Author: Alexander Boot

I’ve been inside a psychiatric hospital only once in my life (note to my detractors: as a visitor, not a patient). Reading The Times editorial For Gay Marriage enabled me to relive that eerie experience.

It’s not only that I disagree with the views expressed in the article, though I do have a tendency, much and justly decried by my friends, to presuppose intellectual deficiency on the part of my opponents. However, over many years I’ve learned to consider the other man’s well-argued opinion as valid, if ill-advised. In fact, I’m constantly reminded of that great adman who always wore a lapel pin saying ‘Maybe he’s right’.

But whoever wrote that editorial isn’t just wrong — he is mad. When sane people argue a case, they do so by looking at the evidence, analysing it, finding logical links and amalgamating the lot into a coherent point of view. They eschew ignorant, emotive, grossly biased non sequiturs — of the kind this editorial flashes in every line.

‘[Gay marriage] is a cause that has the firm support of The Times,’ it says, because ‘to allow same-sex couples to marry would enrich an historic institution and expand the sum of human happiness.’

This is insane twaddle. Governments have been instituted among men not to create a paradise on earth but to prevent hell on earth. Five millennia of recorded history show that this is only ever achieved by pursuing not happiness — whatever it means, which isn’t much — but justice, social cohesion and, as Edmund Burke put it, prudence, prescription and prejudice. (The last word is getting rotten press from the PC set, but to Burke it simply meant the intuitive knowledge shared by most people — effectively what makes a nation a nation.)

It has been understood from time immemorial that one man’s happiness is another man’s misery. Pursuit of happiness, enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, is an Enlightenment construct that, in order to mean anything at all, has to be qualified in so many ways as to make any sane person question the validity of the term altogether.

Otherwise one could suggest all sorts of absurd ways in which ‘the sum of human happiness’ could be ‘expanded’. Legalised necrophilia, zoophilia, money laundering, driving without a licence, shoplifting — all these would add no end to the number of happy individuals, thereby achieving the expansion so dear to the warped heart of The Times. They would also knock stones of different sizes out of the foundations of our society.

Marriage, a union of a man and a woman sanctioned by the state and, ideally, blessed by God, is a building block not just of society but indeed of the human race. It’s also a natural competitor to the power of the state. That’s why all tyrannical states in history sought to undermine marriage or even to do away with it.

One of the first acts of the bolsheviks in Russia was to abolish marriage, and Inessa Armand, Lenin’s mistress, likened sex to ‘drinking a glass of water’ (for the sake of the Great Leader’s reputation, one hopes she didn’t mean drinking it in one quick gulp). To the same end, the bolsheviks also legalised homosexuality. Thus the first country to make homosexuality legal was Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1934, a time and place not otherwise known for worshipping human rights. And the Nazis reduced marriage to a gruesome exercise in eugenics, augmented by SS stud farms and euthanasia.

It’s a lamentable fact that Western governments are gravitating towards totalitarianism as well, what with the individual becoming less and less powerful and the state more and more so. And though today’s governments wouldn’t dare abolish marriage altogether, they too have a burning need to take it apart piece by piece.

Ye shall know them by their fruits: statistics in this case don’t lie. Today as many people get married in Britain as did in the 1890s, when the population was half of today’s. In 1950 there were 408,000 marriages in Britain and 33,000 divorces. The corresponding numbers for 2000 are 306,000 and 155,000 — in a larger population, there were fewer marriages, and more than twice as many divorces. Almost 50 percent of all children in the UK are born outside marriage, which usually means they grow up fatherless — with all the well-documented consequences that don’t fall far short of a social, cultural and educational collapse.

Now the government strives to redefine the very concept of marriage the better to destroy it — sorry, ‘to enrich an historic institution.’ Dave wants to do it ‘because he’s a conservative’. Nick wants to do it because he’s a LibDem. Both want to do it because they sense in their statist viscera that, unless marriage is destroyed, their spivocratic power will never become absolute. A stable marriage is likely to keep the man, the woman and their children out of the clutches of the state — they are less likely to become its dependents and therefore more likely to reject its dictates. That just won’t do, will it now, Dave and Nick?

And why stop there in our quest for equality? Commendably, Dave and Nick aren’t sexist but they are still specist. I’m awaiting their unequivocal support of marriage between humans and other mammals. As that too would expand the sum of human happiness, they’d be able to count on The Times as a staunch ally.

‘Reforms to marital law need to be informed by a sense of history, lest they give rise to unintended and damaging consequences,’ continues The Times, as if deadset on proving that it has indeed gone bonkers. Surely any sane person would see that homomarriage isn’t ‘informed by a sense of history’? And surely no one blessed with such a sense would dismiss as antiquated irrelevances the strong protests coming from the leaders of both principal Christian confessions in Britain? That sentence, appearing as it does amid a strident clamour for same-sex marriage, can be used for diagnostic purposes by any competent psychiatrist.

The history of Britain and her realm is inseparable from the church as the guardian and teacher of public morality. The more effectively does the church act in that capacity, the greater the moral health of the nation. An agnostic may question that this is the case. An atheist may even oppose this or that tenet of Judaeo-Christian morality. But, regardless of his faith or lack thereof, anyone with a secure grasp on historical reality will see that every attempt to replace Judaeo-Christian morality with anything else has invariably produced untold misery.

I feel sad every time a venerable British institution bites the dust. The Times has been moving to perdition for quite some time now. Its circulation is now merely eighth in Britain, having declined from 726,349 in 2000 to 405,113 today. A few more editorials like this, and it’ll dwindle away to nothing. Sorry to see that happening.

 

 

Election

According to the official estimate, Putin scored 64 percent of the vote. Accoding to the independent observer Golos (Voice), the figure was just over 50 percent. A landslide by any other name, and this was on the cards before the last voter cast his ballot for a tenth time.

Both estimates agree that the communist Zyuganov finished second with about 17 percent, leaving every other candidate in the dust of single digits. So yet again the KGB and the Party have reenacted their perennial struggles for power. Yet again the KGB won, as it has done consistently since 1982, when its chairman Yuri Andropov took over the country and paved the way for his beloved apostle Gorbachev. Yet again the Russians went for the devil they know, rather than any cardboard angel waved by the opposition.

Putin’s re-elevation was never in doubt. Everybody knew he was running the country anyway, only having relinquished the actual office to Medvedev to avoid serving three consecutive terms. The National Leader acknowledged as much himself, when announcing his candidature a few months ago. Asked if he didn’t think this swap of offices looked a tad cynical, he replied with disarming honesty that the people mustn’t worry their pretty little heads about such trivia. He and Medvedev had had it all set up from the very beginning. Unimpressed with such candour, the opposition websites raged and raved, but the ordinary Russians just nodded. They expected nothing less, or nothing more.

Yesterday’s election boasted a 65 percent turnout, higher than we’ve known in Britain for quite some time. Having said that, we don’t use what the Russians call ‘carousel’ voting, with crowds of bribed citizens bussed from one polling station to another, voting each time. Yesterday some were shipped to Moscow from as far as 600 miles away, what with the polls in the capital having pointed at a worryingly even split of the vote.

Among other things, this points at the Russians’ ability to learn from the West, something Dostoyevsky described so eloquently in his Karamazovs. After all, the same technique was used to resounding success by Mayor Daley of Chicago who thereby delivered the swing state of Illinois to JFK in the 1960 election. The Mafia boss Sam Giancanna added a helping hand, thus showing how well the symbiosis of crime and politics could work. Lesson 1 learned, and I fully expect the Russians to learn a few others in the next couple of centuries, such as how to run an election in a different way or how to deposit money in a bank without first laundering it.

Carousel voting isn’t the only violation reported during yesterday’s elections. There are thousands of others (over 3,000 were reported shortly after the polls opened). Voters were bribed or threatened, observers beaten up, ballot boxes stuffed — all par for the course. Again the opposition politicians and journalists sputtered spittle, but even they stopped just short of claiming that without such tricks Putin would have lost. They may not know who Joseph de Maistre was but they all have heard his aphorism: every nation gets the government it deserves.

Runup

Beauty is best perceived from a distance, as the Russians say, and I happily watched last fortnight’s shenanigans from the comfort of my London flat. First came the rally at the Luzniki sports arena on 23 February, the Army Day. Dr Goebbels himself would have been proud of the spectacle: tens of thousands were brought to Luzniki, seduced by overtime pay at work and a promise of a good show. Beats working, any day.

Flags waved, crowds screamed themselves hoarse, but the highlight came from the National Leader himself. Suffocated by tears, he was still able to recite a few lines from the patriotic poem Borodino Lermontov wrote in the wake of the 1812 war against Napoleon. In my loose translation, ‘Boys, is it not Moscow behind us? So let’s die before Moscow as our grandfathers did! And to die we promised; and at Borodino the oath of loyalty we kept.’ Stirring stuff, that, but what does it actually mean in the context of a political campaign?

Simple. The opposition is the enemy, assailing, Napoleon-style, everything a real Russian holds sacred. Putin is that real Russian, the present-day answer to Field Marshal Kutuzov, and he demands loyalty in the face of the common enemy. And in case the implication got lost in the translation from 1812 to 2012, he then made it abundantly clear. ‘Don’t look to the other side of the hill [the West, in the lingo of Russia’s mean streets), don’t betray your motherland!’ he shouted, tears streaming down his face. What could be clearer than that? Anybody who opposes Putin is a traitor. And traitors, as he said in a different context, don’t live long.

Job done, election in the bag. By way of insurance, however, Putin put a finishing touch on his real-man image created by numerous photos of him half-naked galloping on a steed, him half-naked holding a rifle with telescopic sights, him showing off his prowess at martial arts, him clad in the uniform of the Russian special forces — in short, him being the strong leader making most Russians and a few of our own commentators swoon from excitement.

This time he was depicted playing ice hockey in full medieval-knight gear. For most Russians the game is shorthand for testosterone-fuelled masculinity. They all know the hockey song with its lyrics ‘Hockey is played by real men; a coward doesn’t play hockey.’ Putin is that real man. He’s not a coward. So how could he lose? He couldn’t. And he didn’t.

Mikhail Ivanovich Putin

Yes, I know Putin’s name is Vladimir Vladimirovich. But in his circles, those formed by the intertwined strains of the KGB and the international underworld, a man doesn’t always go by the name his parents gave him. A moniker is de rigeur. Some code names are transparent: for example, Gen. Zolotov, head of Putin’s security, is known as ‘Generalissimo’. Others are less so, such as the one identifying the oil trader Timchenko as ‘Gangrene’, which wouldn’t be my first choice of a codename, but then I haven’t got one, so there.

Putin’s is a neutral ‘Mikhail Ivanovich’, which was revealed by the businessman Sergei Kolesnikov in a February interview to the Russian newspaper The New Times. The interviewer didn’t know why Putin would choose such an odd moniker, but I could venture a guess: he named himself after Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, the nominal president of the USSR under Stalin. Sometimes the National Leader also goes by the more straightforward ‘boss’ or ‘tsar’.

Kolesnikov was a partner in several businesses with intimate links to Putin, such as the Ozero (Lake) Cooperative and Rosinvest, a well-known conduit of money from Russia to various offshore accounts. At some point he fell foul of his partners, including the silent ones, and had to run for his life. Kolesnikov came out of Russia bearing not only his own testimony but also audio tapes of highly incriminating conversations, share certificates, bank transfer documents and other bits of evidence. In this country they would be sufficient for the CPO to indict Putin for money laundering, though not necessarily to obtain a conviction.

According to the paper, the evidence has been authenticated by Western media, including the FT. Kolesnikov stated that back in 2001 Putin instructed him and his partner Nikolai Shamalov to buy $203 million worth of medical equipment abroad. The money was to come from London’s own Roman Abramovich, but 35 percent was to go into various offshore accounts. Kolesnikov says that 35 financial institutions have been used for this purpose since then, but he names only two: Rolling International in the British Virgin Islands and Santal Trading in Panama.

According to him, the money would then be rerouted into the shares of various corporations, mostly in Liechtenstein where they widely use bearer stock certificates — no names please, we are Russians. The corporations (Kolesnikov specifically mentions London’s EM&PS Medical Supplies wholly owned by the Russians) would then pay dividends, up to $41 million at a time. It was with this money that a group of investors bought the controlling interest in Rosbank, which handles most transactions for Gazprom, the world’s largest exporter of gas.

Kolesnikov is in no doubt that Putin is the real owner of Rosbank, something Putin’s spokesmen deny. But then they would, wouldn’t they? This tallies neatly with the claim Stanislav Belkovsky, the Russian political scientist, made to the German magazine Die Welt. According to Belkovsky, Putin owns, among other interests, 4.5 percent of Gazprom as well as 50 percent of the oil-trading company Gunvor (the other 50 percent is owned by Timchenko, aka ‘Gangrene’). That, suggests Belakovsky, makes Putin one of the world’s richest men.

I have seen the documents quoted by The New Times, but obviously can’t verify their authenticity. That would be a task for the police. However, one could suggest that, if even 10 percent of the accusations were true, Putin should be in prison, not in the Kremlin. And in any case, such documents published in the runup to a campaign would scupper the chances of any Western politician, including the likes of Berlusconi and Chirac (who both, incidentally, attended Putin’s 55th birthday party in 2007 — I’m sure, if neither is in prison by then, they’ll be guests of honour at his 60th this year). In Russia, no one bats an eyelid. You don’t expect a chap like Putin to live on his salary, do you?

Aftermath

As I write, crowds of protesters are gathering in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. The losing candidate Mikhail ‘Single-Digit’ Prokhorov will be in attendance, all in a purely disinterested fashion of course. There will be speeches and diatribes galore, and more such events will be held all over Russia.

Some Western observers believe that public unrest will put an end to Putin’s tenure long before its legal expiry, but I doubt that. Much as I’d like to share this optimism, the National Leader is fully in command, and he knows how to combine coercion with bribery to nullify any serious opposition.

With the price of oil sky-high, he’ll have enough wherewithal at his disposal to increase the pensions a bit (not much of a commitment, considering that few Russians live to pensionable age) and the military spending a lot, thus confirming his muscular image. He has already mentioned $750 billion as the first tranche — this at a time when we can’t afford a single aircraft carrier to defend the Falklands or, for that matter, the planes to take off from a carrier even if we had one.

I pity the Russians; I fear for us. Interesting times lie ahead — personally, I’d welcome something considerably more dull.

 

John Major extolling the virtues of a classless society. Dave Cameron explaining that he supports same-sex marriage not in spite of being a conservative, but because of it. His Chancellor, much to his fulsomely professed chagrin, being unable to justify the abolition of the 50-percent tax bracket.

It’s tempting to suggest that these so-called Tories simply don’t understand the meaning of the word ‘conservative’. But, as simple explanations tend to gravitate towards simplistic, do let’s try to delve a bit deeper.

Every word today’s spivocrats use has two meanings: one is the actual dictionary definition; the other, something they wish to communicate in order to get reelected. If the two coincide, fine. If they don’t, the second will take precedence over the first every time. Keep misusing words long enough and often enough, and their true meaning will gradually fade away not only for the spivocrats themselves but also for their audience. As Aquinas suggested, repetition is the mother of all learning. So we learn.

To counter this kind of education, before Dave and his merry men come out in favour of post-natal abortion as the ultimate expression of conservatism, do let’s try to grasp the true meaning of the term. (Incidentally, as a conservative, I find abortion abhorrent, and the post-natal variety beyond abhorrent. However, every time I see a picture of Tony Blair’s smile I get second thoughts.)

Conservatives are people who wish to conserve something, that’s basic. Since different nations cherish different things they wish to conserve, the word doesn’t easily cross national borders. In the USA, for example, a conservative means mostly a Whiggish economic libertarian, which isn’t the same thing. In Russia the word means a Stalinist. And in France it means nothing at all. To find a way out of this semantic maze one would have to narrow the word’s meaning to a British conservative, or, even further, to an English one.

So what would English conservatives like to conserve? First they’d observe that England has been blessed with a comparatively smooth historical continuum. Represented graphically, it would be somewhat jagged, but not nearly as much as in any other sizeable European country this side of Switzerland. Obviously, an invisible chain binds the past, present and future generations of Englishmen, and it’s this chain that a conservative would strive to keep intact.

In order to do so, he’d have to identify the key links, which is a fairly straightforward task. In politics, he’d like to preserve the constitutional makeup of the realm. In matters of the spirit, he would be aware of the critical role Christianity in general and the established church in particular play in every aspect of the realm — so he’d want to maintain that. In culture, he’d favour the eternal over the transient, so, if he found himself in a position to finance, say, music, he’d choose the tradition that links William Byrd with James McMillan over one that connects Sid Vicious with Led Zeppelin. In clothes he’d prefer a three-piece suit to a ‘Kiss me, I’m British’ T-shirt. Given the choice between a woman with and without a tattoo, he wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.

A complete list, if it were at all possible to compile, would be inordinately long, but you get the picture. An English conservative would amalgamate his intuitive, temperamental predisposition with a certain system of thought to make sure that England’s political, spiritual and cultural history proceeds on a relatively smooth course. In other words, he’d do his bit to make sure England remains England.

That doesn’t mean he’d be opposed to any kind of change. Without peripheral changes, no civilisation would be able to keep its core together. Or, as Burke, one of history’s greatest conservative thinkers, wrote, ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.’ Trust a Whig to explain conservatism to future generations.

But the key word in his pronouncement is ‘some’. Burke didn’t say ‘any old’ because, as a true conservative, he refused to assume that any change is automatically for the better. Some changes serve conservative ends and ought to be hailed. Others undermine it and ought to be decried.

Now, if we apply our understanding of conservatism to today’s Conservative party, we’ll instantly see that the two simply don’t mesh. For the sake of brevity, let’s just look at the current debate on the House of Lords, heir to the barons who 797 years ago gave us Magna Carta, the bedrock of English liberties.

The traditional, constitutional role the House of Lords plays in the English realm is to act as a counterbalance to the unelected power of the monarch and the elected power of the Commons. It has been understood for the best part of a millennium that hereditary peers have a vested, historical interest in preserving the realm with its traditional liberties. Since they owe their political presence to birth and not politics, they aren’t subject to political pressures and can freely proceed with the business at hand: preventing either the king or the majority from acquiring dictatorial powers.

Thus, having the Lords either appointed by politicians or elected by the people is a travesty of the system, its gross perversion. I’m not even arguing against this sort of thing on merit — such an argument would hardly be sporting for being too easy. I’m simply saying that a conservative would under no circumstances support either an appointed or elected Lords.

So here’s a Conservative MP Martin Vickers, writing to The Times in support of an elected upper House. ‘A key to any reformer should be to sweep away the many unaccountable bodies that rule our lives and that must include the House of Lords.’ Mr Vickers then goes on to equate an unelected Lords with the European Commission as one of those unaccountable bodies that tyrannise the English. I’m surprised he left the Queen out.

That this is frankly idiotic and ignorant is so obvious it hardly needs saying. But the interesting thing is that for Mr Vickers and presumably for his ‘conservative’ colleagues the debate is between an appointed and an elected Lords. An hereditary upper House, which even Harold Macmillan’s generation of the Tories would have regarded as a given, isn’t even mentioned any longer. The English constitution has been buried under the rubble of political correctness and political expediency.

In the good tradition of English pragmatism, something to which I’m privy only vicariously, one can’t just point out what’s wrong. One must answer the perennial question ‘So what are we going to do about it?’ Well, the immediate measure I’d propose would be to deselect any Tory candidate who scores below the national average on an IQ test and fails a simple test on the constitutional history of the English realm. That wouldn’t guarantee the survival of conservatism in this country. But at least it would keep the likes of Vickers out.

He could then apply for citizenship in America where they already have an elected Senate. In due course, Vickers could stand in senatorial elections and conceivably win. Try that, Martin, you never know your luck.

 

Yesterday I spoke about the economic crisis to the students and faculty of a London university.

At some point, the subject of the NHS came up, tangentially, with me mentioning in passing that a) contrary to a widespread superstition, it’s not a religion, but merely a way of financing medical care and b) as far as ways of financing medical care go, it’s just about the worst one can think of: wasteful, corrupt, statist and grossly inefficient.

The students, surprisingly, agreed with me, but their professors, predictably, didn’t. Never mind the waiting lists, insisted one of them. The NHS is the best value for money anywhere in the world.

That’s a hell of a consolation, I objected in my usual facetious manner, if you don’t happen to be bleeding too fast. And anyway, that’s simply not true.

Then how come, insisted my opponent, all European countries envy us our wholly socialised medicine? If so, I replied, they’ve managed to contain that emotion reasonably well. After all, not a single one has gone for that sort of thing. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they haven’t really flattered us all that much.

I had neither the time nor the inclination to comment on my own experience with the NHS, and anyway, patience not being my prime virtue, I soon got disgusted with that lot. I feel differently about my readers, so here it is.

First, my worship at the altar of our national deity has been somewhat curtailed by private medical insurance. My principal exposure has been at the primary-care level and, though it takes several days to see my GP, he is truly excellent.

In fact, by spotting the early symptoms of a rather ghastly disease and instantly referring me to one of the best consultants in the business, he probably saved my life a few years ago. However, my experience with NHS secondary care makes me understand my good friend (an NHS doctor himself) who claims that, if he had a serious problem, he’d rather be treated in Zaire than at an NHS hospital.

Once I had a series of gall-stone attacks, without knowing that’s what they were. Each attack was worse than the previous one, and finally my wife had to call the ambulance in the middle of the night.

The paramedics explained that it was against their charter to take me to a private hospital and promptly transported me to one of London’s newest and supposedly best NHS hospitals.

It had been built only a few years earlier, and the plan – mercifully shelved though not yet cancelled – was to accommodate this new arrival by demolishing a great hospital, itself only about 30 years old, a mile down the road. Sounds like a perfectly sensible idea, doesn’t it?

The doctor on duty took a couple of hours to see me, with the pain growing worse by the minute. Finally he turned up, admitted he didn’t have a clue about the diagnosis and shot me full of dope, which produced the kind of convulsions that would take a Goya to render pictorially and a Kafka verbally.

My doctor friend later suggested that this classic reaction of gall stones to opiates would have served as differential diagnosis for any decent physician. Well, it didn’t in this case.

Another hour or two later (I’d lost track of time) I was wheeled into a ward, only to find that half the beds next to mine contained women in various stages of undress.

Historically, I haven’t always minded sharing my bedroom with scantily dressed females, but somehow the time and the place seemed wrong. And in any case, most of them were way past the age of consent. Respect for patients’ dignity is clearly not a top priority in the NHS, I thought before passing out.

To cut the long (and painful) story short, I spent the next three days there without either being seen by a specialist or having my condition diagnosed by any other doctor.

Finally, in the evening of the third day, I rose from my bed, put on my clothes and said I was discharging myself, much to the displeasure of the doctor on duty. She was a diminutive girl who looked about 15 but, considering she was fully qualified (in a manner of speaking), had to be older.

‘Does this mean you’re going against medical advice?’ she demanded haughtily. ‘Yes, I know I’m denying myself the advantage of your vast experience…,’ I said and added a few words I later regretted.

The next day I went to see a private consultant who diagnosed gall stones before I finished my first plaintive sentence. We’ll operate tomorrow, he said (a friend of mine, not blessed with private insurance, had to wait six months for a similar operation on the NHS). Not to worry, he said, it’s only a keyhole surgery.

However, when the surgeon got inside me the next morning, he realised that gangrene had set in. So keyhole surgery went out of the window, and he had to open me up like a tin of sardines.

Another day or two, he told me when I came to, and you would have been dead. Then he said something about the NHS, translating the first letter in its name as ‘Nasty’, the second as ‘Horrible’ and the third as something I’ll let you guess.

My only other experience with an NHS hospital was more comic than near-fatal. That time it was a kidney stone, rather than the gall variety (in case you’re wondering, I collect ailments, aiming to merit an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records).

I was taken to a hospital that had both an NHS wing  and a private one. The former was my first port of call, but, after they realised I could go private, I was wheeled to the latter.

The muscular chap who did the wheeling kept calling me ‘Alex’, even though we weren’t close friends and he was less than half my age. It was Alex this and Alex that, but only until we crossed the magic line separating the two wings. The moment we did cross it, he instantly began to call me ‘Mr Boot’, which I remained for the duration of my stay.

Add to this my beloved mother-in-law who died of a hospital-acquired MRSA, and I’d be lying to you if I claimed that my objections to the NHS are purely academic and dispassionate. Personal experience does come into it, adding an empirical tinge to the philosophical rejection.

This would be unsound if it were only my own experience – but it isn’t. One can hardly open the papers these days without reading about yet another murderous outrage committed in the name of a medical care equal to all.

How much brainwashing has it taken, one wonders, to make Englishmen worship the NHS the way they used to worship God? Probably enough to make the USSR proud and Red China turn green with envy.

It’s not often that one gets the chance to say something nice about our politicians, but the Conservative MP Dominic Raab has put forth a good bill. Supported by, among others, David Miliband, Jack Straw and Sir Malcom Rifkind, all former Foreign Secretaries, the motion proposes that the 60 Russian officials from the so-called Magnitsky list be denied access to Britain and have their assets frozen.

Allow me to remind you of the facts of the matter. In 1996 the Stanford-educated American financier Bill Browder started Hermitage Fund which in due course became the biggest foreign investor in Russia. That country figured prominently in Mr Browder’s family history: his grandfather Earl was one of the founders of the American Communist Party and a lifelong KGB agent. One suspects, however, that this fact was of less importance to Browder than to the KGB people who run Russia, particularly Putin who is known to be sentimental about his alma mater.

One way or the other, Browder managed to stay on the right side of the Russian authorities long enough to become a very rich man, and one with enough clout to have supported Putin in his rise to power. He did, however, try to introduce Western business practices into the murky world of Russian finance, which is a bit like trying to teach Mike Tyson not to punch people. A conflict was inevitable, especially since gratitude doesn’t figure high on Putin’s list of virtues.

In 2006 Browder was out of the blue denied entry to Russia, but continued to run Hermitage from his offices in London. Such absentee management, though at first successful, couldn’t work indefinitely. Over the next two years, Hermitage’s Moscow offices were raided by the police, with various employees arrested, beaten, maimed and otherwise reprimanded. To Browder’s credit, he tried to get as many of them as he could out of Russia, but one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, stayed behind.

He was arrested and 11 months later died in remand prison. The official (false) diagnosis was pancreatitis, a disease usually, though not always, caused by excessive drinking. The unofficial (true) reason was abuse, beatings, torture and denial of medical treatment.

Since then Browder has waged a tireless international campaign aimed at punishing those 60 Russian thugs directly involved in the murder. The Raab motion is a reflection of the political support he has managed to whip up, and I do hope it becomes law. However, there are larger issues involved.

There are about 300,000 ‘new Russians’ living in London, and many of them come from the same KGB-mob background as the Magnitsky 60. Having made millions in ways that would be illegal anywhere else in the world, they use their ill-gotten gains to buy up not only the most expensive houses in London but also quite a few venerable Brirish institutions, such as football clubs, bookstore chains and newspapers.

We don’t mind: money doesn’t smell, and anyway it’s not illegal to buy things, is it now? We’re all supporters of private enterprise, aren’t we? So we don’t flinch when the ‘new Russians’ bust up expensive London restaurants and pay for the damage with briefcases full of cash. We don’t wince when observing those gangsters order a £2,000 bottle of wine and then dilute it with Diet Coke. We don’t mind when the likes of Berezovsky and Abramovich make a travesty of British justice by settling their tawdry accounts in our courts. We do object to their use of Polonium 210 in central London, but not too strenuously and not for very long.

Jonathan Sumption, Abramovich’s own barrister, has acknowledged that his client acquired his wealth through ‘an agreement to sell media support to the president of Russia in return for privileged access to state-owned assets.’ That, according to Mr Sumption’s admission, was ‘corrupt’. This isn’t the first adjective that springs to mind, but the question is, how is this any different from the way organised crime normally operates?

Now, I’m neither a lawyer nor a historian of law, but I do find it hard to imagine, say, the Krays being allowed to buy The Times in the 1960s, the Richardsons being welcome to The Telegraph, or even either of them allowed to take over a string of football clubs all over the country. Money didn’t smell in those days either, but its provenance mattered somewhat. So what has changed since then? I’ll let you answer this question yourself, provided you do agree that things are different now. We’ve become champions of free enterprise über alles, but free enterprise shouldn’t be a suicide pact.

So well done to Dominic Raab and those politicians who support his motion, even though one would be within one’s right to question some of their motives. Jack Straw and David Miliband, for example, haven’t repudiated Lord Mandelson, that exemplar of fiscal probity and their party comrade, for his intimate links with Oleg Deripaska, the aluminium king whose kingdom is not of the Western world. So what has awakened their conscience in this instance?

I wonder if Miliband in particular is still smarting from the indignity he suffered during his stint as Foreign Secretary at the hands of Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. When Miliband mentioned in passing Russia’s record on human rights, Mr Lavrov displayed an enviable command of the English idiom by replying, ‘Who the f… are you to lecture me?’ I can’t imagine Viscount Palmerston or, closer to our time, Lord Carrington being talked to that way, but then we have agreed that things have changed.

Still, whatever their motives, they are doing the right thing. I just hope they don’t stop here.

 

To paraphrase Lord Acton ever so slightly, power attracts; and absolute power attracts absolutely.

It has to. For otherwise I struggle to explain why Russia’s once and future president Putin appeals to so many Western intellectuals, including quite a few who write for our main newspapers.

Some of it has to be good, old-fashioned ignorance. The drooling admirers simply may not know that Putin’s regime isn’t just corrupt (we have enough of those in the West) but downright criminal (we haven’t many of those). Putin’s pathway from 2000 to 2012, via Polonium 210, is strewn with political murders, racketeering, extortion, beatings and maimings, vote rigging, money laundering and every other number from the repertoire of felony.

Moreover, he is a proud and unrepentant veteran of the KGB, which beats the SS to the honour of being the most evil organisation in history. Applying the Nuremberg logic, a member of a criminal organisation is himself a criminal; a proud member, doubly so. Putin’s sponsoring organisation, and therefore Putin himself, are covered with the blood of 60 million murdered people — and that’s just in Russia. Those kind of numbers normally suffice to qualify for the appelation ‘criminal’, with room to spare.

But let’s suppose some people don’t know any of this, though such ignorance raises serious questions about the hiring policies of our academe and media. And, stretching the benefit of the doubt to snapping point, neither are they aware that Putin’s KGB camarilla, securely fused with the criminal underworld, has been stealing Russia blind, richly meriting their nickname ‘the party of thieves and crooks’. Outside Moscow, Petersburg and places where raw materials are produced or processed, ordinary Russians starve, while Putin’s cronies launder billions through various Western institutions. And being a Putin crony is a sine qua non of enrichment in Russia — one can no more become wealthy there while at loggerheads with Putin than one can run a Las Vegas casino without being in cahoots with the mafia.

And yet one would think that halfway intelligent people, even if they are ignorant of Russia, must be able to smell a rat. Even if impervious to the substance of the Putin regime, they have to be sensitive to its style. All those naked torsos, bulging muscles, crude and obscene language, cheap populism, mass rallies that thousands are coerced to attend, sabre rattling, support for every terrorist regime under the sun — surely people must be able to see the unmistakeable parallels with the livery of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany? And if they do, how can they find a kind word for Putin in spite of all that?

I asked myself that question, and then realised that the answer is buried within it. Our intellectuals like Putin not in spite of all that but because of it. Like a weedy campus nerd enviously observing a muscular athlete thrust his hand under the skirt of a compliant girl — the same girl with whom the nerd has just discussed Sartre and Marcuse — our culturati must feel the vibes emanating from Putin and his gang.

There’s nothing new about that. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis had the same appeal in the West, and for exactly the same reasons. All those Lloyd Georges and George Bernard Shaws didn’t even discriminate; they liked both the brown and red varieties of the nightmare.

Just like Hilary Clinton gasping girlishly about ‘the alpha dog’ Putin, Western intellectuals from the 1920s and 30s got that funny feeling down there at the sight of all those leather jerkins and silvery skulls with crossed bones underneath. There was something, well, manly about pumping bullets into priests’ heads or gassing Jews. The culturati couldn’t do that themselves of course, they lacked the nerve. Then so much more did they admire those who didn’t: Lenin, who murdered about 10 million in the seven years he was in power; Stalin, who added 50 million or so; Trotsky, who felt the other two were too soft; Hitler, who knew whom he loved and especially whom he hated.

It’s supposed to be de rigeur for a Western intellectual to go through a leftie phase, be it Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist, when young, only to settle into a more palatable set of ideas later in life. But I question the innocence of such youthful afflictions. God forbid I start waxing Freudian, but there must be a deep psychological need deep down somewhere to worship muscular murderers. And, though people’s minds undoubtedly develop with age, I doubt their psychology can do an about-face. Given a strong enough stimulus, the dormant cravings can wake up with a jolt, driving an ex-leftie Tory or Gaullist into the embrace of today’s Lenins, Trotskys and Maos.

All that’s required is self-vindication and self-absolution: protecting oneself from guilt. This can come from the post-rationalisation of something already felt intuitively, and the tricks are never in short supply. Take your pick: Putin may be rough around the edges, but he’s a true patriot; he’s good for Russia; he’s a man of principle, unlike our own self-serving bunch; he is leading Russia to true democracy, albeit in a roundabout way; there’s no alternative to be found among 150 million Russians; those who dislike Putin secretly hate Russia. But underneath it all bubbles the undercurrent of sensual attraction to brawn.

Nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry. Except that these folk have access to public forums, and so can cause untold harm. I hope we don’t let them.

 

 

 

 

A few hours ago, the First Channel of Russia’s TV announced that a combined action by Russian and Ukrainian ‘special services’ have thwarted a planned attempt on Putin’s life.

‘Following an international search, members of the gang were apprehended earlier this year,’ said Marina Ostapenko, head of PR for the Ukraine’s secret police (SBU). According to the First Channel, the inspiration behind the planned assassination came from an Adam Osmayev, who had spent a long time in London. The moment Osmayev was arrested, he began to cooperate with the police, all purely voluntarily of course. According to him, the plot involved the use of a suicide bomber, trained for the task somewhere in the UAE.

Within minutes of the announcement, rumours began to circulate in Moscow that the plot is Putin’s equivalent of the Reichstag Fire staged by the Nazis in 1933 to consolidate their hold on power. Those who spread such rumours point out the convenient timing of the announcement, a few days before the election. Why, they ask, if the arrests were made two months ago, the announcement came only this morning?

Why indeed? After all, Putin is reputed to have form in staging explosions for political purposes. It was the explosions in Moscow blocks of flats back in 2000 that set up the Second Chechen War and established Putin as the strong national leader so beloved of the Russians and admired by Peter Hitchens. A few years later Alexander Litvinenko wrote the book Blowing Up Russia, accusing Putin of the crime. In due course, the book attracted a rather extreme and decisive form of literary criticism in the centre of London, which didn’t do much to exonerate the Russian secret police in general and Putin in particular.

As questions are bound to be raised, by me among others, it’s only natural that the First Channel (Putin’s mouthpiece) should nip them in the bud. Asking such questions, explained their press service, ‘is a clear sign of mental illness obviously linked with the election campaign.’

Thanks for the diagnosis, Comrades — oops, sorry, ladies and gentlemen. And there I was, wondering what was wrong with me. No doubt, if I lived in Moscow rather than London, I’d get proper treatment from the psychiatrists working for Col. Putin’s former employer.

 

 

 

 

 Winston Churchill’s famous description of Russia pointed out her enigmatic nature. The great man had a point: Russia is indeed full of mysteries. Some of them, however, are relatively easy to solve, such as why Russian sports shops sold 500,000 baseball bats last year, but only three baseballs and one baseball glove. Even allowing that this great sporting nation may play the game to a different set of rules, the disparity is puzzling – but not very.

 Other mysteries may present more of an intellectual challenge, but the presidential election forthcoming on 4 March isn’t one of them. Col. Putin will win, and one has to compliment him on a ground-breaking electoral strategy aimed at negating some of the bad publicity the good colonel has received over the last 12 years.

 The task wasn’t easy, for some of the publicity was so bad it would scupper even a Mugabe campaign. Just take the dossier published by Marina Salie, who in 1992 headed the Petersburg Council commission investigating  Putin’s business machinations when he was still a lowly deputy mayor. Among other choice bits, the documents showed that Putin had signed deals to export $100 million worth of raw materials in exchange of food. The raw materials dutifully left Russia. No food came back in return – this at a time of rationing in Petersburg.

 Onwards and upwards: Putin’s current 12-year record as national leader is signposted by such milestones as the second (genocidal) Chechen war, the gassing of dozens of hostages together with their kidnappers at a Moscow theatre, 40-odd opposition journalists and politicians ‘whacked’ (to use Putin’s own jargon) in dark alleys, a spot of nuclear terrorism in the centre of London, free press suppressed, terrorist regimes armed, palaces built all over Russia, shady links with dubious ‘exporters’, dozens of cronies elevated to riches, stroppy billionaires sent to concentration camps – just tell me where to stop.

 So what kind of strategy would have steered Putin to his present leadership in the polls (55 percent, with the nearest rival at eight percent, all of them together at 28)? The kind that could stand our own politicians in good stead: ‘Putin is the lesser evil!’ Yes, he might have done all those unpleasant things. Yes, he may be one of the richest men in the world (something claimed by the political scientist Belakovsky in an interview to Die Welt). Yes, his use of a figurehead ‘president’ Medvedev to keep his own chair warm for a few years was cynical. But, if not Putin, WHO THEN?

 Surely not Gennady Zyuganov, the communist leader? Those chaps had their innings for 74 years, and you know what happened. And not ‘Mad Vlad’ Zhirinovsky, the music-hall fascist who wants Russian soldiers to ‘wash their boots in the Indian Ocean’? Mikhail Prokhorov, an ‘oligarch’ envied and therefore loathed for his billions? No, absolutely not. Putin, scream all government-controlled TV channels (which is to say all TV channels), may not be an angel. But at least he is a strong leader, a career KGB officer who won’t take any nonsense from the West. HE IS THE LESSER EVIL.

 It has to be said that even Russians who have lived in the West for decades struggle to counter this eminently realistic strategy. For example, in an article written for a Russian on-line magazine, Vladimir Bukovsky, who used to be tortured in KGB psychiatric wards by Putin’s colleagues, came out in favour of Prokhorov, all six-foot-eight of him. Prokhorov, according to Bukovsky, has two irrefutable assets going for him. First, if elected, he promised to donate 17 of his 18 billion dollars to charity, keeping just a miserly one billion for his day-to-day expenses (Mitt Romney, ring your office). Second, he has never been directly implicated in murder. So fine, he may have been arrested by the dastardly French for running a prostitution ring, but wasn’t he eventually released without charge? What more do you need? If this isn’t the stuff of which landslides are made, I don’t know what is.

 And the real democratic opposition? It doesn’t exist. Oh sure, there are a few websites filled with longings for the kind of politics Russia has never had, and some of the writers have a genuine literary talent. What they don’t have is any clue of how any other system can possibly function in Russia. Russia, they claim on rather feeble evidence, is ready for democracy, no matter what the naysayers are naysaying. Everybody is ready for democracy – just look at Lybia and Iraq. It’s never too late for freedom.

 And how do we define freedom? Here semantics comes in handy. The old Russian word for freedom is volia, which is a cognate of ‘will’. True enough, freedom to a Russian is tantamount to a licence to do as he will – not to have his person and property protected by just laws. That sort of thing is too legalistic for Russians, too unspiritual – too Western for words. Let the Brits have their laws; the Russians have souls instead. Characteristically, Nikolai Lossky’s standard text The History of Russian Philosophy devotes 57 pages to the metaphysical thinker Soloviov and only two to all the Russian philosophers of law combined. And things haven’t changed much since the tsars: in a recent poll 80 percent of Russians stated that a strong leader is much more important than any set of laws.

 Given such a political climate, a winning electoral strategy writes itself. The odd picture of Putin’s muscular naked torso, a few more of him holding a rifle, riding a steed, displaying his prowess at martial arts or sporting a military uniform, and Boris is your uncle. And specific promises? Why, if elected, Col. Putin will invest $750 billion into rebuilding Russia’s military power. So Russia will become as great as it was under Stalin, especially considering the rate at which the West is disarming.

The good colonel can’t lose and he probably won’t even have to cheat. For IF NOT PUTIN, WHO ELSE? No one. And few people will shed a tear for a country in which there’s no alternative to a KGB thug, who’s proud to be one. ‘There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,’ Putin once declared. ‘This is for life.’ Quite.

I don’t think it would sound terribly controversial to say that England wasn’t born yesterday. It has been lovingly nurtured over two millennia by sage men expressing their affection for this ‘green and pleasant land’ by building up institutions that don’t just help England thrive — they enable her to survive as England; they are England.

Destroy those institutions one by one, and England becomes less. Continue this attrition, and it won’t take long for England to become something else. To stop being England in other words. Do you wish this to happen? I know I don’t.

Yet that is precisely what’s under way at present, and the demolition is presided over by a government that has the gall to call itself conservative. By way of illustration, I’ll cite just three examples, of many — these are work in progress, so perhaps an outside chance exists that the ‘progress’ will be nipped in the bud. (This is more in the nature of hope than expectation.)

One is the plan to turn the House of Lords into a fully elected chamber, to be called Senate or some such. We already have a Supreme Court, so why not restyle the Queen as Governor, the Commons as legislature and be done with it? Then we can apply for statehood within the USA — provided they agree to pay the EU off.

This displays such a barbaric ignorance of England’s constitution that no such savage ignoramus ought to be allowed to leave school, never mind enter politics. It has been known since Plato and Aristotle that the most just and viable government is one that keeps various political systems in fine balance. Practically the only Western country that has historically achieved such a balance to resounding success is England.

The demos had its interests represented in a democratically elected Commons, an unelected monarch provided the overall authority, and an aristocratic House of Lords made sure that the power of neither the monarch nor the people would become tyrannical. In practice, the dominant power has been vested in the Commons since 1688 — but it was securely checked by the other two branches, none of which was held hostage to political pressures, as elected officials inevitably are.

It was also assumed that the peers, who owned so much land in England for generations, had umbilical links with the country and would therefore do their utmost to protect it against either royal tyranny or mob rule. Hence having an elected upper chamber is a travesty — the house built brick by brick over centuries will collapse, and our assorted spivocrats will lord over the ruins. Which is why they, regardless of their party affiliation, are pushing for this obscenity to become a fact soon. Never mind bono publico. Their own bono is all that matters.

Another institution that lies at the heart of England is the Anglican Church, of which the Queen is Supreme Governor. Yet speaking the other day at Lambeth Palace to leaders of various faiths, Her Majesty saw fit to declare that, ‘[The Church’s] role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.’ Someone forgot to tell that to Richard Hooker.

In all humility, the Queen got it wrong. The role of the Church is precisely ‘to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions’ — as it is the role of the Supreme Governor of the Church to act as Defender of the Faith. The faith, Your Majesty, not any old ‘faith’ — Jack of all faiths, Supreme Governor of none. As Supreme Governor of the Church, it isn’t the monarch’s role, and nor is it the Church’s, to protect the freedom of any kind of worship. This may be her role as head of state, but that’s another hat, or rather crown, that she wears.

May I humbly remind Her Majesty of this exchange that took place on 2 June, 1953.‘Archbishop. Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them? Queen. All this I promise to do.’

The Coronation Oath didn’t mention any commitment to even-handed multiculturalism. However, as you can see, it did mention other commitments that sound as if they just may be at odds with Her Majesty’s statement the other day. Score another one for our spivocrats in all three major parties.

The third institution that’s currently under attack is marriage, and therefore family. Neither Plato nor Aristotle would have recognised its critical significance. They were champions of agora politics, where men expressed themselves not as individuals but as citizens. Home for them was but a bedroom and a dining room, and they — and their wives — easily floated from marriage to marriage, and, in every possible combination of sexes, from one lover to the next. If a heterosexual dalliance or marriage produced children, then Plato advocated their becoming wards of the state, so that every citizen could assume that someone roughly his own age could be his biological sibling.

Christianity changed all that by privatising the spirit and internalising man. People would now express themselves not by arguing in the public square, but by contemplating and praying at home or church. The Western world that reflected this seismic shift, the most revolutionary one in history, abandoned the overarching polis and began to rely instead on small, tight, familial bodies: guild, parish, village, township. And of course family was by far the most important of all familial institutions — the building block of Western society.

And it’s this building block that’s in the process of being knocked out of the house and smashed to smithereens. All three parties — and many clergymen — are pushing for ‘same-sex’, which is to say homosexual, marriage to gain equal status with what any sane Westerner would recognise as proper marriage. Family is of course the major competitor to the congenital megalomania of the modern state, and so it has to be destroyed for our spivocrats to reign supreme. It has already been largely deprived of any religious significance — now its social value will be discounted to practically zero. Since Abraham, marriage has been understood as a union between a man and a woman, with the propagation of our race being its social function. That’s why all three Abrahamic religions treat marriage as a sacrament and hold it in high esteem.

But of course such arguments don’t work for either our spivocrats or their flock. According to them, the dial is reset in every generation, and each subsequent generation is so much more advanced than any of its predecessors. So those anomic creatures in Westminster feel perfectly justified in destroying institutions that have proved their paramount value over millennia.

Do you love England? So reach for a handkerchief. And, once your eyes are dry, do something about it while England is still there. What’s left of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can’t boast of being particularly good at languages. But, what with an inordinate amount of toing and froing over a lifetime, I manage to get by in most countries when it comes to buying things or ordering a meal.

I even make a point of refusing English-language menus, and, if one is thrust upon me, only ever look at it for amusement value. For example, a Petersburg restaurant once had a mystery item on special, called ‘boiled language.’ I like mine nice and blue with lots of salt and pepper, I wanted to say, even though I knew that the Russians have the same word for tongue and language (yazyk, if you’re interested).

Anyway, by accident of birth I’m bilingual in English and Russian, so whenever I find myself in Moscow (which is as seldom as I can help it) I can ask anything I want, such as ‘I like my food hot, my vodka cold, and not vice versa’ or ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

Since I’ve been spending much time in France for many years, I can go so far as to exchange off-colour jokes with the maître d’ at my favourite Paris restaurant, secure in the knowledge that he is duty-bound to laugh at my one-liners (nowadays professional obligation seems to be a precondition for anyone to appreciate what my wife calls my infantile humour).

Having lived in Italy for a while and travelled extensively through Spain, I can order a fairly sophisticated meal in Rome or Madrid, and the waiters don’t even feel tempted to insult or overcharge me.

And English usually gets me through northern Europe, though not without the odd misunderstanding. Once I asked an Amsterdam fishmonger to prepare my bass for me, and he laughed just the way the French maître d’ does, even though on that occasion I wasn’t aware of making a joke. Turned out that to the Dutch gentleman preparing a fish meant cooking it, not cleaning and scaling, which is how the word is understood in the Anglophone world.

The only capital city in which I can’t make myself understood at shops and restaurants is the one where I happen to live: London. And I’d be lying to you if I claimed that my reaction to this linguistic conundrum is invariably good-natured.

This morning I was at a major supermarket where I couldn’t find Polish cucumbers in brine, which normally live in the Foods of the World section. I had to stop several assistants before I found one who could understand the word ‘cucumber’. Not a single one knew what brine was. ‘Vinegar?’ they’d suggest helpfully. ‘No, not vinegar! Brine! Salt and water!’ ‘Vinegar,’ they’d say with decisive finality.

On another occasion I was driven to distraction by a shop assistant who kept pointing me towards the butcher’s counter where I could buy ‘peeg’, rather than the pickle I had trouble finding. And when buying bread at a French bakery, such as Paul, one had better be able to speak French if wishing to communicate the difference between ‘rye bun’ and ‘rum baba’.

Now I don’t mind speaking French, but there’s a big difference between not minding and having to. In fact, I’m bloody-minded enough to refuse to speak any language other than English in my city. If they take my money in my country, they should damn well speak my language — just as I try my best to speak theirs in their country.

If this makes me sound as if I were somehow against immigrants working in London, I want to dispel this impression once and for all. I’m not. In fact, I welcome it — it’s nice to buy real bread from people who know how to make it; I like ordering my pasta from people who don’t pronounce it ‘passter’; I’m ecstatic about ordering a tapa from a waiter who knows the difference between Serrano and Ibérica hams. I just don’t want to have language problems in my own city.

Moreover, I’m a firm supporter of free trade, including the import of labour, though I do draw the line on the import of welfare recipients. I just wonder why I’ve never met a Paris waiter who doesn’t speak proper French, while these days hardly ever meeting a London one who speaks proper English.

Having lived in Texas, which in those days wasn’t known for a cosmopolitan outlook on life, I noticed that the widespread animosity towards Mexican immigrants went from peaks to troughs, depending on the economic situation (which in Houston depended entirely on the price of crude oil). When the economy was booming, nobody minded Mexican bricklayers or, for that matter, waiters very much — they were doing jobs that the good ole boys didn’t want. But when the economy dipped, suddenly the good ole boys wanted those jobs, at which point they’d begin to describe the ‘Messicans’ in terms that would incur the wrath of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

We don’t seem to have a similar problem here: our economy is in the doldrums, 20 percent of British young people are unemployed (and God only knows how many more on the ‘sickie’), and yet catering and retail jobs go to people who don’t understand me even when I speak slowly and loudly. I could suggest why this is happening, and even what needs to be done to change the situation, but I’ll save that for a different article.

For now I’ll just go on saying, ‘Well, you better habla, mate. This is England, you know. Inglaterra! Entiende?’