Author: Alexander Boot

They say across the pond that no one has ever gone out of business for underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer. We can say the same about the British voter: no one has lost an election or, more to the point, a referendum for underestimating his intelligence either.

This is lamentable, for an electorate unable to evaluate the facts and make logical inferences makes democracy inoperable: people can’t vote their interests when they can’t understand what their interests are. That makes them easy prey to purveyors of lies, to any tout peddling falsehoods in the secure knowledge that no one will see through them.

The other day, for example, John ‘Edwina’ Major, whose cleverness is only matched by his taste in women, attacked Eurosceptics with spittle-sputtering venom that never looks natural in an Englishman. (Where an Italian screams “Che cazzo!!!”, an Englishman half-whispers “Rather unfortunate, that.” The other way around just doesn’t seem right.)

Sir John now preaches what he practised back in 1990-1992, as Chancellor and PM. Then his commitment to European integration cost the Treasury £3.4 billion in one day, known as Black Wednesday. Now the same genius agitates for more of the same – and people, mentally castrated by our ‘education’, listen.

As if to vindicate this grim assessment of British voters, yesterday’s poll shows that one out of six think Brexit would see them banned from European holidays. It’s no wonder that, terrified at the prospect of holidaying in Blackpool, 88 per cent of that group plan to vote Remain.

The past may not be an unfailing predictor of the future, but it’s the best we’ve got. Hence over 15 per cent have to believe that European resorts had been off limits to the British before Major signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

Yet this isn’t the case. Back in Victorian times the English practically owned such French resorts as Biarritz and Nice. Why do you suppose Nice’s most picturesque walk has been called La Promenade des Anglais since 1860? Because English tourists were banned?

But forget history – most of our school graduates already have: some 64 per cent don’t know the century, never mind the dates, of the First World War. Let’s stay firmly lodged in the present.

A simple extrapolation, one of those the British en masse can no longer make, would suggest that, if EU membership is a prerequisite for European travel, then citizens of countries not blessed with that distinction can’t show their foreign faces on the continent.

No Americans with their loud voices. No Chinese or Japanese with their cameras. Darren and Tracy, when you last lived it up in Ibiffa (Ibiza, as it’s otherwise known) or Costa del Sol, was that your impression? No? Yet none of those nationals carry red EU passports.

Ten per cent of the respondents harboured different fears. They suspected they’d still be able to turn Ibiza and other EU hotspots into hell on earth, but thought it would be too dangerous to do so. The locals would be so cross with Britain for doing the runner that they’d take it out on the tourists.

Chaps, take my word for it: the Europeans don’t bear such grudges. For example, the French love the Germans to bits now, and one would think the memory of 1940 would still rankle. Wayne and Lee, go through your holiday photographs and you’ll see how imbued Europeans are with the spirit of Christian forgiveness.

Remember when you got pissed on cheap beer with shots and wallowed in your own vomit on the dance floor? Remember those chairs you tossed through restaurant windows? Remember copulating with Sharon and Kylie right on the crowded pavement? You got away with it, didn’t you?

So don’t worry about continentals getting overexcited about Brexit. If they don’t mind your vomiting, they won’t mind your voting.

The Remain shills have done their job well: 52 per cent of the respondents say they’re confused about what Brexit would mean to them. Our systematically dumbed down masses confuse easily, and the spivs of all parties know how to exploit this with the sleight of hand to do a riverboat gambler proud.

Even less inert minds might feel inundated with the torrent of scaremongering details dumped on them by the Remain campaign. You show me your figures, I’ll show you mine: which are more believable? For most people, those that appeal to their primordial fears.

Figures, ladies and gentlemen, ought to be at the margins of the debate, if present at all. It’s not about a few pennies on the exchange rate here or there. The real question is so simple that even my hypothetical Darren, Tracy, Wayne, Sharon, Lee and Kylie would have no trouble understanding it.

Do you, Darren, Tracy, Wayne, Sharon, Lee and Kylie, want Britain to be a sovereign nation in charge of her own destiny or a chattel to a giant, monstrously corrupt bureaucracy in whose shenanigans you’ll have no say? Think of this on your flight to Ibiffa.

Secondary schools in Scotland now teach classes in what they call ‘small talk’, but what is in fact the basic skills of humans talking to one another in the human language.

The Scots have realised that the pandemic absence of such skills makes the wee tots unemployable in any other than the most menial tasks, a level field in which they’ll have to compete with Bulgarian migrants.

Allan MacGregor, the chief executive of The Bing Group, which funded the first such course, said his firm was committed to “developing the workforce of tomorrow by helping young people hone the interpersonal skills required to impress and succeed”.

At the risk of offending Mr MacGregor, one could suggest that, if that sentence is any indication, his own verbal skills could do with some honing, but that’s not the point. Neither is the noble purpose of improving young people’s job prospects, though that’s probably part of it.

The point is that the young generation seems to be losing the gift of human speech altogether. If so, then the consequences will be far worse than Anglophone natives losing out to Bulgarian migrants in the economic rough-and-tumble.

In God’s eyes, erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

It would never have occurred to the Old Testament writers that a time would come when inflicting a Babel on the world would be done not by God as a way of unleashing his wrath, but by some men as a way of brutalising others.

Just riding a London bus for half an hour (mine is the 22, which runs through some of the best parts of town) and listening to schoolchildren talk will tell you all you need to know. Our education is cranking out millions of little Mowglis devoid of the gift of human speech.

The situation is far worse than many people imagine. Sure enough, one hears many complaints that youngsters don’t know basic grammar, that they can’t express themselves precisely, never mind elegantly, that they can’t write a paragraph that makes sense. All that is true, but alas it’s not the whole truth.

A large and ever-growing segment of our young generation can’t talk at all, never mind with precision or, God forbid, elegance. They communicate not in coherent sentences, but in grunts, interjections and some encoded semiotic signals. That wastes the advantage of being human, indeed brings their very humanity in doubt, for surely speech is a distinguishing characteristic of our species.

It’s fashionable to blame social networks and other electronic media for this catastrophe, and they do probably have a destructive role to play. Yet my friends and I communicate with one another mostly through electronic media, and sometimes we even share our thoughts with the ether of Facebook – this without losing the ability to converse in complete sentences, even in languages other than our own.

We’re products of a different education, or rather self-education, for fundamentally there’s no other. As children, we were motivated, largely self-motivated, to read increasingly longer books, to discuss increasingly more involved subjects, to ponder increasingly more difficult problems.

Language was essential to such activities, and they were essential to honing and expanding our language. This is elementary to the point of banality, but the ensuing question is neither elementary nor banal: Why do most of today’s youngsters lack such motivation, or self-motivation if you’d rather?

Why do our schools allow them to communicate in feral grunts, which even turns their faces feral? Why do their families let them get away with incarcerating themselves in the tower of Babel? Don’t the schools and families realise the calamitous social and cultural consequences of such animalisation?

Some probably do, but that doesn’t matter. Most schools and, more and more, families are run by the state, and the state is run by a small elite that stands to gain everything and lose nothing from this lamentable situation.

By and large, I subscribe to the cock-up theory of history, not the conspiracy one. But it’s hard not to ascribe wicked designs to the people who systematically turned the education system that was the envy of the world into its laughingstock.

People so dumbed down that they can’t grasp the simplest of concepts, nor even express themselves in anything resembling human speech, are putty in the hands of those who seek unlimited and unquestioned control. Nowadays it’s the absence of knowledge that’s power.

Language is how we perceive and express thoughts. Primitive (not to be confused with simple) language betokens a primitive mind – which is exactly the type of mind that prevents people from seeing that our politicians speak in nothing but solecisms, non sequiturs and lies.

Every governing elite fashions a system of public education that educates the public to accept the governing elite. Our politicians can only stay in their ivory tower if their flock lives in the Tower of Babel. QED.

 

 

Chesterton once described Thomas Hardy’s work as “the village atheist talking to the village idiot”. The columnist Oliver Kamm proves the two can coexist within one breast.

In his Times article he sets out to prove that science and religion are incompatible. He only succeeds in proving that both of them are incompatible with the columnist Oliver Kamm.

I can’t think offhand of many beliefs that are as vulgar as atheism in general and materialism in particular. But gradations do exist, and one finds the vulgar end of vulgarity at the rock-bottom level housing Oliver Kamm. Yet even there, the belief that science and religion are incompatible stands out as the world record holder in vulgarity run riot.

I’ve met no theologians suggesting anything like that, and only a handful of scientists. Typically, champions of this harebrained idea know little about science, less about religion and nothing about epistemology. Kamm is a case in point.

Writing about the chemist Harry Kroto, Kamm writes: “He devoted his life to expanding knowledge. In doing so… he also reduced the scope of religious explanations.”

How? Kroto’s main interest was molecular spectroscopy, and I’m not aware of any conflict between his field and religion.

The two planes of knowledge can’t clash because they don’t intersect in their specific objects of study. The only area where they could overlap is philosophy, but it’s not immediately clear why the two are in a zero sum relationship: more of one meaning less of the other.

If Kamm knows why, he should have explained it. Instead, he just drops his pseudo-profound statement like a sack of dung, proving yet again that there’s no fool like a ponderous fool.

Having dug himself into a hole, Kamm does what fools do – he keeps digging: “But religion, even at its most tolerant, is dogmatic. It holds that truth is revealed. Science is experimental. The coexistence of science and faith doesn’t mean compatibility.”

Truth, which is faith, is indeed revealed, and science, or rather some science, is indeed experimental. Both, however, start with an intuitive premise. A theologian would call it belief in God. A scientist would call it a hypothesis.

Both will then hold their intuition to the test of empirical facts to see if they agree. If they do, knowledge emerges at the other end, but the types of knowledge are different – the two thinkers get different answers because they ask different questions.

The theologian answers such questions as “How can something come out of nothing?”, “What is the purpose of life?”, “What is consciousness?”, “What is man’s role in life?” These are questions natural science can’t answer, nor even ask.

(Incidentally, ‘science’ means only ‘natural science’ to Kamm – as if, say, philosophy weren’t scientific. This is exactly the kind of egregious ignorance one expects from the likes of him.)

Theologians, unless they also happen to be scientists, as many are, seldom busy themselves with the arcana of the material world, leaving this endeavour to natural scientists. They respect the knowledge gained thereby for it expands our understanding of God’s design.

This has always been thus, and the supposedly deadly conflict between religion and science is a figment of vulgar imagination. After all, it wasn’t only great cathedrals but also great universities that owe their existence to Christianity. So, to a great extent, does natural science.

Once mediaeval thinkers had corrected the Greeks’ metaphysical error of not recognising the objective existence of the physical world, they could be certain that nature obeyed universal laws – it was after all created by a universal law-giver.

The scientists’ job was understood as finding out what those laws were, and how they are manifested. This understanding lies at the heart of every presupposition of modern research. (This regardless of whether the scientist has lost or preserved the original faith.) That’s why science eventually became incomparably greater in the West than in any other civilisation – only Christendom possessed and cultivated the essential prerequisites.

Alas, modernity saw the appearance of what I call ‘totalitarian scientist’, and what Ortega y Gasset called ‘the very prototype of the mass-man’: “[He] knows his own minimal corner of the universe quite well. But he is radically ignorant of all the rest. We shall have to call him a learned-ignoramus, which is a serious matter, for it means that he will act in all areas in which he is ignorant not like an ignorant man, but with all the airs of one who is learned in his own special line.”

We see such scientists all around us: Wolpert, Dawkins – and Kamm’s idol Kroto. The venerable late chemist claimed to have three religions: Amnesty Internationalism, atheism, and humour. With all due deference, this vindicates Ortega’s observation: only an ignorant fool can say such things – this regardless of his attainments in some technical areas.

Kamm, however, can’t claim even such attainments. What he does possess is the undiluted smugness and high airs of an ignoramus. Then again, a modern journalist obviously can parlay such qualities into a successful career.

Yet another hole has been punched in our firmament, yet another star fell out. The hole and the rest of our universe have been filled with hysterical panegyrics and never-ending chants of quasi-religious worship.

In fact, Ali symbolised much of what’s worst in America specifically and the modern world generally. He doubtless earned his pugilistic fame, but outside the ring he only earned infamy. Or rather that’s what he would have earned had the world remained sane. As it was, the world was willing to issue him a line of credit, as unlimited as it was unearned.

Even his crude doggerel was hailed as displaying a “talent for verse” (The Times obituary), whereas it fell short of even competence. To wit: “Now Clay swings with a right, what a beautiful swing,// And raises the Bear straight out of the ring…”

Such praises were reverse racism: had a white schoolboy written something like that, he would have been told never to rhyme words again. But for a black man such helpless versification was seen as an achievement: to paraphrase, it’s not how well he did it that was amazing, but that he did it at all.

Similarly, Ali’s cracker-barrel philosophy was praised even by those who ought to have known a vulgar platitude when they heard one. Yet they kept hailing Ali’s aphorisms the way they never hailed, say, La Rochefoucauld’s. And the aphorisms kept coming: “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life…” “A man who has no imagination has no wings…” And so on.

Most of us would be embarrassed to utter such adages, but Ali had a great talent for self-promotion. He knew white ‘liberals’ would swallow anything he threw their way because they detected a kindred soul, someone as consumed by hatred of the traditional West as they were.

If anything gives the lie to the American term ‘liberal’, it’s the leftwing adulation of Muhammad Ali, whose views couldn’t possibly be covered by the notion, no matter how far stretched. In fact, his beliefs were as illiberal as anything ever proclaimed by a Jim Crow enthusiast.

Imagine a white conscientious objector saying “My enemy is the black people, not the Viet Cong.” He would have been tarred and feathered, if he was lucky. Yet, replacing ‘black’ with ‘white’, this is exactly what Ali said when refusing to fight in Vietnam.

Admittedly the parallel isn’t quite exact, for the blacks were indeed victims of shameful discrimination, a blotch on American history that has never quite been expunged. Action causes counteraction, which is why black racism can be understood, if not vindicated. Yet racism it is, and describing it as something consonant with liberal ‘values’ is pathetic. It jibes not with the ‘values’ but with the underlying hatred.

Ali claimed he couldn’t serve in the US army because of the pacifist nature of his religion, Islam. The poor man was obviously unfamiliar with the scripture and history of his new creed. Suffice it to say that pacifism isn’t high on the list of Muslim tenets.

It was even lower on the list of the tenets preached by Elijah Muhammad, the extremist who founded the Nation of Islam sect, the one Ali joined under the influence of another extremist, Malcolm X. In fact, the ‘Black Muslims’, as they were called, openly preached violence as a means of ending racial discrimination.

Ali said, “You want me to go somewhere and fight when you won’t even stand up for my religious beliefs at home.” What did he expect? That Americans, many of whom are white Christians, would stand up for Islam at its most radical, that is at its most violent towards Christians and, in this case, whites in general?

Ali’s conversion to Islam was quite ridiculous. He refused to be called Cassius Clay, which he described as a ‘slave name’. In fact, Muhammad Ali was more of a ‘slave name’ than Clay, for few Africans had ever espoused Islam until forcibly converted to it by Muslim slave traders.

Ali had Irish roots on his mother’s side, but of course that prevented neither him nor his ‘liberal’ admirers from regarding him as fully black. If Obama’s white mother is ignored, then why not the Gradys of Western Ireland, one of whom married a freed American slave? Curiously, the ‘liberals’ seem to subscribe to the same philosophy that the worst racists encapsulate in the rant ‘a drop of tar, all nigger’.

When I first moved from the US to England, a middle-class gentleman suggested that people like Ali were mostly leftwing because they were black. “It’s the other way around,” I replied. “They are black because they are leftwing.”

Indeed, negritude has become more of a political statement than a race. And few things are worse than a race or a religion being used as a veil for political resentments – a tendency Ali personified most vividly.

One hopes that the hysterical adulation will abate in a day or two, and Ali will be remembered for what he was, a great boxer, and not for what he wasn’t, a great man. He was, however, a man for our time – but that’s the time’s fault, not his.

 

 

 

 

 

Regular readers of this space are aware of the deep respect, nay affection, I feel for my friend Dave.

Yes, at weak moments I’ve been known to call him a spiv, a nonentity and a self-serving opportunist. But Dave always takes such criticism in the loving spirit in which it’s offered.

For example, this morning he mournfully nodded agreement when I told him he shouldn’t drink and speak, in public that is. “Dave,” I said, “You know I love you. But even I get confused about some of the things you say. I mean, having a drink or two to loosen up before speaking is fine. But getting sloshed isn’t – people just don’t know what the hell you’re trying to say.”

What caused this rebuke was Dave’s joint appearance with the new London mayor Sadiq Khan in support of Britain becoming a province in the EU, or a gau in the Fourth Reich, if you listen to Dave’s nemesis Boris.

Before taking the microphone, Dave was so agitated he had to steady his nerves by getting several large whiskies down his neck and falling off the wagon in a spectacular fashion. Then he got up, put his arm around Sadiq and called him… no, not the things he was calling him just a couple of weeks ago.

Then Dave for all intents and purposes described Sadiq as a supporter of Islamic State and a crypto-terrorist. Since at that time he was, for once, sober, Dave didn’t quite use those words, but he might as well have done.

Dave did say during PM’s questions that he “was concerned about Labour’s candidate as mayor of London who has appeared again and again and again” on stage hand in hand with radical imam Suliman Gani.

Actually he missed a trick there, for he should have repeated ‘again’ nine times, once for each such Sadiq-Suliman joint effort. Dave then co-opted Jeremy Corbyn for support, saying that even “the leader of the Labour party is saying it is disgraceful”.

So far so good, even though Dave’s stone-sober animadversions were met with shouts of “Racist!!!” coming from his fellow parliamentarians across the aisle. But then yesterday he spoke after having a few (or more than a few, truth be told), and ended up confusing everyone, me included.

Sadiq, said Dave, “is a proud Muslim, a proud Brit and a proud Londoner” and a great politician – this in spite of being “the son of a bus driver” and not, like Dave himself, “the son of a stockbroker”. To be fair, Dave didn’t actually say ‘in spite of’, but that’s how it came out.

That sort of class oneupmanship didn’t go over big with most people, but I actually didn’t mind it all that much. Perhaps that’s because, as Dave’s drinking mate, I was used to that sort of thing. When in his cups, Dave routinely talks about “those bloody jumped-up proles” who want to “run the show” in spite of being “common as muck”. But I did put my logical hat on and tried to reconcile Dave’s two assessments of Sadiq a fortnight apart.

For one thing, Dave clearly doesn’t think there’s any contradiction in being both a proud Muslim and a terrorist sympathiser. In fact, he probably feels that the latter is a natural adjunct to the former, even though Dave would have to get really whacked out of his mind (“pissed as a fart”, as he refers to extreme inebriation) to put it in so many words.

Nor does he any longer seem to think there’s anything wrong about cheering for Islamic State. He implied as much by sharing a platform with Sadiq who in his turn had shared it with crazed imams. This, even though just a fortnight ago Dave described Sadiq’s actions as being practically tantamount to being a terrorist himself, if by one remove.

Or even if there is a teensy-weensy bit wrong about being a terrorist sympathiser, it’s only a small failing, unnoticeable against the backdrop of the urgent imperative to turn Britain into a gau of the Fourth Reich, as my friend Boris puts it.

This is one possible interpretation of Dave’s about-face but, alas, not the only one. In fact, if I didn’t know my friend for a man of high principle and unimpeachable integrity, I’d think he is, well, all the things I sometimes call him at weak moments, those I mentioned in the first paragraph.

As it is, I’ll only repeat my words of avuncular advice: Dave, we’re none of us members of the Temperance League. We all like a drink, but for God’s sake, man, drinking and public speaking don’t mix. So next time stay sober and decide in advance whether a proud Muslim is the same as a terrorist sympathiser – or not quite.

One knows a rotten idea by the consistent inanity of arguments for it. The EU passes this test: every argument in its favour is either mendacious or inane.

The speaker’s credentials don’t matter: federasty is a cauldron in which academics, ignoramuses and academic ignoramuses are all boiled together to produce a uniformly foul mess. True to form, neoconservatives throw themselves in as one of the less savoury ingredients.

Neoconservatives are making steady inroads on American politics, in foreign policy at least. And their British Parteigenossen tropistically reach towards the light shining out of certain outlets in the body of US neoconservatism.

This brings us to Niall Ferguson. Now ensconced at Harvard, he has discovered that neoconservatism pays, and never mind intellectual credibility. Ferguson never does, which is why he commits gross rhetorical fallacies in every piece he writes. His article Fog in Channel: Brexiteers Isolated from Britain’s Duty to Save Europe is a case in point.

True to his internationalist neocon allegiance, Ferguson has to uphold every article of EU faith. Intellectual probity matters to him no more than it did to Lenin, Trotsky and his other fellow internationalists.

Hence he relies on rhetorical fallacies, such as argumentum ad populum: the belief that a proposition is true because many people support it. Thus Ferguson has taken the roll call of “leading historians” and found out that more of them support Remain. Specifically, “70 historians gathered at 11 Downing Street to affirm their support for EU membership.”

There’s a remote possibility that historians who think differently weren’t invited to the home of Dave’s fellow Euro-tout – but Ferguson forges right ahead, undeterred by elementary demands of intellectual honesty.

“US administrations since the heyday of Henry Kissinger have consistently favoured UK membership in the EU” is another version of argumentum ad populum, this time with a sycophantic twist. This may be true. So what?

Under the influence of neocon gurus, US foreign policy has indeed been growing more internationalist. The ultimate ideal seems to be a single global government, within which the US will call the shots. (For details, see my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick.)

Recent US administrations may indeed have believed that such a development would be in American interests, but Ferguson’s argument is meaningless – unless of course he thinks, as he probably does, that our interests are always identical with American ones.

Ferguson also has the gall to drag in the great late thinker R.G. Collingwood who, he says, “would dismiss the arguments for Brexit”. Either Ferguson hasn’t read Collingwood properly or he didn’t understand what he read. In fact, Collingwood regarded self-government as an ironclad requirement for society.

Then comes the clincher: “the president of the United States… advised against Brexit”. This version of argumentum ad populum relies on the universal agreement that Barack Hussein is blessed with near-papal infallibility. Since little in his record affirms the belief that Obama is always right, this is yet another infantile rhetorical fallacy.

Then the question of European security comes up and, as we know, only Brussels stands between us and world catastrophe. However, “the Brexiteers insist that the EU is at best irrelevant: Nato is the key institution.”

This Brexiteer insists on just that, and I anxiously await persuasive arguments proving I’m wrong. Alas, none is forthcoming: to Ferguson this insistence is so self-evidently wrong that it doesn’t merit discussion.

This isn’t the only thing that goes without saying: “No one can seriously deny that the process of European integration has brought an end to centuries of Franco-German conflict and has settled the German question for good.”

Have you noticed how those who preach Trotskyist ideas also use Trotskyist style? “No one can seriously deny…” and that’s that. QED. If you dare deny, you aren’t serious.

An intellectually honest person is congenitally on guard against such phrases as ‘self-evident’, ‘it is obvious that…’, ‘it goes without saying that…’, ‘needless to say…’. He knows that they are either a sign of intellectual laziness or, worse, an attempt to dupe the gullible with falsehoods.

What “settled the German question for good” is the military castration imposed on Germany by the victorious allies in 1945 and since then enforced by Nato. France, whose belonging to the victorious alliance wasn’t entirely unequivocal, is consequently stronger than Germany militarily, if weaker in every other respect.

Anticipating this situation, Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats concocted at the end of the war plans for what now is called the EU. And true enough, another Franco-Prussian war doesn’t seem to be on the cards.

But Ferguson here repeats another fallacy one hears in France a lot, where they credit the EU with the post-1945 peace in Europe. What they mean by this is peace between France and Germany – but surely a British historian can have a broader perspective? Surely he has heard of a dozen bloody conflicts in other European countries? Surely he must realise there’s more to Europe than just France and Germany?

Not when he’s a neocon, he mustn’t. Neocons are true to their Trotskyist DNA: they’ll say anything to promote their political objectives. Ferguson is no exception, which is most lamentable in a scholar.

 

The Kopelman Quartet playing Haydn and Shostakovich at Wigmore Hall this morning was cause for both joy and melancholy.

The joy came from the performance itself, evoking fond memories of great quartets of yesteryear, such as the Alban Berg and the Borodin (in which Mikhail Kopelman was first violin for 20 years).

It’s not my intention to attempt a review here – suffice it to say that the art of musical performance is dying under the blows raining on it from musical nonentities peddled like any other ‘celebrities’ by concert organisers and record executives who know little about music, and care even less. But it’s not quite dead yet, and stubborn holdouts like the Kopelman Quartet remind us of its past grandeur.

This was by far the best chamber recital I’ve heard in at least a decade, and for once it deserved a standing ovation. But it didn’t get one, and not because the audience didn’t appreciate the playing. They did, and they clapped their palms raw.

No, the reason for no standing ovation was more medical than aesthetic. I don’t know how to put this without coming across as crassly insensitive, but most people in the audience would have had difficulty getting up on their feet.

I’m 68 years old, and I don’t often feel young these days. But I did this morning, realising I was at least 10 years under the median age of my fellow listeners. Most of them, those whose locomotion was unassisted by Zimmer frames, could hardly reach their seats, and those contraptions averaged more than one per row of seats.

Actuarial statistics being what they are, I feared at least one coronary event was likely, somewhere between Shostakovich’s slow-movement recitative and the waltz in the finale. The hope loomed large in my mind that a defibrillator-equipped cardiac arrest unit was standing by somewhere backstage.

Mercifully my macabre fears weren’t realised. Having clapped themselves out, the young at heart courageously drove their Zimmer frames down the aisle, in the general direction of the free glasses of sherry on offer. A defibrillator, even if available, wasn’t called into action. I was happy for my fellow listeners, but also sad.

Now I’ve mentioned actuarial statistics, chances are that, by the time I reach the median age of today’s audience, most of them will no longer be with us. Who, I wonder, will flock to Wigmore Hall then? Where will the audiences come from?

In the past, a recital of this calibre would have been attended by swarms of young people, many of them conservatory students. This morning I didn’t espy a single youngster with (or even without) a violinist’s callus on the left side of his neck.

This could have been a free master class for them, and yet they chose to skip it. Perhaps they realise that learning to play their instruments with depth and sensitivity isn’t what’s going to make or break their careers. In fact, judging by the level of today’s young musicians, such qualities would disqualify them from success.

Music is indeed a dying art (you understand I’m not talking here about vile, electronically enhanced pop excretions), and it’s running out not only of real musicians but also of real audiences. By the looks of it, before long it’ll run out of audiences, full stop.

Granted, the hall demographics change noticeably when a giftless celebrity like Lang Lang is playing at the South Bank or the Barbican. One does see many younger people then, which makes one even sadder.

That those youngsters are prepared to pay king’s ransom to hear yet another nonentity raping music, while neglecting to attend performances by true artists like the Kopelman Quartet, shows that the situation is even worse than I think.

These pimply youths join forces with greedy musical businessmen to kill music by vulgarisation – to encourage an aesthetic fusion between music and pop. The same type of people play both, because the same type of people like to listen to both – and don’t really know the difference between them.

In our affection for free enterprise we’ve lost the erstwhile understanding that the highest manifestations of the human spirit can’t be flogged like tubes of toothpaste. Very little great music has ever been written (or performed) to appeal to a wide public voting with their cash at the box office.

Businesses must function according to market laws, but real culture can’t. If it starts doing so, it stops being high culture – and then it descends to the lowest possible level on its way to extinction.

Great music has always been produced for few by fewer. Alas, aristocratic patronage has gone the way of aristocratic society – and I’ll leave you with this melancholy thought.

Nuclear weapons are designed to kill people. Guns are made to achieve the same purpose. So are cannon. So are bayonets. So are tanks. So are grenades. So are poison gases.

Between 1939 and 1945, 60 million people were killed in the most sanguinary conflict the world has known so far.

Of those, only about 200,000 were killed by nuclear weapons.

On either side of that conflict, Russian and Chinese communists murdered 120 million, all with antediluvian weapons. Before they got going, another 17-20 million had been killed in the First World War – yet Rutherford hadn’t yet got around to splitting the atom.

Since those 200,000 were killed with atom bombs, millions more have been murdered by evil men – yet not one person died courtesy of Rutherford’s achievement.

Moreover, the killing rate has slowed down appreciably – this in spite of the Soviet Union’s aggressive designs. The Soviets embarked on an unprecedented military build-up culminating in the 1970s, when they had 50,000 tanks poised to pounce.

Western European armies were terribly outgunned in personnel strength and every weapon category. One would have thought that the Soviet juggernaut could easily have rolled all the way to the Atlantic – but it didn’t.

What prevented the Soviets from acting in character was NATO’s nuclear umbrella. The Soviets realised that any attempt at conquest would be thwarted by a cataclysmic response. So they thought better of it.

Military experts calculate that storming Japan’s islands one by one in 1945 would have cost between 1 and 1.5 million American lives, and many more Japanese ones. Yet the killing of those 200,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki obviated the need for any such action.

How many millions would have died had the Soviets not been kept in check by nuclear weapons? I don’t know. But many – you can count on that.

So yes, nuclear weapons can kill millions of people with lightning speed and brutal efficacy. But, as my simple calculations show, they can also save millions of lives. Whether they kill or save depends on who uses them, and for what purpose.

To paraphrase the NRA slogan, nuclear weapons don’t kill people. People kill people. Weapons are inanimate and therefore amoral. Like a handgun or a knife, nuclear weapons can serve a wicked purpose when in bad hands and a noble purpose when in good ones.

This is but a preface to a few words about the revolting speech delivered by President Obama at Hiroshima.

Barrack Hussein shares the subversive view held by the Left everywhere. He thinks that somehow nuclear weapons are immoral in se, regardless of who uses them and why.

The Left hold this view for precisely the same reason I hold the opposite one: I’m happy that the NATO nuclear umbrella protected (and continues to protect) Europe from Soviet aggression and, possibly, the world from another all-out war, and they are not.

If queried about this, Obama and other lefties will make bien pensant pacifist noises, most of them doubtless sincere in their revulsion at mass carnage. But the warm spot reserved in their hearts for the communist cause never quite goes cold. Most probably don’t think along those lines in so many words, but in their viscera they still see the USSR as a factor of progress.

The West, on the other hand, represents everything they detest – and true enough, much about it is detestable. The West is misguided, often wrong, frequently immoral, bent on its own destruction, overly materialistic, not sufficiently spiritual – well, you know the mantra as well as I do.

Yes, the West is all those things, but there’s one thing it isn’t: satanic. Yet this modifier fits assorted enemies of the West like a glove. Realising that in this world we’re not blessed with absolute good, we must strive to achieve the next best thing: prevent absolute evil.

I’m sorry to think in such primitive binary terms, but sometimes one has to, when choosing which side to support. Whatever the Left say about this, they lean towards the wrong side, and the wrong side has always exploited this leaning.

At the time when the Soviets were cranking out nuclear weapons like proverbial hotcakes, they masterminded and financed a global anti-nuke campaign aimed against the West. With the evil cunning of predatory beasts, they realised that the Western Left would play along – and they were right.

The Soviet Union is no more, though it has come back in a different, possibly more dangerous, guise. But it succeeded in corrupting much of the West into believing that nuclear weapons are inherently evil – even when used by good men to defend themselves. The USSR’s successors are continuing this effort, but only halfheartedly.

They know the Left side of the West can do the job all by itself, and Barack Hussein didn’t disappoint. “We must have the courage,” he said, “to escape the logic of fear and pursue the world without [nuclear weapons]”.

The courage, in other words, to submit meekly when Putin’s 15,000 tanks sweep across the Plains and overrun the 1,500 tanks NATO has at its disposal. This is ‘the logic of fear’ I’m not prepared to escape. And I’m terrified that the West’s great power is led by such a creature.

 

 

 

 

Not only that – Dave also wishes he could destroy Britain’s economy, impoverish us all, reduce our pension funds by £32,000 (another precise figure from the Treasury), drive every foreign business out, undermine the City, reduce the value of our houses, destroy the NHS and the Premier League, degrade the pound to the level of the yen, prevent us from travelling on the continent, downgrade our ability to combat terrorism and espionage.

All such calamities will, according to Dave’s documented statements, will either definitely follow Brexit or are extremely likely to do so. Yet, in spite of such looming catastrophes, he dearly wishes Britain could leave the EU, and only his heightened sense of responsibility prevents him from acting on his innermost convictions.

Such is the only possible inference from the statements made by people who are privy to Dave’s private thoughts. Thus, for example, Steve Hilton, Dave’s close friend and the mastermind behind his rise to power:

“If he was a member of the public, or a backbench MP or a junior minister or even a Cabinet minister, I am certain that he would be for Leave. That’s his whole instinct. That’s who he is.”

Boris Johnson, a fellow Etonian who knows Dave well, concurs: “That sounds to me like an accurate and fair reflection.”

Hold on a second, let me see if I’ve got it right. Dave is the kind of man whose best instincts are to plunge Britain and the rest of the world into a nuclear holocaust, something that, according to his public statements, would follow Brexit with the certainty of night following day.

Now I’ve been known to use uncomplimentary terms to describe Dave. I’ve mocked his intellect, derided his moral sense (or rather the absence thereof), called him a spiv, nincompoop, self-server and many other things stopping just short of obscenity. But it has never occurred even to me to suggest that Dave harbours Dr Strangelove ambitions to reduce the world to radioactive dust.

And even barring such a cataclysm, which Dave thinks is only likely, rather than guaranteed, he’s supposed to cherish the thought of reducing his native country to pathetic penury, leaving her downtrodden populace at the mercy of terrorists, spies and Albanian immigrants.

In other words, Messrs Hilton and Johnson believe that at heart Dave is the kind of monster compared to whom Kim Jong-un is a closet humanitarian trying to get in touch with his feminine side. Such is the only logical interpretation of their statements.

However, relentless logic must fall silent whenever politicians speak. Since all three parties involved in erecting this intellectual structure are indeed politicians, their statements must be seen from a different angle, one that precludes any presumption of veracity.

Viewed from that angle, the picture becomes crystal clear. Dave is neither a Eurosceptic nor a Eurocrat. His inner convictions incline towards neither end because he has no inner convictions. Or rather he has one: an unswerving commitment to holding on to power for as long as possible, paving the way to money, fame and influence thereafter. He doesn’t call himself ‘heir to Blair’ for nothing.

Messrs Hilton and Johnson either don’t realise this, in which case they are fools. Or else they do realise it, but say what they say anyway for personal political gain, in which case they are knaves. One way or the other, all three parties act according to type.

Dave will confidently predict the plagues of Egypt befalling Britain as a result of Brexit because he feels this is what it takes at the moment to achieve the self-serving goals of his life. And Messrs Hilton and Johnson will mouth any obvious drivel because their goals call for it.

The picture is indeed clear, and it’s gruesome. The public is getting the distinct impression that both campaigns are being led by equally dishonest nonentities, with both lacking men of integrity and intellect at the helm. ‘The plague on both your houses’ will be a natural reaction and, given that, the reluctance to change the status quo will prevail.

Hence the prominence of the likes of Messrs Hilton and Johnson in the Leave campaign almost guarantees its defeat. You don’t really think that most British voters are capable of thinking for themselves, do you?

Such melancholy conclusions seem to follow ineluctably from the juxtaposition of Cameron’s macabre scare mongering and Messrs Hilton’s and Johnson’s insane comments on Dave’s secret cravings. If other conclusions are possible, I’d like to know what they are.

 

 

 

 

The other day I was talking to a chap who feels about the EU the way a tree feels about dogs, and for pretty much the same reasons.

He said regretfully that our side would probably lose the referendum – because the British people are too conservative to want to change things.

Now, while we agree in our assessment of the EU, we diverge in our understanding of conservatism. I’d say that a conservative would be more likely to support a proven statehood that has been around for centuries than one that has existed, in historical terms, for five minutes. Someone who opts for the latter is rather the opposite of a conservative – unless he misunderstands the term.

Any reasonable understanding of conservatism has to start with the question of what it is that we’re trying to conserve. And there’s the rub, as a famous English conservative once put it.

For different nations define political conservatism differently because their traditions vary. Thus the Russians would use the term to describe Stalinism, the French don’t really use it all, whereas the Americans use it to denote economic libertarianism, which has something to do with conservatism but not much.

One can understand their terminological difficulties. Speaking specifically about political conservatism, there’s little in the Russian political tradition that’s worth conserving. And what would a French conservative wish to conserve? The pernicious Enlightenment tautology of liberté, égalité, fraternité? And would an American political conservative wish to conserve the pernicious Enlightenment falsehood of all men being created equal?

It’s no wonder the term ‘conservatism’ is nonexistent in France and misused in America. Let’s just say that the term seems to lack a universal, one size fits all, definition.

However, at the risk of being thought presumptuous for trying to succeed where others have failed, I’d like to offer what to me sounds like the only unassailable definition of a Western conservative: he who wishes to preserve the political, cultural, religious and social heritage of Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom.

Given this understanding of conservatism, the British political variety presents few challenges of definition – it practically defines itself. If the overall quest is to conserve the heritage of Christendom, including its political manifestations, then traditional (as distinct from today’s) Toryism is coextensive with my definition.

The triad of ‘God, king and country’ may be as primitive as all slogans tend to be, but it’s more precise than most, encapsulating neatly the essence of British conservatism, both its transcendent inspiration and political expression.

I’d suggest that constitutional monarchy (first achieved and then debauched in England) underpinned by qualified franchise is the only method of government that truly reflects the political essence of Christendom. This theoretical postulate has received ample empirical proof in the history of the UK and, before it, England.

A monarch ruling by divine right or some similar claim to legitimacy represents the transcendent aspect of such a system, a factor of constancy linking generations past, present and future on a timeline demarcated by Creation at one end and the Second Coming at the other.

At the same time, an elected parliament is a temporal institution translating the people’s interests into political action and preventing the monarch from becoming a despot. To achieve a workable balance, Parliament’s power must be real but limited, the monarch’s power limited but real, and they should both feel accountable to the institution that is itself accountable to God only.

It’s true enough that this system, as close to ideal as is achievable in this world, has been well-nigh destroyed in its traditional native habitat. But every British conservative must lament this situation and do what he can to reverse it.

I’d be so bold as to insist that no Englishman who claims to be a conservative in any other sense can possibly be anything like what he claims. Specifically, no true conservative can possibly support the wicked fly-by-night contrivance that goes by the name of European Union.

The EU simply doesn’t fit: it hasn’t been historically proven, it has no legitimising divine authority, it takes neither people’s wishes nor – more important – their interests into account, it has no safeguards against despotism, it has no balance of power. In other words, it’s everything a conservative should abhor.

Yes, it’s likely that the British will vote the wrong way on 23 June. But they’ll do so not because they’re conservative but because they’ve been corrupted by almost a century’s worth of socialist – which is to say anti-conservative – propaganda. This effort is now at its peak, and it’s likely to succeed because the British no longer have the mind or the education to understand even the most basic of political realities.

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” said Churchill, and this adage is a hundred times more accurate today than it was when he said it. Hence, if the British vote Remain, it’ll be not because they’re conservative but because they’ve been – and are being – corrupted and dumbed down.

I’m glad we’ve sorted this out: nothing destroys serious debate as much as failure to agree on the fundamental terms.