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Gary Robertson ⚽A phone call can really mess up your train of thought.

Here I was flowing with ideas, packed with facts and figures, ready to write the column of my life . . .  Then it rang. There was no point in hoping it was for someone else. I live alone nor was there any chance the call would be a short one. As soon as the name appeared on my screen my brain switched off as I did the man art of pretending to listen and nod, occasionally slipping a strategic "yes" "no" or "aye that's not good" into what was essentially a monologue about everything from my son's apparent inability to rise from his slumber before lunchtime on his days off university to the pros and cons of "the fat jag".
 
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with football but now as I write I'm struggling to find a starting point.
 
I guess Thursday might be a good one. Sure let's begin there.
 
With only Hearts and Celtic being Scotland's last two representatives in European competition this season I decided the honourable thing to do would be to watch both games and give an honest appraisal - after all that's what I'm here to do.
 
So let me sum up Thursday in two words - beautiful chaos.

An injury ravaged Hearts side travelled to Thun in Switzerland and once again chaotic defending and sheer bad luck contributed to the Edinburgh side's loss.
 
Scottish teams losing in Europe is hardly something new but when you gift the opposition two of their three goals - the first being an OG from McCart and the other only twelve minutes later when a hashed clearance landed at the feet of Labeau to slot home from close range - you begin to question whether God is actually a fan of the SPL or does he sit there rather like a Scottish football correspondent from the BBC and show only a passing interest?
 
Thun, who are struggling big time domestically, grabbed a third before the one piece of quality that Hearts did show, a header from Findlay at least gave the travelling Jambos some cheer on a chilly night. 3-1 considering injuries and shoddy defending was looking back perhaps not such a bad result for the lads from the Gorgie Road.
 
Then came Celtic.
 
I swithered whether or not to watch this game all week but I felt a sense of duty to do so. Like the vast majority of Hoopites dread was the overwhelming emotion that gripped all but the most ardent and optimistic of fans.
 
Celtic's European record has this season been dismal. Since the hiding away to LASK that ended the Champions League dream for another year they have failed to pick up a single point in the Europa League and again little was expected against Turkish giants Besiktas.
 
It was hard to envisage what was to come, impossible if I'm brutally honest once the away side took the lead. Massive credit to Sam Johnstone who saved the penalty awarded for a stupid challenge by Lotomba but when the rebound was fired into the net it was Déjà vu all over again least that was the expectation. At this point with nothing to lose Martin made three changes just after the hour mark that would turn this game on its head.
 
Out went Tounekti, Høgh and Forrest - in came Osmand, Duran and Donovan, and within seconds a lovely cross field pass from McGregor was fired home by Osmand and Celtic Park erupted.
 
The team with the backing of the crowd carried on a drive that's been lacking then saw scorer turn provider as Osmand set up Duran who expertly rounded the keeper and fired Celtic into a most unexpected lead. The delirium would last only 7 mins when the away side with a speculative shot found the bottom corner of the net. Celtic weren't done with yet and in moments heroes are needed and Celtic have one in Camilo Duran, the Colombian wonder kid side footing close home from Tierney's scuffed shot to grab his second, and once again the Bhoys had the lead.
 
I think at this point God probably tuned in, thought we'd suffered enough, and the victory was Celtic's.
Dreamland.

Saturday
 
A plethora of goals, sixty one  in fact, scored across all four of Scotland's top flight leagues, I could be here all week talking just about Saturday alone.
 
You'll be glad to know I've picked out a few highlights from this round of matches.
 
Hibernian travelled to Aberdeen both desperately in need of points. Sitting at the bottom of the table in November isn't where anyone wants to be yet that's where Hibernian were.
 
Having come off the back of a victory over city rivals Hearts in the League Cup semi final the men from Easter Road played with a swagger that defied their lowly position and trounced the Dons 4-0. There was no fluke about this result. It was well earned and those who made the 256 mile round trip from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and back were well rewarded for their faith.
 
Elsewhere Motherwell and Dundee United fought out a 1-1 draw, St Johnstone overcame Dundee 2-1, and in the evening (an 8pm kick off) Rangers travelled to Paisley to face St Mirren.
 
The home side did make the visitors work for their victory although once again it took a dubious penalty for Rangers to break the deadlock in the 18th minute when Penrice, who should probably stay indoors the next time there's a windy day, threw himself to the floor after being breathed on by St Mirren's Ramos, the ref Nick Walsh pointed to the spot. VAR didn't want to get involved, it seemed, and Naderi did the rest - 1-0 to Rangers.

Much huffing and puffing ensued and it took to the 61st minute for Dan Neil to double the lead and restore the smile to McInnes' face.
 
This put Rangers a point behind Celtic (having played the same number of matches) it was up to Celtic on Sunday to extend the gap again.
 
Other highlights from Saturday
 
A 7 goal thriller between Morton and Stenhousemuir, a victory for the home side by a single goal made all the more remarkable having played the majority of the match with ten players, having Okkie (of Morton) shown a straight red in the 26th minute.
 
An impressive 4-1 victory at home by Arbroath (another place thermals are needed in summer) over Ayr and a hard won 1-0 victory by Partick over hapless Queens Park who now find themselves six points adrift while Partick sit pretty on 28 at the top of the table on a three point cushion.
 
The shock result of the day however came in League one where bottom of the table Cove Rangers fired four past high flyers Hamilton without reply.
 
It would appear the Accies have hit a bit of a wobble and while Ross County continue to do their thing, win, a 4-1 victory over lowly Peterhead and with only three points covering the bottom five it#s the league to watch for thrills and spills for sure. There's now a five point gap at the top as Ross relentlessly roll on.
 
League Two and with victories for both Stranraer and Clyde the table remains the same. Only goal difference separates the two at the top à further six points back to Elgin in third.

Sunday
 
Hearts on an unbeaten home league record that stretches back to last year faced Falkirk who themselves were on a decent run of form having won their previous four including last week over Celtic.
 
The Bairns showed their victory over Celtic was no fluke as they flew out the traps their first scored on four minutes and by halftime they were 4-0 ahead.
 
Second half having done all the hard work they took the foot of the gas slightly after scoring a fifth in 47 minutes giving Hearts a glimmer of hope as the home side fans (those who remained) were rewarded with a first goal in Hearts colours for Frenchman Guendouz and a 75th minute penalty from Braga.

A final score of 5-2 to the away side continued their fine run and they now find themselves in third spot in the SPL.
 
Celtic v Kilmarnock was pretty much a non event. The home side made hard, very hard work overcoming Neil McCanns side 1-0. Granted excuses could be made I guess after Thursday's efforts so let's not judge too harshly.
 
For me at least while the game was dull, settled by a solitary goal from Liam Scales' head, three points going into yet another international break keeps the wolves from the door for now and makes life a little more comfortable but this Celtic team.
 
If I do have a worry though it would be O'Neills admission to Sky Sports news that he's still not 100% sure of his best team.
 
This for me at least took a little of the shine away from what had been a fantastic, then adequate couple of performances by the team.
 
If you don't know by now Martin and it's November . . . 🤔

So that's that for this week. There's so much more I could rant about. For instance McAvennie's moronic comment about Auston Trusty taking time off to attend his fathers funeral as "woke nonsense" (he has since apologised but I suspect not because he in a moment of clarity thought "that was stupid" - money talks).

Whatever you're doing do it well, stay safe and have fun.

Til next time …… 🐼

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

The Number 7

Barry Gilheany ✍ On the Russell Brand rape case.

A Predator Stalks British Light Entertainment Shielded By An Entourage Of Enablers And Contemporary Culture. The Case Of Russell Brand As A Chronicle Aftertold

On Monday 9th November the celebrity comedian, presenter, actor and addict Russell Brand was sentenced to a prison term of ten years and six months after his conviction of the rape of one woman and the sexual assault of three other women after the launch of a police investigations into allegations of sexual offences against him published by the Times and Sunday Times newspapers and broadcast by the Channel 4 documentary Dispatches in 2023. 

At least ten more women are expected to come forward with similar accusations against Brand raising the spectre of a Jimmy Saville type tsunami of cases. Mention of another monster sexual predator raises the question of what exactly has changed within British broadcasting environments since Saville stalked the land in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The uncomfortable reality for such august institutions as the BBC, Channel 4 and The Guardian (for whom Brand wrote weekly florid reflections on being a West Ham United supporter) is that he continued to operate despite such red flags as his requests to runners (the lowest rung in the broadcasting and film food chain, invariably young women looking for their foothold in the industry) to bring back contact details for young women) and his explicit jokes about “flashing” on radio. 

When one compares the environment in which Saville operated and that in which Brand moved around, then disturbing parallels are revealed. The era of the Swinging Sixties with its radical deconstruction of the class ridden and sexually oppressive social orthodoxies had the unfortunate side effects of facilitating Saville, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter and the other notorious predators of that time because of the lack of awareness of child sexual abuse the actual meaning of consent in sexual relationships.

Because of their enormous cache to the BBC, Saville et al could operate with impunity because of the lack of sexual harassment laws to protect women at work and also because Saville could deploy his mixture of charisma and men to ward off any prying queries. One has to ask if the Cool Britannia culture of the 1990s and the noughties; the risqué content of TV shows like Men Behaving Badly; the proliferation of lads mags like Loaded and FHM and even the iconic rock band Oasis created the zeitgeist that Brand (and maybe others, pace David Walliams) exploited? 

Mercifully free of racist and homophobic content, this contemporary pre-manosphere form of masculinity emerged at the time where the material gains of feminism were now clear and also paralleled the emergence of the “laddette” culture. However, despite the advances in legal protection for women at work; in legislation against rape, violence against women and harassment, light entertainment and the media generally remained institutionally sexist industries in which the complaints of women about the behaviour of top male celebrities continued to be brushed aside by executives too focused on the bottom line of audience popularity. The reality in that it has taken the #MeToo movement to out the unsavoury underbelly of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and other totemic symbols of fame and celebrity. When histories and analyses of 21st feminism are written, then #MeToo may well be cited as the transformative moment for women. Where legislation proved insufficient to bring down Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, it was the courage of their women victims allied to the investigative journalistic prowess of Ronan Farrow that delivered justice. On this side of the Atlantic, it was similar cooperation between Russell Brand’s courageous victim and good old “mainstream media” journalistic enquiry which ultimately brought him to book.

The Russell Brand case is certainly a chronicle aftertold of sexism and sexual abuse in the media industries repackaged for the first decades of the 21st century. The comedian Katherine Ryan warned of a “predator” in the entertainment industry.[1] Other female comedians such as Shappi Khorsandi and Kate Smurthwaite have recalled since Brand’s conviction their discomfort of being in his presence. Bob Geldof certainly seemed to have the measure of him as evidenced by their spat at the 2006 New Musical Express (NME) awards which has just resurfaced online when, on being presented by Brand with the NME hero of the year, Sir Bob brushed past him to tell the audience, “Russell Brand, what a c__t”. Brand had announced that he had won by saying “Of course, the winner is Live 8 so please welcome to the stage Sir Bobby Gandolf”. In typically tasteless style, Brand later joked the reason Bob Geldof was “such an expert in famine” is that “he had been dining out” on “I don’t like Mondays for 30 years”.[2]

It is not as if there had not been evidence of Brand’s disgusting attitudes towards women and their rights to bodily integrity on the public record. It is there in his memoir The Booky Wook published years before his arrest. In it a teenage Brand recounts a crush in the early 1990s on a fellow student at the Italia Conti theatre school (from which he was expelled for poor attendance) which led to his pursuit of her through the streets of London and then boarding ticketless on a train to her hometown of Wigan where, despite his admission that she did not want him accompanying her never mind coming to her family home, he did so anyway and bedded her. There, he “lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till she reluctantly removed her bra” before deploying “tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers.”[3]

Anecdotes such as that and the description of how Brand spat in the face of a lap dancer and smashed the phone of a sex worker did not dissuade critics from showering the book with praise; it reached No.1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list and won biography of the year at the 2008 British Book Awards.[4] I have to personally admit to reading The Booky Wook and not having copped onto those offending passages possibly because, like presumably many other readers, I was mesmerized by his portrait of a seeming eccentric written in his typically florid prose. The content of this autobiography graphically prefigures the bedroom scene of the rape for which he was convicted; the forcible penetration of his victim’s anus and the horrific patina of bodily fluids on the bedsheets which, ever the control freak, he ordered her to clear up in the manner that a powerful politician or business figure would speak to a chambermaid.

Further examples of the career of this sexual monster abound. He was labelled “shagger of the year” by The Sun three times (can one imagine a similar accolade for women transgressors such as Bonny Blue). He enjoyed rock star status (no doubt enhanced by his weird sartorial sense) that propelled him to a sell out standup your and an eponymous show on BBC Radio 2. Audiences laughed as he regaled them with stories of how he enjoyed watching women choke during oral sex. Few questions were asked of his spell in “winky nick;” a rehabilitation clinic that his managers had enrolled him in, and which is used as an alternative to jail for convicted sex offenders. Why were no eyebrows raised when he said in a 2010 follow-up memoir “If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out?”. Even after the notorious “Sachsgate” affair in October 2008 when he and his guest Jonathan Ross left voicemail messages for the Fawlty Tower actor Andew Sachs boasting of how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter and the welter of national condemnation it drew including the then PM Gordon Brown, Brand was able to keep his job while Ross was suspended for three months and Radio 2 controller, Lesley Douglas, resigned. He regularly made sexual comments about the station’s newsreader and, rather than taking on board advice from the producer that the newsreader was upset, improvised a song about her reading the bulletins in her underwear.[5]

There are others who have questions to ask, though not those relating to the reputational damage caused to the media institutions. Why did - during his supposed reinvention on his return to the UK in 2014 after the breakup of his marriage to Katy Perry during his time as an actor in the USA - did so many “labour luvvies” such as Owen Jones, Jemima Khan, Ed Miliband and even, as came to light last week, PM Andy Burnham, fawn over him as some sort of progressive icon; somebody who as leader of the Labour Party, felt compelled to be interviewed by Brand on his You Tube channel in order solicit his backing for Labour in the 2015 General Election? Why did George Monbiot and Owen Jones feel compelled to write fawning reviews and introductions to his 2014 book Revolution a menage of faux anti-establishment populism and pop psychology slop on “consciousness”. Who deemed him a suitable authority on drugs to be invited to a parliamentary sub-committee to share his insights? Who deemed him to be a suitable panellist on Question Time or an interviewee with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight where he expounded on his reasons for not voting (a position which he reversed in 2015 when he urged a Labour vote in the General Election of that year.

Despite a concerted campaign since the end of his trial by the Daily Mail to frame the afore mentioned figures on the left as being complicit in the cover up of Brand’s crimes, perhaps the worst they can be accused of is naivety (although Owen Jones has in his condemnation of The Sun for its “persecution” of the disgraced BBC News anchor Huw Edwards has shown himself to be a poor judge of character), no such latitude can be shown to the motley crew of far right “anti-establishment” conspiracist groupies which have surrounded Brand since his move to the USA and reinvention as born again Christian and alternative health guru and to the hundreds of thousands of social media followers he has racked up since the start of his trial attracted like moths to the fire of his anti-WEF, anti-Covid lockdown and vaccination, anti-Ukraine and climate change denial agenda cocktail. The following reaction from Restore UK councillor Owain Clotworthy to Brand’s conviction may be beyond, even in these conspiratorial times, may be beyond the pale of acceptable opinion but judging from the uptick of Brand’s social media followers from the start of his trial, the Overton Window may be shifting, if ever more slightly, in online space.

Posting on X, Cllr Clotworthy claimed Brand was the victim of a “witchhunt” by the elites and urged him to “stay strong.” He wrote “Funny how the real pressure only kicked off once he questioned the elites, rejected the COVID narrative, and publicly found Jesus as his Lord and saviour.” He jibed that his accusers had “dug up old claims from decades ago when he was living a very different life,” dismissing the case as a “show trial.” Brand was “speaking truth,” he insisted.[6]

Unfortunately, such sentiments and accompanying misogynist tropes about “why these women have waited so long?” or that women were to blame for their fate for “throwing themselves at famous men” appeared with depressing regularity on my X feed. Such ancient notions about women’s behaviour before and after the incidence of rape were front and centre of the defence case at Southwark Crown Court. However, in what is surely a landmark moment in English jurisprudence, the trial judge in the sentencing hearing in decisively refuting such arguments explicitly endorsed the “No Means No” principle. The woman’s behaviour did not matter; whether she had drunk to excess or whatever signals she transmitted to the man. Women have the right to wear whatever clothes they wished. The length of time it takes a women to take to bring a rape or sexual assault allegation does not matter (no statute of limitations in other words). He recognised the factors that prevent immediate reporting of rape such as fear of the rapist; the psychological power that her abuser continues to hold over her; the long-lasting effects of trauma and of previous adverse experiences of the judicial process.

Ideally Brand’s involvement with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, where he has used his star status to criticise vaccines and vaccine mandates, junk food and pharmaceutical companies, should sound the death knell for this movement and all its world. He has heaped praise on MAHA’s figurehead and US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), Jr and Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services and who has been criticised for his promotion of pseudoscience including promotion of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid 19 during the pandemic. During his trial, he took two MAHA Action calls in which he did not address the charges against him but spoke experiencing “the ceremonial pressure of a trial.” True to form, when Brand was a moderator for a segment at the MAHA summit in September (just before the start of his trial), a day-long event that featured RFK, Jr, JD Vance and other Trump administration officials, he and Mehmet Oz kicked off their joint appearance by making a joke about Brand hugging the Secretary of Agriculture backstage which in the words of Oz “took MAHA to a new level.” Brand quipped in reply, “She initiated that contact, I should make that clear, doctor.” An epitaph for Brand Russell.[7]

And the saga continues. As I write this, another of Brand’s former girlfriend, Jemima Khan, has posted details of her experience of his violence and coercive control. But this is Britain’s #MeToo moment. Never before has an entertainer of the public profile like Russell Brand been adjudicated as a sexual predator who displayed stunning levels of arrogance, narcissism, and entitlement in his career in the way in which he was excoriated in Southwark Crown Court today. The victim impact statements of Brand’s prey are vivid testimony to the decades long effect of rape on its victims from feeing useless; fear of and mistrust in relationships; almost physical sickness at the sight of their abuser on TV and loss of confidence.

But at least Brand did not evade justice as Saville did before him. The story of Russell Brand is the story of how unequal power relationships in the entertainment industry facilitated this evil predator’s casual disrespect for women and the norms of civilised behaviour and of, in general, the fear and aura wielded by powerful men, be it in business, the media, sports or politics. The call by the Culture and Media Secretary Lisa Nandy for media industries to sign up to the Creative Industry Standards Authority, an industry body that protects whistleblowers, as part of her candid admission on the Laura Kuenssberg Show that women have not been protected in unregulated media environments is certainly a significant step in the right direction. Legal reforms to tackle the pervasive myths about rape which the judge so effectively took apart may also be in the pipeline.

Lastly a message to those who claimed that Russell Brand was targeted because he was anti-vax or anti-Ukraine such as Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore, George Galloway, Jackson Hinkle, Tucker Carlson, and Briahna Joy Gray: Fuck You!

References  

[1] Brand suspected of carrying out attacks on at least 10 more women. The Guardian. 7th November 2026 p.6

[2] Throwback to Bob Geldof’s famous foul-mouthed exchange with Russell Brand.” The London Economic. 6th November 2026

[3] Geraldine McKenzie. Hiding in plain sight. How star got away with predatory behaviour. The Guardian. 6th November 2026 pp.2-3

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid

[6] Aaron Newbury, Outrage as rapist Rusell Brand defended by Reform councillor. Daily Express 7th November 2026.

[7] Michelle R. Smith Brand appeared with allies of Trump during rape trial. The Guardian. 7th November 2026 p.8

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Hiding In Plain Sight Again

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Forty Nine

 

A Morning Thought @ 3320

Packy Carty  ✍ They say pride comes before the fall, and few parties have been prouder or fallen further than the DUP since the summer of 2017.

That June Theresa May lost her majority and ten DUP MPs suddenly held the balance of power at Westminster. They sold their votes in a confidence and supply deal for £1 billion, and for a while the bible bashing creationists were the most powerful men and women in British politics.

Paisley junior seemed drunk on hubris. In January 2019, days before the Commons voted on May's withdrawal deal, a BBC Newsnight reporter asked him if he would be offering the Prime Minister any sympathy after a difficult day. "I will be asking her for milk and no sugar," he said. It was meant as a joke. It reads now like an epitaph.

To understand what came next you have to understand what the DUP was actually trying to do. Unionism knew it could not win the long demographic game. The Protestant majority the Northern state was built to guarantee was gone, and the trend lines only run one way.

Brexit offered a way out of that arithmetic. Whatever they said in public, their opposition to May's backstop only made sense if the border went back where partition had put it, on the land, in Ireland. Reassert the border, harden the Union, and effectively rip up the Good Friday Agreement in the process. So days after Paisley's quip they helped vote May's deal down by 230 votes, the heaviest defeat a British government had suffered in the Commons in modern times, and they voted it down twice more.

The plan backfired in the most spectacular way. In October 2019 Boris Johnson, the man they had cheered at their own party conference the year before, agreed a deal that put the border down the Irish Sea. In December he won his landslide against Corbyn's Labour, an 80 seat majority, and unlike May he did not need the DUP. Nigel Dodds lost North Belfast and Emma Little-Pengelly lost South Belfast the same night. It was outrageous to think the blackmail they exerted on May's government would not be revisited with a vengeance once the DUP's support was no longer needed, and it was.

The sea border was more than a betrayal. It was the British state placing part of what it claims as its own national territory under a body of law in whose making it has no vote, setting the North outside its own sovereign decision making process. A government that believed a future majority in the North would vote to stay in the Union would be highly unlikely to make that call over the sovereignty of part of what it deems its national territory. It reads instead as a long, slow disengagement, preparation for withdrawal when demographics make the North's continued existence untenable.

The material consequences are already visible. With the North left inside the EU single market for goods, its economy has begun to turn on an all-island axis. North-South trade in goods stagnated at between €2 billion and €3 billion a year from 2001 to the 2016 referendum; it has set new records since, with northern firms selling €5.5 billion into the South last year. The sea border is quietly laying the foundations of an economic united Ireland within the EU. The DUP, of all parties, were to the fore in bringing about these conditions.

Like Icarus the DUP had flown too close to the sun, and the rot was in the wings before the Brexit gamble. The Renewable Heat Incentive, set up under Arlene Foster's watch, paid claimants more to burn fuel than the fuel cost them, and much of the money flowed to poultry sheds and rural businesses in the DUP's own heartlands. Whatever the intent, it was a transfer of public money into the party's own social base. When it blew up, Martin McGuinness resigned in January 2017 and Stormont went dark for three years, while Foster's answer to the demand for an Irish Language Act was that you don't feed a crocodile.

Then came Paisley himself. In 2018 he was suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days, the longest ban on record, for failing to declare two luxury family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government, and for lobbying on that government's behalf. A recall petition in North Antrim fell just short, at 9.4% against the 10% needed. The DUP quietly readmitted him the day before it closed. The party closed ranks, and the voters remembered.

By 2021 the Irish Sea border was biting and the party turned on itself. Foster had survived RHI, but she could not survive her own MLAs. In April at least 22 of them and four MPs signed a letter of no confidence, angry at her handling of the Protocol and at her decision to abstain on a vote to ban gay conversion therapy.

The internecine feuding that followed was something to behold. Edwin Poots won the leadership, but it had a short shelf life. He lasted 21 days before a mutiny removed him, and Jeffrey Donaldson was waved through unopposed. Jamie Bryson even live-tweeted a key internal meeting as it happened. Three leaders in two months, and the worst was still to come.

Under Donaldson the party pulled down the Executive in February 2022 in protest at the Protocol. Three months later Sinn Féin topped the poll in the Assembly election for the first time. The boycott ran for two years, and when the DUP came back in February 2024 on the back of "Safeguarding the Union", it was to watch Michelle O'Neill take the First Minister's chair. Every move made to protect the Union had delivered the very thing they feared.

Weeks later Donaldson was charged and walked out of the leadership. In June 2026 a unanimous jury at Newry Crown Court convicted him of 18 historical child sex offences against two girls, including rape, and in October he was jailed for 15 years. The judge called it a catastrophic descent into disgrace. Edwin Poots has since said that quite a number of people within the DUP knew about concerns a woman had raised about Donaldson's behaviour. Who knew what, and when, now hangs over the party hierarchy like the sword of Damocles.

The voters had already passed judgement. In the July 2024 Westminster election the DUP fell from eight seats to five. They lost Lagan Valley to Alliance, South Antrim to the Ulster Unionists, and North Antrim, held by a Paisley since 1970, to Jim Allister of the TUV.

When a political class loses the material argument, it retreats into culture. This autumn Drumcree was resurrected, and the leadership of Unionism was deferred to Jamie Bryson, an unelected loyalist acting as legal adviser to the Portadown Orangemen. He was candid about the strategy: everyone would come to the table, he said, once they had fought each other to exhaustion in a culture war. "Either the Portadown District goes down (the Garvaghy Road) or the Executive goes down," he told Orangemen. Carla Lockhart, DUP MP for Upper Bann, stood beside him on Drumcree hill and warned of "profound consequences" if the parade did not get through.

It was a zero sum contest of their own choosing, and they lost it. The residents of the Garvaghy Road held their ground, the march was blocked and then banned, and the Executive did not go down either. Gavin Robinson would not pull Emma Little-Pengelly out of office. He settled for what he called a graduated response, which meant boycotting joint engagements with O'Neill.

Lockhart resigned as a party officer on 22 October. On 2 November she left the party altogether, saying the response had fallen far short of the profound consequences promised. She now sits as an independent unionist, with Jim Allister holding the door open, and talks of building a grassroots movement within Unionism. Her departure leaves the DUP with four MPs, its fewest at Westminster in 25 years.

The desertion has not stopped at Upper Bann. In Dungannon, Clement Cuthbertson, a party member since 1996 and a councillor since 2014, quit to sit as an Independent Unionist on Mid Ulster council, citing a loss of confidence in the direction the DUP has taken. There are reports of a party split three ways, with one faction said to want Paul Givan in Robinson's place. It is a poor platform from which to fight an Assembly election in May.

Look at where the train wreck has left them. Unionism now sends five separate strands to Westminster: the DUP, the Ulster Unionists, the TUV, and two independents in Lockhart and Alex Easton. The DUP, the UUP and the TUV are jostling within a few points of each other in the polls, three parties fighting over ground that has room for two. A fractured Unionism is not a temporary crisis of leadership; it is the political expression of a social base that is shrinking and an economy that is quietly reorienting south.

Meanwhile nationalism emerges from Drumcree galvanised and resurgent. Sinn Féin's support had been drifting, its base apathetic at how little its ineptitude at Stormont, and the sectarian carve-up there, had delivered for families and communities. In July a LucidTalk poll had the party on 22%, down from the 29% it won in 2022. Like Foster's crocodile moment, Drumcree handed it a confrontation with the old enemy and a much needed distraction from its own failures. By late October More in Common had Sinn Féin up five points in three months, from 25% to 30%, and named it the main political beneficiary of the Drumcree fallout, with an Assembly election due in 2027.

Every confrontation the DUP picked over these nine years, it lost, and every red line it drew was crossed. In 2017 it held a British government in the palm of its hand. In 2026 it cannot hold on to its own MP in Upper Bann.

The party that set out to save the Union by hardening the border has instead hastened the material conditions for ending it. The Northern state was already on borrowed time; the DUP has shortened the loan. Those who once asked a British prime minister for milk and no sugar are left in disarray and desertion, and no one is putting the kettle on.

Sources

• News Letter: Paisley "milk and no sugar"
• RTÉ: Paisley survives recall petition
• Irish News: Paisley readmitted a day before petition closed
• Irish Times: Foster bows out as First Minister
• Irish Times: why cross-border trade has leapt since Brexit
• Irish News: cross-border trade at record levels in 2025
• Irish Times: Donaldson sentenced to 15 years
• PA: Number in DUP knew about claim over Donaldson behaviour, Poots
• Irish Times: Who is Jamie Bryson?
• Irish Times: Jamie Bryson, unionists "must go on the offensive"
• RTÉ: Carla Lockhart resigns from DUP
• Irish Times: Unionism splinters again
• Irish Times, Newton Emerson: serious talk about the end of the DUP
• Clanrye News: three factions report
• Poliwave: LucidTalk poll, July 2026
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No Tea For The DUP

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.

27-March-2026

Russia’s Bloody Shift From Subimperialism To New Old Imperialism

In October 2022, just before the Ukrainian army retook the south-eastern city of Kherson, retreating Russian soldiers exhumed the remains of the 18th-century Prince, Grigory Potemkin, from St Catherine’s Cathedral.

Potemkin’s bones were removed to Russian-held territory on the left bank of the Dnieper river, along with statues to him, to Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov and to Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who, like Potemkin, served under Catherine the Great. Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-appointed governor of the occupied part of Kherson region, said: “These are sacred objects that I believe needed to be saved.”[1]

15 November 2022. After the Russian army’s retreat, people in Kherson
going to see Volodymyr Zelensky raising the Ukrainian flag.
Photo from president’s office / wikimedia

In the 1770s and 80s, when the American and French revolutions lighted beacons of republican hope, the empire Potemkin fought for was growing into a reactionary monster. He was a key figure in the colonisation and attempted “Russification” of south eastern Ukraine; the founding of Yekaterinoslav (“to the Glory of Catherine”, now Dnipro); the annexation of Crimea in 1784; the crushing of the Zaporizhzhia cossacks; securing Black Sea ports; and war with the Ottoman empire, an important precondition for Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century.[2]

Now, Potemkin is in a pantheon of state functionaries venerated by Kremlin ideologists from Vladimir Putin downward, by the education system and by the media. For Putin, these heroes are direct predecessors to the Soviet army in the second world war, the tinpot dictatorships established in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 and the Russian troops that invaded Ukraine in 2022. They were all defenders of his imagined “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” from one enemy after another: Poland, Austro-Hungary, Bolshevism and the “anti-Russia project” that led to the Soviet Union’s demise.[3]

Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev, in their analysis of twenty-first century Russian imperialism in a Marxist framework, interrogate the relationship between this ideology – strong enough for the officers commanding the Kherson retreat to risk lives for bones and statues – and the economic, political and social dynamics in which it is anchored.

Budraitskis and Matveev’s starting point is the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. Not only have its consequences done untold damage, economically and geopolitically, to the Russian elite – but, as they argue convincingly (page 2, page 81 and page 121), much of this damage would have been done, even if the initial military objective of imposing a puppet government in Kyiv had been achieved.

An explanation must be found for such a self-defeating strategy. Why did a far-reaching action by the state, long seen by Marxists as the instrument of capital, cut across capital’s economic interests so dramatically? It was by no means the first time: citing David Harvey, Budraitskis and Matveev point to the Vietnam war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “examples of imperialist ventures that are not easily attributable to the requirements of capital accumulation” (page 15).

But the Russian case must be explained on its own terms, and they starts with the Putin regime’s ideology of imperial mythmaking and “civilisational” conflict with the west, and show how it grew on the soil of post-Soviet Russian capitalism and its discontents. They write in their Introduction (page 7):

Russian imperialism since 2014 has been counterproductive, largely irrational, and rooted in the historical myths of empire. But it was the modern experience of primitive accumulation, as well as recent events such as the Arab Spring, that enabled the ideological consolidation of Putin’s regime.

Here I consider four themes through which this argument is developed: (1) the understanding of post-Soviet Russia as a subimperialist power; (2) the development of imperialist and nationalist ideologies in the Russian elite prior to 2014; (3) the threat posed by the Maidan uprising in Ukraine to the Kremlin, and how it reacted; and (4) the driving forces that took the Kremlin from its initial military intervention in Ukraine (2014) to all-out invasion (2022).

The subimperialist model

A first key theme in Russia’s New Imperialism is the “internationalisation of Russian capital” that began in earnest after the 1998 crisis, when a banking crash and four-fold ruble devaluation weakened the financial-industrial groups that grew rich on rent-seeking in the 1990s (pages 19-26). Productive investment flourished (oil prices rising steadily from 2000 to 2008 helped), and “the two channels of integration into the global economy – namely, exports [primarily of oil, gas and metals] and borrowing – reinforced each other”. Russian capital was exported, in the first place to Ukraine and other post-Soviet states: foreign direct investment by Russian entities multiplied 20 times over between 1999 and 2007.

In these years, Putin remade the relationship of capital and the state. He centralised state control of the media and punished Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man. The economic elite lost its “direct, unmediated political power”; chunks of the energy sector were brought back into state ownership; and by 2007 seven of the top twenty companies, including the top three (Gazprom, Rosneft and Sberbank), were majority-owned by the state.

Putin’s relationship with the owners of Russia’s largest businesses “could aptly be described as ‘Bonapartist’”, Budraitskis and Matveev write, citing Karl Marx’s famous argument that “in order to save its purse [the bourgeoisie] must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles”.[4] Russian capitalists lacked social legitimacy and felt threatened by labour unrest: Putin “re-ordered state-business relations” and they benefited.

But it did not stop at that. Leadership of state companies was handed to Putin’s closest associates: this was a more direct fusion of state and capital. “The economic elites lack public legitimacy and independent sources of political power. They exercise power through the Kremlin, and only in this way” (page 31).

To explain Russia’s integration into global capitalism, Budraitskis and Matveev look to dependency theory, developed by Ruy Mauro Marini to describe Brazil under the military dictatorship of the 1960s. Brazil then, and Russia in the 2000s, were “subimperialist” powers that exported raw materials and low-value-added goods to the rich countries and imported high-value-added products.[5]

Moreover, they assess the Kremlin’s geopolitical strategy up to 2014 as “antagonistic cooperation” with the US and its allies (which had, by the way, either ignored Putin’s genocidal wars on Chechnya, or claimed them as part of the “global war on terror”). Russia facilitated logistics, and supplied aircraft, for the NATO operation in Afghanistan. Notwithstanding Putin’s rhetoric against the “unipolar world order” at Munich in 2007, and even after the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, “the Kremlin sought pragmatic cooperation with the US in areas that corresponded to its own perceived interests” (page 37).

The weakness of this “subimperialist” model – its dependence on volatile commodity and finance markets – was cruelly exposed by the 2008-09 financial crisis, Budraitskis and Matveev write (page 23). The Kremlin responded to the slowdown that followed in 2012-13 with efforts to stimulate investment, but these failed “as they faced the limitations imposed by the very nature of Putin’s personalist dictatorship” (page 26) – that is, the way that he remade the relationship of state and capital.

The authors of Russia’s New Imperialism argue that these political and economic policy factors alone can not explain Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, and the annexation of Crimea that burned many of its bridges with the western powers and capital markets. Rather, they present a more fundamental double shift – in the form of imperialism, from rational to irrational, and in foreign policy, from pragmatism to ideological decision-making.

The early 2000s formula [in foreign policy], placing interests above ideas, was replaced by the opposite belief that there is a global struggle of ideas, and national interest is determined by one’s place in this struggle.[6] […] Russia’s transition from its ‘rational’ economic imperialism of the 2000s to the ‘irrational’ ideologically motivated imperialism of 2014 and beyond is part of the same process (page 39).

Budraitskis and Matveev offer a discussion of ideology understood broadly as “a set of core ideas about the world and human relations that serves as the basis for making political decisions”. These ideas are formed at a “first level” (“the collective life experience of certain social groups and dominant perceptions (‘common sense’) in society as a whole”, and then articulated by intellectuals as a world view, at a “second level” (pages 39-40).

They track the emergence in the 1990s of a “cynical” Russian elite ideology,[7] grounded in what it perceived as “liberation” from Soviet strictures on the pursuit of private interest, and entwined with violence. An “attitude of permanent conflict”, echoing the street gang culture that security services officials of the 2020s lived through as young men, became the “unspoken rule of political life” (pages 50-54).

Ideology and military intervention 2014

A second theme in Russia’s New Imperialism is the way that strands of articulated “second level” ideology, rooted in this “first level”, were drawn together in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Conservative and antidemocratic ideas, previously used pragmatically, were increasingly internalised by the elite. In this long-term, multi-layered process, Budraitskis and Matveev see Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012[8] as a turning point.

The rhetoric of his election campaign this time differed markedly from the depoliticised and technocratic style of the 2000s. He was no longer a manager whose main task was to ensure economic growth, but a patriotic leader of a great nation’s majority and the defender of the nation’s sovereignty against Western influence (page 60).

The philosophical component of this state ideology is influenced by Ivan Ilyin, an early 20th century conservative and anticommunist, who saw the authoritarian state as morally right against its citizens, who must submit to it. In response to the “colour revolutions” in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and elsewhere, the Kremlin reimagined another idea from anti-Bolshevik émigres, Eurasianism, as the “Russian world”, understood as an alternative value system to western liberal democracy. Other key elements in Putinist ideology are the Russian Orthodox church, and the special role of the security services, which, Budraitskis and Matveev argue, harks back to the oprichnina, a repressive institution that carried out mass terror under Ivan the Terrible.

Ivan Ilyin. Photo from wikipedia

Putin’s idea of the Russian state echoes 19th-century historians, who saw it as the “form” of the Russian people that mystically reproduces itself, and of their successors in the late Stalinist period who saw its centralisation and expansion as “historically progressive”, and anything that stands in its way as reactionary. Putin’s narrative differs in one crucial respect, though: there is no forward progress, only a cyclical pattern: “the West is [eternally] trying to destroy the Russian state through military aggression, importing false ideas, and supporting radical opposition” (page 65). The eternal need to resist this pattern produces the imperative for Putin’s gauleiters in Kherson to protect Potemkin’s sacred bones.

Budraitskis and Matveev emphasise that Putinist ideology came together untidily and patchily, emerging fully-formed only in the 2020s. In the months before Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Putin described himself alternately “conservative” and “liberal”. But in this jumble, the outlines of irreconcilable conflict were emerging. By 2013, “Ukraine’s choice between tightening relationships with the EU, and joining the [Russia-dominated] Eurasian Union was framed by the Kremlin as mutually exclusive, not only for political and economic reasons but also for ideological reasons” (page 68).

In November 2013, then president Viktor Yanukovich of Ukraine pulled out of talks on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU, opting instead for a range of energy and other subsidies from Russia. A student-led demonstration against this shift was subjected to a vicious attack by police. That brought hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets of Kyiv in anti-government protests. And that became the Maidan uprising that brought down Yanukovich’s government in February 2014.

Maidan: the existential threat

This brings us to a third key theme in Russia’s New Imperialism: social control was a key element in the Kremlin’s decisions to go to war, in both 2014 and 2022. The “personalist regime” consolidated by Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 was in large part a reaction to protests against rigged parliamentary elections in December 2011. Behind these protests, and the alarming sight of the Arab spring pulling down regimes across the Middle East and North Africa, the Kremlin saw only the hand of the west and its existential threat to the “Russian world”.

Considerable progress made in 2009-10 in the Kremlin’s negotiations with the Obama administration – e.g. a nuclear arms limitation agreement, reversal of George Bush’s decision to deploy a missile defence shield in eastern Europe, and joint positions on Iran – made no difference to this.

In the Kremlin’s view, the authentic sources of anti-Putin protests lay not in internal contradictions but in external ill will. Oppositionists were merely its conscious or unconscious agents. In this way, the confrontation became historical and cultural, not political (page 78).

The Kremlin applied these same ideologised assumptions to social protest in Ukraine. Budraitskis and Matveev show that the Russian elite was by no means united around Putin’s belief that the Maidan protesters were “pawns controlled by foreign hands” – but that view prevailed. Ukraine’s choice between closer economic ties with Europe or with Russia was perceived as “civilisational”. Yanukovich was the guarantor of “traditional values”. Ideology trumped economic policy, resulting in self-harming military intervention.

The imperatives of social control again forced the Kremlin’s hand in the run-up to the all-out invasion in 2022. Increasingly the perception of the west as a “historically unchanging source of existential threat to Russia as a state” determined both domestic and foreign policy decisions. “The refusal of the post-Maidan Ukrainian governments to return to Moscow’s orbit of influence was seen as part of the West’s large-scale project to ‘contain’ Russia, which was also expressed in the growth of oppositional sentiments across Russian society” (page 113).

Putin viewed the heterogenous protests in Russia in 2018-19, and Aleksei Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign, as the work of western intelligence services; he compared them to the Maidan and the Arab spring. By mid 2021, both military preparations for what Putin assumed would be a very brief operation, and ideological preparations articulated in his July 2021 article on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”,[9] were complete.

Budraitskis and Matveev set their explanations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – ideological conviction, supercharged by fear of social protest – against other interpretations current in universities. The claim that Russia was pursuing its economic interests is easily dealt with. “If the Ukrainian market was so important to Russia, why would the Kremlin risk losing it by annexing Crimea and fomenting violent separatism in Donbas?” they ask (page 81). And lose it Russia did: its exports to Ukraine in 2015 were less than half of the 2012 level.

A more significant target is the claim that Russia’s hand was forced by “geopolitical and security considerations”. In one crucial article, the “realist” scholar John Mearsheimer – no kind of Marxist, but heavily relied on by many would-be Marxists – wrote that it is “Geopolitics 101” that “great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory”. But was the threat real, or perceived?

Mearsheimer says NATO took steps to “assuage Russian fears”, for example by never permanently stationing military forces in its new eastern European member states – but that that matters little, because “it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them”.[10] This gives the lie to the whole argument. “The subjective perception of threat replaces the objective correlation of forces as a key explanatory factor in Mearsheimer’s analysis” (page 82).

And what a distorted perception it was. As Budraitskis and Matveev point out, “the security situation has actually improved for Russia during the period of NATO eastward expansion”. The number of US troops in Europe in 2010 was 30,000, one tenth of what it was during the Cold War; the number of US tanks in Germany fell from 5000 in 1991 to zero in 2014; the German army’s own tank fleet fell from 7000 in the Cold War to 244 in 2017, only 95 of which were fully operational. No wonder that one of Putin’s own military experts, Alexander Khramchikhin, wrote in November 2013 that the US “does not intend to fight a war in Europe – neither an aggressive nor a defensive one”.

In this reviewer’s experience, discussions about Ukraine in western “left” political circles are replete with references to Mearsheimer’s shoddy logic, supported by myths such as “western arms supplies to Ukraine rose sharply before 2021” (untrue) and “Ukraine was close to joining NATO” (untrue), allied to fantasies about “Ukraine’s ethnic cleansing in the Donbas”, and so on.[11] Ideology can indeed be a powerful social force.

Budraitskis and Matveev also respond to interpretations of Russia’s actions that emphasise their provisional, unplanned character. While there is evidence of the Kremlin improvising its support for the Donbas “republics”, Crimea, they stress, is different. Its annexation “created an unprecedented situation” (page 84). Putin must have known there would be “no way back” and that sanctions and diplomatic distancing were inevitable.

From annexation to invasion

However profound the shift of Kremlin policy in 2014, all-out war was still not predetermined. The authors of Russia’s New Imperialism do not consider the full-scale invasion an “inevitable continuation” of Tsarist or Soviet imperialist policies; rather, it was “largely determined by internal political dynamics that led to a transformation in the worldview of the Russian elites” (page 75). A fourth key theme is how these dynamics played out between 2014 and 2022.

The impact of the war on corporate Russia was overwhelmingly negative. Russian investments were increasingly shut out of Ukraine. Further west, sections of international capital pressed on with collaboration – European gas companies’ support for the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany being the emblematic example – but Russian corporates’ access to western financial markets was severely restricted. Budraitskis and Matveev compare Russia’s failure to recover from the 2015-16 global economic doldrums with Brazil’s rapid rebound. Investment turned inward: the arms industry, always enormous, was pumped up still further, and the state-controlled corporations that controlled it reached into other economic sectors.

Russia added “economies of plunder” to its repertoire, i.e. investments “linked to the violence of Russian military and paramilitary formations” (page 99). The results were mixed. Occupied areas of eastern Ukraine have been a net drain on the Russian economy; the Donbas, with its broken supply chains and damaged industry, even more so than Crimea. In Africa, where paramilitaries’ seizure of resources “resemble early modern European imperialist modes of plunder” (page 101), paramilitaries such as the Wagner group profited but it is doubtful that the Russian economy benefited overall.

Against this background, the ideology that had taken shape in the 2010s now began to dominate statecraft. The Donbas conflict was portrayed as one between “traditional values” and degenerate, “globalist” western forces. But this was not just a tool to create a new social coalition behind Putin; rather, Budraitskis and Matveev argue, moral values were seen by the Russian ruling class “as an integral part of the strategy to defend sovereignty” (page 107). Similarly, a “large scale infrastructure to implement state historical policy” (page 108) went far beyond rewriting school textbooks: a view was being propagated that the Russian ruling elite rests not on democratic legitimacy or international law, but on “the imperial legacy of the past”, which is “inevitably linked to territorial expansion” (page 112).

Catherine the Great’s arrival in Crimea, as imagined by the Russian artist Ilyas Faizullin in 2005.
Photo from Nemetsky dom respublika Tatarastan web site

None of this ensured that the Russian ruling class – let alone the majority of the population – was united in support of Putin’s decision in 2022 to recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics”, and then to invade the rest of Ukraine. But the “personalist regime” provided no opportunity even for factions in the Kremlin to influence the president’s strategic decisions (page 124). Politicians and businessmen were actually compelled to rally to the cause: the “special military operation” was justified not only in foreign policy terms but as a means of strengthening the ideological homogeneity of the elite (page 127).

The failure to defeat Ukraine within days again brought Russian imperialism to uncharted territory. Budraitskis and Matveev catalogue the regime’s relative success in redirecting the economy: Russia remains a major commodities exporter, has shifted its trade from western powers to China, India and others, and centred its domestic economy on arms production and associated sectors. The military-industrial complex has siphoned off resources from civilian industries (page 132).

This was not capital directing the state, but the state directing capital: Putin created “‘facts on the ground’ to which businesses had to adapt”, thus demonstrating “the extent to which his personalist dictatorship has expropriated the political power of the economic elite” (page 134).

Like all good books, this one raises questions in the reader’s mind.

Broadly, I agree with Budraitskis and Matveev’s answers to the question, “what brought Russian imperialism to the point of the allout invasion?” And I think it is also useful to pose it counterfactually: why didn’t Russia move towards some sort of “normal” capitalism – like Brazil, for example – instead of this fascist-like authoritarianism and war?

Working as a journalist and researcher of Russian businesses in the 2000s, I believed that there could be hard times ahead for the labour movement and opposition organisations, and that Russian bullying of its former colonies had not ended. But war, dictatorship and a new gulag? Not on this scale.[12]

One factor in my thinking was that the Russian economy and state were being seriously weakened, year after year. Russia had lost economic control of Azerbaijan in 1994, when it signed the “contract of the century” with western oil majors; the Russian company Lukoil hung on in a secondary role. In central Asia, Russia ceded dominance: Chinese and western oil companies acquired the biggest production assets in Kazakhstan; China, Japan and South Korea made the running in Uzbekistan; and the completion of the central Asian gas pipeline in 2009, switched control of Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth largest gas producer, from Russia to China at a stroke.

But empires in decline can become more violent, not less. The murderous Russian onslaughts on Chechnya in 1994-96 and 1999-2002 turned out to be a foretaste of the Donbas conflict. Russia’s economic weakness reinforced the Kremlin’s descent into the irrational, ideological decision-making that Budraitskis and Matveev so carefully describe.

A second, related, question concerns Russia’s relationship with international capital. I am entirely persuaded by Budraitskis and Matveev’s argument that Russia carved out a “subimperialist” role, which unravelled after 2014. Were there other ways out of it – alternatives to Putin’s way?

Towards the end of the 2000s, some sections of the elite voiced a strong desire to escape from this subordinate position, in discussions about the danger of “Dutch disease” – over-reliance on commodity exports – and the need to invest in technology and value-added sectors. These ideas did not cut across the “Russian world”; indeed some elite figures saw them as the best way to reinforce that world.

As I see it, these alternative routes out of the subordinate role in which Russia was being integrated into the world economy were, in part, closed off by factors outside the elite’s control: the 2008-09 economic crisis and its aftershocks, and the social movements that terrified the Kremlin, the Arab spring at some distance, and Maidan uncomfortably close to home. I do not want to say, though, that economic crisis or social protest left the Russian elite no choice. Of course it had a choice, and the ideological factors foregrounded by Budraitskis and Matveev are essential in explaining why it made the choices that it did.

The attention paid in Russia’s New Imperialism to the social processes, and their impact on elite ideology, helps it to stand out from mountains of superficial commentary about the causes of the war on Ukraine, whether from those who see it as an inevitable product of an incorrigible imperialist mindset or those who imagine, with the Kremlin, that western powers were to blame.

A third question concerns what the single case of Russia tells us about twenty-first century capitalism more generally. In an Epilogue, Budraitskis and Matveev draw attention to the Donald Trump’s reelection to the US presidency in 2024, his “clear affinity with Putin” and the similarity of the two governments’ ideological content and political style.

They discuss the extent to which the Putin regime might be defined as fascist. An argument “that the regime’s fascistisation is underway” can be based on “its effort to ideologise and reeducate Russian society in the spirit of militarism and imperialist nationalism”, they write. But “analogies with fascism must not be applied singularly to portray Putin’s Russia as an anomaly but rather must seek to understand its place within a global trend”. To start with, the invasion of Ukraine has “increased antidemocratic and nationalist sentiment” across the EU, and contributed to the electoral success of far-right parties elsewhere (page 170).

This should be the starting point for a great deal of collective thinking. For one thing, this advance of the right takes place against the background of extraordinary changes in world capitalism – the rapid rise of Chinese manufacturing power, the emergence of vastly powerful and infinitely rich US-based corporations, including those controlling new technologies, and all the changes in the character of labour that result.

Moreover, the advance of the right must be taken together with the constant explosions of progressive social protest – not in the forms we were inspired by in the late twentieth century, and often only loosely connected to the organised labour movement – especially but not only in countries of the global south.[13]

Can Russia’s new imperialism thrive in this world? What does it tell us about elites elsewhere will react?

A last question that Russia’s New Imperialism brought to my mind concerns the fate of socialist thought in the twenty-first century. This book makes a real contribution. The authors start with the particular case, Russia, and proceed to examine the economic, political and social changes in Russia itself and internationally, that conditioned the rise of Putinist authoritarianism. They dissect the decisions to intervene in Ukraine, in 2014 and 2022, show how these cut across the material interests of Russian capital, and argue painstakingly that the elite’s ideology, not as a set of ideas but as a social force, is the driver here. From here they reflect on broader issues about contemporary imperialism generally.

This strikes a contrast with a great deal of “Marxist” writing on the war, not only by hardened post-Stalinists who deny that Russia is imperialist, but from others, who acknowledge that it is, but find ways to reinforce the illusion that “NATO expansion” caused the war, not the Russian elite. For example, Alex Callinicos in a recent article starts from a general proposition – that a “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers” is underway – and, where the particular case of Russia’s war on Ukraine does not fit his preconceptions, distorts or omits realities.[14]

The danger is that Marxism becomes a way of moulding analysis to justify political dogma, instead of developing ideas that can inform struggles to defeat and supersede capital. Perhaps it will turn out that Budraitskis and Matveev’s most important contribution is that they eschew dogmatism, and so help point the way to developing Marx’s approach to capital, and the forces that oppose it, in the twenty-first century. / 15 October 2026

References

[1] “Okkupanty ukrali iz Khersona pamiatnik i ostanki Potemkina”, Ukrainska Pravda, 26 October 2022

[2] See e.g. Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: a History of Ukraine (Allen Lane, 2015), pages 133-142; Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: a History (University of Toronto Press, 1988), pages 203-205; Dominic Lieven, Empire: the Russian empire and its rivals (John Murray, 2000), page 212

[3] Putin’s July 2021 article on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” set out the ideological justification for the February 2022 invasion. Then, e.g. at the 9 May 2022 Victory Day parade, and on the Russian annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in September 2022, he referred specifically to the linkage between the 18th century, the second world war and the current war

[4] Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, chapter IV

[5] R.M. Marini, “Brazilian subimperialism”, Monthly Review 23:9, February 1972, pages 14-24

[6] On this, Budraitskis and Matveev are quoting Dmitry Trenin, a prominent analyst in Russia, in “What Putin really wants in Ukraine”, Foreign Affairs, December 2021

[7] Russia’s New Imperialism includes a discussion of the meaning of cynicism, leaning on Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Verso, 1988)

[8] Putin served two terms as president from 2000 to 2008. To comply with constitutional requirements he stepped down, and Dmitry Medvedev was president 2008-12. The constitution was amended to allow Putin to serve two further terms, and he was re-elected in 2012. In 2020 the constitution was amended again, such that Putin can now serve until 2036, when he will be 84

[9] Vladimir Putin, “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, kremlin.ru, July 2021

[10] John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”, Foreign Affairs 93(5), 2014, pages 77-89

[11] On arms supplies, see e.g. S. Pirani, “Marxism, Russian imperialism and social forces”, Links, 9 September 2026. On Ukraine and NATO, see e.g. T. Bilous, “A letter to the western left from Kyiv”, openDemocracy, 25 February 2022, S. Pirani, “Ukraine: the sources of danger of a wider war”, People & Nature, March 2022, M.E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia and the making of the post-cold war stalemate (Yale University Press, 2022). On the Donbas, see e.g. S. Pirani, “The Russian statelets in the Donbas are no ‘people’s republics’”, Jacobin, 2 March 2022; D.R. Marples (ed.), The War in Ukraine’s Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future, (Central European University Press, 2022); Vlad Mykhnenko, “Causes and Consequences of the War in eastern Ukraine: an economic geography perspective”, Europe-Asia Studies 72, February 2020; Serhii Kudelia, “The Donbas Rift”, Russian Social Science Review 58, 2017

[12] In Change in Putin’s Russia: power, money and people (Pluto, 2009), I recalled the oligarch Petr Aven’s admiration for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and wrote that: "Russia’s property-owning class might be ready to use large-scale violence” against social movements, but “no physical repression of opponents on the gigantic scale practised by Pinochet has been seriously contemplated by post-Soviet Russian governments, because of the relative quiescence of the population” (pages 129-130)

[13] A thought-provoking discussion of the most powerful social movements internationally of recent years, from a point of view closer to anarchism than to Marxism, is The Peoples Want manifesto

[14] A. Callinicos, “Geopolitical fractures and the Marxist critique of imperialism”, Links.au, August 2026. A response is: S. Pirani, “Marxism, Russian imperialism and social forces”, Links, 9 September 2026.

Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev, 2026. Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology, Published by Stanford University Press. 
 
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Russia’s New Imperialism 📚 Capital and Ideology

Dr John Coulter ✍There are two lessons from this tale from the Seventies which I hope all of you reading this will learn.

Firstly, remember the police’s ‘one punch campaign’; ignore that at your peril as this tale could be so easily being written from my jail cell where I am completing a long sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

Secondly, to all my fellow minister’s sons and daughters, listen to these words of wisdom based on experience - never ever start a physical fight as the preacher’s kid will always come out the loser.

Let we take you back to the early Seventies when as a teenager I had the mother of all crushes on a lassie in the north east Ulster Bible Belt. Let’s call her Cynthia (not her real name).

She was the one girl that telling I was the minister’s son had no impact. I spent a fair chunk of my weekly pocket money buying cards with supposedly romantic messages penned on them, but to no avail with her.

The one girl I wanted to date was seemingly beyond reach. I even tried asking her relations to ‘put in a good word for me’, but it all appeared to fall on deaf ears.

Okay, so I was only in my early teens, but I genuinely believed I had found my soul mate for life. I just had to convince her about her future role!

Then she dropped a bombshell on me. One summer’s evening at the Sunday church meeting in the Bible Belt, she began to date a chap I’ll call Herbert (again, not his real name).

I was flabbergasted and intensely jealous. Finally, in the late summer holidays, a matter of days after returning from the Boys’ Brigade camp, jealousy got the better of me.

Saturday evenings witnessed the summer church youth clubs held in church halls. I heard on the gossip grapevine that Cynthia might be at one, so off I went with a school chum. Sure enough, there she was … with Herbert!

They waited until the opening religious devotions had finished and the club activities started, then sneaked outside where they would snog in Herbert’s brother’s car. Jealousy in your teens can lead you to do all sort of crazy things.

After pacing the hall for about 15 minutes, out I marched to the car. I called out Herbert’s name and at the same time, kicked the brother’s car, putting a small dent in the rear driver’s side door.

I waited for Herbert – who had done absolutely nothing wrong, or against me – to get out. At this point, I should add that in terms of fisty-cuffs, I could not punch my way out of a wet paper bag.

While my dad had been a member of the Army cadets in his youth with boxing as his preferred sport, which helped earn him a commission to Sandhurst Military Academy, these genes did not pass their way to me.

While other farmers’ sons knew how to handle themselves in a scrap, I had no idea what to do in a fight because no one would ever touch a minister’s son. To fight with the preacher’s kid was simply ‘not the done thing’.

Unexpectedly, Herbert got out the other side and came round behind me. I turned round and was punched in the stomach, but not hard enough to wind me. I just lashed out with my fist.

As it had been a few moments after I began shouting at Herbert and Cynthia inside the car, word quickly spread around the youth club that I was trying to start a fight – another incident unheard of in the Presbyterian community. The minister’s son simply did not resort to violence.

This was one of those fluke one-punches in life. I caught Herbert on the face, sending him reeling back onto the bonnet of the car behind his brother’s.

Herbert was stunned, partly by the punch which ironically had cut him, partly by the fact the preacher’s kid was using violence.

I consider myself very lucky to have only hit Herbert on the face. A few inches lower and I would have caught him full-on in the throat, delivering what could have been a one-punch fatal blow.

I am also very lucky Herbert did not report me to the police for assault and the damage to his brother’s car.

I walked to the other side of the road. Herbert, by this time, was off the bonnet of the car and asking me what he did to deserve being hit. But what could I tell him? He would only laugh if I said I was jealous.

I made up a total lie that a chap from an Exclusive Brethren Hall in the Bible Belt had told me Herbert was ‘bad mouthing’ me. Luckily for me, a good friend and fellow minister’s son came out and tried to calm me down.

Unlike me at this time in life, my fellow minister’s son was a level-headed person who could see I would be in a lot of trouble for starting a fight at the joint church youth club. I’ll call him Thomas (again, not his real name)

Thomas brought me inside and calmed me down. When I told him the real reason for the fight with Herbert, he told me I was “a total twit” and was asking for major trouble. It arrived shortly afterwards in the form of dad.

It was dad’s turn on the rota of ministers to take the closing epilogue at the end of the evening’s activities. The youth club leader – who later became a Presbyterian minister and was one of my spiritual mentors at university – broke the news to dad that I had started a fight.

The problem was if I was ‘let off’ because I was a minister’s son, it would send the wrong signal to the other young people and fighting would become a regular occurrence. I had to be made an example of. I got suspended from that youth club for six months, but was allowed to attend youth fellowship meetings on Sunday evenings.

This was one occasion when being a preacher’s kid was a definite disadvantage. The message to the other young people was simple – if this is what we do to punish the minister’s kid, none of the rest of you step out of line!

News of my misdemeanour spread around the congregations like wildfire. It was a question of keeping my head down for several weeks – and enduring watching Cynthia and Herbert sitting cosily together at church events.

Some of my best friends had a good laugh at my expense over the youth club debacle. One told me ‘you should have played her at her own game’. As the minister’s son, I had been so used getting my own way in matters, but here was a gorgeous young lassie who would not go on a date with me.

His advice was sound for one a few years younger than me – get another girlfriend and show Cynthia you can live without her. Now why could I not have come up with that solution?

My love of heavy metal when all around me were country music fans plus the youth club incident had given me a ‘bad boy’ image. A steady girlfriend would also serve to take some heat off me, and reduce the amount of criticism about me in the congregations.

While I never had any intention of joining the Young Farmers’ Club movement, it did not stop me attending its public functions. In the Seventies, the clubs located in that north east Ulster Bible Belt organised a series of concerts.

Dad would take the religious devotions at such events, and I was allowed a reprieve from my ban at the youth club to attend. By sheer chance, I was seated beside two girls – let’s call them Claire and Chloe (obviously, not their real names!).

At the end of the night, I took a chance and asked Chloe if Claire would like to ‘go with me’ – teen speak for becoming my girlfriend. To my utter surprise, Chloe returned with the message that Claire had said ‘yes’.

Claire and I unveiled what became known in the church community as “The Big Romance” a few days later at a function involving the Junior Section of the Boys’ Brigade. There was enough of Cynthia’s acquaintances there to get the message back to her – John Boy has moved on!

Claire was very attractive, too, and there was a string of lads who wanted to date her, but I couldn’t care less about this – as long as I was seen with her. Then the ban was lifted on me at the youth club. Bingo! I could be seen with Claire at church events in front of Cynthia.

The plan was working. Claire and myself were like a mini celebrity couple at that stage in the north east Ulster Bible Belt. At church functions, the church photographer would take our photos. One of my level-headed chums was my social advisor. He told me how to act around Cynthia – to stop behaving like a love-sick puppy, and act as if I couldn’t care less about her.

A Company section Boys’ Brigade display was the high point of the relationship with Claire. The annual BB display was one of the major social occasions in the church life. I was awarded the Scripture Cup for scoring 100% in the Battalion Scripture competition, as well as the Ballymena Battalion award.

The tactic was simple. Anything Cynthia could do, I could match. Claire was giving me mega hugs for winning the prizes. For some reason, Herbert could not attend, so Cynthia was sitting with her chums. I was pretending to ignore her, but secretly pining for her.

How much longer would she go out with Herbert? As soon as she dumped Herbert, I would make my move. What could possibly go wrong? Things did.

Of all the organisations which had the most influence among the young people in that north east Ulster Bible Belt, it was the church youth fellowships. For years on from the great evangelistic mission of 1972, young people were still becoming born again believers.

Herbert had become a Christian and one Sunday evening at a youth meeting, he gave his testimony on how Jesus Christ had come into his life and made such a difference. You could have heard a pin drop during his talk – and Cynthia was so moved, she became a born again Christian that night, too.

Honestly, I had totally mixed emotions. There was tremendous joy that Cynthia had got ‘saved’, but intense jealousy again that with both Herbert and her now born again believers, it could be several more months before she dumped him – if ever!

And so church life continued in this tit-for-tat battle of romance; myself and Claire versus Cynthia and Herbert as to who could be the most loving couple!

In reality, it was only about 18 months, but to me it seemed a lifetime; then the inevitable happened. It was a typical Sunday evening youth fellowship event. I was enjoying a cuppa when suddenly out of the main hall walked Herbert.

Unusually for him, he was in tears. The gossip grapevine soon provided the answer. He’d been dumped by Cynthia. Now was my chance!

Unfortunately, my immature thuggish behaviour at that church youth club had not been forgotten by Cynthia. I never did get that date. Here’s the lesson from that early Seventies north east Ulster Bible Belt which is as relevant in 2026 as it was then - violence solves nothing!
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
Dr Coulter has been a journalist since 1978 and is currently a political commentator with GB News.

Life As A Preacher’s Kid 🪶 How A Silly Jealous Punch Earned Me A Six-Month Ban

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