ON Tuesday evening, Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down, announced, concerning the materials used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal, ‘We were able to identify it as Novichok, to identify that it was military-grade nerve agent.’
Aitkenhead added: ‘It is our job to provide the scientific evidence of what this particular nerve agent is. We identified that it is from this particular family and that it is a military grade, but it is not our job to say where it was manufactured.’ He said there was no known antidote to Novichok.
The chief executive’s few words tore the rug from beneath the feet of PM May, Foreign Secretary Johnson and Defence Minister Gavin Williamson who had told Russia to ‘shut up and go away’ in the House of Commons. The Tory government, led by May and Johnson, used the poisoning to lead a crusade against Russia, and dragooned other EU states to throw out of their countries over 100 Russian diplomats in all. In fact, the duo were seeking to prop up their very weak minority Tory government with an anti-Russian crusade, complete with calls for rearmament and the need for war preparations to deal with the Russian menace.
Labour leader Corbyn, who demanded that evidence be produced to prove their claim that Russia was behind the poisoning, was denounced in the House of Commons as a Soviet agent and treated as an enemy of the people. Within days, he was further assaulted as an anti-Semite for his refusal to give all-out support for Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people.
Meanwhile, the UK and the US banded together to veto a resolution in the UN Security Council condemning Israel for its Gaza massacre. The chief scoundrel in this drive to war was Foreign Secretary Johnson. He consciously whipped up an anti-Russian campaign designed to keep the minority Tory government in office, and to stampede EU states into anti-Russian action, with an enthusiastic bout of patriotic hysteria. He campaigned at home and abroad with real energy, telling Deutsche Welle that Porton Down scientists were ‘absolutely categorical’ when they allegedly assured him that ‘there’s no doubt’ that the chemical came from Russia.
He proved Doctor Johnson’s assertion that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’. More than 25 countries, including numerous EU member-states, the United States, Canada, Albania, Norway and Ukraine, were stampeded to collectively expel over 150 Russian diplomats, to show solidarity with Britain, the alleged victim of Russian aggression.
Yesterday, many people were condemning the state broadcaster the BBC for its wall-to-wall coverage of the Skripal poisonings, the jingoism of May and Johnson and the hysterical attempts to humiliate Jeremy Corbyn.
However, the real scale of the crisis that the May-Johnson Tory party leadership created was made clear by a retired Russian lieutenant general, Evgeny Buzhinsky. He warned the West of a doomsday scenario and suggested the situation could escalate into the ‘last war in the history of mankind’.
Buzhinsky, who leads the security think tank the PIR Centre, told the BBC’s Today programme he was ‘afraid that it will end up in a very, very bad outcome’. Asked to clarify, he said: ‘A real war, worse than a cold war is a real war. It will be the last war in the history of mankind.’ Buzhinsky said the West was ‘cornering Russia and to corner Russia is a very dangerous thing’. In fact, the Tory leadership was prepared to risk war and the lives of large numbers of people to try and shore up its sinking government ship.
They have shown the world that they put the interests of the UK ruling class before everything else. Now is the time for millions of workers to take to the streets to organise a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government that will bring in socialism and join the workers of the EU and the world to put an end to capitalism worldwide. After two world wars, capitalism is now gearing up for a third – now is the time to put an end to it.
