Author: Alexander Boot

You know how it is. Sometimes we get so swamped by petty everyday concerns that we forget what’s really important in life.

I know it’s a lame excuse for my having missed your birthday yet again the other day, and I hope you aren’t upset with me. As your friend and admirer, I think you’re the last person in the world I’d ever wish to upset.

Speaking of people who upset you, serendipity or what? Your birthday coincides with the anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s death in 2011. Remember her?

She was that annoying pest who kept saying nasty things about you, calling you a fascist, blaming you for mass murder and so forth? She was, to use Saki’s expression, one of those human flies that buzz.

Why, she even wrote a libellous book about you, bringing all those nasty things together under one cover. So you had her swatted like a fly, or “whacked”, as you describe such acts so elegantly.

Good on you, mate. Show me a man who doesn’t envy your masculine power, and I’ll show you a liar. At least Peter Hitchens is honest about his affection for you. Why, he positively swoons every time he sees a picture of your bare torso.

I especially like the one of you half-naked, with a rifle in your hand, riding a horse. That’s my Vlad, I think every time I see it. The muscles are getting a bit flabby, but by God they’re still there – amazing in a man no longer in the first flush of youth.

You’re five feet of flabby muscle, exuding testosteronal strength and issuing with your very flesh an implicit warning to all your detractors.

Speaking of detractors, such as Politkovskaya, Nemtsov and all those dozens of naysaying hacks and politicos you’ve had whacked, only a weak-kneed liberal would hold that against you.

How can a strong leader remain strong if he allows those vermin to undermine his authority? In fact, I know many British conservatives who wish we had a strong, decisive leader like you, rather than the wishy-washy, namby-pamby, shilly-shallying bunch we’re cursed with.

Just think how much more smoothly Mrs May’s tenure would run if she could whack Boris, Jacob and the entire editorial staff of The Daily Mail? And then, while she’s at it, shut down all opposition media, print, broadcast and electronic? Think of the respect she’d command from the general public, other world leaders and Peter Hitchens.

As it is, she’s muddling through, waiting to be ousted by the first opponent blessed with what our Spanish friends call C.O. Jones (I’ll let you figure this one out).

Also, no Western leader I can think of, with the possible exception of your friend Silvio Berlusconi, has been able to duplicate your ingenious scheme for protecting public finances.

They all squander money on useless social programmes, medicine, education and some such, keeping whatever little is left in their countries’ treasuries. How stupid is that?

You know and I know and every conservative knows that private individuals can look after their money much better than the state can. Extrapolating ever so slightly, one could see that, likewise, private individuals can do a much better job looking after public money too.

You’ve surrounded yourself with such frugal men, who have collectively transferred more than a trillion dollars into their Western bank accounts. That way they protect public finances from both governmental profligacy and the traditionally volatile Russian politics.

Fair enough, you’ve also helped yourself to the odd hundred billion or so, but the money is much safer in your hands than it would be in the hands of those Russian losers who live on £100 a month.

I also admire you for the way you’ve brought those Ukies to heel – and I’m not the only one. You’ve shown the world how to deal with jumped up upstarts who have ideas beyond their station. Independence indeed. Who do they think they are?

Just look at those Spanish wimps who’ve done nothing to stop that nonsense in Catalonia, other than bust a few heads with police batons. You showed how such things ought to be done by whacking 10,000 Ukies with air raids, multiple missile launchers, heavy artillery and AA rockets.

Admittedly one of those brought down a Dutch airliner, but hell. There’s no war without collateral damage, as you’ve so ably demonstrated in Syria. But at least the whole world knows not to mess with the strong leader you are, Vlad.

Actually, there’s little I can say about you that wasn’t said on TV by your Propagandist-In-Chief Dmitry Kisilev, whom some noxious insects describe as ‘Putin’s Goebbels’:

“On 7 October Vladimir Putin turned 65. His life is all about serving Russia… In the West, people have ambivalent feelings about Putin, as always. Those outside the sphere of professionally malevolent politics and invariably venomous media are well disposed to Putin. For example, there are congratulatory graffiti in Barcelona, Berlin and Paris. And British designers presented him with a ‘Putin’ motorcycle jacket… The whole world attaches to Putin its hopes for peace and prosperity.”

Even Peter Hitchens couldn’t have put it better. Since I pin my own hopes for peace and prosperity on you, Vlad, I’m going to look for one of those jackets, even though I don’t ride a motorcycle. Nor do I have any ambitions of posing like a male answer to Lady Godiva – but only because my musculature is no match for yours.

And yes, I’m going to roam London with my trusted spray paint, writing on every wall “Putin = Peace + Prosperity”, just like your fans in Barcelona, Berlin and Paris.

So here are my belated good wishes, Vlad. Many happy returns – and many more whacked naysayers and detractors. Keep showing the world what a strong leader should be like.

(By the way, the other day I overheard Corbyn say something about you I can’t repeat in polite company.)

The differences between Catherine II and our own dear Theresa I (and, one hopes, last) are obvious. However, ever the seeker of the positive, I’d also like to point out some similarities.

Granted, Catherine – I’m guessing here – was probably more libidinous than Theresa. She also tended to reward her more ardent lovers with titles, large estates and sometimes whole provinces.

Theresa, even if she had lovers, would probably be disinclined to reward one with, say, Cumbria, even if she were in a position to do so, which she isn’t.

Nor would she ever follow Catherine’s example by having her female staffers (then called ladies-in-waiting) take her prospective lovers out for a test drive to make sure they satisfied her exacting performance standards and were free of VD.

Even though Theresa, by the very nature of her profession, has to have a certain amount of ruthlessness and powerlust, I doubt she’d have her hubby-wubby murdered by her lovers even if her job depended on it (and if she had lovers). So Mr May has no fear of suffering the fate of Peter III.

Admittedly the similarities between the two ladies are less apparent, but they do exist. One is the vast distance separating their words and deeds.

Catherine (who was considerably better educated than Theresa, but this is by the bye) was involved in brisk correspondence with prominent Enlightenment figures, such as Diderot and Voltaire.

That most absolute of monarchs referred to herself as a republican and a ‘philosophe on the throne’. She admired all the progressive ideas, and their originators admired her.

Voltaire, in particular, was completely smitten, calling Catherine an ‘enlightened despot’ and saying that, if he were younger, he’d make himself Russian. Catherine smiled benevolently – and immediately extended serfdom to the Ukraine (intimations of Putin there?).

Acting in the same spirit, Mrs May coughed her way through a speech extolling the virtues of capitalism, a term coined by William Thackeray but popularised by that great Tory Karl Marx.

Thereby she mirrored Catherine’s professed admiration for the liberal values of the Enlightenment – but then came a reality check.

For at heart Theresa is, mutatis mutandis, as much of a statist as Catherine was. That’s why most of the policies she… I almost wrote ‘announced’, but then remembered that Theresa doesn’t really announce policies. She hints at them obliquely, leaving herself an out to change her mind if the focus groups say so.

In this case, however, she was less equivocal than usual. While complimenting free markets, she stated her intention to cap energy prices, a measure that relates to capitalism the way Catherine’s serfdom related to liberté.

This capping was the flagship of Ed Miliband’s electoral programme, and Theresa has decided to grab that relay baton and run with it. I wonder how she feels about wholesale nationalisation as a way of protecting free enterprise and preempting Comrade Corbyn.

There are many other hints at policies that indeed make Catherine sound like an economic libertarian by comparison. Most of them are opportunistic, cowardly and hare-brained, which Catherine wasn’t and Theresa, alas, is.

But one is truly disgusting. Theresa plans to the change the organ donation system from ‘opt-in’ to ‘opt-out’. Do you see what this means?

At present, a hospital can’t remove organs after death in the absence of explicit consent in the person’s will. Now, if that item has been forgetfully left out, doctors will take it as implicit consent to harvest the organs as they see fit.

Combined with the delights of euthanasia reaching our shores from Holland and other progressive EU members, this neat trick will create brisk business in organ harvesting, with more and more patients put out of their presumed misery for the sake of their livers and kidneys.

I’m not going to dispute the intrinsic benefits of organ donation, nor its morality. Obviously one can see its usefulness, and even the Catholic Church isn’t opposed to the practice. Yet equally obvious is that the choice to donate organs has to be made by the person and not by the state.

I shouldn’t have to ask a Romanian immigrant not to pick my pocket – if I wish to help out, I ought to hand over my wallet voluntarily.

In the same vein, a man leaving 40 per cent of his estate to charity commits a charitable act. Yet the state extorting 40 per cent of his estate isn’t charity. It’s oppression.

Just as inheritance tax (and other unjust taxes) discourages charity, so does the ‘opt-out’ system discourage opting in.

Belgium that, along with Holland, pioneers every ghoulish perversion of modern ‘progress’, has adopted the ‘opt-out’ system, only to see a marked reduction in voluntary organ donation. At the same time she has seen a spread of euthanasia performed specifically for the purpose of organ harvesting.

Our hearts (along with other internal organs) belong to Daddy, the omnipotent, paternalistic state – this is the message Theresa the Puny is sending out. At least Catherine the Great couldn’t be tested on that issue: medicine wasn’t far enough advanced for organ transplantation in her time.

But not for medical experiments on humans. Thus Peter I, Catherine’s role model, was known to amend death penalty orders by writing “not to be punished by execution – to be passed on to doctors for experiments.”

That practice acquired a bad name in the twentieth century, but perhaps the time has come to revive it. How about it, Theresa? All in the name of free enterprise of course.

In parallel with covering the carnage in Las Vegas, our papers have devoted quite a few column inches to another blood-curdling crime.

I must tell you about it, but first make sure there are no children within sight of your computer screen. For the crime committed by Brian Lord, former GCHQ Deputy Director, is so vile that children reading about it may be traumatised for life.

Are you ready? Here it comes then. Mr Lord, 56, brutally assaulted a woman at a dinner party. He… wait a second, let me pull myself together and make sure my hands aren’t shaking…

Now… he put a hand on a woman’s knee! And kept it there for two to three minutes – the poor victim was so distressed she couldn’t remember the exact duration.

Having recovered from the unspeakable shock, the victim went to the police. The frisky spook was arrested, charged with sexual assault and found himself in the dock.

The prosecution demanded a guilty verdict and a custodial sentence, and its case sounded irrefutable:

“During some party games, the defendant placed his hand on the lady’s knee… It was there for a significant time and caused her embarrassment and awkwardness. She felt she was not in a position to deal with the situation by speaking to this defendant, expressing her concern, or leaving the table.”

One wonders why. In my experience, women have little problem dealing with such assaults one way or another.

For I have an embarrassing admission to make: during the course of my lamentably long life, my criminal hand used to find itself on a few knees here and there (typically one at a time). Some knees didn’t mind such brazen flirtation, some did.

Those that did communicated their recalcitrance in various ways, some of them too obscene to mention here, for fear that in spite of my warning there still may be children in your room. Others would simply swipe my hand off. Others would ignore it. Others would use their husbands as an excuse for their unfriendliness.

None ever found it hard to speak. None ever felt severely traumatised. None ever had to leave the table. And, most important, none ever described my action as sexual assault or threatened to call the cops and slam me in the pokey.

Mr Lord must have had good lawyers who prepped him properly. According to the prosecutor, “He was emphatic that his actions, however unwise, were not sexual in nature.” Out of interest, what were they then? Spiritual? Religious?

One gets the impression that, by accepting that statement, the prosecutor proved that somewhere deep down he, like any remotely sane person, was aware of how utterly ludicrous the case was.

He wasn’t alone. Apparently three other judges who had dealt with the case had doubted it was in the public interest to proceed owing to its “minor nature”.

Minor? This case wasn’t ‘minor’. It was insane, testifying to the pandemic of madness going by the name of modernity.

As a result… the case was thrown out? Mr Lord was acquitted? Neither. He pleaded to a lesser offence of common assault, was conditionally discharged for a year and sentenced to a fine.

The court took into account that Mr Lord had “never been in trouble before” and was a “family man”. But the judge still felt called upon to issue a stern rebuke: “Your behaviour crossed the line to criminal behaviour, as a result of which you have lost your good name and your good character, which I know you will have held dear.”

‘Criminal’, Your Honour? Are you out of your bleeding mind? And if a man may lose his ‘good name and character’ over a bit of clumsy flirtation, we’re all, well, most of us, thoroughly criminalised reprobates.

I shan’t repeat the arguments I put forth in an article of a few days ago: http://www.alexanderboot.com/rape-is-in-full-bloom/. But there I was talking of the state maniacally trying to alienate the sexes by broadening the notion of rape to an insane degree.

This salvo fired in the same war goes quite a bit further. The state communicates to the populace that behaviour that in the past rated nothing worse than a slap may now put a man in prison.

The state thus insists that it can reach the most remote nooks of human behaviour and put its foot down. It’s in the state’s interests – and within its power – to alienate the sexes, lest they may unite against the state.

Hence flirtation is no longer an acceptable mode of intersex relations. In France, even wolf-whistling at a woman has been criminalised, not to mention asking for her phone number. And Britain is following the same course.

One effect of this madness is that the very notion of crime is trivialised. In this case, Mr Lord was spared a custodial sentence largely because it was his first offence. In an adjacent courtroom, a burglar or a mugger might have been let off at the same time and for the same reason.

An iron bar has been placed next to our moral, and therefore legal, compass, which has gone haywire as a result. The arrow that used to point at a crime now points at a forgivable indiscretion – and increasingly vice versa.

Thus misled, we’re heading straight for a moral, and therefore legal, precipice. It’s a long way down and no way up.

Recently I was beastly to the sports writer Matthew Syed, criticising him for his unsound (which is to say fashionably Leftie) views on racial stereotypes.

Yet the title of his article today, Hero Or Hypocrite? History Shows That Muhammad Ali Was Both, caught my eye. A quick scan showed that deep down Matthew is my spiritual brother: “There is a tendency,” he writes, “to place our heroes on a moral pedestal.”

As examples of such unmerited elevation, he cites Muhammed Ali, whose “[objectionable] conduct and political opinions were always there, lurking beneath the airbrushed façade”, and Princess Diana, “the passionate but flawed woman who walked the earth [but] has given way to a Messianic caricature.”

All true. All good. Our secular hagiography, even if we should have it at all, which we shouldn’t, is too full of undeserving characters.

Suddenly I felt ashamed about having been beastly to Matthew. He got those racial stereotypes wrong, but who of us never errs? Perhaps I was unfair to say he should stick to sports, steering clear of subjects requiring some thought.

But then Matthew got back into my bad books with the speed of Ali’s left jab: “Mother Teresa spent most of her life in this position of uncritical reverence. She was the saviour of the poor, the saintly woman who ministered to their needs. The truth is that, for all her many admirable qualities, she was also a religious conservative who opposed contraception, an ideology which condemned millions of women to poverty.”

In general, I don’t object to people having views different from mine – provided they make sense. This proviso is hard to satisfy, for views that differ radically from mine are usually but glints tossed off by the revolving ball of unsound philosophy. (The death penalty stands apart: I’m for it, but I’ve heard valid arguments from those who aren’t.)

And an unsound philosophical premise can make even clever people look dumb. I don’t know if Matthew is clever but, even supposing for the sake of argument that he is, he fails on that score.

Let’s decorticate that paragraph. Matthew has nothing against contraception. I suspect he sees nothing wrong with abortion either.

If so, he’s in agreement with the British Medical Association, whose members recently voted to remove all that silly red tape from abortion on demand practically until birth. I struggle to see any difference between a baby a month before delivery and a month after, but then no one has ever accused the Left of intellectual rigour.

And if opposition to abortion is regarded in those quarters as strictly marginal, opposition to contraception is seen as being so insane as to be outside the margins. Who but “a religious conservative” would hold such views, and we know where that lot belong. In the garbage heap of history, to borrow a phrase from Trotsky who shared Matthew’s side of this argument.

Hence he seems to think that Mother Teresa’s opposition to contraception disqualifies her from sainthood. Not one of the secular variety, but the real kind, bestowed on such people as Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas of Aquino.

Such people live in an intellectual, spiritual and moral universe that’s different from the one inhabited by the likes of Matthew and the BMA. That universe signposts its own territory, and trespassers are severely punished by being made to look like idiots.

Within that territory, not only a Christian saint but any orthodox Christian opposes contraception. How does Matthew think Paul, Augustine and Thomas felt about it? I suspect their views would ill-qualify them for today’s secular sainthood.

In his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI reemphasised the Church’s teaching that it’s wrong to use contraception to prevent a new human being from coming into existence.

These days that rigid stance is associated with the Catholic Church only, but this hasn’t always been so. Until 1930, all Protestant denominations, including our own dear C of E, also condemned contraception as sinful. In other words, until 87 years ago all Western Christians were – or at least were supposed to be – against contraception. And 1.2 billion Catholics still are.

We may argue about the merits of such intransigence till the bishops come home, but the fact of the matter is simple. While opposition to contraception isn’t fashionable among atheists, it’s still an article of faith for orthodox Christians.

So in effect Matthew thinks that Mother Teresa doesn’t deserve to be a Christian saint because she was a true Christian, someone who lived in a universe of which Matthew is ignorant but to which he’s instinctively hostile.

Never mind the saintliness of ministering to the needs of the poor. That true Christian wasn’t fit to be a saint because she was a true Christian. That’s like saying that Muhammed Ali wasn’t fit to be a boxer because he knocked people out.

Matthew might as well have rebuked Mother Teresa for wearing nun’s habits, which would have prevented her from making any Ten Best Dressed list. The logic would have been equally inane.

The wind returneth again according to his circuits. Matthew has climbed back into my bad books, having left them momentarily. But somewhere in my soul there’s a spot warmed up by gratitude.

I’m grateful to Matthew Syed for confirming yet again my life-long conviction that all Lefties are either fools or knaves. And I’ve heard no rumours of Matthew’s knavishness.

Whenever massacres like the one in Las Vegas happen, hacks respond by venting their ideological prejudices.

Those on the Left want to ban all guns wherever they haven’t yet been banned. Those on the Right want to legalise all guns wherever they haven’t yet been legalised. And there’s also the middle ground, exemplified by our own Max Hastings, where the prevailing sentiment is close to the title above.

In his article, Mr Hastings first highlights his credentials by mentioning his marksmanship exploits in the army and his rich collection of sporting guns. He then proceeds to make a case against all guns “designed to kill people”, and hails the British ban on handguns – which, by the way, tend to be a lot less deadly than Mr Hastings’s shotguns.

He also claims that no evidence exists that private ownership of guns reduces crime, this because Mr Hastings has never read an article about a hero who foiled a mugging by whipping out his trusted S&W.

Such cavalier treatment of data is typical of hacks in general, but especially those on, or leaning towards, the Left, such as Mr Hastings. If he’s really interested in the truth of the matter, which he probably isn’t, I suggest he read John Lott’s comprehensive study, whose conclusion is also its title: More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Dr Lott presents heaps of statistical analysis of crime data for every US city, county and state, measuring the effect of 13 different types of gun control on crime rates.

Those who are motivated by facts rather than ideological bias will learn that, since the time most states allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons, the levels of all violent crimes have gone down significantly.

What has this effect isn’t Mr Hastings’s imaginary vigilante saving a fair maiden by shooting her assailant dead, but the simple knowledge that this could happen. It’s not exactly counterintuitive to suggest that an aspiring criminal is more likely to be deterred by a possible bullet than by a non-custodial sentence complete with counselling.

The experience of other countries bears this out. In Switzerland, every able-bodied man has an assault rifle at home. This is complemented by handguns to be found in practically every home. However, the murder rate in Switzerland is so close to nonexistent that the Swiss don’t even bother keeping the relevant statistics.

Another example I like to quote is that of Japan, where gun laws are among the world’s strictest. Sure enough, the murder rate in Japan is low. However, it’s even lower within the Japanese community in California, where gun laws are among the world’s loosest.

The tendency to shoot people just for the hell of it has as little to do with the availability of guns as the tendency to drive vans through crowds has to do with the availability of vans.

This format doesn’t allow extensive speculation on the reasons for such crimes. Suffice it to say that they cover just about everything that goes into the making of society: religion, culture, education, law, psychiatric care, social and demographic make-up.

Denying law-abiding citizens the right to defend their life and property would only make sense if the state could be relied upon to do this job by itself. However, the growing crime statistics throughout the West show this isn’t the case.

Having thus put forth the case for legalising guns, we can then move into a different but related territory: the kind of guns that ought to be legal.

One suspects that even fully paid-up NRA members would agree that some weapons don’t really belong in private hands. Missile launchers would fall into that category, along with cannon, howitzers and – dare one say it – heavy machine guns.

NRA chaps regard the Second Amendment to the US Constitution with the reverence that used to be reserved for the Gospels. That amendment says: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

Fair enough. But what kind of guns are we talking here? When that document was drafted, the only firearms in existence were single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols, delivering a fire rate of two shots a minute at best.

These were the weapons available to ‘a well-regulated militia’ should the need to protect ‘the security of a free state’ have arisen. Such a need was real at the time: neither the Constitution of the United States nor its society had been sufficiently bedded down to guarantee freedom and security.

In case of real threat, internal or external, an armed populace was indeed useful. Wielding the same type of weapons as those used by the army, and with a similar skill, people could be instantly massed together to form a formidable fighting force (as, alas, they were in the Civil War).

However, life has moved on, and not even the most fanatical NRA members claim that untrained chaps armed with M16 rifles could take to the streets in defence of ‘the security of a free state’.

A threat to national security could conceivably come only from rather more sophisticated weapons: ICBMs, nuclear bombs, tanks, artillery, AA systems, mobile missile launchers. I’d suggest that a tax-payer wielding an assault rifle, even one with a full-auto capability, would offer an inadequate line of defence.

That’s why even the aforementioned NRA types no longer offer such lofty claims. Instead they talk about personal protection, and here I’m with them a hundred per cent.

It logically follows that law-abiding citizens should have access to guns used, and useful, for that purpose. Yet here a full-auto rifle capable of firing 900 rounds a minute is a bit of an overkill, as it were.

Such weapons are designed to put so much lead per square foot, which is helpful when dealing with a frontal assault. However, the probability of Mr Billy-Joe Jones finding himself in such a situation at his Houston bungalow is low enough to be dismissed.

Any expert will tell you that a 12-bore shotgun, like one of those Mr Hastings uses for sporting purposes, is ideal for home defence. A shotgun is a simple mechanism that doesn’t require much maintenance, nor much skill to operate. Just point it in the general direction of the intruder, pull the trigger, and – as they say in Houston – he’s wallpaper.

A shotgun is too unwieldy to carry around, say on one’s way to a supermarket or a business meeting. There a handgun should do nicely, though its effective use does require much training. I used to go to shooting ranges regularly, but it took me a long time to learn how to hit the proverbial barn door with my .357.

These two types of weapons are sufficient for self-defence, and forget about the need for ‘a well-regulated militia’. That’s why they should be legal.

So, to expand on the title above, I’m not anti-gun, but having millions of army weapons in civilian hands is sheer madness. Insisting on it undermines the otherwise open and shut case in favour of private gun ownership.

Society won’t be purged of Original Sin, and therefore crime, by banning things, be it guns, vans, knives, pop concerts or that towering monument to vulgarity, Las Vegas. But good people must be allowed to protect themselves against bad ones – and have the tools to do that job.

The root ‘paed’ (or ‘ped’) derives from the Greek for boy or, more generally, child. It appears in many words, mostly compounds. These range from the laudable pedagogue and paediatrician to the eccentric pedant to the naughty pederast and nasty paedophile.

Greek no longer being taught in British schools, our comprehensively educated thugs place too much emphasis on the first root of some compounds and not enough on the second. As a result, they sometimes attack paediatricians, mistaking them for paedophiles.

Yet, whatever we feel about pederasty and paedophilia, neither presents a greater danger than another ‘paedo’ word: paedocracy, rule by children.

You don’t even have to read Lord of the Flies to validate this point of view. Just look at Britain, a country soon to suffer untold misery brought about partly by her ideological commitment to paedocracy.

Taking his cue from the French statesman Guizot, Churchill once said that “Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.”

Some doubt the attribution of this quote, but few doubt its veracity. Actually, real, visceral conservatives are unlikely to be socialists at any age, which doesn’t mean they have no heart. But the statement rings true as an indicator of a general trend.

It’s vindicated by modern democracies, where youngsters tend to vote for Left-wing politicians and causes, whereas older and wiser heads are more likely to vote the right way.

The two latest polls follow this trend: but for the youth, the Leave vote would have been a landslide, rather than merely a convincing majority; and Corbyn would have lost the general election by a crushing margin.

One has to admire Nick Clegg’s unapologetic cynicism manifest in his insistence that we need a second referendum because the Leave voters are dying out. They are indeed, if perhaps not quite at a rate Nick would welcome.

Of course our putative champions of democracy only like it when the ballot goes their way. No one who takes democracy seriously would have a legitimate reason to complain about the referendum. The turnout was the highest of any election since 1992, and Leave got more votes than Yes to Common Market in 1975, Major in 1992, Blair in 1997 and Cameron in either 2010 or 2015.

But Clegg’s reference to voting demographics is unimpeachable, as is the implied strategy of paedocratic subversion. For, to quote that other great advocate of democracy, Leon Trotsky, the youth are indeed “the barometer of the nation”.

Ever since government by divine right was replaced with government by manipulation, politicians have depended on a silly electorate easy enough to manipulate.

The quickest way of achieving this devious goal is to lower the voting age. The young, so beloved of Trotsky and other tyrants, are attractive specifically because their gonads are at their most active, while their brains aren’t yet even wired properly.

This is an ideal combination for expert manipulators, and they’ve always taken advantage of it. Every modern revolution featured mature gentlemen inciting subversion, but the young actually perpetrating it.

Today’s 18-year-olds, ripe as they are physiologically, are children psychologically and, typically, infants intellectually. Easy to organise into a rioting mob, they’re incapable of passing mature judgement on even trivial matters.

Would you trust an 18-year-old to run a university department? Coach a football team? Manage a large company? Of course not.

Yet somehow we feel that children ought to have an equal say in how the country is run, even though compared to this activity those mentioned above are indeed child’s play. This doesn’t make sense.

Nor is it supposed to. For aspiring Left-wing tyrants aren’t after mature statesmanship. They want their wicked ideology to prevail at any cost, which history shows is guaranteed to be exorbitant.

And, regardless of whether or not socialists hold political power, they invariably manage to usurp intellectual power, imposing their own seditious ideas on public discourse.

Through their control of mass media, Left-wing ideologues hypnotise the electorate into cerebral inertia. People have been brainwashed into responding to ‘liberal’ slogans not with reason, like sapient humans, but with instincts, like Pavlov’s dogs.

That’s why so few stop to wonder what sort of catharsis occurred in 1970, when the voting age in Britain was lowered from 21 to 18. Was it felt that the rapidly declining standards of public education had overnight made children wiser?

And now a movement is afoot to lower the voting age even further, to 16. Apparently even Dominic Raab, MP, a good conservative egg, is in favour of this abomination, proving yet again that even good political eggs can only ever be of the curate’s variety.

Would he trust a scrofulous adolescent to handle his personal finances? Somehow one doubts that. Yet this supposedly conservative politician feels that the same youth is qualified to pass judgement on public finances (among other vital issues) – and enforce it with his vote.

It’s predictable that advocates of silly ideas will offer silly arguments in support. And “the young will live with the consequences of our policies, so they should have their say” is as silly as they get.

By the same token, babies will live with such consequences even longer, so should they have the vote too? That’s probably where the country is heading.

If the maxim attributed to Churchill is right, and history shows it is, then many of those scrofulous youths will shed their silly ideas in parallel with losing their acne. Then they’ll find out the hard way that doing things is easier than undoing them.

Just look at the hoops we have to jump through to get out of the EU, that corrupt, tyrannical, anti-historical contrivance. Yet all it took to get in was one flurry of John Major’s pen.

Should Corbyn’s stormtroopers succeed in manipulating the youth vote to win the next election, they’ll plunge the country into an economic, social, and moral abyss – much deeper than one even Mrs May can manage, and she’s trying her best.

Then we’ll realise that paedocracy is indeed the deadliest ‘paedo-’ word in English, and that ‘young people’ is indeed an oxymoron. But even if we ever manage to climb out of the abyss, it’ll take decades to do so.

Raise the voting age to at least to 25, I say. This of course isn’t politically expedient, a concept that modernity has turned into an antonym of right, intelligent and moral.

A scan of the papers shows a staggering increase in their coverage of sex crimes, compared to even a few years ago.

It’s as if, when even kissing a woman on the lips instead of the proffered cheek could land the offender in prison, men, with reckless disregard for their own liberty, are forcing themselves into chaste females on an unprecedented scale.

Some rape cases make the papers ask the question I regard as rhetorical: “Why did this case ever reach the jury?” More and more such cases follow an identical pattern.

Two young friends (classmates, colleagues) end up in bed (against a tree, on a park bench) after a drunken night out. The morning after they may or may not remember what happened the night before.

That encounter is never repeated, and one would think both parties would put it down to experience and move on. Yet months or sometimes even years later the woman decides upon mature deliberation that she never did consent to sex.

The likelihood of such a miraculous recovery from amnesia is directly proportionate to the possibility that in the interim the man has become rich, famous or both. However, sometimes this happens even in the absence of marked improvement in the chap’s fortunes.

One way or the other, the woman contacts the police, the police arrest the man, the CPO decides to pursue the matter, and months later the case goes before the jury.

Meanwhile the defendant’s name is pasted all over the papers since, unlike the alleged victim, he’s denied anonymity. His life is put on hold, his reputation is ruined by that old saw about smoke and fire, his career suffers.

When the case is dismissed for lack of evidence, or when the jury passes a not guilty verdict in less than an hour, the young man punches the air and weeps with joy. The rest of us wonder why this case was tried in the first place.

After all, court proceedings are laborious and costly. That’s why the CPO routinely refuses to prosecute when there’s no ‘realistic prospect of conviction’, in their parlance. In other words, when there isn’t enough evidence to sustain a case.

Rape cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute even under the best of circumstances. Such offences tend to be committed without witnesses, and forensic evidence is often ambiguous or absent. Typically it boils down to her word against his, which isn’t the most reliable method of deciding a man’s fate.

However, one would think that, when the complaint is brought up a year after the event, the prosecution’s case isn’t just difficult but impossible. This irrespective of whether or not a crime actually was committed.

The man claims the sex never happened or was consensual, the woman says it did and it wasn’t. She may be telling the truth. But a guilty verdict depends not on the truth but on what the prosecution can prove beyond reasonable doubt.

I’d suggest that under such circumstances this standard of proof can never be met. Therefore, such cases should never come to court. Yet they do, and their number is growing fast.

Why? Given this kind of evidence, or rather lack thereof, the CPO would never prosecute any other assault.

Let’s say a woman complains to the police that her then boyfriend viciously beat her up a year ago. Witnesses? None. Any demonstrable damage? No. Anything that would stick in court? Afraid not.

Now regardless of whether or not the unfortunate event occurred, the police would never even submit the case to the CPO or, if they did, the CPO wouldn’t even think of prosecuting. Now why does sexual assault require less evidence than, say, battery?

Because the latter is merely a crime against a person, while the former is also a crime against the state. Or rather against the ethos the state uses as a mechanism of power.

The modern Western state imposes its power by attacking tradition woven out of ancient presumptions, certitudes and beliefs. It strives to create a new civilisation on the wreckage of the old one. But first the old one has to be wrecked.

An attack on the family, the traditional arena of sexual activity, is in the vanguard of this offensive. Having taken sex out of the naturally egalitarian context of the family, modernity has placed it into the virtual reality of trumped-up equality, where men and women have to be regarded as not just equal but identical. Rather than bringing the sexes together, this predictably alienates them even further.

The idea is to produce a sexual mechanism of state power by creating an environment in which the sexes look upon each other as rivals or even enemies. Thus alienated, they can never present a united front in the face of state tyranny, as the traditional family always did.

Hence testosteronal male aggressiveness has to be portrayed as specifically directed against women, and even consensual sex is often likened to rape. ‘Sex equals rape’ isn’t designed as a statement of fact or even of faith. It’s a battle plan of modernity.

That’s why our press is saturated with lurid descriptions of rape and sexual abuse, creating a climate where the words ‘rape’ and ‘sex’ are intermingled in people’s minds. That’s why women are conditioned to regard rape as the worst thing that can happen to them. (Worse than death? Disfigurement? Paralysis? Losing an eye? Don’t you dare ask such tactless questions.) And that’s why women are encouraged to report dubious or downright false rapes even months after the fact.

The purpose isn’t to protect vulnerable people but to make all people vulnerable to state power. Divide et impera is the underlying principle.

Before you report me to whichever authorities such things are supposed to be reported to, the title above isn’t a statement of my innermost feelings.

This is a sign prominently adorning the shop windows in a growing Russian chain of organic food outlets, sort of a miniature version of Whole Foods. The shops boast of selling, among other things, the best bread in Russia.

The chain, whose outlets appear in central thoroughfares of Moscow, Petersburg and other cities, belongs to the billionaire Gherman Sterligov, who professes Christian piety.

In that spirit, his expensive bread (up to £3 a loaf) is offered for free to poor people. But a slightly expanded version of the same proviso applies, as another sign makes clear: “No free bread for smoking, drinking, made-up and poof-looking people”.

The shorter sign, carved in wood, is for sale, costing an equivalent of £30. You must agree this is a small price to pay for such a concise encapsulation of one’s life philosophy.

To be fair to Russians, some of them have complained about the signs to the local councils. The protests were rejected, with the authorities invoking freedom of speech and the proprietor’s right to display whatever sign he wishes on his property. One wonders if they’d be as committed to civil liberties if a sign said “Down with Putin”, but that’s a separate issue.

The issue that interests me today is fascism, especially since some readers have taken exception to my describing as fascist such anti-immigration parties as the German AfD and the French National Front. What makes them fascist? asks a reader who, like me, identifies mass uncontrolled immigration as a serious problem.

I dare say it’s the same thing that makes Sterligov fascist, and indeed the government that allows such signs to be displayed for public consumption. The problem lies not so much with the underlying sentiment but with emphasis and style, and only a fool dismisses those as insignificant.

Fascism combines elements of both socialist and conservative heresies, and overstressing one aspect at the expense of the whole is the essence of heresy.

Most people assume that a heresy puts forth a wrong proposition, or at least one that contradicts the orthodoxy altogether. That’s not always true. In fact, many heresies aren’t necessarily wrong in their main tenet. Where they err is in trying to assign an undue significance to that one idea, passing a part for the whole.

This tends to compromise the whole, especially since heresies are usually expressed hysterically and intrusively. “The style is the man himself” (Le style c’est l’homme même), said Georges Buffon, and the same could apply to beliefs.

Sterligov is a heretic because he misses a key, overriding point about the religion he supposedly professes: hate the sin; love the sinner. His heresy takes him out of the territory he may share with conservatives and into the lot signposted by fascism.

A true conservative or, for that matter, Christian will oppose homomarriage, the mandated treatment of homosexuality as an equally valid “lifestyle”, propaganda of homosexuality and the Walpurgisnacht of Gay Pride parades. But only a fascist will display “no poofs” signs or, as Sterligov also allegedly does, pay thugs to attack homosexuals in the streets.

In the same vein, a true conservative will be appalled by an influx of cultural aliens distorting the demographic balance of a country, debauching its culture and social cohesion. But only a fascist will turn such feelings into the hub around which his whole life revolves.

In general, I tend to be wary of single issue politics even when I happen to agree with the single issue. For example, I know quite a few people who have allowed their perfectly legitimate abhorrence of the European Union to take over their whole outlook on life.

This is another example of fanaticism compromising a sound idea, for such tunnel vision leads those people into numerous blind alleys and intellectual traps. One such is their affection not only for European neo-fascist parties but even for the frankly fascist regime of Putin’s Russia, where “no poofs” signs are not only allowed but actively encouraged.

Their logic is lamentably primitive. We hate the EU. Putin hates the EU. Ergo, Putin is our friend. Single-issue politics has put blinkers on those poor souls, making them overlook blindingly obvious evil.

For Putin doesn’t just hate the EU; he loathes the West and demonstrates in practice his contempt for everything that makes the West Western.

His political opponents are harassed, beaten up, imprisoned or killed. His courts rubberstamp predetermined verdicts. Free speech is nonexistent, with the mainstream media spewing nothing but emetic propaganda and all opposition websites blocked. Putin bolsters every enemy of the West, including North Korea. He commits aggression against Russia’s neighbours. Hardly a day passes without Putin or his mouthpieces issuing nuclear threats against the West.

Our EU-haters ignore all that. They describe Putin’s regime as conservative because it’s anti-EU. That’s all that matters – and the profusion of “No poofs” signs further reinforces Putin’s conservative credentials in their minds.

Yet neither Christianity nor conservatism can be defined by what we hate – only by what we love. The thesis of love may dialectically presuppose the antithesis of hate but, when the balance is skewed towards the latter, the emerging synthesis won’t be conservative. It’ll be fascist.

One has to admire Corbyn’s understanding of politics and economics. His ascent to power, he forecasts dispassionately and accurately, will produce an immediate run on the pound and a collapse of business investment. An economic catastrophe, in other words.

Since Britain’s imports exceed her exports, the predicted devastation of the already devalued pound will drive the cost of living sky high. This will be exacerbated by an inevitable hike in unemployment and inflation, with the financial system showing all the stability of a feather in a hurricane.

Financiers like that sort of thing as much as a cyanide sandwich. Even British investors will look for greener pastures elsewhere, while their foreign colleagues will be falling over their own feet in an outward stampede. (No doubt this will be blamed on Brexit, but then everything will be.)

Yet in spite of displaying such impressive analytical acumen, Corby is seeking power with nothing short of maniacal persistence. Obviously he feels that the correctly forecast consequences are worth taking – especially since he won’t be the one taking them.

Such insouciance in the face of the disaster likely to hit common folk (uncommon folk have ways of protecting themselves) would be incomprehensible in a party supposedly committed to looking after the working man – but only if we confused its slogans with reality. In reality, they see people, working or otherwise, only as so many building blocks in the edifice of socialist tyranny.

Much is being made of Labour anti-Semitism, and true enough: 61 per cent of all anti-Semitic harangues by public officials come from Labour. And one can confidently predict that the on-going party conference is bound to drive that proportion even higher.

But Corby’s frankness on the impending economic collapse provides even starker evidence for what has to be clear to any student of history: socialism is wicked, and the more socialist a party, the more evil it is.

Corby’s Labour is as socialist as it’s possible to be this side of concentration camps filled with what Lenin described as ‘noxious insects’ (anybody Lenin didn’t like). And if this lot get their way, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of their stepping over into that territory too.

The Labour conference isn’t just one continuous incitement to riot – it is a riot. Actually, street riots are what one speaker after another is calling for, if that’s the only way to get Corby into a position where he could collapse the economy.

None of them sees anything wrong with confiscation of private property, something that hasn’t been tried in Britain on a large scale since Henry VIII looted the monasteries. And Henry’s way of solving marital difficulties appeals to many delegates as a legitimate political expedient.

Every time the royal family was mentioned yesterday, invariably in pejorative terms, the delegates roared “Guillotine!!!” – and our royals aren’t even Jewish. In some quarters this sort of thing may be described as treason, but that word is no longer used in polite, and especially rude, society.

Here our socialist friends show that their understanding of history is less reliable than their grasp of economics. For those who scream for the guillotine the loudest eventually put their own heads on the block – to that law of history there are no known exceptions.

The typological precursors of Labour, all those Jacobins, Bolsheviks and SA, got their comeuppance after first spilling most satisfying oceans of blood. The regicides Robespierre and Saint-Just perished in Thermidor; Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev were killed by Stalin; Röhm and Strasser were massacred by Hitler.

The very fact that such names can be mentioned as relevant to British politics is a calamity in itself. It’s hard to contain one’s heart-felt wish that Corbyn and his jolly friends get their own Thermidor prophylactically. But alas, the only Thermidor these champions of the proletariat are likely to get is of the lobster variety.

Delegates to the Labour conference provide musical accompaniment to incendiary speeches by singing Internationale and Bandiera Rossa, with blood dripping from every word. I just wish more people pricked up their ears and listened: this lot mean what they sing.

As it is, the British are likely to get a Corbyn government next time around, vindicating de Maistre’s maxim that every nation gets the kind of government it deserves. But I still hope we don’t deserve Corbyn – no nation’s sins are as grave as that.

P.S. I tend to eschew the trick so beloved of many pundits, saying “I told you so” when their predictions come true. However, without uttering that sacramental phrase, here’s what I wrote about Corbyn before he even got to lead Labour: http://www.alexanderboot.com/none-dare-call-it-conspiracy/

This word is hardly ever applied to socialists in general or the Labour party in particular. In fact, most people, even many of those who aren’t themselves socialists, wince whenever this word is used.

However, it’s not only appropriate but sufficiently explanatory. The word is evil.

Once you realise that both the philosophy of socialism and, more important, its psychological inspiration, are evil, everything falls into place. The trouble is that most people refuse to acknowledge this simple and amply demonstrable fact.

Socialism has somehow acquired a warm glow, whose spectrum includes shades of fairness, equality, love, caring, sharing – all those things people used to associate with Christianity, but don’t any longer.

In fact, the shifting of such commendable things into the domain of socialism represents the greatest larceny of modernity. For, stripped of its phony sloganeering, socialism emerges as what it really is: a secular religion of envy, hate, state tyranny and general enslavement, both physical and spiritual.

However, the image that socialism projects isn’t like that, is it? That’s why even its opponents express dismay at the never-ending string of anti-Semitic scandals within the ranks of the Labour party. And so many are amazed at the open manifestations of this sentiment at the on-going Labour conference.

The list of such manifestations is long.

Following a deluge of disgusting threats, the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg had to be given a full-time bodyguard.

Andrew Percy, a former government minister, has been targeted for anti-Semitic abuse.

Vile anti-Semitic rants ex cathedra have been wildly applauded, including a comparison of Israelis with Nazis and an invitation to a debate on whether or not the Holocaust happened.

Ken Livingstone, who equated Zionism with Nazism, has been defended.

A leaflet has been circulated quoting (approvingly) Reinhard Heidrich as saying that “National Socialists had no intention of attacking Jewish people”. The leaflet doesn’t specify whether Heidrich said this before or after he chaired the ‘Final Solution’ Wannsee Conference.

Numerous calls to kick Jewish and pro-Israel groups out of the party have been made.

I must say I’m surprised – that so many people are surprised. For example, why shouldn’t socialists insist that the Holocaust never happened when they were the ones who perpetrated it?

Oops, sorry, I forgot: we aren’t allowed to associate Nazism with socialism. Nazism is evil sui generis, while socialists are, as Chris Williamson explained at the conference, “caring individuals”.

However, Hitler disagreed. He readily acknowledged his indebtedness to Marxism in private, even as he attacked it in public. In his memoir Hitler Speaks Hermann Rauschning quotes the führer as saying that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx. “I have learned a great deal from Marx,” conceded Hitler, “as I do not hesitate to admit.”

One thing he could have learned from Marx – not that he needed any tuition – was virulent anti-Semitism, going hand in hand with anti-capitalism. “What is the secular basis of Judaism?” asks Marx in his anti-Semitic pamphlet Zur Judenfrage. “Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”

Since Marx himself was a secular Jew, one detects an element of self-refutation in that statement, but we aren’t going to demand logical rigour from socialists, are we?

This founding sentiment of socialism explains why its international branch was no different in that respect from the national variety. State anti-Semitism was rife in the Soviet Union and, when Stalin died, he was weeks away from implementing his own Final Solution by deporting all Jews to the Far East.

Since Judaism is doctrinally associated in the socialist mind with capitalism, rather than, say, with classical music or nuclear physics, where Jews are represented more widely than among the capitalists, anti-Semitism is as germane to socialism as anti-capitalism is.

The Labour conference reminds us of this symbiosis by declaring that its aim when in government is to create a command economy by nationalising, well, just about everything they can lay their hands on.

Economists, along with everyone blessed with basic literacy and knowledge of history, are screaming bloody murder. Command economy, they say, has been proved disastrous everywhere it has been tried. Its cost is measured not only in the billions of pounds it’ll wipe out instantly, but also in several generations of unremitting human misery.

That’s like telling a murderer that his victim’s mother will be upset. He doesn’t care – if he did, he wouldn’t be a murderer.

Because it’s a factor of freedom, money in private hands is an affront to socialism, which is all about state power. An independently wealthy person doesn’t depend on the state as much as a welfare recipient does. Hence the socialist ideal is putting the whole population on the welfare rolls, the way it was in effect done in the Soviet Union.

That ideal may not be fully attainable in a country like England, where the memory of civil liberties and secure property is still alive. But any reasonable approximation would be welcome, which is exactly the message Labour are flogging.

It takes malignant myopia not to discern the animus behind such desiderata: envy, hatred, powerlust – everything that collectively can be covered by a single word, evil. The same word that explains Labour’s toxic anti-Semitism.

This isn’t an aberration. It’s the nature of the beast, and I wish more people realised this before putting Jeremy Corbyn into 10 Downing Street.