This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Here we go again, politicians and media hand in hand, doing the work of the terrorists. They are called terrorists because their aim is to scare us into doing their will. Those who help them scare us, by exaggerating their power and importance, are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is stupid, and they should stop.

Supposed ‘experts’ speak in grave tones about ‘security’, an area about which you can say anything at all because nobody ever confirms or denies anything. The ‘security services’, costly and ineffectual as they are, are pleased to be given an importance they have not earned.

And they will be along in a minute demanding more powers to snoop into the lives of the innocent while continuing to fail to spot the guilty. Like anyone who is allowed to claim expenses while not being required to give details of how he spends the money, these people live by boasting and exaggeration, plus a bit of angry pomposity if anyone questions their real worth.

I especially dislike all this lofty stuff about how bad the Belgians are at tracking terrorists. Are we so much better? How will all this look if – and in truth we have no realistic way of predicting or preventing it – it is London next?

The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, says ludicrously that this is a ‘war’ and others bloviate and splutter along the same lines, instantly winning themselves starring roles on the 24-hour news feeds.

What nonsense. How the sordid criminals of the Brussels suburbs, who are common murderers of low morals and low intelligence, must grin like dogs and rejoice to be paid such a fat compliment.

Let Monsieur Valls visit a real war zone and see what modern munitions can do to a big city, such as Baghdad, where the shockwaves from bombs falling a mile away made the hospitals tremble so violently that women gave birth prematurely.

Let him see the enormous craters, the concrete buildings with their floors collapsed like a pile of pancakes, the general chaos. Let him observe how normal life ends, schools close, money loses its value, the shops empty as supplies dry up and the economy ceases to function.

If we were at war, life as we know it would come to a stop, and we would be set back decades, living in ruins without electricity.

That is war. They know all about it in Iraq, Syria, Libya and the other places we have ‘liberated’ recently. What we face is crime – stupid, vicious, cruel, but crime, actions which don’t deserve to be dignified or pumped up beyond their real significance.

When we have eventually found all there is to be known about the culprits, I predict that they will turn out to be very like the drug-addled petty crooks and lowlifes who killed Lee Rigby, who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo and who murdered more defenceless people in Paris last November.

Read this report from the BBC’s Secunder Kermani, which brilliantly describes the reality, quite different from our fictional picture of Wahhabi puritans directed from a bunker in Arabia: ‘One friend of the [Abdeslam] brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam “watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another”. He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no one took him seriously.

‘Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing – this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris.

‘The network that the Abdeslam brothers had around them – based as much on personal loyalty, disenchantment and petty crime as radical ideology – would be key in helping Salah [the other brother] escape after the Paris attacks.’

This is not war. It is the action of deranged nobodies, trying to give their dead-end lives meaning with a grandiose cause.

If you want to know where to find them, just follow the smell of marijuana, the supposedly harmless drug which rots the reasoning powers of its users and which, when combined with radical Islam, explodes into red ruin.

The Big Dope Lobby and its many suckers and dupes constantly attack me for pointing out the dangers of the drug they want to legalise. They claim I blame everything on it. But what can I do?

This week I ask your pardon for referring to this drug twice in one column. For it is not just associated with Islamic terror. It is also linked with the most callous and cruel non-political crime.

The dreadful death of PC David Phillips was caused by Clayton Williams, a youth who smokes the drug so much that his Facebook picture showed him with a cannabis joint in his mouth.

Williams had been smoking this supposedly ‘soft’ drug on the evening he mowed down PC Phillips, the father of a young family – a horror Williams’s doped mind still seems unable to understand.

When will the twin lies, that there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that taking cannabis is a harmless, peaceable recreation, be exposed for the dangerous falsehoods they are?

Though I dislike most of his views, I have always been rather impressed by Barack Obama, a thoughtful and interesting man. He has also been dead right about Cuba, realising that the best way to finish the Castro nightmare is to end the US blockade and make it clear that island’s misery is the fault of its communist despots. He should do something similar in North Korea. A picture of him standing alongside Kim Jong Un might cancel out the embarrassing memory of his plainly unwanted surprise grapple with tango dancer Mora Godoy in Buenos Aires (right).

Once again you will have woken this morning to find that the clocks have been shoved forward by an hour. For me, and for many other early risers, this means weeks of something rather like jet-lag. But what’s it for? Why do we do it? Nobody actually knows. We just do it because we have done it for years. There’s no solid objective evidence that it does any good at all.

Wait a few weeks and the evenings will get lighter all by themselves. Yet we’re told absurdly that it provides more light. It doesn’t.

A Cherokee elder, baffled by the paleface habit of messing around with clocks, once asked: ‘What sort of person thinks that by cutting a foot off one end of a blanket, and then sewing it on to the other end, he gets a longer blanket?’

You won’t be surprised to learn that I am more interested by the gloomy bit of Easter – the betrayal by the secret police spy, the show trial, the cowardice of the government in the face of the mob, executing the innocent and releasing the murderer – than in the happy part. The really great myths, so-called, are not about something which once happened. They are about something that goes on happening all the time, and is happening now.