A hard-won government in Spain can teach us a lot

It’s been a long haul, but Spain at last has a confirmed government again.

That matters to me particularly because we now live in Spain, land of our Brexit exile. Others, though, might also find much of relevance in the difficult road that got us here, littered as it was with obstacles, many of them self-inflicted.

Pedro Sánchez addresses the Cortes

Let’s start with the positives.

Spain has its first coalition government since the end of the Franco dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in 1978. That brings it into line with most countries in Europe, where government always requires negotiation between parties and compromise to reach an agreement that commands broad support. It’s not the case in Britain, of course, where Members of Parliament are still elected by simple majorities in individual constituencies. As a result, parties with minority support nationally can command a huge majority in Parliament. As is the case today.

I’m not sure that this leads to better government.

Pedro Sánchez, now the confirmed Prime Minister of Spain after holding the role in an acting capacity since last April, and leader of the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), has agreed a joint programme for progressive government with Pablo Iglesias, of the anti-austerity, harder-left Unidas Podemos Party (UP). That has kept the right well away from power, even though the far-right Vox now has a major parliamentary presence.

You read that right. A joint programme for progressive government. And the hard right out of power.

How many, in Britain, the United States, Poland, Hungary, Turkey or Brazil would give their eye teeth to have such a government? And how many, particularly in Britain, the United States, Poland, Turkey or Brazil would like to see the far right well away from government?

So, now the negatives. 

The Spanish left nearly didn’t pull the trick off, and its worst enemy was itself. As in Britain and the United States especially.

That joint programme between PSOE and UP was something that could have been agreed months ago. Say, straight after the General Election in April, which left the PSOE as the biggest single party in the Spanish Parliament – the Cortes – with 123 seats, while UP had 42. PSOE was up significantly, while UP had lost seats, but at least between them, they had 165 MPs, just 11 short of the 176 needed for a majority in the 350-seat Cortes.

They couldn’t reach agreement. After six months of negotiation, new elections had to be called in November. Both parties lost seats, three in the case of the PSOE, though it was still the biggest party in Parliament, while UP lost seven. Now their task had become far harder, since they’re now 21 behind the magic number for a majority.

Far worse still was the surge in support for the quasi-fascist Vox, which shot up from 24 to 52 seats to become the third biggest parliamentary presence.

The PSOE-UP failure to compromise before the November election meant that when they finally did, the two parties of the left were working from a weaker position, and against a far more vigorous opposition. Note and learn, British Labourites or American Democrats: you risk it all when you decide to dig your heels in and refuse to budge on principle. Insisting on doing it all may leave you unable to do anything at all. The price of intransigence can be a Trump or Boris government.

Sánchez has at least avoided that fate, but by the tightest of margins. He couldn’t win his investiture on Sunday (yes, Spanish MPs can work on Sundays) when an absolute majority was required, in the first vote; on Tuesday however, with the bar lowered to requiring simply more Yes votes than Noes, he squeaked through, by just two votes with eighteen abstentions.

Those abstentions were won through hard negotiation. Sánchez had to make agreements with eight parties, covering 313 different commitments, to secure those abstaining votes. Not all those commitments are compatible with each other. Government, with so much to deliver to keep minor parties at least neutral, and up against such a powerful right, isn’t going to be easy.

This is particularly true in the specific circumstances of Spain. Some of the commitments Sánchez has had to make concern the status of Catalonia and its desire for independence. That’s something he can’t grant and retain his support in the rest of Spain; it’s going to be challenging to give the Catalans enough, short of independence, to keep Tuesday’s abstainers in line.

With a powerful and ferocious right-wing Opposition, he and Iglesias are going to have torrid time implementing their programme. It’s going to be enthralling to watch. I’m at least glad they have the opportunity to try – after the crushing defeat of the British left in December, being able to do as much as Sánchez can in Spain seems a distant dream.

There were some good moments in the investiture debate.

One of the most moving was the standing ovation offered to Aina Vidal, who turned up to vote despite undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer.

Aina Vidal stands to acknowledge the ovation for her presence

Another was Sánchez’s reference to one of the iconic figures of the Second Spanish Republic, the one overthrown by Franco. Manuel Azaña told his compatriots, “we are all children of the same sun and tributaries of the same river”.

In Britain and the US, I can’t help feeling that we’re all children of the same deeply disrupted climate system, and tributaries to the same traffic jams.

Maybe the Spanish example can help us towards a more encouraging future.

The case for Brexit, made by certain Englishmen

There are times when one can begin to understand why so many English people voted for Brexit.

We recently had some work done on our house. Recommendations from friends I always feel are stronger than just a star rating on some kind of internet site. So, with our friends encouraging us to use this particular contractor - let's call him Darren - we weren't too worried that he had absolutely zero references on the website that evaluates firms like his.

Our confidence was somewhat rattled, however, by the same friends phoning us again just days before the work was scheduled to start, saying, "for God's sake, don't use Darren: he's appalling".

Still, we'd already paid him a substantial deposit by then, and his behaviour had been charming. Perhaps with effort on our part we could accommodate him.

Ah, well. Had it only been that simple. We were soon to discover that the only way to accommodate Darren would have been to give him the whole house. And pay him to improve it.

He had a little team of building workers that had been with him for years. English to a man. We were struck by how hard and how well they worked. Until we saw them at a time when he wasn't around. When the cat was away, the mice, it seemed, had endless cigarettes to smoke or phone calls to make from their van outside. If they showed up at all.

Turning a house into a tip
But it isn't builders' work to turn it back, apparently

They also left a trail of dirt behind them which none of them ever bothered to clean. Dust sheets? Apparently never heard of them. Vacuum cleaning after they'd done? Not work for an upstanding builder. Taking off their muddy boots when they came indoors? There was no time for such niceties - after all, they had important cigarettes to smoke.

We decided to be polite but firm.

"You know Gary didn't show up till 10:30?" we might say.

"He tells me he was there at 8:00," Darren might reply, "And I've never known him lie to me."

Things would get broken and have to be replaced.

"It wasn't broken when I last looked at it," he would tell us.

"Well, it's broken now," we'd reply.

"OK, but who's to say it was one of my people who broke it?"

I suppose no one could say that with certainty. Only that no one else had been anywhere near the piece in question but his people had. But we were beginning to understand that pointing out inconvenient truths to Darren, however difficult they might be to deny, would only make the situation worse. And by "worse" I mean pretty seriously worse.

"Just stay there," he told me once, "and I'll be round shortly to sort this out with you, you effing unspeakable."

Only he didn't use the word "effing". Or "unspeakable".

Things reached a climax when he told us that he knew where our sons lived and they'd better keep looking over their shoulders too. Since our sons live in Madrid, that was quite a claim. It also suggested a grip on sanity worthy of a US President (and, yes, I do mean one particular US President).

Overall, however, most of his work was done well with only some blemishes or minor elements incomplete. In the end, for the sake of peace, we decided to call the job done and get the odd bits that needed finishing - or in some cases fixing - dealt with by someone else.

Who did we turn to? Three Poles, for different areas of work. And, you know, they were appalling: they turned up on time, they were quick and efficient, they did high-quality work, they were conscientious, they were honest in their charges, they covered everything around where they were working with dust covers and vacuum cleaned behind them. They never, never threatened us or our family with grievous bodily harm.

One of them was probably the most expensive workman we've ever used, in terms of hourly cost. But since he was also the quickest we've ever seen, the cost of using him was no greater than that of Darren's cigarette-smoking lads. And, boy, the work was immeasurably better.

Now, I know that English workers are by no means all like Darren's. There are conscientious and hard-working individuals among them. But I suspect most Brits reading the account above will find it rings familiar bells. There are far too many for whom those are the appropriate standards for work.

It's to understand why they might decide to vote for Brexit. I mean, those Poles we had clearing up Darren's work, can live and work freely in Britain under the EU rules. And set those shameful standards for work quality.

Who on Earth wants that kind of competition? Especially when, to put a stop to it, all we have to do is vote to leave the EU.

A case that must have seemed compelling, I'm sure, to builders sheltering in a van for their second early mid-morning cigarette break.

Polish residents, Polish police, in Britain

It’s curious to read that two Polish police are being deployed in each of London and Harlow, the latter the scene of a recent fatal attack on a Polish resident which also injured another.

Polish police join an English colleague on patrol in Harlow

The Poles have become the biggest single group of foreign-born residents in Britain. In the atmosphere of heightened xenophobia, which I assume was present but pent-up before the Brexit vote but has been released by it, Poles have become the major target of the increased wave of hate violence.

On a couple of occasions recently I’ve been accused of displaying insufficient pride in my country. I’d have no difficulty pleading guilty to the offence if I thought it was one. I have a hard time, however, thinking of patriotism, notoriously described by Samuel Johnson as the last refuge of the scoundrel, as a virtue.

What, after all, am I supposed to feel proud about? I take pleasure in the great results won by British athletes at the Paralympics, feeling a bond with my compatriots. But pride? I didn’t contribute to their success except indirectly and at tiny scale through taxes. The achievement was theirs, not mine; to take pride in it feels terribly like claiming undeserved credit.

In any case, it’s not as though my country’s only achievements are matters of pleasure. Am I supposed also to feel pride over our forces’ involvement in Iraq? Our role in the badly-judged and ill-fated intervention in Libya? Or, looking at other areas, in Maggie Thatcher’s attempt to ban literature about homosexuality from our classrooms? David Cameron’s sustained assault on the miserly support we provide to the poor and ill? The aversion towards foreigners that inspired Brexit and the murder in Harlow?

Perhaps a small anecdote will explain why I don’t go along with these feelings.

For our first two years where we currently live, we were cursed with a neighbour from hell. She would hold all night parties five or six times a month, apparently drug-fuelled events which would run from midnight until midday, where festivities followed a constantly repeated pattern: raucous laughter and merry shouting, followed by karaoke singing at volume, followed by tearful recriminations and fighting interspersed with cursing and the noise of breaking crockery; after a brief pause, the cycle would start again with the laughter and shouting.

The police, starved of resources, would not assist. That’s in spite of one police employee telling me down the phone, one night at 2:00 am, “Oh, my God! I can hear her from here!”

It took two years to get her out of the place, but we and the neighbours on the other side eventually managed it by dint of constant complaints and phone calls to the landlord and the agent. In the meantime, she’d broken some of our belongings and stolen others, but we felt that was a small price to pay.

Since then, we’ve had a new family next door who never disturb us, for whom we accept packages and who accept packages for us, with whom we exchange friendly greetings when we meet. An extraordinary relief. A way of re-establishing our belief in the inherent decency of people.

The new neighbours are Polish. The old one was English.

Does that illustrate why I don’t go along with appeals to patriotism? And above all reject popular prejudice against Poles?

There may be a new hope for all of us in the arrival of Polish police in Britain. Just as it was a blessing to replace a foul English neighbour by likeable Polish ones, maybe we could benefit from more Polish policemen too – replacing the hopeless English ones who wouldn’t come out when we needed support against the ghastly Englishwoman next door.

In the meantime, anything that helps stop the kind of xenophobic violence that led to the Harlow murder has to be welcome.

Even if, as I suspect, the Polish police presence is just a gimmick for the moment.

Kataryna and the sad tale of lost English opportunity

Kataryna left her home in central Poland to establish herself in Brussels because, she told us, she was “in love.”

The object of this love was a fellow Pole, and they married in Belgium. But it didn’t really take. Two or three years later she decided that it was time to call it a day: they had no kids, nothing that really tied them to each other, and there was no point in struggling on with a marriage that wasn’t going anywhere.

It was a hard decision for her to take. “I’d said for the rest of my life, and I meant for the rest of my life. It was difficult to change that.”

Her Catholic Polish upbringing was against it, but she went through with the divorce.

Her family clamoured for her to come back home. But she resisted.

“I had a life here. And I felt something was waiting to happen for me in Belgium, which wouldn’t back in Poland.”

Kataryna in her Polish bakery and café

So she stayed on. She works in a Polish bakery and café in the mornings – that’s where we met her – but, in term time, she teaches Polish to children in several schools in the Etterbeek district with its large population of Poles.

“And there really was something waiting to happen for me. I fell in love again, with a Belgian, and we’ve been married ten years. He’s 50, thirteen years older than me, and my friends all warned me that he would betray me and leave me. But he hasn’t, not yet. At least, I always feel he’s there behind me, supporting me, and I don’t feel he’s ever been unfaithful. Maybe I’m a fool, but that’s what I feel.”

It seems that she gets physically ill when he’s away, and then miraculously recovers when he returns. Apparently he also feels lonely and incomplete when he’s separated from Kataryna.

Her husband brought her a ready-made family of three. His first wife left him with all three soon after the birth of the last. Kataryna finds the youngest easy, since he has only known her. The other two were more problematic, especially the middle child, a girl now entering teenage.

“It isn’t simple,” she says.

We wished her well. I hope the marriage is as good, as solid as she believes it is. I hope life continues to treat her as well in Belgium as she feels it has so far.

Her café drew us to it on both days we were in the area. Our breakfast was all the more pleasant for listening to her story, although it was surprising that she should speak so openly to strangers. Surprising but also cordial and friendly.

Many more Poles will be able to follow in Kataryna’s footsteps if they wish. And Belgians will be able to go back in the other direction: as my wife and I know from several trips to Kraków, the flows are beginning to reverse, with other EU citizens seeking careers in Poland.

Sadly, in the future, neither Belgians nor Poles will find it as easy to choose to settle in England. Brexit will see to that. Equally, English people who might want to pursue a dream, or love, or just simply a job opportunity, elsewhere in Europe, will no longer find that an easy option.

In England, sadly, we’ve chosen to give up the right to free movement. A freedom, not an obligation. We gave it up so that we wouldn’t have to grant it to our neighbours. We have restricted ourselves in order not to be generous to others.

With her ready smile and open spirit, Kataryna was a living symbol of how valuable a liberty England has decided to abandon.

What has the EU ever done for us?

It was quite an experience, spending a weekend in Cracow – or perhaps I should write Krakow? And pronounce it so the second syllable rhymes with cough and not with bough? Or am I being too political correct?

Well, no, actually. I’m just enthusiastic about the visit and that just makes me a little shamefaced about using an old-fashioned spelling, and German pronunciation. Somehow, I feel that such a vibrant place deserves better from me.

Vibrant it certainly was. Even when the temperature dropped to -16 C, the night was alive with revellers wandering from restaurant to bar to club and back. Even the shops were open, apparently most of the night. The place just breathed vitality.

Krakow: as lively as it’s attractive. And it’s both

You can’t possibly build a serious view of a country from 48 hours spent in one of its cities. But, hey, politicians make ridiculously sweeping generalisations in that way, so why shouldn’t I? After all, out of 330 mass killings in the US last year, one was committed by a pair of lunatics claiming allegiance to ISIS, but that was more than enough for Donald Trump to call for the exclusion of all Muslims from the US, and be applauded for it.

So based on the experience of an entire weekend, I’m happy to proclaim that Poland is young, dynamic, thrusting and going places. Interestingly, 100% of our sample (an old friend – old in terms of time since we first met her, not actually old, I hasten to add – talking to my wfie but, hey, that’s a sample, isn’t it?) pointed to a feeling among Poles that the country is doing remarkably well, and this is due above all to membership of the European Union.

It’s well known, on the other hand, that others have gone off the European project. They resent the loss of national independence it implies, and don’t realise that this is the price they pay for the prosperity. Nothing new there, though. People quickly forget a benefit they’ve already secured, and focus only on what they gave up for it. In Britain we’re seeing the same phenomenon. The Guardian today, for instance, reports on an analysis produced by one Michael Burrage for the British anti-EU campaign. He reckons the country grew much more quickly from trade with the old Common Market than it has from trade with the single market that replaced it.

But isn’t that the way of things? The quickest benefits come in the early days. And the wealth that came from that initial growth has never been lost. We gain less now, but we’re still gaining. As Britain Stronger in Europe replied, for the other side of the debate, membership of the EU was worth about £133bn in 2014, which is no trivial sum. But easy to forget if you only focus on what the country has had to give up to obtain it.

It was fun being Krakow. It was encouraging to see what a lot of good EU membership can do. And that sent me home more than ever determined to resist the trend to take Britain out.

The joys of a winter break. Even without the sun

Luton, where we live, boasts an airport.

In fact, many only know the town for that reason. “Oh, the airport, right?” they say.

Some who are better informed, think of it as the home of that enlightened organisation, the English Defence League. It stands for… well, you don’t need me to explain, do you? The word “League” is a bit of a giveaway, isn’t it? To say nothing of “English” and “Defence.”

Another group think of it as “Stab City.” Trainee emergency doctors love our hospital, as there are few places that offer such an exciting variety of knife wounds. They even get quite a respectable number of gun shot victims – I mean, nothing like a US hospital, of course, but still quite substantial by more civilised standards.

The airport is one of those cheerful little ones. The kind you might expect to provide reasonably good regional services – human in scale, unhurried, uncrowded, generally comfortable. Sadly, it has given way to ambitions way beyond its natural limits and become a major international centre. You know the sort of thing: flights to places whose names contain far too many consonants to be real.

Why, it’s even changed its name to London Luton, because if you don’t mind a ten minute bus trip, a forty minute train ride, a twenty-minute tube journey, and probably another ten minutes in a cab at the other end, it’s really quite convenient for London. And the experience won’t set you back anything like the cost of your first night in then hotel.

Well, not a lot like it.

Because it has the aspiration to be a Sylvester Stallone despite having the body of a Woody Allen, it’s always struggling to make better use of its space. Which it means it spends an inordinate amount of time making lousy use of its space, as building workers close huge areas off to transform them into something much more efficient and comfortable. In other words, something delightful which we’ll all enjoy, at some far off day in the future. Like Conservative economic policy, for instance.

They’re doing it right now. I’d been impressed by the way the airport had hugely improved the security check area. After a false start when it took about 45 minutes to get through, they managed to reduce it to under fifteen, which I feel is a reasonable amount to ask for, as the price for not getting blown up at 30,000 feet. Now, sadly, the pursuit of progress has led to massive regression. There has to be a PhD thesis waiting to be written how often that happens, if there haven’t already been several.

The ruthless pursuit of efficiency means that you now wait about twice as long in the queue. When you get to the front of it, you use a huge tray into which to place your things, so big that the number of people who can be dealt with at a time is cut pretty much by half. If you’ve brought a laptop, you need two of them things, one of which looks empty with a MacBook Air in it.

You then shuffle along in a forlorn little line reminiscent of the newsreel film of refugees trying to get into Hungary. Eventually, you get through to the other side to wait in another queue to collect your gear from the oversize trays at a counter far too small for them.

Next one walks through acres of spacious rooms, wide and high-ceilinged and palatial, all screened off for the builders. Eventually, you reach the departures area where the handful of seats have been taken and you’re left standing in front of a board which, for ten minutes, announces cheerfully that the gate for your flight will be displayed in 1 minute.

Still, that’s the price you pay if you want a winter break. I’ve often felt their beneficial effects. A great way to recharge the batteries. Of course, most people use such a break to go in search of sun and warmth, but we have more original and unorthodox ways. I’m on my way to rejoin my wife in Cracow, Poland. I’m glad to say that the clouds have cleared from the view I’m enjoying through the window next to me. It’s been replaced by a delightful pattern of snow-logged fields interspersed with snowbound cities. I’m glad to say that the pilot has just announced that the temperature at our destination has risen significantly, and has now reached -four degrees of frost. Nighttime’s going to be fun.

Cracow. Or Krakow.
Not exactly Luton. Not exactly hot, either

Talking about announcements, I did enjoy the safety briefing from our cabin purser. She delivered it in sentences that alternated between English and Polish, but it took me a while to work that out: at first I didn’t realise that every other one was actually in English. Not that it mattered: I think I remember about pulling the mask over my face, fixing it with the elastic band and breathing normally; I also fully intend to deal with my own mask first before helping others with theirs, if the situation ever arises. There didn’t seem to be much talk about lifejackets but, hey, unless we land in the Oder or the Vistula, I don’t see how there’d be much call for one.

Not that I want to be ungracious. I’m happy to admit that she was, at least, making the attempt to speak my language. I certainly couldn’t have replied in hers.

Anyway, I’m on my way to Cracow. Should be fun. A break. A new experience.

I suspect I’m unlikely to regret having forgotten to bring the sun cream. The scarf I left at home, on the other hand? I might need a new one.

Ukraine: a moment of truth at Easter. On Hitler's birthday

Easter Sunday. For Christians at least, a good day, pretty much the best. 

On the other hand, this year it also happens to be Hitler’s birthday, which is not quite such a cause for celebration.

And both are relevant. The Ukrainian government – if ‘government’ isn’t too strong a word for a body whose writ is so little followed – has declared an Easter truce in its fight with pro-Russian rebels in the East of the country. This may be a generous and open-hearted gesture, or it may reflect a lack of confidence in its own forces, even to the point of not being sure that any armour it sends against rebels won’t be immediately taken over and turned back the other way.

As happened last time.

As for Hitler’s birthday, well I’ve already commented on the similarities between Putin’s behaviour and Hitler’s. In fact, more than once. I fully accept that not everyone agrees with me: I’ve had it pointed out to me that Putin’s behaviour in Crimea is no different from Thatcher’s over the Falklands.

That strikes me as a false analogy. The Falklands – the Malvinas – ought certainly to be Argentinian and will, I’m sure, be handed over some day. The objection back in 1982 was that President Galtieri sent armed forces to seize them. British possession of the Falklands may well be wrong, but Galtieri’s actions was illegal.

Such breaches of international law damage us all. Not just in the Falklands but anywhere they occur, most notably in Iraq: the West, far from being innocent, is the most frequent and flagrant perpetrator. That, however, doesn’t justify Putin who also has form in these matters: even before Ukraine, he used military force in Moldova and Georgia.

So how about the parallels between him and Hitler?

The most striking similarity is escalation.

Hitler’s first (illegal) military action was to reoccupy the Rhineland. Well, it was German territory, after all. You could argue that the Versailles Treaty, in stipulating that the Rhineland had to be left demilitarised, was unjustly limiting Germany’s legitimate rights.

Then came the annexation of Austria. Well, Austria having lost its Hungarian and Slavic populations, was a massively German nation and there was certainly huge enthusiasm for union with Germany.

Next it was the turn of Czechoslovakia. It had large pockets of German population who, rightly or wrongly, claimed their rights were being trampled on by the Czech authorities. They appealed to Germany to assist them, an entirely disingenuous appeal since they were already heavily dependent on the Nazi regime. That was the crisis that led to the Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain for Britain and Daladier for France thought they had guaranteed “peace in our time” by agreeing to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, through Hitler’s annexation of the areas of majority German population.

The following spring, Hitler had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

That autumn, he invaded Poland and Europe found itself sucked into the Second World War.

Now history doesn’t repeat exactly. The steps are different. But Putin is ramping things up just as Hitler did.

First it was Crimea. Well, a bit like Austria and the Germans, the population is mostly Russian-speaking and closer to Russia than to Ukraine. In fact, it only became Ukrainian through a high-handed act of Kruschev’s in 1954.

Now it’s the Russian-speaking populations of the Eastern Ukraine. Well, rather like the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, they feel aggrieved about being regarded as Ukrainians (at least, quite a lot of them do). Perhaps they feel that Russia is their mother country. And, again rather like the Sudetens, it looks as though they’re getting a lot of foreign encouragement (some of it in the form of armaments and possibly even troops without insignia) for their rebellion.

Comforting that we can count on him as a champion of freedom

Yesterday, despite the truce, there was fighting in the port of Mariupol, which left three people dead. The Russian authorities have expressed outrage. Well, I believe any citizen of the world should see this kind of killing over political matters as outrageous, but Russia clearly feels that it has a specific interest in these incidents because one side of the conflict is Russian-speaking. Which is rather like the United States feeling it has a right to speak for British citizens in trouble with the law, merely on the grounds that they speak the same language (well, pretty much the same language).

What’s next? That’s not difficult to imagine. If Eastern Ukraine is allowed to secede and join the Russian Federation, like Crimea, will Putin next annex the area of Moldova, immediately to the West of Ukraine, where he has already stationed troops in an ostensibly independent nation? From Moldova, he threatens Ukraine’s third city and most important remaining port after the loss of Crimea, Odessa.

None of this is identically analogous to Hitler’s actions, but it’s the same kind of salami-slice approach to foreign policy with the aim of gradually extending its territory. The end result would be a Ukraine so emasculated that it would barely be viable as an independent nation, leaving it liable to absorption wholesale into the Russian Federation. Rather like the rump of Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Reich.

What’s Putin’s objective in doing all this? Again, he’s made no secret of his nostalgia for the Soviet Union. It seems difficult to deny that he’s working to reconstitute it.

It wasn’t much fun last time the world was dominated by a United States glaring at a Soviet Union each in its forest of nuclear weapons. And it wasn’t fun for rather a lot of Europe. No wonder the Baltic States and Poland are concerned – they can see where this may be heading.

It doesn’t have to go there. On Thursday, Russia, Ukraine, the US and the EU met and agreed a way out of the crisis. It involved rebels giving up their occupation of public buildings, in return for an amnesty for protesters who have not committed capital offences. Clearly, it depends above all on Russia reining in its supporters in Eastern Ukraine, and them agreeing to go along with the arrangement.

Will it stick? If it does, something remarkable will have happened. Russia, on the road to aggrandisement by military means, will have drawn a line and said “no, we go no further down this road.” Putin will have pulled back from policies that seem set to push the world back towards a state of affairs that was ugly then and could be a lot uglier now.

He will have diverged fundamentally from the route that Hitler took. We might look back to this 125th anniversary of Hitler’s birth and congratulate Putin on his extraordinarily judicious behaviour.

But three died in Mariupol yesterday. And the pro-Russian protesters aren’t vacating government buildings. The omens aren’t good.

Still, it’s Easter Sunday and I mustn’t spoil it. Have a good one, whether you believe in it or not. At least enjoy the chocolate.

Happy Easter