Month: September 2024

Ever since Heraclitus observed that you can’t step into the same river twice, mankind has known that everything develops, irreversibly so. Even natural selection held no secrets for our civilisational ancestors.

Already in the first century BC Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses and thus contributing to the survival of the faster ones.

It would have indeed taken a blind man to overlook the dynamic essence of nature. All species develop, some thrive, others don’t, and most die out. We now know that some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited the world no longer do.

And even a single biological organism, such as a tree, goes through predetermined biological cycles: birth, childhood, youth, maturity, decline, death. A human being develops over the same cycle, which indisputable observation has led some thinkers, Toynbee and Spengler spring to mind, to come up with the naturalist view of history, perhaps the most anti-Western theory I can think of.

But the really damaging theory of history first appeared in the 18^th century and acquired a sacramental status in the 19^th. That was the idea that each new phase wasn’t only a development of an old one, but also an improvement on it.

Life wasn’t just in flux, with things changing over time. According to progress junkies, things didn’t merely change; they became steadily and ineluctably better. They developed as if with a specific purpose in mind: from primitive to complex, from small to big, from chaos to order, from bad to good, from scatterbrained to rational, from wicked to moral.

The last two forms of development applied to man only, but the tendency was common for all nature. And why not? When later in the 19^th century Nietzsche explained that God was dead, he meant that educated people no longer believed. That was simply an observation, and an accurate one at that.

Therefore, man was no longer perceived as the unique creature made in the image and likeness of God. He was just another order of nature, a beast of a special kind – cleverer than any other animal but an animal nonetheless. Hence man too obeyed ubiquitous natural laws, by then helpfully formulated by Darwin. For evolution, read history.

Darwin explained, being rather economical with the proof, that Homo sapiens started life long ago (millions of years ago? billions? – never mind, as many as it took to make the theory plausible) as a single-cell organism. The single cell kept growing and becoming more complex until it became Charles Darwin via many intermediate stages.

Since Charles Darwin undoubtedly represented progress over an amoeba, the point seemed irrefutable. Progress, which is to say inexorable meliorative development, was now seen as an ontological property of biological life and hence of man, its more advanced element.

In the century preceding Darwin, man was paid a blanket compliment of getting better, not just older. Man had finally begun to acquire reason, having until then flown by the seat of his pants. Progress was under way, and man was growing from his natal senselessness to rationality, and hence from immorality to morality, showing signs that eventually the Rational Millennium was bound to arrive.

Soon Darwin was on hand to explain this tendency in biological terms, and preachers of progress experienced the joy of a safe cracker who hears the final satisfying click. Darwin’s hypotheses fell far below the level of evidential proof required of other sciences, but they were happily accepted as the ultimate truth.

History turned out to be a science after all, and a natural science at that. So what’s a few missing links here and there among progressivist friends? An irrelevant footnote at worst.

In any case, philosophers of progress were happy to leave the biological details for natural scientists to sort out. What mattered to them was the historical truth of meliorative evolution as it applied to human life.

Just look at social and economic formations, the way Darwin’s contemporary Marx looked at them. Can’t you see the steady progress from primitive and crude to complex and refined?

Primordial caveman, hunter and gatherer, developed a barter economy; his descendants progressed to slave ownership and then to feudalism; that was replaced by capitalism; capitalism became imperialism and hence moribund; socialism took over, with ensuing communism set to adumbrate the very millennium of Reason and hence Virtue that those 18^th century philosophes had prophesied.

Not every thinker accepted Marx’s take on progress, but few of them raised any objections to the notion of progress as such. It was patently obvious to all sensible people that life was getting steadily better, however ‘better’ was defined.

Life in the 19^th century was better than in the 18^th; that was better than life in the 16^th century, and there wasn’t even any point talking about earlier times. They were enfolded in darkness out of which man was gradually alighting, guided by the beacon of Reason.

Yet whenever we say that A is better than B, we’re implying the existence of objective valuation criteria enabling us to pass comparative judgement. But in this case such criteria don’t exist.

The criteria a historian uses are based on his own thoughts, experience, sensations. And these are largely affected by his own time. That’s roughly what Benedetto Croce meant when he said: “All history is modern history.”

Our own time is dominated by science and resultant technology, which are constantly getting more intricate and sophisticated. However, it’s slipshod thinking to insist on that basis that life is getting better. There’s no doubt that an Apple Mac represents a technological advance over the quill pen, yet more great books were written with the latter than the former.

History is a progression but not necessarily progress. It’s a chronological development of man’s thought and the acts inspired by thought, but only someone in the grip of wishful thinking would discern invariable melioration in the chronology.

One would have to be blindly committed to the fallacy of progress to insist that Beethoven was better than Bach, Brahms better than Beethoven and Pierre Boulez better than all of them. Or, that Aristotle was a better philosopher than Plato, Kant a better one than either of them, while Foucault and Derrida top the lot by a head.

A modern man may like his way of life, but it’s foolhardy of him to aver that the way of life in, say, Elizabethan England was nowhere near as good. Show me a nuclear reactor, a car and the Internet, and I’ll show you Donne, Marlowe and Shakespeare. They didn’t have modern technology, but then we don’t have any equivalents of them.

Looking at, say, the Middle Ages, modern man sees nothing but ignorance, cruelty and superstition. However, had a student of Albertus Magnus at Paris University in the 13^th century been endowed with the gift of prospective vision, he’d probably look at our times and see nothing but barbarism along with intellectual and moral degeneration.

Neither of such hypothetical individuals would probably want to swap his own way of life for the other one. Their tastes would differ too much.

Yet modern people are conditioned to believe that any change is for the better. They’ve bought the lazy and ill-conceived theory of progress, and they have neither the desire nor the intellectual wherewithal to bring it to task.

This is a very serious matter indeed since, using this theory as a starting point, modern man blithely initiates damaging changes to his way of life because he’s constitutionally unable to regard any change as damaging. Progression always means progress to him, he has no doubts on this score.

However, I’d argue that nothing stunts progress as much as presumption of progress. Man isn’t necessarily getting better because he has more expensive toys to play with. It may be easier to argue he is getting worse.

And he’ll continue to get worse until he is able to assess himself, his past and his present accurately, dispassionately – and with no presumption of progress anywhere in sight.

In anticipation of the White House meeting between Biden and Starmer, Putin pulled his air bases back, beyond the 200-mile reach of Storm Shadow and ATACMS missiles.

He needn’t have bothered. Our criminally chicken-hearted leaders failed to reach an agreement to let the Ukrainians use those missiles on targets deep into Russian territory. Yet again the West has succumbed to blackmailing threats.

Judging by his whole life, Joe Biden isn’t afraid of indulging in corrupt practices besmirching his reputation. He isn’t afraid of millions of illegal migrants streaming into the US. Biden, his protestations of piety notwithstanding, isn’t even afraid of God’s judgement.

The only thing that scares him out of his wits is the dread E-word: escalation. Or, to be more exact, Putin’s threats thereof. Vlad keeps drawing red lines and promises to unleash Armageddon should any of them be overstepped.

Nevertheless, Biden has succumbed to domestic and international pressures by timidly putting his toe over one line after another. No Armageddon ensued, and yet that in no way diminished the credibility of Putin’s new threats in Joe’s eyes.

NATO, specifically American, armaments have even been used to occupy hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, with Abrams and Challenger tanks, supported by F-16 fighters and US satellite intelligence, rolling towards Kursk. Moreover, even the infantry weapons used by the invading Ukrainian force were of NATO manufacture.

How many red lines were crossed there? More than you’ll find in a Mondrian painting. Yet nothing came from the Kremlin other than more empty threats. Characteristically, the threats even lacked the cataclysmic specificity of the earlier vintages.

Then the threat was to turn America into radioactive ash and drown Britain in a tsunami caused by nuclear blasts. What followed the invasion of the Kursk province related to such threats the way a hangover relates to brain cancer. The Kremlin sources did reiterate that they were at war with NATO, not just the Ukraine, but they’ve been saying the same thing for ten years – and screaming it for the past two.

Even the Kremlin’s threat of action should the US and Britain unshackle the Ukrainian rocket forces was rather nebulous. Putin said that, should that happen, the Russians would have to assess the situation and decide on the appropriate course of action. He added that Russia would consider herself at war with NATO, but then what else is new?

Putin’s permamently drunk alter ego Medvedev and a few other mouthpieces did utter vague threats of a nuclear response, but that wasn’t exactly a novelty either. Nor is it a credible threat.

By now everyone knows that Americans have promised to wipe out Putin’s entire invasion force should a nuclear device go off anywhere near the Ukraine. Granted, Putin may use his KGB expertise to analyse Biden and conclude he’d chicken out again. However, Xi also forbade Putin to use nukes, and China is indeed in a position to issue such injunctions.

Starmer has played his customary weasel role by describing his meeting with Biden as “long and productive”, but he was only half-truthful: it was indeed long. He also added that “we’ve come to a strong position”. For Russia, by the looks of it.

Much as it pains me to say this, the Russian gangster is right, and our leaders are wrong. Putin has indeed been at war with the West, and the West has indeed been at war with Putin.

But it has been a phony war on our part, even more so than the first conflict that rated that description. The West has been systematically arming the Ukraine, providing every manner of training and logistic support. Yet at the same time NATO has been doing just enough to keep the Ukraine in the fight while making sure the country had no chance of winning it.

That’s cowardly, this much goes without saying. But it’s also monumentally idiotic, as anyone cursorily familiar with history will confirm. War isn’t chess, you can’t play it for a draw. A draw may ensue anyway, but that outcome can only ever be achieved by resolute efforts to win. Entering a fight with the intention of not losing guarantees just that, defeat.

Any war, from those described by Herodotus and Thucydides to the one described by Beevor and Keegan (or, better still, Suvorov, Hoffmann and Solonin), provides ample proof of that observation. And the original Phony War, fought or rather not fought in the hope that Hitler would come to his senses and stop his juggernaut in its tracks, is proof not just ample but conclusive.

All this is terrible news for the Ukraine, NATO, Europe and the West in general. There is nothing to deter Putin from attacking a NATO country, such as Estonia or Latvia, and keeping the alliance at bay with another threat of nuclear annihilation. Should that happen, NATO would in effect disband, letting every former member fend for itself. The consequences of such a disaster would be unpredictable, or rather predictably awful.

Nor is the news likely to get better. Kamala Harris has already reiterated her commitment to Biden’s craven policy, packaging that intention with the usual waffle about loving the Ukraine and her sovereignty.

And J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has finally explained what the latter meant by boasting he would end the war in three days (or three minutes, can’t remember which). Essentially, that’s for Putin to be able to say with full justification that what’s currently his is his for ever, and what’s not currently his is negotiable.

Russia would be allowed to keep all her stolen Ukrainian territory, with some mythical DMZ in place to make sure no new invasion could ever occur. Good luck with that: we all know how reliable demilitarised zones have been in the past.

Moreover, the Ukraine should undertake to abandon her attempts to join NATO or any “allied organisation”, presumably meaning the EU. All that would mean delivering an interim victory to Russia, giving her time to rebuild, rearm and then launch another, more devastating, assault on the West.

As far as the Ukraine is concerned, the forthcoming US election will feature two Manchurian candidates, not just one pitted against a legitimate rival. The outlook is bleak.

The Ukrainians and their friends shouldn’t be ingrates. They should thank the West wholeheartedly for its support, for without it a sovereign Ukraine would have ceased to exist long ago.

Yet without this support taking the shape of a full-blown commitment, the victory of Russian fascism will be only deferred, not prevented in perpetuity. That’s why those who understand what’s at stake are appalled at the sight of two chickens, Biden and Starmer, strutting their stuff.

Both were hatched a long time ago, and yet they are as yellow as ever.  

I’m feeling especially smug today. Henceforth my name should be mentioned side by side with those of older prophets, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Daniel et al.

My prophesy was admittedly less cosmic than theirs, but it was just as prescient and accurate. But judge for yourself.

Back in 2013, yet another court case hingeing on sexual consent was making front-page news. He said she had consented, she said he was a rapist, that sort of thing. The British public was all worked up about the issue, and, as a socially responsible person, I felt duty-bound to offer a solution.

I suggested that, when going out in the evening, every young man should carry a consent form, which the object of his affection should sign before any hanky-panky takes place. I went into some detail enumerating the rubrics that form should include:

“Definitely specified before each erotic encounter must be a) position(s); b) duration; c) orifice(s) utilised; d) method of contraception; e) financial responsibility for any medical problem transmitted therein; f) any extras, e.g. S & M, B & D, other; g) presence and/or number of observers and/or other participants; h) use of any audio and/or video recording equipment; j) any resulting contractual obligations, e.g. the man does the dishes and/or mows the lawn tomorrow.”

Anticipating certain legal problems before they arose, I displayed a firm grasp of jurisprudence and no mean business acumen by adding this suggestion:

“To become legally binding, the form must be signed by both parties and then officially notarised, which may present something of a problem. You see, the decision to have sex frequently and irresponsibly involves no long-term planning. Not only can it be spontaneous but, even worse, it may be taken at a time when most notary offices are closed for the night.

“The problem is serious but not insurmountable: supply, as we know, generates demand. Before long all-night notary offices will appear in every neighbourhood, with the officials also licensed to dispense condoms and offer advice on various ballistic and contraceptive possibilities inherent in assorted sexual variants.”

I forgot to mention that, to help timid young ladies overcome a sudden onset of misgivings, such all-night notary offices could also dispense Rohypnol, but, other than that, my proposal was meticulously thought through.

It was also – and here I have to let you in on a secret – offered in jest, as a piece of satire. However, that literary genre is rapidly becoming obsolete because it can’t keep up with reality. The most dystopic predictions come true, and satirical mirth turns out prophetic in the hands of victorious modernity. Spanish authorities are a case in point.

They must have read my article, appreciated its ideas, and I only wonder why it has taken them 11 years to act on it. But act on it they did, by issuing a Consent Agreement for young men, especially footballers, to carry. As a tribute to, well, me, the form was produced in English.

The document has three pages and eight sections: I. PARTIES, identified as “The Proposer” and “The Consenter”, with space provided for full names and ages. II. TIME, specifying the initiation point of the act and its duration. III. ACTIVITIES (“Initial all that apply”), unimaginatively enumerating a mere 12 possibilities, such as digital penetration, oral sex, vaginal or anal sex, restraints used and so forth. IV. CONTRACEPTION. V. RATCHET CLAUSE [“There shall be no sexual activity of any kind other than that specified and consented to in this Consent Agreement without the establishment of a new, separate agreement. (See Clause 1 below)”]. VI. ACCIDENTAL VIOLATION. [“Either party to this Consent Agreement being male, may, through no fault and without intent, penetrate a female orifice not made available for sexual activity under this Consent Agreement.”]. VII. FAILURE TO PERFORM, wherein “Both the Proposer and the Consenter waive any right to legal redress for such failure to perform. VIII. EARLY TERMINATION. “This Consent Agreement may be terminated at any time during the period of consent agreed upon herein…”

Underneath there are spaces provided for the Proposer’s and the Consenter’s name and signature, and a separate line for a witness to sign. Yet, unlike in my proposal, no provision is made for the notarisation of the signatures, which is a lamentable oversight.  

I do hope those Spanish lawyers had as much fun drafting that contractual document as I did 11 years ago. Yet my prophesy is no less prescient for being unwitting, and I have every reason to be proud.

Yet I would be remiss if I failed to mention another, less detailed but somewhat more poetic, prophesy of this aspect of romantic love. The man who stole my thunder 400 years before I put my fingers on the keyboard was none other than William Shakespeare:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate:/ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, /And summer’s lease hath all too short a date…”

Literary scholars often disagree on the secret meaning of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but no disagreement is possible here. The “summer’s lease [that] hath all too short a date” undoubtedly anticipates Clause II of the Consent Agreement: “The Consenter and the Proposer make their bodies available to each other from time_____:_____[] AM [] PM on the date of_______ for a period of ________ hours.”

The language of romantic gallantry has changed over the centuries, but such is progress. Still, my fellow prophet Will must be congratulated on his prescience. Credit where it’s due, he had to look much further into the future than I did.

At this point, I’d be expected to wonder if the world is in the grip of collective insanity, but I’ll spare you the obvious laments. Some things just go without saying. And in any case, Seneca said it best:

“None of it can be helped, but all of it can be despised.”

P.S. This is my original article: http://www.alexanderboot.com/premature-ejaculation-can-get-you-convicted-for-rape/

That’s how many preventable deaths are caused every year by long A&E waits.

The figure comes from the report commissioned by the government and submitted by Lord Darzi, a former Labour health minister.

Lord Darzi also mentioned that our cancer survival rates lag behind other developed countries. However, he didn’t express this deficit numerically, leaving us to guess how many people die who could have lived. My guess is that the number is much higher than 14,000.

Then it’s not just A&E departments that keep patients at arm’s length. Thousands and thousands have to wait months, sometimes years, for essential operations and treatment. That has to push mortality rates further upwards, though the report doesn’t say how high.

As for primary care, depending on where you live, getting a GP appointment is either difficult, taking days or even weeks, or well-nigh impossible. My own surgery is a prime example.

When I was first assigned to it, we had two excellent GPs, both men. Just two – yet there was never a problem getting a next-day appointment. One doctor even paid me a house visit once, a service that used to be routine and is now nonexistent. The other GP possibly saved my life by referring me to an oncologist 20 years ago, when he spotted something untoward.

They both retired in their 50s, crushed under the weight of useless admin demanded by the NHS. Reinforcements arrived in the alluring shape of 12 young women, who now use patients the way badminton players use shuttlecocks.

We are passed from one to another, never seeing the same doctor twice. What care has lost in continuity, it hasn’t gained in availability. Next-day appointments are a thing of the past – next week is the best we can hope for. And I live in an affluent part of central London, where the situation is much better than even a mile or two away.

Again, I don’t know how such developments affect the health of the nation, but it would be counterintuitive to believe the effect is positive. I wonder what Lord Darzi thinks about it.

On balance, his report, saying that the NHS is “in a critical condition”, is uncharacteristically honest, which one doesn’t normally expect from Labour. What one does expect is muddled thinking, and Lord Darzi obliges by offering two mutually exclusive findings.

First he says that ministers must stop “throwing money” at hospitals, which have failed to increase productivity despite a major increase in staff numbers since 2019. Yet in the next breath he mentions that the NHS is “starved” of £37 billion in capital investment.

Perhaps this amount should be gently pushed towards the NHS, not thrown at it. Or thrown overarm, rather than in an underhanded fashion.

In any case, Sir Keir Starmer responded to the findings by pledging “the biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth”. The choice of words is telling: our PM seems to realise that whatever he proposes will remain a figment of his imagination.

One such figment is Sir Keir’s promise never to raise taxes on “working people” as a way of plugging the aforementioned budgetary hole. There he lets his imagination run wild: raising taxes on working and other people is a Labour compulsion, which they indulge even more passionately than the Tories.

The political price of tax rises supposedly needed to save the NHS is low. Our leading parties, but especially Labour, have won the propaganda war by sacralising the health service in the British mind.

We are ready to swallow any canard peddled by any government, such as that the NHS is the envy of the free world. This makes it hard to explain why the free world has so far neglected to follow our shining example – and still maintains much higher cancer survival rates, to mention just one marker.

Our PM also hinted at our difficulty “to meet the ever-higher costs of ageing population”, creating the impression that other Europeans oblige their governments by dying young. Yet 20 European countries boast a higher life expectancy than the UK, and none of them has a socialist Leviathan dominating their medical care.

So far Starmer hasn’t got around to following the advice of his fellow socialist, George Bernard Shaw. GBS suggested that when people reach 70 they should be asked to prove the social benefit of their continuing existence. If they couldn’t do so to GBS’s satisfaction, it was off to the abattoir with them.

That would be one solution to the exorbitant cost of treating wrinklies, but Starmer is manfully resisting it for the time being. Instead he is talking of greater use of technology and a “shift in the distribution of resources towards community-based primary, community and mental health services.”

Allow me to translate from socialist into human, avoiding Starmer’s tautologies as best I can. He is talking about replacing clinical medicine with social care, counselling, psychotherapy and other shamanistic practices beloved of socialists. We can also look forward to intensified state hectoring on every aspect of our life, from diets to leisure pastimes to preferred modes of transportation.

The modern state’s solution for anything is increasing the modern state’s power over everything. The NHS Leviathan is merely a projection of that innate impulse onto medicine, and such ossified socialist structures are unreformable.

Getting back to Darzi, he sounds desperate, disingenuous and hopeful. “My colleagues in the NHS are working harder than ever but our productivity has fallen” – that’s desperate. It’s also an illustration on the previous paragraph.

“It took more than a decade for the NHS to fall into disrepair so it’s going to take time to fix it” – that’s disingenuous. Darzi puts the blame squarely on the Tories, not on the uncorrectable systemic failings of nationalised medicine. One such is a guaranteed steady decline in productivity that mortifies him so.

“But we in the NHS have turned things around before, and I’m confident we will do it again.” I’m not aware of any such successful turnaround in the past, and I’m sure it won’t happen in the future. To use Chekhov’s quip, “this cannot be because it can be never”.

I’m expecting new radical proposals concerning public health, such as dancing around campfires at midnight, eating dried toads or sacrificing virgins (if none can be found, house pets can be used). These would be about as likely to solve the problem as anything our government can come up with.

A piece of avuncular advice: if you can’t get any A&E help, make sure you aren’t bleeding too fast. Then again, red is the colour of Labour.

Beheading is an effective treatment for a headache, but some sufferers may find it a tad too radical.

This profound thought flashed through my mind when I read about a few Anglophone Westerners, including 17 Scotsmen, emigrating to Russia to swap ‘neoliberalism’ for ‘traditional values’. Considering that over a million Russians have moved the other way since 2022, the score is still in our favour, but still.

I know exactly how those emigrants feel. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t bemoan, orally or in writing, the West going to the dogs. However, I’ll take neoliberalism any day if the only alternative to it is paleofascism.

Yet some people seem to disagree with me, as they are entitled to. Their decision has to consist of two parts, the first one understandable, the second ill-advised: dissatisfaction with their homeland and a realistic hope that Russia will be better.

Major-General Irina Volk of the Russian Interior Ministry accentuated the first part: “The desire to move to Russia for permanent residence arose against the background of the abolition of traditional moral and family values in American society, as well as the low level of education.”

One thing I can say for Gen. Volk is that our own major-generals don’t look like her. I’m sure she has reached such a high rank at such a young age by assiduously practising traditional values. Volk means ‘wolf’ in Russian, and I do hope it’s her surname and not nickname. In any case, the song she is howling is familiar to anyone ever exposed to Kremlin propaganda.

All the recent migrants to Russia sing from the same lupine hymn sheet, highlighting “destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes” in the West. They all claim to “share traditional Russian spiritual and moral values”.

One fertile Canadian couple blessed with eight children explained what neoliberalism means: “There’s a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, just a lot of things that we don’t agree with they teach there now. We wanted to get away from that for our children.”

Any Westerner who is fed up with ideological wokery has my sympathy. Any Westerner who criticises it has my support. Yet I can respond with nothing but scorn to any Westerner who falls for the Russian propaganda of ‘traditional values’.

That said, they may have a point because traditions differ. The Russian variety, for example, includes the compulsion to pounce on the country’s neighbours. Looking at the 1991 map of the moribund Soviet Union, née the Russian Empire, I can’t see a single bordering country that hadn’t fallen victim to Russian aggression at some point.

Another Russian tradition is government by fiat, the decree imposed by a single omnipotent ruler. Such governments have always oscillated within a narrow range between authoritarian and totalitarian, the latter finely poised these days between fascist and Nazi.

Suppression of free speech is another traditional value there. At the time of Elizabeth I’s reign in England, the mildest critics of the Russian tsar were flayed alive, fried in giant frying pans or, if the tsar felt merciful, only drawn and quartered.

Fast-forwarding to the reign of Charles III, double-digit prison terms are being routinely given to Russians who find anything wrong with the criminal war on the Ukraine – indeed even to those who simply refer to it as just that, a war, rather than the prescribed term of a ‘special military operation’.

It’s true that what the Russians call ‘non-traditional orientation’ is discouraged at all levels short of the upper reaches of government. There, however, it’s rife, and some of Putin’s closest lieutenants aren’t immune to same-sex attractions.

And – here I must lower my voice to make sure we aren’t overheard – if you believe reports from his numerous ex-colleagues in the KGB, even the man himself isn’t quite as macho as his PR will have you believe. Rumour has it that Putin ordered the murder of Alexander Litvinenko on finding out that the latter was writing a book on why Vlad’s career in the KGB had been so sluggish.

But fair enough: the children of that despairing Canadian couple won’t be asked at their Russian school which of the 100-plus sexes they’d rather be, they won’t be taught advanced condom studies at a barely postpubescent age, and I doubt the critical race theory will figure prominently on their curriculum.

But what will their Russian curriculum feature instead? Independent journalists have found out that the current school year will be mostly devoted to ‘patriotic’ subjects and extracurricular activities – at the expense of traditional, as it were, disciplines.

One such subject, introduced after the full-scale invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, is called “Talks of Important Matters”. Such talks mainly focus on vindicating Russian aggression and portraying the Ukrainians as sub-human in frankly Nazi terms.

Military training will also take much of the schooltime this year. The course is called “The Essentials of Security and Defence of the Motherland”. The pupils will be taught “basic elements of military training” and “safety requirements in handling firearms”, that goes without saying.

Yet Russian traditional values on the syllabus will also include “basic concepts of today’s warfare… including the methods of using combat drones”. Especially privileged will be 523 schools where pupils will be taught not only how to use combat drones, but also how to design and manufacture them.

And of course “Family Building” will be another compulsory course, inculcating “a system of family values traditional for our Motherland”, to teach pupils such “conceptual-value guidelines as marriage, having many children and chastity.”

Knowing Russia fairly well, I anticipate problems in finding instructors qualified to teach chastity. Perhaps some of the monks from the Candlemas Monastery in central Moscow could be thrown into the breach…

On second thoughts, perhaps not. A few years ago, it turned out that the holy fathers used their quarters to run a brothel, charging a modest $35 a pop. An interesting touch was added by the personalities involved. The vicar of the monastery at the time was Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), Putin’s confessor, while Patriarch Kirill is the monastery’s superior.

I wonder if these migrating dupes of the Russians had done due diligence before taking this step. How much do they know about the country? They know exactly what they are leaving, but do they realise where they are going?

I doubt if they even know how to say ‘traditional values’ in Russian, but that presents no immediate problem. Putin has magnanimously agreed to waive the language-test requirement for immigrants, doubtless because he plans to turn them into a propaganda coup.

Generally speaking, I refrain from prophesying, but I’ll make an exception in this case. I’ll tell you exactly what will happen to those useful idiots – and how soon they’ll outlive their usefulness.

They’ll be feted to begin with, and every TV channel will be vying for their appearance. They’ll all be given decent lodgings and sinecures in whatever field they fancy. Their children will be sent to showcase schools, where they’ll have their brains scrubbed clean of any Western memories.

Then, a few months later, the novelty appeal will start wearing thin before it disappears altogether. Like the Cambridge spies of yesteryear, they’ll try to live the life of Russian citizens, only to find they aren’t made for it. Before long they’ll realise they live in a fascist country, where the liberties they used to take for granted are unheard of and where any passing cop can torture them with impunity.

They’ll start missing Scotland, America, Canada, wherever they are from. Unlike their children, they’ll find Russian an impossible language to learn and the local mores impossible to understand.

A gulf between them and their thoroughly brainwashed children will appear, and they’ll be looking with horror at the fascist nonsense the little ones spout after a day at school. Moreover, they’ll realise that, when they grow up, the children may well be asked to die for ‘traditional values’ in the Ukraine or elsewhere.

Eventually they’ll do a Shamima Begum and beg to go back. And there I hope they’ll suffer the same fate. You see, the Russians declare every minute of every day that they are at war not with the Ukraine but with NATO. That means that citizens of NATO countries don’t emigrate to a hostile power – they defect, become turncoats.

Hence they must be deprived of their citizenship and banned from ever returning, just like Shamima was. And as for Gen. Volk, well, she can teach me traditional values any time.

The Russian for grammatical tense is the same word as the one for time. I find that overlap convenient when thinking about history.

So let’s try to consider that discipline in the terms of grammatical categories. All Indo-European languages have the three basic tenses, Past, Present and Future. Some, such as English, also have other tenses linking the three temporal planes.

So which tense applies to history? The answer isn’t at all obvious, and we can find many celebrated historians and philosophers of history who put forth different arguments.

Some, such as scholars influenced by positivism, have insisted that history is strictly unconnected events strewn about the past. Some, mostly idealist thinkers, have seen history as a continuum where the past clarifies the present and makes it possible to predict the future. Still others have insisted that history ends at present and offers no insights into the future whatsoever.

Let’s just say that the first, positivist, view reduces the study of history to the hobby of collecting relics of the past. History stops being a science and becomes a variously enjoyable pastime catering to one’s curiosity about ancient artefacts and hunger for retrospective gossip.

Our Past becomes very Indefinite indeed, in fact meaningless. Monty Python satirised that view by asking “What have the Romans ever done for us?” The implication is that Romans are ancient history, and their toing and froing have no bearing on our life today. A budding historian may well think that studying Rome is like watching a period TV drama: a painless but pointless way of idling away an hour or two.

Relying on Past Indefinite to make future more definite is a parlous business, although not so much so as Bertie Russell suggested. That the sun rose today, he said, doesn’t mean it will rise tomorrow. Thus the Future tense of history is so murky that we may as well assume it doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the past is the only reliable predictor of the future. It’s not a sure bet, but it does offer good odds. The study of history thus becomes an expedient for which there is no sensible substitute if we wish to prepare for things to come – and especially if we want to shape them to our liking.

That said, history only offers a speculative view of the future, which is its side benefit but not its purpose. It doesn’t turn Future Indefinite into Future Definite, even though some determinist historians may believe it does.

Confucius, while shunning determinist certainty, did encourage caution: “A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do you know that his future will not be equal to our present?”

Perhaps to clarify the grammar of history we have to leave the realm of philology for that of anthropology interlaced with philosophy. Unalloyed anthropology, which studies man as any other animal, won’t help us understand history. Essential to that understanding is the realisation that man is so much more than just an animal.

Unlike all other species, man thinks, analyses, synthesises and in general engages his cerebral faculties in unique ways. Man always thinks before acting, with the prior thought sometimes taking a lifetime, sometimes a split second and usually a span falling between the two extremes. But the thought is always present as a stimulus to action. If so, then history becomes a study not only of man’s acts but also of man’s thoughts.

A combination of thoughts and acts adds up to man’s experience, just as it sums up the experience of a single individual. If you, I or anyone we know were to write an autobiographical sketch, we’d be able to trace back our thoughts, decorticate our acts and find how the former preceded the latter.

That way we’d come close to understanding how we’ve developed over time, realising that everything in our life has been interconnected, although not always in an obvious way. As a corollary to that exercise, we’d have debunked the positivist view of history.

If historical facts are unconnected, they offer no idea of how our race has developed over time. Denying historical causality is tantamount to believing that human thought (and hence experience) is static, the same for all ages. A positivist thinker denies man what he grants himself: capacity for development.

Contrary to what Enlightenment philosophers thought, this doesn’t presuppose mankind’s evolution from irrationality to the ultimate rational, and hence moral, millennium. Neither does an individual always become cleverer and better as he matures. But he does become something, and becoming is a process, not a fait accompli.

Some thinkers believe that history is nothing but a compendium of dark facts we try to elucidate in the light of our present understanding. It’s the present that makes the past, in other words, and this view again devalues history to a trivial pursuit.

It’s true that some historians glorified the past, while others demonised it, with both proceeding from their own thoughts tainted by ideology. Rousseau, for example, believed in the primordial goodness of man subsequently perverted by civilisation, especially Christendom. Enlightenment philosophers, on the other hand, saw man’s past, especially but not only Christendom, in exclusively dark tones only to be lightened up by the arrival of Reason (always implicitly capitalised).

Whatever we may make of such opposite views, neither has anything to do with the study of history as a sum of man’s experience. History is neither Past Indefinite nor Present Indefinite nor Future Indefinite. It’s Present Perfect, something that started in the past but is still acting at present.

Just as a man is largely shaped by his individual experience, so has mankind become what it is by its collective experience. And ‘has become’ is Present Perfect, not any other tense.

Dispassionate analysis of facts meticulously collected is a study of human experience and hence a study of human nature. This makes history not only a fascinating science but an indispensable one, more so perhaps than such worthy disciplines as psychology and neurophysiology.

It’s a most unfortunate fallout of the Enlightenment that thought got to be associated strictly with science, meaning natural science. Neither philosophy nor history was regarded as a science at all. Both and their combination have got to be treated as pure speculation, a mental exercise akin to word puzzles.

Historiography, a mere recording of facts, is still seen as helpful in establishing the context in which real progress, that of science of technology, has occurred. The thought that history is a science of human nature, possibly the most important such science, is treated as sheer heresy or, typically, dismissed as so unsound as not to warrant serious discussion.

That’s a grammatical error. For history is Present Perfect, not Past Indefinite. It’s our experience, a record of our on-going attempts to make something worthwhile of our nature. It’s the past shaping the present, not the present shaping the past. If we don’t study history as it should be studied, we’ll never understand how we’ve become what we are.

That means we’ll stay as we are, which doesn’t bode well for our survival. The future becomes not only indefinite but frightening.

The government has announced gleefully that the remaining 92 hereditary peers will be kicked out of the Lords within 18 months.

The reasons cited for this act of constitutional vandalism fall into two categories: real, which are vicious; and those offered to the public, which are illiterate. The real reasons all have to do with the hatred Labour feel for every last vestige of our civilisation, emphatically including its constitutional arrangement.

In his article, Charles Moore appealed to tradition: the institution of hereditary peers in the House of Lords goes back 700 years. Of course, he wrote, if we were to start the upper chamber from scratch, we wouldn’t even consider such an anachronism. But since we aren’t starting from scratch, do let’s have some respect for the patina of venerable age.

Now Lord Moore knows perfectly well, but is reluctant to say, that the tradition attached to the House of Lords is precisely the reason Labour vandals hate it. Another argument put forth by Lord Moore, that hereditary peers aren’t susceptible to party-political pressures, cuts even less ice.

The whole idea is for (ideally dictatorial) power to be concentrated in the hands of the central (ideally socialist) government. Any institution capable of applying clamps to such tyranny is ipso facto anathema.

Members of the Commons are all professional politicians, which these days more or less means spivs. As such, they can be bribed, bought, coerced or pressured into toeing the line – after all, they depend on the government for their careers, indeed livelihood.

A hereditary peer neither owes nor needs any political favours, and he depends on nothing but his birth for his post. Hence he may vote strictly on the basis of his reason and conscience, which may make him a menace to spivocracy.

The upshot of it is that a hereditary Lords adds an essential check to the balance of power, and that’s precisely why socialists detest it. They don’t want any checks and balances. They want dictatorship, or any possible approximation to it.

Then again, 45 of the 92 remaining hereditary peers are Conservatives, and practically none are Labour. That goes to prove Labour’s point: those walking cadavers are guaranteed to stick spokes into the wheels of progress, as it’s understood by socialist spivs. Out with them.

And it’s not just that: all those despicable 92 are white men. Where’s diversity there? Where’s inclusivity? Where’s equity? That’s what happens when you let nature take its course. Why, the very presence of those pale-faced crypto-misogynists is a slap in the face of progress.

So much for the real reasons behind one of the worst acts of constitutional vandalism in British history. Now let’s mention the arguments in favour of it offered for public consumption.

One such argument was put forth by Nick Thomas-Symonds, minister for the constitution, whose post would be more properly described as minister for constitutional sabotage.

“The hereditary principle in law-making has lasted for too long and is out of step with modern Britain,” he said. “The second chamber plays a vital role in our constitution and people should not be voting on our laws in parliament by an ­accident of birth.”

An alien could be forgiven for believing that ‘accident of birth’ has been expunged from British politics altogether – or at least will be, once the proposed legislation has gone into effect. Well, not quite. There’s that other burr under Labour’s blanket: the monarchy.

That’s your accident of birth at its most outlandish: people get to head our state simply because they are born in the purple. Don’t they know that red or at a pinch brown are the only acceptable colours of modern politics?

If you think for a second that our governing vandals wouldn’t get rid of the monarchy in a second if they thought they could get away with it, you are mistaken. It’s the next item on their agenda, and they are just waiting for the propitious moment to strike.

That, to me, is self-evident. But another example of accident of birth at work in politics is even more self-evident, and I don’t think that even our socialist spivs see it in their crosshairs. Not yet, anyway.

Britain is supposed to be a democracy, meaning that those entitled to vote elect their government. But where does this entitlement come from if not from an accident of birth? Upon reaching majority, anyone born in Britain is allowed to take an active part in politics by voting for Labour or – if they wish to be sticks-in-the-mud – some other parties.

According to that despicable colonialist Cecil Rhodes, “To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life”. But winning anything in any lottery is random luck or, in this particular lottery, an accident of birth, isn’t it?

I don’t know if this iniquity bothers our rulers as much as hereditary peers do but, if it does, I can propose an effective solution: disfranchising all native-born Britons. That will hammer the last nail into the coffin of power based on an accident of birth. Moreover, it’ll satisfy another argument, that from meritocracy.

When some 25 years ago Tony Blair, arguably the most subversive PM in British history and definitely the most disgusting one, delivered the first blow to our constitution, he explained that any right to affect legislation should be based on achievement, not birth.

There we go then. A Briton born and bred votes from an accident of birth and no required achievement. A chap who braves the storms to paddle across the Channel, on the other hand, has definitely achieved something.

Tony’s own achievement qualified him in spades. After all, he was a fire-eating activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a transparent Soviet front. What he was out to achieve was Britain losing her nuclear deterrent and also her energy independence, in which nuclear power played a vital role.

Though young Tony didn’t quite achieve the entirety of his goals, he came close enough by weakening the country as much as was feasible at the time. Is that the kind of achievement he had in mind?

Perhaps Angie Rayner, our deputy prime minister, is an even higher achiever. Not every girl manages to get pregnant before her 16^th birthday, leave school never to resume any appreciable education, and then embark on a steeply ascending political path by activism in trade unions and other such setups.

I’d suggest that centuries of good breeding, sound education and gradual training in exercising political power responsibly constitute better preparation for government than such ‘achievements’. That’s what hereditary peers used to have, and some still do.

One wonders how Britain managed to become the greatest empire in history when it was governed almost exclusively by white men of such objectionable backgrounds. I detect a causal relationship there, but that’s only me.

“It’s not racist if it’s against the French,” quipped a British comedian once, eliciting a sympathetic laugh from his audience. He was referring to the perennial English game of scoring points off the French.

The game has been played for some 1,000 years, but the levels of intensity have varied. During the Hundred Years’ War that ended in 1453, it was rather passionate. In the end, having won every significant battle, the English lost that war, which didn’t do much to promote Gallophilia on these shores.

The last time the English and the French found themselves on the opposite sides in an armed conflict was during the Napoleonic Wars, when the French acquired a distinctly diabolical character in British folklore.

“You must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil,” said Horatio Nelson to his sailors, adding mystical touches to the traditional rivalry. Since then, though, French-baiting has become mostly jocular, with jokes targeting the French compulsion to eat cheese, have kinky sex and lose wars.

However, though the desire to aim our slings and arrows across the Channel may have abated, it hasn’t disappeared. Sometimes it springs to the surface, as it did in the Times article France’s Rape Case: The Week That Put a Nation on Trial by Peter Conradi.

Although Mr Conradi entered the game with gusto, he ended up heavily outscored. It’s France that has emerged the clear victor.

The trial in question is that of Dominique Pélicot, 71, who got his kicks in a way that even the most passionate Gallophobes would agree is rather atypical even of that naughty nation. It all began in September 2020, when Dominique was caught ‘upskirting’ women at a local supermarket near Avignon.

Personally, I don’t see the point of surreptitiously photographing women’s knickers (assuming of course they wear them – one never knows in France, as any true Englishman will tell you), but we all get our jollies as we can.

In any case, it’s good to see a fellow septuagenarian who is so much more au courant with modern technology than I am. Apparently, if you know how to use your phone camera (which I don’t), you don’t have to lie supine on the floor, aiming your Nikon upwards to get the requisite angle.

Anyway, having nabbed Mr Pélicot, the police then looked at his camera first and his computer second only to see a horror story unfolding before their Gallic eyes. Over a decade, Pélicot had been drugging his wife of 50 years and inviting strangers to come and rape her while she lay unconscious.

All in all, about 80 men enjoyed Mme Pélicot’s unwitting favours, some of them more than once, and 50 of them are sharing the dock with her hubby-wubby. He recruited them all through a sleazy website, but then I told you he was technologically literate.

Pélicot is clearly degenerate to the point of being deranged, while his accomplices are as wicked as he is. I sincerely hope the court rules that they should be locked up, with the key hopelessly lost in eternity.

However, they are the ones to be held responsible for this crime, not France in general. It’s Pélicot and his accomplices who are on trial, not, as Conradi’s title will have us believe, their country.

To insist on wider implications, it should be argued persuasively that such crimes are both typical and widely condoned in France. Otherwise, the Pélicot case is as symptomatic of marital relations in France, as Fred and Rosemary West are of British parenting or Dr Shipman of British care for the elderly.

Now I have quite a few French friends and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them invites platoons of strangers to copulate with their drugged wives. Moreover, I’ve never heard any of them telling stories about such a pastime involving anyone else, and some of them are lawyers.

I doubt Mr Conradi is any better informed than I am, and yet he sees fit to nail the whole country to the cross of his opprobrium. He extrapolates France’s perversity from “the treatment of the case by France’s leading newspapers, which have largely tucked away the grim proceedings on their inside pages”.

“If such a case were taking place in Britain,” he adds, “it would dominate the front pages and lead the television news”. Conradi makes it sound as if such obsession with lurid sex crimes were a good thing: “It’s also a matter of media culture: leading national newspapers, such as the left-leaning Le Monde or right-wing Le Figaro, do not stoop to putting [such stories] on their front pages.”

Good for them, I dare say. But note how Le Monde, the French counterpart of The Guardian, is only “left-leaning”, whereas Le Figaro doesn’t just lean to the right – it’s already irredeemably “right-wing”. It’s clear enough to what side Mr Conradi himself leans.

True enough, our broadsheets are these days barely distinguishable from tabloids. At a time when a major war is raging in Europe, another one is brewing in the Middle East, either of them can lead to a cataclysmic conflagration, and Britain herself has fallen into the hands of those evidently committed to doing her harm, they’d doubtless put on their front pages the story of some degenerates having their wicked way with an elderly grandmother.

Their voyeuristic audience would rejoice: it’s so much more fun to read about the STDs Mme Pélicot contracted during her ordeal than about Ukrainian children blown up in Mariupol or tortured in Bucha. Our editors know how to give due prominence to things that really matter. That’s why they are already allocating more column inches to the Pélicot case than it’s receiving in France.

However, I can see Conradi’s point. The Russians are only murdering hundreds of thousands, whereas the Pélicot case can be used to promote the MeToo ideology so dear to the heart of our formerly conservative paper. And Conradi does his bit with relish.

He quotes approvingly the gibberish mouthed by a French social worker who doesn’t sound in any way superior to our own homegrown variety: “I think it’s symptomatic of our society, which is still patriarchal and doesn’t take the measure of the revolution that’s unfolding before their eyes,” she said.

Revolution, nothing less. Sans-culottes are on the march, and Mme Pélicot, whose own culottes were so heinously removed on so many occasions, is their standard bearer.

Meanwhile the French legal system has neglected even to come up with a definition of rape that Conradi would countenance. All their code says is that rape is  “sexual penetration, committed against another person by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”. That sounds exhaustive enough to me, but not to Conradi. This definition is deficient because it “does not explicitly include the question of consent”.

That’s it, I must have a serious talk with the French jurists among my friends. How dare French jurisprudence describe nonconsensual sex while omitting the buzz word of woke ideology? Anyone may misunderstand and decide that raping a woman at gunpoint may be construed as consensual hanky-panky.

The French have already picked up quite a few rotten things from Britain: tattooed, facially metalled proledom, education that doesn’t educate, law enforcement that doesn’t enforce law, healthcare that doesn’t care for health. Please let them stay for a little while longer in the state of blissful ignorance about our woke imperatives.

It’s not France that’s on trial, Mr Conradi. It’s Pélicot and his accomplices. Leave France to her vices and devices, will you? And for God’s sake spare us the woke idiocy that’s convulsing Britain. Before long, it’s the French who’ll put us on trial.

Some years ago, I wrote the book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, inspired by the financial disaster of 2008.

The main point was that our financial problems were a symptom of an underlying civilisational malaise caused first by the Reformation and then by the contagion inexplicably called ‘the Enlightenment’.

The former was a rebellion against apostolic Christianity; the latter, one against Christendom as such, not only its religion but also much of the civilisation that the religion had produced.

That included a specifically Christian take on economics, summed up in the past by “not by bread alone”. However, “not by bread alone” didn’t mean not by bread at all.

It’s just that Christianity established a pecking order in which money and everything it bought occupied a low rung on the ladder of values. Such things might have been important, but some other things were more so.

It was as if Jesus had told compulsive money makers, “By all means, go on if you must. But never lose sight of what comes first.”

The Reformation, especially its Calvinist offshoot, perverted that pecking order by treating riches as God’s gift, His reward for virtue. For the first time in history, acquisitiveness received a divine blessing. (Such is the origin of what Weber described as “the Protestant work ethic”.)

Following what Ortega y Gasset called the ‘revolt of the masses’, the Christian pecking order collapsed altogether and was replaced with naked rationalist materialism. The pursuit of material possessions, otherwise known as happiness, was elevated to a secular moral height it had never scaled before.

This eventually led to rapacious, impatient consumption with no holds barred. Happiness, which is to say material possessions, was treated as an inalienable human right, and millions of people tried to defend it by taking promiscuous risks. In due course, the sum of all risks became too heavy for the financial system to bear, and it collapsed.

Such is the schematic representation of a rather involved argument touching on aspects of history, theology, philosophy, politics and economics. Obviously, since I was writing about a civilisational shift from A to B, I had to devote quite a few pages to A, which is to say Christendom.

Anyway, after the book was published I gave a copy to a well-known journalist, at that time my friend and editor. My friend was – still is, God bless him – a highly intelligent man, touching on the upper limit available to an atheist. Hence I was sure he was going to review my Crisis in a high-circulation paper.

No review appeared for a month or so, and finally I asked him if he had had the chance to read the book. “Oh you mean the one about God…” he said dismissively, and I realised my Crisis would remain unread and unreviewed, at least by him.

The book wasn’t “about God”. It was about economics considered historically and philosophically. But mea culpa: words like ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ did figure prominently in the first half of the book – they had to be there as essential parts of the argument.

Yet such words have become optical taboos: as far as the modern mind is concerned, they don’t belong in a serious discussion. A modern editor casts a quick eye over the text, espies a profusion of the offensive words, and his eyes glass over. The book is ‘uncool’. It’s not worth reading.

Now, I’ve described my friend as highly intelligent, but he won’t be offended if I suggest he isn’t one of history’s greatest minds. Yet several Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries who could have a valid claim to that distinction suffered from the same myopia.

The word ‘God’ burned their lips with the same singeing intensity, and I for one am amused by the dexterity of the mental acrobatics they displayed when trying to zigzag around it. The ‘G’ word was unutterable to them – even when they clearly had it in mind.

They talked about ‘defence mechanisms’, while refusing to mention the existence of a mechanic able to design such protective devices. They discussed the ‘laws of nature’, skipping the need for a legislator who could have laid such laws down. They talked about nature as something endowed with a mind, which wasn’t especially clever.

Thus, in no particular order, Herder insisted that the world is a natural organism designed to produce higher organisms within itself. Designed by whom exactly? Well, nature itself, if you insist. Quite.

But that endows nature with a rationality for surely it takes reason to design anything. I’m unable to discuss the matter with old Johann Gottfried, but had that discussion taken place, he would have doubtless explained that he was speaking metaphorically. If so, the metaphor didn’t quite work.

To Kant, nature had a rational plan, and human nature was the matter through which that plan was to be carried out. The plan was teleological: eventually, at some time in the future, a rational millennium would be achieved, but not quite yet.

Again, unable to utter the word ‘God’, one of history’s greatest thinkers resorts to a lame metaphor that simply doesn’t work. While implicitly agreeing with Herder that nature is predetermined to evolve from low to high, Kant reverts to primitive pantheism by assigning to nature an ability to draw long-term plans.

Kant’s able disciple Schelling treated history and nature as two great realms manifesting the Absolute from the beginning of time. Yes, but what exactly is that Absolute, Herr Professor? And how did time begin?

The Absolute, explained Hegel, is man’s thought expressed through actions. History is nothing but the dialectical development of this Absolute Spirit, or Absolute Thought, if you’d rather.

If I understand correctly, which with Hegel can never be taken for granted, the world is graced with the presence of some collective intellect, of which we all partake. Like any individual mind, this collective intellect develops with age, growing from primitive to intricate, which is to say from a cave dweller to Hegel.

But what is it? Where does it come from? Why didn’t he just admit that he was talking about God? Hegel couldn’t make that admission. Neither could Kant, Herder, Shelling or Fichte. Neither could their French counterparts, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire.

None of them could admit what all of them knew: only God makes man, history – and, for that matter, nature – intelligible. Even the greatest thinkers, which all of them were, couldn’t credibly dispense with that essential starting point. That’s why they had to concoct variously convoluted crypto-theological metaphors to get around the offensive ‘G’ word, hoping their readers wouldn’t be able to decipher their codes.

One thing for sure: my editor friend is in good company, and one of long standing. Not quite as long-standing as mine, but one that’s much more up-to-date. This seems to be the ironclad requirement of modernity: everything has to be up-to-date, progressive and forward-looking.

Never mind intellectual rigour and honesty. Such virtues have gradually faded away over the past couple of centuries.

Had you asked me yesterday what a bus shelter is, I would have said: “A bus stop that has a roof, three walls and one open side”.

In doing so, I would have tried to suppress the disdainful condescension Londoners tend to feel about ignorant out-of-towners. Fancy not knowing what a bus shelter is! I’d be amazed if that country bumpkin has ever even seen a double-decker, I would have thought with the snobbery characteristic of a capital city dweller.

Thus I recall once overhearing an American ask a bus driver whether he was going to Holborn, which word came across as Hall-born. “It’s Hoebn, mate,” said the driver, and the contempt in his London voice had more layers than one would expect to find in a millefeuille at a French patisserie.

Anyway, in my hypothetical case, it’s I who would have been ignorant. For I would have missed a whole new meaning Mayor Sadiq Khan has added to the concept in question. In his capable hands, a bus shelter now means offering protection not only for people waiting for a bus, but also for those riding in it.

The good mayor has introduced a direct bus route in North London, running from Stamford Hill to Golders Green. That development sounds unremarkable in itself. However, what makes it astonishing isn’t that it was introduced but why.

Both neighbourhoods are home to large communities of Orthodox Jews, who often shuttle from one place to the other. But until the new route came on stream, they had had to change buses at Finsbury Park, an area predominantly inhabited by gentiles, many of them of the Muslim persuasion.

Jews waiting for the next bus to arrive were routinely subjected to abuse, both verbal and physical. Hence the new route was opened not so much for their convenience as for their safety.

“For 16 years now the Jewish communities in Stamford Hill and Golders Green have been lobbying for a direct link between those two communities, said Mr Khan. “They were frightened because of a massive increase of antisemitism since October 7 last year.”

That is, since a murderous Hamas attack on Israel, which, according to some London denizens, wasn’t murderous enough.

‘Massive’ is the right word for the rise in anti-Semitism. The Met Police recorded 2,065 anti-Semitic crimes between October and July, a 278.9 per cent increase on the same period in the previous year. Hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks occurred even in Westminster, the central area not known for a large Hebraic presence.

“I don’t want any Londoner to be scared to leave their home because they’re worried about public transport,” added the mayor. “I think we’ve got to recognise the fear that Londoners feel who are Jewish, we’ve got to recognise the tremors of hate that are felt by Jewish people across the country.”

Reports say the Jewish community is “delighted” with the new route, but I would have been happier with another word: enraged. The whole thing is so sinister as to make me wonder in what place and period I live.

If London, circa 2024, even remotely begins to resemble Berlin, circa 1934, the problem has degenerated beyond a point where a new bus route could provide a solution. A local or national government that can’t keep any group safe is in default of its raison d’être, and palliatives just won’t do.

Far be it from me to advocate rough homespun justice, but it’s better than no justice at all. Perhaps London Jews should take their cue from the events in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20^th century.

Between 1903 and 1905 a wave of pogroms swept over Kishinev, one of the centres of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Dozens of people were killed, hundreds were wounded, hundreds of women were raped, thousands of homes were robbed and trashed.

The government did little to stop the violence and in fact tacitly encouraged it. Therefore the Jews of Odessa, another centre of the Pale, realised their turn would come next. Knowing they couldn’t rely on the government for protection, Odessa Jews decided to protect themselves.

They created self-defence units and, when the marauding mob barged into their neighbourhood, the thugs were greeted with pistol shots. Having left a few bodies behind, the rioters retreated, tail between their legs.

Now, unlike the Russian Empire, Britain is ruled by law. Hence there’s no place here for responding to violence with extralegal violence – provided the law does its job. Yet I’d maintain that responding to such sinister attacks by opening a new bus route isn’t a case of the law doing its job.

It’s the Met reneging on its remit of protecting Londoners from villains, and Mayor Khan being too cowardly (or reluctant) to solve the problem, not just mitigate it. And you don’t solve the problem of mob violence by playing with buses.

You do so by putting more cops on the streets of North London, where most Jews live, empowering the police to do what it takes to stamp out anti-Semitic attacks – and the courts to pass stiff sentences.

After all, England, unlike Russia, has no history of pogroms, not recent history at any rate. The last – or shall we say the latest – such riot happened in York, in 1190. It won’t stay the last one for long, however, if the government acquiesces in anti-Semitic attacks by refusing to deal with them as severely as they demand.

If Jews are forced to do in London what they did in Odessa in 1905, London won’t be London, England won’t be England, and – on the plus side – Sadiq Khan won’t be the mayor. Not much of a silver lining, but still.