Month: November 2011

Though Mr Ashdown and I live some of the year in the same part of France, we don’t live on the same planet. Paddy’s choice of residence shows he’s a man of impeccable taste (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?). Alas, his choice of arguments in the recent Times article proves that taste doesn’t always spring from intelligence. Unless the intelligence on offer is of the extraterrestrial kind.

Mr Ashdown indulges in an odd sort of I-told-you-so rhetoric. We should, according to him, have joined the euro 15 years ago, when he pushed for it, even though he magnanimously allows that at this moment the idea isn’t all that attractive. Had we joined then we’d be in clover, rather than, well, the sort of stuff we’re in now. We wouldn’t have followed the bad example of those irresponsible southerners, borrowing themselves into the poor house. (Are the Irish southern? — my geography is weak). Instead we’d rely on our well-established fiscal probity and powerful manufacturing base to emulate Germany. Had we been subject ‘to the euro disciplines’ we wouldn’t have been ‘free to repeat our old indisciplines’. That takes us into the notoriously barren past-subjunctive territory ruled by King Whatif. It must be close to the planet Mr Ashdown is from. Normally this isn’t my favourite destination, but I’m willing to go there just this once.

Germany is the second-largest exporter in the world, behind only the rather more populous China. Britain is a very distant eighth on that list, closer to Mexico than to Germany. We are behind not only the Calvinist Netherlands (with about a quarter of our population) but also the fiscally irresponsible Italy and the would-be German France. The Germans drive mostly German cars, the Italians mostly Italian ones, the French mostly French ones. We drive mostly German, French and Italian ones. Has Mr Ashdown seen a lot of TVRs in his part of North Burgundy? Is that what made him decide Britain still has a strong manufacturing base? In fact, as proportion of GDP, our property business has outstripped all our manufacturing combined — an astounding achievement in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Presumably we can move up the ladder by exporting our houses and tower blocks to China, and then — watch out, all those Merc, Fiat and Braun makers.

Mr Ashdown suggests we wouldn’t have acted like those who are so different from us (all those garlic eaters) by reaching for the cheap euro loans. We’d be more like those similar to us, say the Germans and Dutch. I dare say, on purely empirical evidence, the Irish are rather closer to us than the Germans are — and even the latter, along with the French, went well over the debt limit they themselves had set. In other words, ‘euro disciplines’ are a figment of Mr Ashdown’s imagination.

We should still join the euro, pontificates Mr Ashdown, when it’s ‘in Britain’s interests’ to do so. How about never? Is that a precise enough time frame? The euro, along with the EU in general, isn’t an economic project but a political one, which the likes of Paddy know but choose to ignore for our benefit. Economically the project is as illiterate as it’s unrestrained ideologically. As soon as we realise this, Britain’s position vis-à-vis the euro will appear to be roughly the same as it was in 1940 vis-à-vis all those German bombers flying from French bases. Except that now they try to buy, rather than bomb, Britain into submission. Mr Ashdown would go along with that, provided the price is right. So money is what he means by ‘Britain’s interests’, as if there were no other. Such crass materialism — even if it weren’t grossly misplaced — seems odd in a devout socialist, but then only on this earth. On Mr Ashdown’s home planet this must be par for the course.

 

 

 

And there I was, thinking nothing much could surprise me any longer. I was wrong: apparently, Sir John Major is advising Dave Cameron on foreign policy. I confidently expect further imminent additions to Dave’s advisory staff: John Terry (diversity), Bernard Madoff, in absentia (economics), Brian Sewell (family policy). It’s good to know that our PM is being guided by true experts.

Mr Major, as he then was, left during his tenure an indelible impression upon me, not to mention the rest of the country. What was especially fetching, apart from his taste in women, was his answer to the question of whom among his predecessors in office he regarded as his role model. Pitt? Canning? Peel? Disraeli? No, none of those. Mr Major, as he then was, unerringly picked Neville Chamberlain as the most outstanding PM in British history. One can understand why: what could have been more appealing to John ‘Edwina’ Major than the old newsreels of his idol waving that piece of paper in the air. Peace in our time. But not just yet.

To push through the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, Major had to combine Chamberlain’s knack for appeasement with Churchill’s bellicosity in fighting off the MPs who had misgivings. At the time he referred to them as ‘bastards’ and questioned their intellectual competence and emotional stability. Indeed, who but insane idiots could have found anything wrong with Britain stepping on the path leading to a Germany-dominated Europe?

What surprises me is that Sir John isn’t also advising HMG on fiscal policy. After all, his experience in that area is invaluable. For it was Major who, as Chancellor, dragged Britain into the ERM in 1990, a marriage that ended in divorce and cost the taxpayer £3.4 billion — a trifling amount by today’s standards but a tidy sum at the time. I’m sure if Major joined forces with Michael Heseltine (who believes we should join the euro soon), they could thrash out a policy Dave ‘David’ Cameron could claim as his own.

One does wonder whom Dave would single out as Britain’s most illustrious Prime Minister. A pound gets you a euro, it must be John Major.

 

 

According to Freedom House the world didn’t boast a single democracy in 1900. However, in 2007 there were supposed to be 123 democracies out of 192 existing countries. The world is mostly democratic then, which ought to be enough to put QED grins on the neocons’ faces and make us all rejoice. In Hegel’s view the 1806 battle of Jena ended history, in the sense that no further debate was any longer possible. However, history manifestly restarted soon thereafter, only, according to the ex-neocon Fukayama, to end again in 1989 with the final victory of democracy everywhere. Now that history has been kickstarted again, are you rejoicing?

As the shift from zero to 123 occurred in the 20th century, then, according to democracy worshippers, it ought to be regarded as the sunniest period ever. Instead, somewhere between 400 and 500 million people died violent deaths at the time — more than in all the other centuries of recorded history combined. Moreover, some of the most horrific massacres ensued after failed attempts to implant the saplings of one-man-one-vote democracy into a soil all too ready to reject them. Russia and Germany spring to mind, but then you can name your own examples from just about every continent.

Woodrow Wilson, one of the neocons’ icons, dragged America into the First World War under the slogan of ‘making the world safe for democracy’. The principal warring parties were perplexed, considering that France was already a republic, Britain a constituional democracy with a fine parliamentary tradition, while Germany, Austria and even Russia had functioning parliaments, even though the last had been struggling to come to terms with it. And all those parliaments craved war. In fact, the German parliament, especially its social-democratic faction, was so gung-ho that in 1914 Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg pushed the Kaiser into declaring war on Russia in all possible haste because, ‘Without this,’ he claimed, ‘we’d never carry the socialists.’ In the end only one German MP voted against war credits, the bolshevik Karl Liebknecht, taking his cue from Lenin.

It takes a woeful misreading of history not to realise that Wilson’s demagoguery was aimed at pursuing American imperial ambitions, with ‘democracy’ happening to be the battle-cry close at hand. In fact, his American contemporaries were stunned even more than the outlanders, considering that until then the word ‘democracy’ had hardly been common parlance. The Founding Fathers barely ever used it, and ‘democracy’ didn’t figure among the 278 words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. He only talked about ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Why didn’t he just say ‘democratic government’ instead? That would have reduced the address to an even 270 words, and surely brevity is important.

By now you’ve realised that I’m only talking about the past to draw your attention to the present. For it is under the mendacious (or, to be kinder, misconceived) slogan of democracy cum nation-building that the US has created a veritable powder keg in the Middle East, which could indeed end history, but not in the way Messrs Hegel and Fukayama meant it. I don’t know if neocon agitprop spinners actually believe that their version of laser-guided democracy can triumph in the region. If they do, they are fools. And if they don’t, while still spinning the same yarn, then they are knaves. As a direct result of America’s aggressive, ‘nation-building’ policies over the last eight years, the Middle East is about to explode — yesterday’s events in Egypt are but a harbinger of things to come. The systematic effort to unseat relatively secular, if undoubtedly unsavoury, regimes because they lack universal suffrage can only charitably be described as harebrained. Americans in general, and the neocons in particular, fail to notice that all those Shahs tend to be replaced by Khomeinis, not James Madisons. The natural successor to Mubarak will resemble Osama more than Obama. That chap whose name sounds like ‘I’m a dinner jacket’ makes all sane people feel nostalgic about the Shah — and it’s not impossible that even the ghastly Saddam and Gaddafi will be missed before too long. But at least enough ballots will be universally cast (and no doubt meticulously counted) to keep the neocons happy. 

Who, pray tell, will make the world safe from ‘democracy’ before a real catastrophe befalls?

 

 

 

 

 

In an earlier entry I wondered how long before this subject will graduate from school to university, with degree courses on offer. Doctorate-level education is clearly needed, considering that Britain is a proud site of 200,000 abortions every year. And surely, if almost half of our children are born out of wedlock, many of those pregnancies must be accidental.  Perhaps, the solution lies in augmenting purely academic work with on-the-job apprenticeship, I don’t know.

Anyway, according to a reader’s letter, this academic development will have to remain a cherished dream for the time being. However, many universities do offer advanced courses of similar intellectual content. So if you think of furthering your education (and it’s never too late), or have a child about to leave school, the opportunities abound.

For example, you can take a course in ‘The Lesbian Phallus’ at the Occidental College, LA (Critical Theory, Social Justice Dept.). Queen’s, Belfast, offers ‘How to train in the Jedi way’. Not to be outdone, Georgetown University counters with ‘Philosophy and Star Trek‘. You can pursue ‘Harry Potter Studies’ at Durham or ‘The Life and Times of Robin Hood’ at the type-cast Nottingham University. Alfred University, NYC, can contribute to your intellectual growth by offering ‘Maple Syrup Making’, and Glasgow proudly lists a post-graduate course on ‘The History of Lace Knitting in Shetland’.

Without passing any unfashionable quality judgment, one simply has to observe that the concept of university has changed somewhat since that budding young scholar left the village of Aquino and travelled, via Monte Cassino, to Paris to study with Albert the Great. How much richer young Thomas (and we along with him) would have been had he learned not Aristotle but, say, ‘The art of skinning a bullock’ or ‘The plight of women in the agora’. So I hope you’ll join me in rejoicing at the progress we’ve made since those uncivilised times.

Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble says that, once the euro has been stabilised, Britain will join ‘faster than you can say Gott Strafe England‘, or words to that effect. His colleagues also suggested they have a secret plan to prevent Britain’s referendum on repatriating a few marginal powers from Brussels. On the first point, it takes refreshing effrontery to make such statements when the euro (and the EU, come to think of it) has been shown up for the economically illiterate, ideological contrivance it is. On the second point, they needn’t bother. The trick isn’t in preventing a referendum but in going ahead with it — provided that Nick Clegg and his Parteigenossen can word the question (sorry about using Germanisms, but ‘all of Europe speaks German now’, as we well know — nicht wahr?). As someone who used market research for 30 years, I can assure you that the wording of the question can skew the answer. From the height of that experience, I can offer Nick a few friendly suggestions:

1) Would you like to a) live in a large house in the shires by staying in the EU or b) live in a cardboard box under Waterloo bridge by leaving?

2) Would you prefer driving a) a Mercedes by staying or b) yourself up the wall by going?

3) Would you choose a) jobs and growth by staying or b) unemployment and stagnation by leaving?

4) Would you rather spend your holiday in a) Nice by staying or b) Peckham Rye by going?

5) Would you rather lead a) a prosperous life by staying or b) a bayonet charge by leaving?

Any one of these, Nick, and everything’s hunky-dory. Or, as we’ll soon be made to put it, Alles in Ordnung.

Our powers that be are considering a ban on smoking in cars. Not theirs; ours. It’s all for our own good, and especially for the good of our children. Gosh, Dave, and I didn’t know you cared. In fact, the impression we’ve had for quite some time is that our government cares about our children only insofar as to turn them into little savages. Now we know that impression is wrong. But it’s easy to see how we were misled into this error.

Perhaps it was our state education that has elevated the use of condoms to an academic discipline. I wonder how long before our universities will be offering degree courses in condom usage: B.cu for knowing what they are for, M.cu for knowing how to put them on, D.cu for holding on to the tip so no air gets in. Oh pardon me, that’s not all our children learn. They are also taught that all religions are equal, and all are equally rubbish. That we’re all apes, which isn’t so much science as self-fulfilling prophecy. That multi-culti diversity is so good as to be God. That any way they speak English is fine as long as they understand one another (they may not understand us, and we them, but the whole point is to guarantee that our paths will never cross — unless our comprehensively educated darlings mug us in a dark alley). That any music is cool as long as they think it is. That they don’t have to learn how to read, write and add up to get ahead in life — the state will take care of them.

It’s our government policies that have allowed the state to squeeze its bulk into the place formerly occupied by the father, making the father redundant. Millions of children are brought up by intermittently single mothers, and 52% of those children live below the official poverty line. Millions of them are obese from all the slops they eat, and 86% of all children never have a meal at the table with their family.

But hey, now we know the government cares. However, can one be permitted to ask a few questions? Such as, why just cars, why not homes? Admittedly, cars tend to be smaller than flats, this side of America at any rate, so the concentration of nicotine would be higher. But on the other hand, people tend to smoke more at home than while driving, what with the sad necessity of steering with one hand and changing gears with the other. Why not classify nicotine as a Class A drug and be done with it? And the most subversive question of all: exactly where do you chaps get off? The car is my property; I can do whatever I want in it. The car is an extension of my home, my castle, where I’m lord and master. I can tell my passengers not to smoke; they can only ask me. If they don’t like my smoking, they shouldn’t get in the car with me. My children don’t have that option, or rather wouldn’t if I had any. But the ban will have to be blanket — you shall look after your children, you unfeeling bastard, even if you have none.

Now, even though the evidence against passive smoking is less than unequivocal, I’m prepared to accept that not smoking in my car is a good idea. But if history teaches us anything, it’s that a government that legislates supposedly good ideas will always turn into laws ideas that are definitely bad. The more the state does for the people, the more it will do to them. Thus it was Nazi scientists who first established a link between smoking and lung cancer. Hence, along with Nuremberg laws the Nazis passed one banning smoking for all women (extended life expectancy wasn’t an issue for the men in the trenches). As a result, well into the 60s lung-cancer statistics remained better for women in Germany than anywhere else. Why were the Nazis so solicitous? It wasn’t the good of the people; it was the good of the state (the healthier the people, the longer they’ll serve the Führer).

This is similar to the justification that HMG uses in this case: the healthier we are, the less pressure we’ll put on the NHS, which is to say the state. Now that is the strongest argument against the very notion of an NHS. Stronger even than the cull of wrinklies it is conducting, using such expedients as infections and neglect. Stronger than the waiting lists. Stronger than all those directors of diversity, facilitators of optimisation and optimisers of facilitation who are rapidly replacing doctors and nurses in our hospitals. We are (still) a first-world country with third-world medical care. No wonder then that our government isn’t above imposing third-world tyrannies.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, beauty and brains seldom reside at the same site. And though anger does sometimes improve people’s looks (women hate hearing this, can’t imagine why), it invariably has the opposite effect on their mental faculties.

Nick Clegg proved at least the second part of this observation by blowing his top the other day. What caused his ire was a very timid suggestion that perhaps now would be a good time to repatriate some of our erstwhile powers from the EU. Not all, God forbid. Some. Very, very few. That was enough to set Nick off. The kind of people who say such things are demagogues! Populists! What we should focus on is jobs! And growth! Blimey! There, there, Nick. Take it easy, mate. Look, you’re getting red in the face. Loosen your tie, sit down, relax. There, you’re looking much better. Good lad. But don’t bandy ‘demagogue’ and ‘populist’ around ever again, all right? People might talk about glass houses and stones, so you’ll get upset again. God only knows what you’d say next.

First aid out of the way, let’s look at what Clegg actually said. One can infer that, according to him, trying to reclaim some of our sovereignty from Brussels would be tantamount to no jobs and no growth. And conversely, the EUSSR equals growth and jobs. To proffer this equation at the best of times would be neither amusing nor clever. To insist on it now, when Europe is looking at the biggest economic disaster in its history, is, well… I don’t want to cause another tantrum by finding the right adjective that would do justice to this folly. And my wife says I mustn’t swear.

Since about 25 years ago, when I first took interest in the subject, I haven’t heard a single rational argument in favour of the EU that can’t be destroyed in 10 seconds flat by any averagely educated person. Lately I’ve been hearing from all sorts of people that the consequences of us cutting loose would be too awful to contemplate. We must be in the EU to trade with Europe. Right. So without signing such treasonous acts as the Maastricht Treaty we couldn’t be a trading nation. Shame they forgot to tell that to the Duke of Wellington, that notorious eurosceptic. In fact, Britain did reasonably well in that department throughout the 19th century, with no European commissioner anywhere in sight.

So suppose we left the EUSSR tomorrow. Would the French stop selling their Bordeaux and Brie (pasteurised) to les rosbifs? Or the Germans their Volkswagens and Brauns? Europe has a healthy trade surplus with us, and the burghers of either Calais or Cologne are unlikely to cut off their economic noses to spite their faces. Any reduction in trade will hurt them more than it would hurt us.

Moreover, rather than bleeding both domestic and foreign taxpayers white (an idea close to what passes for Clegg’s heart), Britain could then offer all sorts of concessions to investors and traders, turning herself into a bigger Channel Island, but one with old culture and architecture. Stop trading with us? They’d be elbowing one another out of the way to get into the queue. The resulting revenue could then be used to repatriate some of our manufacturing capacity. This even at the risk of upsetting those ‘conservative’, which is to say Friedmanite, economists who insist we can all get rich by selling houses and bonds to one another, while letting those swarthy foreigners actually make things. The first part of that theory was proven wrong in 2008, if any proof was necessary. The second part doesn’t answer the question of jobs, the kind traditionally done by the working classes. The assumption was that, once liberated from degrading themselves on the assembly line, they’d all become systems analysts. Instead they’ve become an unemployed, unemployable and brutalised lumpen proletariat, assisted in that development by education that doesn’t educate.

Wouldn’t this offer a better prospect for jobs and growth than becoming a gau in the Fourth Reich ever could? Of course it would. But it wouldn’t offer better prospects for Nick Clegg’s job and growth, and that’s the whole point. Just put yourself into the poor chap’s shoes. Chances are he’ll be out of a job at the next election, if not earlier. I’m guessing here, but the plan must have been to go back to his political roots in the EUSSR, like ‘the wind [that] returneth again to its circles.’ He’ll never be Prime Minister here, will he? But the chances for Clegg to land a top EU job would be nil if Britain kept even marginally aloof. If by then a single European state has been set up, as seems likely, with Britain not at its centre, all the cushy jobs will go to the likes of Monti and Merkel, not to any subject of a recalcitrant monarchy.

No wonder Nick is angry. Wouldn’t you be?

 

When the West was still governed by statesmen rather than spivs, John Quincy Adams said, ‘[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’ After the aforementioned shift took place, John F. Kennedy disagreed: ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.’

The listeners were supposed to jump up and scream ‘let’s march!!!’, rather than sit back and ask awkward questions. Any price, Mr President? Any burden? Any hardship? Can we put at least some limit on those? Does the price go as high as self-extinction? Impoverishment? Social disintegration? And what if our present friends change their minds and become our foes after we’ve armed them to the teeth? Are we certain their definition of liberty is the same as ours? And when you say ‘we’, do you mean yourself, your government or all of us? What if we, ‘the people’, feel differently from the way your royal ‘we’ does?

Alas, moderntiy breeds a populace incapable of asking such questions forcefully enough, if at all. Whether such unquestioning docility spills out into a tuneless rendition of Stars and Stripes or a mighty roar of Horst Wessel is only a matter of the time, place and response desired by the demagogue.

Thus Americans, and we along with them, nod their assent when fed reassurances that we aren’t fighting Islam. We’re fighting Islamism, of the kind that makes its adherents fly planes into tall buildings. Such reassurances are either mendacious or ignorant, or usually both. In any modern war, agression is initiated by the impassioned and empowered elite, not the people at large. It wasn’t, for example, the German people who started the war, but the Nazi elite. But this irrefutable consideration didn’t prevent that original Eurosceptic Sir Arthur Harris from doing what had to be done.

What would John Q Adams do if he were alive today? Assuming he still kept his principles, he wouldn’t embark on the futile task of building nations at the cost of thousands of American lives — and millions in the nations being built. He’d also know enough about the history of Islam to know it’s an aggressive creed, with world domination built into its doctrinal DNA. That hasn’t changed in the last 1,400 years and is unlikely to change in the next thousand. What has been variable is the West’s ability to ‘champion and vindicate’ its own freedom. This is now at its lowest ebb, and the current bellicosity of Americans assisted by their satraps (well, us) only serves to underscore this fact, not to deny it.

If they set themselves the task that’s sound ethically, intellectually and morally — that of protecting their rather tasteless architecture against planes cum bombs — they could do a much better job of it by relying on punitive prevention rather than sanctimonious, laser-guided lessons in democracy. It would be simple enough to declare that the West is not going to take issue with what goes on within the Muslim world. If they choose to castrate their women, maim their thieves or stone their adulterers, they should by all means go ahead (we can’t stop them anyway). But any act of terrorism against any Western country will result in massive, and Harris-style indiscriminate, retaliation. That could take the form of confiscation (rather than merely freezing) of all Muslim assets in the West, massive bombing raids on the sites dear to their rulers’ hearts, occupation of the oil fields, economic blocade (as opposed to limp-wristed sanctions), you name it. Whatever works.

The lines would be clearly drawn, the measures prepared in advance and put into a trip-up mode, we’d all know where we stand. But to act this way the West has to regain its erstwhile self-confidence, its certainty that it stands for the God-given truth, not something as transient and nebulous as ‘democracy’. Yes, and pigs will fly, though of course not to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of founding a new lobby, the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism. Can I count on you as a member?

 

Sorry, this headline is just a cheap trick to catch your attention. I’m not suggesting the tents outside St Paul’s or Westminster Hall should be shot up, although the idea isn’t without some theoretical, purely aesthetic attraction. But in practice not only such a measure would be inhuman, but, as the Americans prove, it is also unnecessary. The other night New York’s finest, taking their cue from similar actions in Oakland, California, and Portland, Washington, managed to wipe out their own obscene eyesores without resorting to anything heavier than batons, floodlights and pepper spray. In the end, they didn’t even have to use the spray.

But then of course they didn’t have to worry about Vince Cable and the Archbishop of Canterbury telling them, as they tell us, that the tent dwellers have a point. Which point is that, other than that of those scrofulous youths being as feeble of mind as they are infantile of emotion? Contextually, it has to be that capitalism is to blame for our present misfortunes. Therefore we must have no, or at least less, capitalism and more, much more, socialism. How much more, exactly? At present HMG spends close to 50% of our GDP, about 75% in the Celtic fringe. Should it be as high as in Stalin’s Russia (85%)? Higher? But there such tents really would have been machinegunned, with all the dwellers’ families shipped off to concentration camps. Would the St Paul’s youths take this kind of rough with the smooth of socialism? Those of us who, unlike the youths, pay taxes tend to pay about 60%, all in. Should it be 100%? But then, if Arthur Laffer is to be believed, as in this case he should be, no one would work and HMG would get no revenue at all. Even the 50% marginal tax rate has produced a loss of revenue, though Vince thinks it ‘sent an important message’. The same message, one supposes, as that sent by the tents.

It isn’t capitalism but socialism that’s the immediate culprit in our current plight. Specifically, it’s the morally corrupting and financially unsustainable levels of public spending, promoted by our spivocrats. Ever since they discovered the trick of buying their votes with our money, there has been no stopping them. The calculation is simple: in the absence of moral restraints that can in the West only come from Christianity, there will always be more non-working wealth consumers than hard-working wealth producers. So give them what they want, squeeze the producers, and our spivocrats will have jobs for life, here or in the EUSSR. And if there aren’t enough homegrown freeloaders, then we can always import millions of likeminded outlanders — salt strewn on our civilisation to make sure nothing else will ever grow again. Give them a few years to become voters, and they’ll never have to become workers. Will they vote for a party that inscribes small government on its banners? Fat chance.

That’s the real logic behind the welfare state, and never mind the mock-Christian noises about looking after the less fortunate. Those truly bereft of fortune die of neglect in our welfare state’s hospitals or freeze to death in their welfare state’s flats. We’ve always had the poor (‘the poor always ye have with you,’ went the un-PC adage of that formerly popular proto-conservative). But never in the past did we have governments that self-perpetuate by trying to impoverish the whole population.

Is that the message, Mr Cable? Is that the point, Archbishop?

After ordering the clearout of Wall Street occupiers, Michael Blomberg, New York’s mayor, said something no European politician would ever utter: ‘Given the choice between human rights and public safety, I’d choose safety every time.’ A simple message, unadorned by any ‘gosh-crikey-jolly-hockey-sticks’ twitches we find so endearing in our own politcians. I wonder if he’d fancy the job of Mayor of London. Or that of Archbishop of Canterbury. Yes I know Mr Blomberg’s isn’t a Christian, but then Dr Williams isn’t much of one either. 

Neither are men. However, some women are qualified to hold high judical jobs. So are some men. Some women are better qualified than some (or even any) men. Some men are better qualified than some (or even any) women. Now, societies in which such primordial truths have to be enunciated are in deep trouble. And societies in which Ken ‘Kenneth’ Clark can be the Justice Secretary and Lord Neuberger the Master of the Rolls are in deeper trouble still.

Mr Clark wants priority to be given to women and ethnic minorities when it comes to top judicial jobs. He agrees with Lord Neuberger that the current proportion is ‘worryingly’ small. Both refer to Section 159 of the 2010 Equality Act as a justification for their unjustifiable worries. Both accept the Act’s provision that ‘A [must be] as qualified as B to be recruited or promoted’ ahead of B. Let’s ignore that, if an Equality Act talks about hiring A ahead of B, it ought to be more appropriately called Inequality Act. It’s logic and semantics I’m talking about, not politics.

What worries me is the modern tendency to treat people not as heterogenous individuals but as homogenous groups. This propensity goes against the grain of what used to be called Christendom — and is one of the reasons why Christendom ‘used to be’, but no longer is. That each person is a free, autonomous and unique entity was a founding truth of our civilisation when we still had one. But I don’t wish to take Messrs Clark and Neuberger out of their depth by referring to such matters. Instead, they ought to consider observable, empirical facts.

Such as that it’s borderline impossible to find two equally qualified candidates for any high-level job. At least, I never saw such a pair in the 20-odd years that I was in a position to hire. It is possible to find two similar CVs. But CVs don’t do the work — it’s people who do that. And all sorts of imponderables come in when two persons’ ability to do a top job is being considered, the kind of things one can’t put into a barrister’s CV: strength of character, firmness of convictions, ability to work with others, sternness leavened with mercy and so forth. (I know all this sounds too trivial to mention, but I’m trying to make the point for the benefit of Messrs Clark and Neuberger so even they can understand.)

It takes much sagacity and experience to weigh all those factors to choose the right candidate. Thus a candidate’s belonging to any group defined by sex, race or complement of limbs is an utter irrelevance, one that needlessly encumbers a process that’s devilishly difficult to begin with. Such group identity should not even be a remote consideration in a country ruled by law, where top judicial appointments ought to be the most critical of all.

But in a country increasingly ruled not by laws evolved over centuries but by diktat from the EUSSR, perhaps such appointments really have little significance. So perhaps Messrs Clark and Neuberger have a point after all. Do let us have judges who are all black, lesbian cripples appointed to the job specifically because they possess those characteristics. It doesn’t matter any longer. But, for old times’ sake, can we at least make sure they all have law degrees?