Author: Alexander Boot

On September 28, a Met cop keeping a watchful eye on a pro-Hezbollah march in Trafalgar Square reminded me how much and why I loathe the phrase “It’s a matter of opinion”.

If I were to compile a list of locutions I detest most, that one would take pride of place.

What I loathe about it isn’t the denotation but the connotation, everything lurking behind these seemingly innocuous words. And lying in wait there, ready to ambush the last vestiges of sanity, is the deadly relativism of modernity.

The assumption that dread phrase conveys is that no absolute truths or even facts exist. You have one truth, I have another, he has still another, and let’s not forget theirs. Everything is up for grabs, everything is subjective, nothing is objective, everything is a matter of opinion.

It’s as if today’s lot have backtracked from Aristotle to Plato, thereby denying that any reality exists outside man’s perception of it. Modern man is happy to benefit from science, which is all based on understanding that things exist objectively, irrespective of our senses or understanding. But he rejects the elementary cognitive culture that has to flow from the same assumption.

Yes, some things are indeed a matter of opinion. Others, however, aren’t, and it takes that cognitive culture to be able to tell the difference.

For example, saying that Fulham FC is a nicer team than Manchester City is expressing an opinion. Saying that Manchester City is a better team than Fulham FC is stating a fact.

This is all kindergarten stuff, but modernity evidently hasn’t yet reached that educational level or, more likely, has regressed beneath it. Thus everything is deemed to be a matter of opinion, from which it logically follows that every opinion is equally valid.

Thus my opinion on the string theory is valid even though my knowledge of physics comes from a school course yonks ago and a few popular books since then. Not only that, but it’s no less valid than that of a Nobel Prize winner in that discipline. He has his opinion, I have mine, and anyone who mentions the word ‘authority’ simply doesn’t understand modernity.

However, standing out even against this macabre background is that Met cop’s contribution to this intellectual calamity. The policeman distinguished himself at a vigil for the Hezbollah chieftain Hassan Nesrallah killed a day earlier. (And please no comments from my Russophone readers about that evocative surname.)

A passerby reminded the officer that no such vigil ought to be allowed to take place because Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation. The policeman’s reply proved his impeccable modern credentials: “Your opinion is up to you… your opinion is your opinion.”

He then added that he doesn’t “take a lot of political interest”. Neither, by the sound of it, does he take a lot of legal interest, to use his turn of phrase.

For in 2019 HMG added Hezbollah to the list of organisations proscribed under the Terrorist Act. As far as our law enforcement is concerned, that moved the designation of that group from the realm of opinion into that of fact. Or, more precisely, the law.

Now, the Romans came up with a useful legal principle still in force throughout the civilised world: ignorantia juris non excusat, ignorance of the law is no excuse. If it’s so for a law-breaker, surely the same principle applies ten-fold to a law-enforcer. Or am I missing something?

I’m not familiar with the inner workings of the Metropolitan Police. But I imagine that officers who draw the detail of guarding order during a protest march must be briefed on the legitimacy of the protest. The words ‘terrorism’ and ‘proscribed organisation’ had to come up at some point during the briefing on that vigil.

If they didn’t, the senior officer conducting the briefing is guilty of sackable negligence. However, a statement from the Met denied the accusation: “The proscribed status of Hezbollah, Hamas and other groups is included in the briefings given to the officers deployed to police related events, but we recognise… we need to do more to make sure the details of those briefings are fully understood.”

What part of ‘terrorist organisation’ did the officers fail to grasp? They’d have to be rather dim, not to say clinically retarded, to misunderstand such a simple concept. However, I’m sure they aren’t. Reality is more sinister than that.

Our police forces know perfectly well what Hamas and Hezbollah are, and what they advocate. Our terrorist groupies don’t hide their light under a bushel, they don’t lower their voices when screaming “Death to Israel!”, “From the river to the sea!”, “I love Hezbollah” or “I love Hamas!”

However, our police forces have been taken over by those who sympathise with such sentiments because they are either Lefties or anti-Semites or, most likely, both. Each such group has a bias towards youth, and most street cops are young people.

A YouGov poll shows that 10 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds “have a favourable view of Hamas”, and 13 per cent don’t believe Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on 7 October, 2023.

More generally, one third of the overall British public “’believes that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews”, and among young people this figure rises to 48 per cent. Almost half.

Twenty per cent of Britons are sure supporters of Israel “control the media’” while ten per cent believe that control is exercised not just by supporters of Israel but specifically by Jews.

Thus anti-Semitic tropes are so thoroughly mixed with anti-Israeli ones that it’s hard to tell them apart. However, the critical mass of British anti-Semitism still hasn’t approached majority. That’s why open expressions along such lines are still frowned upon, if not too vigorously.

Thus that Trafalgar Square cop had to exercise some caution. Confronted by a passerby who objected to that glorification of a terrorist red in tooth and claw, the policeman couldn’t just tell him to move on and stop bothering him with pro-Israeli nonsense.

But he did have to shut him up somehow. So he unveiled that stock modern rebuttal he knew brooked no disagreement: “It’s just your opinion”. As a typical young Briton, he knew that no cutting rejoinder was coming. In the modern parlance that phrase passes for an argument, and it’s irrefutable.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” goes the old saying. I disagree. Madness comes second, preceded as it is by stupidity.

The onset of collective stupidity erased the lines separating opinions, facts, judgements and arguments. That made dumbed-down people vulnerable to evil Left-wing propaganda, with hatred of Israel in particular and Jews in general as a ubiquitous component. And only then did victims become mad by losing all touch with reality.

If you disagree, well, too bad. I’m entitled to my opinion, aren’t I?

One of Donald Trump’s stock boasts is a skeleton phrase allowing for a limitless number of insertions: “If I had been president […] wouldn’t have happened”.

Fill in the blank with anything you wish had been avoided, from the Punic Wars to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine via both World Wars, and you’ll capture the general thrust of Trump’s braggadocio. But one of those possible insertions is less preposterous than others.

It’s indeed likely that, had the US been led by Trump rather than Biden in February, 2022, Putin would have thought twice before pushing the button for a full-scale assault. I wouldn’t have bet my house on such reticence, but I’d probably have taken a smaller bet, say a tenner.

The reason I’d have been ready to take a flier isn’t Trump’s special relationship with Putin, although I’m certain it exists. I don’t know whether it’s criminal, shameful or merely ill-advised. Since neither man strikes me as a friend-making type, such a relationship has to be based on either grudging respect or unknown mutual interests, but one can see it’s there.

However, Putin wouldn’t have been deterred by any personal links with Trump. Either the Russian chieftain or his advisers would have known that a US president doesn’t have dictatorial powers. Trump might have been willing to toe Putin’s line, but both his cabinet and Congress could have had different ideas.

Contrary to his self-serving bluster, neither would Trump have threatened to nuke Moscow in response. Such a threat would have been too grossly irresponsible even for him, and he has set the bar of irresponsible claims rather high. No American president would go nuclear in response to any aggression against a non-NATO country, and I don’t even put much faith in Article 5 of the NATO Charter either.

What could have stopped Putin’s juggernaut in its tracks would have been a general projection of American, and hence NATO, strength. In such matters, appearance is the same as reality and, even if the US hadn’t been stronger under Trump, it would have looked stronger.

By contrast, America looked cowardly and impotent under Biden, an impression that was instantly created or perhaps reinforced on 31 August, 2021. That was the day Americans officially lost the war with Taliban.

Actually, as both the British and the Russians could testify, there was nothing unusual about a mighty global power finding itself lost in Afghanistan. The country’s terrain and, above all, the indomitable fighting spirit of its people have been known to cancel out any advantages Westerners might have in weaponry and numerical strength.

(I’d like to chat about this with Victor David Hanson, the author of the brilliant book Carnage and Culture. Dr Hanson argues that the West has always won confrontations with the East, and he explains why. What about Afghanistan then? I’m sure he has a good answer, but I’d love to know what it is.)

However, what matters in any lost war isn’t just the fact but also the manner of losing – just as there is a telling difference between retreating and running away. And there the Soviets had a distinct edge over the Americans.

Their 1989 retreat after a decade-long war with Afghanistan was – or at least looked – orderly and one could even say dignified. They marched out leaving nothing behind but some 15,000 of their own casualties and over a million Afghan ones. The retreating troops brought all their weapons with them, and every vehicle that could move out did so.

By contrast, Americans didn’t just leave Afghanistan. They ran away, leaving behind some $7 billion worth of military equipment (this estimate by the Defence Department strikes me as too modest) and, more important, thousands of their Afghan friends. That was a chaotic flight, not orderly retreat.

Now, Putin’s instincts were formed in the back streets, where, by his own admission, he was a “common thug”. He ran with the gangs, I ran away from them, but there is nothing about their mentality that would surprise either me or anyone familiar with wolf packs. Wolves flee from those who are stronger than they are and pounce on those who are weaker.

What many Western commentators don’t understand about Putin is that mentally he has never left those lupine street gangs. He will backtrack, tail between his legs, from a show of strength and pounce like a scowling wolf on any sign of weakness.

Biden’s shameful flight from Afghanistan told Putin all he needed to know. The US president was weak, cowardly, probably senile. If he meekly accepted the disgrace of his own troops shedding their weapons as they fled, surely he wouldn’t go to war over a little foray into a country he knew nothing about. The Ukrainians may well live in the UK, as far as Biden is concerned in his present state of health.

While it’s conceivable that the Punic Wars would have happened even had Trump been US president in the Third Century BC, I am fairly certain he would have lost the Afghan War with dignity even had he been unable to win it. That would have planted doubt into Putin’s head, the head of the petty thug he has remained for life.

He would have seen a sign of temporary weakness but not one of vacillation and cowardice. There would have been nothing for him to pounce on.

As it was, pounce he did, but the Russian chieftain miscalculated. His generals had assured him they would overrun the Ukraine by blitzkrieg taking days, weeks at the outside. Under such circumstances, the US could only have saved the situation by responding with speed and resolve, qualities the present administration conspicuously lacked.

Biden actually issued a veiled invitation for Putin to invade. Days before the attack, he practically said the US would overlook a limited foray, which not only encouraged Putin to go ahead, but also gave him a useful PR strategy. The invasion of the Ukraine wasn’t a war, explained Kremlin propagandists on cue. It was only a ‘special military operation’, and prison awaited any Russian daring to use the dread W-word.

The Ukrainians fought the aggression with skill and courage, as people usually do when their national survival is at stake. The limited foray turned into a war of attrition, with Russian casualties in the Ukraine topping those in Afghanistan by an order of magnitude.

The US and NATO had no option but to support the Ukraine with equipment, ordnance, intelligence and funding. But they treated the Ukraine the way Spaniards treat bulls in the ring: the animals are allowed to fight, but they aren’t allowed to win.

Supplies have kept the Ukrainians in the fight, but one of their arms has always been tied behind their back. Meanwhile, the West in general and the US in particular are visibly losing interest.

I fear for the Ukraine whoever wins the US elections in November. Harris would probably continue Biden’s policy of diminishing interest and attenuating supplies, which would soon deliver victory to Putin’s larger battalions.

And should Trump win, he’d doubtless try to act on his boastful promise to end the war in days. The only possible way of doing so would be for him to twist the Ukrainians’ arm into territorial concessions on pain of a summary discontinuation of American supplies.

Putin would then declare victory and start leisurely preparations for the next round. I can even imagine him promising his friend Donald not to attack during his tenure. Waiting four years would anyway be desirable for Russia to lick her wounds, regroup and rearm.

And après Trump le déluge, the kind that will engulf the Ukraine in the terror of another barbarian onslaught. A harrowing prospect, that, and one I hope we’ll never see. But, as we know, hope is cheap.

What would you think if you saw this trigger warning on a copy of the Bible?

You’d probably describe it as virtue-signalling, preposterous and downright idiotic. You’d be right: it is all those things. But not only.

Whenever anyone puts words down on paper, he should have his intended readers in mind. If what he writes is too recondite for them, he won’t be able to hold their attention. If his writing is too basic, it’ll have the same effect.

So before composing my hypothetical trigger warning its author should have taken a moment to consider his putative reader. Had he done so, he would have realised that anyone who picks up a copy of the Bible already knows what it contains, if only in broad strokes.

He has to be aware, for example, that the Genesis story most lamentably contradicts Darwin, and that the Gospel writers failed to sidestep Jesus Christ and his message to the world. The reader may prefer Darwin to Genesis and Marx to Mark, but he’ll know exactly what to expect in Scripture.

Thus my hypothetical warning, in addition to all the adjectives you assigned to it, merits one more, and it’s damning: superfluous. It serves no useful purpose whatsoever, other than allowing its author to establish both his atheism and his intellectual deficiency (I’ll refrain from opining this once that the two are one and the same).

Moving swiftly from hypothesis to fact, the great minds of Nottingham University have seen fit to slap a trigger warning on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, to the effect that it contains “expressions of Christian faith”.

Crikey. Who could have thought. This mediaeval masterpiece depicts a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims travelling together from London to Canterbury Cathedral, to worship at the shrine of St Thomas Becket.

That is to say that any potential reader with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius) doesn’t need to be warned of the book’s Christian content. Unless the bright sparks of Nottingham University doubt that their students could meet that minimum requirement, the warning is superfluous – in addition to being virtue-signalling, preposterous and downright idiotic.

If those chaps felt the urgent need to caution potential readers against something in Chaucer, they could have mentioned the book’s graphic, not to say pornographic, sexual content. That was par for the course in mediaeval literature, especially after the Black Death.

Up to a third of Europe’s population died in the pandemic, and the survivors abandoned many of their erstwhile restraints. For example, The Decameron, written by Boccaccio some 20 years before The Canterbury Tales, was quite bawdy.

I discovered that at age 10 or so by defying my parents’ ban and sneaking the book out of their bookcase. Yet Chaucer outdid Boccaccio, for example in one of the Tales, about the Wife of Bath.

She shared with the pilgrims some rather intimate details of her conjugal experience with her five husbands, each one left replete and exhausted. The good wife wasn’t averse to boasting about her superlative anatomy: “And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me/I hadde the best quoniam myghte be.” A ‘quoniam’ was a Middle English euphemism for female genitalia.

Let me tell you, something like this in a film would deliver an ’18’ rating and certainly a trigger warning of the sexual content. Such warnings are fashionable at present, with viewers forewarned not only about sex and violence, but also about drinking and smoking.

Censors go out of their way to protect our brittle sensibilities, but Nottingham University’s powers that be felt it was more urgent to caution students against “expressions of Christian faith” than against a woman boasting about her vaginal excellence.

Their censoring zeal didn’t even compel them to issue a warning about the rather sinister anti-Semitism of The Prioress’s Tale, which presented a version of the blood libel.

There, a Christian boy walks through a Jewish ghetto singing the hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater, an invocation of the Virgin Mary. Since Satan “hath [built] in Jewes’ hearts his waspe’s nest”, the Jews murder the boy and throw his body into a cesspit.

Far be it from me to suggest that such passages should have led to a warning against Chaucer’s anti-Semitism. All such warnings are nothing but glossocratic wokery, but the one about Christianity in Canterbury Tales really does take the bicky.

It offers a valuable insight into the minds of modern academics and university administrators. They are permissive in matters of graphic sex and religious hatred (provided it’s not directed at Muslims), but any reference to Christianity makes their blood boil. They instantly reach for their trusted blue pencil and scribble that moronic warning.

How long before The Canterbury Tales and other great books with a Christian content are removed from university libraries? I’d say years rather than decades. Those offensive volumes may even be used as a replacement for hydrocarbons as fuel for our homes and cars. Unless the latter have been outlawed by then.  

You’ll soon get the chance if the James Paget Hospital in Norfolk has its way.

Its bosses issued a directive to the staff on “inclusive language DOs and DON’Ts”, which mandates a ban on words with ‘man’ in them, such as ‘postman’, ‘fireman’, ‘policeman’ and presumably ‘mandate’.

Fortunately, ‘mailman’ is an Americanism, for otherwise the medics would have to say ‘personperson’, rather than the more manageable if still less than mellifluous ‘postperson’. Still, a journey from Personchester to Personhattan remains a possibility.

Such persondatory usage is somewhat lacking in novelty appeal. When 50 years ago I got my first job in the West, at NASA in Houston, I ran into trouble with some of my female co-workers for using offensive ‘man’ words.

When I tried to argue, I was told I didn’t understand Western ways but, given time, I’d learn. They were right: I have indeed learned, if not exactly accepted.

However, another part of the directive would have struck even those NASA ladies as incomprehensible. They had no doubt whatsoever that men were born male and women female. Even though the former oppressed the latter by using such deliberately offensive words as ‘manic’, ‘manage’ and ‘mandarin’, there was no doubt who was what and at what point they became what they were.

The Norfolk hospital administrators will have none of that natal determinism. They ordered staff to use the phrase “assigned female/male at birth” since this more “accurately depicts what happens when a child is born”.

Well, you know the problem: trying to be all things to all men (or rather persons, as that misogynist Paul should have written to the Corinthians) is a tall order. You try to please everybody and end up pleasing nobody.

While the directive predictably upsets troglodytes like me, its unashamed binary character will enrage even those who hail the underlying principle.

If a person is assigned ‘gender’ at birth, then surely whoever is authorised to do so must choose from the full list of genders widely recognised as such within the still narrow circle of fanatics. At the last count there were 102, but scientific progress is proceeding apace. Before long the list will be augmented, and those Norfolk medics are duty-bound to keep track of any new additions.

As worded, the directive seems to follow Genesis, which says: “male and female he made them”. This simply won’t do – medical persons should know that it wasn’t God but Darwin who created man, or rather person. And Darwin’s theory presupposes a steady progress in human understanding of everything, including the number of sexes, sorry, I mean genders.

The directive also shows the danger of relying on the Passive Voice. The phrase “assigned female/male at birth” raises the question of who does the assigning. Back in those unsophisticated times, it was the obstetrician who triumphantly announced to the new mother “You’ve got a boy!” or “You’ve got a girl!” Those doctors of yesteryear went by strictly formal characteristics, but I did tell you those times were unsophisticated.

However, assigning ‘gender’ shouldn’t mean changing the assigner. It should still fall on the obstetrician to assume godlike powers and declare in a booming voice: “Aporagender I assign you!” or genderflux, ipsogender, sekhet, whatever is appropriate.

This whole thing appears to me as another attempt to endow physicians with metaphysical powers. In the old days, before Jesus Christ became a superstar, people believed not only that God made people male or female, but also that only God could give or take life.

As I mentioned yesterday, the medical profession is acquiring the arbitrary quasi-divine power to terminate a human life, in either gestation or old age. So why shouldn’t a doctor decide on the newborn’s sex? Before long, that Norfolk hospital will issue a new guidance for the medics to introduce themselves by saying: “I am Nigel Johnson thy Doctor, and thou shalt have no other Doctors before me”.

In this cosmic context it’s almost embarrassing to mention that the directive also instructed staff to use ‘ze’ or ‘zir’ pronouns because they are “gender neutral and preferred by some trans people”. Where’s the pluralism on that?

The Office for National Statistics identifies only 0.55 per cent of Britons as trans. Even discounting the likelihood of ideologically inspired exaggeration, I don’t know how many of the remaining 99.45 per cent detest those stupid games with pronouns, but I’d guess many do. Surely the grammatical rights of such an overwhelming minority should trump those of a minute proportion?

Our progressive modernity isn’t only crossing the line beyond which madness lies. It’s erasing that line, and we are persondated to come along without demurring.

People should remind themselves of late 18^th century history, when Paul I reigned in Russia and George III in England. Both monarchs suffered from mental disorders, but with a telling difference.

Every Russian schoolboy knew about the madness of Paul I, but only Britons with a particular interest in history knew about the madness of George III, at least until Alan Bennett’s play and the subsequent film. The difference is that in some places mad kings are allowed to create mad kingdoms, and in some others they aren’t.

Monarchs no longer rule even if they still reign. The hole formed thereby has been filled by a small elite with a particular knack for demagoguery and hardly anything else. They are short on reason but long on powerlust, and that emotion can be served by creating a mad kingdom.

They know that a one-eyed man can become king, but to do so he must first blind everyone else. I refer to the stratagem they use for that purpose as glossocracy, controlling people by controlling their language.

The bosses of that Norfolk hospital provide a caricatured illustration of that mechanism, but an illustration nonetheless. My advice to their staff and really everyone is to fight the power-hungry zealots every step of the way, by force if necessary.

However, I’m not holding my breath in the hope that people will do that. The glossocrats have done too good a job turning the multitudes into docile herds.

“Please remember: be careful what you wish for. The right to die can become a duty to die.”

So wrote Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, in a letter to Catholic parishes. Britain’s senior Catholic cleric urged people to write to their MPs and oppose the assisted dying bill to be debated in the Commons next month.

In the medical profession, he added, we could witness “a slow change from a duty to care to a duty to kill.” His Grace is right to issue this call, even though (I’m tempted to say ‘because’) most people disagree.

In a recent poll, two-thirds of the respondents supported the bill, with only 20 per cent opposing it. Since Catholics make up only 8.3 per cent of the population, one clearly doesn’t have to share His Grace’s faith to find oneself in the moral minority.

This stands to reason. The case against doctors legally killing patients doesn’t have to rely on denominational affiliation to be solid. In fact, it can be made without a single reference to divine authority, although perhaps not by a prelate who has to stay within his remit.

His Grace proved that by using the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument: if euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it will become compulsory. Doctors will start killing more and more people, either of their own accord or under pressure from suffering patients and their families.

The bill would allow terminally ill adults within six months of death to seek something incongruously called medical help: suicide by doctor. This proposal has holes big enough to drive an ambulance through.

To begin with, in many cases doctors don’t know how long a terminal patient has left to live, or whether he is indeed terminal. Take it from me, for I’m a dead man writing.

Some 20 years ago no one thought I’d survive my Stage 4 cancer. A consultant stereotypically named Donald McDonald told me: “Your prognosis is poor.” Since his accent was also stereotypical, the death sentence sounded more like “Your prognersis is pure”, but I understood.

Under the terms of the proposed bill, that would have made me eligible for a lethal injection, and something in Dr McDonald’s dour delivery suggested he would have been happy to administer it. That would have deprived you of the subsequent decades of my vituperation.

You might say that, since I didn’t specifically ask to be killed, I was off limits. Ideally, you’d be right, but in this life we aren’t blessed with ideal situations. People are fallible, and the more their fallibility is encouraged, the worse it gets.

The experience of Holland, which in 2000 became the first previously civilised country to legalise euthanasia, shows that doctors have quite a bit of latitude on the issue of consent. For example, one Alzheimer patient there asked to be euthanised. However, at the last moment she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.

As to the sheer numbers, in 2022 there were 8,720 reported cases of euthanasia in Holland, an increase of 1,000 on the previous year. By now the annual death list must have grown into five digits, though it must still be lagging behind Canada, where one in 20 deaths is caused by assisted suicide.

Advocates of the bill insist that nothing like that can possibly happen in Britain, which strikes me as jingoistic. Such people insist, on little evidence, that Britons are so much more sensible than Canadians that euthanasia would be practised only in extreme cases, when the patient is suffering badly and the doctor can guarantee that the poor chap won’t last beyond six months. That strikes me as ignorant.

For exactly the same things were said in 1967, when the Abortion Act was passed. Though abortion was – and remains – still illegal, the new law provided a legal defence for the woman and her doctor in some exceptional cases, specifically when the woman’s physical and mental health was at stake.

That was de jure. De facto, however, any woman can now claim mental anguish at the very thought of having a baby and get an abortion on demand at up to 24 weeks of gestation. Some 250,000 take advantage of the opportunity every year, turning abortion into just another form of contraception.

The wedge only showed its thin end in 1967, but those with some moral sense and understanding of human nature were trying to stop that outrage by reminding people of the overall shape of that tool. They were shouted down just as opponents of the euthanasia bill will be shouted down now.

The bill will certainly pass, and an ever-accelerating cull of wrinklies will begin. If the example of Canada, Holland and Belgium is anything to go by, the notions of both unbearable suffering and terminal diseases will be constantly inflated, until they explode into deadly shards. Patients suffering from, say, clinical depression will be deemed proper candidates for the needle, as they are in those countries already.

Now I’m going to contradict what I said earlier by mentioning God, but only tangentially. You don’t have to espouse any religion to know that both our morality and legality have Judaeo-Christian antecedents. These days most people may not know this, but that’s the basis of all the laws protecting our persons and property.

The injunction against the taking of a life without due process is perhaps the most seminal of such laws, and surely even rank atheists must know this. They may not agree that, since it’s God who gives us life, only he can take it away. However, they – and many generations of their families – grew up with the understanding that a human life is inviolable.

Eroding this understanding will have far-reaching and, what’s worse, unpredictable social consequences by numbing people’s minds and cauterising their moral sense. A society may withstand chipping away at some of its traditional structures, but it won’t survive undermining its own foundations.

Interestingly, the same people who are fanatically committed to both abortion and euthanasia invoke the sanctity of human life whenever the subject of the death penalty comes up. They offer all sorts of spurious arguments, usually citing the possibility of forensic error leading to an irreversible punishment.

That possibility can be reduced to zero by, for example, tightening the required standard of proof in cases where the death penalty is on the table. Changing ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ to ‘beyond all doubt’ would eliminate the possibility of an innocent man being executed, while preserving the social benefits of justice done and seen to be done.

The only argument against the death penalty that I find valid is the corrupting effect it has on the executioner. A man whose job is to kill defenceless people, even if he does so legally and they richly deserve their fate, has to suffer some psychological damage. He is thus punished without due process, something that our jurisprudence abhors.

Now, if this argument works (and I do think it has some merit) for someone whose job is to kill, surely it works even better for someone whose job is to treat. Turning doctors into executioners has to corrupt them and the whole society, and it may find the ensuing erosion unbearable.

However, abortion on demand and euthanasia have become articles of progressive faith, and there’s no point arguing against the proposed bill on merit or by appealing to traditional morality. Those two-thirds of the population who support the bill don’t do so because they’ve carefully weighed the pros and cons. They do so because they’ve been brainwashed to hate traditional morality for being just that, traditional.

This is called anomie, and it’s the dominant condition of modernity. Now, that’s what I call a terminal disease, and it has become endemic.

Various protesters continue to attack paintings at the National Gallery, which most people will agree isn’t a nice thing to do.

However, if one is so inclined, the National Gallery offers a wide choice of possible paintings to slash, cover with a photograph or throw some soup on. As a keen student of statistical probabilities, I’d think  that, should targets be chosen at random, Rembrandt or Velázquez  would be as likely to be vandalised as Van Gogh.

However, just hours after two Just Stop Oilers were sent to prison for attacking Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, last week three of their comrades threw some more soup at two versions of the same painting, one from 1888, the other from 1889.

Now, the National Gallery exhibits 2,300 paintings, most of them masterpieces. Though I’m not an expert on soup-throwing, I’d still suggest that any one of them should do as an outlet for a bubbling social conscience. Moreover, a red splodge on, say, the bare bottom of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus could serve the additional purpose of protesting against the objectivisation of women.

Another can of Campbell’s tossed at the face of any religious personage, say Zurbarán’s St Francis, could also act a multi-purpose protest against oil (in this case the paint), religion and Israel as a throwback to the Old Testament. This last one is a bit far-fetched, but it can do at a stretch. Just let your imagination run free.

Such exciting possibilities, and still youngsters from Just Stop Oil and, this time, Youth Demand, unerringly chart a path to those Sunflowers time after time. This takes any possibility of random choice out of consideration, says the statistician in me. What we are witnessing is a clear bias, and I must get to the bottom of it.

Could it be that Israel’s stroppiness caused by colonial capitalism and also warm weather caused by my diesel BMW are mere pretexts? What if – and please don’t discard this possibility out of hand – those youngsters are merely making an aesthetic statement?

It’s just possible that their tastes in art are as retrograde as mine, and they believe – as I do – that all those post-Impressionists (not to mention the multitude of other -ists) owe much of their renown to extra-artistic factors.

Specifically Van Gogh is a fine painter, but that’s not why he fetches higher auction prices than the other, better, artists I’ve mentioned. I suspect that, should he have retained a full complement of facial features, Van Gogh wouldn’t be outselling Botticelli or Cranach.

(Years ago I dropped into Christie’s to look at their pre-auction display. The reserve price of a beautiful – and large – Cranach painting was one-fifth of the cheapest post-Impressionist on offer.)

At some time in the second half of the 19^th century, art veered off the traditional path of Western culture. In fact, it used that path for a doormat. New artists didn’t care about expressing aesthetically the spiritual essence of our civilisation – in fact, they explicitly rebelled against it.

Since wiping collective feet on Western tradition has since become a sine qua non, modernity detects a kindred spirit in Van Gogh, and a spot of self-mutilation doesn’t go amiss either. Alcoholism, drug addiction or ideally suicide also add to artists’ mass appeal. Dying of old age in one’s own bed is oh-h-h so yesterday.

These young lovers of canned soup must feel the way I do… No, forget that. You are right: my explanation is too off-the-wall. Having said that, another couple of Youth Demanders yesterday pasted a photograph of a crying Muslim woman on a painting by Picasso, not, say, Vermeer.

Again, aesthetically speaking, some may think the photograph was an improvement on the original content of that frame. But enough aesthetics – let’s talk politics.

Youth Demand insist that all arms supplies to Israel be summarily stopped and, in a seemingly unrelated fashion, that all new oil and gas production be cancelled. ‘Seemingly’ is the operative word there because different protests aren’t really unrelated. They are bound together by hatred of the West – not just of what it has become but what it has been from inception.

Lest you may think it’s only Muslims who wish to annihilate Israel and everyone in it (sorry, I mean to free Palestine), one of the two photo-pasters was a Jew by the unlikely name of Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld.

This 21-year-old is a politics and international relations student, which these days is another way of saying an impassioned hater of everything the West has ever stood for. To prove that, Monday said this on Wednesday: “I’m taking action because as a Jew, I feel like it’s my duty to call out the genocide being committed in Gaza. I want the world to know this isn’t in the Jewish name and I want to see a free Palestine.”

Okay, Monday, you’re off the hook. No blood guilt for you, mate. As a Jew, you see nothing wrong in millions of other Jews living every day in fear of extinction under a rain of rockets falling on their heads. But let’s agree on what “a free Palestine” means, the other side of sloganeering.

Happy to help with the translation: it’s fully synonymous with “from the river to the sea”, which in its turn is synonymous with exterminating 7.2 million Israeli Jews, going Hitler a million better.

Perhaps neither aesthetics nor politics has much to do with this. It may be just the anomie of youthful rebelliousness coming to a boiling point and bursting out.

However, such fervour diminishes with age. My friend Tony, who worked for years as prison psychiatrist, observed that inmates who stay inside past their 35^th birthday hardly ever reoffend. The solution offers itself: all those firebrands should be sentenced to a term equal to 35 minus their age.

Monday-Malachi should thus be looking at 14 years in the slammer. The humanist in me thinks that may be too steep for disfiguring a painting, especially a modern one. But then I think of bono publico, and the humanist falls silent.

Having previously served as Minister of State for Culture in Blair’s government, David Lammy was appointed Shadow Foreign Secretary in 2009.

“At a time when Britain is recasting itself on the world stage, I look forward to setting out Labour’s vision for a values-led foreign policy based on cooperation and internationalism,” announced Mr Lammy on his appointment.

What kind of values would they be, minister? That question doubtless was on many lips, and Mr Lammy set out to provide a lighthearted answer by appearing on Celebrity Mastermind just a few days later.

Now, if his goal was to re-emphasise his credentials in both culture and foreign affairs, not to mention such less recondite disciplines as arithmetic, that stint was only a qualified success.

Oh well, let’s forget understatement. Lammy’s appearance was in fact rather embarrassing, and not just for him personally.

Asked what was the surname of the married scientists Marie and Pierre who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 for their research into radiation, Mr Lammy answered: “Antoinette”.

One should single out the salient points of this reply. First, our former Culture Minister thought Marie Antoinette was still around in the 20^th century, busily working on research into radiation.

That means he didn’t have a clue who she was and, by inference, was ignorant of the key events in French history. This is a double whammy for his nous in both culture and foreign affairs. In that context, it’s even superfluous to mention Mr Lammy’s ignorance of the basic history of science – every schoolboy should have heard of Pierre and Marie Curie.

Another question on a related subject was: “Which fortress was built in the 1370s to defend one of the Gates of Paris and was later used as a state prison by Cardinal Richelieu?” “Versailles,” answered the former Culture Minister. His knowledge of geography was as sound as that of history: Versailles is in Paris, as far as Mr Lammy was concerned, and he had never heard of the Bastille.

He then opined that it was Red Leicester rather than Stilton that was the usual cheese to accompany port, but that’s excusable. Mr Lammy is a Labour politician after all, and his unfamiliarity with ‘posh’ tastes must have appealed to his core support.

The same excuse could have worked for his not knowing that the highest gallery of theatre seats is called ‘the gods’. Only the toffs know such arcana, and a Labour politician can’t come across as a toff even if he is, which Mr Lammy isn’t.

However, he was running out of excuses. Asked who succeeded Henry VIII on the English throne at the age of nine, Mr Lammy answered: “Henry VII”. That showed his unwavering commitment to equality: Mr Lammy was equally ignorant of French and English history.

Still, even if he had never heard of Edward VI, he should have sensed intuitively that VII was unlikely to succeed VIII, on general grounds. That knowledge could have been picked up in kindergarten, even if that was the last level of Mr Lammy’s education, which it wasn’t.

But never mind ancient history or indeed arithmetic. The next question dealt with events only six years prior to Mr Lammy’s tour de force, and they had immediate relevance to his foreign policy remit: “Which country’s so-called ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003 led to the resignation of its president Eduard Shevardnadze?”

Mr Lammy nominated Yugoslavia for that role, a year after Georgia had been attacked by Russia in an attempt to quash the very revolution that the Shadow Foreign Secretary had evidently never heard of. Even so, he should have known that Shevardnadze could only be a Georgian name, but that’s a minor matter, comparatively speaking.

Moving across the Atlantic, Mr Lammy didn’t know that Purple Heart was the American military decoration for those wounded in action. That sort of thing may upset our sensitive American cousins enough to ruin the special relationship, provided Mr Lammy is familiar with the term. (No big deal if he isn’t; it’s quite meaningless these days.)

One might think that Mr Lammy’s educational credentials included nothing but the School of Hard Knockers followed by Screw U. Well, one might think wrong.

He attended The King’s School, Peterborough, founded by Henry VIII, who was then succeeded by Henry VII. After studying law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Mr Lammy was called to the bar in 1994. He then became the first black Briton to study at Harvard Law School, where he received a Master of Laws degree.

This raises questions not only about Mr Lammy but also about the educational standards at those venerable institutions. But such inquiries will have to wait until we’ve contemplated the more urgent matters.

For this year Shadow has been removed from his title – Mr Lammy is now in charge of Britain’s foreign policy. He thus takes his place in the roll call of his impressive predecessors: Castlereagh, Canning, Palmerston, Salisbury, Grey, Curzon, Balfour, Eden, Bevin – and I’m sure I’ve left quite a few out.

These men gave Britain a prominent place in the world’s political geography, but not all of them were equally accomplished. However, I’m willing to bet that none of them would have been defeated by questions coming out of a school primer. And I’m sure all of them knew that VIII came after VII, not the other way around.

Do let’s concede that a TV quiz show isn’t the right testing ground for a foreign secretary. Generally speaking, not knowing much trivia shouldn’t be held against Mr Lammy. Specifically speaking, however…

Let’s be kind and call him not uneducated but differently educated. He did answer correctly a question involving Oprah Winfrey, which would have made me search in vain for a friend to call who might know who on earth she was. Let’s be even kinder and allow that in the intervening 15 years our Foreign Secretary has learned that Marie-Antoinette and her hubby Pierre didn’t win the Nobel Prize for physics.

Having got kindness out of the way, now let’s be realistic. Let’s use Mr Lammy as the starting point of inductive extrapolation into the level of the people who run the country.

So here’s another Mastermind question: Where and how are they going to run Britain? Answers: A. Aground. B. Into the ground. C. In circles. D. Rugged. E. For the hills.

If you need to call a friend, I’m available. But whatever you do, don’t call David Lammy.

Vlad Putin turned 72 yesterday, and yet again I failed to wish him many happy returns. Very forgetful on my part, a sign of old age no doubt.

Neither did I remember to give Vlad a present, but then what do you give a man who has everything? Palaces, yachts, tens of billions stashed away offshore – Vlad’s possessions would defeat any sycophant racking his brain for a gift that might please Bunker Boy.

In any case, even if Vlad were still a yacht or a palace short, I couldn’t afford to give him such a present. Nor, truth to tell, would I want to. Yet even his closest associates, all billionaires in their own right, must find it hard to touch the right chord in their chieftain’s heart.

But then who says a birthday present has to be a valuable material possession? Poets, for example, have been known to write immortal sonnets for their beloved, and surely this is a better idea than an M&S gift card or even a piece of jewellery. Those of us who believe in the primacy of the spirit know that while material joy is transient heavenly joy is transcendent.

Putin’s cronies know it too, which is why they like to commemorate Vlad’s birthday by tugging on his heart’s strings. Thus, on the day Vlad turned 54 in 2006, they murdered Anna Politkovskaya, his bitter critic.

To be fair, they probably didn’t stumble on that gift idea all by themselves. Vlad might have dropped a hint to that effect, possibly paraphrasing Henry II by saying: “Who will rid me of this meddlesome journalist?”

For Anna Politkovskaya was indeed a journalist, and she was as meddlesome as they got. Hardly a day went by without Vlad having to wince as he read her reports on the second Chechen War, where the Russians were rehearsing the population-control concepts they are currently putting to such profitable use in the Ukraine.

Politkovskaya constantly shuttled between Moscow and Chechnya, visiting refugee camps filled with indescribable misery that she nevertheless managed to describe most poignantly.

I visited one such camp in 1995 BP (Before Putin) and the harrowing experience will stay with me for ever. But unlike me, Politkovskaya had the ear of a vast Russian audience, and she was writing her accounts at a time Vlad was firmly ensconced in the Kremlin.

Moreover, it was precisely the Second Chechen War, started in 1999, that put Vlad in the seat formerly occupied by Stalin. Since Russia still had a semblance of public opinion in those days, the public had to be sold on the idea of an obscure KGB officer as the leader.

To that end, his KGB colleagues blew up several Russian buildings together with all their inhabitants, blamed that outrage on the Chechens and used it as the pretext for another war. The gullible public was thus made aware of the pressing need for a strong leader, and who can be stronger than an officer in the outfit that had murdered some 60 million Soviet citizens?

Criticising the Chechen War was thus tantamount to criticising Vlad himself. And not merely criticising – it was bringing into doubt his very legitimacy. No wonder Vlad had to pop antacids and analgesics every time Politkovskaya put her poison pen to paper.

Granted, she was beaten to the full account of those building explosions by Litvinenko and Feltshinsky who published the book Blowing Up Russia in 2002. But since those reprobates lived outside Russia at the time, it was harder to get to them.

(Harder but not impossible. In fact, Vlad’s people managed to murder Litvinenko in London, just a month after Politkovskaya. Call it a belated birthday present.)

But even though Politkovskaya lived in Moscow, she still had the gall to publish her 2004 book Putin’s Russia, in which she dissed Vlad all the way to higher doses of aspirin and antacids. So, to repeat my earlier question, what do you give a man who has everything? The answer is, Politkovskaya’s head on a platter.

That’s just a figure of speech. The intrepid journalist wasn’t beheaded. She was shot dead in the lift of her block of flats. But the timing was perfect: 7 October. Vlad must have managed to contort his features into a grin-like grimace.

Now, it would be unfair to suggest that Vlad only has friends in Russia. In fact, his brand of strong leadership fascinates many admirers in such places as North Korea, China, Iran and The Mail on Sunday. Some of such sentiments are genuine, others spring from convenience, but they are all fervent.

And let’s be honest: Vlad is a real friend in need. Whenever a rogue country or a terrorist group needs support, moral or material, Vlad is there to help out. His arsenal and chequebook are always open for organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah and, say what you will about Muslims, but ingrates they aren’t.

Vlad rubs their back, they’ll rub out his enemies – and none are more mortal than the West, including Israel. So would it be preposterous to suggest that Hamas’s sadistic foray on 7 October, 2023, was also a birthday present for Vlad?

It has certainly proved even more precious than the murder of Politkovskaya. That act had a purely aesthetic value, but no strategic kind. Hamas, on the other hand, provided an invaluable diversion by kicking off a war to distract the West’s attention from the Ukraine.

Now you understand my predicament. Much as I’d love to give Vlad a birthday present, I can’t really murder anyone. And nothing less seems to do.

Anyone who criticises our justice system when it doesn’t do its job must praise it when it does. Hence I doff my hat to the judges who sent several Just Stop Oilers down.

Last Friday, two of those zealots were sentenced to terms of up to two years for throwing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in 2022. The judges evidently couldn’t see the logic of holding the painter responsible for warm weather or indeed for the use of hydrocarbons.

However, I do see the logic of taking such fanatics off the streets before they start throwing bombs at people rather than soup at paintings. Personally, I’d lock them up for life, just to be on the safe side.

However, Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, disagrees. As far as he is concerned, the sentence is “a draconian and disproportionate punishment for a protest that caused minor damage to a picture frame.”

It’s only a hunch, but I suspect Mr McCallum would feel the same way even had the canvas itself been terminally damaged. However, if he weren’t a deranged fanatic, he’d know that in such legal matters it’s also the thought that counts.

Or, more precisely, the criminal intent. If someone shot at a crowd but only managed to cause a couple of flesh wounds, he’d still be charged with attempted murder and punished accordingly. He could have killed even if he didn’t do so. By the same token, the two Oilers clearly intended to damage Sunflowers, and it wasn’t a form of art criticism.

Five of their accomplices were also sentenced for blocking the M25, the ring road around London that carries 200,000 vehicles a day, 15 per cent of the UK’s motorway traffic. Progressive people the world over were up in arms, and French papers accused the UK of denying freedom of expression.

Right. I get it. Trying to disfigure a painting in the National Gallery and holding thousands of people hostage on a motorway are innocent exercises of free expression. All I can say is that yet again progress-junkies show a lamentable lapse in logic.

I’d like to help them out of that intellectual conundrum. Chaps, the term ‘freedom of expression’ omits a modifier that reasonable people assume can be taken for granted. That word is ‘legitimate’, as in ‘freedom of legitimate expression’.

Since climate fanatics don’t seem to take that implicit adjective for granted, the whole phrase is rendered meaningless. If disfiguring a museum exhibit or preventing law-abiding people from going about their business is free expression, then anything is.

Murder, for example, may be construed as free expression of pent-up anger. Theft, as free expression of the urge to redistribute wealth. Rape, as free expression of sexual desire. In other words, what we are observing here is a characteristic tendency of the Left to make words mean so much that they end up meaning nothing.

We are currently seeing another version of free expression all over the country. As the anniversary of the Hamas sadistic massacre of Israelis approaches, London and other major Western cities are overrun with pro-terrorist demonstrations. The marchers express themselves by screaming support for the terrorist organisations proscribed by law for being just that, terrorist.

The slogans exhibited on their placards range from anti-Israeli to frankly anti-Semitic, which too is against the law. It’s that omitted modifier ‘legitimate’ again.

Yet I for one feel warm gratitude for the marchers, as I always do for people who vindicate my innermost beliefs. The one relevant to the business at hand is that all anti-Western fanatics, whatever their ostensible gripe, are united in the same cause: hatred of the West.

One pro-Hezbollah placard held aloft yesterday made that point clear: “British Museum. Paint it red. Over 100,000 dead”.  The reference to soup-throwers is unmistakable, as is the solidarity of all such evil anomians regardless of their pet whinge against our civilisation.

The marchers didn’t restrict themselves to merely rooting for Hamas and Hezbollah. They made sure they left no one in doubt that any enemy of the West was their friend. Thus their placards also expressed their support for Houthi bandits who fire rockets at passing ships.

They tried to express that sentiment not only freely but also poetically: “Yemen, Yemen make us proud. Turn another ship around”. ‘Proud’ and ‘around’ don’t really rhyme but, as I said, it’s the thought that counts. Never mind versification, feel the passion.

A similar fanatic outside the White House in Washington D.C. yesterday showed the right way forward by becoming the real trailblazer of pro-terrorist support. I use the phrase advisedly because he tried to self-immolate by setting his own arm ablaze.

This form of free expression has something going for it: if all such zealots set themselves on fire, they’d rid our cities of undesirables and, as a side benefit, provide a cheap source of alternative energy. All we’ll have to do is point them towards the areas where wind farms and solar panels fail to heat people’s homes adequately.

London police made 16 arrests yesterday, and I hope our justice system will continue to send those champions of free expression down. But Starmer finds himself in an invidious position. On the one hand, he has to ignore his own feelings and voice some opprobrium of the on-going flouting of the law.

On the other hand, 44 per cent of Labour voters support the marchers’ cause, as opposed to a mere 10 per cent of those who appreciate Israel’s right to defend itself (the corresponding numbers among Tory voters are eight and 36 per cent), with the rest uncommitted. As a professional politician, Starmer may disregard his own feelings up to a point, but not the feelings of his core constituency.

He is therefore unlikely to deny their freedom of expression, as they see it. As I see it, freedom of expression is either meaningless or pernicious unless it coexists with freedom from expression, some of its extreme and illegal forms.

Without this proviso, free expression may easily turn into a civilisational suicide pact, a sort of undignified Dignitas for the whole society. Having said that, I don’t quite see tweedy and Barboured crowds marching through London and chanting “Freedom from expression” – even though this may be a good idea.

“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

So wrote Edmund Burke, perhaps the greatest political mind these Isles have produced. Like his many other adages, this one builds on the past to prophesy the future.

What we are witnessing today isn’t so much the diminution of liberty but its corruption: too little of it where it’s vital, too much where it’s harmful. Modernity can’t find the right balance because it looks down on the past with contempt.

Yet many political realities we take for granted today were born in the Middle Ages. That the rulers as well as the ruled are to be subject to legal and moral restraints is one such reality, and perhaps the most important one.

While in the Hellenic world every new official document expanded the public domain at the expense of the individual, the great legal charters of the mediaeval world aimed to protect the individual from the despotism of the rulers. The Charter of Liberties, Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were only the culmination of this development; its beginnings go back centuries earlier.

Tracing them back step by step, we’ll arrive at their provenance in the Christian doctrine of the autonomous individual as the focus of earthly life. While early Christians didn’t use the term ‘human rights’, they wouldn’t have been unduly bothered had an intrepid stranger explained what the term meant. By contrast, Plato or Aristotle would have thought the stranger not so much intrepid as mad. People to them only had rights as citizens, not as mere human beings.

The modern system of representation has ancient roots as well, and it was from barons’ councils that our modern parliaments have evolved. In pre-Norman England it was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles, convening after a king’s death to choose a successor. That was, to name one instance, how Harold Godwinson took the throne, which he then lost to a Norman arrow in 1066.

The same can be said about the system of adjudication and property protection, whose historical antecedents go back to the Old Testament but whose political embodiment was mediaeval. Above all, during the Middle Ages the individual could feel relatively secure behind the wall of local institutions patterned on the family. Parish, village, guild, monastery, cooperative, neighbourhood and even the family itself had their autonomy generally respected.

Originally created mostly for the purpose of keeping people safe from encroachment by central government, in time such institutions assumed the role of the formulator, educator and custodian of the social and moral order. It was such institutions that gave physical shape to the three pillars on which, according to Burke, government should rest: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

The social and moral order maintained by the church and familial institutions was by definition conservative – its origin was assumed to have been derived from the word of God, and that word wasn’t subject to change. For the same reason, the church is (or rather ought to be) ipso facto a conservative institution – its function is to preserve the tradition that’s not only two millennia old but is also based on eternal and immutable truths.

Politically too, the church either has to eschew progressivism or betray its own function in earthly life, that of acting as social adhesive, moral judge and mediator of salvation. The first means staying intertwined with secular society; the second, rising above it; the third, eventually leaving it behind.

While the second and third are self-explanatory, the first in the mediaeval world meant mainly ensuring that the patchwork quilt of numerous, and often competing, familial groups wouldn’t threaten social cohesion. The danger was inherent: it could be assumed with certainty that various groups would at times pursue clashing ends.

Whenever their secular interests were pulling them apart, the church would step in to remind, say, the warring clans that at the highest possible level they had more to bring them together than to tear them apart. Without this moderating, conservative role played by the church, familial institutions would never have added up to a cohesive society.

The political realm outside that familial order was always fluid and tactical in its modus operandi. Rooted not in ideology but in expedience and custom, it wasn’t so much chiselled in stone as drawn on quicksand. While personal relationships within a family clan were constant, the political relationships among various elements of the feudal political order changed all the time.

Such fluidity wasn’t then, nor is now, contrary to real conservatism – it is in fact its essential characteristic. Burke said as much when commenting that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”.

Change was aplenty in feudal times: a vassal could become stronger than his lord, or the latter richer and more powerful than his prince. The formal bonds among them might have survived the shifts, but the vessels would be empty – the contents were no longer there.

Geographic demarcation was equally fluid: a lord could switch his allegiance from one prince to another, taking his land into another domain. Or else he could become a prince himself, claiming new lands and rearranging the political geography of his region.

Thus no nations could have appeared, at any rate not in our modern sense of territorial, political, economic, legal, cultural, ethnic and linguistic unity. The genitive designation of the Holy Roman Empire as that ‘of the German Peoples’ referred to religious and cultural commonality only, not to an entity definable in clearly drawn geographical terms. Even England, whose geographic limits are defined naturally, remained an agglomerate of independent provinces throughout the Middle Ages.

Weak or at least limited central government had neither the strength nor the inclination to encroach upon the autonomy of local institutions. Though it sometimes had to regard them as competitors and act accordingly, an all-out attack was unthinkable until a mighty absolute state appeared and began to put its foot down.

The triad of state, church and family (along with family-like institutions), with the last two at least holding their own against the first, was then destroyed. The state emerged victorious. And once the protective wall of intermediate institutions was swept out of the way, the state’s power over the individual could be reliably predicted to gravitate towards becoming absolute at some point.

The conclusion is clear: the social and moral order of Christendom is incompatible with a political triumph of central over local institutions. Since such a triumph always involves the subjugation of the personal to the collective, and therefore some enslavement of the individual, it could only be achieved at a cost to such institutions.

The ultimate cost was their demise, which was the levy no traditional state was prepared to pay. For the modern state, however, it was cheap at the price.

Modern democracy is inseparable from central government riding roughshod over local pluralism. Strip the word ‘democracy’, as used today, of its armoured shell of demagoguery, and it becomes synonymous with limitless centralisation, leaving people unprotected from the encroachments of an impersonal, omnipotent state run by an increasingly corrupt bureaucracy.

Hence a democracy unaccountable to a transcendent authority and uncontested by competing forms of government is incompatible with the traditional moral and social order in the West. That’s what Burke meant and what we have forgotten.

The upshot is clear: read Edmund Burke, ladies and gentlemen – and weep.