The Ukraine flag flies from the mast at my local University of Hull and flags are draped from the windows in the more affluent parts of the city, the shopping centre in nearby Beverley has yellow and blue dangling lights along the front of the shopping centre and we are drowning in pro-Ukrainian propaganda on the mainstream media. It is not hard, of course, to be against Putin who has invaded a sovereign country but why have we turned into such a blatantly racist country, banning weekend Russian lessons for Russian children and forcing a Russian tennis player to decry Putin in public before he is permitted to play at Wimbledon? Everything Russian is bad and everything Ukrainian is good.
Ukraine and Russia are the breadbaskets of Europe and make a fair contribution to bread production and other wheat flour based products across the world. Ukrainian farmers are somewhat preoccupied now and will not be attending to this year’s wheat harvest. Under embargo conditions, the world is prevented from selling wheat seeds to Russian farmers so, in addition to the oil shortage and the rapidly rising prices of fuel, we are almost certainly going to face a wheat shortage. China has been stockpiling wheat and other foodstuffs—almost as if they knew something was going to happen—but have we? Of course not. All we seem to stockpile is pronouns of which, judging from the rash of them that I see at the foot of people’s emails, there seems to be a surplus.
I wonder how the chattering classes will feel about supporting war in Ukraine when their SUVs are sitting empty of fuel on the drive and they cannot even buy a pan loaf at Waitrose, let alone a bloomer of sourdough bread. I think we’ll soon see the Ukraine flags coming down. Conversations over the dinner table, if there is any food left with which to make dinner, will probably revolve around how plucky little Ukraine has made its point and it is now time to stop. A few walks to the nearest fee paying school in the rain with young Sebastian and Persephone will soon bring on a yearning for the warmth and comfort of the SUV. Being unable to boast about how the kids made the bread for the lunchbox by themselves will soon turn minds to the memory of full rows of shelves in the bakery section at Sainsburys.
But presently these are the very people calling for us to arm the Ukrainians to the hilt, house Ukraine refugees and eschew all things Russian. Of course, it would be wonderful if Putin decided to stop either spontaneously or had quickly been repelled at the border. But can’t they see that the more we egg on the Ukrainian government and send them weapons, the longer the Ukrainian people will suffer and the greater the casualties among the innocent Ukrainians will be. “But what else can we do?” they say. It is not my job to decide or to advise what we do and what should happen but at the moment we seem to be determined to keep this going until we are exhausted by virtue signalling. I don’t want Putin to control Ukraine any more than they do but it is obvious that one way the war would end would either be Ukrainian capitulation or a swift Russian victory. Sure, there would be a mess to clean up after and a tense political situation to be resolved by the United Nations, but each day the war is prolonged the mess gets greater and the situation becomes more tense.
The middle class flag wavers must make an effort to see what is going on and that Ukraine is not as white as self-raising flour. As reported by Ryan McMaken in Mises Wire, while western leaders have so far resisted escalating the situation in Ukraine to World War III ‘a number of foreign parliaments among the US’s NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) “partners” have not been nearly as hesitant to escalate matters.’ Citing Newsweek, McMaken said: ‘Lithuania’s parliament unanimously approved a resolution calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine—joining other NATO members Estonia and Slovenia in the appeal.’ Of course they did, these countries hate Russia and within Lithuania, formerly part of the USSR, I have met people who openly adulate Adolf Hitler for no other reason than he, like them, hated the Russians. There is credible evidence that there are far right elements in Ukraine and established journalists such as Peter Hitchens support this view. There is also evidence that we are directly arming them.
It is very hard to fathom why our politicians and the public seem to be so united, not only in understandable condemnation of Putin, but also in their unquestioning support of Ukraine. We don’t have to take sides, it’s not compulsory but our one-sidedness is prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people and will ultimately lead to intolerable shortages of fuel and food in our own country. If the bread does run out, Boris Johnson—who seems to have taken centre stage in the warmongering—under advice from his leading adviser Carrie Antoinette and her eponymous forebear he will probably say ‘let them eat cake’.
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