Belarus test for the Conservative government

 Mark Wallace's article in the i on Tuesday explains how our government should help those Belarussian exiles who are fighting for democracy in their home country. During the Cold War ...

...Back when exiled oppositions and expatriate dissidents from a score of nations took refuge in the West, often in London, such tactics to deny papers and disrupt citizenship were commonplace.

In reply, governments in exile began to issue their own passports, which the West then recognised, denying tyrants a veto over the lives of their critics.

Tsikhanouskaya [the wife of the leader of the opposition who is in detention] intends to do the same, and it can be just as effective. But it needs Western governments to agree to recognise the papers.

Given any opportunity to tip the scales in favour of decent people and good causes, and against the enemies of our most precious values, surely we should do so?

Prime minister Johnson was seen by many of us to be in thrall to Russian plutocrats and the finances of the Conservative party too dependent on Russian money funnelled in via a loophole in electoral legislation. Belarus is too all intents and purposes a puppet state of Putin's Russia. It will be a test of how much of a clean break is the Sunak administration with Johnson's and Truss's. One may expect president Biden to do the decent thing.