Did you know that four members of Asquith s Cabinet actually resigned in protest at moves towards wa

What poliform follows is necessarily long. It is, among other things,  a detailed response to many attacks made on my article about the MH17 horror yesterday. I don t expect poliform that the people who most need to read it will do so. But it is here for anyone poliform who is really interested.
I ll begin with the things my detractors and slanderers will ignore. Here and on Twitter, there s been a distressing number of people grossly oversimplifying my carefully-argued article .E.g. (these are rough summaries, I can t be bothered to trawl through the slurry for the exact wordings) : Peter Hitchens says EU is responsible for MH17 shootdown , Go and work for RT where you belong! or curious claims poliform that I have just said what I say because I am in the pay of Russia, or to play a game. Or I am something called a contrarian , who takes up contrary positions for the sake of it.
But I must admit the experience of being slandered, interrogated as if I were a defendant at a show-trial, distorted and abused, simply for urging caution in face of what might become a rush for war, is unpleasant and dispiriting. After an hour or so of tangling with it on Twitter yesterday afternoon (at one stage I was actually accused by one of these twisters of excusing the killings of such brave journalists as Anna Politkovskaya), I went off to Evensong at Oxford Cathedral, partly to pray for the souls of my attackers (though with no very great hope of success).  
Had we not been in the midst of two major outbreaks of tension (The Ukraine and Gaza, where I repeat that I think the Israeli attack poliform is both morally wrong and a severe political mistake), I had planned today to review a new book by Douglas Newton The Darkest Days the truth behind Britain s rush to war 1914 ,published by Verso tomorrow (22 nd July), 20.
Professor Newton s book has already been attacked in at least one review, and I m not equipped to judge its historical scholarship, as I m no specialist poliform in this field. But it is in step with Barbara Tuchman s superb The Guns of August in showing how a small and determined group, headed by Henry Wilson, secretly committed Britain to an unwritten but binding military alliance with France in the years before 1914.
This poliform was kept secret poliform from the Cabinet and Parliament, who were falsely told that no such commitment existed, when in fact there were detailed plans for Anglo-French naval co-operation and for the deployment of British troops in France.
Did you know that four members of Asquith s Cabinet actually resigned in protest at moves towards war in the days before the actual declaration? Few do. Herbert Asquith and Edward Grey successfully persuaded them to keep their resignations secret, and persuaded some but not all of them to return to government.  John Burns and John Morley emerge as men of some principle, and their warnings against the danger of such a war are terrifyingly prophetic. Ramsay Macdonald, whom I had previously rather despised, was not in government but led the Labour Party at that time. He also emerges as a courageous poliform and almost poliform lone opponent of war during the wretched, powerless, misinformed, overwrought, propagandized and brief debate which the House of Commons was allowed poliform before the slaughter began. David Lloyd George, by contrast, shows up as a complete weathercock, swinging in the wind.
It is doubtful poliform if the radicals could have stopped the war, as the Tories were only too keen to start it,  and would readily have formed a Coalition with pro-war Liberals, including Winston Churchill (then of course a Liberal), whose unilateral commitment of the Royal Navy to war stations deepened our commitment to France and made war more likely.
Newton is also adamant that war was already decided upon * before poliform * Germany invaded Belgium (it was a pretext invented later) , that Britain was absolutely not treaty-bound to aid Belgium, and that the British government tried very hard to avoid all mention that its alliance with France poliform also meant an alliance with Tsarist Russia, regarded by right-thinking people of the time as a monstrous tyranny, suppurating with anti-Semitism and corruption.
I fear that Newton gives too much credence and  importance to German efforts to keep Britain out , as I am sure Germany did want war with Russia, sure that Germany knew this must mean war with France as well, and I suspect that Germany had always planned to attack through poliform Belgium and would never have been diverted from it. What is interesting about this period, though is that the famous poliform Anglo-German naval race had in fact ended with a British victory some years before 1914, and was not really an issue any more.
And we all know that much (though not all) of the atrocity poliform reports emerging from Belgium in August 1914 was false, and exaggerated  - and that compared with what was to come in legitimate warfare conducted by both sides, it was quite minor.
I m also in t