This is an open letter from pro-independence thinker Gordon Guthrie to Alex Salmond after he failed to quit Kremlin propaganda channel RT.
Dear Alex,
I can understand why you are resisting requests to cancel your show with RT — but you need to.
There are never clear lines — RT projects state power, and yes, the BBC and the World Service project soft power— but RT is a corrupting institution.
There is no imputation that you are taking a line from Moscow, or that you would let them control your guests or the topics on your show, or should I say your side show—for TV is not the main business of RT.
Salisbury and its fall-out shows us how seamlessly Putin’s Russia works now—the Russian embassy in London taking to Twitter to join the party.
RT is primarily a clip show—an ostensible new source that can be clipped and pumped out through another of Putin’s channel, his embassies, his bot farms and social media lines.
Your clips are not part of that offensive. Instead you, and David Davies, David Lammy, Johnny Mercer, Nigel Evans, Alistair Campbell et al, are the defensive jab—look RT can’t be biased, these people endorse it.
You are being played. It is your independence of mind that he is weaponising.
The most significant involvement in Scottish politics came when a Russian propaganda outlet peddled the line that the the IndyRef that your Government organised, that was validated by thousands of members of our party, had been rigged.
Putin clearly supports Scottish independence —in a Belfast ’72 style if he can get it — as the rope supports the hanging man if he can’t. But he believes that in centralism lies strength.
Both you and I know how false that is, and that Russia is still a jailhouse of nations. Its peoples won’t be free of the rapacious grip of his brand of tinpot imperialism until it is broken up.
Sometimes Occam’s razor simply tells us that the Putin sent a fella called Occam over to cut his enemies throats on our streets.
In using nerve gas in Salisbury he has erased the gray area, moved the line—and you find yourself on the wrong side of it.
It takes your friends to say in the name of your legacy, and your reputation, you need to shift to the right side of that line.
The SNP is not englamoured by hot-rouble funding like the Tories, nor is it stocked with unapologetic Stalinists like Corbyn’s captured Labour Party.
We live in a critical time: Trump pirouettes grotesquely on the stage, Nato teeters, and the cheap farce of Brexit plays out badly.
We cannot let the party that you led so ably, and the cause that you championed so well, get dragged into this mire, especially now.
The show, must not, go on,
Yours,
Gordon
Gordon Guthrie is a former SNP candidate and author of Scotland After Brexit
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