Putin is full of bluff but Russia is weak, says FREDERICK FORSYTH

Our counter-spooks chose well when they advised the Prime Minister whom to chuck out. Entire networks have been crippled and will not be easily or quickly reestablished.

And this has not been just in the UK. We also advised foreign governments pretty shrewdly as well.

With our usual self-deprecation we tend to prevent the British people knowing just how good our own services really are and how they are respected by our friends and allies.

Behind the scenes, so I am told, secret services right across Europe would be devastated if EU negotiator Barnier fails to realise in his arrogance that any diminution of our contribution to the EU-wide intelligence capacity would be regarded as an unmitigated disaster.

We have a huge asset there. Let’s hope our negotiators use it. Vladimir Putin postures and threatens but the real state of his armed forces is a fraction of what he claims.

Much is run down, out of date, obsolescent. That is why his modernisation programme is so frantic. But it is costing him a staggering amount of money. This is coming from his oil and gas revenues.

If Western Europe could fulfil its oil/gas needs from another source his arms expenditure would sunder.

That is why the silly snowflakes preventing us from even sinking test bores to see if we could follow the USA in making ourselves self-sufficient, even able to replace his Gazprom in fuelling Europe, are doing us no favours at all.

As North Sea oil runs out we have to keep the lights burning and the houses warm from another source. Wind farms provide a fraction of what we need.

Wood pellets from America are filthier than now-discredited coal. It could be the answer is beneath our feet. As for Putin, his aggressive chauvinism is immensely popular with the Russian masses.

But people are fickle. If their gas/oil prosperity falters they could change. It is the Russian economic frailty and the West’s strength in that arena that gives us the real edge.

________________________________________________

It is artificial intelligence, or the lack of it, to blame for Windrush

THE shameful treatment of an unknown number of loyal British citizens who came, or whose parents came, from the Caribbean five decades ago or more, has been called a national disgrace. Not so.

To be truly national would have meant that the whole nation, meaning the British people, were aware and responsible. This was yet another bureaucratic shambles, a governmental snafu which a truly overwhelming majority of the British people find profoundly abhorrent.

I suspect what happened was this. Back then all records were paper. The computer had not been invented. So records were stored in paper form, warehouse after warehouse of them.

Then came digitisation, the transfer to computer discs. In that process it seems scores, hundreds, thousands of those records simply went astray.

Proof of right of residence, duly issued at the time, went missing. That was just error, the human condition. The shame occurred much more recently when this absence of trace was discovered.

The bureaucratic machine, rather than accept the obvious, presumed its own infallibility. No proof of right of residence? Must be an illegal immigrant.

In the days before the abolition of common sense some sensible mandarin would have said: hold on, these good people have been living here, working, paying taxes, abiding by the law, for decades.

There must have been a mistake. But computers are not sensible and the computer today is the new god. We were once told this box of pixels would be a useful servant of mankind.

Now it is clear it is the reverse. We are the servants of this wretched and frequently flawed machine. Add to that the Civil Service’s ruthless refusal to admit error and you have the injustice and the scandal.

_________________________________________

Families really do need fathers

THE wave of street crime – mainly inflicted by knives – that has swept London seems to have no logical explanation. But two common factors stand out and, however regrettable, facts are still facts.

One is that the inflictors are all young, some appallingly so. Over 20 seems to be rare. The other is provable, albeit delicate.

The great majority of the victims and inflictors are drawn from the capital’s black community. Explanations abound, all predictably conventional. First comes gang culture.

Not burgling or car-stealing gangs – that needs technical knowhow. Just pavement-roaming gangs, many knife-carrying. There are white gangs and mixed gangs but the figures refuse to be denied.

Among those who pull a knife a high proportion are black. A second explanation is of course drugs – cheap as chips and universally available. But I wonder if there is a third lurking unseen.

It would need a serious official enquiry to explore. How many (what percentage) of these feral, knife-toting youths were raised with no live-in father? An attentive father is crucial to a growing lad.

He teaches, demonstrates, warns, shows by example, rebukes, restrains and occasionally steps in to lay down the law. A boy who cannot even recall his father grows up with a huge gap in his life.

Might he not try to fill that gap with a gang headed by a dominant older male? And is the black community tragically prone to the no-dad family?

_________________________________________

Assad still has chemical evil

IN A welter of self-satisfaction we are told the poison-gas facility of the monster Assad of Syria has been destroyed for ever. Hold the phone. I think we have been told that before.

Only a few years ago. Now it seems a Syrian scientist who was involved in the creation of these horrors but who then changed sides and opinion after seeing what he had done has declared the principal source of Assad’s chemical warfare was not even touched.

More to the point, we gave them so much advance warning that in a frantic burst of activity great quantities of scientific kit was removed just in time.

Were our bombs and rockets destroying empty buildings? I fear we may find out when it happens a third time.

__________________________________________

Why National Service was farsighted…

ACTOR Tom Courtenay, star of Quartet, has just had eye surgery which corrected the colour blindness he never even knew he had – and admits his life is transformed. As he is 81 that’s a long time not to have realised.

I recall that back in the RAF, when I applied for flying branch, candidates had to go for rigorous testing at RAF Hornchurch.

The biggest single cause of rejection on medical grounds (there were others) was colour recognition deficiency.

As aircraft have a red light on the port wing in darkness and a green one on the starboard wingtip, it’s pretty helpful to know which is which.

Without National Service and its compulsory testing, how many young lads are walking around not aware they can’t see colours properly?

__________________________________________

THE attitude of the Remoaners, exemplified in the Lords last week, becomes more and more bizarre.

Let’s just glance at the facts. Almost two years ago, for only the second time in our centuries-long history, the entire British people was given a referendum – not local, not regional but truly national.

Like a general election with one constituency – the whole nation. No one has claimed it was rigged. Ballot boxes were not stuffed as in Russia. Candidates were not intimidated because there were none.

Just one question put to one people. And the people voted one way – with a 1.4 million majority for the verdict the establishment neither wanted nor expected.

Now a few thousand (or even hundreds of thousands) wish to reverse the verdict because they do not agree with it. They demand a re-run, negation or national declaration of error.

And if there were a general election whose outcome they didn’t like? Would they be allowed to reverse it? They’d be laughed out of court. The arrogance is simply stupefying.

________________________________________

WHY can women not vary their voice tone according to whom they are addressing?

Too often I hear from another room the CO saying something like: “Hey, you lovely, wonderful creature, what would you like for dinner?”

I am just about to reply: “Well a bit of smoked salmon would be nice,” when I realise she’s talking to the puppy.