PETER HITCHENS: Terror is stalking our streets but it has NOTHING to do with ISIS

As time goes by, the more convinced I am that drugs, especially marijuana, are an enormous problem, and indeed the main cause of mass murders. I fervently hope that sanity will one day prevail and that there will be sensible policies about them. I think it’s very good that PH keeps up the commentary on this topic.

Hector | 13 December 2019 at 02:59 AM :
*** Reasons to keep NATO
- NATO has kept the peace in Europe, you forget the reason for it in the first place, a series of continental wars which the usa needs to clean up - countries Eastern Europe which are in NATO have not been attacked by Russia or invaded in the last 20 years***

Would appear to be the sales pitch for a "protection racket".

*** - the process of joining NATO forces important socio economic reforms into the society wishing to join***

Oh, now let's see what that really means ... austerity, asset-stripping, cultural genocide thanks to convergence with the exceptionalist US-empire, imposition of political correctness and identity politics, and monopoly-capitalism as the only permitted economic -- and hence social -- system.
Ie. the fake "democracy" of not being allowed any options to choose between!
Now with prospective NATO enlargement via countries in Central and South America (for instance, Colombia which doesn't even have an Atlantic border) in which typically US trained and armed banana republic death-squads will -- as usual -- be available to ensure public compliance.
And of course everyone gets -- or is that has? -- to buy lots and lots of very expensive (and MIC corporate profitable) military hardware from the USA.

in reply to Mike B | 12 December 2019 at 12:21 PM ....

The millions of "refugees" with which Turkey has for some time now been threatening the EU are hardly likely to be supporters of the secular government (or its non-sectarian opponents) in Damascus, Syria.
Erdogan's regime has been running terrorist militias in Syria since the beginning of the conflict there, and (along with Qatar) supports the Moslem Brotherhood -- presently also a combatant in Libya.
Turkey was intending to fill the cease-fire zone in Syria along its northeast border area with these people -- ie. use the sectarians to effectively occupy and grab that zone on behalf of Turkey. The inconvenient presence of Kurds and Kurdish armed forces allied with the USA (and generally not at war with Damascus) has so far prevented that from being done.
When the whole of Idlib province is liberated from terrorist control there will be even more sectarian militants and their families -- some sponsored by Turkey, some not -- to be re-located to somewhere. A considerable number are not even Syrian. Turkey does not want a return of those it backed (including those who are ethnically Turkish) since they would then become a potential element of serious de-stabilisation within Turkey itself.
An already nervous EU would prefer not to take them, and the USA definitely would not. They would also be a threat to their countries of origin, where they'd rightly be regarded as terrorists anyway.
So when it comes to finding a place to deposit them ... well, which country happens to have a government that wouldn't hesitate to betray its indigenous population in favour of a commercial deal that enriched its regime's corporate cronies ... and an "opposition" in parliament which is too politically correct to object to that.

I think Boris picked up a wave of protest votes to silence the intellectuals calling for a people's vote on Brexit and a push back on this inclusivity and woke thing coming from the BBC.
In 2024 he will probably lose all those votes from a disappointed electorate.

Hector,

Russia was weakened in the decade or two after the fall of the Soviet bloc. In the last decade or two, the incursions of NATO up to the borders of Russia have certainly increased tension. If NATO has a positive role, that is arguably jeopardised, perhaps beyond repair, by its expansion into Eastern Europe.

C. Morrison

Glad to see you read the Yorkshire Post. It is one of the four daily papers available in the reading-room of my local library, and stands well above the other three for devoting space to all sides of the debate in terms of politics. There is little mention of activities that I would describe as 'titillation for the masses'. Readers' letters also appear to receive fair coverage.

All in all, as a newspaper, it takes me back to better days, when most publishers had far more reason to be proud of their newspaper.

SB | 13 December 2019 at 04:52 PM :
*** In 2024 he will probably lose all those votes from a disappointed electorate.***

Too late.....
By 2024 the 'Boris' regime's neo-liberal ideologically driven excesses and fanatical subservience to the US empire will have inflicted so much damage on Britain that repair might never be possible.
Seriously questionable whether the UK will even exist any more by then, since Scotland and Northern Ireland are quite likely to have been split away ...
Little wonder the 2019 election was configured in such a one-issue way as to exclude any detailed dissection and discussion of overall policies, agendas or longer-term implications.

By 2024 the 'Boris' regime's neo-liberal ideologically driven excesses and fanatical subservience to the US empire will have inflicted so much damage on Britain that repair might never be possible.
Posted by: C. Morrison | 14 December 2019 at 01:46 PM

If the political left continue believing in this sort of fantasy world, as they have traditionally done, I think that Boris is virtually certain for a landslide in 2024 as well. It’s probably this sort of ridiculous scaremongering that lost Labour a large number of votes, people have heard it all before and just see straight through it.

C Morrison,

How likely is it really that Scotland will secede by 2024? Surely Johnson, for good reason, won't let them vote. We can't have rolling referenda. The Scots only voted five years ago. Once a generation is surely enough. The SNP shouldn't, and probably won't, get their referendum until the 2030s. And who knows what will have happened by then. They seem to be governing badly, so their popularity may well sink by 2024, let alone 2030.

Ulster will leave when the Catholics are a majority. That won't happen by 2024.

Jopres57 | 14 December 2019 at 09:10 PM :
***.. continue believing in this sort of fantasy world ***

What's "fantasy" about national assets being handed to tax-evading crony profiteers, or sold abroad?
What's "fantasy" about the bankers and City of London being perpetually pampered at the expense of the country and its population?
What's "fantasy" about prodigious amounts of money being expended on armaments that can only be used to serve the purposes of a foreign empire and its corporate controllers?