Heart of a Dog

Down comes the statue of Mikhail Bulgakov in his native Kiev, where the ones of Alexander Pushkin were already long gone. Those who bewailed the toppling of the statues of slave traders never object to this cancellation of literary masters, despite never having heard of either.

Via the NATO member state of Turkey, IS fighters have been brought into Ukraine. Their suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge was under British direction. IS is part of the side that we are backing, and that side accordingly tears down the monuments to great art and thought.

Before the statues of Bulgakov and Pushkin, there were the Temples at Palmyra, where the Head of Antiquities, Dr Khaled al-Asaad, was publicly beheaded. And before Palmyra, there were the Buddhas of Bamiyan, blown up by those whom we fought in Afghanistan for 20 years before surrendering unconditionally. Pakistan claims that it has just killed 26 Taliban, and Afghanistan claims that Pakistan has just killed 13 noncombatants, mostly children. Believe both.

Pakistan is at war with Afghanistan because Narendra Modi has used the Taliban to take colonial possession of it. The Durand Line is as meaningless as the Sykes-Picot Line. The P in Pakistan is Punjab, the a is Afghania (i.e., the Pashtun homeland of which most of the area is in Afghanistan, but there remain two and a half times as many Pashtuns in Pakistan), the k is Kashmir, the i was added "for ease of pronunciation" to sound more Urdu and less Punjabi, the s is Sindh, and the tan is Balochistan. But of those, only Sindh has ever been wholly in Pakistan. Part of Bolchistan is in Afghanistan, while rather more of it is in Iran. It is fundamental to Pakistan that Amritsar, Kandahar and Srinagar are all naturally and rightfully Pakistani cities. And it is fundamental to Pakistan that so is Zahedan. 

Remember that when you consider that Pakistan was the principal broker between Iran and the United States, and that the United States had just bombed the Pilau-flagged by Indian-crewed Settebello off the coast of Oman. Here we go again. It is all very well for the Government to crack down on the proliferation of barbershops, vape shops and mini-marts as fronts for drug dealing, money laundering, prostitution, immigration crime, and much else besides. This time last year, I was hearing it all. But the Government never asks why those behind such operations had washed up in Britain in the first place.

Who is to demand such an account? Based on the Division Lists, neither Suella Braverman nor Robert Jenrick had the brass neck to attend the House of Commons today. One quarter of Reform UK's total number of MPs was Ministerially responsible for granting Hadi Alodid's indefinite leave to remain. Stephen Ogilvie's family says that his condition is stable, but what if he died? Would Braverman and Jenrick be right honourable enough to resign their seats?

And might there finally be a COBRA meeting? In April, there was one of those, and a national emergency was declared, in response to two nonfatal stabbings out of the 150 to 212 knife attacks committed per day in the United Kingdom, leading to the deployment of an extra 100 Police Officers who had apparently had nothing else to do, as well as the imposition of further obligations on universities and on cultural institutions, obligations of the kind that otherwise inspired derision from the quarters that were lauding them in that case. If Bloody Sunday had happened in England, Scotland or Wales, then the Government would have resigned the next day. Nothing has changed.