Barrow Boy

Based on his performance on Newsnight, the greying John Woodcock, who chairs Progress of which I am a member, needs to grow up and get out of the student union.

The mighty Patrick Cockburn pointed out that we were not actually allied to those who were already fighting IS on the ground, including Assad, and that we were in fact pretending that Assad was somehow not the President of Syria while classifying everyone else in the field against IS as a range of terrorist organisations.

Woodcock spluttered that there could never be an alliance with "this murderous dictator". Quite what he would have done in either World War, heaven alone can begin to speculate.

Clare Short was also on hand to point out that, as is set out at great length his Cockburn's latest book, it is our paper tiger associates, the Gulf monarchies, who are both the ideological and the financial originators and backers of that against which we are now affecting that they are joining us in battle.

Beyond a single stylised photograph of a female Emirati "fighter pilot", no evidence has been produced that "the Five Arab States" are doing anything at all, even by the standards of our own meagre deployment due this Government's having sacked, scrapped and cancelled everyone and everything else.

But where is the Sixth Arab State? Where is Kuwait, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar up to her eyeballs in both preaching and financing the Caliphate? The country for which we fought the first of the three Gulf Wars to date is very conspicuous by her absence. Very, very, very conspicuous, indeed.

As is NATO Turkey, with an enormous Army to match Saudi Arabia's enormous Air Force. And with a likewise matching Islamist Government heavily implicated in the Islamist insurrection in, and invasion of, Syria. 

You know, the insurrection and invasion that David Cameron wanted to back last year. The insurrection and invasion that the cheerleaders for this war wanted to aid by means of an International Brigade. They got what they wanted there.

As Cockburn very importantly mentioned, there is no Third Force. There never has been. There never will be. Anyone who thinks that elderly émigrés sipping coffee in Paris amount to a row of beans, coffee or otherwise, in Syria needs to get out of not even the student union, but the primary school playground.