Don’t blame me for telling the truth about Putin’s war in Ukraine. Facing up the facts about the mistakes of the past has to be the first step towards the peaceful future we all want to see.
In my BBC Panorama interview on Friday, Nick Robinson outrageously accused me of “echoing” Russian president Vladimir Putin’s excuses for his invasion of Ukraine. The political establishment has since been busy echoing that slur.
So, let me set the record straight. I am not and never have been an apologist or supporter of Putin. His invasion of Ukraine was immoral, outrageous and indefensible. As a champion of national sovereignty, I believe that Putin was entirely wrong to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Nobody can fairly accuse me of being an appeaser. I have never sought to justify Putin’s invasion in any way and I’m not now.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I saw it coming a decade ago, warned that it was coming and am one of the few political figures who has been consistently right and honest about Russia’s Ukraine war.
What I have been saying for the past 10 years is that the West has played into Putin’s hands, giving him the excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway.
Back in 2014, when the EU first offered Ukraine an accession agreement, I said in a speech in the European Parliament that “there will be a war in Ukraine”. Why? Because the expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving Putin a pretext he would not ignore.
As I have made clear on multiple occasions since then, if you poke the Russian bear with a stick, don’t be surprised if he responds. And if you have neither the means nor the political will to face him down, poking a bear is obviously not good foreign policy.
Even though he was on the radio last night (Friday) denying it, former Labour cabinet minister George Robertson, who later became head of NATO, has also recently made clear that Putin’s fears about EU expansion helped cause the war. He is on the record – twice - in his New Statesman article in May and a BBC interview in February of this year.
And it’s not only Ukraine. The West’s diplomatic blunder over how to tackle Putin’s mix of paranoia and assertiveness was just one of many disastrous interventions in the two decades since Tony Blair’s Labour government joined the catastrophic invasion of Iraq (which I opposed).
Western statesmen have too often tried to dress up in white cowboy hats and pose as heroes saving the world. We have witnessed vanity taking the place of reason in foreign policy, and the result has been to destabilise a series of countries with dire effects both there and here.
We should recall how, around the same time as tensions with Russia were being ramped up, US President Obama and his secretary of state Hilary Clinton, with the full support of David Cameron’s Tory government, reduced Libya to a smoking ruin in order to remove the dictator Gaddafi.
I have consistently pointed out the dangers of the West’s foreign policy. It gives me no pleasure to say that I have been proved right and that the Tories and Labour have been wrong.
Of course I understand that many British people strongly sympathise with the resilient Ukrainians. The fog of war always makes it hard to be sure of casualty figures, but US intelligence sources suggested last year that almost half a million had been killed or wounded on both sides in the conflict. It is a meat grinder for both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, with no apparent end to the slaughter in sight.
The UK alone has pledged £12.5 billion to Ukraine in military support and other aid. The war has also had a drastic impact on the European and British economies, contributing to the big jump in everything from energy costs and food prices to interest rates, intensifying the cost-of-living crisis that has hit millions of hard-pressed British households.
There is no easy solution to the war. But facing up to the truth about the causes and consequences must be a start. That is why I simply want to tell it as it is, and have done for a decade. Those slanderers who claim that telling the truth makes me a “mouthpiece for Putin” only reveal the weakness of their own case.
There is an issue of British democracy here, too. The escalation of British support for the war in Ukraine has not even been an issue in this election campaign, since the old parties all agree with it. Am I, as the leader of Reform UK, a party that is now running second in major polls, not even allowed to question this political conformism?
What real democratic choice could there be, if we are all expected to say the same thing and libelled if we refuse to do so? At election time, more than ever, free speech remains the lifeblood of our democracy.
My question for voters is this. Who would you trust most to shape the future of UK foreign policy? Me, who saw the disastrous wars in Ukraine and elsewhere coming down the line and repeatedly warned against them? Or the establishment parties who helped to make them happen?
