Author: Alexander Boot

People often talk about one glance being all it took. In my own modest experience a second glance was usually necessary, this one at the girl’s face.

No such dawdling with Athens: I instantly loved what I saw. And instantly regretted I had been reluctant to come here all these years.

Too many people told me Athens was dirty, chaotic, smelly and rather Third World. Actually it’s no dirtier or smellier than any major city, although chaotic it undeniably is. As to being Third World, perhaps. So much the better.

The First World has been neutered by modernity, dragged into uniformity, denatured and deodorised into vapid commercialised mediocrity, its formerly great cities turned into lifeless pictures drawn by numbers for the delectation of tourists.

Athens must depend on tourists for its sustenance, but it’s refreshingly contemptuous of them, as if saying, “Fine, I’ll take your money. But don’t expect special privileges in return.”

Now I don’t suffer from the journalistic hubris of claiming gnostic insights on the basis of a flying visit. Hence I can only offer one smitten man’s fleeting, dishevelled observations.

The first thing I loved about Athens is its palette. None of the dark, heavy grimness of some northern cities: Athens never moves too far from white, and then only in the direction of either pink or custard.

Endearing signs of third-worldliness are everywhere. One immediately realises that no evaluation of Athens can be squeezed into the framework built on the experience of other Mediterranean cities. It’s unlike any of them.

For one thing, one would look in vain for the demarcation between the right and wrong sides of the track: it doesn’t exist. Compared to, say, Barcelona or Genoa, all of Athens is the wrong side of the tracks.

Oh, to be sure, one finds the odd pocket of carefully combed gentility here and there – but invariably in the vicinity of government buildings, such as the President’s residence or immediately to the southeast of the Acropolis.

The rest of it is densely covered in graffiti, resembling in style and spread those adorning the N train on the New York subway of my youth. Some convey cogent messages, usually those of sexual intercourse with either police or the EU; most are purely decorative.

Crossing the street in Athens is all one’s life is worth. Pedestrians are given no more than 10 seconds to cross even the widest avenues and, if you lose a precious second to indecision, it’s your hard luck. Cars will rush in at twice the posted speed limit, and woe betide the ditherer.

This is another reminder that one is in the Third World: drivers assume social ascendancy over walkers, for until recently only the very few could afford cars. However, provided one survives the first encounter with a pedestrian crossing, survival skills don’t take long to develop.

One detects that feminism hasn’t quite reached Athens, which is another appealing sign of third-worldliness. Cafés are full of men well below pensionable age playing cards or backgammon, with no women any nearer than the old lady bringing them another litre of house red (typically €5).

Some of these chaps must be married, so what are their wives doing while they deal the next hand? Well, the usual things: working, looking after the house and children, carrying heavy bags. I mean, if women don’t do those things, they won’t get done, will they?

Wine and food are functionally different in Athens, compared to, say, France or Italy. The French build their meals around great wines. Italians cook great food and find wines to match. Both strive for perfection, while Athenians are just out to have a good time and shout ‘opa!’ to the sound of ubiquitous Sirtaki music.

On the first night, I ordered a pricey bottle and then, old hand that I am, a glass of house red for comparison. Tasting no appreciable difference, I’ve since stuck to the cheap stuff.

And the food? Well, I’ll give you a hint: they don’t call the country Greece for nothing. Combined with the rotgut, Greek fare is instant heartburn for a neophyte and, one suspects, even for those who consume it every day. But no one minds: Athenian men, ideally stag, are out to enjoy one another’s company: the food and drink are just there to oil the wheels.

Yes, Athens is chaotic, but so is life. The city used to be considerably less chaotic than life, a long time ago. Some 2,500 years ago rigorous intellectual discipline came to Greece, but has since left.

That it was there is evident not just from their philosophy but also the surviving architecture. No extemporising, no deviation from strictly enforced norms: straight lines, right angles, all capitals on every column in the same building exactly identical. Not for the ancient Greeks the playful licence afforded Gothic builders: just look at the capitals in any French cathedral and see if you find two identical ones.

The discipline of ancient Greece didn’t outlive ancient Greece. First the Christians took over with their accent on the individual, alien to the public-spirited Hellenes. Then the Muslims bossed the country for 400 years. Then modernity smashed its way in, now fronted by the EU (whose sick mind decided that Athens and Berlin belong in the same state?).

As a result, the Greeks have lost a sense of direction. They no longer know what the purpose of life is, but so much more are they determined to enjoy its process. The architecture of Athens says all this loud and clear.

By the looks of it, no construction happened in the city between 200 BC and the nineteenth century AD. When it resumed, chaos prevailed, but it’s a delightful chaos.

No two houses are the same, but somehow they all look similar. The joyous palette pulls them together, and little variation of height. The streets convey the message of modern free-for-all, but not without hinting at classicist uniformity, long since gone.

Life is bustling everywhere, with women hurrying about their business without seeming to mind being shunned by the men. Actually, looking at Athenian womankind, one can’t really blame the men for their androcentricity.

One doesn’t see too many graces about, and today’s Helens mostly have faces that could sink a thousand ships. But the sexes must come together at some point, for one sees a lot of prams pushed along by women whose husbands attend to the serious business of backgammon.

Another form of life that’s in abundance is stray cats, millions of them – those toms definitely don’t shun their females. Now I’ve seen stray cats before, but never in such numbers, nor so well-fed. These creatures are all the size of overfed cocker spaniels, which spells bad news for the pigeon population.

Somehow the contrast between the old and the new isn’t as annoying as it is in other places. Possibly that’s because the old and the new are in Athens separated by so many centuries, indeed so many civilisations, that they don’t really clash. Or else the gushing life of Athens is so appealing that one is reluctant to judge.

A few yards from the Agora, still majestic in its ruinous state, there’s a shop called JIMMYS TATTOOS. I was appalled: the people who invented the word apostrophe have forgotten how to use it. But then the sign wasn’t in their mother tongue.

There are mercifully few signs in English anywhere, some quite comic. For example, a rip-off restaurant in the main square strikes a blow for truth in advertising by calling itself TRAP, while a bar next door to my hotel honestly refers to itself as DIVE.

Whenever I return from my travels, my friend Tony asks a lapidary question: Could you live there? Anticipating the same enquiry about Athens, the answer is, probably not. But I wish I could.

 

 

 

The stones of cities talk. They tell stories – of great men who trod their pavements; their prophets, saints and villains; the blood that flowed into their drains; civilisations born, dead or forever alive; the trees of great cultures growing to luxuriant splendour only then to shed their leaves one by one.

The stones of Athens talk louder than just about anywhere in Europe. And they aren’t the only ones who do the talking.

This I discovered the other day when asking the concierge at our hotel what, apart from the Acropolis, he’d recommend we see. This led to a quarter-hour’s discussion of the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, something one seldom expects to have with hotel staff.

The young man strongly advised us to steer clear of Aristotle’s Lyceum in favour of the groves of Plato’s Academy – even though the proverbial groves are all that remains of it. This because Aristotle was the much inferior philosopher to begin with, even before he was eternally compromised by his subsequent, if unwitting, incorporation into Christianity by Aquinas and other scholastic subversives.

Christianity, he explained, took the great Hellenic civilisation, squeezed it dry, drank up the juices and then discarded it like used-up lemon halves. Yes, but… I objected meekly and with an ingratiating smile. Can’t one say that by incorporating first Plato and then Aristotle into its own philosophy, Christianity gave them a new life? Take Neo-Platonism, for example…

My interlocutor refused to take Neo-Platonism even as an example. The less said about that profanation, that sacrilege, that vulgarisation, the better. His own smile was pleasant but far from ingratiating.

I must say that in all my travels I’ve never before encountered a Platonist concierge, nor one who could direct me towards the ruins of one particular philosophical school in preference to another. One more readily expects directions to a restaurant that gives the concierge a kick-back (“Just tell them Mario sent you”), a shopping district or, if one is so inclined, a brothel.

Thus inspired by the realisation that Athens is different, we did what every tourist does first: climb Acropolis Hill, all the way up to the Parthenon, followed by a descent to the Agora and then another, shorter, climb to Pnyx Hill.

Few stones in the world talk as eloquently, but they do need an interpreter or perhaps a language teacher, for not many people these days understand stone. Looking at the throng of tourists attacking the Hill, most of them young and showing few signs of a cultured family background, one could see that the language of those stones was, well, Greek to them.

True enough, each highlight along the way is accompanied by a board with a short write-up about the place. But the information provided is exclusively archaeological, structural and architectural. Talking to cultural innocents, the boards leave their virginity intact.

Who cares when and how the Theatre of Dionysus was dug up? Who cares whether the columns of the Parthenon are Doric, Ionic or Corinthian? Oh some people do, as they should. But, given the little space available, wouldn’t it be better to tell them that the theatre is where Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes premiered their plays? Or, at the risk of incurring the concierge’s wrath, that St Paul spoke on the Hill?

It’s nice to know the exact dimensions of the dais on Pnyx Hill, but wouldn’t it be more useful to tell the visiting children (chronological or cultural) that Pericles and Demosthenes delivered their orations from there?

In the Agora every little stone is accompanied by recondite information about technical matters, with nary a word about what happened there. Chaps, this was every Athenian’s real home, with his house merely, and not invariably, his bedroom.

This is where they all rushed every morning to discuss, and determine, the future of the city. This is where Socrates, old and looking half-mad, would accost strangers with silly and irrelevant questions – you know, the kind that lay the foundation of Western thought.

Unfortunately, the contemporaneous powers-that-be realised that the questions weren’t silly and irrelevant, that they indeed were laying the foundation of the kind of thought that was at odds with Athenian democracy.

Democracy, Athenian, modern or any other, has no place for sages mouthing nasty things about it. So the democrats locked Socrates up in prison – and there it is, a caged hole cut into the rock of Pnyx Hill. It’s mercifully identified as Socrates’s dungeon, though no information is provided of why he was put there – or subsequently killed.

I would have been tempted to include the words ‘first great victim of democratic tyranny’, or, as a minimum, to say that Socrates’s friends offered to spring him on the eve of his enforced suicide, but he refused as a matter of honour, and not to give his prosecutors the satisfaction of such an implicit admission of guilt. Wouldn’t it have made a more interesting story than structural information?

Perhaps it wouldn’t. As the concierge told me mournfully, even Greek children are nowadays only told that their heritage is great, without explaining what makes it so. Socrates was charged with perverting the minds of the young; his accusers’ typological descendants succeed in keeping those minds perpetually empty.

So the stones keep silent. The Acropolis and its environs are merely tourist attractions, a sort of vaguely historical Disneyland, minus the rides. An opportunity missed, yet another generation lost.

(Tomorrow I’ll tell you of my impressions of the city itself, which I love.)

 

 

 

Between 1965 and now British education slid downhill from being the envy of the world to becoming its laughingstock.

The pre-1965 11-plus exams would confound most of today’s 18-year-olds, including many entering university. Even basic literacy is nowadays seen as an achievement, with some 80 per cent of school leavers having reading problems. Subtracting 1/3 from 1/2 is seen as a pie in the sky, and being able to figure out change in a shop as a sign of uncanny talent.

Why? In a word, democracy.

Or rather modern democracy of one-man-one-vote raised to an absolute and transferred into all areas, including those that in a sane society should have nothing to do with politics. Such as education.

Our crypto-republic is confirming an ineluctable law of nature: all modern republics gravitate towards democracy, all democracies gravitate towards ideological egalitarianism. And, Midas in reverse, egalitarianism turns to shambles everything it touches.

Those 11-plus exams separated academically promising children from those who were better suited to more practical careers. The former went to grammar schools (superior to most of today’s universities), the latter to secondary moderns (superior to most of today’s comprehensives). Thus 25 per cent of the pupils were well-educated, and the rest sufficiently competent to handle themselves in the rough-and-tumble of adult life.

Then, in 1965, in rode the Labour egalitarian brigade led by Education Secretary Anthony Crosland on his high horse. He took an oath, hand on Das Kapital: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school…”

So he did. The downhill slide began, proving yet again that it’s only ever possible to equalise things at the lowest common denominator. Comprehensive education means comprehensive ignorance, rendering millions of people unfit to function in modern life.

Mrs May, herself a grammar school girl, has vowed to bring grammars back, which is laudable. Yet the genie of egalitarianism has acquired a life all its own. It won’t be pushed back into the bottle whence it came.

Egalitarian education has over three generations mostly spawned egalitarian teachers, those who see nothing wrong with the system, realising they wouldn’t do well in any other. Many of them are products of comprehensives themselves.

Over time they’ve formed a whole alphabet soup of unions, organisations, associations and what have you. These are committed to cutting the cables on any lift capable of carrying our education back to the top.

When Education Secretary Justine Greening tried to defend the expansion of grammar schools to a gathering of head masters, she was mercilessly heckled. Educators who don’t educate screamed “Rubbish”, “Shame” and “No” in voices doubtless built up at party rallies and CND marches.

Such strident opposition reminded the government of the aforementioned ineluctable law: egalitarianism has to triumph over sanity; ideology has to trump reason. Hanging its head down in shame, HMG has set out to expiate its mortal sin of elitism.

Plans are being hatched to lower entry marks for children from poorer backgrounds. If such children fail at age 11, they’ll be given other chances with 12-plus and 13-plus exams. That way everyone will be able to benefit from grammar school education.

These ideologised creatures don’t realise that trying to enable everyone to benefit from grammar school education is tantamount to making sure no one will. Making grammars egalitarian will effectively turn them into comprehensives by another name.

That’s just fine for today’s lot, as it was for Crosland and his fellow wreckers. Ideology creates a virtual world, as divorced from reality as the manic delirium of a schizophrenic.

Yet reality does exist, and it’s unsentimental. Contrary to the silly pronouncement adumbrating modernity, all men aren’t created equal. Some are taller than others, some are stronger, some are more aggressive, some are braver, some are kinder. More to the point, some are cleverer than others and better able to absorb academic disciplines.

Such people tend to do better in practical life, and they usually marry within the same group. Their children, on average, are better equipped genetically and culturally for academic pursuits than children from less successful households.

Trained by Marx to ascribe everything to social demarcations, today’s Britons talk about such things in terms of middle class or working class, even though it’s the ‘middle classes’ who these days do most of the work. The same toxic egalitarianism transferred to economic activity has enabled the ‘working classes’ not to work, turning them into déclassé pariahs.

Whatever you call these groups, for all the efforts of our fully paid-up egalitarians, children growing up in households full of books will be better educated than those whose, typically single-parent, households are full of crushed beer cans and discarded syringes. And even those who grow up in families closer to the working classes of old will be at an educational disadvantage.

Free grammar schools are designed to help the brighter of those children overcome such disadvantages. The design doesn’t always work out – perfect systems don’t exist. However, it succeeds often enough, while turning grammar schools into misnomers never will. But that doesn’t matter to our ‘progressives’.

The march of progress is inexorable, as Mrs May with all her good intentions is finding out. Ideologised ignorance will prevail.

Theresa May is “deeply disturbed” about the failed coup in Montenegro staged by the Russians, and with good reason. Putin’s kleptofascist junta, mostly made up of KGB officers, is challenging the West all over the globe.

The methods used so far are more KGB than Red Army: using hybrid forces to annex the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine, a coup to prevent Montenegro’s joining Nato, blackmail, recruitment of agents and ‘useful idiots’, electronic hacking aimed at disrupting Western politics and paralysing the will to resist, disinformatsia and so forth.

The West, specifically Nato, even more specifically the US, faces a vital challenge, and the world’s shape, indeed survival, may well depend on how successfully this challenge is met.

Putin’s immediate goal is to undo what he calls “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, the breakup of the USSR. To do that he must first neutralise Nato, of which three former Soviet republics are members.

What with the US financing 75 per cent of Nato’s budget, the position of the American administration is critical. Hence it’s hard not to be concerned about the frankly pro-Putin position adopted by Trump and his people.

Some of them have been compromised by their intimate links with the Russians; some lied about the contacts and had to be sacked. One wonders about Trump’s motives in surrounding himself with people like Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Rex Tillerson, who’ve all made such vast fortunes in Russia that it’s hard to expect them to stay impartial.

The first two, along with National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, have been sacked. Considering that Trump himself has made billions out of Russia, one may well doubt his own objectivity. In fact, by way of a parting shot, Carter Page admitted that Trump himself had authorised the contacts in question.

Lately, the president has had to keep much of his affection for Putin to himself, what with many in his own party, to say nothing of the Democrats, being opposed to any unilateral rapprochement with the Russians. However, for all his meandering, Trump hasn’t really changed his initial pro-Putin course.

But it’s not a course he himself charted. Here one must mention a rather sinister influential figure: Dimitri Simes, president of the think tank The Centre for the National Interest and publisher of the journal The National Interest. That Simes serves national interests is indisputable, the question is whose.

He and I got out of Russia at about the same time, and the mauvaises langues among the émigrés insisted then that Simes was a KGB plant to begin with. I have no idea whether that’s true, but one fails to see how he’d be covering Russia differently if he were indeed Putin’s man.

Back in December he published A Blueprint for Donald Trump to Fix Relations with Russia, a lengthy tutorial for Trump in the art of appeasement and giving Putin a free hand in gluing the Soviet empire back together.

Simes wrote exactly what Putin’s propagandists are screaming off TV screens and newspaper pages, except he couched his rhetoric in the jargon of American political punditry. The hope must have been that such subterfuge would make the propaganda more digestible, but it still causes dyspepsia.

First Simes wrote: “In selecting individuals for key positions dealing with Russia, it will be important to appoint those both willing and able to implement your policy.” Trump has followed that advice faithfully, as Messrs Page, Manafort, Flynn and Tillerson could testify.

Moving right along, Simes reiterated Putin’s nuclear blackmail that has become Russian television’s stock in trade: “First and foremost, Russia remains the only nation that can erase the United States from the map in thirty minutes.”

I doubt that this is technically feasible, but it’s the thought that counts, and it comes right out of Putin’s head. The inevitable conclusion is that, if the USA wants to stay on the map for a while longer, it should get out of Putin’s way.

From nuclear blackmail on to the terrorist kind. Without Putin, claims Simes, the West wouldn’t be able to control international terrorism. He didn’t go so far as to suggest that some of this terrorism is inspired and expedited by Russia herself, but Russian dignitaries routinely drop broad hints to that effect.

Putin’s prime minister Medvedev’s hint was the broadest of all: “terrorist acts in the EU and the rest of the world happen because Western countries pursue the policy of isolating Russia”.

An influential Russian MP has added that he “isn’t sure that one terrorist act in Paris would suffice to initiate [the West’s] talks with Putin.”

The hints shouldn’t be taken as blustery braggadocio: Russia does have some influence with jihadists. Many Isis chieftains are former Iraqi officers trained by Moscow; weapons and training mainly come from Russia; Russia’s Muslim outskirts, especially Chechnya, provide a steady stream of Isis rank-and-file and also of terrorists.

Specifically, one wishes the FBI were more upfront about the obvious links between Russia and brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsranayev, two Chechens who in 2013 launched a murderous attack on the Boston Marathon. The former probably and the latter definitely were trained in Russia, which is kept relatively hush-hush.

Putin’s propaganda, of which Simes is an adept mouthpiece, is bearing fruit, and not just among Trump’s immediate circle. Here’s, for example, what former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said about Putin’s possible aggression against Estonia:

 “The Russians aren’t gonna necessarily come across the border militarily. The Russians are gonna do what they did in Ukraine… I’m not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St Petersburg.”

At its closest point, Estonia, a country roughly the size of Denmark, is 85 miles from Petersburg. Finland is the same distance away, which proximity was used by Putin’s typological predecessor Stalin as a pretext for attacking Finland in 1939.

Gingrich’s statement sounds suspiciously like advice to Putin: do some more hybrid stuff, Vladimir. Pretend it’s Estonians themselves attacking their own country, with the help of Russian paramilitary volunteers over whom Putin has no control.

Simes’s ‘blueprint’ does the same job, though with greater subtlety: “We should put an end to the illusion that… the U.S. commitment to defend even the newest and smallest NATO members must remain unconditional… The goal must be to prevent incidents that could provide a temptation – or excuse – for Russian intervention. There should be no illusions that America accepts responsibility for allies who provoke conflict and then request assistance and reassurance to deal with the consequences.”

Get it? America shouldn’t defend a Nato member that ‘provokes’ conflict. Of course manufacturing such a provocation, or anything construed as such, is a doddle for the Russian KGB junta: there’s plenty of experience, specifically in that region.

The aforementioned attack on Finland started with the Russians shelling their own border village Mainila and claiming that the fire had come from Finland. This was used as a casus belli, even though the evidence of the true origin of the shelling was incontrovertible (shell fragments disperse in the direction of the shell’s trajectory, which in that case came from the south, not north).

Knocking off a dozen Russians living in Estonia and subsequently coming to the defence of the consanguine minority could also do nicely – that sort of thing worked famously for Hitler in 1938 and 1939. Estonia’s brutal insistence that the resident Russians learn the country’s language could also be interpreted as sufficient cause.

Simes co-opts to his cause the nonagenarian Henry Kissinger, who in his dotage has become even more of an appeaser than he was back in the Nixon days: “Kissinger’s alternative – with which we strongly agree – is to seek to integrate Russia into an international order that takes into account Moscow’s minimum essential interests.”

Moscow’s ‘minimum essential interests’ are to divide the world into spheres of interest, with Russia directly controlling half of Europe and ‘Finlandising’ the rest. Incidentally, both the Finns and the Swedes are alert to that threat.

Throughout the Cold War Sweden remained neutral and Finland for all intents and purposes a Soviet satellite (hence ‘Finlandisation’). However, in the face of non-stop Soviet overflights violating their airspace, the two countries are drawing closer to Nato. Both are hastily rearming, and Sweden is reintroducing conscription.

Simes doesn’t mention that, but he keeps stressing that Russia is in the forefront of armament technology. As proof of the Russians’ technological attainment he offers “the cofounder of the most advanced digital company in the world, Google, is Russian-born Sergey Brin.”

Now Brin’s parents emigrated from Russia when he was six. Sergei grew up as an American and has little to do with Russia. One wonders how he’d feel if he knew his name is being used for the purposes of pro-Putin propaganda.

So far Trump hasn’t deviated from Simes’s ‘blueprint’ one iota. One hopes there are enough checks and balances in US politics to keep the president from acting on some of the more cataclysmic veiled recommendations.

It took our pseudo-Conservative government 24 hours to backpedal on the new tax penalising entrepreneurs.

It’s clear why the reverse gear was engaged: the budget has singled out for fiscal punishment precisely the groups that are viscerally Conservative. Realising that, many Tory MPs began to fear for their seats.

A revolt was brewing, and Mrs May decided it would be prudent to put brakes on her Chancellor. What is less straightforward is why Mr Hammond, doubtless with the PM’s support, introduced this budget in the first place.

It helps to imitate God and start with the word. In this case, the word is capitalism, the economic method supposedly practised by Western governments. It’s impossible to understand our state’s motives without first realising that ‘capitalism’ has become a mendacious misnomer.

Western economies are no longer capitalist: they range from corporatist to frankly socialist. For the goal of all modern Western governments is self-aggrandisement by gaining maximum control over the people.

There are obvious differences among, say, totalitarian, socialist and liberal-democratic governments, but these are differences of method, not principle. Some modern regimes rely on coercion, some on brutality, some on more subtle levers of power. But they all have levers, and they all operate them with single-minded focus.

Totalitarian regimes cultivate a sort of mass Stockholm syndrome: they enslave the people and use non-stop propaganda to make the people like their servitude and depend on it. Liberal democracies also cultivate a culture of dependency, mainly by extorting so much of the people’s money that many of them have to beg the state for alms.

This is accompanied by bien pensant jargon of share, care, be aware, with the state subliminally equated with the loving, merciful, occasionally wrathful God. Modern states extort, on pain of imprisonment, a lion’s share of people’s earnings, while brainwashing the robbed into believing the loot serves the common good.

The state’s efforts to rob industrious Peter to reward indolent Paul are portrayed as a form of Christian charity. Today, in a staggeringly disingenuous article, Michael Gove had the gall to argue that Mrs May’s politics can only be understood in the light of Catholic social thought to which the PM is privy thanks to her Anglican background.

That’s why she supposedly uses the phrase ‘common good’ so often. This is either a misunderstanding or a lie. Mrs May uses the phrase in exactly the same sense in which all modern politicians, regardless of party affiliation, use it: common subservience to the state.

The phrase is a calculated lie, designed to make people accept parting with over half of what they earn through backbreaking work. This overall lie spins out a multitude of small ones, such as ‘welfare’ or ‘social security’.

Our dear National Insurance is yet another misnomer camouflaging an extra 12 per cent income tax. That way the government can boast that our base tax rate is 20 per cent, rather than the 32 per cent it actually is.

Add to this local, property, car and road taxes, VAT, TV licences and whatnot, and a person in the lowest tax bracket is robbed of about half of his earnings. And the higher the bracket, the bigger the robbers’ loot.

Before figuring out the politics involved, Mrs May had defended our taxation system for being ‘progressive’. This is like praising paralysis for being progressive. That people who earn more should pay more tax in absolute terms is fair. That they pay proportionately higher rates of tax is gross injustice, but Mrs May’s statist DNA precludes her from understanding that.

Whatever she may be in private life, as a public figure she’s a dedicated, visceral statist. Once we’ve realised this, the budget, inspired by Mrs May and enunciated by Mr Hammond, becomes easy to understand.

Just look at the groups hit the hardest: entrepreneurs, savers, private pensioners, inheritors. What do they all have in common?

Entrepreneurs implicitly rebel against modern corporatism. Their independence of mind and freewheeling approach to life go against the psychosocial type modern states try to spawn: that of a dependent.

Savers and private pensioners display some of the same undesirable characteristics as the self-employed. They realise that a government that does a lot for the people will inevitably do a lot to them. So rather than relying on the state’s tender mercies, they try to take care of their own future.

And of course things like inheritance tax and death duties are meat to our visceral statists. God forbid a successful man can provide not only for himself and his wife but also for his children and grandchildren. Inheritance is the bête noire of the modern state, and the greater the chunk the state can bite out of it, the better shot it’ll have at making more people dependent on government handouts.

The same logic explains why our already crippling social expenditure is going up, even though this makes it impossible to reduce our appalling £1.8 trillion debt. Foreign aid also goes up, extending welfarism to other countries, in the hope that this will increase our ability to control them (it won’t, but this is a different story).

How one wishes for a Tory government… hold on: my wife is telling me we already have one. Could have fooled me.

 

I forgot that yesterday was International Women’s Day and hence neglected to commemorate it properly. Since I’m busy today, I’m going to re-run last year’s piece, to which I really have nothing to add.

First we had Mothering Sunday, a religious holiday Western Christians celebrate on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Then, under the influence of the US, Mothering Sunday was largely replaced by Mother’s Day, a secular holiday without any religious overtones whatsoever. That’s understandable: our delicate sensibilities can no longer accommodate any Christian festivals other than Christmas Shopping.

Now that secular but basically unobjectionable holiday has been supplemented by International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated by all progressive mankind on 8 March. Our delicate sensibilities aren’t offended at all.

Actually, though the portion of mankind that celebrates 8 March calls itself progressive, it isn’t really entitled to this modifier – unless one accepts the propensity for murdering millions just for the hell of it as an essential aspect of progress.

For, not to cut too fine a point, 8 March is a communist event, declared a national holiday by the Bolsheviks in 1917, immediately after they seized power and started killing people with the gusto and on a scale never before seen in history. A few wires were expertly pulled after the war, and IWD also got enshrined in Soviet satellites.

The event actually originated in America, where the Socialist Party arbitrarily chose that date to express solidarity with the 1909 strike of female textile workers. Yet the holiday didn’t catch on in the States, doubtless because the Socialist Party never did.

Outside the Soviet bloc, 8 March went uncelebrated, unrecognised and, until recently, unknown. I remember back in 1974, when I worked at NASA, visiting Soviet astronauts made a big show of wishing female American employees a happy 8 March, eliciting only consternation and the stock Texan response of “Say what?”

The event was big in the Soviet Union, with millions of men giving millions of women bunches of mimosa, boxes of chocolates – and, more important, refraining from giving them a black eye, a practice rather more widespread in Russia than in the West.

But not on 8 March. That was the day when men scoured their conscience clean by being effusively lovey-dovey – so that they could resume abusing women the very next day, on 9 March. For Russia was then, and still remains, out of reach for the fashionable ideas about women’s equality or indeed humanity. As the Russian proverb goes, “A chicken is no bird, a wench is no person.”

Much as one may be derisory about feminism, it’s hard to justify the antediluvian abuse, often physical, that’s par for the course in Russia, especially outside central Moscow or Petersburg. Proponents of the plus ça change philosophy of history would be well-advised to read Dostoyevsky on this subject.

In A Writer’s Diary Dostoyevsky describes in terrifying detail the characteristic savagery of a peasant taking a belt or a stick to his trussed-up wife, lashing at her, ignoring her pleas for mercy until, pounded into a bloody pulp, she stops pleading or moving. However, according to the writer, this in no way contradicted the brute’s inner spirituality, so superior to Western materialistic legalism. Ideology does work in mysterious ways.

The Russian village still has the same roads (typically none) as at the time this was written, and it still has the same way of treating womenfolk – but not on 8 March. On that day the Soviets were housetrained to express their solidarity with the oppressed women of the world, or rather specifically of the capitalist world.

As a conservative, I have my cockles warmed by the traditionalist way in which the Russians lovingly maintain Soviet traditions, including the odd bit of murder by the state, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Why we have adopted them, at a time when communism has supposedly collapsed, is rather harder to explain.

But why stop here? Many Brits, especially those of the Labour persuasion, already celebrate May Day, with red flags flying to symbolise the workers’ blood spilled by the ghastly capitalists. Why not spread the festivities more widely? I mean, May Day is celebrated in Russia, so what better reason do we need?

The Russians also celebrate 7 November, on which day in 1917 the Bolsheviks introduced social justice expressed in mass murder and universal slavery. I say we’ve been ignoring this glorious event far too long. And neither do we celebrate Red Army Day on 23 February – another shameful omission.

But at least we seem to be warming up to 8 March, an important communist event. At least we’re moving in the right direction.

A reader of mine suggested that those who celebrate IWD should perform the ballistically and metaphysically improbable act of inserting the holiday into a certain receptacle originally designed for exit only. While I don’t express myself quite so robustly in this space, I second the motion.

Cherie (Mrs Tony) Blair predictably expressed her support for IWD, ending her letter to The Times with “Count me in”. Well, count me out.

 

“Accident of birth is no reason to be handed a seat in the House of Lords”, says The Times editorial Noble Rot. What follows is an impassioned rant, as opposed to a reasoned argument, in favour of an elected upper chamber.

Actually, if the writer had a modicum of constitutional understanding, he’d know that ‘accident of birth’ is the only valid qualification for the Lords. But since such understanding isn’t to be found at either the left or the right end of the political spectrum, the House of Lords is under attack from both ends.

The rubbishy editorial has two gripes against the Lords: first, it’s undemocratic; second, its members are old. Yet both putative minuses are in fact huge pluses.

Being ‘undemocratic’ is the whole point of the upper chamber, not its drawback. Its historical function is to counterbalance any possible excesses of the Commons, keeping it on the straight and narrow.

In theory at least, their Lordships are impervious to partisan pressures – their appointment doesn’t necessitate currying political favour. They therefore can pass judgement only on the basis of their conscience and vested interest in the country their families have served for many generations.

This isn’t to say that an elected upper chamber can’t work. It can, elsewhere. For example, the US Senate, loosely modelled on the House of Lords, is a reasonably functional institution born out of necessity. After all, all titles of nobility were abolished immediately after the colonies became independent.

But introducing a replica of the US Senate in Britain is tantamount to mocking and abandoning centuries of constitutional tradition. Advocating such a measure is a sign of gaping ignorance enhanced by trendy anomie.

According to the editorial, Blair’s subversive reform of the Lords wasn’t subversive enough. After all, 92 hereditary peers still kept their seats. We don’t want that. We want spivs like Blair and Cameron to inhabit both chambers.

The other gripe, that their Lordships are too old, is another example of left-leaning idiocy. After all, it’s councils of elders, not youngers, that are the oldest form of government, and with good reason.

Few people acquire at an early age the wisdom required for statesmanship, something even the revolutionary framers of the US Constitution realised. That’s why they introduced minimum ages for all political appointments, 35 for the president. I’d suggest that, what with the average life expectancy now being twice what it was 200 years ago, no one under 60 should be qualified for high political office.

We may argue about the specific cut-off points, but not the general principle: in affairs of the state, age is an asset, not a detriment. This principle, however, doesn’t cut much ice with our paedocratic modernity promoting infantilism as a political tool.

If there’s one common feature among different tyrannies, autocratic, totalitarian or democratic, it’s their accent on youth. Tyrants realise that impetuous, unformed brains can be putty in their hands, mouldable into any shape. Brainwash them early, and they’re yours for life.

For example, Trotsky once described young people as “the barometer of a nation”. That may be true, but history shows that the barometer inevitably falls off the wall and shatters, with grown-ups cutting their feet on the shards of glass.

Democratic tyranny of the majority, in Tocqueville’s phrase, is just as paedocratic, and for the same reasons. Wiser, older heads may just notice that a modern politician can pack even a short speech with solecisms and every known rhetorical fallacy. People in their 60s are less likely to scream themselves hoarse with cretinous gusto every time a democratic tyrant utters a meaningless platitude.

If a formerly respectable paper is attacking our constitution from the left, good people on the right do their bit too. There’s even a petition making the rounds on Facebook calling for the abolition of the Lords.

My Brexiteer friends are aghast at their Lordships’ two rulings clearly aimed at slowing and diluting Brexit or, ideally, killing it stone-dead. The rulings are indeed abominable, but the proposed treatment is worse than the disease.

Calling for the abolition of an ancient institution because it has done something we don’t like is neither grown-up nor clever. My fire-eating friends should ponder why they want to leave the EU in the first place.

If the idea is, as it should be, to restore the ancient constitution of the realm, then they must see that what they’re proposing will destroy that constitution with even greater finality than anything the EU can muster. Emotions, however laudable, are a poor guide to political judgement. The mind works much better, chaps; you should try using it.

My zeitgeist-bucking proposal is to reduce House of Lords membership to hereditary peers only, ideally to those whose peerages go back 100 years or more. As a parallel measure, I’d recommend raising the voting age to 25, the minimum age for MPs to 40, 50 for cabinet members and 60 for prime ministers.

This won’t improve our politics appreciably – things have gone too far. But at least it may slow down the decline and delay a gruesome end.

We have thousands of laws, most accumulated over centuries, though some 60 per cent of the new ones have been kindly bestowed on us by the EU.

Since, fingers crossed, we’ll soon be ineligible for such charity, we’ll find that we need no help from the EU to destroy the best legal system the world has ever seen.

Yes, we have thousands of laws, big and small. But that whole sprawling structure rests on relatively few supports, the underlying core principles whose removal would bring the whole structure down.

You know, things like presumption of innocence, double jeopardy, the right not to give self-incriminating evidence (called the Fifth Amendment by Americans, most of whom don’t realise that the English concept predated the US Constitution by some 600 years), habeas corpus – and equality of all before the law.

It’s this last support that has been wantonly kicked out by the Sentencing Council led by Lord Chief Justice Thomas. The Council has issued new guidelines, according to which criminals from racial and other minorities should receive lighter punishments. This is the first time in our legal history that race is officially declared a mitigating circumstance.

I can’t think off-hand of a more subversive measure and one that can do comparable long-term harm. Actually, take that back. There have been a few similar developments lately.

During the tenure of John Major, the concept of double jeopardy was for all intents ditched. The right not to give self-incriminating evidence (and not to have the refusal to do so treated as an admission of guilt) suffered the same fate under Tony Blair.

Neither presumption of innocence until proven guilty nor habeas corpus is doing so well, considering that any number of (admittedly hideous) British subjects have been held at Guantanamo for years without a formal charge.

And now m’lords are burying the sacred principle of equality of all before the law, obviously not realising that the legal buttresses of the realm are being dumped into the same hole.

The new rules tell the courts to give lighter sentences when young offenders have ‘deprived homes, poor parental employment records, low educational attainment, and early experience of offending by other family members’.

Now it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to suggest that few criminals are classically educated youngsters coming from cultured well-to-do families run by successfully employed parents who’ve never as much as received a speeding fine. TV crime dramas may give the impression that tweedy middle-aged gentlemen commit many, if not most, crimes, but reality is alas dramatically different.

However, should such a gentleman now commit a crime, he’d be treated more severely than a ghetto black or a representative of some other minority. Sounds discriminatory, doesn’t it?

I wonder if I qualify for preferential treatment. Hope so. If I ever murder a BBC Radio 3 presenter, this will be my line of defence.

Is this coz I’s from Russia, Your Honour? If you read my book How the Future Worked, you’ll find that, in addition to being an ethnic minority, I grew up in a poorer family than any existing in Britain, lived in a smelly communal flat where six families shared the same loo, bathroom and kitchen, and suffered discrimination throughout my life there. I simply had to strangle that objectionable woman mouthing pseud nonsense in that giggly, plummy voice – it’s on account of my childhood, Your Honour. It ain’t me who done it, it’s the deprived child inside me. Seen The West Side Story? I’s like them criminals there, depraved coz I’s deprived.

According to the guidelines, “There is also evidence to suggest that black and minority ethnic children and young people are over-represented in the youth justice system.” You say children, I say vicious criminals. But yes, the statistical observation is true.

So what? And why do those feral children commit a disproportionate number of crimes? Could it be because of the prevailing liberal mindset waging war on the notion of individual responsibility for one’s actions? Because of the inverse racism of those who believe that blacks must be mollycoddled because they can’t possibly live up to the normal standards of civilised behaviour?

Then Lord Justice Treacy uttered the words that in one fell swoop mocked the millennia of the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition, according to which all individuals are moral agents, rather than puppets whose wires are pulled by society.

“Children,” he declared, “should not be blamed for factors beyond their control.” That denies those ‘children’ their fundamental humanity, with the implication that the crimes they commit are all society’s fault. What about law-abiding, hard-working people from the same backgrounds? How do you suppose they feel? I’d be offended if I were them.

What are the functions of custodial sentences? First, justice: meting out a punishment commensurate with the crime. Second, restoration of social tranquillity: justice is seen to have been done, and respect for the law grows. Third: deterrence, making sure others will think twice before breaking the law. A distant fourth: rehabilitation, making the criminal a better person coming out than he was going in.

The new guidelines fail monumentally on all four counts. And that’s the least of their problems. They attack the very essence of our civilisation, than which no greater crime exists.

 

The discovery that the rather mediocre Easter Sonata, wrongly attributed to Felix Mendelssohn, is actually by his sister Fanny has poked the feminist hornet’s nest yet again.

Out flew the old insects ably led by the BBC, flapping their wings and buzzing the usual politicised inanities about the gross injustices suffered by women composers throughout the ages. The implication is that swarms of female geniuses have only been held back by flagrant discrimination.

Until now Clara Schumann has been the biggest inscription on the banners of musical feminism. It has been suggested, or sometimes actually said outright, that poor Clara had her composing genius suppressed by a regiment of Teutonic MCPs led by her husband Robert. But for such sharp practices, the world would realise she was at least her husband’s equal.

There was a brouhaha about this in 2015, when it was discovered that the A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, all of them despicably male. Clara’s name was held up as the greatest omission.

Now Mrs Schumann herself, one of the best pianists of her time, didn’t consider her compositions to be significant. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her own recitals, as was a common practice then. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

And yes, perhaps in the nineteenth century there existed some prejudice against professional women, although that didn’t diminish Mrs Schumann’s success in something she really was good at, performance. Yet, at a wild guess, women’s rights were even a smaller priority in the twelfth century, when the sublime composer Hildegard von Bingen plied her art unimpeded.

Hildegard’s works survive to this day not because she was a woman composer, but because she was a great composer. Which Clara wasn’t, and neither was Fanny, as her hundreds of known works demonstrate vividly to anyone whose ears aren’t blocked by ideological plugs.

This category demonstrably doesn’t include the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who have embarked on a widely publicised search for ‘lost’ female composers.

They have their work cut out, for, according to the BBC, there are at least 6,000 of those lost sheep, waiting to be found for the delectation of music lovers who’ve had their fill of MCPs like Bach and Beethoven. The suggested number is nothing short of staggering. Let me spell it out for you: SIX THOUSAND.

Now, at the risk of sounding immodest, I know music rather well. My wife, a concert pianist, knows it much better. This morning we put the 6,000 number to the test by compiling our own list of male composers, ranging from sub-minor to minor to major to super-major.

Admittedly, we only spent half an hour on this exercise and, had we spent the whole day and used some reference literature, we could probably have done better. As it was, we barely got to a hundred, scraping the bottom of the barrel, where some 18^th century Russian liturgical composers reside next to the lesser known Dutch and English polyphonists of the Elizabethan era (or whatever it was called in Holland).

Now it’s fair to assume that – due to discrimination only! – male composers must have outnumbered female ones at least 100 to one throughout history. Hence, accepting on faith the 6,000 figure put forth by the BBC, there must be more than 600,000 shamefully masculine composers languishing in the dark dungeons of history, waiting to come out and see the blinding light of fame.

I hope you realise that we’re no longer talking just about ignorance, stupidity and tastelessness. The toxic ideology of feminism has poisoned the brains of our culture vultures, rendering them certifiably mad.

Edwina Wolstencroft, BBC Radio 3’s editor, confirmed this clinical diagnosis when announcing plans to broadcast works by female composers, emphatically including Fanny Mendelssohn. I hope, said Miss Wolstencroft that “the live broadcast contributes towards Fanny’s recognition as a musical genius.”

Right. Fanny is ‘a musical genius’. So what term shall we use to describe those MCPs Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert? Since the verbal scale of human artistic attainment doesn’t really go higher than genius, we can only assume one of three things.

Either those gentlemen were demigods, sitting at the right hand of Apollo atop the musical Olympus, or Miss Wolstencroft et al. genuinely believe that Fanny is every bit their equal, or this lot care not about music but ideology expressed through music.

Dismissing the first assumption as sheer paganism, we have to accept some combination of the second and third ones as the likely cause.

Then we realise what a subversive role the BBC and likeminded institutions play in our culture, of which music is the salient representation. They are the enemy within, cancerous cells gradually eating away at everything that’s healthy and genuine.

As such, they cause even a greater harm than pop excretions. At least no one seriously considers those as the acme of the human spirit. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Wolstencroft does.

I have a confession to make: I like puerile and even prurient humour, provided it’s funny.

Of course what’s funny to me may be offensive to you, tasteless to him and ought to be against the law to them. Fair enough.

But I’d rather a joke were puerile and even prurient than anodyne. Too many times have I been left feeling like a pariah in the company of clubbable gentlemen. One of them would tell a joke sounding as if he’d left the punch line out. All around me would be in stitches, while I’d be unable even to crack a polite smile.

Alternatively, I’d also feel like a pariah when, in a similar company, telling a joke I found hilarious and everyone else present felt like having me arrested.

Sometimes, when I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I can even come up with a decent one-liner myself. I recall some 30 years ago, when I had just moved from New York to London, talking about the race situation in America to the very embodiment of a clubbable gentleman (for the outlanders among you, ‘clubbable’ means fit for membership in a Pall Mall club, not someone you’d like to club, although the two may well go hand in hand).

Anyway, I remarked that most American blacks tend to be left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” suggested my interlocutor. “It’s the other way around,” I replied. “They’re black because they’re left-wing.” (I’ll spare you some of my jokes that fall into the puerile and prurient category.)

This lengthy preamble is an attempt at self-justification. For I have another confession to make: I like Jimmy Carr, the comedian most of my friends find beyond the pale. Obscene, tasteless, foul-mouthed, is what they call him. All true. Yet, to me, also funny. Sometimes.

The other day he appeared on Desert Island Discs. For the outlanders among you, this is a radio interview show first broadcast in 1942. A guest is asked which eight recordings, one book and one luxury item he’d like to have as a castaway.

His selections say a lot about the man. For example, though I still have enormous respect for Enoch Powell, I took it down a notch when, back in 1989, most of the politician’s musical selections were by Wagner. One has to be mad, I thought, to want to listen mostly to Wagner his whole life, or for that matter at all.

What interested me about Jimmy Carr’s appearance wasn’t his selections, but the subject touched upon in the interview. Is there anything he wouldn’t consider a laughing matter?

Obviously the latitude Mr Carr allows himself is practically limitless, as some of his material shows: “They say there’s safety in numbers. Go tell this to the six million Jews.” Or, “My girlfriends keep telling me they’re pregnant. I say, hey, I’m not made of coat hangers!”

He defended such irreverence on the show: “Because people are offended, does not make them right. Nobody should be drawing a line…” No line at all?

Oh well, there’s one exception: the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when 94 people were crushed to death at a football stadium: “You could never joke about Hillsborough, as it’s a tragedy that’s touched people in a very specific way, and I cannot imagine anybody coming up with a joke about that.”

So Mr Carr does draw a line, but he draws it in funny places. Why just Hillsborough, appalling as it is? Why not Dunblane? The Holocaust? Our mutilated soldiers in Iraq (“We’ll have a f****** good Paralympic team,” he once quipped.) Why just Hillsborough?

One can only guess at Mr Carr’s motives, although PR probably has a role to play. As a Cambridge alumnus, he’s seen as rather posh, which nowadays is a failing in need of counterbalancing. It’s conceivably to that end that Mr Carr loads his jokes with swearwords more than do many comedians who only ever went to the school of hard knockers.

It’s conceivably for the same reason that he elevated football fans, generally seen as downmarket, to secular sainthood, putting them off limits for jokes. God isn’t afforded the same exemption.

When offered the Bible as one of his books for the island, Carr said he’d burn it “to help start his fire”. That’s what made me think about humour and its limits.

I hope you won’t think me solipsistic if I again refer to my own experience, that of a lifetime wag. As I grow older, I find that the areas open to my wisecracks are getting narrower. At times I don’t even deliver a funny line because I’m scared of offending. Not so much my immediate audience – I fear offending God.

As a lapsed Catholic and now an atheist, Mr Carr is clearly immune to such concerns. I just hope, for his sake, that before tossing the Bible in the fire, he reads one verse:

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”

Then, to be on the safe side, he may have a Pascal wager with himself – one never knows. Meanwhile, have you heard the one about…