Category: Blog

On 27 September, 2024, the US Department of Defence issued a document that went largely unnoticed in Britain. America, on the other hand, is abuzz with troubled – some will say alarmist – comments.

No wonder. Called DOD Directive 5240.01, the document gives every indication of a country preparing to go to civil war. In broad strokes, the Directive makes the vast bank of military intelligence data available to civil law enforcement.

It also explicitly states that, under certain circumstances, the armed forces can be called upon to quell civil unrest, by lethal force if necessary. This effectively invalidates the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which removed the military from civil law enforcement.

The Act was deemed necessary during the Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the army was widely used against obstreperous American citizens and went about its task with a hand too heavy for some tastes.

When I wrote “explicitly states”, it was a figure of speech. The Directive is so loaded with legalese jargon that little about it is really explicit. One has to decipher the obtuse cant to prise the kernel of meaning out of the jumbled prose.

Legal terminology can be used to elucidate the precise meaning of every word, but also to obfuscate it. The second stratagem often serves to leave the message open-ended, allowing room for interpretation and also for convenient disclaimers.

One such was offered by Pentagon spokesman Sue Gough (yes, I gather she isn’t a man, but verbal probity takes priority over woke virtue). Her press release stated that: “The policies concerning the use of force by DOD addressed in DoDD 5240.01 are not new, and do not authorise the DOD to use lethal force against U.S. citizens or people located inside the United States, contrary to rumours and rhetoric circulating on social media.”

Having cast a quick glance over that disclaimer, a resurrected William Shakespeare would say: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”. Indeed, such denials by the Pentagon are extremely rare. So rare, in fact, that one smells a giant rat running around trapped among the building’s five corners.

I may be missing some fine points but, as I read the Directive, it seems to do exactly what Miss Gough says it doesn’t do. Here are a couple of salient points.

According to the document, the Secretary of Defence can approve “assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality, or any situation in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury.”

Those chaps do have a way with words, don’t they? But to this unbiased reader, the text is unequivocal. The US Army is authorised to help out the police by firing at misbehaving Americans. This, in a country that’s always at pains to point out that even intelligence agencies such as the CIA have no jurisdiction within the country.

I don’t know about the CIA, but military intelligence, including the vast resources of the National Security Agency that can give you chapter and verse of every phone chat you’ve ever enjoyed, can now be used to spy on US citizens.

Perhaps I’m misreading the directive – I did tell you its language is at times impenetrable. But it does provide for “Defence Intelligence Component intelligence assistance to any Federal department or agency, including a Federal law enforcement agency, or to a State or local law enforcement agency when lives are in danger.”

Let’s remark parenthetically that the reference to situations “when lives are in danger” leaves much room for arbitrary interpretation. A stampeding crowd of unarmed protesters, for example, may conceivably trample people to death. Does this mean the DIC may forewarn the army about the protest march, with the latter then going in with guns blazing?

That’s how the much maligned conspiracy theorists read it. Thus, for example, Robert F. Kennedy, who upset his august family by his apostasy from the sainted Democratic Party: “… Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power –  for the first time in history – to use lethal force to kill Americans on U.S. soil who protest government policies.”

Much as you, I and all God’s own people may detest conspiracy theories and those who spread them around, it’s hard to deny that perfectly practical and not at all theoretical conspiracies do happen. That boy perhaps shouldn’t have cried wolf, but this doesn’t mean there are no wolves on the prowl at the outskirts of the village.

What upsets many commentators, including those considerably saner than Mr Kennedy, isn’t just the contents of the Directive but also its timing. Issuing that document just six weeks before the presidential election gives some people unpalatable food for mournful thought.

My serious American friends – and all my American friends are laudably serious – fear that civil unrest will ensue no matter who wins the election. Trump’s supporters and their demigod of a candidate already hinted at that possibility last time, when a MAGA mob tried to take the Capitol building by storm.

However, there are many indications that, this time around, it’s the Harris crowd that may revolt should their candidate lose, and they are indeed revolting. Harris herself and her staff give rise to such fears by their inflammatory rabble-rousing.

They portray Trump not as an unfit candidate for the presidency, but as a villain whose return to the White House would spell an end to democracy, along with such sacred American accoutrements as motherhood, baseball, apple pie and verbs made out of nouns. Words like ‘fascist’, ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘Hitler’ and ‘dictatorship’ cross their lips with increasing regularity.

Fair enough, Trump doesn’t even bother to conceal his disdain for the traditional political class on either side of the aisle. But if he aims to rule by decree, one wonders why he didn’t do so during his first term, when he supposedly had ample opportunity to put his foot down.

My impression is, and I hope I’m wrong, that Biden (who will remain president for two months after the election) and Harris are setting the stage for overturning the results of the election if it goes the wrong way.

When the Republic is in mortal danger, democratic niceties may fall by the wayside – as they did during the Second World War, when thousands of Nisei and German Americans were interned without due process. If the Democrats succeed in portraying Trump’s victory as a similar threat to everything the nation holds dear, they may use the two-month window of opportunity to set things right, from their perspective.

The Directive in question may then be invoked as the legal justification for any action, including the use of lethal force. The document certainly has that kind of ring to it, and it was put forth at a suspiciously opportune time.

This is all pure speculation, you understand. But something does smell foul, like that proverbial rodent. I hope the smell is all it is and remains to be. For the consequences of another American civil war are too awful to contemplate.

Such a massive explosion would produce shock waves wreaking destruction not only on America but on much of the world, emphatically including Britain. Let’s just pray that the Directive is as innocuous as Miss Gough will have us believe.

Anyone who questions Darwin is these days regarded as one notch above a flat-earther, if that. We take it for granted that everything evolves from small to big, from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced.

However, my contention is that, if we stop taking evolution on faith for the sake of argument, we’ll find that exactly the opposite of it is both more evident and more plausible. I do hope that one day schoolchildren will be taught the theory of devolution, with at least equal time allocated to it as to Darwin’s slapdash musings.

Those tots will then find that things more naturally develop from big to small, from complex to simple, from intricate to primitive. Of course, anyone who believes in the Creator doesn’t need me to put forth this argument. Yet even a rank materialist can’t deny obvious facts.

That rank materialist will know that he owes his birth to two fully mature beings, his mother and father, who each produced a tiny particle of themselves, carrying information accumulated over many centuries. The two particles then came together (I’ll spare you the gratuitous graphic details) and conceived the rank materialist.

Development was in this case vectored downwards. It started with two fully grown human beings who activated some intricate physiological and psychological processes occurring in the unfathomably complex systems known as human brains. Will, reason and emotion came together to release two cells that then combined to produce the rank materialist nine months later.

Just before starting to write this, I ate a Cox apple. Unless I miss my guess, this smallish fruit came from a rather large tree. Not only is the tree bigger than the fruit, but the apple is also bigger than its seeds that can then produce another tree. Again we are witnessing what can appropriately be called devolution, not evolution.

The couple of small eggs I had for breakfast had come from a big hen, for my lunch I’ll eat a small portion of a bird related to the one that laid the eggs. And at dinner I’ll have a piece of meat cut out of the carcass of a cow, itself produced by a method not dissimilar to the one responsible for the existence of that rank materialist.

Duccio and Rembrandt were more accomplished artists than the chaps who painted animals in the caves at Santander. But their artistic minds are dwarfed by the mind of the man who first realised that the natural world could lend itself to pictorial representation. There too the development proceeded from the more complex downwards.

In the same vein, the man who invented the wheel was an intellectual giant compared to Robert Street who in 1794 patented the first internal-combustion engine. Street’s intellectual effort was in its turn superior to that of Carl Benz who invented the car.

Now what about the intellect involved in higher pursuits than producing mechanical devices? Exactly the same tendency is observable there. The 20^th century thinker Alfred North Whitehead once commented that: “The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.

Footnotes are set in small type at the bottom of the page to provide a reference for something set in big type above. Whitehead’s implication is clear: Western philosophy also developed from high to low, from superior to inferior, from original thought to mere commentary.

If you wish to take exception to the theory of devolution, you’ll have to argue that today’s composers are better than Bach and Beethoven, today’s poets are superior to Dante and Shakespeare, today’s novelists put Dickens and Tolstoy to shame, today’s playwrights go further than Ibsen and Chekhov, today’s economists outsmart Adam Smith and David Ricardo, today’s political scientists go Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre one better.

After you’ve exhausted yourself trying to prove the unprovable, I’ll ask you to compare Vermeer to Tracy Emin and flash a smug QED smile. Note that so far we haven’t had to take God’s name in vain, nor even to appeal to modern biology (assisted by archaeology, physics and chemistry) that has relegated Darwin’s theory from science to unadulterated ideology.

A grown man, Dr Robert Darwin, had to add his spermatozoon to the ovum produced by a grown woman, Susannah Darwin, née Wedgwood, to produce a tiny embryo that then became baby Charles. Chickens lay eggs, oak trees produce acorns, small fruit grows on big trees. This is how the theory of devolution works in practice.

I’m not claiming irrefutable rigour for this theory. I can see quite a few arguments not only pro but also con. However, on balance it strikes me as more plausible than anything Darwin and his acolytes have come up with.

If we look at man’s mind, something that natural science hasn’t yet come to grips with and probably never will, then the theory of devolution is easier to argue than its opposite. And if you examine the political institutions the human mind has created, you’ll notice a steady decline in the level of the people who man them.

Just compare our past few prime ministers with the likes of Wellington, Disraeli and Churchill – or for that matter any recent US presidents with Washington, Adams or Madison. The larger the test sample you use, and you’re welcome to draw in comparable figures from other countries, the more noticeable the steady decline. Or devolution, if you’d rather.

Looking at the portraits of old British PMs, one sees some supremely intelligent faces and some perhaps less so. But not a single one shows the same lack of any discernible mental acuity you’ll find exhibited on Keir Starmer’s face, or on that of his inimitable deputy Angie Rayner.

The theory of devolution works in ways as mysterious as they are inexorable. But it does work.

The term ‘special relationship’ might have meant something in the past, but these days it sounds like a distinct anachronism.

It’s no use pretending that the US and the UK enjoy a partnership of equals. The US is clearly the senior partner, and there are few signs that she singles Britain out for preferential treatment.

For example, it was only on 26 December, 2006, that Britain finished paying back the Lend-Lease debts to the US. It’s useful to remember that massive American supplies to the Soviet Union were offered for free – this though Stalin started the war as Hitler’s ally, and Britain fought Nazism alone for the first two years.

In a later conflict, Ronald Reagan denied Britain any assistance during the Falklands war, and his Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, had to take it upon himself to furnish the British forces with last-minute satellite intelligence.

However, even if Britain’s relationship with the US may not be special, it’s certainly vitally important. The two countries are NATO allies and, since Britain isn’t exactly pulling her weight in collective defence, our security largely depends on America’s willingness to come to our aid should the going get tough.

A trade deal with the US would also come in handy, and its likelihood wholly depends on the benevolence of the next US administration. There too one detects no parity: such a deal is more important for Britain than for America, by far.

Against the background I’ve outlined in extremely broad strokes, Britain must cover her bets and secure friendly relations with the next US president, whoever he – or in this case she – will be. Alas, just as Trump’s campaign began to gain momentum, Starmer’s government committed an act of unspeakable folly.

Senior Labour figures, doubtless with Starmer’s blessing, are doing all they can to help Harris into the White House. In August, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, his director of communications, along with several top Labour MPs, attended the Democratic National Convention.

Contrary to their subsequent denials, they weren’t there just as so many flies on the wall. Dover MP Mike Trump, who was there, explained that: “We went back out after our landslide victory, to impart some of our knowledge as to what we learnt on the campaign trail, and look at what they are doing with their campaign.”

Now it has turned out that Labour are sending over not only strategists but also foot soldiers to lend Kamala a helping hand. Last Wednesday, Sofia Patel, Labour’s director of operations, asked for volunteers to travel to swing states in the US to do their bit.

“I have nearly 100 Labour Party staff (current and former) going to the US in the next few weeks heading to North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia,” went her LinkedIn post. “I have ten spots available for anyone to head to the battleground state of North Carolina – we will sort your housing.”

That last sentence hints at a possible breach of the US law that only permits foreign volunteers to take part in such campaigning if they aren’t getting paid. It can be argued that the promise of free accommodation constitutes payment, but frankly I don’t care one way or the other.

What concerns me isn’t the fine points of the US electoral law but the obvious points of Britain’s foreign policy. And, true to form, Labour has shown yet again that it puts ideology before national interests not only in domestic but also in foreign affairs.

Trump, for all his faults, is well-disposed towards Britain. He has extensive business interests here, but one can detect that his affection for our country isn’t just motivated by pecuniary considerations.

Harris, on the other hand, doesn’t even bother to conceal how passionately she dislikes Britain. She holds Britain’s colonial past against her, presumably because Kamala’s father, Marxist professor of economics, must have been terribly oppressed in Jamaica, all the way to Stanford University.

However, even if it were the other way round, with Harris loving Britain and Trump hating her, openly supporting one candidate against the other would be an act of rank stupidity. What if the other candidate wins? The other candidate being Trump in this case, how willing will he be to remain Britain’s friend for the next four years?

Like all narcissists, and even his most fanatic supporters accept he is just that, old Donald neither forgives slights nor, more to the point, forgets them. He sees foreign policy as so many deals based on personal relationships, and he views other leaders in binary terms.

Whatever their politics, if they get along with Donald, and especially if they are effusive in their praise of him, he describes them in glowing terms. And if they are more reserved, they rate nothing but the kind of terminology that used to be off limits on global diplomacy.

For the time being, the Trump campaign has filed a formal protest, citing Patel’s post as proof that the Labour expeditionary corps is staffed not with disinterested idealists but with people given a financial incentive. Regardless of how the protest pans out, Starmer’s relations with Trump may be irreparably damaged – and so will be Britain’s relations with the US should Trump win in November.

As it is, I can’t imagine Trump ever being ready to do business with Starmer’s foreign secretary David Lammy. Our top diplomat is on record calling Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”, a “tyrant in a toupee” and a “dangerous clown”. Though he indulged in such rhetoric when merely a backbencher, he may well be a persona non grata in a Trump White House.

(This kind of logorrhoea follows the Left’s long tradition of flinging epithets at their adversaries. Kamala herself is hardly pulling punches. She has described Trump as “increasingly unhinged and unstable”, adding that he “certainly falls into the general definition of fascists”. To be fair, Donald isn’t above responding in kind.)

The events since then won’t help Trump to forget those insults, especially since Starmer has already stated that a Trump victory would be “undesirable”. All this goes to show that His Majesty’s government enjoying a 282-seat parliamentary majority is driven by ideological zeal only, not by the country’s interests.

Driving jobs and capital out of Britain, suffocating the economy with extortionate taxes and “workers’ rights” (empowering the unions), introducing laws against free speech, and now conceivably alienating Britain’s most important ally – all these are different manifestations of the same destructive ideology. That means we’re in for a rough ride in more ways than one – but then you already know this.

This popular 1878 song can’t be held up as an exemplar of rhyme and metre. Yet every Briton of a certain age knows the first two lines, which gave rise to the word ‘jingoism’:

“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do/ We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too…”

Alas, these two lines don’t describe the current state of Britain’s armed forces, which is why it’s useful to recall the next, lesser known, lines of the same verse:

“We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,/ The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”

Now these lines do bear some tangential relevance to today’s geopolitics, even though Constantinople, as it then was, isn’t an immediate target of Russian imperial expansion. But other targets are still in Russia’s crosshairs.

The song was composed at the end of yet another Russo-Turkish War (there were seven altogether if I’m counting correctly), in which the Russians sought to protect the Balkan nations, especially Bulgaria, from Ottoman atrocities.

Their less noble objective was to reverse the calamity of the Crimean War and achieve Russia’s perennial goal of capturing Constantinople and gaining control of the Straits. After Russia routed the Turks in the 1878 Battle of Plevna, that goal was in sight. The road to Constantinople was open, and the Straits were within reach.

That outcome wasn’t something the British Empire could countenance. It couldn’t allow a hostile power to achieve strategic dominance over the key trade routes connecting Britain to the Middle East. Especially since the Russians had been dropping hints about India as another possible conquest.

Hence a fleet of British battleships sailed in to send a message. The Russians, the memory of the Crimean debacle still fresh in their memory, got it loud and clear. They stopped at the gates of Constantinople and signed a treaty that effectively put an end to the Ottoman Empire as an aggressive force – but also to Russia’s designs on the Straits.

Today Russia’s imperial ambitions are directed westwards rather than southwards, but any Briton trying to sing that jingoistic song would be laughed out of the pub. Successive governments seem to have been so passionately committed to the cause of unilateral disarmament that the only message Britain can send now is that of impotence and cowardice.

The Royal Navy is at its historical weakest, and Horatio Nelson has been too dead for too long to do something about it. Otherwise he certainly would: for the first time since Trafalgar, the French navy outnumbers ours.

Still, we can almost get away with that in the present strategic situation. The Russians are pushing across the continent in a westerly direction, and if allowed to go on, the nearest salt water they’ll reach will be the English Channel. (If you think they see the Ukraine as the last stop, there’s a bridge across the Dnieper I’d like to sell you. Or, more apposite, one across the Vistula.)

But the Duke of Wellington would be even less happy than Nelson. Courtesy of the new cuts in defence spending, for the first time since Waterloo the British Army will have fewer than 70,000 soldiers. By comparison, our grossly understaffed police forces number 149,769 officers. More than twice as many.

Such a tiny army can only be deployed in a tripwire mode, with the soldiers dying en masse in the hope of slowing the enemy down to gain time for help to arrive from across the ocean. And if help doesn’t arrive, they’ll all be mown down.

That prospect is unlikely to increase morale, and it doesn’t. An MoD survey found that some 58 per cent of our servicemen rate their morale as low.

So much for the ships and the men. Now what about the money?

Here the Labour government is enthusiastically building on the legacy of the previous Tory governments. They always treated the defence budget as the first candidate for cuts.

This was accompanied by frankly idiotic rhetoric about the changing nature of modern warfare. Thus, announcing another round of sweeping cuts, Dave Cameron explained that modern battles were different from Waterloo. They no longer required what Napoleon called large battalions.

Presumably, two computers could fight it out between them and whichever one went on the blink first would lose. At least Cameron had the excuse of never having seen a truly modern electronic war, like the one raging in the Ukraine.

Today’s government, on the other hand, should know that boots on the ground are as vital as they always have been. For all the drones, missiles, robots and PlayStation gadgets being used by both sides, soldiers still fight and die, and the fewer they are the more likely they are to be killed.

At present, our defence spending stands at 2.3 per cent of GDP, barely above the absolute peacetime minimum demanded by NATO. Starmer has promised to raise it to 2.5 per cent, but only when some loose cash is burning a hole in the Exchequer’s pocket. In round numbers, that means never.

The Ukrainians are heroically keeping “the Bear” of that old song at bay. But for how long? America’s assistance is dwindling away, showing every sign that it’ll go down to nothing regardless of how the November election goes. Without the US, it’ll fall on Europe to protect itself, and the western part of it shows no appetite for putting guns before butter, or rather before social handouts and foreign aid.

Poland is a welcome exception, but then the Poles have no illusions about their ursine neighbour, having found themselves more than once on the receiving end of its fangs and claws. Poland is busily building up the strongest army in Europe, spending almost five per cent of her GDP on defence — more than the US in relative terms.

Unlike the Poles, Western European governments proceed on the assumption, or rather hope, that they’ll never have to fight another war. Keeping their fingers crossed, they lavish money on all sorts of projects, none of which even remotely approaches defence in vital importance.

This is the suit Britain follows, with one PM after another claiming that cutting defence is a “difficult decision”. It may be, but that decision isn’t just difficult. It’s also foolhardy, irresponsible and potentially fatal.

Indeed, “Britons true” don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got no ships, we’ve got no men, we’ve got no money too. This ought to be the new song, but no one is singing it.

One thing I can say for Donald Trump is that he is forthcoming about his specific plans should he return to the White House.

The crux of his economic policy seems to be imposing tariffs of up to 20 per cent on all imports – unless they come from China. Those would be taxed at 60 per cent, while Trump would slap a tariff of “100, 200, 2,000 per cent” on cars manufactured in Mexico or China.

God help us, the man is mad. Two thousand per cent? That’s tantamount to shutting down the US market for such products, a measure evoking a child screaming at the top of his voice and throwing his toys out of the pram.

“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States,” explained Trump. “You make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious” that companies will “come right away”.

This shows what happens when the stress in ‘political economy’ falls on ‘political’ rather than ‘economy’. I’m sure this sort of thing plays well among the less intelligent strata of the US population, the types who in my day decorated their bumpers with stickers saying “Buy a foreign car, put 10 Americans out of work”.

Those chaps could be forgiven for their economic illiteracy. But a man likely to become US president isn’t entitled to such leniency.

Protectionism flies in the face of traditional economic wisdom, which became traditional specifically because it was wise. It has also been vindicated by historical experience, in the US and elsewhere.

If we look at the Great Depression, for example, we’ll find that the 1929 stock market crash, supposedly the trigger of the calamity, barely made the front pages of the papers at the time. Only about two percent of all Americans owned any shares, and, people being people, those overachievers were unlikely to be viewed by the rest with excessive sympathy.

In fact, when the value of those shares plummeted, most of the non-holders probably responded in a very human way by displaying schadenfreude. The crash was none of most people’s concern, and the papers reacted with commensurate restraint.

The depression only began to bite after Roosevelt’s protectionist measures went into effect. And that makes sense.

As Mises, Hayek or any Chicago economist worth his salt would have told you, the success of a reasonably free economy is determined by the consumer, which is to say by a strong, voracious demand. And what boosts the demand is free competition among suppliers, regardless of which country they come from.

In such conditions they are forced to offer better products, lower prices and more efficient services. Supply-side ideas, so popular back in the 1980s, don’t change this fact. Supply-side is just a way of stimulating consumer demand.

Manufacturers and other suppliers take the lead by offering the goods and services they bet people will want to buy. If the bet pays off, they win. If it doesn’t, they lose.

The aforementioned conventional wisdom speaks with its usual bluntness. You can only help a consumer economy by helping the consumers, it says. You can’t do so by hurting them.

This can only mean that protectionism can’t help the economy. It almost certainly will cause untold damage, by mollycoddling domestic production behind a protective wall of near-monopoly. That anyone should deem this necessary suggests that domestic production was ineffective to begin with.

Yet when its incompetence is artificially protected from more competent rivals, it will have little incentive to get its act together. Quality will go down, prices will head in the opposite direction, funds will be channelled into the least – and away from the most – productive areas, and consumers will bear the consequences.

There isn’t now, nor was there at the time of the Great Depression, anything new about any of this. Bright economists from Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Adam Smith and David Ricardo onwards had known it and written about it. Ricardo even went so far as to argue that a country shouldn’t retaliate against protectionist tariffs imposed by other countries against it. Doing so, he insisted, would only hurt its own people.

Thus, for example, Smith: “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.”

Thus spoke common sense, something Trump proudly (and loudly) likes to highlight as his forte. In fact, his attachment to protectionism smacks of economic illiteracy, which is indeed common but not very sensible.

If Trump gets elected and acts on his promises, his protectionism is guaranteed to drive up inflation and increase America’s national debt even more than Harris’s objectionable socialism would. And it’s not just those dastardly foreign producers who will bear the brunt of tariffs, but also US consumers.

If Trump hasn’t studied the causes of the Great Depression, perhaps he should cast a quick glance over his own experience as US president. Every economic study I’ve seen shows that it wasn’t just foreign manufacturers but also US consumers who were hit by the tariffs Trump introduced then.

The University of Chicago ran a survey last month. The question put to a group of prominent economists was whether they agreed with the statement that “imposing tariffs results in a substantial portion of the tariffs being borne by consumers of the country that enacts the tariffs, through price increases”. An impressive 98 per cent said yes.

As far as Trump is concerned, they thereby branded themselves as rank communists out to get him. To me, they simply upheld economic theories vindicated by centuries of practical experience.

This isn’t to say that political considerations have no place in economic policies. The trouble with Trump is that he tries to justify his economic protectionism by economic arguments, which is neither grown-up nor clever. However, a persuasive case may be made for limiting or even blocking imports from China.

Such imports to America and Europe have built up an evil communist regime as an economic powerhouse able to challenge the West all over the world not only economically but, more important, politically and militarily. Alas, the US has a long history of creating monsters by putting short-term economic benefits before long-term strategic needs.

Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany built up their brawn largely – the former almost exclusively – thanks to transfers of American technology and capital. For every million in profits the US realised from its munificence towards the Soviets, she later spent a billion trying to counteract the ogre she had created. (Anglo-American economist, Stanford’s Prof. Anthony C. Sutton, published several books presenting extensive research on the subject.)

Trying to curtail China’s growth by “obnoxious” tariffs, sanctions or even an outright ban for that reason would doubtless hurt US consumers, but one could argue they’d suffer pain in a good cause. I’d certainly be sympathetic to this argument should Trump make it.

But he doesn’t. The argument he does make falls into the category of rabble-rousing populism, not sound economics or strategic thought.

On September 28, a Met cop keeping a watchful eye on a pro-Hezbollah march in Trafalgar Square reminded me how much and why I loathe the phrase “It’s a matter of opinion”.

If I were to compile a list of locutions I detest most, that one would take pride of place.

What I loathe about it isn’t the denotation but the connotation, everything lurking behind these seemingly innocuous words. And lying in wait there, ready to ambush the last vestiges of sanity, is the deadly relativism of modernity.

The assumption that dread phrase conveys is that no absolute truths or even facts exist. You have one truth, I have another, he has still another, and let’s not forget theirs. Everything is up for grabs, everything is subjective, nothing is objective, everything is a matter of opinion.

It’s as if today’s lot have backtracked from Aristotle to Plato, thereby denying that any reality exists outside man’s perception of it. Modern man is happy to benefit from science, which is all based on understanding that things exist objectively, irrespective of our senses or understanding. But he rejects the elementary cognitive culture that has to flow from the same assumption.

Yes, some things are indeed a matter of opinion. Others, however, aren’t, and it takes that cognitive culture to be able to tell the difference.

For example, saying that Fulham FC is a nicer team than Manchester City is expressing an opinion. Saying that Manchester City is a better team than Fulham FC is stating a fact.

This is all kindergarten stuff, but modernity evidently hasn’t yet reached that educational level or, more likely, has regressed beneath it. Thus everything is deemed to be a matter of opinion, from which it logically follows that every opinion is equally valid.

Thus my opinion on the string theory is valid even though my knowledge of physics comes from a school course yonks ago and a few popular books since then. Not only that, but it’s no less valid than that of a Nobel Prize winner in that discipline. He has his opinion, I have mine, and anyone who mentions the word ‘authority’ simply doesn’t understand modernity.

However, standing out even against this macabre background is that Met cop’s contribution to this intellectual calamity. The policeman distinguished himself at a vigil for the Hezbollah chieftain Hassan Nesrallah killed a day earlier. (And please no comments from my Russophone readers about that evocative surname.)

A passerby reminded the officer that no such vigil ought to be allowed to take place because Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation. The policeman’s reply proved his impeccable modern credentials: “Your opinion is up to you… your opinion is your opinion.”

He then added that he doesn’t “take a lot of political interest”. Neither, by the sound of it, does he take a lot of legal interest, to use his turn of phrase.

For in 2019 HMG added Hezbollah to the list of organisations proscribed under the Terrorist Act. As far as our law enforcement is concerned, that moved the designation of that group from the realm of opinion into that of fact. Or, more precisely, the law.

Now, the Romans came up with a useful legal principle still in force throughout the civilised world: ignorantia juris non excusat, ignorance of the law is no excuse. If it’s so for a law-breaker, surely the same principle applies ten-fold to a law-enforcer. Or am I missing something?

I’m not familiar with the inner workings of the Metropolitan Police. But I imagine that officers who draw the detail of guarding order during a protest march must be briefed on the legitimacy of the protest. The words ‘terrorism’ and ‘proscribed organisation’ had to come up at some point during the briefing on that vigil.

If they didn’t, the senior officer conducting the briefing is guilty of sackable negligence. However, a statement from the Met denied the accusation: “The proscribed status of Hezbollah, Hamas and other groups is included in the briefings given to the officers deployed to police related events, but we recognise… we need to do more to make sure the details of those briefings are fully understood.”

What part of ‘terrorist organisation’ did the officers fail to grasp? They’d have to be rather dim, not to say clinically retarded, to misunderstand such a simple concept. However, I’m sure they aren’t. Reality is more sinister than that.

Our police forces know perfectly well what Hamas and Hezbollah are, and what they advocate. Our terrorist groupies don’t hide their light under a bushel, they don’t lower their voices when screaming “Death to Israel!”, “From the river to the sea!”, “I love Hezbollah” or “I love Hamas!”

However, our police forces have been taken over by those who sympathise with such sentiments because they are either Lefties or anti-Semites or, most likely, both. Each such group has a bias towards youth, and most street cops are young people.

A YouGov poll shows that 10 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds “have a favourable view of Hamas”, and 13 per cent don’t believe Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on 7 October, 2023.

More generally, one third of the overall British public “’believes that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews”, and among young people this figure rises to 48 per cent. Almost half.

Twenty per cent of Britons are sure supporters of Israel “control the media’” while ten per cent believe that control is exercised not just by supporters of Israel but specifically by Jews.

Thus anti-Semitic tropes are so thoroughly mixed with anti-Israeli ones that it’s hard to tell them apart. However, the critical mass of British anti-Semitism still hasn’t approached majority. That’s why open expressions along such lines are still frowned upon, if not too vigorously.

Thus that Trafalgar Square cop had to exercise some caution. Confronted by a passerby who objected to that glorification of a terrorist red in tooth and claw, the policeman couldn’t just tell him to move on and stop bothering him with pro-Israeli nonsense.

But he did have to shut him up somehow. So he unveiled that stock modern rebuttal he knew brooked no disagreement: “It’s just your opinion”. As a typical young Briton, he knew that no cutting rejoinder was coming. In the modern parlance that phrase passes for an argument, and it’s irrefutable.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” goes the old saying. I disagree. Madness comes second, preceded as it is by stupidity.

The onset of collective stupidity erased the lines separating opinions, facts, judgements and arguments. That made dumbed-down people vulnerable to evil Left-wing propaganda, with hatred of Israel in particular and Jews in general as a ubiquitous component. And only then did victims become mad by losing all touch with reality.

If you disagree, well, too bad. I’m entitled to my opinion, aren’t I?

One of Donald Trump’s stock boasts is a skeleton phrase allowing for a limitless number of insertions: “If I had been president […] wouldn’t have happened”.

Fill in the blank with anything you wish had been avoided, from the Punic Wars to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine via both World Wars, and you’ll capture the general thrust of Trump’s braggadocio. But one of those possible insertions is less preposterous than others.

It’s indeed likely that, had the US been led by Trump rather than Biden in February, 2022, Putin would have thought twice before pushing the button for a full-scale assault. I wouldn’t have bet my house on such reticence, but I’d probably have taken a smaller bet, say a tenner.

The reason I’d have been ready to take a flier isn’t Trump’s special relationship with Putin, although I’m certain it exists. I don’t know whether it’s criminal, shameful or merely ill-advised. Since neither man strikes me as a friend-making type, such a relationship has to be based on either grudging respect or unknown mutual interests, but one can see it’s there.

However, Putin wouldn’t have been deterred by any personal links with Trump. Either the Russian chieftain or his advisers would have known that a US president doesn’t have dictatorial powers. Trump might have been willing to toe Putin’s line, but both his cabinet and Congress could have had different ideas.

Contrary to his self-serving bluster, neither would Trump have threatened to nuke Moscow in response. Such a threat would have been too grossly irresponsible even for him, and he has set the bar of irresponsible claims rather high. No American president would go nuclear in response to any aggression against a non-NATO country, and I don’t even put much faith in Article 5 of the NATO Charter either.

What could have stopped Putin’s juggernaut in its tracks would have been a general projection of American, and hence NATO, strength. In such matters, appearance is the same as reality and, even if the US hadn’t been stronger under Trump, it would have looked stronger.

By contrast, America looked cowardly and impotent under Biden, an impression that was instantly created or perhaps reinforced on 31 August, 2021. That was the day Americans officially lost the war with Taliban.

Actually, as both the British and the Russians could testify, there was nothing unusual about a mighty global power finding itself lost in Afghanistan. The country’s terrain and, above all, the indomitable fighting spirit of its people have been known to cancel out any advantages Westerners might have in weaponry and numerical strength.

(I’d like to chat about this with Victor David Hanson, the author of the brilliant book Carnage and Culture. Dr Hanson argues that the West has always won confrontations with the East, and he explains why. What about Afghanistan then? I’m sure he has a good answer, but I’d love to know what it is.)

However, what matters in any lost war isn’t just the fact but also the manner of losing – just as there is a telling difference between retreating and running away. And there the Soviets had a distinct edge over the Americans.

Their 1989 retreat after a decade-long war with Afghanistan was – or at least looked – orderly and one could even say dignified. They marched out leaving nothing behind but some 15,000 of their own casualties and over a million Afghan ones. The retreating troops brought all their weapons with them, and every vehicle that could move out did so.

By contrast, Americans didn’t just leave Afghanistan. They ran away, leaving behind some $7 billion worth of military equipment (this estimate by the Defence Department strikes me as too modest) and, more important, thousands of their Afghan friends. That was a chaotic flight, not orderly retreat.

Now, Putin’s instincts were formed in the back streets, where, by his own admission, he was a “common thug”. He ran with the gangs, I ran away from them, but there is nothing about their mentality that would surprise either me or anyone familiar with wolf packs. Wolves flee from those who are stronger than they are and pounce on those who are weaker.

What many Western commentators don’t understand about Putin is that mentally he has never left those lupine street gangs. He will backtrack, tail between his legs, from a show of strength and pounce like a scowling wolf on any sign of weakness.

Biden’s shameful flight from Afghanistan told Putin all he needed to know. The US president was weak, cowardly, probably senile. If he meekly accepted the disgrace of his own troops shedding their weapons as they fled, surely he wouldn’t go to war over a little foray into a country he knew nothing about. The Ukrainians may well live in the UK, as far as Biden is concerned in his present state of health.

While it’s conceivable that the Punic Wars would have happened even had Trump been US president in the Third Century BC, I am fairly certain he would have lost the Afghan War with dignity even had he been unable to win it. That would have planted doubt into Putin’s head, the head of the petty thug he has remained for life.

He would have seen a sign of temporary weakness but not one of vacillation and cowardice. There would have been nothing for him to pounce on.

As it was, pounce he did, but the Russian chieftain miscalculated. His generals had assured him they would overrun the Ukraine by blitzkrieg taking days, weeks at the outside. Under such circumstances, the US could only have saved the situation by responding with speed and resolve, qualities the present administration conspicuously lacked.

Biden actually issued a veiled invitation for Putin to invade. Days before the attack, he practically said the US would overlook a limited foray, which not only encouraged Putin to go ahead, but also gave him a useful PR strategy. The invasion of the Ukraine wasn’t a war, explained Kremlin propagandists on cue. It was only a ‘special military operation’, and prison awaited any Russian daring to use the dread W-word.

The Ukrainians fought the aggression with skill and courage, as people usually do when their national survival is at stake. The limited foray turned into a war of attrition, with Russian casualties in the Ukraine topping those in Afghanistan by an order of magnitude.

The US and NATO had no option but to support the Ukraine with equipment, ordnance, intelligence and funding. But they treated the Ukraine the way Spaniards treat bulls in the ring: the animals are allowed to fight, but they aren’t allowed to win.

Supplies have kept the Ukrainians in the fight, but one of their arms has always been tied behind their back. Meanwhile, the West in general and the US in particular are visibly losing interest.

I fear for the Ukraine whoever wins the US elections in November. Harris would probably continue Biden’s policy of diminishing interest and attenuating supplies, which would soon deliver victory to Putin’s larger battalions.

And should Trump win, he’d doubtless try to act on his boastful promise to end the war in days. The only possible way of doing so would be for him to twist the Ukrainians’ arm into territorial concessions on pain of a summary discontinuation of American supplies.

Putin would then declare victory and start leisurely preparations for the next round. I can even imagine him promising his friend Donald not to attack during his tenure. Waiting four years would anyway be desirable for Russia to lick her wounds, regroup and rearm.

And après Trump le déluge, the kind that will engulf the Ukraine in the terror of another barbarian onslaught. A harrowing prospect, that, and one I hope we’ll never see. But, as we know, hope is cheap.

What would you think if you saw this trigger warning on a copy of the Bible?

You’d probably describe it as virtue-signalling, preposterous and downright idiotic. You’d be right: it is all those things. But not only.

Whenever anyone puts words down on paper, he should have his intended readers in mind. If what he writes is too recondite for them, he won’t be able to hold their attention. If his writing is too basic, it’ll have the same effect.

So before composing my hypothetical trigger warning its author should have taken a moment to consider his putative reader. Had he done so, he would have realised that anyone who picks up a copy of the Bible already knows what it contains, if only in broad strokes.

He has to be aware, for example, that the Genesis story most lamentably contradicts Darwin, and that the Gospel writers failed to sidestep Jesus Christ and his message to the world. The reader may prefer Darwin to Genesis and Marx to Mark, but he’ll know exactly what to expect in Scripture.

Thus my hypothetical warning, in addition to all the adjectives you assigned to it, merits one more, and it’s damning: superfluous. It serves no useful purpose whatsoever, other than allowing its author to establish both his atheism and his intellectual deficiency (I’ll refrain from opining this once that the two are one and the same).

Moving swiftly from hypothesis to fact, the great minds of Nottingham University have seen fit to slap a trigger warning on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, to the effect that it contains “expressions of Christian faith”.

Crikey. Who could have thought. This mediaeval masterpiece depicts a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims travelling together from London to Canterbury Cathedral, to worship at the shrine of St Thomas Becket.

That is to say that any potential reader with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius) doesn’t need to be warned of the book’s Christian content. Unless the bright sparks of Nottingham University doubt that their students could meet that minimum requirement, the warning is superfluous – in addition to being virtue-signalling, preposterous and downright idiotic.

If those chaps felt the urgent need to caution potential readers against something in Chaucer, they could have mentioned the book’s graphic, not to say pornographic, sexual content. That was par for the course in mediaeval literature, especially after the Black Death.

Up to a third of Europe’s population died in the pandemic, and the survivors abandoned many of their erstwhile restraints. For example, The Decameron, written by Boccaccio some 20 years before The Canterbury Tales, was quite bawdy.

I discovered that at age 10 or so by defying my parents’ ban and sneaking the book out of their bookcase. Yet Chaucer outdid Boccaccio, for example in one of the Tales, about the Wife of Bath.

She shared with the pilgrims some rather intimate details of her conjugal experience with her five husbands, each one left replete and exhausted. The good wife wasn’t averse to boasting about her superlative anatomy: “And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me/I hadde the best quoniam myghte be.” A ‘quoniam’ was a Middle English euphemism for female genitalia.

Let me tell you, something like this in a film would deliver an ’18’ rating and certainly a trigger warning of the sexual content. Such warnings are fashionable at present, with viewers forewarned not only about sex and violence, but also about drinking and smoking.

Censors go out of their way to protect our brittle sensibilities, but Nottingham University’s powers that be felt it was more urgent to caution students against “expressions of Christian faith” than against a woman boasting about her vaginal excellence.

Their censoring zeal didn’t even compel them to issue a warning about the rather sinister anti-Semitism of The Prioress’s Tale, which presented a version of the blood libel.

There, a Christian boy walks through a Jewish ghetto singing the hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater, an invocation of the Virgin Mary. Since Satan “hath [built] in Jewes’ hearts his waspe’s nest”, the Jews murder the boy and throw his body into a cesspit.

Far be it from me to suggest that such passages should have led to a warning against Chaucer’s anti-Semitism. All such warnings are nothing but glossocratic wokery, but the one about Christianity in Canterbury Tales really does take the bicky.

It offers a valuable insight into the minds of modern academics and university administrators. They are permissive in matters of graphic sex and religious hatred (provided it’s not directed at Muslims), but any reference to Christianity makes their blood boil. They instantly reach for their trusted blue pencil and scribble that moronic warning.

How long before The Canterbury Tales and other great books with a Christian content are removed from university libraries? I’d say years rather than decades. Those offensive volumes may even be used as a replacement for hydrocarbons as fuel for our homes and cars. Unless the latter have been outlawed by then.  

You’ll soon get the chance if the James Paget Hospital in Norfolk has its way.

Its bosses issued a directive to the staff on “inclusive language DOs and DON’Ts”, which mandates a ban on words with ‘man’ in them, such as ‘postman’, ‘fireman’, ‘policeman’ and presumably ‘mandate’.

Fortunately, ‘mailman’ is an Americanism, for otherwise the medics would have to say ‘personperson’, rather than the more manageable if still less than mellifluous ‘postperson’. Still, a journey from Personchester to Personhattan remains a possibility.

Such persondatory usage is somewhat lacking in novelty appeal. When 50 years ago I got my first job in the West, at NASA in Houston, I ran into trouble with some of my female co-workers for using offensive ‘man’ words.

When I tried to argue, I was told I didn’t understand Western ways but, given time, I’d learn. They were right: I have indeed learned, if not exactly accepted.

However, another part of the directive would have struck even those NASA ladies as incomprehensible. They had no doubt whatsoever that men were born male and women female. Even though the former oppressed the latter by using such deliberately offensive words as ‘manic’, ‘manage’ and ‘mandarin’, there was no doubt who was what and at what point they became what they were.

The Norfolk hospital administrators will have none of that natal determinism. They ordered staff to use the phrase “assigned female/male at birth” since this more “accurately depicts what happens when a child is born”.

Well, you know the problem: trying to be all things to all men (or rather persons, as that misogynist Paul should have written to the Corinthians) is a tall order. You try to please everybody and end up pleasing nobody.

While the directive predictably upsets troglodytes like me, its unashamed binary character will enrage even those who hail the underlying principle.

If a person is assigned ‘gender’ at birth, then surely whoever is authorised to do so must choose from the full list of genders widely recognised as such within the still narrow circle of fanatics. At the last count there were 102, but scientific progress is proceeding apace. Before long the list will be augmented, and those Norfolk medics are duty-bound to keep track of any new additions.

As worded, the directive seems to follow Genesis, which says: “male and female he made them”. This simply won’t do – medical persons should know that it wasn’t God but Darwin who created man, or rather person. And Darwin’s theory presupposes a steady progress in human understanding of everything, including the number of sexes, sorry, I mean genders.

The directive also shows the danger of relying on the Passive Voice. The phrase “assigned female/male at birth” raises the question of who does the assigning. Back in those unsophisticated times, it was the obstetrician who triumphantly announced to the new mother “You’ve got a boy!” or “You’ve got a girl!” Those doctors of yesteryear went by strictly formal characteristics, but I did tell you those times were unsophisticated.

However, assigning ‘gender’ shouldn’t mean changing the assigner. It should still fall on the obstetrician to assume godlike powers and declare in a booming voice: “Aporagender I assign you!” or genderflux, ipsogender, sekhet, whatever is appropriate.

This whole thing appears to me as another attempt to endow physicians with metaphysical powers. In the old days, before Jesus Christ became a superstar, people believed not only that God made people male or female, but also that only God could give or take life.

As I mentioned yesterday, the medical profession is acquiring the arbitrary quasi-divine power to terminate a human life, in either gestation or old age. So why shouldn’t a doctor decide on the newborn’s sex? Before long, that Norfolk hospital will issue a new guidance for the medics to introduce themselves by saying: “I am Nigel Johnson thy Doctor, and thou shalt have no other Doctors before me”.

In this cosmic context it’s almost embarrassing to mention that the directive also instructed staff to use ‘ze’ or ‘zir’ pronouns because they are “gender neutral and preferred by some trans people”. Where’s the pluralism on that?

The Office for National Statistics identifies only 0.55 per cent of Britons as trans. Even discounting the likelihood of ideologically inspired exaggeration, I don’t know how many of the remaining 99.45 per cent detest those stupid games with pronouns, but I’d guess many do. Surely the grammatical rights of such an overwhelming minority should trump those of a minute proportion?

Our progressive modernity isn’t only crossing the line beyond which madness lies. It’s erasing that line, and we are persondated to come along without demurring.

People should remind themselves of late 18^th century history, when Paul I reigned in Russia and George III in England. Both monarchs suffered from mental disorders, but with a telling difference.

Every Russian schoolboy knew about the madness of Paul I, but only Britons with a particular interest in history knew about the madness of George III, at least until Alan Bennett’s play and the subsequent film. The difference is that in some places mad kings are allowed to create mad kingdoms, and in some others they aren’t.

Monarchs no longer rule even if they still reign. The hole formed thereby has been filled by a small elite with a particular knack for demagoguery and hardly anything else. They are short on reason but long on powerlust, and that emotion can be served by creating a mad kingdom.

They know that a one-eyed man can become king, but to do so he must first blind everyone else. I refer to the stratagem they use for that purpose as glossocracy, controlling people by controlling their language.

The bosses of that Norfolk hospital provide a caricatured illustration of that mechanism, but an illustration nonetheless. My advice to their staff and really everyone is to fight the power-hungry zealots every step of the way, by force if necessary.

However, I’m not holding my breath in the hope that people will do that. The glossocrats have done too good a job turning the multitudes into docile herds.

“Please remember: be careful what you wish for. The right to die can become a duty to die.”

So wrote Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, in a letter to Catholic parishes. Britain’s senior Catholic cleric urged people to write to their MPs and oppose the assisted dying bill to be debated in the Commons next month.

In the medical profession, he added, we could witness “a slow change from a duty to care to a duty to kill.” His Grace is right to issue this call, even though (I’m tempted to say ‘because’) most people disagree.

In a recent poll, two-thirds of the respondents supported the bill, with only 20 per cent opposing it. Since Catholics make up only 8.3 per cent of the population, one clearly doesn’t have to share His Grace’s faith to find oneself in the moral minority.

This stands to reason. The case against doctors legally killing patients doesn’t have to rely on denominational affiliation to be solid. In fact, it can be made without a single reference to divine authority, although perhaps not by a prelate who has to stay within his remit.

His Grace proved that by using the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument: if euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it will become compulsory. Doctors will start killing more and more people, either of their own accord or under pressure from suffering patients and their families.

The bill would allow terminally ill adults within six months of death to seek something incongruously called medical help: suicide by doctor. This proposal has holes big enough to drive an ambulance through.

To begin with, in many cases doctors don’t know how long a terminal patient has left to live, or whether he is indeed terminal. Take it from me, for I’m a dead man writing.

Some 20 years ago no one thought I’d survive my Stage 4 cancer. A consultant stereotypically named Donald McDonald told me: “Your prognosis is poor.” Since his accent was also stereotypical, the death sentence sounded more like “Your prognersis is pure”, but I understood.

Under the terms of the proposed bill, that would have made me eligible for a lethal injection, and something in Dr McDonald’s dour delivery suggested he would have been happy to administer it. That would have deprived you of the subsequent decades of my vituperation.

You might say that, since I didn’t specifically ask to be killed, I was off limits. Ideally, you’d be right, but in this life we aren’t blessed with ideal situations. People are fallible, and the more their fallibility is encouraged, the worse it gets.

The experience of Holland, which in 2000 became the first previously civilised country to legalise euthanasia, shows that doctors have quite a bit of latitude on the issue of consent. For example, one Alzheimer patient there asked to be euthanised. However, at the last moment she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.

As to the sheer numbers, in 2022 there were 8,720 reported cases of euthanasia in Holland, an increase of 1,000 on the previous year. By now the annual death list must have grown into five digits, though it must still be lagging behind Canada, where one in 20 deaths is caused by assisted suicide.

Advocates of the bill insist that nothing like that can possibly happen in Britain, which strikes me as jingoistic. Such people insist, on little evidence, that Britons are so much more sensible than Canadians that euthanasia would be practised only in extreme cases, when the patient is suffering badly and the doctor can guarantee that the poor chap won’t last beyond six months. That strikes me as ignorant.

For exactly the same things were said in 1967, when the Abortion Act was passed. Though abortion was – and remains – still illegal, the new law provided a legal defence for the woman and her doctor in some exceptional cases, specifically when the woman’s physical and mental health was at stake.

That was de jure. De facto, however, any woman can now claim mental anguish at the very thought of having a baby and get an abortion on demand at up to 24 weeks of gestation. Some 250,000 take advantage of the opportunity every year, turning abortion into just another form of contraception.

The wedge only showed its thin end in 1967, but those with some moral sense and understanding of human nature were trying to stop that outrage by reminding people of the overall shape of that tool. They were shouted down just as opponents of the euthanasia bill will be shouted down now.

The bill will certainly pass, and an ever-accelerating cull of wrinklies will begin. If the example of Canada, Holland and Belgium is anything to go by, the notions of both unbearable suffering and terminal diseases will be constantly inflated, until they explode into deadly shards. Patients suffering from, say, clinical depression will be deemed proper candidates for the needle, as they are in those countries already.

Now I’m going to contradict what I said earlier by mentioning God, but only tangentially. You don’t have to espouse any religion to know that both our morality and legality have Judaeo-Christian antecedents. These days most people may not know this, but that’s the basis of all the laws protecting our persons and property.

The injunction against the taking of a life without due process is perhaps the most seminal of such laws, and surely even rank atheists must know this. They may not agree that, since it’s God who gives us life, only he can take it away. However, they – and many generations of their families – grew up with the understanding that a human life is inviolable.

Eroding this understanding will have far-reaching and, what’s worse, unpredictable social consequences by numbing people’s minds and cauterising their moral sense. A society may withstand chipping away at some of its traditional structures, but it won’t survive undermining its own foundations.

Interestingly, the same people who are fanatically committed to both abortion and euthanasia invoke the sanctity of human life whenever the subject of the death penalty comes up. They offer all sorts of spurious arguments, usually citing the possibility of forensic error leading to an irreversible punishment.

That possibility can be reduced to zero by, for example, tightening the required standard of proof in cases where the death penalty is on the table. Changing ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ to ‘beyond all doubt’ would eliminate the possibility of an innocent man being executed, while preserving the social benefits of justice done and seen to be done.

The only argument against the death penalty that I find valid is the corrupting effect it has on the executioner. A man whose job is to kill defenceless people, even if he does so legally and they richly deserve their fate, has to suffer some psychological damage. He is thus punished without due process, something that our jurisprudence abhors.

Now, if this argument works (and I do think it has some merit) for someone whose job is to kill, surely it works even better for someone whose job is to treat. Turning doctors into executioners has to corrupt them and the whole society, and it may find the ensuing erosion unbearable.

However, abortion on demand and euthanasia have become articles of progressive faith, and there’s no point arguing against the proposed bill on merit or by appealing to traditional morality. Those two-thirds of the population who support the bill don’t do so because they’ve carefully weighed the pros and cons. They do so because they’ve been brainwashed to hate traditional morality for being just that, traditional.

This is called anomie, and it’s the dominant condition of modernity. Now, that’s what I call a terminal disease, and it has become endemic.