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That was the date in 1932 on which the last free interbella elections were held in Germany. It was also the last chance to stop the Nazis, who had lost much of their earlier support.

The NASDP was still on course to score heavily, but a bloc of the Socialists and the Communists could have it outvoted. The Nazis knew it, and their diary entries at the time were suicidal – they were bankrupt and, if they lost, they would never be able to launch another electoral bid. Time for a bottle of schnapps, a revolver and a farewell note to the liebschen.

The forecasts were accurate. Conservatives led by Hindenburg came in first, but the old man was on his last legs, and everyone knew it. The SPD and the KPD together did receive 1.5 million more votes than the Nazis. Yet the Nazis were still ahead because the two Left parties weren’t together.

The socialists, by far the larger party, had sought a bloc with the communists. Had they succeeded, it’s almost certain that the Second World War would have been prevented.

Alas, while the SPD was an independent party, the KPD wasn’t. It was Stalin’s puppet, and Stalin’s plans didn’t include a peaceful Germany. He wanted the Nazis to take over the country and use her as what Lenin had called “the icebreaker of the revolution”.

He knew a Nazi Germany would attack the West sooner or later, with the war exhausting both sides whatever the outcome. Stalin would then ride in on his white steed and take over a ruined Europe. What was Lenin’s fantasy could become Stalin’s reality, and he wasn’t about to throw it away.

So the KPD was told to forget any blocs. Its leader, Ernst Thälmann, obeyed the order, thereby eventually buying himself a one-way ticket to Buchenwald, where he was killed in 1944. The Nazis seized power in 1933 and, well, you know the rest.

Far be it from me to compare Britain circa 2024 with Germany circa 1932: the differences are too obvious to mention. No British party, whatever its parliamentary majority, is likely to create anything near the catastrophe that befell Germany and the rest of the world back in the 1930s. However, there also exist some similarities, and these aren’t too obvious to mention.

Our ruling party, Labour, is enjoying a vast parliamentary majority delivered to it by Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system conspiring with the mind-numbing incompetence of the Conservative Party.

Fundamentally, the latter springs from the Conservatives’ disavowal of conservative policies, abandonment of conservative principles and, as a result, forfeiture of conservative competence in matters economic. Essentially, the Tory Party had become Labour Lite, and there was always the danger that the public would opt for Labour Full Strength.

When in the previous general election, Labour fielded a rank communist, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Tories countered with charismatic Boris Johnson, that outcome was deferred for a few years. However, it couldn’t be prevented.

The Tories ditched Johnson, who really didn’t have much except charisma going for himself. They eventually replaced him with Sunak who was much less appealing without being much more conservative. Labour, on the other hand, came to its senses, replaced Corbyn with Starmer, who knew how to make bogus moderate noises, and won by a landslide.

Having done so, they took the support of about 20 per cent of the electorate for a ringing mandate and immediately began to drive the country on the road to destruction. The mighty Tory Party has been reduced to a rump faction unable to provide genuine opposition.

It owes some of its misfortune to the emergence of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party that cost the Tories some 100 parliamentary seats. Had they kept those 100 seats, they still would have lost, but by a smaller margin. That would have enabled them to put some brakes on Labour’s drive to the precipice and also to harbour some hopes of resurgence.

Like the German Left in the 1930s, the British Right (if the Tories qualify as such) was split and ready for plucking. However, whatever mess Labour will create over the next five years, it’s far from certain that either the Tories or Reform will be able to oust Starmer on their own.

The Reform Party is trying to appeal to the conservative spirit of the British people, but that spirit has largely evaporated. Nigel Farage’s key message is immigration, which he wants to reduce to a barely noticeable minimum. That strikes a chord with much of the electorate, but single-issue parties hardly ever form governments.

Farage knows it too, which is why he harmonises his main theme with secondary subjects, lower taxes and defence. These traditional Tory policies also appeal to many voters, and they sound good to most.

However, once the echoes of the sound have died out, scrutiny will start. To get to the target of three percent of GDP, our defence budget will have to grow by about £30 billion. Lowering tax revenue even by a modest 10 per cent would shave some £82 billion off the Exchequer’s receipts. We are looking at what Labour politicians call a budget hole, to the tune of at least £112 billion. How will Farage fill it?

I hope he has a plan, but somehow I doubt it. But even if he does, sound economics dictates a sweeping reduction in spending across the board, starting with social projects and proceeding to blaspheme against the sainted NHS.

In other words, the only proven way of achieving the targets of Reform’s rhetoric would be to pursue the whole raft of conservative policies, trying to boost economic growth and hence tax revenue. However, I’m not convinced the British public has an appetite for going conservative to that extent. Decades of rabid socialist propaganda have produced the intended corrupting effect.

Thus one would think that a merger, or at least an electoral bloc, of Reform and Labour Lite, aka the Tories, would dilute conservatism to a point where our brainwashed and dumbed-down electorate would find it palatable. However, just like the Left parties of Germany’s past, I can’t see any rapprochement between the two Right-ish parties of Britain’s present.

Farage has already declared he’d never agree to any bloc with the Tories, and I think he means it. After many years of trying, he has finally gained a seat in the Commons, as a leader of a small but up-and-coming party. Reform will never become king, but it could well become king maker, thus gaining power beyond its numbers.

At the same time, Mr Farage barely conceals his contempt for the wishy-washy Tories, who have delivered the country to raving Lefties in moderate clothing. That feeling is enthusiastically reciprocated, what with the Tory mandarins, federasts almost to a man, hating Farage for the role he played in Brexit.

The last time we had an electoral bloc was in 2010, when Cameron and Clegg brought together the Tories and the LibDems. However, the two parties were much closer together: politically, Cameron and Clegg were dizygotic if not quite identical twins. Even so, the alliance was short-lived.

Whoever is elected to lead the Tories in the on-going free for all will still be Labour Lite and hence opposed to everything Farage stands for. Then again, either leader would rather be the big man in a small pond, even if the pond ends up the size of a puddle. The leader’s chair would be too small to accommodate two egos.

I do hope the two parties will find some arrangement they could live with, for without it the harrowing prospect looms of Labour running unopposed for a generation, to devastating effect.

Study late-Weimar German history, chaps, would be my advice. You may learn that, unless you hang together… well, you won’t hang separately, like Thälmann. But neither will you win, and all of us will end up losers.

I’m not suggesting that the two countries have decided to join forces against the European Union. As things stand, I doubt Iran and Israel can see eye to eye on any cause.

But the unfolding conflict in the Middle East may soon make Europe see the two countries as accomplices. As a result of Iran’s continuing aggression against Israel, both direct and by proxy, a new refugee crisis beckons, and the EU is ill-equipped to handle it.

As it is, the ideological attempt to create a bloated pan-European Leviathan is failing – and largely because of the fallout from an explosion of Muslim immigration. For all the fiery speeches, the EU is constitutionally and philosophically incapable of solving this problem.

Europeans have learned to shrug with indifference when observing the steady empowerment of the EU. Most members are net recipients of EU funding, and few people will reject handouts on a matter of principle. Some nod their agreement at tirades about compromised national sovereignty, but the masses are quite complacent about that sort of thing.

Comparing, say, France with pre-Brexit Britain, one detects a similar demographic breakdown. The intelligentsia are predominantly pro-EU and the common folk are just as predominantly anti. Yet one detects little appetite in France or elsewhere in Europe for actually leaving the EU, as opposed to making it less bossy and meddling.

Should France get a referendum similar to ours in 2016, it’s hard to tell which way it would go. But this is futile speculation because the French upper classes will block any such development, and they have more power in their country than their British counterparts have in theirs.

One would think the EU should therefore be quite secure and so it would be – but for one nagging issue: porous borders and the ensuing influx of Muslim immigration.

That influx is threatening to flood the political mainstream in Europe, sweeping away the pro-EU sentiments residing therein. Because – and let me make perfectly clear that, as founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I deplore such attitudes – Europeans don’t mind a bit of diversity, but they dislike too much of it.

When they see their neighbourhoods overrun with people who talk funny, dress eccentrically and behave oddly, they begin to complain first, rebel second. That gives an open goal to the big hitters on the national-populist fringe, and they are beginning to score heavily.

Just the other day the Austrian Freedom Party ran away with the national elections, and its parteigenossen from other countries have either done the same already or are threatening to do so in the future. Another million or so arrivals from the Middle East may well tip the balance in their favour.

As it is, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in Holland, Viktor Orbán in Hungary are already in charge, while the National Rally in France and AfD in Germany are close to electoral victories. Even in the Anglophone countries close to my heart, Britain and the US, unchecked immigration is a key electoral issue for nationalist candidates.

Those European parties that run the anti-immigration issue up their flagpole aren’t the best friends of the EU. The idea of a single European state governed out of Brussels by grey-faced bureaucrats goes against the grain of nationalism or even patriotism. For the sake of consistency if nothing else, the nationalist parties must make anti-EU noises to the point of disavowing that organisation.

Hungary and Poland lead the way, but Holland and Italy aren’t far behind – for now. However, the situation is changing by the day. Up to a million Lebanese have already been displaced by the on-going conflict, and most of them are fleeing to Syria.

Something tells me they don’t see Syria as their final destination. In fact, they are certain to take the path to Europe well-trodden by millions of others. Nor is it the only path: Turkey is another popular stopover on the way to France or Germany.

Why can’t Saudi Arabia or the UAE take them, you may ask? Aren’t Muslims duty-bound to offer hospitality to their brethren in distress? They are but they don’t. One detects no willingness on the part of the rich Islamic states to open their doors to immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, North Africa and Gaza.

They haven’t forgotten what such hospitality did to Lebanon in 1975-1990, when a beautiful and westernised Middle Eastern country was turned into smouldering ruins by the Civil War caused by Palestinian immigrants. If there is one thing the Saudi and Gulf Arabs cherish as much as money, it’s social tranquillity. They obviously know something Europeans don’t.

So far the EU has tried to curtail the influx by bribing the governments of Turkey and Syria to limit the outflow. That has kept the numbers of new arrivals down to millions, as opposed to tens of millions. Yet even that has proved too heavy a burden for Europe’s fragile finances to bear.

Neither Turkey nor Syria is among Israel’s best friends. Europe is, or at least pretends to be. That stance may make those two countries reluctant to offer the EU a helping hand at its time of need. Hence a new migrant crisis looms large over Europe, with unpredictable consequences.

Much as I despise the EU and the ideology behind it, I’m not going to gloat over its misfortune. Its financial troubles – and France has just announced a deficit spinning out of control – affect us as well, what with the growing economic globalisation.

But what I really dread is a Europe of countries run by nationalists of various political hues. Nationalism by definition presupposes not only the love of one’s own country but also hostility to those of a less fortunate nativity.

A Europe run by national-populist parties will become a powder keg, and the conflict between Israel and Iran threatens to hoist such parties to power. By this, I certainly don’t mean to imply that Iran and Israel are equally complicit in creating this fraught situation.

Iran is the indisputable aggressor, while Israel is fighting for her survival. Yet both an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic animus is strong if still largely dormant in Europe. Most anti-Semitic outrages there are committed by refugees from Muslim countries or their children.

However, most nationalist parties in Europe have anti-Semitic antecedents. Some have tried to live that heritage down, but the sentiments thrive at the grassroots. That’s why, as such parties gain more power, their countries may well turn against Israel. I don’t know how soon or how strongly, but such a development is likely.

Meanwhile, the refugee crisis continues to fester in Europe, and it’s threatening to blow it apart. I’ll be on hand to tell when that happens, but you’ll probably know it without my help.

Baroness Theresa ‘Darling Bud’ May has delivered a rousing oratory waxing indignant about the likes of Trump and Farage who describe climate change as a “hoax” or a “scam”.

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. Since I only describe it as a swindle, I find myself outside the range of Darling Bud’s slings and arrows. That’s why, rather than feeling defensive, I can sit back and reflect on her remarks dispassionately.

The first thought that comes to mind is that susceptibility to cults is inversely proportionate to the level of culture. And this is one telling difference between a religion and a cult. The former heightens one’s ability to acquire culture, the latter nips it in the bud.

(G.K. Chesterton said the same thing with epigrammatic precision: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”.)

This observation is true of individuals, and it’s equally true of societies. That stands to reason.

An essential part of culture is discrimination, and I’m using the word in its proper, rather than political, sense. A cultured person has an ability, both innate and acquired, to tell right from wrong, good from bad, true from false, beautiful from ugly, intelligent from stupid, credible from incredible, plausible from impossible.

His ability to discriminate makes him impervious to any newfangled orthodoxies. Before he accepts them as such, a cultured person will cast a critical eye over them to make sure they fall on the left side in each pair I listed in the previous paragraph.

If upon such scrutiny he finds them wanting, a cultured person will reject such orthodoxies out of hand, regardless of how many people accept them. Conversely, an uncultured person will avidly gobble up any thin gruel of an idea as long as it caters to his hunger for a higher purpose. Because he needs to believe in something, he is ready to “believe in anything”. Including such unscientific, ahistorical nonsense as a climate catastrophe awaiting the world unless the western part of it destroys its economy with ‘net zero’.

I don’t know whether Baroness May has any religious faith but, if she has, it hasn’t in her case fulfilled its civilising potential. Either she genuinely worships the cult of global warming or, as a politician, accepts that it has already graduated to the status of orthodoxy, and I don’t know which is worse.

Most zealots will react angrily, possibly violently, to anyone who dares to argue against their cherished cult. Rather than being seen as a sensible individual coming up with well-reasoned arguments, such a naysayer will be regarded as a heretic or apostate. And no aspiring politician wants to be cast in any such role: there’s no applause awaiting and, more important, few votes.

When I ill-advisedly find myself arguing against exponents of the climate cult, I always ask a lapidary question: “Have you read a single book on the subject?” So far I’ve received a single yes answer to that question, which made me ask a follow-up: “Which one?”

The next reply I received, “What the **** does it matter?”, confirmed what I knew already. My interlocutor, along with most people, arrived at his belief without having taken the trouble to study the subject. Like most modern, which is to say uncultured, people, he suffers from the deadly combination of high passion and low knowledge.

In what sounded like self-laceration but was meant to be a scathing attack, Darling Bud lashed out at the “out-of-touch elite” that uses the climate change debate “to fight a culture war”. This brought to mind the canonical story of a thief running away at full pelt from his pursuers and shouting “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else.

Having set up her stall, Baroness May then proceeded to fill it with pseudo-evidential goodies. One such is the economic bonanza that net zero will create: “When the sceptics say that the green transition will cripple business, we say they could not be more wrong. Study after study shows that the transition to renewable energy will unlock global market opportunities worth trillions of dollars over the next decade alone – with businesses in every world region able to capitalise.”

Show me your study, I’ll show you mine. And mine will demonstrate convincingly that, even if we assume that wind farms and solar panels will eventually provide enough domestic energy, they will never be able to sustain a strong industry. Since the need for industrial output will persist for ever, industry jobs will go to countries that ignore Western cults.

The other day I experienced acute schadenfreude when I read an article calculating that the cost of running an electric car is already twice that of a petrol or diesel vehicle. And that’s before millions of batteries go zonk.

Though Baroness May isn’t as far as I know a communist, she operates in the same idiom. The cost of energy is climbing up steeply, and households are already reeling under the impact. But Darling Bud wants them to grit their teeth and accept today’s pain for the sake of the glittering future awaiting tomorrow. Or perhaps the day after. Or maybe never – it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is keeping faith in the cult.

In the same spirit, she then attributed everything awful in life to global warming, showing a creative ability to construct chains of causality out of thin air. Modern slavery, for example, is a direct result of warm weather.

Those who couldn’t keep up with the runaway train of her thought were treated to a staggering explanation, link by causal link. Because of warm weather, “life becomes a matter of survival from one day to the next, and into that picture come the criminal gangs making money out of human suffering. Because these situations make people more vulnerable to being trafficked and taken into slavery.”

Darling Bud then added a few touches of colour by telling her audience some harrowing stories of a 53-year-old Romanian electrician forced into the sex industry and a seven-year-old girl sold into slavery and forced to sleep with dogs, one hopes only literally.

All because of global warming, Baroness? If you have to ask, you don’t worship the cult.

One could offer her any number of facts showing this swindle for what it is. Such as that warm and cold periods have always alternated, and climate has been warmer than it is now for about 85 per cent of history, or that the warm peaks have produced periods of the greatest prosperity.

But that would be a pointless exercise. Cults are impervious to facts or reason, and their worshippers, such as our former PM, neither activate their own minds nor appeal to anyone else’s. They just scream their harangues, and in this regard the supposedly grown-up Theresa May is no different from that evil Swedish child with learning difficulties.

Send out for the men in white coats. The government – and I promise I’m not putting you on – wants 70 per cent of school leavers to go into higher education.

I admire Starmer’s self-restraint. I’m sure his egalitarian loins ached for 100 per cent, but he manfully decided to postpone that objective until his second term. But even his present aim is guaranteed to destroy what John Henry Newman called “the idea of a university” in his eponymous book.

To be fair to Sir Keir, it was Tony Blair who laid the groundwork for this madness when he set his sights on 50 per cent. Now his Labour heirs proudly announce that the shining ideal has been realised. But they are lying.

Half of school leavers don’t go to universities. They go to jumped-up trade schools, most of them former polytechnics, that were misnamed for nefarious, which is to say egalitarian, purposes.

The government is quite open about this: it shines the light of its vision on all and sundry, with no bushel to hide under anywhere in sight. The idea, as proudly declared, is to boost the number of students from poorer backgrounds from 30 to 50 per cent by 2035.

The words “regardless of aptitude” weren’t mentioned, but they can be confidently assumed. Basing university admission on individual attainments would go against the socialist vision of class struggle.

People mean nothing as individuals; it’s only as members of warring classes that they have any value. And our socialist government is prepared to debauch the very idea of higher education even further to give the poorer classes a leg up in their struggle against… what exactly?

If you have to ask, you aren’t a socialist. Your ears aren’t attuned to the UHF vibes of Marxist echoes reverberating somewhere in the firmament.

Let me spell it out so that even socialists can understand: if 70 per cent of all school leavers go to university, zero percent of school leavers will do so. Universities qua universities won’t exist. We might as well refer to elementary schools as universities, which would get us close to 100 per cent.

Champions of this madcap bloating to bursting insist that, without the benefit of higher education, it’s hard to make a living in our capitalist rough-and-tumble. That’s nonsense even on its own puny terms – unless our £80,000-a-year train drivers all have advanced university degrees.

Conversely, I’d like to see statistics on the number of those who do hold such degrees and yet are flipping burgers for a living. There’s truth to the old joke: “What do you say to a PhD in classic philosophy? I’ll have fries with that.”

But even assuming that our socialist utilitarians have a point and degree holders do learn some marketable skills, that’s not what universities are for. I’d suggest we listen to Newman whose 1852 book spells it out beautifully.

Newman despised academic utilitarianism. Universities were to him places where thinkers come together to pursue intellectual and no other ends. Universities, he argued, should teach students “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse”.

As a result, students will acquire a “perfection of the intellect … the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things”. As I recall, Newman didn’t attach any number to the percentage of school leavers who had the requisite abilities to indulge in such pursuits.

Seventy per cent? Fifty? You can hear Cardinal Newman laughing in his Oxford grave.

I can’t estimate that proportion with any hope of accuracy. Suffice it to say that in 1950 only 3.4 per cent of young Britons were in higher education.

As a lifelong champion of progress, I’m generously prepared to accept, against every bit of available evidence, that since then we’ve got three times as intelligent and academically gifted. So let’s say that 10 per cent would be a realistic assessment of school leavers intellectually equipped to go into higher education. But that’s 10 – not 70 and not even 50.

You might say that Newman’s ideas were fine for his time (1801-1890), but they are out of sync with the cultural and economic realities of the 21^st century. These days youngsters can’t eschew the utilitarian aspect of education; they can’t afford the luxury of wasting several years on studying subjects of no practical value.

I disagree. I think the ability “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse” can then be profitably applied to any field that catches a graduate’s fancy. Moreover, this realisation didn’t become extinct 100 years ago.

Until very recently, a widespread path to riches was for a youngster to go to university and study subjects known since time immemorial to develop the faculties Newman highlighted. Arts, philosophy, theology, history, classics, that sort of thing.

The graduate would then get a ground-level position with a City firm, learn on the job and start getting seven-digit bonuses within a few years. His “clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things” would be not only useful in his work, but indeed essential to it.

At this point, I have to return to my recurrent theme I’ve stated a thousand times if I’ve done so once. Our governing socialists understand all I’ve written so far as well as I do – possibly even better because some of them went to British universities with which I’m familiar only tangentially.

Hence they are aware that, by putting quantity before quality, they’ll destroy what little is left of our real universities – and they won’t even improve the lives of the poorer classes in any appreciable way. However, if you tried to argue with them along such lines, they’d look at you with a blank expression of ennui.

You’d be missing the point, like someone who advocates a vegan diet speaking to a cannibal. The inner imperative of socialism isn’t to improve any institutions or people’s lives. It’s to destroy whatever little is left of Western tradition.

The oldest British university, Oxford, was founded in 1096, the second-oldest, Cambridge, in 1209. Western academic tradition doesn’t get much older than that, which is a sufficient reason for socialists to loathe it. And anything they loathe, they try to destroy.

This is the only realistic way of assessing all Labour policies, including educational ones. Oh well, if you believe Joseph de Maistre, the British people got the government they deserve.

I have a confession to make, and please don’t judge me too harshly. Much as I flap my wings every time a conservative writer is cancelled, I myself have embarked on a one-man cancelling mission.

I’m about to banish from my reading list the American academic Steven Pinker, or rather his book Enlightenment Now. Unlike woke cancellers, however, I first made an effort to find out and judge dispassionately the nature of the argument he puts forth.

To that end I read the first 100 pages or so, and only concerns for my own mental health and blood pressure prevented me from reading the book to the end. I have, however, scanned it to the end, which was enough to grasp Prof. Pinker’s gist. It was also sufficient to reinforce my cherished belief expressed in the title above.

Prof. Pinker is a passionate advocate of the Enlightenment that, according to him, replaced superstition with Reason (always implicitly capitalised), thereby making us all better-off. Yet his own reasoning is proof of the damage the Enlightenment has inflicted on that very faculty.

He devotes hundreds of pages to scientific-looking illustrations complete with charts and graphs proving that over the past couple of centuries people have become healthier, wealthier, more comfortable and longer-lived.

That, argues Prof. Pinker, is enough to discredit any “negativist” and “declinist” who points out the rapid degeneration of the West. And of course we have the Enlightenment to thank for our well-being. But for Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot, we’d be eating slops, drinking swills, using snake oil salesmen instead of doctors and consequently dying at 40.

That line of reasoning is a classic rhetorical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc – averring that if something happened after an event, it happened because of it. For Prof. Pinker’s argument to make any sense at all, he’d have to resort to the Subjunctive Mood.

That’s generally a thankless task, and in this case a hopeless one. For he’d have to argue that, but for Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot, science, and hence technology, would have frozen at their 18^th century level. Thus today we wouldn’t have painless dentistry, modern drugs, rapid transportation, computers and all those things that, according to Prof. Pinker, define progress.

I see no sensible justification for that view. To begin with, the scientific revolution of the 17^th century, which adumbrated scientific and technological progress, happened without any contributions from Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot. Moreover, the men largely responsible for that revolution, such as Newton and Leibnitz, weren’t atheists, which conviction Prof. Pinker sees as a sine qua non of any progress.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that science would have stopped developing at that point. There’s every reason to believe that it would have continued to do so in pretty much the same way and at pretty much the same pace. This subjunctive argument sounds more convincing than its opposite.

Natural sciences developed not in spite of Christianity but because of it. Only after Christian thinkers corrected what R.G. Collingwood calls the metaphysical error of the Hellenic world did science truly get off the ground. Scientists began to believe in the existence of universal and rational laws governing the world of matter, which equipped them to direct their inquiry into the right conduits.

If we were at trial, with Prof. Pinker representing the progress junkies and me the ‘declinists’, I’d spare him the trouble of drawing up all those graphs. I’d simply stipulate that, in purely material terms, our lives are indeed better than they were 300 years ago.

Prof. Pinker partly defines progress in purely materialist terms because, he explains, material well-being is all that matters to most people. Again, so stipulated. Uninteresting if correct.

But since when is truth subject to a show of hands? This is yet another rhetorical fallacy, argumentum ad populum: because many people hold a certain view, it must be true. Really, for someone who worships at the altar of Reason, Prof. Pinker is rather lacking in intellectual rigour.

Progress in the toys man surrounds himself with isn’t tantamount to progress in man himself. And looking at the development of Western man since the Enlightenment, it’s hard not to notice that he has degenerated in every faculty, except those required to keep himself fed, clothed, treated and entertained. In fact, ever since the destruction of Christendom, Western man’s material acumen has been growing in inverse proportion to his ability to maintain his culture and civilisation.

To be fair, Prof. Pinker doesn’t reduce his arguments merely to trinkets. He also insists that, as a direct result of Enlightenment atheism, man acquired a hitherto absent ability to feel sympathy, empathy, sensitivity and all such markers of morality. As Tocqueville showed, post-Enlightenment documents replaced sentiment with sentimentality, morality with moralising, and righteousness with self-righteousness.

Prof. Pinker’s supposition has to languish at the level of superstition, being too weak to qualify even for an honest belief.

The Enlightenment declared war on Christendom, with its every tradition, practice and thought. That war was fought for the sake of empty slogans but, alas, it wasn’t fought just with slogans.

The Enlighteners announced their victory by perpetrating a wholesale massacre of whole classes that were trying to shield their eyes from the dazzling light of pseudo-Reason. And the Enlighteners started as they meant to go on.

More people died violent deaths in the 20^th century, the first atheist one from beginning to end, than in all the prior centuries of recorded history combined. Many were killed with the products of technological progress so dear to Prof. Pinker’s heart, but most were dispatched by expedients long in the public domain: executions, artificial famines, torture, neglect.

Even honest atheists acknowledge the restraining power of Christianity to keep human bestiality down to a manageable level. Not down to zero, of course: because people are sinful they have always had the propensity to kill one another. Contrary to Prof. Pinker’s unfounded insistence, war is an integral part of the human condition.

But the way societies functioned in Christendom, that propensity to kill was limited by any number of factors. One such was that kings and princes had difficulty recruiting large numbers. Because young men were needed to till the land, monarchs had to beg their vassals to spare some of their subjects to go into battle.

The Enlightenment removed such restraints in one fell swoop by introducing the concept of all-encompassing citizenship and, eventually and inevitably, democracy. Universal citizenship presupposes universal conscription, and towards the end of the Enlightenment 18^th century, the French army, to name just one, grew ten-fold overnight.

Wars got to be fought not between armies but between populations, which turned civilians into military targets. That at a stroke added many zeroes to casualty statistics.

Also, pre-Enlightenment wars were typically fought for territory and dynastic interests. But post-Enlightenment wars have pitted against one another various ideologies, a word and concept invented in the late 18^th century.

The most prominent of them were socialism and nationalism, both owing their birth to Prof. Pinker’s favourite period. These ideologies have amply realised their cannibalistic potential. They caused more deaths by several orders of magnitude in just one century than all those religious wars, Inquisitions and other Christian burrs under Prof. Pinker’s blanket managed in almost two millennia.

Contrary to what he seems to believe, man’s essence can’t be reduced to his material products and surroundings. An animal man may be, but he isn’t just an animal and certainly a unique one. Alone in the world’s fauna he is endowed with a soul, mind, spirit, which you are welcome to treat as separate faculties or one and the same.

It’s impossible even to begin talking about progress without being able to show a positive development in such faculties. This neither Prof. Pinker nor anyone else is able to do.

Quite the opposite, when outward and inner developments are vectored in opposite directions, a catastrophe beckons. Physicists invent weapons capable of wiping out life on earth, doctors stage diabolical experiments on people, computers are used to empower the state over the individual, planes transport bombs rather than passengers.

Also, post-Enlightenment modernity has effectively replaced culture with cults. These words may be cognates, but they denote incompatible phenomena.

Western culture was created by men of genius as a medium for communicating with God and glorifying Him. Western music, arts, architecture all trace their roots to ecclesiastical beginnings. And all of them have largely lost their cultural value, turning instead into illustrations to variously pernicious ideologies. The Enlightenment pushed the button for culture breaking up into cults.

Looking just at music for brevity’s sake, it’s hard not to notice the purely cultish appeal of pop din to immature minds and underdeveloped souls. Prof. Alan Bloom was the first to observe 40 years ago that worship of various pop groups had become the principal self-identifier of his students.

Yet even in classical music the worship of cultish performers has replaced any true appreciation of music and those who reveal its divine mysteries. This tendency started in the 19^th century with the appearance of the first cultish performers, Liszt and Paganini. Yet they were great musicians too, a requirement that has since fallen by the wayside.

I invite Prof. Pinker to listen to the performance of the same piece first by, say, Gieseking, Gilels or Gould, then by Yuja Wang, Lang Lang or even Trifonov – and then continue to shill for progress on that comparative basis.

He’d also be called upon to make the same claim by comparing St Bartholomew’s church with the Lloyd’s building, J.M.W. Turner’s work with Tracy Emin’s, Elizabethan poetry with today’s – and I’m stacking the odds in his favour by using British examples only.

Offered his book as Exhibit 1 in my imaginary trial, any sensible jury would find for the ‘declinist’ prosecution. If that’s the level of thought the Age of Reason produces, can we please go back to the Age of Faith?

And yes, we’d still be able to keep all those things Prof. Pinker holds so dear. They too owe their existence to Christendom – not to the vandals who destroyed it.

Unlike Kamala Harris, I don’t often use the word ‘holistic’. Like Kamala Harris, I believe that, as often as not, different parts of a complex whole are interconnected, which may justify the use of that word, much as I dislike it.

Now, holistically speaking, I’m convinced that the way a person talks is a reliable indication of the thought process involved.

Someone who speaks in perfectly parsed, logically connected sentences with clear antecedents and with each word used in its precise meaning may not be a profound thinker. But at least he is a lucid one, a quality Somerset Maugham rated above all else.

Conversely, when someone forces a listener to ask what on earth he’s trying to say, or makes a reader go over the same sentence several times attempting to disentangle the convoluted verbal mess, that person isn’t a thinker at all. His only excuse may be that he is a German philosopher but, as Schopenhauer showed, it’s possible to overcome even that congenital defect and still produce lucid prose.

Looking at the two presidential candidates from that angle, I can say that Trump may make me sad, but Harris makes me desperate.

Trump’s crude, semi-literate speech betokens a primitive, undisciplined mind. Even his body English is ungrammatical and full of solecisms. But at least he is always concise and to the point, leaving the audience in no doubt about his message.

The other day he even showed that he may eventually learn how to speak diplomatically, which is a useful skill for someone in charge of a country’s foreign policy. On meeting PM Starmer, Trump said that the latter is a “nice man” who “did very well. It’s very early but he is popular.”

I don’t know how closely Trump follows British politics, or indeed how well he understands it. However, I’m sure his advisers must have told him that Starmer’s popularity is dropping faster than Princess Di’s knickers in her heyday.

In fact, Starmer has to represent everything Trump loathes in establishment politicians. Sir Keir is a high-spending, high-taxing woke socialist with strong globalist inclinations and an unquenchable thirst for punishing (and banishing) the rich.

Trump’s pronouncements, crude though they are, and also his actions when in the White House suggest that it took a big effort for him to say something polite about Starmer. Yet he did make that effort, which indicates some bow towards proper politics.

Moreover, Prime Minister Starmer was accompanied at that meeting by Foreign Secretary Lammy, whom one can safely describe as not one of Trump’s most ardent admirers. In fact, Lammy campaigned for cancelling the president’s 2018 visit to the UK. Donald Trump, according to David Lammy, was a “dangerous clown” and a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath.”

This sort of thing says more about Lammy than Trump, but that’s a comparatively minor matter. For everything I know about Trump suggests that he doesn’t suffer personal insults with equanimity. If there is one adjective that always crops up in connection with Trump, it’s ‘narcissistic’, and narcissists tend to lash out at the slightest manifestation of opprobrium.

However, he didn’t call Lammy any pejorative names, racist or otherwise, and by all accounts behaved in a civilised, some will even say presidential, manner. That’s a move in the right direction, although I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Trump talked to his retinue after the meeting.

By contrast to Mr Trump, Miss Harris doesn’t say many crude things, doesn’t make savage remarks about the opposite sex and doesn’t often swear at her political opponents. Yet one almost wishes she did.

For things she does say, on the rare occasions when she isn’t flanked by aids whispering in her ear, shouldn’t qualify her to be elected even the proverbial dog catcher.

I don’t know much about her specific plans for foreign and domestic policy (does anyone?), because she restricts herself to generalities and platitudes. One can surmise, on little hard evidence, that her politics are as close to Starmer’s as possible in the context of US politics.

Yet what she says, however little that may be, is nowhere as important as how she says it. It’s that holistic aspect of her speech, to use Kamala’s favourite adjective, that proves her incompetence. No one capable of uttering the two passages below can be trusted to run the nation that Trump wants to make great again.

In reverse order, the first one comes from Kamala’s rare solo TV interview the other day, while the second pearl popped out of its shell earlier this month:

“For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritising affordable housing for working people.”

And,

“The trauma that exists in communities around the violence of losing their children, losing a brother, losing a father, an uncle – all of that must be addressed, and we have to have a holistic response to it. It’s about understanding what we need to do to, again, understand that, to your point, we have to have a holistic response to this issue and prioritise it, instead of reacting to the tragedy that, sadly, they are too predictable.”

Someone else could accuse Kamala of misogyny: the only losses, other than “their children”, she mentioned were those of male relations. What happened to losing a sister, a mother or an aunt? Is losing a female person less tragic? You see, like Donald Trump, I too am learning alien ways, in this case trying to use the debating logic of our woke modernity.

But relying on my more natural way of thinking, I can state with absolute certainty that a politician capable of delivering the two passages above has no business being a politician – of any kind, never mind a US president.

Kamala got hold of a key word, ‘holistic’, and used it as the axis around which her thought revolved. It’s the sort of thing third-rate barristers do: basing their defence in a mass murder case on the abuse suffered by the defendant as a child, they’ll stick ‘abused’ into every sentence.

America – and what’s left of the free world – can’t afford a third-rate thinker in the White House any more than a defendant can afford a third-rate lawyer. Kamala has had her stint as the latter, and I hope American voters are wise enough not to let her have a shot at the former.

You might have gathered that none of this is a ringing endorsement of Donald Trump. It is, however, a ringing endorsement of the lesser evil. That’s the best we can hope for these days.

The Russian government, enthusiastically supported by its KGB church, is planning to rid school curricula of Darwin’s theory because it “contradicts religion”.

I don’t see how. Since we can’t know God’s ways, we have to assume he could in his omnipotence create things not just fast but also slowly.

Nor do I believe Darwin’s theory, slapdash though it is, should be excluded from curricula. It may be bad science, but no good science can compete with it for sheer influence. The same, incidentally, goes for Marxism: bad economics, worse philosophy, yet extremely influential and hence to be studied.

I’d definitely teach Darwinism, if only to train pupils how to think critically. They should be taken by the hand and gradually led to the realisation that the theory doesn’t hold water, certainly not as an all-encompassing explanation of life. It takes someone as philosophically ignorant as Dawkins to say that Darwinism “explains everything”.

I’d start by offering pupils this quotation: “Not one change of species into another is on record… we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.” Who wrote this? Some fundamentalist preacher? No, it was Darwin himself, in My Life And Letters.

And, considering in his Origin the complexity of the human eye, he went even further: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Unlike their idol, today’s Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data, such as the dearth of any intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. In fact, Darwinism, along with any other materialist explanations of the world, has been refuted not only by logic but also by every natural science we may wish to consider:

Cosmology has reached the conclusion that our material world has not existed for ever: conclusive evidence shows it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time.

The physics of elementary particles has reached the level where some forms of matter (particles and field) can’t always be differentiated. Their material characteristics are now often seen as secondary to their metaphysical properties describable in terms of information only.

Palaeontologists have found and studied millions of fossilised remains of ancient organisms, and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in the development of species. If millions of fossils collected over 180 years have shown no such evidence, one can safely assume it doesn’t exist.

Genetics has demonstrated that mutations can only be degenerative in nature. Also, the amount of information in a single DNA molecule is so vast that it couldn’t have been gradually created even in the time exceeding by trillions of years the most optimistic assessments of the age of our universe.

Biochemistry accepts irreducible complexity as fact: each molecule of living matter contains a multitude of intricate systems that in a simpler form wouldn’t have existed at all. That means they didn’t evolve but were created as they are at present. 

Geology is another example. How is it that specimens of new species always appear in fossil records instantly and in huge numbers, fully formed and lacking any obvious predecessors? How is it that many species appearing in the earlier layers are in no way more primitive than the later ones?

Microbiology has shown that even single-celled organisms believed to be the simplest living beings are in fact incredibly complex systems of interacting functional elements. Even greater complexity is revealed at the genetic level, accompanied by much confusion in deciding what is primitive and what is advanced.

Indeed, if we look at the number of their chromosomes, man, with 46, is more complex than the mouse (40), mink (30), fly (12) and gnat (6). Yet using this criterion, man is much more primitive than the sheep (54), silkworm (56), donkey (62), chicken (78) and duck (80). And the prawn, with its 254 chromosomes, leads the field by a wide margin.

So is man perhaps the missing link between the gnat and the prawn? Actually, even some plants are more complex than we are. Black pepper, plum and potato each boast 48 chromosomes, and the lime tree a whopping 82.

Much has been written about the universe obeying rational and universal laws, which presupposes the existence of a rational and universal law-giver. But rationality apart, look at the geometric perfection of physical bodies.

Particularly telling here is the golden section, which is obtained by dividing a length into two unequal portions, of which the shorter one relates to the longer one as the latter relates to the overall length. Any length can be divided into an infinite number of portions, but only one division will produce this geometrically perfect ratio.

Modern scientists discover the proportion of golden section in the morphological makeup of birds and man, plants and animals, in the structure of the eye (which so baffled Darwin), in the location of heavenly bodies, in brain biorhythms and cardiograms.

Scientists are united in their conclusion: because this phenomenon goes across all levels of material organisation, it conveys a deep ontological meaning. But science is unable to explain it, and honest researchers have to admit their inability to account for the aesthetic aspect of the world.

After all, aesthetically perfect shapes add nothing to the organism’s survivability and may often endanger it. Why, for example, do cereal plants need stalks with joints arranged according to the golden section? Such an arrangement does nothing to make the stalk stronger. Why do the bodies of dragonflies relate to the length of their separate parts according to the principles of the golden section?

The aesthetic arrangement of nature points at a metaphysical, rather than physical, purpose that’s not of this world. And this is revealed in so much more than just the golden section. Just listen to birdsong, to name another beautiful example, or look at the peacock’s tail that jeopardises the bird’s survival by revealing its location to predators and making it slower in trying to get away.

Examples of this kind, and every branch of science can provide thousands, would have been sufficient to put paid to any other scientific theory a long time ago (and even evolutionary fanatics never claim that Darwinism is anything more than that). Generally, if a theory doesn’t become fact within one generation, or at most two, it’s relegated to the status of a museum exhibit. Yet today’s world was prepared to throw its whole weight behind Darwinism because it needed it even more than Marxism.

The two theories dovetailed neatly and, if anything, Darwinism went even further. Not only did it attack religion more effectively than Marxism did, but it also rivalled Marxism for wide-reaching social and economic implications.

One no longer had to leave the realm of seemingly objective biology to explain both socialism, with its class struggle, and capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog competition for survival. Even more fundamental is Darwinism’s demotic insistence on the purely animal nature of man.

No, I definitely wouldn’t excise Darwin’s theory from school curricula. Instead, I’d use it as an introduction to natural science, philosophy, rhetoric and religious studies.

But then I believe in debunking false theories by rational arguments, not cancelling them or their exponents. That’s because I’m not a fascist of any hue: brown, black, red, green – or Putin’s.

The salaries of employees reflect their relative value to the employer. Hence, if someone receives double the salary of someone else, the former is deemed to be twice as valuable.

Starting from this unassailable observation, we can then assess properly the current Wanted advertisement run by the Church of England, London diocese. The job advertised is that of a “head of racial justice priority”. (Is it possible to be a head of priority? You tell me.)

The salary on offer is £66,646 a year, which happens to be more than twice the stipend received by parish priests. The inescapable conclusion is that to our established church a chap capable of mouthing woke twaddle is twice as valuable as someone who preaches the word of God. Vox DEI speaks louder than vox dei.

The ad says that the successful candidate will “foster a culture… built on love, fairness, equity, justice, collaboration and integrity”, enlightening people on “the injustice and impact of racism”. He will “break down mental, cultural and institutional barriers… to engender true race equality,” thereby helping “address the historical legacy of slavery and challenge systemic racism”. 

I’m sorry, am I missing something? I thought equality before God is an integral part of any Christian message to the multitudes, and it’s the job of a priest to deliver this message from the pulpit. On the other hand, the sermon of secular DEI in relation to race or anything else is properly delivered by social workers, left-wing dons and Labour politicians.

A Christian minister and a Labour minister are jobs not just different but diametrically opposite, although DEI propaganda compromises both. But at least a politician indulges it in a secular context.

God knows it’s wicked enough even there, but in our democracy run riot securing 20 per cent of the electorate is supposed to give politicians a mandate to do as they please. Hence we may huff and we may puff, but we can’t argue that a woke politician is corrupting his mission.

He is, but this isn’t an argument we can ever win. However, when our established church misappropriates its finances to fund DEI propaganda, the church isn’t just going beyond its mission. It makes a mockery of it.

This isn’t to say that the church should never comment on worldly affairs. Not at all. It should sit in judgement and cry foul whenever a government acts in ways inconsistent with Christian morality. But it should steer clear of any faddish ideology specifically because it’s a) faddish and b) an ideology.

Fads come and go, but a church should overlook the transient in favour of the transcendent. Governments these days act as weathervanes, turning this way or that depending on the way the wind blows. But because the church’s mission is eternal, it should be impervious to political vicissitudes.

When it comes to committing itself to an ideology, the church should remind itself what all ideologies are. The term first appeared in France at the very end of the 18^th century, and new words are coined when they are needed to denote new concepts.

The need for this particular concept sprang from the very nature of the Enlightenment, which, when stripped of its sloganeering cant, was a mass revolt against Christendom – not just its founding religion but the civilisation it had produced. When troops go into battle, they need to inscribe something on their banners, and ideology is what provides the text.

An ideology was to the philosophes a system of rational convictions designed to supplant irrational superstitions, which is how they saw Christianity. However, it was understood even then that such rational convictions may be held for reasons other than purely epistemic, that is based on evidential reasoning. Irrational was the new rational.

In other words, an ideology isn’t a philosophy but a secular creed perceived to be in competition with religious faith, which it sees as its mortal enemy.

Now, Christianity is a rational religion and, as such, isn’t at odds with science or philosophy. But it is at odds, indeed at war, with cults, false religions claiming they preach the truth but in fact peddling lies. Worshiping such cults is called idolatry, which word fits any ideology like a glove.

Ideologies appeared at the crest of the Enlightenment to fill the gap left by religious faith. Man was now perceived as merely a higher order of animal, but the ‘enlighteners’ knew he was the kind of animal who had an innate need to rise above his quotidian existence. Man has a compulsion to believe in something higher than himself.

That’s where ideology steps in. It gives people a chance to worship the superpersonal without rising to the supernatural. Yet upon closer examination, any ideology is found out sooner or later. It turns out to be not a philosopher’s stone but fool’s gold.

That’s why people susceptible to ideological temptation tend to float from one ideology to another. They look for a secular god, but because that god is false they can’t find it. At least they can’t find a single one, which is why they resort to secular polytheism.

And their rites grow more and more bizarre. Sexual equality turns into a ritual dance around a woman’s phallus, quest for peace turns into shamanistic shrieks for unilateral disarmament, social justice into rampant levelling, racial equality into a wholesale repudiation of Western history.

Like Greek gods who all lived on the same mountain, ideological idols also stay close together. They inhabit their own temple, that defined by hatred of Christendom. Yes, our civilisation has already been relegated to the status of distant memory, but iconoclasm tends to persevere long after the icons have been smashed.

All this is to say that for a church to feel the need for a highly paid “head of racial justice priority” is tantamount to worshiping idols at the expense of its mission to worship God. This comes close to my understanding of satanism and it’s useful to remember that, etymologically speaking, Lucifer means ‘enlightener’.

Ange Rayner, our deputy prime minister, knows how to ward off any accusations of misbehaviour. Wave the sabre of her class origin, and accusers flee like demons from the cross.

Photographed whirling drunk in a sleazy nightclub at 4 AM? “I’m working class.”

Accepted all-expenses-paid holiday with her intermittent lover at a billionaire’s penthouse? “I’m working class.”

Hired a personal photographer, on a £68,000 taxpayer-funded salary, to boost her online image? “I’m working class.”

Pushed an old woman under a bus? “I’m working class.” Sorry, I made this last one up. The idea is to probe the outer limits of that excuse, which seems to go far, although perhaps not quite as far as that yet.

Still, barristers routinely cite their clients’ humble origins as a mitigating circumstance. So perhaps my hypothetical excuse isn’t as fanciful as all that.

Actually, my problem today isn’t with Ange, that walking caricature of a Labour politician. It’s with the term ‘working class’, and I’ll be using her only as an illustration of its fatuity.

The term has two meanings, one English, the other Marxist. The English meaning is self-evident: ‘working class’ describes people who work. Those who don’t work aren’t working class, those who work are.

Now, anyone who has ever looked at the diaries of doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers and dons will have to agree that they work extremely hard. So does that make them working class? In English, definitely. In Marxist, no.

According to Marx, only industrial labourers qualify as working class, aka the proletariat. But Ange doesn’t, not by that standard.

She has never worked at a factory and in fact has never done any meaningful work of any kind, apart from a short stint as social worker. She spent the rest of her career climbing the greasy pole of trade union politics all the way up to a safe Labour seat.

Specifically, Marx based his social taxonomy on a person’s relation to the ‘means of production’. Yet Ange has never produced anything other than an illegitimate child at age 16. Her means of production was her womb.

So how is she working class? I get it. Ange is a classical scholar who knows how to penetrate the etymology of words. The word ‘proletarian’ was coined in the 17^th century on the basis of the Latin root proles, meaning ‘offspring’. A proletarian was thus a person whose only useful function in life was to produce progeny.

If so, Ange’s illegitimate child indeed qualifies her as a proletarian, but somehow I doubt this is how she would explain it. Ange has a shaky mastery even of living languages, such as English, never mind dead ones. She is gobby without being eloquent.

Marx’s definition made little sense even when he concocted it, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That was the time when industrialisation came to Britain, but it has since left. We now live in a post-industrial age, and no conveyor-belt definitions apply any longer, if they ever did.

Nor do any economic ones in general. Otherwise we’d have to argue that a train driver paid £80,000 a year for a four-day week is working class, and a teacher isn’t, even though he gets less than half that and still spends his weekends marking papers – and his evenings filling in endless forms on gender and racial equality.

I lived in the US for 15 years, and yet I never heard anyone describing himself as ‘working class’. I’m not saying that such Americans don’t exist, only that I never met any. My friends were mostly academics, my colleagues were admen, and neither group self-identified in class terms.

Suddenly, when I moved to London back in 1988, I met many advertising colleagues, all on princely salaries, describing themselves as working class. They saw that part of their identity as innate and immutable, like their height or the colour of their eyes.

That reinforced my belief that the definition of working class no longer has anything to do with economics. After all, I’ve met a few aristocrats with a lineage going back centuries who had less money than today’s train drivers. And in my professional capacity, I once even met Alan Sugar who despite all his billions still describes himself as working class .

If not economics, what then? I’d suggest a combination of culture and ideology as the defining discriminators of the working class. Sometimes culture is primary and ideology secondary, at other times it’s the other way around.

Here I use the term ‘culture’ broadly, to include not just education and aesthetic preferences, but also manners and conduct. All of these are given some bias by one’s birth and early upbringing, but they aren’t determined by such factors for life.

It’s possible for a girl with Ange’s social background to grow up with interests other than getting pissed at a night club and procreating behind a bike shed. I have among my close friends people whose start in life was no more auspicious than hers, but who as adults boast (figuratively speaking – such people never boast) broad erudition, refined tastes and impeccable manners.

By manners I mean so much more than knowing which utensil to use with which course at dinner or where brown shoes can or can’t be worn. The ultimate test of manners is intuitive knowledge of how to modify one’s speech and behaviour to take others into account. (A gentleman never offends unintentionally, as Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said.)

I’d suggest a supermarket-trolley test as a marker of class. When stopping at a shelf to decide which product to buy, some people try to place their trolley not to block access for others, and some don’t.

The former don’t make a conscious decision to be so accommodating – they intuitively adjust their behaviour to make other people’s life easier. The latter don’t decide to be boorish either, they just are. I’d describe them as proles, but I wouldn’t be talking about their wealth or living quarters at birth.

Neither education nor manners are innate, both can be acquired by conscious effort as one goes through life. Those whose beginnings are humble have to try harder, but that makes their achievement even more valuable and laudable.

But some people, and this is where ideology comes in, refuse to make that effort. They insist on screaming their proledom at the world, eternally staying in the gutter in any other than the practical sense. They may make billions or rise to the second highest position in government, while still flashing the tattoos and other cultural stigmata of their early life as some kind of badges of honour.

It’s not where people begin in life that matters, but where they end up. People can’t always choose to become rich, but they can always choose to become cultured and hence no longer prole. If they refuse so to choose, it’s often the pernicious Marxist ideology of class struggle that holds so many of them back.

Class (and also race, in any other than the purely chromatic sense) is as often as not a statement of ideological conviction. For some, such as Ange Rayner, it’s also a stepping stone on a career path. If she is expecting applause and compassionate understanding, she won’t find any at these quarters.

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.