If boris johnson is serious about helping ukraine, the most resolute action he can take is at home — scottish national party

The UK’s allies are beginning to take note of the intractability of the problem. A report from the Center for American Progress – a thinktank close to the Biden administration – stated last

week that “uprooting Kremlin-linked oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom’s ruling Conservative party, the press, and its real

estate and financial industry”. After all, clear mechanisms to crack down on these practices exist. My government has long called for Westminster to legislate on the improper use of Scottish

limited partnerships – just one favourite instrument of financial exploitation – to ensure that they are no longer used to facilitate the sort of financial corruption that has benefited

authoritarians and their wealthy cronies for far too long. Corruption and lack of transparency are a drag on liberal democracy, and authoritarians have become adept at using these scandals

as a way of saying to people ground down by them that all forms of government are the same, and all politicians are as bad as each other. And so I can only call on the prime minister to

finally take action. He must recognise that his government and his party have enabled this situation, and he must acknowledge that the most resolute action he can take is at home, to rebuild

his government’s tattered reputation. To quote the author and journalist Oliver Bullough from his book, Moneyland, which documented so much about the London “laundromat”: “Without trust,

liberal democracy cannot function.” And as Bullough wrote more recently about the situation in Ukraine: “No one is more to blame than us for the fact that Russia’s richest can treat war like

a spectator sport.” And while during such periods the temptation is to focus on individuals in power, this can lead us to forget the role of the competing factions within the Russian

security state and the pressures they are exerting on the situation, and it may lead some to forget the pressure this is putting on 40 million Ukrainians – our fellow European citizens – as

they go about their daily lives. In some ways, this is a reality many have been dealing with since 2014, especially those in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.