18 2GM Saturday May 28 2022 | the times
News
A disgraced bishop who was convicted
of Holocaust denial said that Vladimir
Putin was “standing up to the forces of
evil” in a sermon praising the Russian
leader’s war in Ukraine.
Richard Williamson was filmed
preaching Kremlin propaganda at a
church in Poland earlier this month.
The footage emerged after it was
broadcast on RT, the Russian state-
controlled television network.
Williamson, 82, who has been twice
excommunicated by the Catholic
Church, described Putin as a man of
“intelligence and great courage”.
“The purpose of Putin, he has said, is
to denazify and demilitarise Ukraine,”
he told the church.“But foolish Europe
is following the United States to
attempt to crush Russia.”
In the video, Williamson wears a
mitre and is flanked by two men wear-
ing surplices. The original footage was
Disgraced bishop says Putin is ‘fighting evil’
published by Brynica Educational
Centre, a Catholic teaching organisa-
tion, which said that Williamson was
speaking at “a private weekend retreat
on the border with Belarus for a group
of traditionalist faithful”. Williamson
could not be reached for comment.
In 2009, Williamson denied the exis-
tence of Nazi gas chambers in a TV
interview with a Swedish documentary
programme and questioned the gener-
al consensus among historians that six
million Jews were killed during the
Holocaust.
A German court found him guilty of
Holocaust denial later that year.
His comments sparked a global crisis
in Jewish-Catholic relations and
proved a public relations disaster for
Pope Benedict XVI, who had only
weeks before reversed Williamson’s
first excommunication 20 years earlier.
Williamson has also previously
claimed that the US planned the Sep-
tember 11 attacks and accused Freema-sons of conspiring against Catholics.
Speaking in Poland this month, he went
on to espouse a conspiracy theory that
“the criminals ruling the world” were
engineering “an artificially created
famine”, in reference to spiralling food
prices partially caused by Russia’s
blockade of the Black Sea.
“They played the trick of Covid, they
played the trick of Ukraine provoking
Russia in 2014,” he said.
“Russia has needed to defend itself.
The real aggressor is not the apparent
attacker. Russia was provoked for
several years by Ukraine, by agents of
the United States.”
Born the son of an Anglican vicar,
Williamson taught abroad after leaving
Cambridge University and converted
to Catholicism in 1971.
He was excommunicated in 1988
after being ordained as a bishop with-
out papal permission. That was re-
versed in 2009 but he was excommuni-
cated again in 2015.First round of strikes on
Underground called off
Charlie Parker, Debbie WhiteTom Ball
Unions have called off strikes that were
due to disrupt two London Under-
ground stations during the jubilee
weekend. Eighty members of the Rail,
Maritime and Transport (RMT) union
at Green Park and Euston Tube
stations had planned to go on strike
next Friday in a row over allegations of
bullying.
Yesterday the union announced that
“significant progress” had been made in
talks with London Underground and
that a review with union involvement
would take place. The allegations are
understood to involve a single manager.
Other planned walkouts will go ahead.
Mick Lynch, the RMT’s general
secretary, said: “London Underground
has finally seen sense to take the union’s
arguments seriously regarding[alleged] workplace bullying and we
will now suspend the strike on June 3.”
The union said that “if no immediate
improvements are seen” and “the
review does not lead to a just settle-
ment”, then “strike action for a different
day will be called”.
A spokesman confirmed that “all
other outstanding LU stoppages are
due to go ahead”. A walkout is sched-
uled for Monday June 6 as people
return to work after the long weekend.
“June 6 is a wholly different dispute
on London Underground involving
4,000 station staff in a row over pen-
sions and job losses. This action is still
scheduled to go ahead as there is no
resolution,” the union said.
Drivers on the Central, Jubilee and
Victoria lines will strike on the evenings
of June 3 and 4. There is also a ban on
overtime from June 2 until July 10.leash, or been prepared to unleash,
some of these fascist groups to become
embedded within state forces.”
One of the reasons given by Presi-
dent Putin for the invasion was the “de-
nazification” of Ukraine, to remove the
influence of forces such as the Azov
Battalion. Formed in 2014, it has been
accused of torture and association with
neo-Nazi ideology and symbolism. Its
defence of the Azovstal steelworks in
Mariupol brought it to wider attention.
When the podcast host, Neil Maggs,
who has presented on Radio 4, askedwhether Kelly sided with Nato or
Russia, he declined to give an answer.
He added: “Dealing with Putin is the
role of the Russian people.” Kelly did
describe Russia as a “gangster capitalist
state run by Putin” and said he was not
a supporter of the Russian invasion. He
said Nato had provoked Putin by “put-
ting a gun on their [Russia’s] borders”
and “would’ve been aware of the risky
world they were creating by doing that”.
James Nixey, director of the Russia-
Eurasia programme at the think tank
Chatham House, said: “It’s so patheticand grotesque I just don’t know where
to start. As it’s not a sensible comment,
I don’t have a sensible reply.”
Dr Ben Noble, associate professor of
Russian politics at University College
London, said: “It may well be that the
Kremlin is using these people as ‘useful
idiots’ — that is, as unwitting conduits
for propaganda.”
The comments risk division within
the union before what could be the big-
gest rail strike since privatisation, and
since the union was founded in 1990.
The Times can also reveal that SteveUnion railmen stick up for Kremlin
Skelly, a regional organiser in the same
district as Kelly, gave a speech at a 2014
meeting of Solidarity with the Anti-
fascist Resistance in Ukraine, a cam-
paign group that echoes the Kremlin
line that Ukraine is a “far-right regime”.
A report of the meeting said that
Skelly, who represents staff at Great
Western Railway, “said he was proud”
that the RMT was the first union to
back the group and moved a successful
motion at the TUC congress.
In May it was revealed that Alex Gor-
don, a former train driver and president
of the RMT, is a longstanding Marxist
who has branded Ukraine “a failed state
held to ransom by neo-Nazis”.
After Moscow invaded Crimea in
2015, he protested outside Ukraine’s
embassy wearing the black and orange
Ribbon of St George, a symbol of Rus-
sian military valour. He denies support-
ing Putin or his actions in Ukraine.
In 2014 a photograph emerged of
Steve Hedley, the assistant general sec-
retary, in Russia in a military hat and
brandishing an assault rifle.
This week members of the union
voted overwhelmingly to walk out over
jobs, pay and conditions. Six months of
strikes could begin in the next two
weeks if talks between unions, train op-
erators and the government fail.
The Times can reveal that the RMT
has amassed £57 million that will help
bankroll its strike. The pot is made up of
a property portfolio of £35 million in-
cluding an £21.7 million block of luxury
flats in Clapham, south London.
Mick Lynch, general secretary of the
RMT, last night told the Political
Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast
that the planned strikes could in effect
stop the rail network. “This involves
Network Rail’s infrastructure — all the
signallers, the controllers and all the
maintenance staff from the top of Scot-
land to the bottom of Cornwall and all
points in between — and if they’re in-
volved in action, that will stop the rail-
way to a large extent.”
He denied the union backed Putin. “I
think that was six or seven years ago.”
The RMT said: “The RMT does not
support Vladimir Putin or the war in
Ukraine. Both Brendan Kelly and Steve
Skelly agree with that position.”
The Department for Transport said:
“We are committed to helping passen-
gers get the best deals on rail across the
country, introducing new railcards and
season tickets – including flexi-seasons
which we launched last summer – and
our recent Great British Rail Sale saved
passengers over £7 million.”
Ukraine reports, World, pages 44-Ben Ellery, Charlie Parker
As bosses at the far-left RMT, the coun-
try’s biggest transport union, plot sum-
mer strikes that will bring chaos to Brit-
ain, contentious moves and com-
ments by its leaders have risked
distracting the public from their aim
of securing a pay increase.
The Times can reveal that as
Russia bombed Ukraine, an or-
ganiser involved in the pro-
posed walk-out spouted
Kremlin propaganda about
the invasion. The comments
were made in a podcast by
Brendan Kelly, a regional or-
ganiser for the west and the
southwest, whose members
include Network Rail staff
who support strikes.
The union has come under
fire for much of the past
decade as its bosses repeat-
edly expressed sympathies
with Russian separatists who
have been fighting govern-
ment forces in the east of
Ukraine. In March, it emerged
that Eddie Dempsey, the RMT as-
sistant general secretary, had visited
the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine
in 2015, where he posed for a picture
with a pro-Russian separatist com-
mander.
During the recording of the podcast
for Bristol Unpacked Kelly, who de-
scribed Dempsey as a “good bloke” and
“personal friend”, repeated Kremlin
claims that the Ukrainian government
is allied with fascist forces, a remark
branded “pathetic” by an expert.
Kelly said: “There is a problem,
though, and it can’t be ignored, the war
that’s taken place for eight years with
14,000 deaths was the result of a huge
amount of bombings being carried out
by the Ukrainian government.
“You can’t deny, it’s the truth, if the
Ukrainian government was using
forces, or allied with fascist groups in
some of those areas, that’s where some
of the left have campaigned, not neces-
sarily in favour of Putin but the use of
fascist forces against the population...
“The Ukrainian government is not
fascist but what they have done is un-
the coun-
plot sum-
os to Brit-
nd com-
risked
eir aimt as
or-
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ged
T as-ad visited
n Ukraine
a picture
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who de-
bloke” and
Kremlin
vernment
a remark
pert.The RMT’s Eddie
Dempsey, below,
met a pro-Russian
separatist in the
Donbas; Steve
Skelly spoke at a
pro-Kremlin talk;
and Steve Hedley
posed with a rifle
while in RussiaMick Lynch said a
strike could bring
railways to a halt