There’s an ululation out there, a shouting, that we should just nick all the money of these people because they’re the bad guys. That cash can then be put to such good uses:

Oligarchs' superyachts and mansions must help fund a new Ukraine

No, really, just no:

A prized painting by Russian master Wassily Kandinsky that was sold under duress during World War II has been returned to the descendants of its former Jewish owners.

The oil painting, Bild mit Häusern (Painting with Houses), was just one of a treasured art collection inherited by Robert Lewenstein and his wife Irma Klein, which, at one point, also included works by Van Gogh, Renoir and Rembrandt. But the pair was forced to auction off the Kandinsky painting in October 1940 as they fled the Nazis five months after they invaded the Netherlands.

Records show the director of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum bought the Kandinsky for a fraction of its value at the time. Het Parool reports: "He paid 160 guilders for it – a pittance of the original value at the time, 2000 to 3000 guilders."

We are not attempting to compare this current war with the Holocaust. We are also not comparing the stripping of assets from any passing Russian with those events of 1940. We’re not comparing, we’re insisting they’re the same thing.

It’s entirely possible to freeze assets for the duration, is probably sensible to do so as a method of putting pressure on the system in The Russia. But to actually take the assets - a clear requirement before they’re then spent on doing something else - requires a more than passing reference to that rule of law thing.

It’s necessary to convict, in a fair trial, in a court of law, of something that was a crime at the time it is claimed it was committed, in the jurisdiction of the law being applied. Even, the penalty in the law that applied at that time must include the confiscation which is the sentence.

Nicking houses and boats on the basis of passports does not meet these standards. Therefore we should not be doing it.

The reason we do not act like fascists is because we are not fascists.

It’s reasonably well known that I have extensive business experience in The Russia. Just for the avoidance of doubt I have no business, assets, interests, contracts nor anything else in the country and have not done for well over a decade.