This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I confess I was rather looking forward to the arrival of the alleged ‘children’ from the Calais migrant camp. Leftists have an oily habit of stretching the definition of this emotional word. It helps them make the exaggerated claims of suffering, by which they so often achieve their political aims.

I fully expected to see square-jawed, muscled, hairy young men of military age, and I have greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the soppy idiots who spread and believed the propaganda about them. Of course it’s possible that they are all really 12, and have been terribly hardened by war and suffering. But if that is so, how come they are in a crime-ridden camp in France, which exists purely to besiege our borders and launch illegal attempts to cross them?

Nobody ever asks how the inhabitants of this camp got there, because the answer in almost all cases is that they were trafficked there by well-paid crooks. What responsible parent would put an actual child in the hands of such people, notorious worldwide for their ruthlessness? And why are we supposed to be so tear-stained that these people are stuck in France? France, the last time I looked, was one of the most civilised countries in the world. It is not a war zone. Nobody starves there. There are schools. Many fashionable British liberals own houses there. The quality of the coffee has gone down a bit in recent years, but that is no reason to stow away in a lorry or climb a 15ft fence so you can move to Tottenham or Slough.

So what are these enormous, prematurely aged children fleeing from? Why must they come here?

And then, while the self-righteous pro-migrant faction are failing to answer these questions (they cannot), along comes somebody to compare these events with the 1938-1940 Kindertransport trains which carried Jewish children out of the reach of Hitler. Baloney. The comparison is false and, in my view, disgraceful because it diminishes the horror of the past to make a cheap propaganda point about the present.

After the highly public Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, in which Jews under Nazi rule were lawlessly murdered, beaten, robbed and dragged off to prison camps without trial because they were Jews, nobody had any excuse for not helping Jews to leave the Third Reich. Mass murder was plainly the next step. These were real refugees from actual persecution (and it remains our shame that we allowed only the children in, leaving their parents behind to be slaughtered).

Look at the pictures from this era. The children involved have been torn from families, in many cases seen their homes defiled or torched, their parents obscenely humiliated in front of them. Yet somehow they remained children. Pity and mercy are precious things, qualities given to us to keep us human. Those who seek to exploit these emotions for political ends, to play upon real feelings for fake purposes, have much to answer for.

This is NOT justice - it's a witch hunt

The Great Child Abuse Inquiry continues to devour itself, in a storm of rumour and whispers. There is some justice in this.

The whole idea that this country is waist-deep in unprosecuted abuse scandals has always been based on allegations that cannot be objectively proved. Now this industry is the target of its own methods.

The whole country has become a vast kangaroo court, in which guilty and innocent alike are accused, and in many cases we can never find the truth.

For a year, I have been fighting the case of the late Bishop George Bell, whose courage and principle I have long admired, who was suddenly accused of long-ago child abuse by a solitary complainant, 57 years after his death. No other accusers have come forward.

To begin with, his own church, aided by several newspapers, the BBC and the police, acted disgracefully as if his guilt was proven. The police even said they would have arrested him if he hadn’t been dead, an absurd and meaningless statement which persuaded many he was guilty.

Now, thanks to relentless pressure by many good people, plus me, the BBC have honourably retreated, the police have softened their line, and the Church themselves have published a booklet about Chichester Cathedral in which they admit that the charges against Bishop Bell have never been tested in any court and are just ‘plausible’, a feeble word given that the accusation, if true, would strip away his good name for ever.

It’s not enough. But it took all the running we could do just to stay in the same place, returning to the old English custom that all are presumed innocent until guilt is proven. If the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary could grasp this point, their hopeless inquiry could be shut down before it soaks up the entire national budget and we could go back to proper British justice.

The best summary of what is wrong with our selection-by-wealth comprehensive school system comes from a campaigner against Kent’s excellent if oversubscribed surviving grammar schools.

One of her children didn’t pass the test. Her reaction? ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me. We shopped at Waitrose.’

Don't panic! They're just sad old wrecks

How we love to frighten ourselves about those wicked Russians.

There was a sort of frenzy on Friday as portions of Moscow’s museum-piece fleet slogged past the White Cliffs of Dover, as if the Spanish Armada were at our gates.

Actually the Channel is an international waterway, and we don’t own it. Russia (whose Gross Domestic Product is smaller than Italy’s) is quite entitled to send her ships through it. And Russia is in no fit state to invade anything much larger than Rutland.

The Russian ships are handsome, but doddery. The ancient Soviet-era carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, started life in a Ukrainian shipyard and was then named after the decrepit Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

She left a shocking trail of black smoke as if she was burning coal.

Her main escort, the outwardly majestic Peter The Great (originally named after the KGB chief Yuri Andropov), recently spent two years rusting gently, tied up at Severomorsk.

No wonder, given that most of her class are unusable thanks to wonky nuclear reactors.

The really sad thing is that, having madly scrapped our own carriers and sold off the Harriers that flew from them, not to mention axeing a huge number of destroyers and frigates, we have reduced our own naval power to a pathetic level. Is it perhaps envy that makes us so fretful?

If Russia is now better at projecting power in the Middle East than we are, it is because we are weak by choice, not because Moscow is strong.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down