This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

So far there is little sign of serious thought about the Paris atrocities. We are to have more spooks, though spooks failed to see it coming, and failed to see most of the other outrages coming, and the new ones will be no more clairvoyant than the old ones.

France and Belgium are reaching for emergency laws, surveillance, pre-trial detention, more humiliation of innocent travellers and all the other rubbish that has never worked in the past and won’t work again.

David Cameron (in a nifty bit of news management) takes the opportunity to announce that he will henceforth be spared from flying like a normal human being, in an ego-stroking Blaircraft paid for by you and me. Austerity must have been having a day off.

Actually, if grand personages like him had to shuffle through the security screens, belts off, shoes off, shampoo humourlessly confiscated, like the rest of us, these daft and illogical rules would have been reviewed long ago.

British police officers dress up like Starship Troopers, something they’ve obviously been itching to do for ages and now have an excuse to do, the masked women involved looking oddly like Muslim women in niquabs.

It’s not the police’s job to do this. If things are so bad that we need armed people on the streets, then we have an Army and should deploy it. If not, then spare us these theatricals, which must delight the leaders of ISIS, who long for us to panic and wreck our own societies in fear of them.

Next comes the growing demand for us to bomb Syria. Well, if you want to. Only a couple of weeks ago all the establishment experts were saying that the Russian Airbus massacre was obviously the result of Vladimir Putin’s bombing of Syria.

Now the same experts say it’s ridiculous to suggest that our planned bombing of Syria might bring murder to the streets of London or to a British aircraft.

Perhaps it’s relevant to this that Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter who survived the Bataclan massacre in Paris, said he heard one fanatic in the theatre say to his victims, ‘It's the fault of Hollande, it's the fault of your President, he should not have intervened in Syria.’

There may be (I personally doubt it) a good case for what’s left of the RAF to drop what’s left of our bombs on Syria. It may be so good that it justifies risking a retaliation in our capital, and that we should brace ourselves for such a war.

But I think those who support such bombing should accept that there might be such a connection, and explain to the British people why it is worth it.

I am wholly confused by the Cameron government’s position on Syria. It presents its desire to bomb that country as a rerun of the Parliamentary vote it lost in 2013.

But in 2013, Mr Cameron wanted (wrongly, as it turned out) to bomb President Assad’s forces and installations, to help the Islamist sectarian fanatics who are fighting to overthrow the secular Assad state.

This is more or less the exact opposite of what he seems to want now. Far from being a rerun, it is one of the most embarrassing diplomatic U-turns in modern British history.

Or is it? Does Mr Cameron in fact intend, somehow, to return to his original purpose, and to use the RAF to aid the anti-Assad rebels – who are the sort of people he would arrest if they turned up here?

If ISIS was our real target, then this would be absurd. But is ISIS our real target? If so, we would abandon all scruple, and side with the Syrian Kurds, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Russia and Assad to defeat it. For they are by far its most effective opponents.

After all, when we fought the Hitler menace, we allied with another monster, Stalin, to do so.

Mr Cameron also called ISIS ‘the head of the snake’, and the origin of all these horrors. But again, is this true? Or is ISIS in fact an outgrowth of the burgeoning, richly-funded spread of extreme, puritanical, intolerant, violent Islamism, whose head is not in Raqqa but rather further south?

I hope that if Mr Cameron brings a plan for war to Parliament, there will be enough informed and wise men and women there to question him thoroughly on these points, and vote against him if they are not convinced.

Trickery and propaganda do not invariably arrive in the same shape. Just because we all now know that Anthony Blair defrauded us into a dangerous war with WMD, we shouldn’t be too sure that we won’t be just as easily fooled by his equally smooth and persuasive heir.

The Terror Link Nobody Wants to Talk About

What do modern terrorists have in common? Yes, they are fanatical Islamists, usually (but not always) from ethnic minorities.

But there’s something else very interesting. They are invariably on mind-altering drugs, usually cannabis. The Bombay killers took cocaine and steroids. Anders Breivik took steroids. At least one of the Boston bombers , the Tsarnaev brothers smoked cannabis (one heard voices in his head, one of them was without doubt a dope dealer) , Lee Rigby’s killers. Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, smoked (a lot of ) cannabis. Omar El-Hussein, the Copenhagen killer, had twice been arrested for cannabis offences. Seifeddine Rezgui, the Tunisian beach killer, was a cannabis user. Ayoub el-Khazzani, who tried to kill passengers on the Amsterdam Paris train, is a convicted dope user. The Charlie Hebdo killers, the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, were known cannabis users. The killers of two Canadian soldiers, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, were cannabis users.

And now we know that the same is true of the November 13 killers, Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam,were heavy users of marijuana. Abdelhamid Abaaoud had likewise ‘drifted into a life of thievery and drugs’. Omar Ismail Mostefai was on police records for buying illegal drugs. As for Hasna Aitboulahcen, who was blown to pieces in the St Denis siege, she ‘hung around with drug dealers’.

Don’t try to avoid the significance of this information by accusing me of saying things I don’t. The point here is that drug abuse appears to be a common factor. So why completely ignore it? If the police of North America and Western Europe stopped turning a blind eye to it, they might be a lot more use in the struggle to defend us all from terror.

An exquisite skyline swamped by concrete

Approval has now been given for the building of a vast new concrete slab in the heart of London, 22 Bishopsgate. You may like this sort of thing or not. But once it is built it will be hard to tell London’s skyline from that of Chicago. This doesn’t seem to me to be a gain. In a generation, Christopher Wren’s lovely forest of spires and domes, which belonged to Britain and the world, has been shouldered aside by temples of greed. I am astonished that this has happened with so little protest.

What's so funny about this unpleasant story?

Alan Bennett has for many years dug into the darker side of suburban Britain, giving a faintly tragic, even sordid, tinge to what most of us think is normal and reasonably happy. How strange, then, that the new film by and about him ‘The Lady in the Van’ , makes an oddly cheerful comedy about what looks to me like a rather unpleasant story. Did none of his rich, left-wing north London neighbours shun him for allowing a smelly, bad-tempered nuisance to park in his front garden for years? If so, they aren’t in the film.