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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winston Churchill’s two pronouncements on democracy are believed to be contradictory, but really aren’t.

In one, he said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” In the other, Churchill observed that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Before deciding whether one statement refutes the other, let’s agree on what Churchill (b. 1874) meant by democracy.

According to Freedom House, the neoconservative thinktank in Washington, D.C., in 2007 the world could boast 123 electoral democracies – up from 40 in 1972 and from zero [sic] in 1900. In other words, just over a century ago even America, never mind what Freedom House doubtless sees as a vestigially tyrannical Europe, didn’t qualify for the ultimate accolade of politics. Democracy then is barely 100 years old.

Now, one suspects that Churchill’s idea of democracy, formed as it was at a time when, according to Freedom House, democracy didn’t exist, differed from Freedom House’s.

Though both a staunch monarchist and a committed parliamentarian, Churchill didn’t believe he was living a double life. To him there was no contradiction in a strong monarchy being balanced by an elected lower house, with the hereditary upper chamber making sure the balance didn’t tip too much to either side.

That was the essence of England’s ancient constitution, one that so many American visitors claim doesn’t exist because it hasn’t been written down. I usually reply that a written constitution is like a prenuptial agreement specifying the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother.

To Freedom House, democracy means something un-Churchillian: the best imaginable form of government that shouldn’t just dominate other forms but oust them. Yet Churchill is posthumously co-opted as the champion of this idea, with his first statement above dragged in as support, while the second one is conveniently forgotten.

But Churchill never implied anything quite so false as that and anyway, as we’ve seen, the word democracy meant something entirely different to him. Never did he say that unadulterated, uncontested democracy is the best conceivable form of government.

This, however, has become an article of faith in liberal democratic circles. That fallacy is bandied about with maniacal persistence. Didn’t Churchill say democracy was perfect?

Actually, no, he didn’t. He said that democracy was deeply flawed, although other pure political systems were even more so. And his second pronouncement highlights the principal flaw of democracy: most people aren’t qualified to decide who should govern them.

Democracy hounds are lying when they insist that mankind has never come up with anything better. It has, the first time some 2,500 years ago.

Both Plato and Aristotle looked at the three main political forms they knew, namely monarchy (the rule of one), aristocracy (the rule of minority) and democracy (the rule of majority), and found all of them wanting, if not without each having some good points.

Monarchy, while providing continuity and avoiding partisan squabbles, has a potential for tyranny. Aristocracy, while conducive to competent governance and high culture, has a divisive effect on society. And democracy, while giving every citizen a stake in government, promotes vulgarity, mediocrity and draws into government those unfit to govern (something that’s consonant with Churchill’s second pronouncement).

The great Athenians reached a conclusion that has since been shared by most significant political thinkers: the best political system is a synthetic one, amalgamating all three forms of government. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Vico, Burke, Canning, Tocqueville, Mill, Kant and assorted Enlightenment thinkers in France and Germany all arrived at this conclusion, if from different angles.

Cicero referred to such mixed government as res publica, “public affairs”, and Churchill would have recognised it as the best form of government ever tried. Alas, by 1947, when he talked about democracy being the least of many evils, modernity had won the glossocratic battle, and, by way of shorthand, Churchill tacitly agreed to describe our government as a democracy.

(The word ‘republicanism’ now means virulent anti-monarchism, which is yet another example of modernity playing fast and loose with political concepts.)

In fact, the idea of res publica was best realised in the England of, and before, Churchill’s birth and youth. However, that England, and especially her contemporaneous America, should have alerted advocates of a mixed constitution to the need for eternal vigilance. For, in an increasingly secular world obsessed with the dubious concept of inalienable human rights, the democratic element may assume dictatorial powers. So it has transpired.

Democracy hounds opened the floodgates and modernity rushed in, sweeping aside even what was worth keeping and littering the landscape with the flotsam of petty ideas and puny aspirations. Sooner or later the flood was bound to drown every institution of our traditional polity.

Democracy had to follow inexorably, first in America, even if this wasn’t the Founders’ original design. Many of them, John Adams specifically, were horrified when observing the chicken hatched by the egg they had laid. In 1806 Adams wrote: “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

This, by his correct if belated judgement, had a disastrous effect not only on America but on the whole world. In 1811 Adams rued: “Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race and the whole globe ever since?” Laudable hindsight, but only hindsight nonetheless.

In common with other sage men, Adams saw every idea in its dynamic development, not as a perpetual stasis. He could foresee where things were going, although even he couldn’t predict the destination they reached 200 years later.

Liberal democracy has since stopped being an idea and become an ideology, which negates both its liberal and democratic elements. In fact, liberal democracy has eerily acquired many features normally associated with communism.

One such feature is its eschatology, the belief that, once liberal democracy has emerged universally victorious, mankind will no longer travel. It will have arrived. That idea was encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History, a reaction to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.

That simpleminded book showed a lamentable ignorance of the Soviet Union, the West and indeed history, but that didn’t matter. Fukuyama put in a nutshell the eschatological aspect of the dominant Western cult, that of the inevitable and universal triumph of liberal democracy. That’s what modernity wanted to hear and it applauded.

Liberal democrats and communists are like Orwell’s animals: converging in their overarching views and only arguing about the number of legs. One feature both ideologies share is their doctrinaire intolerance.

Each of them is certain it possesses the ultimate truth, which makes any disagreement at best frivolous and at worst subversive. If it’s frivolous, it must be ignored or shouted down. If it’s subversive, it must be punished.

Thus, under both communism and liberal democracy, the range of permissible public inquiry gets steadily narrower. Observing this, a communist may shrug with indifference, but a liberal democrat really shouldn’t. After all, the founding tenet of his creed is liberty, made up of various components, with freedom of speech paramount.

Thus communism and liberal democracy vindicate Hegel’s dialectics, specifically his idea of the unity of opposites. They also prove the inadequacy of our political taxonomy, where almost every term gets to mean something different from – and, in the case of liberalism, opposite to – its original definition.

In my 2006 book How the West Was Lost, I propose a simpler classification, identifying two overarching cultural types, Westman and Modman. The former was the product of Christendom destroyed and supplanted by the latter.

Modman was brought into existence by what Ortega y Gasset called “the revolt of the masses”, the mainly negative impulse to destroy the traditional Western civilisation. That type soon bifurcated into two subtypes I call ‘nihilist’, ideally represented by communism, and ‘philistine’, championed by liberal democracy.

Neither subtype exists in unalloyed purity: the nihilist shares many of the philistine’s aspirations and vice versa, with only the balance of the two being different. The two subtypes have a tendency to converge, something we are witnessing at the moment, with Western liberalism growing more and more illiberal by the day.

It’s a common deterministic fallacy to insist that, because things happen, they were bound to happen. I find it impossible to countenance any form of determinism or even the idea (common to communists and liberal democrats alike) that history unfolds according to some inexorable laws.

However, some things make other things likely to happen, even if not predetermined. The shrill, intolerant ‘cancel’ culture is that opposite of liberalism to which it’s for ever attracted. Therefore, it was predictable, if not unavoidable.

Churchill died in 1965, when the world was already dramatically different from the one in which he was born, raised and formed. It’s now more different still, and I doubt Churchill would like it if he were blessed with an implausible longevity. He’d like it even less that his offhand remarks are held up as justification for what he’d detest.

Speaking to Time magazine, which has again named him Person of the Year, Donald Trump said he “vehemently” disagreed with Biden’s decision to let the Ukraine strike Russian targets with US-made long-range missiles.

I just as vehemently disagree with Biden’s procrastination in that department. That permission should have been given a long time ago, ideally immediately after Russia’s invasion began almost three years ago.

Still, better late than never, and one has to commend Biden’s action, if not the motives behind it. He clearly loosened the reins on the Ukraine for the sole purpose of queering the pitch for Trump, making it harder for him to act on his braggadocio about ending the war instantly.

But sometimes right things are done for wrong reasons, and Biden’s belated acquiescence is one such right thing. Trump’s comment, on the other hand, confirms my belief that, on this issue at least, neither his heart nor his head is in the right place.

“I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” he said. “Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done.”

Since this statement is consistent with many others Trump and his retinue have made over the years, it demands a comment. For those chaps clearly define escalation as the Ukraine’s stubborn resistance to fascist aggression.

When Russia pounced on the Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, with the publicly stated intention to stamp out the country’s independence and return her to her erstwhile colonial status in the Russo-Soviet empire, that wasn’t escalation. Escalation only started when the Ukrainians began to fight back.

When the Russians use sites outside the range of Ukrainian artillery and missiles to launch murderous strikes on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, that’s not escalation. Escalation, according to Trump, is when the Ukrainians hit those sites with longer-range missiles.

And what exactly are such strikes “making worse”, and for whom? Whatever negotiations have to occur sooner or later, surely the Ukraine is improving her position, while making Russia’s worse. Since this has to be clear to anyone with half a brain, Trump’s “worse” means he looks at the war from Putin’s perspective.

He then tugged on the readers’ heart strings by bewailing the heavy death toll in the war. But again, the way he did so clearly shows that Trump isn’t playing favourites or, if he does, his favourites aren’t the Ukrainians:

“The level, the number of people dying is number one, not sustainable, and I’m talking on both sides. It’s really an advantage to both sides to get this thing done. You know, this is a war that’s been – this is a tragedy. This is death that’s far greater than anyone knows. When the real numbers come out, you’re going to see numbers that you’re not going to believe.”

I’ll believe the numbers. Also I, along with all decent people, mourn those killed – but not on “both sides”. One side, Putin’s Russia, is the blood-thirsty aggressor. The other, the Ukraine, is fighting for its national survival, to protect its people — and the rest of Europe — against the kind of treatment Russian invaders have been meting out from day one: genocidal mass murder of civilians, rape, torture, looting.

Contrary to what Trump imples, there is no moral equivalence here. Russia, turned into a transparently fascist, or rather Nazi, country by Putin, is the (absolute) evil attempting to extinguish a (relative) good. Most Russian soldiers have taken a king’s ransom (some £2,000 each, a fortune in Russia) to go to a foreign land and murder people who have done them no wrong.

Thus Trump is only half-right: every Ukrainian killed is indeed a tragedy. Every Russian killed, on the other hand, is a blow struck against evil. It’s only from this understanding that any decent Westerner can begin to consider a possible way “to get this thing done”.

It ought to be clear to anyone other than a pro-Trump fanatic (and there are way too many of those for my liking) that, yes, the war must end. But not all ends are created equal.

Trump himself has been as effusive about his intention to “get this thing done” as he has been reticent about the end he sees as desirable. Since he regards as escalation the Ukraine’s attempts to protect her cities by hitting the sites from which death is rained on them, my guess is that Trump will force the Ukraine to accept peace only on Putin’s terms.

He could do so easily enough, by withdrawing Biden’s license to strike deeper into Russia and cutting off all supplies to the Ukraine. Many members of his in-coming administration, including the envoy Trump appointed specifically for negotiating peace terms, are on record with statements to that effect.

Trump himself hasn’t been so forthright, but the broad hints he keeps dropping suggest that his own position isn’t significantly different. True enough, something one can confidently predict about Trump is that he is unpredictable. No one knows, possibly including himself, what he may do on any given day.

Yet so far I haven’t heard him make a single statement rallying the West’s support for resisting the evil aggression that, if allowed to succeed, will put the whole world, certainly its western part, in danger. I have heard quite a few statements to the opposite effect, and I can only hope Trump doesn’t mean what he says.

The ability to use English precisely isn’t among the many indisputable talents the president-elect possesses. That leaves room for conjecture, and I do hope mine is off the mark.

Whenever I’m involved in a debate on ‘assisted dying’ (death by doctor), I feel relieved when my opponents fail to come up with a potential clincher: “Greta Thunberg”.

I doubt that would make me abandon my opposition to euthanasia, but it would certainly force me to water it down. Someone ought to put that deranged child out of her misery, even if that would deviate from the strict tenets of Christian morality.

Speaking at a rally in Mannheim last week, Thunberg, now of age although you wouldn’t know it, displayed impeccable manners by addressing the crowd with “F*** Germany!”.

Rather than lynching her on the spot, the predominantly German gathering whooped and clapped. They clearly had no affection for their country, which in this case may not be such a bad thing – excessive German patriotism has been known to lead to all sorts of mischief.

So encouraged, Greta got the giggles which she managed to suppress for long enough to enunciate: “And f*** Israel!”. English is indeed becoming the lingua franca of savagery.

The darling of President Obama, Pope Francis, Michael Gove and Ed Miliband (Britain’s past and present Energy Secretaries – sorry, Secretaries for Energy and Net Zero), António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, along with a bevy of Hollywood A-listers is taking no prisoners.

Neither does she discriminate: Greta will shill for any anti-Western cause, not just that of climate madness, her cause célèbre. She showed that versatility in the run-up to the US elections, when she wrote it didn’t matter who won.

The US would still remain “an imperialist, hyper-capitalist world power that will ultimately continue to lead the world further into a racist, unequal world with an ever increasingly escalating climate and environmental emergency.”

So let’s take the tally of Greta’s pet causes. Destroying Western economies with net zero, yes, that goes without saying. Fusing climate zealotry with support for Muslim terrorism may be a logically difficult trick, but trust Greta to pull it off. Anti-capitalism should be chalked up there as well. Fight against racism and for universal equality, can’t be without it.

To the best of my knowledge, Greta hasn’t yet come out for enforced euthanasia, but then she may be afraid of finding herself on the receiving end. After all, advocates of death by doctor insist that mental disorders should make patients eligible regardless of their age. And no shrink worth his salt would fail to diagnose Greta as certifiably insane.

Even someone without the benefit of psychiatric training would know the girl is deranged after one look at her manic smile instantly giving way to contorted grimaces of hysterical hatred. I don’t know about euthanasia – some of us are still trying to be civilised – but it’s clear Greta ought to be committed, and I don’t mean the kind of commitment she already displays by regularly creating public mayhem in various countries.

Such marginal figures only ever come to prominence if their harangues are consonant with the zeitgeist. When they shill for a typically subversive cause or, in Greta’s case, a whole garland of them, much depends on whether or not the cause has been elevated to orthodoxy.

If it hasn’t, such a shill will be ignored. If it has, fame beckons – and freedom from even the mildest disagreement or, God forbid, criticism. That’s straightforward enough.

What I find baffling is the docility with which those who should know better play along. So fine, Ed Miliband is a monumentally stupid fanatic, but Michael Gove isn’t. Yet there they are together in a 2019 photograph, listening with rapt attention to the rant of a 16-year-old school dropout with learning difficulties.

I doubt Gove’s face could show keener interest had he been listening to Cicero, Demosthenes or, closer to our time, Winston Churchill. Did he realise Greta was uttering hysterical gibberish? Of course, he did. But he didn’t dare show it. It was orthodox zeitgeist ranting through that sick child, and one rebelled against it at one’s peril.

After her 2019 “How dare you” speech at the UN, Greta was nominated for five straight Nobel Peace prizes, and Time magazine put her retarded face on its front cover as its Person of the Year. Few personages have achieved such fame in recent years, especially at her barely post-pubescent age, but I know why Greta was so lucky.

She is the quintessence of our civilisation at this time, the encapsulation of its overpowering death wish. She may be a deranged, illiterate, infantile lout unqualified to broach any halfway serious subject. That’s what makes her the symbol of our time, which is also deranged, illiterate, infantile and loutish.

Children are naturally destructive, and their minds aren’t yet wired to think rationally. They respond to stimuli instinctively and emotionally, like little animals. However, unlike other little animals, human young possess what Aristotle called ‘potentiality’. In some cases, this develops into the actuality of rational adulthood, but in some others it doesn’t – and the number of the latter cases has to be at a record high now.

The Age of Reason has killed reason, if by delayed action. Whole societies now act on impulse, responding with Pavlovian alacrity to electrical signals emitted by semi-literate charismatics. Infantile thoughts, infantile emotions, infantile tastes aren’t just present but dominant, and their possessors have the power to impose their quirks on the masses.

This has been going on for a long time, but with a powerful accelerator built in. Even a generation ago, no one would have taken seriously an obviously disturbed child spouting hysterical diatribes. Today, she has to be taken not just seriously but reverentially.

One thing I can say for Donald Trump: he saw right through Greta. In 2019, having heard Greta excoriate world leaders on their climate irresponsibility dictated by greed, Trump mocked her on Twitter: “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”

But the entire UN General Assembly gave Greta a standing ovation. How many of those chaps punishing their palms despised Thunberg and everything she stood for? I don’t know, but some doubtless did. That’s not the point, however. The point is that even those few sensible people didn’t dare to remain seated with their hands in their laps.

That’s like Soviet Party congresses in the 1930s, when Stalin rose to speak. A standing ovation invariably broke out, and no one dared to stop clapping first. The thunderous applause would go on for five, ten, twenty minutes, with NKVD spies keeping an eye out for the first delegate to stop.

That, however, was history’s worst tyranny, when intelligent grownups had to act as obedient children on pain of severe punishment. But I detect a growing similarity with our own time and place. Don’t you?

Our disobedience isn’t yet punished by quick death in a cellar or a slow one in a uranium mine. But, if these days the punishment is less severe, it’s just as assured – at least for those who have much to lose. So Michael Gove had to suppress his wince and feign unwavering interest as that sinister child was spouting on.

Now back to the subject of some exceptions to our rejection of euthanasia…   

You’ve doubtless spotted the Americanism in the title above. And fair enough, for the past 400 years or so, Americans have claimed sole ownership of ‘gotten’ in a glaring exercise of cultural appropriation.

I used it deliberately, strictly to make a point. The question is, why do our MPs use it, along with other Americanisms? What point are they making, if any?

It’s true that Churchill’s famous quip about two nations divided by a common language sounds dated these days. The increasing globalisation and growing dominance of US media, especially television, opened the floodgates and Americanisms rushed in.

The issue has a personal resonance with me. The US was my first Anglophone country and, when I lived there, neither my accent nor choice of words branded me as an outlander. More interesting, Penelope, a native Devonian, also adopted many American usages if not the American accent.

The US was the first Anglophone country where she lived as an adult, having left England at 17 to attend the Paris Conservatoire, spent the next 10 years in France and then moved straight to New York, to find herself on a collision course with me.

When Penelope first took me over to England, to introduce me to her parents, she promised her mother she’d touch base with her the moment we got back. “You’ll do what?”, asked my future mother-in-law, genuinely perplexed by the baseball idiom.

Shortly thereafter we moved to London, and I was worried about my job prospects. In those days I made my living as an advertising copywriter, and ads are always written in the language of their audience. Hence my portfolio was idiosyncratically American, and I feared potential British employers would laugh me out of the profession.

I needn’t have worried. As it turned out, my American experience earned a feather in my cap, not a kick up my backside. London admen loved everything American: cars, clothes, ads and of course the idiom. They’d say things like “Don’t make a federal case out of it” or “I’ll take the fifth on that” even though Britain has neither a federal government nor a system of constitutional amendments.

To me, the effect was jarring. Those working class Englishmen (and, in the UK, advertising is the same social hoist for working class Britons as basketball is for black Americans) sounded incongruous. American phrases just don’t have the same ring to them when the aitches are dropped.

My accent soon followed my shift across the Atlantic without any special effort on my part: pronunciation is mostly imitative, and I picked up the educated accent of my family and friends. Getting rid of American usages, on the other hand, did take some work, and even now the odd Americanism creeps into my speech. When I’m aware of this I chase it away for aesthetic reasons: stylistic integrity matters.

Also, by adopting the language of the English educated classes, I’ve also adopted their innocuous snobbery, part of which is rejecting, and even sneering at, American words and phrases. Cultural supremacy also comes into this: educated Englishmen see themselves as the Greeks to Americans’ Romans – our culture remains primary, even if we’re no longer the global power the US is.

However, there’s nothing especially wrong with Americanisms as such. English, after all, welcomes geographical variety, with this small island boasting some 50 major dialects (five in London alone) and uncountable minor ones. Two Englishmen from adjacent counties sometimes have more trouble understanding each other than either has understanding Americans.

For all the profusion of American TV shows, hilarious misunderstandings do sometimes happen, especially when the same word means different things in the two countries. The slang word ‘fanny’, for example, stands for the geometrically opposite body parts to an American and a Briton, which may lead to strained pauses in conversation.

This, however, is rare, and by itself there is nothing too pernicious about the American lexical colonisation. Yet nothing in such matters is ever by itself. Subtext is more important than text.

It’s with this understanding in mind that I reacted to the news that over the past 25 years the use of 100 common Americanisms in Parliament has risen 40 per cent. One routinely hears our representatives committing verbal treason by saying things like ‘gotten’, ‘get it for free’, ‘reach out’ in the meaning of getting in touch by phone, ‘to leverage’ along with other unsightly examples of nouns turned into verbs, and so on.

What’s telling here isn’t that MPs do that, but why. Part of the reason is that they make a point of slipping Americanisms into their speech because that’s how their constituents talk. Gone are the times when our MPs came from the higher social strata than most voters. Ours is the age of the common man, and that mathematically average individual is more culturally tyrannical than the princes of yesteryear ever were.

And common men everywhere are intuitively attracted to the United States, the first country in history where that type assumed primacy, the first country constitutionally dedicated to the advancement of the common man.

This is noticeable everywhere in Europe, but especially, for obvious reasons, in Britain. Ordinary people feel the kind of kinship with America that they don’t feel with the ‘toffs’ at home. Class means nothing in America, they think, and it doesn’t matter that they are mistaken. Perception, as Marshall McLuhan taught, is reality.

(This sounds vaguely Platonic, but I doubt McLuhan was guided by Athenian idealism. He was specifically talking about manipulating the common man through mass media. Outside that worthy pursuit, only reality is reality – that’s where Aristotle surpassed his teacher.)

That’s why lower-class Britons reach out (in the correct sense of the expression) tropistically for Americanisms. These act as membership badges on their lapels.

However, even these days few MPs are genuinely lower class, and anyway the most prolific user of Americanisms in Parliament is Dave Cameron who is distantly related to the royal family. Of course, he and his colleagues are likely to succumb to prolier-than-thou attitudes as a way of ingratiating themselves to the electorate. That much is par for the course.

However, it’s not just American usages but also American politics that exerts a special pull. Most of our politicians are ignorant about British statehood, the unique nature of our ancient constitution. They are familiar with the outer details well enough, but the underlying existential spirit escapes them.

They see nothing wrong with an American-like system supplanting our indigenous institutions because they see them, correctly, as something partly designed for but not by the common man. It’s not just Labour MPs of whom nothing else can be expected, but even many Tories who pin a target to those institutions that have no counterpart in the US.

In the past couple of decades, for example, we’ve got an abomination called the Supreme Court in a gesture of obscene obeisance. Tony Blair, the most subversive PM ever, although Starmer may still usurp that distinction, even tried to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor that dates back to the Norman Conquest at least.

He failed then, having realised that our constitution couldn’t withstand such a barbaric onslaught, but his likeminded saboteurs will come again. Meanwhile, they are all campaigning for driving the few remaining hereditary peers out of the House of Lords. Instead they want to have two elective chambers, just like you know who. There’s even talk of replacing the Lords with a Senate not only in essence but also in name.

That changes things dramatically. Instead of dealing with something innocuous if aesthetically objectionable (Americanisms penetrating from TV) and merely political tricks (catering to the electorate), we are looking at something downright evil: an attempt to destroy history’s most successful and enduring constitution so as to strengthen and perpetuate the government by those unfit to govern.

Thought I’d get this off my chest. Y’all have a nice day now, you hear?   

Replace ‘France’ with the name of any other Western country, and the title will still work. But it was France that came up the other day in conversation with my American friend.

He and his wife are the most dedicated, I’d even say compulsive, explorers of Europe’s art and architecture. They cross the ocean several times a year and spend weeks at a time driving from one church or museum to another, not ignoring the restaurants in between.

My friend pointed out that French cathedrals are crowded with visitors, as are museums, where it’s religious art, or rather art on religious subjects, that mostly draws gawking multitudes. I had no quarrel with the observation, but my friend used it to reach a wrong conclusion.

So Christianity is alive and well in France, he said. That didn’t at all tally with my experience, and I said so, offering a few examples from my 24 years of part-time residence in Burgundy. Still, that was only one man’s experience, a notoriously poor survey sample.

The conversation then switched to Russia, and he said correctly that the Russians like to enjoy the physical products of Western civilisation while despising its metaphysical roots. He was right, but later it occurred to me – in what the French call l’ésprit d’escalier (an idea that comes to you in the staircase, as you are leaving) – that exactly the same thing could be said about most of those culture vultures gasping at the sight of Romanesque churches or Renaissance art.

As they gasp, they aren’t at all moved by the faith that guided the hands of stonemasons, painters and sculptors. Some artists painted landscapes, others chose the Annunciation, but it’s still crusted pigment on canvas, isn’t it? Some applied it with more skill, some with less, the former is better than the latter, and that’s all there is to it.

Anyway, the very next day a parcel arrived, containing the book I had ordered, Métamorphoses françaises by the eminent sociologist Jérôme Fourquet. Writing in a deadpan manner purged of any judgement, he cites comparative data on various aspects of life from different historical periods.

Such painting by numbers produces a grim picture, justifying the title above. Here are a few choice bits, starting with how well Christianity is doing.

In 1961, 82 per cent of babies were baptised at birth. In 1980, that proportion went down to 70 per cent, and in 2018 to 27. One factor must be the dearth of priests to perform baptismal rites.

At the time of the French Revolution, when France’s population was about 28 million, there were 170,000 priests, monks and nuns in the country. Roughly the same number (177,000) existed in 1950. Today, 68 million French people have to make do with only 10,188 priests.

Just 13 per cent of the people knew the significance of the Pentecost in 2020, which testifies to the failure of education, not just religion. Add such failures together, and barbarism is just round the corner.

In the same year 40 per cent of the under-35s believed in sorcery, 28 per cent were in therapy in 2013 (as opposed to 5 per cent in 2001), while 20 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women did yoga in 2020. So at least some faiths are doing well. I’m wiping my brow even as we speak.

The number of marriages has gone from 400,740 in 1973 down to 149,983 in 2020, while the number of divorces headed in the opposite direction, from 36,063 in 1968 to 134,601 in 2004.

The number of children growing up in a single-parent family went from 8.2 per cent in 1975 to 24 per cent in 2018, but it’s the increase in the number of children born out of wedlock that’s truly staggering: from 8.5 per cent in 1946 to 65.2 per cent in 2022. That’s right, two-thirds of French babies are born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Meanwhile, more and more French people express their artistic cravings by using their own bodies as canvas. In just 14 years, from 2010 to 2024, the number of tattooed 26-34-year-olds went from 20 to 42 per cent, but the growth among the 50-64-year-olds was even steeper in percentage terms: from 5 to 24 per cent.

One would normally count on wrinklies not to let the side down, but they disappoint. In the 65-plus group, where pregnancy isn’t a burning issue, 79 per cent see nothing wrong with abortion, a marginally higher proportion than even among the under-35s, 77 per cent.

Lest you may think the French are suffering a crisis of faith, I’ll have to disabuse you of that notion: they do have robust beliefs, especially in conspiracies. Thus, 32 per cent agree with the statement “The AIDS virus was developed in a laboratory, tested on the African population and then released into the world.”

Moving up from there, 33 per cent agree that “The USA has developed a powerful secret service capable of provoking tempests, cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis to subjugate the world”. And 34 per cent nod when hearing that “Some vapour trails left by jets in the sky are composed of chemicals specially created for some nefarious purpose.”

The number of new-born boys given Muslim names has gone from a commendable 0 per cent in 1900, to 0.2 per cent in 1945 and all the way up to 21.1 per cent in 2021.

One statistic is open to interpretation. In 1983, police seized a mere 255 kilos of cocaine, while in 2022 that take went to an impressive 27,000 kilos. That may testify both to higher demand and more effective policing. My money is on the former.

The last time I looked (for purely research purposes, as I hope you understand) the street price of coke was 90 euros per gramme. I’ve tried to calculate the total value of the amount seized in 2022 but quickly got lost in all those zeros.

In conclusion, I’d like to thank Jérôme Fourquet for using French data only. God only knows what similar British or American statistics would show. But since I don’t know, I’m smiling smugly. Ignorance really is bliss.