PETER HITCHENS: Why British-made tanks rolling into Russian villages may be good for Putin
If it weren't for the English Channel, and the Royal Navy, this country would either be a heavily armed police state or a subject province in someone else's empire.
Something similar goes for the USA, with the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other, and two feeble neighbours to north and south. Other countries don't have it quite so easy. Russia, for example, has no natural defences of this kind.
I do get tired of tough-guy commentators from London and Washington, prosing on about the Russia-Ukraine war, with a mixture of ultra-masculine bravado and moral purity. Now the macho supermen are exulting about Ukraine's invasion of Russia – in which British-made tanks are trundling through Russian villages.
Don't they grasp that this attack hands a gigantic long-term propaganda victory to the Moscow tyrant Putin? For years, he argued that eastward expansion of Nato would place a hostile alliance, armed by the Western powers, on Russia's border, 500 miles from Moscow.
For years, Western statesmen and commentators sniggered patronisingly at the very idea that expanding Nato was risky. Nothing to worry about, they insisted.
British-made tanks are trundling through Russian villages during the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine
Now, as Putin said they would, British and American armoured vehicles are churning up the landscape on the road to Kursk, a city that has huge emotional and historical significance in the Russian mind, especially thanks to the cruel, incredibly bloody fighting in and around it in the 1940s, fighting that ensured Hitler's final defeat.
In Russia, power has little to do with law or rules. The man who can show he can and will guard the nation becomes tsar. Power of this kind rests on raw force and total ruthlessness, and so Russia has almost always been an army with a country, rather than a country with an army.
The Russian word for 'safety' is quite unlike its English equivalent. That word is 'bezopasnost'. It is wholly negative. It means 'without danger'. Because, in Russia, danger is the normal default position. Western statesmen and media, mostly knowing nothing of Russia, fail to grasp this.
So instead of having a workable if cynical relationship with this enormous country, we are always either at Russia's throat or at its feet. In 1853, for example, we invaded Crimea. In the First World War we secretly offered Moscow ownership of Istanbul in return for help against the Kaiser.
In the Second World War, we gave the Kremlin Eastern Europe, in return for doing most of the actual fighting against Hitler. Now we feel tough again.
But I promise you it will not last. God help and comfort all the poor people fighting, dying, disabled, disfigured, homeless, ruined and bereft in this moronic, needless war, so that a few silly people can fancy they are the heirs of Churchill. Oh, and a reminder to Al 'Boris' Johnson. I am still keen to debate this issue with you, at your earliest convenience.
This soft policing of cannabis will only bring more tragedy
What is the connection between drug driver Alex Rankin, who ran a red light in her Ford Fiesta while under the influence of marijuana, and the horrible killings perpetrated by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham last year? What is the connection between Calocane's filthy crime and Ann Widdecombe, the last British politician to suggest serious prosecution of marijuana users?
I will tell you. This country's establishment, political, media, police and legal, is united in a desire to go soft on marijuana. We maintain a paper law against it. But we do not enforce it, and we stifle any attempt to have it enforced.
When Miss Widdecombe tried in 2000 to persuade the Tory Party to strengthen the law she was torpedoed by several Shadow Cabinet members, who systematically briefed against her, and so wrecked her plan.
In the 24 years since, the drug's use has become terrifyingly widespread. Police and courts have ceased even to take notice of it. Yet I have no doubt that the reason Calocane was severely mentally ill was his use of marijuana. His Nottingham neighbour reported that his home stank of the drug. No surprise to me.
Each time such a crime is committed, I wait for someone to say of the culprit: 'He was a nice, quiet boy till his teens, then he started smoking cannabis, and he changed…' But because the law is so weak, millions no longer see this dangerous poison as a drug at all.
Nottingham killer Valdo Calocane was mentally ill and was a marijuana-user
Alex Rankin, 27, ran a red light in her Ford Fiesta while under the influence of marijuana
So here we find suburban blonde mother Alex Rankin, 27, not perhaps what you think of when you hear the words 'dope smoker'. But amid the laughable excuses she offered for her action, it turned out that the levels of THC (marijuana's active ingredient) in her blood had exceeded the legal maximum of two micrograms per litre.
Legal maximum? Possession of marijuana is officially a serious crime, theoretically punished by up to five years in prison and an unlimited fine. How then can there be a legal maximum limiting how much of it is in your blood? It is painful to me to watch the relatives of Calocane's victims agonising about aspects of the crime nobody can or will do anything about.
The question is: 'Why are there so many dangerously mentally ill people on our streets?' The answer is: 'Marijuana'. And nothing is done about it because influential idiots still think it harmless and modish.
More will die. I am sick of warning and not being heeded. Will no one act?
Why I shop in a museum
I am often accused of living in the past, though it is far from true. But I now have to do my shopping in a museum. To be specific, I have had difficulty finding a shop (yes, I've heard of the internet) that sells Frank Cooper's Vintage Oxford Marmalade, almost black in colour and capable of standing up on its own without a jar.
But it turns out that it is on sale at the Museum of Oxford, which is where I'll buy it in future. I wonder what other essentials will soon be obtainable only in museums.
Frank Cooper's Vintage Oxford Marmalade
From a Metropolitan Police recruiting advertisement: 'You've stopped someone carrying a large amount of drugs. He's just a teenager. He's exhausted. He's scared. Not giving you his name. Where he's from or where he's going. He's broken the law.
But maybe he really needs your help.' It then says: 'Change needs empathy. Change needs you.' As I have long pointed out, our police are now paramilitary social workers, not police at all. What further proof do you need?
Major update in deaths of Kansas City Chiefs fans who 'froze to death' at friend's watch party
