Skip to main content

"Archer, Aitken, Ashcroft..."

It was a real blast from the past this morning, hearing Jonathan Aitken, the ex-con Conservative, who is apparently being considered as an advisor on prisoner conditions. I know we are supposed to be a bit forgiving he has, after all, "paid his debt to society", but there was still just a whisper of the old arrogance in his interview on Radio 4. It was hard to avoid the contrast with another disgraced ex-minister John Profumo, who genuinely did serve a penance for his behaviour. Of course the political opponents of the Conservatives will make hay- it is a misjudgement by Iain Duncan Smith that only serves to remind us of the sleaze of the last Conservative administration. As Lord Ashcroft struggles to answer questions about the assurances that he is alleged to have given concerning his tax status upon being ennobled, the old taint fills the air once more.

I have three questions about the behaviour of other previous members of the cabinet.

As regular readers here will know, I have expressed astonishment and considerable concern at the fact that the Conservatives are formally allied to the Putinist "United Russia" faction in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I found it inconceivable that any democratic party could be associated with United Russia, least of all in the Council of Europe, which is an organisation founded upon a commitment to Human Rights.

Perhaps the link might be more understandable when one considers that several Conservative Peers receive remuneration for their work with companies that are wholly or largely deriving their business in Russia. If you go through the register of Lords' interests, a pattern begins to emerge:

Lord Howe is the President of The Russian Enterprise Trust.

Lord Howell is a member of the advisory board of Hermitage Capital, a Russian Investment Company

Lord Hurd is a consultant to Alfa Bank,

So is Lord Powell of Bayswater, (a cross bencher, but strongly associated with the Conservatives)

Lord Lamont is a consultant to Hermitage, but also serves on the board of Rotch Property, whose sister company is Rotch Energy which appears to have acted as a front for potential Russian acquisitions in Poland.

Lord Lang is paid by Charlemagne Capital, which derives most of its income from Central Europe and Russia.

Lord Lawson is a member of Central European Trust.

Lady Neville Jones has yet to declare her interests, but she has previously had interests in firms active in Russia.

Thus several senior members of the Conservative Party are receiving substantial amounts of income from companies that have major interests in Russia.

Several others have incomes derived from companies where Russia is a significant but not dominant source of revenue.

The questions are:

Whether the views of these peers are moderated or influenced by the income that they receive.

and

Has any of these peers expressed an opinion on the continuing alliance in PACE with United Russia?

If so, what was it?

Comments

Anonymous said…
Cicero


Shame those Kremlin stooges at the Economist disagree with you this week re Georgia currently hmm


Lepidus

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...