All That Post-Brexit Uncertainty

A friend of mine used to say that the only certainty in life was its uncertainty.

He wasn’t a quantum physicist parroting the principle associated with Werner Heisenberg in 1927. My friend described himself as a romantic capitalist who liked the adventure of entrepreneurship. He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 47, a couple of years after surviving a serious cancer operation in London.

Uncertainty has been a feature of daily life ever since Albert Einstein proved that space is curved and time is not linear. If the behaviour of a quantum particle is unpredictable why should packets of quanta in the shape of human beings be any different?

And yet, post-Brexit, all you hear on the BBC and see in most of the papers, is that the UK is in a state of uncertainty. Some people have short memories. I remember that before June 23 uncertainty was rife about a number of things – the state of the NHS, the Cameron Government’s borrowing deficit, the likelihood of Roy Hodgson’s England football team achieving something notable in the European Championships.

We were far from certain about whether the summer would be sunny or changeable.

But now it seems all manner of things are being blamed for the uncertainty created by the Referendum vote to leave the European Union. Travel firms go bust – post-Brexit uncertainty is the reason given. The Governor of the Bank of England talks about cutting interest rates and then doesn’t do it – post-Brexit uncertainty is the reason given. Prime Minister Theresa May appoints Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary – post-Brexit uncertainty is…wait a minute, I’ll come on to that later.

The 67 years that constitute my timeline from 1949 could be described as The Age of Uncertainty, like one of the books making up the Roads to Freedom triology of novels by Jean Paul Sartre.

The Labour Government from 1974 to 1979, in which Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson halfway through, was the embodiment of uncertainty, principally because of the dependency of support from other political parties.

Lucky Jim lost the 1979 General Election after Labour’s prolonged uncertainty turned into the Winter of Discontent. Out of piles of uncollected bags of rubbish on the streets of London, Margaret  Thatcher emerged triumphant, Britain’s first female Prime Minister and a template, did she but know it, for the daughter of Eastbourne clergyman Hubert May and his wife Zaidee.

The Cuban Missile crisis of October 1962, the assassinations of President John F Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King and the collapse of Soviet Communism between 1989 and 1991, generated enormous uncertainty, as did the near total collapse of American banking and finance between 2007 and 2008. Remember that one?

Uncertainty has been part of life for longer than I can remember. I don’t suppose the Romans waiting for the arrival of Alaric’s barbarians in 410 AD looked upon the immediate future as a glass half full.

But just as there are always people who hope for certainty, there are those who refuse to accept the result of votes that go against them.

Assuming that the House of Commons doesn’t follow Tony Blair’s advice and vote down the EU Referendum result, the question of whether we should remain or leave has been settled - after all the past broken promises. The time has come to start shaping the future.

The ill-informed petulance of those who wanted to remain in the past has surprised and rattled me. What did they imagine they belonged to? A country with no name, no flag, no history or tradition, an all-inclusive borderless zone invisibly managed by a benign unelected bureaucracy?

Probably most of them are below the age of 43 and have no living memory of the way Britain was signed up for the European Communities Act in 1972, a process that included the gerrymandering of votes in the House of Commons contrived by the whips of both Edward Heath’s Tory Government and Harold Wilson’s Labour Opposition. 

Probably most of them have no memory or even interest in Britain’s pre-history of the EU, when this country was one of seven members of the European Free Trade Association. Efta, formed in 1960 to facilitate trade rather than a political idea, lost three of its members to the European Economic Community, Britain included. By one of history’s little ironies, freeing ourselves from the political octopus of the EU is likely to mean re-joining Efta. which now comprises Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. All four countries appear to be doing better than some of those who left, not only in trade but in football as well.

Probably most of the Remainers believe that continued membership of the EU means protecting the planet from man-made climate change. They won’t be pleased about Theresa May’s decision to scrap the Climate Change department as an independent entity and merge it with business and environment.

Probably most of them think that the EU embodies the equivalent of the United Nations: a consensus of national interests mitigated by four freedoms: free movement of people, goods, services and money.

Probably most of the Remainers think that leaving the EU inevitably means less freedom and more constraints; less altruism, less generosity and more selfishness.

Probably most of them really do believe that Britain is more prosperous inside the EU, not realising that we currently have a trade deficit in the region of £96 billion because we buy more from other EU member states than they buy from us. In short we import more from the EU than we export and our exports to Euroland are falling principally because of trade with countries in other parts of the world.

Probably most of them regard the EU as a bastion of peace and goodwill in a factitious world of national and sectional conflicts. The EU is a cosy harbour offering protection to 28 countries from the currents and storms beyond the arms of the harbour wall in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now they feel all at sea or they think that Britain is all at sea. For a country with a long maritime history and tradition this response is odd.

Would the EU have prevented World War II, had Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter’s post World War 1 ambition been realised in time to stop Hitler’s rise to power in 1933?

The League of Nations didn’t. Hitler could have been stopped had Britain and France taken unilateral action in 1936 when Nazi Germany unilaterally re-occupied the Rhineland; but they didn’t and Hitler prospered.

Those who believe the EU’s hands are cleaner of blood than Pontius Pilate’s should take the trouble to look again at the break-up of former Yugoslavia in the wake of the collapse of the political entity known as the Soviet Union.

They should also re-examine what happened in Ukraine following political advances made by the EU.

And those troubled by refugee boat people fleeing conflicts largely stemming from political and military adventures by Britain and the US in the Middle East might ask themselves why the EU failed to respond adequately to the crisis.

Some commentators are now saying that Theresa May has set up her new Cabinet to sabotage Brexit. According to this interpretation the appointment of David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson is the equivalent of three men in a leaky boat up a creek without a paddle.

I always thought Mrs May was regarded as a pretty dull woman, not noted for cunning. In the six years of her life as a Cabinet Minister under David Cameron, I cannot recall anybody either praising or damning her for Machiavellian super-subtlety.

Barbara Castle once observed of Margaret Thatcher that when she metamorphosed from leader of the Opposition to Prime Minister her confidence and authority visibly grew with the job. Can this have happened to Theresa May?

If it has, why would she risk jeopardising her own Government and the future of the country it is supposed to represent by engineering a political catastrophe or, in the language of the EU, a ‘beneficial crisis’ that results in Baby Bunting Britain hurrying back into the swaddling arms of the EU?

Personally I think her three appointments have more to do with balancing conflicting elements in the Conservative Party – for the time being. The way things are now may not be the shape of things to come, especially if EU member states are subject to further damaging economic and migration crises.

Meanwhile there is a lot of background reading and talking to do by officials being recruited into the new department for leaving the EU, a necessary prelude to mapping out a strategy whether or not it is on the lines of the six-stage process detailed by Richard North’s protean Flexcit magnum opus.

Dr North, who seems to prefer notoriety to popularity, nevertheless has gifted the UK one tremendous idea: that leaving the EU is not an event but a process. This means it wasn’t accomplished on June 23; the result of the Referendum was an instruction to the Government to proceed, nothing else. Achieving it is going to be painstaking and demand a lot of time and patience.

Pieces to camera by excitable TV news journalists should be regarded as light entertainment. The process of working out the details is not going to be dramatic. Any attempt to sex it up should not be heeded. 

Time for Britain to Cut the Tie with America as Well

Having announced our intention to formally remove ourselves from the European Union, I hope that in future a British government will take steps to cut the Gordian Knot that binds us to the United States.

The "special relationship" referred to by David Cameron in the House of Commons today appears to be extremely one-sided. The current US President feels free to lecture British people about the merits of remaining subject to the control of an unelected, unaccountable European Commission, warning us that in the event of us ending that control we would lose out on future trade agreements with the United States.

I hope we do. I am sure this country could do a lot better by cutting loose from protectionist America which ensures that every deal it does benefits its own people at the expense of everyone else. Britain has paid off the Lend-Lease debt imposed by the United States during World War 2. Since then we have spent mega billions buying into American nuclear missile systems that we are never likely to use and all for the benefit of American armaments manufacturers.

American bankers and market traders wrecked the economies of the West in 2007/8, making fortunes for themselves by dealing in mortgages that were virtually worthless, bequeathing us budgetry austerity ever since. Thanks guys. You sure know how to treat your allies.

And now we know that a former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, told former President George W Bush, a year before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that he, Blair, was "with him all the way." And he was. In Iraq, then in Afghanistan. Six hundred and thirty-two British service personnel came back from those places in coffins. Hundreds more returned in wheelchairs.

Tony Blair evidently decided that Bush junior needed support in his attempt to live up to his father, George senior, and glorify his presidency with the laurels of military victory. I heard Blair apologists say today that in 2003 Iraq's President Saddam Hussein was a dangerous unknown quantity who, following 9/11, might supply Islamic terror groups with stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Britain and the United States probably supplied Saddam with the technology between 1980-88 when, on their behalf, he sent his soldiers against the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was their regional ally. Al Qaeda was never active in Iraq when he was in power. That only happened two or three years after the American-led coalition invasion in 2003.

Go back a bit futher if you like to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the former USSR, the time-scale of which almost exactly parallels the Iraq-Iran War. If the United States had not poured millions of dollars as well as weapons of massive destruction into Afghanistan (via Pakistan) to equip and train the mujahidin, the whole bloody mess that followed, and which prevails today, might not have happened. One of the consequences of that particular insurgency was the formation of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group of trans-national Islamic fighters.

In short the United States helped to create the state of the world that now exists between Afghanistan and Africa by meddling in matters of no long-term interest to Washington. My last American hero was not President J F Kennedy but General George Marshall without whose plan, backed by about 17 billion dollars, much of Western Europe would not have so rapidly recovered after World War 2.

There was no such long-sighted, well-funded, plans for either Afghanistan or Iraq. I wouldn't be surprised if George W Bush had never heard of George Marshall. Do US presidents, as a rule, understand that other countries of the world do not exist specifically for the purpose of supporting the economic/political/military interests of America?

I dare say I won't see Britain cut the tie with the Star Spangled banner in my lifetime. But then I thought that about the European Union.

The Referendum, Jo Cox and Democracy

Amid the Diana-fication, almost the beatification, of murdered backbench Labour MP Jo Cox, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that Thursday’s referendum is simply that: it is not a General Election.

Judging by the way the media has pitched the whole contest as a scrap between Prime Minister David Cameron and Tory Rival Boris Johnson and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, you’d be forgiven for thinking that if the majority vote is in favour of leaving the EU, that will mean a change of resident at 10 Downing Street.

It won't. If the Leave campaign wins the man tasked with the responsibility of starting the long process of disengagement with Brussels won’t be either Mr Johnson or Mr Farage, but Mr Cameron – if he decides to stay as Prime Minister until his second term ends in 2020.

Daft as it may be to state the obvious, I have a feeling that there are people out there who think this is a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all party political battle. As others have pointed out elsewhere the ownership of the Referendum is not the politicians but the public. Nor does it belong to the spectre of a slain MP.

Jo Cox did not die for democracy, she did not choose to martyr herself for the good of the cause. As far as anybody knows she was picked on and attacked out of the blue. If she had had a premonition of what was about to happen, I’m sure she would have done her best to have avoided it, at the same time ensuring that nobody else got hurt inadvertently.

I can understand the desire to make a collective public expression of sadness, if it helps people to deal with their anger, bewilderment or sorrow. But the immediate elevation of this reportedly personable woman to ‘stardom’ in the parliamentary firmament – first by the Prime Minister and then by sundry other politicians and journalists – struck entirely the wrong note for me.

And if this process continues when Parliament specially reconvenes on Monday I think public sympathy might turn to irritation, not about Jo Cox but with those exploiting her murder to say something sententious, not to say tendentious, about the current state of democracy in this country and its representatives.

Remember, in May 2008 – long before Jo Cox was elected to be an MP - the House of Commons lost a High Court case to prevent public disclosure of MPs’ expenses. Subsequently, these guardians of democracy tried to scupper proposed expenses reforms.

They eventually agreed to piece-meal reforms after forcing the Labour Government of Gordon Brown to drop a proposal to scrap the allowance for second homes.

In May, 2009, The Daily Telegraph printed a long series of articles from leaked computer discs highlighting some of the practices common in Parliament, such as ‘flipping’ homes to maximise expenses claims and changing the designation of second homes to avoid paying Capital Gains Tax.

The public, on the receiving end of austerity cuts, whose sons and daughters are killed in foreign wars allegedly in defence of freedom and democracy, whose homes are burgled and property stolen usually without any satisfaction of justice, tend to have the same regard for politicians, in both Westminster and Brussels, that they have for journalists and the groomers of children.

The memory of Jo Cox’s life should be honoured. It should not be used as emotional propaganda by those with another agenda.

Show Us Yer Joy

While campaigners for Britain leaving the European Union squabble about facts and tactics the more astute among them might pick up on a point made today by journlaist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris.

He told an ITV news journalist that both the campaigns for remaining in the EU and leaving it tended to accentuate the negative: staying in was better than taking the risk of leaving, staying in would do more harm than leaving. Parris wondered why the remain campaign was so lacking in uplift: if being a part of EU was worth the time, trouble and expense, surely it was worth shouting about.

A good point, I thought, especially as the June 23 referendum is likely to be decided by the more than 20 per cent of people questioned by pollsters who say they haven't made up their minds which direction the country should take.

Are the undecideds likely to be excited by the Prime Minister declaring in his most plausible head boy fashion that Britain will be safer, stronger and better off in a "reformed EU" than outside it, like poor old Norway for example. It's a pretty uninspiring message especially when repeated, more or less, by uninspiring Opposition MPs such as Labour's Yvette Cooper.

The bland leading the bland.

If, as David Cameron claims, Britain is safer inside the EU marquee rather than outside it, he should explain why since 1973 mainland Britain has been subject to at least 65 terrorist attacks, killing more than 380 people, maiming and wounding thousands and costing billions. These include the M62 coach bomb attacck in 1974 which killed 11, the Birmingham pub bombings the same year which accounted for another 19, the 1988 Panam bombing over Lockerbie which killed 270 and the London bombings in 2005 which killed 52 and injured more than 700. Add on the bombings and shootings over three decades in Northern Ireland from 1968 and the casualties and costs mushroom.

While the EU in its various incarnations since 1973 cannot be blamed for the Provisional IRA or Al Qaeda, what has it done to justify David Cameron's assertion that membership has made us safer? Globally, of course, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning junta in Brussels has proved to be extremely dangerous. It encouraged the atomisation of former Yugoslavia following the end of Communism in Europe and the rage for independence that followed and had a hand in causing the bloodshed in western Ukraine by trespassing in Russia's sphere of influence. Latterly, the EU stands accused of making the refugee problem worse by offering blandishments to Turkey to act as a border guard for south-eastern Europe. On top of all this, of course, the EU's iron law of freedom of movement has led to a million or more economic migrants from Poland, Albania, Rumania, Spain and elsewhere coming to the UK.

You may say, so what? If you did I would reply that neither I nor anybody I know actually voted in any general election favour of any of this. It happened because decisions were made and taken elsewhere and simply adopted first by the Labour Government of 2004/5 and subsequently by the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition from 2010 to 2015.

Let's face it, the EU does not have an encouraging democratic track record. It has a history of ignoring national referendums when the result is not as expected. The people of the Netherlands, France and the Republic of Ireland were told to think again when they, respectively, voted against proposed EU treaties. Leave campaigners appear to have forgotten this in the heat of the debate about whether Britons  - "who never, never shall be slaves", according to the national anthem - should remain or go. Come on chaps, look back in anger at the crap that's been going on since 1973: the wine lakes, the butter mountains (in support of French farmers), the fish thrown back in the sea (in support of a fisheries policy contrary to our interests), the dotty carbon capture policies costing us billions and making millions for India's Tata Steel. Next time you hear business leaders and experts advocating continued EU membership for the sake of the economy, look back at the farce of Britain's short-lived membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and what happened in September 1992. John Major's Government was forced to spend billions to maintain sterling's value on international markets in defence of this discredited system.

It's not as though the European empire has generated any interesting art, literature or music in the last 43 years - unlike the Roman Empire or Napoleon III's French Empire. The only bit of music associated with it that I can think of is the Ode to Joy finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A rousing and glorious blast of triumph appropriated by a bunch of furtive federalists. Ludvig would not have been amused. So come on, all you remainers, let's see the expression of your joy. Show the doubters and the truculent Europhobes something other than the usual spurious arguments. At least the leavers have a plan, Richard North's 420-page FLEXCIT, contrary to all the chundering in the media. For those who haven't world enough and time there is a 48-page summation available for a fiver called The Market Solution. Added to thse two documents, there is a new edition of The Great Deception, the history of the European 'project' that Dr North wrote with Christopher Booker, a copy of which I recently bought. In short, the leavers, in the words of Sir Humphrey, have well and truly "nailed their trousers to the mast". Which means they can't climb down.

In 1975, on the occasion of the first referendum about Britain's membership of the European Economic Community - the "Common Market" as it was deliberately and misleadingly called -  doubters were assured that joining Europe would make the country more prosperous, stronger, safer even. Forty years and 65 terrorist attacks later the wine lakes and butter mountains have been replaced by an Everest of debt and a schedule of Government borrowing that runs into billions every month. The money given back to Britain by the EU comes from us in the first place.

How different it all is from when I were a lad in Walthamstow, London E17, and Harold Wilson could be heard on the wireless worrying about Britain's "balance of payments", a matter of a few millions either in the black or the red. We thought the news was bad then. Little did we know.

Bombing the Soft Europeans

The departure terminal at Brussels airport was made to look like parts of Syria after the two Islamic State bomb attacks yesterday. And I suppose that was part of the purpose, to show soft Europeans what it's like to be on the receiving end of an unexpected bomb.

What the bearded holy terrorists may not know or if they do, understand, is that us soft Europeans have been on the receiving end of bombs of all sorts. We have a tradition of being bombed that goes back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the ill-fated Paris Commune that followed and two World Wars. 

Seventy years ago in July, 1946,  militant Zionist terrorists blew up part of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing more than 90 British military personnel and others. In fact, post 1945 the British have been bombed and shot at all over the world, especially in Northern Ireland. Central London, Guildford, Birmingham and Manchester have all been visited by bombers. Provisional IRA, IS or Al Qaeda, the result is always the same: splintered lives and blood up the walls.

Much of what I wrote in this blog on November 14, 2015, after the Paris shootings, stands for what I think now. My only wish is that television news would show a little more judicious discrimination in what they broadcast. How does showing people running away from a bomb site help anyone but those organising these attacks? And why do the earnest and well-meaning insist on buying into the regularly offered explanation of poverty, deprivation and disenfranchisement, for the radicalisation of young Muslims?

I've heard that excuse trotted out for more than 30 years. The result, certainly in Bradford, has been renewed efforts to adapt mainstream society and culture to the needs and demands of minority groups, accompanied by the usual press release superlatives, 'vibrant', even 'vibrancy', 'diverse' and 'community', as though the various sectors of the people who live here identify with one religious or cultural tendency. In fact, just for the record, life here is a lot more sectarian, tribal, clannish, than that simplification allows.

Crying the poor mouth, as the Irish say, is the usual way of staking a claim to resources. Ordinary people, by whom I mean working class white trash who don't work in education, local government, the media or the Church of England, don't fall for that. The others do. Some of them.

The earnest and well-meaning assume that the deprived and disenfranchised carry out the shootings and bombings. They don't. It's the educated, sometimes university-educated righteous brothers, who seek to impose martyrdom on total strangers. It's not money and opportunities these people lack but humility. 

Let's face it, yesterday was not a good day for the European Union. Prime Minister David Cameron has several times declared that due to Britain's membership of the EU, British people are "safer" and, by inference, the peoples of the 27 other members states are safer too. Safer until the next surprise attack sends body bags and reporters to another European city.

Winning the Referendum - for the Outsiders.

Whether or not Richard Nixon's special counsel Charles Colson had a cartoon on his wall with the legend: 'When you get 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow', the fact is that remains a terrible piece of advice.

It guarantees that come the day you relax your grip of said appendages their owners will turn on you and kick your arse - out of power. Forever. Yet between now and Thursday, June 23, the day when the people of the UK have the opportunity to vote to leave the European Union - the biggest single confidence trick of the modern era - we can expect a great deal of ball-squeezing to persuade the credulous to stick with what they are used to rather than risk change.

A host of rich and prize-winning celebrities from entertainment and politics will get extensive air-time and print space to hammer home the vital importance of 'staying in Europe' for the sake of trade, security, defence and inclusivity. The United States, they will be told, is in favour of Britain staying in the EU. That strikes me as a pretty good reason for baling out of the leaky boat that constitutes the EU's ship of state.

The issue is not the continent of Europe but the artificial political construct currently known as the European Union but which in previous incarnations was the European Economic Community ansd the European Community. The name of this federal state seems to be different with every significant treaty change so that Joe Public is never sure what he belongs to or what it means, leaving the way open for old Europhile politicical grandees like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine to talk down to them in tried and trusted cliches about Britain's position 'at the top table' of world affairs.  

Nor is the issue a black and white conflict between 'Little Englander' nationalism and pan-europeanism. It is about whether the free peoples, or allegedly free peoples, of the United Kingdom want to go on being part of an unaccountable  political organisation that arbitrarilly takes their money and tells them what they cannot do. I recognise that there are occasional readers of this blog who believe that membership of this organisation has enhanced the well-being of many people. In my opinion the EU, in its various forms, inadvertently started the war in Yugoslavia and damned nearly dragged us into military conflict with Russia by trying to sign up Western Ukraine as an associate EU member - the status that is being offered to David Cameron.

I think those BREXIT factions currently sniping at each other over who has and hasn't got the better exit plan have lost sight of what an amazing turn of events the forthcoming referendum represents.Three years ago, the likelihood of a Conservative Prime Minister, a professed supporter of EU membership, putting such a referendum into place was as remote as Leicester City topping the Premiership table. Armchair strategists felt confident in ridiculing anyone who looked forward to the day when that would happen. And when the unlikely looked highly likely they ridiculed the idea that the referendum might take place sooner rather than later, later being 2017.

The Prime Minister has put himself in this precarious position, partly to try to steal the thunder of the UK Independence Party of Nigel Farage and partly to prevent he Conservative Party in Parliament from being torn asunder on the issue of EU membership as was the party of David Cameron's predecessor John Major. Will his gamble pay off, will this turn out to be for him a beneficial crisis? If you beome transfixed by the know-alls, then yes, probably he will win the day on June 23.

I think it entirely depends on whether the out campaigners have the humility to learn a lesson from the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. His unexpected victory was due entirely to popular support from the electorate at large, not the Parliamentary Labour Party, its fellow travellers and their cronies in the media. That's why the media has spent so much time subsequently undermining Mr Corbyn (ironically an advocate of EU membership), for he is there without their benediction. 

The referendum will be influenced by Question Time, Any Questions, staged televised debates and the Today programme, just as it will be influenced by blogs; but it will be won by those who go out into the country and address public meetings. This is what Jeremy Corbyn did, and he won overwhelmingly. This referendum won't be won on fine-print details, as some purists would wish, but on blood and guts passion and conviction. David Cameron is adept at that. But Nigel Farage is better, and he has the advantage of knowing the EU from the inside.

Our balls have been in the hands of lying Europhiles since the last referendum in 1975, when they told us that memebership of the EEC was vital for Britain's economic future. They knew all along that the project was really about creating a federal political state. The time has come to kick their arses once and for all and get out into the sunnier uplands of the wider world.

The Night of the Jihadis...Revisited

The last time I saw Paris, in early May 2011, there was a bomb scare near the Quai d’Orsay. The streets, busy with bug-eyed tourist coaches, cars and hooting scooters, were patrolled by blue-uniformed armed police.

A few days before, American Seals had stolen into Pakistan under the cover of darkness and assassinated Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. French news magazines were full of it. Bin Laden’s bearded face shone in hot sunshine on all the glossy covers on news-stands. Evidently the French were apprehensive of retaliation by Islamic jihadis.

Twelve years earlier, in late March 1999, a writer friend and myself spent a long weekend in the capital of love to celebrate the publication of a couple of books and to see the exhibition of David Hockney’s three Grand Canyon paintings at the ugly Pompidou Centre. 

On the afternoon of our departure the streets were full of armoured vehicles and CRS men in their dark blue airmail hats. NATO had just started bombing Serbia in response to the crisis in the Balkans. Tomahawk Cruise missiles were flying. The French authorities feared some kind of backlash in the city. Coincidentally, the length of the Pont des Arts bridge was full of larger than life statues of falling US Seventh Cavalrymen and Sioux Indians gripping – tomahawks. The Battle of the Little Big Horn had come to Paris.

I happened to be re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal round about the time of the latest massacre of innocents in Paris. The eight masked Islamic State kamikaze nihilists must have been making their final preparations while I was reading. The book begins and ends with attempts to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle, first by members of the French military disillusioned by Government policy over Algeria (the Secret Army Organisation), then by a British hit-man, code-named Jackal, hired by the OAS. Against vast odds - many thousands of patrolling police oficers and paramilitary men - the Jackal comes within a whisker of killing the President. Part of the fascination of this story, first published in 1971, is that the reader watches the Jackal making his detailed preparations including four changes of identity. The security forces are always chasing, never lying in wait. If a fictional lone gunman could come close to destroying the status quo then why not a real group of trained and determined gunmen utterly indifferent to their own safety?

De Gaulle survived seven or eight attempts on his life; he even survived the 1968 student revolution which occupied the streets of Paris and the university quarter of Nanterre. That bout of street-fighting, replicated in Berlin, London and Chicago, was in part triggered by the (undeclared) Vietnam War. Although widespread and intense, exciting much fervour among the impressionable young and older intellectuals, the revolt did not result in casualties on anything like the scale of either the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January this year (20 murdered) or these November killings (129 dead and counting).

The French have known nothing like it since the war for independence in Algiers. In that murderous encounter, embittered by the French defeat in Vietnam in 1954, the French Government felt obliged to agree to talks with its enemy and eventually to withdraw from Algeria. I don't think they'll be doing the same in this case because this is not a battle for independence but war on a way of life.

All this the world well knows – doesn’t it? I thought so until I watched some of the television reporting of the latest killings. That Islamic gunmen, driven by religious fervour, anger at French military action in Syria and a shoot-to-kill policy, should take to the streets of Paris and open fire on civilians seemed to come as a complete surprise to some. It was as though they had no knowledge of recent history. Militant Islam's war on the West started in the mid-1970s with Black September, the late Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation and continuing through the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, the 1989 fatwah against Salman Rushdie and thereafter the rise of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan (funded by the United States), followed by the religious nihilists of the Taliban, Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and latterly the black-masked killers of Islamic State.

Going back further, the jihad against the godless West has been going on ever since General Gordon was killed in Khartoum by the Mahdi’s forces in January 1885 – 130 years ago. In Afghanistan it goes back to the early decades of the 19th century when the British made a bad choice of allies among tribesmen and ended up sending a punitive expedition from India through the Kyber Pass and into Kabul.

In the book We Love Death As You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists by Rafaello Pantucci, director of International Securities Studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security (founder, the Duke of Wellington), the point about the longevity of militant Islam’s war with the West is re-stated:-

The reality is that while British security services understand much better the networks they are dealing with and what radicalisation looks like, there is still very little understanding of how to counter and de-radicalise.

Among the wider radical community, numerous arrests and lengthy incarcerations have not stopped a steady number of young Britons posting radical material online, attending meetings or seeking out others with similar ideas with whom they can plot and form secret communities.

Britain’s jihad has been underway for decades, and the appeal of the ideas that underlie it has proved remarkably resilient.

Three main drivers usually have to be in place before individuals become involved in terrorism: ideology, grievance and mobilisation. How they coalesce is dictated by random events and how individuals respond to a given situation, factors that are difficult to forecast.

In his book Pantucci explains each of these three factors in detail, giving them an historical context. Like the emblems in a fruit machine, they have to be aligned in order to drive an individual to terrorism.

One of the problems of this murderous conflict is the different application of the word ‘martyr’. The Christian and post-Christian West associates martyrdom with self-sacrifice, not the taking of the lives of others. Usually this conscious act of existential self-abnegation is undertaken by an individual who lays down his or her life for others or in support of an idea. The eight Islamic State killers in Paris killed or wounded hundreds of others to justify their adopted nihilism and their own acts of self-immolation. Clearly they had no conscience about doing this because they believed that the people they were shooting and bombing were infidels.

To fall into this category appears to have little to do with belief in God or Allah; it’s more to do with the Islamic caliphate as defined by the leaders of Islamic State. Their followers happily kill fellow Muslims - Shias - wherever they find them. The military forces of the West may have killed 100,000 Muslims in the ‘shock and awe’ attack on Iraq in 2003; but in the eight year war between Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran (the West supported Iraq in that one) more than a million Muslims were killed. Few if any Muslims in this country felt compelled to join in. It didn't seem to be a public issue with them at the time even though the West tacitly supported Iraq.

The West’s military meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan undoubtedly played a part in educating disaffected young Muslims in the art of insurrection and insurgency. Islamic State is one of the consequences. The refugee crisis now bewildering the European Union is a concomitant consequence of that. Again, all this the world well knows – at least I thought it did. 

But the heart is also involved as well as the head. All day the sombre weight of what happened in Paris has been upon me.That weight has been there so many times in the past it's a wonder I have any humanity left. Gruesome newsreels of so many wars, civil wars, acts of genocide, terror attacks and hatefulness have been a constant feature of life since Korea in the early 1950s. Thirty of my nearly sixty-seven years were besieged by Northern Ireland, a conflict which the late Denis Healey said he could not imagine an end to. 

I felt the same about the terrible civil war in Lebanon when various religious militias tore into each other and the fabric of the country. Thirty years ago or more Beirut was like Aleppo and other Syrian cities now. In the early Nineties it was the turn of Sarajevo. I had hoped the 21st century would be different from its blood-boltered predecessor. Fifteen years down the road I'm still hoping; but then, as Russians say, hope is the last thing to die.