Last week's column read so much like a pastiche that some of us thought that it might have been time for him to retire, but this week, Peter Hitchens is on great form:
Is Ukraine stuck? Wars can be very unpredictable – especially in their early weeks – but there are a lot of signs that Ukraine has run into political and military trouble.
It is not that its forces are likely to be defeated or that the Russians are about to sweep into Kiev. Far from it. They are in a mess too.
It is that the large-scale recapture of the land lost to Russia in 2022 looks less and less likely as the days shorten. Those who invested heavily in a summer offensive against Russia have so far been disappointed. And what then?
The USA is still (wisely) dead set against involving itself directly in the war, so what will break the stalemate? Does this just have to go on and on filling graveyards and doing severe economic damage to Ukraine and Europe? With what aim?
I am no military expert. I haven't fired a proper gun for about 40 years and was not much of a shot when I did. (I sometimes whiled away late shifts on quiet nights in Parliament by using the rifle range which for all I know is still somewhere under the House of Lords.)
But I can sniff the wind as well as anyone, and when the mighty US magazine Foreign Affairs publishes a major article with the title Will The West Abandon Ukraine? (to which the answer, in my view, is 'quite possibly') I think something is going on.
I've never been able to grasp what Britain's interest is in sustaining a costly and risky war in South-East Europe between two corrupt and ill-governed hunks of the old Soviet Empire. A lot of US Republicans, not just the ghastly Trump, are also doubtful about the point of it.
Then there are recent reports of growing friction between Ukraine and Poland's government. I'm surprised this has not happened before, given the fairly recent (80 years ago) violent history between the two neighbouring peoples, in an area where events 500 years ago can still stir up bitter enmities.
And there is the current scandal of alleged corruption in Ukrainian military recruiting offices. This is no shock to anyone, as you can barely breathe in Ukraine without encountering corruption. But the point is that it suggests people in quite large numbers are paying to avoid fighting.
At the same time a lot of men of military age, banned by law from leaving Ukraine at the moment, are being caught trying to slip across the frontier with Romania. Which suggests that quite a few are getting through, and that this is a major difficulty for a country which has suffered terrible military casualties.
Honestly, if this war had not been so widely portrayed in crude storybook terms as a super-simple fight between total good and total evil, which it isn't, we might have reached this stage before. But better late than never.
If our concern is truly for the people of Ukraine, then we would be much better occupied promoting a lasting peace than in fuelling and paying to prolong a war in which actual Ukrainians die and suffer, and gain nothing much in return.
And:
Red-green fanatic Sir Keir Starmer was photographed (next to Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper) last week at an airport near The Hague, where they were visiting the Europol police HQ so he could make a very odd speech.
Others may worry about the speech, or Sir Keir's strange attire. But I am fascinated to know why the Great Green European flew to the Dutch city, when he claims to be so keen on cutting emissions.
I am fond of The Hague, its superb art gallery, its efficient trams and its enjoyable sandy beaches, and I could have told him that it is very easily reached by train. The Eurostar from London hurry direct to nearby Rotterdam.
From there, clean electric trains run every few minutes to The Hague itself, while the city's airport is 15 miles out. The station is smack in the middle of the city. And Europol is 20 minutes from the station on a Number 17 tram.
I do sometimes wonder whether these Green zealots really mean what they say.
And, although see here:
What is the BBC doing making a drama about Ireland's greatest scandal, the horrible Magdalene Laundries, in which unmarried mothers were imprisoned and exploited, and worse, by the Catholic Church?
Were I Irish, I would wonder whether Britain didn't have any such scandals of its own to look into. One Irish reviewer of The Woman In The Wall, Ed Power of the Irish Times, said (accurately) that the series was a 'baroque and hysterically overcooked attempt at confronting the wickedness'.
But it's not just that the drama is deeply weird, full of pointless swearing and smoking and virtually impossible to follow.
It is that it is deeply hypocritical to use such resources to dwell on scandals of the past which were long ago uncovered and make us look good.
I'd like to see a drama about the present-day mass slaughter of abortion and the neglect of children resulting from mass divorce, which our liberated culture has created instead.
And:
The misery in Libya is indeed terrible. But so was the crazy and destructive war unleashed in 2011 on that country by David Cameron, who did not have a clue what he was doing.
He deserves to be despised for his folly just as much as the Blair Creature should be scorned for his similarly disastrous intervention in Iraq.
Overthrowing tyrants may be good box office, but if you replace them with anarchy, you have made people's lives far, far worse.
Apart from all the other bad outcomes they created, these two fools helped launch the colossal movement of peoples into Europe, which will change the history of our continent, and not necessarily for the better.
And:
Last week marked 50 years since I first began the trade of scribbling for a living.
In September 1973, I reported my first golden wedding, began my first shorthand classes with the demanding Mrs Whittaker, wrote up the results of my first flower show and covered my first trial in the magistrates' court, all under the stern eye of more experienced persons, for I was an actual indentured apprentice.
It was the same country yet wholly different, the people more individual and varied, the smells stronger (apart from that of marijuana, which was still pretty much illegal), and the pubs were closed most of the time.
There were masses of manual jobs. The police were visible, unpolitical and opposed to crime [no, like the monarchy, or the education system, or the BBC, or anything else that is alleged to have become "politicised", the police have always been political, since, like each of those, the very concept of them is profoundly so. The question is whose politics].
My newspaper was produced by a magical Victorian process of melted metal and great thundering rotary presses in a cavern under the newsroom, which we would all go and watch, if not busy, when they began to turn for the first edition each midday.
Meanwhile inflation was at 9 per cent and the Americans were overthrowing governments they did not like in violent putsches, which seems familiar.
And ordinary express trains had dining cars open on Sundays. Which seems like a dream.
no, like the monarchy, or the education system, or the BBC, or anything else that is alleged to have become "politicised", the police have always been political, since, like each of those, the very concept of them is profoundly so. The question is whose politics].
ReplyDeleteThat is utterly false and shows, like most of you types, you know nothing about British history. The police in Britain have never been political until the 1960's-it was one of the things that distinguished ours from the armed state-run gendarmes of the continent. Europe's police forces served the state and civil law (and thus the government) whereas our police were unarmed 'citizens in uniform' upholding a common law and serving the Crown and not the state. Robert Peel's 9 founding principles of British policing included: "To seek and preserve public favor...by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy."
And "To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty."
Peel's British police were originally small local forces prohibited even from carrying the firearms that were then legal for all other citizens and obliged to uphold the law without fear or favour.
Their long, slow politicization beginning under the Wilson Government and Roy Jenkins in particular is all charted in that excellent book A Brief History of Crime.
You are proving my point. You truly believe that your own politics are not political at all. Well, that has always been the basic Tory assumption, but it means that you cannot complain when the Tory Party does not do what you want.
DeletePeel was Home Secretary and then Prime Minister, twice in each case. The very concept of a Police Force is political; the clue is in the name. The State's ideology has changed several times since Peel's day, but it has always had one. It cannot not have one. And the Police have always enforced whatever it has been at the given time. That is what they are for.
He can still do it.
ReplyDeleteWhen he wants to.
DeleteYou are proving my point. You truly believe that your own politics are not political at al
ReplyDeleteYou’re missing the whole point. Peel’s founding principle for the Met was that the police served the law and not the government and never got involved in policy-whether that of his government of any other. That is what it means to be impartial and non political. The politicisation of the police started to occur when they were withdrawn from the streets, local forces were merged and nationalised, police training was centralised and the police placed under politically correct codes of practice. Macpherson then accelerated the process.
That has been, from the very start, a political proposition, in and of itself, and accordingly formulated by a highly partisan politician. The Police did not become politicised when they stopped automatically agreeing with people like you. By doing so, they always were. That was the idea.
DeleteJust as our judiciary and monarchy must never get involved in politics to maintain parliamentary sovereignty and the separation of powers, the police must maintain political impartiality in order to apply the law equally to all and retain the public consent which policing relies upon.
ReplyDeleteDo you want a gold star or something for that? Grow up.
DeleteThe State's ideology has changed several times since Peel's day, but it has always had one. It cannot not have one. And the Police have always enforced whatever it has been at the given time. That is what they are for.
ReplyDeleteI’ve rarely read a sentence that was more wrong. That is the opposite of what the police “are for”, at least until recently in this country. They are there to uphold a common law without fear or favour: the polar opposite of enforcing a particular governments ideology. They were originally called “citizens in uniform” as they were expressly not meant to be a political body serving the government of the day but to be literally “one of the people.”
You still don't get it. You never will. This is why they are called minor public schools.
DeleteThat is hilarious; I have never attended a public school. It’s especially hilarious as you still don’t even get what it means that the police to be non political. It simply means they don’t get involved in politics.
ReplyDeleteThat was the case until recent decades, as Peter says here and describes in his book.
The civilian nature of Britain’s original police and the notion of policing by consent is recognised the world over as the principal difference between them and the gendarmes of the continent, who were and are highly political and who thus have a totally different relationship with the public.
I was a Boy Scout, too. But I'm not now.
DeleteHitchens writes in the above column on Ukraine: “”A lot of US Republicans, not just the ghastly Trump, are also doubtful about the point of it.””
ReplyDeleteIndeed the only opposition to support for this war in both the U.S. Congress and Senate comes from Republicans. It’s Kosovo all over again.
If all leftists were as smart as both Hitchens brothers they’d realise these are leftwing wars and only the Right has a real reason to oppose these humanitarian interventions.
No Conservative MP opposed the war in Kosovo. Or in Afghanistan. Not one. There were indicative votes. Look them up. There was one of that party opposed to Libya, but still only one. The were 16 rebels on Iraq, but that was not very many.
DeleteHitchens thinks that whatever he thinks at the given moment, and that has varied widely during his long and possibly ending time on the Mail on Sunday, is conservatism. It very rarely is. On foreign policy, it never is. Ever.
Ukraine is where any antiwar right in Britain has gone to die. Who is there?
DeleteWho, indeed? Mind you there is no anti-war parliamentary Left on this, either.
DeleteEven in the United States, the view of neoconservatism as some sort of incubus is overstated. The signatories to the Project for the New American Century included impeccable old hands such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the wider pro-war movement embraced, and was embraced by, the likes of John Bolton, who had been hired as Spiro Agnew's intern by David Keene. These were no entryists.
There were some antiwar journalists on the British right back in the day, you knew a lot of them, but they were outside the rightwing mainstream then and any remaining are nowhere near it now. Most of them have lined up behind the war in Ukraine just as no Tory MP opposed the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. As you say, there were indicative votes so anyone can check.
DeleteIn America, again you even wrote for The American Conservative, but as you say paleoconservatism has never been the conservative or Republican mainstream, not even under Trump.
I am not sure that the paleocons have ever claimed to have been "the conservative movement, or the Republican Party, as it used to be". Certainly, they are not. Pat Buchanan's opposition to the war in Bosnia was a definitive break.
DeleteBefore that, then it had always been "Support Our Troops" no matter what. As it still is for most people on the Right, and especially for anyone with any claim to be in its mainstream, including its historical mainstream. In the United States. And in the United Kingdom.
Of the GOP field, only Trump and Ramaswamy are firmly against the war in Ukraine, with at least 11 more or less prowar candidates including several uberhawks. Among the Dems, it's two to one against, Kennedy and Williamson against Biden, and then there's West.
DeleteLike the liberal ones, no rightwing British newspaper opposed any of the wars, for that you needed the Morning Star and you still do. The likes of the Telegraph literally wanted to try opponents of the Iraq war for treason but they have taken basically that view of all the wars. That's the Anglo-Saxon right.
Williamson is not there yet, but she is on the way. No Republican candidate will make a similar journey. I am glad that paleoconservatism emerged, but that was what it did. It was not what had been there before. Major Nixon and Reagan figures were associated with what came to be called neoconservatism.
DeleteNothing like the emergence of paleoconservatism has ever happened in Britain, with the right-wing papers always hysterically gung-ho for any war even if they tolerated the odd dissentient columnist as a curiosity, and with few or no Conservative MPs ever opposing whatever intervention was being proposed. There are rarely very many liberal commentators or Labour MPs against a war, either. But until Ukraine, there had always been at least a few of the latter, and in the case of Iraq a lot of them.
The Left is always the backbone of the anti-war movement. Or at least it was, until Ukraine. Only a very small section of it still is, so that is the only anti-war movement that there still is. But we have been right about all the previous wars, of which only Iraq has been unpopular from the start, and we are right about this one.
Nowhere becomes Anglicised anymore, but the more Americanised a country becomes, then the more bellicose its Right becomes. That is happening right now in France.
Too true. John McDonnell is not that much of a surprise and the TUC is only to be expected but people like Andrew Fisher and Ian Lavery are desperately disappointing on Ukraine, not even Jeremy Corbyn ever says anything. In your words, "The Left is always the backbone of the anti-war movement." The odd columnist, and they are very odd indeed, does not add up to an anti-war Right. There isn't one. Now there's barely an anti-war Left either so there's effectively no anti-war movement.
DeleteThose very odd columnists often go in for pretending that things like the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Democratic National Committee were somehow left-wing, thereby allowing the likes of the BBC to claim to have been balanced when they have had only a Telegraph hawk and a Guardian on to agree with each other.
Delete