Month: June 2022

East is East, and West is West? Verily I say unto you, Kipling had no prophetic powers. He didn’t foresee that, 130 years after he wrote that poem, the West would boast a pro-Russian Pope.

Pope Francis must be on an ecumenical mission to reverse the 1054 Schism. When he broaches the subject of the on-going war, he sounds exactly like the KGB Patriarch Kirill, known in some quarters as ‘agent Mikhailov’.

That means they both sound like Putin’s propagandists, and indeed Putin himself. Both try to justify the bandit raid on the Ukraine. And both certainly agree on the casus belli.

According to all such sources, Putin’s only option was to attack. He was severely provoked (“partly provoked” is how the Pope put it) by the eastward expansion of Nato, threatening Russia’s very survival.

Nato, egged on by its Anglo-Saxon members, was going to use the Ukraine as the beachhead for an offensive to smite Holy Russia. Had Vlad not struck, Abrams tanks would be rolling into Red Square even as we speak.

That idea can be expressed in many ways, and His Holiness expresses it succinctly and unambiguously, as befits a prelate. He recalls that, a few months before the war, he spoke to an unnamed head of state. That mysterious official told him, a propos of nothing, that “a wise man who speaks little is a very wise man indeed”.

Allow me to expose the incognito. The proverb that so impressed His Holiness is Russian, which gives us a clue to the identity of his interlocutor. This little discovery vindicates the book the Pope must have seen when he was younger: “Everything secret will become manifest”.

Moving right along, Putin said “…that he was very worried about how Nato was moving. I asked him why, and he replied, ‘They are barking at the gates of Russia. They don’t understand that the Russians are imperial and can’t have any foreign power getting close to them.’ ”

Nato has never made a single threat to Russia that could be described as even “whispering”, never mind “barking”. It’s not there to annihilate Russia, only to prevent Russia from annihilating others.

And what does “imperial” mean? A blank licence to pounce on any country within reach? As for foreign powers getting close, Russia already has five Nato countries on her borders – and so far those Abrams tanks have stayed put.

The Pope not only repeats those Russian lies, but he also treats them with obvious sympathy. Having vented his perfunctory regrets about the savage brutality of the Russian troops, he added that: “… the danger is that we see only this, which is monstrous, and we do not see the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented.”

Quite. Those raped Ukrainian women and children, both male and female, have only themselves to blame. They provoked imperial Russians by wearing short skirts, tight trousers and, presumably, revealing nappies.

Anticipating the reactions of heathen vermin like me, His Holiness clarified matters: “Someone may tell me at this point, ‘But you are in favour of Putin!’ No, I am not. I am simply against reducing the complexity to a distinction between good and bad.”

God forbid. Good and bad are too complex to pinpoint accurately in any situation, and never mind the Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount.

If I understand correctly, since the Pope isn’t supposed to be in favour of Putin, he repeats Putin’s propaganda out of his professional attachment to relativist truth in all its complexity. As long as that truth has nothing to do with good and evil.

Such relativism is odd in a Christian prelate. One feels like repeating the clichéd question: “Is the Pope Catholic?”

The more he enlarges on this subject, the more valid does that question appear. Thus he adds: “Here is no metaphysical good or bad. What is emerging is something global, involving elements that interlink.”

In other words, the Ukraine got caught between the Scylla of the West (minus Germany, France and Italy) and the Charybdis of Russia. Being imperial, Russia is genetically programmed to seek expansion ad infinitum, so she had to react to Scylla’s encroachments by bombing the Ukraine flat.

Fair enough. But what’s the West’s interest in the bloodbath?

Pope Francis is happy to elucidate: “What is before our eyes is a situation of world war, global interests, arms sales and geopolitical appropriation, which is martyring a heroic people.”

I get it now. It’s arms manufacturers who are to blame. And Nato, with its commitment to geopolitical appropriations. As for Putin, his conduct of the war is lamentable, what with so many heroic people martyred, looted, raped and left homeless. But he really had no other choice, did he?

True, some problems indeed don’t lend themselves to binary moral simplifications. But this isn’t one of them.

A horde of savage bandits attacked a peaceful country going about its daily business. Their road map highlights other destinations too, for future reference. Given half the chance, they’ll reduce all of Europe to Bucha and Mariupol.

They are unquestionably evil, while the heroes so close to the Pope’s heart are being martyred because they are defending everything that’s good in their country – and other countries, which the bandits also see as prey.

The Pope’s moral compass is going haywire. It must have been left next to an iron bar for too long.

On 27 February, 1943, the Gestapo began rounding up Berlin’s male Jews to deport them to…well, kingdom come. Their pestilent presence clashed with the Nazis’ declared aim of making Germany Judenrein, rid of Jews.

Yet many of those men were married to Aryan women, most of whom refused to divorce their husbands, in spite of the pressure the Nazis applied and the incentives they offered. Some of the husbands were part-Aryan themselves, rather than what the Nuremberg laws defined as “full Jew”.

However, the women and their families didn’t accept that outrage meekly. They came out in force to demonstrate on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse. The protests lasted seven days and ended in… I’m not going to tell you.

Instead, if you happen to know any Russians, ask them to guess the outcome of the action. Any such guess would be based on their knowledge of the Nazis’ monstrosity, and also on their own experience of Putin’s Russia.

Five gets you ten, they’ll assume that the police ploughed in with rubber truncheons, laying about them like Macduff, the Thane of Fife. The demonstrators dispersed, their wounds sputtering blood on the nearby Alexanderplatz.

Many were dragged to police stations, where they were all beaten up and tortured. Some of the men were raped with broom handles; some of the women, the old-fashioned way. Prison sentences were then meted out en masse.

Right? No, those poor Russians guessed wrong. The Nazis did no such thing. On Goebbels’s orders 1,800 Jews were released. This, though the Nazis had just lost at Stalingrad and were feeling enough heat to become even more brutal than usual.

The parallel with Putin’s regime is as inexact as such parallels usually are. There were some anti-war demonstrations all over Russia immediately after 24 February, when the bandit raid on the Ukraine began.

Yet they ended in the way my hypothetical Russians hypothetically ascribed to the Rosenstrasse protest: truncheons, torture, imprisonment. Since then the country has been silent. Demonstrating is fine, but not if that turns into a suicide pact.

Then again, not one person among the thousands in the upper reaches of the Russian government has uttered a single word of protest against the brutal, genocidal attack on the Ukraine. Yet, with all the suitable disclaimers, the situation in the Third Reich was different.

Many top German generals, such as Beck, Halder, Blomberg, Fritch, Schleicher, were openly opposed to Hitler’s war – and as openly looked down on him as an upstart corporal. And Admiral Kanaris, head of the Abwehr, not only opposed the war but even plotted against Hitler, some sources suggest in cahoots with the British.

Yet none of those generals was imprisoned or suicided, although some were cashiered. It was only after the July, 1944, plot that some dissidents, including Kanaris, were arrested and executed.

In other words, the blind obedience and uniformity of opinion within Putin’s elite outdo even Nazi Germany. The conclusion makes itself: Putin isn’t Hitler. He is worse.

Many of Hitler’s acolytes, including some of those I’ve mentioned, were Hitler’s stooges. But they weren’t his mindless puppets.

As a Russian émigré commentator mentioned, what goes on in Russia resembles not so much a dictatorship as a death cult. Putin is typologically closer to Jim ‘Kool-Aid’ Jones, than to Hitler.

(For my younger readers, Jones created a fanatical sect. Like many madmen, he emitted powerful emanations, which he used to turn the adherents of his cult into unthinking automata. On his command, in 1978 all 918 cult-followers, a third of them children, committed suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.)

Hitler too could hypnotise multitudes with his evil charisma – but not quite to the same extent. Putin achieves the same purpose admirably, if by means other than charisma. That’s why he isn’t so much a dictator as a shaman of an evil, brainwashed cult.

And that’s why his 5,000 top henchmen open their mouths and repeat, on Putin’s cue, insane mantras, along the lines of Russia’s natural border being Pas-de-Calais, threats of a nuclear incineration of the world and calls for the genocide of Ukrainians.

Some will take issue with the observation that Putin is worse than Hitler. After all, the KGB major hasn’t murdered millions, occupied most of continental Europe or plunged the world into the most devastating war ever. Not yet, would be my way of completing that sentence.

Actually, Hitler hadn’t done any of those things either, until 1 September, 1939. If Putin acts on ten per cent of his eminently believable threats, Hitler, even post-September, 1939, will look like a humanitarian by comparison.

If the parallel with Hitler is imprecise, the one between the Munich appeasers and today’s EU is unimpeachable. Not all of the EU, just its rotten core.

France, Germany, Italy and Hungary are actively sabotaging the efforts of Poland and the Baltics, which, in alliance with Britain and the US, are doing all they can and even more to help the Ukraine. All those Putinversteheren cover up their cowardice and greed with bien pensant soundbites about the urgent need to stop the bloodshed, save lives and Putin’s face, and some such.

Manny Macron has even gone so far as to say that the last thing Europe wants is the destruction of Russia. The alternative to such a cataclysm is for the Ukraine to capitulate, cede another chink of her territory and stay supine – until Russia has amassed enough power to grab what little is left, and then push on.

Nobody wants to destroy Russia, Manny. Don’t listen to your friend Vlad – he is lying to you. What all decent people (which category manifestly doesn’t include Messrs Stolz, Macron, Draghi and Orban) want is to prevent Putin from destroying others. Ukraine first, the Baltics second, Poland and possibly Finland third – and tomorrow, to borrow a well-known phrase, the world.

President Zelensky keeps appealing to the West with Churchillian pleas: Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. The job he has in mind isn’t destroying Russia. It’s recovering the Ukraine’s possessions stolen by the sadistic death cult that goes by the name of Putin’s Russia.

Unable to produce cars, computers, up-to-date equipment or anything people would want to use, the death cult excels in one manufacturing category only: mass production of corpses.

Those who don’t realise that the cult threatens the survival not just of the Ukraine, but of our civilisation, what’s left of it, are either fools or knaves. Or, as some European ‘leaders’ prove, both.

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him,” said Pygmalion’s Higgins.

True, in those days accent was – and to some extent still is – a class indicator. And, though class tensions were never as toxic as Marx portrayed them, neither were they nonexistent.

The Phonetic Atlas of England lists 50 major dialects and perhaps twice as many minor ones. (London alone boasts five distinctive accents, each with sub-variants.) It would be fair to say that even in our progressive times some are perceived as being superior to others, especially since a few accents aren’t always comprehensible to Englishmen from elsewhere.    

Now, 110 years after Shaw wrote his play, such discrimination is about to be outlawed. The Social Mobility Commission has recommended legislation to make socioeconomic background a “protected characteristic” under the Equality Act, alongside race, sex and other forms of discrimination.

Since so far every such proposal has been acted upon, watch out. If you don’t want to get in trouble, make sure you never look down on someone who sounds as if he has just emerged out of a Liverpool or Newcastle slum.

Sorry, did I say ‘look down’? My mistake. You can get in trouble even if you neither do nor even think any such thing. For, according to a recent study, ‘accentism’ is a so-called implicit or unconscious bias. That means you can be an inveterate accentist and not even know it.

It’s not immediately clear how you can get rid of such prejudice if you don’t even realise you have it, but I trust our government officials. They’ll think of something to make our collective schizophrenia progress even faster.

‘Accentism’ is a neologism, adding yet another -ism to the rich collection we have already. I’d love to take credit for this enlargement of our lexicon, but that would be unfair to Dr Robert McKenzie, a social linguist who led the aforementioned study Speaking of Prejudice.

The study found that people with strong northern accents are seen as “less intelligent” and “less educated” than their southern counterparts. The conclusion is obvious: accentism must be outlawed because it causes “profound” social and economic harm to those on the receiving end.

Also, people with “denigrated accents” are more likely to be found guilty in court. No doubt that’s true. But – and I know the skies will open and I’ll be smitten by lightning – could it be that people with “denigrated accents” commit more crimes? I don’t think too many muggers sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Dr McKenzie passionately advocates changes to the Equality Act, citing Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner as one known victim of accentism. He said: “She realises that criticism of her accent is a way of taking away her message, and women in particular are targeted this way.”

In actual, rather than our virtual, reality, Miss Rayner could indeed sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg and still come across as a stupid, ignorant, heavily tattooed guttersnipe. No phonetic exploration is needed to “take away her message”.

Her illiterate, turgid, quasi-communist harangues do a splendid job of it by themselves. Anyway, since Rayner has risen to the second-highest position in one of our two main parties, it’s hard to argue that she has been held back by her accent. If anything, she has grossly overachieved. 

No one thought another politician, Enoch Powell, was “less intelligent” or “less educated” because he spoke with a Wolverhampton accent. Closer to home, one of my closest friends sounds like the Yorkshireman he is. Yet I assure you that even his detractors would never underestimate his erudition and brilliance.

Regional accents began to acquire a bad reputation only in relatively recent times. And back in 1755, when our first dictionary was compiled, even the brightest of men – including Dr Johnson, who compiled our first dictionary – bore the phonetic imprint of their birth.

Things began to change with the rise of the middle classes first to a prominent position, then to a dominant one. People in these social strata tend to be socially insecure, which is why they are often more snobbish than aristocrats.

The dwindling aristocracy ringfenced its accent, but the classes immediately below it began to use a uniform, flat pronunciation (and certain lexical quirks) as a badge of class, sending an instant Mowgli-style message: “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

Also, in those backward Victorian times, England hadn’t yet got around to the idea that every jumped-up trade school could be called a university, for Tony Blair to boast that half the population would soon have higher education. Hence all the upper classes tended to send their offspring to the same few schools and the same two universities.

Those schools provided a better education in humanities than do today’s post-graduate courses at Oxbridge. They were also in competition and, by way of a uniform, each developed its own subtle variance on the public-school accent. That way no one would confuse an Old Etonian with a Harrovian, or either of them with a pupil of Rugby or Marlborough.

Then a new concept appeared, Received Pronunciation or Queen’s English. Victoria, though not her German consort, spoke that way, and the public-school classes imitated her speech, with varying success.

Regional accents became the lot of the uneducated classes, but there was a powerful gravitational pull upwards. Ambitious youngsters wished to join the haute bourgeoisie, and getting rid of their natural accents was an essential social hoist at the time.

Then in barged the twentieth century, heralded by the roar of August guns. Out went the aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall.

The middle classes became truly dominant and they began to put their phonetic foot down. A uniform middle-class pronunciation became de rigueur in many professions, and regional accents could still apply brakes to a career.

Eventually Received Pronunciation began to be associated with BBC announcers. Students from all over the world were learning their English vowels from BBC broadcasts, even as that accent began to deteriorate in its native habitat – first imperceptibly, then noticeably.

As society became more egalitarian, upper-class accents began to shift towards the middle. That vindicates my belief that it’s only possible to equalise down, not up.

Regional accents became more acceptable, if not yet universally so. Yet they too suffered from the pandemic of uniformity. If Prof. Higgins lived closer to our time, he’d find it harder to pinpoint a Londoner’s accent to within a few yards of his home.

All of London, and generally South-Eastern, accents started to smooth out their differences and largely merge into so-called Estuary English, transmogrifying into a generic pan-regional pronunciation.

As England degenerated from an increasingly egalitarian society into a frankly socialist one, regional accents became widely acceptable, even desirable. They were seen as a password opening the door to proletarian virtue. A regional accent was an affirmation of political correctness before the term was even coined.

That tendency didn’t leave the upper classes untouched either. From the Palace down, they started to shift towards the middle as well. Even the language of the Queen left much of Queen’s English behind.

If you compare Her Majesty’s accent at the beginning of her reign and now, you’ll know what I mean. And our lovely future queen, Kate, enunciates words like ‘ball’ as close to ‘bow’, which sounds Estuary to me.

As for the BBC accent, it has disappeared altogether. Being the quintessence and promulgator of a socialist England, the Corporation actively encourages regional accents. These days, most of the Phonetic Atlas is regularly illustrated in news broadcasts.

This brings me to another lament of Dr McKenzie. His heart bleeds gushingly all over the plight of some of our civil servants who have to disguise their regional accents at work.

That may be, but the reverse practice is much more widespread. In advertising, for example, I knew several people who worked hard to shift their accents downwards, to make it easier to get jobs and secure promotions.

The same happens in Miss Rayner’s own field, especially in her own party. Tony Blair, for example, resorts to phonetic subterfuge to disguise his expensive education. He desperately tries to drop his aitches, but sometimes he forgets and reverts to his natural way of speaking.

I have a good explanation for the implicit bias that so vexes Dr McKenzie. Most people with northern accents are perceived as “less intelligent” and “less educated” because they are. So are most people with southern and upper-class accents, along with those whose accents have no obvious geographical origin.

Those pejorative modifiers apply to most people, full stop. They don’t apply to a few bright and erudite individuals here and there – and those people are never underrated because of their vowels.

Never, that is, except in the febrile minds of our social, or rather socialist, warriors who are obsessed with class.

My approach to arithmetic tends to be digital: counting on the fingers of one hand, two in extremis. But that’ll suffice to assess the government’s project of sending boat people to Rwanda for processing.

The plan has come in for hamstringing legal challenges and much criticism, most notably from the Prince of Wales, who called the scheme ‘appalling’. That made my mind up for me even before I considered the issue in detail.

HRH is my infallible guide to reaching the right conclusions. Whenever he advocates something passionately, I don’t have to think for myself. I simply take the opposite position and smile all the way to the keyboard.

Thus his drive for ‘organic’ foods (to be pedantic about it, all food is chemically organic), has turned me off such foods for ever. HRH wants to have chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers banned. This noble principle is dearer to him than the millions of lives around the world that will be lost to famines as an inevitable result.

This brings me back to my rudimentary arithmetic. The population of the world will reach eight billion this year. I don’t know how many of them would happily swap their home country for Britain, but I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot, in round numbers. Billions, for sure.

Even HRH and other honorary members of the righteous, or rather self-righteous, set must agree that Britain can’t welcome all such aspiring immigrants. She can’t even accommodate all of roughly 80 million who are refugees already.

Hence some limitations on immigration have to be in place. I’d be keenly interested to know how Prince Charles proposes to handle this problem, but he hasn’t so far graced us with anything approaching a solution.

As to limitations on illegal immigration, there shouldn’t be any. The government is duty-bound to stop it altogether, 100 per cent. Such migrants are law-breakers, which makes this problem not only arithmetical but also legal.

Boris Johnson, who commendably sees little intellectual difference between HRH and the trees he loves to hug, put it in a nutshell: “We cannot sustain a parallel illegal system. Our compassion may be infinite, but our capacity to help people is not.”

On that occasion, he didn’t cite any numbers, leaving the task to me in my self-assumed capacity of homespun arithmetician. So back to my adopted discipline.

In 2021, 28,526 people crossed the Channel in dinghies and other death traps, having paid gangsters thousands of pounds for the privilege of risking their lives. That was more than a three-fold increase over 2020 – and another huge increase is expected this year.

The general rule is that refugees must stay in the first safe country they reach. Since they cross into Britain from France, one has to assume that France isn’t safe in the eyes of the world.

But here’s an interesting paradox: since the 1970s France has indeed suffered the greatest number of terrorist attacks in Europe. However, most of them have been perpetrated by first- or second-generation migrants. That circle is as vicious as they come, which explains why the French look the other way when those dinghies set sail for Britain.

Boat people who don’t drown en route fall into the reluctant embrace of the Home Office, which has to process each case individually. That costs £1.5 billion a year, plus £4.7 million a day for hotels.

That’s it. No more arithmetic is either forthcoming or needed. It ought to be clear to HRH and his like-minded wokers that the plan to ship all such illegal immigrants to Rwanda for processing makes sense on every level – moral, legal, political and financial.

The first 31 are supposed to be shipped tomorrow, but that’s unlikely to happen. Left-wing activists have instructed left-wing lawyers to launch 31 challenges on behalf of that group. They demand an injunction, which may for years bind the whole sensible plan in legal shackles.

Since my grasp of immigration law is even weaker than my numeracy, I don’t know what recourse the government has. It may be able to fight off the challenges and go ahead.

Barring that, much as I detest democracy by plebiscite, I’d be happy with a referendum on this issue. On second thoughts, we don’t really need one. The referendum held six years ago almost to the day communicated the electorate’s views in no uncertain terms.

The people voted to leave the EU for various reasons, but perhaps the strongest one was their wish for Britain to be able to control her borders. The reaction of the woke élite (and most of our élite is woke) to that vote makes one doubt those people’s commitment to democracy.

They held up Brexit for over three years, and it took Boris Johnson’s masterly handling of political mechanics to give the people what they had demanded. As an aside, this partly explains the flood of venom poured on Johnson in all our media, with the exception of The Telegraph and The Mail.

He has many sins, and I for one hate most things the PM is doing. But he deserves gratitude for Britain’s regaining her sovereignty and the right to ruin her economy by her own efforts.

Yet the same influential bigwigs who tried to undermine Brexit are now working behind the scenes to reverse it. Their methods are perforce underhanded, for they can’t afford to be seen as open enemies of democracy. Yet their strategy isn’t hard to discern.

First, they try to make sure Britain’s control of her borders remains a pipe dream. Then they do their utmost to ascribe the current economic difficulties to Brexit, rather than to HMG adopting the same suicidal policies they themselves favour.

The next step will be to force the Tory government out and put their own Labour puppets in. That will be followed by a massive campaign, saying that every reason for Brexit has been compromised.

The influx of migrants hasn’t abated, the economy hasn’t improved, and most of the same EU laws still apply. Hence Britain can only recover by returning to the fold. Keir Starmer, or whoever is in charge, will then call for re-entry into the EU, and the combined forces of the left-wing media and woke quasi-intellectuals will work tirelessly to get their desired result.

Since most of those people are republicans, they may launch a parallel campaign to abolish the monarchy. I wonder if they’ll be able to count on HRH the Prince of Wales for support.   

I once staged a little experiment with the young designers on my staff. They all worked in the same room, with pop music providing background noise. Since I can’t stand that din physically, I told them to turn that abomination off whenever I entered the room.

“You just hate all vocal music,” they said. Not at all, I replied. The next day I brought in a CD of some Bach cantata and put the chorale on.

The youngsters showed acute discomfort. One nice girl simply couldn’t stand the pain. She plugged up her ears with her index fingers and walked out. Tastes differ, commented another nice girl.

Hence this little contemplation.

Homespun proverbs usually make sense, if only on a basic level. Some, however, such as the one alluded to in the title, are wide of the mark.

The implication is that beauty doesn’t exist objectively. Whatever someone – anyone – considers beautiful, is.

You find a Schubert lieder beautiful, he opts for pop, they prefer rap. So all these are different facets of beauty. It’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?

So it is – these days. But such totalitarian subjectivity defies not only taste but also logic. If beauty can mean anything at all, it’s so undefinable that for all intents and purposes it’s nonexistent.

Yet beauty does exist, and it allows for valid disagreement only within a narrow range. One man may discern more beauty in the finale of St Matthew Passion, another may argue in favour of the parallel part of St John. However, if either of them insists that a Beatles song is as beautiful as either Passion, albeit in a different way, he has no idea of beauty.

What is beauty? Pontius Pilate once asked a similar question (“What is truth?”), which did his posthumous reputation no good at all. For he tried to apply relativist criteria to an absolute, implying that absolutes don’t exist.

However, three centuries earlier the greatest minds of Hellenic civilisation had no problem answering either question. Or rather they considered the two questions one and the same.

Thus Plato identified Truth, Beauty and Goodness as the inseparable ontological properties of being (note the prefiguration of the Trinity). Beauty is thus inextricably – and invariably – linked with both high reason and morality.

A materialist may argue that, in that case at least, Plato thought in strictly metaphysical categories. Once you’ve accepted such terms, you may accept his argument. But here, in our physical world, nothing is absolute, everything is in flux.

Yet the materialist refutes himself. He is using thought, a metaphysical entity, to argue that metaphysics doesn’t exist. That makes it hard to take him – or any materialist argument – seriously.

Now, if beauty is an inalienable ontological property of being, we must be born with an aesthetic receiver, an innate sense of the beautiful. And not just we.

Let’s ask that same materialist why male birds are so brightly coloured. A peacock’s plumage, for example, dazzles with its profusion of lurid hues.

If the peacock is but a product of evolution, and if evolution is always ameliorative, improving the survivability of each species every step of the way, then how does a peacock’s tail make the species more resilient?

Easy, smirks the materialist with characteristic smugness. The male bird uses his bright vestments to attract females, thereby enabling him to pass on his genes and ensure the survival of the species.

Splendid, yet another mystery solved. However, it’s not, not really. First, that same gorgeous tail attracts not only panting females, but also predators. They can espy a male peacock from a mile away, and then pick him off at their leisure.

For that gorgeous tail makes a peacock cumbersome. He can barely fly, and when he tries, he can’t stay airborne for long. Hence he can only perform his evolutionary duty if a female gets to him before a predator, which isn’t the way to bet.

Thus his tail may spell suicide, not survival (the same argument goes for birdsong, which not only woos females but also betrays the male’s location). So shall we agree, at least, that the problem is less easy than it seems to our materialist?

If this question puts the materialist argument in a coffin, then the next one nails the lid shut. Whence does the female bird get the aesthetic sense to appreciate the beauty of the male’s plumage? It has to be innate, for a bird can’t refine its taste by going to concerts and galleries.

Furthermore, the bird’s taste coincides with ours. We too are dazzled by the beauty of a peacock’s tail, and we too find the sounds of a nightingale’s voice beautiful.

Suddenly, Plato’s idea gets wings. Beauty is indeed an ontological property of being, and not just of the human variety. This doesn’t prove that beauty is absolute and objective, but it certainly makes this view plausible.

We are all born with an aesthetic receiver but, like a wireless, it may be primitive or state-of-the-art. One receiver may filter out interferences and let us hear every note clearly; another one may let us hear only a hissing, crackling noise. But the music we are trying to listen to is the same in both cases.

Therefore, those equipped with only a dud receiver are in no position to judge beauty or speculate on its nature. It takes a fine-tuned apparatus of the highest quality to perceive beauty properly.

That’s where sanity ends and modernity starts. For modernity is defined, inter alia, by repudiation of hierarchies, emphatically including the hierarchy of taste, which is to say the ability to tell real beauty from fake surrogates.

Moreover, since modernity described on its banners the elevation of the common man, it’s also egalitarian aesthetically. Hence, affirmation of any kind of hierarchical ascendancy threatens to undermine the very foundations of modern society.

Even the hierarchy of wealth may be deemed offensive, which is the psychological basis of socialism. Yet rankling though such inequality may be, it’s palpable.

No one can argue that a chap who has a million is no richer than one with only a thousand to his name. The latter may resent and try to dispossess the former, but he won’t deny the obvious evidence before his eyes.

Appreciating the difference between wealth and poverty is easy, while appreciating real beauty requires attuning one’s receiver to the right wavelength. That takes an effort, and most people aren’t going to make one in the absence of an immediate pecuniary gain.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t perceive beauty. They can but, every time they are exposed to it, they feel that the walls of their complacency are being breached. The whole fortress of modernity is about to come tumbling down, leaving them defenceless and despondent.

That’s why they may react passionately and even violently to any suggestion that some tastes are inferior to others. They are eager not only to assert any grotesque parody of beauty, but also to destroy the real thing.

This sentiment resides at the grassroots of modernity, and this weed grows taller and mightier all the time.

The playwright Edvard Radzinsky regularly streams stories of Russian history, as real as they are surreal.

One made me laugh to tears the other day and, though I don’t expect you to do exactly the same, you are still likely to smile. Barring that, you’ll learn next to everything there’s to know about Russia. (Aristotle’s inductive method I mentioned yesterday will come in handy.)

One of Moscow’s central squares is adorned with the statue of Yury Dolgoruky, the Grand Prince of Kievan ‘Rus, who allegedly founded Moscow in 1147. The prince rides a horse, stopping it just in front of the Moscow Council building.

Until the octocentenary of Moscow in 1947, Dolgoruky had been known in the Soviet Union as an “exploiter of the peasantry and the tax collector of the feudal system”. But Stalin, who liked to trace his imperial lineage back to the origins of Russia, felt a statue would be a fitting tribute to the founder of Moscow.

“A sacred place never stays empty,” goes the Russian proverb, and the Dolgoruky statue was to occupy the spot formerly filled by two others.

The original equestrian statue was erected in 1912 to commemorate Gen. Skobelev, a hero of the 1877 Russo-Turkish War. Five years later, the presence of that satrap to the tsar could no longer be tolerated by the victorious Bolsheviks.

After the revolution, the country was reeling under the blows of two deadly pandemics (typhus and Spanish flu), an equally deadly famine, the deadlier Civil War, a devastated industry and a collapse of agriculture. Millions, uncountable and uncounted, died. More to the point, the survival of Soviet Russia was still by no means assured.

All that made Lenin a busy boy, but he knew how to prioritise. So he still found time to remove the eyesores of statues to tsars and their servants. One such removal he led personally, that of the statue of Grand Duke Sergey erected in the Kremlin on the spot where he had been blown to bits by a terrorist bomb.

The leader of world proletariat shepherded his whole government out and led the charge from the front, in the manner of Gen. Skobelev or perhaps a Texan cowboy. The hands-on leader tossed a lasso over the Grand Duke’s torso and drew all his commissars into a tug of war. The statue was promptly toppled, eventually sharing the fate of its protagonist.

Clearly, Skobelev too had to be knocked off his pedestal. So he was, and an obelisk to Liberty moved into the vacated place, facing the Moscow Council.

The obelisk was topped by a statue of a muscular woman holding the globe, which irreverent Muscovites promptly christened ‘watermelon’. They also joked that the Council was opposite, meaning opposed, to Liberty.

Such humour was tolerated until 1941, at which point the monument was blown up, the woman decapitated, and her severed head transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery.

In 1947, it was time for Dolgoruky to move in, and a competition was announced. By then Russia’s best sculptors had become masters of monumental art, what with the thousands of Lenin and Stalin statues with which they decorated the Russian landscape. A Dolgoruky statue was a doddle, and they all pitched in.

To everyone’s surprise, the competition was won by a Sergey Orlov, known, if at all, only for producing small figurines of bunny rabbits for children. Yet he emerged the winner, teaching history buffs yet another lesson of that period.

At that time the US Ambassador Averill Harriman was leaving Moscow and, by way of a farewell party, Foreign Minister Molotov took him to an exhibition of gifts for children. There Harriman espied one of Orlov’s bunny rabbits and took a shine to it.

Molotov immediately promised to send it to him as a present and contacted Orlov with an offer of 4,000 roubles, a princely sum. Little did Molotov realise that the sculptor was a Soviet man to his bone marrow.

Orlov flatly refused to let his work be sullied by that capitalist’s fingers, normally used to strangle workers. Molotov could keep his blood money, as far as Orlov was concerned.

The rebuffed minister complained to Stalin, as one did. But Stalin explained to him in unprintable words that Orlov was right and he, Molotov, was wrong. To make him better understand just how wrong, in a few months Stalin had Molotov’s wife arrested.

Meanwhile, the great leader was so impressed with Orlov’s patriotism that he awarded him the prized Dolgoruky project there and then — even though he hadn’t even entered the competition. And the sculptor didn’t let Stalin down. He produced a small-scale model that very year.

Stalin’s first impression was favourable, but then he noticed that the horse lacked a certain male fixture. It was a mare, and no symbol of Russian masculinity could be seen riding one. Stalin’s famous yellow eyes narrowed, and the sculptor instantly saw a vision of a Siberian labour camp flashing in his mind’s eye.

Scared out of his wits, Orlov went back to the studio and attached the desired organ overnight. To be on the safe side, he made it disproportionately large, leaving viewers in no doubt that Dolgoruky’s steed was a very male stallion.

Stalin was happy, and a team led by Orlov began to create the full-size statue. The progress was slow, for the miniature figurine didn’t easily translate into a monumental sculpture. So slow, in fact, that Stalin didn’t live to see it completed. Dolgoruky first began to charge the Moscow Council in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death.

Khrushchev took over, and it so happened that every day he was driven to his dacha past the prince and – critically – his improbably endowed horse. Alas, the statue was lit up in such a way that the oversized organ cast a huge shadow on the façade of the Council building, much to the Muscovites’ mirth.

When Khrushchev noticed that striking effect, he flew into a rage and ordered that the horse undergo a sex-change operation. It took workmen a whole night to turn the stallion back into a mare by sawing off that monstrous appendage.

Federico Fellini, where are you when we need you? The Italian had such a keen sense of the surreal that he could turn this story into yet another masterpiece, provisionally titled Che Cazzo?.

I wasn’t quite seven when the statue went up around the corner from where I lived. It pleased me aesthetically, although I was aware of neither its transsexual experience nor its predecessors in Sovetskaya, formerly Tverskaya, Square.

Mercifully, I managed to acquire some sense of reality eventually, by leaving Russia and Dolgoruky behind in 1973. The men roughly my age, those who rule Russia now, haven’t had such a chastening experience.

Keep that in mind when you hear them insist that Putin is a reincarnated Peter the Great, Russia’s natural border is Pas-de-Calais, and it would take them just two bombs to turn the US into a North American Strait.

Do consider the source.

Let’s agree on the terms first, suggested Descartes, and for once he had a point. ‘Mind’ in the title stands for the rational faculty; soul, for the irrational one.

The juxtaposition doesn’t mean to imply that the English are devoid of the latter or the Russians of the former. However, the balance of the two is so different that many dialogues between an Englishman and a Russian will soon sound like a game of Chinese whispers.

The two will blame each other. The Englishman will think the Russian is incapable of grasping rational arguments based on empirical evidence and sequential logic. The Russian will accuse his interlocutor of soulless, cold-blooded rationalism.

Both would be almost right, with neither completely so. The English can feel, the Russians can think, but the value they attach to these faculties differs dramatically.

Yesterday I argued that the civilisations produced by Christianity and Islam are so different largely because of their treatment of philosophy. Exactly the same observation applies to Russia and England (or the West in general).

The other day I visited the Rafael exhibition at the National Gallery, and one of the centrepieces was a faithful reproduction of his School of Athens fresco (the original is at the Vatican).

The fresco emphasises the contrast between Plato and Aristotle. Plato is depicted carrying his Timaeus in one hand and pointing at the ceiling with the other, whereas Aristotle holds his Ethics, while lowering his palm to the floor.

This reflected the popular image of the two thinkers, and it’s unclear whether Rafael’s knowledge of their work went beyond that. In fact, Timaeus deals with many earthly subjects, whereas Aristotle believed that life on earth was guided by heavens.

Where the two thinkers really differed was in their method. Plato tended to proceed deductively, from the general to the specific, while Aristotle’s stock in trade was induction, systematic extrapolation from empirical fact.

However, it’s true that Plato’s work mostly affected metaphysical philosophy, while Aristotle’s influence was mostly exerted through his rationality. Even though he made no great scientific discoveries of his own, Aristotle’s method, when added to Christian cosmology, lies at the foundation of not only Christian scholasticism, but also modern science.

If you’ll permit a time-saving generalisation, English thought owes more to Aristotle than to Plato, whereas with the Russians it’s the other way around. Like many generalisations, this one allows for numerous exceptions, which are, however, indeed exceptions.

If you read Nikolai Lossky’s History of Russian Philosophy, you’ll find many references to Plato and hardly any to Aristotle. When I lived in Russia, none of my friends read Aristotle, but Plato’s Republic adorned many coffee tables.

Even though few Russians of that circle actually read Plato, all of them pretended they had. That sometimes led to funny incidents.

In those days, many of my friends were musicians (a situation that still hasn’t changed, actually). One of them, let’s call him Valery, was an avid reader and an even more avid show-off. For that reason, he always had a volume of Plato prominently displayed in his flat, to remind his guests that Valery was an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

Once another musician dropped by and espied the coveted tome. “Have you read it?” asked Valery as a prelude to boasting that he himself had. “I have,” smirked the other chap dismissively. “It’s all crap. And anyway, Plato ripped everything off Montaigne.”

Such chronological mishaps aside, it’s telling that, while Plato’s idealism was highly productive in Russia, Aristotle’s rationality never quite reached it. In fact, many Russian intellectuals profess contempt for rationality, which they routinely confuse with rationalism.

There is an unhealthy element of Gnosticism there, and it’s discernible in the work of many Russian thinkers – and practically all significant ones. Russians are supposed to be privy to some secret spiritual knowledge that gives them ascendancy over a soulless, materialistic, rationalistic West.

Dostoyevsky expressed this dominant attitude in so many words. According to him, the Russians were “the sole ‘God-bearing’ people on earth who are destined to renew and save the world in the name of a new God and who have been vouchsafed the keys of life and of the new world… [Russian thought] is paving the way for the great spiritual regeneration of the whole world.”

Elsewhere he describes how savagely most Russian peasants beat their wives. Yet that little custom in no way reduced their spiritual superiority over the West:

“Every [German] house has its own vater, terribly virtuous and incredibly honest. He controls the whole family totally. They all work like oxen and save money like Yids… I don’t know what’s worse, Russian swinishness or the German way of saving through honest work.”

For what it’s worth, one could suggest that on balance industry and thrift are preferable to swinishness – but de gustibus and all that. By the way, Dostoyevsky’s virulent anti-Semitism wasn’t just his personal idiosyncrasy. It’s widespread among Russians, partly as an expression of the same Gnosticism. One can hear Russian anti-Semites say, “The Jews are much smarter than we are. But they don’t have our souls.”

That underlying contempt for reason, especially as manifested in quotidian life, explains much of Russian history. It also explains why the country boasting the world’s richest natural resources has never managed to create a decent life for most of its denizens.

Even in our age of high technology, some 40 million Russians (out of 140 million) have no indoor plumbing. As they trundle through snow at night to do their business in icy outdoor shacks, they doubtless contemplate the innate spiritual superiority of their country.

Such Gnostic idealism comes across in every Russian TV chat show, in every speech made by Putin and his acolytes. They all address Russian souls, not minds – and they certainly say things that Westerners find baffling.

The other day, for example, the namesake of the Russian Platonist philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov, suggested on his Kremlin-sponsored talk show that Russia’s natural border is Pas-de-Calais. To any Englishman or, more to the point, Frenchman this statement sounds like a symptom of a terminal mental disorder.

But Solovyov wasn’t speaking to Englishmen or Frenchmen, with their hopelessly rationalist empirical minds. He was bypassing reason to appeal directly to the innermost recesses of the Russian soul, where such lunacy makes perfect sense.

All this would be innocent enough if such irrationality didn’t have dire practical consequences. If you don’t believe me, talk to any Ukrainian you know.

The Lady in Heaven has run into trouble in earth. This independent British film tells the story of Fatima, Mohammed’s daughter, which should give you an idea about the nature of the problem.

Since I haven’t seen the film, I can’t comment on whether Fatima is portrayed sensitively enough not to excite Islamic fury. But that doesn’t matter.

Since Islam prohibits any depiction of sacred personages, no portrayal would be sensitive enough. Fury is therefore par for the course.

According to the reviews I’ve read, the film opens with the scene of a jihadist murder perpetrated by ISIS, then to segue into the seventh century. This sounds like a hint at a causative link between Islam and violence, which makes mere indignation grossly inadequate. Muslims are prepared to kill anyone who says they kill.

Add to this the blasphemy of showing Fatima, albeit with her face piously covered, and bombs, guns or machetes become an inevitable form of film criticism. The popular aphorism notwithstanding, these are much mightier than the pen or keyboard favoured by your usual reviewers.

That’s why Cineworld took the mass protests in Sheffield, Bolton and Birmingham seriously. They pulled the film after just four days “to ensure the safety” of staff and viewers.

That prudent measure gave rise to many a foray into comparative religious studies accompanied by indignant comments on the Muslims denying freedom of expression, which we deem essential and inalienable.

My sympathy is with the Muslims. For, had Islam allowed or, worse still, invited free discussion, it wouldn’t have survived a millennium and a half. And it certainly wouldn’t have survived in any Western environment, if competing freely with Christianity first and secularism second.

Islam has to rely on doctrinaire fiat enforceable by violence because it has little else to rely on. Theologically, this hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Allah only knows what else, is too weak to endure by persuasion.

Look at its take on Christianity, for example. By some accounts, Mohammed spent two years at Nestorian monasteries in Syria. His treatment of Jesus Christ, as merely a prophet or perhaps a divine man, but not God, is certainly Nestorian.

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, a brilliant exercise in popular Christian apologetics. Lewis relies on obvious logic to argue that Jesus could have been three different things, but one thing he definitely couldn’t have been was just a prophet.

The three things Lewis identified were Liar, Lunatic or Lord. Since throughout the Synoptic Gospels, not to mention St John’s, Jesus says he is God, those are the only three things he could have been.

If he knew he wasn’t God but still claimed he was, he was a liar. If he wasn’t God but genuinely believed he was, he was a lunatic. The only other possibility is that Jesus was exactly what he said he was, one of the three hypostases of God.

Not realising this betokens intellectual weakness, which isn’t unique to Mohammed’s view of Christ. That’s why Islam relies on exercise more than on exegesis. Essential to it is unquestioning obedience to the Koranic law and practices, while free thought is downright perilous.

That tendency intensified throughout history. During the first centuries of Islam, it was still in touch with Christianity and Judaism, moving along parallel, if not necessarily converging, lines.

However, their great philosopher Al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) argued, somewhat self-refutingly, that philosophical speculation ought to be banned. Philosophers, he maintained, got some things right, some wrong, but hoi polloi wouldn’t be able to tell which is which.

“It is therefore necessary,” he wrote, “to shut the gate so as to keep the general public from reading the book of the misguided as far as possible.”

Another great Islamic thinker, Averroes (d. 1198), Maimonides’s friend and neighbour in Córdoba, tried to fight that injunction. Averroes (Ibn Rushd, to give him his Islamic name) was one of the main links between Aristotle and medieval thought.

However, all pagan implants, and therefore Averroes, were roundly rejected by Islam and never properly incorporated into mainstream Muslim thought. Ghazzali won in the end.

Averroes exerted a much greater influence on Western thought, specifically on Christian scholasticism or, even more specifically, Thomas Aquinas and his Paris University.

The popular aphorism says that Aquinas baptised Aristotle, but what he really did was re-read Aristotle in the light of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

The Greek word used there, logos, means both word and reason. Hence Christian thought could blend the Word of God with Jesus Christ – and the Divine Reason of Greek philosophers, Plato first, Aristotle second.

The fundamental Christian doctrine of free will could then absorb Greek philosophy and thereby encourage free inquiry. This later found a political expression in such notions as freedom of conscience, self-expression and speech.

That’s why Christianity created the greatest civilisation in history, one that has remained fecund for many a century. On the other hand, by choosing Al-Ghazzali over Averroes, the previously spectacular Islamic civilisation went barren once history emerged out of the Middle Ages.

The religion of Islam, however, has endured better than Christianity, and for pretty much the same reasons. For freedom of inquiry presupposes freedom of doubt. Too many avenues become open, and most people can’t choose the right one – Al-Ghazzali had a point there.

Thus Christianity got to be first doubted, then mocked, then rejected as the principal cultural dynamic. The great store of Christian thought opened its doors to the shoplifters of the Enlightenment, who grabbed Christian freedoms, carried them to their own home and expunged all evidence of their legitimate provenance.

That allowed Christian values to survive the demise of Christianity for several centuries but, as many are beginning to notice with horror, not indefinitely. Thus freedom of speech perseveres, but only selectively, as freedom of woke speech.

While Christian holdouts may resent blasphemous films about Christ, there is precious little they can do about that within our post-Christian civilisation, all too ready to commit suicide by free speech.

Such – or any other – freedoms are alien to Islam. It’s neither theological nor philosophical, but legalistic. The word ‘Islam’ literally means ‘submission’ to the law, which can be enforced by any means necessary, including violence.

That’s why Muslims are ready to kill any Westerner who blasphemes against Mohammed and his sacred entourage. That’s also why pious, which is to say good, Muslims are completely incompatible with the West. As far as we are concerned, the only good Muslims are bad Muslims.

However, they still make attempts to use our own perversions as weapons to attack us with. Hence, in addition to raising purely Muslim objections to The Lady in Heaven, dealing with its portrayal of sacred personages, the protesters also beat us with our own clubs.

Apparently, Mohammed’s under-aged wife Aisha, along with his closest acolytes Abu Bakr and Omar, are portrayed as conniving chisellers. And not only that, but they are all played by black actors. Using the logic they learned at English schools, the protesters accused the film’s makers and distributors of racism.

If you show bad black people, you are thereby saying that all black people are bad. And that’s racism, a sin that to you, Mr Englishman, is much worse than even blasphemy.

Hence the film is hit with a double whammy. First, anyone showing it should be beheaded in accordance with the Islamic scriptures. Second, that evildoer can be charged with racism in accordance with the woke scriptures. (Not necessarily in that order.)

So who says Muslims can’t absorb Western values and incorporate them into their own? They can. But the only Western values that appeal to them are perverse. That makes Islam… I better not complete this sentence for fear of decapitation.

Remember Kipling? “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…”  

One would think that the job of our saintly NHS is to delay death for as long as possible. True enough, treating patients is still one of its tasks. But not the only one – and perhaps not even the most important one.

For, as the good book tells us, you can’t be a servant to two masters. Hence the NHS has to put its true master, the state, before patients. And when its master’s commands are in conflict with patients’ health, there can be only one winner.

It’s from such premises that the latest outrage committed by the NHS can be properly understood. You see, the state has willed that all its servants heroically join its war on culture, tradition and indeed sanity.

The NHS is no exception. Thus, when the other day I walked through the good offices of Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, I saw that the walls of its atrium were tastefully decorated with vast murals depicting happy patients.

Every patient in every mural was some hue of black, which doesn’t exactly reflect the demographics of either Chelsea or Westminster, two of the most exclusive areas of London. But the murals have nothing to do with demographics. They are bullets fired in the culture war.

That wall art, however, may annoy, but it’s unlikely to kill, although I’m sure that the sight made my diastolic blood pressure jump up 20 points. Yet the NHS web pages on ovarian, womb and cervical cancers are something else again.

They offer public information alerting women to the dangers and encouraging them to make early detection possible. That’s a noble, life-saving objective, but achieving it involves the same general principles that apply to crass commercialism.

One such principle is making sure that the information works as a sniper rifle, not a scattergun. It should be precisely targeted to the intended recipient, effectively saying, “Look! It’s you I’m talking to, and what I’m saying is important.”

Thus a web page warning women about their deadly diseases should instantly and unequivocally identify women as its target. But there, as that pre-progressive writer put it, is the rub.

For, according to the government diktat, the use of the word ‘woman’ is actively discouraged, if not yet banned outright. Hence the pages in question are deliberately vague about their target. Talking about cancers that afflict only women, they expurgate the word from the text.

Thus, they used to say that ovarian cancers are “the most common types of cancer in women”. Now they say: “Anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer.”

Womb cancer used to “affect the female reproductive system”. Now it’s “cancer that affects the womb”.

Cervical cancer used to “develop in a woman’s cervix”. Now it’s “found anywhere in the cervix”.

You’d think that, though such woke equivocation is annoying, it’s hardly misleading. But you’d think wrong.

For the state has more than one prong in its frontal attack on culture, tradition and sanity. Its main thrust is education, thoughtfully designed to render people unable to read and understand English properly.

Hence a recent review showed that 42 per cent of adults were unable to understand even the most basic medical terminology.

This means that almost half of all women visiting that web page might not know that ‘ovaries’ and ‘cervix’ have anything to do with them. Their attention wasn’t drawn to the word ‘woman’ that would have the effect of saying: “Hey, it’s you I’m talking to.”

Another prong of the government offensive is runaway immigration, ideally from underdeveloped parts of the world. This is designed to dilute the demographic strata likely to resist brainwashing indoctrination.

Hence 60 per cent of London’s population don’t list English as their first language. Many such women may still understand ‘woman’, but ‘cervix’, ‘ovaries’ and ‘womb’ may well take them out of their depth. They will then go to another website, ideally one with more pictures than words.

I don’t know how many lives would be saved if health rather than wokery were the focus of such public information. Possibly many. Definitely some.

But the god of culture war is a jealous god, and he is athirst. He’s ready to smite not only culture, tradition and sanity, but actual people.

This little story isn’t the aetiology of the disease, but merely a clinical picture of its symptoms. There are many such clinical pictures and many different symptoms.

But the ultimate victims aren’t only culture, tradition and sanity – and not just individual people. It’s our moribund civilisation, desperately trying to survive, but failing every step of the way, bleeding out pinprick by pinprick.

So repeat after me the slogan thrust down our throats during the Covid pandemic: “Thank you, NHS!”

A majority doesn’t need special provisions for safeguarding its rights. A minority does.

It relies on everyone’s help to make sure its rights aren’t denied or abused. That’s why I hope you’ll join Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in making a resolute stand on the issue of WWP rights…

Hold on a second. Are you telling me you don’t even know what WWP stands for? That only goes to show how little respect you have for the founding tenets of British democracy.

You must be one of those complacent individuals who take their rights for granted and ignore Goethe’s immortal words: “Of freedom and of life he only is deserving who every day must conquer them anew.”

In other words, if you fail to uphold WWP rights, you risk losing your own. So start by learning what WWP is.

It’s Women With Penises, a minority whose rights are stamped in the dirt every time a WWP is denied entry into so-called safe spaces: women’s lavatories, changing rooms – and yes, showers at my tennis club. Luckily Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is led by a man who is prepared to tackle this challenge, the gravest one the nation faces.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sir Keir Starmer: “’For the vast majority of women this is all about biology and of course they don’t have a penis.

“We all know that and of course they need safe spaces and we’ll support that. But there is a small minority of individuals who are born in a gender they don’t now identify with.

“Some go through a process, others don’t, and that is traumatic for them and I respect and support them.

“[For] 99.99% of women it’s all biology, we must support their safe spaces, but let’s not disparage or fail to support the small group of people who struggle with their gender identity and I think we can resolve this if we all approach it in that spirit.”

Sir Keir’s commitment is so unequivocal that he is prepared to fight even for those rights that seem to be mutually exclusive. “Of course they need safe places,” he says, talking about WWOPs, Women Without Penises. At the same time, we mustn’t “fail to support the small group of people who struggle with their gender identity.” Perhaps we should let WWPs in and then kick them out immediately.

WWOPs don’t like the idea of WWPs entering their dressing rooms for two reasons. One is physical, the other metaphysical.

The metaphysical reason is outdated modesty: they don’t want WWPs to see their nudity, partial or total. But this only means they refuse to accept WWPs as fully fledged women. This suggests a bias, a preconceived notion that has no place in our progressive society. Hence this objection must be dismissed with the contempt it deserves.

The physical reason deserves more attention. WWOPs are afraid that a WWP may use the P part of her designation to rape them. And one has to admit with chagrin that isolated instance of such rapes have indeed been reported.

Yet by the same token a danger also exists that a lesbian WWOP may also rape a heterosexual WWOP in the very same dressing room from which troglodytes wish to ban WWPs. Moreover, since lesbians greatly outnumber WWPs, that risk is statistically much greater.

You may argue that at least lesbian rape lacks a penetrative aspect, but this would only deepen the hole of troglodyte views you’ve dug for yourself. This argument proves that you’ve never seen the inside of a progressive sex shop, whereas even a flying visit would teach you that a genuine P is no prerequisite for sexual penetration.

So what are we going to do? Slam the door of every women’s lavatory in the face of any woman who can’t prove her heterosexuality or absence of penis? And how do we propose she could prove that? (Nothing from you, I know what you’re going to say.)

Now we are beginning to understand Sir Keir’s conundrum. On the one hand, he wants to protect WWOPs from rape. That means keeping WWPs out. On the other hand, he wants to respect WWPs’ rights to go wherever they please. That means letting them in.

I can see only one solution: passing a law eliminating all differences between, or rather among, sexes. We are all one sex or gender (a semantic nuance that escapes me, this side of grammatical categories): human.

Any of us may enter any space we wish, safe or otherwise. Yes, that may increase the risk of rape. But who said that a fight for freedom should involve no risks and sacrifices? Our forebears had to die for us to have the rights we enjoy, and here we are, whinging about the remote possibility of a WWP raping a WWOP here and there?

Let’s hear it for Sir Keir Starmer, the last bastion of rights still standing. And aren’t you happy to know that we have no problems more pressing than WWP rights to occupy the attention of our politicians?

Skyrocketing inflation, cost of living and crime rate; the possibility of a nuclear war; the sorry state of public finances; education replaced with indoctrination – none of these exists in Britain. One only wonders how this blissful period will be viewed by our descendants centuries from now.

They’ll note that, in the first quarter of the 21^st century, Britain had many women with penises. And no politicians with balls.

P.S. The Mirth of a Nation: The dictionary of Cockney rhyming slang is about to receive a new entry, “Don’t be such a Jeremy”. Every few months a TV interviewer hilariously mispronounces the surname of Jeremy Hunt, MP. An easy mistake to make, in his case.

P.P.S. Is it just me, or is there something incongruous about a Socialist politician being called ‘Sir Keir’?  Wrong honorific, surely? ‘Comrade’ is much more appropriate.