than those who suspect the West — echoing the Kremlin’s own claims of a foreign conspiracy. Most Russians, however, were indifferent or believed the entire poisoning was staged.

But the authorities have to tread carefully: Jailing Navalny could risk making a martyr out of him and be interpreted as a sign of weakness. But leaving him free practically guarantees he will be a nuisance. In deciding how to respond to that conundrum, the Russian authorities are like a character in a fighting video game, forced to pick a weapon before entering into battle.

“Тhere are a million different options of how it will play out, but Sunday will undoubtedly be a very sharp start to the political season,” said Gaaze.

Or, in the words of political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya on Telegram: “The situation with Navalny is very similar to two trains rushing towards each other, doomed to collide. There will be many victims.”

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A New Class War: Democracy & Managerial Elites

HOW do we interpret the recent 'STORMING of the US CAPITOL'? How does it compare with, for example, The Storming of the Bastille in 1789 in Paris in 1789 or The Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1920? Perhaps it's too early to tell!

DO ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS?

My departmental supervisor at Manchester Poly, John Phillips (Oxford), claimed when I did my thesis on conversational analysis argued that J.L.Austin, who had developed a theory of speech acts, that he had overlooked the alternative arguement that there was a case that there were also acts that could say some thing: 'words' may be able to do some things but 'acts' may be able to say some things. John Phillips gave as an example an episode in 'Shane' in which Shane played by Alan Ladd accounters a dirt farmer in the first scene, and without a word being uttered a conversation of actions take place in which the actor's recognise what is require and what is understood by the participants.

At the time I think we'd been studying language and conversational analysis in particular John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960), who was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.

John Phillips was at the time in the 1970s keen to stress that actions can speak louder than words. In this context perhaps the storming of the US Capitol on the 6th, Janauary 2021, may well serve to speak volumes hisorically just as the earlier storming of the Bastille and Winter Palace did.

CHOMSKY on 'The FRAGILITY of AMERICAN DEMOCRACY'

To help us grasp what's going on in the US perhaps we should consider an interview on the 26 November 2020 with Noam Chomsky: 'Trump Has Revealed the Extreme Fragility of American Democracy' in what was presented as an exchange with C. J. Polychroniou Chomsky stated:

'Speculation of course, but I’ll indulge in a bad dream — which could become reality if we are not on guard, and if we fail to recognize that elections should be a brief interlude in a life of engaged activism, not a time to go home and leave matters in the hands of the victors.

'I suspect that Trump and associates regard their legal challenges as a success in what seems a plausible strategy: keep the pot boiling and keep the loyal base at fever pitch, furious about the “stolen” election and the efforts of the insidious elites and the “deep state” to remove their savior from office.

'That strategy seems to be working well. According to recent polls, “Three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say Biden’s win was due to fraud” and “The anger among Trump’s base is tied to a belief that the election was stolen.” Rejection of the legal challenges with ridicule may please liberal circles, but for the base, it may be simply more proof of the Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations.'

This conclusion by Chomsky that the 'Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations' fits in with the concept that Trumpism is conceived as challenging the established liberal managerial elites. Chomsky himself has long complained that the politics in the US has been simply a choice between Coka Cola and Pepsi Cola.

Now we have Trump and Trumpism, did this break the mould of the managerial elite or not? Were the Clintons corrupt as many of the invaders of the Capitol complained? Does democracy need to be rescued from the managers, and is even Professor Chomsky part of the managerial elite as a dominant figure in the US community of scholars?

The Managerial Elite & American Politics

Perhaps we should examine these considerationa further by examining a review in October 2020 on the Chronicle's website, in which Pedro Gonzalez commenting on 'The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite' by Michael Lind, writes:

'As Lind sees it, the country’s political institutions are a façade for the corporate state, while our government is merely an instrument for the rootless transnational elite and avaricious politicians, both of whom are aided by a vast army of bureaucrats teeming with resentment for those whose lives they manage. The managed—that is, the rest of us—are lumped into a racially divided, proletarianesque working-class, with a largely native-born, white core.'

Gillian Tett in her column in this weekend's Financial Times has argued that Western elites tend to assume that their way of thinking is the only valid mode of thought'. She quotes from Joseph Henrich, the evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, who in his book 'The Weidest People in the World' comparing to the mentality of Western, Educated, Industrialised. Rich and Democratic people against other more tribalistic groups.

Hendrich believes most societies throughout history have used different mental approaches: they see morality as context-based, presuming that someone's identity is set by family and, adopting a "holistic reasoning" rather than "analytical reasoning". "Analytic thinkers see in straight lines," Hendrich writes "Holistic thinkers focus not on the parts but the whole... and expect time trends to be non-linear, if not cyclical."

Gillian Tett concludes Trump has captured the tribal 'non-linear' approach of those who resent what they see as the elite managerial class and she writes:

'Here lies the epistemological split - and the futility of elites invoking "reason" to persuade Trump voters to rethink their convictions. Words alone will not heal America. Neither will the law, nor logical analysis of the constitution. What is desperately required is empathy... You can only counter the legacy of Trump if you first grasp why he was so potent to start with.'

Was Trumpism really a threat to what Chomsky use to call the Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola tradition of American politics? Whatever was the case, Professor Chomsky recently urged the public to vote for Joe Biden. Perhaps he prefers the Status Quo after all?

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Steve Baker calls on Boris to publish Freedom Plan

From Lockdown Sceptic Website

by by Will Jones / 15 January 2021

Steve Baker, the Deputy Chair of the anti-lockdown Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Conservative MPs, has issued a rallying cry to the group’s members. The Sun has the story.

In an explosive rallying call to fellow members of the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group, the ex-minister blasted: “People are telling me they are losing faith in our Conservative Party leadership.”

The group represents dozens of Tory backbenchers who are worried about the side effects of long lockdowns.

Mr Baker urged those colleagues to make their concerns directly to Mr Johnson’s Commons enforcer, Chief Whip Mark Spencer.

In a bombshell note to MPs seen by the Sun, Mr Baker writes: “I am sorry to have to say this again and as bluntly as this: it is imperative you equip the Chief Whip today with your opinion that debate will become about the PM’s leadership if the Government does not set out a clear plan for when our full freedoms will be restored.”

He told them to demand “a guarantee that this strategy will not be used again next winter”.

The major intervention reads: “Government has adopted a strategy devoid of any commitment to liberty without any clarification about when our most basic freedoms will be restored and with no guarantee that they will never be taken away again.”

The action appears to have been triggered by key Government advisers going public with their view that lockdowns must continue well into 2021.

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Avon Lady Calling With The Virus by Les May

EARLIER this evening someone dropped an ‘Avon Catalogue’ enclosed in a plastic bag through my door. I could see the information that it would be collected on Sunday. If whoever did this is infected with the virus which causes Covid 19 then potentially they are putting in danger the lives of everyone in the houses to which they distributed the catalogue.

No doubt this action not specifically excluded by the lockdown regulations. But that does not mean it is a sensible thing to do. If by chance whoever did this is prosecuted I shall not waste any crocodile tears on them.

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Lockdown sceptics should support this lockdown

Editorial Comment: THE Spectator ran an article on the 6th, January by Alistair Haimes, who had until then been a enthusiastic lockdown sceptic, which called on others to support the current government Lockdown. As a consequence of this both Will Jones on the LOCKDOWN SCEPTIC WEBSITE and Les May on the NV Blog have responded with their views on posts displayed below on the NV Blog.

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Scepticism is supposed to be the bedrock of science. But where scepticism shades into cynicism it can be as blind to changing events as the unexamined credence it claims to displace. Scientific belief should be based on informed supposition which is then rigorously tested against the evidence — that is the basis of the scientific method. There should be no shame in changing opinions and assumptions when facts change. We start with assumptions, test them against the evidence (which itself changes) and then use that conclusion to repeat the process, ad infinitum. So if conclusions don’t change when facts change, something might have gone awry.

As an example: your view on the merits of the current winter lockdown versus the Halloween lockdown. First: do you think a lockdown is prima facie defensible? To some people, ‘no!’; to far more people, ‘normally no, but it depends’. Whatever initial view you put into your decision hopper, now try to bend that assumption around the first input of information: the healthcare system either (a) clearly has capacity left, apparently running at below average levels for the time of year, as it was in October; or (b) might credibly need to triage fairly basic healthcare within, say, three weeks as seems to be the case now, or so we are told. Whether we are in (a) or (b) should change your opinion; if it doesn’t, you might be doing this wrong.

Now, add in the game-changer of approved, effective vaccines. Your opinion should be different before and after the approval of the vaccines (2 December for Pfizer, 30 December for Oxford). Put simply, it is perfectly justifiable to be against open-ended restrictions in a world with no vaccine, but to think a brief period of restriction while vaccines are rolled out is sensible, and personally I know many lockdown sceptics whose views pivoted on the day the first vaccine was approved.

Finally, consider the pace of the epidemic. Have cases apparently stabilised, as at end of October, or has there been an out-of-leftfield development like the Kentish variant, which experts believe might be at least 50 per cent more transmissible with no obvious sign of deceleration? Whatever the state of your opinion on lockdown so far, this development should alter it at least somewhat.

You might be stridently, philosophically, against lockdowns whatever the consequences, or you might be a dour socialist zealot who instinctively thinks that the cilice should always be tightened in a crisis; but for everyone in-between, allowing opinion to change with evidence like this is likely an excellent idea. Where opinion becomes rigid it can also become brittle, and often doesn’t age well.

Personally (not that it matters given I’m just a punter rather than in government) I have unashamedly been sceptical of the government’s use of interventions throughout the epidemic, though I’m closer to the moderate than the fundamentalist wing. I thought that the March 2020 lockdown was sensible and inevitable while disease parameters and treatment protocols were clarified and healthcare capacity was built, but believe it dragged on far too long, inflicting incredible social, economic and collateral health damage when the first wave of Covid was obviously waning with the seasons. It appeared the government was allowing opinion-polls to lead it down a path of ever more severe restriction rather than examining realistic targeted alternatives that could tide us over sustainably until a vaccine arrived (which I admit came miles faster than I’d imagined possible), and hadn’t stopped to gauge the damage done along the way.

You can of course understand the bind. There is a crisis, the government needs to do something, lockdown is something it can do, so it does lockdown. It might well be the only lever to pull initially, but that doesn’t mean the lever should stay pulled. Who knows, it may even be the best answer in the medium-term, but it is hard to believe that scrutinising every cost and alternative along the way wasn’t a very worthwhile exercise even so.

For lockdown two, like many others, I thought that the case in November was not well argued, was farcically presented with scary out-of-date death charts and poorly administered (creating the boom Halloween weekend by leaking plans on the Friday night was absolutely unforgiveable).

Every intervention, after all, has a beginning and an end, and the degree of social mixing from the ‘one last shindig’ at the beginning to the ‘thank God that’s over’ effect at the end may conceivably outweigh the temporary reduction in R — such ‘forcing events’ cause discrete social circles to overlap which otherwise wouldn’t intersect.

But in the event, the key moment in autumn (possibly during lockdown) wasn’t underground kids parties or news presenters’ knees-ups, it was the emergence of the Kentish variant. Some have hypothesised that the variant emerged from the way we treat Covid sufferers. Hospitals with chronically ill patients create living petri dishes for mutation (it is worth remembering that a quarter of all infections are still presumed hospital acquired). Add in treatments like convalescent plasma (blood extract containing antibodies­) and there are then all the pressures needed to evolve a mutant strain. We will, like good scientists, have to await more data.

Lockdown three, I’m sorry to say (and I can hear the howls from sceptics as I write this), is justifiable, practically and ethically. Given the rollout of the vaccine, the emergence of the new variant and the plausible risk of the healthcare system falling over, there is probably now no realistic alternative. Whatever one’s objections to the first two lockdowns, on both cost-benefit and libertarian grounds, it is at least a defensible position to acknowledge the merit of a brief lockdown during a maximum-speed vaccination campaign to minimise morbidity and mortality along the way.

The calculation is entirely different now from that of the previous two lockdowns. Given the vaccine, the variant and the healthcare situation, the current restriction can be supported (regretfully) without cognitive dissonance by those who opposed the previous lockdowns vehemently and vocally. It is either bad logic, bad faith or fundamentalism to argue otherwise.

This is a position that will make no friends. The zero-Covid Sanhedrin (whose ship sailed long ago in a connected Europe) and the libertarian sceptics (very few of whom are actually anti-vaxx by the way) will both find reasons why this nuanced view is outrageous.

The big, big difference this time is this: an opening in a rock without an exit is a cave — but if you can see an exit, it’s a tunnel. The previous two lockdowns were caves. It was dark and nasty, possibly involving bats, and we had no idea how we were going to get out except back into the same world we’d entered from. But this time really is different: we’re going not into a cave but into a tunnel, there is a credible exit strategy that we can see and believe in, and we’re scheduled to emerge in about 100 days (give-or-take) into a country where almost all the most vulnerable will have been vaccinated and where lockdown is not just lifted but dismantled, hopefully never to be seen again, and good riddance.

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