Ed Davey calls for parliament to be recalled over Ukraine

Ed Davey has demanded a recall of parliament so it can debate the possible deployment of British troops in a peacekeeping force in Ukraine.

The Politico website quotes him as saying:

"Keir Starmer should bring back Parliament to debate his plans to support Ukraine.

"We have just days for the U.K. to lead in Europe and save Ukraine from a shoddy deal cooked up by Trump and Putin."

Politico says this comes from an interview of theirs with Davey, but I can't find it on the website.

Later in this report we read:

Davey ... offered flexibility about the timing of any vote, but insisted a check by parliament is needed as Starmer presses ahead.

Asked if it was essential that MPs should get a vote before any troops head to Ukraine, Davey said it was !too early to say. We’ve always been happy with retrospective votes. It’s about getting the balance right between Parliament making its voice heard and government doing what it thinks it needs to in order to protect the realm."

Davey said he welcomed Starmer attending Macron’s mini-summit in Paris on Monday as a good start. "But we need to do even more," he said. "For instance, it is time that the UK and Europe look at spending frozen Russian assets on protecting Ukraine."

Ed is often to be heard calling for a recall of parliament - he's as fond of recalls as the England cricket selectors were when I was a boy - but this time he is surely right.

If the US is no longer prepared to underwrite the security of Western Europe, then we are entering a new and frightening world. Our politicians going to have to step up and, in the case of the Conservative front bench, grow up.

I don't believe that Russia has designs on Western Europe, but it is an imperialist power with a near racist belief that anyone who speaks Russian should be its subject. This means that in future the Baltic states, for instance, will be in serious danger of a Russian invasion.

But then I was warning about Russian imperialism 20 years ago.

Later. The Liberal Democrat MP Mike Martin has also contributed his thoughts in a Twitter thread.

Lembit Opik: “I have been asked to stand for the Estonian Presidency"

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In what the Mirror credibly labels an "Exclusive", Lembit Opik claims that he's been asked by multiple parties to stand as the President of Estonia, despite never having lived there:

Opik claims he is the second best-known Estonian in the World after the 83-year old classical composer Arvo Part.

Part and a part you might say, if you had less tact than me.

Lembit tells the Mirror every time he appears on Estonian television, people ask when he is going to move there. He says:

"I’m interested in Estonian politics because I’ve invested a lot of time in helping the Estonian political system develop. Former members of my family have also been involved in politics in Estonia so there’s a natural fit there."

One former member of Lembit's family who was involved is Estonian politics is great uncle Oskar, who was a member of the puppet Nazi government that ruled the country between 1941 and 1944.

The only substantial account of his career I can find is in the Daily Mail, which treated it as a piece of whataboutery after Chris Huhne had condemned David Cameron's decision - in retrospect, a disaster for his party and country - to pull the Conservatives out of the mainstream Conservative group in the European parliament.

Anyway, the article tells us that:

A post-war Estonian investigation into crimes against humanity named Oskar Opik as one of eight officials who ‘share responsibility with the German authorities, by virtue of their office, for all criminal actions carried out in Estonia, and beyond its borders by military units or police battalions raised with their consent during the period of the German occupation’. 

He and the other directors were ‘responsible by virtue of the positions they held, for having given orders which resulted in crimes against humanity’. 

Oskar Opik always denied having any jurisdiction over political prisoners. But the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity stated that ‘the directorate’s autonomy, in particular, enabled them to maintain police structures that co-operated with the Germans in rounding up and killing Estonian Jews and Roma, and in seeking out and killing Estonians deemed to be opponents of the occupiers’. 

Not being a public-school Stalinist like Seumas Milne, I can recognise that, contested by Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, Estonia was in an impossible position. But this historical baggage is unlikely to be helpful if Lembit really does have serious political ambitions there.

But, beyond that, Estonia is now faced with a serious threat from Putin's Russia. Putting it politely as one can, I doubt that a man who contrived to lose Montgomeryshire for the Liberals is the man the country needs to keep it safe.

Six of the Best 736

Chris Dillow explains why a new centre party would likely fail: "Political parties are powerful brands that have been built up over decades. This loyalty doesn’t only attract millions of voters. It means that members stick with the party through thick and thin, even if they profoundly disagree with their policies and leaders."

Good news. Cicero's Songs is back with a post on Estonia.

Nicole Vassell on the experience of the few Black students who do make it to Oxford or Cambridge.

The Pledge of Allegiance in American schools was promoted by a man who made a fortune selling pricey flags to schoolchildren, reports Andrew Belonksy.

"There’s books and biographies. Friends of friends of someone who knew them and they’re the ‘experts’ that write about John’s life. After John died, stories about our family became wild and he’s no longer around to do anything. I thought I’ve got to do something." Kelly Maile talks to Julia Baird, John Lennon's sister.

The Pub Curmudgeon tours the pubs of Leicester and even meets Chairman Meow.

Putin may threaten Estonia next

UN Dispatch reports:

Last week Russian security forces abducted an Estonian security officer along the country’s border with Russia. The incident is a serious development, but is also merely one of several that have analysts looking at Estonia as the possible next theatre for Russian ambitions.

And concludes:

Now analysts are having to contend with a real possibility that the Baltic states will be the next of Putin’s foreign adventures. If so, despite their small size, it will have far wider consequences than the current conflict in Ukraine. 

With their NATO membership, any attack on Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania will inevitably lead to a much wider conflict between the West and Russia, the type that can reshape Eastern Europe as we know it today.

So far Putin has met with little opposition from the West as he seeks to reassemble, if not the Soviet Union, then Russia's 19th-century empire.

We were silent over Georgia, near silent over the Crimea and tonight there are rumours that many European nations are resisting the sanctions over Ukraine that were agreed last week.

What I fear is a return to the situation when I was young where, not only was Estonia not an independent nation, but any thought that it might be was near ridiculous.

This is what I wrote about John Le Carré's Smiley's People and its television adaptation three years ago:

One thing that interests me about Smiley’s People is that it reminds us how much the world has changed since it was written in 1979. The plot begins with the murder by the KGB in London of an elderly former Soviet general who has defected to become the head of an Estonian nationalist organisation. 

To the realists who have taken over the Circus since Smiley’s retirement – and to an extent to Le Carré himself – the Estonians are relics of the past and somewhat ridiculous. The future lies in détente with the Soviets. I take this as a true picture of the official view under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan’s governments of the 1970s.

If we are to avoid a return to a world like that - and it is not hard to find left-wingers who will bend over backwards to find excuses for Putin's imperialism - then the West is going to have to stand up to Russia and its ambitions.