Author: Alexander Boot

Neither do we want men, blacks, whites, Jews, Muslims, Indians, cripples, homosexuals and heterosexuals. Provided that, after each such undesirable category, we add the magic words as such.

There’s only one characteristic that should entitle a person to a ministerial position: statesmanship. All else is irrelevant – or rather it would be if common sense hadn’t fallen by the wayside in our virtual reality of identity politics.

That’s why two cabinet members, one present, the other former, have cried bloody murder on hearing that Boris Johnson is planning to sack several women in the upcoming cabinet reshuffle.

Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom was the first off the blocks, insisting that “gender equality should be the absolute norm”. Since it’s widely rumoured that Mrs Leadsom’s name is high on the sacking list, one might detect a touch of self-interest in that statement.

Diversity, continued Mrs Leadsom, should be the “watchword… not for its own sake, but because of the excellence that a diverse range of views bring to decision-making.”

I question the Tory credentials of anyone who uses the word ‘gender’ in any other than the grammatical sense. But I agree with the sentiment: a person’s sex shouldn’t be a disqualifying characteristic for any job. Yet, and this is what seems to escape the Business Secretary, neither should it be a qualifying one.

It’s also true that, generally speaking, “a diverse range of views” may indeed “bring excellence to decision-making”. Then again, it may not. It all depends on the calibre of the people enunciating the views, not on their sex.

I doubt that even the rankest misogynist would object to a cabinet fully staffed by Margaret Thatcher’s clones. Yet even the most passionate feminist would think twice before having even one Mrs Leadsom in a position of power, never mind a whole cabinet filled with her likes.

There can be no male or female perspective on government. There can be no male or female views. Views can be either sound or unsound, and never mind the source.

This is so blindingly obvious that even Amber Rudd, a disgruntled former Home Secretary, is familiar with the argument. “ ‘Surely we just want the best candidate for the job,’ ” she writes, “is the typical response when you point out the need for more women at the top of politics.

“Yet there’s another, rarely discussed, argument: that diversity is a good thing in itself. Diversity fosters a broader mix of experience and priorities, leading to better outcomes. Many private-sector studies have demonstrated that diversity improves business decisions. It is the same in politics. No one is going to fight for women like a woman.”

Every word in this statement is either false or idiotic, and most are both. A rarely discussed argument, Miss Rudd? We must read different papers, or indeed live on different planets.

All one hears these days is a demand for ‘diversity’ irrespective of other qualities, of the kind that, according to Miss Rudd, is “a good thing in itself”. And it pains me to remind someone who held cabinet-level positions for years that it’s not the government’s job “to fight for women”. Its job is to fight for the realm and its subjects.

Also, I’d like to see the studies that allegedly demonstrate the positive effect of ‘diversity’ on decision-making. I have, however, seen some brilliant studies by serious scholars like Thomas Sowell (himself, incidentally, black), showing that such considerations hardly ever come up in private enterprise.

I myself spent over 30 years in advertising, one of the most cut-throat industries. And never once did I see anyone hired or fired on the basis of any factors other than the ability to do the job.

This isn’t to say I never saw a single manager harbouring prejudices against various groups. In fact, I hardly saw one who didn’t.

But, as Dr Sowell demonstrated by his ground-breaking research, people running competitive businesses simply can’t afford to indulge their petty bigotry or, conversely, misconstrued ideas of social justice. The cost of doing so is too high.

Businesses compete not only for markets but also for competent staff. From my own experience, the difference between hiring, say, a good and bad creative team or account handler can be the difference between winning accounts and losing them. And the difference between winning and losing accounts is the agency thriving or going under.

Dr Sowell offered invaluable insights supported by a vast corpus of data. He found that the higher the stakes, the less likely would hiring and firing be dictated by extraneous considerations. That’s why, he showed, incidences of discrimination are much higher in the public sector, where the stakes are presumably lower.

Well, they may be lower for a paperclip counter in the lower reaches of the civil service, but at the level of ministerial, especially cabinet, positions they are as high as high can be.

Someone elevated to that tier just to satisfy idiotic demands for actuarial diversity can put the whole country, not just an advertising agency, out of business. So, no, diversity isn’t a good thing in itself.

It’s one of the cancer cells metastasising all over our body politic. Unless a powerful therapy is found, the disease will spread even further, killing every healthy cell along the way.

In search of the more visible symptoms, just look at Andrea Leadsom and Amber Rudd.

A stand-up comedian has fled Russia after making tasteless jokes about Christianity and funny ones about Putin. He correctly surmised that his act might cost him his liberty or possibly even his life.

Those new faux-Christians in the Kremlin take blasphemy against either God or his earthly envoy Putin seriously, mainly because they feel the two have merged into one. Hence they enforce the concept of the Russian state tersely worded in 1833 by Education Minister Uvarov: “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Folk”.

Since the three elements of the triad exist in organic unity, an attack on one is an attack on all. Thus a public expression of atheism, no matter how mild, constitutes sedition and therefore grounds for criminal prosecution.

Criminal courts are happy to oblige. “No one in his right mind would write anything against Orthodox Christianity,” declared a Russian judge in 2016, sentencing a man to punitive psychiatric care for writing “There is no God” online.

Allow me to clear up any possible linguistic confusion. The Russian term православие used therein does mean Orthodox Christianity, but it’s always used in a narrower sense to denote Eastern, especially Russian, Orthodoxy. Neither an anti-Vatican II Catholic nor a 1662 Anglican would be described as an Orthodox Christian in that sense.

I’m not sure I agree with the Russian judge that atheism really is a sign of mental instability. If it were, we’d have to regard as mad, rather than merely misguided, chaps like David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Francis Crick or the recently deceased Roger Scruton, and something in me balks at doing that.

Writing “anything against Orthodox Christianity” in Russia evidently betokens not so much madness as an understated self-preservation instinct. But here, in London, one can still find something wrong with the Russian church and expect to remain at large.

I’m not going to delve into the vital doctrinal differences between Western and Eastern Christianity. Suffice it to say they exist and, as I argue in one of my books, they produce distinctly different ecclesiastical and civilisational archetypes.

The Eastern archetype is embodied at its most extreme in Russia, where, since the time of Peter the Great (d. 1725), the church has acted as an adjunct to the state and, increasingly, its secret police.

Solzhenitsyn complained that the Bolsheviks forced priests to report secrets vouchsafed to them at confession. Yet this practice predated Bolshevism by some two centuries at least.

Alas, before the advent of universal equality and social justice, the church had attached itself to the wrong state and therefore had to share its demise. This was executed in the style traditionally associated with universal equality and social justice: mass murder.

Some 200,000 priests were killed in all sorts of imaginative ways during the first 25 years of Bolshevism, 40,000 of them when Lenin was still in charge.

Yet the church survived, thanks to Hitler. When the war started, Stalin found to his dismay that the people wouldn’t fight for the bright future of communism, underpinned as it was by its monstrous past and present.

Holy Russia had to be taken off the mothballs, in the hope that it would command more loyalty. It was then that the moribund church was restored to some subservient but extant status.

Its role was refined, compared to pre-revolutionary Russia. If then priests had to cooperate with the secret police, they now became its operatives. The church hierarchs were appointed by the Central Committee of the Party in partnership with the KGB.

Since Putin has created a state seeking legitimacy in a version of Uvarov’s formula, Orthodox hierarchs have become the state’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, but without the embellishments. When Vladimir Gundyaev was elected patriarch, not only he but also the other two candidates were career KGB operatives.

If under Stalin the church was seen as a necessary but marginal evil, under Putin it’s an almost equal partner in the ruling camarilla. As such, the church has acquired the same endearing traits, such as untrammelled greed and acquisitiveness.

Acting in their new mode, the hierarchs were granted the privilege of importing duty-free alcohol and cigarettes, which they parlayed into billions. His Holiness the Patriarch, for example, has amassed wealth estimated at $4 billion.

Yet that was only one money stream flowing into the church coffers. Others ranged from mighty rivers, such as an interest in oil-trading companies, to small but pleasant brooks.

Among the latter is the Sretensky Monastery in central Moscow that has been found to house a hard-working brothel, charging $35 a pop. One wonders whether the holy fathers confused missionary work with the position of the same name.

It’s good to see that the concept of monasticism continues to evolve in Russia, mostly in the direction of getting in touch with lay life, as it were. But then, as the Russian saying goes, “like priest, like parish”, with the state here acting in the capacity of the priest.

An interesting touch is added by the personalities involved. The vicar of Sretensky Monastery, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), is Vladimir Putin’s confessor, while Patriarch Kirill is the monastery’s superior.

On balance, I don’t think I’m mad or, if I am, my feelings about the Moscow patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox church aren’t among the symptoms. I’m only amazed that some honest Christians – and they do exist in Russia – can remain loyal to that affront to their faith. But then Russia is indeed a rather peculiar place.  

Looking drawn and haggard, Manny Macron kindly illustrated the points I made the other day about the delusions plaguing the EU in general and France in particular.

Actually, I’m paying them an unwarranted compliment by assuming they are delusional, rather than duplicitous.

It’s the former if they think any British government could accept the despotic conditions the EU puts forth as preconditions for a trade deal. It’s the latter if they only put forth those conditions as a way of punishing Britain for what many Frenchmen see as treason and many others as apostasy.

Personally, I recall neither pledging allegiance to the EU nor being baptised in its holy water, but French people tend to have a different perspective on things European.

On Thursday I mentioned one shibboleth bandied about with maniacal persistence: ‘level playing field’. Evidently there are others as well, namely ‘dynamic alignment’ and ‘undercutting’, with the first designed to preclude the second.

A level playing field means that Britain won’t get a trade deal unless she maintains the same regulations and red tape that the EU enforces in such areas as workers’ rights, environmental protection and state aid.

Dynamic realignment means that, whenever EU bureaucrats decide to make the tape redder or the regulations tighter, Britain undertakes to follow suit in perpetuity.

Undercutting is self-explanatory. By submitting to such egregious tyranny, Britain must lose whatever competitive edge she might otherwise have.

Now, operating within the rarefied linguistic atmosphere Dubya once made famous, the French indeed have no words for entrepreneur or competition, not in our sense anyway. The letters of the words may exist, but the spirit evaporated long ago.

If England’s economic legislation, starting from the repeal of the Corn Laws, has generally aimed to encourage competition, the corresponding French laws have tried to stifle it.

It’s France’s restrictive labour, social and environmental laws that are responsible for her catastrophic levels of youth unemployment and the precipitous decline in industrial production. Hence Manny should really mind his own business, rather than ours.

He should step on the unions, make it possible for employers to fire (and therefore to hire), reduce taxes (both business and personal), replace untenable social commitments with something closer to the real world, abandon the profit-busting 35-hour work week – and in general communicate to the populace that words like entrepreneur and patron (boss) have been taken off the list of popular insults.

In fact, he could do worse than ‘dynamically aligning’ France’s economy with Britain’s, as it is now and will be in the future. That’s what he’d do if he were more decisive and less of an EU fanatic prepared to sacrifice his citizens’ well-being for an ill-conceived ideology.

However, one has to commend Manny for making a startling economic discovery, France’s greatest since Jean-Baptiste Say wrote in 1803 that supply generates demand (forgetting to add that sometimes it doesn’t).

Manny’s contribution is to stigmatise ‘undercutting’ as a tool of economic competition. As with most economic ideas emanating from the EU, this one is highly selective, applying to Britain only.

For example, France annually imports some $60 billion’s worth of goods from China, whose whole economy is built on using cheap, as near as damn slave, labour to undercut other producers.

However, just as Britain isn’t Canada according to that bird-brained Mme Loiseau (I resisted this pun the other day, but can’t contain myself any longer: l’oiseau is the French for bird), neither is Britain China according to Manny.

In fact, Britain is like no other country in the world in that she dared leave the confines of the EU, having first accepted them. Tyrannical states, such as the EU, hate to see their subjects break free, and they’ll do all they can to keep them in.

Perhaps the time has arrived for the EU to put the East German experience to good use by building a wall all along its borders – and, for the time being, use economic weapons rather than firearms to discourage escape.

Speaking of East Germany, Angela Merkel’s response to the Thuringian elections added a new touch to the EU’s concept of politics. Until now its common practice has been to treat voters in EU-related referendums as pupils sitting exams.

When they cast their vote the wrong way, they were made to vote again until they got it right. Yet Frau Merkel has shown that the same approach can be profitably used in strictly internal elections as well.

Because her own party, the CDU, won the minister-presidential elections by forming a bloc with the AfD nationalists, Angie simply overturned the result and told Turingia to have another go, this time concentrating better.

While largely sharing her dim view of the AfD, I still have a constitutional query. Is this sort of thing allowed under the Federal Republic’s constitution?

If it is, the constitution is flawed. If it isn’t, this act is tyrannical. I don’t know which is worse.

Yet such practices fit into the nature of the EU as snugly as does its attempted economic blackmail of Britain. An organisation erected on a foundation of lies is simply acting in character.

The more serious a problem, the more seriously should people think about it. Alas, one increasingly runs into people who are not only incapable of serious thought but also ignorant of what it is.

First, let’s agree on what serious thought isn’t. It is, for example, distinct from a feeling. No expression of a thought can start with the words “I feel”. A feeling doesn’t require any substantiation; a thought, before it’s regarded as such, does.

Neither is a thought identical to an opinion, for the same reason. An opinion may be introduced by “I feel…” or “I think…”, but unless it can withstand a rigorous intellectual test, it falls short of being a thought.

Especially relevant to serious discourse is the realisation that a thought also differs from a fancy. Such discourse has room for both dreams and thoughts, but a grown-up thinker will never confuse the two, though a child may.

Some dreams are less fanciful, while still not qualifying as thoughts. Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if no one in the world were poor or ill?

A child might give this matter what he thinks is a thought, but a grown-up won’t. He’ll know that such an end is so divorced from any possible means of achieving it that he’ll dismiss the notion out of hand.

However, a serious person might say that, while the words ‘no one’ brand this notion as a pie in the sky, there’s a kernel of a thought in it. For it’s possible to make sure that fewer people in the world are poor or ill.

Would this be desirable? Of course. Would it be achievable? Definitely, for it was done before at times and in places. The embryo of a thought has thus been created, and it can be gestated to maturity by adding ‘how’ to ‘what’.

The means are essential to any end, but they are different from it. The desired end may be general and idealistic, but the means must be rational and realistic. Otherwise they can destroy the embryo of a thought with the brutality of a back-alley abortionist.

All this is elementary, yet many people – including some who run countries – are incapable of such rudimentary logic. They conflate ends and means to a point where the two merge into a seemingly indivisible entity.

Since most people are jealous of the few thoughts they have, they often claim that those who disagree with the means reject the ends. If the ends tend to be noble, then such naysayers are at best ignoble. They can be despised, perhaps even hated. But they don’t rate a serious debate.

You might think I’m describing a rare case of inadequacy. However, this is our modern political discourse in a nutshell, characterised as it is by much wing-flapping and spittle-sputtering, but little thought worthy of the name.

Take any oft-debated issue at random, say the NHS. Anyone arguing it’s a bad idea will be floored by a rhetorical punch. Don’t you want all people to have good medical care, you heartless bastard you?

This is the sleight of hand I mentioned: the irate imbecile identifies the end with the means. For it’s possible to be passionate about good medical care for all while still rejecting full nationalisation as the best way of providing it.

I’m not talking here about the merits of the debate, only about the quality of the thought that goes into it. The quality is abysmal.

Any issue will do as an illustration. Do you agree, asks a non-thinker, that the gap between the rich and the poor should be smaller? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that I do. Then what?

Well, then you must be in favour of taking more money from the rich and giving it to the poor. This isn’t fantasy land, but arguments one hears every day from politicians around the world, with much of the grateful audience nodding agreement.

Yet these aren’t thoughts, but infantile rants. For in theory the supposedly objectionable gap can be closed from either end: by making the poor richer or the rich poorer. In practice, however, only the first method works. The second one has produced economic disasters everywhere it has been tried.

Any other examples? Take free trade. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if goods were made cheaper by abandoning tariffs and duties? Yes, it would.

However, someone who’d rather pay a little more for his claret than live in a country whose sovereignty is dissolved in a foul-smelling melting pot isn’t an enemy of free trade. He has simply weighed the means against the end and found the balance unsatisfactory.

Or don’t you want people to breathe cleaner air? I do – a reply that isn’t compromised by my certainty that the means proposed to that end would deliver no tangible ecological benefit, while producing a tangible economic disaster.

i’m not arguing any particular issue. I’m only pointing out how childish most people’s thinking is on such matters.

And it’s ‘most people’ who decide such matters in conditions of universal suffrage. They do so by readily falling prey to demagogic slogans put forth by self-serving politicians.

This raises too many questions about the nature of democracy to answer, indeed to ask, in a short article. I’ve tried to do so in a book or two but, lest I be accused of crass commercialism, I shan’t mention the titles.

Andrew Neil’s interview of French MEP Natalie Loiseau brought back fond memories of the past three-odd years, marked by the worst mess in British politics since the Stuart interregnum.

The mess was caused by our vacillation ably assisted by the EU’s perfidy. The former component seems to be abating, but by the looks of it the latter one shows no such sign.

For Mme Loiseau clearly enunciated the EU stand on any possible trade relations with a post-Brexit UK. This stand rests on an immovable foundation: EU functionaries know that anything less than a disaster for Britain will spell more than a disaster for the EU.

Should Britain make an economic success of it (every other kind has already been achieved by the sheer act of leaving), the EU may suffer a domino effect. Other countries, previously prepared to trade sovereignty for prosperity, will realise they’re getting a raw deal.

They’ll feel they could regain sovereignty and gain prosperity in one fell swoop, by following Britain out. A few years of that and the EU will be reduced to a single Franco-German state, called Allemance or Francmagne or perhaps the Fourth Reich.

Whenever Mr Neil cited any facts and statistics, Mme Loiseau responded with the air of wounded superciliousness so characteristic of the French political class: “I am surprised zat a journalist doesn’t know zis…”

In that spirit, she maintained that the EU accounts for most of Britain’s foreign trade. Actually, replied Mr Neil pedantically, it’s only 45 per cent. Mme Loiseau didn’t say that 45 per cent means most if the EU says it does, but her expression conveyed that very message.

Yet the argument wasn’t really about statistics. The EU, the ventriloquist to this woman’s dummy, wants Britain to obey all its social, environmental, economic and legal diktats, while no longer having even 1/28 of a say in how those diktats come about.

She calls it a “level playing field”. I’d call it bullying, which is one of the reasons we left that political contrivance in the first place. 

The EU, like any other political contrivance, kneads political terminology (along with facts and figures) with a dexterity normally found only at Korean massage parlours. The meaning of the terms they use depends solely on expediency and often has nothing to do with exact semantics.

In this case, the “level playing field” Britain is expected to dredge as a pre-condition for free trade means we should accept all the stifling, stultifying regulations that are successfully driving EU economies into recession. And, should disputes arise, they must be settled by the European Court of Justice.

Mr Neil couldn’t understand why, say, Canada can have a trade deal with the EU without satisfying such tyrannical demands, and we can’t. The pundit was being slightly disingenuous there.

He knows perfectly well that the EU defines free trade in ways that would have confounded Ricardo or Guizot. It insists that any, even supposedly independent, country wishing to trade freely with the EU must obey every EU law.

This condition is applied arbitrarily: Britain is supposed to toe the line, while, as Mr Neil pointed out, Canada isn’t. Mme Loiseau responded with her normal “I’m surprised zat…” petulance.

First, she said that Canada doesn’t have a free-trade deal with the EU, to which Mr Neil responded with the datum that 98 per cent of trade between Canada and the EU is duty-free. Having been caught out, Mme Loiseau made a startling geographical discovery.

Britain, she explained, isn’t Canada. For once she said something so blindingly obvious that one wonders why that observation had to be made. Mme Loiseau happily clarified:

Canada wanted a trade deal because she wanted to associate herself with the EU, while Britain wants one for the purpose of dissociation. That sounded as if Canada was about to apply for EU membership, while Britain wanted to use trade as an act of war.

No doubt that kind of drivel makes sense to EU fanatics, but it bemused Mr Neil. One can understand his predicament: it’s possible to reply sensibly only to a sensible statement. Instead of waiting for crazy actions to follow crazy words, it’s best just to walk away.

But duty called, and Mr Neil didn’t walk away. Instead he briefly outlined the economic and social problems besetting the EU in general and France in particular.

He even had the gall to mention the strikes paralysing France – only for Mme Loiseau to cut him off in mid-sentence. She was surprised zat a journalist could be so ignorant as not to know zat ze strikes had ended.

Quite, said Mr Neil. But they persisted for two months, following in the wake of the year-long gilets jaunes revolt. So, considering the economic plight of France, Germany, Italy and so on, could the EU afford to risk a trade war with Britain?

Mme Loiseau performed a Gallic shrug meaning the question was irrelevant. If Mr Neil thought zat zere would be no consequences after Brexit, he was sorely mistaken.

In other words, the EU is ready to cut off its nose to spite its face if that’s what it takes to make a point pour encourager les autres. That was predictable, for reasons I outline earlier.

Its mendacious protestations apart, the EU is a political, not economic, construct. Hence politics will always trump economics.

I hope Boris Johnson has the guts (he certainly has the parliamentary majority) to up the stakes. He should announce that, if the EU wishes to play that kind of stacked game, we hold some of the aces.

Britain could turn herself into a haven for foreign business and capital, a sort of larger version of Jersey, by loosening regulations, cutting taxes across the board and pursuing free-trade agreements with the rest of the world.  

When all those Volkswagens, BNPs and Enis scream bloody murder, and France’s youth unemployment grows beyond the present, already catastrophic, 21 per cent, one wonders if Mme Loiseau and her ilk will remain deaf.

If they do, they may be reminded yet again that France hasn’t exactly lived down her DNA of a revolutionary republic. But not to worry: I doubt our government is capable of playing so tough. Pity.

Progress marches inexorably across the globe, leaving no corner untouched. It pleases me to inform you that it has now reached parts of Malaysia and also Indonesia’s autonomous Aceh province.

Aceh is ruled by Sharia law, which tends to fall somewhat short of our exacting standards of women’s equality. The gap between Sharia and Western feminism hasn’t been completely closed, but I know you’ll join me in celebrating the growing proximity between the two.

In Aceh, the religious law is getting not only more feminist, but also more lenient. This, however, is mainly due to intercession on the part of the central government.

The local officials felt that only beheading or, at a pinch, stoning was a fitting punishment for hanky-panky. However, because of the global reach of the Internet, Indonesia’s government felt that might besmirch Indonesia’s otherwise sterling reputation.

Hence it stepped in, and the locals had to settle for less terminal chastisement involving a rattan cane. As far as transgressors are concerned, this was definitely a step in the right direction.

Crimes thus punished include gambling, adultery, drinking, homosexuality and extramarital sex, and, this still being a remote corner of the world, women are held to stricter standards of probity.

I don’t know whether the Koran says “spare the rod and spoil the woman”, but in any case Muslim men jealously guard the morality of their womenfolk. Hence a woman can be caned not only for having sex with a man other than her husband, but also for sitting close to a man in a coffee shop – even at adjacent tables.

Yet this isn’t a case of one punishment fitting all crimes: the number of lashes varies from just a few to 150, with the higher number guaranteeing that the lesson will last a lifetime, which in this case may be measured in days.

Where’s the feminism in that? you may wonder, having been irresistibly intrigued by the title above. Thought you’d never ask.

You see, until now both men and women have been invariably caned by men. However, the innate Muslim sense of justice prevailed, and Aceh struck a blow (as it were) for equality.

Henceforth women will be lashed by other women, those belonging to the newly formed flogging squad of Aceh’s Sharia Implementation Unit. Actually, recruiting the necessary numbers took quite some time because some women were too infirm in their faith to take on the task with alacrity.

However, the vacancies were eventually filled, and the new recruits underwent rigorous training. An important part of it isn’t only physical fitness but also mental strength.

According to Sharia police chief investigator Zakwan, the floggers must be trained to “have no mercy for those who violate God’s law”. That taken care of, they can concentrate on mastering proper technique.

The first woman flogger has already practised her newly acquired skill, earning a compliment from Mr Zakwan. “Her technique was nice,” he said.

I agree. Her technique was indeed nice, but it could still be improved. Perfection, after all, is unattainable in this world, being the sole prerogative of Allah.

This is where I think I could help by offering unsolicited advice. For I couldn’t help noticing that the cane is wielded in a manner similar to the flat forehand in tennis.

So, defying the outdated notion of “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, those devout female floggers should borrow a stroke from the infidel game of tennis.

Two words provide the key to achieving proper weight distribution and maximum cane speed at impact: kinetic chain.

In layman’s terms, this means putting all the relevant muscle groups to work by activating them in turn. The kinetic chain starts with the so-called unit turn: the flogger turns her shoulders, naturally taking the cane back, bends her knees slightly and loads up her back leg by putting most of her weight on it.

Having completed the backswing, she then steps forward, rotating her shoulders and hips in the same direction. As her weight is transferred onto her front leg, she starts the forward swing of the cane, keeping her wrist slightly cocked.

The speed at which the cane moves through the air should increase gradually, starting slow and reaching its maximum at impact. At that last moment, the wrist uncocks with a natural snap, guaranteeing most satisfying agony on the part of the target.

Since the stroke is essentially flat, there’s no immediate need to swing from low to high. However, at a more advanced stage, that element could be added for an extra slashing effect. Allah will rejoice, but the simpler technique will do to be going on with for the time being.

I’d offer my hands-on coaching services, but Penelope put her foot down. “Over my dead body,” she said. Not yours, dear. Over the bodies of those dissipated women who dare choose the wrong seat at a coffee shop.

The case of Sudesh Amman, gunned down by the police after stabbing two random passers-by in Streatham, reminds us yet again of an uncomfortable truth.

When it comes to Muslim terrorism especially, our law is ordure because it proceeds from a wrong notion.

Western governments fall over themselves trying to ascribe every such atrocity to individual grievances or idiosyncrasies. Heaven forbid they accept that people’s actions just might be motivated by their faith.

Assorted leaders feel duty-bound to insist that the terrorists’ faith has nothing to do with their behaviour. The omnipresent mantra maintains that “Islam is a religion of peace”.

One wonders what it is about Islam’s history and scriptural sources that begets this counterintuitive belief. Actually, that’s not what feeds it at all. Our politicians just share a widespread philistine conviction that everyone is like them, give or take.

Most of them are Christians, but only nominal ones. Christianity in no way affects what they feel, think or do. It’s merely a badge of some vague group identity.

Such politicians may still be good people. But they are bad Christians.

Being predominantly philistines, they believe that most Muslims are also good people, yet bad Muslims whose behaviour is as little inspired by their faith as the politicians’ behaviour is inspired by theirs.

But they are wrong in general, although some soi-disant Muslims indeed have as little piety as most soi-disant Christians. But the key difference is between ‘some’ and ‘most’.

Some Muslims drink alcohol, treat women with respect, go to the mosque only on high holidays if then, and pay no attention to its 300-odd Koran verses that call for violence towards infidels.

They are bad Muslims and, as such, may very well be good people. Good Muslims are different, and the better Muslims they are, the more hostile they are to Christians, Jews and the West in general.

Good Muslims, many of them British, dance in the street whenever a London bus or train is blown up by their coreligionists. Good Muslims believe that Sharia should take precedence over the law of the land, and 40 per cent of all British Muslims agree.

Over the past 1,400 years Islamic violence towards Westerners has only ever been mitigated by the West’s strength and resolve to keep it in check.

The strength is still there but, judging by the litany of Islam being a religion of peace, the resolve isn’t. And without resolve, ability counts for nothing.

The world began with an idea, God’s, and it may well perish by an idea, its own. In this particular instance too, the particulars of yet another act of Muslim terrorism get much attention, while its metaphysical origin is ignored.

The case of Sudesh Amman shows how the craven failure to acknowledge that Islam as such is our enemy stamps common sense into the dirt. Or drowns it in blood if you’d rather.

In 2018, Amman was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for disseminating jihadist literature and openly calling for mass murder. Such a short sentence was derisory to begin with, but what followed was sheer madness.

He was released halfway into his term, which happens automatically unless the convict does something awful in prison. I don’t know if Amman had received some deradicalisation training, but he probably had.

Against every evidence of rampant recidivism, our governments insist that prisons should be mainly educational, rather than punitive, facilities, and that most criminals leave their cells rehabilitated and ready to do charitable work in hospices.

In this case, however, the authorities showed some lack of faith in the success of Amman’s rehabilitation. In fact, he was still considered so dangerous that his every step was monitored by as many as 25 police officers, some of them armed.

This explains why Amman was shot dead less than 60 seconds into his stabbing spree. However, while congratulating the officers involved, one can’t help asking, nay screaming, this natural question: “Why the hell was he at large in the first place?!?”

A government’s primary function is to protect its citizens from harm. Our government, hamstrung by its ideological wokishness, is remiss on this score.

Our ministers refuse to accept that, as far as we are concerned, good Muslims are ipso facto bad people who endanger our society. That’s why no measure currently mooted will succeed.

For example, the government is likely to abandon the provision for automatic early release. That’s good, but are we to understand that if, say, Amman had served his full three-year sentence, he wouldn’t have knifed anybody?

Also mentioned is a further educational effort aimed at converting good Muslims into bad. That too is doomed to failure because good, which is to say devout, which is to say fanatical, Muslims won’t be swayed by rational arguments.

If such measures won’t work, what will? What are we going to do about it? as Britons invariably ask.

My answer is let’s first agree on what it is. Once we’ve done so, the specifics will take care of themselves.

The Ammans of this world can’t be allowed to roam our streets, before, after or instead of their incarceration. Keeping them off can be achieved by various measures, none of which I can confidently predict will be taken.

I’d start with the old notion of protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem. Loosely translated, it means that citizenship, the right to be protected by one’s country, is contingent on one’s allegiance, submission to the country’s laws.

Since Amman and his ilk manifestly renounce such allegiance, their citizenship should be revoked, regardless of where they were born. Since they wish to live by Sharia law, I’m sure they’ll be happy to be deported to a country where it’s in force.

Then, any mosque or Islamic centres in which a single jihadist word is uttered must be summarily shut. The same goes for Muslim schools, newspapers and other media.

If a jihadist crime has been committed, the perpetrator’s faith must be treated as an aggravating, rather than extenuating, circumstance. The ensuing sentences would then be measured not in months or years, but in decades.

Also, the death penalty for jihadist murder must be reintroduced, bringing the criminals together with their 72 virgins gagging for it in paradise. If we feel justified killing murderous jihadists in Iraq or Syria, why can’t we do the same at home? If a moral distinction exists, it escapes me.

And so on, so forth, one exercise in futility after another. For no government will ever have the clarity of thought and the strength of resolve to do anything about the problem – nor indeed acknowledge its true source.

All we’ll hear is a companion mantra to “what are we going to do about it”: “something must be done”. And something will be done, to no effect whatsoever.

One wonders how Queen Victoria’s government would have approached this problem. Oh well, it’s best not to.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge adorned last night’s Bafta ceremony, he in the capacity of the British academy’s president, she as his charming wife.

I don’t know about Kate, who has mastered the essential royal art of keeping shtum, but Will, who hasn’t, wasn’t happy. His chagrin was caused by the absence of off-white winners in the directing and acting categories.

Britain, he said, has produced “incredible film-makers, actors, producers, directors and technicians, men and women from all backgrounds and ethnicities enriching our lives through film.” However, BAFTA has seen fit to ignore those incredible achievements at awards’ time.

Will just couldn’t get his head around that slap in the face of modern sensibilities. “It simply cannot be right in this day and age,” he fumed, even to be “talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process”.

He’s right about that: this should never come up in civilised conversation. If it does, people might think that Harry isn’t the only apple that didn’t fall far from the tree that was Diana.

Why does HRH think the incomprehensible need to talk about this state of affairs arose in the first place? I can see only two possibilities, even theoretical ones.

One, Bafta’s voting members are all racist bigots who have formed a conspiracy to keep deserving black aspirants out. Two, they actually voted for what they regarded as the more deserving candidates.

The first possibility really isn’t possible. Anyone who follows such matters knows that Bafta members, as a group, fit every nuance of the word ‘woke’, and then some that this polyvalent word hasn’t yet acquired.

This lot are more likely to support Hamas or Jeremy Corbyn than allow a racist thought to cross their minds. This, no matter how broadly HRH would choose to define racism. Vote for an actor just because he is black – possibly. Vote against him for the same reason – never.

That leaves only one possibility: they genuinely voted on merit, assisted in this undertaking by Britain’s demographics. It pains me, a lifelong champion of diversity, to acknowledge this, but blacks make up only 1.63 per cent of the country’s population.

Even assuming that they are proportionately represented in the film industry, which they probably aren’t for various social reasons, on purely statistical grounds they can’t be expected to dominate BAFTA awards – much as Will and I feel they should.

For one thing, such a worthy end would demand rather drastic means. Script writers would have to concentrate on producing stories that involve blacks. That’s unlikely, considering that most writers are shamefully white.

Even if they are as passionate about diversity as Will and I are, when it comes to practising their craft writers tend to write about what they know. If most of them are white middle class (I’m guessing here, but the guess rings true), those chaps would be hard-pressed to pack their plot lines with black characters.

That means fewer roles for black actors – unless of course our cinema follows the worthy if recent tradition of our theatre and begins to cast black actors in white roles, such as Hamlet or Lady Macbeth.

To wit, Sam Mendes’s 1917, which won seven prizes last night, including the one for the best film. It’s about the First World War, fought at a time when most inhabitants of these Isles were irredeemably white. Hence, to introduce even a meagre platoon of black protagonists, Mr Mendes, who is a stickler for historical accuracy, would have had to err against his artistic integrity.

So how does HRH Prince Will propose to “ensure diversity in the awards process”? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m afraid he wishes to abandon meritocracy in said process (a note to HRH: the word process is almost always redundant – “in the awards” would have been better English, unless of course proper style is discriminatory).

Hence black directors, actors and so on should be given BAFTA awards simply on the strength of their race, regardless of merit. Americans call this affirmative action, we call it reverse discrimination, but highly visible public figures in either country generally refrain from demanding it in so many words.

Reverse discrimination is these days practised much more than the old kind, but quietly. The assumption is that it’s one of those things that go without saying.

Will should really hold his polo horses, for a while at any rate. His own family has already taken a step towards racial integration (or rather half a step, for Meghan is only half-black). There’s no need to take another stride just yet, especially considering how the first one has worked out.

I’m not suggesting he douse his flaming conscience with water, but perhaps indulging it in private would do him – and, more important, our monarchy – quite some good. He has good role models to follow in his family, and I mean his grandmother and his great-grandfather. Not his mother.

Decorum won’t allow me to write the next, logical sentence. But you get the sentiment.

Perhaps it could have been expressed differently, say with a reference to shaking their dust from our feet. That would have made the message more civilised, but no more heartfelt.

For the British have regained their right to be just that, British, a nation governed the British way, according to British customs, history and laws. That’s not what our metropolitan trendies want to be.

They’d rather belong to a vast quasi-imperial contrivance, whose fine points the plebs are supposed to be too stupid to grasp. ‘Plebs’ to them has to be not a class notion, but a political one, defined as a full synonym of Leavers.

Otherwise this attitude would be even more idiotic than it is, because the ranks of Leavers included some of our finer minds, such as the late Roger Scruton, not to mention a large group of my close friends, who not only know and understand European culture, but also produce some of it.

Any one of them – well, false modesty aside, us – is not noticeably inferior intellectually to any Remainer out there, or perhaps all of them combined. But those sore losers do have a point: many of those who voted Leave may have trouble coming up with a tight definition of, say, sovereignty.

Yet they’d have no such problem defining identity. Not that the need would ever arise: British people don’t need to define Britishness. It’s indelibly written in their hearts.

They love their country, are proud of it and hate to see it lose its character to an influx of alien laws, regulations and – truth be told – throngs. Some of them, not many, may indeed dislike foreigners. But, more important, all of them love Britain and the British.

More than just about any other European national identity, Britishness has a vital political component. France can remain France under her 17 different constitutions adopted during the time when Britain has had just one. France can even remain France as part of Nazi Germany.

Britain isn’t like that. Take away our monarchy, the sovereignty of our Parliament, and the rule of our common law, and Britain wouldn’t be Britain any longer.

The bonds tying together France are mostly cultural, linguistic and perhaps even gastronomic. That’s why the country did well under German occupation: everybody still spoke French, the food was less plentiful but still French, Sartre’s dramas were staged and Marcel Carné’s films shot – Paris reste Paris, as Maurice Chevalier was singing. 

That’s why the French are happy to emulate Messrs Esau and Faust and dissolve their sovereignty in the cauldron of a stew cooked by German and French bureaucrats towards the end of Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

And that’s why they – even the more intelligent among them – fail to understand the British on this subject. The French don’t realise that, while Britain has always been governed by the rule of law, she, unlike France, has never been governed by the rule of lawyers.

Most of our laws, even when they don’t have obvious scriptural antecedents, have gradually developed over centuries as reflections of the English national character. That’s why some things that are traditionally sacrosanct to our governments, such as property rights, are to those clever French legislators statements of intent at best and petty annoyances at worst.

Hence, for example, our country roads are hardly ever as straight as in France. A countryside is made up of private holdings, making it impossible for a British planner to put a ruler on the map, draw a straight line some 30 miles long and turn it into a road without encroaching on someone’s property. Yet that’s precisely what the French did throughout the 19^th century, most blatantly during the reign of Napoleon III.

Personally, I’m grateful for this: driving along those straight ribbons is easier and safer than along the meandering sunken lanes in England. But they never let one forget how profoundly different, not to say incompatible, the two countries are.

The French refuse to acknowledge this. They have an ill-conceived notion that they could recapture their past grandeur by hanging on to Germany’s coattails, while bossing every other EU member.

I think they are wrong even as far as France’s interests are concerned. But that’s their business, I just wish they kept their noses out of ours. Fat chance.

By way of a fond good-bye, Manny Macron explained that the Brexit campaign only became victorious due to “lies, exaggerations and simplifications”. Presumably, as opposed to the Remain campaign that was the paragon of veracity, integrity and subtlety.

To illustrate his point, Manny lied in his very next sentence. Britain, he said, became the first country to leave the European Union in 70 years. This lie is popular with all EU fanatics, including our home-grown ones.

For the European Union, a single supranational state in the making, hasn’t existed for 70 years. It was founded on 7 February, 1992, at Maastricht. Until then, it had been called the European Economic Community.

The difference goes beyond semantics. For the intention of the EU founders has always been political: to create a single state. Yet, for tactical purposes, they lied that all they wanted was economic harmony. This is how one of the EU godfathers, Jean Monnet, put it in the 1950s:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Thus the EU is a political contrivance built on the termite-eaten foundation of perpetual lies. When one of its functionaries accuses those who exposed the lies for what they are of being themselves liars, only one answer is possible.

In Manny’s own language: “Va t’en…” In our own language, congratulations, Britain. We may still end up in hell, but at least it’ll be one of our own making.

The F-word, the C-word and even – as a tribute to our American friends – the compound M-word are more or less standard fare on TV.

But let the A-word, as in ape, cross your lips and you’re in deep trouble, as ITV news anchorman Alastair Stewart has found out.

In a spat with a (black!) man on Twitter, he had the gall to quote the (white!) playwright William Shakespeare: “But man, proud man, Dress’d in a little brief authority. Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d, his glassy essence — like an angry ape.”

His correspondent justifiably complained that he had been called an ape, and as a result Mr Stewart had to tender his resignation, accompanied by regrets about his “misjudgement”.

He clearly has a firmer grasp of classic literature than of modern realities. Otherwise, he would never have fallen into that racist trap. His excuses sounded feeble and meaningless, even though Mr Stewart showed that he had used the same quote before when arguing with a white man.

He ought to have known that certain words are to be avoided on pain of dire consequences – regardless of any absence of racial connotations.

As a lifelong fighter against racism and for diversity, I’m pleased to offer a short, by no means exhaustive, sample of such objectionable words, and also put forth some suggestions on how they can be circumvented.

You’ll find that in some instances such detours make the sentence longer, but that shouldn’t put you off. Think of it as taking side roads to avoid a motorway gridlock. Yes, your new route may be longer, but that wouldn’t bother you, would it?

In that spirit, here are my choices. Make them yours and you just may be able to hang on to your job for a while longer.

Ape (or monkey) should never be used. Simian is a good substitute noun, and imitate is a safe alternative for ape as a verb. A woman may thus discourage a man by saying “no simian business”. A “simian puzzle tree” will take some getting used to, but time is on our side.

Banana is off limits. When shopping at a greengrocer’s, just ask for a pound of curved yellow tropical fruit, making sure he understands you aren’t asking for a homosexual hunchback from Burma.

Black may be acceptable in some situations but, to be on the safe side, is best to avoid. BlackBerry mobiles can be just as easily described as AfroCaribbeanBerry mobiles.

Boogie-woogie is a wrong name for that style of jazz. Call it jitterbug: what you lose in accuracy, you gain in job prospects.

Coconut is a fruit of the palm tree. Why not call it just that to avoid trouble?

Coon, as in raccoon, is so offensive that, if you have to talk about American mammals, call them rac-youknowwhat.

Jig may have been an appropriate name for that dance in 16^th century Britain, but in the 20^th century you’d be lucky to get away with merely a sacking if you use the word. You can’t go wrong with reel, though it’s not quite the same thing.

Jungle is a tropical rainforest. Avoid the word like the plague in all uses, such as j=music or j-bunny. Ideally, you should campaign for Kipling’s Jungle Book to be renamed Tropical Rainforest Book.

Niggardly and niggling are strictly taboo. Exercise caution even with phonetic associations appearing in words like renege and sniggering. Nigeria and Niger are hard to avoid, although it’s worth trying circuitous routes like West African country with Lagos (or, in the latter case, Niamey) as its capital. Better safe than sorry.

Sambo is a Russian martial art. Use the word in any other meaning, and unemployment beckons.

Spade is grossly pejorative, a sacking offence no matter how it’s used. Say shovel instead, as in “call a shovel a shovel”.

Never say spear. Always say javelin, even if it means quoting from Shakejavelin.

Watermelon is a Cucurbitaceae, in botany. A much safer word, that, but don’t ask me how to pronounce it.

Oh well, this will do for a start. The important thing is for you to get into the general spirit of things, for which the poncy word is Zeitgeist. Whenever you open your mouth in public, think of a minefield, where one wrong step can reduce you to red spray.

If you’re careful, you just may negotiate your way safely and get on the right side of the racially sensitive people, among whom I proudly count myself. I hope this little glossary has been helpful. Good luck, and watch your step.