Month: October 2023

No? Then you never lived in Russia at the time I did. Then and there such sanguinary awakenings were a routine matter every morning.

You may think my hometown was plagued by nocturnal violence, with some members of the family assailing their somnolent relations, but that wasn’t the case. Moscow was plagued all right, but not by domestic violence. It was catastrophically infested with bedbugs.

Those bloody pests figure in both English and Russian folklore, but note both the similarity and the difference. The two nations refer to the same problem, but the Russians merely established its aetiology, while the pragmatic English offered a concrete solution.

The English reference to that fauna appears in a good-natured nursery rhyme:

Good night, sleep tight
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
But if they do, then take your shoe and
Hit them till they’re black and blue

The first two lines have become proverbial, the way many people wish good night to one another even if they’ve never heard of anyone actually bitten by those nasty creatures. As to the proposed remedy, it strikes me as effective but only of limited practical value.

You see, bedbugs strike mostly at night, and their bites are seldom painful enough to wake one up. When a victim opens his eyes in the morning, the bedbugs are usually sleeping off their blood hangover away from both prying eyes and punitive footwear.

However, if you do hit one with a shoe, my experience suggests it doesn’t turn black and blue. It turns into a red blot, which shows how little exposure to bedbugs Britons had when they came up with that rhyme.

On the other hand, Muscovites responded to the pestilence the way they responded to communist propaganda: with a joke. That one targeted both nuisances: “What do bedbugs have in common with capitalists? They both suck the blood of the working classes.”

For all the much-vaunted English pragmatism, I have to say the Russian joke was more useful than that cute nursery rhyme. It provided solid information, of benefit to sociologist, hygienist and epidemiologist alike.

Bedbug infestations usually occur in congested urban dwellings whose residents have a rather laissez-faire attitude to hygiene. They wear old shabby clothes, often hand-me-downs, their rooms are stuffed with dilapidated furniture, they hardly ever vacuum.

Bedbugs thrive on such environments, which is why they did so well in Moscow. Most of the people there – and not just the working classes – lived in crowded communal apartments, had no money to buy new clothes or bed linen, hardly ever owned a vacuum cleaner, and their only concession to hygiene was taking a bath once a month, whether they needed it or not.

Why am I boring you with such useless information? If you have to ask, not only did you never live in the Moscow of my time, but you are clearly not living in the Paris of today.

That city is suffering a major invasion of bedbugs, and the rest of the country isn’t far behind. Recent data show that one in ten French households have that problem.

More to the point, ten out of ten French households, and the same proportion of British ones, are exposed to an avalanche of woke bilge engulfing every aspect of life. Including, oddly enough, even the presence of bedbugs.

All hell broke loose when a TV news anchor put this question to the founder of a pest-control firm:  

“There is a lot of immigration at the moment. Is it people who don’t have the same hygiene conditions as those in France who bring [bedbugs]…?”

You what?!? That deafening scream emitted in unison from thousands of woke throats. That anchor (and no, it isn’t Cockney rhyming slang) was guilty of hate speech, racism, fascism, along with every other ism you’ve ever heard of, and I’m sure you’ve heard of many.

Instead of bending over and taking his punishment like a man, the hapless journalist made matters worse by trying to defend himself. “Must journalists justify the questions they ask?” he said. A mighty roar delivered a deafening reply: “You bet your sweet cul they do!”

The anchor complained of being “insulted, harassed, defamed” and generally “pilloried” for “refusing to accept the uniformity of thought.” Personally, I’m not aware of any pressure to accept uniform thought on the subject of bedbugs – in fact, I didn’t know such uniformity existed.

But in fact he was probably referring to a broader issue, that of uncontrolled immigration. His TV channel has problems with tectonic demographic shifts that introduce alien cultural and social mores and, as the anchor implied, also unpleasant pests.

For the record, the aforementioned expert on pest control pointed out the presenter’s mistake. Neither immigration nor hygiene, he said, has anything to do with bedbugs: “That is why they affect absolutely everyone.”

Well, not quite everyone, monsieur. It’s true that understated hygiene isn’t a major cause of bedbug infestation, although it’s certainly a minor one. But, like some of my best friends, bedbugs are good and avid travellers.

They can happily hitch a ride with people moving from an infested area to a previously pristine one. They then settle in crowded, dirty, impoverished places – like the Paris ghetto-like banlieues and the communal flats of my childhood.

Having sucked enough underprivileged blood, bedbugs can then travel by local transportation to the upmarket areas, and indeed “affect absolutely anyone”. Yet, conditioned as I am to look for primary causes, I think it’s wrong to say that mass immigration has nothing to do with it.

Other French pest-control experts, those who haven’t yet cottoned on to the profound political implications of bedbugs, concur. They warn that an influx of tourists at next year’s Olympics is likely to increase the population of Paris bedbugs and also of rats.

In fact, they see a direct link between mass tourism – and of course immigration – and the profusion of bedbugs. Those blood-suckers disappeared in France immediately after the war, only to come back some 40 years later with millions of couples wishing to be photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower – and also huddled African masses yearning to be rich.

Then how come, I can hear you ask, Britain doesn’t have the same problem with bedbugs? After all, we have no shortage of either tourists or immigrants.

Honest answer? I haven’t a clue. You can’t expect me to answer every trick question. To quote Russian folklore again, I’m not a magician. I’m only learning.

Like Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert was a tireless propagandist of atheism. Unlike Richard Dawkins, he was a first-rate scientist.

In the former capacity, he didn’t escape yawn-inducing vulgarity, a condition invariably afflicting anyone who argues against the existence of God or insists that science and religion are incompatible.

Yet as a scientist of note, Prof. Wolpert stated in one of his books a thought I found interesting and, more important, useful. Real, especially modern, science always goes beyond common sense, he wrote. If it doesn’t pass this crucial test, it isn’t a real science.

Unlike his trite atheistic animadversions, that rang true.

If we look at photons getting to us from faraway stars by unerringly and, on the face of it, rationally choosing the shortest path of least resistance for millions of years; if we even begin to consider the implications of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity (and how the two may be at odds), universal constants, modern genetics with its undecipherable codes, we’ll see that common sense will help us grasp none of these. It will mislead, not lead.

That stands to reason, especially for a scientific ignoramus like me who fails to come to grips with even the lower reaches of science, those Prof. Wolpert would have regarded as still attainable by common sense. In any case, my interest in natural sciences has always been cursory, leading me only as far as reading popular books on various disciplines, especially those acting as battlegrounds for political jousts.

My interests are primarily confined to the sciences Prof. Wolpert wouldn’t have recognised as such: theology, philosophy (including its political genre), history, aesthetics. However, having stumbled on his comment, I realised it applied to those fields as well.

Just as we can’t fathom the mind of a photon by common sense, neither can we grasp the complexity of human, social interactions by relying on that faculty alone. Common sense is worth having but, if we use it as a sole guide, we’ll soon reach an implicit sign saying “Thus far but no farther”.

This understanding is especially valid nowadays, when common sense has become the buzz phrase of politicians typically described as populists or, incongruously, conservatives. Unlike socialists of various hues, they are supposed to proceed from homespun wisdom, not highfalutin abstractions. Two and two always makes four to them, not any other digit and certainly not the inalienable right to change sex.

To some extent that’s true. If you look at liberal (in the real sense of the word) economics through the prism of common sense, you’ll see it works better than any other kind. Liberating the people’s congenital quest for money, power and social status can lead a nation to prosperity and material comfort that no version of command economy can provide.

This is God’s (or rather Hayek’s) own truth, the part of it within the reach of common sense. This simple mechanism will then ineluctably lead to the realisation that ever-accelerating technological progress increases productivity, which will in turn vindicate the commonsensical faith in liberal economics.

The cogs of the mental machine are meshing smoothly, everything is ticking along nicely. But then a gnashing noise interferes. For, while a modern economy increasingly activated by the push of a button is ravenous for highly qualified labour, it pushes aside with disdain the primitive, muscular kind.

That raises socially existential questions, such as what to do with the millions of people incapable, for various reasons, of functioning in an ever more esoteric economy.

If one button does the job formerly done by 100 workers, what will 99 of them do (one will be needed to push the button)? What will we do to prevent a social situation pregnant with the embryo of revolutionary outburst? How do we reconcile any possible solution with the values we hold as immutable and the rights we hold as inalienable?

Suddenly our commonsensical thought spins out of control. We realise that common sense has reached its limit because coming into play are so many factors that it’s impossible to forestall entropy by basic rational calculations. We relied on common sense to lead us to social virtue and ended up in a cul-de-sac.

We bump our heads against the wall trying to find a way out, only to realise this isn’t one cul-de-sac but many, not just an economic one but also social, cultural, educational, religious, legal, political, generally civilisational. We aren’t really in a cul-de-sac, it turns out. We are in a maze, with no lantern to light up an exit.

We now have to backtrack to the starting point of first principles, hoping that the breadcrumbs we’ve been spreading along the way are still there to signpost a safe route of retreat. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, so we are left fretting and sweating.

None of this is to denigrate common sense as such. It’s a useful tool, even as a sledgehammer is useful. However, basic tools alone won’t get us very far.

Lowly common sense, typically operating on a strictly empirical level, will only ever be useful in solving high tasks if it’s a servant to the master of sound first principles. Interestingly, though common sense can’t do without such first principles for long, the latter sometimes don’t have to rely on the former to arrive at truth.

One example from my own experience, if I may, and I’m only using it because it’s close at hand, not to toot my own horn. My friends and readers of long standing will confirm that I’ve been saying and writing from the early 90s that all those glasnosts and perestroikas hadn’t made Russia any more virtuous or any less dangerous.

That went against the grain of not only public opinion but also common sense. My judgement didn’t tally with the compendium of known facts, that indispensable toolkit of empiricism. Moreover, many of those who held the received view had more facts at their fingertips than I did (I’ve caught up since then).

I proceeded strictly from general principles. Russia, I knew, had for 70-odd years been ruled by evil, possibly the greatest political evil that mankind had ever concocted with the devil’s able assistance.

Yet the devil can be defeated, evil deeds can be forgiven, sins can be redeemed. However, that takes genuine remorse and readiness to pay penance.

None of that was in evidence. The flagbearers of supposed purification were a motley group of CPSU Central Committee secretaries, other high communist officials, a swarm of KGB officers and organised crime figures. They had changed their language but not their spots.

Knowing that, I was immune to ‘common sense’ and all the widely publicised facts of democratic elections, parliaments, free enterprise, disappearing censorship and other wonderful things happening to Russia. Proceeding strictly from first principles, I knew that, even if true, those things wouldn’t last. The evil wasn’t dead. It was only dormant, or yet lurking in ambush, waiting for the right moment to raise its head.

If the devil is in the details, then God is in the first principles – provided they are true. And details put first principles to a test, either proving or disproving their truth. Common sense comes in handy when we gather the necessary facts and arrange them in the right order.

In other words, common sense is a useful tool of first principles. But God help us all when it’s posited as their replacement.

This question springs from a melancholy observation: just about everyone in the service sector seems to speak English as a second language. Many of them hardly speak it at all.

That presents an interesting linguistic challenge for anyone seeking assistance in a supermarket or trying to book a medical appointment. Nor is it just the service sector either.

An unprecedented amount of construction and renovation, mostly residential, is going on in London. The city is densely covered with scaffolding, and the builders putting the scaffolds up and then working on them mostly swear in various Slavic languages.

Also, one gets the impression that all delivery vans must have a security device that cuts off the engine whenever a Briton born and bred gets behind the wheel. And I can’t remember the last time a cold caller tried to sell something to me in unaccented English.

Now you understand the question in the headline. What on earth are the Britons doing while immigrants do all the work? Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, he who often suffers the indignity of having his surname mispronounced by interviewers, has provided a cogent answer.

They live on government handouts, either by ‘throwing a sickie’ or simply refusing to look for work. The former category is so swollen with people on disability benefits, that one can safely conclude Britain has more cripples in 2023 than in the aftermath of either world war.

Mr Hunt has left malingerers alone for now. However, he is targeting professional shirkers for an avuncular rebuke. “Those who won’t even look for work do not deserve the same benefits as people trying hard to do the right thing,” he says.

I’d say that those who won’t even look for work don’t deserve any benefits at all, but such maximalism is alien to our putative conservatives. The government is only proposing to reduce payments for a while, not to stop them permanently.

In parallel, the national living wage will be raised to over £11 an hour, which amounts to over £22,000 a year for someone in full employment. That’s hardly a king’s ransom, but then people on such incomes don’t typically claim royal lineage.

Of course the problem is that those of them who know how to add up can figure out that, if they milk the benefits system for all it’s worth, they can do as well or better without ever doing a day’s work. The choice is a no-brainer: had I been able to make the same living, I myself wouldn’t have spent decades going to the office every morning.

The Chancellor estimates the number of professional shirkers at about 100,000, which strikes me as a huge underestimation. According to the Office of National Statistics, 36 million people (54.2 per cent of the population) now live in households that receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

It’s hard to believe that a mere 100,000 of them refuse to look for work, while the remaining millions are “people trying hard to do the right thing”. Let me tell you: they aren’t trying hard enough.

The jobs I mentioned above can’t be very difficult to get if migrants who can barely make themselves understood in English find them within days of arrival. How hard can it be to push a button and say “Dr Sawbones’s office”? Or ask a customer: “Will you have chips or mixed vegetables with that?”

I’d suggest that a lot more than 100,000 benefits recipients would be able to handle such onerous tasks, and most establishments in need of such personnel complain of woeful understaffing.

Hence I can offer HMG free advice that will solve several problems in one fell swoop. Every able-bodied person of working age should receive no long-term benefits at all, ever.

Just think of the problems such a decisive step would solve. First, there are billions in savings that the Exchequer could use for worthier purposes. Then, even more important, the moral health of society will greatly improve if all current freeloaders start doing an honest day’s work.

Also, while they are out at work they won’t be able to do the asocial things so many of them do to turn whole areas into hellholes. And as a fringe benefit, with less employment available for migrants, fewer of them will have an incentive to settle in Britain, legally or otherwise.

People with compassion in their hearts can be reassured that those on the receiving end of such unspeakable cruelty won’t starve. Given the extra incentive to find work, they’ll do so without much trouble.

Thomas Sowell, one of my favourite living thinkers, has done extensive research showing that people who’d do nothing to improve their current income are instantly energised when their basic necessities are under threat.

Again, my own experience confirms those findings: I used to be stuck in the same jobs for years when I could find better ones with a minimum of get-up-and-go. Yet I’d instantly turn into a beehive of activity whenever my safe jobs turned out to be very unsafe indeed.

My advice strikes me as sensible, and I’m sure Mr Hunt would agree – in private, over a pint. However, judging by the decibel volume of the enraged shrieks already greeting even his palliative proposal, he’d never be able even to hint at such meanness in public.

He’d stay in office for exactly as long as it would take him to write a ‘Dear Rishi’ resignation letter – and he knows it.

I can only conclude with a brilliant aphorism uttered by a retired politician I used to mock mercilessly, Jean-Claude Junker.

“Junk”, as I called him, once said: “We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” Bravo, Junk. I can’t think of a better indictment of our whole political system.