Category: Blog

Both ends of the age spectrum have come into focus on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the US presidential debate, President Biden came across as Patient Biden. The poor man stumbled over words, lost the thread repeatedly, went through an obvious agony trying to remember his aides’ instructions – and even his golf handicap.

It’s easy to sneer at that sort of thing, but, as a man only five years younger than Biden, I sympathise. Just yesterday, I had to default in a tournament tennis match I was winning.

Unfortunately, it was played during the first heatwave of the summer, with the temperature at 32C (about 90F) – and quite a bit higher on the red-hot court. Having won the first set, I had to call it quits in the middle of the second. Carrying on seemed dangerous, and a tennis match isn’t the kind of noble cause one should sacrifice one’s life for.

Two lines from American films flashed through my mind as I shook hands with my delighted and astounded opponent: “I’m getting too old for this shit” and “A man should be aware of his limitations.”

Now, I have more energy and stamina than Joe Biden had even five years ago, but still not enough to occupy a high political office, never mind one of the Leader of the Free World. Moreover, I don’t think I show too many signs of cognitive decline, while Joe croaks senility with every word he struggles to get out. But, unlike me and the object of Clint Eastwood’s scorn, he isn’t aware of his limitations.

Everyone else is though, and even Democrats are beginning to realise that having an obviously demented man in the White House would be playing with fire, possibly the kind generated by a nuclear blast. There’s talk about getting Joe out of his misery and replacing him as a candidate at the last moment, though no one is sure how to do that.

Crossing over to our side of the pond, one is smacked in the face with another age concern, this one caused by youth rather than senescence. This morning, Sky News scaled new heights of idiocy by hailing a political travesty called ‘Our generation. Our vote.’

They devoted a long segment to a mock election among children under the voting age of 18. Dozens of British youngsters were interviewed, not a single one of them white. As the founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more, well, diversity there. I’m also worried that foreign viewers might get a wrong idea about the demographic makeup of British society.

That aside, the interviewed youngsters, most of them around 16 or so, were more articulate than Joe Biden, which might have determined their selection for the programme. Sky News probably found it hard to locate enough white children able to enunciate a coherent sentence in an intelligible accent.

However, what those children – and their Sky interviewers – were saying so articulately still didn’t make sense. They all insisted that children of 16, for starters, should vote because they are the ones who’ll bear the brunt of the policies put forth today.

This doesn’t add up even at the level of basic logic. Following this line of thought to its logical conclusion, babies should be given the vote. After all, statistically speaking, they’ll have to suffer the consequences of today’s politics for longer than the 16-year-olds.

Now Labour is pledging to lower the voting age to 16, using the same crepuscular logic demonstrated by Sky News. If you think their motives are disinterested, just look at the outcome of the ‘Our Generation. Our Vote.’ rehearsal ballot.

Labour came in first, Greens second, LibDems third, Tories a distant last. Labour outscored Tories four to one, which should give you a fair idea why the Lefties of the world constantly want to expand the franchise ad nauseam. People whose brains aren’t yet wired properly are more likely to swallow the socialist gibberish passed for serious political thought.

“No one is listening to us,” complained one young lady of Subcontinental descent, and the grownups in the Sky studio nodded their sympathetic agreement. They couldn’t get their minds around the idea that listening to children isn’t the same as letting them shape a nation’s life.

How many Sky presenters will let their children decide serious issues in their own households? A lot fewer, I’d suggest, than those who’ll support any woke idiocy as long as it keeps the Tories out.

Sorry to carry on about age so much, but it is a concern. Yes, William Pitt the Younger became a pretty good PM at 24, and Konrad Adenauer was still a commanding Chancellor well into his eighties. Yet Pitt still didn’t vote as a child and, even when Joe was young, his own mother would have agreed he was a pygmy compared to old Konrad.

One way or another, a nation should make an individual decision on whether or not an old man is sufficiently compos mentis to run its government. On the other hand, the issue of voting age has to be based on statistical probability, not case-by-case assessment. And anyone who thinks children must vote should himself be barred from the ballot box.

And… er… age… I like, you know, whiskies of some age… at least sixty… or maybe six, like my golf handicap… and you’re not getting younger… you’re getting better… or is it worse – but enough of my Joe Biden impersonation.

I’m going to commit an act of double plagiarism by quoting Enoch Powell misquoting Virgil: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.

Replace the River Tiber with the River Seine, and the warning seems apposite. For France is in real danger of severe social unrest, perhaps even a civil war.

Before you shrug your shoulders, suggesting that what happens to assorted amphibians has nothing to do with you, I beg you to take another look across the Channel.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong: it’s quite possible that the trouble bubbling just underneath the surface in France won’t burst out violently. It’s also possible that the problem is strictly confined to the space between France’s borders.

However, it would be foolhardy not to consider another, very real possibility that Europe is on the brink of trouble not just with a capital T, but indeed with the T as an extra-bold drop initial. And if we reverse the entire history of mankind and try, for a change, to heed lessons of history, we’ll see the links in a chain of begets clasping together.

Trouble in one major European country can beget trouble all over the Continent, which in turn can affect Britain and then the rest of the world. The current situation bears an eerie resemblance to the 1930s, when fascists and communists clashed in the streets of Berlin, Paris – and London.

Eventually, the radical left-wing parties in France formed an alliance called the Popular Front (Front populaire). That happened after a massive campaign of propaganda and subversion run throughout the 20s and 30s by the Soviets and organised by the German communist Willi Münzenberg.

Münzenberg, described by Walter Laqueur as a “cultural impresario of genius”, flooded Europe and the US with a stream of brainwashing unleashed by numerous newspapers, journals, radio stations and cinema studios he put together with Stalin’s funds. NKVD chiefs had a point when they referred to Front populaire as “our operation Popular Front”.

Münzenberg also organised worldwide protest movements, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist rallies, and anything else that could wreak havoc on social tranquillity. That paved the way for the rise of extreme-left parties in Spain, which led to the Civil War, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, which led to you know what. The two political extremes succeeded in undermining the existing order in key European countries, making a mockery of ‘collective security’, a 1930s term that was proved to be a grotesque misnomer.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but when France goes to the polls this Sunday, it’s likely that Le Pen’s crypto-fascist National Rally (RN) will come in first, closely followed by a hard-left alliance nostalgically called Front populaire.

Macron’s supposedly centrist coalition was trounced by the other two in the European Parliament elections, and pollsters confidently predict the same result nationally. Yet it’s not just Macron’s party that may be demolished, but the entire political order in Europe – and beyond.

It’s tempting to blame the problem on the European Union, and this isn’t a groundless temptation. But the malaise runs deeper than the EU, which isn’t so much the disease as its symptom.

The real infection was spread by the post-war attempt to shove a neo-liberal (in fact, non-liberal) ideology down the collective throat of Europe, which was bound to create a violent reflux sooner or later. A clash has been brewing for decades between the actual reality of people’s lives and the virtual reality of the ideology promoted and enforced by the ruling bureaucracy.

This has nothing to do with the idea of a united Europe in se. Europe was united in the Middle Ages, and there’s no reason it can’t be united again – provided it’s bound together by a proper adhesive. In the Middle ages it was Christianity that acted in that role, and what is its substitute today? Commitment to the free movement of people?

The modern ideology was rotten to begin with, and rot is a process that never ends by itself. Huge holes are appearing in the ideological fabric woven by modernity, and these can only be darned by different hues of political extremism.

People turn to extremes when the centre can no longer hold. In fact, their turning to extremes points to systemic problems with the centre, with the mainstream. The mainstream – however defined – has traditionally been cast as the guardian of political and social stability. When the centre collapses, stability may well follow suit.

Even the US isn’t immune from this problem. That was demonstrated on 6 January, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building two months after their ideological leader lost the presidential election.

The polarisation between the anode of the right with the cathode of the left is sharper there than I’ve ever seen, and there’s talk of a possible civil war regardless of who wins this time around. Britain is slightly more moderate, and the feeling at the grassroots is that the two main parties aren’t so different as to turn their supporters violent.

I don’t think many Britons have so far cottoned on that a hard-left government is about to take over on 4 July, and when they do realise that, it’ll be too late to do anything about it for a generation at least. But France is a different story altogether, and so is most of the Continent. Neither Le Pen’s people nor the reconstituted Front poulaire will take defeat lying down.

The political system of the Fifth Republic, with its proportional representation and hence inordinate power vested in the executive branch, isn’t conducive to stability under the best of circumstances. This may explain why the French political bureaucracy is so predominantly pro-EU. Aware of the structural defects of its own system, it seeks strength in a giant supranational Leviathan supposedly capable of swallowing local problems and regurgitating them into Collective Security Mark II.

All of this has more to do with make-believe than with any detectable reality. The reality is that the French are sick of woke diktats, whoever issues them, their own government or the EU. Now they seem to be desperate enough to turn to the radical remedies prescribed by the extreme right and the extreme left. When this happens, it’s moderation that may well fall victim.

The two political extremes in France may have more in common than they, and the people in general, realise. But this commonalty lies deep, whereas the differences are on the surface, and they are likely to produce violent clashes.

If, as expected, RN comes first and Front populaire second, much will depend on whether or not Le Pen gains an absolute majority. If so, Macron, who isn’t going to relinquish the presidency come what may, will have to ask RN to form the next government.

The lefties will then resort to riots, mobilising the resentful masses in France’s ghetto-like banlieues. Some French commentators are warning that these may well go beyond the usual burning of cars and looting of boutiques. The possibility of an all-out civil war is mooted in all seriousness.

Moreover, France’s inordinately huge civil service, some 2.5 million-strong, is threatening to disobey any orders emanating from an RN government and its likely, barely post-pubescent, head Jordan Barella. That’s likely to paralyse any orderly life in the country, making the more macabre prophecies come true.

An economic crisis is likely to ensue: the markets tend to abhor any political extremism even if it’s not all that extreme (Liz Truss’s short-lived tenure in Britain comes to mind). And when the French suffer economically, they tend to take to the streets, torches and cobblestones in hand.

The more likely hung parliament may be even worse. Macron’s presidency will look more like a cooked goose than a lame duck. The National Assembly dominated by the two extremes will be too embroiled in its own squabbles to provide overall stability. The markets will react, the people will rebel… well, I don’t want to repeat myself.

France is only the most immediate illustration of the drift towards the extremes observable throughout the West, but especially in continental Europe. The on-going European war, bigger than any post-1945 conflict, makes matters even worse. Putin’s propagandists aren’t a patch on Willi Münzenberg, but they are doing their worst to plunge Europe, or any parts thereof, into chaos.

All things considered, the temptation to talk about various rivers foaming with blood is strong. This is one kind of prophecy that one hopes won’t come true but fears it may.

Contrary to the popular adage, opposites don’t attract. If they do, they aren’t really opposites.

However, they can converge tangentially, overlapping on this or that issue while still differing on others. Thus, populist Right and populist Left seldom agree on economic policy, except perhaps in France, where Mélenchon’s Trotskyists and Le Pen’s crypto-fascists are both socialist.

Yet you won’t find the same convergence between, say, Farage and Corbyn, or Trump and Ocasio Cortez. There is an economic chasm separating Farage’s and Trump’s near-libertarianism from Corbyn’s and AOC’s near-communism.

Nor can one talk about any visceral attraction drawing such opposites together. What’s more noticeable is mutual loathing. But they do converge on the issue I consider the world’s most vital one at present. Putin.

And the deeper we delve into possible reasons, the closer we get to the common ground at the root of it all. Both extremes actively dislike the West, if for different reasons.

Conservatives are broadly in sympathy with the Right’s reasons, while despising those of the Left. Yet whatever their motivation, both radical groups despair of bringing the West in line with their ideals, which makes them look for paragons of anti-Western virtue elsewhere. And Putin is the most implacable enemy of their enemy.

The other day I wrote about Farage’s self-proclaimed admiration of Putin, albeit only as a “political operator”. But Putin isn’t a political operator at all, for the simple reason that his country has no politics in our sense of the word.

Tyrannical dictators aren’t politicians any more than Mafia chieftains are. They do manoeuvre to avoid being knifed in the back by their lieutenants, but that’s not politics. It’s jungle warfare.

Other than that, Putin rules by murdering dissidents at home and abroad, throwing thousands of people in prison for voicing the slightest disagreement with his policies, suppressing free press and freedom of assembly, arming and training terrorists all over the world and – above all – waging aggressive wars of extermination, mainly against the former slave nations of the USSR, such as Chechnya and now the Ukraine.

Which of these aspects of Putin’s ‘politics’ does Farage admire most? All of them? Perhaps, because otherwise he wouldn’t be willing to parrot Kremlin propaganda by claiming that Putin was provoked into murdering hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians by NATO’s “ever-eastward” expansion.

Actually, in recent months that dastardly bloc also expanded ‘ever-northwards’, when Finland and Sweden, both neutral for decades, begged to be admitted to NATO. Why does Farage suppose they decided to do that?

Choose the right answer: A. They were talked into it by NATO to provoke Putin even more; B. They realised they needed extra protection in the face of Russian fascism on the march.

If you chose B, congratulations. You now understand why Eastern European countries, all perennial victims of violent Russian oppression, beat Finland and Sweden to it. Not to see this obvious fact suggests that blinkers are firmly in place. And it’s admiration of Putin that shields his fans’ eyes with that fashion accessory.

Yesterday Farage responded to the public outcry over his repugnant pro-Putin remarks by doubling up. According to him, it’s Zelensky, expertly prodded by Boris Johnson, who sticks a crowbar into the wheel spokes of peace.   

Asked if he’d be willing to see Zelenksy cede territory, Farage said: “That’s his choice. No one is even talking about peace. All we are talking about is ‘Ukraine is going to win’. Really? I’m pretty sceptical about that.”

Ukrainian victory can come in many guises, and Farage didn’t specify what he meant by “winning”. But his kind of peace comes in one shape only: the Ukraine’s capitulation, total or as near as damn.

Political leaders, such as Farage and even sometimes Trump, have to preserve a modicum of circumspection in their public pronouncements. They leave it to their acolytes to spell out their innermost thoughts.

Thus, candidates from Farage’s Reform Party tried to ward off the slings and arrows aimed at their leader. Our would-be MPs have opined that:   

“…Russia/Putin has shown a maturity of which we can only dream of.” [Love the grammar.]

“Putin is a master of Realpolitik… if only the West had politicians of his class.”

[I wouldn’t have] “given a penny” to Zelensky because he is a “dangerous corrupt oligarch”.

It is “the biggest lie” that “Nato is a defensive alliance”.

Things aren’t conspicuously better on the other side of the Atlantic, and haven’t been ever since George W. Bush “looked deep into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul”. Congratulations to Dubya: he managed to see something that wasn’t there.

Trump has never bothered to conceal his admiration of Putin. Once, after meeting that mass murderer, he said: “I liked him. He liked me. It was great.”

At present, Trump is indulging his tasteless appetite for braggadocio by claiming he’ll stop the war within 24 hours or at most three days of regaining the presidency. Trump has been reticent about his way of bringing that peaceful intention to fruition. Yet two of his closest advisers let that mangy cat out of the bag.

Clarifying Trump’s position were Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg and Frederick Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in the National Security Council during Trump’s presidency and are now part of his inner circle.

These gentlemen propose that all arms supplies to the Ukraine be stopped until Zelensky has sued for peace. As a starting point of that initiative, the Ukraine must agree to freezing the frontline at its present location, which would effectively mean ceding 20 per cent of her territory to Russia.

That’s only for starters, of course. Russia, bled white by the war, would catch its breath for a couple of years, regroup, rearm and then come again to claim what’s left of the rump country.

Coincidentally, this happens to be Putin’s thinking on the subject as well, which he summed up in what amounted to an ultimatum a couple of weeks ago. Zelensky rejected that ‘proposal’ out of hand, stating correctly that it amounted to a demand for capitulation.

In a touching show of unity, populist Left is in agreement with populist Right on this issue. Both Corbyn and Mélenchon love Putin in direct proportion to their hatred of the West.

Theirs is the deeper resentment because they detest everything the West stands for, including its most fundamental principles. In that, they feel they’ve found a kindred soul in Putin, and they are right.

Unlike the Lefties, people like Farage or Trump don’t hate the West – they merely hate what it’s becoming or has already become, and they have every justification for this. Yet when it comes to their policy towards Putin’s fascism, this is a distinction without a difference – certainly for the Ukrainians, and for those who know enough history to realise that fascism must be stopped before it ignites the world.

Convergence without attraction, such could be the slogan inscribed on the banners of right and left populists as they march together towards suicidal appeasement. That word is a cognate of ‘peace’, but its opposite in meaning more often than not.

In 1989, Vladimir Rezun, aka Viktor Suvorov, delivered an analytical tour de force.

He published the book Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, in which he answered that question by showing that Stalin was at least as culpable as Hitler.

What made Suvorov’s findings so astounding is that he had no access to any Soviet archives, indeed to the Soviet Union. A former GRU spy, he defected in 1978 and was living in Britain under a sort of witness protection programme.

Since Suvorov’s only sources were books and articles in the public domain, he didn’t have any new data at his disposal to challenge the Soviet version shared by Western historians: Stalin’s Russia was a peaceful state, whose army was designed strictly for defensive purposes.

That’s why on 23 August, 1939, Stalin (or, to be pedantic about it, Molotov) signed, and put his faith in, the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler (or, to be pedantic about it, Ribbentrop). Yet on 22 June, 1941, Hitler perfidiously broke the Pact and attacked the Soviet Union, catching Stalin off-guard.

Suvorov hadn’t uncovered any dusty documents giving the lie to this received version. All he had to bring to bear on the task was his keen analytical brain, inside knowledge of the Soviet Union and its army, and intelligence training.

He showed that, rather than being unprepared for war, Stalin created the biggest and best-equipped military machine in history. His plan was to realise Lenin’s dream of world conquest by using Germany as what Lenin had called the ‘Icebreaker of the Revolution’.

To that end, Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, the two predators agreeing to divide Europe between them. Immediately after the Pact was signed, Stalin claimed his contractual sphere of influence by invading the three Baltic Republics and the eastern parts of Poland and Romania, including Bukovina, which wasn’t mentioned in the Pact at all.

He also tried to grab Finland, but that tiny republic heroically repelled Stalin’s hordes, ceding some of its territory but retaining its sovereignty.

A week after the Pact, on 1 September, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west, and on 17 September the Red Army attacked her from the east. The two victorious predators held a joint victory parade in Brest. The Second World War started, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as allies.

Yet Soviet gains fell far short of a world revolution, and Stalin’s plan had been from the beginning to build up his military muscle and overrun Germany, which by 1941 meant most of Europe.

Suvorov was the first analyst to show convincingly, nay irrefutably, that the Soviet war machine was designed, manned and equipped for offensive purposes. To accelerate that process, Stalin turned the country into a diabolical combination of boot camp, concentration camp and war factory. The Soviet Union became a single-industry country, churning out more (and better) tanks than the rest of the world combined, more warplanes than Germany had, more and better cannon.

The most telling give-away was the way the giant Red Army was deployed. Suvorov knew from his Military Academy education that an army planning to stop enemy aggression is always deployed some distance from the border, keeping it out of trouble’s way in the first days and giving it time to marshal its defences.

Conversely, an army planning an aggressive thrust is always deployed right at the border, to take time away from the other side. That’s how the Red Army was set up in June, 1941, but it was more than just its proximity to the border.

The massive attack force, the greatest in military history before or since, was arranged in two wedge-like salients, one in West Byelorussia, the other in the West Ukraine. The two wedges were aimed at the heart of Germany’s Poland, and from there Germany itself.

Such a formation had obvious advantages, all of them offensive, and disadvantages, all of them defensive. Offensively, an all-out attack from the Białystok and Lvov salients would be like two knives cutting into Germany. That deployment allowed the greatest concentration of forces on two strategic directions, which would eventually converge.

But defensively, such a formation was fraught with danger. If Germany delivered a pre-emptive strike, it was a relatively easy matter to strike between the two wedges, cut them off from the flanks and achieve a complete encirclement. That’s what happened on 22 June, 1941, when Hitler beat Stalin to the punch by a few days.

Since Suvorov published his book, Russian academic historians enjoyed the few years of relative freedom in the early ‘90s, when the doors of Soviet archives were open ajar and a few documents became available. ‘A few’ are the operative words, because access was granted merely to a fraction of one percent of archival material with its millions of documents.

Still, Russian historians managed to uncover several plans of strategic deployment written by Gen. Vasilevsky, head of the General Staff. They were all versions of the same plan, with only minor modifications. That was more or less the plan Suvorov had deduced.

Since then, historians like Mel’tyukhov and Solonin, along with dozens of others, have produced a whole library of books, proving Stalin’s aggressive plans beyond any reasonable doubt. One can safely say that Russian academic historians reached a consensus on this issue.

With the arrival of Putin, all scholarly research stopped, and history was again turned into propaganda. Remaining within that consensus became unsafe, and Russian historians had the choice of either toeing the new (Stalin’s) line or emigrating.

Yet Western historians, supposedly working in conditions of untethered freedom, never reached the same consensus. They continued to cling to Stalin’s version of why and by whom the Second World War started.

One exception that springs to mind is Joachim Hoffmann (d. 2002), a German historian, the academic director of the Military History Research Office of the German Armed Forces. Working mainly with German archives, he produced in 1995 the seminal work Stalin’s War of Extermination, in which he confirmed the version of his Russian colleagues.

Yet by and large Western scholars continue to reject the conclusions reached by Messrs Suvorov, Mel’tyukhov, Solonin, Hoffmann et al. Their counterarguments hinge on the absence of a single document signed by Stalin that ordered a strategic offensive and specified its date.

However, as we know, the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence. Thus, the Red Army undeniably attacked Finland on 30 November, 1939. However, no single document for which Western historians pine existed there either.

Before they were put out of business (or in prison), Russian historians had been able to amass a vast corpus of evidence that collectively adds up to the truth of the Second World War. Yet Suvorov is the only one of them whose books have been published in the West, even though historical science has advanced no end since his Icebreaker.

Books of academic history, on the other hand, need to be peer-reviewed to be published, and Western historians have a vested interest in keeping the findings and conclusions of their Russian colleagues under wraps.

They sneer at Suvorov, that rank amateur who dares to write in a lively, colloquial style, eschewing the ponderous, involute jargon that alone can render a book credible to our historians. Moreover, Suvorov looked at the same data they knew – but had the audacity to analyse it more deeply to show the only way in which it could make sense.

If historians bending under the weight of their credentials and tenures couldn’t make heads or tails of that material, how come that charlatan could? And even academic historians mustn’t be published if their research has reached the same conclusions.

Show us that single document or shut up, such is the consensus of Western historians. What, you’ll do so when the Soviet archives have opened up? Fine, we’ll talk then.

These gentlemen ought to ask themselves a simple question. How is it that the Russians refuse to open up those archives even now, almost 80 years since the war ended and 100 years after Stalin took over from Lenin? Why are they guarding Soviet secrets so vigilantly?

After all, the Soviet Union doesn’t even exist any longer. What’s there to hide?

Let’s just say that the doors of those archives would have been flung wide open long ago if the documents inside confirmed the Stalin-Putin version of Soviet strategic plans. After all, the big war is the axis around which Putinism revolves. Long before Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, Russian cities were awash with posters and bumper stickers, saying “We can do it again!”

It ought to be clear to anyone that archival secrets would confirm the conclusions of Suvorov and his academic followers – which is why they remain secret. Meanwhile, there’s only one possible reply to falsifiers of history who scream, “Shows us that single document proving that Stalin planned to conquer Europe”.

That reply is, “Show us a single document proving he didn’t.” Meanwhile, those archival sleeping dogs continue to lie — by omission.

If you take issue with our diversity run riot, you are a [choose your own epithet: bigot, racist, troglodyte, fascist, champion of segregation or perhaps even genocide].

That’s par for the course, and one of those tags will be slapped onto your forehead regardless of the nature of your objections or the rationale behind them. But what if you welcome diversity on any scale and announce that in public?

Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? You are the opposite of all those awful things. [Choose your own modifier: open-minded, liberal, empathetic, sympathetic, colour-blind, anti-racist, anti-fascist, humane]. Or so you’d think.

Well, you’d think wrong. Because openly stating your commitment to racial diversity is just as bad as doing the opposite. According to the most up-to-date trend, skin colour is like God in the Biblical commandment. You can’t mention it by name at all, positively or negatively.

Thus, when we have a black person of any sex play Hamlet or, say, Agrippa (not a hypothetical example) in a West End production, we are supposed both to notice the incongruity and not to notice it. That is, we should mentally give the director the highest marks for his colour-blind daring, while at the same time pretending we see nothing unusual in Hamlet as the black Princess of Denmark.

If, on the other hand, we voice approval of such casting (voicing disapproval isn’t an available option), we break the terms of an unspoken but binding contract. WE HAVE NOTICED, meaning we are unconscious racists programmed to spot chromatic differences.

I hope I’ve explained what’s what to your satisfaction. However, if such subtleties still escape you, consider the case of Katrin Göring-Eckardt, Green MP in Germany and Vice President of the Bundestag.

Frau Göring felt duty-bound to comment on a recent survey that showed that 21 per cent of respondents would rather see more white players in Germany’s squad at Euro 2024. That was appalling, as far as the parliamentarian was concerned.

“This team is truly exceptional,” she wrote. “Just imagine if there were only white German players.” The statement was unintentionally ambiguous, or rather could be perceived as such, given the will.

One could imagine that such a monochrome team could be either better or worse than the present one, but that’s beside the point. Even mooting the theoretical possibility of an all-white team could be interpreted as nostalgia for the Third Reich. Aware of that possibility, Frau Göring tried to preclude ambiguity by ending her message with three rainbow emojis.

I’m not quite up on modern symbolism, but I thought the rainbow was a statement of sexual rather than racial diversity. Then again, the two are so securely fused as to be inseparable. Hence that semiotic finale should have absolved Frau Göring of any crime against modernity.

But it didn’t. All hell broke loose, and that impeccably woke woman was treated as Alfred Rosenberg incarnate.

Her crime was even having noticed that some Germany players were off-white. Whether she thought that was good or bad didn’t matter one jot. She took race in vain, meaning she is a racist. That’s all there is to it.

“I find it really worrying when people in Germany are judged by the colour of their skin,” also sprach Wolfgang Kubicki, the deputy leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Christian Democrat Manuel Ostermann wouldn’t be outdone: “Are you judging people based on their appearance? According to your own definition, that would be racist.”

In today’s Germany (or anywhere else in the West) an accusation of racism is tantamount to a capital charge. Such a stigma is like the yellow star Jews had to wear in the Third Reich, although the punishment is these days less severe, for the time being.

Frau Göring’s life wasn’t in danger, but her career was, and she knew it. Thus she deleted her objectionable post and offered profuse apologies.

“It upset me that 21 per cent of Germans would prefer it if there were more ‘whites’ in the national team,” she wrote. “I’m proud of this team and hope that we can convince the 21 per cent too.”

The politician seems unaware that, regardless of her protestations of woke probity, she broke one of the commandments of modernity. Perhaps it’s not really her fault – after all, no one has so far bothered to go up that mountain and receive those stone tablets, new edition.

Yet again it has fallen upon me to fill that gap, albeit using a more modern medium. So here it is, Decalogue, Mark II.

And God spake all these words, saying:

I am Modernity thy Lord. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt make unto thee any graven image thou wilt like, such as posting images of thy genitals on the Internet.

Thou shalt not take the name of any race in vain.

Remember Martin Luther King Day, to keep it holy.

Honour thy father and thy mother, or thy fathers and thy mothers of any sex.

Thou shalt not kill any person other than a racist, transphobe or climate denier.

Thou shalt not commit adultery for verily I say unto you: no such thing exists and sex with anyone is holy any wise.

Thou shalt not steal unless thou art in need of funds for a political cause.

Thou shalt bear false witness that not just male and female Darwin made them.

Thou shalt covet rich man’s wealth and raiment off his back.

Blessed Modernity, who hast cast all holy Scriptures aside to give us thy real commandments: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Amen.

This question was once put to me by an American interviewer of the MAGA persuasion, whose innermost belief was that nationalism was invariably commendable.

I gave him a longish answer centred around the fundamental difference between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad). The second, I said, is the extreme form of the first.

And extremism – contrary to what Barry Goldwater once said – is always wrong because it tends to narrow one’s field of vision, causing intellectual and moral glaucoma. That renders a nationalist blind to the nuances and complexities of life, making him as primitive of thought as he is febrile of emotion.

The question was general, and so was my reply. But if we keep things concrete and ask what’s wrong with the nationalist populist parties making headway all over Europe, my answer can be short if not necessarily sweet. They are all pro-Putin.

Some leaders and members of such parties spread Kremlin propaganda because they are paid agents of Russian security services. Others do so because they are unpaid agents, shilling for Putin out of the disinterested badness of their hearts. Still others are simply useful idiots.

Not all such parties are identical in every respect. Some of them, such as Germany’s AfD, are full of neo-Nazis; others, such as our Reform Party, aren’t. Some, such as Le Pen’s National Rally, are known to have taken Putin’s rouble; others, such as Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, aren’t (that doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t, only that we don’t know they have).

But there exists a common thread running through all of them. They all sacralise their nations, which is half a step removed from sacralising power – and strong leaders who wield it with no-holds-barred conviction. The weaker the actual leaders of their own nations, and today most of them are vacillating, self-serving wimps, the more likely our nationalists are to look outwards in search of an ideal model.

That makes them intuitively attracted to Putin, even though he no longer flashes his naked torso. A little pecuniary or other incentive from the Kremlin may intensify such affection, but in many cases it’s not even necessary. A Putinista’s heart can do the job on its own, and that organ, as Pascal explained, has its reasons that reason knows not of (Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point).

This brings us to Nigel Farage, a Putinista of long standing, which he kindly reminded us of in a BBC interview yesterday. Not that I for one have ever forgotten this little failing on his part.

“We provoked this war,” said Mr Farage, as he already knew we would back in 2014. “My judgement,” he added with characteristic self-effacing modesty, “has been way ahead of everybody else’s in understanding this.”

Now, to draw an obvious and close parallel, predicting a world war in 1934 would have been prophetic. Doing so after 1939 would have been idiotic because the war was already in full swing. By the same token, in 2014 Putin’s stormtroopers annexed the Crimea and established puppet ‘republics’ in the Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk provinces.

The Ukrainian side responded with limited military action, and the war has been raging ever since. What happened in 2022 wasn’t the beginning of the war but its proliferation to a full-scale engagement. Hence Mr Farage’s contortionist slap on his own back is only testimony to his bad taste, not proof of his status as a present-day Cassandra.

He then reiterated his remark first made in 2014 that he admires Putin, albeit only as “a political operator”, not as a person. Let’s not be coy about this, Mr Farage. Aforementioned admiration is really unqualified, isn’t it?

So well, all right, we provoked this war. But how?

Mr Farage’s reply came right out of the PR briefings at the FSB, formerly KGB: “It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to say to his Russian people, ‘They’re coming for us again’, and to go to war.”

Now, Mr Farage tends to use English with precision if, to my taste, a slightly strained demotic colouring. Hence I’m sure he must know the difference between ‘reason’ and ‘pretext’. The former means the real cause of an action, whereas the latter is a false reason given in justification.

Had Mr Farage said ‘pretext’, there would be no argument in these quarters. But do let’s give him credit for lexical accuracy and accept that NATO’s “ever-eastward expansion” was in his view Putin’s real reason for embarking on the mass murder of Ukrainians.

In that case, Putin had to believe (not just claim) that, say, Estonia’s membership in NATO and the EU presented a real danger to Russia. Granted, a country with a population of 1.3 million couldn’t possibly be seen as a formidable adversary. But her territory could be used by NATO as a beachhead from which to invade Russia, putting paid to her “1,000-year-old state”.

One can see a boozy Russian mechanic somewhere like Vologda sharing that view with his mates over a bottle of the national drink. But Putin has one definite advantage over this hypothetical individual: he has instant access to a vast corpus of intelligence data.

Therefore NATO’s eastward expansion could only have been the reason for the war if the GRU and SVR had produced evidence of NATO preparing or at least contemplating such an aggression.

Since no such data exist, nor can possibly ever exist, said expansion wasn’t the reason for the war. It was merely the pretext Putin and his Goebbelses used to justify their attempt to spread Russian fascism over all of Europe, starting with its eastern part.

Again, Mr Farage clearly has a warm spot in his heart for Putin’s fascism or at least its propaganda. Spreading it without even bothering to change a single word may be seen as treasonous by some, since the Ukraine is our ally and Russia our self-proclaimed enemy.

For me, ‘Farage’ is yet another concise answer to the question in the title – and yet another reason (not pretext) why I’ll never vote for Reform or any other party he heads.

By entering into a comprehensive strategic partnership with North Korea, Putin has confirmed both Russia’s growing eastward slant and her perennial enmity to the West.

North Korea has been supplying arms and ordnance to Russia, and the new partnership allegedly includes provisions for Kim sending his troops over as well. But it’s Russia’s growing intimacy with China that’s particularly enticing, with the latter clearly cast in the male role.

In fact, Russia’s slant in the direction of China has been so steep that the country has tumbled into China’s embrace. About 60 per cent of all currency trading at the Moscow Exchange is in yuans, with that proportion steadily growing.

China accounts for about 40 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade, but this figure is misleading. For China dominates foreign trade in Asian Russia, especially the Far East. There China’s part in the region’s foreign trade approaches 90 per cent.

At the same time China has secured long-term leases (in effect, ownership) on some 37 million acres of Siberian territory, with the area size mushrooming year on year. All of this bears an eerie resemblance to the medieval relationship between the Mongols and the Russian princes who each had to travel to the Horde to obtain his licence to rule.

“Nothing is new under the sun,” goes the proverb, and my previous sentence set the stage for some historical explanation of the title above. The sentiment it expresses is a constant of Russian history – and has been since long before Russia became a unified country, rather than an aggregate of separate and typically hostile principalities.

I am talking about real history, not the figment of Putin’s imagination, a faculty he puts in high gear every time he tries to legitimise himself within the historical continuum. Thus he explained yesterday that Russia wouldn’t survive defeat in the on-going war.   

“It means the end of the 1,000-year history of the Russian state,” said Vlad. “I think this is clear to everyone…” I don’t know about that, but what should definitely be clear to everyone is that nothing that even remotely can be described as the Russian state existed 1,000 years ago.

What existed then was Kievan Rus’ founded by Viking marauders in the 9^th century and already falling apart in the 11^th. Until then it had been held together by the iron hand of Prince Vladimir who had baptised Rus’ in 988.

When Vladimir died in 1015, his sons kicked off an internecine carnage. Kievan Rus’ was rent apart, and her religion along with it. Towards the end of the 11^th century, a great part of the country reverted to paganism, which was mentioned in a chronicle of 1071.

The conflict between eastern and western principalities was particularly ferocious: eastern princes must have felt that contaminating proximity to the West made western principalities less than Russian. When Andrey Bogolyubsky, Prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, captured Kiev in 1169, he gave the city to his host for a three-day rape and pillage – a treatment that in Rus’ was reserved for foreign cities. In other words, for Andrey and his troops Kiev was as foreign as any Polish or German city.

Most historians ascribe medieval Russian hatred of the West to religious strife, but they have causality the wrong way around. In fact, Vladimir chose the Eastern Rite specifically because he rejected not so much Western Christianity as the civilisation it was spinning off.

At that time Western Christianity was already producing the kind of statehood in which the relationship between the sovereign and the people was based on inchoate liberties. That was something princes from farther east were finding hard to accept, and Vladimir was no different.

The prince knew that, given some breathing space, the people under his sway could well begin to get ideas above their station. And, sensing unerringly that a civil war was already under way, he wanted them to remain abject slaves, not to become mere subjects.

That was the nature of the fundamental problems he had with Western Christianity and, by extension, with the West at large. In time those problems became an essential fibre of the Russian psyche, although not always in any straightforward way.

As if to prove their eastward slant, Russian princes were more than willing to enter into coalitions with eastern foreigners against the more western principalities.

Thus the Chernigov Prince Igor (hero of The Lay of the Igor Host and Borodin’s subsequent opera) formed an anti-Kiev alliance not only with the Smolensk Prince Rurik (a descendant of the founder of Kievan Rus’) but also with the Polovets chieftains. When, after Igor’s death in 1202, Rurik captured Kiev, most of the city was again razed and burnt. According to a chronicle, this “great evil was like no other since Russia had been baptised”.

In 1237-1240 the Mongols occupied most Russian principalities, starting centuries of what Russian historians call the Yoke. In fact, most of the Russian princes happily collaborated with the Mongols, using them to settle accounts with their neighbours. Russia’s favourite saint, Alexander Nevsky, is especially remarkable in that respect.

Although Alexander wouldn’t accept even a mild compromise with Catholicism spearheaded by the militant monastic orders, he was more than willing to accept any far-reaching compromise with the Mongol invaders. In fact, rather than fighting them, he fraternised with Khan Batu’s son Sartaq, an Arian Christian, thus becoming the Khan’s foster son (Batu, incidentally, was Genghis’s grandson).

Though he had never heard of Quisling, Alexander acted in a similar capacity by busily collecting tribute for the Mongols from his fellow Russians and ruthlessly punishing those who wouldn’t pay. Having their eyes poked out and their tongues cut off were the mildest of the punitive techniques favoured by the great hero, and his Mongol masters approved.

In 1547 Alexander was canonised in the Russian Orthodox Church. Clearly, the Russians have their own standards of saintliness.

Moving rapidly through the centuries, we’ll see that most foreign observers, from Ibn Fadlan in the 10^th century to Giles Fletcher in the 16^th to Maistre and Custine in the 19^th, single out xenophobia as a salient Russian trait. However, that xenophobia was selective, being more acute when directed at the West.

If you read the works of the Russian writers and philosophers of the 19^th century ‘Golden Age’, you’ll find various manifestations of this tendency in all of them, from Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky, from Pushkin to Soloviov (Chekhov being a notable exception).

Sometimes this attitude is masked by fulsome protestations of affection, such as Dostoyevsky famously writing in his Karamazovs about going down on hands and knees to kiss “the sacred stones of Europe”, or Soloviov dreaming of fraternal reunification of Western and Eastern churches.

In the former case, Dostoyevsky’s affection for the inanimate objects in the West was matched by his virulent hatred of anything Western that moved. In the latter case, Soloviov’s version of ecumenism left one in no doubt as to which church should absorb which. And though Tolstoy professed to loathe the state as such, when he got down to specifics one realised that it was the Western state – and its elements in Russia – that he mostly abhorred.

Putin’s frequent forays into history betray both his own ignorance and a tendency he shares with many other tyrants: falsifying history for his nefarious ends. But true enough: he is indeed part of an historical continuum, that of Russia’s irreconcilable animosity towards the West.

From its very beginning (in the 16^th century, not 1,000 years ago), the Russian state has combined the features of Byzantine Caesarism with Mongol tyrannical centralism, both Eastern. Hostile standoff with the West, punctuated with occasional blood-letting, didn’t start with Putin – and neither will it end with him.

Though Kipling had a different East in mind, he was right in his prophecy that “never the twain shall meet”. They shan’t – although one does hope that Russia’s hatred of the West won’t blow up the world.

Replace Tories with conservatism, and the same observation will hold true for any Western European country. I’m just using Britain as my test case for simplicity’s sake.

Socialists have won the hearts of Britons, and it takes something extraordinary for the mind to step in and override the deep-seated intuitive bias.

That’s how Margaret Thatcher, the last conservative PM (and I do mean the last, not the latest) won her election at the end of the 1970s. That was the decade during which Britain had recklessly set out to prove it wasn’t so much the sick man of Europe as its basket case.

The social and economic conditions were nothing short of catastrophic, the unions were running riot, the country was grinding to a screeching stop, and the people were getting desperate. In came Maggie, preaching a philosophy more libertarian than conservative, but definitely anti-socialist. Drowning people clutched the straw and voted for her.  

She then delivered an economic turnaround, an act of political heroism for which I struggle to find any analogues during my lifetime, and it’s a rather long lifetime. Previously on the way to becoming a slightly richer version of the Soviet Union, the country began to resemble a slightly poorer version of the United States. That gave Britons a chance to heave a sigh of relief – and then revert to their innermost feelings and leanings.

That proved yet again that, though the Tories may at times win elections, they’ll never win the argument, not as Tories at any rate. They can achieve electoral victories only on the crest of an utter mayhem perpetrated by a Labour government or else by a successful attempt to hijack Labour policies and – above all – philosophies. They must out-Labour Labour to govern in the name of conservatism.

As to winning the argument, any seasoned debater will tell you it’s impossible to do so if the other side sets the terms. And the terms of political discourse have been not just set by socialism but chiselled in stone by it.

The NHS is a case in point. This is a massive socialist project that has been elevated to a moral high ground previously occupied by God. Anyone with a modicum of analytical ability will know that the problems of that socialist Leviathan are systemic, not symptomatic.

It doesn’t work as a civilised health system not because of mismanagement and corruption – although these are in ample supply – but because it’s based on a wrong premise. Like all ossified socialist structures, it can be neither reformed nor improved. It can only be replaced.

I’m certain that any Tory politician with an IQ creeping into triple digits knows this as well as I do. Yet he also knows that saying something along those lines publicly is impossible – not just politically but, if you will, ontologically.

The socialist notion that equally bad is morally superior to unequally good has been hammered so deeply into people’s minds that it has penetrated their DNA. The same goes for education.

Many parents deny themselves not only luxuries but also many necessities to spare their children the horrors of mind-numbing state education. Yet they’ll be aghast if a Tory MP suggested scrapping comprehensive schools altogether. Their own children’s education is actual reality, whereas politics is the more compelling virtual kind.

As private individuals, they’ll send their progeny to a private school. As people concerned for the greater good, they’ll vote for a politician who puts socialist education on a moral pedestal.

By the same token, as private individuals they resent having to have almost half their income extorted by the government, and they may even think that perhaps our social expenditure is too high. But they’ll flee like demons from the cross if a Tory leader were to explain rationally that the welfare state isn’t just ruinous economically but also defunct morally.

“We must all pledge our allegiance to the welfare state,” wrote the arch-Tory Peregrine Worsthorne back in the early 1950s. That was tantamount to worshipping socialism and all its dud products, but the future editor of The Sunday Telegraph knew what he was talking about. There it was, another socialist idea raised to a plateau occupied by cast-iron orthodoxies.   

Any vociferous dissenter would be using cold reason to argue against febrile emotions, which is invariably a losing proposition. Such an intrepid individual would be accused of getting sadistic pleasure out of the sight of poor people dying without food, shelter and medical care.

His attempts to justify his position by proposing a more effective system based, say, on private charities, would fall on deaf ears. By trying to change the terms of debate to which the people have given their unqualified agreement, he has branded himself a callous monster, an inveterate misanthrope.

The same applies to the belief that everyone with a pulse should play an active role in politics by voting governments in or out. Socialists know that the broader the franchise, the better their electoral chances, and any political party has to try to win power. Yet the idea that even adolescents should decide how their country is governed is manifestly insane.

That’s why it had to be put onto the terrain of socialist egalitarianism, where it became hard to argue against. The underlying principle has entered the people’s hearts, making all its offshoots well-nigh irrefutable. The collective heart is mightier than the collective mind.

The question of how the Left has won the power to set the terms of debate can’t be answered in a few words. I tried to answer it in a few books but, regardless of whether or not I succeeded, the process was gradual and it took not years but centuries to come to fruition.

My overarching argument has an element of determinism to it, not my favourite element in the periodic system of political philosophy. But denying determinism shouldn’t mean denying continuity and causality.

Hence it stands to reason that the Enlightenment, with its destructive animus against all traditional beliefs and hierarchies – religious, political, social and cultural – was bound to initiate a chain of begets. All those hierarchies had to be put six feet under for the common man to soar miles high.

That had to beget a boundless political democracy, which in turn extended the same principle to every walk of life. Equality of wealth, status and even taste got to be universally accepted as a desideratum not only ideal but also achievable.

By a series of incremental steps over a couple of centuries, democracy of everything turned into socialism everywhere, as it was bound to do. People got to believe that they could only be saved collectively, not individually – and that such collective salvation was their birthright.

All this adds up to the secular religion of modernity, and secular religions preclude fundamental debates. People may question their particulars, but not their essence, and all political parties with any chance of ever forming the government in Britain tacitly subscribe to this injunction.

The dominant secular religion punishes heretics and apostates with political impotence and oblivion. The socialist terms of debate are the rules by which the game must be played, and the only option is not to play the game at all.

This option is available, with a long list of qualifications, to thinkers. But it’s off-limits for doers, men of action, which all politicians must be by definition. That’s why the perennial choice in British politics is between Labour Lite, aka the Tories, and Labour Full Strength.

The latter looks set for a triumphant landslide this time around. However, even when socialist candidates lose, their principles win. Such is the ineluctable logic of modernity, and it won’t be bucked.

All politicians are good at verbal legerdemain – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be politicians.

But socialists are infinitely better at it because they have no scruples about combining the gift of the gab with brazen mendacity. They not only come up with slogans but are capable of turning even a single word into one.

Having taken ownership of spurious neologisms, they then turn them into weapons in their quest for power. In my book How the West Was Lost, I referred to this stratagem as ‘glossocracy’.

One such word is ‘equality’, which, after a series of intermediate steps, in reality gets to mean ‘bigger and more powerful government lording it over a smaller and less powerful individual’. After all, people aren’t really created equal in any other than the theological sense.

In the material world, inequalities of personal traits and qualities are bound to produce inequalities of wealth and status. These can only ever be negated by coercion, of the kind that only the central state is strong enough to apply. The closer we wish to get to the egalitarian ideal, the bigger and stronger therefore the state has to be.

Since the word ‘equality’ seems to imply something else entirely, it’s nothing but a glossocratic tool, wielded by all British parties, including the Tories. Thus we have a Levelling Up Department, which, though founded in 2006 by Blair, has survived under all the subsequent Tory administrations.

Another glossocratic misnomer beloved of socialists is the word ‘work’ and all its derivatives. “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,” was how Marx and Engels put it to criminal use in their Communist Manifesto.

To them and their gang the word ‘worker’ thus meant strictly a manual labourer in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The poor chap was oppressed, not to say enslaved, by ‘capitalists’ (another glossocratic term, by the way) and toiled round the clock for miserly pay.

You might object that a worker is anyone who exchanges his labour for a living, regardless of what kind of labour he does. It may indeed be manual, but it just as well may be mental or even, God forbid, creative. A scientist who never leaves his lab even on weekends works hard for his crust, as does a clichéd poet scribbling his verses throughout the night in his garret.

If you do proffer this objection, you miss the point. You are trying to use English, not glossocratic. True, your definition of a worker is correct as far as the English language is concerned. But we’re talking about the glossocratic language here, and there this word can’t deviate too far from Marx’s definition.

This little preamble explains the confusion Sir Keir Starmer caused by using the related term ‘working people’. Once his Labour Party is ensconced in power, it’ll never raise taxes on ‘working people’ – such is Starmer’s mantra, and it’s echoed in every pronouncement by his socialist colleagues and even his party’s manifesto.

Since anyone capable of doing elementary sums knows that Labour’s commitment to higher spending is impossible even to approach without tax rises, Sir Keir was taken to task by his normally sympathetic interviewers at LBC.

“What, or rather, whom do you mean by ‘working people’, Sir Keir?” they asked, or words to that effect. That was a signal that the marks were ready to fall for the lexi-con.

“When I say working people,” explained our future PM, “it is people who earn their living, rely on our services and don’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble.”

In other words, he means people in employment who have less than £1,000 in savings, which is considered the minimum nest egg to handle contingencies. Such people add up to about a third of the working population. This means that at least two-thirds of Britain’s working households don’t qualify as ‘working people’, as far as socialist lexi-con artists are concerned.

The remaining third are people who have no savings, that goes without saying. But neither do they have overdrafts and credit cards to be used as umbrellas on a rainy day. That number, I’d suggest, has to be much smaller than even a third of the population.

(I go by the crowds of people who max out their overdrafts and credit cards for frivolous reasons, such as going on an expensive holiday. Surely they could do the same to save Grandma’s life or pay for Grandpa’s operation? Provided, of course, that the horrendous NHS waiting lists preclude a ‘free’ option.)

That means that at least two-thirds, and in reality probably more, of the working people should brace themselves for vast tax increases.

These can come in the shape of higher council taxes, levies on homeowners and motorists, lower thresholds and higher rates of inheritance tax, taxes on parents who scrape pennies together to give their children a half-decent education, definitely wealth taxes and much higher corporate taxes.

Jeremy Corbyn, whose leadership of the Labour party was passionately supported by Sir Keir, once promised to “squeeze the rich until the pips squeak”. This is exactly what his disloyal friend and disciple is planning to do – and ‘the rich’ is of course another glossocratic con.

Socialists define ‘the rich’ as loosely and self-servingly as they define ‘workers’. Anyone is rich to them who works hard to salt away a few pennies, to own his house (however modest), to send his children to a school that doesn’t confuse education with brainwashing, perhaps even to bequeath an estate to the next generation to give it a better start in life.

Such people keep the economy ticking over, and they are to be clobbered for that. And, if the current polls are any indication, they have only themselves to blame. They should see through the socialist lexi-con and refuse to fall for it at the ballot box.

“The Tory Party is a party of high tax,” sneer Labour spokesmen, and unfortunately they are right. However, the implication is that the incoming socialist government will lower the tax burden, which is a cynical lie. Or a lexi-con, if you’d rather.      

As I write, a key railway line in London has been out of service for almost two days, with trains between Shepherd’s Bush and Clapham Junction suspended and many other trains diverted.

This is a major inconvenience that I’m sure can be expressed in a monetary equivalent, and not a small one. At the same time, a street in West Kensington, an upmarket area between those two terminals, has been blocked off by police.

All this mayhem has been caused by one young man who at 4.20am yesterday climbed on the roof of a residential building, displaying nothing short of acrobatic agility. He then started breaking off TV aerials and masonry, such as chimney pots, and hurling them into the street and on the railway tracks.

Police negotiators and other officers immediately arrived at the scene and tried to talk the man down. They are still there, and he is still on that roof, one hopes running out of chimney pots.

A Met Police spokesman said that the “incident remains ongoing” and – pay attention for here’s the crux of the matter – “Officers are trying to speak to him following concerns for his welfare”. 

Since the intrepid pot-thrower himself doesn’t seem to share such concerns, the situation is at an impasse. The perp refuses to listen to reason, and he has no concern for his safety or for rail traffic in West London that he is holding hostage.

This, though I’m certain that Met negotiators are well-trained in appealing to the better parts of criminals’ nature. If the wrongdoer happens to belong to a socioeconomically disadvantaged and historically oppressed minority, as this one does, Met officers doubtless feel his pain. They know that such standoffs call for extra sensitivity on their part, with their milk of human kindness never going sour.

So how can they get that criminal – sorry, that victim of racial, economic and social inequality – down from that roof if he wishes to stay where he is? There seems to be no solution to the conundrum, at least none that the Met can think of.

This is where I come in, ready to offer my services to the cause of public safety. My solution is guaranteed to be effective, and it’s so simple that it can be explained in three letters: SAS.

That unit is trained in handling situations involving criminals and tall buildings. This they proved in 1980, when they stormed the Iranian Embassy taken over by six terrorists (also victims of colonialism and institutional racism). SAS got 25 out of 26 hostages out alive and killed all the bandits. Job done.

If they could do that half a century ago, surely they’d know exactly how to handle a single pot-thrower who has no weapons other than whatever he can break off from the roof. Their commander would explain that no “concerns for his welfare” applied any longer, and they certainly didn’t take priority over concerns for the wellbeing of local residents and train passengers.

After that, the SAS soldiers would get the chap in their crosshairs and, speaking in simple words even he could understand, tell him he has one second to stop his barrage and 10 to descend. If he failed to do that, he’d be shot.

Too radical? Well, my second option would be for the officers to climb onto the same roof and Taser the criminal, or subdue him using another one of the dozens of techniques they know how to use effectively and quickly.

That nothing like this has been done for two days should answer any questions you might have about the reasons for our steeply climbing crime curve. Our police aren’t allowed to do policing any longer – just as our teachers aren’t allowed to teach.

They, both policemen and teachers, may get their pay from their immediate employers, but in their hearts they are supposed to see themselves first and foremost as social workers cum therapists.

Cops are expected to mollycoddle even murderers, never mind a chap who merely causes thousands in damages by paralysing a railway line. I wonder what they’d be instructed to do if the same man were raining bullets rather than chimney pots on the street. Would they then be allowed to summon a weapons unit or the SAS? Or would they first ring the psychologist and social worker on their speed dial?

Tocqueville wrote that in America all political problems became legal sooner or later. With us, it’s the other way around: all our legal (and crime) problems sooner or later become political. And the politics of the land are solidly woke, with both major parties insisting that a criminal’s rights supersede those of his victim’s.

It’s a good time to embark on a criminal career in Britain. Chances are such a novice wouldn’t be caught. Or if caught, he wouldn’t be prosecuted; if prosecuted, he wouldn’t be tried; if tried, he wouldn’t be convicted.

If you contemplate retraining as a felon, I recommend burglary. In most cases, cops even refuse to investigate such crimes, correctly realising that a burglar does the same thing as our government: redistributing wealth. Burglary is still rather lucrative, and the risk is close to zero. Best of luck!