Britain’s Inquiries Cannot Deter a State Already at War

Last week another inquiry was concluded in the United Kingdom (UK).

These are the ceremonial kinks of redundancy; whenever you ask yourself what the Zondo Commission accomplished, and answer “nothing” – at that point you may thank the UK for leading the way there.

This latest inquiry took three years, cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and involved a chemical attack on the town of Salisbury, Wiltshire.

There, on the 3rd of March 2018, a KGB double agent called Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by two officers belonging to Russian intelligence. Whilst this attempt was unsuccessful (both Skripal and Yulia survived), some months later a woman in a village eight miles away sprayed herself with discarded perfume (the bottle of which contained the Novichok used to try and kill Sergei Skripal) then collapsed at her partner’s home and later died. The eponymously named Dawn Sturgess Inquiry was formally established in 2022.

Donald Trump was in the company of then Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018 when the news of the first attack on the Skripals broke; when it was noted that a nuclear power (UK) had just been attacked, Trump was said to whisper to one of his entourage: “these people have nukes?”

Killing dissidents

As soon as the Russian assassins’ path to Salisbury from airports and train stations was identified using CCTV footage, most sensible people were able to notice a pattern: the Russians were not mad about the English, and dismissed them enough to casually kill dissidents on its soil.

Twelve years earlier, the Millennium Hotel in London had been the site of another poisoning. Like Skripal, Alexander Litvinenko was a former Russian spy who had moved to the capital and become a UK citizen.

In the UK Litvinenko spent a peripatetic era associating Vladimir Putin with disgusting activities, like paedophilia, and claiming that the publishing of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Denmark was orchestrated by Putin and the Federal Security Bureau, the successor to the KGB. According to Litvinenko, the Beslan school massacre in Russia in 2004, where over 300 students and teachers were killed, was conspired by the Kremlin.

In the Mayfair hotel’s Pine Bar on 1st November 2006, Litvinenko accepted a pot of green tea from former colleagues. The tea contained the toxic isotope Polonium-210. Litvinenko became ill that day, was hospitalized and eventually died three weeks later, his body subjected to terminal radiation exposure.

It’s no secret that the UK occupies a special place in Putin’s hatred of the continent. Theories of why are interesting.

One relates to Putin’s broader statements about the decline of Western civilization. Here, he feels that the UK has beaten the path of the unproductive, entitled, complacent citizenry – many interpret this as disguised homophobia.

Another looks at the oligarch’s relationships with the UK, starting in the mid-1990s.

This is a more compelling study. Assuming that Putin met with all the oligarchs upon the departure of Boris Yeltsin and explained, in varying degrees of politeness, that half of whatever they had was now his – and this included emerging investment property schemes across the UK – it would be reasonable to suspect that many oligarchs who purchased stucco-fronted mansions in London and sprawling country piles did so with some discomfort.

Here, Litvinenko was said to be instrumental in ushering nervous Russians into the comfort of the UK’s national security services, who then began extracting intelligence in exchange for protection.

Suspicious deaths

If protection was what the oligarchs were looking for, it's not exactly clear whether it was found, as a series of suspicious deaths followed Litvinenko’s.

The era of Russian money in the UK officially ended when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, prompting wholesale seizure of assets and sanctions. It is thought Putin underestimated the UK’s nerve to perform such theatrics – particularly as his proxies had been donating money to the Conservative Party.

So when Lord Hughes, chair of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, announced in his findings on Friday last week that Putin had personally authorized the attempt to kill the Skripals, it marked another point in a conflict few want to acknowledge exists, and one that will not be resolved by inquiries.

The cost of the attempt to kill the Skripals and Dawn Sturgess’ death, including the inquiry, sit comfortably over £10 million. If you add this to the cyber-attack that temporarily paralysed the UK car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover (JRL), it approaches £15 million. Then other cyber-attacks, all linked to Russia, on UK supermarkets, which destroyed their coding and forced many back to counting stock with pens and paper, and the figure crosses the £20 million threshold.

In addition to the chemical and cyber-attacks, Vladimir Putin is said to be central to the financing of gangs smuggling illegal immigrants into the UK – the consequences of which have established hostile political divisions in the UK that will take generations and drastic policy to soothe.

Putin is also blamed for the identitarian pathogens that have contaminated UK’s universities if not the extreme left flank of the country’s politics. Modern UK climate change theory and its nihilistic activist groups are rumoured to have the hand of Putin’s choreographers (without knowing it, of course) in their origins.

Whilst these are only hypotheticals at this stage, were any of them ever to be proven, the cost of his efforts to destroy a country he clearly loathes would well exceed £20 million.

Dithering

Sadly, the UK is trapped in the same dithering condition that has cursed its European allies. As the prospect of Donald Trump departing Ukrainian negotiations shapes more into a reality, the continent will be forced into a position unfamiliar to the entirety of the European Union bureaucracy – something that terrifies the UK, which has deliberately weakened its armed forces since 2010. Recent polling indicates that less than 20% of able-bodied Gen Z has any desire to fight the Russians.

The problem Russia presents to Europe, but especially to the UK, is miscalculated by the UK’s culture of inquiries and a commentariat swamped with tough-talking centrist dads who want war – but not with their own children. Possibly the most worrying feature of this threat involves the UK’s ailing economy, led by financial illiterates, and in no shape to accommodate the demands of kinetic conflict.