Privatisation! Free trade! Shares for all! The great con that ruined Britain

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

I thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones. 

I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.

And it’s all very well being able to buy cheap goods from all over the world, as we fling our borders wide and abandon the protection of our own industries that everyone says is so wicked and will make us poor and backward.

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

But the new broom swept, and it swept pretty clean. In towns I know well, car assembly lines, railway workshops, glassworks engineering plants, chocolate factories vanished or shrank to nothing. 

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

Someone usually pops up at this stage and says that we still manufacture a lot. If you say so, but then why are the drug-dealers so busy in our new factory-free industrial areas, and why can I never buy anything that was made here, except from absurdly expensive luxury shops? 

Why are our warships made of foreign steel? Why are the few factories that do exist almost always foreign-owned, their fate decided far away by people who don’t much care about this country?

And why is our current-account deficit with the rest of the world the worst it’s ever been in peacetime, and nearly as bad as it was during the Great War that first bankrupted this country a century ago? 

If it’s all been so beneficial, why do so many of the containers that arrive in British ports, full of expensive imports, leave this country empty?

Sure, some things have got cheaper, and there are a lot more little treats and luxuries available. 

The coffee and the restaurants are better – but the essentials of life are harder to find than ever: a good life and an honest place; a solid, modest home big enough to house a small family in a peaceful, orderly landscape; good local schools open to all who need them; reasonably paid secure work for this generation and the next; competent government and wise laws. 

These have become luxuries, unattainable for millions who once took them for granted.

And now the remains of our steel industry are vanishing, not because nothing can be done (any determined government could save it if it really wanted to) but because we’re all still worshipping that free-market dogma that captivated us 30 years ago. 

I never thought I’d yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.

Maybe our real enemy isn't ISIS...

The cross-eyed prejudice of this country’s chattering classes sometimes gets beyond all bearing. 

We all loathe Islamic State. We were all rightly dismayed when these maniacs captured Palmyra, one of the great monuments of human civilisation, murdered its chief curator and began to smash it up.

Yet when the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, succeeded in driving the fanatics out of Palmyra, the media could hardly bring themselves to put it anywhere further forward than page 94, and the politicians, always ready to say rude things about IS, could barely utter a word.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me wonder whether the alleged hostility of the West to IS is genuine, or a pose.

It often seems to me that they loathe Russia, and Syria’s President Assad, much more. Which side are we really on in this conflict?

Striving to identify the maddest moment of the week, I am forced to choose between two: the crazed closure of the majestic coal-fired power station at Ferrybridge to satisfy green zealots (remember that when the power cuts come, as they soon will); and the police ordering paying passengers off a Cornwall-bound train because it was too full – the culmination of a 50-year policy of trying to drive custom away from the railways, rather than expanding and modernising them. 

So bad, it had me backing the villains 

I have actually been watching the BBC’s dramatisation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager because it is so bad. How much worse could it get? 

A secret agent in deep cover who simpers nervously every time he is rightly accused of treachery and can’t stop himself ogling the boss’s girlfriend, while the boss is looking?

A supposed spy chief, who more closely resembles a grumpy Barnsley social worker who has just failed to arrange a gay adoption – and who, while many months pregnant, travels across the world and outshoots a professional assassin?

After not too much of this I was rooting heartily for the villains, who seemed to me to be making a perfectly sound case for the arms trade.

And, while I understand that plots sometimes have to be changed for TV, I think it was utterly gratuitous to invent scenes in which the beautiful Elizabeth Debicki was sadistically tortured, when no such thing happens in the book. Not to mention the ridiculous ‘happy’ ending. Please, spare us a sequel. 

Archbishop in an unholy mess

I am still scratching my head over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s bizarre response to powerful evidence, gathered and assembled by eminent lawyers, a former police officer and a judge experienced in child abuse trials, that abuse allegations against the late Bishop George Bell are highly questionable, and based on a sloppy, inadequate investigation.

The Archbishop, Justin Welby, hasn’t given an inch and continues to defend the Church’s acceptance of a solitary, ancient, uncorroborated, anonymous charge – even though, since it was made public, there have been no further accusations.

But Archbishop Justin has now told the BBC that George Bell – a man he believes to be a filthy child molester who dishonestly and selfishly abused a little girl – is also ‘the greatest hero that most of us have’. I’ve heard of a broad church, but this is ridiculous. One or the other. Not both.

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Some Thoughts on Germany's New 'Alternative' Party

I have learned to be careful with continental movements which at first appear to be conservative. In France and Belgium, I tend to find that such groups have unlovely origins, which they are unwilling to disown. The founders of France’s  Front National are, shall we say, ambiguous about the Vichy era and by implication the Hitler era.

Flemish nationalism in Belgium has similar problems with fully disowning the, er, questionable behaviour of some of its forerunners during the ascendancy of National Socialist Germany. And so on. When I describe Britain as being almost  the only virgin in a  continent of rape victims, this is, sort of, what I mean.

Almost every continental country experienced either a tyranny or a tyrannical occupation in the middle of the 20^th century, polluting its past. Even the democratic neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, were compelled to make sordid bargains with the German Empire  (German troops crossed Sweden, German war materials crossed Switzerland, which was unable, out of self-preservation,  to offer much sanctuary to Jews, and  also offered a haven for money and gold whose origins were perhaps suspicious). Portugal, not then a democracy, was blown this way and that by the winds of power.   This past continues to pollute much conservatism, just as past associations with Stalin pollutes so much of the Left. People who won’t deal frankly with either (depending on which albatross they have around their necks) don’t, in my view, deserve to be taken seriously.

But the new anti-immigration party in Germany (not ‘anti-immigrant’ as the BBC and the liberal media so tendentiously claim in their unbiased way) may not be of this type, any more than UKIP is here. Not that I am necessarily inspired by its success, any more than I was by the gains made by  of UKIP.

I have made more than one voyage to Germany to examine various supposed revivals of neo-Nazi movements, none of which in fact turned out to be significant.  They are invariably knuckle-brushing movements led by idiots.  I think Germany has learned pretty thoroughly to avoid such things, which seldom get above 7% of any vote and swiftly sag into impotence, despite winning seats in local assemblies through proportional representation, and even qualifying for state aid, as they sometimes do (a good argument against state support for political parties).

These days such things tend to begin in the former East, partly because it is much, much poorer and partly because the old East German State did little in the way of de-Nazifying education, claiming as it did that it was the inheritor of the anti-Nazi part of Germany and so (unlike the West) did not need to do so.

The recent Pegida  (‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’) Movement certainly began in the East and was quickly found to have nasty elements in it.  Actually crude hostility to outsiders is to be found all over continental Europe, where the racial and cultural tolerance common in post-colonial Britain is often absent, as I have been privately told by Polish immigrants explaining why they come here rather than to other EU countries. I have myself directly encountered this bitter loathing (directed against North Africans)  in Rotterdam, the heart of supposedly liberal Holland. One of Pegida’s leaders was certainly guilty of using contemptuous and hateful language about migrants as such, rather than simply opposing immigration.  I think it’s pretty much disqualified from serious politics. Any such movement in Germany has to be about 100 times cleaner than it would need to be anywhere else.

But the Alternative fur Deutschland is not quite so easily dismissed, which is perhaps why it did so well in Sunday’s provincial elections (though far better in the former East than in the West) .

The AfD began, much as did UKIP, among academics, economists and rather grand journalists concerned at the threat to German independence from the EU and to German prosperity from the Euro. It did quite well, but not well enough to win seats, in the 2013 federal elections. 

But in 2015 it switched to much stronger emphasis on immigration (unsurprisingly) and found in Frauke Petry a new and persuasive leader. Mrs Petry, 40,  is not a Farage figure, but a young woman in the modern style, educated and very much in tune with the world of today, not especially socially conservative in her life or opinions. She is a chemist who studied in Britain, at Reading University,  but got her Doctorate from Goettingen. She is estranged from her husband (a Lutheran Pastor) and now living with a party colleague. She still takes her four children to church. She was born in the East but moved to the West in 1990 at the age of 14.

But she does have dangling round her neck the claim that she once called for border police to shoot refugees. Did she? I am genuinely unsure.  I have yet to see a complete unedited version of what she said.  Does anyone have one?  

This is one of the newspaper stories about it

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/german-police-should-shoot-refugees-says-german-party-leader-a6844611.html

I thought I knew less after reading it than I felt I’d known before. What exactly did she say and in what sequence?!’  I want to shout at the reporter.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to put off a lot of voters in Germany on Sunday. There have been many analyses of these votes. Where did they come from? Often from people who hadn’t voted previously, and not necessarily from Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. But the AfD is now established as serious threat to Germany’s suffocating consensus, in which the equivalents of Labour and the Tories openly embrace each other in coalition government, instead of pretending to be hostile as they do here.

The AfD may come to threaten both major parties, if the migration problem is not somehow got under control.  It also reflects a growing discontent with falling standards of living among Germans who had once been used to stable jobs and rising incomes. It might not help anyone to see this as a kind of revival of the Nazis. By doing so, you might miss the real point.

Personally, I think the moral impossibility of civilised countries using violence to guard their borders against migrants is one of the most complicated issues facing us. We're not as nice as we like to claim we are. For instance, a border featuring razor wire is itself a passive but severe threat of violent injury to anyone who seeks to cross it illegally. So is the presence of armed border patrols. What are we saying when we erect such fences and employ and deploy such patrols? Or even when we rely implicitly (as we in Britain do) on the depth and danger of the cold sea to keep our coasts secure from unwanted arrivals?

Yet in the end we are compelled by all we hold dear to weaken when the choice is to do so or to use violence, or to abandon people to drown in the sea. We will let people in, and rescue them. We have to, or we would not be the civilisation we are. Once it has got to this stage, I can see no alternative.

Australia, almost alone, is spared these dilemmas, because it has entirely maritime borders, composed of deep and inhospitable seas, and also because the countries from which migrants headed for Australia come have functioning governments and can be compelled to take them back . So it can repel unwanted illegal migrants by using measures (mainly interception on the high seas, towing back to point of departure or detention on extra-territorial islands) well short of lethal or even injurious violence. Not that these methods escape criticism.

The EU and the USA simply cannot do this. They have unenforceable land borders,  which can be overwhelmed by numbers and cannot conceivably be adequately patrolled. And they face an unending migration across the often calm waters of the Mediterranean, from Libya which has no central authority, and across the narrow seas from Turkey, which isn’t prepared to exercise its authority and, even if it does accept returned migrants, can’t be expected to try very hard to keep them from trying again. Both EU and USA also lack  extra-territorial islands on which to place unwanted migrants.

It might have been possible, 30 years ago, by exerting influence on nearby states, to persuade them to prevent mass immigration across the Aegean, the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande. But it’s my belief that many influential people  in the US actively supported mass migration from Central America , as the USA was transformed into a low-wage economy (this caused a notable split in the US conservative movement in the early 1990s, in which social conservatives were pretty much flattened by Reagan-Thatcher-Murdoch economic liberals who had snatched the body of conservatism there much as they have done here) .

And I also suspect, but cannot prove, that many in the higher reaches of the EU felt much the same way. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi made no secret of his ability to open the gates of migration if he so chose, and blackmailed the EU by doing so, as I’ve mentioned here earlier. How odd that Britain and France should choose to overthrow him without having a clue what would replace him, and made a similar ill-planned assault on Syria which has been almost as disastrous from the migrant point of view. The most absurd thing about this has been the monstrous, ludicrous claim that Russia(!) is ‘weaponising’ Syrian refugees, when the whole problem has been caused by Western and Gulf  actions. If it hadn’t been for Russia,  Syria would be just like Libya only a lot worse and millions more of its people would be heading our way. Whereas if we and the Gulf states had stayed out, Syria would be peaceful. Is this what Freudians call ‘projection’, accusing others of the things you’re guilty about?

But getting anyone to say anything sensible about Russia is almost completely impossible. Even quite intelligent people are determined to see Moscow as the seat of all villainy, and this distortion makes it hard for them to see what is wrong with our own societies and governments. Perhaps that’s why they do it.

A recording of a speech and Q&A; session on Russia at the University of Lincoln

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBzoMuJUrAU

A discussion about Russia on LBC Radio

Here is a recording of a discussion I had with Kate Maltby of I (among other things) The Spectator on LBC radio. The subject is British relations with Russia

http://www.lbc.co.uk/great-clash-between-commentators-over-putin-and-russia--123729

 

The British bobby is long dead - but we have one last chance to bring him back

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country.

We are all less free than we used to be. We have to be careful what we say, especially if we work in the public sector. We are under constant surveillance, from CCTV cameras, and thanks to snoopers who monitor our calls and internet use. If, for some reason, the authorities take against us we can be plunged, in an instant, into an unexpected underworld of highly publicised suspicion that can last for years and ruin us with legal fees, even if at the end they sullenly drop the charges.

Nobody is safe from this. If a field marshal in his 90s can be raided at home by 20 officers at breakfast time, and subjected to questioning and searches on the basis of the wild fantasies of an unhappy nobody, then so can you. And though the police themselves will insist they have not released your name, don’t be surprised if this Trial By Plod somehow becomes very public, very quickly.

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country

Yet, at the same time, ordinary crime and bad behaviour – the things the law now regards as trivial – grow unchecked around us. Who now lives in a town free of graffiti and vandalism, or one where Friday night has not become menacing, drunken and loud?

Years ago, when I first noticed that something had gone badly wrong with the police, readers would write in and chide me for being rude about a force they still trusted. I get very little of that now. Respect for the police has largely disappeared among the law-abiding classes, and seldom survives any actual contact with them. Now I brace myself for apparently organised abuse from police officers themselves. I should warn them that this behaviour only helps to make my point.

Their ‘I’m all right Jack’ mentality and refusal to accept just criticism is as bad as anything trade unionists used to do and say back in the 1970s.

I have to say, because I hope it is true, that not all police officers have this mentality, but a distressing number do.

 

The police have been subjected to a 30-year inquisition and revolution, in which old-fashioned coppers have been pushed aside (and into retirement) by commissars of equality and diversity. Deprived of their proper occupation, preventive patrolling on foot (long ago abolished), they have become officious paramilitary social workers. These new police are obsessed with the supposed secret sins of the middle class, and indifferent to the cruel and callous activities of the criminal class.

They are also in the grip of a dogma that excuses ordinary crime by blaming it on bad housing and ‘poverty’ (in one of the world’s most advanced welfare states).

Only a small part of this crime even reaches the courts any more. Much of it is dealt with, if at all, by empty ‘cautions’ and laughable ‘restorative justice’. The police can then concentrate on what really bothers them. Yet when they turn sternly on the middle classes, they act like continental examining magistrates, who assume everyone is guilty before trial (and sometimes even say so) and demand that suspects co-operate in their own prosecution.

They can arrest, noisily and in large numbers and at miserable times of day, to punish people who have never been found guilty of anything. In most cases, these people would have come willingly to an interview. They can seize property vital to people’s livelihoods, and hang on to it for months. They can grant supposed ‘police bail’, so allowing them to keep their chosen victims under suspicion for years.

When these things mysteriously become public, they can deny responsibility, and who can prove otherwise?

This is oppressive, dangerous and scandalous. The treatment of Lord Bramall may be the last warning we get that it has gone too far, and the best chance to turn the police back into the friends of the public, and the enemies of crime and disorder.

******

Picking a fight we cannot win

Do you really think the Russian deep state couldn’t have murdered Alexander Litvinenko secretly, in such a way that we could never have traced it to them?

The oddest thing about this case is the use of a violently radioactive, totally traceable poison, and the conduct of the two alleged killers, whose revolting deed was mismanaged in a way that would be comic if a man had not died as a result.

Meanwhile, the two suspects prance about in public (I once met a smirking Andrei Lugovoi in Moscow, as he strolled through an expensive hotel).

This is surely a gesture of angry contempt, against which Moscow knows we are more or less powerless to react effectively. We might wonder why. Maybe it has something to do with our courts refusing to extradite people such as the Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev, regarded in Moscow as terrorists, and then giving them political asylum.

Whether this decision was right or wrong (and I don’t know enough to say), you can see why it might annoy them. Despite being an increasingly insignificant country, we have got ourselves involved with some big and nasty people in a rather rough neighbourhood. I hope it’s worth it.

******

At least poor Leo's not on the 6.22 from Paddington

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s not as good as they say. I longed for subtitles and the only character whose dialogue I clearly understood was the grizzly bear. She said ‘Grrrrrr’ as if she meant it.

But if you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot. After what seems like about nine hours, unable to get to the lavatory, confronted with incessant cold, revolting meals of raw offal, charmless travelling companions, your uncomfortable journey frequently interrupted by unexplained disasters or pure spite, the 6.22 from Paddington begins to seem like paradise. Even when, as recently happened to me, you are turned out of the train by ‘Great Western’ on to a freezing platform halfway through your journey home and told it is for your own good.

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. If you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot.

****

The Government wants you to support the renewal of the absurdly elaborate and huge Trident missile system. I see that the Defence Ministry organised, as a complete coincidence, a press trip to show off the red Scalextric-type nuclear trigger I was allowed to play with aboard HMS Repulse 30 years ago. Well, Israel, a more fearsome nuclear power than us, facing a greater danger, doesn’t waste its money on such a luxury item.

Spending £100billion on Trident, and neglecting your conventional forces as a result, is like spending so much on insuring yourself against abduction by aliens that you can’t afford cover for fire and theft.

*******

My thanks to all of you who remembered my friend Jason Rezaian, unjustly imprisoned in Iran, in your thoughts and prayers, and who wrote to the Iranian authorities urging his release. After more than 500 days in a Tehran prison, and some nervous final hours as diplomats ensured his wife was able to leave the country with him, Jason is now free again, and recovering in a US military hospital. I am sure that you played your part in securing his release.

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"The EU is the Continuation of Germany By Other Means"

Here is a talk I recently gave to the Keele World Affairs discussion group, at Keele University, on ‘The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means.’

Some of you may be interested

 

http://kwaku.org.uk/Archive/Video/Peter%20Hitchens.html

 

David Cameron's Rush to War CAN be Halted ....if we try

I really don’t think anyone has any business being more pessimistic than I am. And while I’m grateful to, and cheered by, those of you have heeded my call to write to your MPs urging them to oppose British bombing of Syria, I am exasperated by those who have said (and many have)

 

‘It’s a foregone conclusion, and acting against it is a waste of time.’

 

 I even gather that some MPs who oppose the bombing have replied in this defeatist tone to letters from constituents.

 

May I remind those who say this that I was told exactly the same thing in 2013 when I also tried to mobilise opinion against Mr Cameron’s last attempt to go to war(on the opposite side) in Syria?

 

And then the votes were counted and lo! , Mr Cameron had lost his vote .

 

I believe he has been peeved about this ever since. Whenever he struts about at any international conference, he feels the other leaders are whispering ‘That’s David Cameron, the man whose Parliament won’t allow him to use his air force’, and sneering.

 

I believe he thinks this makes him a second-class statesman, that he’s not a proper leader unless he can order bombers to pound foreign places whenever he feels like it.  He clearly felt that Ed Miliband had wrongly robbed him of an opportunity to bomb, and he clearly resents it, as he shows every time he speaks about it.

 

I do wonder how that picture of him strolling past an RAF Typhoon jet at Northolt (where Typhoons are not normally based) on his return from Paris came to be taken.  As far as I know, Typhoons, are more or less useless type of air superiority fighter built at great expense some years too late for World War Three, in which they would supposedly have tangled with Soviet Mig-29s and Su-27s over Germany in ultra-modern dogfights.  They certainly have no current role to play in bombing ISIS. I gather they’re now to be modified for some other purpose, utterly unsuited to their design and capabilities, but that’s another story.

 

As well as Churchill syndrome, he seems also be suffering from a galloping case of Blair’s disorder, a desire to be seen alongside and among fighting men.

 

But since then things haven’t gone entirely to plan. People have noticed that the Defence Review was mainly notable for trying to undo stupid mistakes made by the Cameron-led Coalition a few years ago (the worst being the crazy scrapping of Nimrod maritime patrol planes, now to be replaced by expensive American equivalents) – but also for seeking to conceal the bad mess we have got into over Trident replacement, now badly delayed (like almost every major capital infrastructure project in the country) and overrunning its costs (like almost every major capital infrastructure project in the country). Not to mention trying to find something to do with Gordon Brown’s vast and unusable aircraft carriers (HMS White Elephant I, and HMS White Elephant II) which are as suited to the shrunken coastal defence force now known as the Royal Navy as a ten-gallon Texan hat would be to the actor Toby Jones.

 

They also fail to conceal the pitifully small Army which limps on after the dreadful cuts Mr Cameron himself imposed upon it.

 

Our national defence, truth to tell, is in a dreadful mess, hopelessly unbalanced by the ludicrous machismo of the unusable Trident, which frightens nobody and which we don’t even control, and poorly placed to respond quickly to the sudden dangers which are the main concern of any serious defence planner.

 

And in the midst of this Mr  Cameron wants to get us into another war. People have asked why our involvement in Syria is worth opposing, since it is likely to be politically and militarily ineffectual - see Patrick Cockburn’s superb article in today’s  (25/11/2015)‘Independent’ for a discussion of the uselessness of the plan here

 

http://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-independent/20151125/281522224998772/TextView

 

 

It is mainly because these interventions are often the beginning of something much bigger and longer-lasting ( as those of us who can recall British troops being welcomed to Londonderry in 1969 by Roman Catholic Irish families can recall) .

 

There is also grave danger of unintended consequences, as the Turkish destruction of a Russian jet on Wednesday showed. Which sides are we really on in this five-sided war of almost everyone against almost everyone?

Turkey and Russia are both ostensibly attacking Islamic State. Yet Turkey has shot down a Russian plane, and Turkish-backed militias claim (appallingly) to have killed the pilots as they parachuted to earth. Since neither Russia nor Turkey seems to have been wholly frank about their intentions, can we be sure Mr Cameron (whose selective loathing of President Assad is great and unassuaged) is being wholly frank about his aims? Has anyone really asked him what they are, in a place where he has to answer? I hope they do.

 

And to encourage those who have yet to write to their MPs asking them to vote against this adventure, I reproduce below the Monday article in which I explained the strong case against war :

 

Please Act Now to Oppose Irrational Intervention in Syria

Right. I have decided what to do about the Paris atrocities and ISIS, assuming (as everyone does, though evidence for this is so far scanty) that they are directly connected.

 

I would like to do something else, but I can’t. My influence on British foreign policy is non-existent, so that arguing for co-operation with Russia, Iran, Bashar Assad and the Kurds, and for serious action to bring about a peaceful settlement in Syria,  will make no difference.

 

So instead I have decided to concentrate on the urgent task of trying to prevent David Cameron getting a majority for British military involvement in Syria. This would undoubtedly make matters worse, has no good reasoning behind it, and may well contain long-term dangers we can barely conceive.

 

So I must ask all my readers in the United Kingdom to write or e-mail their MPs, as soon as possible, politely, concisely and cogently,  urging them to vote against any such intervention. This may conceivably affect events. I believe similar action may have done so the last time David Cameron wanted to go to war in Syria (apparently for the opposite reason for which the seeks to do the same now, but this is not wholly clear) , in September 2013.

 

I offer the arguments below, in case they wish to link to them in their e-mails, as a summary of the case against.

 

Why Change our Minds Now?

Emotion is a poor guide to strategy. Recent events in France, Sinai and elsewhere have rightly angered and distressed civilised people. But our emotions don’t excuse is from thinking. Some of the worst decisions in history have been taken on the basis of emotion. What is for certain is that there is no good reason for Parliament to change its mind on the subject.

 

Indeed, action was opposed by a recent (2nd November 2015) report by the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the only up-to-date dispassionate examination of the matter in this country. You may read it here

 

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmfaff/457/45702.htm

 

 

The Committee argued only a few weeks ago that such an intervention would be legally questionable, militarily marginal, politically unpredictable, diplomatically complex and perhaps incoherent.

 

Some may argue that last week’s UN Security Council resolution changes this to some extent. However, the resolution was vague, not operational, and did not authorise military force.

 

As the New York Times pointed out here….

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/world/europe/un-security-council-approves-resolution-urging-countries-to-combat-islamic-state.html?_r=0

 

…..the resolution offers ‘no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes the use of force.’

 

 

Downing Street briefings have not directly contradicted this, but have somehow managed to give a rather different impression, suggesting that the new resolution changes the legal position when in fact it does not. This, er, confusion about the legality of action and the meaning of UN resolutions gives me a strange sense of déjà vu. Perhaps someone should ask Lord Goldsmith about it.

 

The full text of the resolution may be found here (scroll down to reach it) :

 http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc12132.doc.htm

 

Those who genuinely think that British participation in the bombing of Syria would instantly change the balance are living in a world of fantasy. Our forces are small, and will make little difference ( assuming they share the same aim) to the efforts of the US and France already under way.

 

See paragraphs 22  and 23 of the Foreign Affairs Committee report:

 

‘In military terms, we noted that although our witnesses believed that a decision to extend airstrikes into Syria would be welcomed by Coalition allies, some said that it would not have anything other than a marginal effect. The experts told us that it would not be likely to involve extra aircraft but would simply re-focus existing assets; that the UK was already contributing valuable surveillance in Syria; and that the ability to conduct airstrikes as well would not have a decisive effect. Sir Simon Mayall concurred, adding:

 

“There are not that many of them, actually. This is not an air campaign anything remotely like the scale of 1991 or 2003. We need to be very clear about this. This is not a war-winning air campaign, by any stretch of the imagination.”

 

‘23.As a result, several witnesses concluded that there was little reason for the UK to change its policy. Julien Barnes-Dacey was strongly against the proposal and told us that the airstrikes make the threat from ISIS worse (my emphasis, PH) because they “feed a sense of radicalisation”:

 

“Sunnis say, ‘Look, the West is not helping us against Assad, but they are fighting ISIS.’ […] We become direct parties, all the while contributing nothing meaningful, in terms of military numbers or capability. I really fail to see how air strikes against ISIS will not do more harm than good.”

 

In paragraph 33, the reasoning of the select committee is quite clear: ‘…we believe that there should be no extension of British military action into Syria unless there is a coherent international strategy that has a realistic chance of defeating ISIL and of ending the civil war in Syria. In the absence of such a strategy, taking action to meet the desire to do something is still incoherent.’

 

In paragraph 35 it seeks the answer to several important questions, which I think the government will have some difficulty in answering if there is any sort of coherent questioning and debate in the Commons.

 

Enabling the House to reach a decision

 

35.The Government should explain the following points before asking the House of Commons to approve a substantive motion authorising military action:

 

a)On an international strategy:

 

i)How the proposal would improve the chances of success of the international coalition’s campaign against ISIL;

 

ii)How the proposed action would contribute to the formation and agreement of a transition plan for Syria;

 

iii)In the absence of a UN Security Council Resolution, how the Government would address the political, legal, and military risks arising from not having such a resolution;

 

iv)Whether the proposed action has the agreement of the key regional players (Turkey; Iran; Saudi Arabia; Iraq); if not, whether the Government will seek this before any intervention;

 

v)Which ground forces will take, hold, and administer territories captured from ISIL in Syria.

 

b)On the military imperative:

 

i)What the overall objective is of the military campaign; whether it expects that it will be a “war-winning” campaign; if so, who would provide war-winning capabilities for the forces; and what the Government expects will be the result of extending airstrikes to Syria.

 

ii)What extra capacity the UK would contribute to the Coalition’s actions in Syria.

 

36.We are persuaded that it is not yet possible for the Government to give a satisfactory explanation on the points listed above. Until it is possible for the Government to address these points we recommend that it does not bring to the House a motion seeking the extension of British military action to Syria.’

 

Whether your MP is Tory, Labour or SNP, she or he really ought to be aware of these arguments, and able to explain why she or he plans to ignore them if she or intends to support the new rush to war.

 

There is no excuse, if you write to your MP, for any of these politicians to claim afterwards that they were unaware of opposition to the plan, or misunderstood the effect of the UN resolution, or were unaware of the severe political and military drawbacks listed so recently by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

 

The recent atrocities have not in fact changed the material position. So why would a responsible, informed or thoughtful MP, whose decisions can in the end lead to the dropping of bombs, the drawing of this country into yet another endless and insoluble foreign conflict in which its aims are, to put it kindly, unclear, suddenly switch to supporting intervention? Bullying by the government whips or a desire to please Mr Rupert Murdoch and his media should play no part in such matters of life and death.

 

Please act now. For all the government’s claims that it is still pondering the matter, I believe there is a strong chance that it will ambush the Commons with a vote soon before it rises for Christmas on 17th December. That gives those who oppose this hasty and ill-considered action only a very little time to mobilise the forces of truth and reason against those of emotionalism, bombast and irrational panic.

 

I note that Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill are already being invoked, a clear sign that Munich Syndrome is raging in Whitehall, and especially fiercely in Downing Street itself. This is the delusional and historically illiterate belief that all crises are identical to the Czech crisis of 1938,  that all this country’s enemies are identical to Hitler,  that the sufferer is Winston Churchill reincarnated (he tends to growl in the later stages of the complaint) and that anyone who criticises him is Neville Chamberlain resurrected.

 

There is no known cure, but lying down in a darkened room with a cold compress on the brow and an umbrella to hand can relieve the symptoms.  

Which side are we really on in this war of the awful against the evil?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I don’t think the British or American governments really want to fight the Islamic State. They just want to look as if they are doing so.

I judge these people by what they do, not by what they say. And in recent months I have noticed them doing – and not doing – some very interesting things.

The White House and Downing Street both seethe with genuine outrage about Russia’s bombing raids on Syria.

Yet the people Vladimir Putin bombed have views and aims that would get them rounded up as dangerous Islamist extremists if they turned up in Manchester. So why do British politicians call them ‘moderates’ when Russia bombs them?

It’s not as if London or Washington can claim to be squeamish about bombing as a method of war. We have done our fair share of it in Belgrade, Baghdad and Tripoli, where our bombs certainly (if unintentionally) killed innocent civilians, including small children.

Then there’s the curious case of Turkey. Rather like Russia, Turkey suddenly announced last summer that it was sending its bombers in to fight against the Islamic State.

But in fact Turkey barely bothered to attack IS at all. It has spent most of the past few months blasting the daylights out of the Kurdish militias, a policy that Turkey’s President Erdogan has selfish reasons for following.

Yet the Kurds, alongside the Syrian army, have been by far the most effective resistance to IS on the ground. Why then does a key member of the alleged anti-IS coalition go to war against them?

Turkey, a Nato member, is not criticised for this behaviour by Western politicians or by the feeble, slavish Western media. These geniuses never attack our foreign policy mistakes while we are making them. They wait until they have actually ended in disaster. Then they pretend to have been against them all along.

I’ve grown tired of people impersonating world-weary cynics by intoning the old saying ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ as if it were a new-minted witticism.

But in this case, this sensible old rule seems to have been dropped. Instead, our enemy’s enemies – in the case of the Kurds, Syria’s government and the Russians – are mysteriously our enemies too.

Meanwhile the Turkish enemies of our Kurdish friends are somehow or other still our noble allies.

Compare our weird attitude towards Syria’s horrible but anti-IS president, Bashar Assad, to Winston Churchill’s wiser view of Stalin.

Stalin became our ally when the Nazis invaded Russia. Churchill, a lifelong foe of Soviet communism, immediately grasped that times had changed. ‘If Hitler invaded Hell,’ he said ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’

That is because, in body, heart and soul, sleeping and waking, with all the force and spirit he possessed, he was committed to the fight against Hitler above all things. So he would have accepted any ally against him.

Is this true of our leaders, who constantly portray Assad (and Putin) as Hitler, who imagine themselves as modern Churchills and condemn their critics as ‘appeasers’?

No. They play both ends against the middle. Their anti-extremist rhetoric, turned up full when confronting Birmingham schoolteachers or bearded preachers, drops to a whisper when they want to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, the home of Islamist fanaticism.

Things are not what they seem to be here. Russia’s action may be rash and dangerous. It may fail, especially as we are obviously trying so hard to undermine it. But at least it is honest and straightforward.

A new look set to sweep the nation

A hijab-wearing model, Mariah Idrissi, has been chosen for a new advertisement by the fashion chain H&M. 

I think we will be amazed at how quickly this becomes normal. It won’t be long before we have veiled Muslim Cabinet Ministers, TV newsreaders and judges. It is all part of a slow but unstoppable adaptation of this country to Islam. 

In my view it will eventually mean that non-Muslim women will come under pressure to conform. 

If you doubt the power of this huge change, consider this. There are archive films available showing women in Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East dressed in Western styles. It has taken only 40 years for them to disappear beneath scarves and shrouds. The process may be quicker for us. 

The hard-Left menace we ignored

The continued rage about Jeremy Corbyn’s rather dated Leftism baffles me. Most British journalists weren’t (as I was) members of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In the months before I quit, I used to be angrily called to order by the chairwoman of my local party. She was cross with me for (as she put it) provoking too much heckling from noisily pro-IRA, ban-the-bomb types.

Meanwhile, the real Left worked by stealth. That is why our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction’s ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?

Well I never. Schools that introduce the Daily Mile – encouraging children to walk or run a mile during school time – report more attentive, happier pupils who look as children used to look before we locked them in cars and houses and abandoned them to TVs and computer screens.

This news will be unwelcome to the potent lobby which urges the drugging of children to make them behave in boring classrooms and exercise-free schools, a disgusting barbarity that will one day be looked on with horror. 

I’ve tried many times to set out the case against the wicked fantasy of ‘ADHD’, which usually earns me nothing but ignorant rage in return. But perhaps a rather clever new novel will succeed where I have failed. 

I do urge you to read Concentr8 by William Sutcliffe (Bloomsbury £12.99), set in the very near future in a London convulsed by riots, ruled by a fameseeking mayor with eccentric hair.

Many of the most shocking passages in it – concerning the cynicism of the drug industry and of doctors about the use of mind-altering drugs to control the young – are not fiction but researched fact. Also, you’ll be interested to find out what happens to the mayor’s hair in the end.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Some Immediate Thoughts on the New Crisis in Syria

Just who is fighting whom in Syria? I should have thought this was the thing we most need to know before getting involved. Some years ago, before this war was a cause, I began receiving private letters from a worried British woman married to a Syrian Sunni Muslim, then living in Latakia.  Her main motivation was fear about the danger to the quiet, contented life which she and her family were then living and now are not. They are now, like so many others, refugees. I think she hoped that some discussion of this in the media might avoid such an outcome. I only wish it had been so.

 

After some checks, I believe them to have been authentic. She described the worrying appearance in that country of armed, heavily-bearded militiamen speaking Arabic in a way quite different from that in Syria.

 

I was an unlikely choice for Syrian state propaganda. I had for some years been writing rude and disobliging articles, when the opportunity arose, about Syria’s habit of massacring rebels, its discrimination against Jews, its harbouring of the Nazi refugee Alois Brunner, a  mass-murder of children,  its undoubted involvement in the attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard an El Al jet at Heathrow and its probable (in my view ) involvement in the Lockerbie bomb, strangely attributed to Libya. I thought the cosying up to Syria which followed its support for the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991 was absurd. I thought the West’s use of Syrian torturers to interrogate suspects, taken there on rendition flights after September 11^th 2001, was disgraceful. My main motive for these articles had been Zionist. I am a strong supporter of Israel’s continued existence, and had long regarded Syria as one of the main threats to that.

 

So when a certain Tory MP (whose career has since exploded amid farcical revelations about his private life) accused me of being some sort of Syrian patsy, I was actually astonished, and sought (but did not get) a retraction.

 

My interest in this issue was motivated by puzzlement  - and also by a pained sympathy for the lady who wrote to me from Latakia. I have also found it all too easy to imagine myself becoming a refugee, driven from my home by war. It has happened in my lifetime to far too many people who thought themselves quite safe, as we do, and as you probably do. You are not. Some fool may even now be devising the plan that will eventually force you out on to the road with a few belongings, leaving your house in ruins or in the hands of strangers. It makes me angry that people behave in such a way that this sort of thing happens.

 

It seemed clear to me that there was a strong lobby for ‘democracy’ in Syria, with powerful supporters in Washington DC. This had been pressing for worsened relations between the USA and Damascus for some time before the protests began. I have learned to be suspicious of such lobbies for two reasons. One, they are generally selective about their desire for democracy (the lovers of democracy in Syria seem pretty unmoved by its total absence from Saudi Arabia, its suppression in Bahrain and its defeat and erasure in Egypt), and therefore must have other real motives. I have since heard that French diplomacy underwent a similar convulsion, with Paris demanding a strong anti-Assad line against the doubts of some of its experienced diplomats. I strongly suspect that something similar has happened in London. It is possible to guess that the reason for this is the strong alliance, based upon oil and arms sales, between some Gulf states and those three countries.  Those states are Sunni Muslim, whereas Syria was broadly secular and on good terms with Shia Iran.

 

 

Two, their allies are unconvincing.  I have no doubt that the various factions which formed the Free Syrian Army and other Syrian opposition groups have genuine grievances against the Assad state. Almost everyone in Syria does, It is a cruel, and presumably corrupt, despotism with little to be said for it save that it had until recently been internally peaceful, and that it maintained unusual levels of mutual tolerance among its varied peoples.

 

But I have huge doubts as to what sort of state they would create, were they to overthrow Assad. We are repeatedly assured that they are quite distinct from Islamic State, a body to which we attribute almost supernatural powers of horror and intolerance. They need to do this, or people might notice its very strong similarity to the current government of Saudi Arabia, also given to ferocious religious intolerance, beheadings and so forth (and currently engaged in a pretty appalling aggression against Yemen) , though less inclined to publicise them on YouTube.

 

But I am not wholly convinced by these assurances that these people are our friends and allies. I do not think that Christian and Shia people in Syria are convinced by them either. They back Assad not because they love him but because the alternative is a Sunni theocracy in which their lives would be enormously worse. Quite a few Sunni Muslims, the famous moderate Muslims of whom we hear so much, seem to have taken the same view, since they continue to play such a large part in Assad’s Army. He would have fallen long ago, were this not so.

 

To me it seems absurd to imagine that defeat for Assad would not pretty much immediately mean that the Islamic State extended its power to Damascus and Aleppo. The supposedly non-extremist fighters against Assad are certainly not pro-Western, and the divisions between them and ISIS seem to me to be slight.

 

Of course, a compromise peace would be good. Like all conservatives I believe very much in such arrangements. But the main obstacle to such a peace has been the absolute refusal of the rebels to contemplate any deal that left Assad in power. Every conference which has attempted to bring about a deal has foundered on this point. As I have many times pointed out our righteous modern insistence on trying and imprisoning (and sometimes hanging) overthrown tyrants, has made them  understandably reluctant to step down, so losing the sovereign immunity that keeps them safe from being hustled into a cell. The shocking and barbaric murder of Colonel Gadaffi in a Libyan drainpipe (an event which launched new horrors in that country) might also encourage any embattled head of state to battle on rather than show any weakness. Those who genuinely wanted peaceful amelioration of Syria would see this, make a deal and get all the concessions they could pocket while allowing Assad to stay.

 

But his foes, and the supposedly wise and responsible great powers of the West, have pursued a policy of all or nothing. They have got nothing, except unending and terrible war.

 

And now Russia has joined it, attacking Assad’s enemies, not necessarily ISIS. My heart sank when I heard this news, as I cannot see it ending well. I had hoped an agreement was still possible. Now I fear a limitless conflict, with ghastly implications for our peace and prosperity.  Russian exasperation is understandable. But unilateral action of this kind is just wrong, and destroys any prestige Vladimir Putin had gained from his behaviour at the UN.

 

It sank even further when I heard the American response, full of machismo and entirely lacking in caution or subtlety. I immediately contrasted the American reaction to Turkey’s supposed decision, some months ago to join the war against ISIS. This was naively welcomed by western politicians and media. In fact Turkey has barely attacked ISIS at all, but has instead launched repeated attacks on the Kurdish forces who have been inflicting serious reverses on ISIS in Kobane and elsewhere. This is all to do with Turkey’s dismal internal politics, often discussed on this blog, and nothing to do with the safety of the Middle East from murderous fanaticism. Yet the hostility and scepticism which greeted Russia’s attacks on people whose victory would help ISIS were quite absent when Turkey launched attacks on people whose defeat would help ISIS. Why?

 

Here’s a question to ponder. If (and I think this is the actual choice) you had to choose between Syria being run by Assad or by the opposition to Assad; and if the victory of the opposition was highly likely to benefit ISIS; who would you then want to win? And if the answer is ‘the opposition’, how can those who seek that end claim in reality to be opposed to ISIS, which will benefit so much if their wish comes true.

 

Russia may have thought this through more carefully than the USA. But the Kremlin has still made a terrible mistake. The USA is no longer run (as Russia still is) by disillusioned cynics seeking the least worst outcome. It is in the hands of Utopian idealists and there is no limit to the horrors they can unleash upon the earth in the names of freedom and democracy. Ask anyone in Baghdad. Meanwhile the British government is in the hands of political teenagers whose combat experience –if they have any at all – was gained at the dinners of the Bullingdon Club.

New Violence in Kiev - But Nobody Seems to Care Much

Forgive me for mentioning it, but serious violence has returned to Kiev, scene (in February 2014) of the lawless overthrow of the legitimate President of Ukraine. Viktor Yanukovych, by a violent, armed mob.  For a list of the 18 police officers incontestably killed in the 2014 events, whose deaths are proof that this was not a wholly one-sided clash between ruthless state and peaceful, unarmed people, see here  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_during_Euromaidan#cite_note-MSV-03.02.14-1

 

This supposedly spontaneous events of 2014 (in my experience as a revolutionary, spontaneity takes a lot of organising) , in which serving foreign politicians and diplomats openly showed their partiality towards the demonstrators, and the legitimate President was unconstitutionally removed from office, has now passed into myth as a laudable exercise in idealistic and disinterested people power, supposedly aimed at ending the corruption and general squalor of Ukraine’s oligarch-dominated state.

 

To which one can only respond with helpless if bitter laughter, as the resulting government is actually headed by an oligarch and entirely dominated by them, and if Ukraine has since ceased in any important way to be Olympically corrupt, then I have to say I have seen no reports of this.

 

Now,  I have from time to time, in many debate s on this subject, pointed out that grave danger in which the Kiev government finds itself. Having come to power through mob violence, it has no real moral protection from falling in the same way.

 

And the forces which carried it to power still exist, though slightly altered. Their hard core were then concentrated round the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party . This has since been displaced by Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party, which mopped up Svoboda’s vote in 2014 and now holds 22 parliamentary seats and 7.5% of the vote, a fact Kiev apologists will hope you don’t know when they point out (accurately) Svoboda’s failure to do well at the October elections. They also relied heavily on the hard men of the ‘Right Sector’, many of whom are presumed to have ended up in semi-autonomous units in Ukraine’s otherwise shambolic Army, where they have been prominent in the fight against Russian-speaking separatists, backed by Moscow, in the eastern part of Ukraine. This has now settled into a sort of Maginot war around the port of Mariupol, which has sprouted huge concrete defences and is ringed with howitzers, liek something out a history book. 

 

These ultra-nationalist forces are showing signs of strong discontent with the Poroshenko government, not least because of its recent realistic and non-Utopian attempts to reach a  compromise with Russia over the embattled east.

 

So on Tuesday, the (London) Daily Telegraph reported as follows:

 

‘TWO national guardsmen yesterday died of the wounds they sustained in a grenade attack outside Ukraine's parliament, as tensions flared over how to end the war against pro-Russian separatists in the east.

The clashes in Kiev erupted on Monday after Ukrainian MPs voted in favour of legislation that would devolve power as part of a peace agreement reached in February. Critics have denounced the move as tantamount to surrender. Yesterday the Radical party, which has been accused of involvement in the violence, announced it would quit the governing coalition.

Meanwhile, a new ceasefire appeared to hold in the east, on the first day of the new school year. "As of 12pm there were no reports of violations by the illegal armed groups. Now the situation is calm," said Oleksander Motuzyanyk, a government spokesman.

Some 144 people were injured on Monday when a crowd including supporters of the nationalist Svoboda party used batons, smoke bombs and other street weapons to try to storm parliament.

One national guard officer died on Monday and a second died early yesterday as a result of injuries caused by a hand grenade, said Arsen Avakov, the interior minister.

The national guard reported another death yesterday afternoon, saying that the 20-year-old guardsman had died from shrapnel wounds to the brain.

Petro Poroshenko, the president, condemned the violence as a "stab in the back". A suspect arrested at the scene was identified as a Svoboda party member who fought with a volunteer militia in the east.’

 

There was also this report in Metro, the free daily newspaper

 

‘A NATIONAL guard officer was killed yesterday when a grenade exploded outside Ukraine’s parliament amid violent clashes between protesters and riot police.

Another 100 officers were injured – ten seriously – as petrol bombs were hurled by nationalists opposing a vote to give greater powers to separatist regions in the east.

Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko called the demonstrations ‘a bloody provocation’ and said about 30 people had been detained, including the person who threw the grenade. Many protesters were masked and carrying sticks and truncheons.

Interior minister Arsen Avakov blamed the trouble on ultra-nationalist party Svoboda.

‘No political differences can justify what you did today,’ he told its leaders.Devolution of power was a condition aimed at ending the fighting between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists that has killed 6,800.’

 

And this from the ‘Indepndent’:

 

As MPs voted on a contentious bill to try to bring peace to the country and grant concessions to territories still held by Russian-backed rebels, protests turned deadly on the steps of parliament. OLIVER CARROLL reports from Kiev. Premier accuses protesters of being worse than the separatists
By: OLIVER CARROLL

The all-too-familiar sight of masked men, Molotov cocktails, wooden sticks and explosives returned to the streets of Kiev yesterday, as violence between police and the mostly nationalist protesters broke out after a contentious vote in the Ukrainian national parliament. More than 100 people were injured, and one national guardsman died as a result of a grenade thrown during the clashes.

The violence was the worst in Kiev since the current government took power in February 2014, and dramatically highlights the vulnerability of the Western-brokered peace deal agreed in Minsk in February this year.

Key to that was the introduction of yesterday's decentralisation bill, devolving more autonomy to the regions, including those currently under separatist control, which was insisted upon in order to help secure the agreement of the rebels and win the backing of Russia's President, Vladimir Putin.

The planned new law has proven extremely controversial, with opponents suggesting constitutional changes are being pushed through undemocratically at Western insistence, and that they effectively freeze the conflict in eastern Ukraine, implicitly ceding control to the pro-Russian rebels who control large parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

On the eve of voting, however, explicit mention of the special status of the eastern regions was removed from the bill, as government officials were said to be involved in intensive last-minute haranguing and wooing of wavering MPs.

Nonetheless, in true Ukrainian style, a tumultuous session in parliament followed. The message was clear from the first minute of the debate, when MPs from Oleh Lyashko's Radical Party stormed parliament to occupy the Speaker's podium. Once the session they attempted to drown out discussion with loudspeakers, sirens, and by chanting "shame" over the speeches. At times, it seemed that the Speaker's only way of restoring decorum was by shouting "Glory to Ukraine" - although even that soon lost its power. Several scuffles broke out around the podium.

In the end, the government was only able to muster 265 votes from the 368 lawmakers in the hall, and two of the coalition member parties voted against. While this simple majority was enough for the bill to pass its first reading, it was not the 300 "supermajority" required for a constitutional change to be fully approved. Its second reading is now likely to be delayed for some time, putting at risk the deal supposed to secure peace in the east.

In a live address on television, Ukraine's Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, called for life imprisonment for the person who threw the grenade - who police said they had arrested - and said the right-wing protesters were "worse" than the separatist rebels because they were destroying the country from within "under the guise of patriotism".

"The cynicism of this crime lies in the fact that while the Russian federation and its bandits are trying and failing to destroy the Ukrainian state on the eastern front, the so-called pro-Ukrainian political forces are trying to open another front in the country's midst," he said.

The Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, called the bill "a difficult but a logical step toward peace", and insisted that it wouldn't give any autonomy to the rebels.

But news that the bill had passed its first reading was enough to tip the already aggressive crowd of protesters waiting outside the parliament building into violence. Several had come prepared, wearing masks and brandishing wooden sticks. At about 1pm, The Independent saw a group of men begin to assault policemen with sticks. A short while later, another small group broke through the substantial police cordon and began throwing missiles - bottles, stones, bricks - at the police.

Eventually, the missiles became Molotov cocktails and, it is believed, grenades or improvised explosive packbegan, ages of some description. There were several pools of blood around the south and west sides of the parliamentary building, but it is unclear whether these were the result of multiple incidents, or of the injured being treated elsewhere. Several of the reinforced windows had been damaged by shrapnel or some other projectile.

Anton Heraschenko, an MP and adviser at the interior ministry, suggested at one point that gunfire had also been involved, but this was not confirmed and others argued that the injuries were more consistent with shrapnel.

Judging by the banners, a large number of the violent protesters were associated with the far-right Svoboda ("Freedom") party. Bloggers later posted several pictures of leading Svoboda members on the front lines of the clashes.

After coming to prominence during the Euromaidan revolution, Svoboda has become a largely marginalised force in Ukrainian politics. In last October's parliamentary elections, it was unable to muster enough votes to break through the 5 per cent barrier, effectively shutting it out of power. It had until yesterday been relatively quiet.

Many have questioned the timing of Svoboda's intervention, noting that it plays into the hands of a Russian narrative that Ukrainian politics is excessively influenced by the far right.

Mr Yatsenyuk said the day's events signalled the opening of a "second front" against Ukraine and called upon all political parties to denounce the protests.

The officer who was killed in the clashes yesterday was a 25-year-old conscript, the Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, said. A further 122 people needed hospital treatment, most of them officers, but including some Ukrainian journalists and two French reporters, he added.

"Pro-Russian bandits try to destroy Ukraine in the east. Now pro-Ukrainian political forces try to open another front" ‘

 

There was also a report in the London ‘Times’,  behind a paywall, which said that nine police officers were said to be in a critical condition , that casualties ‘streamed into ‘ hospitals and there was blood on the road. It pointed out (which is true) that Ukraine is under pressure from EU nations to governments to make the constitutional changes, giving more autonomy to the war-ravaged areas in the east. Ukraine being virtually bankrupt, this pressure is considerable. But the votes may not be there in the Ukraine’s chamber of deputies. And these demonstrations may provide a pretxt for wavering deputies to resist the reform.

 

What’s striking is that the reports of these events tend to be well inside the newspapers and well down the broadcasts, and to be pretty strictly factual, lacking the breathless emotionalism of the reports on the famous ‘Maidan’ of the winter of 2013-2014.

 

My suspicion is that the Poroshenko state, by being both ineffectual and intransigent,  has forfeited a lot of the idealistic support it had from the ‘West’ when it first began, and that Russia, having stood up for itself, and made it plain it will not allow the eastern rebels to be defeated,  is very slowly being welcomed back into the fold of respectability, which may leave the ‘New Cold War’ enthusiasts without a cause. Though it will never be as beloved in the EU and the USA as it was under the Yeltsin kleptocracy , which happily allowed the ‘West’ to walk all over Russia, and plunder it.

 

It will be interesting to see if and how this happens, and how the enthusiasts for the new, pure, democratic Ukraine cope with the realisation that no such thing ever was on offer, or will happen. The paradox is that Russia, by regaining Crimea (something which is now pretty much de facto recognised) now has much less influence over Ukraine as a whole than it used to.

 

By the way, now that we all know so much more about the ‘democratic’ process by which Britain was brought into the EU, its dishonesty and general lack of real knowledge, can people please stop telling me that the countries of central Europe are willing members of the EU and NATO? Their elites are certainly willing. But I think the views of the people are a lot more ambiguous. I feel a special pang for Poland, released from Soviet captivity only to be immediately led, with chains of money,  into the open prison of the EU.  

 

I wonder if the anti-Russian frenzy of Poland’s more populist politicians can be compared to the fervent anti-Israel feelings encouraged in the police states of the Muslim world – a safety valve in which genuine discontent can be funnelled into phoney emotionalism against an enemy who isn’t really an enemy at all. Poland doesn't even have a border with Russia, unless you count the Kaliningrad exclave.  But it is now wholly dominated by a German-led EU.