What Sort Of World Will It Be?

Fresh from last week’s call for mass renationalisation, and complete with the old Trotskyist signals of differentiation, Fleet Street’s nearest thing to a Corbynite columnist, the unsackable Peter Hitchens, writes:

Here are two good rules, confirmed by history, to bear in mind. It is very dangerous to assume that any sort of alliance or diplomacy can deter or control a country which does not think it is defeated, or thinks it has been wronged. And powerful states do not always keep promises to defend small weak countries against aggression.

For example, for 75 years from 1870, Germany was the main threat to peace in Europe. In that year, the Prussian cynic Bismarck provoked France into starting a war which it duly lost. I have no doubt that German aggression also began the 1914 war which ruined Europe forever. Europe did not ‘sleepwalk’ into it. Berlin marched into it and very nearly won. The crushing Versailles treaty of 1919 was supposed to put an end to this, but made it worse.

Britain and France then promised to defend Poland, in Spring 1939. But they did not mean it. When Germany attacked Poland in September of that year, Britain did nothing except drop propaganda leaflets on the German countryside (the RAF could not find German cities in the dark). France briefly sent some troops into a western corner of Germany, bumbled around for a few weeks and then pulled out again. Poland was horribly crushed.

Alas, it was not until Berlin was barbarically occupied by Stalin’s Red Army and Germany’s eastern regions pillaged and ruined by Soviet power, that Germany learned not do this sort of thing again. Nowadays, it uses peaceful methods, mainly the EU, to dominate Europe and thank heaven for that. I state these brutal facts because it seems to me that we often forget them.

For this coming week, NATO will hold a summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius - a city where, in January 1991, I watched the last bloody flailing of Soviet power in an episode overshadowed at the time by the First Gulf War and now almost wholly forgotten. It is still amazing to me, as I recall those violent, terrifying days, that NATO has got this far east, and we shall see how that works out in the long term. Power and fear really exist, and drive men’s actions. Both power and fear seethe in that part of Europe, as I have seen with my own eyes. They cannot be abolished by paper treaties.

So what we have to grasp - as the NATO leadership considers admitting Ukraine later this week - is that Russia was never defeated by the West in war, and is still full of wounded pride over its largely-forgotten and incredibly costly role in crushing Hitler. Its state of mind reminds me a bit of Britain’s in 1956 when, deluded that we were still a major power, we launched the disastrous Suez adventure. As I have written here, that resulted in the US Navy seriously considering opening fire on our fleet, a humiliating retreat by us and our French allies, and the biggest single loss of power and prestige by this country in modern times.

Well, it is perhaps possible that the west might now inflict a crushing lasting military defeat on Russia, which could permanently alter that country’s view of itself and make it as docile as modern Germany. But it might just as easily go wrong. Russia has nuclear weapons and might fall into the hands of ultra-nationalists who make Vladimir Putin look like the Liberal Democrats.

As for NATO, it is like Tinkerbell. It exists only if people believe in it. We are ceaselessly told of its noble and selfless Article Five, in which ‘an armed attack [against one or more NATO members in Europe or North America] shall be considered an attack against them all’. Few read on to find just how weak that pledge really is. The US Senate in 1949 would never have ratified an open-ended commitment to go to war. So it says that each signatory ‘will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force’. This is waffle. The member state remains free to choose whether to ‘deem’ force ‘necessary’, or to use force at all. Action not including force is clearly implied as a possible response.

Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelensky may get a membership pledge in Vilnius this week. But he and his countrymen should not (as Poland did in 1939) assume that it means his paper allies will actually sacrifice Chicago for a Ukrainian city. He should recall just how anxious the Chairman of the USA’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, has been that the current war should not expand beyond Ukraine’s borders. NATO membership will not change that, as Zelensky will find.

Which brings us back to ask exactly what we are playing at in this high-explosive part of Europe. I no longer even try to ask anyone to consider or adopt my own view of the war. The task is hopeless in the current atmosphere of gung-ho passion. But surely it is beginning to be clear that a negotiated peace would be better than all this blood and ruin. Ukraine, by its courageous and tenacious defence, has actually secured rather a strong position in any talks. I listened on the radio last week to a description of a young Ukrainian soldier being brought, terribly wounded, from the front line to a casualty clearing station. I considered all the men and women in his life who would be grieved for decades to come by what had happened to him. And I cursed all the vain and foolish people from all sides who followed the gory path to war, when they did not have to. If we do not turn away from it soon, we may find we have brought war here too. 

And:

The strange behaviour of banks, in closing some accounts for obscure and unclear reasons, is mainly alarming because we are are heading so fast towards a cashless economy. How can anyone survive without a bank account? But if the banks cannot be talked out of this, then a simple measure will make it more bearable. In sensible France, Article 642-3 of the penal code states that traders cannot refuse cash payments – as so many now do here. They can be fined more than £100 for doing so. Parliament should enact such a law here, and quickly.

And:

Why have we co-operated so readily in the destruction of personal service? I admit that I was fooled by the introduction of cashpoint machines. At last, I didn’t need to worry about getting to the bank before it closed, and writing a cheque for the cash I needed. It did not then cross my mind that it would lead to the accelerating disappearance of actual banks. How stupid I was. The other week, the branch of Lloyds in North Oxford where I opened my first savings account 60 years ago was closed. And while I grieved (I remember its polished wooden counters, its high ceilings and carpeted floor, and the great brass balance where they used to weigh the pre-decimal change in proper pounds and ounces) I admitted to myself that I should have known better at the start. Nowadays if you go into any of the banks that are still open, you are besieged by unfortunates whose job it is to persuade you take out loans, but cannot help you with simple tasks like swapping £20 notes (which nobody wants) for fivers (which everyone wants). How very different from the old banks, where they tried very hard to persuade you not to take out loans.

But away they all go, not always without our consent but always with our submissive co-operation. Why, I often wonder, did we all put up so willingly with the abolition of bus conductors? Buses used to be a fast way of travelling through towns. You got on, the bell pinged, the bus roared away from the stop and later you paid your fare to the conductor. Then you got off (quite often by leaping boldly from the open platform at the back). Ever since, however many wheezes they come up with, bus travel has been an ordeal for the impatient, with endless stops while people fumble for change or (the modern curse) cannot quite align their accursed mobile phones with the equally accursed electronic reader. As for hopping off, there are now doors which are presumably monitored by onboard computers and CCTV, so the driver daren’t let you off anywhere except at the official stop. If she does, she will be in serious trouble. Fast easy travel has been transformed into slow hard travel, and so people don’t want to use it. I suspect many thousands of us have taken up driving cars because they cannot stand this, and I do not blame them.

Then came the ultimate swindle. The supermarkets offered us the chance to work as checkout staff without pay … and we took it. Obediently, we lined up at bleeping robots, scanned our goods over and over again until the computer recognised the barcode, removed unexpected items from the bagging area and helped to make more of our fellow-creatures unemployed. This was when I rebelled. I refused for years to use these things. I brushed off the urgings of the shop workers who had been assigned to the job of guiding us towards the self-service checkouts. I felt for them. They must have known they were working to abolish their own jobs, but what choice did they have? I, on the other hand, did have a choice. I could refuse. I waited, sometimes for ages, to pay a human being for my goods. Sometimes I begged others to do the same. But almost all the time my pleas were useless. And it grew harder. The tills reserved for small purchases vanished, and the number of checkout staff shrank, so that I was faced with a choice between standing for hours while someone processed and paid for a weekly shop, or surrendering. I could easily see the end of it, staffless shops, with nobody there except perhaps some stone-faced store detectives at the exits. I also think that people need work, and that a lot of men and women would be glad of the chance to work in a supermarket, not just for the money but for the companionship and the human contact. And what will happen to them when all those jobs have been abolished?

And now comes the plan to get rid of all the remaining railway station ticket offices. I recall clashing on BBC Question Time last May with a smug Mark Harper, Secretary of State for Transport, who told me that ‘only 12%’ of people buy tickets from ticket offices. Apparently that 12% - one in eight passengers - can now be safely ignored as there are so few of them. Well, so much for the consumer choice we were supposedly promised as the great computer revolution got under way and the economy was yet again liberalised. There is no choice. You can have anything you like as long as you don’t want proper face-to-face customer service. Click on a mouse, hang in to a phone for hours. But an actual human being is an event. Mr Harper also explained that the staff who now do this will somehow be deployed outside ticket offices doing something not quite clear. Perhaps so, but I wouldn’t bet on many of them still having jobs three years from now. Well, once again, the reason why so few people (they include me) buy tickets from ticket counters is because so many of us have been persuaded that it is easier to do so online. Perhaps it is for them. I don’t find it so, especially thanks to the privatised rail system’s mad maze of ticket prices. I have often been very grateful for the knowledgeable advice and help given me by ticket staff in Oxford, where I live. Yet now they are doomed, and once again, perfectly good jobs will disappear so that we can all do what, exactly, instead?

I used to think that, somewhere in government and society, there were people who might stand up for the pleasant things in life, even if they cost a bit more. I used to think that there were people who understood that things have values, as well as prices. I also thought that it had begun to sink in that civilised societies need millions of jobs like this, because work is far better for people than idleness, and that a wise government would protect such jobs, not applaud their destruction. For years, to resist this, I have shopped at proper bakers and butchers’ shops, got my milk delivered in bottles, bought books from actual bookshops. Until the Covid shutdown made it pointless, I shunned the supermarket robots, and I still try to avoid them if humanly possible. But it has done little good, and I feel duped and abandoned, the victim of falsely promises and empty reassurances. What sort of world will it be, when there is nobody there except robots and CCTV cameras?