Author: Alexander Boot

Since human life on Earth had a beginning, it’s illogical to believe it can’t have an end. It can and probably will, some day.

Christians believe there is life in death, but most people deny that nowadays. However, no one denies that there is death in life. Living organisms live, then die. We see it with our own eyes.

We are all – even conceivably I am – going to die, individually. And, if we regard the human race as a living organism, we can also die collectively.

Life on Earth can be erased by the sun getting out of kilter and either frying or freezing us to death. A giant meteor may hit the Earth and break it in half. Some meteorological quirk may create a great flood, even bigger than the one spelled with the capital F.

Someone better-versed in science than I am can doubtless come up with many other doomsday scenarios, but there’s no point worrying about them. Such disasters either happen or they don’t, and there’s nothing we can do about the possibility of democide caused by defects in physical nature.

What should concern us is the possibility of suicide caused by defects in human nature. This is worth pondering, if only because we may have a chance to prevent it. This is an outside chance, I’ll grant you that, but a chance nonetheless.

If collective suicide is a possible end, we certainly have the means to achieve it. The most obvious and quickest way to perdition is a no-holds-barred nuclear war, and we are teetering on the brink of it. This is so obvious that I’ll spare you a long list of likely flashpoints that can conflagrate the world.

Death by demographics would be slower but no less possible. After all, throughout the West and much of the East people don’t produce enough children even to maintain the replacement level. If more people die than are born, then sooner or later there won’t be anyone left, what’s there not to understand?

Another suicide, falling somewhere between the two in its potential speed of execution, could be caused by a release of toxins, either accidental, as a result of negligence, or deliberate, as biological warfare. Think of Covid and the havoc it caused, then think of bubonic plague or some other Black Death, multiply the Covid effect by a million and there you have it: suicide by germs.

Then there is this new-fangled Artificial Intelligence, which, according to some dystopic projections, may create a victorious robotic revolt putting paid to mankind. Personally, I can’t understand how creatures can outdo their creators, but since some knowledgeable and respectable people worry about the cataclysmic potential of AI, who am I to argue?

You may think we aren’t so stupid as to let such things happen. I disagree with the second part: we are eminently capable of committing collective suicide. But the first part is correct: we aren’t stupid at all. What we suffer from isn’t a deficit of reason but its surfeit. We are too intelligent for our own good, or rather too reliant on our reason.

If you look at the four possible catastrophes I mentioned, they were made possible by tremendous tours de force of intelligence.

Marshalling and releasing the energy bubbling in the atom took ingenuity beyond my understanding. Think of Democritus (d. circa 370 BC) who came up with the atomic theory of the universe, then jump on to Ernest Rutherford who first split the atom in 1918, to Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and other great minds who devoted their lives to nuclear physics and quantum mechanics.

We should all be in awe of such depths of the intellect so thoroughly plumbed, but awe suggests not only reverential admiration but also fear. The same goes for the biochemists and toxicologists who have developed perfect means of collective suicide.

Gone are the primitive times of yesteryear, when attackers caused outbreaks of deadly diseases in besieged fortresses by lobbing dead rats over the wall. Today the same effect can be achieved globally by breaking a few test tubes in public.

Would you know how to synthesise such toxins? Neither would I. But we can’t accuse those who can do so of lacking intelligence. On the contrary, they must be smarter than you and me, certainly in one specialised area but perhaps also in general.

And I’m almost paralysed by the awe I feel contemplating the intricate minds dedicated to computer technology and its ultimate achievement, AI. If you think for a second they are stupid, then peek into the innards of your Mac and see if you can figure out how it works.

You can’t, can you? Then show some respect for those geeky boffins who spend their lives glued to screens or hunched over plates, microchips and connectors. They may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.

Women who decide not to have children aren’t necessarily dumb either. On the contrary, they may be too clever by half. They seek outlets for their minds rather than spending the best years of their lives on pregnancies, nappies, breastfeeding and washing their babies, then looking after them, teaching them to walk, talk, read and tell right from wrong, driving them to school and cooking their meals.

They find such outlets in studying things like physics, biochemistry or computer science and parlaying their education into remunerative careers improving their lifestyle and boosting their self-esteem. You are free to think what you will of such women, or even poopoo words like ‘lifestyle’ and ‘self-esteem’. But you can’t deny those ladies have to be rather smart to have careers, to seek fulfilment in their brains, not their wombs.

Scale such exploits down from physics, biochemistry or computer science, and the same observation applies: careers in public relations, HR, management, sales, even show business take intelligence too. Such ambitious women want their jam today, and let others worry about impending demographic catastrophes. Those childless wonders may be selfish, even cynical, but they are nobody’s fools.

“This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote Eliot in his poem The Hollow Man. Hollow spiritually, is what he meant, and this bottomless pit can’t be filled with intellect. And if it can’t, then the world may indeed end, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s with a bang or a whimper.

Human reason will end up denying and eventually devouring itself if its excesses aren’t controlled by a higher reason whence the spiritual and moral constraints come. Such constraints have been systematically removed over the past few centuries, allowing unfettered reason to run free.

Emerging out of the resulting upheavals was Modern man, a creature bristling with noetic smugness. Now he had shaken off the fetters of religion, he no longer had any use for anyone’s reason but his own. Where before he had been enslaved, he was now free.

Yet nothing turns freedom into bondage and then death as ineluctably as a lack of discipline.

No matter how talented a composer is, he’ll produce nothing but cacophony if he ignores the structural and harmonic rules of composition. His unchecked freedom will kill his music.

If anarchists striving for absolute freedom ever produce their own state, the state will soon fall apart, but not before creating the worst tyranny in history.

An anticlerical believer who denies the authority of the Church and relies on his own resources will lose his resources first and his faith second.

The builders of Notre Dame expressed themselves within a discipline. The builders of Centre Pompidou were free to express themselves as they saw fit.

Noetic smugness, unwavering trust in human reason as the be all and end all, may indeed end all. A nuclear scientist’s reason may produce a way to heat our houses or to incinerate them. A biochemist’s reason may create life-sustaining medicines or life-ending poisons. A computer scientist’s reason may produce useful machines or man-eating ogres.

Moreover, a philosopher pondering the link between reason and language may end up denying the validity of reason, language and indeed philosophy (except perhaps his own). Human reason, in other words, may be either a creative tool or a suicide tool, and it takes a higher reason to decide which it’ll be.

Mankind won’t kill itself by being too daft. It may kill itself by being too clever by half.  It’s not stupidity but noetic smugness that’s more likely to lock and load the weapon of mass destruction. That’s what put mankind on suicide watch, and we’d be foolhardy to put self-confidence before vigilance.  

When asked to comment on Trump’s soft treatment of Putin’s war on the Ukraine, Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said: “The supreme leader of the world’s greatest superpower is, objectively, a Soviet, or Russian, asset. He functions as an asset.”

‘Objectively’ is the key word there. Trump probably never signed any contract in blood, and he probably doesn’t think of himself as a Russian asset. But, as I always say when the subject comes up, it’s hard to imagine how different his actions and pronouncements would be if he were indeed a witting agent of Putin.

Obviously, an American president can’t afford the luxury of openly cheering an aggression threatening the world order formed after 1945. Doing so would cost the US the support of all her allies, and no country can go it alone in today’s volatile world.

Nor can Trump say in so many words that everything Putin says about the war is true, and that the Ukraine is at least as much to blame for the carnage as Russia is, possibly even more. If he did so, according to the US law he’d have to register as a foreign agent.

However, as the Portuguese president pointed out, what Trump does say amounts to a similar message. For example, after the red-carpet travesty in Alaska, where Trump failed to secure a ceasefire, he said that Zelensky “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.”

The implication is that only Zelensky’s obstinacy keeps the blood gushing. That’s not wrong: the Ukraine could indeed have stopped the war at any moment since 2014 and especially since 2022. All she would have had to do was capitulate – and this is exactly what the Kremlin has been saying and Trump has been implying.

Trump issues dire warnings to Putin with metronomic regularity, threatening higher sanctions and “severe consequences”, not only for Russia but also for her trading partners. None of this materialises: Trump delivers ultimatums, typically giving Putin two weeks to come to his senses. When that doesn’t happen, “severe consequences” arrive in the shape of another two-week ultimatum.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps lashing out at Zelensky, stopping just short of branding him a warmonger, but leaving his audience in no doubt that this is exactly what he means. Hence, Trump’s administration, says de Sousa, has “gone from being allies on one side to acting as referees in the conflict.” And not an unbiased referee, may I add.

Trump has consistently refrained from criticising Putin openly, other than regretting that at times he can’t recognise his good friend Vlad. Trump doesn’t show the same restraint when extolling the KGB dictator. For example, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion started, he praised the move as “genius” and “savvy”.

Since then, Trump has consistently supported Putin’s ideas on how the war should end: the Ukraine must cede the Donbas region, recognise the annexation of the Crimea, repudiate any possibility of joining NATO.

In return, Trump offers some mythical “security guarantees” to the Ukraine. He knows in advance that Putin will never accept the deployment of NATO troops in the buffer zone, which would be the only viable security guarantee.

While this talk shop stays open, US military supplies to the Ukraine oscillate between being risibly insufficient and non-existent. Instead, the Ukrainians are getting general noises about the awfulness of so many women and children being killed by Russian missiles.

Still, I agree with de Sousa’s qualifier: Trump is probably a Russian asset only de facto, not de jure. However, anyone who understands the KGB mentality will know that this nuance is lost upon Putin.

Before Trump began his political career, he had often accepted Russian, which is to say KGB, money to help him out of tight spots. And for the KGB this is tantamount to a signature on a service contract. Anyone who takes KGB money, in whatever form, is treated as an asset.

Russian help was especially invaluable in the 1990s, during the later stages of Trump’s career as property developer. One after another of his businesses was going into receivership, his Atlantic City casinos were going bust, costing investors and banks billions in bad debts.

As a result, investors stopped investing and banks stopped lending, and no big-time developer can function without credit. That’s when the Russians moved in.

Trump, said Alan Lapidus, his long-time architect, “could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

Trump’s sons confirmed this statement. In 2008 Donald Jr. said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Another son, Eric, echoed that confession in 2014. Asked how the Trump Organisation remained afloat when no banks were willing to give it loans, he shrugged: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Now, the Russian government is a seamless blend of the KGB and organised crime. Any Russian investor willing to pump billions into foreign businesses can only do so with that blend’s approval and encouragement.

One case in point is Trump’s dealings with the Bayrock Group, which led his financial revival that began in the early 2000s.

Bayrock was renting whole floors in Trump Towers at a time when Russian mafiosi made up a large proportion of Trump’s tenants (up to 20 per cent). The Group was run by Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet official in Kazakhstan who had seemingly inexhaustible sources of funds with rather a dubious provenance.

Another Bayrock boss was Felix Slater, a Russian-born mafioso who in the 1990s had pleaded guilty to a vast stock fraud involving the Russian mafia (and its partner, the KGB/FSB, without whose participation no criminal gang could ever function in Russia).

Trump explained he had done business with Bayrock because Arif had impressive connections. “Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors,” Trump said. I bet. But I’d have been tempted to inquire what kind of people and what kind of investors.

There have been books written about Trump’s extensive links with Russian ‘businessmen’, too numerous to list here. I was especially impressed with one such deal, inscribed on a tissue of lies.

In 2008, acting through a trust, the Russian ‘oligarch’ Dmitry Rybolovlev (or rather his wife – a distinction without a difference) paid $95 million for Maison de l’Amitié, Trump’s house in Palm Beach, Florida. (This may be a coincidence, but the name is a direct translation of Dom Druzhby, the Soviet government’s club in central Moscow, where foreigners mixed with KGB recruiters.)

The house, which Trump had bought for $40 million four years earlier, was on the market for a long time without attracting any takers. Then Rybolovlev moved in, paying way over the odds and making some people suspect that the purchase sum represented a veiled subsidy.

Moreover, Trump claimed that the sale was the only deal he had ever done with any Russian, which demonstrably wasn’t true. Still, none of this is prima facie evidence of Trump’s being a Russian asset.

Trump’s leaning towards Putin in the on-going war may be motivated by his sincere admiration of the latter’s “genius” and “savvy”. That, however, is another distinction without a difference.

Assets may work for a foreign government wittingly or unwittingly. In the former case, they might be coerced by kompromat (one of the few Russian contributions to the English language), bought by cash or scared by threats. But they may also act for ideological reasons or out of sympathy for what the foreign government represents – the US ‘atomic spies’ were a prime example of that category.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that, ever since the Russian invasion, Trump has been toing and froing in his actions and pronouncements. But the general vector of his leaning is unmistakable, and Putin certainly doesn’t mistake it for anything other than tacit support.

Three cheers for President de Sousa who said in plain Portuguese what most European leaders think. It’s only words, but they are welcome words.

Because I say so. And why do I say so? Because everyone knows it’s true.

Such is the gist of yet another racist story, this one unfolding at the US Open Tennis Championship. The two parties involved are the American player Taylor Townsend and the Latvian Jelena Ostapenko.

Jelena lost their match, which is hardly surprising, considering that she is a prime candidate for a Mounjaro jab. I don’t know the Latvian for “Who ate all the pies?”, but whatever it is, she must have heard it a few times.

Anyway, Jelena doesn’t like losing, especially to a lower-ranked opponent like Taylor. This brings to mind the famous American football coach, Vince Lombardi, who once said: “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”

People playing professional tennis to Jelena’s standard (she has a Grand Slam title to her name) are invariably bad losers. Nothing unusual about that.

But post-match spats, like the one Jelena had with Taylor, don’t happen all that often. Jelena had two problems with Taylor’s etiquette, which gave rise to the incident later described as racist.

First, it’s customary to start the pre-match warm-up at the baseline, where modern matches are mostly played. Once the two players have established their rhythm, they usually take turns at the net. Townsend, however, defied that unwritten rule by starting the warm-up at the net, thus denying Ostapenko her baseline sighters.

Then, at a critical moment in the match, Townsend won a point on a fortunate net cord. When that happens, it’s customary for the lucky player to apologise, which Taylor neglected to do.

That caused Jelena’s ire, and after the match she told Taylor that she had “no class” and “no education”. Taylor replied, “You can learn how to take a loss better,” and you’d think that was the end of a rather trivial incident.

So it would have been if Taylor Townsend weren’t black. But she is, and no incident involving black people on the receiving end of a tirade is ever trivial these days.

Ostapenko was roundly accused of being a racist, even though her remarks didn’t mention race even tangentially. The tennis world, backed up by the press, sprang to the defence of ‘persons of colour’.

Another player, Naomi Osaka, herself a person of colour (or rather two colours: she is half Japanese, half American black) stated categorically that Ostapenko’s post-match comment was “one of the worst things you can say to a black tennis player in a majority white sport”.

If Naomi genuinely thinks so, she must have led a sheltered life. As a former resident of Texas, I can assure her that some things people can say about blacks are considerably worse than ‘no class and no education’.

The charge of ‘no education’ can be safely levelled at any professional player of any race, unless we narrow the concept of education down to basic literacy. These people spend 10 hours every day training on the court, in the gym or on the running track, and have done so since they were five years old.

Add to that rubdowns, physiotherapy, ice baths, sleeping at least eight hours a night, eating out, and there isn’t much time left to acquire anything I’d call education. Witness Roger Federer, one of the nicest and ‘classiest’ tennis players ever. When once asked what his favourite pastime was away from tennis, he replied, “Shopping”.

What, not brushing up on Thomistic philosophy? Parsing a Bach fugue? Reading Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War? Well, I never.

Nor would anyone watching players’ antics on court consider the ‘no class’ accusation misplaced, again regardless of race. I wouldn’t say that the gentlemanly Federer is an exception, but he is certainly not in the majority.

Players kick water bottles into the front rows of the audience. They smash their racquets over chair backs. They knock the chairs over by throwing water bottles at them (Ostapenko herself has been known to do that). They swear at the umpire, their opponent and any member of the paying public who dared to move a muscle while a point was in progress. They fake injuries either to default out of matches they were losing anyway or to catch their breath during the ensuing timeout.

Meanwhile, Osaka continued: “I’m sorry to say but I feel like in society, especially people of colour, we are expected to be silenced. Or there are times where we have to be very strategic as to when we speak up. And in these type of moments, it’s important for me to speak up, not only for myself, but for my culture.”

One could be forgiven for thinking Naomi was talking about the Jim Crow South, c. 1955, not today’s America. If any group is “expected to be silenced” there, especially on the subject of race, it’s white people. It’s as if they’ve all been issued their Miranda warning: “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” or at least that of public opinion.

Townsend herself graciously conceded that Ostapenko spoke in the heat of the moment and probably didn’t mean to issue a racist insult. However, she’d better keep in mind that, every time Taylor Townsend walks onto a tennis court, she represents not only herself or her country, but also her race:

“I’m very proud as a black woman being out here representing myself and representing us and our culture.

“I make sure that I do everything that I can to be the best representation possible every time that I step on the court and even off the court… I didn’t take it that way [Ostapenko’s remark as a racial slur], but also, that has been a stigma in our community of being not educated and all of the things when it’s the furthest thing from the truth.”

“Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas,” and the demographic veritas doesn’t quite tally with Taylor’s claim. For example, only 10 per cent of American black men have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 61 per cent of their white counterparts.

But that’s neither here nor there: this statistic has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem in hand. For Ostapenko’s remark, whatever we may think of it, clearly lacked a corporate sweep. It was aimed at Taylor Townsend specifically, not her race, nor any other group she may represent.

In any case, stating, as Townsend did, that every time she hits a fuzzy yellow ball she strikes a blow for her race, is a vulgar trivialisation of a genuine problem, interracial relations. Just think what would happen if Townsend’s white, male counterpart and namesake, Taylor Fritz, said that he is proud of being white and represents his race every time he swings his racquet.

He’d be… well, I almost wrote lynched, but then thought better of it. But you get the idea.

This isn’t to say that US blacks have no reason to be hypersensitive. When I lived in Texas, I had a black friend my age who had had to ride in the back of the bus when he was a child. That experience is bound to leave scars, though Clarence did a good job hiding his.

Taylor Townsend was born in 1996, and she grew up in Chicago, where blacks didn’t have to ride in the back of the bus even in her great-grandparents’ generation. Still, the memory of being considered less than human (as American blacks were regarded a hundred years before her great-grandparents’ generation) can’t be erased quickly.

And it will never be erased if racial tensions continue to be whipped up in the media and on campuses. Too many groups in America stand to benefit from fomenting racial strife: they seek to divide so that they can conquer.

If the country suddenly went colour-blind, how would all those professors of black studies make a living? Or censors taking their blue pencils to American classics like Huckleberry Finn? Or racial equality activists, many of them white?

They’d all have to do real work, rather than just indoctrinating impressionable youngsters to hate their country (and the West in general) for its history of racism. This isn’t to say there was no such history. There was, and it was appalling at times and in places.

Treating any race as inferior is a sin, but sins can be atoned, says the formative religion of our civilisation. Which this particular one will never be if any criticism of a black person is treated as racism, against all evidence.

We do live at a crazy time, which I’m tempted to write at the end of just about every article. And unabashed propaganda of racism makes it crazier that it would otherwise be.   

Every time Chancellor Reeves delivers yet another knock-down blow to the economy, she is accused of economic illiteracy.

The implication is that ‘Rachel in accounts’ tries her best to invigorate the economy, failing only because of some unfortunate lacunae in her economic education. This charge is unfair, and even if there is some truth to it, it’s an irrelevant truth.

Failure means inability to achieve the intended result. My contention is that our Labour government, with Rachel in charge of the Exchequer brief, is succeeding famously. The current state of the economy, about which one can say nothing that hasn’t already been said about Stage 4 cancer, is precisely what they were trying to achieve.

If you don’t believe me, take the word of Rachel’s front-bench colleague, Education Minister Stephen Morgan. As she is putting the final touches on the economic coup de grâce, otherwise known as the Autumn Budget, Morgan allayed the interviewer’s fears: “I want to make sure that our Budget is based on our Labour values, and that is what Rachel Reeves will deliver.”

What’s there not to understand? The operative words are ‘Labour values’, and Comrade Morgan is honest to a fault. The upcoming budget, along with everything Labour have done since taking over a year ago, is Labour, which is to say socialist, values in action.

Rachel, her boss Keir and all their accomplices in the cabinet are commendably loyal to their principles, which is more than one could say for the Tory opposition. Unlike them, Labour uphold their values. Rachel Reeves isn’t economically illiterate. She is principled and consistent.

If you wish to contest this conclusion, I suggest you look at everything the Chancellor has done in the past 12 months, along with things she has announced she’s going to do in the upcoming budget.

If you recall, during the election campaign Rachel kept pointing an accusing finger at the Tories’ record in government. Due to their mismanagement, she thundered, the incoming Labour government was stuck with a £20 billion hole in the public purse.

Even though the Tories tried to dispute her calculations, the charge was fair. During their 13 years in office, the Tories did manage to produce that £20 billion hole in public finances. Rachel promised to do something about it, and she has fulfilled her pledge. The hole is now £51 billion.

In a mere year, Rachel has managed to go the Tories 2.5 times better – and those nincompoops took 13 years to achieve their result. This alone is sufficient proof that such a staggering performance had to be deliberate.

Anyone who tries to shoot down Rachel’s economic record will misfire unless he realises that the government is beggaring the country on purpose. Rachel, Keir and Ed are acting in character, and the character is Marxist.

The Chancellor is about to impose the National Insurance tax on rental income, which, in the fine Marxist tradition, she calls “unearned”. When accused of breaking her campaign promise not to increase NI on “working people”, she parries such slings and arrows with enviable legerdemain. She isn’t increasing the NI rate, is she? She is only extending the group to be hit by NI taxation.

Job done; promise kept. Such are Labour values.

First, “working people” earn wages for their labour, ideally physical. Rather than belonging to that category, landlords, on the other hand, suck the blood of “working people” by forcing them to pay rent. Rachel didn’t say so in as many words, but this is the standard Marxist line.

And not only Marxist. Marxism in its purest form calls for the abolition of all private property, and any self-respecting Marxist will tell you that making money from investments (including those in rental property) isn’t just immoral but criminal.

Yet this is echoed by other, ostensibly non-Marxist, doctrines. It was the founder of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Prudhon (d. 1865) and not, as many mistakenly believe, Marx who uttered the famous phrase, “Property is theft”.

However, the most vociferous argument against private property specifically of land was made by the American Henry George (d. 1897). He was perhaps the most influential economist in the last quarter of the 19^th century, whose books sold millions of copies worldwide.

Leo Tolstoy was one of his followers who repeated ad nauseam George’s maxim, “We must make land common property.” Tolstoy went only as far as trying to give up his own estate, but various champions of George converge with Marx and Prudhon by having other people’s property (not their own) in their crosshairs.

Enmity to private property in general, but specifically property producing ‘unearned’ income, has been encoded into the DNA of all socialists, and certainly those gravitating towards the extreme end of that evil doctrine.

That’s why it’s pointless arguing that adding NI to rental income will have a negative effect – mainly on those ‘working people’ who live in rented accommodation.

Their rents, already sky high, especially within striking distance of London, will go up immediately. Some landlords will have to sell, reducing the number of properties available for rent. Since Rachel hasn’t yet repealed the law of supply and demand, this will drive rents further up.

She knows all that and doesn’t care. With socialists in charge, the main purpose of taxation is punitive, not pecuniary. The important thing is to punish the fat cats and, if ‘working people’ become collateral damage, then so be it. You don’t believe that socialists are really out to improve the lot of the poor, do you?

Where many critics see madness in Labour’s sustained assault on the economy, I see method. No one is so mad or so ignorant as to do what the government has been doing for a year now.

Any first-year student of economics knows that extortionate taxation throttles the economy into death by suffocation. I’ll give Rachel credit for knowing this economic primer. She keeps devastating the economy with some of the highest peacetime taxes in history not because she doesn’t know what that does. She knows – and likes it. It’s those ‘Labour values’ all over again.

The same goes for the government’s regulatory strangulation imposed on manufacturing, financial and labour markets. That alone would have been sufficient to bring the economy to its present standstill, but there’s also the noose of net zero woven out of crypto-Marxist strands.

Only Marxists are prepared to use a pseudo-scientific, in fact larcenous, ideology to impoverish large swaths of the population – emphatically including those who work, the ‘working people’.

The government is using, systematically and deliberately, every mechanism at its disposal to discourage the kind of economic behaviour that’s known to produce prosperity. Working hard, spending frugally, investing readily yet prudently – all such practices are punished by Labour’s tax, spend and regulate policies.

Idleness, on the other hand, is encouraged: 6.5 million working-age adults in Britain receive benefits not to work. This is part of one of the most promiscuous spending sprees in British history, and the country hasn’t paid its way for a long time, whichever party was in charge.

But at least the Tories made some token gestures to make deficit spending less rapacious. For Rachel and her merry men, public funds are reins to be used to control the public, making as many people as possible dependent on the state and therefore receptive to its diktats.    

And I haven’t yet mentioned the black hole of the socialist NHS, into which the government is throwing sackfuls of freshly printed (or borrowed) cash without even coming close to filling the hole – or making our health service perform to civilised standards.

No one can possibly cause so much damage so fast out of ignorance, and I’d like to absolve Rachel Reeves of this charge. She isn’t a hapless ignoramus running into blind alleys. She is a malevolent Marxist, steadily moving to her desired destination.

This realisation ought to be the starting point of any criticism. For no one can cure a disease if he doesn’t understand its aetiology.

Let me begin by saying I don’t believe that countries should be ruled by philosopher kings.

For one thing, this is a moot point: a typical king (president, prime minister, dictator) can’t be a philosopher, whereas a real philosopher wouldn’t want to be a king.

The concept first appeared in Plato’s Republic, but the republic he knew first-hand, Athens, only had 250,000 inhabitants at its peak. That’s roughly the population of Exeter, the county town of Devon.

So yes, hypothetically a mayor of Exeter could be a closet philosopher, while discharging his low-level duties with distinction. But when you look at countries the size of the US, Britain or France, the appearance of a philosopher leader is unlikely to say the least.

I’d even go so far as to suggest that, should one such leader miraculously appear, he’d quickly turn despotic. Philosophers tend to believe that their doctrines represent absolute truth. When they find themselves in power, they realise that isn’t the case, become disappointed and usually take it out on the people.

Plato believed that philosophical study could produce absolute knowledge, which he considered a job requirement for a king. Actually, the only philosopher king I can think of was Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 BC), the Roman emperor who was a Stoic thinker in the afterhours.

Still, Rome in his day had roughly the population of today’s Birmingham, and at a stretch I can imagine a philosopher running its affairs. He certainly couldn’t do a worse job than today’s city council. Still, the same objection applies: a million inhabitants is one thing, but 50, 100, 300 million is quite another – qualitatively, not just quantitatively.

Having said all that, let’s agree that, while today’s politicians can’t and shouldn’t be expected to possess absolute knowledge, they must be knowledgeable relatively, say within the limits of a secondary school curriculum.

That’s not too much to expect, is it? Yet even this modest expectation doesn’t seem to be met in the country that’s supposed to lead the West.

For example, when the Ukraine and Russia swapping territory was the talk of the town, or at least the talk of Trump, the president promised that he’d make sure the Ukraine got “oceanfront property”. Since the Ukraine has never in her history had access to any ocean, I thought Trump was perhaps planning to cede to the Ukraine the north-western part of Spain.

It’s called Galicia, as is a western province of the Ukraine. However, I doubt the Spanish government would be sufficiently convinced by such nominalist considerations to agree to that transaction. Of course, another, likelier possibility is that the Donald has never bothered to look at the map of the world in general and Europe in particular.

The other day, he confirmed that suspicion. “Crimea,” he said, “is the size of Texas, washed by the ocean.” I think doing business with casinos in Atlantic City has given Trump a fixation with large bodies of salt water.

In fact, unlike Atlantic City, the Crimea is washed not by an ocean but by the Black Sea. And Texas is 26 times larger than that picturesque peninsula.

If I were in the business of offering unsolicited advice, I’d suggest that the president acquire some knowledge of secondary school geography before taking on the role of the world’s saviour. Otherwise, he might indeed end up demanding that Spain’s Galicia become part of its Ukrainian namesake.

Trump’s VP, JD Vance, is widely believed to be his likeliest successor – provided of course that the Donald doesn’t refuse to leave the White House when his term expires. One way or the other, the dynasty of woeful ignorance is to live on.

“If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation,” said old JD, trying to keep up with his boss.

To be fair, his knowledge has a different lacuna: so far, Vance has proved his ignorance of history, not geography. But give him time.

In fact, neither war he mentioned ended “with some kind of negotiation”. Both Germany and Japan unconditionally capitulated in 1945, while Germany and her allies also surrendered in 1918, when the Western Front collapsed.

It’s hardly profitable trying to drag history into current politics, especially if the former is falsified and the latter is pernicious. For Trump and Vance use the word ‘negotiation’ as shorthand for the Ukraine’s capitulation.

This is what Vance meant when, speaking of the Ukrainian government the other day, he said that all Trump can do is “ask them to negotiate in good faith.” That is to stop being bloody-minded and accept Russia’s terms – ending the war with the kind of ‘negotiation’ that supposedly concluded the two World Wars.

It’s scary to think that these two ignoramuses believe they can tell the world, or at least the Ukraine, what to do. And the scarier thing is that they may be right.

At least, Trump and Vance are relative newcomers to the field of international politics, which is partly why they so often spout drivel. Peter Hitchens doesn’t have that excuse: he has been writing on the subject for decades.

To be fair to Hitchens, not all the drivel he writes is motivated by ignorance. His affection for Putin’s Russia, which he calls “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, is a more significant contributor.

Yet he too makes ignorant references to older wars, perhaps trying to go old JD one better. Thus: “As in the equally futile 1914-18 war, too many passions have been unleashed for anyone to accept the sort of shabby deal that used to end wars in the old days.”

We’ve already established that the two World Wars didn’t end in any “sort of shabby deal”, unless this term stands for capitulation. But then Hitchens explained the nature of the on-going war, taking care not to say anything to upset Putin.  

“The conflict really belongs to the US, which goaded Russia for years, and to Russia, which eventually lost its temper and moronically did what the US wanted it to. Poor old Ukraine just serves as America’s battering ram and as the scene for their quarrel, as Vietnam did in another age.”

Anyone boasting even cursory familiarity with the on-going war knows that every word in that passage is either a lie or a display of ignorance.

The US never baited Russia, nor has Russia ever swallowed America’s bait. The moment the current KGB government fronted by Putin took over Russia, their boy made explicit his mission to reverse what he called “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”. That was made manifest in every pronouncement he made, especially the so-called Munich Speech of 2007.

Everything that has happened since is Russia carrying out that KGB mission. This is criminal, but not necessarily “moronic”, at least not the way Hitchens means it. Poor naïve Russia didn’t do “what the US wanted it to do”. Her KGB government is systematically carrying out its plan to subvert the West and reconstruct the most evil empire in history.

The reading public gets it coming and going. Trump, Vance, Hitchens et al. are feeding it a bunch of porkies, some springing from ignorance, others from malevolence. We aren’t well-served by either politicians or hacks, let’s agree on that.

P.S. To be fair to Hitchens, he can talk ignorant rubbish on any subject, not just Russia and the Ukraine. In the same article, he attacked Lucy Connolly, who was unjustly sentenced to prison for an intemperate tweet.

Not so, writes Hitchens. “She pleaded guilty to a criminal offence and was sentenced according to law, and then released in due time…”

What kind of criminal offence? “Mrs Connolly had gone on Twitter to urge others to set fire to buildings full of people.” She didn’t.

I wrote about this case the other day, but, as a reminder, this is what Mrs Connolly wrote: “Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all that I care. While you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them.”

To any objective reader this only means that Mrs Connolly wouldn’t have minded to see something like that happening. “For all I care” is a dead giveaway – she didn’t urge rioters to set fire to migrant hotels or to “the treacherous government and politicians”.

She did plead guilty to writing that tweet, but it was up to the woke court, instructed by our woke government, to declare it illegal. To put it in a context close to Hitchens’s heart, if one day the pro-Putin nonsense he writes is criminalised, as I sincerely hope it will be, he’ll have to plead guilty to having written it. But it will be up to the court’s interpretation to decide whether he committed a crime.

Now I’m dispensing unsolicited advice, here’s some for Hitchens. Don’t try so hard to be original, mate. Originality is something you’ve either got or haven’t got. When you haven’t, but try to force it, you end up sounding ignorant – and often much worse.

If we look at Britain, £100 in 1850 equalled £110 in 1900, a negligible inflation of 10 percent over half a century.

That meant a British baby born in 1850 with a silver spoon in his mouth, say a solid middle-class income of £500 a year, could live his whole life in reasonable comfort independent of the state’s largesse even if he never made a penny of his own.

By contrast, £100 in 1950 equalled £2,000 in 2000 – a wealth-busting, soul-destroying inflation of 2,000 percent. This meant that the silver spoon would quickly drop out of the mouth of a similarly hypothetical baby born in 1950.

The fact is that a modern state doesn’t really want people to be independent of it. The underlying logic is simple: control over people’s money spells a large measure of control over the people.

That’s why all modern states are counterfeiters, not to cut too fine a point on it. The lever of the money-printing press is the sledgehammer the state can take to any nest egg. A pull on the lever, and the egg is reduced to an empty shell.

The only way of keeping money real would be to limit the state’s ability to counterfeit it. This used to be achieved by pegging paper money to an objective equivalent, usually gold.

Step by step, Western governments adopted a system whereby the paper money they issued was backed up by their gold reserves. Every banknote was instantly redeemable in gold, and both the paper and the metal were equally tangible. This introduced stability into economies and greatly simplified international trade.

However, the gold standard was hard to maintain during major wars, when deficit spending was unavoidable (“Unlimited money is the sinews of war,” as Caesar wrote to Cicero).

Thus, Britain suspended the gold standard during the Napoleonic Wars, the USA during its Civil War, and most countries during the First World War. But afterwards they all returned to the gold standard to bring some deflationary sanity to the runaway inflation caused by wartime spending.

That was before modern governments realised that inflation could be a useful power tool. Once that realisation sank in, the gold standard had to go. Wishing to bind its citizens hand and foot, the state itself had to slip the tethers of fiscal responsibility.

To be fair, the gold standard has its downside. For one thing, it limits the government’s ability to increase the money supply as a means of combating recessions. This time-honoured salvage operation has often been successful in the short term, though some eminent economists, such as Joseph Schumpeter, have objected to it on principle.

They would argue that, unless an economy climbs out of a recession organically, it’ll show a remission, not recovery. This argument rings true, but there is an even stronger one. For the gold standard limits not only the state’s flexibility but also its capacity to increase its own power by using inflation the way Robin Hood used his longbow for redistributive highway robbery.

We don’t want the modern state to have the short-term flexibility to steer the economy into safe havens because we can be certain that in the long term the state can only steer it into dire straits. We must do all we can to deprive modern governments of their flexibility to meddle in the economy.

Hence the attraction of the gold standard, at least to those who value their freedom above an ability to ride the economic rollercoaster through hair-raising rises and dips.

It puts people, not the state’s whim, in control of their own pecuniary destiny. The gold standard may make an economy less upwardly mobile, but in return it will definitely make it more stable and free. For that reason, it’s anathema to any modern government.

America led the way. In April, 1933, shortly after his inauguration, FDR abandoned the gold standard. In this. he displayed the same speed of action as did Lenin, who ‘monopolised’ (which is to say confiscated) all gold and silver plate in Russia in December 1917, a mere couple of months after the revolution.

The methods the two men chose to enforce their decrees were different, but rather less so than one would expect considering their different politics.

Roosevelt operated in a country that perceived itself to be free. Consequently, such Leninist expedients as summary executions were beyond his reach, as was Lenin’s favourite trick of having men tortured until they surrendered every gram of gold in their possession.

Robbing the churches of their valuables, and murdering the priests for good measure, à la Lenin, would also have been frowned upon in the US. Given such annoying limitations, one has to admire Roosevelt for doing his level best.

In the same April of 1933 he issued Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates” by U.S. citizens and demanding that they sell all their gold to the government at the price set by the buyer. Failure to comply was punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 or imprisonment of up to 10 years, or both.

The amount of the fine is staggering, especially in relation to the one dollar a day being paid to the millions employed in public works. As to the threat of a tenner in prison for failure to hand in all privately owned gold within a month, Roosevelt was treading a well-beaten path: the Bolsheviks had shown the way in Russia.

But FDR added an elegant touch that was beyond the crude Bolsheviks: having forced Americans to sell their gold to the treasury for $20.66 an ounce, the next year he used the Federal Reserve machine to ratchet up the price to $35 an ounce, a level at which it stayed fixed for the next 38 years.

At that point it was allowed to float, and in the 45 years thereafter the price of gold has increased almost fifty-fold, in parallel with the practical pulping of paper money.

The difference between people keeping their assets in gold or in currency is vital. Gold sitting in a bank vault is a factor of personal independence: the money is beyond the state’s reach, more or less. Not so banknotes: we are welcome to stuff suitcases full of paper, but the government has an almost absolute control over its value.

The gold standard is thus a factor of freedom, while its absence is a potential factor of tyranny. Since all modern governments are tyrannical in their aspirations, and as tyrannical in their actions as they can reasonably expect to be able to get away with, we ought not to be unduly surprised that a totalitarian Russia and a liberal-democratic USA followed the same course of action, if by different means.

However, until 1971 some tenuous link between paper money and gold still existed, as America was still prepared to settle her foreign debts in gold. In fact, once Western countries had abandoned the gold standard, the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 established a version of the same system.

The signatories agreed to peg their post-war exchange rates to the dollar, while the US government undertook to keep the price of gold fixed at $35 an ounce, thus linking all the participating currencies to gold at one remove. Not a bad idea, considering; but, as such a link ran against the grain of the modern world, it couldn’t last.

In 1964 this point was emphasised by the French president Charles de Gaulle, who sent to the US a cargo ship loaded to the gunwales with paper dollars. He then demanded that his right to exchange the banknotes for gold be honoured.

This was consistent with the French president’s understanding of economics and, truth be told, also with his well-documented dislike of Anglo-Saxons. The world, he explained, needs “an indisputable monetary base, and one that does not bear the mark of any particular country. In truth, one does not see how one could really have any standard criterion other than gold.”

Other countries began to follow suit, and a run on Fort Knox looked like a distinct possibility. Added to the staggering cost of President Johnson’s egalitarian ‘Great Society’ reforms, to say nothing of the Vietnam War, this attack on the dollar left Bretton Woods dead in the water in any real sense.

In 1971 Nixon severed the vestigial link between gold and the dollar by declaring that thenceforth the US government would only settle its foreign debts in paper, either dollar banknotes or treasury bonds and bills.

Since its debts were denominated in dollars, this gave the US government an ability to run up its sovereign debt to its present level of some $34 trillion. Other Western governments followed suit (Britian’s national debt is around £3 trillion, France’s even higher), pushing the button for a potential catastrophe as destructive as any nuclear war.

The term ‘fool’s gold’ originally referred to iron pyrite, which is commonly mistaken for gold. It can now be used to describe our funny, which is to say paper, money. Its constantly inflated supply is making us less secure and, more important, less free.

Our prosperity is phony: it’s a rudderless ship cast adrift to float on a raging sea of paper. Sooner or later, it’ll run aground, but let’s enjoy the ride while it lasts, shall we?

The other day I argued that, in substance, Marxism and fascism largely converge.

The outward manifestations of the two cults may diverge slightly, but then so do those of different exponents of the same cult. For example, for all their substantive kinship, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy behaved differently, as did Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

One of the features that all Marxist and fascist states share is that they are all glossocracies. They control bodies by violence and minds by keeping a tight rein on the word.

Ideologies live or die not only by coercion but also by imposing their verbal content on everyone. That’s why they tend to punish seditious words more severely and surely than crimes against person or property.

That’s how one can recognise a Marxist or a fascist state. If people are thrown in prison for something they say, not something they do, the state is either Marxist or fascist.

There exist exceptions to this observation. For example, inciting murder is a crime in itself, even if no one gets killed. But then there are exceptions to everything. By and large, if a state punishes words, it’s either fascist or Marxist.

That brings me to Britain, specifically the case of Lucy Connolly who walked free yesterday after 10 months in prison.

Mrs Connolly, the wife of a Northampton Tory councillor, is living proof of my statement. His Majesty’s Government is definitely Marxist, and it isn’t averse to acting in the spirit of its ideology, where it converges with fascism.

To take matters in turn, last summer three little girls were stabbed to death at a dance party in Stockport. The media falsely reported that their teenaged murder, Axel Rudakubana, was an illegal migrant. That led to an outbreak of anti-immigrant riots, and tempers were running high.

In fact, Rudakubana was merely a cultural alien, not an illegal one. He was born in Wales to Rwandan parents and grew up enamoured of Al Qaida and everything it stood for. One way or the other, riots did ensue, crowds attacked a mosque and some hotels occupied by migrants, clashing with the police.

So did Mrs Connolly go along for the ride? Did she throw bricks at that mosque or at police officers? She didn’t. Had she done so, she could have got away with a mere slap on the wrist.

He crime was worse: she attacked the Marxist glossocracy, not any particular person or building. Specifically, Mrs Connolly posted this tweet:

“Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all that I care. While you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist then so be it.”

You’ll agree that the language is rather intemperate, and even some people – well, me – who share her sentiments may deplore the way they were expressed. This mode of self-expression would exclude Mrs Connolly from the list of the privileged few rating the honour of being invited to my house for dinner.

Still, should Mrs Connolly be considered for such an invitation, I’d have to take into account the mitigating circumstances: she was reacting emotionally on the spur of the moment to a vile, horrific crime.

Moreover, blunders committed by another state institution, the NHS, had recently taken the life of her son. She projected her own bereavement on the grief felt by the victims’ parents, which added a few degrees to the temperature of her remarks.

However, the court didn’t accept any mitigating circumstances. Mrs Connolly was arrested, charged and denied bail – this in spite of her being a first-time offender who presented no flight risk.

Sorry, did I say ‘offender’? This woke contagion must have rubbed off even on me. What exactly was her offence? Hard as I look, I can’t find any corpus delicti in that tweet.

Mrs Connolly didn’t incite violence. She didn’t write, you are cordially invited to such and such place at such and such time, Molotov cocktails will be served, we’ll have some fun. She only wrote that she wouldn’t shed any tears if those hotels were burned to the ground, not that she’d happily do so herself.

Then she expressed a rather uncomplimentary view of illegal immigrants, but, uncomplimentary or not, it’s shared so widely as to be practically universal. And even if the authorities find such opinions ill-advised, since when are Britons arrested for objectionable opinions?

Since Britain became a Marxist country, is the answer to that one.

A trial ensued, Mrs Connolly was convicted and received a draconian sentence of 31 months in prison. An article in today’s Mail helpfully provides a long list of real, heinous crimes that have recently been punished with shorter sentences or none at all.

However, the author seems to proceed from the assumption that Britain is still a civilised parliamentary democracy ruled by law. That assumption is way out of date: the country is governed by a Marxist cabal using glossocracy to bend the historically free people to its will.

It’s led by Keir Starmer who has promised Parliament he’ll “always support” the courts in such cases. What he means by ‘such cases’ is gross miscarriages of justice, where people suffer horrendous punishments for saying something Starmer et al. don’t like and expressing views they don’t condone.

Those scoundrels accuse Mrs Connolly of being a racist, than which it’s to them impossible to be anything worse. Since our Marxist lot actively foment racial strife as one line in their frontal attack on what’s left of Christendom, they demonise as a racist anyone daring to resist.

Mrs Connolly may or may not be a racist, someone who hates other races, but nothing she wrote in that tweet is prima facie proof one way or the other.

She clearly dislikes the fact that swarms of legal and illegal aliens are inundating Britain, but such sentiments are both valid and widespread. Ditto her statement about our “treacherous government and politicians”. This is neither racist nor wrong. Our governing cabal are indeed treacherous, in that they betray the fundamental tenets of our civilisation – such as the right to free speech.

It’s also clear that Mrs Connolly doesn’t regard herself as a racist: “If that makes me racist then so be it.” What this says to me, though obviously not to Starmer’s courts, is that she is only racist within the warped ideology our government preaches with criminal abandon and enforces with singular cruelty.

In the end, this victim of glossocratic injustice served a third of her sentence, one that no civilised country would have imposed. So what does it make Britain then? You tell me.  

When asked this question a few months ago by the host of a MAGA podcast, I replied with another question: “What’s wrong with extremism?”

For me, just about everything. Extremism is too much of something, and it’s a mental pathology regardless of what it is that extremism is too much of. This is the case with all sorts of things, not just politics.

A glass of wine with every dinner is delicious, but a bottle of whisky every day is toxic. Dieting to keep your weight down is advisable, but not to the point of developing anorexia. Driving fast is a pleasure, but driving too fast is a risk.

Nationalism is patriotism pushed to an extreme, turning one’s country from an object of love to a cult. That’s why patriotic, especially intelligent, conservatives wince at any display of nationalism. We detest it on aesthetic, religious, philosophical and historical grounds.

The latter is significant because any student of history will know how easily a political cardsharp can pull the ace of patriotism out of his sleeve. That’s what Dr Johnson meant in 1775, when he described patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel”.

He was talking not about patriotism as such, but about his political opponent, William Pitt, who Johnson felt was constantly invoking patriotism for nefarious political reasons. More recent examples of such misuse are too numerous and too widely known to cite.

Suffice it to say that every manner of scoundrel has been known to manipulate patriotism, turning it into nationalism and putting it to evil use.

And even when evil men start out as internationalists, they often turn to nationalism as their stratagem for controlling the masses. Stalin, for example, discovered in 1941 that his slaves wouldn’t fight for workers of the world as readily as they would for their slave master, Russia.

One key difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the former is a deep but usually silent feeling, whereas the latter is always loud-mouthed. Patriots love silently; nationalists screech, often to drown out voices of moderation and decency.

As the Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin (d. 1889) quipped, “If you hear someone shouting about patriotism, be sure that something has been stolen somewhere.”

It’s a curious phenomenon that an uxorious man who’d never dream of telling all and sundry how much he loves his wife may still be prepared to scream his nationalism off the rooftops. However, taking this juxtaposition a step farther, such a man may indeed begin to tell people how much he loves his wife when he realises that all his friends and relations dislike her.

A similar onset of defensive patriotic loquacity is reactive, and it can easily become overreactive, with nationalism beckoning at the end. Such nationalism may still be reprehensible, but it’s now understandable.

It’s instructive, I think, to compare British and American brands of patriotism. Both nations are patriotic, but Americans are more susceptible to nationalism.

Most Englishmen I know find American hand-on-heart patriotism a tad vulgar, but then parvenus usually are. By European standards, the US is a rich Johnny-come-lately, and such countries are similar to such people in their urge to self-assert.

Moreover, Americanism isn’t so much a national, much less ethnic, identity as an idea. And cultish loyalty to an idea demands frequent reiteration more than, say, does the quiet affection an Englishman feels for English things and character traits.

That’s why the US has more national flags per square yard, why American pupils start their day (or at least used to) by reciting the Oath Of Allegiance, why American politicians end every speech with a shout of “God save America”, why every American puts his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played.

Nations whose identity has been formed over millennia don’t require such visible tokens of patriotism. That’s partly why English patriotism is less likely to overstep the demarcation line beyond which healthy patriotism turns into malignant nationalism.

Englishmen are self-confident enough not to become defensive about their identity – unless they feel it’s under attack and in need of defending. When pushed, they’ll push back, and their patriotism can then indeed turn to nationalism.

That insipient tendency is observable now, and it can become rampant before long. For decades, schools, universities and politicians have been busily indoctrinating Englishmen to be ashamed of being English.

Any affection for England felt or especially expressed instantly got them branded as Little Englanders, parochial fanatics deaf to the delights of multi-culturalism. The glorious history of their country, which taught the world the meaning of just government, is depicted as nothing but a continuous chain of violent oppression, colonialism and racism. Their neighbourhoods are being turned into something they no longer recognise as England.

That creates a fertile soil for the sprouting of violent nationalistic demagogues like Tommy Robinson. They spread their poisonous seeds, but the earth is increasingly ready to receive them.

And even such traditional symbols of national identities as flags are becoming more ubiquitous – and not just when the England football team is involved in an international tournament. That’s an offence to our authorities, who are all complicit in indoctrinating public contempt for things English.

That’s why council officials in our two biggest cities have armed themselves with secateurs and started cutting down Union Jacks and St George’s Cross flags. And not just in those two cities: the same is going on in Newcastle, Bradford, Norwich, Swindon – all over the country.

Lest you think those officials suffer from an acute case of vexiphobia, put your concern to rest. It’s only British and English flags that they are averse to.

Thus, as they were taking down British flags, council officials in the East London area of Tower Hamlets and in Birmingham happily left Palestinian flags fluttering in the wind.

Now, Tower Hamlets has a Muslim population of 40 per cent, and all of Birmingham some 30 per cent. Still, the last time I looked, those places are still in England, not in Sinai, Gaza or the Arabian desert. If their streets are to be hung with any flags and bunting, these should be British or English, not Palestinian, Russian or North Korean.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s in nature. In politics, some actions produce an opposite but a much stronger reaction.

The action of stamping national pride in the dirt and, even worse, trying to offer an alien ideology as a replacement, may turn the quiet, deep-seated English patriotism into a thunderous, eventually violent nationalism.

When this happens, violent thugs like Tommy Robinson may end up sitting not in prison but in Parliament, and England will lose her admirable quality of moderation and a sense of balance. That means England will turn into something else, and whenever a nation suffers such metamorphoses, the result is never pleasant.

Why, before long a chap standing for a parliamentary seat in Fulham and Hammersmith will start ending every speech with “God bless the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!” And, what’s worse, no one will laugh.      

Everybody, his brother and second cousin thrice removed have been drawing historical parallels, comparing the current round of negotiations about the Ukraine with Munich or alternatively Yalta.

I understand the temptation, but I’m not going to succumb to it. As an innately lazy man, I’m not going to draw parallels, seek analogies or make comparisons. I’ll just let historical facts do all the work for me.

The following are excerpts from Hitler’s speeches delivered in the immediate runup to the Munich Agreement, signed on 30 September, 1938.

In those speeches, Hitler laid out the reasons for his claims on the Czech territory, specifically the ethnically German Sudetenland. The governments of Britain and France found the claims valid, or at least pretended they did.

They agreed to twist Czechoslovakia’s arm into ceding the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for ironclad security guarantees issued by Germany herself, and also by Britain, France and Italy.

You know what happened next, but I’ve said enough for the moment. Now it’s Adolf Hitler’s turn to have his say:

“The Czechs had never been an independent nation until peace treaties raised them to a position of unmerited, artificial superiority over minorities more numerous than they themselves are. In the Middle Ages, Bohemia was a German Duchy. The first German university was founded in Prague two hundred years before Queen Elizabeth.”

“The creation of a multi-national Czechoslovakian republic after the war was sheer madness. She had no characteristic of a nation, from neither an ethnological nor linguistic nor economic nor political standpoint.”

“For some twenty years, all Germans, and also other various ethnic groups in Czechoslovakia, have had to suffer the worst possible treatment, torments, economic annihilation. Above all, they have been denied any chance of self-fulfilment and also the right to national self-determination. Every attempt of the oppressed to improve their lot has failed in the face of the Czech crude urge to destroy. In my Reichstag speech, I declared that the German Reich is taking initiative in putting an end to any further persecution of Germans.”

Europe was at the time still reeling from the devastation of the First World War. That’s why Britain and France agreed to let Germany have the Sudetenland – the part of Czechoslovakia where impenetrable fortifications had been built, stronger by some evaluations than the Maginot Line.

But, Herr Reichskantzler, this stops at the Sudetenland, doesn’t it? But of course, swears Hitler: “These are my last territorial demands.” All he cares about is the fate of the Sudeten Germans. He isn’t a conqueror; he is a “liberator” who only wants to correct “the injustice of the Versailles Treaty” and unite all Germans in the same Reich. “I have no interest in the Czechs.”

Sighs of relief all around. The Czechs are unhappy, especially because all those ruinously expensive fortifications in the Sudetenland will fall into Hitler’s hands without any shots fired and without Germany suffering any casualties.

But they can’t take Hitler on by themselves. The support of Britain and France is vital – and it isn’t just offered. It’s solemnly guaranteed. Britain and France promise that they “will issue international security guarantees for the new borders of Czechoslovakia against an unprovoked aggression.”

The Czechs winced. The deal smelled foul, but at least they could take solace in the promise issued by two great powers to defend Czechoslovakia, what’s left of it.  

That ironclad security guarantee did its job – from 30 September, 1938, to 15 March, 1939, when the Nazis occupied the whole country. The Czech army, demoralised by Munich, didn’t put up any resistance. It could no longer count on the Sudeten fortifications to buy it enough time to set up a meaningful defence.

There’s no need for me to put in my penny’s worth, telling you, for example, that, mutatis mutandis, Putin says exactly the same things about the Ukraine as Hitler said about Czechoslovakia.

Nor do I have to remind you that Putin also claims he has no territorial designs on Europe; that the unoccupied part of Donbas the Russians demand is where Ukrainian fortifications are; that the US and Britain already issued security guarantees to the Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for the country giving up her nuclear weapons.

All those parallel lines have already been drawn by bare facts. What I find both worrying and amusing is how reticent NATO countries are about their possible plans for enforcing such guarantees.

A lifetime spent in the world of Anglophone realities has heightened my interest in specifics, while increasing my distrust of generalities. Thus, after the Alaska fiasco, US spokesmen hinted at the possibility of using American army contingents as a peacekeeping force.

When I read about that, I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop until the next day, when Donald Trump said no such development was on the cards. For once, he was being completely honest.

For Putin to accept the presence of Western troops on the border is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with an automatic. One of the key mendacious pretexts he cites for the brutal attack on the Ukraine is NATO’s eastward expansion. The presence of Western troops on Russia’s border would spell the country’s crashing defeat – and Putin’s premature death ‘of natural causes’.

What else? Another mooted possibility is NATO’s planes enforcing a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. Lovely. But let’s imagine – all purely hypothetical of course – that several Russian bombers penetrate the Ukraine’s airspace and start firing missiles at Kiev.

Will NATO pilots be ordered to intercept the bombers and shoot them down? If you can believe that, you haven’t been keeping track of NATO’s cowardly response to every aggression committed by Putin’s Russia, specifically against the Ukraine from 2014 onwards.

Are we supposed to expect that, having refused to supply the Ukraine with enough weapons to repel the aggression, next time around NATO will start shooting Russian planes out of the sky? No? Then what do those guarantees mean, specifically? What – excuse my tautology – do they actually guarantee?

As I suggested before, I’m tempted to say it’s Munich all over again, but I don’t have to. The facts have said it for me.  

This is what I tried to explain to a French friend, but failed. It’s tempting to ascribe that failure to the inadequacy of my French, and God knows it’s inadequate enough.

However, my English is fairly competent, and yet I’ve been known to suffer similar defeats in an Anglophone environment. This encourages me to look for the problem elsewhere, starting with the observable fact that most people, including intelligent ones, don’t bother to ponder political concepts as deeply as it takes.

My French friend, a retired financier, is certainly nobody’s fool. Throughout his career, he always found some time away from fund management to read Le Figaro every day, and even a book or two every now and then.

Yet his interest in extraneous matters has always lacked the single-minded focus of unwavering concentration. Things like politics, philosophy, religion, art are merely hobbies to him, welcome diversions from debits, credits and market fluctuations.

That’s why, when I mentioned in two separate conversations that Starmer’s regime is at base Marxist and Putin’s fascist, all I got was an indulgent smile, a shaken head and a “mais non”. My interlocutor clearly thought I was an extremist devoid of the uniquely Gallic ability to appreciate nuances.

In fact, the difference between us is that I use ‘Marxist’ and ‘fascist’ as technical terms, while to him they are merely imprecise colloquial designations. ‘Marxist’ is fully synonymous with ‘Stalinist’, and ‘fascist’ with ‘Nazi’. (Thank God for small favours: at least he doesn’t describe conservatives as fascists.)

True, as my friend pointed out, Starmer isn’t guilty of mass murder, he hasn’t established a network of hard labour camps, he neither exterminates whole social classes nor imprisons his critics. Yes, he is a Left-leaning politician, but that doesn’t make him a Marxist. Calling him that, explained my friend, is emotive and unhelpful.

My interlocutor considers Putin a thoroughly nasty man, and he certainly doesn’t condone Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. He is also aware of certain despotic tendencies in Russia’s domestic affairs, such as curbing free speech and imprisoning Putin’s critics.

Yet Putin boasts neither Treblinka nor Auschwitz, he neither gasses Jews nor castrates homosexuals, he doesn’t conduct experiments on people, he doesn’t even pour gallons of castor oil down the throats of dissidents. Yes, he is an aggressive, murderous authoritarian. But so were Russian tsars, and no one called them fascists.

We left it at that: a boozy dinner party isn’t an appropriate place to delve into philosophical depths. Yet this is a subject that can be elucidated by Thomistic metaphysics of substances and accidents.

Aquinas borrowed it from Aristotle because it explains the essential Catholic concept of transubstantiation. Since non-Catholics reject transubstantiation, they also reject St Thomas’s thoughts on this matter.

I’m not proposing to debate the intrinsic value of such metaphysics here. In this context, all I’m saying is that I find it a practically useful cognitive tool.

To sum up schematically, a species’ substance defines what it is. Substance is the unvarying, immutable property of a species, the key to its identity. Accidents, on the other hand, are various non-essential manifestations of the substance. They can come and go without the species losing its identity.

For example, a dog may be big or small, ferocious or cuddly, brown or black, fast or slow, with a loud bark or more of a yelp. All of these are accidents. The dog’s substance is that it’s a Canis lupus familiaris, and this is the essence of the very concept of dog.

All the characteristics my French friend ascribed to Marxism and fascism are accidents. For, in substance, Starmer is indeed a Marxist, and Putin is indeed a fascist. This will become clear once we’ve established the substance of Marxism and fascism, discarding in the process their self-vindicating rhetoric.

They are both secular cults preaching absolute, sacralised state power or its maximum approximation. Both seek to achieve it by fostering a revanchist hysteria of collective resentment against some alleged injustices committed over history to suppress the natural superiority of the controlled population.

The substantive difference between Marxism and fascism is that the former preaches resentment against allegedly oppressive classes, which have historically exploited the downtrodden but inherently superior masses. Fascism, on the other hand, defines the downtrodden yet superior masses in terms of a nation or race historically oppressed by other, inherently inferior, nations or races.

In substance, Marxism and fascism are close to each other. They are two different branches of the same tree, the mass rebellion against Christendom going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment. Where they diverge, more or less, is in the derivative accidents.

Both are egalitarian, preaching universal equality before (and beneath) the state, as embodied in a small élite or sometimes a single leader.

But, while Marxism denies the formerly oppressive classes the otherwise equal status of all, fascism advocates the equality of every member of a nation or race, regardless of social class. Hence the two doctrines use different methods of imposing state control over the economy.

Marxism seeks to reduce the private sector to a minimum or, better still, to eliminate it altogether. Ideally, a Marxist state should own the entire economy, and this ideal is actively sought and sometimes closely approximated.

Fascism, on the other hand, tends to be corporatist. A fascist state controls the economy, but it doesn’t technically own it. In practical terms, while Marxists seek to dispossess private entrepreneurs (‘capitalists’), fascism effectively turns them into managers. Officially, they still own their businesses, but that status is contingent on their compliance with the state’s diktats.

Politically and culturally, both Marxism and fascism seek total control, or as much of it as is achievable within the limitations imposed by the current ethos. Marxism tends to restrict freedom of speech more than fascism. The former seeks to control self-expression in every area of life, whereas the latter allows its subjects some latitude – provided they don’t abuse it by criticising the state.

I hope you accept these attempts at precise yet unavoidably prolix definitions. If you do, I won’t have to go over Starmer’s and Putin’s regimes point by point, showing why the former is inherently Marxist and the latter fascist.

Putin operates in an ethos largely shaped by Marxism and hence conducive to fascism. All he had to do was re-direct public resentment away from alien classes and towards alien nations or blocs thereof.

Those Untermenschen have historically exploited saintly Russians, not letting them achieve the global supremacy to which their unmatched spirituality entitles them. And only the heroism of the Russian people has prevented those beasts from conquering and enslaving the country.

The collective passions are thus re-channelled into the conduit of racial superiority, demanding the nation’s historical due and seeking revenge against those who have kept the nation down.

The sacralisation of the supreme leader wasn’t especially difficult to impose either, what with several generations of Russians growing up accustomed to worship the mummified relics of another supreme leader. All the other accidents of the fascist substance followed naturally: brutal suppression of dissent, political murders, elimination of free media – and of course external aggression.

By contrast, Starmer operates in an environment not organically conducive to Marxism. Commitment to parliamentary democracy, free press and essential civic liberties are all obstacles in the way of Marxist purity. These can be systematically eroded, but they can’t be cast aside in one fell swoop.

But Starmer and his government get full marks for doing their best, given the limitations. If you read that bible of Marxism, The Communist Manifesto, you’ll see how much headway the Labour government is making towards the ideal outlined there.

Systematic debauchment of free speech and private wealth, education that indoctrinates rather than educating, the state extending its tentacles into every aspect of culture, politics and family life, increasingly subjugating the law to the state’s diktats, falsifying history by portraying it as nothing but continuous capitalist/colonial oppression, imposing economic policies that have little to do with the economy and much to do with revanchist Marxist levelling – all of these come straight out of that same playbook, The Manifesto.

In substance, Starmer’s government is as Marxist as Putin’s is fascist. These aren’t just any old words used pejoratively or otherwise. They are technical terms designating specific phenomena – and technical terms thrive on precise definitions, while dying a slow death when used loosely.

Now you see the problem I had with my French friend. It has taken me 1,400 words to make here the same point I tried to make in a maximum of 20 allowed by the etiquette of a noisy dinner party. Predictably, I failed, and it’s all my fault. I ought to have known better.