Deep Concerns

"It's a pity that only one of them can lose" is usually attributed to Henry Kissinger in relation to the Iran-Iraq War. I have no doubt that he said it, but it is far too obvious never to have been uttered before the 1980s.

Most conflicts have been bad versus bad, and most conflicts still are. Mercifully, then, most conflicts have been no concern of ours, and most conflicts still are not.

We deal exactly as much as strictly necessary with whoever wins in the end, but we have no dog in the fight. If you doubt that, then here is the Azov Battalion, for and alongside which it is seriously proposed that we go to war with the Russia of the appalling Vladimir Putin.

Like mine, your eye was probably drawn to the swastika, but after that look at the flag on the other side of the Battalion's own colours. All that is missing is the EU one that the Ukrainian regime also flies, having written into the Constitution the pursuit and then the retention of both NATO and EU membership. We shall never really have left the EU until we have left NATO, and membership of the latter already commits us to the defence of numerous people like this, just as membership of the former subjected us to their legislative will.

In Ukraine, those are the heirs of Stepan Bandera, who proclaimed that, "We shall lay the heads of the Jews at the feet of Hitler." He was pretty much as good as his word. Let us never hear anything more about anti-Semitism from the supporters of this impending war, directed as that charge is against that war's opponents.

Especially since many of those supporters have this evening voted for, while those opponents have voted against, legislation to expand the Home Secretary's existing power to take away the British citizenship of many millions of people, including every Jew who held it, by removing any requirement to notify them, and thus any right of appeal.

The pro-war, pro-NATO and pro-EU faction that is back in charge of the Labour Party has no proposal to repeal that, the most anti-Semitic law that will have been passed in Western Europe since the Holocaust. Let them ever hereafter hold their tongues about anti-Semitism.