Thread by @carolecadwalla

One month before Russia invaded Ukraine, I stood trial at the High Court. And now I wait, in purgatory, to be judged.

But I believe this trial and the silence around it - & all the Kremlin's men - has revealed something profoundly rotten at the heart of the British state.
1/

The case rests on a single question: was it in the public interest for me, a journalist, to speak about a years-long investigation into Russian interference?

That's what the High Court heard, in a £2m trial against a single journalist, on eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
2/

And the trial, itself, revealed new details of the relationship between the Russian govt & Brexit's biggest funder.

Details that went entirely unreported.

Besides Guardian, there was not a peep from a single mainstream outlet.
3/

One month later, Putin's slaughter began. Finally, the British political establishment began to wake from its coma.

Britain has an oligarch problem. Overnight we recognised this. Even Andrew Neil noticed this. Noticed the son of a KGB colonel has 2 newspapers & a peerage.
4/

But 2 months on, still no-one speaks of "Arron" & "Banks".

Even as Russian soldiers bomb & rape & Farage spouts crap about NATO across GB News.

The entire LeaveEU-Brexit Party-pro-Kremlin axis of influence continues with no questions asked or answered.
5/

And the silence that enveloped my trial, that still envelops my trial & shrouds these men betrays something other than lack of journalistic curiosity.

The man who funded Brexit believes Ukraine is to Russia as Isle of Wight is to Britain. Who wouldn't be curious about that?
6/

Which is why I think this silence is actually about power.
A confluence of aligned & overlapping interests with a dash of misogyny. It's only Codswallop. And she probably deserved it.

But at the heart of it all is the cancer that is Brexit.

Britain's untreatable tumour.
7/

Because this silence goes deep. And it goes high.

Forget the oligarchs. It's these men & their associates who spout the Kremlin's lines who helped Boris Johnson to power. Who helped deliver Brexit & then, in a pact with the Brexit Party, his GE 19 win.
8/

Oligarchs are one thing. But the Kremlin's influence on our politics is still dismissed as a "hoax" a "Remoaner's fantasy".

Johnson refuses to investigate. And he & his fellow travellers still control the r/w press. While BBC has a hollow vacuum where its balls should be.
9/

The silence is political. It's ideological. It's based on ignorance of facts & denial of geopolitical reality.

And in the case of my trial, it's inflected by a misogynist media campaign that's been so overwhelming, so successful, it's actually invisible.
10/

My 3 days under oath was the most silencing experience of my adult life. The most powerless. My cross-examination the most brutal & aggressive my solicitor said he'd ever seen.

A cross-examination so extreme it included an attempted sexual shaming.
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It felt like abuse. Because it was. With the entire machinery of the British legal establishment colluding in that abuse.
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Though it's the silence since that's been even harder to bear.

The silence of the entire British political & media establishment.
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Because we can all see who Putin is now. But all the Kremlin's men? They're still operating with impunity.

To be clear, there's nothing libellous in saying this. In my case, it was "common ground" that the claimant holds pro-Kremlin views. His side accepted this.
14/

These tactics of aggression & intimidation & deliberate psychological gaslighting that white is black & black is white...there's a pattern.

And just as Ukrainians know that there's no giving into a bully. They also know that no-one is coming to save them.
15/

They've had to learn to fight for themselves. And not to labour it, but I too desperately hoped for NATO jets that never came.

My dirty secret is the guilt & rage & shame I have about how much it's affected me when people are fleeing with their lives in just a plastic bag.
16/

But, it's the silence that's unmoored me. Here in Twitter's shadowlands, all this is known. And out there in the "real" world, it's not. In the Britain of high streets & tabloids & talk shows, the same old white men provide air cover for the same old white men.
17/

Here on Twitter, Farage isn't given a platform. He's given a grilling. Here we maintain an archive of all the things these grifters ever said. Here, where Russian wages its hybrid warfare, we see what's in plain sight. We don't just recognise hybrid warfare, we wage our own.
18/

While the political establishment has never looked so ignorant, so antiquated. Ch4 employing Andrew Neil as its hot new presenter. BBC's Laura K interviewing Farage to "make sense" of the nation.

Not enough lolz for either of these. Meanwhile: not a single question is asked.
19/

So, sorry. A long thread that's mostly trying to explain to myself why I've found this trial & then its silence so intensely dislocating.

I think I'm in a dissociative state. But what I've finally figured out is that Britain is too.

FIN.