Matt Elliot, of The Taxpayer’s Alliance, Conservative Friends of Russia, and Vote Leave has been rewarded for inflicting huge damage on this country by being elevated to the House of Lords in Liz Truss’ resignation honours list. It’s hard to know what’s worse, Truss having an honours list at all after 44 disastrous days or a man like Elliot being included on it. Not only do we have a Commons stuffed with useless nonentities we are now recruiting people with a proven track record of working against the interests of Britain and the British people joining the Upper House.
Elliot has appeared several times on this blog as the author of Change or Go, the 1,032-page tome that laid the foundation for much of the mendacity that got Brexit over the line. He did this while head of the campaigning organisation Business for Britain - an epic misnomer given the damage Brexit has inflicted on British industries large and small.
He later became CEO of Vote Leave. Here's the slippery bugger defending the great lie about £350 million a week going to the NHS:
Instead of a peerage, shouldn't Matthew Elliot get an Oscar, for telling lies? ⬇️Jo Coburn, "You knew you couldn't deliver £350m to the NHS, you lied"Matthew Elliott, "I disagree.. A referendum is different to an election, in that.."JC, "You don't have to tell the truth?"… pic.twitter.com/i64wOm4oYE— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) December 30, 2023
However, more worrying is his Russian connections. Brexit was an avowed foreign policy objective of Putin, there is clear evidence of Russian interference in elections in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, and Elliot was a founder of the Conservative Friends of Europe in 2012, as we see here:
Is Matthew Elliot standing on the steps of the Russian Duma in this 2012 photograph, as one of the 'founding members of the Conservative Friends of Russia'? pic.twitter.com/86d3ECF3F2
— Chris Lowndes 🇺🇦🕊️ (@chrislowndes) December 30, 2023
Now, I’m of the baby boomer generation and I’ve always said we are the most fortunate cohort for avoiding destructive wars and a lot of the political turbulence that other generations and other regions have suffered. Most of that security came from America and its taxpayers who funded a lot of NATO in Europe and developed the weapons that have kept us safe. I have never forgotten that.
The horrific events in Ukraine over the last two years are a stark reminder of what it was we were being protected from. Moscow has a world view more in keeping with the dark ages where might is right and you just take what you want or can.
It is not so much a country in the normal sense as a lawless region full of criminal gangs where human life is cheap and politically about a thousand years behind the West. They have never had democracy or anything close to it except for a few chaotic years under Yeltsin which sowed the seeds of the kleptocracy that has followed. It is a very dangerous and unpredictable beast.
I fear the time is gone when we could rely on the USA to provide much if not most of Europe’s security needs. Trump has threatened to pull out of NATO altogether and although he may not get back to the White House next year, it can’t be guaranteed. And in any case, the US is sinking into a Mad Max sort of world in any event from which I see no escape.
This isn't just the Republican Party or the MAGA supporters, crazy as they are, but the wider population who vote for men like Trump. For instance, the film star Jon Voight - he of Midnight Cowboy and the Odessa File - is a huge Trump fan which is unbelievable to me!
Another weird phenomenon is the rise of the Sovereign Citizen, which if you don't know about it can be seen in lots of examples on YouTube. This one here from Florida is a good start but you can see examples all across the US:
These people use cars without number plates, insurance or driving licenses. In place of the number plate is something that purports to claim rights under the Global Postal Union Treaty (or something similar) and describes the car as a "neutral zone transport vessel."
Some get out of the driving seat but say they weren't 'driving' at all but 'travelling' and they don't need insurance because they aren't doing this 'travelling' for commerce. I even saw one with an American citizen and his family in a US vehicle in British Columbia, Canada claiming the same immunity.
They all contend they are 'sovereign citizens,' spouting a lot of legal gobbledegook and continuing to argue their totally nonsense cases right up to appearing in front of judges!!!! It's really quite amazing. They even have people who profess to be lawyers convincing them that they are above both state and federal law.
Wikipedia describes them like this:
"The sovereign citizen movement (also SovCit movement or SovCits) is a loose group of litigants, anti-government activists, tax protesters, financial scammers, and conspiracy theorists based mainly in the United States. Sovereign citizens have their own pseudo-legal belief system based on misinterpretations of common law and claim to not be subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.
"The movement appeared in the United States in the early 1970s and has since expanded to other countries: the similar freeman on the land movement emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries. The FBI describes sovereign citizens as "anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or 'sovereign' from the United States".
Any country where apparently intelligent men and women believe this sort of thing is in my opinion on a slippery slope to anarchy. If that happens, Europe will need to defend itself against Russia without American help. We may be able to do it now, after Russia has been weakened but who knows what lies ahead. There is huge support for the war and Putin among the population at large despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths. They don't seem to care at all.
With Russia sinking ever deeper into barbarism and the US in the grip of some sort of insanity there is a 1913 feel to the world as if we are heading for a serious conflict, the whole world can see it coming but nobody can do anything about it.
