Category: Blog

Over two million frustrated Britons have signed a petition to rerun the general election, and the number is climbing steeply. Considering that 70 per cent of the people think they are worse off under Labour, even the sky may not be the limit. (Only eight per cent think they are better off, and I bet they are all employed in the public sector.)

No other government in history has become so unpopular so fast. Just 18 weeks, and the people have had it with the Starmer gang. They want it to go.

In response, Sir Keir stated, correctly, that the system doesn’t work this way. You are stuck with us for several years now, he added, or words to that effect.

Looking at the dull-witted faces of Starmer, Reeves, Rayner, Lammy and other nincompoops currently running our country, one shudders with fear and revulsion. A flicker of expression only ever appears there when they bray for revenge against brighter people than they are, those who don’t rely on the state’s largesse to make their way in the world.

Starmer also insisted, without citing any evidence, that the signatories to the petition hadn’t voted Labour in the first place. He would say that, wouldn’t he? I have no evidence either that many Labour voters have changed their mind, but I’m sure it’s a safe bet.

This belated plebiscite is most welcome, but it does raise an inevitable question. What part of the carnage Labour are perpetrating on the economy and every walk of life wasn’t predictable at voting time?

Everybody with half a brain could have drawn a detailed picture well in advance, and many did (you must praise my stoic self-restraint in refusing to say I told you so). This though Starmer et al. were economical with particulars. But the general tone of vengeful Leftie animus was unmistakable. Feeble minds were coming together with an all-consuming ideology, which is the worst combination imaginable.

Labour inherited an economy groaning under the weight of taxation and regulations but still not doing so badly, relatively speaking. Unlike Germany and France, Britain didn’t look as if she was teetering at the edge of an abyss, with one leg hanging over.

That situation was sure to change under Labour, which was more predictable than the sun rising tomorrow morning (actually, that, according to Bertie Russell, wasn’t predictable at all). Yet people voted for them, and even some of my readers, who tend to be rather conservative, insisted that the useless Tories had to go.

This shows that even intelligent people may not vote responsibly. For the time has long since passed when we could talk about our politicians in terms of useless or useful. They are all, with minor and unlikely exceptions, more or less rotten.

But it matters whether it’s more or less, even if this line of thought is regrettably relativistic. Today’s political thought has excommunicated absolutes. We are for ever stuck with the evil of two lessers, but one lesser is usually more evil than the other.

You realise that I’m not delving into the far recesses of recondite political theory. I just wonder why voters can’t exercise basic common sense, something they are eminently capable of in most other activities.

If the problem isn’t symptomatic but, as I think, systemic, then we are in deep and permanent trouble. After all, our democracy run riot, with everyone over a certain age entitled to vote regardless of any other qualifications, depends on a responsible electorate with a modicum of sensibility.

Our electorate doesn’t meet this requirement, which is made clear by its voting pattern. No sensible person could have voted for this gaggle of idiots bent on revenge. All they are capable of is sabotaging everything they can reach: the economy, education, medical care, constitution, foreign relations, defence, controlled immigration, energy – sniping at Labour policies is like shooting fish in a barrel. You can’t miss, which is most unsporting.

So yes, I added my signature to the petition, a desperate exercise in futility. The law says that Parliament must respond to any petition with more than 100,000 signatories, but I’m not holding my breath. Considering the size of the majority our irresponsible electorate gave Labour, you aren’t getting any prizes for guessing what the response will be.

The system is fundamentally wrong, but I doubt that even a genius like Edmund Burke could have repaired it. His idea of democracy was that MPs should be the people’s representatives, not their delegates. When elected, they should act according to the people’s interests, not their wishes. And it’s their own conscience that should guide them in deciding how those interests can be best served.

Burkean democracy was perfect in the 18^th century, when the franchise was limited, Britain had a ruling class, and most politicians had trained for their mission from childhood. That’s how most of them saw politics: as a mission to serve people, not a career to serve themselves. They could indeed be trusted to look after the people’s interests – and to understand where such interests lay.

Unfortunately, a century of unlimited suffrage has corrupted not only the electorate but also the politicians. They must possess certain feral qualities to get to the top, but integrity and intelligence are not only unnecessary but, by the looks of it, contraindicated.

Yet the system, based on the ‘social contract’ first drawn up by the likes of Hobbes and Locke, keeps ticking on. I doubt the validity of that oft-used term, but one thing for sure: unlike any other contractual arrangement, this one has no stipulated termination clause.

Once they’ve cast their ballot, people have no legal recourse worth speaking of. A social contract can be made null and void only by violent civil disobedience, but that treatment is worse than the disease. Starmer and his merry friends know this, and they are smirking smugly.

It doesn’t matter whether that masturbatory petition collects two million signatures or twenty million. They can ignore it and do what they will: drive the economy into a recession if not depression, beggar people with double-digit inflation (yes, it’s coming), destroy every decent school, put farmers out of business, densely cover their vacated land with wind turbines and solar panels, render Britain disarmed in the face of her enemies.

We’ll look on helplessly, signing petitions, perhaps going on the odd march and bitching about our useless government. It won’t occur to many people that bitching – and thinking – should be done before the election, because afterwards it’ll be too late.

Even fewer will be those who’ll begin to question the very system that predictably delivers such abysmal results and, these days, hardly ever any other. We are simply not conditioned to think in such terms.

P.S. While I was writing this, the number of signatories climbed to 2.2 million, and I write fast. Even Michael Caine has signed it, but I’m still waiting for Vanessa Redgrave to do so.

We sometimes use certain phrases by rote simply because they naturally roll off the tongue. Some such phrases are meaningless, some are hackneyed, but some are worth pondering.

The term ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ is one such. It conveys a universe of constitutional meaning, with the question in the title offering a clue.

For the party with the second largest number of parliamentary seats is the opposition of His Majesty, not to His Majesty. Its full name, His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, makes this abundantly clear.

The opposition party fights political squabbles with the ruling one. The former is there to bring the latter to account, to keep it on the straight and narrow, preventing it from doing too much damage to His Majesty’s realm.

Yet both parties, or any others, remain equally loyal to the monarch who stands above partisan rough-and-tumble. That loyalty brings all parties – and all subjects – into a single entity, which makes the monarch a vital and constant presence as the lynchpin of Britain’s constitution.

If the Commons derives its legitimacy from the current generation of voters, the legitimacy of the Crown goes back so far that it disappears in the haze of time. Since we can’t pinpoint its origin to a single historical event, we might as well follow Burke’s and de Maistre’s recommendation and assume that the monarch’s remit comes from God.

Even if a single monarch may accede to the throne in the wake of a political upheaval, the institution itself sits above politics, as does the House of Lords (you realise of course that I’m talking about those institutions as they are supposed to be, not as what they’ve become as a result of perverse, often subversive, pressures).

This arrangement has been developed over many centuries by many sage men who understood what a true balance of power really means. It should suspend in equilibrium the interests of all classes, with none finding itself in a dominant position and all having their interests, if not necessarily their wishes, adequately protected and represented.

No republic, including the USA, can boast the same balance, although the term has much currency in America.

There it means the harmony of the three branches of government, executive, judiciary and legislative. However, two of those branches are elected and the third one is appointed and approved by the other two. None derives its power from birthright, which puts all three – indeed the whole state – at the mercy of political vicissitudes.

The balance of power in the American Republic is thus transient, constantly in a state of flux. Those manning the three branches are drawn from the same social and cultural pool of humanity, where the same interests are widely shared across the board.

They are even similar educationally: for example, more than half of US senators are lawyers by trade. There is nothing wrong with this in principle: it stands to reason that many of the people trusted to pass just laws should have a professional understanding of justice and legality. But it’s not the same balance of power that exists in our constitutional monarchy.

Both the ruling party and the opposition have an adversarial relationship with each other but not with the state, as headed and personified by the monarch. Such is the political atmosphere of our United Kingdom, and it can be poisoned by the toxic whiff of republicanism.

I haven’t had the fortune or misfortune of going through the system of British education, but the impression I get is that people who do haven’t been properly enlightened in the essence of our government.

Last summer I played a doubles match at my tennis club, followed by the ritual of a chat over a beer. Painfully aware as I am that I must keep my views to myself if I can ever hope to have doubles partners, I did more listening than talking.

Such uncharacteristic passivity helped me find out that all three of my fellow players were “against the monarchy”, as they put it. All three are middle-aged, middle-class gentlemen whose accents suggest minor public schools or at least comprehensives in upmarket neighbourhoods. Yet none of them realised that the phrase “against the monarchy” is fully synonymous with “against the British state”.

They seemed to think that the country would be better off if the head of state and both Houses of Parliament were elected. That way things would proceed as they always have, but better.

Unfortunately, such views seem to be shared by many members of the ruling party and, I suspect, even by some members of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, which makes it rather disloyal. A republican Britain wouldn’t be Britain.

Socialists of course hate any form of dynastic continuity, which is why they are so fanatically devoted to exorbitant inheritance taxation. They justify such subversion by dire fiscal shortage, but such feelings have more to do with visceral animus than any economic considerations.

It springs from the same anti-monarchy sentiments as those evinced by my tennis partners, who are fortunately in no position to act accordingly – unless of course republicanism reaches a certain critical mass in the country.

I doubt that will happen in my lifetime, although I’ve been unpleasantly surprised before. My hope is that Britons haven’t yet been so thoroughly corrupted that they’ll welcome opposition to, rather than of, His Majesty. Yet I am aware of powerful forces pulling in that direction.

In mediaeval Europe, serfs got their subsistence by cultivating a plot of land owned by their lord and master. In Russia serfdom survived until 1861, but Europe was more benign.

Queen Elizabeth I ended British serfdom in 1574. The French, however, were so attached to the institution that it was banned only in 1789, two centuries later.

But the longing for servage evidently remained, and it was so strong that serfdom has made an official comeback. Yesterday the French senate finally stopped beating about the buisson and passed a law forcing everyone to work one extra day a year without pay, or rather with the pay going straight into the government’s coffers.

What’s new about this innovation isn’t so much the concept as the honesty of its announcement. Anyone with a calculator at hand can calculate that anyway, if the government extracts 45 per cent of GDP in taxes, people work for the state until 13 June, only using what’s left of the year to provide for their families.

But at least the French government had been coy about this until yesterday. Now subterfuge has gone out of the window: tout le monde must devote one day a year to unvarnished servitude. This raises state control to a new height, although the French shouldn’t feel smug about this.

Our own government isn’t far behind in satisfying its extortionist urges: our GDP is looted to the tune of almost 44 per cent. Yet the perfidious British have so far refrained from announcing a day of serfdom with Gallic forthrightness.

This brings back fond memories of the Soviet Union, where wages and salaries didn’t exist at all. The words stayed in the vocabulary, but they in fact denoted the paltry crumbs tossed to the populace from the laden table of the state.

Everybody toiled for the state as its serfs, or slaves in all but name. The state then gave the masses a few pennies to keep body and soul together — or not, as the case might have been and often was.

In my day the usual starting salary of a university graduate was about 100 roubles a month, barely enough not to starve to death but not nearly enough to buy such luxuries as meat, fruit or clothes. The people responded the way slaves so often do, by going through the motions at work. “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work,” was the popular refrain.

Yet the pretence to pay was abandoned every year at harvest time, when thousands of university-educated Muscovites were sent to collective farms to help out the shorthanded peasants – and to redeem their hoity-toity sins through the honest goodness of unpaid physical labour.

That exercise in serfdom was par for the course in a totalitarian state buttressed by violent coercion. But today’s France, Britain and the rest of the West are different, aren’t they? Yes they are, for the time being. But the tendency towards closing that gap is unmistakable.

When you add up all the local levies, sales tax, parking charges and a whole raft of other hidden taxes, our governments extort upwards of 60 per cent of the economy for themselves. That’s no longer taxation. It’s confiscation.

Such is the state’s way of communicating to us that our money isn’t really ours. We may earn it, but the state has the power to decide how much we’ll be allowed to keep for our families.

This is actually the language used by politicians all over the West, which testifies both to their cynicism and our gullibility. When he was Chancellor, Gordon Brown would make frequent references to ‘letting’ people keep more of their incomes, citing such munificence as proof of his government’s generous nature and good intentions. The poor chap never realised that he was making a proclamation of tyranny as unequivocal as those made by Marx or Lenin. We can only let people keep what in fact belongs to us.

Free people don’t work for the state. They work for themselves and then kindly offer the state a tithe to maintain public services. This is exactly what they ought to be: the state should serve the people, not the other way around.

That’s why John F. Kennedy’s famous entreaty (“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!”) could only have impressed a modern society that was resigned to relinquishing much of its liberty.

Replace ‘country’ with ‘state’, and the exact reversal of this statement would have made more sense to anyone living in a free society. Wouldn’t you rather hear something like “Ask not how you can serve the state; ask how the state can serve you”? Wouldn’t this be closer to the principles on which all Western states were constituted?

We accept it as an inevitable fact of life that modern states don’t pay their way. They all spend more than they receive in tax revenue, covering the deficit by increasing the money supply through borrowing or printing. This produces inflation, which is another tax in disguise. Thus in 2022, when the inflation rate in Holland was 10 per cent, the Dutch were effectively paying that much more in taxes by another name.

Promiscuous public spending is justified by bien pensant nonsense about the state having to tax – in essence to rob – the more fortunate to look after the less fortunate. Such Robin Hood references can only fool those who don’t understand what’s really going on.

For we don’t just pay for state expropriations with money. We also pay with our freedom because, when the state does a lot for the people, it always does a lot to them.

Such is the inner imperative of all modern states, however they describe themselves. The state’s desire to lord it over the people supersedes everything, including its own laws and regulations.

Thus France’s deficit spending is currently twice the three per cent limit mandated by the EU as a condition for belonging to the euro. Yet I haven’t yet heard even a whisper of France being forced out of the common currency.

Whenever a total collapse beckons, Western governments sometimes try to curb their instincts and slow down the growth of public spending. When the Tories made that attempt a few years ago, it was called ‘austerity’ and savaged in the left-wing press.

Yet even conservatives used that misnomer without realising that’s what it was. Austerity properly means spending less, not spending more but at a slightly slower rate than before.

That’s why real austerity is taboo for modern governments. They are committed to growing their own power at the expense of people’s freedom, and confiscatory taxation along with rampant inflation are the control levers they hold in their hands.

The day of serfdom introduced by the French senate is a reminder of this situation and also a taste of things to come. The slope is getting more slippery by the day, and we are all sliding down at an ever-accelerating speed.

P.S. Learn something every day. I’m grateful to the media for adding a new word to my vocabulary: ‘demisexual’. Apparently it describes the quaint practice of establishing an emotional connection before rutting away. Now if that’s not perverse, I don’t know what is.

For St Augustine of Hippo, that wasn’t an either… or question. Yes, our life is predestined and yes, our will is free.

For sure, we make our free choices, but they don’t affect our salvation one way or the other. We are predestined to be saved or damned, and nothing we do can change the predetermined outcome.

There seems to be a conflict there, and I struggled with it for years. Eventually I think I found a way out that works for me, although some theologians may find my musings unsound – or worse.

Christianity is founded on the belief that Christ sacrificed himself to redeem our sins. But which sins? Surely not just a little boy telling his mother to shut up, or a fair maiden turning out not to be quite so maidenly?

Anyway, according to another basic tenet, all individual sins derive from the original collective one. So it was that sin that Christ redeemed by accepting an awful death.

This means that his sacrifice wiped man’s slate clean of the Fall and therefore of wholesale guilt. Yet since man demonstrably didn’t become pristine as a result, a second sin, Mark II as it were, must have replaced the first one.

Logically, this must have been the sin of rejecting Christ. That offence isn’t identical to original sin, though neither is it dissimilar to it. Both, after all, represent rejection of God: the first by disobeying and the second by failing to recognise him.

If Original Sin Mark I was disobedience and therefore rejection, then Mark II is rejection and therefore disobedience. The opposite of the second rejection is the kind of faith to which Paul, Augustine and Luther ascribed the sole justifying power.

But mankind in its entirety never rejected Christ. Some – arguably most – people did so, yet some – arguably few – didn’t. However small the second group might have been, it was made up of people who chose to belong to it of their own accord, thereby, if we follow this logic one step further, cleansing themselves of the new version of original sin. Hence the choice between acceptance and rejection can’t be collective. It has to be individual and it has to be free.

It stands to reason that a man could do nothing to redeem the collective Mark I; Christ’s sacrifice was necessary to achieve that. But it’s equally clear that a man can do something to redeem the individual Mark II.

Hence, whenever we demonise some people for belonging to a diabolical corporate entity, without proof of such membership or any individual wrongdoing, we dehumanise not only them but, by denying free will, all of mankind. A German who belonged to the SS was complicit in its atrocities, by association at least. But if one accuses an ordinary person who lived in Germany at the time, the accuser must bear the burden of concrete proof. The same goes for Russia and her KGB. Neither nations nor religions do murder; it’s people who do that.

One could still argue that, as the world at large demonstrably didn’t accept Christ, we may be slated for collective perdition. But what is undeniable for any Christian is that Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, and we are free to take that path or not.

Free will thus becomes the most important property of man, and it can only remain so if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one. In fact, if our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into puppets, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

What does that do to predestination then? We have to believe that God has far-reaching plans for the world in general and man in particular. Otherwise we’d fall into deism, which defies logic: it’s hard to believe that God lovingly created the world, only then to lose all interest in it.

Does this mean we are predestined after all? And if so, provided we aren’t entirely happy with Augustine’s explanation of it, how do we reconcile predestination with free will? If the former subsumes the latter, how can there be any freedom in the world?

Luther struggled with this problem, resorting to paradoxes such as, “If it were in any way possible to understand how God who is so wrathful and unjust can be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith.” Such meek intellectual surrender is odd, considering Luther’s character and his insistence on the self-sufficiency of every Christian in dealing with God.

One can sympathise with his problem. Nonetheless, we must still try to come to terms with it. After all, if we believe that it was God who gave us reason, we might as well explore this faculty to its maximum, which can’t be just the ability to calculate compounded interest.

The whole issue of predestination is rooted in the timelessness of God, as opposed to the temporal existence of man. This juxtaposition gave rise to the most elegant solution to our problem, that by the Spanish Counter-Reformation thinker Luis de Molina.

In effect, though he himself didn’t use this terminology, Molina linked the philosophical category of time with the grammatical category of tense. Our lives unfold within three basic tenses: Past, Present and Future. But God, being timeless, has only one tense: the Present Perfect.

What is ‘will be’ for us is ‘has been’ for God. This means that when he predestines each individual for salvation or damnation, God does so not arbitrarily but on the basis of the free choices he knows the individual will have made during his life – before he has actually made them within his earthly timeframe.

This line of thought makes free will trump predestination as a philosophical notion. Predestination, as defined by Molina, is hardly worth talking about; it may be simply taken for granted. If, like God’s omniscience, this concept is based on God’s timelessness, then it resides in the very definition of God.

Using our God-granted free will, we may choose to believe in God or not. But if we accept him, then we have to take the whole package, including predestination.

However, basing, as Luther and especially Calvin did, a complex theology on predestination means assigning to it undue importance. An attribute resident in a synthetic a priori definition hardly rates such distinction, and insisting that it does may in some quarters be regarded as heresy.

Free will, and freedom in general, on the other hand, becomes part of the definition of man, possibly the most important part. The freer we are, the more human and the more godly we are; the further we are removed from animals.

P.S. While we are on such arcane subjects, and before we go back to talking about Trump and Putin, let me run another thought by you.

According to the Bible, a man and a woman become one flesh when they marry. But they had been just that before Eve came out of Adam’s rib and eventually led him astray. In other words, before original sin a woman was contained within a man’s body and they were one flesh. Marriage thus constitutes a return to the pre-Fall state of affairs. One hopes this makes married people sinless, but experience reduces this hope to wishful thinking.

This is the only slogan I find palatable. For, contrary to a common misapprehension, it’s not the economy but ideology that drives modern European governments – all the way to disaster.

All ideologies are totalitarian by definition, in that they seek – overtly or surreptitiously – sway over every aspect of life. Any ideology is a deity that’s always athirst. Its adherents are ready to sacrifice everything at its altar: national security, social tranquillity, economic prosperity.

Another feature all ideologies share is that they are short of positive content. Whatever little they do have is distinctly secondary to the negative animus. This, however, is seldom advertised for public relations purposes.

Thus, when ideologues commit mass murder, they usually justify it by the pursuit of a greater good. That may be social justice, economic equality, religious or racial purity, supposedly threatened national survival – the possible ruses are endless. But ruses they all are. The only real purpose of mass murder is the murder of masses.

Modern European governments have refrained from genocide in my lifetime (I regard Russia as European only in geography, not in essence). But they are still ideological, and hence underhanded, in everything they do.

Anyone blessed with functional eyesight can detect the workings of an essentially socialist ideology behind the toing and froing of the European Union. Since any ideology can rise only from the ruins of the traditional order, its first aim is to create such ruins.

During the Third Punic War, Cato ended every speech in the Senate by saying: Carthago delenda est – Carthage must be destroyed. Replace Carthage with ‘Western tradition’, and any EU dignitary could say the same thing whenever he gets up to speak in Strasbourg or Brussels.

But they don’t. In common with other ideologues, they have refined the subterfuge of couching their doctrinaire aims in the jargon of economic benefits.

Ideology? What ideology?, they keep repeating, if not in so many words. We simply want to pool Europe’s resources to create widespread peace and prosperity. One country mines iron ore, another mines nickel, a third one produces the coal that fires up the steel mills in a fourth that then shares the steel around. What can possibly be wrong with such division of labour and economy of scale? Only one thing: this is just smoke and mirrors.

In 1952, one of the EU founders, Jean Monnet, summed it all up with frank cynicism: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Whenever this quotation is cited to disparage the EU, its advocates claim it’s apocryphal. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. One way or the other, no one can deny that the sentiment is true to life. The EU does all it can to create a pan-European superstate, while systematically damaging the European economies it ostensibly seeks to improve.

Socialism, for all its sharing-and-caring sloganeering, is all about rapaciously centralising power until it’s completely monopolised by the state. The EU, and most nations within it, are demonstrably moving in this direction. And any observer of modern history will know that economic benefits are bound to fall by the wayside all along such a journey.

One slogan inscribed on EU banners is ‘autonomy from the United States’. Anti-Americanism is one button Europeans like to push to produce a desired response. We don’t do things the American way, they announce proudly. That much is true; they don’t.

Thus, though the EU economy was $3 trillion bigger than the US one in 1990, it’s now smaller, even though the EU has 100 million more people. This isn’t to say that the US is free from the socialist contagion. She isn’t. But it’s less virulent there.

Socialism is all about power, and power must be projected. The way a central government goes about that task is suffocating the economy with extortionist taxes and countless regulations, with no regard for the consequences.

Go no further than this observation when trying to explain why America prospers while Europe stagnates – this even during the four years of Biden’s quasi-socialist administration. In the past five years, the EU has outscored the US almost three to one in regulations passed. Add to this probably as many again courtesy of national governments, and you’ll see why the EU is growing only geographically, but not economically.

Another factor is energy costs, which are almost three times as high in Europe. That gap will grow even wider when Trump acts on his credible promise to increase the production of hydrocarbons by boosting exploration, drilling and fracking.

Europe, meanwhile, remains fanatically loyal to the net-zero subset of the overarching destructive ideology. Like all such urges, this is impervious to any outdated arguments based on reason and facts.

It’s pointless telling the Eurocrats that there is no scientific basis for that madness whatsoever. You can cite any number of facts, such as that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known lifespan, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide only has a minuscule effect on climate, if any. They won’t hear because they don’t want to.

They know that hydrocarbons have fuelled the West’s prosperity. That’s exactly the problem – socialists are ideologically committed to decrying prosperity for others, while enjoying it for themselves. That’s why the Germans shut down all their nuclear power stations just as cheap Russian gas stopped firing up their socialist self-righteousness.

The unceasing offensive against nuclear energy is another proof of the ideology behind climate madness. After all, nuclear reactors don’t produce CO2 emissions. They generate abundant and clean energy whose supply isn’t affected by windless, overcast days.

Our own socialists have the same urges. That’s why Starmer and his ministers barely conceal their desire for Britain to, in their jargon, “establish closer ties with the EU”, but in fact to rejoin it as a supplicant, if not as a full member.

There have been periods, most notably in the 1970s, when belonging to the pan-European club could confer some economic benefits, if no other. But seeking membership at this time is too stupid even for our Westminster lot.

But they don’t voice such intentions for any rational reasons, however misguided. They are tropistically reaching out to their ideological comrades on the continent. Their shared brand of socialism calls for expansion ad infinitum, and certainly beyond national borders. That’s all that really matters.

Let’s not be too beastly to socialist ideologues, or rather let’s not single them out for special opprobrium. A good ideology is an oxymoron. All ideologies are equally bad, and they defy their etymology by having nothing in common with ideas. They reside in the viscera, not the mind.

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When we try to define something, we must first single out its unique features, rather than those it shares with many other things.

A tricycle resembles a plane in that they are both made of metal, transport people and have three wheels. However, someone offering that explanation to a visiting alien, without mentioning that planes fly, wouldn’t be almost right or half-right. He’d be mad.

Yet it’s astounding how many intelligent people ignore this simple logical trick when trying to get their heads around Christianity. An epistolary exchange between Nancy Mitford and her good friend Evelyn Waugh is quite telling in that regard.

“How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” wrote Mitford. “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,” Waugh replied. “Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

Waugh’s riposte was a good answer to a bad question. For Mitford’s remark shows a woeful misunderstanding common to most intelligent atheists. Above all, she expected Christianity to make its communicants morally better. And if that manifestly didn’t work, it was the religion she blamed, not the communicant.

Christianity may indeed have a meliorating effect on some people, but that’s not what it’s about. There does exist such a thing as Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) morality, but it’s corollary to the faith’s essence, not the essence itself.

A greater writer than Mitford, Tolstoy, based his whole philosophy on the same mistake, reducing Christianity to its moral teaching or, even narrower, just the Sermon on the Mount. This made him perhaps the world’s most influential thinker in the first decade of the 20^th century, because that’s what the world wanted to hear. But a solid intellectual structure can’t be built on the wobbly foundation of a conceptual error.

Tolstoy’s falsification of Christianity made him “the mirror of the Russian revolution”, in Lenin’s phrase. It also made him talk nonsense on a vast range of subjects – half of the 50 volumes he left behind are taken up with essays, with nary a sound thought anywhere (for details, see my book God and Man According to Tolstoy, if you can find it).

The morality of our religion is called Judaeo-Christian because the Decalogue is an essential part of the Christian canon. Jesus merely added a few touches to the Ten Commandments: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I tell you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

For most neophytes and non-believers the morality of loving one’s enemy presents a stumbling block. If asked to identify the unique feature of Christian morality – or, for that matter, of Christianity – this is the one they mention first.

That’s as if a tricycle has just soared up in the air and flown to a faraway destination. For there is nothing about that commandment that is uniquely Christian.

For example, try to identify this dictum: “He who has done evil unto thee, repay him with good.” Sounds just like Matthew 5:44, doesn’t it? Yet this pre-Christian Beatitude was written in Sumerian cuneiform some 2,000 years before Christ.

Many ancient religions and moral codes contained commandments identical to Judaeo-Christian ones. Thus the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, wrote this in the 18^th century BC: “The strong shall not injure the weak.”

And the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl instructed his adherents in the same Christian vein: “Dress the naked, feed the hungry; remember that their flesh is even like thy flesh, that they are such as even thou art; love the weak because he too is in God’s image.”

In fact, the longer we look at the religious thought that either preceded Christianity or developed concurrently with it, the more similar elements we’ll find.

In common with Buddhism, Christianity accepted that man is sinful (though not originally created that way).

In common with Platonism it postulated an ideal world beyond our earthly reach.

In common with Judaism it saw the world as the creation of one God.

In common with Philo (roughly Jesus’s contemporary) and other Hellenised Jews of Alexandria it defined Logos as God’s creative force. In fact long before John’s Gospel, Plato and the Jewish Platonists of Egypt used the word Logos to describe a self-differentiating divine unity, giving Gibbon an opening for one of his many anti-Christian jibes (to the effect that St John’s revelation had been taught in Alexandria four hundred years before it was written down).

If it were possible to reduce Christianity to its morality, we could still be worshiping An the Sumerian, Marduk the Babylonian or Quetzalcoatl the Mexican. Yet if we obstinately insist on forgoing an ancient temple for a church, we must do so in the full knowledge that, however important Christian morality is, it’s not what we worship.

The only aspect of Christianity that is unquestionably unique to it is the person of Jesus Christ, Logos made flesh, a triune God whose one hypostasis became man, accepted death to redeem the sins of the world, resurrected on the third day and showed a path to life everlasting.

If you read the Nicaean Creed, that’s what Christianity is. Nothing more, nothing less. The rest is commentary, in Rabbi Hillel’s phrase.

Courtesy of Tolstoy and other falsifiers, the word ‘Christian’ has expanded its meaning so much that it burst at the seams. People began to use it in the meaning of ‘good person’, which is a harmful solecism.

A Christian may or may not be a good person, and a good person may or may not be a Christian. A tricycle doesn’t fly, a child doesn’t pedal an airliner, and a Christian is someone who believes – and venerates – every word of the Creeds. What’s there not to understand?

Finally, after almost three years of Russia pummelling Ukrainian cities with every manner of bomb and missile, Joe Biden has magnanimously allowed the Ukraine to hit Russian targets with long-range ATACMS rockets.

The question every opponent of Russian fascism is asking is: “What took you so long?” Yet this isn’t what Trump’s people, including his son Donald Jr., are saying.

“The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives,” tweeted Don Junior, repeating the Kremlin line almost verbatim.

That war is already under way, Don, and it’s no use pretending it isn’t. And it’s Putin’s Russia, not “the Military Industrial Complex” that has started it.

According to David Sacks, a major donor to the Trump campaign, Biden’s decision violates the sacred tenets of American democracy: “President Trump won a clear mandate to end the war in Ukraine. So what does Biden do in his final two months in office? Massively escalate it.”

I’d suggest Mr Sacks brush up on constitutional law. Then he’d know what the words he used, “in office”, actually mean. To save him time, I’m on hand to help out.

The US Constitution doesn’t provide for an interregnum, with no president at the helm. Joe Biden may be a lame duck president, but a president nonetheless. He remains in office until 20 January, and he enjoys all the powers the office confers.

As for Trump’s “clear mandate”, I’m not aware that ending the war was a key part of his campaign. Most of the people who voted for him did so in the realistic hope that the economy would become more robust and the border more secure.

That’s what Trump campaigned on, and he outlined some of the ways, most of them sound, in which he’d act on his promises. He did make some noises about stopping the war in an hour, a day or a week, can’t remember which. But, a few noncommittal hints apart, he never said how he planned to do that, nor what kind of end he found desirable.

His voters didn’t give two flying rockets about the Ukraine, and I’m not sure they can tell it apart from the UK. All in all, Trump did win a clear mandate, but not to let Russia pound the Ukraine with impunity.

Nor did Biden “massively escalate” the war. He only did something he should have done almost three years ago: remove some of the shackles from a country defending Europe from fascism on the march. If he did so to make it harder for Trump to force the Ukraine’s surrender, so much the better.

Until now, the US has pursued a palliative approach to supporting the Ukraine. Every bit of military materiel the US supplied was gauged against the potential risk of escalation, all the way to a nuclear holocaust.

Somehow, it was only the Ukraine that was deemed capable of escalation. Russia’s carpet bombing of residential areas, targeting the energy infrastructure in the hope of Ukrainians freezing to death, large-scale murder, rape and looting of civilians – indeed her very unprovoked predatory assault on the Ukraine – didn’t constitute escalation. The victims fighting back did.

Now the Russians have pushed escalation even further by using foreign troops. It’s good to see that Putin enjoys such an intimate relationship with Kim. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are, goes a Spanish proverb. That, decided Biden, was the last straw.

ATACMS missiles have a range of 186 miles, which makes them long-range only in a manner of speaking. They are far from being doomsday weapons capable of hitting the Kremlin.

They may help the Ukrainians to strike at the airfields and missile sites from which the Russians hurl death at the victims of their aggression. If that is escalation, I say bring it on.

That Biden is motivated by political rather than humanitarian considerations is fairly obvious. If he felt the urge to save Ukrainian lives, he would have removed his injunction earlier. But what motivates Trump and his people, all of whom are in favour of ending the war on Putin’s terms?

I singled out a few names two days ago (http://www.alexanderboot.com/birds-of-a-feather-2/), but, from Trump down, such sentiments are unanimous. His administration will force the Ukraine to sue for peace on pain of losing US supplies altogether.

Now, I can’t judge how decisive the use of ATACMS missiles will be. Such judgements are best left to experts. In my layman view, the hope there isn’t that the Ukraine will win the war but that she’ll be able to negotiate better peace terms.

But I can absolutely guarantee that Putin and his gang will regard any pro-Russian peace treaty, along the lines of what Trump may have in mind, as just a breather.

Putin may accept a chunk of Ukrainian territory in exchange for a ceasefire, but he isn’t after more land. He already has more than he knows what to do with. Putin is after restoring the Soviet empire to its past toxic grandeur, which means wiping the Ukraine off the map as a sovereign state.

The Soviet empire included three tiers: the 15 constituent Soviet republics proper, Eastern European colonies, and ‘finlandised’ neutrals, such as Austria and, well, Finland. All the countries drawn into that orbit are keenly aware of the menace they face.

That’s why Finland hastily joined NATO, something that had been out of the question for decades. That’s why Poland too supports the Ukraine with all she has got, while fortifying her own eastern border and rapidly beefing up her armed forces. The Finns and the Poles know what they are dealing with – they’ve had plenty of opportunity to learn.

The question is, When will the West learn? That sand in which some Western leaders hide their heads, ostrich-like, may soon get red hot. And yes, the way to prevent that is to negotiate with Putin – but from a position of strength.

The Ukraine is unlikely to occupy that position on her own, or even with Western aid. But if ATACMS missiles help her reach approximate parity, not only she but all of us will be better off. These rockets are a factor of de-escalation, but I don’t expect Trump and his people to understand this.

Regular visitors to this space know that I’m not an unequivocal admirer of Donald Trump. However, credit where it’s due, I have to praise some of his policies.

For example, his contempt for net-zero madness strikes a tingling chord of sanity in many a wounded heart. Even if Trump doesn’t manage to whip some sense into other countries, committing America to a bright hydrocarbon future is bound to have an invigorating knock-on effect on all of us.

As the US drills and fracks her way back to energy autonomy, oil prices will collapse globally, making things cheaper all over. By way of side benefit, Russia’s aggressive potential will be degraded, and assorted Middle Eastern tyrants will find it harder to blackmail the West.

Also, Trump’s intention to streamline central government comes straight out of the conservative – which is to say sensible – playbook. His success in that area would ease inflationary pressures on the economy, for it’s excessive public spending that’s chiefly responsible for inflation. It would also curb the meddling instincts of federal bureaucrats, which would have all sorts of positive effects, and not just economic ones.

The numbers Trump cites when talking about the scale and effect of such cutting strike me as a bit fanciful, but there is no denying that on that subject his heart is in the right place. Whether or not he and Elon Musk will be able to do what they intend is something else again.

They may find, as many before them have found, that the so-called deep state is quite resilient. Its core is surrounded by abattises and moats keeping interlopers at bay. Such defences have so far proved impregnable. For example, a similar offensive by the Reagan administration got stuck in the quagmire of federal bureaucracy.

The problems come not only from the necessary scope of changes – and it’s massive – but also from the time available for making them. Barring a constitutional upheaval, Trump only has four years at his disposal to cut the federal bureaucracy down to size, which makes him a man in a hurry.

Yet even with the best will in the world, haste seldom makes anything other than waste. An attempt to blow up an edifice that has taken at least a century to construct has to produce a toxic fallout that ideally should be spread over a lofty timeline. Cutting in one fell swoop whole departments employing hundreds of thousands of paper pushers may create shockwaves of chaos, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that these could be attenuated quickly.

Still, if Trump is serious about this, and I think he is, we should all wish him as much luck as he is going to need. Who knows, if America prospers by a decisive shift from centralism to localism, her example may even inspire Europe to mitigate its own affection for socialism, although that hope is slight.

Going hand in hand with reducing the inordinate size and wilful incompetence of federal agencies is Trump’s sincere commitment to cutting taxes. As a practical man of action, and one who has felt the lifetime noose of taxation on his own neck, Trump doesn’t need Arthur Laffer to instruct him on the destructive effects of extortionate levies.

He knows that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher tax revenue, but they inevitably produce lower productivity, slower business activity and eventually stagnation. In modern, variously socialist, economies, taxation is anyway more punitive than economic. It is a weapon of class war, its battering ram. And say what you will about Trump, but a socialist he isn’t.

However, his plan of firing the first salvo in trade war will undo all the good things he hopes to achieve. Trump’s hands-on experience in economic activity didn’t prepare him for tackling the issue of tariffs, and he has little education to plug the gaping holes in his knowledge.

His plan of introducing 20 per cent tariffs on all imports (60 per cent on Chinese ones) is a three-foot blanket covering a six-foot body. If you pull it over your cold feet, the rest of you will freeze.

By protecting malfunctioning industries the state diverts to them the resources that could be more profitably spent to bolster others. By resources I don’t mean state subsidies – those are usually counterproductive – but the natural flow of capital from end user (other industries or consumer) to manufacturer.

Saved from more successful competitors, the protected industry loses incentives to lower the price of its products and improve their quality. Prices go up, inflation follows in their wake, the net effect on jobs and overall prosperity is negative.

The theory of this was established by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”

Now, Trump doesn’t strike me as an avid reader of economic theory or anything else. But he should heed the voice of practical experience, including his own in his first term.

This will tell him that the mantra of saving American jobs by protectionism simply doesn’t wash this side of demagoguery. Dominic Lawson helpfully provides the numbers in today’s Times:

“Take the example of Trump’s 2018 steel tariffs, designed to preserve jobs in US steel manufacturing. Unfortunately there were more than 12 million jobs in US industries that used steel in their production process – and whose costs soared. A 2020 report by the US Federal Reserve board of governors suggested the steel and aluminium tariffs were linked to a loss of 75,000 US manufacturing jobs; there had been an increase of only about 1,000 in ‘protected’ US steelmaking jobs.”

Edmund Burke, whom Trump probably hasn’t read either, also wrote about the deadly effect of state interference in the economy: “The moment that government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted.”

And a government kicking off trade war doesn’t just “appear at market”. It barges in with destructive force. Hence catchphrases like “Buy American” or “Buy a foreign car, put 10 Americans out of work” may work as bumper stickers or campaign slogans, but they are economically illiterate.

I wonder if Trump actually realises that his lifelong affection for protectionist tariffs is at odds with his professed commitment to free markets. If he doesn’t, I hope his advisers explain the facts of life to him before it’s too late.

If he sets off a global trade war, the casualty rate will be appalling everywhere, including the US. After all, some 60 per cent of global GDP is generated by world trade. Throw a monkey wrench into those works, and there will be no winners. We’ll all be part of collateral damage.  

The first time I ever predicted an election result was a fortnight before 5 November. Trump will win, I said on a New York podcast, and he’ll win big.

Now, like a freshly deflowered virgin who enjoyed her first tryst, I’m encouraged to continue in the same vein. So here it is: there is no way the Senate will approve all of Trump’s picks for cabinet and staff positions.

I know it, all 100 senators know it and, most important, Trump knows it. Say what you will about the president-elect, but he isn’t short of street smarts. So why so many doomed picks?

One gets the impression that Trump wants to thumb his nose at the Washington establishment, even if it’s largely Republican. I can beat you all with one arm tied behind my back, he seems to be saying with his usual pugnacity.

Even if he loses one or two of his nominees, the message will have got home: the president will barge full speed ahead and damn the political torpedoes. So which ones will he lose?

I’m not going to venture a guess because there are several enticing possibilities. But in general one gets the impression that Trump doesn’t just want sycophantic loyalists. He wants sycophantic loyalists who reflect aspects of himself. His picks are an exercise in amour propre.

Thus two of his nominees have been accused of, though not charged with, sex crimes. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s choice for Attorney General, has been implicated in a scandal involving sex trafficking and statutory rape. And Pete Hegseth, his nomination for Defence Secretary, was investigated for sexual assault in 2017.

Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but the Senate isn’t a jury of one’s peers. It may well punish candidates simply on suspicion of scandal. Now, I find it hard to believe that Trump’s team missed such little peccadilloes when vetting candidates. More likely is that Trump actually wants to pick a fight, win, lose or draw.

Some of his other picks are guilty of things worse than suspected sexual impropriety. For example, his choice for Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reminds us of the small step separating unorthodox from unhinged.

Mr Kennedy is clearly incapable of holding his views to the most rudimentary tests of factual veracity and sound logic. This isn’t surprising in someone who spent his youth in a narcotic haze. Kennedy’s CV includes several arrests for marijuana possession and one felony conviction for possession of heroin.

Trump said Kennedy is “a very talented guy and has strong views” who will “go wild on health”. I’m not sure about the talent part, but, considering Kennedy’s “strong views”, one can’t gainsay going wild.

He has never seen a conspiracy theory he couldn’t take on faith. An anti-vaxxer of long standing, Kennedy has stated that no childhood vaccines, including those against polio, are effective and all of them drive up autism rates.

There is absolutely no evidence of even correlation there, never mind causation. It is, however, a fact that the polio vaccine reduced the number of reported cases from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.

On this basis, one can trust Kennedy’s self-diagnosis of having had a part of his brain eaten by some mysterious parasitic worm. That deficit of grey matter may also account for his belief that fluoride in drinking water makes children autistic, while herbicides in their food make them transsexual.

Many commentators raised serious doubts about Covid-19 vaccines, but Mr Kennedy opted for insane ones. The virus, according to him, was part of a dastardly conspiracy with racial objectives. It was specially designed to target black and Chinese people, while sparing Jews.

And speaking of viruses, it’s not HIV that causes AIDS. Kennedy has been reluctant to name the real culprit, but he wasn’t so reticent about Wi-Fi that, according to him, causes cancer. Sorted. Mystery solved.

As a general principle, Kennedy believes in voodoo medicine that relies on remedies unsupported by any clinical evidence. As to the drugs boasting such support, they should have no role to play in the health of the nation. Thus the announcement of Mr Kennedy’s nomination instantly sent tremors through the pharmaceutical industry, with its shares taking a headlong plunge.

And naturally his views on Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine must make Trump grin like the Cheshire Cat. That conflict, explains Kennedy, is in fact, “a US war against Russia” deliberately provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion. That was done specifically to “sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons.”

The Ukraine, insists Kennedy, shouldn’t be admitted into NATO, but Russia should. After all, Russians living in the Ukraine are “being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government”.

I share Mr Kennedy’s antipathy for the neocons but, should he find himself sitting at cabinet meetings next to Marco Rubio, a neocon par excellence and Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, he’d have to temper such feelings. Sen. Rubio, incidentally, voted to stop all US aid for the Ukraine.

My parents taught me to be chivalrous towards women, but I still can’t resist the temptation of treating Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nomination for Director of National Intelligence, as an out-and-out nutter.

Now, call me a racist and report me to the Equality Commission, but I have problems with candidates taking the oath of office on a copy of Bhagavad Gita, not the Bible. I appreciate Miss Gabbard’s multicultural background, but I question the suitability for the top intelligence role of someone raised on the Vaishnava Hindu tenets of karma and those promoted by the International Society of Krishna Consciousness.

Moving from the general to the specific, she goes even further than Kennedy in viewing Russia from Putin’s perspective. Thus media freedom in Russia is, according to her, “not so different” from that in the US.

Yes, we all bemoan the diminution of free speech in the West, which is indeed deplorable. However, it takes either a cosmically stupid individual, or else a Putin agent, to claim parity with Russia in that respect.

Does Miss Gabbard know that all Russian media are forced to function exclusively as propaganda outlets, and that the slightest disagreement with Putin’s policies is a shortcut to draconian prison sentences? If she doesn’t know that, she doesn’t belong in the intelligence services. If she does know and still says it, she belongs in the loony bin.

And of course the war in the Ukraine “could have easily been avoided if NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of Nato.”

One such concern, insisted Miss Gabbard in unison with Putin’s propaganda, was that the Ukraine has secret laboratories developing American biological weapons. That’s cloud-cuckoo-land. Also, in 2022 the Ukraine was still years, not to say decades, away from any hope of NATO membership.

Then what are Putin’s other “legitimate security concerns”, as opposed to illegitimate ones? That NATO would launch a massive unprovoked strike on Russia?

If Miss Gabbard genuinely believes that’s a possibility, she ought to have her head examined. No, hold that. I’ve already conducted that examination vicariously and found her either deranged or stupid or at least bone ignorant. A perfect candidate to head all US intelligence, in other words.

Add to this list of nominees Mike Waltz, chosen by Trump as his National Security Adviser, and you’ll see that all of them support his apparent intention to twist the Ukraine’s arm into agreeing to end the war on Russia’s terms.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk who, while cutting public-sector waste, will try to populate Mars with millions of colonists, fill roads with nothing but self-drive Teslas and implant AI electrodes into people’s brains to make them almost as intelligent as Mr Musk.

None of them will be blocked by the Senate for political reasons alone. Some of them, however, may be denied Senate approval because they aren’t quite mentally sound. So why, apart from the possible reasons I cited above, did Trump put them forth?  The title of this article should give you some clue.

Supporters of free enterprise über alles would be well advised to take a broader look at society. This would enable them to see that although competitive free enterprise may be a necessary condition for civilised society, it’s certainly not a sufficient one.

For one thing, men at the cutting edge of free enterprise don’t believe in competition. Quite the opposite, they’d like to nip it in the bud by bankrupting every business but their own.

A free entrepreneur par excellence usually can exist today only in a start-up mode, or else at the level of a corner sandwich shop. Once his business has become successful, his thoughts gravitate towards putting an end to competitive activity. He wants to put the competition out of business.

At that end of economic thought he is greeted with a fraternal embrace by his brother the democratic bureaucrat who, for his part, used to believe in pluralism while he was clawing his way up the party ladder. Now he has reached the top, pluralism means only one thing to him: a threat to his position. The modern brothers instantly recognise their kinship and have no difficulty in striking a corporatist partnership.

Free enterprise in the West today occupies about the same slot as it did in Lenin’s Russia during the New Economic Policy (NEP). Faced with an economic collapse and mounting famines, Lenin allowed most of the service sector as well as some small-scale manufacturing to go private. But what he described as the “commanding heights of the economy”, which is to say banks, heavy industry, foreign trade, large-scale manufacturing, exploration and control of natural resources, remained firmly in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Replace ‘Bolsheviks’ with ‘the bureaucratic corporatist élite’, and today’s situation in the West isn’t a million miles away. For all the Sherman Acts and Monopolies Commissions in the world, big business has to gravitate towards monopoly – one of the few things Marx got right. That is, he was right in his observation but not in his explanation.

A modern businessman has a psychological need to achieve total control of his market in the same way, and for the same reasons, that a modern politician wishes to achieve total control of his flock. Class has no role to play here – one of the many things Marx got wrong.

Modern man prays at the altar of uniformity, and he melts down any class differences until they are reduced to quaint idiosyncrasies. Every class of philistine modernity tends to gravitate towards an amorphous middle. In today’s Britain, for example, the differences between ‘the proles’ and ‘the toffs’ seldom go deeper than the clothes they wear.

What also drives the modern ‘free’ businessman towards monopoly is the same utilitarian impulse that paradoxically drives many aristocrats towards socialism: they know that putting the clamps on the socially dynamic strata of the population will prevent any serious competition appearing. Here the entrepreneur’s longings converge with those of his employees who tend to act as a collectivist bloc.

Their motivation is old-fashioned envy coupled with the deep-seated belief that it’s possible for some to rise only at the expense of others falling. By the same token, the ruling bureaucracy has a vested interest in keeping businesses as large, and consequently as few, as possible for this will make control easier and more total.

In short, the only people who do believe in unvarnished free enterprise are big businessmen waiting to happen, those who are still climbing towards the summit and don’t want their rope cut. Once they’ve got to the top, they’ll realise the error of their ways and start acting accordingly.

Another dynamic at work here is a tendency towards the globalisation of business, closely following a similar trend in modern politics. Like modern life in general, business tends to lose its national roots. In the absence of protectionist tariffs, known to be counterproductive at least since the time of David Ricardo, an aspiration to monopoly drives a big business towards foreign expansion ad infinitum, which is another form of protectionism but one that doesn’t provoke retaliation in kind.

This megalomania, along with a tendency to dissipate ownership by financing expansion through stock market flotation, leads to a situation where ‘free enterprise’ becomes neither free nor entrepreneurial. The ‘capitalist’, Marx’s bogeyman, is eliminated in philistine modern societies as efficiently as he used to be shot in nihilist ones.

Most international corporations are neither run nor controlled by capitalists, if we define the breed as the owners of capital (or of ‘the means of production’). That type, rather than having been created by the Industrial Revolution, was killed by it, albeit by delayed action.

Today’s captains of industry don’t necessarily own the capital of which they dispose, and they don’t live or die by their success or failure. The risks they venture are usually taken with other people’s money, and they stand to gain untold fortunes by achieving success, while personally risking next to nothing in case of failure. If they fail, they take the king’s ransom of redundancy and either move on to the next bonanza or, should they so choose, retire to a paradise of philistine comfort.

Qualities required for a rise through modern corporations are different from those needed in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. They are, however, close to those required for careers in government bureaucracies.

This is partly due to the growing disparity between the ever-expanding outlook of the management and the ever-narrowing outlook of the specialists who make the products. In the old days, someone who designed bridges could advance to the next rung in his company by demonstrating ability. Once he got there, he continued to design bridges, but with added responsibilities.

People at the top rung would thus come from the same stock as those several steps below, although their duties would be different. Not so modern corporations. Growing specialisation creates a different situation: the people in production represent a different breed from those in the boardroom. The latter are hardly ever drawn from the former.

Most leaders of giant modern corporations come from legal, sales or marketing, rather than manufacturing, backgrounds. Curiously, when Marx wrote Das Kapital, the gulf between workers and management could still be bridged by hard work and ingenuity. The industrial conditions imagined by Marx were in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy: it’s only when some of his ideas were acted upon that an unbridgeable chasm appeared between the corporatist management and the narrowly specialised labour force.

Even as the governments of philistine modernity grow more corporatist, so, tautologically, do actual corporations. A new élite is thus formed, and it’s a homogeneous group whose members are indistinguishable from one another regardless of whether their original background was business or politics. Hence the ease with which they switch from the corporate to the government arena and back, especially if they come from the international end of either.

The spiritual father of the breed was Walter Rathenau, Managing Director of German General Electric in the 1920s. One of the leading theoreticians and practitioners of corporate socialism, he prophesied that, “The new economy will… be… a private economy [which] will require state co-operation for organic consolidation to overcome inner friction and increase production and endurance.”

Here was the original politician cum tycoon, and there was poetic justice when he was murdered in 1922, 11 years before his dream became a reality in Germany, and by the same people who made it so.

As ever, my interest here is primarily linguistic and taxonomic.

The old terms, such as ‘capitalist’, ‘proletarian’ or ‘worker’ no longer mean much and certainly nothing of what they meant a century ago. Witness Starmer’s difficulty when he was asked to define ‘working people’ (those he promised, falsely, would be exempt from his extortionist tax hikes).

Although Starmer isn’t a bright man, even he sensed that 19^th century terminology sounds like a ludicrous anachronism in the 21^st century. And because he isn’t a bright man, he couldn’t propose a non-Marxist lexicon to justify his Marxist longings. Mind you, that task may defeat even cleverer people than him.