Tensions have continued to escalate between the British and Russian Governments, ostensibly over British civil society initiatives on Russian territory. Lord Kinnock’s son was briefly arrested.

But are we alone in thinking that the latest incidents have been exaggerated beyond all common sense?

The Foreign Secretary’s reaction seems more than a little over the top, reminding us of the Cold War and referring to Russian tactics as ‘not worthy of a great country’. We have had an emotional display of ‘anger and dismay’. There is none of that necessary coolness that should govern all inter-state relations.

And, of course, up pops the Litvinenko-Lugovoi-Berezovsky scandal as the fons et origo of the whole ugly mess. What is it about Litvinenko? Has the British establishment mired itself in ‘principle’ ('principle' not generally being the first consideration amongst this august network of the great and the good) or are two competing state security systems dragging their countries into the mud over what any local copper would recognise as a 'domestic'?

Worse, President Putin leads his country on the basis that he has returned its pride after the late Soviet debacle. He is scarcely going to respond well to the foot-stamping of Boy David. And why has the UK Establishment hitched its star to Berezovsky so obviously?

We can only surmise that old Cold War feuds are guiding policy in ways that are now running counter to the fundamental long term interests of the nation – the people's access to security, trade and energy.

When Foreign Minister Lavrov refers to the UK’s ‘colonial attitude’, I am afraid that we have to admit that he has a point. Under the current Government, the extension of liberal or progressive values is an article of political faith. What appears as moral necessity to one side, soon appears as busy-body interference and as cover for more material and strategic interests on the other.

Quentin Peel in the Financial Times today says that ‘Britain may be on the moral high ground’. Sadly, it is not. Both sides are far from any moral high ground, both are standing on molehills and claiming Everest. Our Government’s petulance and arrogance easily matches excessive Russian pride and lack of concern for liberal values.

A struggle between institutions and even individuals has now got completely out of hand. The players in this particular game are acting with consummate immaturity.

If anything, though we are patriotic Britons, our sneaking sympathy goes out to a Russia that is trying to deal with some substantive issues of security and economic development, while an odd little coterie in London seems intent on playing a game that should have been finished over a decade and a half ago.

Both sides should step back. The Russians might recognize that the murder of Litvinenko was a crime and encourage a proper investigation that can collaborate according to Russian law with the UK to find the culprit.

The British should recognize that they can mount their own investigation but they cannot bully Russia into extradition just because they have been bullied, in their turn, into unacceptable extradition arrangements by Washington.

The demand that the Russians should change their Constitution at the behest of a foreign power is actually an outrage and is only not seen as one because the British have no Constitution and can bend what they have to the demands of their American ally and European aspirations regardless of the instincts of their own electorate.  

But, above all, we British should not push our luck by interfering in the politics of other countries any more than other countries should interfere in ours.

The Russians might also help by recognising that Berezovsky is now in London with a social set that has decided that he is 'one of them'. Frankly, I don't give a damn about the man and neither should the Russians.

The Russian oligarchs were just in the right in the right place in the right time, like Henry VIII's gentry who grabbed church lands. The general chaos allowed a lot of asset-grabbing at the expense of the Russian people. It makes neither he nor his opponents moral beacons that they are rich.  Their politics are the politics of dangerous dabbling.

If the Russians can find something in British law to deal with him, fine. Otherwise they should just relax and let him burn himself out secure in his life and what property he has.

And the British should stop backing a man who is clearly perceived as a subversive by another sovereign state. Whatever you think of the quality of its democracy (try looking really hard at British democracy), Russia still has an elected government.

If taking Russia on as one of the BRICs was not enough, the UK, which has nurtured its Indian relations with great care in recent years, has, in the person of Trade Minister Digby Jones, now attacked India’s Central Bank for ‘sheer protectionism.

The accusation comes from failing to respond to an approach from Standard Chartered bank about opening a rural branch network. Gordon Brown is on his way to India and China. It strikes us as somewhat ‘imperious’ to demand market reforms of a sensitive rising economic power in advance of an important visit.

With only China and Brazil to go, that means that our Government is in danger of alienating, through adopting 'colonial attitudes', 50% of the most dynamic economies of the coming fifty years. 

Since the Chinese have really never forgotten the Opium Wars, this strikes us as precisely the wrong approach to take to the big emerging economies. Thank God, we never went to war with Brazil!

There is an interesting angle in the Russian case that no-one has yet picked up on. Kinnock and his wife Glenys have been leading lights, alongside Peter Hain (now mired in scandal), in promoting an aggressive liberal internationalism in British political circles.

That the father should be British Council Chairman and his son the Head of the Office in St. Petersburg should raise eyebrows, especially given the liberal evangelism of the elder Kinnocks within the Labour coalition.

That the Foreign Secretary has piled in calling the incident (over an hour’s detention for alleged drink-driving) ‘completely unacceptable’ should be seen in both an inter-state and a domestic political context.

As we saw in the last posting, the 'Kinnockite' element within the Labour coalition has been an important factor in ensuring a Left-wing component to the Blair-Brown New Labour coalition. 

David Miliband is the natural heir apparent to the Blair wing of the New Labour Party. The Left that chose to accept war in 2003 is much more comfortable with Miliband than Brown. 

If and when the leadership struggle comes, Miliband will need united Blairite support.  The price, to the Left, is always going to be support for liberal internationalism and this means support for global extension of human rights, feminism, unionism and all the other progressive causes.

There is no obvious or necessary link between the Foreign Secretary's assertive reaction to the FSB's laying metaphorical hands on the son of a prince of the political realm in an act of political lese majeste and the close knit ideological and political relations within the Labour Party, but it would foolish to discount the connection entirely. 

A little history is in order. The British Council was founded in the 1930s to fight fascism.  It would be naïve if anyone believed that it was not more than occasional cover for what might be called spying activities by the uncharitable.

It would also not be absurd to see it as the ‘forward march of English liberal values’ and, for that reason, a subject of interest to anyone who, for whatever reason, was not entirely persuaded that their country was best run on the basis of those values.

A third of its income comes from the Foreign Office (and we note the anomalous position within independent British broadcasting of the BBC World Service in terms of its funding).

There is a flow of ‘influence’ between the aspirations of the political leadership of the FCO, its institutional prejudices (notably against the Russian state), the desire for information and contacts overseas and the desire to persuade both its target population and the domestic population back in the UK of whatever the political line of the day may be.

Given the Litvinenko affair, given differences of opinion over a wide range of foreign policy issues, given the odd and atavistic anti-Russian sentiment within both New Labour and important bits of the security services, given the fact that the bulk of the soft Left actively opposes Russian missile defence plans and given the recent near-death squabble over the delivery of Russian artworks to London ...

... there is something going on here which says as much about the struggle for the maintenance of dominance by Atlanticists within the UK Left as it does about the Russian bear.

The ‘hidden’ issue may be that there are already whispers in London that Britain's national interest may lie in ‘cutting a deal’ (we have heard this term used) with Russia because energy rather than trade is going to be the main driver for this small island nation.

Atlanticists are seriously worried about this sentiment, especially as it ties in with the all-too-obvious fact of military weakness and growing fears of being sucked into an aggressive Euro-American stance against Russia, with unforeseen and possibly grave consequences in the long term.

But ‘cutting a deal’ implies so much more. It also implies that the liberal-progressive model of an active export of values (which has been under pressure since the failure in Iraq and which, as we have seen, is the basis for remaining left-progressive support for Blair and Brown) is also under threat from both lack of resources and lack of will.

If so, this is serious for those political animals whose raison d’etre is precisely this expansionism. The bulk of the Left in the PLP (a very much wider group than the declining Campaign Group) certainly does not share this position because it neglects domestic concerns to ‘help’ people overseas who clearly do not want that help on our 'colonial' terms.

Many in the PLP and outside feel uncomfortable about forcing change on other peoples whether through the barrel of a gun and or through what amounts to political interference and ‘subversion’. In that sense, the Russians are pushing at a recently opened door of concern.

The UK Government’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy may have been well intended but (unless you are in the arms industry) it is now working against jobs and justice. The more informed Leftist analysts see so much 'liberal' activity as cover for the re-imposition of US hegemony.

The back-lash against the anti-corruption operations of the Scorpions in South Africa is one of many signs that domestic Lefts are resisting the use of values-driven agencies to impose systems that are, in effect, liberal capitalist in which market forces are easily as important as democracy and human rights.

Another consideration is that the lobby against the US missile defence system’s imposition in Europe is now beginning to develop legs in London, with a first important public meeting at the House of Commons next week.

The moderate Left, represented by the grassroots Compass Group linked to former Deputy leadership candidate Jon Cruddas, has thrown in its lot with the 'antis' as has the influential Peter Kilfoyle.

While there is no love lost for Putin, there is certainly no love lost for the US, certainly in a week when few Leftists will not be aware of new allegations of British Government involvement in promoting the possibility of a coup in Italy in the 1970s.

So, all in all, the murder of part-fantasist minor intelligence figure by persons unknown has escalated into something far more serious – a major PR battle between a national determination version of the progressive Left and a sovereign nation on one side (though not yet realisuing they are on the same side) and an internationalist and expansionist liberalism on the other.

Any sensible analysis would agree that, in this struggle, most of the hysteria is coming from the Western side, notably from Foreign Office officials. Hysteria is generally a sign of desperation. Many High Tories who are not dining companions of Mr. Berezovsky will wonder what the fuss is about.

It does seem absurd that a major Western nation dependent on global trade and on external energy supplies for its economic survival is so willing to alienate a weaker (economically) but rising power that can provide long term energy supplies and a major marketplace - as well as collaborative intelligence against insurgency - for the sake of solving one rather stupid and vicious murder in London.

Some might say the same about UK collaboration with the US designed to contain another source of potential energy and a trading partner, Iran, yet another flawed democracy, so there is a lot at stake here.

The ‘support America at all costs’ element that is so dominant within New Labour has been seriously damaged by the Iraq imbroglio and by its alliance with the Bush Administration.

The ‘Atlanticists’ are now working hard to keep their liberal Left on board this year in anticipation of President Clinton II and a General Election in 2009. Sod jobs, peace and cheap energy for the people, we are talking about power.

To keep their bit of the progressive Left on side, the Atlanticists have to show that they are serious about liberal values. A year of mayhem in Anglo-Russian relations is tolerable because when the ‘right’ person is in the White House, things will change and perhaps mutual accommodation can be sought from strength.

However, our strong advice is to be very wary of anti-Russian propaganda - indeed, any propaganda. The Russians have legitimate concerns about foreign interference that would be intolerable to Britons if the situation was reversed and about a system of military containment that might be pushed far too easily in an offensive direction.

All in all, the Russian Federation may be a regime with some very unpleasant characteristics to the sensitive liberal mind, but it is finding its own way towards the management of immense internal pressures and towards the appropriate exploitation of its territories.

The same could be said of Iran or countless other countries which the West is trying to bring within its cultural and political orbit with the aid of ‘liberals’ inside those countries. And the US use of torture, detention without charge and the death penalty and the conduct of other allies makes this special concern with Russian conduct especially peculiar. 

I am sure that our national strategists have many reasons for continually tweaking the bear's nose but our view is that we should question whether those reasons stand up to scrutiny from a national interest perspective as logical, founded in fact and in the interests of the people.

www.tppr.co.uk