Sir Roger Gale
Member of Parliament for Herne Bay and Sandwich (including West Thanet)
 

NB. This column was written before President Trump announced the withdrawal of US support from Ukraine. I am accordingly attaching a letter from the former President of Poland, Lech Walesa, which may also be of interest. 

The last of these columns, written in January, ended with an observation following the Potomac air crash that Mr Trump sought to attribute to a policy of `diversity` pursued by the previous American administration. You may recall that I asked: 

“Am I alone in believing that the as-yet ill-informed and partisan comments issued by the President of the United States are untimely, ill-judged and revolting? This story is not about him.” 

Since then it has been made clear that so far as Mr Trump is concerned every story is indeed about him.  We have heard him deride Taylor Swift, a Kamala Harris supporter, after she was booed in his presence at the Super Bowl final. We have learned of his ambition to turn the Gaza strip into a seaside resort following, presumably, the `re-location` of the current Palestinian population.

And at the end of the longest shortest month in history he has sought to  hijack the war in Ukraine and as an aspirant winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and `Peacemaker-in-Chief` he has been prepared to surrender everything that President Zelensky has been seeking to defend  and that too many thousands of Ukrainian men and women have sacrificed their lives fighting for,  upon the altar of a `deal’ over mineral rights. Having accused Zelensky of being a dictator (“Did I say that? Did I”?    Yes, Mr President, you did) and Ukraine of starting a war that was in fact precipitated by the invasion of a sovereign country by Putin`s neo-Soviet Union, Trump and his Presidential bag-carrier, J.D.Vance,  have  been prepared, live on television, to abuse  and vilify one of the most courageous men within living memory .   Trump has confirmed his reputation as a bully and as a narcissist determined that `the story` has to be about him and in doing so he has put the freedom of the Western worked and the cause of democracy seriously at risk.  

It is not President Zelensky but `Peacemaker` Trump himself who has sparked the terrifyingly real possibility of a Third Word war and it will be left to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the President of France and other European Leaders, who as I write are at present meeting in Lancaster House in London, to try to inject some sanity into this situation and to get a real peace process back on track.  And at this point I must pay tribute to `Sir Starmer` and also to the Leader of the Opposition in the United Kingdom, Kemi Badenoch who, working in lockstep, have set partisan politics aside in the national and international interest. 

I declare that I have never been a true believer in the `Special Relationship` between the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

While my country spent many years repaying to America debts incurred during the Second World War I remember vividly the crushing, by the Soviet Union, of a revolution in Hungary in 1956 led by Imre Nagy and incited by the USA.  I heard, out of the wireless in my Mother`s kitchen, a Hungarian voice screaming “For God`s sake help us. For God`s sake help us”.  The American cavalry did not arrive, Imre Nagy was whisked off to Moscow and never seen again alive and hordes of Hungarian refugees streamed, briefly, into Austria before that escape route was cut off.

In 1968 another revolution, this time in Czechoslovakia and led by Aleksander Dubcek, was also brought to a swift end by imported Soviet Mongolian troops. I was at that time one of some 50,000 people that filled Bayswater in London, from the gates of the Russian Embassy in Notting Hill back towards Marble Arch, in protest against Russia`s suppression of democracy – but to no avail. The promised American support did not materialise.  The spark of democracy was brutally extinguished and Dubcek survived to live out his life in exile as a village postmaster. 

I was on an aircraft to Washington as part of a delegation sent to promote UK tourism when US forces bombed Gaddafi`s Libya  from an airbase in East Anglia and I remember a US Congressman shaking my hand and saying “God Bless you and Margaret Thatcher” while American visitors cancelled their planned holidays to Britain in their thousands – in case of Gaddafi`s `retaliation`! 

And it was, of course, Trump Mark One that signed off the deal that pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in a manner that placed the lives of UK servicemen and supportive Afghans in jeopardy and threw Afghan womanhood to the wolves of the Taliban. 

The United States has `previous`.  

Additionally, having seen the manner in which Mr Slutsky ( Tormentor of Chechnyans), Mr Kalashnikov and Mr Tolstoy (yes, they do exist) and others of the Russian delegation behaved while I served with the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe I do not believe that any `peace agreement` between the USA and Putin`s Russian Federation that is not reinforced  by security guarantees backed up by multinational military power will be worth the paper that it is written upon.

It was that vital guarantee that Trump declined to give to President Zelensky during the acrimonious and very public White House meeting that led Zelensky to dare to question a `deal` that Trump believed could and would be imposed upon Ukraine. He was right to do so. Rare Earth comes, it seems, at a higher price than Trump is prepared to pay – even for his much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize. 

In the meantime we are left with a lot of fences to mend in the rules-based world order and  the prospect of a second State Visit to Britain  by a `World Leader’ who , for the time being at least, is unlikely to be welcome in this country. 

Back at home the Government, in the form of the Secretary of State for Energy Mr. Miliband, is going to throw more billions of pounds in subsidy at the Drax power station.  Drax is the outfit that imports wood pellets from Canada at a cost of thousands of tons of carbon emissions in transit while pretending that the burning of these pellets is somehow generating `clean energy`.  It is claimed that the timber from which the pellets are made comes from `sustainable sources`. It in fact is produced from the thousands of Oak, Maple, Pine, Hickory and Cypress trees felled in forests across Canada – trees that are currently absorbing C)2 and that will take years to replace.  

I have, with my colleague Rosie Duffield, formerly a Labour Member of Parliament and now representing Canterbury as an Independent, been raising this matter on the floor of the House and we shall continue to do so.  It will not go away or be brushed under the carpet. 

In other news pressure from pensioners denied their Winter Fuel Allowance continues to mount upon a  Government whose economic policies would appear, far from stimulating `economic growth`, to be leading inexorably towards `stagflation` and farmers are now regular visitors to Westminster and Whitehall as they continue to demonstrate against the potential impact of the imposition of inheritance tax and the burden of additional other taxation and  costs upon their family businesses and our national food sustainability.  The Government seems determined to blunder ahead with the transfer of ownership of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and the renting back, at vast cost to the British taxpayer, of the US air base on the largest island, Diego Garcia. Why, if they are in the business of `deals` and if they are worried about increased Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean, is the United States not paying for this facility? 

It was  fifty years on February 11th since Margaret Thatcher was first elected as the Leader of the Conservative Party ,  questions about the failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to bring charges against Mohammed Fayed for rape or sexual assault during his lifetime remain unanswered but will be pursued and the Aga Khan and the singer Marianne Faithfull have both passed away during the month.

 

Former President of Poland Lech Walesa to President Trump. 

Your Excellency, Mr. President,

We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, with fear and distaste. We find it insulting that you expect Ukraine to show respect and gratitude for the material assistance provided by the United States in its fight against Russia. Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the front lines for more than 11 years in the name of these values and the independence of their homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia. 

We do not understand how the leader of a country that symbolizes the free world cannot recognize this. 

Our alarm was also heightened by the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation, which reminded us of the interrogations we endured at the hands of the Security Services and the debates in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, acting on behalf of the all-powerful communist political police, would explain to us that they held all the power while we held none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffered because of us. They stripped us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government or express gratitude for our oppression. We are shocked that President Volodymyr Zelensky was treated in the same manner. 

The history of the 20th century shows that whenever the United States sought to distance itself from democratic values and its European allies, it ultimately became a threat to itself. President Woodrow Wilson understood this when he decided in 1917 that the United States must join World War I. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this when, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he resolved that the war to defend America must be fought not only in the Pacific but also in Europe, in alliance with the nations under attack by the Third Reich. 

We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and America’s financial commitment, the collapse of the Soviet empire would not have been possible. President Reagan recognized that millions of enslaved people suffered in Soviet russia and the countries it had subjugated, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their defense of democratic values with their freedom. His greatness lay, among other things, in his unwavering decision to call the USSR an “Empire of Evil” and to fight it decisively. We won, and today, the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands in Warsaw, facing the U.S. Embassy. 

Mr. President, material aid—military and financial—can never be equated with the blood shed in the name of Ukraine’s independence and the freedom of Europe and the entire free world. Human life is priceless; its value cannot be measured in money. Gratitude is due to those who sacrifice their blood and their freedom. This is self-evident to us, the people of Solidarity, former political prisoners of the communist regime under Soviet Russia. 

We call on the United States to uphold the guarantees made alongside Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which established a direct obligation to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its relinquishment of nuclear weapons. These guarantees are unconditional—there is no mention of treating such assistance as an economic transaction. 

Signed, 

Lech Wałęsa, former political prisoner, President of Poland