Author: Alexander Boot

Oh the times olden, before British education embarked on a steady course from being the envy of the world to becoming its laughingstock.

When teachers taught, rather than indoctrinated. When academic curricula featured mostly academic subjects. When young brains were taught to think rather than scoured of any such ability. When schools were schools, rather than laboratories for social engineering. When 25 per cent of the pupils were well educated, and the rest adequately trained for grown-up life.

(If you think that more than 25 per cent of all pupils are capable of high academic achievement, it’s clear that you’ve never stood in front of a classroom.)

Then, in 1965, came the Charge of the Left Brigade led by Education Secretary Anthony Crosland on his high horse. He rallied the troops by yelling: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school…”

What followed was one of the rare instances of a Labour politician going on to do exactly what he promised. However, looking at young people today, one wishes Crosland hadn’t been so true to his word.

Half a century after the introduction of comprehensive ‘education’ Britain is firmly perched close to the bottom of every international table of literacy and numeracy.

Allow me to put this in the language even our youngsters can understand: most British pupils can’t read, write or add up. The only exams they do well in are pregnancy tests.

In common with all giant socialist projects, this one has achieved results that are diametrically opposite to the slogans. Rather than reducing social stratification, it has increased it no end.

Desperate to give their children any education at all, parents scrape together their last pennies to send their offspring to paying schools. Those children whose parents haven’t got enough pennies to scrape together, are left stuck in the social mire from which they’re unlikely ever to extricate themselves.

If grammar schools used to provide a social and economic hoist, today’s comprehensive schools are millstones around the neck of upward mobility. Children who leave school completely illiterate have nowhere to go but to the social – or prison.

Such are the educational achievements of soft, non-Marxist socialists. And, if you think things can’t get any worse, look at what’s coming in the near future, when the hard, Marxist left takes over.

No guessing is needed: our next PM, the Trotskyist leftie Corbyn, is as refreshingly honest about his intentions as his non-Marxist leftie precursor was way back when.

Jeremy is going to augment the current curricula, already heavy on condom studies and feather-light on academic disciplines, with such subjects as Trade Unions, Collective Action, Solidarity with Fellow Employees and – I’m guessing here – presumably Barricade Building and Firebombing Police Stations.

“Children should not only learn about trade unions and their rights at work,” explained the Trotskyist, “but should be fully equipped to exercise and develop those rights.

“Schools need to teach these values and together we can, and will, transform society so it works for the many, not the few.” Admirable self-confidence, that.

Any student of countries where such notions were put into practice will know exactly how the likes of Corbyn transform societies, using satanic brainwashing from cradle to grave as their weapon. They start by washing people’s brains and then quickly proceed to firing bullets through them.

But at least in the Moscow of my youth brainwashing came on top of teaching pupils how to read, write and even sweat over Newton’s Binomial Theorem (one of my numerous scholastic failures).

In Britain, PM Corbyn’s government will spread emetic Marxist propaganda instead of teaching even the three Rs, never mind Newton’s Binomial Theorem.

Pupils will learn about their rights at work without acquiring the basic skills to get work in a modern economy. That’s like learning gastronomy in the middle of a murderous famine (which, incidentally, is a universal agricultural consequence of Corbyn-style politics).

Britain at the moment resembles a ship heading for the reefs, with the captain screaming “Full speed ahead!” It’s to a large extent socialist educational ideas that have cast the ship adrift, while punching holes in the hull bottom.

For, softened up and dumbed down by two generations of comprehensive ignorance, British voters are perfectly capable of putting a ghoul like Corbyn at the helm. Indoctrinated in the wicked ideology of progress, they believe that any change has to be for the better.

When a demagogue like Corbyn truthfully promises to transform society, many jump up and salute without taking the trouble of pondering the shape this transformation will take.

The British are ready to emulate the Germans, circa 1933. We’re as fed up with our ineffectual, duplicitous, self-serving government as the Germans were with the spineless, decadent, incompetent Weimar Republic. Any change has to be for the better, doesn’t it?

I may be letting the side down, but I’d make a nonentity like Theresa ‘Brexit’ May PM for life if that’s what it takes to keep Corbyn out. I’ve already lived under communism, thank you very much.

European leaders have finally joined forces to achieve an elusive yet unquestionably worthy goal: keeping Jean-Claude Juncker upright.

The occasion for that show of unity was the gala dinner at the NATO conference in Brussels. It was there that Juncker – or Junk, as he likes to be called by his friends, among whom I proudly count myself – rallied the assorted presidents and prime ministers to a common cause.

When Junk turned up for the event, it became instantly clear to the august assembly that he was none too firm on his feet. Junk was walking in zigzags, stumbling, tottering and losing his balance.

When he got to the steps leading up to the podium, Junk provided a vivid illustration to Lenin’s brochure One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, which he considers essential reading. “Read your Lenin, Al, you old bugger,” he often tells me. “You’ll learn all you need to know.”

It was then that the European Rapid Reaction Force went into action. Presidents of Finland and the Ukraine, along with several prime ministers led by Mark Rutte of Holland, propped Junk up, gently pushing and pulling him in the right direction.

An unbiased observer wouldn’t have failed to notice that none of the men would have been able to do the job by himself. It took the combined efforts of most European leaders to propel Junk around. If there ever was a powerful argument for pan-European unity, that was certainly it.

As Junk explained later, his irregular locomotion pattern was caused by an attack of sciatica. He thereby made an invaluable contribution to both the aetiology and symptomatology of the condition.

In the former, he made a breakthrough discovery that sciatica is caused by the toxic substances added to Glenfarclas malt whisky, his favourite tipple. As with all such additives, the toxic effect is directly proportional to the amount consumed and the rate of consumption.

When taken slowly and in moderate quantities, Glenfarclas has no immediate deleterious effects. In fact, it may even confer some cardiovascular benefits. In that sense it’s like arsenic that, depending on how it’s used, may either kill or deaden the pain of root canal work.

However, drinking a full bottle of Glenfarclas after lunch at which two bottles of wine were consumed may indeed cause any number of undesirable side effects, such as indeed sciatica. As a lifelong champion of ‘elf and safety, I demand that Glenfarclas should henceforth carry a government health warning to that effect.

As to Junk’s contribution to the symptomatology of sciatica, medical science will be grateful to him for showing that the condition may cause zigzagging, stumbling, losing one’s balance, trying to topple over backwards, laughing uncontrollably and for no good reason, kissing everything that moves and babbling “Where’s that busty Croatian president? Boy, would I like her to preside over my face…”

As a side benefit, Junk has shown that costly medical research on multiple subjects is a waste of money and time. A properly conducted, rigidly controlled trial on a single volunteer can often suffice.

This provides a telling response to all those naysayers who claim that the EU is useless. True, its benefits aren’t instantly apparent. But that doesn’t mean they are non-existent.

Hence we must all be grateful to Junk for making this seminal, if inadvertent, contribution to medicine on behalf of the EU.

And speaking of the EU, another news item caught my eye. On his visit to Britain (against which all the decent people of the world, along with Messrs Corbyn and Sadiq, are protesting vigorously and vociferously), President Trump has seen fit to deliver himself of totally unfounded statements that will forever compromise the special relationship.

It pains me to have to repeat them, but I must. Trump has uttered words to the effect that:

a) soft Brexit is no Brexit, b) it’s not what the British people voted for, c) Theresa May has destroyed Brexit and ignored the will of the people, d) Britain is in turmoil as a result, e) by exiting the EU without really leaving it, Britain is killing stone-dead her chances of getting trade deals with non-EU members, specifically the US, f) Britain is losing her culture because of mass immigration.

Like all decent and other people who protest against Trump’s visit to Britain (yet saw nothing wrong with visits by such worthy luminaries as Ceaușescu, Xi, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia et al), I find Trump’s statements deplorable, unwarranted and unhelpful.

And, what makes them even worse is that every one of them is true.

When my friend Junk dries out… sorry, I mean recovers from his painful condition, I’ll seek his counsel on this matter. I tried to do so this morning, but all I got from him was “Call that Croatian chick for me, Al. You know, the one with the big…”

Two points, as a matter of fact.

First, all NATO countries do display criminal negligence in their defence policy, relying on the US to protect them against the Russian threat.

Why should America foot a disproportionate part of the bill? Trump’s question is legitimate, and one can only be amazed that no previous US president asked it with the same forcefulness.

Of course, Trump is being slightly disingenuous there. He knows that some of America’s defence spending is actually a payment for her playing the role of global leader. When the British Empire was cast in that role, Britannia didn’t rule the waves for free either.

Yet the T in NATO stands for Treaty, and any treaty is a contract. A contract always involves terms and conditions with which all the parties must comply for it to remain valid.

One such term is that all NATO members must spend at least two per cent of their GDP on defence. Sure enough, the US pays roughly double that. However, of the 28 other NATO members, only the UK, Greece, Estonia and Latvia meet that requirement, just.

The UK apart, but only slightly apart, the other four dutiful members hardly represent a formidable military force. But all other NATO members are in default of the contract.

Trump is demanding that they raise their expenditure to the same four per cent that the US spends. This may be fair, but it’s utterly unrealistic – that’s like demanding a million-pound ransom from a hostage who lives in a bedsit. But the stipulated two per cent is indeed a must.

However, Germany, NATO’s richest European member, spends a pathetic 1.24 per cent. Then of course she faces exorbitant bills to accommodate all those millions of Muslims who bring welcome cultural diversity to Europe.

Trump is right to point this out, as he’s also right on his second point: Germany’s dependence on Russia. I don’t know if Germany is totally controlled by Russia, as Trump claims, but she’s certainly greatly controlled.

How can it be otherwise if Germany gets 70 per cent of her gas courtesy of Gazprom (one of whose employees is Germany’s former chancellor Schroeder)? And this percentage will go up even further in two years, when the new pipeline comes on stream.

Now energy, quite apart from its immediate use, is a strategic commodity. At wartime it becomes as critical as any weapon system, even more so. If Britain had depended on Germany for much of her energy, we’d have had a swastika flag flapping over Westminster in 1940.

It’s such strategic considerations, rather than just the billions flowing into Putin’s coffers, that should concern Trump.

But then the president sees life mainly in financial terms, just as he sees foreign policy as merely a series of deals to strike. There’s nothing to be done about that; a man in his 70s isn’t going to change the philosophy of a lifetime.

“What good is NATO?” asks Trump, and this is a valid question to which there’s only one possible answer, one I offered above. NATO’s principal role is to protect the West against the Russian threat.

The West’s commitment to NATO is thus bound to hinge on how clearly and realistically it perceives the Russian threat. If they regard it as non-existent, one can’t blame European governments for their reluctance to shell out billions for protecting themselves against nothing much.

If there’s no threat, then it’s much more important for any German government to spend money on enabling Germans to retire on practically their full pay. Pensioners vote; tanks don’t.

It’s reasonably clear that Merkel doesn’t see Putin’s Russia as a threat. But does Trump?

Here we again re-enter the murky waters of Trump’s relationship with Putin. These waters may never become limpid because a US president has enough power to side-track an investigation into his affairs, even if he can’t stop it altogether.

However, it’s still possible to get to the bottom of at least some areas. One such is the profits Trump derived from Russia, and these were sufficiently large to invoke words like ‘kettle’, ‘teapot’ and ‘black’ whenever he accuses Germany of living off Russia’s gas.

Trump’s son Donald Jr., who in the run-up to the election had regularly shuttled between New York and Moscow, clarified matters a few years ago, when he happily admitted that “… Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

On record, Trump tried to negotiate huge property development deals with the Russians some 10-15 years ago, but nothing much came of it. He did get a few million for organising a beauty pageant in Moscow and building a golf course or two, but such amounts would hardly have constituted ‘a disproportionate section’, nor really ‘a lot of money pouring in’.

So where did the ‘disproportionate section’ and ‘a lot of money’ come from? From off-record deals, obviously.

One can only guess there, although some researchers, such as Yuri Feltshinsky (Litvinenko’s co-author), add a fair amount of substance to the guesses by providing much circumstantial evidence of how laundered Russian cash saved Trump from his latest bankruptcy.

Yet staying in the realm of facts, Trump is on record regularly expressing his admiration for Putin – and the president isn’t on record saying one bad thing about him.

Whether this comes from genuine admiration or something underhanded is interesting but irrelevant. Both are equally reprehensible.

It’s also a fact that the Russians pumped a lot of money and effort into trying to boost Trump’s presidential campaign.

Whether or not that had any appreciable effect is open to question, but the effort itself isn’t. And the gangsters manning the Russian government and ‘parliament’ are also on record cracking champagne and dancing in the aisles on hearing the news of Trump’s victory.

The gangsters were in for some let-down because neither they nor perhaps even Trump himself appreciated the constitutional limits on presidential power in the US. Thus Trump has been unable to repeal anti-Putin sanctions, as he promised to do during the campaign. But he did make the promise.

Dipping into even murkier waters of the What If? genre of geopolitics, we might go all the way and ask all sorts of unpleasant questions.

What if Trump indeed isn’t an entirely free agent? What if his threats to dismantle NATO have an ulterior motive? What if the deal he seeks to strike with Putin will involve dividing the world into spheres of influence, the way Hitler did with Putin’s role model Stalin?

Trump’s tête–à–tête with Putin on Monday may answer those question, or then again it may not. But don’t think for a second we have no reason to worry.

P.S. Two excellent reasons to support Trump’s visit to London: Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan. They both protest against it.

As I write this, our papers are bursting at the seams with encomia for Gareth Southgate, the England manager.

These are largely merited, although my preference would be to tone them down a bit. After all, it’s only football, not a breakthrough in the treatment of cancer.

But I generally keep such misgivings to myself, realising that no treatment of cancer would ever cause such a riot of mass hysteria. Panem et circenses, and all that.

When I say that the encomia are largely, as opposed to totally, merited, I specifically have one praise in mind, that Southgate is a refined, cultured individual.

It would be amply appropriate if qualified with “…for a footballer”. With that relativist proviso, Gareth is indeed a paragon of culture.

He sports sharp three-piece suits in fashionable colours (although, and this is unforgivable, he wears a belt rather than braces under his waistcoat), sports no visible tattoos, speaks in a comprehensible accent and manages to string words together without linking them with the f-word and its derivatives.

Actually, it’s possible for a man to be cultured and still swear a lot. I’d go so far as to say it’s a prerequisite, but here I may be influenced by the Russian quip “even though he swore a lot, he wasn’t a man of culture”.

What is absolutely impossible for a cultured man to do is commit the kind of solecisms that abound in Southgate’s speech. I do mean the kind of solecisms, not simply misusing words every now and then.

Show me a man who claims he never misuses a word and I’ll show you a self-obsessed boaster. We can all get careless and use a wrong word (mea culpa, although I can always use my accident of birth as an excuse).

But only a linguistic lout will ever misuse a word because he wants to sound ‘posh’ (using this word without at least implied quotation marks isn’t posh). This is a dead giveaway of an ignoramus with pretensions of upward cultural mobility.

Asked before the World Cup how his players would respond to racial abuse from the crowd, Southgate replied, “The idealistic response would be to walk off the pitch…”

He clearly thinks that ‘idealistic’ is the ‘posh’ version of ‘ideal’. It isn’t. The two words are cognates, but then so are ‘dish’ and ‘disk ‘or ‘shirt’ and ‘skirt’. They do mean different things though.

That wouldn’t be worth mentioning if this minor matter didn’t reflect a major sociocultural trend: compulsive, increasingly compulsory, egalitarianism. In this, language is only an indicator, but a reliable one.

When I worked in advertising, I used to take notes of my colleagues’ solecisms and malapropisms – and bear in mind we’re talking about professional communicators here.

I heard (and saw) them use ‘erstwhile’ for ‘esteemed’, ‘appraise’ for ‘apprise’, ‘risqué’ for ‘risky’, ‘simplistic’ for ‘simple’, ‘a priori’ for ‘in advance’, ‘effect’ for ‘affect’, ‘masterful’ for ‘masterly’, ‘complimentary’ for ‘complementary’, ‘eminent’ for ‘imminent’, ‘cryptic’ for ‘short’ – well, I don’t intend to burden you with my whole list.

These aren’t careless errors of cultured men. It’s linguistic and cultural louts stealing words that belong to others and then triumphantly flaunting them in front of the rightful owners.

Occasionally, pedant that I am, I’d point out that, say, ‘masterful’ isn’t the same as ‘masterly’. This invariably ran into an indignant response: “What difference does it make? Language is just a means of communication.”

Well, language is a means of communication, but it isn’t just that. I wouldn’t raise that point though, knowing I’d lose my audience – and probably my job.

Instead I’d say: “Precisely. That’s why words should be used in their real meaning, to make sure communication isn’t misleading. In this case, a presentation can be masterly and it can be masterful. I don’t know which you mean; your communication has misfired.”

This would have earned me the reputation of a stuck-up w*****, except that I slyly protected myself by being good at pool and swearing with some creative neologistic flourishes each time I missed a shot.

Because I couldn’t drink five pints of lager at lunch, that didn’t quite make me one of the lads, but at least it offered some social protection.

In the past, cultured people spoke in a cultured way and uncultured people spoke in an uncultured way. For there’s only one way to learn a language properly, whether one is born to it or not: voracious reading of good books over a lifetime.

Cultured people did that, and linguistic precision came as a bonus. Uncultured people, which is to say the majority, didn’t do that, and bad usage came as a consequence.

Lexical and grammatical properties were clearly signposted, and little trespassing ever occurred: the uncultured masses (with notable and welcome exceptions) felt no need to better themselves culturally. In fact, they looked down on toffy-nosed speakers, a sentiment that truly cultured people didn’t reciprocate.

Then, with the advent of compulsive egalitarianism, came the misapprehension that all people are created equally well-spoken and endowed by their creator, that is Darwin, with the inalienable right to mangle English as they see fit.

There are noticeable differences of course, but different no longer means better and worse. Any way of speaking is deemed to be as good as any other.

Anything people say is correct because they say it. This has become the linguistic ideology preached by even supposedly educated commentators on language (Oliver Kamm of The Times is a bright example).

Actually, this isn’t so much an ideology per se as an ideological subset, part of the systematic and deliberate  lowering of cultural standards to the lowest and commonest of denominators. This tendency is sometimes described as ‘prole drift’, though I wouldn’t dare use such an elitist and discriminatory term.

Having got this off my chest, I’m going to join 30 million other British fans in cheering Gareth’s team on in the World Cup semi-final tonight, screaming “Ingerland!!!: at an unresponsive TV screen.

Idealistically, we should win the whole f***ing thing.

P.S. At least Gareth isn’t as bad as French football commentators, who insist on using phrases like grosso modo, a priori and in extremis every two minutes. This has an opposite effect to the one desired.

The unfolding crisis in Westminster clarifies the nature of British politics.

I’ll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with any claim, slogan or, for that matter, constitution – written or otherwise.

Our monarch doesn’t rule through Parliament, nor indeed in Parliament.

Our government isn’t a democracy in the strict etymological sense of the word, nor even figuratively. It’s not the rule of the people; it’s the rule over the people.

To use Burkean terminology, our MPs are neither people’s representatives nor even their delegates.

Our government has no balance of power – this was replaced by dictatorship of the Commons a long time ago, but now it’s not even that.

The Cabinet doesn’t exercise executive power, and nor does Parliament have legislative supremacy.

The Prime Minister has little control over the Cabinet, which doesn’t matter very much because the Cabinet has little control over anything.

We aren’t ruled by the monarch, the people, Parliament, the Cabinet or the prime minister. We’re ruled by the apparat.

This word of Latin origin but Soviet usage designates a sort of faceless power behind the throne, a collective éminence grise wielding an inordinate control over affairs of the state.

In totalitarian states, the apparat performs a largely bureaucratic function, and its power derives therefrom. The big cheeses usually have neither the time nor the inclination to get into the nitty-gritty of day-to-day government. This is a function they tend to delegate to the apparat.

It’s therefore up to the apparatchiks either to release the devil that’s in the detail or keep him bottled in there. They can surreptitiously undermine any diktat or else make it appear as a flash of genius.

That’s how Stalin gained power in the Soviet Union – unlike Lenin and Trotsky, he didn’t mind getting his hands dirty with bureaucratic drudgery. When Lenin appointed Stalin Secretary General of the Party in 1922, the job was seen as just that, secretarial. Stalin referred to himself with sly self-deprecation as secretarishka (little secretary).

However, the little secretary soon became the big boss. Acting behind the loudmouths’ backs, he built his own apparat brick by brick. And in that edifice there was no room for any of the thundering revolutionaries.

The apparat proved too strong for them, and 30 years later it proved too strong for Stalin as well.

In October, 1952, he was demoted from Secretary General to just one of the Secretaries. Even though he retained much of his power, a fair chunk of it was now in the hands of the apparat. Four months later Stalin died under suspicious circumstances.

In Britain the role of the apparat was traditionally played by the Civil Service, which used to be considered the best in the world. I don’t know if it still is, though I doubt that on general principle. But it’s definitely not the apparat any longer.

That is, some of its members do belong to the apparat, as do some MPs, some cabinet members, some journalists, some businessmen, some all sorts of people. The current apparat is a hodgepodge of different professions, different influences, different groups.

Just as any other apparat, it exerts its power behind the scenes, but that doesn’t make its power any less real. The apparat is invisible but, just as Kepler deduced the existence of some planets from the deflection in the orbits of others, its presence is indisputable.

It’s not a conspiracy in any usual sense of the word. There are no dark smoky cellars with evil men hunched over the floor plan of the Houses of Parliament.

The apparat doesn’t want to blow up Westminster. It only strives to undermine the constitutional principles on which it rests, and it’s getting away with that because those principles are largely forgotten and even more largely ignored.

Yet it’s not just Westminster that lives or dies by the constitution. It’s Britain herself, for politics largely (though far from exclusively) defines Britishness, which, unlike Englishness, is itself a political construct.

Take away the British constitution, and Britain will no longer be Britain. Politics to us is what wine and cheese are to the French.

France has had 17 different constitutions during the period that Britain has had only one – yet France has remained France, kept together by wine, cheese, language and culture in general.

However, Britain won’t survive the collapse of her ancient constitution because she has no wine and cheese to fall back on – and no language, as anyone who has ever heard young people speak these days will confirm.

Margaret Thatcher came out of the apparat, but she tried to turn against it. She didn’t realise that the apparat had become too strong to take on. So it proved. The apparat got rid of her and dragged Britain into the EU.

The reasons for that constitutional treason were both physical and metaphysical. Physically, the politicians within the apparat realised that the EU offered them life after death. After being ousted from Parliament in London, they could still have lucrative political careers in Brussels or Strasbourg, giving them a lifelong membership in the apparat.

But there were also deeper reasons. The apparat lives a life of its own, and it’s supranational by nature. An apparatchik from England has more in common with an apparatchik from Finland than he does with any Englishman who doesn’t belong to the apparat.

Since the apparat doesn’t owe its life to Britain, it owes her no allegiance. It’s parthenogenic; the ovum from which it was born hadn’t been fertilised by any national input.

What happened on 23 June, 2016, was a popular revolt against the apparat. The apparat had permitted it to happen because it had grown so arrogant that a defeat in the referendum seemed inconceivable.

Similar revolts, in various forms, are happening all over the Western world, with their apparats fighting a rearguard action, usually victorious for the time being. The apparat always comes back with reinforcements, and that’s what’s happening in Britain now.

Do you think for a second that those Tory Remainers, led with singular ineptitude by Mrs May, are trying to defeat the referendum they lost because they don’t realise they’re destroying the country? Don’t they know that they’re practically unrolling a red carpet for the Trotskyist evil to settle with catastrophic consequences at 10 Downing Street?

Of course they do. But they don’t care because their loyalty is pledged not to the party, nor, God forbid, to the country, but to the apparat. They aren’t only supranational but also suprapartisan. They don’t care if the Tory Party or even Britain herself dies – as long as the apparat lives.

If we still ran our politics constitutionally, the government would have abided by the solid vote in the referendum regardless of how some members of the government had felt about it.

The people voted to be rid not only of the EU but, even though many of them didn’t realise it, of the apparat as well. The only decent course of action for a truly constitutional government would have been to leave the EU within a couple of weeks of the referendum, and without paying any exit fees.

Whatever negotiations were necessary could have proceeded from that starting point. Some economic sacrifices might or might not have followed but, even if they had, they wouldn’t have been as severe as those made by the British during Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

The British government felt then that no sacrifice was too great to preserve the nation’s sovereignty and therefore her soul. The British government today is British in name only.

The apparat rules and it’s proving invincible, its muscle gradually built by the steroids of surreptitious power. Prime Minister Corbyn, anyone?

There’s something eerie about a physician committing a crime. Compassion and empathy are doctors’ job requirements after all.

A mechanic or an architect may have those qualities, either out of religious conviction or simply because he’s a nice person. But if he’s neither a believer nor particularly nice, no one is going to say he isn’t fit for the job.

It’s different for doctors. When a medic lacks compassion and empathy, and especially if his callousness leads him to a life of crime, somehow he’s more culpable than a mechanic or an architect would be under the circumstances. We expect higher moral standards from a man who took the Hippocratic oath.

That’s why David Mackereth, a top NHS doctor with 26 years’ experience, should count himself lucky. He committed a heinous crime and merely got sacked.

This testifies to the generous tolerance of modernity. At another time or in another place, the same transgression would send him down for a long stretch. Or, if the death penalty were still on the books, he’d get the chop.

By now you must be anxious to know what kind of crime put an end to such an illustrious career. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, but do make sure you’re sitting down.

Dr Mackereth believes that – wait a moment, let me get hold of myself – one’s sex isn’t a matter of choice. How about that, have you ever heard anything so outrageous?

Not only that, but he insists on putting this belief, reactionary to the point of being fascist, into practice. Dr Mackereth denies his patients the right to sex self-identification. He obtusely refers to a person born with the XY chromosomes as a man and to one bearing XX chromosomes as a woman.

And he mangles the English language, its present version at any rate, by describing a man as a he and a woman as a she. Is it any wonder that the NHS  described him as ‘unfit to work’. Unfit to live, more like it.

Rather than accepting his punishment with meek submission, Dr Mackereth dared to defend himself, invoking his Christian faith.

“I’m not attacking the transgender movement,” he said, “but I am defending my right to freedom of speech, and freedom of belief.

“I don’t think I should be compelled to use a specific pronoun. I’m not setting out to upset anyone. But if upsetting someone can lead to doctors being sacked then, as a society, we have to examine where we are going.”

How can an educated man get things so wrong? We have ample freedom of belief, with the little proviso that, if your belief happens to be Christian, you keep it to yourself and certainly don’t act on it – especially within the sanctuary of the NHS.

And we have more than enough freedom of speech – but not of any old speech. A Muslim may refuse to shake hands with a female client (a case from my own experience) or insist that all pork products be removed from a school canteen. How much more freedom do you need?

Do you also want a Christian to quote Genesis 5: 2 (“Male and female created he them…”) with impunity? Be reasonable now. This would be not freedom but anarchy, repudiating the authority of modernity altogether. That simply won’t do, will it now?

It won’t. That’s why Dr Mackereth was found to be in violation of modernity’s real Bible, the 2010 Equality Act. Off with his head.

Actually, if I were him, I wouldn’t have mentioned Christianity under the circumstances. After all, every master of rhetoric, from Socrates on, has taught that an argument should be couched in terms one’s audience can understand.

These days any overt reference to Christianity renders the audience not just uncomprehending but hostile. Thus insisting on the truth of one’s beliefs because the Bible says so is an admirable moral stand, but a guaranteed loser in a debate (or a sacking offence, as Dr Mackereth found out).

Mercifully, there’s seldom any need, especially when arguing about tangentially medical matters, such as transsexuality, abortion and euthanasia. Christianity has informed our civilisation on such matters, and its precepts held sway for so many centuries that they’re firmly implanted in Western thought – regardless of how egregiously modernity perverts and abuses it.

The sanctity of human life, for example, is originally a religious concept, but every secular legal or moral code has incorporated it as well. That’s why it’s possible to build an irrefutable intellectual argument against abortion and euthanasia without venturing outside common sense and sequential logic.

Because Christianity is true, it’s supported by a corpus of medical, scientific and legal knowledge to such an extent that it’s no longer necessary to refer to scripture. Purely, or rather seemingly, secular arguments can do the job for themselves.

In this case, Dr Mackereth could merely have cited reams of medical research proving beyond any doubt whatsoever that it’s impossible for a man to become a woman and vice versa. Cutting bits off or sewing them on isn’t going to do the job. Physiology and biology won’t be denied.

Real sexual amorphism does exist, but it affects such a small number of people that it shouldn’t merit public discussion, never mind legislation. The overwhelming majority of today’s transsexuals are disturbed individuals who should be either told to go home and forget that nonsense or, in extreme cases, offered psychiatric help.

Had he taken that line of defence, Dr Mackereth would still have been sacked. Like any other state behemoth, the NHS isn’t about intellectual rigour. It’s about bending people to state control.

But he could have taken it to court and taken his chances. His defence counsel could certainly have brought more tomes of scientific evidence into the courtroom than any other defence could ever boast.

Or perhaps he’d lose the case anyway. A tyrant can forgive any crime, except one against tyranny. And all modern states, regardless of what they call themselves, are tyrannical to an extent unthinkable at any time before Jesus Christ became a superstar.

That’s why Dr Mackereth should count himself lucky. He committed a crime against the modern despotic ethos, yet he’s still at large. Long live liberalism.

A film script has just crossed my desk, and I do think it has great potential. The financing may be hard to get, and critical support is far from assured, but that’s not taking anything away from the sparkling exuberance of the script as such. But judge for yourself.

OPEN ON ROOM SOMEWHERE IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. RENT GIRLS AND BOYS ARE SITTING AROUND OVAL TABLE DISCUSSING THEIR STOCK-IN-TRADE. THROUGHOUT SUBSEQUENT EXCHANGES CAMERA PANS ROOM, CUTTING ON CLOSE-UP OF SPEAKER, THEN REVERSING TO TESSA FOR REACTION SHOTS

TESSA: In an ideal world, I’d like a hard one. But I’ll take a soft one if I have to. Better than none.

BORIS: A soft one is like polishing a turd…

TESSA (DISMISSIVELY): Oh shut up, Boris. You’re the only one here who goes in for coprophilia.

MICHAEL: I don’t know how to take this…

TESSA: The way you always do, Michael. Bend over and take it like a man.

PENNY (WAKING UP): I’ll take a hard one any day. A soft one is useless, worse than none.

TESSA (SARCASTICALLY): Oh good morning, Penny. Glad you could join us. We’re talking about leaving the Brussels home and starting our own. You know, the Common European Home, COM for short? What did you think we were talking about?

PENNY (DISAPPOINTED): Oh that. And I thought…

ANDREA: No one here gives a turd what you thought, Penny. Anyway, all you ever think about is flashing your thunder thighs.

BORIS: And speaking of turds…

TESSA: Oh shut up, Boris. No one here is speaking of turds. We’re talking about keeping our johns well happy after we go freelance. Without getting the Brussels cougar daddy really livid.

ANDREA: I’m with you, Tessa. The soft one will do me. And if you wanted a hard one, that would do me too. COM to think of it, the hard one would do me even better. (GUFFAWS)

MICHAEL: I think I’m speaking for all the rent boys and girls here when I say that we’re all unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly committed to the hard one. But we are all –  just as unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly – committed to Tessa, who prefers the soft one. Sorted.

PENNY: The hard one worked for me, last time I did my TA training…

DAVID: What’s that, TA, Penny? Tits and…

PENNY: Not funny, Dave. That’s Territorial Army, I’ll have you know. I’m an officer there…

BORIS: When it comes to TA, you’re a bloody general, Penny.

TESSA: Penny, either listen or go parade your TA somewhere else.

PENNY (IRONICALLY): Yessir!

TESSA: Anyway, I did Brussels the other day and I know how we can keep them sweet.

DAVID (SCOWLING): I get it. By poaching their johns.

BORIS: And by polishing a turd.

TESSA (IRATE): Oh, shut your gobs, lads, for crying out loud. They won’t mind it all that much if we poach some of their johns, long as they get their cut. You do us right, we’ll do you right, they told me at the home.

LIAM: Why do we need to leave the home then? If we still kick our hard-earned back their way?

TESSA: So they don’t send the boys in. Get it? Or shall I draw you a picture?

DAVID: I don’t get this. Are we leaving COM or what? I thought we were starting our own home, smaller and leaner.

TESSA: You thought right, Dave. A new home run by the old home’s rules. What’s there not to like?

BORIS:  With you as the bloody madam, no doubt. (STABS FINGER INTO MICHAEL’S CHEST) You said I’d get the madam’s job, you turd.

MICHAEL: I did, unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly. But seeing that Tessa here is doing such a sterling job…

LIAM: Not a euro one?

BORIS: No one’s laughing, Liam, you turd.

TESSA: Boris, one more ‘turd’ from you, and you’re back to walking Fleet Street. You follow?

BORIS: Yes, madam.

TESSA: So we’re all in agreement then? We’ll hold on to the soft one and wave it at COM? See if they swallow it?

ANDREA: Oh they will. Especially if they can get freebies at our new small home. And come and go as they like.

BORIS (WITH RESIGNATION, OR RATHER WITHOUT IT): Fine, have your soft one, you bloody turd polishers.

DISSOLVE TO OVAL OFFICE AT WHITE HOUSE.

TRUMP: So I hear the Limeys beat off Switzerland.

PENCE: It’s ‘beat’, sir, not ‘beat off’. And it’s Sweden, not Switzerland.

TRUMP:  Sweden, Switzerland, ain’t no goddam difference. Don’t be like Tessa, Mike, always correcting my English.

PENCE: I think she’s going soft on you, sir.

TRUMP: Not me, you asshole. She’s goin’ soft on COM.

(FADE TO DARK SCREEN WITH CREDITS CRAWL COMING ON)

That question was hilariously asked in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian. It was hilarious because it was so incongruous.

Everybody knows we got – inter alia, oodles of alia – our plumbing, roads, aqueducts, public lavatories, alphabet and much of our thought and legality from the Romans. Even the notion that a meal should have three courses came from them.

However, as any wizened old cynic will tell you, every silver lining has a cloud.

In this case, recent research shows that the Romans are directly responsible for almost two million people dying of tuberculosis every year – not to mention all those millions who have died over the centuries from the time soldiers wore shiny breastplates to the time they started sporting Kevlar vests.

TB first appeared in Africa some 5,000 years ago and there it stayed until the Romans got going in earnest. When the Roman republic became the Roman Empire, TB began to spread like bad taste.

This ought to have given mankind a pause, best used to ponder the downside of globalism and free movement of people.

The upside, otherwise known as the silver lining, is obvious enough and it’s primarily economic. Some will insist it’s cultural as well and England, say, can benefit no end from the resuscitating cultural input of the 100,000 Somalis now resident here.

Without sounding too reactionary for words, let’s just say that the cultural benefits of global human circulation are open to debate. What’s indisputable is that people from exotic countries bring not only couscous and curry, but also viruses and bacteria.

If you look at two other deadly blights that have afflicted Europe, syphilis and Aids, both were spread due to the Europeans’ unquenchable thirst for expansion.

Syphilis, which reduced the number of Schubert lieder and Baudelaire poems (and, on the plus side, shortened Lenin’s life), was by all accounts brought to Europe by a triumphant Columbus expedition.

So it wasn’t just potatoes, chaps: old Christopher’s ships were also laden with some 30 exotic infections, including smallpox, measles, influenza – and of course syphilis.

I’m not suggesting considerations of hygiene should have put a stop to exploration. And, the day after the great US holiday, I won’t dare insinuate that we should have left America undiscovered and let native Americans (previously known as Red Indians) get on with it.

However… well, I won’t develop this qualifier to its logical conclusion. Suffice it to say that, had those 30 diseases stayed where they came from, Europe might have been spared hundreds of millions of deaths.

A curmudgeon like me may be a bit harsh on the Third World, but then so are the statistics. In 2016, the latest year for which such data are available, 10.4 million people contracted TB, and 1.7 million of them died.

More than 95 per cent of all cases occurred in what used to be called underdeveloped countries. (Are they now called ‘differently’ or ‘alternatively’ developed? Hard to keep up with all the progress.)

And Google helpfully informs me that “Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounted for an estimated 69 per cent of all people living with HIV and 70 per cent of all Aids deaths in 2011.”

Such petty concerns shouldn’t be allowed to stop, nor indeed slow down, the march of diversity. But it wouldn’t hurt raising them from time to time, for not raising them may hurt very badly indeed.

Now what was that about ‘the Aids of March’?

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Permanent Secretary of the French Academy and a historian of Russia by trade, has written an article in Le Figaro, lamenting that Russia now sees herself as mainly an Asian power.

Her take on history is that Russia has always been like a pendulum swinging between Europe and Asia, and only the West’s bloody-mindedness has kept her from settling at the European end where she belongs.

To drag Russia back into the European fold, Mme Carrère d’Encausse calls for “searching for paths towards real dialogue”, meaning lifting all sanctions against Russia.

The article is so inane and so ignorant on so many levels that it’s tedious trying to comment on them all. Yet the columnist Igor Yakovenko undertakes just that task in one of those on-line journals that are blocked inside Russia because the great leader doesn’t like them.

Writing with his characteristic brilliance and, alas, equally characteristic shallowness (especially when venturing outside Russia), Mr Yakovenko points out that no such thing as a homogeneous Asia exists, although he believes, incorrectly, that a homogeneous Europe does.

“The civilisational barrier between India and China,” he writes, “is no smaller than that between either country and any country in Europe.

“There are different Asias. Towards which does the Figaro writer think Russia gravitates?

“Europe does exist as a whole. In spite of all the differences among European countries, they all rest on the same foundations of values and culture: Christianity, Greco-Roman heritage and the Latin alphabet. Yet no Asia as a whole exists: different religions, cultures and alphabets.”

It pains me to say this about a writer I hold in high regard, but Mr Yakovenko here displays a characteristic Russian reluctance to hold what he writes to rigorous tests of fact and logic.

(Such intellectual standards were firmly established by the most influential Russian thinker ever, Leo Tolstoy. In addition to novels of unmatched genius, he produced 25 volumes of unmitigated rubbish on every conceivable subject: religion, philosophy, morality, politics, agriculture, education, economics, art. I’d refer you to my book on the subject, God and Man According to Tolstoy, but MacMillan published it as an academic volume and charges astronomical amounts for it.)

The unqualified point about the common European alphabet is bizarre, and Mr Yakovenko wouldn’t have made it had he given it a moment’s thought. For many European countries eschew the Latin script either partially (Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia use both Latin and Cyrillic) or wholly (Bulgaria uses Cyrillic; Greece and Cyprus, Greek).

It’s reasonably clear that to Mr Yakovenko the Europe to which Russia belongs is Western Europe, not Bulgaria and Cyprus. Russia to him, and to most of the Russian intelligentsia, is unquestionably Western European culturally, which means unquestionably European tout court. I wish it were as simple as that.

Actually, the question in the title above has been asked for the better part of four centuries, and most persistently since the reign of Peter I (1682-1725). Every theoretically possible answer has been flogged to death: a) Europe, b) Asia, c) both, d) neither.

Yet even most Russians, and Westerners this side of L’Académie française, still struggle with the answer. So perhaps history should offer a clue.

The accounts of Elizabethan travellers to Russia, such as Giles Fletcher, show they didn’t for a second see the Russians as fellow Europeans. In fact, the territory that’s now Russia was identified on the contemporaneous maps as either Muscovy or, more usually, Tartary.

Peter I set out to change that situation in one fell swoop by, as he put it, “chopping a window into Europe”. Chopping is a rapid, violent action, and that’s how it turned out. For example, at least 300,000 died building Peter’s European capital on a Finnish swamp – his window was chopped through human flesh.

Peter’s turn of phrase was unfortunate in other respects as well. For windows are only used by burglars or Peeping Toms. The phrase “opening a door to Europe” would have been nicer, if probably less accurate.

Peter’s idea was that Russia should learn from Europe the better to dominate it – the way he himself had learned from the Swedish generals he later routed at Poltava.

Yet, like most tyrants, he was a man in a hurry. What had taken Europe millennia to accomplish he wanted to compress into his own lifetime.

Hence saplings of the West were imported wholesale and planted in a Russian soil all too ready to reject them. However, in the arts if not much else, the saplings did grow into luxuriant trees. A century after Peter’s death, Russia took her place side by side with other great European cultures, especially literatures.

Yet there’s more to culture, and infinitely more to civilisation, than just the arts. In fact, I’d say that artistic pursuits are perhaps the least important, if most enjoyable. Sweden, for example, is undeniably a European country even though she has made a rather understated contribution to European arts.

Civilisations differ from one another mainly in the way they see God, man and the world the former created and the latter inhabits. This underlying vision, typically based on the founding religion, determines everything else – and certainly the relationship between the state and the people.

Russia got her Christianity not from the West but from Byzantium, and she got it later than Western European countries did. Now the differences between Western and Eastern confessions may seem trivial to a modern observer, but the doctrinal disagreements begat two civilisations going their divergent ways.

One key disagreement, over filioque, seems to be recondite and trivial. In 1054 the West, as represented by Rome, had declared that the Holy Spirit proceeds equally from the Father and the Son. In turn the East, as represented by Constantinople, insisted that the procession was not double but single, from the Father through the Son.

Yet it’s largely (though far from solely) this seemingly inconsequential difference that explains why political liberty found its natural home in the west, and tyranny in the east.

After all, expressed geometrically, double procession would look like an equilateral triangle. The Father and the Son have true equality underpinned by the Holy Spirit. The three hypostases thus possess what today we call equal rights. Translated to a civilisation based on this concept, the triangular Trinity is likely to be reflected in pluralism.

Conversely, single procession from the Father through the Son implies a straight line, an immutable vertical hierarchy, with the Father sitting at the top. The implications of this went beyond theology.

What was at stake was the kind of kingdom Christians wished to build in this world. Hence the schism of 1054 directly led to the violence of 1204.

That clash between Western and Eastern Christians was linked to the disagreement over filioque, although not just to the face value of the matter. The issue of filioque highlighted the growing chasm between the West and the East, even though the two ostensibly shared the same religion.

In any case, Eastern Christianity had always been under a great influence of other Eastern religions, and consequently of the way of life that sprang from Eastern religiosity. For example it was largely for this reason that Eastern Christianity tended to gravitate towards mysticism, a direct sensory link with God that more or less excluded reason.

It’s also largely because of Eastern influences that various deadly heresies were much more prevalent in the East than in the West. Many of those sprang from the Manichean tendency to regard the physical world as evil.

While a Christian has at his fingertips an immediate link between the absolute grandeur of God and the relativity of earthly life, an exponent of an Eastern religion hasn’t. If for a Christian the absolute is unknowable completely, for, say, a Buddhist the absolute is completely unknowable.

Inextricably linked to the Eastern view of the physical world was relative indifference to tyranny – after all, hard as people tried, there was no getting away from evil on earth anyway. Introspection offered the only escape route, and that road could be taken in any social and political environment.

On the other hand, the West, while obviously accepting that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, still couldn’t be contemptuous about this world. Christianity sought salvation of the world, not from the world.

The notion of a sovereign individual, intrinsically valuable because of his humanity rather than any particular achievement, is uniquely Western, which is to say European. While compromised in Eastern Christianity by both outside influences and Byzantine Caesarism, this notion is alien to all civilisations that actually are Eastern .

In this, regardless of the many significant differences astutely observed by Mr Yakovenko, they are similar, not to say identical.

Eastern mystical, introspective agnosticism, not to mention straightforward Confucian materialism, are as different from Western individualism as the Buddhist transmutation of souls is different from Christian resurrection.

All this determined the core differences in the relationship between man and state. In the West, with minor glitches here and there, that relationship has always been based on inchoate liberties and at least some pluralism.

In the East, tyranny is the congenitally natural form of government. Hence it’s rather facile to cite, as Mr Yakovenko does elsewhere, the example of Japan and the Asian Tigers as paragons of former Eastern tyrannies that saw the light of Western democracy.

Those countries might have borrowed some Western models for purely economic reasons (or else have been forced to do so by a victorious America), but underneath it all their national character survives very nicely. An essential part of it is subjugating the individual to the collective, and the collective to the leader.

Now, just as Russia got her religion from Byzantium, she got her statehood from the Mongols led at the time by Genghis Khan’s grandson. The rule of the Golden Horde continued for centuries, and even Ivan III (d. 1505), nicknamed ‘the gatherer of the Russian lands’ for his attempts to bring all  principalities together under Moscow, continued to pay tributes to the Mongol khan.

If the ideal (alas, no longer the practice) of Western politics is subsidiarity, the devolution of power to the lowest sensible level, Eastern – and therefore Russian – politics is vectored in the opposite direction. Because this is coded into the country’s DNA, Western-style democracy can never succeed there, nor has ever succeeded.

This isn’t to say that Russia can never acquire a veneer of pluralism – Mr Yakovenko is right in saying “If Taiwan and Singapore can do it, why can’t we?” No reason at all, though I for one would be pleasantly surprised if Russia progressed that far.

But veneer is all that could possibly be on offer. Russia can no more adopt the essence of the West (especially at a time when the West itself is destroying it) than a man can change the colour of his eyes.

So, to answer the question in the title above, Russia is Asian in every sense that should count to Mme Carrère d’Encausse – in ways the country interacts with Europe. Russia’s politics, legality, philosophy, view of life, existential instincts, relationship between the state and the people are all, mutatis mutandis, Asian.

But yes, Mr Yakovenko – Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Repin are definitely part of European culture. No one can deny that.

When I said the other day that my pieces would be coming thick and fast, I was foolishly overconfident.

It turns out that, contrary to my misconception, regular writing requires a lot of energy, certainly more than I possess at the moment. So I have to take it easy.

Hence my pieces will be coming in a trickle, rather than a steady stream. But one such trickle will appear tomorrow.