Author: Alexander Boot

Do you live in an area where you or your child would be likely to run into a uniformed soldier? Or into a veteran of our recent wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan?

Statistically speaking, chances are you don’t. But if you do, I still think you don’t give such a possibility another thought – and you certainly don’t see a soldier as a factor of mortal danger to you or your brood.

If all that is true, I can use my sleuth-like deductive power to figure out one thing about you: you don’t live in Russia.

There, more and more soldiers go back home after completing their tour of duty in what’s officially called a ‘special military operation’, or, unofficially (and in Russia illegally) ‘the war against the Ukraine’.

War in general has a coarsening effect on fighting men, even in a well-behaved army observing every rule of civilised warfare. That, if you’ve been following the news at all, doesn’t describe the Russian army fighting in the Ukraine.

If you have been reading the papers, then you know that thousands of Russian soldiers torture and murder civilians, rape women, men and children, loot and steal. That sort of thing doesn’t do much to improve their moral health, but there also exists another problem.

Many Russian soldiers weren’t morally healthy to begin with. Thousands of them are imprisoned criminals promised a reprieve if they join up. Those who take Putin up on this kind offer go to the Ukraine and continue to ply their old trade, this time legally.

Moreover, the Russians are now offering the same option to criminals who haven’t even been tried yet. When they are arrested, say for rape or murder, they are given a choice between a prison camp and a boot camp, and you won’t win any prizes for guessing which way most of them go.

In any civilised country, this practice would raise the issue of deterrence. After all, courts and prisons largely exist to make a chap contemplating a crime think twice. But if a rapist casing a house knows he can always avoid punishment by joining up, he may still think twice, but the second, deterring thought will be much weaker.

Getting back to the issue in hand, we can detect a potential problem. Returning criminals, or even soldiers who are criminal novices, may eschew civilian careers in, say, social services and start roaming the streets with intent.

Actually, ‘may’ is the wrong word here. There have been hundreds of reported cases that involve demobbed or furloughed soldiers committing horrendous crimes of every description. The streets of Russian provincial towns increasingly begin to resemble a war zone.

Parents fear for their children’s safety, but they don’t need to be afraid, not in the Perm province at any rate. The authorities there have issued a leaflet instructing children how to protect themselves against men in uniform.

The text doesn’t really require any comments, but I’ll provide some parenthetical ones anyway – the temptation is too strong. So here it is:   

A Soldier Won’t Hurt a Child: simple rules for a child dealing with a soldier

These rules will help you communicate safely and easily with soldiers who defend Russia during the special military operation. Remember: your proper behaviour is a guarantee of your safety!

[This brings to mind notices, such as Beware of Dog on houses and Don’t feed the animals on zoo cages. The threatening tone is unmistakable.]

Boys: How you should look when running into a soldier

Desirable: natural hair colour, trousers, shirt, T-shirt in a neutral colour

Undesirable: dyed hair, jewellery or accessories, skimpy shorts, clothes in bright colours

Don’t forget! Your clothes mustn’t be showy. Choose a modest outfit covering your personal zones [?] and not too tight

[‘Personal zone’ makes no more sense in Russian than it does in English, but one can guess what it means. However, I shudder to think what will happen to a child wearing shorts and a tight shirt who runs into a returning hero. Kaleidoscopic images of baroque horrors flash through my mind, but I’ll keep them to myself.]

What you can talk to a soldier about

Desirable: your hobbies, the soldier’s hobbies, school, weather

Undesirable: military operations, politics

[“Mister, what do you like to do when you aren’t fighting our enemies? What, rape little boys and their mothers?”]

How you should behave

Give your defender a smile. But it’s worth remembering that you should smile or laugh only when appropriate

You shouldn’t shout or do anything unexpected. Remember! Such actions may provoke a soldier returning from the front into a sudden and negative reaction!

Act quietly. Try to listen attentively to our hero’s war stories. Important! Do not interrupt!

Here endeth the lesson, at least one taught to the children of Perm. Yet Western grownups who still harbour illusions about Russia’s war on the Ukraine should learn something too: about the war, the Russians’ fighting methods – and the country where such leaflets are necessary.  

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist, got it wrong when he said: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In today’s world, certainly its British part, ideology doesn’t just trump economics. It enslaves economics for its own nefarious purposes.

Allow me to explain this by boring you with a few economic truisms, facts so basic that any secondary school pupil should have them at his fingertips. Since our ministers, with the possible exception of Angela Rayner, possess such qualifications, nothing I’m going to say should be news even to them.

One such truism is that consumer confidence is a key factor in a consumer economy, which is what every Western country is supposed to enjoy. When consumers look towards the future with optimistic hope, they begin to, well, consume and invest more.

As a result, the economy grows in strength, the key indicators improve, consumers and investors become even more confident. Happiness all around.

Are you with me so far? Good. So what economic indicators are known to make consumers more confident?

First, inflation has to be low for otherwise people’s earnings will have less purchasing power. And here’s the good news: Britain’s inflation rate is down at a manageable 2.2 per cent.

Then there should be plenty of jobs around, so consumers won’t toss and turn at night fearing unemployment. More good news: unemployment is at its lowest level since 1974.

What else? Oh yes, the economy shouldn’t be stagnant. To be fair, our economic growth isn’t brilliant, but the British economy is still the fastest growing in the G7.

All in all, Britons should be serenely confident that our economic future looks bright, or at any rate brightish. And yet the Consumer Confidence Index is languishing at minus 20, meaning that consumers are running scared.

Such sentiments will have a knock-on effect on the economy: people will be spending and investing less, tax revenues will go down, the government will have to borrow more, inflation will go up as a result, employers will stop employing, unemployment will soar – well, you don’t need me to teach you the economic primer.

So why are British consumers lacking confidence? Simple. Within the first weeks of its tenure, the Labour government has already stated its wholehearted commitment to wrecking the economy by suffocating it with taxes.

Turn another page in that primer, and you’ll find another truism: high taxes make capital, and hence jobs, flee. A higher capital gains tax, inheritance tax, employment tax all have this predictable effect.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver her first budget on 30 October, but entrepreneurs are already fleeing en masse in anticipation. To repeat the old joke, I just hope the last one to leave will lock the door and turn off the lights.

When the budget is actually delivered, and people’s worst expectations are exceeded, the economy won’t take long to collapse or at least suffer the kind of damage that will take decades to repair.

Miss Reeves knows all that as well as you and I, possibly even better. After all, she holds a master’s degree in economics from the LSE, not just a secondary school diploma. And yet she is lying to the country by saying she’ll have “difficult decisions” to make on taxes, meaning she’ll raise them.

The lie isn’t that she’s going to raise taxes: she’s perfectly truthful about that. The lie is that the decision is difficult. It isn’t. It’s dead easy.

By the same token, if Fido could talk, he wouldn’t insist that his decision to chase Tabby around the block is difficult. That’s what his DNA is wired to do, and all socialist governments (meaning the governments of all Western countries) are just as programmed to raise taxes.

There’s no point arguing against that on economic grounds. Doing so can only spring from the failure to realise that the implicit purpose of modern taxation isn’t always, and never merely, fiscal.

Another omnipresent aim is to extend the power of the state by limiting the people’s ability to become independent of it. In that sense, taxation in the modern Western world – whatever else it might be – always has to be punitive and preventive.

The whole system is designed around this desideratum, and it will fight any interloper with the kind of resolution that would put the Spartans at Thermopylae to shame.

Another aim has more to do with PR. It’s to assuage the desire large swaths of the population have been brainwashed to feel for ressentiment and craving revenge against those more successful than they are. That’s why they’ll welcome, or at least won’t resist too strongly, the tax hikes whose sole effect will be reducing the state revenue by driving the wealthiest and most productive people, not to mention businesses, out of the country.

Labour politicians emetically shout about their concerns for the ‘working people’, especially – I dare say exclusively – those who belong to public-sector trade unions. Yet real working people and our government inhabit two different economic worlds.

People work their whole lives to live comfortably, raise and educate their children, provide for their own old age – such is their actual, tangible reality. The government, on the other hand, lives in the virtual reality, where ideology and powerlust reign supreme and nothing is tangible.

The two realities are irreconcilable; like Euclid’s parallels they never cross. That’s why we should prepare ourselves for another crisis, with the economy lying in ruins. And rising out of them, like a phoenix from the ashes, will be the state – stronger, bossier, increasingly tyrannical.

Sorry to be such a doomsayer. But hey, I’m a consumer too. That’s why my confidence is racing ahead of the Index on its way down.

Robert Jenrick, frontrunner in the Tory leadership race, realises that Reform UK schismatics threaten to perpetuate Labour rule.

Unless they are brought back into the fold, the Tories may for ever remain a rump party with little chance of reclaiming power. Hence the need for pushing the Conservatives far enough rightwards to make Reform UK redundant.

One way of doing so is to reassert the Tory claim to Englishness, thereby knocking the nationalist sabre, or perhaps pint, out of Nigel Farage’s hand. To that end Mr Jenrick set up his stall in an article saying that: “The attitudes and policies of our metropolitan establishment have weakened English identity. They have put the very idea of England at risk.”

Mr Jenrick gets top marks for his political acumen, but his thinking on national identity in general and English identity specifically sounds muddled. However, he can console himself with the thought that he isn’t the only one. This matter has baffled many thinkers, even some serious ones.

Jenrick talks about being equally proud of being British and English, lamenting that the second part is getting a rough treatment: “Whereas all of the most high-status people in Scotland and Wales are proud to be Scottish and Welsh, most of the English political and media elite are far from proud to be English.”

That’s doubtless true, but there is a ready explanation for this difference. While a great part of Scottish or Welsh identity consists in not being English, an Englishman can’t seek his own identity in not being Scottish or Welsh.

Anyway, though I wish the Tories well, neither their politics nor Mr Jenrick’s ambitions interest me very much. But the matter of national identity does, starting with the question of what constitutes a nation.

The question isn’t one of especially long standing. The issue of nationhood only moved to the forefront of people’s thought after the collapse of Christian universalism and its replacement with national, even ethnic, particularism.

This isn’t to say that national identity hadn’t existed until then, only that it played second fiddle to other identities, such as fickle dynastic allegiances and rather more constant folkloric differences, those of language and what’s broadly described as culture.

I always cite Thomas Aquinas as an illustration. He was born and raised in Italy, but his family had Germanic roots and was even related to the Holy Roman Emperor. As an adult, Thomas then spent most of his life in Paris. So was he Italian, German or French? I don’t know, and I’m sure neither did he.

The idea of blood-and-soil nationhood became popular in the 19^th century, the first in which victorious modernity ruled the roost. That notion received rather bad press following the Second World War, but it survives to this day.

For example, the American ‘paleoconservative’ (the term was coined by my friend Paul Gottfried but I don’t especially like it, though I like him) Sam Francis wrote: “Every real nation is a people of common blood and descended from the same ancestors”.

This idea is attractive but too one-dimensional for my taste, to the point of being nonsensical. It certainly doesn’t help the denizens of multi-national countries, such as Britain or Francis’s own US. By his criterion, the US isn’t a nation at all and has no hope of ever becoming one. Britain isn’t a nation either, and neither is just about any sizeable European country.

In general, Francis’s definition of a “real” nation makes me uncomfortable because it’s fundamentally anti-Christian. Christians are all brothers not because of any consanguinity but because they all have the same father who stands above ethnicity or nationhood.

It’s not by accident that most proponents of blood-and-soil nationalism have problems with Christianity, and that includes Francis. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he once wrote, for example.

Which race was that? Hebrews? Caucasians? Americans? Christianity wasn’t created by or for any particular race or nationality, this is basic. My point is that nationalism of any kind, and especially the blood-and-soil variety, doesn’t sit comfortably with Christianity. Patriotism is something else again, but the etymology of the word points at one’s country, not at the composition of one’s blood.

A Breton and a Provençal aren’t “of common blood”, and neither do they “descend from the same ancestors”, unless it’s Adam and Eve. Yet both are French. The common blood of Englishmen may be less dubious, but it too has had many different inputs.

It all depends how far back we’re willing to go. Let’s just say that at first various Germanic and Celtic tribes contributed to the English bloodstream, then the Romans dropped a little in, and then Scandinavians and Frenchmen added some major tributaries – and we shan’t even talk about the minor ones.

Paradoxically, America, for all its mongrel make-up, is in some ways ahead of us in the blood-and-soil stakes because the previous inhabitants of the North American continent, those of the wigwams, tomahawks and white man speak with forked tongue fame, didn’t have countries in our sense of the word.

Britain, however, was formed by a union of four countries, each predating her. Mr Jenrick is clearly aware of the 1707 Acts of the Union, which is why he talks about identifying as both British and English.

That’s wonderful, but can one really claim allegiance to two nations at once? I’m in an ideal position to know that it’s possible to possess more than one passport, but belonging to more than one nation does create conceptual problems.

One detects some confusion there, and it’s common even to men who are older or more intellectually accomplished than Mr Jenrick. Even such achievers routinely talk about Britain being made up of four countries or four nations, which doesn’t solve my problem with definitions.

Let’s begin to sort it out by stating that the concept of a nation presupposes cultural, geographic and political commonality, and it may even include an ethnic element, but that is more debatable. This is reflected in terminology, though not everywhere.

Thus ‘French’ implies both citizenship in the French Republic and cultural commonality. ‘American’ is a term that’s also both political and cultural. But then one thinks of Jannik Sinner, the best Italian tennis player ever, whose first language is German even though he is Italian born and bred, and the cultural aspect of nationality begins to totter.

Now, it’s possible to date a multi-national Britain back to 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and united the two crowns. But even if we go back only as far as 1707, that still makes Britain an older country than Germany, Italy or for that matter the US. Nevertheless, British nationhood needs, according to Mr Jenrick, to lean on the crutch of Englishness to stand on its own hind legs.

Everything I’ve said so far points at a problem. How do we solve it?

Let’s agree that ‘British’ implies mainly, though not exclusively, a political identity, whereas ‘English’ is mainly, though not exclusively, ethnic. That doesn’t solve the problem, but it does simplify it by eliminating conflicting allegiances. It’s thus possible to be both British and English at the same time.

Other than that, I can’t think of any objective criteria of nationhood, only subjective ones. If one identifies as English first, British second, that’s what one is. Such self-identification may be based on any number of factors: family roots, language, preference for warm beer rather than, say, cold vodka. Above all, I think, it’s based on what Otto Bauer (d. 1936) called the “commonality of fate”, and I thought I’d never quote any Socialist approvingly.

This has to do not only with one’s past but also with one’s commitment to the future, one’s – ideally unspoken – commitment to sharing one’s country’s fate, whatever that may be. Wearing St George’s Cross underpants is strictly optional.

Are you worried that your phone or some other communications device may blow up in your face? If you are, I’m on hand to propose a sure-fire method of protecting yourself:

Do not under any circumstances join a terrorist organisation, especially one whose stated mission in life is to wipe Israel off the map.

And if you can’t resist the temptation of becoming a member of Hezbollah, Hamas or some such, eschew newfangled devices, whether high-tech, such as I-Phones, or low-tech, such as pagers and walkie-talkies. Stick to smoke signals, carrier pigeons or, if you must, the odd payphone.

None of these is likely to explode into your face, hands or those parts of your anatomy that are close to trouser pockets. However, as thousands of Hezbollah thugs have discovered, anything more sophisticated just may blow up unexpectedly.

Blow up is different from ignite, which points at the sabotage technique used by the Israelis. Those devices couldn’t have been made to explode by using their integral parts, such as batteries.

An overheated battery may catch fire and burn down the house while the residents are otherwise engaged. But it won’t blow up with sufficient force to… well, I’ll spare you the lurid details of the physical damage those pagers, walkie-talkies and fingerprint-recognition devices inflicted on Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Let’s just say that the injuries were quite horrendous and, in some 20 cases, fatal.

One has to admire the ingenuity, skill and sheer guts of Mossad, or whatever Israeli agency was involved in planning and executing the operation. Their agents had to gain access to large consignments of devices travelling along the supply chain to their Hezbollah procurers. They then had to hide inside a small amount, perhaps only a gramme or two, of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (or a similarly powerful explosive) and a circuit acting as a remote long-range trigger.

No slapdash work was allowed. If even one of the charges had gone off before its time, the whole operation would have been exposed. The blasts had to be synchronised and so timed as to occur at a time when the devices were likely to be in use.

My admiration of Mossad’s brilliance isn’t universally shared. Thus Volker Türk, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, referred to the detonations as “shocking” and “their impact on civilians unacceptable”.

“The fear and terror unleashed is profound,” he added, displaying the customary knack of international functionaries for stating the blindingly obvious. Of course, the operation will spread fear and terror. That’s its whole point, apart from taking thousands of militants out of commission.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres added his own contribution by stating that “civilian objects should not be weaponised” and “that should be a rule that … governments should be able to implement”.

To begin with, no device used by terrorists to coordinate their murderous activities is ever truly civilian. Weapons include not only bombs, rockets and guns, but also communications systems. When a pager or a walkie-talkie is used in that fashion, it’s already weaponised. But never mind semantics; let’s talk about counterterrorism.

I don’t have the ear of either gentleman, which is a shame. I’d like to know which methods of fighting Arab terrorism they’d recommend to Israel as an alternative to weaponising civilian objects.

Would they prefer for the Israeli air force to level the Beirut buildings inhabited by Hezbollah terrorists and their families? Or perhaps, in order to curry favour with UN officials, the Israelis should drive tanks into the centre of Beirut and start laying about them with their tracks and high-calibre guns?

I can’t help thinking that any such foray would result in much higher collateral damage. In fact, this operation by, I assume, Mossad is a marvel of a precision strike. The devices involved were commissioned specifically for use by Hezbollah commanders of various ranks – not, judging by the number of the devices procured, for the rank and file.

The likelihood of a Lebanese civilian using a pager, walkie-talkie or a fingertip-recognition device would have been infinitesimally low. In fact, I can’t think of any other tactic, other than a sniper’s bullet, that would be as humanely selective in its targeting.

Perhaps Messrs Guterres and Türk are more knowledgeable than me, and there indeed exists some possible weaponry they’d rather recommend to Mossad and the IDF. But somehow I doubt that.

In fact, I’m sure that, if probed on their preferred methods of Israel’s anti-terrorist measures, they’d opt for ‘none of the above’ or rather ‘none’. To be sure, assorted Lefties will talk your ear off about the Israelis’ right to defend themselves. However, if we got down to the nitty-gritty, they’d explain that such defence shouldn’t involve killing or maiming those who wish Israel ill and do their best to kill Israelis.

Western Lefties, such as Messrs Türk and Guterres, are viscerally attracted to those who hate the West, and they use their offices to help them as best they can. They feel a Mowgli-like empathy for Third World terrorists, “We be of one blood, thou and I”. While decent Westerners root for Israel because it’s an oasis of Western civilisation in the Middle East, the Lefties hate it for the same reason.

In public, they’ll happily profess regret that Israelis have to live in constant anticipation of rockets raining on their heads or hordes of sadistic savages descending on their villages. But smouldering deep down is their inextinguishable affection for anti-Western actions, no matter how barbaric.

My congratulations to the Israelis on this brilliant operation, the likes of which I’ve never even heard about. I wish we had the same courage to fight for our liberties as that shown by the people of Israel and the Ukraine.

If we did, we’d be the ones wiping out terrorists and aggressors, even if we weren’t their immediate victims. Remember what John Donne wrote about men and islands?

I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Yet speculation about the possible end to the war in the Ukraine isn’t exactly groundless.

After all, we don’t have to consider numerous possibilities. There are only three conceivable scenarios, with a few subplots here and there. I suggest we look at them and decide how the result of the US elections may make each more or less likely.

Scenario 1 (Doomsday). The US in particular and NATO in general continue to drip-feed supplies to the Ukraine, with the drip getting slower and slower.

The Ukrainian army gradually runs out of ordnance, armaments and soldiers, with Russia gaining the upper hand in the war of attrition (in fact, this tendency is already observable). Eventually the Russians break through, and the Ukrainian front collapses.

The Russians win a resounding victory and turn the Ukraine into their colony. Guerrilla war will continue to flare up in places, but the Russians will respond with murderous, and eventually successful, punitive raids.

Likelihood. Low. Whoever wins on 5 November will find this scenario unacceptable. NATO would have to confront an emboldened and ever-aggressive fascist state on its doorstep, requiring a huge military build-up across Europe to contain it. Another Russian aggression, this time against a NATO state, would happen nonetheless, it would only be a matter of time.

Barring the unlikely possibility of the next US president being a Russian agent, this scenario is unlikely, although I wouldn’t put anything past our leaders.

Scenario 2 (Ideal). The US in particular and NATO in general drastically revise their approach to the Russian aggression.

They review Zelensky’s vaunted ‘plan for victory’, find it realistic and decide to do all they can to facilitate it. Removing all stops, they inundate the Ukraine with a flood of state-of-the-art armaments, including long-range missiles, Patriot systems with plenty of rockets for each, warplanes, cannon shells, tanks, armoured cars, drones and so on.

All restrictions on the use of such weapons are removed, the Ukrainians go on the offensive and drive the invaders back to the 1991 borders or at least to the 2014 ones. The Ukraine then joins NATO and becomes a formidable bastion of the West against any further Russian aggression.

Likelihood. Low to nonexistent. Trump, ventriloquist speaking through his dummy Vance, is clearly not even considering such a possibility.  What he has in mind is something close to my Scenario 3.

The Left-wing cabal using Biden and, should she win, Harris as a figurehead president, has had plenty of opportunity to act on this scenario and has neglected to do so. It’s hard to imagine they’ll suddenly grow the appendage responsible for making bold decisions — or the brain capable of thinking beyond the next election.

Scenario 3 (Realistic). A ceasefire is agreed, with the line of demarcation frozen at the current frontline.

According to the subsequent treaty, the Ukraine cedes the 20 per cent of her territory currently occupied by Russia and promises never to try to join NATO in the future. In return, Russia undertakes not to make any further encroachments on the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

The US underwrites the treaty and uses some mechanism to safeguard it. That could be some kind of demilitarised zone fortified and policed by NATO troops, or simply a security guarantee.

The Russians declare victory and announce another annual state holiday to commemorate it. At the same time they continue their aggressive buildup, knowing that no DMZ in history has ever done what it was supposed to do.

As for security guarantees, the Russians will have no reason to believe NATO in general and the US in particular will honour them. The US and Britain didn’t honour the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, guaranteeing the Ukraine’s security in exchange for her relinquishing nuclear weapons – so why break the habit?

The history of Russia over the past several centuries shows that the country regards any peace treaty as merely a temporary expedient enabling her to rebuild, rearm and have another go. It takes psychotic credulity to believe that this treaty would produce a different outcome.

Give it a couple of years or a couple of decades, but the Russians will come again to claim the rump Ukraine and whatever else they can get their hands on, the Baltics and Poland the likeliest targets.

Likelihood. High. Trump has exactly this scenario in mind, and he’ll have enough clout with Russia and, more important, China to bring it to fruition. Trump, the self-proclaimed champion deal-maker, will threaten Russia with a version of Scenario 2 and China with crippling trade sanctions to get his way

Should he win on 5 November, Trump will thus push his plan through and blow his own trumpet at an eardrum-busting volume, declaring himself the kind of peacemaker Jesus had in mind in his Beatitudes. Moreover, he’ll be able to make sure that the toxic fallout from such surrender by another name happens after his stint at the White House.

Should Harris win, her wirepullers may still decide that Scenario 3 is the only way to avoid Scenario 1. They’ll then act according to Trump’s plan, with minor modifications, taking all the credit for the subsequent peace.

Scenario 3 is indeed the most realistic one, but the Ukraine’s refusal to play along will turn it into a chimera. The Ukrainians may choose to fight to the last bullet and the last man, and they have form in that sort of thing.

Ukrainian nationalists continued to fight the Soviets for several years after 1945, against desperate odds. They chose death over slavery, and whatever the realist in us may think about such self-sacrifice, the moral agent in us must applaud its nobility.

Unfortunately, either potential winner on 5 November, but especially Trump, will try to twist the Ukraine’s arm into compliance with Scenario 3. Making the threat to cut off the supplies altogether wouldn’t be beyond them.

Let’s hold our breath, wait and see what happens. Those of us who believe in miracles, should pray for one in this case. You never know your luck.

P.S. The amazing coup of exploding pagers raises more questions than I have the space or energy to ask. But the question foremost in my mind is what on earth that Iranian ambassador was doing with a Hezbollah pager.

Glancing at FB this morning, I came across a photo of an airliner with the initials TWA prominently displayed. “The paint job on Keir Starmer’s personal jet is almost finished,” said the caption.

I’m not sure this is an appropriate way of expressing political criticism, but it did make me laugh. It also made me think about Sir Keir’s latest achievement, and especially his subsequent comments.

Some 1,700 prisoners received an early release last week, and most of them weren’t gentlemanly tax evaders. That number included drug dealers, robbers, burglars and even the odd killer.

Then the government passed a hasty ad hoc ruling that thousands more would continue to be released in the coming weeks because Britain can’t afford to keep them inside. Our prisons are so grossly overcrowded that they’ve run out of room.

By way of an interim decision, the government announced that henceforth prisoners would only have to serve 40 per cent of their sentences, not the customary 50 per cent we’ve learned to know and, in my case, hate.

The system of tariffs makes a mockery of justice, devaluing sentences and emboldening criminals. When an evildoer knows he’ll be out in half the time he is supposed to serve, he may be encouraged to try something on he would have eschewed otherwise.

Half the term means half the justice, half the punishment and – to appeal to every woke heart – half the rehabilitation. And 40 per cent of the term… well, you can do the maths.

Morally corrupt as that system is, it’s not the worst of it. Last week we were treated to the sickening spectacle of released convicts celebrating outside prison gates in the style of Grand Prix drivers. Bottles of champagne were popped, and crowds of meeters and greeters were doused with pricey booze.

Sir Keir didn’t like the show any more than I did: “Being forced to release people who should be in prison makes me angry,” he said.

But what’s a mother to do? “The choice was pretty simple. We’d got to the point where prisons were so full we had the choice between releasing people in the way that we’ve done it, or not being able to arrest people and put them in prison.” 

And then: “No prime minister should be in that position.” There’s one thing our PM got right.

To be fair, Starmer then made some vague noises about how building more prisons would be the way out of that Hobson’s choice. Yet nothing concrete has been announced. All we’ve learned for sure is that Sir Keir is unhappy about the situation, and it’s all the Tories’ fault.

Some of it doubtless is. However, forgetting partisan squabbles for a second, the problem is more fundamental than the diminishing differences between the main parties. All such parties, along with the governments they form, have lost sight of what governments are for.

Last week, Mario Draghi issued a report calling for an increase of productivity across Europe, and any sensible person should welcome this entreaty. All God’s children like better productivity because… And there Mr Draghi inadvertently pointed at the fundamental problem I’ve alluded to.

Unless we become more productive, explained the former prime minister of Italy, Europe will have no chance of becoming “a beacon of climate responsibility” or of “financing its social model… This is an existential challenge.”

No, it isn’t. And thinking it is lies at the root of the problem.

I happen to regard ‘climate responsibility’ as nothing but a cynical, anti-scientific power-grab by our socialist governing elites, and I don’t have a good word to say for their ‘social model’ either. However, even assuming that governments should be concerned about warm weather and the millions sponging on the state, neither should be their first order of priority.

Such things are strictly secondary, not to say tertiary, to the reason why governments were first instituted among Men, to use the language of America’s clearly misogynist Founders. (They should have said “among Men, Women, Other”. Perhaps it’s time to get the old blue pencil out.) The primary responsibility of any state is to protect the people against those who threaten their liberty, safety and property.

That is to say against foreign enemies, domestic tyrants – and criminals. Everything else, even things immeasurably more important than “climate responsibility” and “social model”, should come into consideration only after the primary function of government has been taken care of.

Hence any responsible statesman in any civilised country has a simplified task of drawing budgets, and focusing one’s mind always simplifies intellectual conundrums.

He should look at the pot of money available or realistically projected and decide how much of it is required to provide for proper defence of the realm and effective law enforcement. That done, he can then decide how to allocate what’s left. But first things first.

I don’t know whether there are any civilised countries left in the world, but what I know for sure is that none of those with even a tenuous claim to that distinction is governed by responsible statesmen. That’s why they wilfully do things in reverse.

They start with allocations for things they hope will keep them in power a while longer, such as “social models”, “climate responsibilities”, education that indoctrinates without educating, subsidies for their sponsors and likely voters, foreign aid for assorted despots and so on.

Only then do they look at what’s left and plan how best to spend it. And if as a result our streets become inundated with released murderers, and our country is no longer capable of defending herself, so be it. There isn’t enough money for such incidentals. We’re skint.

Considering the problem in hand, the government should build as many prisons as it takes to keep all convicted criminals locked up for the duration of their sentence. Letting them out because we can’t afford to keep them in is in itself criminal, as is the refusal to arrest criminals because of prison overcrowding. Starmer is right: such a choice should never arise.

Alas, our ‘leaders’ can’t think along such lines. Instead they blame the previous government, Tory if it’s Labour laying the blame, the other way around when Tories are in power. Yet in this respect, the difference between them is marginal, if any. All of them have lost track of the main role governments should play, busying themselves with walk-ons instead.

That’s why I hope Messrs Cameron, Sunak et al. will join Sir Keir onboard his private jet. Once the paint job has been finished.

Ever since Heraclitus observed that you can’t step into the same river twice, mankind has known that everything develops, irreversibly so. Even natural selection held no secrets for our civilisational ancestors.

Already in the first century BC Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses and thus contributing to the survival of the faster ones.

It would have indeed taken a blind man to overlook the dynamic essence of nature. All species develop, some thrive, others don’t, and most die out. We now know that some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited the world no longer do.

And even a single biological organism, such as a tree, goes through predetermined biological cycles: birth, childhood, youth, maturity, decline, death. A human being develops over the same cycle, which indisputable observation has led some thinkers, Toynbee and Spengler spring to mind, to come up with the naturalist view of history, perhaps the most anti-Western theory I can think of.

But the really damaging theory of history first appeared in the 18^th century and acquired a sacramental status in the 19^th. That was the idea that each new phase wasn’t only a development of an old one, but also an improvement on it.

Life wasn’t just in flux, with things changing over time. According to progress junkies, things didn’t merely change; they became steadily and ineluctably better. They developed as if with a specific purpose in mind: from primitive to complex, from small to big, from chaos to order, from bad to good, from scatterbrained to rational, from wicked to moral.

The last two forms of development applied to man only, but the tendency was common for all nature. And why not? When later in the 19^th century Nietzsche explained that God was dead, he meant that educated people no longer believed. That was simply an observation, and an accurate one at that.

Therefore, man was no longer perceived as the unique creature made in the image and likeness of God. He was just another order of nature, a beast of a special kind – cleverer than any other animal but an animal nonetheless. Hence man too obeyed ubiquitous natural laws, by then helpfully formulated by Darwin. For evolution, read history.

Darwin explained, being rather economical with the proof, that Homo sapiens started life long ago (millions of years ago? billions? – never mind, as many as it took to make the theory plausible) as a single-cell organism. The single cell kept growing and becoming more complex until it became Charles Darwin via many intermediate stages.

Since Charles Darwin undoubtedly represented progress over an amoeba, the point seemed irrefutable. Progress, which is to say inexorable meliorative development, was now seen as an ontological property of biological life and hence of man, its more advanced element.

In the century preceding Darwin, man was paid a blanket compliment of getting better, not just older. Man had finally begun to acquire reason, having until then flown by the seat of his pants. Progress was under way, and man was growing from his natal senselessness to rationality, and hence from immorality to morality, showing signs that eventually the Rational Millennium was bound to arrive.

Soon Darwin was on hand to explain this tendency in biological terms, and preachers of progress experienced the joy of a safe cracker who hears the final satisfying click. Darwin’s hypotheses fell far below the level of evidential proof required of other sciences, but they were happily accepted as the ultimate truth.

History turned out to be a science after all, and a natural science at that. So what’s a few missing links here and there among progressivist friends? An irrelevant footnote at worst.

In any case, philosophers of progress were happy to leave the biological details for natural scientists to sort out. What mattered to them was the historical truth of meliorative evolution as it applied to human life.

Just look at social and economic formations, the way Darwin’s contemporary Marx looked at them. Can’t you see the steady progress from primitive and crude to complex and refined?

Primordial caveman, hunter and gatherer, developed a barter economy; his descendants progressed to slave ownership and then to feudalism; that was replaced by capitalism; capitalism became imperialism and hence moribund; socialism took over, with ensuing communism set to adumbrate the very millennium of Reason and hence Virtue that those 18^th century philosophes had prophesied.

Not every thinker accepted Marx’s take on progress, but few of them raised any objections to the notion of progress as such. It was patently obvious to all sensible people that life was getting steadily better, however ‘better’ was defined.

Life in the 19^th century was better than in the 18^th; that was better than life in the 16^th century, and there wasn’t even any point talking about earlier times. They were enfolded in darkness out of which man was gradually alighting, guided by the beacon of Reason.

Yet whenever we say that A is better than B, we’re implying the existence of objective valuation criteria enabling us to pass comparative judgement. But in this case such criteria don’t exist.

The criteria a historian uses are based on his own thoughts, experience, sensations. And these are largely affected by his own time. That’s roughly what Benedetto Croce meant when he said: “All history is modern history.”

Our own time is dominated by science and resultant technology, which are constantly getting more intricate and sophisticated. However, it’s slipshod thinking to insist on that basis that life is getting better. There’s no doubt that an Apple Mac represents a technological advance over the quill pen, yet more great books were written with the latter than the former.

History is a progression but not necessarily progress. It’s a chronological development of man’s thought and the acts inspired by thought, but only someone in the grip of wishful thinking would discern invariable melioration in the chronology.

One would have to be blindly committed to the fallacy of progress to insist that Beethoven was better than Bach, Brahms better than Beethoven and Pierre Boulez better than all of them. Or, that Aristotle was a better philosopher than Plato, Kant a better one than either of them, while Foucault and Derrida top the lot by a head.

A modern man may like his way of life, but it’s foolhardy of him to aver that the way of life in, say, Elizabethan England was nowhere near as good. Show me a nuclear reactor, a car and the Internet, and I’ll show you Donne, Marlowe and Shakespeare. They didn’t have modern technology, but then we don’t have any equivalents of them.

Looking at, say, the Middle Ages, modern man sees nothing but ignorance, cruelty and superstition. However, had a student of Albertus Magnus at Paris University in the 13^th century been endowed with the gift of prospective vision, he’d probably look at our times and see nothing but barbarism along with intellectual and moral degeneration.

Neither of such hypothetical individuals would probably want to swap his own way of life for the other one. Their tastes would differ too much.

Yet modern people are conditioned to believe that any change is for the better. They’ve bought the lazy and ill-conceived theory of progress, and they have neither the desire nor the intellectual wherewithal to bring it to task.

This is a very serious matter indeed since, using this theory as a starting point, modern man blithely initiates damaging changes to his way of life because he’s constitutionally unable to regard any change as damaging. Progression always means progress to him, he has no doubts on this score.

However, I’d argue that nothing stunts progress as much as presumption of progress. Man isn’t necessarily getting better because he has more expensive toys to play with. It may be easier to argue he is getting worse.

And he’ll continue to get worse until he is able to assess himself, his past and his present accurately, dispassionately – and with no presumption of progress anywhere in sight.

In anticipation of the White House meeting between Biden and Starmer, Putin pulled his air bases back, beyond the 200-mile reach of Storm Shadow and ATACMS missiles.

He needn’t have bothered. Our criminally chicken-hearted leaders failed to reach an agreement to let the Ukrainians use those missiles on targets deep into Russian territory. Yet again the West has succumbed to blackmailing threats.

Judging by his whole life, Joe Biden isn’t afraid of indulging in corrupt practices besmirching his reputation. He isn’t afraid of millions of illegal migrants streaming into the US. Biden, his protestations of piety notwithstanding, isn’t even afraid of God’s judgement.

The only thing that scares him out of his wits is the dread E-word: escalation. Or, to be more exact, Putin’s threats thereof. Vlad keeps drawing red lines and promises to unleash Armageddon should any of them be overstepped.

Nevertheless, Biden has succumbed to domestic and international pressures by timidly putting his toe over one line after another. No Armageddon ensued, and yet that in no way diminished the credibility of Putin’s new threats in Joe’s eyes.

NATO, specifically American, armaments have even been used to occupy hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, with Abrams and Challenger tanks, supported by F-16 fighters and US satellite intelligence, rolling towards Kursk. Moreover, even the infantry weapons used by the invading Ukrainian force were of NATO manufacture.

How many red lines were crossed there? More than you’ll find in a Mondrian painting. Yet nothing came from the Kremlin other than more empty threats. Characteristically, the threats even lacked the cataclysmic specificity of the earlier vintages.

Then the threat was to turn America into radioactive ash and drown Britain in a tsunami caused by nuclear blasts. What followed the invasion of the Kursk province related to such threats the way a hangover relates to brain cancer. The Kremlin sources did reiterate that they were at war with NATO, not just the Ukraine, but they’ve been saying the same thing for ten years – and screaming it for the past two.

Even the Kremlin’s threat of action should the US and Britain unshackle the Ukrainian rocket forces was rather nebulous. Putin said that, should that happen, the Russians would have to assess the situation and decide on the appropriate course of action. He added that Russia would consider herself at war with NATO, but then what else is new?

Putin’s permamently drunk alter ego Medvedev and a few other mouthpieces did utter vague threats of a nuclear response, but that wasn’t exactly a novelty either. Nor is it a credible threat.

By now everyone knows that Americans have promised to wipe out Putin’s entire invasion force should a nuclear device go off anywhere near the Ukraine. Granted, Putin may use his KGB expertise to analyse Biden and conclude he’d chicken out again. However, Xi also forbade Putin to use nukes, and China is indeed in a position to issue such injunctions.

Starmer has played his customary weasel role by describing his meeting with Biden as “long and productive”, but he was only half-truthful: it was indeed long. He also added that “we’ve come to a strong position”. For Russia, by the looks of it.

Much as it pains me to say this, the Russian gangster is right, and our leaders are wrong. Putin has indeed been at war with the West, and the West has indeed been at war with Putin.

But it has been a phony war on our part, even more so than the first conflict that rated that description. The West has been systematically arming the Ukraine, providing every manner of training and logistic support. Yet at the same time NATO has been doing just enough to keep the Ukraine in the fight while making sure the country had no chance of winning it.

That’s cowardly, this much goes without saying. But it’s also monumentally idiotic, as anyone cursorily familiar with history will confirm. War isn’t chess, you can’t play it for a draw. A draw may ensue anyway, but that outcome can only ever be achieved by resolute efforts to win. Entering a fight with the intention of not losing guarantees just that, defeat.

Any war, from those described by Herodotus and Thucydides to the one described by Beevor and Keegan (or, better still, Suvorov, Hoffmann and Solonin), provides ample proof of that observation. And the original Phony War, fought or rather not fought in the hope that Hitler would come to his senses and stop his juggernaut in its tracks, is proof not just ample but conclusive.

All this is terrible news for the Ukraine, NATO, Europe and the West in general. There is nothing to deter Putin from attacking a NATO country, such as Estonia or Latvia, and keeping the alliance at bay with another threat of nuclear annihilation. Should that happen, NATO would in effect disband, letting every former member fend for itself. The consequences of such a disaster would be unpredictable, or rather predictably awful.

Nor is the news likely to get better. Kamala Harris has already reiterated her commitment to Biden’s craven policy, packaging that intention with the usual waffle about loving the Ukraine and her sovereignty.

And J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has finally explained what the latter meant by boasting he would end the war in three days (or three minutes, can’t remember which). Essentially, that’s for Putin to be able to say with full justification that what’s currently his is his for ever, and what’s not currently his is negotiable.

Russia would be allowed to keep all her stolen Ukrainian territory, with some mythical DMZ in place to make sure no new invasion could ever occur. Good luck with that: we all know how reliable demilitarised zones have been in the past.

Moreover, the Ukraine should undertake to abandon her attempts to join NATO or any “allied organisation”, presumably meaning the EU. All that would mean delivering an interim victory to Russia, giving her time to rebuild, rearm and then launch another, more devastating, assault on the West.

As far as the Ukraine is concerned, the forthcoming US election will feature two Manchurian candidates, not just one pitted against a legitimate rival. The outlook is bleak.

The Ukrainians and their friends shouldn’t be ingrates. They should thank the West wholeheartedly for its support, for without it a sovereign Ukraine would have ceased to exist long ago.

Yet without this support taking the shape of a full-blown commitment, the victory of Russian fascism will be only deferred, not prevented in perpetuity. That’s why those who understand what’s at stake are appalled at the sight of two chickens, Biden and Starmer, strutting their stuff.

Both were hatched a long time ago, and yet they are as yellow as ever.  

I’m feeling especially smug today. Henceforth my name should be mentioned side by side with those of older prophets, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Daniel et al.

My prophesy was admittedly less cosmic than theirs, but it was just as prescient and accurate. But judge for yourself.

Back in 2013, yet another court case hingeing on sexual consent was making front-page news. He said she had consented, she said he was a rapist, that sort of thing. The British public was all worked up about the issue, and, as a socially responsible person, I felt duty-bound to offer a solution.

I suggested that, when going out in the evening, every young man should carry a consent form, which the object of his affection should sign before any hanky-panky takes place. I went into some detail enumerating the rubrics that form should include:

“Definitely specified before each erotic encounter must be a) position(s); b) duration; c) orifice(s) utilised; d) method of contraception; e) financial responsibility for any medical problem transmitted therein; f) any extras, e.g. S & M, B & D, other; g) presence and/or number of observers and/or other participants; h) use of any audio and/or video recording equipment; j) any resulting contractual obligations, e.g. the man does the dishes and/or mows the lawn tomorrow.”

Anticipating certain legal problems before they arose, I displayed a firm grasp of jurisprudence and no mean business acumen by adding this suggestion:

“To become legally binding, the form must be signed by both parties and then officially notarised, which may present something of a problem. You see, the decision to have sex frequently and irresponsibly involves no long-term planning. Not only can it be spontaneous but, even worse, it may be taken at a time when most notary offices are closed for the night.

“The problem is serious but not insurmountable: supply, as we know, generates demand. Before long all-night notary offices will appear in every neighbourhood, with the officials also licensed to dispense condoms and offer advice on various ballistic and contraceptive possibilities inherent in assorted sexual variants.”

I forgot to mention that, to help timid young ladies overcome a sudden onset of misgivings, such all-night notary offices could also dispense Rohypnol, but, other than that, my proposal was meticulously thought through.

It was also – and here I have to let you in on a secret – offered in jest, as a piece of satire. However, that literary genre is rapidly becoming obsolete because it can’t keep up with reality. The most dystopic predictions come true, and satirical mirth turns out prophetic in the hands of victorious modernity. Spanish authorities are a case in point.

They must have read my article, appreciated its ideas, and I only wonder why it has taken them 11 years to act on it. But act on it they did, by issuing a Consent Agreement for young men, especially footballers, to carry. As a tribute to, well, me, the form was produced in English.

The document has three pages and eight sections: I. PARTIES, identified as “The Proposer” and “The Consenter”, with space provided for full names and ages. II. TIME, specifying the initiation point of the act and its duration. III. ACTIVITIES (“Initial all that apply”), unimaginatively enumerating a mere 12 possibilities, such as digital penetration, oral sex, vaginal or anal sex, restraints used and so forth. IV. CONTRACEPTION. V. RATCHET CLAUSE [“There shall be no sexual activity of any kind other than that specified and consented to in this Consent Agreement without the establishment of a new, separate agreement. (See Clause 1 below)”]. VI. ACCIDENTAL VIOLATION. [“Either party to this Consent Agreement being male, may, through no fault and without intent, penetrate a female orifice not made available for sexual activity under this Consent Agreement.”]. VII. FAILURE TO PERFORM, wherein “Both the Proposer and the Consenter waive any right to legal redress for such failure to perform. VIII. EARLY TERMINATION. “This Consent Agreement may be terminated at any time during the period of consent agreed upon herein…”

Underneath there are spaces provided for the Proposer’s and the Consenter’s name and signature, and a separate line for a witness to sign. Yet, unlike in my proposal, no provision is made for the notarisation of the signatures, which is a lamentable oversight.  

I do hope those Spanish lawyers had as much fun drafting that contractual document as I did 11 years ago. Yet my prophesy is no less prescient for being unwitting, and I have every reason to be proud.

Yet I would be remiss if I failed to mention another, less detailed but somewhat more poetic, prophesy of this aspect of romantic love. The man who stole my thunder 400 years before I put my fingers on the keyboard was none other than William Shakespeare:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate:/ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, /And summer’s lease hath all too short a date…”

Literary scholars often disagree on the secret meaning of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but no disagreement is possible here. The “summer’s lease [that] hath all too short a date” undoubtedly anticipates Clause II of the Consent Agreement: “The Consenter and the Proposer make their bodies available to each other from time_____:_____[] AM [] PM on the date of_______ for a period of ________ hours.”

The language of romantic gallantry has changed over the centuries, but such is progress. Still, my fellow prophet Will must be congratulated on his prescience. Credit where it’s due, he had to look much further into the future than I did.

At this point, I’d be expected to wonder if the world is in the grip of collective insanity, but I’ll spare you the obvious laments. Some things just go without saying. And in any case, Seneca said it best:

“None of it can be helped, but all of it can be despised.”

P.S. This is my original article: http://www.alexanderboot.com/premature-ejaculation-can-get-you-convicted-for-rape/

That’s how many preventable deaths are caused every year by long A&E waits.

The figure comes from the report commissioned by the government and submitted by Lord Darzi, a former Labour health minister.

Lord Darzi also mentioned that our cancer survival rates lag behind other developed countries. However, he didn’t express this deficit numerically, leaving us to guess how many people die who could have lived. My guess is that the number is much higher than 14,000.

Then it’s not just A&E departments that keep patients at arm’s length. Thousands and thousands have to wait months, sometimes years, for essential operations and treatment. That has to push mortality rates further upwards, though the report doesn’t say how high.

As for primary care, depending on where you live, getting a GP appointment is either difficult, taking days or even weeks, or well-nigh impossible. My own surgery is a prime example.

When I was first assigned to it, we had two excellent GPs, both men. Just two – yet there was never a problem getting a next-day appointment. One doctor even paid me a house visit once, a service that used to be routine and is now nonexistent. The other GP possibly saved my life by referring me to an oncologist 20 years ago, when he spotted something untoward.

They both retired in their 50s, crushed under the weight of useless admin demanded by the NHS. Reinforcements arrived in the alluring shape of 12 young women, who now use patients the way badminton players use shuttlecocks.

We are passed from one to another, never seeing the same doctor twice. What care has lost in continuity, it hasn’t gained in availability. Next-day appointments are a thing of the past – next week is the best we can hope for. And I live in an affluent part of central London, where the situation is much better than even a mile or two away.

Again, I don’t know how such developments affect the health of the nation, but it would be counterintuitive to believe the effect is positive. I wonder what Lord Darzi thinks about it.

On balance, his report, saying that the NHS is “in a critical condition”, is uncharacteristically honest, which one doesn’t normally expect from Labour. What one does expect is muddled thinking, and Lord Darzi obliges by offering two mutually exclusive findings.

First he says that ministers must stop “throwing money” at hospitals, which have failed to increase productivity despite a major increase in staff numbers since 2019. Yet in the next breath he mentions that the NHS is “starved” of £37 billion in capital investment.

Perhaps this amount should be gently pushed towards the NHS, not thrown at it. Or thrown overarm, rather than in an underhanded fashion.

In any case, Sir Keir Starmer responded to the findings by pledging “the biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth”. The choice of words is telling: our PM seems to realise that whatever he proposes will remain a figment of his imagination.

One such figment is Sir Keir’s promise never to raise taxes on “working people” as a way of plugging the aforementioned budgetary hole. There he lets his imagination run wild: raising taxes on working and other people is a Labour compulsion, which they indulge even more passionately than the Tories.

The political price of tax rises supposedly needed to save the NHS is low. Our leading parties, but especially Labour, have won the propaganda war by sacralising the health service in the British mind.

We are ready to swallow any canard peddled by any government, such as that the NHS is the envy of the free world. This makes it hard to explain why the free world has so far neglected to follow our shining example – and still maintains much higher cancer survival rates, to mention just one marker.

Our PM also hinted at our difficulty “to meet the ever-higher costs of ageing population”, creating the impression that other Europeans oblige their governments by dying young. Yet 20 European countries boast a higher life expectancy than the UK, and none of them has a socialist Leviathan dominating their medical care.

So far Starmer hasn’t got around to following the advice of his fellow socialist, George Bernard Shaw. GBS suggested that when people reach 70 they should be asked to prove the social benefit of their continuing existence. If they couldn’t do so to GBS’s satisfaction, it was off to the abattoir with them.

That would be one solution to the exorbitant cost of treating wrinklies, but Starmer is manfully resisting it for the time being. Instead he is talking of greater use of technology and a “shift in the distribution of resources towards community-based primary, community and mental health services.”

Allow me to translate from socialist into human, avoiding Starmer’s tautologies as best I can. He is talking about replacing clinical medicine with social care, counselling, psychotherapy and other shamanistic practices beloved of socialists. We can also look forward to intensified state hectoring on every aspect of our life, from diets to leisure pastimes to preferred modes of transportation.

The modern state’s solution for anything is increasing the modern state’s power over everything. The NHS Leviathan is merely a projection of that innate impulse onto medicine, and such ossified socialist structures are unreformable.

Getting back to Darzi, he sounds desperate, disingenuous and hopeful. “My colleagues in the NHS are working harder than ever but our productivity has fallen” – that’s desperate. It’s also an illustration on the previous paragraph.

“It took more than a decade for the NHS to fall into disrepair so it’s going to take time to fix it” – that’s disingenuous. Darzi puts the blame squarely on the Tories, not on the uncorrectable systemic failings of nationalised medicine. One such is a guaranteed steady decline in productivity that mortifies him so.

“But we in the NHS have turned things around before, and I’m confident we will do it again.” I’m not aware of any such successful turnaround in the past, and I’m sure it won’t happen in the future. To use Chekhov’s quip, “this cannot be because it can be never”.

I’m expecting new radical proposals concerning public health, such as dancing around campfires at midnight, eating dried toads or sacrificing virgins (if none can be found, house pets can be used). These would be about as likely to solve the problem as anything our government can come up with.

A piece of avuncular advice: if you can’t get any A&E help, make sure you aren’t bleeding too fast. Then again, red is the colour of Labour.