Author: Alexander Boot

One day someone will catalogue all the plagues of Egypt confidently forecast to punish Britain for having the temerity to leave the EU.

Some sort of rating system would come in handy, assigning points for the forecasters’ creativity in coming up with imaginary dystopic scenarios.

In anticipation of that development, I’d like to nominate for top prize The Evening Standard and its editor George Osborne. This, even though George had a head start on the competition.

At the time of the referendum, George was Chancellor – and one of the most fanatical campaigners for staying in the EU. In that capacity he was already coming up with ingenious scares at a time when others couldn’t yet think of anything more interesting than the promise that we’ll all freeze hungry in the dark.

Having lost the referendum and his job, George had a soft landing at The Standard, owned by the career KGB officer turned ‘businessman’ Alexander Lebedev or, to be needlessly technical about it, by his son.

There George quickly built on his early lead in the scaremongering stakes, eventually leaving everyone else in his wake last year, when he published an article prophesying that, without the EU, we’d have no defence against a pandemic of gonorrhoea.

The article escaped my attention then but, now I’ve unearthed it, I’m in its thrall. For the subject is extremely close to my heart – and do wipe that lascivious smirk off your face.

I no longer revolve in the circles where VD is common currency, and in fact never did. What interests me no end isn’t the putative pandemic of venereal disease, but the real pandemic of mass idiocy, manifest in particular among our politicos, hacks and those who take them seriously.

The article in question quotes Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, who describes the post-Brexit threat of gonorrhoea as “significant” and “disastrous”, what with the imminent collapse of any cooperation with continental health bodies.

Yet in the next paragraph he effectively self-refutes by correctly, if clumsily, stating that such cooperation is unlikely to cease because both parties have a vested interest in it: “The only positive is that we can say this is not only about UK patients, it is about European patients who would be affected as well.”

Score one for idiocy, and I mean not the argument itself, though God knows it’s bad enough, but the way it’s made – in one of our oldest newspapers. And the paper, using Mr Dickson as its mouthpiece, quickly runs up the score.

“Diseases do not recognise borders,” continues the quote, and one has to agree: indeed they don’t. But the carriers of diseases do, and – I don’t know how to put this without offending anyone – such carriers are more likely to come from the Third World and the low-rent parts of Europe (which, due to free movement, often amounts to the same thing).

This observation is so blatantly racist, xenophobic and probably also homophobic, misogynist and global-warming-denying that one would understand it if the paper had refused to entertain that affront, or else only used it as an illustration of the Leavers’ beastliness.

That would have been logical, whereas the article’s next sentence is again self-refuting and therefore inane: “Meanwhile outbreaks of measles in England and Wales have repeatedly been linked to those in countries in eastern Europe…”

Right. So outbreaks of contagious diseases, such as measles and by inference also gonorrhoea, are directly attributable to migration from the countries I so unkindly describe as the low-rent part of Europe.

Since, as we’ve agreed, diseases don’t recognise borders but their carriers do, logic would suggest that limiting such migration would lower the incidence of nasty infections.

Coincidentally, limiting immigration is exactly what Brexit is designed to do, at least in theory. (In practice, this falls into the category of things I have to see to believe.)

It’s then not immediately clear why the post-Brexit risk of VD will increase, rather than diminish, especially since Eastern European girls are disproportionately represented among Britain’s practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.

(I assume, and John Bercow may wish to correct me, that a man is more likely to catch gonorrhoea from a prostitute than from his wife.)

Once again, my point here isn’t political but purely logical. It’s true that I have yet to hear a single cogent argument in favour of the EU in general and especially our membership in it.

However, a certain deficit of cogency isn’t identical to rank idiocy, as displayed by making mutually exclusive statements in almost every sentence. This is yet another reminder that, though the words ideas and ideology are cognates, they are opposite in meaning.

P.S. As I finished writing this, news came in that the Supreme Court had found Johnson’s proroguing of parliament unlawful. I wish someone could do the same to our newfangled Supreme Court. Can we retrieve Col. Pride’s DNA?

Some call it pragmatism or empiricism, others may call it realism or common sense. I call it an intellectual disorder.

To be fair, the illness in question doesn’t just target English conservatives. It’s endemic throughout the West. But only in England (and her cultural offshoots) does it afflict conservatives in large numbers.

I wish I had ten pounds for each time I’ve heard one of my English friends say: “We must know the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

In other words, knowledge to them boils down to a compendium of empirically verifiable facts, not the destination of a teleological intellectual journey towards truth.

Yet facts are akin to bricks. They may be necessary to build a house, but without an a priori picture of the house in the architect’s mind, piles of bricks will just remain an eyesore on the landscape.

A collection of facts isn’t synonymous with knowledge. It’s strictly posterior or secondary. Facts may help to verify knowledge, but they aren’t knowledge.

Overreliance on facts will hold knowledge back, not advance it. For facts to assist knowledge, they must be evaluated in the light of a transcendental ideal, that anathema to so many of our conservatives.

They rebel against transcendental ideals because they associate them with socialism. However, if they gave this matter some thought, they’d realise that the problem only lies with wrong, rather than all, universal metaphysical premises.

It took a few centuries for Occam’s nominalism to become English empiricism, but in essence they are as close to each other as both are close to vulgar materialism (no other kind exists). They all believe in knowing reality by sensory, rather than intellectual, perception.

That makes the intellect superfluous as the pathfinder to knowledge. At best, it can function as a tool for solving the little puzzles of life, equivalents of all those Sudokus one finds in Sunday supplements.

Demoted to such a lowly status, the intellect dies out, as all superfluous things will. Seeking simple solutions to mysteries, our conservative empiricists cut their intellectual throats with Occam’s razor.

The development of thought from 14^th century nominalism to modern empiricism and positivism is merely a progression, not progress. Intellectually, and therefore ultimately morally, it’s deadly.

The nominalists defined reality as a sum total of objects, insisting that metaphysical ideas were mere words with no link to anything real. That this fallacy makes mass atheism inevitable goes without saying. But it also promotes mass idiocy.

For neither objects nor facts about them mean anything by themselves. Before they begin to acquire any meaning, they have to be assessed, interpreted and slotted into some intellectual and moral structure. Otherwise, facts lose all intellectual or moral significance and in that sense paradoxically become arbitrary, which is the opposite of factual.

Reliance on observable facts as the source of knowledge is a sure recipe for obscurantism, for it obviates the need to draw intellectual and moral distinctions. Yet during the flowering of Western thought, knowledge was understood to come from the intellect activated by intuition, not from a search for facts activated by inquisitiveness.

It took intuition to realise that a transcendental reality existed, and it took intellect to understand what it was and how it related to the morality and philosophy guiding quotidian life.

That created a sturdy structure, a trellis for the plants of knowledge to climb up from the grass sewn with facts. Without such a trellis, the plants would have remained on the ground, eventually to be trampled underfoot.

Such neglect of transcendental, universal reality leaves man to fend for himself in the ever-growing thicket of facts thrown up by a compulsively inquisitive modernity. His frame of intellectual and moral reference removed, he is in danger of becoming first an intellectual and then a moral idiot.

He may, for example, look at the fact that the atom can be split and ponder the implications. There are plenty, he may conclude, for fission releases energy.

If his spirit moves him one way, he may decide to use that energy to heat a city during a cold winter. If it moves him another way, he may decide to use the energy to reduce the city to smouldering radioactive ash.

There’s no way of predicting which way he’ll go for his mind is at sea, cast adrift by morally neutral and intellectually feeble reliance on fact as the quintessence of knowledge. And, since the fallen nature of man was laid bare by the ultimate transcendental doctrine of the West, he’d be more likely to opt for destruction.

Nominalism cum empiricism usually comes packaged with the Whig view of history, wherein each historical moment is seen as an advance on its predecessor.

Since we undeniably possess more facts than even the medieval scholasticists, never mind Aristotle, the common inference is that we possess greater knowledge, which in turn deepens intellect and heightens morality.

Yet this is demonstrably not the case, unless someone thinks that today’s professors of philosophy are superior to, say, Abelard or Aquinas, today’s poets are superior to Dante or Shakespeare, or today’s pop stars are superior to Byrd or Bach.

Or, for that matter, that we, the people of a century that gave the world two world wars, genocide, Auschwitz and Kolyma, a century that murdered more people than all the previous centuries of recorded history combined, are morally superior to the contemporaries of Abelard and Aquinas.

In fact, praying at the altar of the empirically verifiable fact is the principal culprit in producing our decadent, intellectually shabby world. And the step from the decadent to the degenerate is even shorter than the one from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Disengaging thought from the supreme metaphysical reality doesn’t just produce ignorance of metaphysics. It leads to a worldwide pandemic of inanity, with people no longer able to judge what they do or say by holding it to rigorous intelligence tests.

One example, from yesterday’s Sunday Times. The review of Orlando Figes’s book Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture (I shan’t give the reviewer’s name for fear of upsetting the RSPCA) opens with this paragraph:

“It is ironic that this passionately exuberant book should be published just as we are about to leave Europe. For Orlando Figes’s subject is how writers and musicians in the 19^th century created a richly diverse European culture that surmounted narrow-minded nationalism.”

My problem with this passage isn’t the author’s implied affection for the EU, but his manifest inability to think.

First, we are leaving (one hopes) not Europe as a cultural entity, but the political project aiming to create a unified European superstate.

Second, the author believes that such a superstate is a prerequisite for creating “a richly diverse European culture”, for he clearly sees Brexit as antithetical to that aspiration.

Hence, if such a culture was created in the 19^th century, one has to infer that Europe was at the time blessed by the existence of such a state. Since even this author must know that wasn’t so, what he wrote is mindless drivel.

Yet clearly neither he nor his editors were capable of realising this – mainly because their minds have been rendered vacuous by the engulfing philosophical vacuum of modernity.

This is but a small example of a worrying situation: modern people, including those who affect our lives by forming opinions and formulating policies, aren’t up to the intellectual (and consequently moral) demands of the task.

Yet the self-professed conservatives among them never tire of repeating the empiricist mantra about looking at the world as it observably is. They are facing a stark choice.

They have to decide whether they want to be conservatives or empiricists. They can’t be both because, if they opt for the latter, there won’t be much left for them to conserve.

And not just him. Thanks are also due to the burglars, muggers and fraudsters operating in your area.

After all, they greatly augment your income – by not depriving you of it. Isn’t a penny saved a penny earned? Well then, think of all those countless pennies you’ve saved and therefore earned due to those gentlemen’s magnanimous decision not to steal from you, for the time being.

Do you agree with this logic? No? Good. But then you must also dismiss similarly justified claims made by the state, especially its outer left reaches. Actually, this qualification is unnecessary: our whole state now resides in its outer left reaches, with but a tiny space separating parties and factions.

The on-going brouhaha about Brexit conceals this fact by serving up binary possibilities, in or out. That’s what it ultimately boils down to, with all the talk about various deals either just background noise or else subterfuge designed to skew the debate one way or the other.

Since Brexit is so polarising, one may get the impression that the two poles reflect the traditional right-left divide. They don’t. All our three major parties proceed from roughly similar presuppositions, with any differences being those of degree, not principle.

Hence the Marxist John McDonnell complains about fee-paying schools costing the Exchequer huge sums. In a sane world, which ours no longer is, this assertion would fly in the face of simple arithmetic.

For our independent schools are financed not by the Exchequer, but by the fees they charge and also by private endowments and investments.

That’s why they save the taxpayers an annual £3.5 billion that would otherwise have to be spent on state schools. Also, in spite of their charitable status and other tax breaks, independent schools contribute £4.1 billion in tax revenues – which number is further augmented by the 300,000 jobs they create.

Not even John McDonnell can be so bad at sums as to be unable to add up large numbers. If he is, I’d be happy to buy him an abacus or, to be upbeat and modern, a calculator.

Alas, neither device would do any good. For not only McDonnell but just about all our politicians, be they Tory, LibDem, New Labour, Old Labour or Trotskyist Labour operate according to the logic I outlined above.

Some 10 years ago, Gordon Brown, then Chancellor, unwittingly explained the logic in a few simple words. Extolling his next year’s budget, he uttered the words that should adorn the façade of every government building.

“The government,” said Brown, “will let you keep more of your money”. Now, a government can let someone keep only something that belongs to the government by right. In other words, your money isn’t yours. It belongs to the government that can decide how much to take out and how much to let you keep.

Just like those burglars, robbers and muggers, they claim to make you richer by not making you poorer. Unlike those gentlemen, the state operates within the law, but the logic is exactly the same.

Applying it to independent schools, you begin to understand what McDonnell means.

Yes, those schools contribute billions to the Exchequer. But they could contribute even more if the state ended their charitable status and  exemption from business rates. And slapping a 20 per cent VAT on school fees (a policy already adopted by Labour) would work wonders too.

In other words, independent schools are costing the taxpayers in exactly the same sense as you are impoverishing thieves by selfishly holding on to your wallet, computer and jewellery.

Lest you might think this logic finds its champions only among the hard left, allow me to reassure you on that score. Here’s what the true blue Tory, former Education Secretary Michael Gove, wrote in 2017.

Poor Sarah Vine’s hubby-wubby argued that tax breaks for independent schools “provided egregious state support to the already wealthy so that they might buy advantage for their own children”. Egregious, dear me, the chap doesn’t pull his adjectives.

If anyone can discern a difference between Gove’s underlying philosophy and McDonnell’s – and not just in matters educational – I’d like to hear about it. They are soul brothers, which kinship starts with their definition of wealth.

The impression they like to convey is that only billionaires send their children to public schools, and those vipers must be soaked to the bone – that much goes without saying for the Tory and Trotskyist alike.

However, I know many people on middle-class incomes (some in my own family) who struggle to scrape pennies together to keep their children out of the dumbing-down laboratories of social engineering that go by the name of comprehensive schools.

And yes, they thereby “buy advantage for their own children”, although McDonnell’s grammar acquired at a fee-paying school, suggests that the advantage may remain elusive. That’s what parents do for their children; such is their duty.

Good parents go beyond school fees in that undertaking, and they still do their best for their children even if they can’t afford the exorbitant fees.

For example, they fill their houses with books, rather than crushed beer cans. They take their children to museums and galleries, rather than pop excretions. They tell them stories that encourage children to read, rather than play computer games. They teach their children discipline and work ethic, rather than how to get by without them.

Does Gove regard all those endeavours as egregious? Probably. They compromise equality at the starting blocks and also at the finish tape, and nothing is more egregious than that for our rulers. They think they can correct God’s oversight in making us all different.

As to the word ‘support’ used by Gove, it’s indeed egregious. The implication is that the state subsidises public schools. But the support Gove means is negative – it’s provided by not extorting, not by subsidising (see the opening paragraphs above).

If this lot are so upset with public schools, I can offer a free piece of advice on how to get rid of them – and to do so without resorting to criminal fiat or equally criminal extortion.

Go back to the system of grammar schools and secondary moderns, which used to make British education the envy of the world, rather than the laughingstock it is today.

Provide a good free alternative to make sure intelligent and capable children don’t have to impoverish their parents with astronomic school fees. Then also make sure that those less academically able would still learn how to fend for themselves in a modern economy without going on welfare.

That way you won’t have to bother about banning public schools or taxing them out of existence. Most of them, with the possible exception of such venerable institutions as Eton, Rugby or Harrow, will fade away of their own accord – who in his right mind will pay £30,000 a year in school fees if he could get the same education for free?

This advice will fall on deaf ears. For these chaps aren’t about getting good education for all. They aren’t even about equality, except as a slogan that plays well with a dumbed-down public. They are after naked power, which means increasing state control over every aspect of life – emphatically including education.

You know we are all in trouble when the state comfortably fits into the same sentence with robbers, muggers and burglars. Actually, those chaps are better: they do what they do just for the money.

One good thing about evil politicians is that they talk openly about their plans. One bad thing about decent people is that they don’t listen.

Lenin, for example, never concealed his intention to turn his party into a secret cabal, grab power and then exterminate and rob whole classes. He even expressed this idea numerically, by stating that he didn’t care if 90 per cent of Russia’s population perished, provided the remaining 10 per cent lived to see communism vanquish.

No one listened. Surely not in Russia, the land of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky – such was the prevailing sentiment among the intelligentsia. Surely that was just a figure of speech. It wasn’t, which the intelligentsia discovered the hard way in execution cellars and death camps.

Likewise, Hitler in his 1925 bestseller Mein Kampf was honest about his plan to exterminate all Jews. You know, the same group that didn’t exist according to the Kaiser (“We have no Jews in Germany, just Germans of the Judaic persuasion.”).

That wasn’t taken literally either, not even by most of the German Jews. The land of Bach, Beethoven and Goethe would never allow such a massacre, they shrugged. Well, it did.

One detects a similar complacency in today’s Britain about the Labour leaders’ pronouncements on their plans in office, should they get there. Even some dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, much as they hate the possibility of a Marxist government, deny that it could do irreversible harm.

Didn’t we have the same sort of thing in the 70s? Omnipotent unions, economy paralysed by strikes, Britain as the sick man of Europe, wholesale nationalisation, three-day weeks, runaway inflation, blackouts and whatnot? But we got over socialism then, and we’d do so now.

Such optimists ignore two fundamental differences between then and now.

One was that Wilson and Callaghan were socialists, but – to the extent that it’s possible for socialists – they weren’t evil. They weren’t Trotskyist energumens committed to annihilating Britain qua Britain.

The other difference was Margaret Thatcher, who became Tory leader in 1975 and PM in 1979. She managed to rally the country, roll back the unions, encourage private enterprise and somehow pull the country out of the putrid swamp into which it was rapidly sinking.

The Labour Party today isn’t just misguided but downright evil. And nor does one detect anywhere on the horizon a Tory leader of Margaret Thatcher’s calibre.

That’s why we must all join forces to make sure this evil cabal doesn’t grab power. Because if it does, it’ll be too late.

Luckily, its chieftains make such resolve easy by emulating Stalin and Hitler and unabashedly laying down plans that, if realised, will put paid to Britain as we know and love her.

For example, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell will use this weekend’s party conference to kick off the ‘Abolish Eton’ campaign to eliminate private schools.

As part of this campaign, he wants to have the endowments, investments and properties held by private schools “redistributed democratically and fairly across the country’s educational institutions”.

Allow me to translate for those whose Marxist is a bit rusty: he’s talking about seizing private property in exactly the same way the Bolsheviks did so in 1917. In both cases, the ostensible justification is an unquenchable thirst for equality.

Thus McDonnell: “We know that our society is grotesquely unequal and part of the reason for that is because of the inequalities in education, particularly in private schools, where large amounts of money are spent on a privileged few.

“That’s why I support the campaign now for us to talk about how we ensure an integrated education system, where private schools don’t need to exist and should not exist where we have equality of education.”

Judging by McDonnell’s grammar, private schools, one of which he attended, don’t guarantee a decent education. Had he come and said “Look at the way I talk – do you really think fee-paying schools are any good?”, I’d be sympathetic.

As it is, he must know that, because God in whom he no longer believes made us unequally educatable, education (or anything else for that matter) can be equalised only at the lowest common denominator.

If the battle of Waterloo was indeed won on the playing fields of Eton, the only battle that can be won in a Marxist-style educational system dedicated to social engineering is one against the country’s future.

As to the “large amounts spent on a privileged few” at public schools, McDonnell must be aware that the money comes from school fees and private endowments – unlike in comprehensive schools funded by the taxpayer.

Even the foolish but not manifestly evil drive for comprehensive education in the 1960s has succeeded only in creating three generations of ignoramuses unable to operate a modern economy.

(Among other things, this forces Britain to import better-educated people from elsewhere, but that’s no problem for Corbyn and McDonnell. One of their aspirations is to increase immigration from all over the world, and not just of educated people.)

At that time, Education Secretary Tony Crosland saw in his sights not just public schools but also state ones for more capable pupils. Crosland expressed his aims with the kind of forthrightness one expects from socialists: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.”

But at least Crosland, unlike today’s lot, wasn’t a Trotskyist. Though bad enough, he wasn’t possessed by the demon of destruction and, had he not died early, he might have realised the error of his ways (though I doubt it).

It’s not just education. The wicked cabal of today’s hard-left Labour is aiming a whole swarm of bullets at everything that makes Britain British.

They plan to rebuild the unions to their past glory, nationalise everything that can be nationalised this side of concentration camps (for the time being), tax the wealth-producing classes into penury, rob publicly held companies of 10 per cent of their shares – and of course decriminalise drugs and prostitution. Private medicine is also bound to go the way of private education, and eventually private enterprise will follow too.

Everywhere such measures have been tried, they’ve never failed to create an economic, social and cultural catastrophe. But the McDonnells of this world don’t care about that.

They are driven by hatred, envy and resentment – by the urge to destroy, not create. That’s why they are evil, and that’s why we’ll be criminally negligent if we don’t stop them.

Have you heard the silly one about Donald Trump?

Seems he was doing a general knowledge crossword aboard Air Force One. At one point he turned to his secretary and asked: “What’s the word for ‘woman’, four letters, blank-u-n-t?”

“Why, Mr President,” said the secretary, “it’s ‘aunt’ of course”. And Trump said: “Got an eraser?”

Well, I told you it was silly, didn’t? The point is that Americans use the implied word metonymically, to describe a woman, whereas the chivalrous Britons only ever use it metaphorically, to describe a man.

But the British aren’t so chivalrous that they can’t rival Americans in the number of synonyms, some of them pejorative, of ‘woman’. If you don’t believe me, look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – it has loads of them.

Actually, according to a petition currently boasting 30,000 signatories, too many. Our noble fighters for women’s rights insist that “sexist definitions” of the word woman be expurgated from that august publication.

Specifically, their list of offensive “synonyms for woman” includes “bitch, besom, piece, bit, mare, baggage, wench, petticoat, frail, bird, bint, biddy and filly”. Those victims of lexicographic assault must have been going alphabetically, which is why they didn’t get to ‘gorgon’ and ‘harridan’, not to mention ‘slag’, ‘slattern’ and ‘slut’.

This reminds me of the story (this one real) involving our first lexicographer Dr Johnson. At the 1755 launch of his Dictionary of the English Language, a woman of a certain age asked him why there were no dirty words in that publication.

“I can see, madam,” replied the great wit, “that you have been looking for them.”

I understand the petitioners’ problem, but then they should also understand mine. As  a professionally trained linguist, I’m hurt to see so much ignorance of my discipline.

Dictionaries have two principal functions: descriptive, always, and prescriptive, sometimes. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary combines both, by listing words and also recommending their correct usage.

The Oxford dictionary, like most others, is mainly descriptive: it lists and defines as many English words as humanly possible. Since English has by far the greatest vocabulary of all European languages, that humanly possible number is large.

The Oxford Corpus, for example, contains almost 2.1 billion words used in the Anglophone world. The more concise big OED still includes a respectable 58 million entries, and I’m man enough to admit that my vocabulary falls short of that number.

By including a word, the OED passes neither moral nor aesthetic judgement on the concept the word designates. It simply states that the word exists.

Almost every word sits at the core of what linguists call its paradigm: the sum total of its cognates and synonyms, close, remote or tangential. No two words in any language can be full synonyms, that is identical in meaning and stylistic nuance, both denotation and connotation.

If two words denoted and connoted identical things, one of them would eventually die out. There would be no need for it.

Now, if we examine the paradigm of most words, we’ll find many offshoots we wouldn’t use, some we’d use in some circumstances and not in others, even a few that might conceivably offend us if someone used them in our presence.

That may matter a lot to some people, less to others and nothing at all to still others. People exercise their own judgement in usage, and that can be variable. For example, I may use the word implied in the silly joke above when talking to my friends, but not when trying to talk a policeman out of giving me a ticket.

But lexicographers don’t judge words, although they may hint at their usage by adding parenthetic descriptors, such as ‘slang’, ‘offensive’, ‘vulgar’ or ‘archaic’.

Those scholars merely record words, which is why they are called ‘lexicographers’, from the Greek for ‘words’ and ‘writers’, and not ‘ithicographers’, from the Greek for ‘morals’ and ‘writers’.

Now that we’re talking lexical nuances, what’s worse than an ignorant moron? The answer is, a politicised ignorant moron.

That, I’m afraid, accurately describes those capable of writing or signing a petition demanding that the compilers of Oxford dictionaries “eliminate all phrases and definitions that discriminate against and patronise women and/or connote men’s ownership of women”, while including “examples representative of minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc.”

Why not simply eliminate the intermediate stages and first ban all dictionaries and then burn them in a present-day answer to the practice popular in Germany, c. 1933? Are the authors and signatories of the petition aware of how accurate this analogy is?

A society that allows such people to dictate their terms and enforce compliance is a totalitarian society. If that’s the ideal to strive for, we’re getting closer by the day.

P.S. Speaking of totalitarianism, I have a good friend who works for one of the French ministries. She reads my pieces and used to do so during her lunch break. But not any longer: her office has put a block on my blog. The official reason is its content of sex and violence.

When I complained to an English friend that my pieces contain neither sex nor violence, he said: “Perhaps that’s why they are blocked.”

But, seriously speaking, I understand those bureaucrats perfectly. What were they supposed to say, that they disagree with the opinions expressed? ‘Sex and violence’ is so much safer and less controversial.

The retired rugby player Gareth Thomas has won praise for his courage from all sorts of lofty quarters, including our future king and queen.

Prince William tweeted, most lamentably leaving out a comma in the second sentence: “Courageous as ever – legend on the pitch and legend off it. You have our support Gareth.”

Not to be outdone, our aspiring, probably future, PM Comrade Corbyn described Mr Thomas as a “role model challenging stigma and prejudice”.

What did the former jock do to merit such accolades? Oh well, he picked up HIV from another homosexual and has now owned up to it.

Ever ready as I am to praise people, I’m trying to get my head around the reason for Mr Thomas’s new status as folk hero. Now, as some wags would have it, HIV is usually transmitted by hot breath on the back of one’s neck.

That’s to say that by far the most widespread method of transmitting this virus is anal intercourse between men. It’s not the only method, and I do know that straights can get the virus too. But what I’ve outlined is what usually happens in real life.

Now, since the orifice involved isn’t designed for that purpose, it must be rather tight, which can probably make penetration painful for both parties. Is that what Mr Thomas’s fans mean by his legendary, role-modelling courage? His ability to take the pain?

Probably not. Those who offer tributes to Mr Thomas do so because he has admitted he has the condition. Since he already came out of the closet 10 years ago, this new admission sounds rather tame, but perhaps one does have to be brave to declare urbi et orbi that one carries a venereal disease.

Now, advances in medical science have removed much of the doom and gloom from HIV and even AIDS. Antiretroviral drugs control the conditions well, and they no longer spell the death sentence.

Hence I still struggle to understand the nature of Mr Thomas’s claim to valour, especially since he seems to be in rude health. Actually, I’m being coy here. I understand it perfectly well.

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to my recurrent theme: the evil of ideologies. This particular ideology is as emetic as all others: it mandates that HIV and AIDS carriers be treated as victims of some unidentified evildoers, who contextually have to be the dreaded Conservative Establishment.

Every HIV carrier is portrayed as a sort of freedom fighter, one who strikes a powerful blow against prejudice. How heroism can be displayed through any type of sexual intercourse is a mystery, unless we’re talking about trying it with a tigress (tiger?) at a zoo. Or, rather, if you find it mysterious, you yourself are a member of the Conservative Establishment.

Hence praising Mr Thomas is a way of establishing one’s own credentials as belonging to the warrior class, manning the frontline in the battle against said Establishment. That members of our royal family should seek such recognition is rather incongruous, but really nothing new.

Didn’t the Prince d’Orléans become Philippe Egalité to express his solidarity with the Revolution? That didn’t save him from the guillotine, but these days I doubt the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are risking the same fate.

Mr Thomas, who used to be unhappily married to a woman and now is happily married to a man, plays along with admirable PR skill. He has admitted publicly to his little problem, he says, for the sake of all those timorous souls who don’t seek early treatment out of embarrassment.

That is indeed laudable, if true. But then it turns out that, although Mr Thomas was diagnosed years ago (he doesn’t specify how many), he has only now gone public because he was being blackmailed. Now what about all those chaps too ashamed to seek treatment during the time Mr Thomas kept silent? Didn’t they deserve help?

The hysteria about HIV/AIDS has abated somewhat since those antiretrovirals started working well. One sees fewer people with those ridiculous ribbons on their chests; the demands that most research funds be channelled into AIDS and therefore away from, say, cancer have become less shrill.

But the ideology isn’t dead; it’s still there, striking less frequently, but striking nonetheless. So, if you don’t want to be ostracised, don’t you ever dare say that the condition is self-inflicted.

Diseases caused by smoking, drinking or excessive weight are self-inflicted. HIV/AIDS is a noble wound suffered in battle. The one against tradition, common sense, decency and, well, the Conservative Establishment.

I say give Mr Thomas the Victoria Cross. His courage on the battlefield merits nothing less.

There exist good and bad faiths, good and bad principles, good and bad ethics, and we can argue which is which.

No such dichotomies with ideologies. They are all bad by definition. Ideology is godless faith, thoughtless rationalism and amoral morality. As such, it’s always pernicious, regardless of its slogans or institutional symbols.

Propositions are sometimes best illustrated (indeed proved) by analysing extremes. I suggest we do just that by looking at the two most malignant ideologies of modernity, Bolshevism and Nazism.

The former preached international socialism; the latter, the national variety. Both claimed a superman status for its adherents, Bolshevism on the basis of class, Nazism on the basis of race. Both were committed to aggressive expansion, Bolshevism because of its doctrine of world revolution, Nazism because of its doctrine of racial hegemony.

Anyone who wasn’t a communist was Stalin’s enemy, to be enslaved or exterminated; anyone who wasn’t German was to Hitler more or less sub-human, to be enslaved or exterminated.

Both were socialist, with the Bolsheviks seeking total control over the economy, while the Nazis allowed some corporatist elements. Both identified ‘capitalists’, especially of the Anglo-Saxon variety, as their ultimate enemies.

Unlike Stalin (who came to the same idea later), Hitler lavishly leavened his anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism, taking his cue from Marx, a teacher he shared with the Bolsheviks. Both Britain and the US were to him viper nests of Jews, who ran their governments and dictated their policy.

America was out of immediate range, but Britain was at Hitler’s doorstep. A well-timed thrust, and all those Downing Street Jews would end up where they belonged: in death camps.

In line with their ideologies, both Hitler and Stalin were preparing for conquest – with Stalin doing so on a vastly greater scale. The Soviet economy was put into a wartime mode in the early 1930s, while Hitler only did so in 1942, three years after the war started.

Stalin had an in-built advantage over Hitler: an unlimited supply of both human and natural resources. Yet Hitler also had something Stalin lacked: a highly trained and expertly led army, and a workforce to match. A potential for exchange was rife.

The Pact the two predators signed on 23 August, 1939, was a marriage of convenience, but it’s a mistake to consider it just that. It was also a marriage of ideological commonality between two socialist, and therefore rabidly anti-Western, powers.

The two predators pursued similar goals in their alliance, up to a point. Hitler knew he couldn’t wage war against half the world without a steady supply of strategic materials, and Russia was the only possible source. Stalin was less desperate, but he knew German technologies would be useful.

Strategically, Hitler used the Pact to protect his rear while he sorted out Europe. Stalin promptly obliged by entering the Second World War on Hitler’s side, attacking Poland from the east just 17 days after the Germans attacked her from the west.

Both countries also had further-reaching plans. Hitler wanted to conquer the European continent and use it as the springboard for the conquest of Britain, leaving Russia for later. Stalin wanted Hitler to exhaust his relatively modest capacities on the continent and then get bogged down in the British Isles.

Then the Soviets would strike, stoking up the fire out of which Hitler would have pulled all the tasty chestnuts for Stalin. Hitler, on the other hand, also planned to trounce Britain before turning his attention to Russia, but he thought he could do so with ease, without enfeebling his army too much.

While Hitler was pursuing his plans, Stalin amassed on his new western borders the most monstrous army ever seen. By the end of 1940, he had over eight million men under arms, some 25,000 tanks, about as many warplanes, the world’s largest artillery park, more airborne troops than the rest of the world combined (all that in peacetime).

Moreover, not only did his armaments outnumber Hitler’s, but they were also of higher quality. The T-34 and KV tanks were already fighting in Finland when Hitler didn’t have their analogues even on the drawing board. His first Tigers saw the light of day only in December, 1942, when the great encirclement at Stalingrad was complete and the outcome of the war had been decided.

But in 1940 Stalin was in no hurry – he was patiently waiting for the Nazis to land in Britain. Only then would he take his foot off the brakes of his juggernaut. Given his overwhelming superiority in both quantitative and qualitative aspects of warfare, the thought of a German attack never even occurred to him. The numbers simply didn’t add up.

However, by then Hitler had realised that Operation Sea Lion would have to remain a cherished fantasy. The Germans didn’t have the sea transports and landing craft to get enough troops over the Channel to establish a beachhead. They had failed to establish air superiority during the Battle of Britain, while the Royal Navy’s sea superiority was still intact.

A massive airborne attack was the only chance, but Hitler had only one paratroop division, and even that was to be practically wiped out by the British during its brilliant landing on Crete, which was widely seen as a rehearsal for the invasion of Britain.

Meanwhile, Stalin’s monstrous army was poised to strike across the Reich’s eastern border. Secret mobilisation was well under way; the Red Army was moving its command centres and airfields close to the border; there were no warehouses left to house mountains of ammunition, and they were growing in the open air, often without even tarpaulin covers.

The Red Army was deployed in an attacking formation: most of its first echelon (there were three altogether) was concentrated in two salients, Bialystok and L’vov, which were like two tines of a fork ready to pierce Europe.

Hitler found himself in a desperate situation. An undefeated Britain increasingly supplied by America meant that, in case of a Soviet attack, Germany would have to fight a two-front war, something every German schoolboy knew was a rotten idea.

Hitler’s only chance now was in pre-empting Stalin’s attack and routing the Red Army with the same blitzkrieg thrust that had worked such wonders in Europe. He sighed and, late in 1940, ordered his General Staff to develop a plan codenamed Barbarossa.

That was coupled with a massive deception campaign designed to convince Stalin that Sea Lion was imminent. Stalin eagerly went along with the ruse because he couldn’t imagine Hitler being so reckless as to plunge into a war on two fronts.

That’s why he accepted Hitler’s assurances that the German troops amassing on Russia’s border were there for training and re-formation purposes. Stalin knew for sure that Sea Lion would have to come first, and his intelligence chiefs knew that they could only argue with him at their peril.

Several GRU heads had been tortured and shot, mainly for telling Stalin what he didn’t want to hear. General (later Marshal) Golikov, who took over the GRU in 1940, knew better. That’s why he diligently suppressed the intelligence reports of 110 German divisions, 11 of them panzer, poised on the border.

The offensive formation in which the Red Army was deployed was risky. Surprise flank strikes at the bases of the two salients could have entrapped the forces deployed there – and that’s exactly what happened.

Hitler managed to achieve strategic surprise and rout the regular Red Army. But still, surprise or no, any military theorist will tell you that shouldn’t have happened.

The traditional war wisdom says that the attacking side needs a threefold superiority as a precondition of success. In the war that started on 22 June, 1941, exactly the opposite was the case.

It was the Soviets who enjoyed at least a threefold superiority in every category – and that was just with their first, western, echelon (remember, they had two others). They had, for example, 11,000 tanks there, compared to Germany’s less than 3,000. They also had 11,000 warplanes, putting the Luftwaffe to shame.

The lies spread by post-war propagandists, both Soviet and Western, say that both the tanks and the planes were destroyed in the first days of the war by the preemptive Nazi strike. Yet the Red Army then lost only 1,200 planes and 600 tanks. The remainder still outnumbered the Wehrmacht by a wide margin.

It’s only now, after this long but necessary preamble, that I’m approaching my today’s theme. Yes, Stalin made some bad strategic mistakes. Yes, the Germans achieved surprise and struck first. Yes, their army was infinitely better led at every level, from general to NCO.

But that still shouldn’t have enabled them to advance at practically march speeds, reaching Moscow by December. The sheer physical mass of the Red Army bristling with an inexhaustible arsenal of armaments, should have stopped the German onslaught within a month – provided the Red Army had wanted to fight.

But it didn’t, and not anticipating that was Stalin’s greatest mistake. The mistake was ideological: he thought the Soviet people had been sufficiently brainwashed to do battle for world revolution, aka conquest. This, though there was hardly a Soviet soldier who hadn’t lost friends and relations to Bolshevik terror, and who himself hadn’t starved during the rape of the peasantry.

Instead, what happened in the first months of the war was in fact an anti-communist revolution. The Soviet people rose against Stalin and refused to fight for him. Many of them would rather fight for Hitler.

Before 1941 was out, the Germans took 4.5 million prisoners, and 1.5 million of them demanded weapons to fight Stalin. Many of those 4.5 million marched into Nazi captivity fully armed, sometimes to the sound of regimental bands.

So why didn’t Hitler end up winning the war, and why did Stalin do so? The answer lies in their ideologies. They both were evil, and in many respects similarly evil. But Stalin was less ideologically intransigent than Hitler.

All Hitler had to do was form a Russian Liberation Army, and it could have more than a million men under its banners already in 1941, a year before the widely publicised capture of the turncoat Gen. Vlasov. Then that army could have grown larger than Stalin’s, and the war would have ended differently.

Top Hitler generals, such as Franz Halder, realised this and begged Hitler to hoist a liberation flag. That made sense militarily – but not ideologically. “We aren’t liberating Russia from anybody or anything,” explained Hitler to Halder. “We are conquering her.”

And so the Nazis behaved as savage conquerors, armed ideologically with Rosenberg’s infamous pamphlet Der Untermensch (for which the author won the ultimate literary prize at Nuremberg). Suddenly the Russians found themselves between two devils, and at least Stalin was the one they knew.

Moreover, having realised that the Russians wouldn’t fight for communism, Stalin jumped on a different ideological horse, one, incidentally, that even his today’s successors are riding: patriotism, Mother Russia – even the church.

Old Russian heroes, such as Suvorov, Kutuzov and Nakhimov, who until then had been described in Soviet encyclopaedias as evil satraps to the tsars, were taken off the mothballs and re-canonised. The army was issued insignia reminiscent of the Russian Imperial Army. The institution of the patriarch was restored, and church hierarchs, until then culled in their thousands, were invited to the Kremlin and had a lovefest with Stalin.

All this was accompanied by the more traditional Bolshevik methods of unrestricted terror. Retreating soldiers were machine-gunned by the newly formed ‘blocking units’ of the NKVD, those guilty of desertion, encirclement or imprisonment – including those who had broken out of encirclement or escaped from POW camps – were tried by tribunals, and either hanged or shot.

During the war, 157,000 Soviet soldiers were thus executed, and perhaps three times that number killed even without a kangaroo trial. Moreover, Stalin’s message to the troops was that the family of insufficiently valorous soldiers would be prosecuted and, as a minimum, deprived of ration cards (that is, starved to death).

That combination of the ideological carrot and terroristic stick turned the course of the war around. Soviet soldiers began to fight, and Hitler was drawn into a long war on two fronts, one he had no chance of winning.

Indeed, ideologies – any ideologies – are more effective in the breach than in the observance (with apologies to William Shakespeare for bowdlerising his line). One hopes today’s ideologues would realise this.   

Alas, the Liberal Democratic Party didn’t exist in the early days of the Roman Empire. That deprived Jesus of an opportunity to affiliate himself with the LibDem manifesto, which he otherwise would have done with alacrity.

However, should he choose today for his Second Coming, he’d get his chance. Why, if he timed it properly, he could even stand for the party in the general election, in the unlikely event he could pass the preliminary vetting.

That’s the impression one gets reading Prof. Ian Bradley’s article Why Liberalism Stands at the Very Heart of Christianity.

The article was inspired by Tim Farron, who, writes Bradley, “spoke movingly and bravely in last Saturday’s Times about the tensions involved in being an Evangelical Christian and leader of the Liberal Democrats”.

Well, I was moved by Mr Farron’s conundrums too, but in a direction opposite to Prof. Bradley’s. In fact, the first adjectives that sprang to my mind when reading Mr Farron’s article were neither ‘moving’ nor ‘brave’, but ‘vulgar’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘disingenuous’.

It’s both vulgar and theologically illiterate to co-opt Christ for any political platform, especially one of recent vintage. As a self-professed Evangelical Christian, Mr Farron ought to remind himself of Christ’s own words about where his kingdom isn’t.

Surely he must realise that the salvation Christ brought to man wasn’t the kind achievable through redistributive political action and social engineering, both the hallmarks of modern ‘liberalism’, as practised by the LibDems.

“Theological and political liberalism surely go hand in hand,” writes Prof. Bradley, and for once he’s right. One could argue, however, that neither has much to do with Christianity, the former usually and the latter by definition (the modifier ‘political’ should be a dead giveaway).

“Both,” laments Prof. Bradley, “are under assault from the rise of fundamentalism, populism and nationalism across the world and especially in its most powerful nations… Common to [these] groups is a literalist interpretation of scripture, a strong attachment to nationalism, Islamophobia and opposition to gay, transgender and women’s rights.”

Seldom does one see such a mishmash of ontological category errors in one paragraph. For, being political and not religious phenomena, neither populism nor nationalism has anything to do with any type of Christianity.

Christian fundamentalism does have something to do with it, although the same pejorative adjectives I used earlier sometimes apply to it as well. Actually, “a literalist interpretation of scripture” isn’t alien to Evangelical Christianity in general, which shows a certain lack of both theological and poetic imagination.

So is one to understand that, unlike those objectionable groups, Mr Farron isn’t opposed to “gay, transgender and women’s rights?” Does he regard such opposition as un-Christian? If he does, he’s either ignorant or mendacious.

Admittedly, transgender rights didn’t figure in either Testament. In those backward times, people still couldn’t imagine that within a couple of millennia their descendants would praise men born as women getting pregnant by women born as men.

However, taking a wild stab in the dark, somehow I don’t think that either Leviticus or, say, Romans would have welcomed such a development should it have been mooted. As to the other two rights upheld by our liberal Christian, both scripture and ecclesiastic tradition are absolutely unequivocal about them.

Homosexuality is described in both Testaments as an ‘abomination’, which is the traditional Christian position, at least in the apostolic confessions. But it’s not Mr Farron’s position. When asked whether he regarded homosexuality as a sin, he replied “I do not”, adding a silly non-sequitur to the effect that we’re all sinners anyway.

Indeed we are, and homosexuality is one of the sins some of us commit. As a political ‘liberal’, Mr Farron is free to think otherwise, but wrapping that faddish secular stance in a Christian mantle is a vulgar and ignorant category mistake.

As to women, scripture defines them as ‘helpers’ to men, and St Paul says: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.”

Women clearly played a vital role in Christ’s life and Passion, but to talk about them in the crude terms of modern feminism and MeTooism again represents vulgarity at its most soaring. People who do so don’t have much in the way of intelligence, nor, more important, taste.

Not only do Messrs Farron and Bradley misunderstand Christianity, they also stumble over the concept of liberalism. Both use, or rather misuse, the word in the sense in which it’s used by modern socialists, whatever party they represent.

English liberalism, whose roots Prof. Bradley correctly identifies as Nonconformist, has performed an about-face since its inception. It used to stand for individual liberty, a small state, free enterprise and personal charity. Now it stands for exactly the opposite.

Citing biblical usage, Prof. Bradley equates liberalism with “broad, open-minded, gracious, expansive generosity.” Presumably, this fine quality is best expressed not through individual love, but through the good offices of a central, omnipotent state committed to robbing hard-working people for the sake of creating a vast parasitic class and sapping the country’s resources.

No? Sorry, my mistake. I must have been misled by the policies consistently advocated by today’s ‘liberals’, including Mr Farron. His voting record and numerous pronouncements show a loyal commitment to every hare-brained leftie superstition on offer.  

For example, he insisted that 50 per cent of target seats be contested by women and 10 per cent by ethnic minority candidates, regardless of any other qualifications. As a LibDem leader, he practised what he preached by appointing 12 women and 10 men to senior positions.

In the good Christian spirit, he voted not only for homomarriage, but also for extending it to the armed forces. Mr Farron’s voting record also shows that, while considering same-sex marriage essential to our defence, he regards a nuclear deterrent as superfluous.

While describing himself as a Eurosceptic, he logically believes in staying in the EU and flinging our doors open for migrants whose views on Christianity may be rather less liberal than Mr Farron’s.

And of course he supports the complete legalisation of marijuana, although he stops short of suggesting that it could be used as incense. Anyway, his brand of Christianity has no room for those time-honoured bells and smells.

The attempt to usurp Christianity for left-wing politics is nothing new. Yet people who insist that Christianity is some kind of socialism believe in the latter more than the former, and properly understand neither. That’s predictable in our academics, but unfortunate in MPs, whose policies affect our lives.

So far, non-stick frying pans are the only practical benefit of space exploration, and even that benefit is dubious: cast iron usually works better.

Yet every now and then, one observes an eruption of gushing enthusiasm over discovery of something or other in space.

The latest seismic event of this nature concerns the possibility that the recently found exoplanet (one outside the solar system) K2-18b may have enough water to sustain biological, or even human, life.

This morning, two middle-aged women who ought to know better were discussing the possibility on TV in the gasping tones of kindergarten girls who’ve just found out where babies come from.

One of them graciously allowed that it was by no means “guaranteed” that K2-18b is inhabited, and there I was, getting my hopes up sky-high.

One down from guaranteed is highly likely, and even that assessment requires evidence, rather than conjecture. But the two women clearly didn’t know the difference between science and science fiction. Space exploration, one of them said, reflects our desire to learn more about ourselves.

Logically speaking, we could only acquire such knowledge if humanoid creatures were indeed found on some exoplanet. Comparing them to us, we could conceivably learn something, although I’d still maintain that we can learn more from Dante, Shakespeare and Bach – to say nothing of Scripture, and nothing is what’s usually said about it.

Now, all those centuries ago I worked at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston (or rather Clear Lake City), where I often drank with astronauts. I also travelled to the Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, where I drank with older scientists speaking in caricature German accents.

However, the romance of space travel was lost upon me, and it still is. So I have to disappoint the two TV gushers: people didn’t spend trillions on space exploration out of curiosity. They did so because they wanted to spy on other people and kill them more efficiently.

In both the USSR and the US, the space programme was an offshoot of a military build-up. After Wernher von Braun and other Nazi scientists had demonstrated the killing potential of missiles, both post-war superpowers awakened to the possibilities.

Once Germany was overrun, they forcibly recruited Nazi rocket scientists and engineers, dividing them between the two countries. The division wasn’t exactly equal: the Russians got 2,200 of them, while the Americans had to make do with a mere 1,600.

However, arguably the American imports were more senior – after all, they included von Braun himself, who had died before I got the chance to drink beer with his associates in Alabama. The Germans didn’t persevere as long in Russia: they were allowed to go home after Stalin’s death in 1953.

But the Soviets’ own space programme was already up and running, led by such talented men as Korolev and Chalomey. The essence of it was put in a nutshell by Khrushchev (whose son Sergei worked for Chalomey). He ordered Korolev to create a rocket that could carry a nuclear warhead to the US.

Around 1956 Korolev mentioned to Khrushchev in passing that oh, by the way, the same rocket could also put a satellite into space, just for fun. Khrushchev instantly grasped the propaganda potential of such a coup and ordered that a satellite be launched in 1957.

It was then that ideology barged in on space real politik. The Sputnik’s scientific value was nil; its propaganda value was immense. That caught Americans by surprise: their own space programme was developing along strictly pragmatic lines.

However, Khrushchev threw down a gauntlet, and the Americans had to pick it up. They too began to use the space programme for propaganda purposes – with neither side neglecting the military application.

President Eisenhower was lukewarm on space, putting it mildly. But his young and impetuous successor, Kennedy, was red-hot on it. He even lied to the public about the “missile gap”, with America supposedly trailing Russia in the space race.

In fact, the American rocket programme was already far ahead, which was demonstrated by the 1969 Moon landing. A gap in favour of the Soviet Union existed only in the area of ideology and the decibel level of the surrounding noise.

Since then the two countries have largely abandoned space-related propaganda – it has become old hat. Yet the military potential of space exploration remains huge, and it’s driven by the desire to kill people, not to learn more about them.

However, there was another strain to space-related ideology, one that went beyond the tug-of-war between the two powers.

When Gagarin became the first man in space, he also became the poster boy of communism and was hysterically feted (that, incidentally, was the last time I felt enthusiastic about space, which is forgivable for a lad of 13). But at one of the endless galas, Khrushchev, typically tipsy, let the ideological cat out of the bag.

Gagarin, he said, went all the way up to heaven and saw no God there. Wasn’t that proof that God didn’t exist?

I won’t demean either you or myself by pointing out the idiocy of that statement. But Khrushchev inadvertently revealed another impelling aspiration behind space exploration: atheism.

Modern people have taken on the impossible task of proving that man was created not by God, but by Darwin. Yet even some of them are aware that they could do with better proof than our supposed simian descent, which belief is doubtless based on atheists’ frank self-assessment.

Central to the Judaeo-Christian view of the world is the uniqueness of both man and Earth, the sole stage on which man’s drama is played out. Central to atheism is the urgent desire to debunk that view.

Hence atheists feel compelled to find life, ideally sentient life, on some other planet. That way they’d feel justified in insisting that man is nothing special, that he’s indeed nothing more than a jumped-up ape.

From there they’d be able to construct a rickety bridge to the materialist cosmology for which their loins ache. QED.

So yes, in that sense the two TV gushers have a point. The secondary purpose of space exploration is indeed to learn something about ourselves. Or rather to unlearn it.

Had I relied on the NHS 15 years ago, you’d be spared my immoral… sorry, I mean immortal prose.

To be fair, it was a brilliant NHS GP, Guy Lawley, who first spotted something wrong and referred me to a private oncologist for tests, which started within a couple of days.

However, back then I could still get to see him on a day’s notice, as opposed to the fortnight it would take today. And Guy is no longer with the NHS: he retired at 50, in disgust at having to spend most of his time filling useless forms.

Once in the hands of private consultants, and much to their barely concealed surprise, I managed to survive two different cancers, both in Stage 4 (there’s no Stage 5). An NHS patient with a similar diagnosis would almost certainly have died.

He would have had to wait much longer for each diagnostic test, especially exploratory surgery, longer still for hospital admission – and he wouldn’t have received the same state-of-the art treatment that saved me.

One example if I may. The kind of chemotherapy used in my type of cancer wipes out leucocytes, white blood cells, leaving the patient with no immunity to ward off infection and, until the leucocytes are rebuilt, at deadly risk.

That’s why, after each chemo session, a private patient receives a combination shot of three different agents, which takes 48 hours to restore the immune defences. The problem with that shot is that it’s expensive. In my day it cost £1,200 a pop, which was too rich for NHS patients’ blood.

Those poor souls received the same three drugs, but in three different syringes. That much cheaper alternative left them unprotected not for two days but for two weeks. They had to live for a fortnight knowing that any germ flying through the air was a poisoned bullet aimed at them.

This is just a bit of personal background to the impersonal statistics showing that the UK lags far behind other civilised nations in cancer survival rates. In just about all cancers, we’re at or near the bottom of the table.

Yes, I know the NHS is the envy of the world, as all other giant socialist projects always are. But the world clenches its teeth and manfully overcomes envy to get on with the business of saving lives.

Meanwhile, more than 100,000 British oncological patients a year are diagnosed when their cancer has already spread, reducing their chances of survival. The reason for this is given as NHS staff shortages, which I find baffling.

After all, the NHS is the biggest employer not just in the UK, not just in Europe, but in the world. Why then is it short of doctors and nurses saving people’s lives?

Anyone asking this question simply doesn’t understand socialism. It operates according to a law that says that any socialist enterprise, whatever its stated role, exists mainly for the benefit of its administrators and, ultimately. the state.

That’s why, while the frontline medical staffs are shrinking in the NHS, the administrative staffs are growing like mushrooms after an autumn rain. In fact, one gets the impression that doctors and nurses get in the way of the NHS’s real business, that entrusted to directors of diversity, optimisers of facilitation and facilitators of optimisation.

Whatever indispensable things those chaps can do, diagnosing cancer manifestly isn’t one of them. That’s why in 2017 115,000 cases were spotted only in advanced stages.

The same major study shows that three quarters of NHS services don’t treat cancer patients quickly enough. The guidelines call for 85 per cent of patients urgently referred by a GP being treated within 62 days (privately, I was treated within a fortnight).

Yet 94 of 131 cancer services in England failed to do that last year, almost a three-fold increase compared to five years ago. It’s useful to remember here that in some cancers an early diagnosis makes the difference between one in 10 dying and one in 10 surviving.

Every successive government pledges to throw more money at the NHS, and some even manage to do so. Politicians know vote getters and losers when they see them.

Even a hint at the remote possibility that perhaps other methods of providing medical services work better will spell the end of a promising political career – the voting public has been house-trained to worship the NHS with devotion formerly reserved for God.

This subject is impossible to discuss rationally and dispassionately. If you don’t believe me, just mention at a large party that papering the cracks in the NHS will never work, even if it becomes the only, not just the largest, UK employer.

Its problems, to use the medical parlance, are not symptomatic but systemic. The NHS, you might add, is run badly not because its practitioners are inadequate, but because its underlying idea is.

Then hasten to shield your head from the slings and arrows of the outrageous brainwashed. The projectiles will come in a swarm – as they always do when someone commits the ultimate sacrilege.

Meanwhile, the oncological argument goes on – and we are losing.