Russian Documents?

Last week, Labour produced extensive documents showing the plans of the Tories to enable US pharmaceutical companies to be able to charge much higher prices to the NHS, in part by being able to keep drugs on patent for much longer periods.  It is a starting point for what would inevitably be a gradual process of opening up healthcare in Britain to private competition, so that, as in the US, the NHS would be reduced to a rump used only by those who cannot pay.  When Trump says, he would not want the NHS even if it was offered to him on a platter, what he means is that he abhors everything the NHS stands for.  He does not want the NHS, he wants his billionaire friends to be able to provide private healthcare in place of it!  It would be the same argument that is used with private schools - "What you want people to be banned from buying private healthcare?"

Everyone knows that Trump wants to get his grubby little hands on the UK healthcare market for him and his billionaire friends.  This is the same man who wanted to buy Greenland for goodness sake.  And, we know that the Tories will fall over themselves to help Trump to get what he wants.  Some of them will see their own personal opportunity to get their snouts in the trough, but more importantly, having dragged Britain into the disaster that will be Brexit, they now have to prostitute the UK economy to others like Trump, or the Saudi Royal Family, in order to get the trade deals that they will be desperate for to prevent the economy disappearing completely into the toilet.

Trump will know that he has all the cards in his hand, if the UK wants a trade deal, and so whatever lies he comes out with now, it is obvious that one of the demands will be what he has said all along, which is that Britain will have to pay much higher prices for US drugs, and the UK healthcare market will have to be opened up to giant US corporations.  Labour had, in fact, provided documents to that effect some time ago, but they had been heavily redacted by the government.  Now, Labour has produced unredacted copies of those documents.

The government not only failed to deny that these documents were genuine, but has even agreed that they are.  They initially tried to minimise the importance of them, claiming that they did not prove what Labour had been saying.  That was not washing.  So, now, a week latter the Tory gutter press have come up with another tack.  They now claim that the documents had been leaked by the Russians, and in one version were supposed to be part of a disinformation campaign - despite the fact that Tory Ministers have affirmed that the documents are genuine!

But, the implication behind these Tory claims is that the Russians are interfering in the election on behalf of Corbyn.  This is all part of the actual disinformation campaign that the Tory gutter press has waged against Corbyn since he became Leader.  The truth is, of course, that the Russians are interfering in this election, just as they interfered in the 2016 EU referendum, but they are certainly not interfering on behalf of Corbyn and the Labour Party.  A labour victory is the last thing the Russian oligarchs around Putin would want to see.  Its Corbyn and McDonnell that championed the Magnitsky Act, for example, that acts against the wealth of those oligarchs; its Corbyn and McDonnell whose economic policies would hit at the Russian billionaires, and the use of London as a tax haven for their ill-gotten gains.

The Russians have been interfering not in support of Corbyn but in support of Johnson and the Tories.  It is Putin's cronies that have financed the Brexit campaign of Farage and co., just as they have financed others of that ilk such as Le Pen.  The Russians channelled thousands of pounds into a Northern Irish Tory group, which then found its way back into Britain to finance the Brexit campaign.  They are closely tied to Cambridge Analytica and its various manifestations, as well as to right-wing nationalist groups such as Breitbart that backs Trump, Johnson's buddy.  It is Putin's cronies, living in London, that have paid thousands of Pounds to play tennis with Boris Johnson, and who have contributed hundreds of thousands of Pounds directly into Tory coffers.

Its no wonder that Johnson and the Tories refused to publish the parliamentary report into Russian interference in British politics before the election.  They know their hands are dirty, from the dirty Russian money they have been taking.  The suggestion that the documents showing the extent to which the Tories plan to sell off bits of UK healthcare to the US is somehow Russia acting to support Corbyn is ludicrous.  It is the equivalent of Trump's claims that the Russian interference in the 2016 US election was actually undertaken by Ukrainians, and was designed to help Clinton!

Putin's kleptocratic regime is closely tied to other kleptocrats such as Trump.  The Russians intervened in the US elections to help Trump get elected.  The same forces intervened to help Trump's allies in Britain, like Farage and Johnson, to get Brexit passed.  They are intervening again now to try to get Johnson elected.  So much for "taking back control".