The deaths of at least seventy people at a football match in Egypt has confirmed my reasoned prejudice against this sport, whose psychological, cultural and economic effects is so disastrous. Of course, there is nothing in the game itself, apart from its inevitable propensity to injure the players, that is intrinsically deleterious; but all that surrounds it, at least in its modern professional form, is harmful and horrible.

Football rots the mind and ruins the conduct. Among other harmful effects, it deforms the ambitions of young men from poor areas; it deceives them into thinking that it is the way out of their economic problems and the sovereign way to obtain diamond studs for their ears, so essential to their dignity. Their chances of success are not much higher than that of buying a winning lottery ticket and in any case it appears that such young men in England do not even have the elementary self-discipline necessary to compete with foreigners in this activity.

Be that as it may, the Guardian newspaper's report of the tragic events in Port Said was most interesting, and not without wider significance. The beaten team in the match that ended in so many deaths was called Al-Ahly, and the newspaper reported that the following had occurred afterwards:

Fans congregated outside Al-Ahly's ground in the Cairo neighbourhood of Zamalek… Chants rang out in front of the club against the ministry of the interior and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, as fans believed that there was a major lack of security at the match.

What's upsetting is the huge lapse in security which I feel is purposeful on the part of the interior ministry and the military.

The violence flared after Al-Ahly, one of Egypt's most successful teams, were beaten 3-1. Television footage showed players running from the pitch chased by fans while a small group of riot police tried to protect the players, but they appeared overwhelmed and fans attacked the players as they fled. Fans of both teams clashed and stormed the pitch and dressing rooms.

Surely (if this account is otherwise accurate) the fans who gathered outside the ground in Zamalek should have shouted:

We are fools, we are morons, we are criminally stupid, we are murderously idiotic!

We are like children! We deserve no freedom! We must be beaten with truncheons!

Not long ago I published a little book pointing out that Britain is the most littered of any major country in western Europe and suggesting some reasons why this is so. Almost invariably when I introduce the subject into conversation, the first thought of my interlocutors is that there are not enough litter bins, that is to say it is the fault of the authorities that the British are the slovenliest people in western Europe.

Few people, I suppose, are more willing to criticise our public administration than I, but this is going too far. I regularly drive down the A14 from the M6 to Cambridge - a distance of about 80 miles - and the roadside, yard after yard, mile after mile, is indescribably filthy, with plastic bottles, polystyrene burger boxes, long strips of polythene and plastic bags full of rubbish by the thousand and the tens of thousand.

How many people must have thrown their rubbish out of their vehicles to produce this informal linear rubbish-tip, and how many litter bins would have been necessary to prevent it from developing? One every yard for 80 miles? Would people have stopped - illegally - to put their rubbish in the bins? Furthermore, I ask my interlocutors whether, in the absence of litter bins, they dispose of their detritus in this way? You may readily guess the answer; so then I grow furious, and accuse them of talking - rubbish, the kind of rubbish that leads to, and justifies, the most abject authoritarianism.

The form of the argument blaming the ministry of the interior for the appalling behaviour of the football fans in Egypt, and that blaming the British local authorities for the slovenliness of the British in the matter of litter, is exactly the same. Both are manifestations of man's eternal search for the greatest freedom of all, the freedom from responsibility.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

No one, I think, would regard as excessive the sentences meted out to the two killers of Stephen Lawrence. Indeed, no one would really have objected (except from the legalistic point of view) if they had been sentenced to very much longer, or even to remain in prison for the rest of their lives without possibility of release. To have done what they did was not a spur-of-the-moment mistake, such as anyone in a moment of passion might make; it was a sign of a deep-seated and ill-resisted propensity to do, and to enjoy, the commission of evil.

Initially, I must confess, I had doubts about the propriety of the abandonment of the ancient, indeed immemorial, principle of double jeopardy, according to which a man cannot be tried twice for the same crime; but a judge of my acquaintance persuaded me that my doubts were needless, for the law provides sufficient safeguards against the arbitrary use of the new powers to retry for the same offence. The latter, to qualify, must be a very serious one, and the evidence upon which the renewed prosecution relies must not only be completely new and unused, but prima facie compelling. He assured me that this was a slippery slope down which we did not have to fear to slide.

The day following the sentencing, the Guardian published an editorial with the title Late but fitting punishments. One could not but rejoice at this conversion to the notion of fitting punishment on the part of those who have so often denied, implicitly or explicitly, the very rightness of the concept of fitting punishment: but the question not asked and therefore not answered was "What made this punishment fitting?"

This means that imprisonment is not primarily a therapeutic manoeuvre. It is not psychotherapy, let alone an operation. Of course it would be very nice if prison had a therapeutic effect, as in a certain sense it does: the evidence suggests that longer prison sentences are followed by lower recidivism rates.

But the recidivism rate after release from prison is the wrong measure of the value of imprisonment, although it is now deeply inscribed as such on the minds of the population, especially intellectuals. The purpose of prison is to provide fitting punishment, to prevent crimes that would otherwise be committed by people who would commit them if free to do so, and deterrence of those who waver as to whether to commit crimes or not. In some cases, a crime is so heinous that it is the fittingness of the punishment alone that should determine its severity or length; and the murder of Stephen Lawrence (as indeed many other crimes) falls into this category. Even had the convicted men devoted themselves after their crime entirely to making books for the blind and helping old ladies across the road, they should still have received the sentences they received.

The editorial has a sentence that particularly caught my eye, for its implies that the newspaper has now been converted to the science, or what is usually regarded as the pseudoscience, of physiognomy. Referring to the fact that the convicted men, now fully adult, were sentenced to lower terms of imprisonment because at the time of their crime they were less than 21, the editorial said:

But it would of course have been preferable if justice not been deferred to the point where the culprits were adults with hard lives etched deep into their faces.

The adjective "hard" is surely a euphemism. If you examine the faces in photographs of people in the past who undoubtedly had very hard lives, much harder from the purely material aspect than those of the two convicted men, such as, say, coal miners, you will not see such "etched" faces among them. Indeed, if you look at the pictures in Mayhew's great book on the London poor of 1851, you will not see such faces either. What the Guardian means when it says ‘hard lives’ is ‘brutal and criminal lives.’

Now the Guardian is quite right in saying that the brutality and criminality of these people is etched on their faces: you don’t get faces like that direct from nature, you get them from biography. And if you saw such men in the pub, or walking down the street, you would do your best to avoid them.

The fact is that Britain is now more richly-endowed with such faces (if richly-endowed is the appropriate term) than any other country known to me. Walk down any street, observe any Friday or Saturday night in any British town or city, and you will see many of them. The faces are brutal and criminal because our culture is brutal and criminal.

Let us leave deeper enquiry aside. What is interesting is that, by saying that the faces of the culprits have their lives etched on their faces, the Guardian is implicitly endorsing the necessity, inevitability and wisdom of prejudice and discrimination. A person who failed to take notice of what is "etched" on the faces of the two convicted men would not be saintly, but a fool worthy to be Archbishop of Canterbury, even if not everyone with the face of a thug is actually a thug.

The desire to have no prejudices is therefore absurd, both because in practice it is impossible and because it is the desire to be a fool. The point is not to have no prejudices, but to be aware of them and also to have the constant mental flexibility to override them if the evidence requires it. That people can put aside their prejudices is, after all, the basic principle of the jury trial. People are not to be convicted because they have nasty faces etched by nasty lives, but because the evidence proves that they did what they are accused of having done. But even if acquitted, we still avoid people with nasty faces, and usually (though not always) rightly so.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

A simple mistake, but with hilarious consequences – to use a favourite family expression. I agreed to meet my wife "at the entrance to Macy's" in the enormous Dolphin shopping mall west of Miami. I meant the entrance through which we had entered; she didn't. My mobile phone had no network coverage. So I paced up and down for an hour while she frantically patrolled the other five entrances having forgotten (apparently) the way to mine. Eventually, a fairly hard-looking security man called Bruno approached me and set about the re-unification of man and wife. When I was blamed for the mistake he looked at my wife and said (jovially), "Yeh, I got one of these at home". Sexism or male solidarity?: construe it as you will!

If it was irritating at the time to be stuck outside Macy's I was grateful afterwards for the forced opportunity to observe people. Neither inside nor outside did I hear a single word of English spoken until Bruno approached me. This was not very surprising because the mall is just west of La Pequena Habana, though these days people of Cuban extraction are almost a minority and there are strong elements of Little Managua and Little Caracas. But all of these people would be classified in American politics and bureaucracy as Hispanic and, standing and watching, it is pretty obvious that this is one of those terms - like Slav and Celt - which was a linguistic term stretched and abused into an "ethnic" meaning. Some Hispanics look like Afro-Americans, some like Native Americans and some like Europeans. Since my looks are well within the broad Hispanic range nobody addressed a remark to me or tried to sell me anything in any language other than Spanish until Bruno showed up.

Florideans are serious whingers, though, and the current figure of 83% of them who think that the USA is "heading in the wrong direction" is a record in time and space. (I know it is a very curious concept that a vast country – supposedly full of individuals - is going somewhere, but I think it can only be understood by remembering that the USA is a contested project as well as a real country.)

The Tea Party is strong in Florida, maybe even stronger than anywhere else. The major ethnic minority is unusually sympathetic to the Republican cause because of the Cuban situation. And all of this seems to suggest life may be very difficult for a Democratic incumbent.

On the other hand, put yourself in the position of an orthodox, conservative Republican in contemporary Florida. Say you want to crack down on immigration and you risk alienating millions who want their relatives to be able to come and go. So you have to go round saying that you oppose illegal immigration (who doesn't?) but welcome legal immigrants - and in large numbers. The slightest hint of racism in your attitude to this question will work in President Obama's favour.

Say you want to reduce Medicare and other age-related forms of social security and you risk alienating the vast retired population of the state, but if you don't say that you can hardly be considered serious on the subject of reducing public expenditure. The standard move on this question is to introduce some kind of means testing, but I know what my view would be if it were suggested that my recently acquired old age pension should be abolished while those who had been less effective in preparing for old age could keep theirs. Homo Floridiensis seems to be hyper-typical of democratic behaviour in wanting to reduce public expenditure in general without reducing expenditure on anything in particular.

On the other hand, you don't need to say too much about the problems of the global economy. The posh, WASPish, university-based radio station to which we listened when crossing the swamps was indefinitely concerned with global issues including the Greek and Italian economies and the fate of the Euro, but the Miami press – in both languages – ignored these issues. Foreign news down there means Latin America. Nowhere in the USA does one feel more in “Las Americas” than in Miami.

Let us assume that the Republican Party can come up with a decent candidate in next year's election. This is a tenuous assumption for those who watched November's pre-primary debate, which looked a lot like Dumb and Dumber, suggesting that there are talented Republicans who have made their judgement call and are hanging on for 2015 when there will be no incumbent and the Democrats might implode. But let's suppose a silver tongued squarer of circles who can appeal to both conservatives and a broader audience.

The economic discontents and the broader malaise suggest voters will be initially sympathetic, but he or she will have to contend with a Democratic Party re-invigorated by the prospect of the Tea Party. It was noticeable in the November 2011 elections across the country that, whereas Republican candidates more or less held their own, "conservative" ballot propositions - on "same day" voting registration, on "personhood" and on union rights, for instance - came crashing to earth.

But the key to what will happen in 2012 is surely the realisation that the most important schism is no longer region, class or ethnicity, but generation. Most "seniors" have done well out of the economic system, but most "millennials", meaning people who have come to voting age since 2000, are facing declining standards of living and severe economic insecurity. The two groups differ even in their conception of American identity: over 90% of seniors are "white" whereas fewer than 60% of millennials are and a quarter of those who are married are married to someone classified as being of a different race. Conservatism does not play well with them. So, the deciding factor in the 2012 election, if it's close, may be generational turnout; we know the seniors will turn out fairly diligently and Obama's fate may depend on whether the juniors do.

Florida has brought the date of its primary forward to January 31. This is much to the annoyance of some elements in the Republican Party interested in a late-entry candidate and also to many other states who have brought theirs forward, fearing they will be trivialised if they are post-Florida. Thus the best spectator politics on the planet has kicked off rather early in 2012.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

George Orwell was interested in pulp fiction as a window on the soul of society, and the football pages of our newspapers are interesting for the same reason. They will no doubt prove invaluable to social historians of the future.

For myself, I cannot recapture the interest in the game that I had as a child, though it is so much better-played now (as well as paid) than it was then. Perhaps it is the excessive, indeed grotesque, importance with which so many people invest it, and their endless talk about it, that has put me off; and I cannot help but wonder whether the game exerts a corrupting, or at least a highly distorting, effect upon the ambitions of many young males. It is to the uneducated of this country what the City and the media are to the educated.

I scan the football pages, then, for what they tell us about our society and country, and most of what they tell us is not very encouraging. The clubs are neither British-owned nor are their players British; on the whole they do not train up British players, and such British players as they have are often undisciplined; the clubs are seldom among the best in Europe, despite their players being the best-paid; and they are not even profitable. British professional football therefore seems like a metaphor for the British economy as a whole: fragile, ill-founded and a playground for spivs.

A football story caught my eye in The Guardian of 2 January. The Headline was Damning judgment makes uncomfortable reading for Liverpool: Report reveals in forensic detail why independent tribunal found Suarez guilty of racially abusing Evra.

EVRA: Say it to me again, I'm going to punch you.

SUAREZ: I don't speak to blacks.

EVRA: OK, now I think I'm going to punch you.

SUAREZ: Go on, black, black, black.

The independent tribunal believed Evra's accusatory account of the affair rather than the self-exculpatory account of Suarez. I have no reason to suppose that it was wrong to do so.

But The Guardian's report is clearly biased, in order to stimulate the moral outrage of its readers. For example, it says with regard to Evra having called Suarez Concha de tu hermano, that it was:

... literally an obscene term referring to Suarez's sister but one which is commonly used in Spanish as an exclamation.

This is important, because it is likely that Evra's subsequent question, "Why did you kick me?" was not uttered in the tone of a disinterested enquiry after truth. More likely it was uttered in an aggrieved, aggressive or menacing manner, and this in part accounted for Suarez's manner of reply. After all, the independent tribunal found, as a mitigating circumstance, that Suarez had never been accused of using such language before, though (I am told by someone who follows these things more closely than I) he has not always behaved on the field in a gentlemanly fashion. In other words, he was provoked; and indeed the tribunal found that Evra had started the exchange as another mitigating circumstance, though this was perhaps a little unfair to Evra, since the original foul was committed on and not by him.

The newspaper's claim that "the report reveals in forensic detail" and that it "has brought a new meaning to the word transparency" is belied by its summary of the key findings. Here are the first two:

The question is simply whether the words or behaviour are abusive or insulting. It is not necessary that the alleged offender intends his words or behaviour to be abusive or insulting.

Mr Suarez's use [of the word negro] was not intended as an attempt at conciliation or to establish rapport; neither was it meant in a conciliatory or friendly way. It was not explained by any feeling that a linguistic or cultural relationship had been established between them.

Quite a lot may ride on a word: for example, one of the reasons the report into the Lawrence case found that the police were institutionally racist was that they did not completely accept that the murder was "purely" racist in motivation. The police argued that the suspects were criminals who were thought to have committed non-racist violent crimes, and therefore their full motives could not be known, at least not without further investigation. In this, surely, they were right; but the damage done by the investigation's accusation has been severe.

In fact, it is perfectly obvious that the motive behind insulting words is important in assessing the seriousness of a case. It is one thing to insult someone through lack of knowledge of social conventions and quite another to do so with the full intention to offend.

Unfortunately, there is a trend to make the perception of insult (or bullying) the test of whether insult (or bullying) has actually taken place. You are insulted or bullied if you think you have been insulted or bullied, and the only proof required that you have been insulted or bullied is your belief that you have been. No evidence that your belief is reasonable or justified is required; and so bureaucrats, acting in a pseudo-judicial way, have an ever-expanding locus standi to interfere in everyday life.

While in this case the deliberately insulting nature of the words used seems little in doubt, I find it alarming that people are now prepared to go running to the authorities, like children to teacher, over what was, after all, a minor incident that, moreover, was soon over. The very fact that we can run to authorities to ask them to take action over such trivia renders us psychologically fragile and more, not less, liable to insult.

The forensic inexactitude or incompetence of the tribunal, at least as reported in The Guardian, is again shown by a circumstance that is taken to mitigate Suarez's offence: his vow never to use the word negro on an English football pitch again. This, surely, implies that he has not recognised the wrongdoing in itself; for if he had done so, he would have vowed not to use the word anywhere.

There is nothing sacred, after all, about English football pitches; and I am reminded of the notices that appeared in the hospital in which I worked to the effect that henceforth anybody who assaulted a member of the staff in the hospital would be prosecuted. I was pleased, of course; but the corollary, psychologically-speaking if not in strict logic, was that assault in the hospital on people other than the staff, or on the staff other than in the hospital, or indeed in any other circumstances, would not be prosecuted.

There is one final point about the punishment of Suarez, a fine of £40,000 fine and a suspension for eight matches.

Once the commission established that the FA [Football Association] charge against Suarez was proved, the automatic two-match suspension for using insulting words was increased to four because of the racial element.

Now it seems to me a questionable proposition that a racial insult is automatically twice as offensive as, or worthy of twice the punishment of, any other. But there is another question: is Evra now to receive an automatic two-match suspension because he used insulting words to Suarez? That Suarez didn't hear them does not matter: Evra used them, and the circumstances in which he used them suggested that he intended them to insult.

It seems preposterous to me that footballers of all people should be expected to speak like choirboys; but unless Evra is sentenced, it is clear that we live under a regime of racial justice. It does not matter that this racial justice is intended to protect, not harm, minorities; the point is that it is not race- or colour-blind. Moreover, unpleasant gestalt switches have been known to happen. The over-zealous rooters-out of racism and the BNP have more in common than they probably would like to admit, among it a highly racialised view of the world.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

Berlin is not short of Museums of contemporary history. The city already has the Wall Museum, the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, the GDR Museum, the Kennedy House, and even a Luftwaffe Museum.

Recently, it acquired two new ones: the revamped Topography of Terror exhibition on the SS security machine and the Palace of Tears at the former east-west border control station just outside Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse.

The opening of the former marks the end of a prolonged palaver involving disputed designs, construction stops and false starts, during which there was a temporary and rather unsatisfactory exhibition in the open air. In the end, the museum has been built as a simple functional box, erected on the site of the old Reichssicherheitshauptamt - the Imperial Security Main Office - which was the principal hub of the National Socialist system of surveillance and terror.

It begins by tracing the growth of the institution as the Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich combined more and more of the various security organisations under their control. The organisations based there included, but was not limited to the Sicherheitsdienst, with its internal and external branches, and the Sicherheitspolizei, the umbrella organisation of the feared Gestapo. Next, we are taken through the mechanisms of internal repression which extinguished most overt opposition to the Nazis. Finally, there is a grim account of how the web of torture and annihilation, culminating in the mass murder of the Jews through shooting and gassing, was spun across occupied Europe from the Prince Albrechtstrasse.

The covered exhibition in the new building is a straightforward narrative, with the aid of photographs, administrative diagrammes, archive film footage, sound recordings, witness statements and document facsimiles. There are no concessions to modish heritage approaches such as dramatic reconstructions or interactive gimmicks, nor are there any original artefacts, apart from the foundations of the buildings themselves.

If this sometimes makes it difficult to relate at a human level to the enormity of what is being portrayed, then this deficiency has been more than made good by a shattering special exhibition on the deportation and expropriation of the Jews of the South-West German town of Loerrach in late 1940. The forty-odd photographs taken by a participant in the round-up show not so much the hostility of the population as their indifference and complicity: from the curious children who watch as elderly Jews are forced to load their remaining possessions into lorries, to the friendly wave from the drivers to local girls, to the frantic participation in the auction of the household effects left behind by the deportees - the only time when the population come to life.

Just as the Topography of Terror is not just another Third Reich museum, the new exhibition at Friedrichstrasse is not just another GDR or Wall museum. It deals specifically with the topography of another terror, namely the mechanics of legitimate travel across the German-German border, and it is located at the main crossing-point, in a GDR-era building whose associations were so traumatic that it became known as the Palace of Tears. It seeks to capture the "control", not the "border" or GDR experience, and does so very well.

I remember the place from occasional trips before the fall of the wall, and the photos and witness statements brilliantly evoke the labyrinthine nature of the station, while the preserved passport and customs booths, the scenes of daily intrusions and humiliations, still send a chill down the spine. A fascinating side-bar is the whole subculture of shops and eateries which catered for travellers - mainly for those with prized western currency - and were heavily penetrated by the regime's security services. One of the most interesting exhibits is an original restaurant diary in which the Mitropa waiters kept a record of the comings and goings of customers.

The coincidental opening of these two museums on state instruments of oppression within the same year raises questions of comparability. Both regimes were dictatorships and both subscribed to totalising ideologies, but there the parallels end. The RSHA was about the business of mass murder - the comparison might be with Stalinism and the Lubianka in the 1930s - while the Palace of Tears was a place of great sadness, certainly, and often of great brutality, but was never a human abattoir.

Looking back at the Third Reich and its perpetrators, Hannah Arendt famously spoke of the banality of evil. Even now, the ruins of the RSHA are pervaded by an overwhelming sense of evil, whereas the Palace of Tears laves one only with an inescapable aura of banality and crumminess which the GDR has proved unable to shake off.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

Do you know the joke about the two safari guests whose car breaks down in the midst of some very dangerous wild animals. They both get out and are soon confronted by an advancing lion. They make a run for it. The lion gains on them. Then one suddenly stops, takes off his backpack and produces a pair of running shoes. His friend looks at him in disbelief. He says:

You will never outrun him in those.

I know, but all I need to do is to run faster than you.

I was reminded of this story, when I heard that the head of the French Central Bank Christian Noyer had suggested - and his remarks were subsequently tweeted far and wide by the Bank - that it was Britain and not France which should next be downgraded by the credit rating agencies. There is some truth to the comparison of the two economies in regard to debt levels, deficits and growth, though not as much as he claims. But apart from being a deeply un-neighbourly comment, transparently designed to ensure that Britain is eaten first by the bond markets, Noyer's claim completely missed the truth of the situation.

Britain is not part of the Eurozone and is less exposed to Mediterranean debt, which according to some calculations amounts to 25% of French GDP. Moreover, it can inflate itself out of a hole through printing more pounds. By contrast, when the banks start collapsing along the southern tier, and the governments default, the three main French banks will fall with them, and Nicolas Sarkozy won't have the money to recapitalise them. The widespread expectation in Paris that they will then be bailed out by Germany, or that the ECB will print money for them, strikes me as unsafe, and would if realised precipitate a constitutional crisis within the Union.

France therefore faces two months of severe crisis on the bond markets, and it is far from certain that the state will be able to pay its bills from the end of January 2012. Noyer, by the way, would not even be better off trying to push the credit ratings of Greece, Spain, and the rest of the PIGS even lower, in the hope that they collapse before France does, because the contagion effect would merely hasten the French collapse.

The Union, in other words, may be disabled at its centre. For this reason, London must take a deep breath and - having saved herself through her own efforts - help Europe to save itself by following her historical example and adopting the Anglo-American principles of closer union, debt consolidation and a robust common defence, by establishing a complete political union. The Germans will bring to the table their economic and fiscal power, the French their bomb and UN Security Council Seat, and the Celtic and Mediterranean fringe their debts, skills, markets and sunny dispositions. There are risks in following this path, but the alternative is worse.

This new arrangement will need to be embedded in a new global security architecture. The Eurozone would become a revamped European Union, though I would prefer the appellation "Democratic Union", as it would set the right tone, would recognise the fact that important European states were not part of the Union, at least for now, while there might be areas outside Europe to the south and east which will join the Union in future.

The new Union would join NATO as a single state with one army. The remaining members of the existing EU would repatriate certain legal and other powers, and then join the rump EU/DU in a European Community which would be a free trade area and a close military alliance. Britain and the EU/DU would then join with Canada and the United States to form the North Atlantic Confederation, with its existing military arm NATO.

The North Atlantic Confederation would then join with the other great democracies, such as Australia and New Zealand and possibly South Africa, to form a Democratic League. Membership of the League would be limited to democracies who are committed to the defence and export of democratic values worldwide. This would for now exclude some existing democracies such as India and Brazil, which are still in the realist stage of development. Such a re-configuration would help to stabilise Europe, integrate Germany, and harness the potential of the continent for the common good.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

During November the Obama administration announced its intention to engage more closely with the Asia-Pacific region. Unlike its initial turn to the East in 2009, however, when Mrs Clinton went to China in order to reassure Peking about the state of the US economy (and thus the trillions of US Treasury bonds held by the last major communist regime), the present initiative shows flashes of steel. The United States has stepped up military aid for countries which feel intimidated by the growth of Chinese power. The talk is now as much of containment as of cooperation; the Bush administration's policy of closer ties with India is being resumed. Above all, relations with China are to be given a greater priority than the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this reason, not only Mrs Clinton but many commentators are beginning to speak of a new Pacific century in American foreign policy.

Now where have we heard all this before? In 1993, the US State Department official Peter Tarnoff called upon the United States to reconsider its concentration on the old continent and to turn her attention to the rising powers of the east. His boss the Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced,

Western Europe is no longer the dominant area of the world. There is a lot of criticism coming from western Europe, but I don't see or hear that coming from Asia.

The similarities between the two cases are obvious. Today, Washington feels that her allies - with the exception of Britain - have not being doing enough in the common struggle against terrorism, especially in Afghanistan. As the outgoing Defence Secretary Robert Gates pointed out in a parting shot, the Europeans policy of running down military expenditure has rendered them largely incapable of effective action. Some US observers have asked, where have all the soldiers gone.

Above all, the United States is furious with the European Union for its failure to address the sovereign debt crisis, which is threatening to de-stabilise the whole global economy at a time when the United States and other countries may be seeing light at the end of the tunnel. In this context, the eastern turn reflects the hope that Washington will find better partners and investors in the Asian economies, who have so far weathered the storm in much better shape. It also reflects an expectation that the conflicts in the Middle East have been settled, or at least contained, allowing the United States to address new threats and opportunities on the horizon.

This strategy is based on two questionable assumptions, however. First, only a few years after Washington hailed the eastern Tiger economies, the entire region was wracked by the Asian economic crisis of 1997-1998. Who is to say that the Asian economies will not soon experience a similar meltdown? Indeed, recent reports from China increasingly suggest that all is not well.

Secondly, it must be remembered that the Clinton administration was soon forced to eat Christopher's words and take control of the Bosnian situation before it spiralled completely out of control due to European incompetence. By 1995, the administration's troubleshooter, Richard Holbrooke, was writing that

the United States in a European power.

Moreover, the very extent of Europe's problems means that Washington will soon have to make the old continent its top priority, whether this be the economic and fiscal fallout from a eurozone collapse, or the attempts of Russia to move into the vacuum by putting pressure on the Baltic states or other parts of the old Soviet empire. Europe, as Winston Churchill said almost exactly 100 years ago, is still where "the weather comes from". All this suggests that time will show the current preoccupation with the East to have been not the start of a Pacific Century but a mere Pacific Phase.

The author thanks Mr Eddie Fishman of Cambridge University for advice in the drafting of this article.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

Britain has long been preoccupied with the question of what would have happened if Hitler had succeeded in invading the island in the Second World War. The counterfactuals divide into two categories. On the one hand, there are the "alternative histories" of the invasion such as Kenneth Mackesy's excellent Invasion (1980), which posits that Hitler would have won if he had launched an early invasion in May or June of 1940. There are the thrillers such as Len Deighton's famous SS-GB, and children's novels such as Michael Cronin's Against The Day (1998).

A curiosity is John Bowen's No Retreat (1994) which deals with "Free British" infiltrators returning to the island in 1990, nearly fifty years after it had fallen to the Nazis, finding its inhabitants not all desirous of being "liberated".

Then there are the faux documentaries such as the film It Happened Here (1964) and Adrian Gilbert's illustrated volume Britain Invaded: Hitler's Plans for Britain - A Documentary Reconstruction (1990), which takes the reader from the successful landing on the south coast, through a bruising occupation, to ultimate liberation thanks to the American atomic bomb. Gilbert's account drew extensively on real German preparations for the invasion, including the lists of Britons to be interned and possibly liquidated. Noel Coward (who was on the list) quipped

My dear, the people we would have been dead with.

At first, relations between the two are very strained, but the arrival of snow marks not only the shift of the seasons but also forces occupier and occupied to work together. What results is more of a cooperation than a collaboration, as the Germans help with the farmyard tasks, and the women in turn provide them with civilian clothes. This is because Captain Wolfram - who locates and conceals the map early on in the film - is in no hurry to complete his task, partly because he wishes to sit out the rest of the war and partly to frustrate Himmler.

As one might expect, a romantic interest of sorts develops between Wolfram and local girl Sarah Lewis (Andrea Riseborough), and it comes as no surprise that local "stay behind" units become active against the Germans, but the film is never predictable. Despite its title, the only active resistance is the futile shooting of a horse belonging to a woman mistakenly identified as a collaborator. There is no showdown, either triumphant or tragic, between the partisans and the occupiers. We never see most of the men again after the first frames, and it is possible they got away, but a casual conversation also suggests that at least some of them may have been shot by the Germans. There is no certainty either way, reflecting the agony of occupation the world over.

Resistance was shot on a budget of about £1.2 million, which is very little for a period film, particularly one with some special effects (mainly Wolfram's flashback battle scenes). It is a remarkable debut for Director Gupta. The author of the original novel of the same name (2007), Owen Sheers, who also co-wrote the screenplay, describes the film as a "bold adaptation" of the original. Unlike the book, which operates in the third person, and provides insights into the minds of all the major characters, the screen version is centred around Sarah Lewis. We are captivated by her dilemma: an intense loyalty to her beloved husband in the hills, the need to get by in the valley and a troubling attraction to Wolfram. As her idyll collapses around her with the imminent arrival of the Gestapo, and the "real" occupation, Sarah declines to join the captain on his escape to Ireland, but takes to the hills instead, after burning the map. We observe this with ambivalence, because her gesture of resistance is also an act of vandalism against the past.

The most striking scene in the film, however, is the exchange between the partisan leader Tommy Atkins (Michael Sheen) and his young , taciturn and possibly slow-witted recruit George Iwan Rheon). It is not actually in the novel. It has been added to sharpen the central theme of the film, which is choice and the costs it imposes. We know, of course, that Sheen is right: the resistance he advocates is the only possible one both politically and morally. We are disturbed, however, by the consequences of George's actions: dead horse and distraught owner.

Likewise, Wolfram does the right thing in hiding the map from Himmler, and keeping the war out of the Valley, but his determination to do so means that he is compelled to shoot the injured British partisan Michael Sheen in cold blood rather than risk blowing the gaff by handing him over to a POW camp.

Sarah too, effectively commits suicide at the end - she enters her death into the family bible - and we are left wondering whom her "right" choice has actually benefitted, not her probably dead husband and certainly not herself. In its quiet, poetic way, therefore, Resistance reminds us that under a brutal occupation there is always a choice, but that none of the options are good and that even the best can be lethal.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

What Europe faces today is the financial and economic equivalent of May 1940, when the continent was plunged into darkness by the Nazi invasion of France and the Low Countries. Nothing in the Eurozone is certain now: neither private nor public pensions, neither asset values nor salaries, neither personal nor public finances. The unfortunate Greeks are beginning to find their credit cards rejected abroad. Only a few countries, such as Germany and Holland, can be confident of emerging from a breakup of the Euro if not unscathed then at least with a strong currency, a general creditworthiness and a robust economy.

Many other states - Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and perhaps even France - risk total fiscal, economic and social meltdown. In most cases, the situation will be disastrous whether the common currency stands or falls, with states having only the choice between a decade or more of austerity to maintain the Euro, or departing for a world of no credit, high import costs and punitive interest rates, being no more attractive than that between leukemia and a Brain tumour. The leader of the free world - the United States - remains aloof as it did in 1940, not least because of its own problems. It is at times like these that one counts oneself lucky to be living in this country, which is insulated from the very worst of the continental catastrophe by the existence of the pound.

That said, Britain - as the Chancellor rightly warns - will be seriously damaged by the collapse of the Euro, which would quickly smother the tentative economic recovery here. It is less easy to know how to influence the destiny of the continent.

In 1940, Churchill laid such stress on keeping France in the war that he suggested a full political union with that country. The equivalent today would be the deployment of Britain's reserves and credit in support of the Euro, in effect joining the common currency. Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne have wisely refused to do so, because the total financial firepower available will not be sufficient to stop the tsunami of debt contagion which will sweep the Eurozone as one country after the other defaults. Hurling more money into the Eurozone would thus be like Dowding sending the remaining RAF fighters to France, where they would have been no more than a drop in the ocean, instead of holding them back for the Battle of Britain.

The country at the centre of the storm, Greece, is fond of invoking 1940, the year when it rejected the Italian ultimatum. Here, however, the analogy is not merely strained but harmful, as the hysterical anti-German propaganda of the past two years in Athens attests. There is no desire in Berlin – or at the Stammtische of the Federal Republic - to dominate the Greeks or any other European people, quite the reverse. The problem for Greece – and the rest of the PIGS – is not that the Germans have been bossing them around today, but that they failed to do so for so long. Nobody forced them to join the Euro and it is reasonable to ask them to make sacrifices to escape a predicament for which they themselves bear the primary responsibility.

On the other hand, the consternation caused by Greek Prime Minister's announcement that he would put the most recent "bailout" deal to a referendum in the New Year was further proof, if any was needed, that the European Union has a problem with democracy. Under heavy pressure from Frau Merkel and Mr Sarkozy, Mr Papandreou rowed back from his original plan, suggesting that the vote could be brought forward, or even avoided if a coalition government could be formed which would sanction the even greater cuts to the public service which the agreement requires.

This shows that neither he nor the European leadership have understood that the crisis will not be solved without a referendum not merely in Greece but in every country of the Eurozone.

At the moment Europe is bedevilled by democratic involvement of the worst sort: a cycle of Irish referenda, Bundestag votes and German regional elections, each of which hold up the process unilaterally. Some Europeans are asked at different times to vote on different proposals, and others are consulted through their democratically elected governments, but at no point have they been consulted simultaneously on the same fundamental issue, which is how much of their national sovereignty they are willing to trade for increased security and prosperity. Yet if the common currency is to be saved then all the peoples of the Eurozone will have to agree on the solution: those in rich countries to the use of their taxes to support "Eurobonds", and those in the poorer countries to bear the austerity measures necessitated by continued membership.

Nothing less than a collective popular act of refounding the Union, or at least of the Eurozone, will do. In short, Mr Papandreou may have chosen the worst possible moment to consult his people, and he may have done so for entirely opportunistic reasons, but he had the right idea.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

The murder of Stuart Walker, a homosexual barman in the town of Cumnock, in East Ayrshire, has aroused the newspaper's particular interest, and indeed it was of such startling brutality that the police have not released details of it. The murder was horrible: equally so whatever its motive, which so far is unknown.

The newspaper quoted a friend of the deceased, Emma Smith, as saying,

If it [the murder] turns out to be linked to him being gay, then I'll go absolutely mad. We can't still be having that sort of thing happening, not here, not in Cumnock, not in this day and age.

Although the details of the crime have not been released, we know that it was barbaric. Stuart Walker was tied to a lamp-post, beaten and set alight. What Emma Smith said was that "this sort of thing" (which was presumably done by more than one person), is unacceptable, if it is the result of special animus against homosexuals.

It is instructive in this context to consider the death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, pictures of which rightly horrified the world. Few people (except, perhaps, Mr Anthony Blair, for reasons that it would probably be libellous to mention) doubt that Gaddafi was a very bad man, in fact one of the very worst. He was a mass murderer and a torturer, at least by proxy, on an industrial scale. No man ever deserved punishment more than he, no man had fewer redeeming features. And yet the manner of his death was horrible. As Emma Smith might put it, we can't be having this sort of thing, not in this day and age.

Why not? It is surely not because Gaddafi was a member of a group in danger that is worthy of protection, namely dictators of North African countries (whether they have quite gone extinct remains to be seen), nor because he was a member of any other group that needs or deserves special protection. It is simply because he was treated as no man should be treated, and this irrespective of his own previous conduct. In other words, the sheer inhumanity of his death transcended other considerations, even if that inhumanity were not a bad augury.

Now let it be supposed, for the sake of argument, that Stuart Walker was not the kind of person that, immediately after his death, he was reported as having been, that is to say everyone's friend. Let us suppose, on the contrary, that he was a person of the most reprehensible character: could he have done or been anything that would have lessened the guilt of those who tied him to a lamp-post, beat and burned him? Would anything that he had done or been make the slightest difference to the gravity of the offence?

According to those who believe in the category of hate-crime, it would make a great deal of difference: the difference between "the sort of thing" that we can and can't have in this day and age. But this distinction, that is often presented as a triumph of sensitivity after centuries of prejudice or unfeeling, is moral retrogression rather than progress, in so far as it is an implicit, even if only partial, acceptance of the worst kind of behaviour.

Why some murders are selected for publicity and others are not is an interesting question; no doubt everyone uses dramatic and unusual events for his own moral purposes, to illustrate what he thinks needs illustrating (I have certainly done it). But many of the reports of murders nowadays are sure to include the "tributes" paid to the victim, as if the wickedness of murder depended upon the personal qualities of the victim, and to kill a person who had, say, a pleasant smile or who was handsome was far worse than to kill someone with a perpetual frown or who was ugly. The "tributes" to the victim often consist of a list of the most banal qualities that one would hope to find in many, if not most, people; but the very word "tribute" suggests something approaching a willing death or sacrifice for a cause by someone of more than usual worth.

The sentimentality exhibited by believers in hate-crime is a manifestation of the Leninist brutality of soul, according to which the only really important question in life is who does what to whom. The notion of hate-crime undermines the ideal (and I think is intended to undermine the ideal) of equality under the law, to the great advantage of political entrepreneurs, who see nothing in a polity or an economy but spoils to be divided in their clientele's, and therefore in their own, favour.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

I have been looking forward to this week and to this day for a long time, sandwiched as it is between a period of work and a period of travel. Along with the rest of the large Lancastrian contingent in the ground I see it as an opportunity to watch our county make steady progress towards the Holy Grail of a first championship since 1934.

But if the setting is Heaven, the plot is from Hell. Lancashire, already eighty runs behind on the first innings, go out to bat and the batsmen are dismissed with alarming regularity. At lunchtime the cognoscenti gather around the pitch (something you're not allowed to do in the more populist forms of cricket). It looks harmless, level and blond, a batsman's paradise, but it contains the secret trap of "variable bounce" which makes bowlers gimlet-eyed and ambitious and puts the devil of doubt into batsmen's minds. A smartly dressed man remarks to me that he was born in 1941 and has always wanted to see Lancs (as we usually call ourselves) win the championship. "And now, I suppose, I never will," he adds bitterly. This is not just blind pessimism, but a reference to the shared belief that this year the county are playing most home games not at Old Trafford, Manchester, where the weather and the pitches are thought to disadvantage us, but in the leafy surrounds of Aigburth, Liverpool.

In some ways it has actually prospered since then because the kind of idiots who become sports journalists and administrators - and who fall for simple fallacies like post hoc ergo propter hoc - were all for getting rid of it in favour of a smaller, city-based, competition. Australia were best in the world and they only had six "first class" teams, so . . . . Well now England are officially the best in the world and the equivalent idiots in Australia are filling column inches with speculations about changing their structures.

The County Championship has proved its ability to produce players of the highest calibre. Arguably, to win the championship is the most prolonged achievement in sport, with up to 64 whole days of play, though fans of baseball are entitled to point out that if you win the “World Series” you have played a minimum of one hundred and seventy games. Anyway, my only consolation, driving out of Worcester, is the most basic one - that there is always next year.

Early evening, 15 September 2011, the kitchen of a remote farmhouse in Languedoc. After walking all day in the Monts de L'Espinouse in temperatures verging on 30 degrees my only thought is about whether there is enough beer in the fridge. Then the voice from upstairs announces, "Lancashire have won the County Championship". The information has arrived by text from my youngest son, himself a supporter. And it's a miracle - or, at least, a near-miracle given the number of unlikely necessary conditions which had to be met. They had to play well and win the last two games. The September weather had to hold. Most unlikely of all, Warwickshire - leaders and favourites - had to be thwarted. Until the last possible moment this seemed wildly improbable, but then Hampshire, already relegated, totally outplayed in the first innings, following on, stubbornly, selflessly, determinedly stuck it out to deny Warwickshire a victory. Wonderful, brave, lovely Hampshire!

For days I wake up smiling, thinking of aspects of this happy event. It was an heroic victory, by a team financially poorer than it had ever been before and deprived of its traditional ground. Bookmakers had made them favourites for relegation and a prominent local journalist had announced that they were the weakest county playing staff of his lifetime. There one rather cheap-rate overseas player, Fawaz Maharoof, who was not the kind of global superstar we had previously employed in this role and, in any case, given his call-up by Sri Lanka and subsequent injuries, he played very little. This was the victory of lads from Bolton and Bury and Blackburn, many of whom had been previously written off as not quite up to it. But they had team spirit: there are many stories of recent years of famous Lancashire players on mobile phones in changing rooms discussing million-pound advertising or television deals with their agents in front of teammates paid a fraction of those sums. None of that this year. And they had a coach - Peter Moores - who really, seriously knew what he was doing. In my experience as an observer of team games this is extremely rare.

For me there is something pretty wonderful about the juxtaposition of Lancashire's championship with England's number one status: not just that we are the best of the best, but also the confounding of a form of managerial radicalism which is one of the curses of modern life. There is a problem? Restructure the institutions! In sport you fail to qualify or to win, we must change everything. Sport is particularly vulnerable to the tinkerers and institutional theorists because failure is so well defined. But has tinkering with the educational system or the constitution done us any good? Better, usually, to soldier on, learn from your mistakes and appoint the best people when a vacancies arise. So there is great satisfaction that England has become number one at cricket not on the basis of some invented urban meta-clubs with state-sponsored "academies" attached, but on the the basis of the likes of Lancashire CCC (founded 1864).

My other intellectual problem with this concerns the question of how would I explain to the majority of the population who just don't get it how satisfying all this was for me and many people like me? Cricket is not religion, but it is like religion in that for some people it is at the core of life while to others it means nothing at all. It's not as if it has no rivals. I had a third granddaughter born this year and a son who plonked a BAFTA on the kitchen table with a bit of a smirk on his face.

Even in sport, I'm involved in lots of different ones and my own cricket team won a big silver cup this season and the little football team of which I'm a shareholder actually made it to the Premiership and the world stage a couple of years ago. There are many sources of pride and pleasure in life and this one would seem ill-suited to competing with most of the others - an obscure cricket competition, watched by relatively few people and won by a bunch of blokes I've never even met.

But, I have seen Lancashire win competitions - named for John Player, Gillette, Benson and Hedges and Nat West, for example - in full stadiums in front of large television audiences. Those occasions were good, but not as good as this. I think fans of first class cricket actually revel in the complex and obscure nature of the game in the same way that fans of minority musical genres do. I note that of all the congratulatory messages I had (as if I had anything to do with it!), most of those which weren't from Lancastrians were from Indians.

Sporting success as a fan is a different dimension of pleasure, not comparable or tradable with other aspects of life. The nature of pleasure is dependent upon whom you share it with. Weirdly, there is a scene in Triumph of the Will which reminds me of being a Lancashire fan. It involves clean-cut young men standing up and saying "Ich bin ein Saarlander . . . Ich bin ein Bayerischer . . " etc., but then going on to say that they are all Germans. And the reason it reminds me is that the citizens of Burnley, Blackburn et al. make a fair old fist of seeming to loathe each other in the context of football, but come together to support Lancashire at cricket.

This pleasure will last a long time and can ultimately be expressed only in sacred clichés: we have come to the party; we are over the moon; the monkey is off our back and now we can treat each game as it comes. And even that defeat at Worcester was a cloud with a silver lining because one of its consequences was that Worcestershire stayed up so we'll be able to go to that lovely ground again next year.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels the writer's imagination becomes the reader’s reality. It glows, incandescent and furious.

It's all so demographically predictable: I am old and male and therefore less likely to read novels. I am even following tediously in my father's footsteps because I remember that he once asked if he could have Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes when I had finished with it, only to throw the book away in disgust when he discovered it was a novel. He didn't read novels and nor do a lot of my former colleagues in universities.

But I can't and don't regret the loss of the pleasure of reading novels very much. Did anyone ever lie on their deathbed wishing they had read more novels? The novel as a genre is treated as being at the centre of our culture: book clubs read not books in general but novels and we make children study them. Yet this is a fairly new form, the extended story, which developed only in the eighteenth century and is thousands of years younger than poetry, drama and music. It is, perhaps, the typical expression of a culture more tolerant of introspection and egotism than previous societies. In any case, the place of the novel in our culture is now quite domineering: the best guess is that over 100,000 new works of fiction are now published every year in the English language and it is suggested that these constitute only 5% of those which are written.

Of course I have tried to write one, based on the inadequately challenged assumption that if you are a "writer" you ought to write a novel. Mine had two fundamental - and probably very common - faults: they were far too descriptive, in the nineteenth century style, and they tended to autobiography. What I really wanted to do was capture the flavour of reality, which has always seemed to me to be far more interesting than unreality. I therefore have an acute distaste for fantasy and science fiction.

The worst implication of the place of the novel in our culture is the insistence on including the study of novels in education. I have a vivid memory of watching one of my sons struggle through Jane Eyre, just five days before he was due to take an exam which required his knowledge of it. When he finished he asked rhetorically, "Is that the worst book ever written - or what?" No, it isn't - there are lots worse, but making intelligent young men read the Brontë sisters when they have never even heard of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion or John Stuart Mill's On Liberty might just be the worst idea in the history of education. Soft humanism replaces hard thought and the study of the novel has a very high opportunity cost.

I crave a better understanding of the world and, whereas reading novels seemed to offer this when I was younger, it long since ceased to do so. I have had much more satisfaction from reading philosophy and history. David Hume remains the most exciting writer I have ever read and, among contemporaries, I have been gripped by Jan Morris, Alistair Horne and John Keegan, for example. The emphasis on war indicated by those names is probably typical of a generation that was never shot at.

I broke my novel famine at Wimbledon. It was raining and we were on Court One, which unlike the Centre Court, has no roof, though most seating is under cover. There was nothing else to do and I read Joanna Trollope's The Other Family. It was OK; it passed the time. But it didn't do too much else and I haven't read one since.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

Visitors to London cannot fail to be struck by the ubiquitous traces of Britain's maritime and naval heritage. Proceeding from west to east down the Thames, there is the World War II cruiser HMS Belfast, then the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, the old Royal Navy yards at Chatham and the Medway. Even the railway stations, especially those of the Docklands Light Railway, speak of a seafaring past, for example East India Dock. My favourite halt on the DLR, however, is Gallions Reach, a name redolent of the Spanish Armada and general derring-do. It was also the place at which I alighted in order to visit the Royal Navy's most modern ship in Prince Albert Dock, just beside City Airport.

HMS Dauntless is the second of the new Type Daring-class 45 Destroyers, and represents a massive advance on its predecessor, the Type 42, which served in the South Atlantic thirty years ago. The ship's modernity begins with the facilities. In the past, the ratings often slept forty to a cabin, now six men or women share one space. The communal areas are fitted out with bars, and numerous televisions or DVD players. There is even a gym. It is therefore hardly surprising that the ship's company make not only a sharp but also a very happy impression. The interior is striking: an artistic medley of exposed wiring and pipes not unlike the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This is a legacy of the Falklands War when damage control parties found that the traditional panelling actually got in the way of repairs. The Health and Safety notice I passed therefore struck a rather incongruous note: the men and women on board know that when they are called upon to inflict devastation or to suffer it, such regulations will quickly go overboard.

Moreover, it is said - though not by its officers - that the ship enjoys important stealth features, such as the radar signature of a fishing trawler. In short, as its Captain Will Warrender argues, HMS Dauntless can be compared with the early twentieth century HMS Dreadnought, which completely revolutionised design of fighting ships. Given that the vessel is British-designed and built, with some help from the Dutch and French with radar and missile technology, respectively, HMS Dauntless is a clear sign that British naval power is far from waning.

The new ship will add considerably to Britain's global military and political each. Together with the assault ship HMS Ocean, Dauntless and her five sister ships (of which HMS Daring is already afloat), she will comprise a formidable amphibious task force capable of projecting influence to all coastal regions of the world. She will also be able to escort allied vessels, increasing Britain's ability to work within a coalition, especially with the Americans, who are normally very sniffy (and rightly so) about what others can bring to the table. Her versatility means that she can be deployed on both hard war-fighting and soft humanitarian missions, such as disaster relief.

To be really effective militarily, however, the Type 45 destroyers should really be matched with fixed-wing aircraft carriers (HMS Ocean can only carry helicopters). At the moment, the navy scandalously has none of these, and even when the new aircraft carriers are available in about ten years time, one of them will be mothballed, while the other will not be serviceable on a continuous basis. The decision to run down the carrier fleet was much regretted at the outbreak of the Libyan war: the sight of the last carrier being towed away to be scrapped past the scene of the fighting en route for her final resting place in Turkey spoke for itself. There is also a question-mark over the number and quality of aircraft to fly off the new commissioned carrier.

Recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown the importance of the army, but the campaign in Libya, where the Navy did so well even without its carrier, has also shown how dangerous it is to neglect maritime power. It desperately needs more funding, not at the expense of the other Services of course, but as part of a properly-resourced national security strategy. There should be at least one more operational carrier, the Fleet Air Arm must have more aircraft and the Navy needs its own dedicated unmanned drones. At the same time, the government needs to proceed with the overhaul of the unglamorous but essential auxiliary fleet, without which the Navy cannot function. The Type 45s are a vital contribution to the nation's defence, but their value will be much diminished without the capital ships they have been designed to protect.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

There was an excellent and typical example of this dissociation in a recent edition of the French newspaper, Libération. It was an article by Louis Michel, a Belgian minister and member of the European parliament, entitled "When Belgium apologised to the Rwandan people". The occasion of the article was the first visit of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, to France which, you may remember, was accused of having supported the genocidal Hutu government up to the last possible moment. Official relations between Rwanda and France have improved because, it seems, both now need each other.

The author begins in an unctuously self-congratulatory way:

On the occasion of the official visit of the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, to France, which seals the normalisation of relations between two friends of Belgium, in which I cannot but rejoice, let me be allowed to testify to the manner in which my country has turned the page in our past relations with Rwanda, in order to look to the future.

We are convinced that at the time of the genocide the Belgian authorities could, and should, have acted differently in order to have prevented it.

It follows that it is right that Belgium should agree to assume a moral responsibility for the Rwandan drama. Not to recognise or to deny the failure of our authorities leaves the Rwandans to bear the burden of this trauma alone.

For foreigners to assume a significant part of the guilt is both to puff themselves up with moral importance and to deny the agency of those who actually were responsible. For M. Michel, then, the Rwandans are still not fully adult, and therefore not fully capable by themselves of committing evil. Belgium, for him, still stands in loco parentis for all Rwandans. This demonstrates how deeply entrenched colonial attitudes still are, especially in those who so self-consciously reject them.

Then comes a wonderfully subtle piece of dishonesty:

Although the political party of the Prime Minister of the day [when the apology was made] had not been in power at the time of the events, it was fundamental, in the name of the continuity of institutions, that we should assume our part of the responsibility.

Paragraph after paragraph is stuffed with sentiment that makes greeting-card poetry look Shakespearean in its realism and subtlety. I will quote briefly so as not to provoke nausea:

To have recognised the mistakes and injustices of the past, to have affirmed that we share the responsibility for this frightful human waste was, in our view, to open the way to a reunification of the heart and minds of all Rwandans.

When people indulge in high-flown nonsense, it is legitimate to ask what end such nonsense serves. I have already pointed out that this particular example allows the writer to assume a position of supposedly disinterested moral grandeur while taking a poke at his political opponents. It allows him, as one of the righteous, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven without, however, having to pay an admission fee. And no doubt it allows him to feel a little better about his own peccadilloes, whatever they might be: for what could they possibly be to set against complicity with genocide?

But there is a further advantage. In the very same edition of Libération, there is an article about Kagame's Rwanda, in which we read not only of the understandable democratic deficits of the regime (censorship, constant surveillance of the population etc.), but the following remarkable sentence:

The country, very poor in minerals, has enriched itself with war booty brought back from the Democratic Republic of Congo and with the massive pillage of cobalt mines.

It is curious that the newspaper article passes over this sentence without commentary. But it is not at all curious that M. Michel should do so; for if he had noticed it, and its rather deep significance, it would have forced him to think that perhaps Mr Kagame was not quite the hero of a morality play, as a result of which he would actually have to think hard about what attitude, if any, Belgium should now take to the situation in the region. And it is always easier to be moral about what other people have done in the past that to be moral about what one has oneself to do in the present. It is for this reason that political apologies for the past actions of others have become so flourishing a genre.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

In the late 1990s, the former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd liked to point out that nobody sitting down to list British interests at the start of the decade would have ranked the former Yugoslavia very highly, and fewer still would have predicted that NATO would go to war there twice before the millennium. Whatever one thinks of Hurd's handling of the Bosnian crisis, he was right about that. By the same token nobody trying to predict Mr Cameron's foreign policy could have foreseen that his first war would be a humanitarian intervention in an Arab country, with the thinly-disguised aim of effecting regime change and democratic transformation. Had he not famously warned that democracy could not be "dropped from 10 0000 feet"?

It is much too early to say what the implications of his victory are for the coalition's future policy. The Libyan intervention does, however, cast the strategy of his predecessor in a new light. Mr Blair is best remembered, and most criticised for, his removal of Saddam Hussein and his support for Mr Bush's planned democratisation of the Middle East.

What is often forgotten is that the Labour government pursued two separate approaches in the Arab world, each based on fundamentally different principles, but with similar ends. In Iraq, to the consternation of the old Foreign office "Camel Corps", Mr Blair sought to disarm Saddam Hussein through regime change. In Libya, he deployed that self-same corps to persuade Mr Gaddafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction.

The dangers of this approach, however, are now apparent. One can argue forever about its morality. What is now beyond dispute is that the policy can be dangerously counterproductive. We are now in the embarrassing position where the supreme military commander of the victorious National Transitional Council, Mr Bel-Haj has just revealed that he was kidnapped by western security services and deported to Libya where he was tortured. It appears that Bel-Haj was not so much an international jihadist as a long-standing opponent of the regime, whom we handed over to cement the relationship, not because he posed a serious threat to western interests.

More generally, it is now clear that the strength of Islamism in pre-revolutionary Eastern Libya primarily reflected local opposition to the Colonel's regime, and that the rapprochement with Tripoli put us in their sights quite unnecessarily (there are enough good reasons for being targeted by Islamists, such as supporting Israel or promoting democracy). In short, our dalliance with Gaddafi created far more Islamists than he incarcerated.

Secondly, the Libyan intervention will cause us to look at the interventions of the past twenty years in a new light. In the 1990s, confidence in the ability to shape events through air power, grew steadily throughout the decade culminating in the NATO operation over Kosovo, which ended the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing without the deployment of ground troops in combat or the loss of any air crew. The more recent travails in Iraq and Afghanistan on the other hand, with their thousands of casualties, brought increased scepticism about the capacity of the west to promote political change by military means.

In Libya, by contrast, the rebels showed great courage, but they would have been massacred early on without NATO intervention, and they would probably not have taken Tripoli and toppled the regime had that support not been sustained until the conclusion of the campaign. Some may well now ask not so much whether the removal of Saddam Hussein required a full-scale invasion, or whether it might not have been effected through a combination of air power and local opponents of the Baathist regime, as the original PNAC plans had envisaged. More generally, the removal of Gaddafi will strengthen those who argue that the west should help those who would free themselves, but lack the power to do so. Within the Armed Services, the Libyan experience may therefore have the effect of shifting the centre of gravity back from the Army, which bore the brunt of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Navy and especially the Royal Air Force.

We do not know yet whether the National Transitional Council will bring democracy to Libya. We can say with confidence, however, that if it does, British bombs dropped from a great height will have had a lot to do with it.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.