Month: November 2024

Trump’s victory may or may not be a reason to rejoice, but it’s definitely a reason to gloat. The anguished contortions of left-wing faces are precious.

And yes, there is such a thing as a left-wing face. You can recognise it by the smug expression of someone who knows what’s good for you better than you do. It’s Gnosticism without the gnosis.

Nor is it just facial reactions. Lefties are keen to bewail the depth of the tragedy that has befallen the world. Reading their whingeing comments, one can be justified to think that the SS has come back and is rounding up all lefties. Hail to the Chief ought to be replaced with Heil Hitler.

The impression is strengthened by The Guardian’s call for “resistance”. I think the word they were looking for but for some reason didn’t find was ‘opposition’. That’s what political runners-up do in civilised societies. ‘Resistance’ evokes the images of Frenchmen wearing berets and shooting Nazi occupiers with Sten guns dropped by SOE planes.

What happened yesterday caught the ‘liberals’ by surprise, but I can’t imagine why. The result has been confidently predictable for quite some time.

Appearing on a New York podcast a fortnight ago, I broke my lifelong custom of never predicting election results. “Trump will win,” I said, “and he’ll win comfortably”.

My host, a MAGA Republican, said, “Well, yes, common sense would suggest…”. “Common sense has nothing to do with it,” I replied. “The polls say so, as long as you know how to read them.”

My plebiscitary prescience has been acquired not by an exercise of any extraordinary gifts, but simply by the experience of closely watching US elections from Nixon onwards. And extreme Left candidates only ever win there by subterfuge, when they successfully put on centrist airs.

Biden took the trouble of doing that in 2020 and won. Harris didn’t in 2024 and lost. Kamala didn’t even bother to conceal her unwavering allegiance to the NYT version of woke socialism – and her feeble grasp of the visceral instincts of Middle America.

She’d even introduce herself at mass rallies by informing the audience that her pronouns are she/her. Though I haven’t lived in the US for 36 years, that’s too short a time for Americans to have changed so much as to countenance such glossocratic power grab.

The electric-hybrid and Prosecco states bookending the continent on either coast predictably went for Harris. The more numerous pickup-truck and Bud states in between just as predictably didn’t.

Having played Cassandra once, I’m not going to do so again by trying to second-guess Trump’s policies. As everyone knows, he is rather unpredictable, although I imagine domestically he’ll try to do roughly the same things he did the first time around.

It’s his foreign policy that makes me look to the future with apprehension. Trump wasn’t a bad peacetime president, although he wasn’t quite the saviour of MAGA fantasy. However, the West is no longer at peacetime, and we can no longer make do with just a reasonably competent if eccentric administrator at the helm. We need a war leader, and that calls for a different DNA.

Churchill, for example, has few equals among statesmen who have ever led their countries at war. As a peacetime prime minister, on the other hand, he was unremarkable. Mind you, looking at our government today, I’d happily settle for unremarkable, but the fact remains: good at peace doesn’t necessarily mean good at war, and vice versa.

Speaking of Trump’s foreign policy, one obvious development requires no crystal ball to predict: Foreign Secretary Lammy can’t possibly remain in his job past Inauguration Day. Yes, I know our national pride can’t allow a foreign power to dictate our cabinet appointments. But needs must.

Trump doesn’t strike me as a magnanimous type who is likely to forgive the epithets Lammy has been throwing at him for years. A narcissist is like an elephant, and Trump will never forget Lammy’s vile insults, such as calling him a “neo-Nazi sociopath”, a “fascist” or a “KKK type”. Hence the poor chap won’t be welcome at Trump’s new home, and Britain needs America more than America needs Britain. Lammy should start looking to life on the backbenches or ideally out of public life altogether.

Unlike my New York host, I’m not overcome with joy. I’m only glad we’ve been spared the gloom of Kamala ‘She/Her’ Harris at the White House. However, under normal circumstances either candidate should only have been able to enter that building by going on a guided tour.

Yet our circumstances throughout the West are anything but normal. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in political strata, with the centre being crushed by the two extremes.

The seismic activity is brisk: the whole bulk of Western politics has been pushed so far out of kilter that the old notions of left, right and centre have lost whatever meaning they ever had. I’ll leave it for the wielders of such terminology to sort themselves out, but I only hope they’ll stop referring to the likes of Trump as conservatives.

Conservatism no longer has a reliable constituency anywhere in the West, which is why I can’t think offhand of a single Western leader who merits the conservative sobriquet. Yet it’s not only nature but also politics that abhors a vacuum. The space vacated by conservatives has been filled by radical right-wing demagogues.

What goes for right-of-centre conservatives also goes for left-of-centre socialists. Most of today’s Democratic (and Labour) politicians are closer to Lenin and Trotsky than to Humphrey or Gaitskell. And a clash of the two extreme poles is fraught with danger.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law works in politics too because the two extremes see each other not as opponents, friendly allies who happen to disagree on some points. They see each other as implacable enemies and act accordingly.

Hence, when one extreme emerges victorious, it seeks to expunge every trace of the other extreme’s policy. Such an action produces an equal and opposite reaction when the roles are reversed. No one minds how vindictive the reaction is and how many babies are thrown out with the bathwater.

Swift’s brilliant satire features Big-Endians and Little-Endians locked in eternal arguments about how best to break a boiled egg. The writer satirised his contemporaneous Tories and Whigs, pointing out in his lucid style how trivial the political differences between them were. We should have such risible problems, those typical of a civilised society.

The sharp polarisation of today’s politics is a characteristic of a disintegrating civilisation. Ever since the Girondists took their place right of the aisle at the National Assembly, and the Jacobins left of the aisle, Western civilisation – certainly including its political expression – has been coming apart.

The present clash between a right-wing demagogue and a left-wing nonentity incapable even of coherent demagoguery emphasises this point, drives it home with deafening force. Still, as I’ve been saying throughout the campaign, given the two extremes, sensible people should choose the more acceptable one.

Thus Americans have made the right choice, although I’m sorry that was the only choice on offer. The simulacra of their dilemma dominate the politics throughout what used to be the civilised world on either side of the Atlantic. So my congratulations have to be tinged with sadness.

Though he writes about the US election, William Hague unwittingly shows why the Conservatives lost their own: because of wet mock-Tories like him.

The title of his article in The Times, Trump Is No Reagan – We All Need Him to Lose, is only half right. Trump is indeed no Reagan, a truism amply communicated by his name.

But the second part makes so little sense that one has to doubt Lord Hague’s mental competence. He seems not to realise that, for Trump to lose, Harris has to win. Yet Lord Hague doesn’t even attempt to show why that victory would be any good for America or, for that matter, Britain.

Parochially speaking, Trump is rather well disposed toward Britain, while Harris hates her with a barely concealed passion.

Her Jamaican father, a Marxist professor of economics, was oppressed by dastardly British colonialists all the way to Stanford. And her scientist mother was downtrodden in Madras to such an extent that she had to take her emotional wounds to Berkeley. Kamala mentions her parents’ CVs often, and with much passion. One could be forgiven for believing that she regards moving from Jamaica and India to California as a harrowing ordeal, for which she holds Britain responsible.

Lord Hague is so effusive about Ronald Reagan, and so derisive about Trump, that I for one am ready to vote for the former in preference to the latter. That, however, isn’t an option, and Lord Hague’s animadversions are as pointless as they are malevolent.

This isn’t to say Trump is above criticism. It’s true that his obsession with protectionist tariffs isn’t normally associated with fiscal conservatism. It’s also true that he seems to advocate the same mistake David Stockman, Reagan’s economic guru, made by putting too much faith in the Laffer Curve.

Arthur Laffer drew that geometrical shape to show that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher tax revenue. However, when he became the OMB Director under Reagan, Stockman found out to his horror that, as he put it in his book, “The Laffer Curve doesn’t pay for itself.”

That is, tax cuts must be accompanied by a concomitant reduction in spending, a harsh economic reality that seems to escape Trump. In general, his economic pronouncements tend to be the kind of demagoguery that plays big in downmarket public bars, but has little chance of improving public finances.

Lord Hague waxes nostalgic about the Republican Party when “it was in the safe hands” of “the great Senator John McCain” and Mitt Romney. Their ideas were so closely aligned with Mr Hague’s (as he then was) that “the transatlantic bonds of conservatism held fast.”

Add the adjective ‘wet’ or, better still, the particle ‘non-’ before ‘conservatism’, and Lord Hague’s nostalgia would be justified. He makes that clear by saying that “political ideas flow freely across the ocean. Isn’t Britain’s new government influenced, in its ambitions for renewable energy and deficit spending to fund public investment, by the confidence of the Biden administration in pursuing those goals?”

Indeed it is: both governments are united in their wholehearted commitment to destroying their economies with foolish policies based on fraudulent science. If such is Lord Hague’s idea of economic unison, then both countries would be better off each treading its own path.

Meanwhile, he continues to tug on our heart’s strings: “It is hard for British Conservatives to accept that the Republican Party we knew so recently has become inhabited by something quite different, by a cult of personality rather than a political philosophy. It is as if a close friend has died, or at least taken leave of their senses.”

Hold on a moment, where did I put those damn handkerchiefs… There, we can talk now, and let’s ignore Hague’s woke use of a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent.

Fair enough, the Republican Party has changed since Reagan’s time, as has the Conservative Party since Maggie’s tenure. However, the impression one gets from Lord Hague’s dirge is that the main opposing parties, Democratic and Labour, have remained the same.

He is right in saying that Trump is no conservative, although on balance he is more conservative than Lord Hague. But the opposition Trump faces isn’t the Democratic Party of Jimmy Carter or even Walter Mondale. It’s a crypto-Marxist group, with ‘crypto-’ on its way out. Similarly, our own Labour Party has just passed a whole raft of Marxist legislation designed to stoke up class war along the lines of The Communist Manifesto.

It’s reasonably clear to those who, unlike Lord Hague, can reason, that the gentlemanly ‘conservatism’ dripping wet is powerless to stem the flow of subversive Marxism threatening to engulf Britain first and America second. Since real political conservatism is moribund in Britain and well-nigh nonexistent in America, perhaps it takes the radical populism of a Trump or a Farage to put up effective resistance.

Lord Hague is sympathetic to our allies facing barbarian onslaught, the Ukraine, Israel and, potentially, Taiwan. He correctly remarks that today’s world is turbulent and the maelstrom jeopardises the West and hence world peace. Faced with such threats, he thinks the West would be unsafe if led by Trump – and it was much safer when led by Reagan.

That may be true, especially since during the eight years of Reagan’s presidency the US defence spending increased by 66 per cent. Trump, on the other hand, makes regular pronouncements on America’s defence budget being bloated because she ill-advisedly has to pay for the defence of others. He has also said occasionally that, if other countries can’t look after themselves, he is inclined to let them sink or swim on their own.

However, Trump isn’t the paragon of verbal responsibility. He may say one thing and do another, keeping everyone guessing. He may also come off the wall like Humpty Dumpty, and with the same effect.

Lord Hague deplores Trump’s unpredictability, comparing it unfavourably with Reagan’s unwavering commitment to the defence of the West, not just the US. I share his fears for the future of the Ukraine especially, what with Trump’s transactional eagerness to do a deal with Putin.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is entirely predictable, something that escapes Lord Hague’s attention. She is guaranteed to continue Biden’s policy of dripping just enough lifeblood into the Ukraine’s arm to keep the country in the fight until it bleeds out. And I have to remind Lord Hague once again that it’s not Reagan but Harris who is the alternative to Trump.

It takes two not just to tango but also to stand in elections. Sniping at Trump is good knockabout fun, and he is indeed an inviting target. However, saying on that basis that we need Harris to win has as little to do with conservatism as does Lord Hague’s career.

Given the actual choice facing the American electorate, I’d vote for Trump any day and ten times on Tuesday (a voting pattern perfected by the Democratic Party).

These days it’s fashionable for supermarkets to list ingredients down to the molecular level. In the spirit of openness and transparency, some lists read like the whole periodic table of elements reshuffled.

And yet I believe they conceal one important fact: unbeknown to us, all their beef is halal. This conclusion is conjecture, but it’s not baseless conjecture. I simply trust the comparative evidence before my eyes.

I started gathering it in 1974, when I settled in Texas where I was to spend the next 10 years. And in that state beef isn’t just a staple meat. It’s an object of veneration and pride. It’s a cult, with the steak sitting atop the totem pole of beef worship.

Perhaps half a million square miles in Texas are taken up by pastures and feeding stations. The latter, as I recall, do little to improve the olfactory environment. Driving west out of Houston one has to go through 20 miles of dung stench, piercing enough to defeat the capacity of any air conditioner to cope.

I don’t know if Texans take an oath of allegiance to beef, but they are certainly prepared to go to war against its enemies. This they proved at the end of the 19^th century, when sheep farmers dared to move into the state.

When I was little, I read O. Henry’s Western stories where every gung-ho cowboy was prepared to shoot any ‘shepherd’. I couldn’t understand the nature of that hostility until Texans told me about the Range Wars.

Those were shooting wars with hundreds of casualties. They were fought for control over ‘open range’ used for cattle grazing. Before oil made Texas rich, cattle farming was the state’s main industry, which is why the ‘shepherds’ threatened the livelihood of the indigenous population.

Hostilities broke out, people died, and the ‘cowboys’ won. Since then no self-respecting Texan will touch sheep’s meat, which I found out the hard way when trying to serve leg of lamb to the boss of my first ad agency. He apologised most courteously but still refused to touch the offensive substance. Mercifully, the supermarkets were open late and I could pop out to buy some steaks.

Texas steak houses competed for custom, but none believed that size didn’t matter. The restaurant next door to me offered three sizes: one pound (for children), two pounds (for women) and three pounds (for Men, always implicitly capitalised).

Not only were the steak houses particular about who should eat what size but they also dictated how the steaks should be ordered. “The management isn’t responsible for steaks ordered well-done” was the ubiquitous sign. Steaks were supposed to be cooked rare or medium-rare, and that’s how I grilled them at home perhaps three times a week on average.

My favourite cut was ribeye, two inches thick and weighing only about a wimpish pound. Once the steaks were grilled, one was supposed to let them rest for 10-15 minutes to make sure the juices spread evenly throughout the fibres. However, no matter how long a steak had to rest, some blood always squirted out when the knife went in.

Now, by that meandering route, we’ve finally reached the point of my detective story. You can follow its plot by buying a steak from a British supermarket or butcher, cooking it rare and then cutting into it immediately – without letting it rest.

Committing that sacrilege in Texas would result in a geyser of blood squirting up to the ceiling. However, doing so in Britain will be a bloodless experience. Not one drop will come out.

You are welcome to offer your own explanation, and I promise to listen. But until then, I’ll be able to think of only one possible answer to the question “Where did the blood go?”. It was drained into the ground because the animal was slaughtered the halal way. (Since Muslims outnumber Jews 12 to 1 in the UK, it has to be halal rather than kosher butchering.)

The reason for this is fairly obvious. Since Muslims make up some six per cent of Britain’s population, much of the meat has to be halal anyway. Hence supermarkets benefit from the economies of scale by using a single halal abattoir, rather than different suppliers for halal and haram meat.

Though I dislike cruelty to animals, I’m not a great champion of animal rights. In fact, I question the validity of the term. Rights are dialectically linked to responsibilities and, since animals can’t have the latter, they aren’t entitled to the former.

I do, however, support essential freedoms. Hence, if some religions demand that cattle be slaughtered in a cruel way, then by all means adherents to those creeds must obey. Moreover, I don’t have a strong gastronomic objection to halal meat, which I prove with gusto when eating at Turkish or Lebanese restaurants.

But I object strongly to purveyors of food not informing us that the food they purvey is halal. If Muslims have a right to eat halal meat, we have a right to know that the steak we buy conforms to the standards of a religion other than our own.

Is this an attempt to sneak Islam in by stealth? I doubt it, and in general I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, supermarkets’ motives are pecuniary rather than subversive. However, something about it all isn’t kosher. It’s halal.

“Their [Tory] brand is broken and they have lost the trust of the British people,” writes Nigel Farage.

It’s hard to argue against the second part of that statement. A party beaten by a 282-seat majority is no longer trusted to govern the country, this much is clear.

But the first part is worth talking about. First, I dislike the word ‘brand’ and other marketing terms in this context.

In its natural habitat the word ‘brand’ describes the image projected by a product. More often than not, it has nothing to do with the product’s quality, price, service backup or any other tangible characteristic. In today’s world, tending as it is to uniformity, a brand is a distinction without a difference.

If you wish to disagree, you’ll have to explain to a Briton why he should ‘just do it’ with Nike and not, say, Adidas, or to an American why it’s ‘Miller time’ and not, say, Coors time.

Miller’s time-honoured jingle says, “When it’s time to relax, one thing stands clear. If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer”. Without straining my memory I could instantly name half a dozen other brands that could say exactly the same thing, and they’d all similarly taste of equine urinalysis. (Sounds so much more elegant than ‘horse piss’, doesn’t it?)

The jingle reflects what ad people call ‘preemptive benefit’: claiming for one’s brand the benefits of the whole product category. This trick may be of long standing, but it’s just that, a trick.

Every American knows the phrase “It’s Miller time”, and I’ve heard it used at the end of a workday or even of a tennis match, after which the people would drink something else or nothing at all. This testifies to the excellence of the brand’s ad agency, but it says nothing unique or even specific about the product.

British conservatism, on the other hand, can issue a slogan its chief competitors can’t possibly duplicate or appropriate: God, king and country. American conservatives can come up with slogans, but not those that communicate uniqueness.

For example, MAGA can be used by any political party whatsoever. Not only the Democrats, but also the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Alliance Party and numerous others can also claim that they want to make America great again.

But the party that thrashed the Tories in the general election can’t possibly plagiarise their slogan. It doesn’t believe in God, is lukewarm at best on the king and puts ideology before the country.

Just imagine Keir Starmer proudly declaring in the Commons that his government stands for God, king and country, and you’ll know what I mean. This would be as unthinkable as him defining working people or indeed a woman.

‘God, king and country’ is the essence and philosophy of British conservatism, not just its brand. The three elements are arranged in the order of priority: the first one communicates the timeless metaphysical underpinnings of British politics, the second one the continuity of the constitution from the past to the future, and the third one the fusion of both into a properly functioning commonwealth of free subjects.

Everything else that British conservatism may stand for is strictly derivative, however essential it may be. For example, practising the philosophy contained in that triad would mean devolving political and economic power to the lowest sensible level, all the way down to the individual. “God, king and country” goes against the grain of an omnipotent bureaucracy lording it over the people. It presupposes government by justice, not by fiat.  

The three elements exist in a synergistic unity, as such tripartite entities tend to do. This unity used to be personified by the Tory Party, and the problem is that it no longer is, not that the Tory “brand is broken”.

It’s from this perspective that I think one should assess Kemi Badenoch’s elevation to Tory leadership. Because she has been an MP for many years we can judge the things she has said, and, because she was a government minister for two years, we can judge the things she has done.

Will the Tory Party succeed under her aegis? That depends on how you define success.

Assuming, against recent experience, that Mrs Badenoch will lead the party into the next general election, I don’t think she has to do much to win it. Starmer and his merry men will do all the work for her by destroying the country to a point where the British will vote for any opposition, even if it’s led by a hybrid of Attila the Hun, Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper.

That would be the success of the Tory brand but not necessarily of Tory principles. It’s Britain, not the Tory brand, that’s broken. And it’s not some brand values that can put the nation together again, but the sage, courageous and consistent application of the conservative essence.

The Tories lost the election not because they were too different from Labour but because they were too much like it. They’ll never be able to heal Britain if that situation doesn’t change.

Will Mrs Badenoch be able to change it? I don’t know, you don’t know, and no one knows. However, most of the time she says all the right things. Her detractors say she talks too much about principles and too little about policies, but that ignores the political standing of her party.

It’s no longer in government. It’s now in opposition where, barring some cataclysm, the Tories are going to remain for the next four years at least. And a Shadow PM has to operate mostly in the negative mode: throwing bricks of criticism through the windows of the governing party.

This is a relatively easy task, certainly compared to the work of a political glazier who has to put glass in those windows. The task becomes easier still when the government’s policies are as destructive and subversive as those of Starmer’s government, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Much more difficult is to establish the solid grounds from which the bricks can be thrown. Mrs Badenoch should devote her greatest efforts to recapturing and rebuilding the conservative soul of the Conservative Party, and it remains to be seen whether she has what it takes.

She lists as her influences Roger Scruton and Thomas Sowell, which isn’t a bad way to start. Thomas Sowell is today’s most honest, intelligent and non-ideological economist and sociologist, while Scruton was a conservative philosopher and, more important, my first editor when I began writing for Salisbury Review.

I can hear the echoes of Sowell when Mrs Badenoch rages against the critical race theory. As far as she is concerned any school that teaches “elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law”.

Prof. Sowell would also flash an avuncular smile when hearing her say that a new ‘progressive’ ideology currently on the rise is built on “the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves – and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals.”

And Mrs Badenoch’s spirited defence of free expression is also something I’ve heard from Prof. Scruton. “Exemplified by coercive control,” she once wrote, “the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, the end of due process, identity politics is not about tolerance.” True. It’s about imposing fascisoid controls by glossocratic methods, as any conservative will agree.

Just like Roger Scruton, Mrs Badenoch describes herself as an agnostic, whose “cultural values” are nevertheless Christian. This sort of thing makes me uneasy, whoever says it. Christianity is an essential part of British conservatism not because of its culture or morality, but because of its truth. Rejecting the truth while upholding the “cultural values” is tantamount to believing that a successful society can be based on a lie.

This, however, is a minor glitch in the modern context. Conservatism has been secularised like everything else, and the first part of my favourite triad has been reduced to lip service. Still, that’s better than no service at all, and it may be possible, just, for a conservative to be an agnostic who respects our civilisation.

In general, Mrs Badenoch has consistently campaigned against wokery, which is more valuable in my view than even conservative economic policies. Policies can be changed but a nation corrupted by wicked ideas may never recover.

What I like most about Mrs Badenoch is the spittle-sputtering hatred she elicits from the Leftists. Thus Dawn Butler, a black Labour MP, confirmed my conviction that negritude is no longer a race but a left-wing political ideology.

Since Mrs Badenoch doesn’t espouse that ideology and is in fact openly contemptuous of it, she, as far as Miss Butler is concerned, represents “white supremacy in blackface”. Why not just call her a coconut, Dawn, and be done with it? Tell us what you really think — and what your party really is.

On balance, Mrs Badenoch talks a good game, and time will show whether she is also capable of playing it. I wish her well and hope she’ll be able to heal the soul of the Conservative Party. Provided, of course, that there is still something left to heal.

The ringing argument was made by Horace (b. 65 BC) in his Ode: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea”.)

Translating this into our prosaic realities, it’s wishful thinking to believe that millions of new arrivals can be successfully assimilated into the ethos of their new country. Recognising this, Britain doesn’t even try to absorb arrivals from exotic lands into British culture.

Hence our mandated commitment to diversity, a fanciful belief that, since all cultures are equally valid and valuable, they can happily co-exist in fraternal proximity. Such is the British approach to the problem.

The French approach is different. They proceed from the assumption that, since French culture is God’s gift to mankind (although God doesn’t exist), there is no need for any other culture and hence for diversity. All new arrivals must be absorbed so deeply into the new ethos that they become French by some osmotic cultural anointment.

Anyone who has ever visited the banlieues around Paris will know that the French way has failed miserably. However, a visit to the comparable areas of London will confirm that the British way has failed just as badly.

And a short trip northwards, to places like Leicester, Leeds or Bradford, will illustrate the price of failure. Demographically, culturally, linguistically and even legally, large swaths of those places have been transformed by large-scale immigration so much that an outside observer may not recognise them as British cities.

Simple arithmetic shows that, if immigration from culturally alien places continues unabated, within a couple of decades all British cities will lose every trait that makes them British. But help is on the way, and it’s going to come from the Labour Party, the most consistently pro-immigration group in the country.

This realisation dawned on me this morning when I read Janet Daley’s article If the West Is Finished, Why Are the Huddled Masses Flooding Here?

Mrs Daley seems to believe that the huddled masses flooding here are living proof that the West isn’t finished. Since so many Westerners are pessimistic naysayers, mass immigration must be welcomed as the reassuring evidence of the West’s rude health.

After all, people from all over the world aren’t falling over themselves trying to get into Russia, Iran or North Korea. They do, however, know that “the combination of liberal democratic government and free market economics [she probably means ‘economies’, but what’s a couple of letters among friends?] is the unbeatable, absolutely irresistible formula for maximising personal fulfilment, mass prosperity, and social justice.”

Put another way, Mrs Daley believes – correctly, I think – that most people come to France, England or Germany not because they want to become culturally French, English or, God forbid, German. They do so in the hope of having a more comfortable life. This can be delivered either by free markets (“mass prosperity”) or state handouts (“social justice”).

More power to their elbow and all that, but when the influx of culturally alien immigration reaches a certain critical mass, it transmogrifies the host culture into something potentially hostile to it. This, to me, far outweighs any economic benefit we may derive from cheap labour, and even any pleasure we get by eating in ethnic restaurants.

It may come as news to our “liberal democratic government”, but most Britons don’t want to live in areas run by Sharia law and wake up every morning to the sound of a muezzin singing from a minaret (or is it the other way around?). That’s why the issue of curbing, stopping or even rolling back immigration enjoys a perennial presence in British political discourse.

One government after another undertakes to do something about it, some of them even try, but all of them fail. However, I have an inkling that this Labour government will succeed without even trying.

If Mrs Daley is right, and I think she is, that it’s mostly Britain’s relative prosperity that attracts immigrants and not their affection for Shakespeare, Turner, Vaughan Williams and warm ale, then one may logically conclude that any diminution of that prosperity will reduce the flow of immigration.

Poland illustrates this hypothesis persuasively. When the country had just dropped the shackles of communism but hadn’t yet cured her economy of its fallout, the huddled Polish masses rushed to these shores. Since Britons no longer had either the skills or the desire to work as plumbers, builders, scaffolders and electricians, Poles took over those functions.

However, in the subsequent couple of decades the Polish economy (economics?) has picked up momentum and is rapidly closing the gap with Britain. Poland’s GDP per capita has already reached two-thirds of Britain’s and parity is just round the corner.

Vindicating Mrs Daley’s supposition, thousands of Poles are going back, leaving Britain’s rusty plumbing unattended. Before long we’ll all have to learn DIY, although I don’t quite see that happening in, say, scaffolding.

Since it’s reasonably clear that Labour policies will impoverish Britain in short order, the incentive to come here will gradually disappear – first for Eastern Europeans, then, by incremental steps, even for Jamaicans, Somalians and Syrians. Why expose yourself to the hardships of emigration when you can do just as well at home?

I think that I’ve just outlined the PR strategy for our government, and Mrs Daley must take some of the credit. Rather than denying the obvious truth that Labour’s policies will beggar the country, its spokesmen should turn the negative into a positive.

Within a year or two, they’ll be able to make a verifiable claim that they are succeeding where several Tory governments had failed. Immigration, legal or otherwise, is now under control and in fact some dinghies are even beginning to sail in the opposite direction. Job done.

Jokes aside, the only immigrant group I know intimately and not by hearsay is the Russians who, like me, have left their homeland in the past half-century. While all of them claimed they were attracted by freedom, I’d suggest that some 80 per cent at least were primarily motivated by economic considerations.

Most of them found what they were looking for in the US, and many of them became Americans, or as near as damn. But becoming an American is much easier than evolving into an Englishman, Frenchman or, God forbid, German.

Even Mrs Daley, who has lived in Britain for yonks still reasons like the American she was born to be. Arguing ab oeconomia comes more naturally to American conservatives than to British ones. That’s why she managed to write a whole article without once mentioning the cultural and social traditions of Europe.

I hope I don’t sound like a Tommy Robinson type if I suggest that, notable but hardly numerous exceptions aside, arrivals from what is imprecisely called the Global South can never assimilate in Britain, nor even adapt to it. It’s easier to believe that they can force the country to adapt to them, and in fact one can already see that happening.

Horace was right, as those Romans usually were on such matters. But I doubt the poet knew he was making an anti-immigration statement.