Inevitably, we are left with a morning/weekend-after feeling in the wake of the Commons vote on Syria, and recriminations fill the air. Some of us feel a pang of loss as we listen to John Kerry's hypocritical diatribe in defence of intervention in Syria, to protect the population, to punish the breach of the Geneva Conventions: we could have been part of this, and now we are bereft, left out in the cold. These feelings are natural in those among us who treasured the Special Relationship, and the opportunities it gave us to strut in America's footsteps. For that is all it was and is: the strutting of the bully. And that special relationship is now more than ever tarnished by the revelation that it involves a massive espionage machine, spying, on our territory, against ourselves and much of the world. Of course, it is to defend us against terrorism.

America will now, presumably, lob her bombs into Syria in defence of freedom and democracy, and in the furtherance of peace. France, to her shame, may this time be yapping along at America's heel. Barack Obama, presumably, will derive some comfort and some electoral advantage, and let us hope that the scale of the damage will be lost in the general, already-existing mayhem. Certainly the Syrian people will draw no benefit from it.

Ed Milliband finally found himself acting courageously and effectively. He should now try it more often, for example in challenging the orthodoxy of austerity, which is damaging us, not as immediately traumatically as Assad is damaging his people, but as assiduously. For a class war has been declared in this country, by a section of the governing class against the rest of us. The opportunity offered by the financial crisis is being grasped in an effort to roll back the state. And why should we not applaud the rolling back of a state that seeks so to deceive its people? Of course, it's not that part of the state that's being rolled back: it's the part that protects us against the fall-out of the market in its impersonal, crushing operations. It's the part of the state that mitigates wage-slavery, and seeks to ensure that citizens enjoy enough freedom from economic constraints to exercise their democratic functions without fear.

A war, a cull of badgers, is always handy to divert us from what is actually being perpetrated against us.