For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers. But verily I say unto thee, methinks my prayers for thee are not always answered.
As thou knowest, I keep a watchful eye on God’s creation, and methinks its affairs are not as serene as my surroundings up here. So what is it I hear about thou now letting priests bless “homosexual and other ‘irregular’ couples”?
“God welcomes everyone”, thou sayest, and, I have it on good authority, that is God’s own truth. Yea, God welcomes everyone. But He does not welcome everything. One thing He does not welcome is sin. Verily I say unto you, He hates it. ‘Tis the sinner He loves, not the sin.
People receiving a blessing, thou sayest, “should not be required to have prior moral perfection.” So yea, by all means, bless sinners singly, as Christians. But bless not two of them together for the sin they commit together.
He who lyeth with mankind or she who lyeth with womankind is welcome to be blessed in the house of God. But the sin shall be condemned.
And I have told thee three times if I have told thee once that mankind lying with mankind or womankind with womankind is a sin. It is unseemly, I wrote to Romans. Such people shall not inherit the kingdom of God, I explained to Corinthians. Same-sex lying, I taught Timothy, is contrary to sound doctrine.
Leviticus had said the same thing before me: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”
I say unto you that sex is in no wise righteous betwixt two men, and two women also. That is to say it is a sin. And thy remit is not blessing sin, doest thou not agree? I spoke to my friend Peter, whose chair thou occupieth, and he sayeth the same thing: condemn sin or get off my chair.
Thou sayest “same-sex and ‘irregular’ couples” shall be blessed. What irregular couples doest thou mean? Art thou referring to sex betwixt brother and sister or father and daughter? Or betwixt mankind and fowl of the air or beasts of the field? Thy namesake did bless fowl and beasts, but not for lying with mankind or womankind.
Change thy ways, brother, for tomorrow thou may well die.
Thy Cardinal Fernández sayeth thou art “firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church.” Methinks I am no longer part of it, and neither is the Old Testament. Didst thou decide to expel us on thine own?
Thou hast the “pastoral vision” of “broadening” the appeal of our church, thou sayest. I am with thee on this vision. Verily I say unto you, I had the same vision and was persecuted for it, going to heaven before my time. But I broadened the appeal of Christ Jesus by damning sin, not blessing it.
Francis, verily I say unto you, thou art in danger of hell fire. Take thought for the morrow for the morrow is nigh.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with thee, but look out. And my love be with you in Christ Jesus, but thou triest my patience. Amen.
It has come back as the columnist Peter Hitchens, a man of modest intellect but immodest egotism. Hence every article he writes includes phrases like “no one has listened to me”, “will you now listen to me?”, “as I have been saying all along” and some such.
The impression of oracular powers is hard to avoid. But who is the intended target audience? It can’t be just the readers of The Mail on Sunday. Even assuming they hang on to every word Hitchens vouchsafes them from his lofty height, there is precious little they can do to take any corrective actions.
So Hitchens’s ‘you’ is aimed at the powers that be, Western governments, which could avoid silly mistakes by listening to him. Presumably, every one of them should include a department whose sole function would be to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Hitchens’s prophesies.
Logically following from there is the idea that political sagacity should be quantified and measured in specific units, hitchenses. Governments could then be rated on a five-star system, from five hitchenses to none.
Seriously now, that kind of earth-shattering tastelessness would make one reject every word Hitchens has ever uttered, even those that would be acceptable if coming from a different source. Rejecting his mendacious drivel on the subject of Putin’s Russia, on the other hand, would be easy even if Hitchens were otherwise a sensible, well-informed, self-effacing man.
I do listen to him because I see it as my duty to counter enemy propaganda, which is what Hitchens’s writings on that topic are. Whether he does a Lord Haw Haw wittingly or unwittingly is a matter for his priest or perhaps the Crown Prosecution Office. What is important to me is that, to paraphrase what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman, every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
Yesterday, for example, Hitchens took aim at “many people [who] reacted to [the Russian aggression] by developing a strange admiration for Ukraine. But it is in fact a corrupt, troubled, ill-governed and increasingly unfree country, not all that different from Russia in many ways.”
That’s a lie. Compared to Russia, the Ukraine is an impeccable Western democracy, an oasis of liberty. Unlike Russia, the Ukraine holds real, as opposed to bogus, elections. Her elected leaders are accountable to the people who are informed by the uncensored media. The Ukrainian president isn’t a dictator like Putin – his power is no greater than that of a French or American president.
The Ukraine may be more corrupt than, say, Britain, but infinitely less so than Russia that’s ruled by an eerie blend of secret police and organised crime. Ukrainian special forces don’t murder political opponents, and those few who ever go to prison are demonstrable agents of Putin’s Russia.
As to her being “unfree”, the government’s conduct of the war is openly criticised in the Ukrainian press – at wartime, when even countries like the US and Britain have been known to suspend some civil liberties. And what do you know, the editors of those papers aren’t even arrested, never mind defenestrated, shot out of hand, poisoned or, if they are lucky, imprisoned, as they are in Russia. There prison terms of up to 10 years or longer have been meted out for the slightest hint of criticism, even for referring to the war as such, not as the mandated ‘special military operation’.
The admiration that all decent people feel for the Ukraine isn’t “strange”. It’s richly merited by the people heroically resisting brutal invaders who are committing the kind of savage, large-scale atrocities that neither the Ukraine nor indeed Europe has experienced since the big war.
Then comes the story of the stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive, which Hitchens knew was going to fail, yet “I kept my mouth shut because apparently impossible things can sometimes happen, but it seemed to me to be more likely that the attack would stall. It has duly done so.”
Mouth shut? Excuse me? Practically every week Hitchens has been agitating for the Ukraine’s surrender, which he calls peaceful negotiations. And before the full-scale invasion, hardly a week went by that he didn’t extol Putin as the “conservative and Christian” leader he wished Britain could have. As to Putin’s stated ambition to rebuild the Soviet empire to its past glory, Hitchens always treated it with barely concealed sympathy.
It’s only when the evidence of the mass tortures, rapes, murders and looting of civilians began to emerge from the occupied areas that Hitchens moderated his almost erotic admiration of the muscled man in the Kremlin.
The counteroffensive hasn’t succeeded in driving the invaders out largely because of the massive propaganda effort launched by Putin’s trolls, moles, agents of influence and useful idiots (you decide which category Hitchens falls into).
They’ve been screaming for years that the Ukraine is a Nazi state (Hitchens always refers to the 2014 revolution as a “putsch”), corrupt, historically a part of Russia, that Putin is legitimately concerned with Nato’s eastward expansion and hence the invasion is Nato’s fault, that supporting the Ukraine will impoverish Western tax-payers for no good cause – well, I don’t want to paraphrase everything Hitchens has been writing for at least 10 years and possibly longer.
When the totality of such spirit-sapping propaganda reached a critical mass, Western leaders, emphatically including Biden, got an excuse for keeping down the level of assistance for the Ukraine, indulging thereby their own craven instincts.
Armaments have been drip-fed to the Ukraine, their quality, quantity and types sufficient for keeping her in the fight but not for her winning. Had the Ukrainian army got the tanks, warplanes and long-range missiles from the start, the war would have ended months ago, and the thousands of deaths that Hitchens sheds crocodile tears over wouldn’t have happened.
The logical conclusion would be for Western governments to realise the error of their ways and start supplying the Ukraine properly, without talking about “the danger of escalation” or “provoking Putin”. The conclusion of the Putin propagandist, aka Peter Hitchens, is that the Ukraine should sue for peace, which is another term for surrendering.
Anyone whose intelligence is one notch above imbecility knows that ceding the occupied territory to Putin wouldn’t bring peace. It would bring a lull of a couple of years, or however many it would take for Russia to regroup, restock, rearm and then go again, that time rolling not only over the Ukraine but also over much of Eastern Europe, including some Nato members.
Then came that claim of oracular powers and unique knowledge: “This has all been entirely predictable, and it has been very painful for people such as me, who actually know something about the area and the issues.”
Saying that Hitchens knows very little about “the area” would be true, but it would be paying him a compliment. The suggestion would be that he writes his subversive bilge out of ignorance, not for some nefarious reasons. What those reasons are I don’t know, but I hope we’ll learn one day.
Meanwhile, he concludes by asking a question doubtless meant to be rhetorical: “And what have we gained by these deaths, exactly?”
Who is “we” there? Certainly not the Ukraine, because even a child will know what “exactly” she has gained: preserving her freedom and sovereignty in the face of a fascist predator. Certainly not Eastern Europe, which the heroic Ukrainians have shielded with their bodies from that fascist predator whose plans self-admittedly included their countries as well.
If by “we’”, Hitchens means Britain, then helping the Ukraine defeat the fascist aggressor in question is by far the least costly way of preventing a major war in Europe, possibly the world. It’s also the least costly way of preempting another emergence of a dominant fascist power in Europe, with the dire consequences that one doesn’t have to be an oracle to predict.
Will anyone ever shut up this present-day Lord Haw Haw? (And no, I’m not suggesting he should be shut up by the same method.)
Anyone who gets the pun in the title is way too old. And anyone who thinks that economists can solve our economic problems is way too naïve. In fact, the title is a hint of what will happen if we follow their prescriptions.
Economics is a self-perpetuating science, and economists only found themselves in high demand when governments began playing fast and loose with the natural workings of the market. Yet central control of the economy is impossible because an economy is made up of people, whose behaviour is often irrational and always unpredictable.
That’s where economists step in. They earn their keep by claiming the clairvoyant ability to predict economic trends, to which end they act like gnostic dervishes who get a following by muttering abracadabra.
‘Paradigm’ is one of the arrows in their quiver of recondite terms, jagged graphs, incomprehensible models and impenetrable statistics. They’ll rain those arrows on anyone who dares suggest that they should get out of people’s hair and just let them get on with what they already know how to do: make a living.
People don’t need pedigreed help in that area. The help they do need is to be found in churches, museums, concert halls and libraries. At least that’s where they should look, even at the risk of a let-down. What they do in the marketplace is strictly derivative.
Yet somehow the Marxist idea of the primacy of economics has taken hold, and it unites the seemingly incompatible political extremes, as personified by Marx and Hayek or Keynes and Friedman. They may all be saying different things, but they share a common premise.
Nationalise the means of production, claim the socialists, and everything else will follow. Socialism good, capitalism bad. Privatise the means of production, object the libertarians, and everything else will follow. Capitalism good, socialism bad. Like Orwell’s animals, both species reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.
Yet economic activity reflects merely a small part of an individual’s essence, and it would be far-fetched to believe that it’s divorced from all other parts. Of course it isn’t, but that shouldn’t be understood simplistically.
When performing on the economic stage most people will behave differently from the way they act at home or with their friends. However, if we know a person well, we’ll have no difficulty in finding a link between the two behavioural modes.
The link is the person himself, his character, culture, ideas, aspirations, religion if any, temperament – even at times appearance and other physical characteristics. And if we consider the totality of what makes a human being human, then we may well reach the conclusion that his economic performance is the easiest part to understand.
That makes economics the simplest of all the sciences devoted to the study of human behaviour. Just consider this. Neuropsychologists, neurophysiologists and other behavioural scientists have spent billions in whatever currency you care to name on trying to understand the human mind. Yet, after all those Decades of the Brain and Genome Projects, they still don’t even know what the mind is, how it works, what produces and constitutes a thought, or whether consciousness will ever be describable in any physical or biological terms.
But the results aren’t all negative. At least all those neurosciences, though largely failing in their declared mission, have succeeded in proving that they are indeed sciences.
They have passed the critical test of going beyond common sense. According to Lewis Wolpert, a serious scientist but a dreary populariser of atheism, real, especially modern, science always does that. In fact, it may well be an essential part of its definition.
If we look at photons getting to us from faraway stars by unerringly and, on the face of it, rationally choosing the shortest path of least resistance for millions of years; if we even begin, to the best of our limited ability, to consider the implications of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity (and how the two may be at odds); if we ponder universal constants or modern genetics with its undecipherable codes; we’ll see that common sense will help us grasp none of these. It will mislead, not lead.
Economics is different. It not only doesn’t go beyond common sense but invariably and miserably fails when trying to do so.
Whenever a professional economist starts using terms and concepts that go beyond the understanding of someone with a decent secondary (or better still, primary) education, then we know that the wool is being pulled over our eyes. The chap isn’t trying to elucidate the issue. He is trying to obscure it, and probably for nefarious reasons.
The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, never had to do this. His books rely on plain common sense to explain a very basic problem: how markets can help people to make a living (spoiler alert: by not letting governments get in the people’s way). But for modern economists, economics is too simple to understand.
One can draw two conclusions from this: First, if our definition of a science includes as a necessary constituent its going beyond common sense, and if economics not only does not but indeed must not do so, then economics isn’t a science. Second, economics has an off-chance of becoming a science if it’s treated as a study of merely a single aspect of life that’s closely intertwined with others, and is only ever pursued in conjunction with them.
That’s why, if we wish to get to the bottom of economic hardships, economics can be but a small part of things to consider. Therefore, we either abandon the project before we have even started or we must delve deeper.
I can’t do in a short article what I once did in a book (The Crisis Behind Our Crisis). All I can do here is single out one aspect highlighted in Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Weber’s brilliant, if debatable, analysis hinged on the causative link between the Reformation and capitalism, both its rise and spread. Yet capitalism, narrowly defined as the use of one’s own or borrowed capital to achieve economic ends, had been spreading steadily throughout the Middle Ages – in spite of the variously vigorous resistance on the part of the church. Granted, there is no denying that capitalism benefited from the Reformation. But was it caused by it?
The answer is probably no, and Weber tacitly acknowledged as much. But neither is this a case of a simple coincidence in time.
Witness the fact that even today Protestant countries boast a per capita GDP 1.5 times higher than in Catholic countries, three times higher than in Orthodox ones, and five times higher than in Muslim lands – this despite an ocean of petrodollars sloshing underfoot in the largest Orthodox country and quite a few Muslim ones.
This hints at an indisputable causative chain. What people believe affects what they think, and what they think affects what they do. This chain demonstrates the primacy of faith over economics; of thought over action; of mind over body.
That’s why, contrary to the popular misapprehension, theology and philosophy are real sciences because they uncover the first causes of human behaviour. Economics, on the other hand, is a dubious science because, even at its best, it merely records what people have always known.
And at its worst – which nowadays means at its usual – it’s not a science at all.
Extrapolating from an indisputable fact is called induction, which was Aristotle’s stock in trade. Taking my cue from the great man, I’ll try to make some general comments on the basis of what I saw the other day.
It was a video of a young Russian jazz singer singing Dream a Little Dream of Me at a Moscow concert some 12 years ago. She introduced the song by rapping with the audience, which is now practically de rigueur even at classical concerts, to say nothing of any other.
The introduction was effusively emotive, something to be expected from any Russian artist. The girl said she had first heard the song in Paris a couple of years earlier, and “it went right through my heart and soul.”
Now, I happen to like that song myself, although my first exposure to it predates that singer’s by perhaps 50 years. But even in my younger days, I would have been physically incapable of expressing myself in such kitsch terms. So the introduction served another reminder of why Russia and I were incompatible and always heading for divorce.
I first heard Dream a Little Dream sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and it’s really unfair to compare any other performer, including that Russian girl, to those two. But on her own terms she was actually a good singer, with a real voice and musical sense.
But when introducing the song, she described its lyrics as very enigmatic, which put me to shame. I had never detected any gnostic quality in that song, which suggested that a Russian girl in her late 20s could find things in an American song that had escaped me.
She explained what it was. One line, she said (obviously in Russian), went “say Ninety-nine and kiss me”. That must have communicated, she opined, a deep numerological meaning, or else it was simply some obscure idiom.
She then sang the song in the original English including that gnostic phrase. Now, it must have been some 40 years ago that I last heard an English idiom I didn’t know. This one, however, went right by me. What if it really had some hidden numerological subtext?
That was a possibility. Another possibility was that the girl got something wrong, transcribing the lyrics of a song sung in a language she didn’t know well.
Back to my trusted YouTube and that great duo of Ella and Satchmo. And there was Ella Fitzgerald, enunciating with her customary clarity: “Say Nightie-night and kiss me.” Nightie-night. Not Ninety-Nine. No hidden meaning. No Gnosticism. No numerology. Just a bloody good love song.
Now for extrapolation. The first one deals with Russians not being particularly good at doing homework (to that extent, I suppose, I am a Russian myself). Even 10 years ago, computers were widely available in Moscow. All the singer had to do was Google “Lyrics to Dream a Little Dream of Me”, and Boris would have been her uncle. She would have seen that the first line of the second verse simply talked about a good-night kiss.
The second extrapolation is more general, going beyond a Russian singer with her poor command of English. Hand-me-down cultures are like hand-me-down clothes. They seldom fit and usually look outdated.
The two qualifiers in that last sentence are useful because cultural interchange is a time-proven manner of augmenting one’s own cultural capital. The interest on it, accrued over many decades, may well acquire an organic, indigenous quality, enriching the culture in ways it might not have been able to enrich itself if left to its own devices.
But this can only work over a long time, with the borrower exhibiting endless patience, exquisite taste and proper respect for both the lending and borrowing cultures. If you write those three nouns side by side – patience, taste, respect – you’ll probably agree that they designate commodities seldom found in today’s world.
Thus one sees and hears snippets of borrowed cultures that are as jarring as the sound of two pieces of glass rubbed together. Last summer, for example, we were having lunch at an outdoor café in Clamecy, a sleepy Burgundian town whose claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Romain Rolland, a third-rate communist writer.
Had his comrades won their victory, the Gothic church in the middle of Clamecy would probably have been pulled down. As it was, it was lending its steps to a dozen youngsters rocking to the sound of a ghetto blaster blaring French rap. We couldn’t make out the words, but the hermaphroditic cultural hybrid destroyed our appetite.
That vocal art has nothing to do with either vocalism or art, and it sounds revolting even in its native habitat. But when ‘sung’ by people named Jean-François, Jean-Paul or Jean-Pierre it’s even worse, much worse.
In a different genre, one sees quite a few large American saloon cars on British and French roads. Those vehicles are designed for wide, straight and empty American highways, where they provide an alternative to trains and planes for long-distance travel. On narrow, twisting European roads, such cars are unwieldy and often dangerous.
Yet Europeans buy those automotive boats not because they like their handling and ease of parking, but because they too want to get their kicks on Route 66 (which is incidentally single-lane for much of its length). It’s an exercise of cultural appropriation that really is misappropriation.
The romance of popular American culture has a strong effect on the lower classes all over Europe. Frenchmen and, after many years of resistance, even Italians queue up at McDonald’s not because they prefer that fare to, respectively, steak frites or pasta al ragù, but because America is cool (the French even borrowed that word for the sake of verisimilitude).
On a higher cultural plateau, my French friends once humbled me by mentioning a great modern American writer whose name I had never heard, James Salter. Since in my youth I used to teach American literature, albeit on a truncated Soviet curriculum, I felt as if my face had been slapped.
I immediately got two novels by James Salter and found them vacuous and pretentious, although composed in well-crafted sentences. It’s not surprising that I had never heard of him in the US or Britain. But he is a household name for every well-read Frenchman I’ve met, and all my French friends are well-read and have good taste.
They simply aren’t sufficiently plugged into the Anglophone culture to detect the false notes instantly audible to, say, Penelope or me. Similarly, I must have missed the finer points of Michel Houellebecque, whose work reads like jumped-up pornography to me. Getting culture second-hand is a time-proven technique, but care must be taken and allowances must be made.
Anyway, if it’s getting late where you are, ninety-nine to all of you. Sleep tight.
So wrote Julia Ioffe, a Russian-born American journalist. She explained her aversion to that greeting by adding: “It’s impolite and alienating to assume I follow your religion.”
It’s neither, actually. But it’s definitely idiotic to think that only Christians have something to celebrate at Christmas. Such insistence suggests that Miss Ioffe fails to follow not only our religion, but also our civilisation.
Or else her Princeton education didn’t teach her that Western civilisation owes Christianity so much as to owe it practically everything. Anyone, whatever his religion or none, who appreciates Western law, science, art, music or politics thereby celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, if only indirectly.
Looking at our jurisprudence, for example, practically every core law we have can be traced back to Judaeo-Christian antecedents – and not just because their spirit was inhaled from the moral atmosphere of Exodus and Matthew.
When great medieval law-givers, such as Charlemagne or, later in the same century, Alfred the Great, began to compile legal codes, they lifted and incorporated whole tranches of canon law. Anyone who raises his right hand and promises to tell the truth must be aware of the origins of that practice, to name just one example of many.
Whenever we visit an art museum or a concert hall, we worship at the altar of Christian culture. Western painting, for example, started in the church, and one could argue persuasively that Western music has never really left it.
Like faith, music is not without, but within us, waiting to be released. In fact, one can say that music inhabits the same compartment of the soul as faith, and it comes alive by activating similar perceptive mechanisms. Because of that, a valid argument can be made that all Western music is implicitly Christian even if it is explicitly secular.
Franck’s chorale may have been written for the concert hall, yet anyone with a modicum of sensitivity will know it was animated by the same spirit as a Bach chorale written for the church. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and a listener who can’t discern Christian inspiration in, say, Shostakovich’s quartets, should send his senses out for a tune-up.
(Miss Ioffe fancies herself a Russian expert, so I’m sure she must have heard those quartets or at least, more likely, heard of them.)
The only Western art form that at its best has remained in thrall to the art of Hellenic antiquity is sculpture. But Christian culture breathed a particle of its founder’s spirit into that form.
Anyone looking at the two Pietàs by Michelangelo, one in Rome, the other in Milan, will notice their Christian content before admiring their Hellenic outer shell. That, incidentally, is the proper sequence for appreciating any Western art. Unlike its Greek predecessor (and some of its modern offshoots), its starting point is ‘what’, not ‘how’.
In a different field, inchoate political structures of Europe took their cue from ecclesiastical politics, with their fusion of solidarity and subsidiarity. In the lay world that concept was translated into the idea of the central state keeping the few essential powers for itself, while devolving all the rest to the lowest sensible level.
Judging by the list of publications blessed by Miss Ioffe’s involvement, most of them respectable, which is to say ‘liberal’, she may be unfamiliar with that type of political structure or else contemptuous of it.
When the word ‘liberal’ was coined, it designated transferring a maximum amount of power from central state to local bodies, and from the latter to the individual. Today’s liberals, if you peek behind the fog of their bien pensant verbiage, preach exactly the opposite: statist centralism, empowering the central state at the expense of the individual. Yet all successful Western states followed the structural amalgam they inherited from the church.
Even Western natural science would have been impossible without the Judaeo-Christian cosmology and general understanding of the world. The starting assumption of any scientific quest is that the world is governed by rational and universal laws. The existence of such laws presupposes the original rational and universal law-giver. This makes the world knowable by human reason and experiment.
Today we take that for granted, as we do many seminal Christian contributions to our civilisation. Few of us stop to wonder why no other civilisations of past or present have produced anything even remotely resembling Western achievements. For example, I’m fairly certain Miss Ioffe doesn’t turn and toss at night, pursued by such conundrums. Yet if a question along such lines ever crosses her mind, I hope she won’t look for the answer in the works of her fellow Princetonian, Peter Singer.
In fact, judging by some of the things she has written, Miss Ioffe is a thoroughly modern young lady with only a tenuous link to what I’d describe as Western civilisation. That word is after all a cognate of civility, a concept that seems alien to Miss Ioffe.
To wit, when a rumour began to circulate that President-Elect Trump was planning to assign the East Wing of the White House to his daughter Ivanka, defying the tradition of its being the First Lady’s quarters, Miss Ioffe tweeted: “Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”
Interesting question, that, and an even more interesting choice of words. No wonder the young lady absolves herself of any involvement with the religion that has produced our civilisation and, by inference, with the civilisation itself.
Yet I’m going to defy Miss Ioffe’s injunction and wish her a Merry Christmas, in the hope that one day she’ll start delving into such issues at greater depth. And yes, I get it, she isn’t a Christian.
During my requisite five minutes of Sky News at breakfast, a chap sputtering spittle at the camera lens voiced his displeasure with COP28.
That conference committed 200 countries to achieving net zero by 2050. That, as far as the spittle-sputterer was concerned, was nowhere near good enough. He didn’t beat about the bush: if we wait that long, he said, “our planet will fry”. The target year should be 2024, not 2050.
Penelope, who only ever watches that awful channel out of wifely solidarity, asked: “Where is the opposite point of view?” The question was rhetorical. She knows as well as I do exactly where the opposite point of view is: in the dustbin of history, to borrow Trotsky’s phrase.
Here we touch upon the key difference between ideas and ideologies. The former appear at the end of a rational weighing of facts and arguments pro and contra. Whoever produces an idea has to take into account the possibility that someone else may weigh the same facts and arguments and come up with a different balance.
A dispute may arise, and it can be solved by any number of means, ranging from gentle persuasion to physical violence. But a dispute is always possible and usually likely.
Not so with ideologies. An ideology is a secular superstition based on infra-rational urges, usually political at base. If an idea is formed in pursuit of truth, an ideology is formed in pursuit of power.
Thus an ideology can only be defeated either by suicide or by another ideology, not by reason and certainly not by facts. A rational argument against an irrational urge is an exercise in futility. Facts are helpless against phantoms.
Although any ideology is by definition secular, most invoke some legitimising metaphysical entity. The ideology of climate change comes from the notion of inexorable global warming, which in turn is vouchsafed to the initiated by the God of Science.
He is a wrathful and vengeful deity, smiting infidels and apostates with the thunder and lightning of ostracism. When the God of Science speaks, we must all prostrate ourselves before him and vow never to lose faith.
Of course tens of thousands of real scientists around the world refuse to pay obeisance to that particular deity on this particular point. They publish serious articles and books, with each sentence referenced to scores of research papers, proving that the whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is anti-scientific claptrap.
These publications show that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known lifetime. That carbon emissions have a minuscule, negligible effect on the environment. That 95 per cent of climactic changes are caused by shifts in solar activity, with contributions from volcanos, oceans, earthquakes and a myriad other factors.
Those infidels talk about the Roman Warming Period, when, under Julius Caesar’s watchful eye, vineyards were blossoming in Scotland. They invoke the Medieval Warming Period, when grain crops flourished and the world population more than doubled as a result.
However, those spoilsports miss the point, and it takes a hysterical teenage girl with learning difficulties to set them straight. The point they miss is that global warming is produced by the evil of capitalism fostered by Western countries that are themselves innately evil.
And evil will triumph unless good men, women and others close ranks and meet it head on. Dialectically speaking, the antithesis of evil is good. Hence every method chosen to defeat evil is itself good. Now, it so happens that at the moment the putative, self-appointed forces of good are using the weapon of global warming to great effect.
With any luck, this weapon will slay the bogeyman of capitalism, with all its attendant democracies, parliamentarisms and civil liberties. This ideal shines so bright that it dims any possible opposition based on such trivia as solar activity or assorted Warming Periods.
Even mentioning such things is ridiculous: it’s committing a category error at its worst. The issue isn’t about scientific truth. It’s, to borrow Humpty Dumpty’s explanation, “which is to be master – that’s all”.
Unlike both Penelope and me, Sky News understands how the cookie crumbles and believes this is the only way to crumble it. Not a single crumb will be allowed to fall off the table; no alternative sustenance is allowed.
In the past, I used to rant and rave about this sort of thing, but these days I’m more likely to look for a reason to laugh. COP28 didn’t disappoint.
Don’t know about you, but I loved the pictures of Arab sheiks and sultans grinning ear to ear at the conclusion of the conference. Seldom does one see such a saintly display of disinterested virtue.
After all, their wealth, power, perhaps even physical survival wholly depend on oil revenues. Yet there they are, joyously signing away those cherished things by committing their countries to the elimination of all fossil fuels by 2050.
Call me a cynic, but I detect a hint at some future compliance problems. Just stop oil? Those chaps would be more likely to swap their thawbs for B&D PVC costumes at the next COP get-together.
Yet the God of Climate Change is like any other ideology. It demands loyal service, but it will be content with lip service. The adherents are mandated to issue the right protestations of devotion, not necessarily to act on them.
Those sheiks and sultans are smiling because they know how to subtract 2023 from 2050. They come up with 27 years, and that’s a lot of oil under the bridge, or under the counter if you’d rather. Allah’s wisdom says that those Western infidels will abandon their silly notions when they realise that penury beckons.
If by that time they have succeeded in destroying or at least degrading their own oil-producing capacity, they’ll crawl into those brocaded and tasselled tents, begging the sheiks and sultans for help and promising the earth in return. One hopes they’ll no longer be calling it “our planet”.
That’s how many lives would have been saved in the UK had the NHS performed at the level of the top 10 countries.
Such was the conclusion of the study of 38 developed countries conducted by Imperial College London. The study ranked the countries on four key patient-safety indicators: maternal mortality, treatable mortality, adverse effects of medical treatment and neonatal disorders.
Norway came in first, followed by Sweden and South Korea. Britain placed 21st, behind such global powerhouses as Austria and Estonia. The only consolation is that the US finished 12 places below the UK, though I doubt those 17,356 families of NHS victims feel properly consoled.
Add to that number those who managed to survive the NHS’s tender mercies but came out with appalling and preventable disabilities, and the picture is painted in predominantly dark hues. I can’t say I am surprised.
One of the first things I heard when settling in the UK 36 years ago was: “We are proud of our NHS.” At that time, I had no personal experience of that service, but my antennae began to twitch.
The only other country I knew that broadcast such pride to the world was the Soviet Union, where medical care was on the par with the poorer African countries. A good friend of mine, a doctor himself, once said to me he’d rather have a serious operation in Zaire than in Russia, and he knew both countries well.
Yet the Soviets insisted their healthcare was wonderful because it was free. I can only repeat what William F. Buckley said on the subject when visiting the Soviet Union. The tour guide attached to him kept reciting that boastful mantra. Buckley, well-trained in sound economics, smiled his supercilious smile and said: “Nothing is free, child”.
What the guide should have said was that Soviet medical care was free at the point of delivery, which would have been more precise. Yet it’s unclear how that particular method of financing medical care could claim moral or any other ascendancy.
Because that was all it was: a method of financing. An appendectomy costs the same whether it’s the state paying for it or the patient. A sensible argument can be made that it’s likely to cost more if the funding comes from the state, if only because of the multiple layers of bureaucracy separating patient from scalpel.
Hence Soviet braggadocio had no basis to it, other than an ideological one. It enabled paid propagandists, like that tour guide, to claim that socialism was superior to capitalism because it was the state paying for medicine. Soviet hospitals, mainly acting as anterooms to the morgues, somewhat weakened the argument, but foreign visitors weren’t told that.
Having left the Soviet Union, I spent 15 years in the US where medical care was excellent at the time, although it wasn’t free at the point of delivery. Mostly it was financed by private insurance companies, with the state stepping in only when a patient had neither insurance cover nor any means of paying for treatment.
I was never in that position myself, but some of my friends were. I noticed that the care they received at municipal hospitals was incomparably better than anything the Soviet Union could offer, and every bit as good as what I received at private hospitals. They had the benefit of exactly the same doctors, the same equipment and the same drugs as did private patients, although they didn’t have private rooms and gourmet food.
What the US medical care conspicuously lacked was an ideological aspect. No one said he was proud of it, no one held it up as proof of capitalism’s superiority over socialism. When people got ill, they were treated, usually extremely well, and no one made a fuss about it.
Then I moved to Britain, and suddenly it was back to the USSR, mercifully in that aspect only. Educated people were telling me they were proud of their NHS. I had no data at my fingertips to argue in specifics but, relying on first principles, I couldn’t believe that a publicly funded Leviathan employing tons of deadwood (as all socialist enterprises do) could deliver anything to be proud about.
“What exactly are you proud of?” I’d ask, always receiving the same reply: our medical care is free. I’d come back with the Buckley retort, to the effect that nothing is free, only to be told that ‘free’ was a figure of speech. It stood for free at the point of delivery, which was almost as moral.
The musky odour of Soviet hospitals wafted in. So, when it came to medicine, the British were as ideological as the communists, and equally irrational. They were proud of having a healthcare financed in about the least efficient way known to man just because that method of financing was socialist.
Since then, I’ve seen, heard of and experienced many horror stories about infections acquired in our unhygienic hospitals killing patients (my beloved mother-in-law went that way), people waiting months or years even for operations classified as urgent, cancer death rates similar to those in the Third World.
What I haven’t seen is any lessening of the pride that indoctrinated Britons are mandated to feel about the NHS. Since that feeling is strictly ideological in nature, it’s impervious to facts, such as the current study showing exactly where British medicine ranks in the world.
I’ve been writing about the NHS for decades, and I’ve learned enough about it to continue paying exorbitant amounts I can ill-afford for private insurance. (Incidentally, those people most proud of the NHS campaign for the abolition of private medical care.) So the survey didn’t surprise me at all.
What did surprise me was the low ranking of the US and also of France, eight places below the UK. I haven’t encountered American medicine for 36 years, and it has clearly slipped precipitously during this time. My American friends have been telling me that for years, but I never quite believed them.
My experience of French medical care, both primary and secondary, is much more current, and I’ve always found it better than our NHS, if not quite as good as our private medicine. Just goes to show how inadequate personal experience is.
Yet the French and Americans have one thing in common: neither claims a high moral ground on the basis of their medicine. They may do so for other reasons, but not this one. This absence of ideological afflatus goes a long way towards putting their medical care in my good books.
These tomes are firmly shut to the NHS – as they were shut to Soviet medicine. Never mind the ideology, chaps, feel patient safety.
I knew it would come to that, but I’m still amazed it happened so soon. Enoch Burke, who taught history and German at a Church of Ireland school, has been sentenced to an indefinite prison term for refusing to refer to a ‘transitioning’ pupil as ‘they’, rather than ‘he’.
Mr Burke explained that, as an Evangelical Christian, he didn’t approve of ‘transitioning’ and refused to abide by its rules. One would think a church school would have little problem with such intransigence – after all Genesis recognises only two sexes, male and female. But thinking so would indicate ignorance of modernity, whether secular, ecclesiastic or any other.
Actually, one doesn’t have to be an Evangelical or any other kind of Christian to refuse to mangle the English language in such a totally cretinous, tasteless manner. Nor is it only the personal pronouns. What about the verbs linked to them? Should they be singular or plural? Doesn’t everybody wince, even writhe, in disgust or at least discomfort when hearing sentences like: “I bumped into Nigel yesterday, and they are fine?” Or should it be “they is fine?”
To be technical about it, Mr Burke, he of the great name, wasn’t thrown in prison merely for failing to acknowledge the grammatical nuances mandated by modernity. He was only summarily suspended, but continued to show up at the school’s staff room, saying he was there “to do his job”.
Eventually the school got a court order to keep him out, but he flouted the injunction, insisting it was unjust. It was only after Mr Burke persisted in his defiance that he was put in prison and told that’s where he’d stay until he agreed to comply with the court order. Since the teacher seems to be made of stern stuff, that could well mean life imprisonment.
According to Mr Burke’s supporters, “the whole country is behind him”, while his family insists he is being persecuted for his Christian beliefs. Legally speaking, that’s not quite true, but we are none of us sticklers for casuistic detail, are we?
Mr Burke was only sacked for his Christian beliefs. He was imprisoned for violating a court order. However, the events were set in train by his principled, self-sacrificial objection to woke insanity. But in a society of madmen, any sane person is a pariah to be isolated.
The row broke out last spring, when head mistress Niamh McShane sent an e-mail to the faculty informing them of the ‘transitioning’ student’s new name and pronouns. At the ensuing staff meeting, Mr Burke made an impassioned speech to the effect that, as a Christian, he was “opposed to transgenderism” and therefore wouldn’t comply.
He then begged Miss McShane to reconsider, which she refused to do, feeling she was firmly on the side of the woke angels. All hell broke loose, with the flame of nationwide scandal singeing not only Mr Burke but also his tormentor, who had to resign.
Every time I read stories like this, I am reminded of Cincinnatus C., the principal character of Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading. That dystopic work depicts a society where everybody is transparent, and only Cincinnatus is opaque. For that crime he is sentenced to death, so you might say that Mr Burke has got off easy.
But that’s the thin end of the wedge. As far as I know, Mr Burke is the first person to be sent to prison, if at one remove, for insisting on using the pronouns dictated by English grammar, not subversive woke fanatics. But I can confidently predict he won’t be the last.
Wokery is the worst kind of tyranny, the kind that strives to dictate not only what people do, but also what they say and ultimately what they think. That sort of thing is called totalitarianism, and it’s much worse than mere authoritarianism.
Authoritarian rulers may be proscriptive, but they aren’t prescriptive. Some of them may explain to the people in simple terms what they aren’t allowed to say on pain of punishment. But such tyrants stop short of telling people what they must say – or else.
The totalitarian tyranny of which I have first-hand experience, the Soviet Union, wasn’t like that. It insisted on everyone using the prescribed jargon, and the punishment for failure to do so was severe. Hence the Soviet Union was worse than even Nazi Germany, where anyone other than a Jew could get away with not saying ‘Heil Hitler’ – as long as he refrained from saying ‘Down with Hitler’.
The modern woke tyranny displays every feature of the Soviet brand, an analogy that many people object to quite strenuously. They say that fine, people are told not only what language they shouldn’t use, but also what language they must use. But we don’t have night-time arrests and concentration camps, do we now?
To which I always reply: “Not yet”. For any tyranny will always impose its diktats by violent methods if no others work. Enoch Burke’s case, the first swallow that makes a slammer, proves my point.
The title sounds both defeatist and wrong. It’s the former because the Ukrainians have stopped the Russian invasion in its tracks. It’s the latter because Israel is pounding HAMAS into the ground.
Teacher and pupil
True, neither evil gang is winning the war fought with shells and bullets. But they are doing much better in the war fought with words and keyboards.
Gen. Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, is unlikely to go down in history as a major military strategist. However, he is credited with conceiving the concept of ‘hybrid warfare’: combining military, propaganda, diplomatic, economic, cultural and other tactics to achieve strategic goals.
The idea isn’t new, but it has had to be thoroughly rehashed to accommodate modern information technology. That the Russians have done, adding a massive electronic effort to the traditional stratagems of creating spy networks and recruiting ‘useful idiots’. And in a display of characteristic Russian generosity, they have shared their knowhow with HAMAS and other similar setups.
The underlying intent is to exploit the inchoate sentiments already existing at Western grassroots. Russian propagandists realise that about two thirds of all Westerners occupy an inert and malleable middle ground, with the remaining third evenly divided between the right and left fringes.
Both are ideologically programmed to respond in a Pavlovian manner to any messages catering to their ideologies. Both, therefore, are gullible and recruitable. The recruitment may be carried out the old-fashioned way involving documents signed in blood or more subtly, with expert brainwashing.
The right fringe is made up of malcontents usually (and incorrectly) called conservatives, but who are in fact Right-wing radicals. They are dissatisfied with where their countries are going, and with good reason.
To take Britain as an example, her indigenous population is being diluted in an influx of alien immigration, her traditional values are being mocked, her whole history is being derided, her education doesn’t educate, her children are encouraged to change sex and so forth – the litany can go on for ever.
People inhabiting the Right fringe have a certain ideal society in their minds, and they increasingly realise their own governments don’t share those ideals and will do nothing to realise them. Hence they are desperate to find someone, anyone, who speaks the same language they do, whose every word tickles their nerve endings.
Putin’s government, made up almost entirely of KGB officers, knows all that. Those KGB operatives still remember the glorious days of the Soviet Union, when millions of Western Lefties were successfully fed the canard of a peace-loving, democratic Soviet Union where everyone is equal, no one is rich, and everything is free.
That pumped endorphins into millions of Western bloodstreams, creating a sense of well-being impervious to facts. Later the Lefties would say they didn’t know about mass executions, concentration camps, torture, murderous artificial famines and other hard Soviet realities. That’s a lie: of course, they knew. But what they knew couldn’t make inroads on what they felt: the ideal might have only existed in their minds, but it was none the less tangible for it, more real than reality.
Some, such as the American playwright Lillian Hellman, kept their Stalinist faith long after the Soviets themselves had described Stalin’s crimes in harrowing detail. However, the hard Stalinist Left later transformed into what’s mislabelled as liberalism, the softer version of the same thing.
Hence, starting from the 1970s and steadily accelerating over the next generation, Soviet propaganda began to express itself in the language of Western campus liberals. The stress was on racial equality, distributionism, Third World virtues, peace, love and respect all around. That set up the outburst of enthusiasm in the West greeting the transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, known as ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’ and even – especially idiotic – as ‘the end of history’.
It took about 10 years for the KGB to progress from being the power behind the scenes to becoming the power, tout court. Russia, already thoroughly criminalised under Yeltsyn, became fascistic under Putin and his ruling KGB gang.
The intention was from the beginning to recreate the Soviet Union, by force if necessary. Since that aim was unlikely to find many allies on the Western Left, both the thrust and the target of propaganda had to change. Putin’s trolls started peddling ‘traditional values’ to Western malcontents on the Right.
Those people were fed the very verbal sustenance their own governments starved them of: traditional sexual morality, strong decisive government with a muscular leader at the helm, religiosity, a strong line on immigration and Islam – again, you can continue this litany on your own. Facts pointing at the bogus nature of all such claims and the real fascistic nature of Putin’s Russia have always been in the readily available public domain, but virtual reality has again trumped the actual kind.
Those eager to dupe themselves are easy to dupe. Hence the propaganda part of the hybrid went into overdrive with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression against the Ukraine.
While a third of a million Russians were being butchered in human-wave attacks on Ukrainian positions, Russian trolls, agents of influence and useful idiots created a fake picture of the proceedings. The Right-wing malcontents all over the world liked what they saw.
The Ukrainian government was depicted as a corrupt regime with strong Nazi tendencies that came to power as a result of a ‘putsch’. That evocative word was chosen in preference to ‘coup’, ‘overthrow’ or, God forbid, ‘revolution’. The upshot was that the West shouldn’t spend billions trying to prop up that reincarnation of evil.
A thoughtful reader commented on my piece the other day by saying: “Most Republicans do not view aiding Ukraine as stopping facism, but as propping up a corrupt regime.” Exactly. And the prevalence of that view testifies to the success of Putin’s propaganda.
Of course, the Ukraine is corrupt. What do you expect after being ruled for almost 100 years by Soviet communism and Putin fascism? She is, however, nowhere near as corrupt as Russia, whose whole government is a fusion of secret police and organised crime.
The Ukrainian people finally became independent when they overthrew their Russian puppet government in 2014, and they have since made giant strides towards civilisation, with the Russians moving just as fast in the opposite direction. Witness the fact that – at wartime! – there exists widespread criticism of the Zelensky government, with Ukrainian media often openly disapproving of its conduct of the war.
Meanwhile in Russia, the KGB government is doling out draconian prison sentences for every whiff of criticism and even for referring to the war as just that, not by the prescribed term of a “special military operation”. Putin’s opponents are being routinely murdered not only in Russia, but all over the world, and Russian money laundromats continue to operate globally in spite of the sanctions.
All that is widely ignored, with ‘conservative’ Western papers happily lending their space to mendacious propaganda of Russian fascism, accompanied by references to Ukrainian ‘Nazis’. That’s why so many Westerners who consider themselves conservative are questioning the advisability of supporting the Ukraine. Russian propaganda there is boosted by the homespun fringe parties that are in Putin’s pocket ideologically and often financially.
The scale of the Russian propaganda effort far exceeds the 1930s achievements of Willi Munzenberg’s Popular Front machine, complete with its own papers, magazines and film studios. And the Russians’ HAMAS pupils are doing very well too.
The other day The Times featured this headline: “Mummy, are they going to bomb our house?” That’s tear-jerking demagoguery at its very best, and the adman in me can’t fail to identify the guiding hand behind such messages in all the ‘liberal’ media.
The original revulsion following the HAMAS raid was short-lived. At first, even the most ‘liberal’ (meaning anti-Western and pro-Third World) media shuddered at the stories of mass murders and savage rapes. Yet the underlying sense that HAMAS’s cause is just had been so cleverly planted into the ‘liberal’ psyche that, when the Israelis began to retaliate, the Arab savagery was quickly forgotten.
Coming to the fore were endless stories to the effect of “Yes, the Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but…” provided they don’t kill any Muslims. Such stories have been richly illustrated with pictures of destroyed Gaza buildings, killed or maimed ‘civilians’, crying children and so on.
The mindset required for such gross misrepresentations of reality didn’t appear by itself. Western ‘liberals’ may have been inclined in that direction, but that inclination has had to be lovingly cultivated and rewarded. And the Russians didn’t just train HAMAS and other terrorist gangs in the use of arms and explosives. They have also taught Third World radicals how to shill for their cause by pressing the right buttons in the Left psyche.
Neither the Russians nor certainly HAMAS is any good at any creative activity, and they aren’t even so good at war. But their two-prong propaganda effort is scoring notable successes all over the world, right, left and centre. The pen yet again is proving to be mightier than the sword, and the prospects for the triumph of the good appear to be bleak.
Next Tuesday, Parliament will vote on the government’s proposal to fly unwanted migrants to Rwanda. That country is seen as a sensible replacement for the three-star British hotels in which many migrants are currently housed.
Now Rwanda’s record on human rights shouldn’t make many asylum seekers see the country as exactly the kind of asylum they seek. Even assuming Rwanda has changed since the events depicted in the film alluded to in the title above, the memory is too fresh to be just a memory.
Hence, I suspect the government’s idea is an iceberg. The visible part is the desire to remove the overflow of boat people as far from Britain as geography and geopolitics will allow. What lies underneath the surface though is the possible deterrent effect on future seekers of British pastures green.
If today’s lot end up in Hotel Rwanda, rather than a three-star hotel in the Home Counties, the next generation may think twice about risking their lives in those cross-Channel dinghies. Oh well, best-laid plans and all that, but I can’t for the life of me see this solution as the best one possible.
Everything I read on the subject (or watch on Sky News between my two breakfast croissants) regales me with a plethora of fine legal points that take me so far out of my depth that I suspect the real purpose is to obfuscate, not to elucidate.
The previous attempt to put migrants on Rwanda-bound planes was blocked by the Supreme Court, a body shoved down Britain’s throat by Tony Blair, which by itself means its remit is mostly subversion. On general principle, any superfluous institution is ipso facto subversive, violating as it does the 17th century principle that says: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
The Supreme Court is superfluous because it at best duplicates and at worst usurps the judiciary function of the House of Lords. That House has managed to review British laws for centuries, but the problem with it, as seen by the Blair lot, was precisely that it was strictly British. That’s why our international socialists needed a bypass that could take them around parochial British interests. Enter the Supreme Court.
The principal function of this defective child of Tony Blair is to ensure compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Thus the Supreme Court was supposed to be one of the chains binding Britain to the EU, effectively turning her into a province of a giant, unaccountable superstate.
One would think that Brexit ought to have put paid to the Supreme Court. After all, the British people, voting in greater numbers than they had ever voted for anything else, communicated their desire to hang on to their, which is to say parliamentary, sovereignty.
The natural thing to do would have been to go back to how things used to be when it was Parliament that governed the country, not the European Commission and its various offshoots. Yet as we know, the idea of getting Brexit done has been steadily undermined by unreconstructed Remainers who want to get Brexit done in.
They hang on to the anachronistic survivals of the EU, such as ECHR and consequently the Supreme Court. That usurping body was thus able to stop those Rwanda planes from taking off.
Now the government has come up with a devilishly casuistic way of bypassing the bypass to make sure all those migrants can fly to Africa. I can’t judge the legal nuances of the proposed legislation, but Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick evidently could.
That’s why he resigned in disgust, correctly stating, albeit in the jargon of political equivocation, that no satisfactory solution to the problem can be found for as long as Britain stays in ECHR. Though he didn’t write that, Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from any European body, considering that we’ve had documents codifying basic liberties for almost a millennium – and an exemplary record for centuries.
By contrast, one dominant member of the EU, France, has had 17 different constitutions since 1789 and long periods of a rather spotty record on human rights. As to the other dominant member, Germany, the less said about her the better.
Mr Jenrick obviously regards ECHR as the millstone pulling Britain down to the bottom of the EU swamp. A truly satisfactory solution to the migrants’ problem is impossible for as long as Britain has that weight around her neck.
No country is truly sovereign if it can’t control who is allowed to cross its borders, and in what kind of numbers. That realisation should be the starting point of any thinking on the subject.
The next logical step would be to introduce effective border controls guaranteed to work. In common with any practical measure, this one must start with clear thinking unsullied by extraneous concerns.
Legal asylum applications must be processed quickly and decisively. A certain number of people who can legitimately show that their lives would be in danger if they stayed in their native lands can be admitted.
Even that number has to be limited on purely arithmetic grounds: people who can make such a claim credible must number in at least tens of millions around the world. I doubt even Tony Blair would hospitably invite as many.
Yet HMG has been way too generous in its definition of legitimate asylum seekers. Thus 55 per cent of the Albanians who have requested that status got it – and Albania is about to join the EU. Not a single Albanian is in real need of asylum, although I’m sure many are in need of a higher standard of living.
As to the illegal migrants, the key to their treatment should come from the adjective, not the noun. ‘Illegal’ means they break the law, which makes them criminals, to be dealt with as such. One likes to think Britain hasn’t completely lost her wherewithal to combat criminality, although anyone walking through some areas of London may be forgiven for getting that impression.
We do still have the Royal Navy that has successfully defended Britain’s coastline from enemy fleets sent out by Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler. I realise we are no longer the naval power we used to be, but surely we still have the capacity of stopping a few dozen unarmed dinghies.
If we haven’t, the problem isn’t physical but metaphysical: the paralysis of will. If that’s the case, a few airliners here or there carrying several hundred illegals to Africa won’t offer even a viable solution.
That’s what the much-despised conservative wing of the Conservative Party are saying. They correctly prophesy that the government’s namby-pamby dithering on immigration could wipe the party out as a parliamentary force. Such right-minded Tories are likely to switch over to the Reform Party, heir to UKIP, thereby hastening the arrival of the doom they predict.
That will guarantee a Labour domination for a generation at least, with catastrophic consequences for the country. A meaningful step towards preventing that disaster would be giving the British people what they demanded in 2016: the reclaiming of parliamentary sovereignty.
That includes regaining control of the national borders – real control, that is. Not the fly-by-night palliatives amounting to little more than smoke and mirrors.
