Express & Star

E&S Comment: Tragedy is no excuse to start war

Hundreds of innocent people have lost their lives in tragic circumstances as a Malaysian Airlines jet was shot down over eastern Ukraine.

Published

But while their families struggle to deal with the sudden and unexpected way their loved ones died, the sabres are already rattling.

Inevitably, the disaster of MH17 will become a political and diplomatic incident in the long-running crisis in Ukraine, as pro-Russian separatists seek to break the country up.

None of the people killed yesterday had anything to do with the tensions.

They were travelling from Schiphol in Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

These are worrying times for people who live in eternal hope of a world at peace. The Israeli military has begun a ground offensive against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

Iraq is burning as insurgents seek to create an Islamic state, taking advantage of the crisis in Syria to expand their operations there.

All the while, Britain carries on as normal. Today, however, the country grieves for the people killed.

The only hope after this devastating incident is for politicians and diplomats to be better people than many of them have been so far. This is now the moment for Russia's leader Vladimir Putin to define himself as a man of peace.

He must pull back any weaponry and equipment he has placed close to the Ukrainian border and support his neighbouring country to mend itself.

So far he has sought to blame Ukraine's government for the tragedy. To exploit this disaster to further his own ends will win him no friends in the West. Some Americans are behaving little better.

John McCain, who once sought to become the President of the United States, blurted out the sort of violent rhetoric that would horrify his fellow citizens had it been directed towards them from a foreign power.

"If it is the result of either separatist or Russian actions mistakenly believing that this is a Ukrainian warplane, I think there's going to be hell to pay and there should be."

Today is not a day in which anyone should be talking of 'hell'.

The Ukrainians must do everything in their power to leave no stone unturned.

And the world's statesmen must not allow innocent people's deaths to be turned into an excuse for war.

It is now a time to mourn, to console and to begin the quest for something that every single loved one of those 295 souls on board the plane deserve: Truth.

Work was meant to have helped traders

The whole point of the long-running, costly and disruptive work in Wolverhampton city centre is to make it a better place for businesses.

Why, then, has the city council dug up a pavement it only laid a few months ago, bringing all the noise, dust and problems back?

The answer is a delay in the delivery of bins.

The city council decided that rather than not do the paving work, it would plough ahead and then come back when they were ready.

This may well be the most convenient thing for the council to do when it has been let down by a supplier.

But it does nothing for the traders who are meant to be the ones to benefit from £1.6 million of work to widen the pavements in Queen Street and remodel Princess Street.

The whole purpose is to make the city a welcoming and attractive place to shop.

It is the traders who struggled on through years of delays and the eventual scrapping of the £300m Summer Row shopping centre, the decade of legal wrangling over new the Sainsbury's supermarket and the imposition, abolition and re-imposition of night time parking charges.

They are the ones who picked up the pieces when marauding thugs looted shops during the riots of 2011.

The intention behind the work is entirely commendable.

But it is being undermined by bad planning. Businesses have suffered long enough.

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