Courtesy of Watergate, -gate has become a productive suffix in political terminology.

Dozens of scandals have rated that attachment, such as Winegate, Motorgate, Koreagate, Irangate and so on. If Nigel Farage and his Reform Party aren’t careful, they may give rise to a new coinage, this one having the advantage of adding up to a real word: Elongate.

Farage’s emetic sycophancy to Elon Musk may not be illegal, but I’m afraid it’ll compromise British conservatism for a generation to come. The other day Farage actually acknowledged that Musk, American tycoon cum politician, would give a “reasonable-sized” amount to his party ($100 million has been mooted), provided it would be “legal and above board”.

The other day I mentioned that in this case, and in an increasing number of others, legal doesn’t equate moral and decent, quite the opposite. A major British party, especially one hoping to form a government, shouldn’t be in hock to foreigners, be they businessmen or especially politicians, and Musk happens to be both.

As an aside, though I wouldn’t describe Musk’s capital as ill-gotten, much of it has been acquired in ways no conservative should countenance. He exploited a niche carved in the motor trade by the climate craze. Not only did Musk pioneer the production of electric cars, but he also accepted billions in government subsidies, thereby catering to the agenda promoted by the Left.

Since Mr Farage is such a stickler for legality, that didn’t break any laws. But such opportunism has nothing to do with conservatism that Farage likes to proclaim.

In all forthcoming elections his party will attack Labour for its suicidal policies, including its obsession with net zero. Any Labour candidate worth his salt will be able to counter with a reference to Musk’s money, much of which was made by taking advantage of what Reform candidates will be castigating as a Leftist swindle.

I for one would dearly love to hear Farage’s diatribes should it become known that, say, George Soros, donated $100 million to Labour. The Left, he’d scream, have sold themselves to the globalist deep state, and Labour has forfeited the right to be called a British party. And that invective would be justified – as much as Labour’s attack on Reform would be if the latter took Musk’s global-warming dollar.

Yet it’s not just Musk’s financial assistance that Farage seems to be counting on. He claims to rely on the global-warming billionaire he calls a “bloody hero” as a bridge to young voters.

“Reform only wins the next election if it gets the youth vote. The youth vote is the key,” explained Farage. “Of course, you need voters of all ages, but if you get a wave of youth enthusiasm you can change everything.

“And I think we’re beginning to get into that zone – we were anyway, but Elon makes the whole task much, much easier. And the idea that politics can be cool, politics can be fun, politics can be real – Elon helps us with that mission enormously… The shades, the bomber jacket, the whole vibe. Elon makes us cool…”.

He certainly does. And someone like Tony Blair can appreciate coolness as a vote-getting quality. In fact, when he got elected, Blair said that his ideal was “Cool Britannia”. He then proceeded to embark on an orgy of constitutional vandalism that makes him the most damaging PM in British history, although Starmer may have something to say about that.

An appeal to “youth enthusiasm” is a hallmark of Left-wing politicians. Trotsky, for example, described the young as the “barometer of the nation”. That barometer then promptly fell off the wall, broke, and millions of Russians have been cutting their feet on the shards of glass ever since.

My firm conviction is that people responsive to “the shades, the bomber jacket, the whole vibe” shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but then I’m not canvassing for votes, and Mr Farage is. I’m sure his party’s polling has identified the young as a key group, and whatever old conservatives like me think about that doesn’t – and shouldn’t – matter.

What should matter, however, is that, for all his cool vibe, Musk is a foreigner, and a foreign politician to boot. He should be welcome to seduce American youngsters with his attire (ridiculous for a man in his 50s, by the way), but using him as political bait in Britain is outrageous. If it’s not illegal, it ought to be.

However, if Musk succeeds in his mission to cut the size of the state, that will set an example one hopes Britain will follow. “I’m hoping he gives us the blueprint, and the blueprint is how to cut the administrative state,” says Farage, and this statement is unobjectionable.

Reform is the only party that has any hope of introducing economic conservatism in Britain, mainly because it starts with a clean slate. For the Tories to justify their other name, the Conservative Party, they’d have to repudiate everything they’ve said and done over the past 34 years.

A hugely charismatic leader could perhaps achieve that, but Mrs Badenoch, for all her otherwise sterling qualities, isn’t one of those. Nor can I see any Tory on the horizon who could give the party a vigorous enough shake to make it come to its senses.

Faced with a vapid Conservative opposition and an actively subversive Labour government, Reform can make serious headway by preaching the conservative sermon. But it should do so on its own, without taking huge donations from ‘cool’ foreign billionaires, politicians and billionaire-politicians.

Mr Farage, however, is showing few signs of fastidiousness in accepting patronage from, or offering lickspittle sycophancy to, trans-Atlantic figures whose constitutional purview is protecting American but not British interests.

If as a result a scandal breaks out, and Farage’s detractors start talking about Elongate, I hope you’ll remember who coined the term. If this is of service to the Lefties, the conservative in me will be despondent. But the linguist will find it hard to suppress a self-satisfied grin.

“To the victor belong the spoils” is a proverbial phrase coined in 1828 by the American politician William L. Marcy.

What he forgot to add was that the victors are guaranteed to squabble over the spoils, especially those dealing with ideology.

If you wish to disagree with this observation, I suggest you remind yourself of what happened to the men who perpetrated both the French and Russian revolutions.

Most of them were eventually slaughtered by their erstwhile comrades who disagreed with them on fine doctrinal points. None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, as I always say.

The conflict brewing within the MAGA ranks is just as heated, although I expect it to be less sanguinary. The bone of contention is the H-1B programme that allows US companies to hire foreign workers who possess high skills not easily found in the native population.

The programme is championed by Vivek Ramaswamy who strikes me as the most level-headed member of the MAGA brass. Because Ramaswamy saw the rational benefits of the programme, he came out in its favour even though he knew he’d be touching a sensitive nerve.

Touching? Jangling, is more like it.

All ideologies demand purity above rationality, and they are extremely sensitive to the slightest hints at heresy, never mind apostasy. MAGA is no different in this respect.

At issue here is mass immigration, curbing of which happens to be one of the central planks of MAGA ideology. Generally speaking, that’s a good idea. Alas, many a good idea turns into its opposite when pushed to a ridiculous extreme (reductio ad absurdum is the egghead term for that process).

“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation),” wrote Ramaswamy. 

“A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

Unfortunately, Ramaswamy then reduced cultural differences to the preference of some TV shows over others, thereby unwittingly illustrating the problem. He also added that America should return to the culture of “unbridled exceptionalism”. Surely he meant ‘excellence’? American exceptionalism is the jingoistic ideology of deifying the country, which is bad political philosophy and even worse theology.

Such quibbles apart, the point Ramaswamy made was serious, and it demanded a serious response. That, however, wasn’t the response he got. What he got was an outburst of spittle-sputtering ideological fervour, which always comes packaged with ignorant and often idiotic rejoinders.

One such came from the blogger Mike Cernovich, who can sputter spittle at a faster rate than most people. Ramaswamy, he wrote, sells short America’s talent for innovation: “The Woodstock generation managed to build our aerospace, the one before went to the moon.”

Quite. But those two true-blue generations received a mighty hand from Werner von Braun and his team, transported in its entirety from Peenemünden to the Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama.

When I worked at NASA, I visited the Centre in 1974 and marvelled at the continuing preponderance of German accents there, 29 years after the war ended. Photographs on the wall showing Braun in his Nazi uniform splendour also left little doubt about the provenance of the American space programme.

Thankfully, German nuclear scientists narrowly missed out on creating the atom bomb. But those great physicists the Nazis ran out of Europe were largely responsible for the Manhattan Project.

Off the top, one recalls such key figures as Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Behe, John von Neumann – not to mention Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, who shouldn’t be mentioned because they turned out to be Soviet spies.

Nor was it just physics. Emigré chemists, such as Otto Meyerhof (Nobel Prize 1922), Otto Stern (Nobel Prize 1943), Otto Loewi (Nobel Prize 1936), Max Bergmann, Carl Neuberg, Kasimir Fajans “soon effected hardly less than a revolution,” writes the conservative think tank CATO Institute. “Their work … almost immediately propelled the United States to world leadership in the chemistry of life.”

Although the H-1B programme didn’t exist at the time, its precursive spirit was wafting through America, blowing into those shores such immigrants as Igor Sikorsky, Nikola Tesla, Vladimir Zworykin – and more recently even Elon Musk. By and large, they’ve all done America proud, although I’m not yet convinced about Musk.

Nikki Haley, who had previously steered clear of MAGA affiliation, took exception to Ramaswamy too. In doing so, she showed a keen nose for the direction in which the wind is blowing and also a talent for the requisite demagoguery.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” fumed Haley. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

This reminds me of a Chekhov story in which two officers argue whether or not Pushkin was a great psychologist. “If he wasn’t,” went the clinching argument, “they wouldn’t have erected his statue in the centre of Moscow.”

Nikki should look up non sequitur and see how it applies to her statement. Unless all those huddled masses yearning to get American social benefits are mostly made up of potential Nobel laureates, her argument missed the point by a light year, not just a mile.

MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec saw an oxymoron where none existed. America, he wrote, should nurture domestic talent rather than admitting those brainy foreigners. He seems to think that the presence of a few thousand émigré scientists would preclude the development of native talents, rather than having the opposite effect, as it always has done. 

“Imagine how many more J.D. Vances are out there,” Posobiec argued, leaving his readers to wonder whether that argument was pro or con.

Other arguments referred to the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which to me isn’t so much a theory as a mathematical fact. If immigrants arrive and multiply faster than the native population can keep up with, they’ll eventually replace this population.

This is worth talking about, and I for one don’t see that simple calculation as a conspiracy theory. Not being an expert in demographics, however, I’m not sure of my footing when the calculations become less simple, as eventually they must.

What I am sure about is that, again, this has nothing to do with the problem at hand. Those Manhattan Project scientists initiated no great replacement, and these are the kind of numbers Ramaswamy was talking about. Perhaps a few thousand, not a few dozen, but even that wouldn’t create an objectionable demographic shift.

A rational curb on immigration isn’t only desirable but essential. Yet the moment ideology comes in, rational walks out. Any country can only protect its sovereignty by controlling the influx of immigration and deciding who should and who shouldn’t be admitted. That’s basic.

But throwing out the baby of top foreign talent with the bathwater of those millions of people fording the Rio Grande isn’t rational. It’s ideological and therefore stupid.

It’s experts who should decide who can qualify for the H-1B programme, not loudmouthed political ideologues. If such experts conclude that this or that top scientist or engineer can make America more competitive, then turning him away at the door is foolish.

But the adjective ‘top’ is naturally restrictive. People who qualify for it can’t be too numerous by definition, meaning that ideally they shouldn’t even be part of this conversation.

Alas, since we don’t live in an ideal world, the H-1B programme has a potential for corruption, and that must be rooted out. But that’s a different story, one that has nothing to do with the programme’s intrinsic merits.

Trump hasn’t joined the battle yet, although in his first term he made cuts to the programme. However, the president-elect has been known to change his views, as I hope he will in this case.   

Today is the perfect time for all Christians – and those atheists whose families used to be Christian in the past – to apologise for their faith. The list of those due an apology is long.

For example, during his long reign as Pope, John Paul II apologised to Jews, women, people convicted by the Holy Inquisition, Muslims killed during the Crusades or at any other time (during the siege of Constantinople?) and anyone else who had a grievance. Pope Francis added homosexuals to that list, apologising on behalf of the Church and also on his own behalf because he had once described that group with a pejorative term.

Protestant leaders of various denominations, thousands of them, won’t be outdone. They’ve issued profuse apologies for genocide, sex abuse, slavery, war and even the Crusades. One would think Protestants would be off the hook on that last one – after all, their particular heresy didn’t exist at the time. But no church can ever overdo mea culpas. The more, the merrier.

The Right Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Bishop of Dover and the likely candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury, apologised implicitly by offering hope to those “dislocated, in refugee camps, fleeing violence, war, climate change, famine and starvation.”

And there I was, thinking that, though shoulders may get dislocated, people can only get displaced. But let’s not quibble about semantics: the Industrial Revolution fuelled by hydrocarbons began in England, at a time when the country was still residually Christian. That’s why the Anglican Church must accept responsibility for the ensuing climate change, along with the famine and starvation that warm weather is known to create.

As for refugee camps, specifically the topical Palestinian ones, those responsible for that outrage worship the first part of the Bible. Since that part also belongs to the Christian canon, Christians in general and Anglicans in particular must accept their share of the blame. I realise that the link is less than direct, but this doesn’t mean no link exists.

Tying climate change to violence and war seems difficult, but only for the likes of me. Those who have taken holy orders will be guided by vox DEI to the requisite epiphany, I have every faith in them.

However, as we all know, prevention is better than cure. Rather than having to apologise for its innumerable offences, the Anglican Church should avoid causing them in the first place. Thanks be to God, its prelates realise that.

Hence parish priests have been instructed to avoid “causing unnecessary offence” by exposing their flock to contentious carols. One such is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (né Veni, veni, Emmanuel) which offends in several ways.

First, it attaches a blatantly male name to God, which is deeply offensive to women. Since men tend to be less sensitive, they wouldn’t object to replacing Emmanuel with Emmanuelle… no scratch that. That was the title of a French soft porn flick from the 70s. Well, you get the gist. Let’s work on finding an inclusive name together.

Then, the carol beseeches God to “ransom captive Israel”. This though Anglican prelates, such as the Right Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin, have explained that it’s captive Palestinians who need ransoming, not Israel that holds them captive.

Then that carol ratches up its offences by suggesting that other faiths are “outside of God’s grace”. First, the lyrics should have made clear that ‘God’ is strictly a figure of speech. With that proviso, listeners ought to have been reassured that so-called God doesn’t discriminate and regards all creeds, especially Islam, as worthy as they are irrelevant.

(In one of my earlier pieces, I suggested that Macron’s France adopt the hymn as its anthem, but that sensible idea was ignored.)

The other offensive carol singled out by the few remaining Anglican hierarchs, those who haven’t yet had to resign, is Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending. Its second verse promises that listeners “shall the true Messiah see”, and how inclusive is that? Not at all, that’s how.

What makes Christ any truer than other messiahs, such as Mohammed? Or the messiah still awaited by the Jews? And don’t get me even started on Buddha, Odin, Nana Buluku, Yan Wang and many other deities with an equal claim to the messianic status. Remember what the E in DEI stands for? Good. Don’t forget it.

It goes without saying that members of any Christian denomination have a lot of offences to apologise for and, if possible, prevent. But meanwhile I can go them one better by offering advice based on my own experience of protecting my feelings from egregious offences.

You see, I too am quite a sensitive soul more than capable of suffering mental anguish. For example, I’m offended by pop music – or rather would be if I weren’t equipped with self-defence techniques. Specifically, I don’t go to pop concerts and even shun restaurants where pop music accompanies eating.

Then I’m also offended by everything written in The Guardian. That’s why I protect my brittle sensibilities by never sullying my hands with that rag.

Nor can I stand female priesthood, which is partly why I left the Anglican Church. See what I’m getting at?

Carol services are typically held in churches. Hence, anyone likely to be offended by Christian messages should steer clear of those dens of iniquity. Happiness all around: no one is insulted and the few remaining Christians can celebrate one of the two greatest dates in their calendar by being Christians, not walking DEI caricatures.

I wish you all a merry, joyous, unapologetic Christmas and a happy new year, unsullied by woke perversions. Those mock priests and priestesses may empty out your churches, but not your hearts.

Britain’s unemployment rate is 4.3 per cent, which is slightly higher than earlier in the year.

But that figure is misleading. Or, abandoning understatement, it’s a barefaced lie. The government tells it to conceal its own corruption, and also that of other people: the population at large and the medical profession.

Data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that about a quarter of working-age adults, some 11 million Britons, don’t have a job. Of these, some 3.2 million currently claim disability and incapacity benefits. That number is growing at about 3,000 people per day, which suggests that Britain has more cripples now than in the aftermath of either world war.

By the end of the decade, it’s projected that one in 12 working-age Britons will be claiming sickness benefits, meaning that the current cost to the Exchequer, £87.2 billion this year, is only a point of departure – for the sky. That’s roughly what the state spends on education and much higher than the £54 billion it spends on defence.

Obviously, some of those 11 million people are genuinely incapacitated and can’t work. We can argue whether it’s the state or some other institution that ought to take care of them, but that they need taking care of is indisputable.

However, it’s just as obvious that millions of others have scammed the system into providing their livelihood on false pretences. Those swindlers are corrupt to the core – if there is a valid moral (as opposed to legal) difference between what they do and theft, I’m not aware of it.

But the system that allows that is also corrupt. If those millions of malades imaginaires were counted as unemployed rather than sick, our unemployment figures would go through the roof, giving a true picture of Britain’s economic doldrums.

Then there are thousands of GPs signing able-bodied adults off as sick. What makes the medics so gullible? The answer is, they aren’t gullible. They too are corrupt, for their own reasons.

A good friend of mine is a clinical psychiatrist who worked at a general hospital for decades. One young patient informed him he was on disability benefit. When my friend inquired about the nature of the problem, the patient explained he had a chronically bad back, making it impossible for him even to contemplate gainful employment.

Later in the interview, my friend asked the young man about his hobbies and was quite surprised to hear the reply: “Martial arts”. That made the diagnosis of a spinal disorder rather hard to believe but, to be on the safe side, my friend observed the patient for a few days.

When he realised that the young man’s movement was in no way impaired, he rang up the patient’s GP, let’s call him Dr Smith. My friend started to describe the patient’s prowess at sports requiring flexibility above all else, but Dr Smith cut him short. “Oh I know all that,” he said.

“Then why did you sign him off?” asked my friend, trying not to show too much indignation. “I’ll tell you why,” explained Dr Smith. “When I once tried to refuse to certify a healthy patient as disabled, he grabbed my computer and we ended up wrestling on the floor.”

One can understand the problem. Our overworked GPs see 50 patients a day, or even more. That gives them only a few minutes per patient and leaves no time at all for extended arguments and rolling on the floor in imitation of some techniques of freestyle wrestling.

To make their own lives easier, they sign the requisite piece of paper and keep their fingers crossed, hoping never to see this patient again. Their corruption is thus understandable, but that doesn’t make it excusable.

My friend didn’t ask Dr Smith if he, as an employee of the NHS, which is to say the state, was under pressure from the authorities not to be a stickler for medical detail when issuing disability certificates. That, however, is likely – as we’ve seen, the government has its own stake in the matter.

This triple lock on corruption should point to the truly detrimental effects of socialism. Those who take issue with it usually cite its economic inefficiency, and they are right. Socialism’s intrinsic imperative is shifting resources from the productive elements in the population, people fending for themselves in free markets, to the unproductive one, the state.

That’s why the wealth of a country is always inversely proportionate to the amount of socialism in it, that much is on the surface. Yet lurking underneath is a much greater harm socialism does to society: it corrupts.

Socialism, and any welfare state is by definition socialist, cynically claims a high moral ground for itself, something to which it’s not entitled. People in such a state are encouraged to abrogate individual responsibility for their actions, and they no longer recognise any transcendent moral authority.

By offering its own care, the paternalistic state perpetually infantilises people, turning them into children who count on their parents for their livelihood. And children are extra-moral or, if you will, pre-moral creatures. When they surreptitiously eat the chocolates Mummy told them not to touch, they aren’t bothered about the moral aspect of that action. They just hope not to get caught.

When they grow up, they happily pull a sickie even if there’s nothing wrong with them. They sense they are a key element in a vicious circle of corruption also involving their GP and his employer, the state. That makes it all right.

As I always say, when the state claims to do much for the people, it will do much to the people. And just about the worst thing it can do is encourage them to be corrupt.

When Peter Mandelson was appointed HM Ambassador to Washington, Chris LaChivita, Trump’s campaign manager, was aghast. Mandelson, he fumed, is “an absolute moron”.

That’s terribly unfair. Lord Mandelson isn’t an absolute moron, nor even a relative one. Credit where it’s due, he is much worse.

LaChivita’s epithet would more appropriately describe the man who appointed to that post someone demonstrably unsuited for it. What was Starmer thinking of, other than his gold-plated pension?

He did have a conundrum on his hands, let’s agree on that. The incoming US president sees life in terms of personal relationships conducive to making deals. Sir Keir certainly knew this. What he didn’t know was how to find within Labour ranks a mandarin or any other fruit likely to be accepted by Trump as someone to do business with.

Starmer probably went over the transcripts of the speeches on Trump made by various Labour heavyweights. Alas, if he hoped to find one that would make Trump smile, that hope must have been quickly frustrated.

Lowering his sights, Starmer must have then begun to look for derogative statements that showed some restraint. The bar set by our top diplomat, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, wasn’t high. He described Trump as: “Racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser… a troll… beneath contempt… a tyrant in a toupee… a profound threat to the international order.”

Compared to that, Mandelson’s own diatribe sounded like an epitome of moderation. He only described Trump as a “danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and racist”. Little short, but still short! Ideally, it should have been “way short’, but beggars can’t be choosers. Starmer found his candidate.

The next day he announced that Mandelson would bring “unrivalled experience” to the role and take the UK’s partnership with the US “from strength to strength”.

It’s true that Trump may sometimes overlook uncomplimentary things said about him if the utterer has since redeemed himself in his eyes. JD Vance, for example, once described Trump as “America’s Hitler”, but was still chosen as his running mate, presumably a sort of Trump answer to Rudolf Hess.

However, Vance’s own politics are close to Trump’s, and anyway he recognised the error of his ways long ago, becoming one of Trump’s staunchest allies in the Senate. Hence his unfortunate slip of the tongue was overlooked. Trump is nothing if not a pragmatist, and he knows from personal experience how easy it is sometimes to shoot from the lip.

However, as Terence once wrote, “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi”, which can be loosely translated as, “What Vance can get away with, Mandelson can’t”.

For Lord Mandelson stands for everything Trump loathes in modern politics. Mandelson’s picture belongs in the MAGA dictionary, illustrating the entry for ‘deep-state globalist’. As Trump and his acolytes use those terms, they are fully synonymous with ‘the devil incarnate’.

Mandelson was one of the architects of New Labour, an election-winning term he might have invented. With him guiding Blair’s hand, Labour came to power and embarked on a rampage of constitutional vandalism not yet outdone by any subsequent government, although I fancy Starmer’s chances.

When Mandelson’s corrupt practices came to light, he was thrown out of government on several occasions, but each time he bounced back like a bad penny, or rather a bad euro, to name his beloved monetary unit.

For Mandelson is among the most fanatical Europhiles in British politics, a man who has pushed for a second referendum when the first one had not delivered the result he wanted. He continued to campaign for ‘closer ties’ with Europe, meaning a return to the EU, during the Tory years, and between 2004 and 2008 he served as European Trade Commissioner.

That CV doubtless endeared him to Starmer, yet Starmer’s meat is Trump’s poison. Trump correctly sees the EU as the quintessence of ‘deep-state globalism’. “Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.” More to the point, repudiation of America is one of the EU’s defining features.

Since Trump is lukewarm even on foreign countries visibly friendly to America, never mind those he sees as latently hostile, he is unlikely to treat Mandelson with friendly equanimity. But that’s only part of it.

Mandelson’s “unrivalled experience” is guaranteed to make Trump see red for another reason as well. For Mandelson isn’t only a Europhile but also a Sinophile. As President of international think tank Policy Network and honorary president of the Great Britain-China Centre, he has done his utmost to establish China’s outposts in Britain, trying to deliver even some of Britain’s strategic industries to Xi’s communists.

Rightly or wrongly, Trump sees China as the greatest threat to America’s interests, and in fact the thrust of his foreign and international trade policy is to diminish China’s global influence. Hence Trump’s protectionist policies, ill-advised though they are on purely economic grounds, have a strong strategic aspect.

He probably realises that slapping 40 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports, and 20 per cent ones on everyone else’s, will hurt American consumers. But he is hoping that, where America will bleed, China – and the EU – will exsanguinate. Alas, Britain, though she still belongs to neither China nor the EU (which Trump calls “socialist mini-China”), will be collateral damage in this planned trade war.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has calculated that such tariffs will lead to a 0.8 per cent drop in GDP growth next year, cutting  a £21.5 billion hole in our budget. Britain will thus be squeezed by the jaws of a trade vice, with pressure applied from across both the Channel and the Atlantic.

Since Britain has always been America’s most (only?) reliable ally in Europe, in theory there should exist a realistic hope of a trade deal making the UK exempt from the more extreme manifestations of Trump’s protectionist zeal.

Yet that hope is guaranteed to be forlorn for as long as our diplomatic relations with Trump’s administration are in the hands of Lammy and Mandelson – and as long as Britain remains a lapdog to China, hoping to become a lapdog to the EU as well.

Mandelson, to be fair to him, is one of the sharpest political operators of recent decades, a chap who is a spin post-doctor, not just doctor. He is certainly not an ‘absolute moron’, if the term is to be used precisely. He is, however, an evil, utterly corrupt opportunist, who, more to the point, represents everything Trump detests.

Picking a better candidate for the post of HM Ambassador to the US would have been dead easy, but Starmer isn’t a man to look for easy solutions. Instead he chose the worst candidate imaginable, and it takes special talent to do that. Britain’s future is in safe hands.

Nigel Farage is cut out of higher-grade human material than the other leaders of our parliamentary parties.

Compared to him, Kemi Badenoch comes across as both heavy-handed and lightweight, although I quite liked her championship of a flat tax rate. Every calculation I’ve seen suggests that a flat rate of, say, 17 to 20 per cent would increase tax revenue, while stimulating the economy by not skinning alive those who move it forward. It would also offer the additional benefit of forcing an army of tax lawyers and accountants to seek productive employment.

Yet, in football terms, enlarging on this subject in Parliament when attacking an abysmally inept government, is a bit like trying an elaborate backheel pass rather than rolling the ball into the empty goal. Kemi is a generally good egg, but if she had Nigel’s sharpness, she could take Starmer apart.

Now Farage has built his political capital on his staunch defence of British sovereignty, be it in the face of the dastardly EU or the occupation that goes by the misnomer of immigration. Not that he is short of other ideas as well, and most of them, such as lower taxation, less regulation and more defence spending are sound.

His frustration with his parliamentary colleagues in all parties is both palpable and understandable. Very bright people, especially when they defend ideas they know are right, often get impatient with those lacking their mental acuity. However, Farage’s urge to look for kindred souls mainly on the other side of the Atlantic is odd and potentially sinister, especially in someone who holds British sovereignty as the highest virtue.

He clearly admires Donald Trump and by the looks of it that love is requited. However, there exists a thick, as opposed to a fine, line separating admiration from sycophancy, and Farage not so much oversteps as erases it.

He has been a prominent member of Trump’s retinue since the latter’s first presidential campaign. There is something untoward about the leader of a British parliamentary party taking an active part in another country’s politics, especially when such enthusiasm obviously implies a quid pro quo – or rather some 75 million quid, if rumours are to be believed.

That’s how much Trump’s appointee Elon Musk reportedly plans to transfer into the Reform Party’s coffers to smooth its way into power. Even if the actual sum is half that size, this is outrageous.

Now, Mr Musk is living proof that, with sufficient talent and application, African-Americans can succeed in both business and politics. Personally, I find him bizarre and ever so slightly unhinged, but he has many fans in Britain, including among my friends.

Since Mr Farage is no fanatic of net zero, I wonder if he remembers that Musk made his zillions mainly by exploiting the global warming swindle with his Teslas. But, however he made his money, it’s mildly speaking unethical for a British party to accept so much of Musk’s lucre.

Chaps like Trump or Musk don’t give millions to other people or parties just because they like them. They see life in transactional terms, which is why they have those millions to give.

If the Reform Party, bankrolled by American politicians (which is what Musk will officially become on 20 January), succeeds in forming the next government, that government will be in hock to a foreign power. That’s pretty good going for a party that, along with its leader, holds British sovereignty up as sacrosanct.

Every British conservative I know, and I know quite a few, felt emetic gagging at the sight of Tony ‘Yo’ Blair playing lickspittle to George W. Bush. Ready to take his marching orders from Washington, Blair committed Britain to the disastrous forays into Iraq and Afghanistan. He thought he was currying favour with the US and would get his payment in the shape of a favourable trade deal.

That still hasn’t come, and won’t while Trump is in the White House and Starmer in 10 Downing Street. There will be a deal if Vance (or Musk) is the next US president and Farage the next British prime minister. But no matter how favourable, it will be too dear at the price.

Vance or Musk would justifiably feel that they bought Farage’s premiership lock, stock and barrel. The so-called special relationship would then feel too special even for those Britons who are less fanatical about British sovereignty than a fully paid-up Reform member professes to be.

Rather than becoming His Majesty’s Prime Minister, Farage would de facto be president (governor?) of an American satrapy, beholden to a foreign power for its largesse. It’s true that the United States of America is a better overseer than the United States of Europe, aka the EU, but even it were paradise on earth, such an arrangement would stamp what’s left of British pride into the dirt.

Meanwhile, Farage goes on regular pilgrimages to places like Washington D.C, New York or Florida, hoping that each hajj will end up in the laying on of American hands, each clutching wads of banknotes. It’s time Mr Farage remembered he is a member of the world’s oldest and historically most successful parliament, not to mention a subject of His Majesty.

It seems odd to have to mention such trivia to the man who probably did more than anyone else to pull Britain out of one giant usurpation of her sovereignty. But if his undignified sycophancy to American billionaires makes us sleepwalk into another bondage, why did he bother?

I understand a foreign businessman is legally allowed to make contributions to British parties, provided his company is registered in Britain. But no such law should be tantamount to giving foreigners inordinate control of British government. It may be beneficial to consider changing such laws, both to limit the size of contributions and also to make foreign politicians ineligible for making them.

Otherwise we risk having our government sold off to the highest bidder, which isn’t the risk any self-respecting country should ever take. If Mr Farage hasn’t considered the possible ramifications of his trans-Atlantic shuttles, perhaps he should.

Donald Trump may not know what good education should be, but he certainly knows what it shouldn’t be: woke, subversive, unpatriotic, factually incorrect, contemptuous of tradition, obsessed with DEI, sympathetic to every perversion under the sun.

Hence things he and his people say on that subject, and things they plan to do, make me jump up and punch the air – or rather would, if my emotional makeup could accommodate such gestures.

The president-elect is planning to shut down the Department of Education, and I hope our own government will follow suit (fat chance). Trump doesn’t think the federal government should subsidise schools staffed with “people that hate our children”.

“We will drain the government education swamp,” he said during the campaign, “and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”

The department Trump sees in his crosshairs is different from its British counterpart. Our Department of Education is responsible for setting the national curriculum, a function that in the US is delegated to individual states.

The US Department merely administers federal funding for schools and universities, and manages student loans and various aid programmes, which takes up about four per cent of the federal budget. Trump’s people believe those functions could be better handled by other agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, Treasury and Department of the Interior.

Administration not being my core strength, I have no view on such practical details. What concerns me is the quality of education, not how it’s managed or financed, although I’m aware that such technicalities may have a bearing on the quality as well.

My general principle is that any government agency that’s not vital to the country’s life ought to be abolished. Defence, foreign affairs, home affairs, treasury all definitely rate their own ministries or departments, whatever they are called.

Some other areas, such as transportation, health, energy and agriculture should be up for discussion. Education falls into that category too, but only if the appropriate department hasn’t compromised itself beyond redemption – as it has done in the US and in every Western country I know. In that case, it should be one of the agencies on their way out.

The presence of some others, such as departments of culture, sport, women, equality, levelling-up and so forth, is simply incompatible with any sensible definition of free and sane society. Their existence is thus a litmus test of freedom and sanity, and Britain fails that test abysmally.

So does the US, but the difference is that at least its incoming administration is planning to do something about it. We should be so lucky.

“Across the country, we need to implement strict prohibitions on teaching inappropriate racial, sexual and political material to America’s schoolchildren in any form whatsoever,” Trump said last year. “And if federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education.”

No British politician in the past 50 years, not even Margaret Thatcher, has ever spoken in such uncompromising terms.

To be fair, strong, unequivocal statements on any subject tend to be suspect in Britain for any number of cultural, historical and temperamental reasons. But I’m afraid we are beyond the threshold where gentlemanly British understatement could work. We need men of action who are capable of wielding an axe, not just cellotape.

Trump, for all his faults, is such a man, and I only hope he won’t chop his own toes off when taking a swing at the Department of Education. Doing away with whole departments in the US requires the kind of Senate majority the Republicans haven’t got, which is why Trump didn’t manage to shut down that Department during his first term.

Let’s wait and see, is my stock phrase whenever Trump’s plans come up in conversation. He and his people aren’t yet in a position to do anything. But I’d happily sign my name under everything they say about education, and I’m extremely economical with such endorsements.

The Heritage Foundation, a Trump-leaning think tank, described the Department as a “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel”. And Christopher Rufo, head of another conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, pointed out a pernicious oxymoron: “An organisation can prioritise excellence or diversity, but not both simultaneously.”

He is right. The whole modern ethos sits on the rickety foundation of such oxymorons, starting with the canonical liberté, egalité, fraternité. The central element of that triad invalidates the other two, which doesn’t deter French officials from proudly displaying that nonsensical slogan on every public building.

Mr Rufo’s statement was based on facts, not just general logic. To wit, the US managed only 18^th place in PISA rankings for maths, science and reading skills, 2022. In case you are wondering who will soon rule the world, the first six places went to countries in South East Asia, with China coming in second.

Trump obviously agrees with Rufo’s diagnosis and to begin with he plans to do away with the £1 billion budget currently enjoyed by educational DEI programmes. And he wants to cut funding for any school teaching the critical race theory or “transgender insanity”, which is laudable.

I’m slightly concerned, however, about what Trump envisages as the antithesis to such educational perversions. He is planning to accredit only teachers who “embrace patriotic values and support the American way of life”.

That sounds like replacing one kind of brainwashing with another, which I don’t think is a legitimate function of schooling – even if the values to which pupils are exposed are generally positive.

Raising patriotism to an absolute may turn out to be as damaging in the end as its opposite. “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” wrote Edmund Burke, which statement adds an important qualifier to Trump’s stress on patriotism über alles.

If I taught a relevant course, I’d try to teach pupils what features make a country lovely, training them to analyse their motherland and, for comparison’s sake, other countries to see which of those features are present. Then I’d leave it to the pupils to decide whether or not they wish to “embrace patriotic values”. Mindless hand-to-heart, eyes-to-flag jingoism shouldn’t take precedence over dispassionate analysis because it may cauterise pupils’ brains.

In this life we aren’t blessed with perfect countries, and most have bad sides alongside good ones, with only the balance differing from one to another. Youngsters should develop the critical minds to figure out which is which, and, if as a result they are critical of their country, fine. Provided such criticism is based on truth made up of accurate facts and sound thought, not, as it is now, on lies made up of ideology and ignorance.

That apart, everything Trump and his people are saying and planning looks promising. And I find their intention to scale down higher education especially appealing.

Today’s ‘educators’ tend to interpret the E in DEI as not just equal access to education, but as the same education for all.

They are sensitive to the inner logic of liberal democracy whose acknowledged ideal is the common, which is to say mediocre, man, a sort of arithmetically average stencil to which all of mankind should be cut. Thus, their ideal isn’t that everyone should have access to higher education, but that everyone should have higher education.

That being ever so unrealistic, they’ll settle for merely half of the population boasting university degrees. That intermediate goal has almost been achieved in America, where 46.5 working-age adults have such qualifications.

Few of them emerge educated in the true sense of the word, although some do acquire useful professions. Most, however, have their crania pumped full of woke effluvia and ideological nonsense. They emerge with a college diploma but with neither education nor any marketable skills.

The Trump administration plans to cut the number of university graduates in half, instead diverting funds from liberal-arts colleges to apprenticeships and training programmes. That’s a good idea, provided they don’t throw out the baby of the humanities with the dirty water of ideological indoctrination.

Any society needs not just doers but also thinkers, and an advanced course in plumbing isn’t going to produce them. Again, there comes my usual mantra of let’s wait and see. For the moment, we can only hear, and most of what Trump and his people say about education sounds good.

 

 

Back in the ‘80s, my son once mocked me for never having heard the term. It was then that I asked him the question in the title.

That was a genuine request for information: to me, correct behaviour of any sort fell under the rubric of ethics, manners, social graces. What did politics have to do with any of it?

The intervening decades have clarified the issue, providing the true answer. Correctness is political because these days everything is.

Since democracy draws everyone into politics, everything becomes politicised. And when democracy acquires a liberal component, it turns every vociferous group into a jumped up political party with global pretensions.

All such groups enunciate some grievances. These usually deal with some nebulous ‘establishment’ violating the rights they claim and insist on reclaiming, by mass protests or, if necessary, even by violence.

The claims may be synchronic or diachronic, that is based on oppression presumably meted out at present or in the past, over centuries of history.

Thus, say, blacks may seek recompense for the slavery they suffered hundreds of years ago, homosexuals for having had their practice outlawed until 1967, women for not having got the vote until 1928, Muslims for the mediaeval Crusades or the more current disrespect of their customs, Indians for having been a British colony, transsexuals for the county fairs of yesteryear, where admission was charged for gawking at bearded women and men with breasts.

Every demand or appetite gets expressed in the language of human rights, inalienable yet oxymoronically alienated. And defenders of human rights are revolutionary politicians by definition, whether they write incendiary proclamations or, if need be, man the barricades. They seek not justice but a share of political power.

All political parties restrict their membership to those who swear allegiance to their cause, and the pseudo-parties of today’s malcontents are no exception. Ostensible qualifications don’t matter. Only ideological ones do. Metaphysics trumps physics yet again.

Thus, a proletarian in Bolshevik Russia wasn’t just, or necessarily, a factory worker, but any fire-eating Marxist explicitly committed to the role of the proletariat as the ‘gravedigger of capitalism’. Those striking Novocherkassk workers massacred by the KGB in 1962 weren’t proletarians, but the party apparatchiks who ordered the massacre were.

By the same token, in ‘liberal’ democracies, only women committed to feminism qualify as women and only virulent black campaigners rate membership in their race. In that spirit, rather than celebrating the first woman prime minister in British history, feminists refused to recognise Margaret Thatcher as a woman at all. And, once speaking to a black audience, Joe Biden said “If you vote for Trump, you ain’t black”, iandvertently letting the terminological cat out of the bag.

When ideology rears its head, it subsumes everything else. Come the revolution means perish anything that isn’t revolution, such is the binary mentality of today’s political movements.

Revolutionary parties typically don’t just want to put their members in power. They want to refashion the whole fabric of society, creating not a new government but a New Man.

The fanatics of human rights raised to an absolute are in that sense no different from the communists who reduced all human rights to one: being a communist, ideally a member of the party or at least, at a pinch, its sympathiser. Both groups believe that, until their arrival on the scene, society had been mired in filth and sin.

Now it has fallen upon them to purge society of its depravity, but it takes political power to do so. Both groups, old-style communists and today’s malcontents, are aware of this: an ideology can only ever triumph by political action.

The two are similar not only in their self-acknowledged mission, but also in the methods of achieving success. Mutatis mutandis, both rely on a combination of state coercion and private efforts, although the relative weight of the two differs in communist dictatorships and ‘liberal’ democracies.

In communist countries, the state is primary and the individual secondary; in liberal democracies, it’s the other way around. In the former, the state specifies the new garment to be cut out of the old fabric of society and then brainwashes the people to help along either actively (say, by snitching on their neighbours) or at least passively, by outspoken acquiescence.

In ‘liberal’ democracies, the loudmouthed activists lead and the state follows. Subversive pressure is applied upwards, not downwards, as it is in communist dictatorships. But the pressure is the same: out with the old, in with the new – whatever the new may be.

Since people tend to think in words, or at least enunciate their thoughts verbally, both communists and ‘liberal’ democrats attach an inordinate importance to words. Language is turned into a battleground of political struggle.

Both communists and today’s malcontents know that their war has to conquer language and hence thought if it’s to conquer at all. That’s the essence of what I call glossocracy, an attempt to dominate society by dominating its speech.

An offhand phrase that in traditional societies would have been dismissed as a trivial irrelevance is raised to the level of crime against society, or whichever of its subdivisions that feigns offence. Communists were, if anything, more liberal in that respect: only their creed was off limits for intemperate or disrespectful quips. Everything else was fair game.

By contrast, ‘liberal’ glossocrats are trying to tear social fabric into tatters from different directions. Each group of politicised malcontents has different desiderata and they all snipe at different targets. But all those groups are closely allied, brought together as they are by their commitment to recreating the world in their own image.

Thus, any word any member of the Malcontent International might see as objectionable will be instantly censured by another member even if his own bugbear is different. That’s why stand-up comedy is going out of fashion: it’s hard to be funny if every joke may conceivably offend someone, thereby infringing on his self-proclaimed rights and exposing the joker to a career-ending slap on the wrist.

While the ‘liberal’ democratic state is a latecomer to the party, it makes a grand entrance by supporting the malcontents with its own censorship, legislation and law enforcement. If in the process it has to become illiberal and undemocratic, then so be it. Words don’t matter – unless they are glossocratic words, in which case they matter more than anything else.

That’s why political correctness is an accurate term. It’s a form of political tyranny, which is in many ways more despotic than communism ever was. Communists relied on execution cellars and death camps to control the population, with glossocracy being only one of the arrows in their quiver. If one refrained from critical remarks, one was in the clear.

In ‘liberal’ democracies, glossocracy is just about the only, or at least the sharpest, weapon, and it attracts a much greater number of wielders. People aren’t just sold but agree to buy a new morality, new society, new definition of what is correct. And no tyranny is as successful as self-tyranny, nor any censorship as effective as self-censorship.

Such is the nature, and success, of political correctness, these days also going by the name of wokery. But tyranny by any other name smells just as putrid.

If pursued with vigour and resolve, liberal democracy will eventually resemble a snake devouring its own tail. It’ll steadily become illiberal and undemocratic.

Such is my recurrent theme and, if you disagree, look no further than Labour’s attempts to sneak Britain back in the EU.

Sir Keir Starmer refuses to word his aspiration quite so forthrightly. Instead, he talks about a “reset of relations” and closer ties with the EU. A distinction without a difference, I dare say.

Actually, there is a difference. At least, full membership conferred some power within the bloc. Not much, but some.

What Starmer means by closer ties is recognising the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and following its laws on free movement of people, food safety, access to British fishing waters, workers’ rights and so on.

A customs union will follow as night follows day, even if the government is denying that possibility at the moment. However, its reputation for what lawyers call truth and veracity doesn’t inspire much trust in their vows on any subject, especially this one.

In 2016, 17.4 million Britons voted to leave the EU, which is more than have ever voted for anything else, and certainly more than those who voted Labour this year (9.7 million). Yet the government clearly believes that its 9.7 votes give it a mandate to overturn the will of 17.4 million.

Then one notices that not a single member of Starmer’s cabinet was among those 17.4 million. They all voted Remain and some, including Starmer himself, actively campaigned for a second referendum.

That proves their intimate understanding of democracy as practised by the EU. People’s choice is all fine and well, provided it’s the choice European federalists favour at the moment. Otherwise, people will have to choose again – and keep choosing until they get it right.

That has happened with the democratically held referenda in Denmark, Austria, Ireland and France. In the first instance, the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty. In the second, Austria voted in a party the EU found unsavoury. In the third, the people of Ireland voted not to ratify the Nice Treaty on the enlargement of the EU. And the French voted against establishing a European Constitution. In all four instances, the EU put its foot down and the boot in.

Starmer and his fellow Remainers have so far been unable to act in that spirit, but they clearly feel that time is on their side. Meanwhile, the government has set up a 100-strong unit to renegotiate relations with the EU. That is, to knock on the EU’s door, trying to flog bits and pieces of British sovereignty for a pittance.

The EU is a manifestation of liberal democratic eschatology at its most strident. It advertises itself as Europe’s ultimate political achievement, the happy ending of its political history. Finally, the European nation has founded a body that represents it properly.

There is a slight problem with this self-image: the body exists, but the nation doesn’t. There exist Swedes, Italians, Bulgarians, Poles, Belgians, even Germans, a hodgepodge of nations that collectively don’t add up to a single one. You don’t think they all coalesce on the basis of Christianity, do you? No, I didn’t think so.

The EU is therefore a sort of IOU issued to European nations: it takes their sovereignty in exchange for a promise to knock them all together into a single entity. In that sense, it’s similar to Soviet communism that took away everything possible from the people, including often their lives, but promised a mythical bright future in exchange.

Put another way, the EU is as much of a utopia as the USSR was, and it’s as pernicious and as socialist, if not yet so violent. That part may still come though, something to look forward to.

The essence of socialism, which is what liberal democracy inexorably tends to become, is maximum centralisation of power. Even as we speak, our Labour government is planning to merge many local councils to create more manageable super-units further removed from the very demos that gave its name to democracy.

The government’s White Paper explains that its aim is to “reduce the number of politicians” involved in making decisions. That’s classic socialism (or liberal democracy, if you’d rather), with its belief that politics is safer in the hands of bureaucrats and apparatchiks than those of elected representatives. The aim of politics seems to be the elimination of politics, a paradox that goes largely unnoticed.

Transfer of power to supranational bodies, which is to say as far away from the national electorate as geography will allow, is a natural extension of the same process. The EU is its perfect example.

Its functionaries proudly boast that they produce some 70 per cent of the laws inside the bloc. That makes them as industrious as they are unaccountable. For the elected part of the EU, its so-called Parliament, is strictly a talk shop. It decides, in round numbers, nothing.

All decisions that count are made by the EU government, the European Commission. Like God, it’s accountable to no one other than itself. The people haven’t put the Commissioners in power, which means the people have no legal way of getting them out.

Nor do Europeans have any recourse when their ruling socialist-bureaucratic elite fails to act in their interests, acting instead solely in the interests of expanding and perpetuating its own power. At least, in the absolute monarchies of yesteryear, princes were accountable to the aristocracy, councils of elders, sometimes even independent courts.

Such is the body for which Starmer’s socialist loins are aching. He doesn’t seem to have much of a mind to consider the ramifications at any depth, but he is richly endowed with an instinctive understanding of the EU’s inner logic – indeed the inner logic of all states and superstates calling themselves liberal democratic.

He hears the clarion call of his ideology in every tonal detail, and it muffles the barely audible whispers of reason and morality. Speaking of reason, there is not a single rational argument for Britain rejoining the EU or even establishing a closer relationship with it.

The bloc’s economy is in the doldrums, exacerbated by its own suicidal, ideologically inspired policies, such as net zero and workers’ rights. Joining that club, say, in the 1960s at least could have delivered some economic benefits, if at a cost that anyone who respected Britain’s constitution would have found intolerable. This time around, the cost would be even steeper, while the benefits non-existent.

Various EU shills in all major parties (except Reform) are lying that “Brexit has failed”. In reality, it hasn’t even been tried.

Having divested themselves of the outer paraphernalia of EU membership, several consecutive governments have been desperately clinging to every whiff of the EU spirit. They, Tory and Labour alike, made Britain bear the brunt of reduced trade with Europe, but were prevented by their innate socialist longings from taking advantage of the possible benefits.

Lower taxation, deregulation, tight control of national borders, freedom to pursue economic opportunities all over the globe – all these were made possible by Brexit. And all these have been tossed aside by our leaders, guided as they all are by their ideological fallacies and overpowering self-interest.

Sometimes I wonder if Starmer has been bribed by Nigel Farage to pursue pro-EU policies. A little more of the same, and the Reform Party will saunter into government at the next election, with the establishment politicians, both Labour Full Strength and Labour Lite (aka Tories), repeating by rote their mantra of being committed to democracy.

No, wrong thought. Starmer doesn’t need any inducement to act stupidly. That ability comes naturally.

“Science and religion are incompatible,” said a middle-aged French gentleman at a dinner party the other day. I said nothing, and there were two reasons for my self-restraint.

First, my ability to frame a nuanced argument in French doesn’t inspire self-confidence. Second, these days I don’t engage in such jousts even when they are conducted in languages I know better.

Being a combative sort by nature, I’m happy to debate any idea close to my interlocutor’s heart – provided it is indeed an idea and not a mindless cliché mouthed without the benefit of any prior thought.

When an argument starts with a mindless platitude, it has nowhere else to go but to more of the same. So I knew exactly what that chap would have said had I taken exception to his inane statement.

Religion is just superstition, he’d have explained, strictly a matter of personal faith and hence lacking any claim to objective truth. Science, on the other hand, deals not with ghosts but with hard facts. Therefore, it’s in possession of that objective truth that eludes believers in God.

Science to such people means specifically natural science, because things like history, sociology, economics, philosophy or, God forbid, theology don’t qualify for that exalted status. But natural science is the ultimate deity of modernity, weaned as it was on the Age of Reason, so defined by those whose capacity for reasoning was weak.

As a general observation, one must point out that science is rather fickle for a deity. The objective truth it identified yesterday can easily become suspect today, a strictly antiquarian exhibit tomorrow and something one scrapes off one’s shoe sole the day after.

That point, however, is too obvious to stand on its own hind legs. After all, men honestly pursuing truth may approach it in incremental steps, never hesitating to move on to the next one if their quest compels them to do so. If they qualify their findings with something like ‘as things stand today’, they are in the clear as far as I’m concerned.

However, the operative words here are “honestly pursuing truth”. If scientists did nothing but that, one would have to believe them to be immune to the toxic effects of modernity, those that afflict every walk of life, from art to politics, from education to medicine, from architecture to sport. Such immunity strikes me as unlikely or rather, equivocation aside, impossible.

Enter Matthew Syed with his article in The Times. Mr Syed is among those former sports journalists who have expanded their horizons into general social commentary. Most of them are men of the Left, meaning they don’t feature prominently on my must-read list.

Mr Syed is no exception, and normally I give his articles a miss. But I’m glad I’ve read this one.  

He writes about Parliament blocking the legislation banning marriage between first cousins. MPs who voted against it cited scientific evidence that, shows Syed, was nothing but a result of “scientific malpractice”.

You see, most consanguineous marriages occur, or rather are usually arranged, within the British Pakistani population, one to which Mr Syed himself belongs. Marrying first cousins is customary there for any number of reasons, religious, economic and social.

However, consanguineous couplings may produce progeny suffering from genetic disorders. Alas, few people know how bad that problem is, and that’s where “scientific malpractice” is to blame.

Finding anything wrong with any custom of a racial minority smacks of racism, the eighth deadly sin that, unlike the traditional seven, can end a career in any field, emphatically including science.

Yesterday I argued that liberal democracy is neither democratic nor particularly liberal. Quite the opposite: the range of permissible public inquiry is steadily narrowing throughout the West. Hence, writes Mr Syed, geneticists are told in no uncertain terms to desist from any research into the medical consequences of that particular custom – or else.

The received view, “endemic throughout the media, from the BBC to The Telegraph”, is that cousin marriage doubles the genetic risk compared to unrelated couples. “Journalists,” writes Mr Syed, “trust what scientists tell them”.

But scientists lie: “When inbreeding persists through generations (when cousins get married who are themselves the children of cousins), the risks are far higher, which is why British Pakistanis account for 3.4 per cent of births nationwide but 30 per cent of recessive gene disorders, consanguineous relationships are the cause of one in five child deaths in Redbridge [a heavily Muslim community] and the NHS hires staff specifically to deal with these afflictions.”

The article is so good that a paraphrase would do it an injustice. Might as well quote at length: “What I hope you are gleaning from all this is how scientific inquiry is being distorted and suppressed out of an almost crippling fear of offending cultural sensitivities; how information vital to the public interest is being censored out of concern that it might be prejudicial to the ‘customs’ of immigrant communities.”

We are gleaning just that. Moreover, Syed’s conclusion isn’t only correct but also utterly predictable. However, I wonder if he extends his integrity into researching areas less close to him personally.

For consanguineous marriage, with its implications for Muslim populations, isn’t the only area where scientists would tread at their peril. Another such is the innate differences in IQ among various races.

In their 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray showed, data in hand, that average IQ differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin.

Their findings were far from indisputable, and in fact Thomas Sewell, one of today’s thinkers I respect most, disputed them convincingly. But there was little doubt that the authors conducted their research in good faith, searching for that ever-elusive truth.

However, true or false, that particular issue is simply not up for discussion to modern scientists, which point was quickly hammered home. The authors suffered instant ostracism, which has never been reversed.

Would Mr Syed welcome objective, dispassionate research in that area? Somehow I doubt it, but I am open to a pleasant surprise. Another such surprise would be his honest comment on the science of global warming, perhaps the most glaring and definitely the most consequential example of scientific legerdemain.

Western, especially European, governments are busily driving their countries into penury “to save our planet” from the catastrophic effects of warm weather. The Australian climatologist Ian Plimer has published two book debunking the chapter and verse of that ‘evidence’ for the scam it is.

Among other things, he shows that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is but a trace gas of a trace gas having next to no effect on climate. Most of climate change comes from solar activity, and all fluctuations are strictly cyclical. In fact, the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known life. (In Roman times, grapes grew profusely in Scotland.)

Dr Plimer also proves the falsity of the notorious ‘hockey stick’ graph, supposedly showing a steep rise in global temperatures. This came from the straight swindle of choosing a biased statistical subset, covering too short a period for any far-reaching conclusions.

Every sentence in Plimer’s books comes with a long list of references, citing eminent scientists in various disciplines. Yet modernity chooses to trust only scientists who tell it what it wants to hear. And what it wants to hear is Greta Thunberg’s hysterical shrieks against capitalism, not Ian Plimer citing reams of serious evidence.

And yet people who are too busy with their quotidian existence to think and study for themselves repeat any falsehood if it can be attributed to ‘science’. They can’t believe in God, but the need to believe in something doesn’t go away. So they put science on their mental altar and genuflect, not realising that they are praying to a false god.

My French dinner companion was only partly right: religion is indeed incompatible with that kind of science. However, an honest inquiry into the physical aspect of life is perfectly compatible with the knowledge that the physical aspect isn’t all there is.

Science and religion are complementary, not contradictory. But to realise that, one has to do some reading and thinking on one’s own, which task escapes most people nowadays.