Putin has used British rich man’s law to avoid scrutiny, at a crippling cost to us all

theguardian.com:

Truth is meant to be the first casualty of war, but in Britain the ability to tell the truth about Russia was gunned down before Putin ordered his armies to advance.

You need to write about Russian power to understand fully the anger and shame plutocratic censorship brings. Anger because Britain is our country, and claims to be a free country, and yet foreign oligarchs can manipulate the truth here as surely as Putin can in Russia. Shame because we cannot perform the first duty of journalists and speak in plain English without our newspapers accepting the risk of staggering legal costs.

In the safe space of the House of Commons, Labour MP Chris Bryant quoted from leaked government documents, which stated Roman Abramovich should be watched because of “his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices”. God help anyone who says as much outside when the government has not put him on its sanctions list.

Bear the costs of challenging wealth in mind when you wonder how London became a centre of corruption. Anglo-Saxon law brings class justice rather than real justice. The verdicts of individual judges are not to blame – whatever their faults, they do not take bribes. But the price of reaching a verdict is so high that few dare run the risk of being left with the bill. A system can be rigged even if the people in charge of it are honest, and there is institutional prejudice in the English justice system in favour of wealth that is as pervasive as institutional racism in the police.

Let one example stand for thousands. The Parisian intellectual Nicolas Tenzer tweeted that the French equivalents of George Galloway and Nigel Farage acted as the Kremlin’s “useful idiots” when they appeared on