PETER HITCHENS: Reason must triumph over emotion or we risk our very own Trump
The likely next President of the USA has his mugshot taken as he faces racketeering charges. He doesn’t care. He is not ashamed to be put through a procedure designed to humiliate him. The current President of Russia makes little effort to pretend that he had nothing to do with the violent death of his enemy. He, too, does not care.
By 2025, it is quite possible that both these men will have control over huge nuclear arsenals. One of them already does.
We seem to be entering a time of troubles quite unlike anything in the modern era. Something similar gripped Europe in the middle 1930s, when reason flew away and did not return for many years. Can we do anything about it?
Oddly enough, I think we can and the key to it is to stop being swayed by crude emotion, especially in matters of politics.
It suited us all (me included) to believe that the Cold War was a simple conflict between good and evil. And so we rejoiced when Moscow’s Evil Empire fell.
Few made any serious effort to work out what to do next and I believe the Western democracies, especially the USA, failed terribly.
Look at Poland, ruined by Communism in 1989, then wisely rescued, subsidised and helped, so that it is now a wealthy, reasonably free and democratic country. Why could we not have achieved the same in Russia? It would have been a bigger job but it would still have cost us far less than the current mess is costing us and will cost us.
Was it perhaps because certain people in the West still felt bitterly towards Russia and wanted that country to remain weak and poor? It is a possible explanation. And I do not just mean money when I mention the cost. There are now credible suggestions that 70,000 Ukrainian young men, sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, have been killed in the war in that country, which I believe was totally avoidable. The real figure is a secret. Still more have been wounded, maimed and disfigured.
If you care (and I do, for it was not their choice) similar numbers of Russians and their families have suffered in the same way.
Even now, we look at this emotionally rather than reasonably. Any attempt to discuss bringing this war to an end with a lasting compromise is dismissed as little short of treason.
What if the war, which is always in danger of bursting beyond its current limits, pulls us down into the pit of conflict, loss, corruption and national poverty which now engulfs Ukraine?
Our politics are not that stable. Both our big parties are increasingly despised by people who were once their loyal voters. Powerful, passionate resentments are growing in our midst.
We may sneer at American supporters of the oaf, Donald Trump. But if we continue down our current path of debt, inflation and feeble government, with deepening war added to the mix, are we sure that we may not find and elect our own Trump before long? I am not.
List of squandered money is a lesson for us all
I still long for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to send a thank you letter to us taxpayers each year. Just a tiny acknowledgement would be good. But in the meantime, I am grateful to the Government for telling me what they are wasting, I mean spending my money on.
They tell me that 7.6 per cent of everything I pay is squandered on servicing the Government’s gigantic debt. This is a huge sum and it makes me very angry because it produces absolutely nothing – and because I learned the other day that the Government is now borrowing more money to pay the interest on what it already owes.
I think this is more or less mad. This is a larger share than they spend on Defence (5.1 per cent); Transport (4.7 per cent); ‘Public order and safety’ (4.4 per cent); and ‘Housing and utilities’ (1.6 per cent). The most, almost 23 per cent, goes on the Sacred NHS. Another 20.4 per cent on ‘welfare’, a figure which does not include the state pension (11 per cent). The worst state school system in the Western world swallows up 10.5 per cent. Overseas aid accounts for only 0.6 per cent, which came as a surprise to me.
I thought it was more and will now adjust my opinions. I have never objected to paying tax but our leaders, our Parliament and we ourselves should pay more attention to how it is spent. This list, which I think is now sent to all taxpayers, might help.
