Farage’s kind of traitor

Nathan Gill, Vladimir Putin and the betrayals of the right

Nathan Gill: Picture credit: Alfred Cannan

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In July 2021 FBI officers pulled Oleg Voloshyn out of the arrivals queue at Washington DC’s Dulles International Airport.

Joe Biden was president back then, and the FBI was not yet Donald Trump’s private plaything and private army. It was still a legitimate law enforcement agency that was willing to arrest Putin’s henchmen.

Voloshyn was certainly one of those. He was a propagandist who pumped out messages for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine.

Moscow regarded Voloshyn as a valuable Quisling. According to a Biden-era US sanctions order, the Russian intelligence services ordered Voloshyn and other current and former Ukrainian government officials “to prepare to take over the government of Ukraine and to control Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with an occupying Russian force.”

The FBI went to work. It examined Voloshyn’s phone and found evidence of treason in the UK as well as in Ukraine and passed it to the Metropolitan Police in London.

It wasn’t the treason that those of us old enough to remember the 20^th century recall. The treason of communists who sold themselves to Moscow because they hated liberal democracy.

Instead, they found evidence of the treason of today’s radical right which sells itself to Moscow because it too hates liberal democracy.

At the Old Bailey the prosecutor, Mark Heywood, said that Nathan Gill was paid thousands of pounds to give TV interviews in favour of a key Putin ally and to make speeches in the European Parliament, where he was an MEP from 2014 to 2020.

Gill was so craven he dutifully recited Volyshn’s scripts word for word. He became such a trusted Russian asset that Voloshyn asked him to “find two others” working in the European Parliament who could also be paid to make media appearances.

Sentencing Gill to ten and a half years in prison on eight counts of bribery, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said:

“Allowing money to corrupt your moral compass constitutes a grave betrayal of the trust vested in you by the electorate.

“Your misconduct has ramifications beyond personal honour, which is now irretrievably damaged.”

Just so. And it’s important to grasp the significance of the lies Gill was circulating – for money.

He repeated the Kremlin line that democratic Ukraine was a racist state that persecuted its Russian minority. The propaganda became a part of Putin’s bogus justification for invading Ukraine in 2022.

Putin claimed that he had to save ethnic Russians in the Donbas, who were being subjected to “genocide by the government in Kyiv.”

In other words, Gill was a man who pretended to be a British patriot, who beat his chest and announced his pride in his country and its great men. He had nothing but contempt for England’s leftwing intellectuals who in George Orwell’s now cliched line, would “feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box”.

And yet all the time he endorsed his country’s enemies. He was hardly alone in that.

Russian intelligence hacked the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to ensure that Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. It provided banking facilities to Marine Le Pen, applauded Viktor Orban and promoted nativists and chauvinists in Germany, Romania and Slovakia.

Putinism and the alt right share a common ideology, and a few are brazen enough to admit it. Steve Bannon said, “Putin ain’t woke. He is anti-woke.” Tucker Carlson cried: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?”

Farage has been desperate to disassociate himself from Gill since the scandal broke.

“I didn’t know anything about it. All I knew was that he’d been to Ukraine,” he told the BBC in October.

“I told him not to go, he defied me and went, I was completely unaware of any statements that he made.”

For all that he was shocked – shocked! – to find treason in his party, Farage was happy to take appearance fees from Putin’s propaganda channel Russia Today (RT). He appeared so often, RT’s publicity department hailed him as one of their special and “endlessly quotable” British guests. “He has been known far longer to the RT audience than most of the British electorate.”

In 2014 Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason of the Guardian went through all Farage’s appearances and reported that he “did not issue a word of criticism” of Russia.

As you can see, it is worth getting to know Nathan Gill because he is not an isolated figure. If only he were.

Gill is now 53 years old. He’s tall and good looking – a politician out of central casting. It is easy to speculate that the need for money mattered as much to him as any ideology,

Until 2008, Gill ran a family business with his mother, Elaine.

Like so many businesses in the British service sector, Burgill Limited relied on picking up the work the public sector outsourced. The Gills offered to supply care workers to local councils. Well, only one council, as it turned out: Hull in Yorkshire far from the family home in Ynys Mon (Anglesey).

As he rose through the ranks of the Faragist movement, Gill had to defend his decision to employ Poles and Filipinos to do the council’s dirty work and house them in bunkhouses.

It sounded as if he forced a grim life on his workers. But in an interview with Wales Online Gill displayed the characteristic self-pity of the radical right.

“We charged £50 a week inclusive of electricity to people who would be earning between £200 and £300 a week. I wish I had that proportion of spending money left after paying my mortgage.”

I can imagine him telling a Filipino cleaner trying to find a space to sleep in the company dorm — “you think you’ve got it hard? You should see my mortgage payments!”

Gill exemplified the hypocrisies of the modern right. He imported foreigners because “we could not find local workers to do the jobs.” But then he built a political career on denouncing migration.

Any business that has just one customer lives dangerously. After the 2008 financial crisis Burgill went bust, and Gill became that stereotypical figure: the embittered business failure.

There’s a tradition on the left dating back to Marxism of arguing that the downwardly mobile middle class, caught between the power of the workers and the power of big business, sees the attractions of fascism,

The workers don’t have much power these days. But do not underestimate the strength of the rage of the deprived middle class. The self-pity that can lead a boss to say that the suffering of migrants is as nothing in comparison with his mortgage repayments turns furious when his business goes bust.

The radical right can direct its fury towards scrounging benefits claimants, the big businesses and banks who rig the market in their favour, foreign rivals who should be banned from competing against them, and in extreme circumstances, the Jews.

After the crash of 2008, the UK right did none of that. Instead, it embraced the most bizarre and self-destructive lie to be sold to the British public in our lifetimes.

Farage, Boris Johnson, and the Tory press were adamant that the EU and its bureaucracy had ensnared Gill and so many other entrepreneurs. Leave Europe and we would leave a tyranny, they maintained. Immigration would fall and the economy would boom.

It remains astonishing that they got away with it. By 2016, Russia was under the control of Putin. China was pumped up with nationalist aggression, and the United States was flirting with isolationism, But, apparently, the UK’s real enemy was an alliance of friendly European democracies who meant us no harm

It was clear at the time, and has become blindingly obvious since, that Brexit suited Russia’s interests.

It weakened Britain – shrinking the economy by £140 billion, and ensuring there was less money to spend on weapons, spies and diplomats – and it weakened Europe as well.

Long before the Russians paid him a penny, Gill was working in Russia’s interests.

And, it should be added, in his own interests as well.

For this failed businessman joining the radical right was a smart career move. Gill was a Mormon – a religion in the UK, where despite the efforts of generations of missionaries has never taken hold. He and his wife, Jana, had five children to support.

So, he began his ascent up the greasy pole of Faragist politics.

Gill was always Farage’s man – a key figure in Wales where support for Farage has always been strong.

Farage called Gill “Our leader in Wales. An honest decent and honourable man who has been loyal to me and the party at all times.”

Meanwhile Gill praised Farage as a brave pioneer leading Britain to a glorious future outside the EU.

In a gruesome moment, he ended a speech to activists with a peroration that included Farage among the great men and women of British history.

“This is the land of Keats and Wordsworth, Tennyson and Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Chaucer, and Tolkien, Lennon and McCartney, Drake and Raleigh……and of Farage.”

The Brexit Gill persuaded his compatriots to support was hugely against the interests of the people of Wales. Some estimates put the cost to the Welsh economy at £4 billion

After bankrupting his business, Gill helped impoverish his country.

But he did well for himself.

His loyalty to Farage paid off and in 2014 he was rewarded with a seat at the European Parliament. For a man with five children to support, the £115,000 salary (at today’s prices) must have made a welcome change. Then there were all the expenses to consider.

But according to the prosecution at the Old Bailey it wasn’t enough, and Gill began looking for bribes as soon as he arrived in Brussels.

Cash and conviction meshed together.

Russia offers today’s right the ideological argument that liberals have no legitimacy. They are not honourable opponents but puppet masters who use their control of education and the mainstream media to brainwash the public.

But it also offers cold. hard cash. I work on the assumption that anyone I hear parroting Putin propaganda lines about Nato starting the Ukraine war, has been bribed by Russia

I may not always be right but as the case of Nathan Gill shows, Russian money is always there, and that those that shout the loudest about their patriotism are always the first to reach for it.

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