Author: Alexander Boot

Ukip may win anywhere between 12 and 25 parliamentary seats come next May, say the polls.

They also say that the Tories and Ukip will win about 50 per cent of the vote between them, with Labour getting just over a third.

One would think that the two centre-right parties would form a pre-election coalition and stand as a bloc. That would prevent the calamity of Miliband (assuming, and this is an unsafe assumption, that he’s still around then) at Number 10, at the head of a minority government, possibly also including what will be left of the LibDems.

Yet both Nigel Farage and other senior figures in Ukip are saying that such a marriage of convenience isn’t on the cards.

One such senior figure, a man who has made me reassess my hitherto firmly held view that politicians can’t be human by definition, told me over dinner last night why Ukip will stick to the ‘I’ in its nomenclature.

If such a coalition government does well, he said, the Tories, as the senior partner, will claim all the credit. If the government does less than well, then it will be Ukip to take all the blame. That may eventually lead to the party being crushed out of existence.

In other words, even if the Tories do offer several portfolios to Ukip, with possibly Nigel Farage as Deputy PM, or else the Secretary for Europe, the offer will be declined.

Instead the party will act as king maker, or slayer as the case may be, exerting a meaningful influence on policy – this regardless of whether the minority government is tinted blue or red.

I don’t know enough about the mechanics of politics to have a firm view on the matter. But somehow I can’t imagine Ukip steering even a minority Labour government in the right direction, and it takes only a marginally lower flight of fancy to see them do that under the Tories.

Ukip has a whole raft of policies, but all of them are derivative from their umbrella commitment to getting Britain out of the European Union.

While this aspiration is shared by many among the Tory rank and file, and by some of Labour’s, we know that the top hierarchy of both parties is deadset against this, for all the vague noises Dave is extruding from his mouth out of political expedience.

If either party forms a coalition with the LibDems, who are as committed to the EU as the communists were to the USSR, then they’ll definitely throw their combined weight behind staying in that wicked organisation.

In case of a Dave-led Tory government in coalition with the LibDems the weight would be slightly lower but not enough to make a difference.

It’s useful to remember that every significant step in the direction of the UK becoming a gau in a Europe dominated by Germany has been taken under Tory governments, those of Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major (which is not to suggest that any other party would have acted differently).

This time around the Tories would be likely, for once, to keep their promise of holding an In/Out referendum, but I’m almost certain its result will go the wrong way. The combined resources of the Tories, Labour, LibDems and – above all – the EU itself will create a propaganda tsunami in favour of the In vote.

The British public proved its susceptibility to pro-EU (or the EEC as it then was) scare mongering in 1975 when for the first time in the history of the United Kingdom this constitutional issue was put to a referendum.

Yet at that time the technical means of disseminating propaganda were peashooters to today’s heavy guns. Some time during the life of the next parliament, these guns will start spewing flatulent pro-EU salvos and will continue to do so until the public surrenders.

A political innocent like me would think that the only way for Ukip to get what it wants, what all decent people want, would be from the inside of a Tory-led majority government.

There it could join forces with the numerous anti-EU backbenchers, both Tory and Labour, to commit the government to regaining British sovereignty, with or without a referendum. The risk pointed out by my dinner guest is of course real, but then so is the possibility of success.

Staying outside looking in just may turn Ukip into a pariah having to fight against the tripartite majority expertly whipped together by the Tories, Labour and LibDems. I doubt such a fight would be winnable.

The upshot of it all is that I have no idea what the immediate electoral future will bring, and my only excuse for this ignorance is that not many people are any the wiser.

Meanwhile one has to take a purely aesthetic pleasure in watching our governing spivs scampering about like cockroaches in a tightly shut jar. They can sense power slipping out of their fingers, and power is all they want, even if they only get it courtesy of Brussels.

This delight is by itself sufficient to extend our heartiest congratulations to Ukip, while keeping reins on hopes that may or may not come true.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

London filmmaker Grace Gelder has just lent a helping hand to Dave’s noble drive towards broadening the concept of marriage.

An expansion was self-evidently necessary. Anyone could see that insistence on the outdated notion of marriage as a union between one (1) man and one (1) woman was out of keeping with the inclusive spirit of modernity.

We live to be happy, don’t we? Everyone knows there can be no other purpose to life.

Hence anything that adds to the sum total of human happiness must be welcomed, and anything that subtracts from it must be resisted. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Marriage used to be regarded as a necessary condition for the survival of the human race, but that, we now know, was wrong. Marriage is all about happiness, although some of my married friends may disagree.

Who are we then to prevent two homosexual persons, male, female or other, from tying the knot? Such obduracy would be judgemental, and that’s among the worst things either an individual or a society can be.

God (who definitely doesn’t exist) save us from passing moral, intellectual or aesthetic judgement. A propensity for doing so would mark us out as pariahs in our brave, new, all-inclusive world, especially if we cling to the frankly fascist view that some judgements just may be better than others.

We’d be known as elitists and classists (I’ve just come across this neologism in a newspaper, making me wonder how we’ve ever managed without it so far). Even worse, we’d carry the stigma of being survivals of the past, whereof nothing deserves to survive.

Such progressive thoughts, I must admit, are new to me. At the time same-sex marriage became a reality, I still hadn’t abandoned my stale reactionary beliefs, which led me to indulge in shameful mockery.

Whatever next, I kept asking, in jest. Marriage between siblings? Parents and children? Different species? True enough, I sneered, such unions can’t, or at least shouldn’t, produce progeny, but then neither can a homosexual marriage. So, if being happy is all marriage is about, why can’t a man divorce his sister and then marry his father or, say, a borzoi?

I’m ashamed now of my sarcasm. Having realised the error of my ways, I’m prepared to accept all those variations on the theme of marriage as perfectly valid and indeed desirable, something not to satirise but to applaud.

Predictably, in my then jaundiced mood I shackled my imagination, not allowing myself to see the full range of nuptial possibilities. What is it called these days? Thinking outside the box?

Well, I not just thought inside the box but I nailed the lid shut. My sneering remarks were based on the assumption that any future expansion of matrimonial licence would still include two parties, irrespective of their sex, species or kinship.

My new heroine Grace Gelder has disabused me of this silly superstition. Having despaired of finding a suitable spouse, this comely young woman with long hair and a tasteful ring in her nostril has married herself.

Now, Oscar Wilde did say that falling in love with yourself is the beginning of a life-long romance, but he never realised that self-adoration could lead to self-marriage. His imagination was as hamstrung by tradition as mine was, even if his life wasn’t.

Miss/Ms/Mrs Gelder’s imagination, on the other hand, soars free and, like all true pioneers, she lit up a path for others to follow.

Apparently her eye-opening Damascene experience came from the Bjork song Isobel which includes the lyric “I’m Isobel, married to myself”. Indirectly this again pointed out how hopelessly retrograde I am, for I’ve never even heard this or any other song by Bjork and – to my eternal shame – have no idea who Bjork is.

In everything other than the number of parties involved, the marriage was as traditional as they come.

Grace proposed to herself, presumably on bended knee, blushed, lowered her eyelashes and whispered ‘yes’. She then bought a ring, a wedding dress and a full stock of flowers, rice and confetti.

She then invited all her friends to the wedding, to be officiated by her recently ordained friend. None of the reports I’ve read specifies either the friend’s sex or the confession in which he/she/it is a celebrant. But on this evidence, our new-style Anglican Church is the likely candidate.

All in all, 50 guests came, which made Grace’s wedding better attended than any of mine. The invitees watched the ceremony proceed swimmingly, with the blushing bride/groom making two sets of vows, exchanging rings with herself, kissing a mirror reflection of herself (a nice touch, that) and tossing a bouquet over her head.

The reports also omitted the more intimate details of the wedding night, which lets one’s fantasies run riot – mostly in the direction of the objectionable phrase that starts with ‘go’ and ends with ‘yourself’.

Whatever the consummation method was, and whatever objects were used therein, it can elicit no moral objections outside the strictest interpretation of Catholic doctrine. The practice was after all sanctified by marriage.

Which brings me to another neologism, the one I used in the title. For the law has so far failed to recognise Miss/Ms/Mrs Gelder’s marriage as valid.

This has led me to coin the word ‘couplism’, designating yet another flagrant violation of every principle modernity holds dear.

Who are we to insist that it takes two to marry? For one thing, this amounts to committing two other widespread crimes, those of racism and intolerance.

We seem to forget that millions of Brits live according to the law that allows up to four concurrent wives. This law is based on their religion, which is as at least as valid as anything else some of us may practise or, in the eyes of the law, even more so.

In fact, the Newcastle footballer Cheick Ismaël Tioté openly has two wives, and he continues to ply his trade with nary an interference. One can infer that our law no longer insists on a particular numerical makeup of wedlock.

Thus it is flagrant discrimination to accept a marriage of three but not of one. And, this side of fondling a woman’s breast without permission, no crime is worse than discrimination – even if it only involves preferring Bach to Bjork (whoever he/she is).

Down with couplism, I say. Let’s start a campaign, which I’m sure Dave will support, to recognise self-marriage – provided of course that such a hermaphroditic union makes the self-married person happy.

I remember a patriotic Soviet song that started with the words “We are born to make a fairytale come true.” Some clever chaps would replace the word skazku (the Russian for fairytale) with Kafku, with the line now saying “We are born to make Kafka come true.”

Now why do you suppose I suddenly recalled that line? Memory, like marriage, does work in mysterious ways.

 

 

 

 

You know how it is. You make a mental note to send your Mum a Happy Birthday card, and then the note slips out of your mind. 

You wake up on the day and suddenly the date displayed on your bedside clock sounds a distress signal in your half-dormant consciousness.

Bother! you scream, if your neglected mother brought you up well. If not, or more likely if you’ve since forgotten all she ever taught, you scream something else.

One way or the other you get the idea of how I felt this morning upon realising that yet again I forgot that yesterday was the birthday of Vladimir Putin, Vlad to his friends, among whom I proudly number myself.

My only consolation is that the bitter disappointment Vlad doubtless felt was amply assuaged by many others, those more diligent than me in marking the key dates of the Christian calendar.

I was particularly impressed by the 100,000-strong celebratory march in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.

The marchers wore blue, white or red clothing, which enabled them to arrange themselves in three files looking from above like the Russian national flag, 2,000 feet long. What a fitting, touching tribute to the man who made Russia what it is!

The tribute is particularly touching if one remembers that Grozny was bombed flat during the second Chechen war started by Putin to consolidate his power.

As a result, the UN designated Grozny as the most devastated city on earth. Thousands were buried under the rubble, adding to the 250,000 Chechens killed in the two post-perestroika wars.

Against that background, the unbridled enthusiasm of the Grozny marchers looked a bit odd. It was like watching the extant Auschwitz inmates taking to the streets to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, a rather surreal sight by any standards.

One can only congratulate the surviving denizens of Grozny on the truly Christian spirit of forgiveness animating this supposedly Muslim nation. Unlike those sore losers with numbers tattooed on their forearms, the Chechens let bygones be bygones.

And what about this beautifully produced video of a children’s choir celebrating the historic event with childish brio but very grown-up mastery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqGaDP7z52g&feature=youtu.be

If you don’t understand Russian, eat your heart out: you’ll miss the full moving experience of watching a hundred tots, most of whom no older than five, singing hosannas to their beloved leader.

Yet pictures, as we know, speak louder than words, and you’ll get into the spirit of things by just watching, even if the high poetry of the lyrics goes by you.

The refrain evokes Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr President” at Carnegie Hall. The tots have embellished the line only slightly by belting out “Happy Birthday, Pre-si-dent of Russia!!!”, which is as far as the parallel can be allowed to go.

For Marilyn was having an affair with the birthday boy, something none of the tots can probably boast, although, if Moscow mauvaises langues are to be believed, Vlad isn’t immune to their appeal. But then loving children is de rigeur for Russian national leaders, and how they express affection is up to them only.

The frames of ecstatic vocalising babes are expertly intercut with sequences of them making a giant birthday cake and decorating it with the song’s refrain placed within a pink heart shape.

The same shape is formed by the children themselves as they sing, “May you achieve everything you’ve set out to, dear President!”, a sentiment probably not universally shared in the Ukraine.

Not to be outdone, grown-ups also fall over themselves to celebrate the glorious occasion properly.

The singing tots come from Vlad’s native Petersburg where he grew up as what he himself proudly described as “your regular street thug”. But Moscow evened the score by staging an exhibition titled Putin’s 12 Labours, drawing a well-merited parallel between Vlad and Hercules.

One painting rivals Velazquez’s Surrender of Breda as the greatest battle painting of all time. It shows Vlad, loincloth-clad, sword in hand, fighting a giant hydra whose heads are helpfully marked as ‘The USA”, ‘The European Union’, ‘Japan’, ‘Canada’ and ‘Sanctions’. If I were Australian, I’d feel left out, but I am not, so I don’t.

Another, equally majestic, painting depicts Vlad taming the ox of Crimea, so identified on the animal’s side. The defeated beast is twice Vlad’s size, which some may construe as a slight misrepresentation of the actual balance of power. But who says a work of art can’t take a little licence?

Hundreds of thousands of Putin T-shirts are selling like proverbial hotcakes, each depicting the National Leader’s likeness. My silk-screened friend Vlad appears naked to the waist (mercifully from the top), clutching a rifle, strangling a snow leopard, on horseback or simply in full, grinning face.

Similar pictures adorn numerous hoardings strewn all over Russia. Some simply say “Happy Birthday, Our Leader!” but others go further in their commendable zeal.

One caption announces that Vlad is “holier than the Pope”, though a claim to infallibility is modestly withheld. Another describes Putin as “the most polite president”, which is richly merited.

Yes, he has publicly stated his intention to “whack’em in the shithouse”, “hang Saakashvili by the balls” and do many other things along similar lines. Yet none of the nouns was preceded by the modifier ‘f***ing”, and if that doesn’t justify describing Vlad’s politeness in superlative terms, I don’t know what will.

Then again, a devoted subject must be attuned to the Leader’s thoughts and plans. Hence the TV personality Tina Kandelaki declared, to wild cheers from the audience, that “Putin has the essential characteristics to captain a ship the size of our continent.”

One hopes the less polite leaders of Germany and France, not to mention Poland and Latvia, sit up and listen. Before too long their people may also be made to celebrate Putin’s birthday just as effusively.

Or perhaps ‘made’ is a wrong word. All those Russian masses must have been driven to the streets by an outburst of spontaneous enthusiasm, not seen in their country since Vlad’s role model Stalin (or anywhere else this side of North Korea).

However, Vlad has a long way to go. His popularity rating is still languishing at a meagre 87 per cent, way short of Stalin’s customary 103.

But if these festivities are any indication, he’s on the right track. Just to think that this was merely his 62^nd birthday. Imagine the celebrations of a rounder milestone, say his 65^th. It’s just possible that by then every hydra will lose its heads, every ox will be tamed and every snow leopard throttled.

In anticipation I have to apologise for my forgetfulness. Vlad, if you’re reading this, sorry, mate. Never again.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

Generally I try to refrain from scare-mongering, for fear of frightening my readers away.

So how do some of them repay my self-restraint? By scaring me instead.

One such reader drew my attention to an American article considering the possibility of Muslims using the Ebola virus as a weapon in their 1,400-year war on the West.

My first reaction is always to dismiss such doomsday scenarios out of hand: they’ve too often come from mentally unbalanced individuals or out-and-out madmen.

Yet if a chap had told me 15 years ago that some nice young men would be able to hijack airliners and use them as flying bombs, I would have doubted his mental health too.

The problem with modernity is that crazy delusions of yesteryear increasingly become commonplace actions of today.

The same arbitrary 15 years ago I wouldn’t have believed anyone predicting that within one generation we’d have female bishops, jogging archbishops who doubt the existence of God, homomarriage, and human rights for apes.

Yes, I would have said, I share your general misgivings about modernity, but let’s not get carried away when it comes down to the particulars. Let’s use our sense of proportion.

Yet here we are, and any sense of proportion is right out of the window. That’s why one feels duty-bound to consider every future possibility, regardless of how insane it sounds at first.

Thus, in addition to scaring me, my reader got me thinking thoughts and asking questions. Such as:

Are the Muslims really at war with the West?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. Islam is inherently, scripturally and historically an expansionist creed bent on world domination.

Being an Abrahamic religion doesn’t make it well-disposed towards other Abrahamic faiths – quite the opposite.

This is predictable: none are as hostile as exponents of superficially similar but fundamentally different creeds.

Thus Christians of the first several centuries AD were less kind to heretics than to non-Christians. Lenin reserved his vilest invective for other socialists, not for the kind of people he dismissed as ‘noxious insects’, that is non-Bolsheviks. And within Islam, the internecine hostility between its two main denominations fully matches the enmity each feels for the infidels.

The history of Islam shows that its ill feelings towards the West have invariably found practical outlets.

Every now and then, the pent-up energy building up in the Muslim world would burst out in blood-red splashes, with passive hostility becoming active warfare. When repelled and appropriately punished, Islam retreats and regroups – only to come out fighting again when duly resuscitated.

The Muslims are clearly going through an active phase now, and their feeling they are at war with the West is no longer dormant. The fact that the West, corrupted by its liberal silliness, refuses to acknowledge this only makes defeat – or, barring that, massive casualties – more likely.

Would terrorists use biological agents or other WMDs if they had them?

I don’t see why not.

Guerrillas in our midst are much more likely than Islamic states to resort to such apocalyptic weapons. The states would be an easy target for equally apocalyptic reprisals, whereas gangs of seemingly stateless thugs, such as the IS, would have no such fears.

The only way for the West to punish them for such crimes would be to accept that we are at war not with any particular Islamic fanatics but with Islam as such.

The specific punitive measures would then be easy to devise, but Muslims already know that such a development isn’t on the cards. An alliance whose leaders repeatedly spread the lie that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ won’t violate the diktats of Zeitgeist.

Can Western police and intelligence services preempt such an attack?

They have so far. Yet even though the past is a good predictor of the future, it’s not foolproof.

In important ways those services are hamstrung by the same liberal silliness I mentioned earlier. Hence they are prevented from using such prophylactic techniques as ethnic profiling or stop-and-search.

Nor does the track record of such services inspire unlimited confidence. They bungled the run-up to 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London, for example.

True enough, no major terrorist acts on Western soil have occurred since then, but then there had been no air attacks on New York buildings during the previous century of aviation either. There’s always a first time, in other words, if you’ll forgive the cliché.

Also, given the notoriously porous borders of all Western countries, one doubts it would be easy to intercept, say, a suitcase containing a primitive nuclear device or a few vials containing an infected liquid.

I bet that even a morbidly impractical chap like me could find a way of smuggling such items in, especially if money were no problem – which it isn’t for Muslim terrorists, who can always rely on the permanently open chequebooks of our good allies, such as Saudi Arabia or Oman.

How about Muslim terrorists using human carriers of deadly contagion, such as Ebola?

Why not? They seem to have no shortage of people willing to strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves to bits, along with a few bystanders.

No doubt the promise of Houri, 72 virgins, in paradise facilitates the recruitment of such martyrs. After all, if a man dreads comparison to such an extent that he prefers virgins and yet balks at paedophilia, paradise may be the only place left to find 72 chaste girls.

Then again, the Arabic word ‘houri’ is a cognate of our ‘whore’, which makes one realise than not only God but also etymology works in mysterious ways.

If a fanatic is prepared to kill himself with Semtex, why not with Ebola? No reason at all. And, if anything, biological agents are easier to smuggle in than plastic explosives.

Could it be Ebola then?

Somehow I doubt it. The purpose of terror is to terrorise, as Lenin explained on the basis of impressive personal experience. It follows that the more victims a terrorist can claim, the better he fulfils his mission.

Ebola, however, is transmitted the same way as Aids: by direct contact with blood or bodily fluids. It’s still possible to use this virus as a WMD, but some other agents are just as deadly but easier to administer.

It’s hard to second-guess murderous fanatics, but they are more likely to consider viruses transmitted through air particles, such as Variola vera (smallpox).

An Ebola carrier would be able to infect only a relatively small number of people, and the resulting epidemic would be limited and containable. Not so with a virus that can be transmitted simply by walking through crowded places.

In any case, my reader succeeded in scaring me. It’s best not to ponder such possibilities, unless of course one works for an organisation whose job it is to keep them purely theoretical.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html  or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

It’s endlessly fascinating to observe how modernity rapes the very reason in whose name it was inaugurated, the foundation on which it’s supposedly built.

Upon closer examination, however, one realises that the foundation is subsiding and termite-ridden.

Detached from its divine source, reason can become very unreasonable indeed. Actually, as if striving to vindicate Hegel’s odd notion that opposites exist in some sort of dialectical unity, modern reason becomes downright stupid with metronomic regularity.

To wit: New York’s Supreme Court is considering a test case brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NRP).

This peculiarly named organisation claims that keeping chimpanzees in cages denies their human rights, or nonhuman if you’d rather. Human or nonhuman, what’s the difference? We are all primates, and that’s all we are.

Therefore keeping the lovable chimp Tommy in a cage, claims the organisation, is the same as holding a man in permanent solitary confinement.

One infers that in the eyes of this weird setup a chimp is a human being, or near enough to be entitled to all the same rights.

This goes to show how a false premise can undermine every subsequent argument based on it. This regardless of how logical the argument sounds.

In this instance, it sounds very logical indeed, which only goes to show yet again that logic is the lowest, if useful, form of reason.

If we accept that man is nothing but a confluence of molecules coming together over a jolly long time as a result of some kind of initial biochemical accident, then the NRP’s argument makes perfect sense.

It can be demonstrated that chimpanzees are so genetically close to humans as to make no difference. The two share 99 percent of their active genetic material, and the genetic distance between them is a mere 0.386.

If that’s all there is to it, then chimps are practically human, even though their intelligence admittedly falls into the low end of the human range, the one inhabited by Richard Dawkins, Ed Miliband and most supporters of Chelsea FC.

Naturally, if we accept simian humanity then it would be churlish to deny Tommy’s right not to be incarcerated without due process.

In fact, I’m surprised it has taken Americans so long. After all, it was as far back as in 1993 that Peter Singer, Princeton professor of bioethics (whatever that is), founded his Great Ape Project (GAP – not to be confused with the retail chain of the same name).

This trailblazing academic has the sexual power of his convictions: in 2001 Singer allowed that humans and animals can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations because “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes.” Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”

For his wife’s sake one hopes he doesn’t practise what he preaches. Poor Mrs Singer would be heartbroken to find out her hubby-wubby is two-timing her with a chihuahua.

Singer is an Aussie, but it’s not surprising that he found in America the perfect environment for developing his bizarre notions. The United States is the proud pioneer of most modern inanities, such as political correctness, psychobabble, litigiousness, neoconservatism and the belief that all men are created equal.

Yet this once, before returning to its native habitat, an American idea first found its practical realisation in Europe. In 2008 the Spanish parliament passed a resolution granting human rights to apes, committing the country to the dictates of Singer’s GAP.

Soon to follow was the UN Declaration on Apes, stating that all primates, including man, are “members of the community of equals” who are not to be deprived of their liberty without due process.

Such ideas may be driven by the best of intentions, of the sort that the road to hell is paved with. But it’s reason that is the subject of this comment, and people endowed with that faculty ought to consider the practicalities even as they try to assuage their flaming consciences.

How will due process work with apes? How would the jury, presumably made up of the defendant’s peers, who can only be other apes, follow the proceedings and then communicate their verdict? How would the defendants confer with counsel? Be sworn in? Give testimony? And if convicted, how would they be punished? Would they ever be found fit to stand trial in the first place?

Even beginning to consider such, and numerous other, details will quickly lead one into an area where madness begins and the men in white coats are just round the corner. The only way to reclaim one’s sanity is to go back to the beginning and realise how fundamentally idiotic the core assumption is.

Whatever their genetic similarity with humans, apes are typologically closer to cats or cows. Apes are animals and, as such, they by definition can have no rights, human or otherwise.

Rights can only exist in a dialectical relationship with duties and responsibilities. Thus our right to the state’s protection is contingent upon our allegiance to the state (protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem in the original).

Since apes are incapable of pledging such allegiance they are not entitled to the protection. Therefore they can have no rights.

The NRP build its case on insisting that humans and simians had a common ancestor 7,000,000 years ago, which may or may not be true. Either way, it’s irrelevant.

When a card-carrying evolutionist  goes back far enough, he claims that all life on earth sprang from a single cell. Hence we have common ancestry not just with chimps but also with flies. Does this mean swatting one constitutes a violation of its rights?

When Darwin first came up with his sensational but rather slapdash theory, John Henry Newman had no problems with it. His complacency stands to reason: being omnipotent, God is as capable of creating things slowly as fast.

It’s only when Darwin’s theory is married to unwavering materialism that it falls apart. It’s quite possible, if to me uninteresting, that man’s body evolved from a lower order of life, some kind of primate.

But that primate would never have become man if God hadn’t breathed a particle of his soul into it. This is the only explanation that makes the origin of human life intelligible.

Replacing that premise with a materialist one inevitably produces intellectual perversions like the GAP or the NRP, intellectual perverts like Peter Singer and perverse ideas like giving human rights to chimps.

If this is what the Age of Reason is about, can we please go back to an Age of Faith?  That’s when mankind still practised real reason, despised false reason – and knew the difference between the two.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html  or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

I don’t know if Andy Street, head of John Lewis, plays football, but he’s certainly a master of our second most popular sport: French bashing.

Nothing in France works, he says. In absolute terms he’s not far wrong: most things in France don’t work as well as they should.

But by comparing St Pancras favourably to Gare du Nord, Mr Street implied that his standards aren’t absolute but comparative. One can also infer that he uses Britain as the baseline value.

By such relativistic standards I’d say that most things in France work famously. Granted, I haven’t conducted an extensive study to reach this conclusion, but then neither, one suspects, has Mr Street to reach his.

For example, France’s health system, cleverly blending the private and public sectors, is vastly superior to our socialist leviathan of the NHS.

I don’t know how much exposure Mr Street has had to French medicine but, after 14 years of dual residence, I’ve had a fair amount.

It’s only one man’s experience, but I can always get a GP appointment in France within hours – as opposed to at least 10 days at my West London surgery. In fact I remember the shock of ringing my local GP’s receptionist in France and hearing her apologise that the doctor wouldn’t be able to see me until after lunch.

France’s infrastructure is also much better than ours. Not only her toll motorways but even minor country roads are regularly resurfaced and beautifully marked, which takes French workmen days – not weeks as in England.

A few years ago it took the French just a month to build a 10-mile bypass around a town on the Loire – compared to the four months it took our lot to resurface and tart up Putney Bridge.

Although Gare du Nord is indeed dingy, public transport in France outperforms ours by a wide margin and it costs a lot less. Fair enough, it’s heavily subsidised, but our train system didn’t work well when it was nationalised and it doesn’t now when it’s private.

Modern architectural monstrosities at the outskirts of major cities may be even more revolting in France than in Britain, although I’m not sure how quantifiable ‘revolting’ is. But at least the French have the good taste of not befouling their handsome city centres, something we manifestly don’t possess.

Although the standards of food are declining in France, only someone with perverse taste would claim, as Mr Street did, that British cuisine is better.

True enough, food may be more varied in London than in Paris, and the wine may be as good, yet the London food wouldn’t usually be British and the wine is likely to be French.

Public education in France is sliding down the hill in our general direction, but it still has a long way to go.

A month or so ago, I had dinner with a few French friends, none of whom was a professional intellectual. A couple of them were lawyers, one was a banker and another one some kind of business consultant.

Again, on the basis of one man’s experience, I’d say they are all better educated than one would expect from their English equivalents.

For example, when the conversation touched upon the Venerable Bede, it turned out they not only had heard the name but had actually read The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, albeit a long time ago. Would their English counterparts be similarly erudite?

None of my French friends sounds ‘sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat’, in Mr Street’s phrase. They’re actually quite jovial and considerably more upbeat than my English friends who, in addition to all the same problems as in France, are also driven to distraction by the EU, the wicked setup the French ill-advisedly welcome.

France’s population is roughly the same as ours. They work about 25% fewer man/hours per year, and their businesses are strangulated by more red tape than one sees here. Yet their GDP is slightly higher than Britain’s, which means their productivity is much greater – something also observable in the speed of their road works.

What doesn’t work in France is politics, and it’s the millstone pulling the country down to the bottom. Amazingly she’s even more socialist than Britain, and it’s not just the international variety, Marxism, that thrives in France.

Also gathering speed is the national socialism of Marine Le Pen’s lot, the National Front. One gets the impression that socialist extremism of any kind has no difficulty working its way into France’s political mainstream.

We, on the other hand, have successfully marginalised our own National Front (BNP). Alas, our answer to François Hollande, Ed Miliband, is likely to win the next election. Thus if at present we enjoy a slender political lead over France, even this wafer-thin edge is likely to disappear in a year’s time.

Given the low education and productivity levels of the British labour force, this will create an economic catastrophe that’ll drive London’s 300,000 Frenchmen back to France, or possibly across the ocean, faster than you can say adieu.

Meanwhile, they may be thriving here, but their children go to French schools, they buy their bread at French bakeries, their cakes at French patisseries and they only ever use the NHS because it’s ‘free’, not because it’s any good.

However, for those of us who don’t have to make a living in France, the country works very well indeed. Why, we’ve even learned to be polite enough not to slag off the French who after all have created the lovely place we enjoy so much.

Andy Street ought to pick up French manners too. And, if he doesn’t want to be accused of hypocrisy, he shouldn’t advise others not to invest in France at a time John Lewis is opening a French-language website.

Why, Andy, beholdest thou the mote that is in thy French brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, fromhttp://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html  or, in the USA,http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

A 22-year-old Colombian woman has unwittingly stumbled upon a promising horticultural idea.

It was unwitting because her intention was never to grow potatoes. Following her mother’s advice, she simply used that versatile root vegetable as a contraceptive device.

However, by the time she was admitted to hospital with acute abdominal pains, and the doctors tried to harvest the potato, it had already germinated and grown roots inside her.

Mercifully, the woman suffered no lasting damage, at least none of the physical kind.

While deliriously happy for her, I’m still sorry that the report of the incident omitted some crucial details.

First, since Colombia is a predominantly Catholic country, one wonders whether the girl’s priest knew she was using contraception, something the Church doesn’t really condone.

Could it be argued that, since God didn’t create the potato for that application, it doesn’t constitute a legitimate contraceptive device? There are layers of theological subtexts there, and it would be a shame to leave them unexplored.

Here’s another question demanding an urgent answer: What kind of potato was it? I do think the patient’s profile would be incomplete without specifying whether it was, say, a small new potato, a medium Russet or a cricket-ball sized baking variety.

Did the vegetable serve its intended purpose? One would think the trickier spermatozoa would be able to find their way around such an obstacle. If they didn’t, the size of the potato becomes even more relevant.

Also, and that’s the foodie in me, I’d like to know what happened to the potato afterwards. In a country where food is sometimes at a premium an edible vegetable, especially one that boasts an unusual flavour, shouldn’t be wasted.

Admittedly the use of certain organs as vegetable patches is somewhat unorthodox, but this idea should certainly be considered for wider use in small countries where arable land is scarce. (I hope my Dutch friends aren’t reading this.) Such an innovative concept would certainly add a whole new meaning to combining business with pleasure.

Alas, instead of approaching the story in this rational and creative way, and uncovering its wealth of both agricultural and amorous possibilities, the papers have chosen the occasion to bemoan the absence of sex education in Colombian schools.

At first glance, the problem just might go a bit deeper than that, as it were. After all, just a few decades ago there wasn’t much sex education in England either, yet those ruddy lasses of yesteryear only ever used potatoes for chips.

What if – and I know I’m letting my imagination run away with me – the girl was a subject in a clinical trial aimed to discover surreptitious ways of growing the crop for which Colombia is more widely known than her potatoes?

That’s only a remote possibility, but one worth pondering.

One just hopes that the sneering reactionaries who slept through their diversity classes won’t use this incident to generalise about the beautiful country of Columbia.

I’ll have you know that, according to The Freedom House, the ultimate arbiter in such matters, Colombia is a full-fledged democracy. As such it satisfies the only criterion of geopolitical virtue that my neocon friends hold in high esteem.

Incidentally, the same Washington think tank doesn’t regard Britain, circa 1900, as a democracy. This means that Colombia today is much more sophisticated than Britain was then, a point further strengthened by the fact that even in the intervening 114 years English women still haven’t explored the raft of possibilities resident in a simple spud.

I hope I’ve given you something to think about the next time you enjoy your bangers and mash. Bon appetit!

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, fromhttp://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA,http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Cameron has only one thing going for him: he isn’t Ed Miliband.

Miliband’s speech at the Labour conference proved yet again that he has learned nothing from the disasters his socialist predecessors have perpetrated with predictable regularity.

Clearly, this Eddie is not for learning.

Dave isn’t a particularly fast study either, but he has the mind-focusing prospect of losing the next election staring him in the face.

Trouble is, Ed may have shot himself in the foot, but he may still hopscotch to electoral victory.

One reason for that is the gerrymandering engineered with enviable foresight by the Blair-Brown lot. As a result, the Tories need a 50% greater popular vote than Labour to win a parliamentary seat, and who says Labour doesn’t think ahead.

A more important reason is the one I pointed out the other day: our Conservative PM isn’t conservative. And what’s worse is that by now everyone knows it.

Hence, though his suit-no-tie liberal image goes over big in Notting Hill, it leaves him vulnerable to a flanking manoeuvre by a third party preaching something like a clear-cut conservative message.

Ukip cleverly positioned itself as one such, and it’s about to become a parliamentary party. True enough, the handful of seats Farage is likely to claim wouldn’t by itself necessarily spell defeat for the Tories. But the trouble is it’s not by itself.

A much more significant factor is the fracturing effect Ukip candidates have on the traditional Tory support, and this will be much greater than the erosion of the Labour vote they are also likely to cause.

Tory voters know that, come what may, they’ll have to live with a government that isn’t quite conservative. But they are disgusted to see governing in their name someone who isn’t just insufficiently conservative but aggressively anti-conservative.

This explains why, in spite of glowing economic reports, predictions of even better things to come, and notwithstanding Ed’s cosmic incompetence, the Tories have been consistently trailing Labour in the polls.

Nothing sharpens a modern politician’s mind like the prospect of losing power. Dave’s mind now honed to razor sharpness, he knew what he had to do.

In fact just before the Tory conference The Daily Mail spelled it out in no uncertain terms: Dave had to deliver the speech of his life.

His task was twofold. The easy part was to look good compared to Ed, which was achievable simply by remembering to say ruefully that the country still has a bit of a problem paying her own way.

The difficult part was to come across as something everyone knows Dave isn’t: a conservative. Someone who can flog Nigel Farage by swinging his own bullwhip from the right.

Now pretending to be something one isn’t is called deception in some quarters, and Dave is the past master. This he proved by delivering a rousing oration that went a long way towards convincing the more credulous wing of the electorate.

The speech gave despairing Tories a straw to clutch, even though some aren’t sure it’s strong enough to support their weight.

In their elation few realised that the politicking leopard still kept his spots firmly in place.

Look for example at Dave’s fiery rhetoric against the European Court of Human Rights, culminating in a promise to replace Labour’s Human Rights Act with our own Bill of Rights.

We don’t need lessons on human rights from Strasbourg, said Dave, and he’s absolutely right. Where he’s wrong is that we don’t need another Bill of Rights either, considering we already had one in 1689.

There was plenty wrong with that Lockean document, but this is beyond my scope here. What matters is that Dave’s legal thought seems to be anchored to a system of positive law prevalent on the continent.

Our common, precedent-based law doesn’t need to be codified in a single document: it comes not from a state diktat but from experience lovingly gathered and meticulously tested over generations.

If Dave is unaware of this, it’s most unfortunate. But if he knows what’s what but talks about bills of rights regardless, it’s much worse.

He has accepted the language, and therefore the thought, of those whose legal tradition isn’t only different from ours but is diametrically opposite to it. This bodes badly for numerous EU-related promises of which Dave, with Nigel breathing down his neck, made quite a few.

Deep down he clearly wants to go to bed in London but wake up in Brussels, to echo his speechwriter’s phrase. Therefore Dave will fight Britain’s exit from the EU tooth and nail, and if this means breaking a few promises yet again – well, he has form.

Then came the blockbuster: the promise to reduce taxes, to which The Times bizarrely refers as a ‘giveaway’. (You can give away only something that belongs to you, which means that in the eyes of this formerly conservative paper our money really belongs to the state, which in its munificence can then decide how much we may keep.)

Dave is promising to raise both the ceiling at which the 40% bracket kicks in and also the personal allowance below which no income tax is paid.

In practical terms, most families will get to keep only a few more hundred a year, but still, it’s better than the proverbial poke in the eye.

Yet Dave’s avowed generosity is going to cost the Exchequer billions every year. Juxtaposing this with another promise, that of beginning to reduce the national debt by 2018, we realise that massive reductions in government spending will be needed for Dave not to break another promise or two.

Yes, we all know about the Laffer curve showing that lower taxes stimulate the economy, thereby increasing tax revenue. This idea was so successful that Ronald Reagan became president on its strength.

However, when his OMB man David Stockton began to crunch numbers, he quickly found out that “the Laffer curve didn’t pay for itself”, as he put it. It doesn’t obviate the need for sweeping cuts in public spending.

Where is Dave going to snip? We already know that he’s committed to increasing the NHS budget at roughly the same rate as ever. The £12 billion foreign-aid budget is also ring-fenced, an odd perversion Dave wants to make ironclad law.

Cosmetic cuts in the welfare budget aren’t going to take up the slack, even assuming they are implemented. Any further cuts to our defence capability will mean we’ll have none left – this despite a particularly volatile geopolitical situation. Nor is it up to us to decide how much we donate to the EU.

What remains is social services, which vast number of Britons hold to be sacrosanct. Will Dave and George really reduce the welfare spend by billions? In spite of the other lot screaming about children going hungry as a result? Somehow one doubts that.

There’s no doubt that Dave sounded conservative yesterday. But it’s a long way from sounding to being, and a longer one still to action.

A sceptic will fear the Tories will never travel that road under Dave. An aesthete will nonetheless be happy to have heard some pleasant conservative noises. And a fair-minded man will wish Dave had credited Farage as his co-author, for without him this speech wouldn’t have been made.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, fromhttp://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our country is at war.

Historically, that’s what the RAF flying bombing sorties has meant. If this fact now calls for a different interpretation, I’d like to hear what it is.

Until I do I’ll be repeating the same old thing: Britain is at war. And I hope you’ll join me.

By doing so you’ll exhibit more clarity of strategic thought than HMG so far has shown, and it’s not getting much help from our commentators, expert or otherwise.

Witness Paddy Ashdown’s article We Must Embrace Putin to Beat Islamic State.

Unlike most pundits, Lord Ashdown, to give him his proper title, has served in the military. His experience in the Royal Marines and the Special Boat Section (as it then was) no doubt trained him how to slit a sentry’s throat without raising an alarm. But acquiring such tactical acumen evidently failed to sharpen Paddy’s strategic mind.

He begins by informing us that “war is a continuation of politics by other means”, and he graciously attributes this adage to its author, Clausewitz.

Now what? Now Paddy comes up with a truism of his own: military action needs to be backed up by politics and diplomacy to succeed.

So far, so good. It’s the transition from the general to the specific that catches Paddy with his intellectual pants down (British readers will get the reference, others may not, but they won’t have missed much).

According to him, in order to defeat the IS we need to draw both Russia and Iran into a broad coalition that mercifully already includes such powerhouses as Bahrain and Oman.

Russia has ample qualifications to join us at the table because “Sunni jihadism is roaring away in the Russian Islamic republics of Dagestan and Chechnya, almost as much as in Iraq and Syria.”

Strategy apart for a second, this statement is simply ignorant. In Soviet times Chechnya was Muslim as nominally as Russia was Christian.

The nature of Chechnya’s conflict with Russia was ethnic, not religious, and it goes back at least 200 years. More recently, it became ‘ethnic’ as in ‘cleansing’, for that was what the Chechens suffered immediately after the Second World War.

Hence the moment they could declare independence, in 1991, they did. The Russians responded in their natural, time-proven way: with violence.

Two wars later, one that started in 1994, the other in 1999, the Chechen population once again suffered massive atrocities, and Chechen cities – including the predominantly Russian-populated Grozny – were levelled.

As a result, the Chechens indeed turned to Islam in earnest, but it’s sheer folly to describe the conflict in Ashdown’s simplistic terms.

Subjecting a Muslim population to atrocities is a sure way of radicalising it, and one only wishes the Americans had learned that lesson when contemplating the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Ashdown’s understanding of the conflict in the Middle East is also weak. He, along with HMG, seems to think that our only problem there is caused by the gang of AK-toting, knife-wielding fanatics calling themselves the Islamic State.

Paddy believes that this outburst of Sunni energy is so significant that a) we must do something about it and b) we can do nothing without securing help from Russia and Iran.

To show a certain breadth of thought, he acknowledges the wider conflict between the Sunni and Shiite factions of Islam, which is good. But what makes this our problem?

Divide et impera is the ancient law of politics continued by other means. Hence if one believes that all we’re observing in the region is an internecine war between two types of Islam, common sense would suggest we have nothing to lose and all to gain by cheering from the sidelines.

True, those IS chaps have beheaded a couple of Westerners and are threatening to stage a sequel or two. Two centuries ago this would have been seen as a legitimate casus belli, but these day it clearly isn’t.

In any case, if that’s all that bothers us, a few punitive raids by Western special forces, including those in which Paddy served with such distinction, could take care of it famously.

Russian special forces demonstrated how such things are done back in the late ‘70s, during Jimmy Carter’s pathetic shilly-shallying over the hostage crisis in Iran.

A few Russian hostages were taken at the same time, but there no shilly-shallying ensued: Spetsnaz immediately kidnapped the leaders of the offending tribe. They then sent various portions of the chieftains’ anatomy to their families, threatening to post the unused portions soon. The next day the Russians got their hostages back.

A version of the same approach would work here. Even though Sandhurst and West Point don’t teach their alumni how to detach testicles, this skill can be quickly learned on the job.

So whence this need to form a broad coalition? One would like to hope that, even in their present truncated shape, Nato forces on their own should be able to handle a few hundred eclectically armed and badly trained fanatics.

If we need the help of Russia and Iran for that, we’re in deeper trouble than I thought. But then Lord Ashdown doesn’t think we wouldn’t be able to achieve our tactical ends on our own. He feels Russia and Iran are essential to any post-war settlement in the Middle East.

Obviously the Second World War failed to teach us the danger of alliances with diabolical regimes, specifically Russian ones. Then Western appeasing vacillation in 1938-1939 created a situation where an alliance with Stalin’s Russia became a necessity.

But despots don’t enter alliances for free. The immediate price we paid was delivering half of Europe and much of Asia to the most satanic regime in history, while the deferred price was spending trillions trying to keep what was left.

Putin is now reviving Soviet imperial ambitions of land-grabbing domination. Since the 1950s the Middle East has been of particular interest to the Russians, for obvious economic and strategic reasons.

The strategy of Great Britain, when she still was a world power, was to keep Russia away from the Mediterranean. And now Paddy is agitating for us to advance Putin’s strategic aims – in spite of his nastiness in the Ukraine, which Paddy grudgingly acknowledges.

If Putin is drawn into the coalition, he, unlike Nato, won’t leave when the shooting stops. Invited to act as king maker, he’ll make himself king.

Our whole diplomatic, political and military strategy should be aimed at keeping the Russians out, not drawing them in – and the same goes for Iran.

If Putin’s price for his participation will be Russia’s powerful presence in the region, it takes utter naivety not to realise what the ayatollahs will demand for their help: the West’s acquiescence in Iran acquiring a nuclear capability.

The result of the Ashdown plan would thus be a Middle East dominated by the nuclear-armed ayatollas and Putin, now emboldened to press on with his plans to reverse “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century.”

Calling this strategy ill-advised would be an act of charity that would stretch the most Christian of faiths.

A country should go to war only when her national interests are threatened – as are ours in the Middle East. But the threat comes not from the Islamic State but from the Islamic faith.

The fideistic aspect of it is astonishingly weak, but the resultant ideological bellicosity is as powerful as it is anti-Western. Depending on the geopolitical balance, this bellicosity ebbs and flows. It’s now at high tide, and this indeed presents a dire threat to the West.

Rather than encouraging the other deadly threat, that of Russian expansionism, we should stem the tide of Muslim aggressive energy.

If we feel this can’t be achieved by peaceful means, then war is justified because our national interests are clearly at stake.

This takes me back to the beginning: RAF raids on Iraq mean we are at war. We must acknowledge this first and then try to understand what we are fighting for, and against whom.

If we somehow reach the correct understanding that our true enemy isn’t the Islamic State but Islam, the strategy would write itself. We must recolonise the Middle East and keep it recolonised until we’re satisfied it has been pacified for a long time.

We should take over the oil fields, using the revenues to develop the economies in the region, offset the cost of the colonisation and bring the price of hydrocarbons down. That would also quell Putin’s imperial ambitions, or at least his ability to act on them.

It so happens that the vagaries of strategic balance at the moment are such that the West has the tactical wherewithal to execute this strategy. What we lack is the power of our convictions, or indeed convictions as such.

Also in short supply is the requisite common sense – as so persuasively demonstrated by Paddy Ashdown, the terminal sufferer from the terrible cognitive dissonance afflicting the West.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

If, like me, you aren’t plugged into popular culture, Robson Green is some kind of TV actor, a rather good one by general consent.

That makes him a celebrity, a status that confers on its proud possessor the authority to enlarge on any subject under the sun and have his views taken seriously.

Now my lifelong familiarity with actors (I grew up in the family of one) has led me to one of those YOU CAN’T SAY THAT observations, namely that thespians tend to be rather dim.

This stands to reason: someone who spends his life assuming other people’s personalities is unlikely to develop a strong one of his own. Good actors are so used to delivering other people’s clever lines that they are unlikely to come up with any of their own.

Proving my oft-made point that left-wingers are usually knaves and always fools, most – though not quite all – actors gravitate towards the sinister (or is it gauche?) end of the political spectrum.

Basking in the reflected light of their celebrity, they appeal to the constantly widening group of people who accept their authority to pontificate. The common misapprehension is that an actor, when not in character, speaks his mind.

This is wrong: a person can only speak his mind when he has one. Since most actors have little of that faculty, in their public pronouncements they continue to deliver someone else’s lines.

That – and only that – makes their statements interesting for they provide a clue to Zeitgeist. Hence Mr Green’s tirade against tax avoidance deserves to be considered with the attention it otherwise wouldn’t merit.

The actor riles against tax avoiders, not tax evaders. There’s no point getting too worked up about the latter, those who break the law trying to shield their money from the state’s grubby fingers.

Taking a moral stand against them is like taking one against robbers. Let the law deal with those who break it.

Tax avoidance is a different matter altogether. This is practised by those who find legal shelters for their money, tucking it away so that neither the Treasury nor its legal arm can get to it.

The only way for the state to claim what it feels is its due is to shame the clever chaps into transferring more of their hard-earned into public coffers. Thus Dave Cameron, that unimpeachable moral authority, often delivers himself of diatribes against the depraved vermin who deny the state its uncountable pounds of flesh.

But Dave, for all his manifest intellectual failings, seldom oversteps the boundary where demagoguery ends and madness begins. He must have slept through most classes at his expensive schools, but at least he did attend them.

Robson, on the other hand, doesn’t suffer from similar restraints on his freedom of self-expression. Hence: “My son was in real trouble when he was young and we took him to the hospital… That’s why you pay your taxes.”

And further: “We’ve got a police system who protect us [should be ‘that protects’, but obviously no teleprompter was available], we’ve got firemen who put out fires. We’ve got defence, man. That’s what tax is for.”

Thanks, Robson, for putting it so simply that even we can understand. But simple is always in danger of becoming simplistic, and this is the case here.

These days the public sector, largely financed by taxes, consumes just under 50 per cent of our GDP (in fact, but for some statistical acrobatics, it would be even higher than that, but that’s a different matter).

In 1900, however, the public sector claimed only 15 per cent of the nation’s wealth. Does this mean that Robert Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury, PM at the time, was less committed to public services than Dave is now? And a lot less than Ed?

Did his government not give a hoot about the Brits getting killed by medical neglect, domestic criminals, foreign enemies or raging fires?

But forget about Britain for a second. Why is it that the thought of confiscating half of people’s income never crossed the mind of a single ‘absolute’ monarch of yesteryear? Shame Robson wasn’t around then to teach them the morality of taxation.

Extortionist taxation isn’t about public services. This serves as nothing but the smokescreen for the real objective: the state putting its foot down. That’s what tax is for, Robson.

All modern post-Christian governments, democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian, overlap on one common imperative: transferring more power from the individual to the state.

Where they differ is in the methods by which they facilitate this process, and therefore in the speed at which it accelerates.

For old times’ sake, most Western states move towards total control more slowly and less violently, which shouldn’t mask the fact that they do move towards it.

People are being gradually conditioned to accept as an inexorable force of nature that it’s up to the state to decide what to do about their health, education – and money.

Yet if there is an historical fact to which there are no exceptions it’s that a government that does a lot for you does a lot to you. That’s why wise men of the past delivered many variations on the same theme: a government governs best that governs least.

We today live in an age of totalitarian economism: deprived of any spiritual core to our lives, we’ve been trained to lead an existence mostly defined in economic terms.

The exact terms differ from one economist to the next, but they all, Marxist and ‘conservatives’ alike, preach the philistine gospel enunciated by Max Weber: “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life.”

If true, then man dominated by the making of money can easily be dominated by a state taking his money away from him. The larger the proportion of his income thus extracted, the greater the state’s domination.

This play was written by Zeitgeist, and Robson Green dutifully delivers its lines with the usual amount of demagogic pathos. However, the rest of us should get up and cheer every clever chap who finds legal ways of saving his wealth from the state.

His intention may only be to protect his money. But in effect he’s protecting what’s left of our liberty.

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html