The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
One of the articles written published by The Organizes Crime and Corruption Network is The Russian Laundromat. You can read this story here.
The Russian Laundromat
Call it the Laundromat. It’s a complex system for laundering more than $20 billion in Russian money stolen from the government by corrupt politicians or earned through organized crime activity. It was designed to not only move money from Russian shell companies into EU banks through Latvia, it had the added feature of getting corrupt or uncaring judges in Moldova to legitimize the funds. The state-of-the-art system provided exceptionally clean money backed by a court ruling at a fraction of the cost of regular laundering schemes. It made up for the low costs by laundering huge volumes. The system used just one bank in Latvia and one bank in Moldova but 19 banks in Russia, some of them controlled by rich and powerful figures including the cousin of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It may be the biggest money-laundering operation in Eastern Europe — a virtual laundromat operating through banks and companies connected to powerful people in the region.
Between 2010 and early 2014, organized criminals and corrupt politicians in Russia moved US$ 20 billion in dirty funds through this laundromat’s complex cleanse-and spin cycle made up of dozens of offshore companies, banks, fake loans, and proxy agents. The process was then certified as clean by judges in the tiny Republic of Moldova. The newly cleaned funds were then spread across Europe.
Now law enforcement and prosecutors in Moldova are investigating the system. “Many judges and executors may go to prison” said Vasile Șarco, the head of the Money Laundering Prevention Unit in Moldova, which has been looking into the case since December.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has worked through the system’s intricacies to uncover the methods and the partners who ran The Laundromat. The banks and companies involved are run by managers and board members that include well known businessmen, a cousin of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and persons said to be close to the KGB.
The key to the system was the involvement of Moldova, a country caught between its aspirations to join the European Union and its history of close ties to Russia. The scheme used Moldova to both provide legal protection against regulators through the country’s judicial system and a means to inject the illegal money into the European Union’s financial systems.
The Cleaning Cycle
The eternal problem with dirty money is explaining where it comes from. Crime is mostly a cash economy, and mobsters or dirty government officials can end up with massive piles of cash they don’t want to explain to anybody—especially tax officials.
The Laundromat was designed to create the illusion of business activity to explain the source of the money, backed by a court which signed off on the transactions to make them legitimate. The businesses, however, were phantom companies shielding the real owners.
A typical transaction began with two companies, often based in the United Kingdom and with their true ownership obscured in the offshore mists of a tax haven. The companies sign a bogus contract in which one agrees to lend the other large sums, although no money ever actually changes hands. It is likely that both companies are owned by the same owner but that ownership is hidden behind “proxy” figures.
The tax haven of choice in this operation was Belize, and the sums involved in each transaction were huge, ranging from US$ 100-800 million. The contracts in each case stipulated that the debt was guaranteed by companies in the Russian Federation, almost always run by a Moldovan citizen. This Moldovan gave the operation access to the courts in Moldova, which would ultimately permit the movement of the dirty money into the legitimate banking system.
The next step was for the “borrowing” company to refuse to repay the debt to the “loaning” company, thereby shifting the debt to the Russian companies who had guaranteed the loan. The “loaning” company then would take the matter to court in Moldova where a judge would issue an order “certifying” the debt as real and ordering the Russian company to pay.
Then the Russian company would transfer dirty money into an account set up by the “loaning” company. For every case, the money was sent to an intermediary bank called Moldindconbank—an institution connected to one of the country’s most powerful businessmen.
Finally the money was wired to the “loaning” company’s account, which was always at the Latvian-based Trasta Komercbanka.
And once it is in Latvia, voila! It is in the European Union, backed by a court order and clean and ready to use.
The OCCRP investigation found that 19 Russian banks, some already being investigated for money laundering, used The Laundromat.
Judging the Judges
More than 20 judges in 15 Moldovan courts helped launder the money. Over three years, they issued more than 50 court orders certifying about US$ 20 billion in debt. This is a staggering amount for a country such as Moldova that had a GDP of just under US$ 8.5 billion in 2013. Some of these judges are now under investigation while others have resigned.
The Laundromat opened for business on Oct. 22, 2010, when a British company called Valemont Properties Limited filed suit in a court in the Moldovan capital of Chișinău against the guarantors of a loan it had made to another UK company. The holders of that guarantee were a Moldovan man, Andrei Abramov, and two Russian companies: OOO LaitaM and OOO Spartak.
OCCRP found Abramov at his workplace, the Chișinău Airport. He said that he got involved with the Russian companies in 2010, right after he completed his civil aviation studies and was looking for a job.
“A friend from Canada put me in touch with a Ukrainian citizen whose surname I don’t recollect. We met in a Chișinău restaurant and he told me he has companies in Russia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.” – Andrei Abramov
Abramov said the man told him he had a consultancy firm and wanted to open a branch in Moldova with Abramov as the manager. “It never happened though. I worked for them for four months and all I got was $100.” Abramov said he was directed to go to Chișinău’s main bus station, where he received packages of documents from Ukraine. Then he would send them onward to Russia. He said he was disappointed that the promises made about his new job were not kept. “I signed a document once for a court in Rîșcani where I said that I don’t have any objection regarding an ongoing trial,” he said.
OCCRP found out from border police documents that Abramov visited Ukraine four months before the Valemont Properties court case. Other Moldovan citizens used in Laundromat operations frequently travelled on the Chișinău-Moscow route.
The court case involving Abramov was tried by a Moldovan judge, Gheorghe Gorun, who certified the debt and ordered the Russian companies and Abramov to pay up. Gorun’s decision was enforced by a Moldovan judicial executor, Anatolie Chihai, who acted as a go-between.
Chihai opened an account with Moldindconbank to receive money transferred from Abramov’s Russian company, which was then transferred again into the Trasta Komercbanka account of Valemont Properties in Latvia. This money route—Russian banks to Moldinconbank to Latvian Trasta Komercbanka—was to be used in all of The Laundromat’s money transfers.
Trasta officials refused to comment on the cases.
OCCRP obtained banking statements that show multiple money transfers into Chihai’s bank account. Both Russian companies, OOO LaitaM and OOO Spartak, transferred billions of rubles that were exchanged for British pounds and sent onwards to Valemont. The money came to Moldova from accounts in two Russian banks, EB Transinvestbank OOO and KB Inkredbank.
Valemont Properties is involved in other Moldovan court cases aimed at recovering debts. In each case, the British company was represented by Ukrainian Bogdan Kuchay, 32. He is a director of OOO Prime, a Russian company founded in 2012, which lists as sole shareholder a Belize offshore company called Denison Limited. Denison has sued debtors in the same manner as Valemont.
Kuchay is involved in other controversial court cases as well.
Ukrainian Bogdan Kuchay became a main actor in another judicial case in Moldova in 2013 after he and fellow Ukrainian Roman Rybchenko, 22, acquired seven shares or 0.00014 percent of the share capital of the Moldovan insurance company, Compania Internațională de Asigurări S.A “ASITO”.
Investigators say they acquired these shares for the sole purpose of suing the company and blocking its bank accounts so that ASITO could not pay pensions to more than 8,000 Moldovan retirees.
A Chișinău judge, Svetlana Garstea-Bria, accepted Kuchay’s suit as valid and pensioners stopped getting money. The case is still on trial while the Moldovan National Commission for Financial Oversight asked the Superior Council of Magistrates, the governing body over Moldovan courts, to sanction the judge who accepted the case.
Bad Loans
The Superior Council of Magistrates (SCM) concluded in a May 27 statement that many rulings in debt recovery cases were issued illegally. The SCM says that the judges based their judgments solely on documents that had not been properly authenticated or notarized, a practice contrary to normal court procedures.
OCCRP reporters met with Valeriu Gîscă, one of the judges who issued five judgments for The Laundromat, in a parking lot next to the Moldovan Government building. He came to the meeting in a black SUV, wearing casual clothes. His rulings certified no less than US$ 2.1 billion that left Russia for offshore company accounts before he resigned in 2012. According to SCM, Gîscă put in his resignation request on grounds of ill health on Nov. 22, 2012.
On Dec. 18, Gîscă issued one final Laundromat judgment for half a billion US dollars, and three days later he was relieved of his duties. Now a lawyer, Gîscă says his rulings followed the law and did not hurt the Moldovan financial system or any bank and just affected one citizen.
“Each time, a guy from Chișinău presented me with paperwork showing that the parties involved had no objections in the court case. These documents were authenticated at the highest possible levels,” he said adding none of his rulings have been overturned.
“If someone laundered money and used us, it is up to the Moldovan law enforcement to prove it. I don’t know who could possibly be behind it and I had no idea that other judges issued the same kind of rulings in Moldova,” Gîscă said.
OCCRP tried to talk with Svetlana Mocan, a judicial executor who enforced many of The Laundromat rulings. Nearly US$ 17 billion in transfers went through her bank account. Mocan would not meet with reporters or answer questions. She said only in a phone conversation: “I don’t have the right to give you information. I won’t give you any.”
Șarco, who leads the Money Laundering Prevention Unit, said the rulings did not follow the law and were not based on proper documents. “We are also going after persons in the banking system. We have three ongoing penal cases and another two are about to be initiated. There are two penal cases opened in Latvia and Estonia, too.”
Șarco said his office started a case against an executor in February of this year and in March arrested another executor.
On July 22, Moldovan Prime Minister Iurie Leancă proposed a set of laws that, if Parliament passes them, would end impunity for judges implicated in money laundering.
Russian Companies, Moldovan and Ukrainian Proxies
Moldovan law enforcement believes that more than 90 companies registered in the Russian Federation were involved in The Laundromat system, making thousands of transfers into bank accounts in Moldova and, from there, onward to offshore companies’ bank accounts.
OCCRP investigated the ownership of some of these companies. It found a number of cases in which directors and shareholders were citizens of Moldova and Ukraine. They appear to be proxies, fronting for the real people behind the money schemes. One example was OOO Proffstandart, a Russian company, listed with four other commercial entities in Moldovan courts with a debt of half a billion US dollars to the Scottish company, Westburn Enterprises Limited.
The majority shareholder of OOO Proffstandart is Ruslan Siloci, 31, from Căușeni, a small town 70 kilometers from the Moldovan capital and 40 kilometers from Tiraspol, the main city in the separatist region of Transdniestr. Căușeni is the hometown of a powerful businessman, Veaceslav Platon, whose father, Nicolae, is head of the local Moldindconbank, the main Moldovan bank engaged in The Laundromat’s money transfers.
Siloci lives in the outskirts of the city in his grandparents’ home. When OCCRP reporters visited on June 19, the door was locked.
“He comes and goes,” said a saleswoman in a nearby shop. “He is a good boy. Are you here to take some money from him? I owe him US$ 100.”
Just then the women pointed out Siloci in a blue Mercedes.
Siloci lit up a cigarette and asked if we’d tried to get in touch with him day before. “My wife told me someone was looking for me,” he said. “I just got back from Ukraine. I went to Odessa to pick up some goods. I’ll make US$ 300-400 for this.”
Siloci said Proffstandart has been closed. “I have different businesses now. I’m dealing with construction materials. It’s hard, not easy to start over.”
OCCRP asked Siloci why his company got entangled in debt. He said he was approached by “clients” who offered him a money making deal.
“I’ll clarify one thing for you. This is how business is done in Moscow. There’s nothing new about it. They looked me up, they found me for the transfers. It wasn’t just me, there were many others.” – Ruslan Siloci
Siloci would not talk about how much money he earned as a proxy. “It’s confidential, a trade secret. Nobody will tell you how it worked. I know there is an investigation on this in Moldova but nobody called me up from the prosecution.”
OCCRP found that Siloci is also sole shareholder of a Moldovan company, Prodpozitiv SRL, against which authorities lodged a criminal case in 2009. He and his firm were suspected of smuggling meat. “This case is in court now. It will take forever to judge,” he said. “I just brought pork instead of chicken from Russia. That was all. I’m reorganizing the company right now. I have a few shops right now here in Causeni.”
If I Had Half a Billion…
Evgheni Vîborov is another Moldovan citizen involved in the Westburn scheme. The 33-year-old driver for an express delivery service in Chișinău is listed as a shareholder and director of the Russian firm OOO Komtehkomplekt. He denied doing anything wrong and was worried to hear about his involvement in a suit over The Laundromat.
“I was in Moscow in 2009 when someone I knew there advised me to buy a company,” Vîborov said. “I was taking care of computers and other technical equipment. In about 2012 I shut down the company and came back to Chișinău. I believe I have given power of attorney to someone but it was long ago and I don’t remember.
“Nobody gave me money and nobody looked for me,” Vîborov said. “I wouldn’t have had to mortgage my house, I’d have my own car and I wouldn’t be working as a driver if I had received money. It never crossed my mind that my company is involved in such a court case,” said Vîborov.
“If I’d had half a billion I’d have donated it to an orphanage.” Moldovan Parliament member, Nae-Simion Teodor Pleșca, bought Vîborov’s neighboring apartment for US$ 53,500 to expand his own apartment. Vîborov still uses it as his official address. “Evgheni is a troubled boy. I believe he was used in money laundering. I think someone tricked him,” Plesca said.” •
The Cowardice of Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage is a coward, yet Cameron and Miliband are too gutless to attack
At Rochester, the main party leaders showed they are too frightened to take on Ukip’s rabble-rouser in chief
©Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
You cannot describe Ukip as a far-right party without running into trouble. Respectable commentators tell you that, while individual members may be neo-fascists and that while Ukip had indeed allied with far-right parties in Europe, it does not come from fascist tradition. And I just about accept that.
Hardly any commentator, respectable or otherwise, notices that Nigel Farage has created his own stab-in-the-back myth. The treacherous “Westminster elite” so despised the decent people of Britain that it flooded the land with foreigners who “took our country from us”. This is the manure in which far-right movements have always grown. But, once again, if anyone objects, I accept that Farage is not a führer or duce.
Rather than arguing about labels, let us agree to allow the facts to speak for themselves. Farage is a rabble-rouser and a coward. He plays with racism, the way Ian Paisley used to play with sectarianism: whips it up, then backs off just before he can be accused of inciting violence.
He does not attend the meetings of the European parliament to defend British interests but pockets the money of the “hardworking taxpayers” he affects to represent and skips away. He claims to be a patriot while defending Britain’s enemies in the Kremlin. He claims to be the friend of the working man, while slapping down his economics spokesman for proposing tax rises that would hurt his backers in the City.
As for the men and women he leads, Ukip candidates and donors have suggested they want to drive Lenny Henry out of Britain because he is black, bar women from the boardroom and stop gays from having sex because as, everyone knows, God punishes the sin of Sodom by flooding the Thames Valley.
If you cannot call Ukip a far-right party, you can at least say that it is an alliance of the septic and the geriatric: a movement of the empty-headed led by the foul-minded.
It tells you everything about the absence of principle in the mainstream parties that they don’t even try to beat Farage. Political commentators could not have been more foolish when they believed David Cameron’s promise to “throw everything” he had at stopping Ukip winning in Rochester.
Cameron may have thrown money and marketing strategies, but he did not throw punches. The Conservative attack on Ukip’s ideas never came. Cameron, who once presented himself as a moderate, instead conceded acres of ground to the extremists, no more so than on the immigration question.
As late as March 2013, Cameron was careful to preface a speech proposing restrictions on immigration by praising “Polish heroes who fought for us during the war, West Indians who helped us to rebuild afterwards, those who’ve come to our shores seeking a safe haven from persecution”.
He understood the dangers of provoking hatred and worked to ensure that no racist party or thug, and no employer or landlord looking to exclude blacks, could find comfort in what he said. You no longer hear Cameron insist that most immigrants are good and hardworking people. He has abandoned the centre and veered to the right. The good manners he learned at Eton have deserted him on the way – and what is the point of having an old Etonian if he doesn’t know how to behave? The new Cameron wants to show Ukip voters that he is just as right wing as Farage. Even when Mark Reckless proposed the repatriation of immigrants living in Britain, the Tories did not hammer him for fear of appearing soft.
Alex Massie of the Spectator brilliantly summarised Cameron’s strategy of never allowing Farage to outflank him on the right by saying that it came down to the slogan: “Ukip are right: don’t vote for them!”
The funeral of Cameron’s gutless strategy came when a desperate prime minister appealed to the centrists among Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat supporters in Rochester to vote tactically to stop the extremist Ukip candidate winning. Reasonable people could not see the difference between the extremist Cameron and extremist Farage and ignored him.
Cameron’s capitulation carries a warning. He won’t fight Ukip not only because he is frightened of Farage but because he is a prisoner of his party’s right. If he wins the next election, we now know that he will keep capitulating because he is a leader without honour or inner strength, whose own cynicism defeats him.
Not that Ed Miliband is any better. Cameron has tried and failed to pull the political insiders’ “triangulation” trick, practised by Bill Clinton: get close to your opponent (Ukip in this case), steal his votes and victory is yours. Miliband has tried to follow the “core vote” trick of George W Bush and Barack Obama: get out Labour’s “core” – about 30% of the electorate – throw in old Lib Dems, who cannot forgive the Tory alliance, that’s another 5%, and, eureka!, our strange electoral system will deliver victory. Like a child building a house out of Lego bricks, Miliband thought he could pick up the handfuls of voters he needed for victory and forget about the rest.
A friend should have told him that astounding condescension lay at the heart of his “35% strategy”. Labour assumed that its “core” supporters would not listen to anyone else; that, even at a time of economic distress and political disintegration, Labour “owned” them.
For years now, I and others have been waiting for Miliband to launch a sustained attack on Ukip with whatever vigour the poor thing could manage. But even in this year’s European elections, he preferred to ignore a radical rightwing party, which was heading for victory, and emptied his revolver into the corpse that was once Nick Clegg. You see it was more important for Miliband to remind his Lib Dem Lego bricks that they should stick with Labour rather than fight a foul stain in national life.
Ukip will not be beaten until those in all parties, who know that most immigrants are not the scrounging scum of Ukip nightmare, say clearly that the debate must be about numbers, not race. It will not be beaten until people who believe in maintaining Britain’s place in the world accept the need for reforming the European Union, but tell the electorate that we will founder if we leave.
It most certainly will not be beaten by David Cameron and Ed Miliband, who give every appearance of believing that you can win a battle without fighting it. •
Nigel Farage is a phoney. Scrutinise him and he’ll crumble
Instead of tearing into the preposterous Ukip leader, Britain’s famously aggressive media have made him a celebrity
Allow me to sketch you a portrait of a political leader. Even by the lax standards of the powerful, he is England’s greatest living hypocrite. He courts popularity by warning that tens of millions from the dole queues of Europe are coming to take British jobs, while employing his German wife as his secretary. He denounces “the political class” for living like princes at the taxpayers’ expense while pocketing every taxpayer-funded allowance he can claim for himself, his wife and his colleagues.
He says he represents “ordinary people”. But he is a public school-educated former banker, whose policies will help him and his kind. He claims he is the voice of “common sense”, while allying with every variety of gay-hater, conspiracy crackpot, racist, chauvinist and pillock. The only sense he and his followers have in common is a fear of anyone who is not like them.
You might expect that Britain’s famously aggressive media would tear into his multiple deceits. Yet so tame has their treatment of Nigel Farage been, so indulgent and complicit, viewers were surprised when the BBC’s political editor found the courage last week to raise a timorous voice and ask him why he was employing his German wife rather than giving a British job to a British worker. Broadcasters are ferocious when they tackle mainstream politicians, but are as eager to please as wet-tongued labradors when they meet Ukip. To understand why, you need to grasp how the political culture of modern democracies encourages both conformism and zealotry.
Broadcasters say they give Britain’s representative of Europe’s rightwing wave such prominence because Farage is good on television: a cheeky and witty guest rather than a formulaic political pro. As Hollywood doesn’t cast ugly actors as romantic leads and radio producers seldom hire presenters with stammers, accusing broadcasters of double standards because they favour people who are good on television feels as absurd as accusing Brendan Rodgers of bias because he picks gifted footballers to play for Liverpool or publishers of prejudice because they commission authors who write well.
Media managers would have every right to sneer at bland “professional politicians”, and promote exciting alternatives, had they not helped create the soundbite-spouting robots they are so keen to denounce. With the arrival of 24-hour news, they had to fill hours of empty schedules. Every ill-considered statement by a politician became a “gaffe”; every disagreement with the leader a “split”. Ambitious politicians responded by saying nothing that might be used against them. Social media and mobile phones have accelerated their desire to march in step with the herd. Now a public figure must behave as if they are on camera whenever they are in a public space.
I am not trying to excuse our leaders. Political parties, private companies and public bureaucracies need to relax if they want a hearing in the 21st century, and stop treating the smallest deviation from the party line as an “unprofessional” affront. But it is rich of broadcasters to preach against professional politics when they were its midwives, and sinister of them to promote fanaticism as a cure for the boredom it generates.
For in the kingdom of the bland, the intolerant man is king. British and US TV have turned newspaper pundits into minor celebrities: a curious addition to the Z-list that makes little sense until you realise that the pundit is free to posture and foam and provide the gladiatorial aggression that will keep the audience from reaching for the remote. Extremist politicians such as Nigel Farage and George Galloway serve the same purpose. They don’t have to worry about breaking party lines because their parties are their own private personality cults, which believe whatever they tell them to believe.
Mainstream politicians, who have abandoned plain speaking, should blame themselves when viewers turn away, of course. But they cannot be blamed for the broadcasters’ abnegation of the basic journalistic responsibility to ask questions without fear or favour.
To pick one of hundreds of examples, Ukip had a party political broadcast featuring “ordinary people” last week. A builder complained that foreigners had taken his job. As you might have predicted, the builder turned out to be an obsessional creep, who thought that Ed Miliband wasn’t British because his parents were refugees from Hitler. My friends in the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate have files the thickness of telephone directories on how Ukip recruits every species of bigot from women-haters to neo-Nazis. They are open for journalists to inspect. But when Farage announced that he was suspending the builder from his party, the media were satisfied and did not ask him why he attracts and retains thousands more like him. They would never let a mainstream leader escape so lightly.
The English have a strong desire to avoid seriousness, a character trait that makes England both an attractive and a remarkably gullible country. We too easily dismiss people as performers putting on a show. “He can’t really mean that,” we say as the far-left politician salutes Saddam Hussein after he has ordered the genocide of the Kurds, or defends Bashar al-Assad as his forces torture civilians. “He isn’t being serious,” we say, as the far-right politician declares his admiration for Vladimir Putin and signs up members who want to kick out the blacks.
Experience has taught English media managers in particular to believe that no one means what they say. Editors demand opinion pieces that confirm their readers’ prejudices and find willing hacks who will write as required, regardless of whether they believe what they say or not. In broadcasting, BBC researchers call and ask thousands of journalists and intellectuals to take a genuinely held belief and reduce it to absurdity. “Would you come on and say that 2+2=5?” they ask. You refuse. They hang up and phone round until they find someone so desperate for attention that they will say it.
When considering Ukip, we should remember the advice of Lord Renwick, a Foreign Office mandarin and Labour peer. He told young diplomats from good families that their background made them suckers for “the Wykehamist fallacy”. When they went abroad, they were in danger of believing that foreign potentates merely struck blood-curdling poses for effect. For all the bombast, they would think that, underneath, these must be civilised men with an ironic sensibility who might have been educated at Winchester. “They haven’t,” said Renwick. “Actually, they’re a bunch of thugs.”
The same should be said of Ukip.
Ukip’s rise threatens the left as well as the right
That Nigel Farage can speak to former Labour voters ought to be a matter of shame to the British left and a call to arms
The British centre-left has been tempted to ignore Ukip – the most powerful movement of organised stupidity in recent British history – even to welcome it in a quiet way. Conventional wisdom holds that Labour’s hopes of winning the next election depend on the rightwing vote splitting. Ukip are the splitters, who will let the left come through the middle in marginal seats.
Beyond electoral tactics lies a regard for populists who are anti-establishment. George Galloway may have crawled up the posteriors of half the dictators on the planet, while Alex Salmond may want to place barriers between the English and the Scots where none has existed for 300 years, but at least they are sticking it to the “system”. Likewise, Farage is a card, who hounds the professional politicians – and all those other pampered elitists who rip us off and ruin our lives.
A look at January 2014 shows that you have to forgive and forget a great deal before you can treat Ukip with anything other than hostility. Farage disowned the entire 2010 Ukip manifesto – and not in the open manner of an honest politician admitting to past mistakes. Instead, he pretended he knew nothing of his party’s promises for a dress code for taxi drivers and a state-enforced repainting of the nation’s trains in traditional colours. Imagine if anyone else in public life said that a document they had put their name to, and called their own, was “drivel” and tried to avoid awkward questions by pretending that they had never read it. At a minimum, they would be greeted with guffaws of incredulous laughter.
Not knowing when to stop, Farage, who has the nerve to pose as a politician who is tough on crime, went on to opine that the ban on handguns after Thomas Hamilton murdered 16 schoolchildren in Dunblane was “ludicrous”. It was left to John Crozier, whose five-year-old daughter, Emma, was among the fallen, to say that the disarming of angry men had meant no other family had to hear that their children had died in a gun massacre since.
Beyond the Farage farragos, one Demetri Marchessini, a Ukip donor, paid for an advert in the Telegraph to announce his abhorrence of homosexuality. He praised the opportunist homophobia of the Putin regime and added that “homophobic” was not be a real word in any event. “Anyone who uses it is uneducated because it mixed Latin and Greek.” It says much about Ukip’s failure to uphold traditional standards that the half-educated oaf did not know that “homo-” and “-phobic” both derive from the Greek.
I could go on. Ukip’s obsession with what gay men do with their bodies was manifest in the remark of an Oxfordshire councillor that the recent floods were God’s punishment on England for allowing homosexuality. Meanwhile Arthur Misty Thackeray, Ukip’s Scottish leader, claimed that Glasgow council was run by a hitherto unknown conspiracy of “gays, Catholics, and communists”.
For all that, Ukip still attracts 17% of the vote in our poll this week. It is not only a large political force in its own right but has large effects on all around it. How many of the 90 or so Tories tearing their party apart are de facto Ukip supporters is unknowable. A few hate David Cameron so much they form a Faragist fifth column. Most, however, are frightened. If they don’t rebel on Europe, immigration and human rights, they know that Ukip may deprive them of their seats by using their failure against them. A “revolt” out of fear isn’t a revolt but a capitulation.
And Cameron is capitulating too. He is frightened of taking on his own backbenchers, who are frightened of taking on Farage, because he does not want the public to see what he is: the John Major of the 2010s. You could argue the capitulation extends to the centre-left, which is relearning the old lesson that in hard times people look to themselves and their families rather than wider notions of the common good.
In other words, Ukip’s success as fearmongers has sent a flood of fear cascading down the political system.
For 100 years, the most reassuring feature of British society was that it did not vote for extremist parties. Far left and far right have pushed their conspiracy theories and shouted their slogans until they were hoarse: all in vain. But Ukip is breaking with the past. Hope Not Hate, which had campaigned with great success against the BNP, discussed last year whether it should fight Ukip too. On one hand, it reasoned, Ukip is not a neo-fascist party with origins in European totalitarianism. On the other, well, just look at the bigoted rabble. Hope Not Hate decided to go for them because it understood that Ukip has made extreme hatreds respectable.
Xenophobic voters who wouldn’t have supported tattooed men with beer bellies hanging over their belts will vote for Farage. As local, European and parliamentary election results make clear, many of them once voted Labour. That Farage, a City man, who offers nothing that might improve their living conditions or job security, can speak to them ought to be a matter of shame to the British left and a call to arms. On some issues, there can be no compromise: racism and other phobias.
But a toning down of political correctness would be most welcome, as would an abandonment of the jargon-filled language of the intellectual left, which ordinary people cannot understand, and know without needing to be told are not meant to understand either. A robust campaign to tell Ukip supporters and, indeed, business leaders who foolishly ally with the Tories, that Britain cannot afford to leave the EU would also be in order. So would an attempt to build a populist social democracy, which, for all their faults, Ed Miliband and his supporters are trying to do.
In their forthcoming Revolt on the Right, the academics Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin will present convincing evidence that in the long run Ukip will hit the left harder than the Conservatives.
Even if they are wrong, and even if in the short term Farage sends Miliband to Downing Street, it is not good enough to stand by while chancers sell millions of our fellow citizens every prejudice known to man and invent a few new ones besides. Left and right are not divided by some Berlin Wall. The one affects the other. A successful far right will poison the whole of politics. The best course is to hit early and hit it hard. •