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Scottish Nationalists Urged to Boycott Russian State Media

Jamie Dettmer

   LONDON - Scotland's nationalists are coming under mounting political
   pressure to stop appearing on Russian state-backed broadcaster RT
   following an explosive report earlier this week by Britain's
   parliamentary intelligence watchdog, which said Moscow has been
   actively seeking to boost the campaign for Scottish independence.
   The intelligence and security committee of the House of Commons says
   the effort to encourage Scotland to break away from the United Kingdom
   is part of a much broader Kremlin bid to destabilize Western
   democracies.
   The former leader of the Scottish National Party, SNP, Alex Salmond,
   who served as Scotland's First Minister from 2007 to 2014, is also
   being urged to stop hosting a regular RT program. Opponents of the SNP,
   both in Scotland and south of the border in England, say he is serving
   as an apparatchik for the Kremlin.
   Salmond "needs to accept that he has been promoting a TV channel that
   has a damaging agenda for western democracy," said Alex Cole-Hamilton,
   a Liberal Democrat member of the Scottish parliament.
   "After the report was published we should have heard the First Minister
   speak out, so I now call on her'¦ to condemn Alex Salmond's ongoing
   relationship with the Russian state in the strongest possible terms,"
   said David Mundell, a Conservative lawmaker in London and a former
   minister.
   Scotland's nationalists have been left fuming this week. Much of the
   initial media coverage in Britain on the explosive report released
   midweek by the House of Commons intelligence and security committee
   detailing Russian influence operations in Britain focused on the panel
   concluding that "Russia undertook influence campaigns in relation to
   the Scottish independence referendum in 2014."
   Russia, the new normal?
   The panel said this was likely "the first post-Soviet Russian
   interference in a Western democratic process." The Scots opted by a
   small but healthy margin in 2014 to remain tied to Britain, but the SNP
   is now pushing for a re-run vote.
   One Scottish tabloid complained about "selective pre-briefings"
   directing attention on Scotland in a bid to divert attention from the
   committee's broader claims about how "Russian influence in Britain is
   the new normal."
   And an SNP spokesperson said Conservative and Labour lawmakers south of
   the border were using Scotland as "a smokescreen to try and conceal"
   the most serious conclusions of the watchdog's report that detailed a
   range of Russian efforts to meddle in the workings of British democracy
   generally.
   Facilitators
   He cited the committee's criticism of British "enablers and fixers,"
   including members of Britain's House of Lords, who have been
   facilitating the flow of Russian money into Britain over the past
   decade turning London into a "laundromat" for Russian cash, which is
   then leveraged into political influence.
   On Thursday, it emerged that 14 ministers in the ruling Conservative
   government in London received tens of thousands of pounds from
   individuals or businesses with links to Russia. The donations were made
   either to them or their constituency parties.

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