Category: Blog

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.

When he found his generals too rash, Emperor Augustus doused their fervour with the cautionary phrase festina lente: make haste slowly.

So spoke a sage man who knew that good deeds can be undone, and bad deeds exacerbated, if rushed into impetuously. A great believer in visual aids, the emperor left behind any number of images to that effect on coins and earthenware plaques, with his favourite thought represented by dolphin and anchor, or else a rabbit jumping out of a snail’s shell.

Shifting the scene from warfare to statecraft, and fast-forwarding some 18 centuries, Edmund Burke singled out prudence as a principal political virtue. He often repeated the adage of an earlier political thinker, Viscount Falkland, who encapsulated the conservative view of change neatly: if it’s not necessary to change, it’s necessary not to change.

And, as the combined wisdom of Falkland and Burke could have added, even if it is necessary to change, don’t rush it. It’s not just waste that haste makes, but often also failure.

When Donald Trump moves back into the White House on 20 January, he should have Augustus’s injunction inscribed on his wall so prominently that it’ll always be in his line of vision. For if he acts on some of his campaign promises too rashly, he can do much damage – even if the ideas behind the promises are sound.

Some of them, such as the intention to slap huge tariffs on imports, including 60 per cent on all Chinese ones, aren’t especially sound even if put into practice at a leisurely tempo. This is the only issue on which all economists agree, regardless of whether their guiding light is Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes.

Sometimes things like stiff tariffs, sanctions or even boycotts are necessary for strategic reasons, but making a purely economic argument for them, as Trump does, is hard going. One almost instant effect of such penalties on the US consumer will be a steep rise in inflation, which would clash with another promise he makes, that of lowering the cost of living.

This will happen even if other countries follow David Ricardo’s advice and don’t retaliate in kind. But that sort of economic vision has dimmed since Ricardo’s time, and most countries will slap similar levies on US exports, a cost again ultimately borne by the consumer.

And of course Trump’s friend Elon would be upset to see his Teslas priced out of the market. After all, China supplies nearly 40 per cent of the materials for batteries that go into Teslas worldwide. If they become 60 per cent dearer, well, do your own arithmetic. Car buyers certainly will.

Trump’s other ideas are commendable, but only if realised the Burke way, prudently. For example, deporting up to five million illegal aliens, most of them Spanish-speaking, ticks every box of sovereignty, justice and fairness:

Sovereignty, because it presupposes control of national borders; justice, because anything illegal must be stamped out for the law to be upheld; fairness, because illegal immigrants working for coolie wages drive down the income of the indigenous population.

But take it from a former long-time resident of a border state, Texas: throwing all those migrants out in one fell swoop will be hugely recessionary. When the economy is doing well, and the current US growth of almost three per cent is the envy of Europe, the locals don’t want to work as brick layers, dishwashers or farm hands, jobs mostly taken up by migrants.

It’s only when the economy takes a dive and any jobs are at a premium that the locals start fuming about the ‘wetbacks’, ‘greasers’ and ‘beaners’. So yes, by all means, illegal aliens must be expelled, but this ought to be done at a slow and steady pace, making sure the holes left behind are filled up as they appear.

Deporting millions of welfare recipients is hugely beneficial, but deporting millions of workers isn’t, certainly not if it’s done quickly and with little foresight. Alas, the nature of US politics is such that Trump has to be in a hurry: he’ll only have four years at his disposal. Hence he’ll either have to moderate his appetite for change or risk higher inflation first and recession second.

Speaking of Elon Musk, Trump has appointed him to head the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. The intention is to cut $2 trillion of spending, which splendid idea is long overdue. But then comes that dread ‘how’ question, known to have taken the wind out of many a billowing sail. ‘How fast’ is its companion also demanding an answer.

The talk inside the Beltway is about cutting some 100,000 public sector jobs to begin with, and billions out of the budgets of most departments. If done over a number of years, such measures aren’t just sound but essential. However, they’ll become neither if carried out as impetuously as Trump has been known to act.

Acting on his economic premises too energetically may make inflation head for double digits within a year, followed by a slow or even negative growth in the economy. One hopes that Scott Bessent, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, can put his Wall Street experience to good use and justify his reputation of having a good economic head on his shoulders. Some Trump loyalists may be suspicious of Bessent’s links with George Soros, but this is a separate issue.

Trump’s refusal to follow Augustus’s advice is also evident in his pronouncements on Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. That was made clear months ago, when Trump first said he’d end the war within 24 hours of taking over the presidency.

The only conceivable way of doing so would be to twist Zelensky’s arm by threatening to cut off supplies to the Ukraine. And in fact Trump’s Republican stooges in Congress have been known to act in that spirit long before their man even won the election.

Yesterday Trump met Zelensky in Paris, at the re-opening of Notre-Dame. After that, Trump posted a statement I found worrying:  

“Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. They have ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers, and many more civilians. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed, and if it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse. I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!”

The presidents of both Russia and the Ukraine are called Vladimir, but it’s clear from context that the one Trump was referring to was Zelensky, not Putin, and we’ll ignore the illiterate capitalisation of ‘World’. But yes, so many confirmed Ukrainian losses are indeed tragic, and yes, it’s time to end the war as quickly as possible.

But not more quickly than possible, and that distinction seems to be lost on Trump. The Vladimir he should be putting pressure on is Putin, not Zelensky.

This isn’t a case of two countries deciding to fight it out, with both equally culpable. This is a case of a transparently fascist aggressor, our existential enemy, pouncing on a pro-Western neighbour, our existential friend. It’s true that America has the greater leverage dealing with the Ukraine, but Putin is also vulnerable to pressure – especially now that his claim to being a world leader has been blown to smithereens in Syria.

Trump’s America can indeed act as peacemaker, but she must not act as an agent of the Ukraine’s re-enslavement. And following or spurning Augustus’s adage may make the difference between the two.

The idea of the Ukraine trading territory for peace is widely mooted, but it ignores the other side, the aggressor. Putin doesn’t give two flying hectares about territory: he has already ceded to China five times the area he could possibly grab in the Ukraine.

Putin started the war to re-colonise the Ukraine and extinguish any pro-Western aspirations spreading there. His oft-stated goal is to restore the Soviet empire, and he wants to go down in history as another “gatherer of the Russian lands”, the title originally given to Ivan III (d. 1505).

The West – which also means the US – has a vested strategic interest in nipping such ambitions in the bud. That objective can indeed be served by ending the war, but doing so in such a way that Russia won’t be able to renew her offensive for a long time, ideally ever.

If Trump can achieve that objective quickly, I’ll be the first to praise him. But if he sacrifices long-term strategic considerations for scoring a quick propaganda coup he can pass for victory, then he’ll be laying the groundwork for future tragedy.

Let’s wait and see, and I for one wish Trump every possible success, that being our success too. I’m just worried that Trump’s idea of what constitutes success may be very different from mine, or from that of any elderly gentleman blessed with a conservative disposition. Which is the human type created by God to tell impetuous leaders to hold their horses.

I saw a funny carton in The Telegraph this morning. One man says to another in a pub: “The worst thing about our government’s blunders is that we can’t properly enjoy all France’s problems.”

I laughed on cue because, though my list of things not to laugh at has widened with age, France hasn’t yet made it. However, any tears of laughter should really give way to those of sadness.

It’s not that gloating is wrong – when it’s about the French, it isn’t. It’s just that both “our government’s blunders” and “France’s problems” have the same aetiology: the chronic and fatal disease of modernity. And that, as Hilaire Belloc wrote, is no laughing matter:

“We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

Both France and Britain, along with all other major Western countries, pursue an unsustainable social and economic model, one demanded by their democracies. I shan’t repeat what I wrote on this subject yesterday, but let’s just say that neither country is, nor ever will be, governed wisely.

In both countries, central government amasses more and more power, while showing less and less ability to use it sensibly. As a result, both governments either try to seduce people into compliance with extravagant promises or else bribe them with handouts.

Any attempt to act on the promises or deliver the full scale of the handouts creates gaping holes in the budget and a constantly growing mountain of public debt (amply matched by the private debt amassed by a population incapable of restricting or deferring consumption). Both governments respond by printing or borrowing money, and also by beggaring people with confiscatory taxation.

Neither measure makes things any better, quite the opposite. When a disaster begins to loom, the governments have no option but to cut spending, but that runs into the stonewall of a thoroughly corrupted populace. The people don’t want their entitlements to stop or even become smaller. And they’ve been sold the canard of governing themselves.

Well then, those upstarts in the capital only have their jobs because the people voted them in. And the people didn’t cast their ballot to become poorer. They want the gravy train to run on time, even if it’s the only train ever to do so. We got you in, we can get you out, comes a collective roar, and it gets louder by the day.

A government, in fact the very system it fronts, has to be strong and stable to survive such turmoil, and that’s where the similarity between Britain and France ends. Or rather becomes less obvious.

The French like to say that their system is a monarchical republic whereas ours is a republican monarchy. This isn’t bad as far as one-liners go, but the implied suggestion of an almost complete convergence is an illusion.

While neither country boasts political competence, Britain enjoys political stability and France doesn’t. Britain has had more or less the same constitution since 1688 (and only a slightly different one in the several preceding centuries), but during the same time France has had 16 different constitutions, three monarchies, five republics, a Directory, a military dictatorship and two empires.

It’s debatable whether the French Revolution delivered on its promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité, but what’s beyond dispute is that it never delivered political stability. Not for longer than a decade or two at a time anyway.

France may be a monarchical republic but, more to the point, it’s also a revolutionary republic constituted on Enlightenment principles. The American republic has the same genealogy, but it was blessed with sage founders who devised a system of checks and balances keeping the system intact even when a particular government collapses.

Nevertheless, it took America a civil war, the bloodiest conflict in her history, to inject some sturdy fibre into her constitutional spine and to communicate to recalcitrant states in no uncertain terms that the central government was playing for keeps.

France has also had her share of civil wars, the latest one in the early 1960s, and any number of smaller social outbursts since then, but no stability emerged at the other end. The state structure has been deflecting at different amplitudes ever since 1789, and at several moments it has tottered badly.

Our monarchy may be republican (or, more appropriately, constitutional), but a monarchy it is, which makes a world of difference. Our king lacks executive power but not the power to make his kingdom united, both at present and over history. The monarch perpetuates organic legitimacy going back so far that, as both Burke and de Maistre wrote, we might as well assume it comes from God.

Such is the centre of our constitution, and it holds whatever turbulence erupts at the periphery. Cabinets come and go, so do ruling parties, so do oppositions, but the system stays upright, able to survive even such cosmically stupid and subversive governments as our present one.

Witness the collapse of Liz Truss’s government after barely six weeks in office. Miss Truss tried to perform the contortionist trick of cutting taxes without cutting public spending, which spooked the markets and drove her out. Less than two years later her party lost the election, and the present calamity on wheels rolled in.

However, we may huff and we may puff, yet no one is seriously suggesting that the whole system is on the verge of collapse. Come what may (up to a point, it has to be said), the monarchy will keep the constitution together – as it has done for centuries.

In France, such continuous survival isn’t a foregone conclusion – the country is paying the full cost of destroying political continuity in 1789. The collapse of Michel ‘Brexit’ Barnier’s government has rung up a new set of charges.

Like that other revolutionary republic, the USA, and unlike states that have evolved organically, the French state is a political contrivance designed by a sort of committee. Under such circumstances the sagacity of the committee members is paramount, and the Americans were luckier in that respect (of course, their founders did their work at a time when the world was still saner).

I wonder how De Gaulle and his people devised their Fifth Republic. Why don’t we make it a presidential republic, one suggestion must have gone. What, like les états unis? Well, sort of. Non, merci. We aren’t les américains you know.

Then how about a parliamentary republic, with the leader of the majority party becoming prime minister? You mean like les rosbifs? Well… at that point de Gaulle must have interfered. Where does it leave me? I want to be king. Or, at a pinch, president. With full powers, and never mind parliament.

Much hand-waving and shoulder-shrugging must have ensued, and as a result a compromise was reached. Let’s have both a parliamentary democracy and a presidential one, in the same state. The president is elected but he isn’t accountable to parliament, you are right about that, Charlot. But he then appoints a prime minister who is. There we go, everyone goes home happy.

That was like putting béchamel sauce on a roast gigot, to explain it in a customary French idiom. Each may be fine in its own right, but together they add up to dog’s dinner.

What if the president comes from one minority party, his prime minister from another, and neither has the majority? And the two largest parliamentary blocs cordially loathe both parties, and also each other? Oh well, that’s letting your imagination run wild. Such a thing will never happen.

Well, it has. Macron’s party was an ad hoc concoction slapped together to get him into power. Its popularity rating is well below what Louis XVI’s was, but no guillotine is on the cards. No resignation either: Manny may not be especially bright, but he knows what he wants, which is power at all costs.

The two blocs, led by Le Pen’s national socialists and Mélenchon’s Trotskyist socialists, suspended hostilities for long enough to drive Barnier’s government out and communicate to Macron that they’ll do the same to whomever he’ll appoint next.

At the same time, each is strong enough to prevent the victory of the other bloc. That stalemate leaves France without a government and on the brink of a popular uprising.

As a part-time French resident, I have a vested interest in something like that not happening. As a full-time British subject, I find it hard not to gloat.

But then I look at our own government and begin to regret its stability. No, scratch that. Stability is good. Governments are transient, but a real constitution is transcendent. Unless, of course, it’s concocted by a committee of near-sighted men.   

So ran a comment from a perceptive reader who shares my understated enthusiasm for democracy run riot. Such scepticism is as old as democracy itself, which is an interesting paradox.

Ask any student of history about the greatest contributions Athens made to our civilisation, and he won’t have to think long. Democracy and philosophy will be his first picks.

Yes, except that the greatest Athenian philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle along with most of their predecessors and followers, shared my reader’s feelings about democracy – or perhaps it would be chronologically fairer to say that he shares theirs.

Aristotle, never one to pull punches, called democracy a “deviant constitution”, while in one of his Republic dialogues, Plato relates a catechistic exchange between Socrates and his democracy-loving interlocutor.

If you had to set sail on a long and arduous voyage, asked Socrates, who would you rather have skippering your ship, a random man off the street or an experienced mariner well-versed in the seafaring arts? The latter of course, answered the younger man. Then what makes you think that the former could be trusted to decide who should steer the ship of state?” asked Socrates.

That was a good question, and in the subsequent 2,500 years people have been unable to provide a good answer. So, to be on the safe side, they stopped asking the question. Ideal or not, total enfranchisement is beyond doubt.

Athenian democracy was of course as different from ours as a toga is different from a pair of jeans. It was limited and it was direct.

It had no need for any system of representation. The 30,000 or so fully enfranchised citizens (out of the population of about a quarter of a million in Athens at her peak) could all vote for every piece of legislation direct, with 5,000-6,000 constituting the quorum. In fact, Plato suggested that this wasn’t only the minimum acceptable but also the maximum desirable number of active participants in a democracy. Going over that cut-off point, he warned presciently, would result in mob rule.

Socrates, according to Plato, wasn’t opposed to democracy as such. He just believed that voting should be a qualification, not a birthright. Before casting their ballot, people should establish their credentials, prove that they have pondered the relevant issues at depth, learned much about them and sought counsel from learned men and treatises.

However, even such mild criticism was too much for democracy to bear. A court of 500 top Athenian citizens sentenced Socrates to death, perfectly democratically. Democracy voted to kill him for asking awkward questions about it.

Athenian education was also different from ours, and I doubt Socrates would retain his faith in the elevating power of learning should he miraculously find himself on a modern campus. If no one but students and professors of philosophy had the vote, we’d have an equivalent of Pol Pot at 10 Downing Street.

This points to a problem both wider and worse than anything observed or even envisaged by the great Greeks. At issue here is a whole civilisation that has succumbed to a deadly disease of which politics is only the most visible symptom.

By a process of steady erosion interspersed with occasional violent outbursts, the civilisation that began in Athens, was galvanised in the first century and flourished for centuries thereafter, was taken over by institutionalised mediocrity. Intellectually vulgar, aesthetically crude and morally corrupt individuals won the right to impose their puny minds and character on society.

The house was still standing, but it had become a mere shell. It was now inhabited by severely limited people who were either unaware of their limitations or, worse still, proud of them. And they had the power to inflict their deficiency on society at large, raising mediocrity to a lofty height. Mediocrity was the new excellence.

People left what they saw as servitude to aristocracy and the church, committing themselves instead to the bondage imposed by self-satisfied nonentities, the dominant type in today’s public life. What at the time of Plato and Aristotle wouldn’t have passed muster even as a quaint opinion is now seen as a valid idea to be imposed on society.

People were sold the rotten goods of equality: any idea was as good as any other, and the one to choose was the one enjoying the widest support. In fact, the very concept of an idea became devalued.

An idea, meaning a conclusion reached by an internal debate on a theoretical subject, used to be a luxury way beyond most people. At the time our civilisation was at its peak, people at large didn’t have ideas. They had beliefs, customs, habits, rules they lived by, local standards, folk arts such as ballads, songs and dances.

Ideas on things like philosophy, politics, aesthetics, law were left to minorities who had the requisite talent and training. Such minorities decided what books should be published, what music should be publicly performed, what laws should govern society – and yes, who should man the institutions passing, administering and enforcing such laws.

Those minorities had to be thoroughly trained and educated practically from birth to acquire the necessary expertise, the right to have ideas and the character to implement them. It was universally accepted that such a background was essential, and those without it could only come up with wrong and probably dangerous simulacra of ideas, not ideas worthy of the name.

That changed overnight, in historical terms. There are more of us than of you, said the intellectually vulgar men. Hence it’s vulgar ideas, tastes and principle that should rule the roost. And, by definition, everyone can have those.

Hence everyone should decide what is true, just and beautiful, and the only way everyone can decide is by a show of hands. These hands may clutch ballot papers, sledgehammers or wads of banknotes, whichever it takes to do the job required. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the absolute rule of the common, which to say vulgar, man.

People whom Plato and Aristotle would have seen as either idiots or raving lunatics acquire a reputation as savants, those they would have regarded as liars or even petty criminals become businessmen or politicians, those devoid of the basic intellectual skills the Greeks saw as a prerequisite for speaking in the agora become known as philosophers. As a result, we have a civilisation that creates a sea of information, yet next to no one able to navigate a course through it leading to anything but the rocks.

A society in which an empowered majority are cannibals will elect only cannibals to public offices, accept only cannibalistic ideas as true, promote only arts catering to cannibalistic tastes, pass laws legalising cannibalism – and use every medium at its disposal to brainwash the public that cannibalism is better than any other diet.

Replace cannibalism with intellectual vulgarity, aesthetic tastelessness and moral decrepitude, and this is a fair picture of modern society. At some point, subversive elites created the masses in their own image, and now the masses repay the compliment of creating elites in their own image. The circle is complete, and it’s vicious.

The only way out would be to break the circle, but that would involve a major cataclysm, of a kind that no decent people would wish to countenance. Barring that, we should get used, if we aren’t already, to corrupt and incompetent nonentities governing us, giftless hacks shoving what passes for art down our throats – and people who haven’t made the slightest effort to develop their minds pontificating on every subject under the sun.

Democracy – which is to say equality – of ideas and tastes goes hand in hand with modern political democracy, and the notion of one vulgar man, one corrupt vote reigns supreme. I don’t know which kind of democracy is the cause and which is the effect.

In all likelihood, they developed concurrently in response to some widespread need, an inner compulsion to claim squatting rights over the edifice of Western civilisation. Whatever that compulsion was, it wasn’t virtuous.  

Marc Guehi, captain of the Crystal Palace football club, is in trouble for breaking a law of the game. And, on general principle, I’m not on his side.

Law 4 of the International Football Association Board’s Laws of the Game states: “Equipment must not have any political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images.”

I agree. There is something bone-crushingly tasteless about players using their clothes as a message unrelated to football. Most spectators don’t care about the players’ innermost convictions and an inscription of any kind isn’t going to convert anybody.

It may, however, upset or even enrage some people. After all, most of us regard some messages as offensive, and football fans aren’t known for keeping their feelings to themselves. So why encourage more controversy than that already intrinsic to a football match?

Many supporters threaten – and at times perpetrate – violence to their opposite numbers. A questionable penalty has been known to kick off a mass brawl in the terraces, with broken bottles and razor blades seeing the light of day. Do we really need additional provocations, especially those that have nothing to do with the game?

We don’t. So let’s keep extraneous stuff out of football, the Association is right about that. Hence, though I sympathise with the message Guehi scribbled on his armband, “I love Jesus”, I think he was out of order to choose that particular medium.

He should have kept his beliefs off his rainbow armband… Hold on a moment. A rainbow armband? Surely that qualifies as a political (or even religious) message by itself, even in the absence of any superimposed statements. Doesn’t it? And yet the Premier League demanded that captains must turn armbands into propaganda vehicles for homosexuality as at least an equally valid form of amorous relations.

That’s not all. Last season all players were supposed to genuflect before kick-off to honour a drug-addled American criminal who was accidentally killed when resisting arrest during a robbery bust. Bending a knee is a gesture of obeisance with strong ritual overtones. Call it political or call it cultish, but that rather obscene rite did seem to violate the Association’s own laws.

That would suggest to me, and Mr Guehi, that all bets are off. If celebrating the life of a black criminal is allowed, nay mandated, then a fair argument may be made that, say, white supremacists should be granted equal time. No? Fine. In that case, let’s get rid of both forms of propaganda – or neither.

Now Marc Guehi is facing censure even though he didn’t refuse to wear an armband that clearly goes against his religion. He merely scribbled a very mild implicit rebuttal, correctly believing he was the gander entitled to the same sauce as the goose.

Sam Morsy, Ipswich Town captain, went quite a bit further when upholding his creedal principles. He refused to wear a rainbow armband altogether because it offended his “religious beliefs”. So logically speaking, one would expect him to incur a stiffer punishment than Marc Guehi, who merely added a little ornament by way of dissent.

Yet Morsy won’t be punished at all. You see, the religious beliefs that don’t allow him to exhibit LGBTQ+ livery aren’t Christian. They are Muslim, which makes them protected by another woke piety in conflict with the rainbow-coloured one.

Thus Christianity is denied equal time not only with LGBTQ+ activism but also with Islam and, I’m sure, any other Third World creed. Buddhism, definitely. Animism, probably. Zoroastrianism, why not.

Judaism? Now that’s going too far. You see, it’s not Third World enough, if at all. And, considering Israel’s ill-advised efforts to defend itself against Muslim terrorism, it’s definitely not woke.

Ipswich Town issued a statement, saying: “We proudly support… blah-blah-blah… and stand with the LGBTQ+ community in promoting… blah-blah-blah. At the same time, we respect the decision of our captain Sam Morsy, who has chosen not to wear the rainbow captain’s armband, due to his religious beliefs.” [My emphasis]

Allow me to sum up. Muslim religious beliefs are worthy of respect, and Christian ones aren’t. Islam can somehow be etched into the plaque celebrating propaganda of various perversions, psychiatric disorders, BLM fanaticism, radical feminism and other woke strikes against our civilisation. Christianity, on the other hand, doesn’t belong on that plaque at all – even though it doesn’t advocate throwing homosexuals off tall buildings or committing violence against infidels.

It’s good to know where we stand, and my congratulations to the football authorities for making the lie of the land so abundantly clear. The land is of course strewn with minefields, but let’s not talk about this now.

P.S. For all its rainbow symbolism, the FA has so far failed to persuade homosexual footballers to come out. Only one top player has ever done it and even he committed suicide soon thereafter.

In 1852, John Henry Newman wrote The Idea of a University, an essay explaining exhaustively what his alma mater Oxford and other such institutions were for, what kind of minds they were to train.

Universities, he wrote, should teach students “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.” (Note that the word ‘discriminate’ was used in its proper meaning, exercising discernment). Their primary role was to give students a “perfection of the intellect … the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things”.

I haven’t seen any recent mission statements but, by the looks of it, Oxford and our other universities are committed to churning out feral humanoids as bereft of intellect and feeble of mind as they are volatile of temper and devoid of manners.

Evidence for this melancholy observation is served up every day, and yesterday came the turn of the Oxford Union debate on the motion “This house believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”.

That the motion passed by 278 votes to 59 was to be expected. Those young firebrands are driven by visceral hatred of Israel because it’s a) Western, b) Jewish, c) opposed to the Third World’s assault on what’s left of our civilisation.

That animus is so powerful that it would nullify any attempts at cerebral activity even if these descendants of Newman were capable of it. But they aren’t. If they were, they’d know that, however much they dislike Israel, it practises neither apartheid nor genocide.

Forget about the ability “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.”  These callow yahoos don’t even know the meaning of the words they use.

Thus ‘apartheid’ means institutionalised racial segregation, which manifestly has nothing to do with a country in which Jews, Muslims and Christians coexist in greater harmony than anywhere else in the Middle East. And ‘genocide’ is mass murder by ethnic, racial or religious category – again, not the fate suffered by the non-Jewish citizens of Israel.

A sensible debate can only occur when the parties start from a sensible premise. Since such a premise was lacking, a sensible debate wasn’t on the cards. What was? Oh well, exactly what happened: a show of gonadic, mindless savagery aimed at anyone attempting to introduce a note of sanity into the proceedings.

Students at our formerly great universities are no longer taught how to arrive at a truth by sequential dispassionate steps, each carefully thought through and subjected to destructive testing. They are indoctrinated to believe that they – and all their thoughts – are perfect as they are. Students aren’t equipped with the techniques of honing their minds, expanding their intellects, embarking on a lifelong effort of daily self-improvement.

Such techniques are an inalienable property of an intellectual elite, the kind Newman had in mind. An inability to wield such techniques at every step taken through life is a characteristic of the faceless masses that, according to Ortega y Gasset, have been in revolt for at least two centuries. Well, they are still revolting.

It was Ortega who correctly identified a malignant problem of modernity as the unqualified masses being empowered and encouraged to fill the spaces previously occupied by qualified elites. Anyone seeking an illustration should compare Newman’s idea of a university with the reality of today’s Oxford, supposedly our best.

Instead of the budding scholars they used to be, the intellectual elite in the making, today’s students are shrill, hysterical zealots worshipping at the cult of any subversive ideology on offer. And ideological zealots have no opponents to debate or reason with. They only have enemies to eliminate, ideally physically but, barring that, in any way that will make them mute and invisible.

So yesterday’s debate proved. When broadcaster Jonathan Sacerdoti took issue with the motion, sputum-sputtering hecklers shrieked “genocidal maniac” and “sick mother***er” at him, and threatened violence with the credibility lacking in their thoughts. That Oedipal expletive, by the way, suggests an international nature of the event. Though it’s slowly gaining currency in Britain, it’s still mostly associated with American usage.

And fair enough, people for whom that idiom comes naturally were in attendance. One of them, Israeli-American activist Miko Peled, described the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October, 2023, as “an act of heroism”. It’s good to see that even at a mature age of 62 Mr Peled retains youthful passions liberally laced with cretinism.

Luckily for him he wasn’t asked to explain, in a logical, detached manner, how murdering and raping (not always in that order) hundreds of unarmed women, men and children fits any accepted definition of heroism.

But his audience didn’t require any explanations – some things just go without saying. When asked if they would have reported Hamas terrorist plans to authorities, thereby preventing the carnage, 77 per cent of the participants said no. And what do you mean, ‘terrorist’?

“What happened on October 7 was not terrorism – these were acts of heroism of a people who were oppressed,” explained Mr Peled to almost universal approval. He then called for “a Palestinian state from the river to the sea”, which is to say for the wholesale murder of the seven million Israeli Jews just like himself (plus any number of non-Jews seen as collaborators). I’m sure that, should such genocide happen, Mr Peled would be cheering from across the ocean.

Young people have always gravitated towards the radical end of things, and they’ve always tended to speak emotionally, often without taking the trouble of thinking first. Nothing new about that.

What is new, however, is our universities’ reluctance and increasing inability to direct youthful passions into the conduit of intellectual rigour and emotional self-restraint. Today, no professor will keep his job for long if he begins to explain to students that – and why – their thoughts are nothing but immature drivel.

That’s why those who’d be inclined to do so seldom become university professors. And if by some chance they do, they have to master the art of subterfuge putting to shame the mediaeval Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity but continued to practise Judaism in secret.

As a result, we no longer have universities, those Newman would recognise as such. We have hatcheries of crepuscular thought and febrile zealotry. If such is our elite, one has to re-evaluate one’s rating of Mao’s Red Guards.  

The war arithmetic is as simple as it’s gruesome. The Russians are suffering casualties at a rapid rate, about 2,000 a day. The Ukraine’s casualties are lower, but we don’t know how much.

However, Russia’s population is over three times the size of the Ukraine’s. This means that, even if the Russian casualties are twice as high, the Ukraine is going to be exsanguinated first.

That’s why the Ukraine is bound to lose any war of attrition, and her only chance of victory lies in marrying her superior generalship and fighting spirit with better and more plentiful armaments. These have to come from the West, but after almost three years little doubt remains that the West won’t keep up its end.

Western supplies come in a trickle sufficient to keep the Ukraine in the fight but far short of what it would take for her to win. Hence the Hobson’s choice facing Zelensky. He either has to fight to the last soldier or negotiate the best peace terms he can get.

These are just general observations. No one outside the Ukrainian high command knows the true state of affairs. Western intelligence services have a vague idea, but even they are short of hard data. The overarching question is, How long can the Ukraine hold out given the present level of supplies and the dwindling numbers of recruits?

Our spooks don’t really know, and I know considerably less. However, judging by the overtures Zelensky made yesterday, the general picture isn’t bright.

For the first time since 24 February, 2022, Zelensky said last night that he was ready to trade territory for peace. One assumes the area he has in mind is the 20 per cent of the country currently occupied by Russian invaders.

By itself, that’s not such a bad deal. Both countries will be able to declare victory: Russia, because it will have succeeded in grabbing a chunk of land; the Ukraine, because Russia will have failed in her real objective of stamping out the Ukraine’s sovereignty and spreading fascism over a greater part of Europe.

But nothing in wartime diplomacy is ever ‘by itself’. The subtext is often more important than the text, and long-term perspectives can throw a shadow over any agreements.

Regarded in that light, Zelensky’s statement smacks of desperation. He gives every impression of a leader who knows his country is losing a war.

Zelensky knows, and so does everyone else, that no lasting peace with an aggressive predator is ever possible. What’s possible is a temporary cessation of hostilities giving the aggressor time to regroup and pounce again.

Under the terms mooted by Zelensky the Ukraine will get to keep 80 per cent of her real estate. But what’s the guarantee that Putin won’t come back for it later? The solution suggested by Zelensky would be naïve if it weren’t so desperate.

“If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under the Nato umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control,” he said. He then added the words that should sadden everyone who detests Putin’s fascism: “’We need to do it fast.”

That sounds like “before we run out of soldiers”, and I hope I’m misinterpreting the subtext. And what kind of umbrella does he have in mind?

Zelensky hinted he knows that full NATO membership isn’t on the cards. Instead he wants NATO’s key members, such as the US, Britain, France, Germany and perhaps Poland, to provide security guarantees. Excellent idea, that.

I suggest a treaty to that effect should be signed in Budapest and called the Budapest Memorandum… Hold on a moment, I’ve just remembered that such a document already exists. Here it is, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by the US, Britain and Russia that thereby guaranteed the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her giving up nuclear weapons.

How has that worked out for the Ukraine so far? I see. So what’s the basis for hoping that a Budapest Memorandum Mark II, or whatever it will be called, will offer a secure guarantee of lasting peace? No basis at all, and Zelensky knows this.

And yet he came up with that proposal, adding that in due course (when Putin croaks?) the Ukraine would reclaim the ceded territory “by diplomatic means”. But Putin doesn’t do diplomacy; he only does blackmail. Since Zelensky is well aware of this, his denotation is meaningless here, and the connotation reigns supreme.

So let’s try to guess what the connotation might be. It’s fairly obvious that hush-hush tripartite conversations are going on involving Putin, Zelensky and the Trump team, with NATO acting in strictly an advisory capacity.

The starting point is Trump’s braggadocio that he’ll end the war on day one, and only my aversion to puns prevents my describing that promise as trumpery. The idea Trump dangled before the interested parties involves freezing the existing front line and creating a buffer DMZ enforced by NATO troops.

Now, Putin used NATO’s eastward expansion as the casus belli. Hence it’s not immediately clear how he’ll explain to the Russians that getting NATO troops at, rather than merely close to, Russian borders is the outcome he has always wanted.

It’s true that fascist dictators don’t necessarily seek public consensus for their actions, but Putin’s hold on his populace does depend on a projection of strength. With rampant inflation racing towards 15 per cent and the dollar heading for the 120-rouble mark, the Russians are getting poorer by the day.

Putin’s propagandists reassure them that the collapsing rouble is a good thing because it makes Russian exports so much more lucrative. That’s true, and I can see Milton Friedman flash an avuncular smile of pride from his grave. However, what’s also true is that, pari passu with exports getting more profitable, imports are getting more ruinous, and most things worth buying in Russia are imported.

The time-dishonoured stratagem of their rulers is to assure the people that all the privations are temporary and more than made up for by Russia’s muscular presence in the world (and of course her unmatched spirituality, that much goes without saying). Hence Putin can’t afford to appear weak, because if he does, he may find his power base crumbling away.

That’s why I can’t for the life of me see him agreeing to Trump’s plan – unless, and there is a big unless there somewhere. It comes from the question Putin has to be asking: “What’s in this for me?”

Trump isn’t yet in a position to provide a satisfactory answer, and won’t be until 20 January. But I’m sure he and his emissaries are dipping their legs, not just toes, in the water.

What will it take? they must be asking. Summary removal of all sanctions? War reparations from NATO (mostly meaning the US)? Russia’s readmission into every international body from which she was expelled? Favourable trade terms? Reinstatement of deals to buy Russian raw materials, especially fossil fuels? The Ukraine’s neutrality and acceptance of de facto Russian control (‘finlandisation’, as such an arrangement used to be called)? Recognition of Eastern Europe as a Russian sphere of influence? All of the above?

I don’t know what’s on the table, but something must be for Zelensky even to imply what he seems to have implied. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough – the Ukrainian president did say time is of the essence.

Unlike his two successors, Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury throughout the 90s, is a force to be reckoned with.

Can you imagine any other Anglican prelate after him describing same-sex marriage as “cultural vandalism” because “there lurks an aggressive secularist and relativist approach towards an institution that has glued society”? I can’t.

I’m not sure how Lord Carey reconciled such laudable conservatism with his resolute championship of female ordination, but one way or another he is a man eminently worthy of respect. It’s in this spirit that I disagree with his article supporting the euthanasia bill.

As the bill on assisted dying goes through its second reading tomorrow, the debates about it are at their most intense. Lord Carey ploughs in, explaining that he changed his “own mind on this issue in 2012”. He was at the time the same age I am now, and let me tell you: we wrinklies tend to be quite ossified in our views.

Something dramatic must have happened to cause Lord Carey’s about-face at that venerable age, and, though he doesn’t say what it was, I can make a fair guess. He probably observed an excruciatingly painful death of someone he knew and realised that it was cruel not to relieve such horrendous suffering in any way possible.

As a sincere Christian, Lord Carey must have wrestled with that position, in conflict as it is with the notion of the sanctity of human life. He had to find a common ground there, as he writes: “Church leaders who speak out will do so on the basis of their religious convictions but they will engage with evidence such as they see it.”

Well, let’s just say that some Church leaders, such as the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, often speak out on the basis of neither their religious convictions nor evidence, but strictly as woke ideologues. Lord Carey is different though.

However, though his integrity is beyond doubt, I think he is missing the point.

He cites a heart-rending story told by a woman whose young husband was dying of cancer: “At that point, the pain relief being administered via a syringe driver was completely ineffective, providing no relief from the agonising pain caused by the numerous tumours (over 50) spread throughout his bones and soft tissue.”

Most of us have similar stories to tell, some acquired by hearsay, some by observation, others even by most distressing personal experience. Watching someone close suffer – watching anyone suffer the way Lord Carey’s correspondent describes – is unbearable, harder even than enduring one’s own pain. My heart strings tugged by Lord Carey are playing a dirge even as we speak.

However, this emotional argument is valid only in respect to assisted dying – not to the assisted dying bill. And I maintain that the two aren’t at all one and the same thing.

Here I must point out that, though physicians observe strict moral codes, theirs aren’t identical to those accepted by Lord Carey’s flock. When reciting the Penitential Act, Christians ask forgiveness for things they have done and things they have failed to do.

Both types of sin are equally grave but, as we move from church to hospital, the situation changes. There exists a whole world of ethical difference between a doctor killing a patient by a deliberate act or by passive acquiescence.

Active euthanasia occurs when a doctor or someone else deliberately does something that causes the patient to die. With passive euthanasia, death happens because the doctor deliberately doesn’t do, or stops doing, something necessary to keep the patient alive.

There also exists a grey area between active and passive euthanasia that is specifically relevant to Lord Carey’s concern about unbearable suffering. Doctors sometimes administer such a high dose of analgesic drugs that they know death may result. Then again, it may not, and in the eyes of the medical profession, they aren’t thereby committing active euthanasia.

Passive euthanasia has been practised since even before Asclepius, the god of medicine, assumed a seat next to his father Apollo. Physicians have always reserved the right to make a clinical decision to withdraw a useless treatment from a dying patient.

They practise every conceivable form of euthanasia by switching off life-support machines, deciding not to carry out a life-saving operation, refusing to prescribe palliative therapies that might add little to the lifespan but much to the suffering. This is how things are, how they’ve always been, and how they’ll for ever remain.

We may debate the ethics involved till the weeping relations come home, and personally I’m uneasy to see doctors assuming the divine powers of life and death. Then again, I’m also uneasy about, and reconciled to, the foul weather we’ve been having for weeks now. Some things just are.

Yet codifying assisted dying in a law is a bad idea. For laws don’t just prohibit or condone an action. They also carry the symbolic moral force of society’s values, its underlying philosophy. Some laws may be unenforced and unenforceable, but they stay on the books as a moral statement. A law – or in this case its absence – sends out a signal of the kind of society we are.

For example, until 1967 the British statute books included laws criminalising homosexuality. However, everyone knew it was widely practised, not least at public schools, and no one made much of a fuss about it: boys will be boys, or for that matter girls. The law was hardly ever enforced when the proscribed act occurred between consenting adults, and yet it was an important statement of society’s moral tenets rooted in Scripture.

The same goes for any laws legalising transsexuality. Gender dysphoria and bisexuality have been known and condoned at least since (now we trace things back to antiquity) the time of Dionysus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena. Yet until now the state has never thrown its legal weight behind anti-Scriptural deviations (“male and female he made them”).

Any law legalising euthanasia will withdraw society’s commitment to the sanctity of human life, something Lord Carey holds dear. That alone is a powerful argument against such a law, and we haven’t even begun talking about slippery slopes, the thin ends of wedges and the potential for disgusting abuse.

Lord Carey dismisses that potential too cavalierly: “I have been disappointed to see the amount of fear-mongering they have marshalled in their arguments, adopting almost universally, the mantra that a ‘right to die, will become a duty to die’. This is in fact not true of places like Oregon which have had assisted dying laws for very many years…”

Show me your examples, sir, and I’ll show you mine, most of them coming from places like Holland and Belgium which also “have had assisted dying laws for very many years”.

One widely publicised case involved a woman of 74 suffering from Alzheimer’s who decided to be euthanised. The doctor put a sleeping pill into her coffee, and the woman dropped off. But when she woke up, she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.

However, I promise not to cite such examples, and I have a large compendium of them, if Lord Carey makes a similar undertaking about his own. Let’s just keep the discussion down to the argument above. I think it’s both persuasive and sufficient.

Few terms bring a happy smile onto a political scientist’s face as readily as does ‘the rule of law’. I don’t quite get this.

Rather than being the ultimate political virtue, the rule of law strikes me as a cliché short of an adjective. And the adjective it’s short of is ‘just’, which should modify ‘law’.

In its absence, the implication seems to be that the rule of any old law is to be praised. That’s demonstrably not the case. In fact, one could argue that even the worst tyrannies are ruled by law.

For example, during its most carnivorous period the Soviet Union had a vast and intricate legal code. It included an article that provided for the execution of anyone undermining – or capable of undermining – the regime. That meant more or less anyone the state might wish to kill, which was the whole point.

That law was unjust any way you look at it, but I suggest we choose just one of those ways because it should suffice. That law was open-ended, which was by itself enough to make it despotic.

An open-ended law, one where the exact boundaries of the proscribed transgression aren’t meticulously specified, is ipso facto tyrannical because it leaves room for arbitrary prosecution. And that room is the kind of vacuum that’s guaranteed to be filled in any modern country.

Just law thrives on precise definitions, which puts it out of reach of our present government, made up as it is of either fools who can’t, or knaves who won’t, define things precisely. It’s comforting to see that Sir Keir Starmer’s personality is voluminous enough to accommodate both types.

Defining things precisely, indeed at all, isn’t Sir Keir’s most salient forte. For example, he tends to struggle with the definition of a woman, a task that wouldn’t defeat a babe in arms who has just learned to say ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’. Nor is Sir Keir capable of identifying the proper owner of the appendage the same tot would probably describe as Dada’s weewee.

When the PM applies his semantic toolkit to more involved concepts, they fall apart before our very eyes. This collapse occurs even in the area of his professional expertise, jurisprudence. And when top public officials are at sea with legal concepts, the ship of justice heads for the rocks of tyranny.

To illustrate this point, the Labour MP Tahir Ali asked the prime minister yesterday if he would commit to “prohibiting the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”.

I have to commend Mr Ali on his verbal dexterity. The way he worded the question one was supposed to get the impression that he afforded equal time and equal protection to Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

That got Mr Ali clear of any accusation of religious particularism and successfully concealed the kernel of his real message. However, Sir Keir displayed uncustomary mental acuity by responding to the kernel, not the outer shell.

“We are committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division including, of course, Islamophobia in all of its forms,” he said. The conspicuous absence of a bow towards the other two Abrahamic religions shows that Sir Keir got the message.

Alas, his vow is a contiguous open end. In fact it’s so open that much hot air escapes and nothing but.

Even Sir Keir isn’t so vague as to express merely a blanket dislike of hatred in general and hatred (that’s what ‘phobia’ means in woke but not in English) of Muslims in particular. He meant that his government was going to push through a law making Islamophobia illegal.

Since the word ‘phobia’ means irrational fear, it’s not immediately clear how it’s possible to legislate against irrationality, but then I did tell you Sir Keir was speaking woke, not English. In that convoluted language, we have no choice but to accept his understanding of Islamophobia in all its forms as one of all the other forms of hatred and division.

However, before any society, and especially one that describes itself as free, agrees to translating such general understanding into a specific law, it must demand that the crime be precisely defined.

Now, Labour’s national executive committee did adopt a definition of Islamophobia in 2022. Since Sir Keir hasn’t so far disavowed it, one has to assume the definition is still in force. According to it, Islamophobia is “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

Now this is an open-ended definition if I ever saw one. What if Islamophobia were rooted not in race but in religion? Would someone be in the clear if he shouted at a group of Muslims that there is a God other than Allah and Mohammed isn’t his prophet? What about a wag asking a Muslim woman in jest to get her face out for the lads?

We already have a whole raft of laws against violent attacks on, well, anyone, including religious and racial groups. Hence the mooted legislation would just repeat what’s already covered by existing laws. For example, it would be superfluous to pass a law prohibiting violence against Muslims because we already proscribe attacks on all people regardless of race or religion.

The time-tested method of elimination thus suggests that what Labour has in mind is a law criminalising not actions but words. That digs the taxonomic hole even deeper.

After much soul-wrenching and hand-wringing, successive governments have only been able to define hate speech as something perceived as such by its recipient. In theory, I could have you arrested for calling me ‘Alex’, rather than ‘Alexander’, ‘Mr Boot’ or ‘Sir’ if I regard such egalitarian familiarity as hateful.

The whole thing about the law is that it’s passed by an authority extrinsic to potential victims. Grievous bodily harm isn’t illegal because the chap with the broken nose says so but because such is the law of the land, passed by the land’s duly constituted legislative body, the same law for everyone living in the land.

By the same token, one Muslim may react to a perceived insult of his religion by shrugging his shoulders and another by whipping out a machete. So is that same insult Islamophobic in some cases and not in others? If a law doesn’t apply to everybody, it applies to nobody.

This is the real problem with such laws, one that’s more serious than even the implied curb on freedom of speech. Not every restriction of speech is unequivocally tyrannical, but every open-ended law is.

Sir Keir’s intention to criminalise “Islamophobia in all of its forms” is unvarnished despotism in the absence of a precise and equitable definition of each form. Considering that vandalism laws already prohibit the abuse of public and religious buildings, and many different laws criminalise assault on person and property, the task of drafting such definitions won’t be easy.

I think the government should travel a well-trodden path and simply state that Islamophobia is anything any Muslim says it is. And never mind exponents of the other Abrahamic religions: Christians whose religion is routinely offended by all and sundry, and Jews who are attacked in our streets more often and more violently than Muslims (and usually by Muslims).

Just as long as we understand that what we are witnessing is an exercise in glossocratic tyranny, not genuine concern for the down-trodden. And in conclusion let me ask Sir Keir another question to struggle with: What’s a Muslim? And can a dark beard be seen as “perceived Muslimness”? Especially if sported by a woman, however defined?

I just wish he pondered such conundrums as far away from Westminster as possible. May I suggest Patagonia?

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan…// The proper study of Mankind is Man,” wrote Alexander Pope (d. 1774), a sublime Catholic poet touched by Protestant humanism and secular empiricism.

It’s wrong to demand philosophical rigour from a poem, even from An Essay on Man written by an exceptionally brilliant man. It’s even more wrong to yank two lines out of a long work and try to reach some conclusion on that basis.

But taking those two lines out of context, as a self-contained statement, one can still disagree most respectfully. If we “presume not God to scan,” I doubt we can succeed in “the proper study of Mankind”. Man alone provides an inadequate teaching tool.

When we study something, the object is usually to make it intelligible. My argument today is that religion alone can provide a useful cognitive tool for the study of man.

Physiologists, neurophysiologists, psychologists, jurists, political scientists can join forces to advance the understanding of the physical nature of man, his physiological needs, his interactions with others – the outer shell of a man’s life and its bouncing about the larger shell of society.

If you think that this is all there is to man, please read no further – these reflections aren’t for you. However, if you acknowledge the obvious fact that there is a mystery to man that goes beyond his physical life, then you’ve just opened the door to another cognitive universe.

All three Abrahamic religions ascribe this duality of man to his creation in the image and likeness of God. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation makes this lineage especially palpable: for some 33 years God lived as fully a man, while remaining fully God.

My contention is that no philosophy probably and no moral philosophy definitely can make man intelligible if it doesn’t start from this metaphysical premise. Many have tried; all have failed.

The religious doctrine of love goes back as far as history does. Two millennia before Christ, the commandment to love one’s enemy was written in Sumerian cuneiform, and in every possible alphabet since then. But only in Christianity did it take pride of place. Christ, speaking through Matthew, thundered above all other moral teachers because he was so much more than just a moral teacher.

Loving everyone, including those out to do us harm, seems a tall order. We are brought up to treat people with the respect they deserve, no less but also no more. Here we are told to treat people with the love they may not deserve, not ostensibly at any rate.

We’ve just touched the outer edge of the mystery hidden deep inside man, taken the first step through the open door of another world. There we realise that, though our respect for people is contingent on their individuality, our love for them isn’t.

It’s not their outer qualities that we are commanded to love but the mystery hidden deep inside them, one we all share alike, regardless of our virtue or lack thereof. Suddenly we realise that we are envoys to a world governed by physical causality and human laws from another world, one governed by love and freedom.

Once they’ve reached this realisation, hermetic monks withdraw from this world and its laws. Yet such religious heroes are few, as are all people endowed with exceptional gifts touching on genius. The rest of us have to live our lives within the confines of this world and its notion of justice.

But we aren’t talking about a how-to guide to virtuous behaviour. We are talking about making man intelligible, and that’s where natural and man-made laws fall short.

A society of men can’t be run solely on the Beatitudes, but when it’s run without any reference to them whatsoever, it ignores the metaphysical essence of man. That puts human laws into sharp inquisitory focus, and they often fail to pass muster.

The modern political philosophy of inalienable rights guaranteed by a social contract was the brainchild of Hobbes and especially Locke. Both thinkers made perfunctory references to God, but only for propriety’s sake, to use the language their audience expected.

Their ideas migrated to France and to the New World, where they were tersely encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence. It stated that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That was pure Enlightenment talk. The right to life is indeed a natural, God-given right whose exercise doesn’t impose any obligations on others and hence doesn’t require their consent. The right to liberty, on the other hand, is a political construct hinging on consensus and even definition. But “the pursuit of happiness” is especially interesting.

Contrary to the popular open-ended misinterpretation, this is a synonymous paraphrase of Locke’s term ‘the pursuit of estate’. This pursuit depends on the security of the estate gained, and indeed property rights are the cornerstone of modern political thought (this side of our Labour government, that is).

However, during the Civil War, the last act of the American Revolution, property rights clashed with the modern conviction that slavery is reprehensible. Southern planters referred to exactly the same Lockean scripture when arguing that abolitionism violated their property rights. In the end they lost the war but won the argument – assigning an absolute value to human rights in a secular context leads to an intellectual cul-de-sac.

The Southerners didn’t regard their Negro slaves as fully human, or even human at all. The morality of owning slaves was to them no different from the morality of owning livestock – they were blind to the metaphysical mystery residing in every man, no matter how poor, lowly and downtrodden. Their title to their slaves was as legal as their title to their cows, and that was all that mattered.

The Romans who developed an intricate legal code still in use throughout much of Europe saw no contradiction between their sage laws and chattel slavery. Moreover, not only did they own slaves but they also treated them with feral cruelty, of which gladiatorial fights were perhaps the mildest manifestation.

Their society was ruled by law, that of the contemporaneous Hebrews was ruled by religion. They too owned slaves, but they treated them more humanely and even set them free during anniversary years. Using our terminology, the Hebrews saw slave ownership as a leasehold, not a freehold. Religion offered them insights into the inner, metaphysical essence of man, the same for all at its core. Thus the Hebrews understood something the Romans didn’t – and acted accordingly.

When Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world, he left his listeners in no doubt that his kingdom was higher than this world. It also operates in much higher strata of intelligence, where everything secret – including the metaphysical essence of man – becomes manifest.

Therefore the proper study of mankind isn’t man but God for, without God, man will for ever remain unintelligible. Man has to reach beyond himself to understand himself, and I’ll leave you with this thought.