The way things are going, one could understand if a register of British government agents was drawn up. After all, we have a media seeded with covert partners of state-funded ‘initiatives’, full of ‘integrity’ every one of them, not at all compromised by the secret sources of their lifestyles.

We have a veritable sea of troubles seeping into view over public procurement. Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s local publican received a multi-million pound order for things he’d never bought or sold before. Just another day at the goldface of the pandemic.

The health secretary himself was ‘gifted’ one sixth of the total shares of a company NHS Wales handed £150,000 of taxpayers’ money to. And now it’s been revealed a prominent donor and former Tory candidate brokered a £100 million PPE contract. Samir Jassal, pictured with Boris Johnson himself, is no doubt worth every rupee.

ALSO ON RT.COMGalloway: Why is the BBC so keen to portray me as a Russian agent when I’m trying to prevent the break-up of the UK?So, in the face of mounting public disapproval (although they ain’t seen nothing yet), you could understand if donors and cronies of the Conservatives were to be forced to reveal themselves somehow when pitching for business. Maybe wear a blue star, or at least comply with a register? No?

Currently there are no plans for such a thing. But according to the Times (which knows, you know) Boris Johnson is about to launch another kind of register, another set of identifiers of closeness to government. We might call it McCarthy’s law.

Yes, that’s right. The British government, for the first time in our long island story, is about to make employees of foreign companies register as agents of those companies’ home governments. But there won’t be, I’ll hazard a wild guess, a requirement for assembly-line workers at Ford to wear a stars and stripes identifier and register themselves as agents of Uncle Sam. Nor – another wild guess – will presenters on CNN or the French state-broadcaster, or the German one be obliged to do so.

My wild guess is that it is the likes of me who will have to register as an agent of a foreign power because I appear on screen on RT, and in plain sight, on this page. Maybe I will get another chance to wear a red star on my coat.

ALSO ON RT.COMGeorge Galloway: Both pro- and anti-independence leaders in Scotland are now RT hosts. Sturgeon may want to get out of the wayNow it is possibly the worst kept secret in the country that I work for RT. Literally hundreds of thousands of people see me do so every week.

When in public office I was rightly forced to declare so. The same is true of my colleagues – our office is quite handily and literally right next door to MI5.

We have nothing to hide, unlike the secret servants of the British government.

The worry is what next? When in the swirl of the fake-news Russiagate hysteria in the United States a similar register was used to exclude journalists and broadcasters from US state facilities for media conferences for example. All in the name of freedom of the press, you understand.

ALSO ON RT.COMGeorge Galloway: There should be no police violence in Scotland, whether RT is filming it or notWill that too be copied by Boris Johnson? Will the multiple Conservative politicians and grandees who have appeared on my RT shows then be precluded from speaking to me as an “agent of a foreign power”?

They can’t be when I’m in elected office of course. But wait…

Will that be the next move? Will elected officials be forbidden to speak to RT? Will RT contributors be forbidden to seek public office? Surely not?

Well nothing can be ruled in, or out, yet. According to the Times, we will know everything right after polling day in May.

Meanwhile, the secret servants of the Cold War will continue to proselytise for just such McCarthyite paraphenalia without you having the slightest idea that your own taxes are paying them to do so. “It’s all for freedom guv, move along, nothing to see here… (if we can help it).”

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The state-backed broadcaster BBC is currently bedecked in black, as quite befits a state-backed broadcaster on the occasion of the demise of a prominent personage of the state that backs it. I have no problem with the BBC being a state broadcaster – many countries have them – but rather with the maiden aunt horror with which it deploys this designation at others while pretending it is the very acme of independent journalism.

ALSO ON RT.COMGeorge Galloway: Both pro- and anti-independence leaders in Scotland are now RT hosts. Sturgeon may want to get out of the wayIn fact, quite a lot of people wonder why the BBC doesn’t seem to like Britain very much, despite being bought and paid for by the British people through a compulsory and whopping licence fee – the non-payment of which can end you in jail (even Stalin didn’t think of that one!) – and a substantial, additional direct grant to the BBC World Service.

The BBC certainly preferred the European Union during these last few years, and in Scotland has facilitated a nascent breakaway which could halve the territory of the country whose name it bears and whose money it spends.

If its broadcasters could choose an imagined country to adhere to, it would be Wokeland –achingly politically correct, gender, race and sex obsessed, and seemingly self-hating.

So much so that it has left an aching void which, within weeks, its former politics guru Andrew Neil will seek to fill with his new GB News channel. The threat is significant, and every other day an announcement of broadcasters from Better Days Britain joining it is received enthusiastically on social media if not in the gleaming spires of the BBC.

I mention all of this now – although I have many times before – because I’ve just been through a week in which the British state broadcaster has literally sought to delegitimize me as a candidate for the Scottish Parliament elections next month on the grounds that I am writing for you, here, on RT.

In fact, twice in one night, the BBC (supposedly covering my manifesto launch, dealing with specifically Scottish Parliament matters) began by asking me if I was a “fit and proper person” to STAND for the Scottish Parliament – elections being after all a matter for mere voters – because I work for RT, the “Kremlin-backed television station.”

Some background: I have worked for RT for around a decade, during which I have been elected to and served in the British Parliament at Westminster. No one ever questioned my right to be so. In fact, I have been a Russophile for more than 50 years, nearly 30 of which I spent as a British MP.

On my shows on RT, I have welcomed guests on my sofa like Conservative cabinet ministers Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Davis, former Tory grandees like Peter Lilley, psephology king Professor Sir John Curtice, lords, ladies, generals, knights of the realm, MBEs and OBEs by the dozen, if not the score. And so many privy counsellors, I really couldn’t count them.

But now my very legitimacy as a candidate for office – elected office – becomes THE story, at least when it comes to covering my campaign. On a third occasion last week, the tack slightly changed. Again, on BBC radio, the absurd canard about Vladimir Putin seeking to interfere in the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 was thrown in my face. The sheer illogicality of this charge is astonishing, because at the time the only elected British politician on the books of RT was me, the anti-separatist. We are asked to believe that Putin and the Kremlin so wanted to foment independence for Scotland that they employed me to tour the country successfully defeating the independence cause in the referendum. That Putin, huh? Sometimes he’s so smart and sometimes so dumb.

The absurdity multiplies once you know that exactly the same charges are being made by the same people against Alex Salmond. So, get this – the Kremlin is backing the most prominent separatist Salmond, and the most prominent anti-separatist: me. It’s a two-horse race, and the Kremlin are on both of them, according to the BBC. Neither does the absurdity stop there. My protestations that nobody at RT, nobody in Russia – never mind the Kremlin – has ever interfered in the content of my television work are met with scarcely concealed scorn by the BBC’s media acolytes, the lesser-spotted Russophobes.

ALSO ON RT.COMBBC faces existential threat. In the 21st century, it has nobody left to lie toAnd yet, logically, that must be true. If the Kremlin would like to see the break-up of Britain – as Britain tried for eight decades to break up Russia – it is being remarkably tolerant in allowing me so many uncensored opportunities to fight to my last breath against the break-up on its platforms. Certainly, no presenter on the BBC would ever have been allowed to argue against the break-up of Russia on any British television station.

The lucky truth for me is that no voter on the streets of Kilmarnock gives any more of a thought to Vladimir Putin than Mr. Putin thinks of them. The men and women of the south of Scotland have enough problems rather closer to home than the Kremlin to worry about. In fact, when speaking on my show on RT about the 60th anniversary of the great mission of Yuri Gagarin, I’m sure most people’s reaction was to nod in respect and admiration for that great, stellar, achievement.

People in Scotland don’t hate Russia; we even have a street still called Gagarin Way. We’ll see soon enough if they hate Alex Salmond and me. But if they do, it won’t be because we’ve got snow on our boots and are hiding as KGB agents under their beds.

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I first fell in love with Robert Fisk’s journalism almost 40 years ago when he wore the unlikely guise of foreign correspondent for the London Times, nowadays – as it had been for centuries – the house journal of war and imperial adventure, but then playing host to that rarest of writers: unbribed, untwisted, and unguided by the missile projectors.

I had been in Beirut in 1982, with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, when the news came through from London that the Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov had been shot by the renegade terrorist Abu Nidal, who was based in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. We both knew what would happen next. And while scarpering was the easy option for me, no such possibility existed for Arafat.

A massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon swiftly followed. It eventually, after stiff resistance (most memorably and ironically in the Crusader fortress of Beaufort Castle), smashed through the gates of the Arab capital city itself. The rest, the massacres at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps and all, is history.

During the siege of Beirut, Fisk introduced his readers, including me, to the use of white phosphorus by the Israeli forces. I remember almost verbatim decades later his description of how the phosphorus slowly cooked from the inside the child victims he was visiting in a Beirut hospital. Having inhaled it, it was a fire neither the victim nor the doctors could extinguish.

While the rest of the media prattled on about “terrorist targets” being attacked, Fisk, like me, knew what was actually being razed to the ground: the miserable refugee existence of generations of Palestinians marooned in camps many miles from their homes, in which foreigners now slept, waking to pick the oranges from their trees.

I had no voice then, but Fisk did, and he used it courageously, shaming most of his journalistic colleagues by so doing.

I followed Fisk to the Independent, then the great hope of those seeking, well, independent journalism. That hope didn’t last long. The Indy became just like all the rest, before being bought (then partially sold) by a former spy of the KGB in London and becoming a small, discredited website with few readers.

But we always had Fisk.

In time, I too had a voice, and spent a lot of time in Beirut (too much), but I never crossed paths with him despite jogging past his seaside apartment a thousand times. But I never failed to read his work. In war after war after war, he shone the light of reason through the fog of Western propaganda, mainly in wars against the Arabs, but in Yugoslavia, too. Fisk stood out not just because of his own stature, but because of the flatness of the surrounding landscape.

Not since the US war on Vietnam – with the likes of Seymour Hersh and John Pilger – had the mainstream media given a platform to such a forensic critic of imperial wars. And, moreover, one like Fisk, whose prose was purple indeed, capable of moving the reader’s sensibilities dramatically.

That made him a dangerous man.

Such was his stature, his awards and accolades, Fisk was bullet-proof from the hitmen of the brigade of stenographers who, in the last 20 years, have become the masked ranks of the Propaganda Army of Empire. Whilst alive, they preferred to ignore Fisk rather than confront him. A ploy made easier by the drift of the Independent newspaper to the margins.

Neither could they avoid the panegyrics of the inevitable eulogies which accompanied his death last month at the age of 74.

And so they bided their time. For a short while. This week a blizzard of cowardly abuse has swept the media landscape. Fisk was apparently “a fraud,” a “fake” who “couldn’t speak Arabic,” “a propagandist” (particularly rich, that one), and “a falsifier.”

Somebody has clearly taken the initiative, and integrity has become the first casualty.

The proximate cause of the reburial in unconsecrated ground of Robert Fisk is, of course, his virtually lone debunking of Douma, the unmasking of the White Helmets as the ambulance brigade of Al Qaeda, and the exposure of the oceanic lie-machine mustered (and paid for by unsuspecting taxpayers, as the recent Anonymous dump showed) by the Western gang that couldn’t shoot straight in Syria.

ALSO ON RT.COMGeorge Galloway: Kiss of death – The winner of the most coveted Henry Kissinger endorsement is… Joe BidenWhat else did Fisk write about to upset them? The failure of the West’s gigantic operation – military, political, financial, diplomatic and propaganda – to overthrow the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. The defeat by the Syrian Arab Army (and its legal international allies) of one of the worst, most murderous hordes to invade a country since Genghis Khan. The humiliation of the Western powers (and their Gulf satrapies), and the enormous boost to the prestige of Russia produced by that failure, cannot easily be forgotten. Not since Vietnam has there been such a defeat as this for the Empire.

Bashar did not “go,” he prevailed. As did Robert Fisk, for more than 40 years. The attempted trashing of his memory is all these pathetic losers have left. If you look closely, you can see their bitter tears of failure on the pages of their invective. Not one of these would-be literary assassins is a household name, nor ever will be. While Robert Fisk has written his name in the stars. It’s all too much for the chicken-hawk liberals to bear…

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