Mr Bean goes to Russia

Apparently the comedian Rowan Atkinson based his Mr Bean character on his hapless, humourless and – truth be told – not very bright brother Rodney.

Having had the dubious pleasure of meeting Rodney quite a few years ago, I can personally attest to his ideal suitability to act as Mr Bean’s prototype. Why, this professional EU baiter even gives this good cause a bad name.

But at least when ranting about the wiles of Brussels, Rodney gives the impression of being in command of his facts and vaguely knowing what he’s talking about. When venturing outside his sole area of expertise, however, he makes his tragic failings patently obvious.

The case in point is his article Just Back From Russia – Prosperous, Capitalist, Nationist, Democratic, Christian, reflecting on Rodney’s vast experience of spending a few days in Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia.

Every adjective in the title is a lie, which will be instantly obvious to anyone with even cursory knowledge of Russia. The word ‘nationist’ isn’t a lie; it simply doesn’t exist in English. Is it the same as ‘nationalist’? Clearly, Rodney invented this word, just as he invented his facts.

Instead of relying on the impressions gathered during a flying visit to a country about which he knows nothing, Rodney should have looked at Russia’s international ratings in every category that matters – that way he could have avoided what the Russians call ‘lying like an eyewitness’.

In human rights, rule of law, democracy, quality of life – well, everything – Russia consistently places close to the bottom, sharing that neighbourhood with assorted Third World hellholes.

For example, Rodney has the gall to praise Russia’s health service, comparing it favourably to our NHS. That the NHS is awful doesn’t make Russia’s health service, a veritable murder factory, any better.

Russia’s mortality rate stands at 15 from the bottom, next to Lesotho’s. The country’s male life expectancy is under 60, and every Russian who has two pennies to rub together gets treated abroad. I myself have arranged London medical appointments for my Russian friends, who saw this as a lifesaver.

And prosperous? According to the information issued by the ruling KGB junta itself, 15.9 per cent of the population are living below the poverty line, higher than in such economic powerhouses as Albania, Sri Lanka and Tunisia. And the poverty line in Russia is drawn at a monthly income of less than £100.

Democratic? Doesn’t Rodney know that the Duma is a rubber-stamping irrelevance, a Potemkin village put up by the kleptofascist junta to make itself presentable to the outside world? Can’t he see that Russia is ruled by arbitrary diktat? No, apparently not.

Capitalist? Russia’s two principal economic activities are plundering the country’s natural resources and laundering the resulting gains through Western banks.

It’s the only sizeable country in the world where government and organised crime are fused into one, and where proximity to the ‘leader’ is a sine qua non of prosperity. When he has some free time from writing drivel, Rodney ought to look up the list of Putin’s cronies who’ve become billionaires on his watch, all those Rutenbergs, Timchenkos et al.

Another captivating read would be the list of businessmen, lawyers, journalists and political opponents murdered by Putin’s junta. Has Rodney ever heard of Magnitsky? Politkovskaia? Nemtsov? Starovoitova? Litvinenko?

Christian? “Vladimir Putin was brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith,” writes Rodney, “and the churches are packed with people of all ages at all times of the day.”

Actually, regular church attendance in Russia is under one per cent, lower than in England, though it’s possible that the couple of churches to which Rodney was taken by his Krasnodar minders happened to be full at the time.

And Putin was brought up in one faith only, the KGB his deity. He began to be associated with that sinister organisation while still at school, and it takes cosmic ignorance not to know that even a hint of faith precluded any KGB career.

In fact, Putin’s first job involved harassing dissidents, including religious dissidents, defined at the time as people who practised their faith openly. When piety became fashionable, Putin and his jolly men began to cross themselves publicly, except that it took them a while to learn that the Orthodox do so right to left, not left to right, as Mafiosi do in American films.

Rodney’s ignorance (or else mendacity) is staggering. For example he extols Russia’s income tax rate of 13 per cent, ignoring the 30 per cent Social Security rate on top of that. And the 20 per cent corporate tax is typically augmented by protection charges imposed by organised crime.

All this wouldn’t be worth writing about if Rodney’s gibberish weren’t so characteristic of the less intelligent (or more ideological) fringe on the right of the political spectrum.

Justifiably driven to distraction by our own spivocratic, dishonest, self-serving, ineffectual government, they begin to look for greener pastures elsewhere – including the most putrid political swamps of the world.

This is practised even by the likes of Hitchens and Booker, Rodney’s intellectual superiors (not that this description unduly narrows the field). Those people ought to be ashamed of themselves: they should know better. The Rodneys of this world should just shut up.