Month: November 2024

The war arithmetic is as simple as it’s gruesome. The Russians are suffering casualties at a rapid rate, about 2,000 a day. The Ukraine’s casualties are lower, but we don’t know how much.

However, Russia’s population is over three times the size of the Ukraine’s. This means that, even if the Russian casualties are twice as high, the Ukraine is going to be exsanguinated first.

That’s why the Ukraine is bound to lose any war of attrition, and her only chance of victory lies in marrying her superior generalship and fighting spirit with better and more plentiful armaments. These have to come from the West, but after almost three years little doubt remains that the West won’t keep up its end.

Western supplies come in a trickle sufficient to keep the Ukraine in the fight but far short of what it would take for her to win. Hence the Hobson’s choice facing Zelensky. He either has to fight to the last soldier or negotiate the best peace terms he can get.

These are just general observations. No one outside the Ukrainian high command knows the true state of affairs. Western intelligence services have a vague idea, but even they are short of hard data. The overarching question is, How long can the Ukraine hold out given the present level of supplies and the dwindling numbers of recruits?

Our spooks don’t really know, and I know considerably less. However, judging by the overtures Zelensky made yesterday, the general picture isn’t bright.

For the first time since 24 February, 2022, Zelensky said last night that he was ready to trade territory for peace. One assumes the area he has in mind is the 20 per cent of the country currently occupied by Russian invaders.

By itself, that’s not such a bad deal. Both countries will be able to declare victory: Russia, because it will have succeeded in grabbing a chunk of land; the Ukraine, because Russia will have failed in her real objective of stamping out the Ukraine’s sovereignty and spreading fascism over a greater part of Europe.

But nothing in wartime diplomacy is ever ‘by itself’. The subtext is often more important than the text, and long-term perspectives can throw a shadow over any agreements.

Regarded in that light, Zelensky’s statement smacks of desperation. He gives every impression of a leader who knows his country is losing a war.

Zelensky knows, and so does everyone else, that no lasting peace with an aggressive predator is ever possible. What’s possible is a temporary cessation of hostilities giving the aggressor time to regroup and pounce again.

Under the terms mooted by Zelensky the Ukraine will get to keep 80 per cent of her real estate. But what’s the guarantee that Putin won’t come back for it later? The solution suggested by Zelensky would be naïve if it weren’t so desperate.

“If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under the Nato umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control,” he said. He then added the words that should sadden everyone who detests Putin’s fascism: “’We need to do it fast.”

That sounds like “before we run out of soldiers”, and I hope I’m misinterpreting the subtext. And what kind of umbrella does he have in mind?

Zelensky hinted he knows that full NATO membership isn’t on the cards. Instead he wants NATO’s key members, such as the US, Britain, France, Germany and perhaps Poland, to provide security guarantees. Excellent idea, that.

I suggest a treaty to that effect should be signed in Budapest and called the Budapest Memorandum… Hold on a moment, I’ve just remembered that such a document already exists. Here it is, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by the US, Britain and Russia that thereby guaranteed the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her giving up nuclear weapons.

How has that worked out for the Ukraine so far? I see. So what’s the basis for hoping that a Budapest Memorandum Mark II, or whatever it will be called, will offer a secure guarantee of lasting peace? No basis at all, and Zelensky knows this.

And yet he came up with that proposal, adding that in due course (when Putin croaks?) the Ukraine would reclaim the ceded territory “by diplomatic means”. But Putin doesn’t do diplomacy; he only does blackmail. Since Zelensky is well aware of this, his denotation is meaningless here, and the connotation reigns supreme.

So let’s try to guess what the connotation might be. It’s fairly obvious that hush-hush tripartite conversations are going on involving Putin, Zelensky and the Trump team, with NATO acting in strictly an advisory capacity.

The starting point is Trump’s braggadocio that he’ll end the war on day one, and only my aversion to puns prevents my describing that promise as trumpery. The idea Trump dangled before the interested parties involves freezing the existing front line and creating a buffer DMZ enforced by NATO troops.

Now, Putin used NATO’s eastward expansion as the casus belli. Hence it’s not immediately clear how he’ll explain to the Russians that getting NATO troops at, rather than merely close to, Russian borders is the outcome he has always wanted.

It’s true that fascist dictators don’t necessarily seek public consensus for their actions, but Putin’s hold on his populace does depend on a projection of strength. With rampant inflation racing towards 15 per cent and the dollar heading for the 120-rouble mark, the Russians are getting poorer by the day.

Putin’s propagandists reassure them that the collapsing rouble is a good thing because it makes Russian exports so much more lucrative. That’s true, and I can see Milton Friedman flash an avuncular smile of pride from his grave. However, what’s also true is that, pari passu with exports getting more profitable, imports are getting more ruinous, and most things worth buying in Russia are imported.

The time-dishonoured stratagem of their rulers is to assure the people that all the privations are temporary and more than made up for by Russia’s muscular presence in the world (and of course her unmatched spirituality, that much goes without saying). Hence Putin can’t afford to appear weak, because if he does, he may find his power base crumbling away.

That’s why I can’t for the life of me see him agreeing to Trump’s plan – unless, and there is a big unless there somewhere. It comes from the question Putin has to be asking: “What’s in this for me?”

Trump isn’t yet in a position to provide a satisfactory answer, and won’t be until 20 January. But I’m sure he and his emissaries are dipping their legs, not just toes, in the water.

What will it take? they must be asking. Summary removal of all sanctions? War reparations from NATO (mostly meaning the US)? Russia’s readmission into every international body from which she was expelled? Favourable trade terms? Reinstatement of deals to buy Russian raw materials, especially fossil fuels? The Ukraine’s neutrality and acceptance of de facto Russian control (‘finlandisation’, as such an arrangement used to be called)? Recognition of Eastern Europe as a Russian sphere of influence? All of the above?

I don’t know what’s on the table, but something must be for Zelensky even to imply what he seems to have implied. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough – the Ukrainian president did say time is of the essence.

Unlike his two successors, Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury throughout the 90s, is a force to be reckoned with.

Can you imagine any other Anglican prelate after him describing same-sex marriage as “cultural vandalism” because “there lurks an aggressive secularist and relativist approach towards an institution that has glued society”? I can’t.

I’m not sure how Lord Carey reconciled such laudable conservatism with his resolute championship of female ordination, but one way or another he is a man eminently worthy of respect. It’s in this spirit that I disagree with his article supporting the euthanasia bill.

As the bill on assisted dying goes through its second reading tomorrow, the debates about it are at their most intense. Lord Carey ploughs in, explaining that he changed his “own mind on this issue in 2012”. He was at the time the same age I am now, and let me tell you: we wrinklies tend to be quite ossified in our views.

Something dramatic must have happened to cause Lord Carey’s about-face at that venerable age, and, though he doesn’t say what it was, I can make a fair guess. He probably observed an excruciatingly painful death of someone he knew and realised that it was cruel not to relieve such horrendous suffering in any way possible.

As a sincere Christian, Lord Carey must have wrestled with that position, in conflict as it is with the notion of the sanctity of human life. He had to find a common ground there, as he writes: “Church leaders who speak out will do so on the basis of their religious convictions but they will engage with evidence such as they see it.”

Well, let’s just say that some Church leaders, such as the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, often speak out on the basis of neither their religious convictions nor evidence, but strictly as woke ideologues. Lord Carey is different though.

However, though his integrity is beyond doubt, I think he is missing the point.

He cites a heart-rending story told by a woman whose young husband was dying of cancer: “At that point, the pain relief being administered via a syringe driver was completely ineffective, providing no relief from the agonising pain caused by the numerous tumours (over 50) spread throughout his bones and soft tissue.”

Most of us have similar stories to tell, some acquired by hearsay, some by observation, others even by most distressing personal experience. Watching someone close suffer – watching anyone suffer the way Lord Carey’s correspondent describes – is unbearable, harder even than enduring one’s own pain. My heart strings tugged by Lord Carey are playing a dirge even as we speak.

However, this emotional argument is valid only in respect to assisted dying – not to the assisted dying bill. And I maintain that the two aren’t at all one and the same thing.

Here I must point out that, though physicians observe strict moral codes, theirs aren’t identical to those accepted by Lord Carey’s flock. When reciting the Penitential Act, Christians ask forgiveness for things they have done and things they have failed to do.

Both types of sin are equally grave but, as we move from church to hospital, the situation changes. There exists a whole world of ethical difference between a doctor killing a patient by a deliberate act or by passive acquiescence.

Active euthanasia occurs when a doctor or someone else deliberately does something that causes the patient to die. With passive euthanasia, death happens because the doctor deliberately doesn’t do, or stops doing, something necessary to keep the patient alive.

There also exists a grey area between active and passive euthanasia that is specifically relevant to Lord Carey’s concern about unbearable suffering. Doctors sometimes administer such a high dose of analgesic drugs that they know death may result. Then again, it may not, and in the eyes of the medical profession, they aren’t thereby committing active euthanasia.

Passive euthanasia has been practised since even before Asclepius, the god of medicine, assumed a seat next to his father Apollo. Physicians have always reserved the right to make a clinical decision to withdraw a useless treatment from a dying patient.

They practise every conceivable form of euthanasia by switching off life-support machines, deciding not to carry out a life-saving operation, refusing to prescribe palliative therapies that might add little to the lifespan but much to the suffering. This is how things are, how they’ve always been, and how they’ll for ever remain.

We may debate the ethics involved till the weeping relations come home, and personally I’m uneasy to see doctors assuming the divine powers of life and death. Then again, I’m also uneasy about, and reconciled to, the foul weather we’ve been having for weeks now. Some things just are.

Yet codifying assisted dying in a law is a bad idea. For laws don’t just prohibit or condone an action. They also carry the symbolic moral force of society’s values, its underlying philosophy. Some laws may be unenforced and unenforceable, but they stay on the books as a moral statement. A law – or in this case its absence – sends out a signal of the kind of society we are.

For example, until 1967 the British statute books included laws criminalising homosexuality. However, everyone knew it was widely practised, not least at public schools, and no one made much of a fuss about it: boys will be boys, or for that matter girls. The law was hardly ever enforced when the proscribed act occurred between consenting adults, and yet it was an important statement of society’s moral tenets rooted in Scripture.

The same goes for any laws legalising transsexuality. Gender dysphoria and bisexuality have been known and condoned at least since (now we trace things back to antiquity) the time of Dionysus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena. Yet until now the state has never thrown its legal weight behind anti-Scriptural deviations (“male and female he made them”).

Any law legalising euthanasia will withdraw society’s commitment to the sanctity of human life, something Lord Carey holds dear. That alone is a powerful argument against such a law, and we haven’t even begun talking about slippery slopes, the thin ends of wedges and the potential for disgusting abuse.

Lord Carey dismisses that potential too cavalierly: “I have been disappointed to see the amount of fear-mongering they have marshalled in their arguments, adopting almost universally, the mantra that a ‘right to die, will become a duty to die’. This is in fact not true of places like Oregon which have had assisted dying laws for very many years…”

Show me your examples, sir, and I’ll show you mine, most of them coming from places like Holland and Belgium which also “have had assisted dying laws for very many years”.

One widely publicised case involved a woman of 74 suffering from Alzheimer’s who decided to be euthanised. The doctor put a sleeping pill into her coffee, and the woman dropped off. But when she woke up, she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.

However, I promise not to cite such examples, and I have a large compendium of them, if Lord Carey makes a similar undertaking about his own. Let’s just keep the discussion down to the argument above. I think it’s both persuasive and sufficient.

Few terms bring a happy smile onto a political scientist’s face as readily as does ‘the rule of law’. I don’t quite get this.

Rather than being the ultimate political virtue, the rule of law strikes me as a cliché short of an adjective. And the adjective it’s short of is ‘just’, which should modify ‘law’.

In its absence, the implication seems to be that the rule of any old law is to be praised. That’s demonstrably not the case. In fact, one could argue that even the worst tyrannies are ruled by law.

For example, during its most carnivorous period the Soviet Union had a vast and intricate legal code. It included an article that provided for the execution of anyone undermining – or capable of undermining – the regime. That meant more or less anyone the state might wish to kill, which was the whole point.

That law was unjust any way you look at it, but I suggest we choose just one of those ways because it should suffice. That law was open-ended, which was by itself enough to make it despotic.

An open-ended law, one where the exact boundaries of the proscribed transgression aren’t meticulously specified, is ipso facto tyrannical because it leaves room for arbitrary prosecution. And that room is the kind of vacuum that’s guaranteed to be filled in any modern country.

Just law thrives on precise definitions, which puts it out of reach of our present government, made up as it is of either fools who can’t, or knaves who won’t, define things precisely. It’s comforting to see that Sir Keir Starmer’s personality is voluminous enough to accommodate both types.

Defining things precisely, indeed at all, isn’t Sir Keir’s most salient forte. For example, he tends to struggle with the definition of a woman, a task that wouldn’t defeat a babe in arms who has just learned to say ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’. Nor is Sir Keir capable of identifying the proper owner of the appendage the same tot would probably describe as Dada’s weewee.

When the PM applies his semantic toolkit to more involved concepts, they fall apart before our very eyes. This collapse occurs even in the area of his professional expertise, jurisprudence. And when top public officials are at sea with legal concepts, the ship of justice heads for the rocks of tyranny.

To illustrate this point, the Labour MP Tahir Ali asked the prime minister yesterday if he would commit to “prohibiting the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”.

I have to commend Mr Ali on his verbal dexterity. The way he worded the question one was supposed to get the impression that he afforded equal time and equal protection to Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

That got Mr Ali clear of any accusation of religious particularism and successfully concealed the kernel of his real message. However, Sir Keir displayed uncustomary mental acuity by responding to the kernel, not the outer shell.

“We are committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division including, of course, Islamophobia in all of its forms,” he said. The conspicuous absence of a bow towards the other two Abrahamic religions shows that Sir Keir got the message.

Alas, his vow is a contiguous open end. In fact it’s so open that much hot air escapes and nothing but.

Even Sir Keir isn’t so vague as to express merely a blanket dislike of hatred in general and hatred (that’s what ‘phobia’ means in woke but not in English) of Muslims in particular. He meant that his government was going to push through a law making Islamophobia illegal.

Since the word ‘phobia’ means irrational fear, it’s not immediately clear how it’s possible to legislate against irrationality, but then I did tell you Sir Keir was speaking woke, not English. In that convoluted language, we have no choice but to accept his understanding of Islamophobia in all its forms as one of all the other forms of hatred and division.

However, before any society, and especially one that describes itself as free, agrees to translating such general understanding into a specific law, it must demand that the crime be precisely defined.

Now, Labour’s national executive committee did adopt a definition of Islamophobia in 2022. Since Sir Keir hasn’t so far disavowed it, one has to assume the definition is still in force. According to it, Islamophobia is “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

Now this is an open-ended definition if I ever saw one. What if Islamophobia were rooted not in race but in religion? Would someone be in the clear if he shouted at a group of Muslims that there is a God other than Allah and Mohammed isn’t his prophet? What about a wag asking a Muslim woman in jest to get her face out for the lads?

We already have a whole raft of laws against violent attacks on, well, anyone, including religious and racial groups. Hence the mooted legislation would just repeat what’s already covered by existing laws. For example, it would be superfluous to pass a law prohibiting violence against Muslims because we already proscribe attacks on all people regardless of race or religion.

The time-tested method of elimination thus suggests that what Labour has in mind is a law criminalising not actions but words. That digs the taxonomic hole even deeper.

After much soul-wrenching and hand-wringing, successive governments have only been able to define hate speech as something perceived as such by its recipient. In theory, I could have you arrested for calling me ‘Alex’, rather than ‘Alexander’, ‘Mr Boot’ or ‘Sir’ if I regard such egalitarian familiarity as hateful.

The whole thing about the law is that it’s passed by an authority extrinsic to potential victims. Grievous bodily harm isn’t illegal because the chap with the broken nose says so but because such is the law of the land, passed by the land’s duly constituted legislative body, the same law for everyone living in the land.

By the same token, one Muslim may react to a perceived insult of his religion by shrugging his shoulders and another by whipping out a machete. So is that same insult Islamophobic in some cases and not in others? If a law doesn’t apply to everybody, it applies to nobody.

This is the real problem with such laws, one that’s more serious than even the implied curb on freedom of speech. Not every restriction of speech is unequivocally tyrannical, but every open-ended law is.

Sir Keir’s intention to criminalise “Islamophobia in all of its forms” is unvarnished despotism in the absence of a precise and equitable definition of each form. Considering that vandalism laws already prohibit the abuse of public and religious buildings, and many different laws criminalise assault on person and property, the task of drafting such definitions won’t be easy.

I think the government should travel a well-trodden path and simply state that Islamophobia is anything any Muslim says it is. And never mind exponents of the other Abrahamic religions: Christians whose religion is routinely offended by all and sundry, and Jews who are attacked in our streets more often and more violently than Muslims (and usually by Muslims).

Just as long as we understand that what we are witnessing is an exercise in glossocratic tyranny, not genuine concern for the down-trodden. And in conclusion let me ask Sir Keir another question to struggle with: What’s a Muslim? And can a dark beard be seen as “perceived Muslimness”? Especially if sported by a woman, however defined?

I just wish he pondered such conundrums as far away from Westminster as possible. May I suggest Patagonia?

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan…// The proper study of Mankind is Man,” wrote Alexander Pope (d. 1774), a sublime Catholic poet touched by Protestant humanism and secular empiricism.

It’s wrong to demand philosophical rigour from a poem, even from An Essay on Man written by an exceptionally brilliant man. It’s even more wrong to yank two lines out of a long work and try to reach some conclusion on that basis.

But taking those two lines out of context, as a self-contained statement, one can still disagree most respectfully. If we “presume not God to scan,” I doubt we can succeed in “the proper study of Mankind”. Man alone provides an inadequate teaching tool.

When we study something, the object is usually to make it intelligible. My argument today is that religion alone can provide a useful cognitive tool for the study of man.

Physiologists, neurophysiologists, psychologists, jurists, political scientists can join forces to advance the understanding of the physical nature of man, his physiological needs, his interactions with others – the outer shell of a man’s life and its bouncing about the larger shell of society.

If you think that this is all there is to man, please read no further – these reflections aren’t for you. However, if you acknowledge the obvious fact that there is a mystery to man that goes beyond his physical life, then you’ve just opened the door to another cognitive universe.

All three Abrahamic religions ascribe this duality of man to his creation in the image and likeness of God. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation makes this lineage especially palpable: for some 33 years God lived as fully a man, while remaining fully God.

My contention is that no philosophy probably and no moral philosophy definitely can make man intelligible if it doesn’t start from this metaphysical premise. Many have tried; all have failed.

The religious doctrine of love goes back as far as history does. Two millennia before Christ, the commandment to love one’s enemy was written in Sumerian cuneiform, and in every possible alphabet since then. But only in Christianity did it take pride of place. Christ, speaking through Matthew, thundered above all other moral teachers because he was so much more than just a moral teacher.

Loving everyone, including those out to do us harm, seems a tall order. We are brought up to treat people with the respect they deserve, no less but also no more. Here we are told to treat people with the love they may not deserve, not ostensibly at any rate.

We’ve just touched the outer edge of the mystery hidden deep inside man, taken the first step through the open door of another world. There we realise that, though our respect for people is contingent on their individuality, our love for them isn’t.

It’s not their outer qualities that we are commanded to love but the mystery hidden deep inside them, one we all share alike, regardless of our virtue or lack thereof. Suddenly we realise that we are envoys to a world governed by physical causality and human laws from another world, one governed by love and freedom.

Once they’ve reached this realisation, hermetic monks withdraw from this world and its laws. Yet such religious heroes are few, as are all people endowed with exceptional gifts touching on genius. The rest of us have to live our lives within the confines of this world and its notion of justice.

But we aren’t talking about a how-to guide to virtuous behaviour. We are talking about making man intelligible, and that’s where natural and man-made laws fall short.

A society of men can’t be run solely on the Beatitudes, but when it’s run without any reference to them whatsoever, it ignores the metaphysical essence of man. That puts human laws into sharp inquisitory focus, and they often fail to pass muster.

The modern political philosophy of inalienable rights guaranteed by a social contract was the brainchild of Hobbes and especially Locke. Both thinkers made perfunctory references to God, but only for propriety’s sake, to use the language their audience expected.

Their ideas migrated to France and to the New World, where they were tersely encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence. It stated that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That was pure Enlightenment talk. The right to life is indeed a natural, God-given right whose exercise doesn’t impose any obligations on others and hence doesn’t require their consent. The right to liberty, on the other hand, is a political construct hinging on consensus and even definition. But “the pursuit of happiness” is especially interesting.

Contrary to the popular open-ended misinterpretation, this is a synonymous paraphrase of Locke’s term ‘the pursuit of estate’. This pursuit depends on the security of the estate gained, and indeed property rights are the cornerstone of modern political thought (this side of our Labour government, that is).

However, during the Civil War, the last act of the American Revolution, property rights clashed with the modern conviction that slavery is reprehensible. Southern planters referred to exactly the same Lockean scripture when arguing that abolitionism violated their property rights. In the end they lost the war but won the argument – assigning an absolute value to human rights in a secular context leads to an intellectual cul-de-sac.

The Southerners didn’t regard their Negro slaves as fully human, or even human at all. The morality of owning slaves was to them no different from the morality of owning livestock – they were blind to the metaphysical mystery residing in every man, no matter how poor, lowly and downtrodden. Their title to their slaves was as legal as their title to their cows, and that was all that mattered.

The Romans who developed an intricate legal code still in use throughout much of Europe saw no contradiction between their sage laws and chattel slavery. Moreover, not only did they own slaves but they also treated them with feral cruelty, of which gladiatorial fights were perhaps the mildest manifestation.

Their society was ruled by law, that of the contemporaneous Hebrews was ruled by religion. They too owned slaves, but they treated them more humanely and even set them free during anniversary years. Using our terminology, the Hebrews saw slave ownership as a leasehold, not a freehold. Religion offered them insights into the inner, metaphysical essence of man, the same for all at its core. Thus the Hebrews understood something the Romans didn’t – and acted accordingly.

When Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world, he left his listeners in no doubt that his kingdom was higher than this world. It also operates in much higher strata of intelligence, where everything secret – including the metaphysical essence of man – becomes manifest.

Therefore the proper study of mankind isn’t man but God for, without God, man will for ever remain unintelligible. Man has to reach beyond himself to understand himself, and I’ll leave you with this thought.

Over two million frustrated Britons have signed a petition to rerun the general election, and the number is climbing steeply. Considering that 70 per cent of the people think they are worse off under Labour, even the sky may not be the limit. (Only eight per cent think they are better off, and I bet they are all employed in the public sector.)

No other government in history has become so unpopular so fast. Just 18 weeks, and the people have had it with the Starmer gang. They want it to go.

In response, Sir Keir stated, correctly, that the system doesn’t work this way. You are stuck with us for several years now, he added, or words to that effect.

Looking at the dull-witted faces of Starmer, Reeves, Rayner, Lammy and other nincompoops currently running our country, one shudders with fear and revulsion. A flicker of expression only ever appears there when they bray for revenge against brighter people than they are, those who don’t rely on the state’s largesse to make their way in the world.

Starmer also insisted, without citing any evidence, that the signatories to the petition hadn’t voted Labour in the first place. He would say that, wouldn’t he? I have no evidence either that many Labour voters have changed their mind, but I’m sure it’s a safe bet.

This belated plebiscite is most welcome, but it does raise an inevitable question. What part of the carnage Labour are perpetrating on the economy and every walk of life wasn’t predictable at voting time?

Everybody with half a brain could have drawn a detailed picture well in advance, and many did (you must praise my stoic self-restraint in refusing to say I told you so). This though Starmer et al. were economical with particulars. But the general tone of vengeful Leftie animus was unmistakable. Feeble minds were coming together with an all-consuming ideology, which is the worst combination imaginable.

Labour inherited an economy groaning under the weight of taxation and regulations but still not doing so badly, relatively speaking. Unlike Germany and France, Britain didn’t look as if she was teetering at the edge of an abyss, with one leg hanging over.

That situation was sure to change under Labour, which was more predictable than the sun rising tomorrow morning (actually, that, according to Bertie Russell, wasn’t predictable at all). Yet people voted for them, and even some of my readers, who tend to be rather conservative, insisted that the useless Tories had to go.

This shows that even intelligent people may not vote responsibly. For the time has long since passed when we could talk about our politicians in terms of useless or useful. They are all, with minor and unlikely exceptions, more or less rotten.

But it matters whether it’s more or less, even if this line of thought is regrettably relativistic. Today’s political thought has excommunicated absolutes. We are for ever stuck with the evil of two lessers, but one lesser is usually more evil than the other.

You realise that I’m not delving into the far recesses of recondite political theory. I just wonder why voters can’t exercise basic common sense, something they are eminently capable of in most other activities.

If the problem isn’t symptomatic but, as I think, systemic, then we are in deep and permanent trouble. After all, our democracy run riot, with everyone over a certain age entitled to vote regardless of any other qualifications, depends on a responsible electorate with a modicum of sensibility.

Our electorate doesn’t meet this requirement, which is made clear by its voting pattern. No sensible person could have voted for this gaggle of idiots bent on revenge. All they are capable of is sabotaging everything they can reach: the economy, education, medical care, constitution, foreign relations, defence, controlled immigration, energy – sniping at Labour policies is like shooting fish in a barrel. You can’t miss, which is most unsporting.

So yes, I added my signature to the petition, a desperate exercise in futility. The law says that Parliament must respond to any petition with more than 100,000 signatories, but I’m not holding my breath. Considering the size of the majority our irresponsible electorate gave Labour, you aren’t getting any prizes for guessing what the response will be.

The system is fundamentally wrong, but I doubt that even a genius like Edmund Burke could have repaired it. His idea of democracy was that MPs should be the people’s representatives, not their delegates. When elected, they should act according to the people’s interests, not their wishes. And it’s their own conscience that should guide them in deciding how those interests can be best served.

Burkean democracy was perfect in the 18^th century, when the franchise was limited, Britain had a ruling class, and most politicians had trained for their mission from childhood. That’s how most of them saw politics: as a mission to serve people, not a career to serve themselves. They could indeed be trusted to look after the people’s interests – and to understand where such interests lay.

Unfortunately, a century of unlimited suffrage has corrupted not only the electorate but also the politicians. They must possess certain feral qualities to get to the top, but integrity and intelligence are not only unnecessary but, by the looks of it, contraindicated.

Yet the system, based on the ‘social contract’ first drawn up by the likes of Hobbes and Locke, keeps ticking on. I doubt the validity of that oft-used term, but one thing for sure: unlike any other contractual arrangement, this one has no stipulated termination clause.

Once they’ve cast their ballot, people have no legal recourse worth speaking of. A social contract can be made null and void only by violent civil disobedience, but that treatment is worse than the disease. Starmer and his merry friends know this, and they are smirking smugly.

It doesn’t matter whether that masturbatory petition collects two million signatures or twenty million. They can ignore it and do what they will: drive the economy into a recession if not depression, beggar people with double-digit inflation (yes, it’s coming), destroy every decent school, put farmers out of business, densely cover their vacated land with wind turbines and solar panels, render Britain disarmed in the face of her enemies.

We’ll look on helplessly, signing petitions, perhaps going on the odd march and bitching about our useless government. It won’t occur to many people that bitching – and thinking – should be done before the election, because afterwards it’ll be too late.

Even fewer will be those who’ll begin to question the very system that predictably delivers such abysmal results and, these days, hardly ever any other. We are simply not conditioned to think in such terms.

P.S. While I was writing this, the number of signatories climbed to 2.2 million, and I write fast. Even Michael Caine has signed it, but I’m still waiting for Vanessa Redgrave to do so.

We sometimes use certain phrases by rote simply because they naturally roll off the tongue. Some such phrases are meaningless, some are hackneyed, but some are worth pondering.

The term ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ is one such. It conveys a universe of constitutional meaning, with the question in the title offering a clue.

For the party with the second largest number of parliamentary seats is the opposition of His Majesty, not to His Majesty. Its full name, His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, makes this abundantly clear.

The opposition party fights political squabbles with the ruling one. The former is there to bring the latter to account, to keep it on the straight and narrow, preventing it from doing too much damage to His Majesty’s realm.

Yet both parties, or any others, remain equally loyal to the monarch who stands above partisan rough-and-tumble. That loyalty brings all parties – and all subjects – into a single entity, which makes the monarch a vital and constant presence as the lynchpin of Britain’s constitution.

If the Commons derives its legitimacy from the current generation of voters, the legitimacy of the Crown goes back so far that it disappears in the haze of time. Since we can’t pinpoint its origin to a single historical event, we might as well follow Burke’s and de Maistre’s recommendation and assume that the monarch’s remit comes from God.

Even if a single monarch may accede to the throne in the wake of a political upheaval, the institution itself sits above politics, as does the House of Lords (you realise of course that I’m talking about those institutions as they are supposed to be, not as what they’ve become as a result of perverse, often subversive, pressures).

This arrangement has been developed over many centuries by many sage men who understood what a true balance of power really means. It should suspend in equilibrium the interests of all classes, with none finding itself in a dominant position and all having their interests, if not necessarily their wishes, adequately protected and represented.

No republic, including the USA, can boast the same balance, although the term has much currency in America.

There it means the harmony of the three branches of government, executive, judiciary and legislative. However, two of those branches are elected and the third one is appointed and approved by the other two. None derives its power from birthright, which puts all three – indeed the whole state – at the mercy of political vicissitudes.

The balance of power in the American Republic is thus transient, constantly in a state of flux. Those manning the three branches are drawn from the same social and cultural pool of humanity, where the same interests are widely shared across the board.

They are even similar educationally: for example, more than half of US senators are lawyers by trade. There is nothing wrong with this in principle: it stands to reason that many of the people trusted to pass just laws should have a professional understanding of justice and legality. But it’s not the same balance of power that exists in our constitutional monarchy.

Both the ruling party and the opposition have an adversarial relationship with each other but not with the state, as headed and personified by the monarch. Such is the political atmosphere of our United Kingdom, and it can be poisoned by the toxic whiff of republicanism.

I haven’t had the fortune or misfortune of going through the system of British education, but the impression I get is that people who do haven’t been properly enlightened in the essence of our government.

Last summer I played a doubles match at my tennis club, followed by the ritual of a chat over a beer. Painfully aware as I am that I must keep my views to myself if I can ever hope to have doubles partners, I did more listening than talking.

Such uncharacteristic passivity helped me find out that all three of my fellow players were “against the monarchy”, as they put it. All three are middle-aged, middle-class gentlemen whose accents suggest minor public schools or at least comprehensives in upmarket neighbourhoods. Yet none of them realised that the phrase “against the monarchy” is fully synonymous with “against the British state”.

They seemed to think that the country would be better off if the head of state and both Houses of Parliament were elected. That way things would proceed as they always have, but better.

Unfortunately, such views seem to be shared by many members of the ruling party and, I suspect, even by some members of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, which makes it rather disloyal. A republican Britain wouldn’t be Britain.

Socialists of course hate any form of dynastic continuity, which is why they are so fanatically devoted to exorbitant inheritance taxation. They justify such subversion by dire fiscal shortage, but such feelings have more to do with visceral animus than any economic considerations.

It springs from the same anti-monarchy sentiments as those evinced by my tennis partners, who are fortunately in no position to act accordingly – unless of course republicanism reaches a certain critical mass in the country.

I doubt that will happen in my lifetime, although I’ve been unpleasantly surprised before. My hope is that Britons haven’t yet been so thoroughly corrupted that they’ll welcome opposition to, rather than of, His Majesty. Yet I am aware of powerful forces pulling in that direction.

In mediaeval Europe, serfs got their subsistence by cultivating a plot of land owned by their lord and master. In Russia serfdom survived until 1861, but Europe was more benign.

Queen Elizabeth I ended British serfdom in 1574. The French, however, were so attached to the institution that it was banned only in 1789, two centuries later.

But the longing for servage evidently remained, and it was so strong that serfdom has made an official comeback. Yesterday the French senate finally stopped beating about the buisson and passed a law forcing everyone to work one extra day a year without pay, or rather with the pay going straight into the government’s coffers.

What’s new about this innovation isn’t so much the concept as the honesty of its announcement. Anyone with a calculator at hand can calculate that anyway, if the government extracts 45 per cent of GDP in taxes, people work for the state until 13 June, only using what’s left of the year to provide for their families.

But at least the French government had been coy about this until yesterday. Now subterfuge has gone out of the window: tout le monde must devote one day a year to unvarnished servitude. This raises state control to a new height, although the French shouldn’t feel smug about this.

Our own government isn’t far behind in satisfying its extortionist urges: our GDP is looted to the tune of almost 44 per cent. Yet the perfidious British have so far refrained from announcing a day of serfdom with Gallic forthrightness.

This brings back fond memories of the Soviet Union, where wages and salaries didn’t exist at all. The words stayed in the vocabulary, but they in fact denoted the paltry crumbs tossed to the populace from the laden table of the state.

Everybody toiled for the state as its serfs, or slaves in all but name. The state then gave the masses a few pennies to keep body and soul together — or not, as the case might have been and often was.

In my day the usual starting salary of a university graduate was about 100 roubles a month, barely enough not to starve to death but not nearly enough to buy such luxuries as meat, fruit or clothes. The people responded the way slaves so often do, by going through the motions at work. “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work,” was the popular refrain.

Yet the pretence to pay was abandoned every year at harvest time, when thousands of university-educated Muscovites were sent to collective farms to help out the shorthanded peasants – and to redeem their hoity-toity sins through the honest goodness of unpaid physical labour.

That exercise in serfdom was par for the course in a totalitarian state buttressed by violent coercion. But today’s France, Britain and the rest of the West are different, aren’t they? Yes they are, for the time being. But the tendency towards closing that gap is unmistakable.

When you add up all the local levies, sales tax, parking charges and a whole raft of other hidden taxes, our governments extort upwards of 60 per cent of the economy for themselves. That’s no longer taxation. It’s confiscation.

Such is the state’s way of communicating to us that our money isn’t really ours. We may earn it, but the state has the power to decide how much we’ll be allowed to keep for our families.

This is actually the language used by politicians all over the West, which testifies both to their cynicism and our gullibility. When he was Chancellor, Gordon Brown would make frequent references to ‘letting’ people keep more of their incomes, citing such munificence as proof of his government’s generous nature and good intentions. The poor chap never realised that he was making a proclamation of tyranny as unequivocal as those made by Marx or Lenin. We can only let people keep what in fact belongs to us.

Free people don’t work for the state. They work for themselves and then kindly offer the state a tithe to maintain public services. This is exactly what they ought to be: the state should serve the people, not the other way around.

That’s why John F. Kennedy’s famous entreaty (“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!”) could only have impressed a modern society that was resigned to relinquishing much of its liberty.

Replace ‘country’ with ‘state’, and the exact reversal of this statement would have made more sense to anyone living in a free society. Wouldn’t you rather hear something like “Ask not how you can serve the state; ask how the state can serve you”? Wouldn’t this be closer to the principles on which all Western states were constituted?

We accept it as an inevitable fact of life that modern states don’t pay their way. They all spend more than they receive in tax revenue, covering the deficit by increasing the money supply through borrowing or printing. This produces inflation, which is another tax in disguise. Thus in 2022, when the inflation rate in Holland was 10 per cent, the Dutch were effectively paying that much more in taxes by another name.

Promiscuous public spending is justified by bien pensant nonsense about the state having to tax – in essence to rob – the more fortunate to look after the less fortunate. Such Robin Hood references can only fool those who don’t understand what’s really going on.

For we don’t just pay for state expropriations with money. We also pay with our freedom because, when the state does a lot for the people, it always does a lot to them.

Such is the inner imperative of all modern states, however they describe themselves. The state’s desire to lord it over the people supersedes everything, including its own laws and regulations.

Thus France’s deficit spending is currently twice the three per cent limit mandated by the EU as a condition for belonging to the euro. Yet I haven’t yet heard even a whisper of France being forced out of the common currency.

Whenever a total collapse beckons, Western governments sometimes try to curb their instincts and slow down the growth of public spending. When the Tories made that attempt a few years ago, it was called ‘austerity’ and savaged in the left-wing press.

Yet even conservatives used that misnomer without realising that’s what it was. Austerity properly means spending less, not spending more but at a slightly slower rate than before.

That’s why real austerity is taboo for modern governments. They are committed to growing their own power at the expense of people’s freedom, and confiscatory taxation along with rampant inflation are the control levers they hold in their hands.

The day of serfdom introduced by the French senate is a reminder of this situation and also a taste of things to come. The slope is getting more slippery by the day, and we are all sliding down at an ever-accelerating speed.

P.S. Learn something every day. I’m grateful to the media for adding a new word to my vocabulary: ‘demisexual’. Apparently it describes the quaint practice of establishing an emotional connection before rutting away. Now if that’s not perverse, I don’t know what is.

For St Augustine of Hippo, that wasn’t an either… or question. Yes, our life is predestined and yes, our will is free.

For sure, we make our free choices, but they don’t affect our salvation one way or the other. We are predestined to be saved or damned, and nothing we do can change the predetermined outcome.

There seems to be a conflict there, and I struggled with it for years. Eventually I think I found a way out that works for me, although some theologians may find my musings unsound – or worse.

Christianity is founded on the belief that Christ sacrificed himself to redeem our sins. But which sins? Surely not just a little boy telling his mother to shut up, or a fair maiden turning out not to be quite so maidenly?

Anyway, according to another basic tenet, all individual sins derive from the original collective one. So it was that sin that Christ redeemed by accepting an awful death.

This means that his sacrifice wiped man’s slate clean of the Fall and therefore of wholesale guilt. Yet since man demonstrably didn’t become pristine as a result, a second sin, Mark II as it were, must have replaced the first one.

Logically, this must have been the sin of rejecting Christ. That offence isn’t identical to original sin, though neither is it dissimilar to it. Both, after all, represent rejection of God: the first by disobeying and the second by failing to recognise him.

If Original Sin Mark I was disobedience and therefore rejection, then Mark II is rejection and therefore disobedience. The opposite of the second rejection is the kind of faith to which Paul, Augustine and Luther ascribed the sole justifying power.

But mankind in its entirety never rejected Christ. Some – arguably most – people did so, yet some – arguably few – didn’t. However small the second group might have been, it was made up of people who chose to belong to it of their own accord, thereby, if we follow this logic one step further, cleansing themselves of the new version of original sin. Hence the choice between acceptance and rejection can’t be collective. It has to be individual and it has to be free.

It stands to reason that a man could do nothing to redeem the collective Mark I; Christ’s sacrifice was necessary to achieve that. But it’s equally clear that a man can do something to redeem the individual Mark II.

Hence, whenever we demonise some people for belonging to a diabolical corporate entity, without proof of such membership or any individual wrongdoing, we dehumanise not only them but, by denying free will, all of mankind. A German who belonged to the SS was complicit in its atrocities, by association at least. But if one accuses an ordinary person who lived in Germany at the time, the accuser must bear the burden of concrete proof. The same goes for Russia and her KGB. Neither nations nor religions do murder; it’s people who do that.

One could still argue that, as the world at large demonstrably didn’t accept Christ, we may be slated for collective perdition. But what is undeniable for any Christian is that Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, and we are free to take that path or not.

Free will thus becomes the most important property of man, and it can only remain so if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one. In fact, if our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into puppets, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

What does that do to predestination then? We have to believe that God has far-reaching plans for the world in general and man in particular. Otherwise we’d fall into deism, which defies logic: it’s hard to believe that God lovingly created the world, only then to lose all interest in it.

Does this mean we are predestined after all? And if so, provided we aren’t entirely happy with Augustine’s explanation of it, how do we reconcile predestination with free will? If the former subsumes the latter, how can there be any freedom in the world?

Luther struggled with this problem, resorting to paradoxes such as, “If it were in any way possible to understand how God who is so wrathful and unjust can be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith.” Such meek intellectual surrender is odd, considering Luther’s character and his insistence on the self-sufficiency of every Christian in dealing with God.

One can sympathise with his problem. Nonetheless, we must still try to come to terms with it. After all, if we believe that it was God who gave us reason, we might as well explore this faculty to its maximum, which can’t be just the ability to calculate compounded interest.

The whole issue of predestination is rooted in the timelessness of God, as opposed to the temporal existence of man. This juxtaposition gave rise to the most elegant solution to our problem, that by the Spanish Counter-Reformation thinker Luis de Molina.

In effect, though he himself didn’t use this terminology, Molina linked the philosophical category of time with the grammatical category of tense. Our lives unfold within three basic tenses: Past, Present and Future. But God, being timeless, has only one tense: the Present Perfect.

What is ‘will be’ for us is ‘has been’ for God. This means that when he predestines each individual for salvation or damnation, God does so not arbitrarily but on the basis of the free choices he knows the individual will have made during his life – before he has actually made them within his earthly timeframe.

This line of thought makes free will trump predestination as a philosophical notion. Predestination, as defined by Molina, is hardly worth talking about; it may be simply taken for granted. If, like God’s omniscience, this concept is based on God’s timelessness, then it resides in the very definition of God.

Using our God-granted free will, we may choose to believe in God or not. But if we accept him, then we have to take the whole package, including predestination.

However, basing, as Luther and especially Calvin did, a complex theology on predestination means assigning to it undue importance. An attribute resident in a synthetic a priori definition hardly rates such distinction, and insisting that it does may in some quarters be regarded as heresy.

Free will, and freedom in general, on the other hand, becomes part of the definition of man, possibly the most important part. The freer we are, the more human and the more godly we are; the further we are removed from animals.

P.S. While we are on such arcane subjects, and before we go back to talking about Trump and Putin, let me run another thought by you.

According to the Bible, a man and a woman become one flesh when they marry. But they had been just that before Eve came out of Adam’s rib and eventually led him astray. In other words, before original sin a woman was contained within a man’s body and they were one flesh. Marriage thus constitutes a return to the pre-Fall state of affairs. One hopes this makes married people sinless, but experience reduces this hope to wishful thinking.

This is the only slogan I find palatable. For, contrary to a common misapprehension, it’s not the economy but ideology that drives modern European governments – all the way to disaster.

All ideologies are totalitarian by definition, in that they seek – overtly or surreptitiously – sway over every aspect of life. Any ideology is a deity that’s always athirst. Its adherents are ready to sacrifice everything at its altar: national security, social tranquillity, economic prosperity.

Another feature all ideologies share is that they are short of positive content. Whatever little they do have is distinctly secondary to the negative animus. This, however, is seldom advertised for public relations purposes.

Thus, when ideologues commit mass murder, they usually justify it by the pursuit of a greater good. That may be social justice, economic equality, religious or racial purity, supposedly threatened national survival – the possible ruses are endless. But ruses they all are. The only real purpose of mass murder is the murder of masses.

Modern European governments have refrained from genocide in my lifetime (I regard Russia as European only in geography, not in essence). But they are still ideological, and hence underhanded, in everything they do.

Anyone blessed with functional eyesight can detect the workings of an essentially socialist ideology behind the toing and froing of the European Union. Since any ideology can rise only from the ruins of the traditional order, its first aim is to create such ruins.

During the Third Punic War, Cato ended every speech in the Senate by saying: Carthago delenda est – Carthage must be destroyed. Replace Carthage with ‘Western tradition’, and any EU dignitary could say the same thing whenever he gets up to speak in Strasbourg or Brussels.

But they don’t. In common with other ideologues, they have refined the subterfuge of couching their doctrinaire aims in the jargon of economic benefits.

Ideology? What ideology?, they keep repeating, if not in so many words. We simply want to pool Europe’s resources to create widespread peace and prosperity. One country mines iron ore, another mines nickel, a third one produces the coal that fires up the steel mills in a fourth that then shares the steel around. What can possibly be wrong with such division of labour and economy of scale? Only one thing: this is just smoke and mirrors.

In 1952, one of the EU founders, Jean Monnet, summed it all up with frank cynicism: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Whenever this quotation is cited to disparage the EU, its advocates claim it’s apocryphal. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. One way or the other, no one can deny that the sentiment is true to life. The EU does all it can to create a pan-European superstate, while systematically damaging the European economies it ostensibly seeks to improve.

Socialism, for all its sharing-and-caring sloganeering, is all about rapaciously centralising power until it’s completely monopolised by the state. The EU, and most nations within it, are demonstrably moving in this direction. And any observer of modern history will know that economic benefits are bound to fall by the wayside all along such a journey.

One slogan inscribed on EU banners is ‘autonomy from the United States’. Anti-Americanism is one button Europeans like to push to produce a desired response. We don’t do things the American way, they announce proudly. That much is true; they don’t.

Thus, though the EU economy was $3 trillion bigger than the US one in 1990, it’s now smaller, even though the EU has 100 million more people. This isn’t to say that the US is free from the socialist contagion. She isn’t. But it’s less virulent there.

Socialism is all about power, and power must be projected. The way a central government goes about that task is suffocating the economy with extortionist taxes and countless regulations, with no regard for the consequences.

Go no further than this observation when trying to explain why America prospers while Europe stagnates – this even during the four years of Biden’s quasi-socialist administration. In the past five years, the EU has outscored the US almost three to one in regulations passed. Add to this probably as many again courtesy of national governments, and you’ll see why the EU is growing only geographically, but not economically.

Another factor is energy costs, which are almost three times as high in Europe. That gap will grow even wider when Trump acts on his credible promise to increase the production of hydrocarbons by boosting exploration, drilling and fracking.

Europe, meanwhile, remains fanatically loyal to the net-zero subset of the overarching destructive ideology. Like all such urges, this is impervious to any outdated arguments based on reason and facts.

It’s pointless telling the Eurocrats that there is no scientific basis for that madness whatsoever. You can cite any number of facts, such as that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known lifespan, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide only has a minuscule effect on climate, if any. They won’t hear because they don’t want to.

They know that hydrocarbons have fuelled the West’s prosperity. That’s exactly the problem – socialists are ideologically committed to decrying prosperity for others, while enjoying it for themselves. That’s why the Germans shut down all their nuclear power stations just as cheap Russian gas stopped firing up their socialist self-righteousness.

The unceasing offensive against nuclear energy is another proof of the ideology behind climate madness. After all, nuclear reactors don’t produce CO2 emissions. They generate abundant and clean energy whose supply isn’t affected by windless, overcast days.

Our own socialists have the same urges. That’s why Starmer and his ministers barely conceal their desire for Britain to, in their jargon, “establish closer ties with the EU”, but in fact to rejoin it as a supplicant, if not as a full member.

There have been periods, most notably in the 1970s, when belonging to the pan-European club could confer some economic benefits, if no other. But seeking membership at this time is too stupid even for our Westminster lot.

But they don’t voice such intentions for any rational reasons, however misguided. They are tropistically reaching out to their ideological comrades on the continent. Their shared brand of socialism calls for expansion ad infinitum, and certainly beyond national borders. That’s all that really matters.

Let’s not be too beastly to socialist ideologues, or rather let’s not single them out for special opprobrium. A good ideology is an oxymoron. All ideologies are equally bad, and they defy their etymology by having nothing in common with ideas. They reside in the viscera, not the mind.

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When we try to define something, we must first single out its unique features, rather than those it shares with many other things.

A tricycle resembles a plane in that they are both made of metal, transport people and have three wheels. However, someone offering that explanation to a visiting alien, without mentioning that planes fly, wouldn’t be almost right or half-right. He’d be mad.

Yet it’s astounding how many intelligent people ignore this simple logical trick when trying to get their heads around Christianity. An epistolary exchange between Nancy Mitford and her good friend Evelyn Waugh is quite telling in that regard.

“How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” wrote Mitford. “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,” Waugh replied. “Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

Waugh’s riposte was a good answer to a bad question. For Mitford’s remark shows a woeful misunderstanding common to most intelligent atheists. Above all, she expected Christianity to make its communicants morally better. And if that manifestly didn’t work, it was the religion she blamed, not the communicant.

Christianity may indeed have a meliorating effect on some people, but that’s not what it’s about. There does exist such a thing as Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) morality, but it’s corollary to the faith’s essence, not the essence itself.

A greater writer than Mitford, Tolstoy, based his whole philosophy on the same mistake, reducing Christianity to its moral teaching or, even narrower, just the Sermon on the Mount. This made him perhaps the world’s most influential thinker in the first decade of the 20^th century, because that’s what the world wanted to hear. But a solid intellectual structure can’t be built on the wobbly foundation of a conceptual error.

Tolstoy’s falsification of Christianity made him “the mirror of the Russian revolution”, in Lenin’s phrase. It also made him talk nonsense on a vast range of subjects – half of the 50 volumes he left behind are taken up with essays, with nary a sound thought anywhere (for details, see my book God and Man According to Tolstoy, if you can find it).

The morality of our religion is called Judaeo-Christian because the Decalogue is an essential part of the Christian canon. Jesus merely added a few touches to the Ten Commandments: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I tell you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

For most neophytes and non-believers the morality of loving one’s enemy presents a stumbling block. If asked to identify the unique feature of Christian morality – or, for that matter, of Christianity – this is the one they mention first.

That’s as if a tricycle has just soared up in the air and flown to a faraway destination. For there is nothing about that commandment that is uniquely Christian.

For example, try to identify this dictum: “He who has done evil unto thee, repay him with good.” Sounds just like Matthew 5:44, doesn’t it? Yet this pre-Christian Beatitude was written in Sumerian cuneiform some 2,000 years before Christ.

Many ancient religions and moral codes contained commandments identical to Judaeo-Christian ones. Thus the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, wrote this in the 18^th century BC: “The strong shall not injure the weak.”

And the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl instructed his adherents in the same Christian vein: “Dress the naked, feed the hungry; remember that their flesh is even like thy flesh, that they are such as even thou art; love the weak because he too is in God’s image.”

In fact, the longer we look at the religious thought that either preceded Christianity or developed concurrently with it, the more similar elements we’ll find.

In common with Buddhism, Christianity accepted that man is sinful (though not originally created that way).

In common with Platonism it postulated an ideal world beyond our earthly reach.

In common with Judaism it saw the world as the creation of one God.

In common with Philo (roughly Jesus’s contemporary) and other Hellenised Jews of Alexandria it defined Logos as God’s creative force. In fact long before John’s Gospel, Plato and the Jewish Platonists of Egypt used the word Logos to describe a self-differentiating divine unity, giving Gibbon an opening for one of his many anti-Christian jibes (to the effect that St John’s revelation had been taught in Alexandria four hundred years before it was written down).

If it were possible to reduce Christianity to its morality, we could still be worshiping An the Sumerian, Marduk the Babylonian or Quetzalcoatl the Mexican. Yet if we obstinately insist on forgoing an ancient temple for a church, we must do so in the full knowledge that, however important Christian morality is, it’s not what we worship.

The only aspect of Christianity that is unquestionably unique to it is the person of Jesus Christ, Logos made flesh, a triune God whose one hypostasis became man, accepted death to redeem the sins of the world, resurrected on the third day and showed a path to life everlasting.

If you read the Nicaean Creed, that’s what Christianity is. Nothing more, nothing less. The rest is commentary, in Rabbi Hillel’s phrase.

Courtesy of Tolstoy and other falsifiers, the word ‘Christian’ has expanded its meaning so much that it burst at the seams. People began to use it in the meaning of ‘good person’, which is a harmful solecism.

A Christian may or may not be a good person, and a good person may or may not be a Christian. A tricycle doesn’t fly, a child doesn’t pedal an airliner, and a Christian is someone who believes – and venerates – every word of the Creeds. What’s there not to understand?