Category: Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.