Author: Alexander Boot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone who insists that no help is needed obviously hasn’t been following the news.

Forget about another lost decade. After Labour’s first month in office, Britain is on track to give a whole new meaning to what Gertrude Stein once called ‘the lost generation’.

The economic, social and cultural damage done already or confidently predictable in the near future will take many years to remedy even if a sage government takes over at the next election. Yet, as things stand, the odds against such a government ever turning up are prohibitive.

Eagle-eyed observers can’t help noticing that our liberal democracy consistently raises nonentities to power. This is a serious matter: the first requirement for any political system should be that it elevate to government those fit to govern.

Brilliant statesmen can paper over the cracks in any system, while incompetent ones are guaranteed to turn such cracks into gaping holes with jagged edges. Casting a panoramic glance over our political scene, I can see no candidates for the former role.

My heartfelt belief is that any system that continues to malfunction with predictable regularity suffers from wide-ranging structural defects. However, proposing a complete overhaul of democracy is what a friend of mine unkindly calls ‘mental masturbation’.

An eminently practical man, he refuses to speculate about impractical ideas, however attractive they may sound. If it can’t be done, it shouldn’t be discussed, he says.

I’m not so sure about that. It’s useful to start out by establishing an ideal and then deciding how much of it is attainable. Proceeding strictly from immediate expediency loses sight of any perspective, eventually leading to untreatable myopia.

But fine, I resign. Let’s not even consider any sweeping changes. But may I please suggest a minor tweak? Surely there’s no harm in that?

If you’ll forgive a little pun, nowadays an opposition party climbing the greasy pole to power always lies in wait. Our Labour government illustrates this statement by practising electoral mendacity on a level never seen before, certainly not in my lifetime.

One lie is currently in the news, for Labour clearly had no intention to keep its promise of no new taxes for ‘the working people’. Thus, just five months ago, Rachel Reeves, then Shadow Chancellor, promised “no additional tax rises”, other than those already announced.

When she removed the Shadow from her title, however, she announced massive tax hikes sucking an extra £40 billion out of the economy and hurting everyone working in the private sector. One gets a distinct impression that in Labour’s taxonomy only members of publicly financed nomenklatura qualify as working people.

Now, as any regular reader of this space will confirm, all that was predictable. Even someone with my modest grasp of politics and economics knew that Starmer, Reeves et al. were lying through their teeth. They planned to go the whole socialist hog from day one, and only kept that aim under wraps for tactical reasons.

By then the Tories had got up everyone’s nose so much that Labour might have been elected even without their massive campaign of bare-faced lying. However, they’d certainly not have won by a landslide enabling them to wreck Britain at their leisure with no meaningful opposition anywhere in sight.

So how come the electorate didn’t see through that transparent tissue of lies? I could answer that question, but not with the brevity this format requires. Let’s just state the obvious fact that our gullible voters evidently aren’t equipped to tell the truthful wheat from the mendacious chaff.

They are always ready to swallow any lie hook, line and stinker, and Labour’s lies do reek to high heaven. (My propensity for feeble puns is a form of Tourette’s, doctor, and there’s nothing I can do about it.) Britons clearly can’t protect themselves against false promises made to dupe them into voting a certain way.

Now, if they can’t protect themselves against the system, the system must be changed to protect them anyway. That can be done by making specific campaign promises legally binding for at least the first half of the upcoming term in government. If the victorious party then proceeds to break them, the election results must be annulled, and a new election called.

By specific promises I don’t mean generalised waffle about a better, fairer Britain, yet again making British nativity the winning ticket in the lottery of life. Such claims are too vague to be enforceable, which is true everywhere, not only in Britain. (MAGA is an example of such nebulous sloganeering.)

But if a party makes concrete promises, such as not to raise the minimum wage, nor to increase the tax burden on small businesses, it must be held to them legally. Failure to honour such promises must incur a hefty fine and an electoral re-run.

If the electorate still chooses to vote the same way, so be it. But at least the people will be voting in the knowledge of what kind of government their choice ushers in.

As it is, something odd is going on. A politician may be drummed out of his chosen profession for telling fibs about such relatively trivial misdeeds as conducting an ill-advised extramarital affair, taking money for posing some questions in Parliament, making shady investments, safeguarding the minor interests of a country other than his own.

But he suffers no consequences whatsoever for lying his way into power, betraying the confidence of millions of people, and hurting them the way he intended all along but kept that intention under wraps. Micro-corruption is a sacking offence, while macro-corruption is a legitimate way of doing politics.

Yet I fail to see any valid moral difference between knowingly making false electoral promises and stuffing the ballot boxes. In either case, political power isn’t so much won as stolen, which compromises the whole system so much as to make it inoperable. A stolen election isn’t substantially different from a coup d’état.

My pragmatic friend will probably regard any mention of enforceable morality in politics as a sign of onanistic mental propensities. However, I’ll argue that in this case I’m the one who is being pragmatic.

It takes moral censorship to punish immoral politics – and to protect the people from the dire consequences of broken promises. Alas, we’ve been served yet another proof that the people are incapable of protecting themselves. This means our democracy is in urgent need of help, and my modest proposal is a way to start.

The Leftists have always been with us, but the current crop is different.

People like MacDonald, Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell, even Wilson may not make the rather short list of politicians I venerate. But at least they all loved their country and tried to do their best for her.

Today’s lot hate Britain and hence don’t mind hurting her with destructive policies. But what does loving one’s country really mean?

One’s countrymen are one’s neighbours, and both Testaments issue the same commandment: “Love thy neighbour as thyself”. That raises the next question of exactly how much we love ourselves.

Few of us consider ourselves perfect, free of any character blemishes. Few believe they’ve never done anything wrong, and most people I know – including a certain A. Boot – have done shameful things they’ve regretted ever since.

Yet though we may not always like ourselves, on balance we seldom lose self-love. Fair enough: we like for something; we love in spite of everything.

It was the US naval commander Decatur who some 200 years ago applied that principle to patriotism in a spiffy toast: “My country, right or wrong.” Since then that phrase has adorned the rear bumper of many American cars, but the sentiment hasn’t made any inroads into the hearts of Labour ministers.

Ideologically, which is to say emotionally, they loathe Britain, right or wrong. And intellectually, they are too stupid to know right from wrong.

Thus they hate every great cultural and political landmark signposting Britain’s history, along with the giants associated with those landmarks. However, much as I despise the likes of Starmer and Reeves, I admire their honesty.

They don’t try to conceal their feelings for Britain. They hate the country and they don’t care who knows it. That’s why the moment they lied their way into 10 and 11 Downing Street, they immediately removed from those Georgian walls the portraits of the men and women the nation has every right to be proud of.

When Britons argue about naming the country’s greatest monarch, Elizabeth I is always in that conversation. So naturally Starmer found her likeness unworthy of a place in Number 10. The sins of that great monarch weren’t redeemed by her sex – the benefits of womanhood don’t apply to colonialist vermin.

Off the wall Queen Bess went, although to the best of my knowledge her portrait hasn’t yet been tossed onto the pyre. I wouldn’t put that past our Marxists, but I suppose they need to lodge their feet more firmly under the desk before touching a match to the twigs.

Elizabeth’s reign was really the beginning of the British Empire, a political entity our rulers see as evil and in every way inferior to the Soviet Union. Thus, following the Queen into what their role model Trotsky called ‘the dustbin of history’ was Sir Walter Raleigh, who was prominent in colonising North America. Colonising anything makes anyone worse than Hitler and immeasurably worse than Stalin. So no mercy to Sir Walter from Sir Keir.

And who was the greatest cultural figure of Elizabethan England and hence tarred with the same imperial brush? Correct. So William Shakespeare was also deemed unworthy of a place on that wall, and his portrait was yanked off.

The British Empire reached its peak under another Queen unworthy of her sex. Rather than repudiating the Empire as the devil’s spawn, Victoria went a long way towards strengthening it. And William Gladstone was one of the most illustrious prime ministers of that era.

Now Gladstone operated on the left of Victorian politics, but Victorian left wasn’t left enough. Contemporaneous though Gladstone was with Marx, he didn’t exactly heed the latter’s dogma. Still, he might have hung on to a place on that wall had the sins of his father not been visited upon him.

Sir John Gladstone owned 2,508 African slaves, and was paid £105,781 in compensation after slavery in the colonies was abolished in 1833. In Britain proper it was abolished in 1807, and in fact English privateers had been harassing the slave trade for many decades before that. Still, the mark of Cain was attached to William Gladstone and, as far as Starmer is concerned, it’s indelible. Into the bin with that reprobate’s portrait.

Now we all appreciate that every woman in high office strikes a blow for equality. Yet we’ve also had to learn that womanhood is a political, not biological, concept. No one is born a woman – this is an honour that has to be earned by wholehearted commitment to neo-Marxism.

That may be partly why Starmer finds it hard to define a woman. Physiologically, he has already implied that 34,000 British women have penises (one-tenth of one per cent, as he put it). But politically, he’d have to deny their sex to millions of Tory-voting women, which may be a step too far even for him.

However, he could still dump the portrait of that sexless monster Margaret Thatcher and did so with alacrity. The first female prime minister doesn’t belong in the residence of a committed feminist.

Starmer’s neighbour, Rachel Reeves, has the power of her feminist convictions. Moving into 11 Downing Street, she declared that thenceforth a female-only rule would be imposed. All artworks in her new residence must be “of a woman or by a woman”.

In that spirit, she threw out the portrait of former chancellor Nigel Lawson who, in addition to his toxic conservatism, committed the crime of being male. The vacant place was filled with the portrait of Ellen Wilkinson, who in 1920 became a founding member of the British Communist Party.

I don’t know whether Miss Reeves’s grasp of communist history matches her affection for it, but, unless she’s prejudiced against foreigners, I could recommend a few other candidates. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, or… no I get it. Rosa Zemliachka would be even better.

That lovely girl was in charge of massacring 100,000 people in the Crimea during the Russian Civil War. Her Marxist credentials were thus impeccable and, unlike Miss Wilkinson, she succeeded in putting them into practice big time.

Yes, I know she wasn’t British but, on current evidence, I doubt Starmer and Reeves are either, in any other than the ethnic sense. Their spiritual home is where their art is.

You probably don’t know that a few years ago I appeared twice on BBC panels discussing crime and punishment. However, if you read on, you’ll know why I haven’t been invited since.

My fellow panellists recognised only two functions of imprisonment. By far the most vital, as far as they were concerned, was the rehabilitation of the criminal. Then, in a strictly secondary or rather tertiary position, was deterrence, punishment pour encourager les autres.

(That phrase literally means ‘to encourage others’, but in Voltaire’s Candide it was used in reference to the rather discouraging execution of Admiral John Byng.)

Hence the discussion generally revolved around the most effective ways of awakening prisoners’ conscience, curing them of their moral or psychological defects and helping them along the road leading from devil to angel. Deterrence also featured, but only as an afterthought.

My interlocutors doubted imprisonment deterred at all. It would only deter if sentences were so draconian, and conditions in prisons so awful, that no civilised country could tolerate such inhumanity. We are all of us humane people, aren’t we?

I tried, on both occasions, to argue that neither rehabilitation nor deterrence can be the primary goal of gaol. However, the moment I uttered the dread word ‘justice’, my participation in the discussion drew to an end, more or less.

So, as a matter of fact, did the discussion itself, in the sense of dispassionate, reasoned discourse. The other participants became shrill and excited, drowning my objections in the gallons of spittle they sputtered. It was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that my notion of justice was too antediluvian to be entertained in polite, which is to say liberal, society.

I tried to defend myself, which attempt failed even more miserably when I dared mention the death penalty. My partners in crime and punishment added a few decibels to their animadversions, outshouting me with ease and leaving me in no doubt that it was only troglodytes like me who merited such punishment. Moreover, they’d be happy to administer it personally.

Since, as I write this, no opposition is peeking over my shoulder, I’ll try to make my belated case. It will be open to discussion, but at least only after I’ve made it.

The idea of retributive justice was exhaustively covered in Psalm 28:4-5: “Give them according to their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours: give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert.”

‘Desert’ being a cognate of ‘deserve’, the scriptural idea of punishment is justice: giving criminals what their acts deserve. I’d suggest that such retributive justice upholds human dignity, while the ‘humane’ justice favoured by my opponents demeans it.

The scriptural, traditional idea of justice differs from the modern equivalent because so does the scriptural, traditional idea of man. Man, according to the formative documents of our civilisation, is made in the image of God.

That doesn’t imply physical likeness. It does, however, imply an approximation to God’s freedom and hence man’s uniqueness among all God’s creatures. Free will – and not, for example, consciousness – is in fact the most salient feature distinguishing man from animals.

A dog possesses a consciousness, but he isn’t free to make choices, such as whether or not to chase a cat around the block. His behaviour is wholly contingent on his biological makeup. Fido will go after Tabby not because he chooses to but because he is programmed to do so.

Man, on the other hand, is free to choose how to act, and after the Fall he can choose not only right but also wrong. This freedom presupposes responsibility for his actions, enjoying the consequences of good choices and suffering those of bad ones. If a man chooses to rob, steal or kill, he is acting as a free agent and deserves punishment commensurate with robbery, theft or murder.

Such is the inference from Scripture, and one can argue that all of Western criminal jurisprudence is nothing but commentary on that inference. Or rather it used to be.

Traditional justice was based on a certain understanding of man’s nature and, as that understanding changed, so did the concept of justice. Ever since the chap whom Nabokov invariably called “that Viennese quack” began to put his mendacious nonsense on paper, man has been losing his freedom in the eyes of progressive people.

More and more he began to resemble an automaton wired to act in a certain way irrespective of his reason. More and more the difference between Fido and his owner got to be seen as that of degree, not kind.

If a man commits a crime, that’s not because he chose to do so but because some mysterious subconscious or unconscious mechanisms in his psyche clicked together. Since as a result he robbed an old woman rather than helping her across the street, those mechanisms must have gone awry.

Now, when a car mechanism breaks down, you go to a car mechanic. And when a breakdown occurs in a psychological mechanism, a modern man will go to a therapist, ideally one qualified in the dark arts of psychoanalysis.

The therapist will start by asking the kind of embarrassing personal questions any sensible person should refuse to answer, perhaps even rudely. The shrink will then set up a schedule for more of the same and perhaps suggest some supplementary cures, such as physical exercise, more sleep, less worrying – whatever.

That way the malfunctioning mechanisms, existing mostly in the fantasy of the therapist and his brainwashed patient, will be repaired and recalibrated. The patient will be cured or, to use my opponents’ language, rehabilitated.

When the patient happens to be a prisoner kept under lock and key, he has no choice whether to undergo rehabilitation or not – just as he is presumed not to have made the free choice to commit his crime. He does, however, have a vested interest in faking therapeutic success. If he can convince prison authorities that he is now a new man full of the milk of human kindness, he can get an early release, and never mind what he did to those hitchhikers.

After all, if rehabilitation is the main aim of imprisonment, it would be both inhuman and irrational to keep an inmate inside after the aim has been achieved. Justice is thus put on a quasi-professional basis. It’s up to professional therapists (or officials acting in that capacity) to decide whether or not the prisoner is sufficiently rehabilitated to be released into society.

Society, on the other hand, has no say in the matter. Made up as it is of rank amateurs in rehabilitating therapy, it’s not deemed competent enough to decide whether or not justice has been done.

However, in Britain at any rate, the decision to convict a defendant in the first place is left to amateurs, ‘twelve good men and true’. They are a microcosm of society and their job is to assess the arguments presented by professional jurists and then pass their verdict on society’s behalf.

In other words, it’s society that decides whether the defendant deserves to be punished. The ancient understanding is that in such matters it’s society’s interests that must be protected first and foremost.

It was a commonplace that crimes unsettle society, making it uneasy and agitated. Social tranquillity can only be restored by the criminal getting the punishment he deserves – the punishment for the act he freely chose to commit as a man created in the image of God but subject to original sin.

That’s why back in 1924 Lord Chief Justice Hewart uttered these wise and oft-repeated words: “Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done”. Rest assured that he didn’t mean society being satisfied that imprisonment has had its desired therapeutic effect.

By punishing a criminal for his act, society pays him the ultimate compliment of accepting him as a man made in the image of God and hence endowed with free will. This is the proud affirmation of humanity, that of the criminal and man in general.

By contrast, treating a criminal not as a man serving the punishment he deserves, but as a patient who was compelled to act by some treatable psychological quirk, deprives the criminal – and also all of us – of humanity, mankind’s most proud possession.

Pervert the understanding of man’s nature, and perversion of justice is just round the corner. There it is, staring us in the face.

My friend’s father owned a successful mid-size factory in London. That gave him an acute sense of guilt because he was a communist.

The old man must have cursed himself for being a hypocrite. After all, his ideology said that businessmen didn’t just hire workers. They exploited them, sucked their blood.

Yet there he was, committing the sin of enterprise in direct contravention of his innermost beliefs. But in another, alien culture it was possible to repent sins and atone for them.

Taking his cue from his enemies, the man embarked on a lifelong programme of expiation. He regrettably continued to make a handsome income from his factory, but in recompense remained loyal to another tenet of his faith.

He might have been a manufacturer, but at least he wasn’t a capitalist. That is, he refused to invest his money, making it multiply without the use of manual labour. He forswore any securities, such as shares and bonds, or properties for rent. And when his collection of Victorian paintings began to increase in value, he did a Savonarola and lit up his own bonfire of the vanities in the garden.

The old man’s aim was to make sure that his heirs wouldn’t have sizeable legacies after his death, and he succeeded to the best of his abilities. All my friend inherited was an extensive knowledge of Marxist literature and an enduring hatred of Marxism.

I acquired both such knowledge and such sentiments via a different route, having had to study Marxism academically at my Moscow university. Allow me to boast about my erudition: I sat through courses in The History of the Communist Party, Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism, Scientific Atheism, Marxist Aesthetics and Marxist Political Economics.

That was a schizophrenic experience in that both my professors and I knew that those disciplines had nothing to do with reality. And yet they – and after them I – had to repeat Marxist inanities by rote. Apparently, I didn’t do so with sufficient conviction, which is why I acquired an early reputation as an anti-Soviet vermin.

But on the plus side, I did learn enough about Marxism to understand exactly where Starmer, Reeves, Rayner, Lammy et al. are coming from. They are the ones who took that vile ideology seriously, even though I doubt they studied it in any depth.

Luckily for them – and unluckily for us – no serious study is required. For Marxism has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with viscera, where hatred and envy reside. All Marxism does is channelling it into the conduits of specific targets and policies.

Like my friend’s Marxist father, our rulers detest the very notion of money making money. Along with Marx, they subscribe to the labour theory of value. Marx borrowed it from Smith, but added his own touches. Without going into detail, that theory says that capital must only reflect the amount of labour that has gone into its generation.

Capital produced by any other means is criminal usury. Such illegitimate gains must be confiscated and the money-grubbing fat cats punished, ideally by death but, barring that, repossession and redistribution.

This explains why Starmer struggles so much when asked to define “the working people” who, according to him, won’t suffer higher taxes. He doesn’t really mean “working people”, such as doctors or lawyers putting in 100-hour weeks. He means the working class, defined by Marx as strictly urban proletariat.

Never mind that the term has become anachronistic in our digitised economies. We are talking ideology here, not reality. However, political decorum still prohibits using overtly Marxist terminology and venting characteristic Marxist resentments.

Hence Starmer sweats whenever asked to define the working people. He can’t tell us who they are for fear of being branded a Marxist, still not an election-winning tag. However, he can state unequivocally who they are not: people deriving their income from securities, rental properties or private pensions.

Even though Starmer isn’t an especially bright man, I’m sure he realises that most of those reprobates had to work hard all their lives to make the capital that now gives them some income. But that’s reality, which isn’t the terrain inhabited by ideology. Those people have capital, which makes them capitalists. And Marx taught that all capitalists are bottom-feeding bloodsuckers. QED.

The ghost of my friend’s father came wafting in, but we’ve already established that he was a sinner. While breaking the commandment proscribing ‘unearned’ income, he illogically still indulged in exploitation, which is another deadly sin – and one Starmer is set to stamp out as decisively as he can.

That’s why, while slapping new taxes on capital gains, he is also set to increase the cost of doing business by hiking a whole raft of corporate taxes. It’s no use proving to him, figures in hand, that such policies will backfire on the very ‘working people’ he claims to venerate. He knows all that, and doesn’t care.

The principal dynamic of Marxism isn’t love of the poor but hatred of the rich, however loosely and arbitrarily defined. Love of the poor only ever manifests itself in the Marxists’ wholehearted attempts to increase their number.

That’s why this month alone 1,600 business owners have shut up shop – even before the first Labour budget is announced. And that’s why wealthy people are fleeing Britain in droves, taking their capital with them, along with the jobs the capital produced and the tax revenue it generated.

Again, economists long on fundamental concepts but short on street smarts are crying havoc, but they have no dogs of war or, more to the point, of reason, to let slip. Reason has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this. This Marxist lot are driven by visceral, ideological predisposition, of which hatred is the main component.

Their attitude to capital fleeing the country was neatly encapsulated by Dale Vince, the green energy tycoon who donated five of his millions to Labour. “If people only live here because they pay less tax, they should f*** off,” said Mr Vince, somewhat hypocritically. “This is a brilliant country,” he added. “There’s no way people won’t live here because of a fairer tax system.”

A fairer tax system to this lot is one that acts on Marxist dogma by stealth. Alas, the electorate has been so thoroughly brainwashed and dumbed down that people don’t realise their vote ushers in Marxism through the back door.

And of course Starmer evokes the memory of my friend’s father by making sure ‘the rich’ can’t pass on their ill-gotten gains to their families. Marxism loathes dynastic succession not only in monarchies but also in common families. The dial must be reset in every generation, with a capitalist’s offspring making their living on the conveyor belt.

Hence the steep hikes in inheritance taxes to be announced in the budget. As far as Marxists are concerned, the state is the only legitimate heir to any legacies. My friend’s father is smiling from his grave.

Just three months into the Labour tenure, if another election were held today, they’d lose it. But it won’t be held today, nor for at least the next four years. That’ll give Britons enough time to get the full flavour of Marxism in action.

They’ll find out that in any class war it’s the whole society that becomes collateral damage. And class war is the Marxist dogma our government lives by. My friend’s late father would approve and rejoice.

On 27 September, 2024, the US Department of Defence issued a document that went largely unnoticed in Britain. America, on the other hand, is abuzz with troubled – some will say alarmist – comments.

No wonder. Called DOD Directive 5240.01, the document gives every indication of a country preparing to go to civil war. In broad strokes, the Directive makes the vast bank of military intelligence data available to civil law enforcement.

It also explicitly states that, under certain circumstances, the armed forces can be called upon to quell civil unrest, by lethal force if necessary. This effectively invalidates the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which removed the military from civil law enforcement.

The Act was deemed necessary during the Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the army was widely used against obstreperous American citizens and went about its task with a hand too heavy for some tastes.

When I wrote “explicitly states”, it was a figure of speech. The Directive is so loaded with legalese jargon that little about it is really explicit. One has to decipher the obtuse cant to prise the kernel of meaning out of the jumbled prose.

Legal terminology can be used to elucidate the precise meaning of every word, but also to obfuscate it. The second stratagem often serves to leave the message open-ended, allowing room for interpretation and also for convenient disclaimers.

One such was offered by Pentagon spokesman Sue Gough (yes, I gather she isn’t a man, but verbal probity takes priority over woke virtue). Her press release stated that: “The policies concerning the use of force by DOD addressed in DoDD 5240.01 are not new, and do not authorise the DOD to use lethal force against U.S. citizens or people located inside the United States, contrary to rumours and rhetoric circulating on social media.”

Having cast a quick glance over that disclaimer, a resurrected William Shakespeare would say: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”. Indeed, such denials by the Pentagon are extremely rare. So rare, in fact, that one smells a giant rat running around trapped among the building’s five corners.

I may be missing some fine points but, as I read the Directive, it seems to do exactly what Miss Gough says it doesn’t do. Here are a couple of salient points.

According to the document, the Secretary of Defence can approve “assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality, or any situation in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury.”

Those chaps do have a way with words, don’t they? But to this unbiased reader, the text is unequivocal. The US Army is authorised to help out the police by firing at misbehaving Americans. This, in a country that’s always at pains to point out that even intelligence agencies such as the CIA have no jurisdiction within the country.

I don’t know about the CIA, but military intelligence, including the vast resources of the National Security Agency that can give you chapter and verse of every phone chat you’ve ever enjoyed, can now be used to spy on US citizens.

Perhaps I’m misreading the directive – I did tell you its language is at times impenetrable. But it does provide for “Defence Intelligence Component intelligence assistance to any Federal department or agency, including a Federal law enforcement agency, or to a State or local law enforcement agency when lives are in danger.”

Let’s remark parenthetically that the reference to situations “when lives are in danger” leaves much room for arbitrary interpretation. A stampeding crowd of unarmed protesters, for example, may conceivably trample people to death. Does this mean the DIC may forewarn the army about the protest march, with the latter then going in with guns blazing?

That’s how the much maligned conspiracy theorists read it. Thus, for example, Robert F. Kennedy, who upset his august family by his apostasy from the sainted Democratic Party: “… Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power –  for the first time in history – to use lethal force to kill Americans on U.S. soil who protest government policies.”

Much as you, I and all God’s own people may detest conspiracy theories and those who spread them around, it’s hard to deny that perfectly practical and not at all theoretical conspiracies do happen. That boy perhaps shouldn’t have cried wolf, but this doesn’t mean there are no wolves on the prowl at the outskirts of the village.

What upsets many commentators, including those considerably saner than Mr Kennedy, isn’t just the contents of the Directive but also its timing. Issuing that document just six weeks before the presidential election gives some people unpalatable food for mournful thought.

My serious American friends – and all my American friends are laudably serious – fear that civil unrest will ensue no matter who wins the election. Trump’s supporters and their demigod of a candidate already hinted at that possibility last time, when a MAGA mob tried to take the Capitol building by storm.

However, there are many indications that, this time around, it’s the Harris crowd that may revolt should their candidate lose, and they are indeed revolting. Harris herself and her staff give rise to such fears by their inflammatory rabble-rousing.

They portray Trump not as an unfit candidate for the presidency, but as a villain whose return to the White House would spell an end to democracy, along with such sacred American accoutrements as motherhood, baseball, apple pie and verbs made out of nouns. Words like ‘fascist’, ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘Hitler’ and ‘dictatorship’ cross their lips with increasing regularity.

Fair enough, Trump doesn’t even bother to conceal his disdain for the traditional political class on either side of the aisle. But if he aims to rule by decree, one wonders why he didn’t do so during his first term, when he supposedly had ample opportunity to put his foot down.

My impression is, and I hope I’m wrong, that Biden (who will remain president for two months after the election) and Harris are setting the stage for overturning the results of the election if it goes the wrong way.

When the Republic is in mortal danger, democratic niceties may fall by the wayside – as they did during the Second World War, when thousands of Nisei and German Americans were interned without due process. If the Democrats succeed in portraying Trump’s victory as a similar threat to everything the nation holds dear, they may use the two-month window of opportunity to set things right, from their perspective.

The Directive in question may then be invoked as the legal justification for any action, including the use of lethal force. The document certainly has that kind of ring to it, and it was put forth at a suspiciously opportune time.

This is all pure speculation, you understand. But something does smell foul, like that proverbial rodent. I hope the smell is all it is and remains to be. For the consequences of another American civil war are too awful to contemplate.

Such a massive explosion would produce shock waves wreaking destruction not only on America but on much of the world, emphatically including Britain. Let’s just pray that the Directive is as innocuous as Miss Gough will have us believe.

Anyone who questions Darwin is these days regarded as one notch above a flat-earther, if that. We take it for granted that everything evolves from small to big, from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced.

However, my contention is that, if we stop taking evolution on faith for the sake of argument, we’ll find that exactly the opposite of it is both more evident and more plausible. I do hope that one day schoolchildren will be taught the theory of devolution, with at least equal time allocated to it as to Darwin’s slapdash musings.

Those tots will then find that things more naturally develop from big to small, from complex to simple, from intricate to primitive. Of course, anyone who believes in the Creator doesn’t need me to put forth this argument. Yet even a rank materialist can’t deny obvious facts.

That rank materialist will know that he owes his birth to two fully mature beings, his mother and father, who each produced a tiny particle of themselves, carrying information accumulated over many centuries. The two particles then came together (I’ll spare you the gratuitous graphic details) and conceived the rank materialist.

Development was in this case vectored downwards. It started with two fully grown human beings who activated some intricate physiological and psychological processes occurring in the unfathomably complex systems known as human brains. Will, reason and emotion came together to release two cells that then combined to produce the rank materialist nine months later.

Just before starting to write this, I ate a Cox apple. Unless I miss my guess, this smallish fruit came from a rather large tree. Not only is the tree bigger than the fruit, but the apple is also bigger than its seeds that can then produce another tree. Again we are witnessing what can appropriately be called devolution, not evolution.

The couple of small eggs I had for breakfast had come from a big hen, for my lunch I’ll eat a small portion of a bird related to the one that laid the eggs. And at dinner I’ll have a piece of meat cut out of the carcass of a cow, itself produced by a method not dissimilar to the one responsible for the existence of that rank materialist.

Duccio and Rembrandt were more accomplished artists than the chaps who painted animals in the caves at Santander. But their artistic minds are dwarfed by the mind of the man who first realised that the natural world could lend itself to pictorial representation. There too the development proceeded from the more complex downwards.

In the same vein, the man who invented the wheel was an intellectual giant compared to Robert Street who in 1794 patented the first internal-combustion engine. Street’s intellectual effort was in its turn superior to that of Carl Benz who invented the car.

Now what about the intellect involved in higher pursuits than producing mechanical devices? Exactly the same tendency is observable there. The 20^th century thinker Alfred North Whitehead once commented that: “The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.

Footnotes are set in small type at the bottom of the page to provide a reference for something set in big type above. Whitehead’s implication is clear: Western philosophy also developed from high to low, from superior to inferior, from original thought to mere commentary.

If you wish to take exception to the theory of devolution, you’ll have to argue that today’s composers are better than Bach and Beethoven, today’s poets are superior to Dante and Shakespeare, today’s novelists put Dickens and Tolstoy to shame, today’s playwrights go further than Ibsen and Chekhov, today’s economists outsmart Adam Smith and David Ricardo, today’s political scientists go Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre one better.

After you’ve exhausted yourself trying to prove the unprovable, I’ll ask you to compare Vermeer to Tracy Emin and flash a smug QED smile. Note that so far we haven’t had to take God’s name in vain, nor even to appeal to modern biology (assisted by archaeology, physics and chemistry) that has relegated Darwin’s theory from science to unadulterated ideology.

A grown man, Dr Robert Darwin, had to add his spermatozoon to the ovum produced by a grown woman, Susannah Darwin, née Wedgwood, to produce a tiny embryo that then became baby Charles. Chickens lay eggs, oak trees produce acorns, small fruit grows on big trees. This is how the theory of devolution works in practice.

I’m not claiming irrefutable rigour for this theory. I can see quite a few arguments not only pro but also con. However, on balance it strikes me as more plausible than anything Darwin and his acolytes have come up with.

If we look at man’s mind, something that natural science hasn’t yet come to grips with and probably never will, then the theory of devolution is easier to argue than its opposite. And if you examine the political institutions the human mind has created, you’ll notice a steady decline in the level of the people who man them.

Just compare our past few prime ministers with the likes of Wellington, Disraeli and Churchill – or for that matter any recent US presidents with Washington, Adams or Madison. The larger the test sample you use, and you’re welcome to draw in comparable figures from other countries, the more noticeable the steady decline. Or devolution, if you’d rather.

Looking at the portraits of old British PMs, one sees some supremely intelligent faces and some perhaps less so. But not a single one shows the same lack of any discernible mental acuity you’ll find exhibited on Keir Starmer’s face, or on that of his inimitable deputy Angie Rayner.

The theory of devolution works in ways as mysterious as they are inexorable. But it does work.

The term ‘special relationship’ might have meant something in the past, but these days it sounds like a distinct anachronism.

It’s no use pretending that the US and the UK enjoy a partnership of equals. The US is clearly the senior partner, and there are few signs that she singles Britain out for preferential treatment.

For example, it was only on 26 December, 2006, that Britain finished paying back the Lend-Lease debts to the US. It’s useful to remember that massive American supplies to the Soviet Union were offered for free – this though Stalin started the war as Hitler’s ally, and Britain fought Nazism alone for the first two years.

In a later conflict, Ronald Reagan denied Britain any assistance during the Falklands war, and his Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, had to take it upon himself to furnish the British forces with last-minute satellite intelligence.

However, even if Britain’s relationship with the US may not be special, it’s certainly vitally important. The two countries are NATO allies and, since Britain isn’t exactly pulling her weight in collective defence, our security largely depends on America’s willingness to come to our aid should the going get tough.

A trade deal with the US would also come in handy, and its likelihood wholly depends on the benevolence of the next US administration. There too one detects no parity: such a deal is more important for Britain than for America, by far.

Against the background I’ve outlined in extremely broad strokes, Britain must cover her bets and secure friendly relations with the next US president, whoever he – or in this case she – will be. Alas, just as Trump’s campaign began to gain momentum, Starmer’s government committed an act of unspeakable folly.

Senior Labour figures, doubtless with Starmer’s blessing, are doing all they can to help Harris into the White House. In August, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, his director of communications, along with several top Labour MPs, attended the Democratic National Convention.

Contrary to their subsequent denials, they weren’t there just as so many flies on the wall. Dover MP Mike Trump, who was there, explained that: “We went back out after our landslide victory, to impart some of our knowledge as to what we learnt on the campaign trail, and look at what they are doing with their campaign.”

Now it has turned out that Labour are sending over not only strategists but also foot soldiers to lend Kamala a helping hand. Last Wednesday, Sofia Patel, Labour’s director of operations, asked for volunteers to travel to swing states in the US to do their bit.

“I have nearly 100 Labour Party staff (current and former) going to the US in the next few weeks heading to North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia,” went her LinkedIn post. “I have ten spots available for anyone to head to the battleground state of North Carolina – we will sort your housing.”

That last sentence hints at a possible breach of the US law that only permits foreign volunteers to take part in such campaigning if they aren’t getting paid. It can be argued that the promise of free accommodation constitutes payment, but frankly I don’t care one way or the other.

What concerns me isn’t the fine points of the US electoral law but the obvious points of Britain’s foreign policy. And, true to form, Labour has shown yet again that it puts ideology before national interests not only in domestic but also in foreign affairs.

Trump, for all his faults, is well-disposed towards Britain. He has extensive business interests here, but one can detect that his affection for our country isn’t just motivated by pecuniary considerations.

Harris, on the other hand, doesn’t even bother to conceal how passionately she dislikes Britain. She holds Britain’s colonial past against her, presumably because Kamala’s father, Marxist professor of economics, must have been terribly oppressed in Jamaica, all the way to Stanford University.

However, even if it were the other way round, with Harris loving Britain and Trump hating her, openly supporting one candidate against the other would be an act of rank stupidity. What if the other candidate wins? The other candidate being Trump in this case, how willing will he be to remain Britain’s friend for the next four years?

Like all narcissists, and even his most fanatic supporters accept he is just that, old Donald neither forgives slights nor, more to the point, forgets them. He sees foreign policy as so many deals based on personal relationships, and he views other leaders in binary terms.

Whatever their politics, if they get along with Donald, and especially if they are effusive in their praise of him, he describes them in glowing terms. And if they are more reserved, they rate nothing but the kind of terminology that used to be off limits on global diplomacy.

For the time being, the Trump campaign has filed a formal protest, citing Patel’s post as proof that the Labour expeditionary corps is staffed not with disinterested idealists but with people given a financial incentive. Regardless of how the protest pans out, Starmer’s relations with Trump may be irreparably damaged – and so will be Britain’s relations with the US should Trump win in November.

As it is, I can’t imagine Trump ever being ready to do business with Starmer’s foreign secretary David Lammy. Our top diplomat is on record calling Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”, a “tyrant in a toupee” and a “dangerous clown”. Though he indulged in such rhetoric when merely a backbencher, he may well be a persona non grata in a Trump White House.

(This kind of logorrhoea follows the Left’s long tradition of flinging epithets at their adversaries. Kamala herself is hardly pulling punches. She has described Trump as “increasingly unhinged and unstable”, adding that he “certainly falls into the general definition of fascists”. To be fair, Donald isn’t above responding in kind.)

The events since then won’t help Trump to forget those insults, especially since Starmer has already stated that a Trump victory would be “undesirable”. All this goes to show that His Majesty’s government enjoying a 282-seat parliamentary majority is driven by ideological zeal only, not by the country’s interests.

Driving jobs and capital out of Britain, suffocating the economy with extortionate taxes and “workers’ rights” (empowering the unions), introducing laws against free speech, and now conceivably alienating Britain’s most important ally – all these are different manifestations of the same destructive ideology. That means we’re in for a rough ride in more ways than one – but then you already know this.

This popular 1878 song can’t be held up as an exemplar of rhyme and metre. Yet every Briton of a certain age knows the first two lines, which gave rise to the word ‘jingoism’:

“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do/ We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too…”

Alas, these two lines don’t describe the current state of Britain’s armed forces, which is why it’s useful to recall the next, lesser known, lines of the same verse:

“We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,/ The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”

Now these lines do bear some tangential relevance to today’s geopolitics, even though Constantinople, as it then was, isn’t an immediate target of Russian imperial expansion. But other targets are still in Russia’s crosshairs.

The song was composed at the end of yet another Russo-Turkish War (there were seven altogether if I’m counting correctly), in which the Russians sought to protect the Balkan nations, especially Bulgaria, from Ottoman atrocities.

Their less noble objective was to reverse the calamity of the Crimean War and achieve Russia’s perennial goal of capturing Constantinople and gaining control of the Straits. After Russia routed the Turks in the 1878 Battle of Plevna, that goal was in sight. The road to Constantinople was open, and the Straits were within reach.

That outcome wasn’t something the British Empire could countenance. It couldn’t allow a hostile power to achieve strategic dominance over the key trade routes connecting Britain to the Middle East. Especially since the Russians had been dropping hints about India as another possible conquest.

Hence a fleet of British battleships sailed in to send a message. The Russians, the memory of the Crimean debacle still fresh in their memory, got it loud and clear. They stopped at the gates of Constantinople and signed a treaty that effectively put an end to the Ottoman Empire as an aggressive force – but also to Russia’s designs on the Straits.

Today Russia’s imperial ambitions are directed westwards rather than southwards, but any Briton trying to sing that jingoistic song would be laughed out of the pub. Successive governments seem to have been so passionately committed to the cause of unilateral disarmament that the only message Britain can send now is that of impotence and cowardice.

The Royal Navy is at its historical weakest, and Horatio Nelson has been too dead for too long to do something about it. Otherwise he certainly would: for the first time since Trafalgar, the French navy outnumbers ours.

Still, we can almost get away with that in the present strategic situation. The Russians are pushing across the continent in a westerly direction, and if allowed to go on, the nearest salt water they’ll reach will be the English Channel. (If you think they see the Ukraine as the last stop, there’s a bridge across the Dnieper I’d like to sell you. Or, more apposite, one across the Vistula.)

But the Duke of Wellington would be even less happy than Nelson. Courtesy of the new cuts in defence spending, for the first time since Waterloo the British Army will have fewer than 70,000 soldiers. By comparison, our grossly understaffed police forces number 149,769 officers. More than twice as many.

Such a tiny army can only be deployed in a tripwire mode, with the soldiers dying en masse in the hope of slowing the enemy down to gain time for help to arrive from across the ocean. And if help doesn’t arrive, they’ll all be mown down.

That prospect is unlikely to increase morale, and it doesn’t. An MoD survey found that some 58 per cent of our servicemen rate their morale as low.

So much for the ships and the men. Now what about the money?

Here the Labour government is enthusiastically building on the legacy of the previous Tory governments. They always treated the defence budget as the first candidate for cuts.

This was accompanied by frankly idiotic rhetoric about the changing nature of modern warfare. Thus, announcing another round of sweeping cuts, Dave Cameron explained that modern battles were different from Waterloo. They no longer required what Napoleon called large battalions.

Presumably, two computers could fight it out between them and whichever one went on the blink first would lose. At least Cameron had the excuse of never having seen a truly modern electronic war, like the one raging in the Ukraine.

Today’s government, on the other hand, should know that boots on the ground are as vital as they always have been. For all the drones, missiles, robots and PlayStation gadgets being used by both sides, soldiers still fight and die, and the fewer they are the more likely they are to be killed.

At present, our defence spending stands at 2.3 per cent of GDP, barely above the absolute peacetime minimum demanded by NATO. Starmer has promised to raise it to 2.5 per cent, but only when some loose cash is burning a hole in the Exchequer’s pocket. In round numbers, that means never.

The Ukrainians are heroically keeping “the Bear” of that old song at bay. But for how long? America’s assistance is dwindling away, showing every sign that it’ll go down to nothing regardless of how the November election goes. Without the US, it’ll fall on Europe to protect itself, and the western part of it shows no appetite for putting guns before butter, or rather before social handouts and foreign aid.

Poland is a welcome exception, but then the Poles have no illusions about their ursine neighbour, having found themselves more than once on the receiving end of its fangs and claws. Poland is busily building up the strongest army in Europe, spending almost five per cent of her GDP on defence — more than the US in relative terms.

Unlike the Poles, Western European governments proceed on the assumption, or rather hope, that they’ll never have to fight another war. Keeping their fingers crossed, they lavish money on all sorts of projects, none of which even remotely approaches defence in vital importance.

This is the suit Britain follows, with one PM after another claiming that cutting defence is a “difficult decision”. It may be, but that decision isn’t just difficult. It’s also foolhardy, irresponsible and potentially fatal.

Indeed, “Britons true” don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got no ships, we’ve got no men, we’ve got no money too. This ought to be the new song, but no one is singing it.

One thing I can say for Donald Trump is that he is forthcoming about his specific plans should he return to the White House.

The crux of his economic policy seems to be imposing tariffs of up to 20 per cent on all imports – unless they come from China. Those would be taxed at 60 per cent, while Trump would slap a tariff of “100, 200, 2,000 per cent” on cars manufactured in Mexico or China.

God help us, the man is mad. Two thousand per cent? That’s tantamount to shutting down the US market for such products, a measure evoking a child screaming at the top of his voice and throwing his toys out of the pram.

“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States,” explained Trump. “You make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious” that companies will “come right away”.

This shows what happens when the stress in ‘political economy’ falls on ‘political’ rather than ‘economy’. I’m sure this sort of thing plays well among the less intelligent strata of the US population, the types who in my day decorated their bumpers with stickers saying “Buy a foreign car, put 10 Americans out of work”.

Those chaps could be forgiven for their economic illiteracy. But a man likely to become US president isn’t entitled to such leniency.

Protectionism flies in the face of traditional economic wisdom, which became traditional specifically because it was wise. It has also been vindicated by historical experience, in the US and elsewhere.

If we look at the Great Depression, for example, we’ll find that the 1929 stock market crash, supposedly the trigger of the calamity, barely made the front pages of the papers at the time. Only about two percent of all Americans owned any shares, and, people being people, those overachievers were unlikely to be viewed by the rest with excessive sympathy.

In fact, when the value of those shares plummeted, most of the non-holders probably responded in a very human way by displaying schadenfreude. The crash was none of most people’s concern, and the papers reacted with commensurate restraint.

The depression only began to bite after Roosevelt’s protectionist measures went into effect. And that makes sense.

As Mises, Hayek or any Chicago economist worth his salt would have told you, the success of a reasonably free economy is determined by the consumer, which is to say by a strong, voracious demand. And what boosts the demand is free competition among suppliers, regardless of which country they come from.

In such conditions they are forced to offer better products, lower prices and more efficient services. Supply-side ideas, so popular back in the 1980s, don’t change this fact. Supply-side is just a way of stimulating consumer demand.

Manufacturers and other suppliers take the lead by offering the goods and services they bet people will want to buy. If the bet pays off, they win. If it doesn’t, they lose.

The aforementioned conventional wisdom speaks with its usual bluntness. You can only help a consumer economy by helping the consumers, it says. You can’t do so by hurting them.

This can only mean that protectionism can’t help the economy. It almost certainly will cause untold damage, by mollycoddling domestic production behind a protective wall of near-monopoly. That anyone should deem this necessary suggests that domestic production was ineffective to begin with.

Yet when its incompetence is artificially protected from more competent rivals, it will have little incentive to get its act together. Quality will go down, prices will head in the opposite direction, funds will be channelled into the least – and away from the most – productive areas, and consumers will bear the consequences.

There isn’t now, nor was there at the time of the Great Depression, anything new about any of this. Bright economists from Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Adam Smith and David Ricardo onwards had known it and written about it. Ricardo even went so far as to argue that a country shouldn’t retaliate against protectionist tariffs imposed by other countries against it. Doing so, he insisted, would only hurt its own people.

Thus, for example, Smith: “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”

Thus spoke common sense, something Trump proudly (and loudly) likes to highlight as his forte. In fact, his attachment to protectionism smacks of economic illiteracy, which is indeed common but not very sensible.

If Trump gets elected and acts on his promises, his protectionism is guaranteed to drive up inflation and increase America’s national debt even more than Harris’s objectionable socialism would. And it’s not just those dastardly foreign producers who will bear the brunt of tariffs, but also US consumers.

If Trump hasn’t studied the causes of the Great Depression, perhaps he should cast a quick glance over his own experience as US president. Every economic study I’ve seen shows that it wasn’t just foreign manufacturers but also US consumers who were hit by the tariffs Trump introduced then.

The University of Chicago ran a survey last month. The question put to a group of prominent economists was whether they agreed with the statement that “imposing tariffs results in a substantial portion of the tariffs being borne by consumers of the country that enacts the tariffs, through price increases”. An impressive 98 per cent said yes.

As far as Trump is concerned, they thereby branded themselves as rank communists out to get him. To me, they simply upheld economic theories vindicated by centuries of practical experience.

This isn’t to say that political considerations have no place in economic policies. The trouble with Trump is that he tries to justify his economic protectionism by economic arguments, which is neither grown-up nor clever. However, a persuasive case may be made for limiting or even blocking imports from China.

Such imports to America and Europe have built up an evil communist regime as an economic powerhouse able to challenge the West all over the world not only economically but, more important, politically and militarily. Alas, the US has a long history of creating monsters by putting short-term economic benefits before long-term strategic needs.

Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany built up their brawn largely – the former almost exclusively – thanks to transfers of American technology and capital. For every million in profits the US realised from its munificence towards the Soviets, she later spent a billion trying to counteract the ogre she had created. (Anglo-American economist, Stanford’s Prof. Anthony C. Sutton, published several books presenting extensive research on the subject.)

Trying to curtail China’s growth by “obnoxious” tariffs, sanctions or even an outright ban for that reason would doubtless hurt US consumers, but one could argue they’d suffer pain in a good cause. I’d certainly be sympathetic to this argument should Trump make it.

But he doesn’t. The argument he does make falls into the category of rabble-rousing populism, not sound economics or strategic thought.