Support for Ukraine and Countering Threats from Russia

Martin Docherty-Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

Let me first pay tribute to my colleague Zoryan, who is an LGBT activist. He and other human rights activists in the west of Ukraine—and his mum—are digging in. They are the reason Ukraine is going to win, because they are digging in and they are going nowhere. Ukraine’s struggle is our struggle because it is a moment of clarity. Our choice is between democracy and authoritarianism, because neither option can be taken for granted and the pendulum can swing both ways.

Let me be clear that there is no side of this House and no shade of opinion contained within it that has not found itself sullied in some way by association with these malicious actors. Most of the time, they did so because they thought no one would particularly notice or because maybe there was a bit of money in it for them. However, too many did it because stations allowed them to amplify messages they thought were somehow not being heard. For those on the right, RT was quick to reinforce the ideas they had about the west, and Europe in particular, being decadent and in decline. For the left, it was the so-called anti-imperialists’ message of the contrast with the corporate media we have here.

It is no great pleasure to say that too many in my own party have done that dance with the devil, most prominently when the former leader and former member of the SNP, Alex Salmond, accepted the lucrative offer of a show on RT. What was his excuse? Other than narcissism and the money, I can imagine that he probably thought this moment would not come to pass and that Scotland’s concerns were somehow not connected with the wider problems posed by Putin’s regime. He is wrong.

I can say all this with a relatively clean conscience, as I wrote my first article in the Glasgow Herald to speak out against Scottish nationalists appearing on RT back in May 2016. None the less, I feel a great pang of shame every time I am asked about this, whether it be by people outside Scotland or closer to home inside Scotland. I feel shame because I know I campaigned for someone who proved himself to be so craven and naive, shame because he has been useful idiot for a TV station that promoted far-right, homophobic, Islamophobic and anti-vaccine messages during a global pandemic, and deep shame because I know that in some way it has hurt the cause of Scotland, which we on these Benches hold dear. I only hope that he finally has the decency to announce that he will not return to that station as the allegations of war crimes mount. But that is the point: these platforms seek to delegitimise all standpoints in the democratic system to weaken the whole body politic. They do so through false equivalence, through gaslighting and through the breathtaking cynicism that says all of these systems are as bad as one another really.

So what all of us need to do is be ruthless in confronting those in our own parties and movements who act in ways that are deleterious to the good functioning of a democratic system, those who facilitate despots and hard men, those who take money—and money that has been looted from less wealthy places—and those who allow criminals to escape accountability. Finally, the best time to have done all of that would have been in 2006 after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko; the second-best time is now.