Tommy Robinson’s Funding, So Much Worse Than Richard Gott’s, Or Morning Star’s, Moscow Gold

You would think that The Guardian would have some – even if only a tad, – of historical awareness but it’s actually remarkable for its entire absence. They’re running a big story on how Tommy Robinson – Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – gains some of his funding from people who live abroad. This is, obviously enough, so different from Richard Gott actually being both a Guardian journalist and also a recipient of KGB money, just nothing at all like the Morning Star being funded for decades by the Soviet Union’s Moscow Gold that it should pass entirely unremarked. Until, of course, someone like us reminds everyone of it.

Isn’t this just terrible?

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] The British far-right activist Tommy Robinson is receiving financial, political and moral support from a broad array of non-British groups and individuals, including US thinktanks, rightwing Australians and Russian trolls, a Guardian investigation has discovered. Robinson, an anti-Islam campaigner who is leading a “Brexit betrayal” march in London on Sunday, has received funding from a US tech billionaire and a thinktank based in Philadelphia. Two other US thinktanks, part-funded by some of the biggest names in rightwing funding, have published a succession of articles in support of Robinson, who has become a cause célèbre among the American far right since he was jailed in May for two months. [/perfectpullquote]

This is entirely different from:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]This tradition started with the British Communist party, which was founded on £55,000 of stolen jewellery, uncut precious stones and caviar smuggled into the country by the Comintern. The Morning Star used to ship half of its copies ‘for sale’ in the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s; paid for up front to the tune of a million quid a year by person or persons unknown.[/perfectpullquote]

And this isn’t the same at all:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Work for the KGB
In 1994, Richard Gott admitted KGB contacts beginning in 1964, and to having taken Soviet money, which he called “red gold.” One of his controllers was Igor Titov, who was expelled by the U.K. in 1983 for “activities incompatible with his diplomatic status,” i.e., espionage, but who left while denying he was a spy.[/perfectpullquote]

This while Gott was:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]A former Latin America correspondent and features editor for the British newspaper The Guardian, he is known for his radical politics and a connection to Che Guevara. He resigned from The Guardian in 1994 after claims that he had been a Soviet ‘agent of influence’, a tag Gott denied.[/perfectpullquote]

No, no, it’s completely different that people The Guardian doesn’t like get foreign money, Oh Yes, because reasons. A recognition of hypocrisy not being one of the left’s strong points.

Note that Gott resigned that staff position but has written for The Guardian since.