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Guarded congratulations to Americans

Trump’s victory may or may not be a reason to rejoice, but it’s definitely a reason to gloat. The anguished contortions of left-wing faces are precious.

And yes, there is such a thing as a left-wing face. You can recognise it by the smug expression of someone who knows what’s good for you better than you do. It’s Gnosticism without the gnosis.

Nor is it just facial reactions. Lefties are keen to bewail the depth of the tragedy that has befallen the world. Reading their whingeing comments, one can be justified to think that the SS has come back and is rounding up all lefties. Hail to the Chief ought to be replaced with Heil Hitler.

The impression is strengthened by The Guardian’s call for “resistance”. I think the word they were looking for but for some reason didn’t find was ‘opposition’. That’s what political runners-up do in civilised societies. ‘Resistance’ evokes the images of Frenchmen wearing berets and shooting Nazi occupiers with Sten guns dropped by SOE planes.

What happened yesterday caught the ‘liberals’ by surprise, but I can’t imagine why. The result has been confidently predictable for quite some time.

Appearing on a New York podcast a fortnight ago, I broke my lifelong custom of never predicting election results. “Trump will win,” I said, “and he’ll win comfortably”.

My host, a MAGA Republican, said, “Well, yes, common sense would suggest…”. “Common sense has nothing to do with it,” I replied. “The polls say so, as long as you know how to read them.”

My plebiscitary prescience has been acquired not by an exercise of any extraordinary gifts, but simply by the experience of closely watching US elections from Nixon onwards. And extreme Left candidates only ever win there by subterfuge, when they successfully put on centrist airs.

Biden took the trouble of doing that in 2020 and won. Harris didn’t in 2024 and lost. Kamala didn’t even bother to conceal her unwavering allegiance to the NYT version of woke socialism – and her feeble grasp of the visceral instincts of Middle America.

She’d even introduce herself at mass rallies by informing the audience that her pronouns are she/her. Though I haven’t lived in the US for 36 years, that’s too short a time for Americans to have changed so much as to countenance such glossocratic power grab.

The electric-hybrid and Prosecco states bookending the continent on either coast predictably went for Harris. The more numerous pickup-truck and Bud states in between just as predictably didn’t.

Having played Cassandra once, I’m not going to do so again by trying to second-guess Trump’s policies. As everyone knows, he is rather unpredictable, although I imagine domestically he’ll try to do roughly the same things he did the first time around.

It’s his foreign policy that makes me look to the future with apprehension. Trump wasn’t a bad peacetime president, although he wasn’t quite the saviour of MAGA fantasy. However, the West is no longer at peacetime, and we can no longer make do with just a reasonably competent if eccentric administrator at the helm. We need a war leader, and that calls for a different DNA.

Churchill, for example, has few equals among statesmen who have ever led their countries at war. As a peacetime prime minister, on the other hand, he was unremarkable. Mind you, looking at our government today, I’d happily settle for unremarkable, but the fact remains: good at peace doesn’t necessarily mean good at war, and vice versa.

Speaking of Trump’s foreign policy, one obvious development requires no crystal ball to predict: Foreign Secretary Lammy can’t possibly remain in his job past Inauguration Day. Yes, I know our national pride can’t allow a foreign power to dictate our cabinet appointments. But needs must.

Trump doesn’t strike me as a magnanimous type who is likely to forgive the epithets Lammy has been throwing at him for years. A narcissist is like an elephant, and Trump will never forget Lammy’s vile insults, such as calling him a “neo-Nazi sociopath”, a “fascist” or a “KKK type”. Hence the poor chap won’t be welcome at Trump’s new home, and Britain needs America more than America needs Britain. Lammy should start looking to life on the backbenches or ideally out of public life altogether.

Unlike my New York host, I’m not overcome with joy. I’m only glad we’ve been spared the gloom of Kamala ‘She/Her’ Harris at the White House. However, under normal circumstances either candidate should only have been able to enter that building by going on a guided tour.

Yet our circumstances throughout the West are anything but normal. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in political strata, with the centre being crushed by the two extremes.

The seismic activity is brisk: the whole bulk of Western politics has been pushed so far out of kilter that the old notions of left, right and centre have lost whatever meaning they ever had. I’ll leave it for the wielders of such terminology to sort themselves out, but I only hope they’ll stop referring to the likes of Trump as conservatives.

Conservatism no longer has a reliable constituency anywhere in the West, which is why I can’t think offhand of a single Western leader who merits the conservative sobriquet. Yet it’s not only nature but also politics that abhors a vacuum. The space vacated by conservatives has been filled by radical right-wing demagogues.

What goes for right-of-centre conservatives also goes for left-of-centre socialists. Most of today’s Democratic (and Labour) politicians are closer to Lenin and Trotsky than to Humphrey or Gaitskell. And a clash of the two extreme poles is fraught with danger.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law works in politics too because the two extremes see each other not as opponents, friendly allies who happen to disagree on some points. They see each other as implacable enemies and act accordingly.

Hence, when one extreme emerges victorious, it seeks to expunge every trace of the other extreme’s policy. Such an action produces an equal and opposite reaction when the roles are reversed. No one minds how vindictive the reaction is and how many babies are thrown out with the bathwater.

Swift’s brilliant satire features Big-Endians and Little-Endians locked in eternal arguments about how best to break a boiled egg. The writer satirised his contemporaneous Tories and Whigs, pointing out in his lucid style how trivial the political differences between them were. We should have such risible problems, those typical of a civilised society.

The sharp polarisation of today’s politics is a characteristic of a disintegrating civilisation. Ever since the Girondists took their place right of the aisle at the National Assembly, and the Jacobins left of the aisle, Western civilisation – certainly including its political expression – has been coming apart.

The present clash between a right-wing demagogue and a left-wing nonentity incapable even of coherent demagoguery emphasises this point, drives it home with deafening force. Still, as I’ve been saying throughout the campaign, given the two extremes, sensible people should choose the more acceptable one.

Thus Americans have made the right choice, although I’m sorry that was the only choice on offer. The simulacra of their dilemma dominate the politics throughout what used to be the civilised world on either side of the Atlantic. So my congratulations have to be tinged with sadness.

Creaking bridge across the Atlantic

Maggie and her bastard son

Though he writes about the US election, William Hague unwittingly shows why the Conservatives lost their own: because of wet mock-Tories like him.

The title of his article in The Times, Trump Is No Reagan – We All Need Him to Lose, is only half right. Trump is indeed no Reagan, a truism amply communicated by his name.

But the second part makes so little sense that one has to doubt Lord Hague’s mental competence. He seems not to realise that, for Trump to lose, Harris has to win. Yet Lord Hague doesn’t even attempt to show why that victory would be any good for America or, for that matter, Britain.

Parochially speaking, Trump is rather well disposed toward Britain, while Harris hates her with a barely concealed passion.

Her Jamaican father, a Marxist professor of economics, was oppressed by dastardly British colonialists all the way to Stanford. And her scientist mother was downtrodden in Madras to such an extent that she had to take her emotional wounds to Berkeley. Kamala mentions her parents’ CVs often, and with much passion. One could be forgiven for believing that she regards moving from Jamaica and India to California as a harrowing ordeal, for which she holds Britain responsible.

Lord Hague is so effusive about Ronald Reagan, and so derisive about Trump, that I for one am ready to vote for the former in preference to the latter. That, however, isn’t an option, and Lord Hague’s animadversions are as pointless as they are malevolent.

This isn’t to say Trump is above criticism. It’s true that his obsession with protectionist tariffs isn’t normally associated with fiscal conservatism. It’s also true that he seems to advocate the same mistake David Stockman, Reagan’s economic guru, made by putting too much faith in the Laffer Curve.

Arthur Laffer drew that geometrical shape to show that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher tax revenue. However, when he became the OMB Director under Reagan, Stockman found out to his horror that, as he put it in his book, “The Laffer Curve doesn’t pay for itself.”

That is, tax cuts must be accompanied by a concomitant reduction in spending, a harsh economic reality that seems to escape Trump. In general, his economic pronouncements tend to be the kind of demagoguery that plays big in downmarket public bars, but has little chance of improving public finances.

Lord Hague waxes nostalgic about the Republican Party when “it was in the safe hands” of “the great Senator John McCain” and Mitt Romney. Their ideas were so closely aligned with Mr Hague’s (as he then was) that “the transatlantic bonds of conservatism held fast.”

Add the adjective ‘wet’ or, better still, the particle ‘non-’ before ‘conservatism’, and Lord Hague’s nostalgia would be justified. He makes that clear by saying that “political ideas flow freely across the ocean. Isn’t Britain’s new government influenced, in its ambitions for renewable energy and deficit spending to fund public investment, by the confidence of the Biden administration in pursuing those goals?”

Indeed it is: both governments are united in their wholehearted commitment to destroying their economies with foolish policies based on fraudulent science. If such is Lord Hague’s idea of economic unison, then both countries would be better off each treading its own path.

Meanwhile, he continues to tug on our heart’s strings: “It is hard for British Conservatives to accept that the Republican Party we knew so recently has become inhabited by something quite different, by a cult of personality rather than a political philosophy. It is as if a close friend has died, or at least taken leave of their senses.”

Hold on a moment, where did I put those damn handkerchiefs… There, we can talk now, and let’s ignore Hague’s woke use of a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent.

Fair enough, the Republican Party has changed since Reagan’s time, as has the Conservative Party since Maggie’s tenure. However, the impression one gets from Lord Hague’s dirge is that the main opposing parties, Democratic and Labour, have remained the same.

He is right in saying that Trump is no conservative, although on balance he is more conservative than Lord Hague. But the opposition Trump faces isn’t the Democratic Party of Jimmy Carter or even Walter Mondale. It’s a crypto-Marxist group, with ‘crypto-’ on its way out. Similarly, our own Labour Party has just passed a whole raft of Marxist legislation designed to stoke up class war along the lines of The Communist Manifesto.

It’s reasonably clear to those who, unlike Lord Hague, can reason, that the gentlemanly ‘conservatism’ dripping wet is powerless to stem the flow of subversive Marxism threatening to engulf Britain first and America second. Since real political conservatism is moribund in Britain and well-nigh nonexistent in America, perhaps it takes the radical populism of a Trump or a Farage to put up effective resistance.

Lord Hague is sympathetic to our allies facing barbarian onslaught, the Ukraine, Israel and, potentially, Taiwan. He correctly remarks that today’s world is turbulent and the maelstrom jeopardises the West and hence world peace. Faced with such threats, he thinks the West would be unsafe if led by Trump – and it was much safer when led by Reagan.

That may be true, especially since during the eight years of Reagan’s presidency the US defence spending increased by 66 per cent. Trump, on the other hand, makes regular pronouncements on America’s defence budget being bloated because she ill-advisedly has to pay for the defence of others. He has also said occasionally that, if other countries can’t look after themselves, he is inclined to let them sink or swim on their own.

However, Trump isn’t the paragon of verbal responsibility. He may say one thing and do another, keeping everyone guessing. He may also come off the wall like Humpty Dumpty, and with the same effect.

Lord Hague deplores Trump’s unpredictability, comparing it unfavourably with Reagan’s unwavering commitment to the defence of the West, not just the US. I share his fears for the future of the Ukraine especially, what with Trump’s transactional eagerness to do a deal with Putin.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is entirely predictable, something that escapes Lord Hague’s attention. She is guaranteed to continue Biden’s policy of dripping just enough lifeblood into the Ukraine’s arm to keep the country in the fight until it bleeds out. And I have to remind Lord Hague once again that it’s not Reagan but Harris who is the alternative to Trump.

It takes two not just to tango but also to stand in elections. Sniping at Trump is good knockabout fun, and he is indeed an inviting target. However, saying on that basis that we need Harris to win has as little to do with conservatism as does Lord Hague’s career.

Given the actual choice facing the American electorate, I’d vote for Trump any day and ten times on Tuesday (a voting pattern perfected by the Democratic Party).

We all have a steak in it

Boneless bone of contention

These days it’s fashionable for supermarkets to list ingredients down to the molecular level. In the spirit of openness and transparency, some lists read like the whole periodic table of elements reshuffled.

And yet I believe they conceal one important fact: unbeknown to us, all their beef is halal. This conclusion is conjecture, but it’s not baseless conjecture. I simply trust the comparative evidence before my eyes.

I started gathering it in 1974, when I settled in Texas where I was to spend the next 10 years. And in that state beef isn’t just a staple meat. It’s an object of veneration and pride. It’s a cult, with the steak sitting atop the totem pole of beef worship.

Perhaps half a million square miles in Texas are taken up by pastures and feeding stations. The latter, as I recall, do little to improve the olfactory environment. Driving west out of Houston one has to go through 20 miles of dung stench, piercing enough to defeat the capacity of any air conditioner to cope.

I don’t know if Texans take an oath of allegiance to beef, but they are certainly prepared to go to war against its enemies. This they proved at the end of the 19th century, when sheep farmers dared to move into the state.

When I was little, I read O. Henry’s Western stories where every gung-ho cowboy was prepared to shoot any ‘shepherd’. I couldn’t understand the nature of that hostility until Texans told me about the Range Wars.

Those were shooting wars with hundreds of casualties. They were fought for control over ‘open range’ used for cattle grazing. Before oil made Texas rich, cattle farming was the state’s main industry, which is why the ‘shepherds’ threatened the livelihood of the indigenous population.

Hostilities broke out, people died, and the ‘cowboys’ won. Since then no self-respecting Texan will touch sheep’s meat, which I found out the hard way when trying to serve leg of lamb to the boss of my first ad agency. He apologised most courteously but still refused to touch the offensive substance. Mercifully, the supermarkets were open late and I could pop out to buy some steaks.

Texas steak houses competed for custom, but none believed that size didn’t matter. The restaurant next door to me offered three sizes: one pound (for children), two pounds (for women) and three pounds (for Men, always implicitly capitalised).

Not only were the steak houses particular about who should eat what size but they also dictated how the steaks should be ordered. “The management isn’t responsible for steaks ordered well-done” was the ubiquitous sign. Steaks were supposed to be cooked rare or medium-rare, and that’s how I grilled them at home perhaps three times a week on average.

My favourite cut was ribeye, two inches thick and weighing only about a wimpish pound. Once the steaks were grilled, one was supposed to let them rest for 10-15 minutes to make sure the juices spread evenly throughout the fibres. However, no matter how long a steak had to rest, some blood always squirted out when the knife went in.

Now, by that meandering route, we’ve finally reached the point of my detective story. You can follow its plot by buying a steak from a British supermarket or butcher, cooking it rare and then cutting into it immediately – without letting it rest.

Committing that sacrilege in Texas would result in a geyser of blood squirting up to the ceiling. However, doing so in Britain will be a bloodless experience. Not one drop will come out.

You are welcome to offer your own explanation, and I promise to listen. But until then, I’ll be able to think of only one possible answer to the question “Where did the blood go?”. It was drained into the ground because the animal was slaughtered the halal way. (Since Muslims outnumber Jews 12 to 1 in the UK, it has to be halal rather than kosher butchering.)

The reason for this is fairly obvious. Since Muslims make up some six per cent of Britain’s population, much of the meat has to be halal anyway. Hence supermarkets benefit from the economies of scale by using a single halal abattoir, rather than different suppliers for halal and haram meat.

Though I dislike cruelty to animals, I’m not a great champion of animal rights. In fact, I question the validity of the term. Rights are dialectically linked to responsibilities and, since animals can’t have the latter, they aren’t entitled to the former.

I do, however, support essential freedoms. Hence, if some religions demand that cattle be slaughtered in a cruel way, then by all means adherents to those creeds must obey. Moreover, I don’t have a strong gastronomic objection to halal meat, which I prove with gusto when eating at Turkish or Lebanese restaurants.

But I object strongly to purveyors of food not informing us that the food they purvey is halal. If Muslims have a right to eat halal meat, we have a right to know that the steak we buy conforms to the standards of a religion other than our own.

Is this an attempt to sneak Islam in by stealth? I doubt it, and in general I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, supermarkets’ motives are pecuniary rather than subversive. However, something about it all isn’t kosher. It’s halal.

Conservatism isn’t a brand

Hopeful congratulations to Kemi Badenoch

“Their [Tory] brand is broken and they have lost the trust of the British people,” writes Nigel Farage.

It’s hard to argue against the second part of that statement. A party beaten by a 282-seat majority is no longer trusted to govern the country, this much is clear.

But the first part is worth talking about. First, I dislike the word ‘brand’ and other marketing terms in this context.

In its natural habitat the word ‘brand’ describes the image projected by a product. More often than not, it has nothing to do with the product’s quality, price, service backup or any other tangible characteristic. In today’s world, tending as it is to uniformity, a brand is a distinction without a difference.

If you wish to disagree, you’ll have to explain to a Briton why he should ‘just do it’ with Nike and not, say, Adidas, or to an American why it’s ‘Miller time’ and not, say, Coors time.

Miller’s time-honoured jingle says, “When it’s time to relax, one thing stands clear. If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer”. Without straining my memory I could instantly name half a dozen other brands that could say exactly the same thing, and they’d all similarly taste of equine urinalysis. (Sounds so much more elegant than ‘horse piss’, doesn’t it?)

The jingle reflects what ad people call ‘preemptive benefit’: claiming for one’s brand the benefits of the whole product category. This trick may be of long standing, but it’s just that, a trick.

Every American knows the phrase “It’s Miller time”, and I’ve heard it used at the end of a workday or even of a tennis match, after which the people would drink something else or nothing at all. This testifies to the excellence of the brand’s ad agency, but it says nothing unique or even specific about the product.

British conservatism, on the other hand, can issue a slogan its chief competitors can’t possibly duplicate or appropriate: God, king and country. American conservatives can come up with slogans, but not those that communicate uniqueness.

For example, MAGA can be used by any political party whatsoever. Not only the Democrats, but also the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Alliance Party and numerous others can also claim that they want to make America great again.

But the party that thrashed the Tories in the general election can’t possibly plagiarise their slogan. It doesn’t believe in God, is lukewarm at best on the king and puts ideology before the country.

Just imagine Keir Starmer proudly declaring in the Commons that his government stands for God, king and country, and you’ll know what I mean. This would be as unthinkable as him defining working people or indeed a woman.

‘God, king and country’ is the essence and philosophy of British conservatism, not just its brand. The three elements are arranged in the order of priority: the first one communicates the timeless metaphysical underpinnings of British politics, the second one the continuity of the constitution from the past to the future, and the third one the fusion of both into a properly functioning commonwealth of free subjects.

Everything else that British conservatism may stand for is strictly derivative, however essential it may be. For example, practising the philosophy contained in that triad would mean devolving political and economic power to the lowest sensible level, all the way down to the individual. “God, king and country” goes against the grain of an omnipotent bureaucracy lording it over the people. It presupposes government by justice, not by fiat.  

The three elements exist in a synergistic unity, as such tripartite entities tend to do. This unity used to be personified by the Tory Party, and the problem is that it no longer is, not that the Tory “brand is broken”.

It’s from this perspective that I think one should assess Kemi Badenoch’s elevation to Tory leadership. Because she has been an MP for many years we can judge the things she has said, and, because she was a government minister for two years, we can judge the things she has done.

Will the Tory Party succeed under her aegis? That depends on how you define success.

Assuming, against recent experience, that Mrs Badenoch will lead the party into the next general election, I don’t think she has to do much to win it. Starmer and his merry men will do all the work for her by destroying the country to a point where the British will vote for any opposition, even if it’s led by a hybrid of Attila the Hun, Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper.

That would be the success of the Tory brand but not necessarily of Tory principles. It’s Britain, not the Tory brand, that’s broken. And it’s not some brand values that can put the nation together again, but the sage, courageous and consistent application of the conservative essence.

The Tories lost the election not because they were too different from Labour but because they were too much like it. They’ll never be able to heal Britain if that situation doesn’t change.

Will Mrs Badenoch be able to change it? I don’t know, you don’t know, and no one knows. However, most of the time she says all the right things. Her detractors say she talks too much about principles and too little about policies, but that ignores the political standing of her party.

It’s no longer in government. It’s now in opposition where, barring some cataclysm, the Tories are going to remain for the next four years at least. And a Shadow PM has to operate mostly in the negative mode: throwing bricks of criticism through the windows of the governing party.

This is a relatively easy task, certainly compared to the work of a political glazier who has to put glass in those windows. The task becomes easier still when the government’s policies are as destructive and subversive as those of Starmer’s government, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Much more difficult is to establish the solid grounds from which the bricks can be thrown. Mrs Badenoch should devote her greatest efforts to recapturing and rebuilding the conservative soul of the Conservative Party, and it remains to be seen whether she has what it takes.

She lists as her influences Roger Scruton and Thomas Sowell, which isn’t a bad way to start. Thomas Sowell is today’s most honest, intelligent and non-ideological economist and sociologist, while Scruton was a conservative philosopher and, more important, my first editor when I began writing for Salisbury Review.

I can hear the echoes of Sowell when Mrs Badenoch rages against the critical race theory. As far as she is concerned any school that teaches “elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law”.

Prof. Sowell would also flash an avuncular smile when hearing her say that a new ‘progressive’ ideology currently on the rise is built on “the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves – and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals.”

And Mrs Badenoch’s spirited defence of free expression is also something I’ve heard from Prof. Scruton. “Exemplified by coercive control,” she once wrote, “the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, the end of due process, identity politics is not about tolerance.” True. It’s about imposing fascisoid controls by glossocratic methods, as any conservative will agree.

Just like Roger Scruton, Mrs Badenoch describes herself as an agnostic, whose “cultural values” are nevertheless Christian. This sort of thing makes me uneasy, whoever says it. Christianity is an essential part of British conservatism not because of its culture or morality, but because of its truth. Rejecting the truth while upholding the “cultural values” is tantamount to believing that a successful society can be based on a lie.

This, however, is a minor glitch in the modern context. Conservatism has been secularised like everything else, and the first part of my favourite triad has been reduced to lip service. Still, that’s better than no service at all, and it may be possible, just, for a conservative to be an agnostic who respects our civilisation.

In general, Mrs Badenoch has consistently campaigned against wokery, which is more valuable in my view than even conservative economic policies. Policies can be changed but a nation corrupted by wicked ideas may never recover.

What I like most about Mrs Badenoch is the spittle-sputtering hatred she elicits from the Leftists. Thus Dawn Butler, a black Labour MP, confirmed my conviction that negritude is no longer a race but a left-wing political ideology.

Since Mrs Badenoch doesn’t espouse that ideology and is in fact openly contemptuous of it, she, as far as Miss Butler is concerned, represents “white supremacy in blackface”. Why not just call her a coconut, Dawn, and be done with it? Tell us what you really think — and what your party really is.

On balance, Mrs Badenoch talks a good game, and time will show whether she is also capable of playing it. I wish her well and hope she’ll be able to heal the soul of the Conservative Party. Provided, of course, that there is still something left to heal.

Poetic argument against mass immigration

Original anti-immigration campaigner

The ringing argument was made by Horace (b. 65 BC) in his Ode: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea”.)

Translating this into our prosaic realities, it’s wishful thinking to believe that millions of new arrivals can be successfully assimilated into the ethos of their new country. Recognising this, Britain doesn’t even try to absorb arrivals from exotic lands into British culture.

Hence our mandated commitment to diversity, a fanciful belief that, since all cultures are equally valid and valuable, they can happily co-exist in fraternal proximity. Such is the British approach to the problem.

The French approach is different. They proceed from the assumption that, since French culture is God’s gift to mankind (although God doesn’t exist), there is no need for any other culture and hence for diversity. All new arrivals must be absorbed so deeply into the new ethos that they become French by some osmotic cultural anointment.

Anyone who has ever visited the banlieues around Paris will know that the French way has failed miserably. However, a visit to the comparable areas of London will confirm that the British way has failed just as badly.

And a short trip northwards, to places like Leicester, Leeds or Bradford, will illustrate the price of failure. Demographically, culturally, linguistically and even legally, large swaths of those places have been transformed by large-scale immigration so much that an outside observer may not recognise them as British cities.

Simple arithmetic shows that, if immigration from culturally alien places continues unabated, within a couple of decades all British cities will lose every trait that makes them British. But help is on the way, and it’s going to come from the Labour Party, the most consistently pro-immigration group in the country.

This realisation dawned on me this morning when I read Janet Daley’s article If the West Is Finished, Why Are the Huddled Masses Flooding Here?

Mrs Daley seems to believe that the huddled masses flooding here are living proof that the West isn’t finished. Since so many Westerners are pessimistic naysayers, mass immigration must be welcomed as the reassuring evidence of the West’s rude health.

After all, people from all over the world aren’t falling over themselves trying to get into Russia, Iran or North Korea. They do, however, know that “the combination of liberal democratic government and free market economics [she probably means ‘economies’, but what’s a couple of letters among friends?] is the unbeatable, absolutely irresistible formula for maximising personal fulfilment, mass prosperity, and social justice.”

Put another way, Mrs Daley believes – correctly, I think – that most people come to France, England or Germany not because they want to become culturally French, English or, God forbid, German. They do so in the hope of having a more comfortable life. This can be delivered either by free markets (“mass prosperity”) or state handouts (“social justice”).

More power to their elbow and all that, but when the influx of culturally alien immigration reaches a certain critical mass, it transmogrifies the host culture into something potentially hostile to it. This, to me, far outweighs any economic benefit we may derive from cheap labour, and even any pleasure we get by eating in ethnic restaurants.

It may come as news to our “liberal democratic government”, but most Britons don’t want to live in areas run by Sharia law and wake up every morning to the sound of a muezzin singing from a minaret (or is it the other way around?). That’s why the issue of curbing, stopping or even rolling back immigration enjoys a perennial presence in British political discourse.

One government after another undertakes to do something about it, some of them even try, but all of them fail. However, I have an inkling that this Labour government will succeed without even trying.

If Mrs Daley is right, and I think she is, that it’s mostly Britain’s relative prosperity that attracts immigrants and not their affection for Shakespeare, Turner, Vaughan Williams and warm ale, then one may logically conclude that any diminution of that prosperity will reduce the flow of immigration.

Poland illustrates this hypothesis persuasively. When the country had just dropped the shackles of communism but hadn’t yet cured her economy of its fallout, the huddled Polish masses rushed to these shores. Since Britons no longer had either the skills or the desire to work as plumbers, builders, scaffolders and electricians, Poles took over those functions.

However, in the subsequent couple of decades the Polish economy (economics?) has picked up momentum and is rapidly closing the gap with Britain. Poland’s GDP per capita has already reached two-thirds of Britain’s and parity is just round the corner.

Vindicating Mrs Daley’s supposition, thousands of Poles are going back, leaving Britain’s rusty plumbing unattended. Before long we’ll all have to learn DIY, although I don’t quite see that happening in, say, scaffolding.

Since it’s reasonably clear that Labour policies will impoverish Britain in short order, the incentive to come here will gradually disappear – first for Eastern Europeans, then, by incremental steps, even for Jamaicans, Somalians and Syrians. Why expose yourself to the hardships of emigration when you can do just as well at home?

I think that I’ve just outlined the PR strategy for our government, and Mrs Daley must take some of the credit. Rather than denying the obvious truth that Labour’s policies will beggar the country, its spokesmen should turn the negative into a positive.

Within a year or two, they’ll be able to make a verifiable claim that they are succeeding where several Tory governments had failed. Immigration, legal or otherwise, is now under control and in fact some dinghies are even beginning to sail in the opposite direction. Job done.

Jokes aside, the only immigrant group I know intimately and not by hearsay is the Russians who, like me, have left their homeland in the past half-century. While all of them claimed they were attracted by freedom, I’d suggest that some 80 per cent at least were primarily motivated by economic considerations.

Most of them found what they were looking for in the US, and many of them became Americans, or as near as damn. But becoming an American is much easier than evolving into an Englishman, Frenchman or, God forbid, German.

Even Mrs Daley, who has lived in Britain for yonks still reasons like the American she was born to be. Arguing ab oeconomia comes more naturally to American conservatives than to British ones. That’s why she managed to write a whole article without once mentioning the cultural and social traditions of Europe.

I hope I don’t sound like a Tommy Robinson type if I suggest that, notable but hardly numerous exceptions aside, arrivals from what is imprecisely called the Global South can never assimilate in Britain, nor even adapt to it. It’s easier to believe that they can force the country to adapt to them, and in fact one can already see that happening.

Horace was right, as those Romans usually were on such matters. But I doubt the poet knew he was making an anti-immigration statement.

A modest proposal to help democracy

Why politics needs help

Anyone who insists that no help is needed obviously hasn’t been following the news.

Forget about another lost decade. After Labour’s first month in office, Britain is on track to give a whole new meaning to what Gertrude Stein once called ‘the lost generation’.

The economic, social and cultural damage done already or confidently predictable in the near future will take many years to remedy even if a sage government takes over at the next election. Yet, as things stand, the odds against such a government ever turning up are prohibitive.

Eagle-eyed observers can’t help noticing that our liberal democracy consistently raises nonentities to power. This is a serious matter: the first requirement for any political system should be that it elevate to government those fit to govern.

Brilliant statesmen can paper over the cracks in any system, while incompetent ones are guaranteed to turn such cracks into gaping holes with jagged edges. Casting a panoramic glance over our political scene, I can see no candidates for the former role.

My heartfelt belief is that any system that continues to malfunction with predictable regularity suffers from wide-ranging structural defects. However, proposing a complete overhaul of democracy is what a friend of mine unkindly calls ‘mental masturbation’.

An eminently practical man, he refuses to speculate about impractical ideas, however attractive they may sound. If it can’t be done, it shouldn’t be discussed, he says.

I’m not so sure about that. It’s useful to start out by establishing an ideal and then deciding how much of it is attainable. Proceeding strictly from immediate expediency loses sight of any perspective, eventually leading to untreatable myopia.

But fine, I resign. Let’s not even consider any sweeping changes. But may I please suggest a minor tweak? Surely there’s no harm in that?

If you’ll forgive a little pun, nowadays an opposition party climbing the greasy pole to power always lies in wait. Our Labour government illustrates this statement by practising electoral mendacity on a level never seen before, certainly not in my lifetime.

One lie is currently in the news, for Labour clearly had no intention to keep its promise of no new taxes for ‘the working people’. Thus, just five months ago, Rachel Reeves, then Shadow Chancellor, promised “no additional tax rises”, other than those already announced.

When she removed the Shadow from her title, however, she announced massive tax hikes sucking an extra £40 billion out of the economy and hurting everyone working in the private sector. One gets a distinct impression that in Labour’s taxonomy only members of publicly financed nomenklatura qualify as working people.

Now, as any regular reader of this space will confirm, all that was predictable. Even someone with my modest grasp of politics and economics knew that Starmer, Reeves et al. were lying through their teeth. They planned to go the whole socialist hog from day one, and only kept that aim under wraps for tactical reasons.

By then the Tories had got up everyone’s nose so much that Labour might have been elected even without their massive campaign of bare-faced lying. However, they’d certainly not have won by a landslide enabling them to wreck Britain at their leisure with no meaningful opposition anywhere in sight.

So how come the electorate didn’t see through that transparent tissue of lies? I could answer that question, but not with the brevity this format requires. Let’s just state the obvious fact that our gullible voters evidently aren’t equipped to tell the truthful wheat from the mendacious chaff.

They are always ready to swallow any lie hook, line and stinker, and Labour’s lies do reek to high heaven. (My propensity for feeble puns is a form of Tourette’s, doctor, and there’s nothing I can do about it.) Britons clearly can’t protect themselves against false promises made to dupe them into voting a certain way.

Now, if they can’t protect themselves against the system, the system must be changed to protect them anyway. That can be done by making specific campaign promises legally binding for at least the first half of the upcoming term in government. If the victorious party then proceeds to break them, the election results must be annulled, and a new election called.

By specific promises I don’t mean generalised waffle about a better, fairer Britain, yet again making British nativity the winning ticket in the lottery of life. Such claims are too vague to be enforceable, which is true everywhere, not only in Britain. (MAGA is an example of such nebulous sloganeering.)

But if a party makes concrete promises, such as not to raise the minimum wage, nor to increase the tax burden on small businesses, it must be held to them legally. Failure to honour such promises must incur a hefty fine and an electoral re-run.

If the electorate still chooses to vote the same way, so be it. But at least the people will be voting in the knowledge of what kind of government their choice ushers in.

As it is, something odd is going on. A politician may be drummed out of his chosen profession for telling fibs about such relatively trivial misdeeds as conducting an ill-advised extramarital affair, taking money for posing some questions in Parliament, making shady investments, safeguarding the minor interests of a country other than his own.

But he suffers no consequences whatsoever for lying his way into power, betraying the confidence of millions of people, and hurting them the way he intended all along but kept that intention under wraps. Micro-corruption is a sacking offence, while macro-corruption is a legitimate way of doing politics.

Yet I fail to see any valid moral difference between knowingly making false electoral promises and stuffing the ballot boxes. In either case, political power isn’t so much won as stolen, which compromises the whole system so much as to make it inoperable. A stolen election isn’t substantially different from a coup d’état.

My pragmatic friend will probably regard any mention of enforceable morality in politics as a sign of onanistic mental propensities. However, I’ll argue that in this case I’m the one who is being pragmatic.

It takes moral censorship to punish immoral politics – and to protect the people from the dire consequences of broken promises. Alas, we’ve been served yet another proof that the people are incapable of protecting themselves. This means our democracy is in urgent need of help, and my modest proposal is a way to start.

The art of Labour politics

Marxist at the desk, Marxist on the wall

The Leftists have always been with us, but the current crop is different.

People like MacDonald, Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell, even Wilson may not make the rather short list of politicians I venerate. But at least they all loved their country and tried to do their best for her.

Today’s lot hate Britain and hence don’t mind hurting her with destructive policies. But what does loving one’s country really mean?

One’s countrymen are one’s neighbours, and both Testaments issue the same commandment: “Love thy neighbour as thyself”. That raises the next question of exactly how much we love ourselves.

Few of us consider ourselves perfect, free of any character blemishes. Few believe they’ve never done anything wrong, and most people I know – including a certain A. Boot – have done shameful things they’ve regretted ever since.

Yet though we may not always like ourselves, on balance we seldom lose self-love. Fair enough: we like for something; we love in spite of everything.

It was the US naval commander Decatur who some 200 years ago applied that principle to patriotism in a spiffy toast: “My country, right or wrong.” Since then that phrase has adorned the rear bumper of many American cars, but the sentiment hasn’t made any inroads into the hearts of Labour ministers.

Ideologically, which is to say emotionally, they loathe Britain, right or wrong. And intellectually, they are too stupid to know right from wrong.

Thus they hate every great cultural and political landmark signposting Britain’s history, along with the giants associated with those landmarks. However, much as I despise the likes of Starmer and Reeves, I admire their honesty.

They don’t try to conceal their feelings for Britain. They hate the country and they don’t care who knows it. That’s why the moment they lied their way into 10 and 11 Downing Street, they immediately removed from those Georgian walls the portraits of the men and women the nation has every right to be proud of.

When Britons argue about naming the country’s greatest monarch, Elizabeth I is always in that conversation. So naturally Starmer found her likeness unworthy of a place in Number 10. The sins of that great monarch weren’t redeemed by her sex – the benefits of womanhood don’t apply to colonialist vermin.

Off the wall Queen Bess went, although to the best of my knowledge her portrait hasn’t yet been tossed onto the pyre. I wouldn’t put that past our Marxists, but I suppose they need to lodge their feet more firmly under the desk before touching a match to the twigs.

Elizabeth’s reign was really the beginning of the British Empire, a political entity our rulers see as evil and in every way inferior to the Soviet Union. Thus, following the Queen into what their role model Trotsky called ‘the dustbin of history’ was Sir Walter Raleigh, who was prominent in colonising North America. Colonising anything makes anyone worse than Hitler and immeasurably worse than Stalin. So no mercy to Sir Walter from Sir Keir.

And who was the greatest cultural figure of Elizabethan England and hence tarred with the same imperial brush? Correct. So William Shakespeare was also deemed unworthy of a place on that wall, and his portrait was yanked off.

The British Empire reached its peak under another Queen unworthy of her sex. Rather than repudiating the Empire as the devil’s spawn, Victoria went a long way towards strengthening it. And William Gladstone was one of the most illustrious prime ministers of that era.

Now Gladstone operated on the left of Victorian politics, but Victorian left wasn’t left enough. Contemporaneous though Gladstone was with Marx, he didn’t exactly heed the latter’s dogma. Still, he might have hung on to a place on that wall had the sins of his father not been visited upon him.

Sir John Gladstone owned 2,508 African slaves, and was paid £105,781 in compensation after slavery in the colonies was abolished in 1833. In Britain proper it was abolished in 1807, and in fact English privateers had been harassing the slave trade for many decades before that. Still, the mark of Cain was attached to William Gladstone and, as far as Starmer is concerned, it’s indelible. Into the bin with that reprobate’s portrait.

Now we all appreciate that every woman in high office strikes a blow for equality. Yet we’ve also had to learn that womanhood is a political, not biological, concept. No one is born a woman – this is an honour that has to be earned by wholehearted commitment to neo-Marxism.

That may be partly why Starmer finds it hard to define a woman. Physiologically, he has already implied that 34,000 British women have penises (one-tenth of one per cent, as he put it). But politically, he’d have to deny their sex to millions of Tory-voting women, which may be a step too far even for him.

However, he could still dump the portrait of that sexless monster Margaret Thatcher and did so with alacrity. The first female prime minister doesn’t belong in the residence of a committed feminist.

Starmer’s neighbour, Rachel Reeves, has the power of her feminist convictions. Moving into 11 Downing Street, she declared that thenceforth a female-only rule would be imposed. All artworks in her new residence must be “of a woman or by a woman”.

In that spirit, she threw out the portrait of former chancellor Nigel Lawson who, in addition to his toxic conservatism, committed the crime of being male. The vacant place was filled with the portrait of Ellen Wilkinson, who in 1920 became a founding member of the British Communist Party.

I don’t know whether Miss Reeves’s grasp of communist history matches her affection for it, but, unless she’s prejudiced against foreigners, I could recommend a few other candidates. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, or… no I get it. Rosa Zemliachka would be even better.

That lovely girl was in charge of massacring 100,000 people in the Crimea during the Russian Civil War. Her Marxist credentials were thus impeccable and, unlike Miss Wilkinson, she succeeded in putting them into practice big time.

Yes, I know she wasn’t British but, on current evidence, I doubt Starmer and Reeves are either, in any other than the ethnic sense. Their spiritual home is where their art is.

Just deserts aren’t on the menu

You probably don’t know that a few years ago I appeared twice on BBC panels discussing crime and punishment. However, if you read on, you’ll know why I haven’t been invited since.

My fellow panellists recognised only two functions of imprisonment. By far the most vital, as far as they were concerned, was the rehabilitation of the criminal. Then, in a strictly secondary or rather tertiary position, was deterrence, punishment pour encourager les autres.

(That phrase literally means ‘to encourage others’, but in Voltaire’s Candide it was used in reference to the rather discouraging execution of Admiral John Byng.)

Hence the discussion generally revolved around the most effective ways of awakening prisoners’ conscience, curing them of their moral or psychological defects and helping them along the road leading from devil to angel. Deterrence also featured, but only as an afterthought.

My interlocutors doubted imprisonment deterred at all. It would only deter if sentences were so draconian, and conditions in prisons so awful, that no civilised country could tolerate such inhumanity. We are all of us humane people, aren’t we?

I tried, on both occasions, to argue that neither rehabilitation nor deterrence can be the primary goal of gaol. However, the moment I uttered the dread word ‘justice’, my participation in the discussion drew to an end, more or less.

So, as a matter of fact, did the discussion itself, in the sense of dispassionate, reasoned discourse. The other participants became shrill and excited, drowning my objections in the gallons of spittle they sputtered. It was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that my notion of justice was too antediluvian to be entertained in polite, which is to say liberal, society.

I tried to defend myself, which attempt failed even more miserably when I dared mention the death penalty. My partners in crime and punishment added a few decibels to their animadversions, outshouting me with ease and leaving me in no doubt that it was only troglodytes like me who merited such punishment. Moreover, they’d be happy to administer it personally.

Since, as I write this, no opposition is peeking over my shoulder, I’ll try to make my belated case. It will be open to discussion, but at least only after I’ve made it.

The idea of retributive justice was exhaustively covered in Psalm 28:4-5: “Give them according to their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours: give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert.”

‘Desert’ being a cognate of ‘deserve’, the scriptural idea of punishment is justice: giving criminals what their acts deserve. I’d suggest that such retributive justice upholds human dignity, while the ‘humane’ justice favoured by my opponents demeans it.

The scriptural, traditional idea of justice differs from the modern equivalent because so does the scriptural, traditional idea of man. Man, according to the formative documents of our civilisation, is made in the image of God.

That doesn’t imply physical likeness. It does, however, imply an approximation to God’s freedom and hence man’s uniqueness among all God’s creatures. Free will – and not, for example, consciousness – is in fact the most salient feature distinguishing man from animals.

A dog possesses a consciousness, but he isn’t free to make choices, such as whether or not to chase a cat around the block. His behaviour is wholly contingent on his biological makeup. Fido will go after Tabby not because he chooses to but because he is programmed to do so.

Man, on the other hand, is free to choose how to act, and after the Fall he can choose not only right but also wrong. This freedom presupposes responsibility for his actions, enjoying the consequences of good choices and suffering those of bad ones. If a man chooses to rob, steal or kill, he is acting as a free agent and deserves punishment commensurate with robbery, theft or murder.

Such is the inference from Scripture, and one can argue that all of Western criminal jurisprudence is nothing but commentary on that inference. Or rather it used to be.

Traditional justice was based on a certain understanding of man’s nature and, as that understanding changed, so did the concept of justice. Ever since the chap whom Nabokov invariably called “that Viennese quack” began to put his mendacious nonsense on paper, man has been losing his freedom in the eyes of progressive people.

More and more he began to resemble an automaton wired to act in a certain way irrespective of his reason. More and more the difference between Fido and his owner got to be seen as that of degree, not kind.

If a man commits a crime, that’s not because he chose to do so but because some mysterious subconscious or unconscious mechanisms in his psyche clicked together. Since as a result he robbed an old woman rather than helping her across the street, those mechanisms must have gone awry.

Now, when a car mechanism breaks down, you go to a car mechanic. And when a breakdown occurs in a psychological mechanism, a modern man will go to a therapist, ideally one qualified in the dark arts of psychoanalysis.

The therapist will start by asking the kind of embarrassing personal questions any sensible person should refuse to answer, perhaps even rudely. The shrink will then set up a schedule for more of the same and perhaps suggest some supplementary cures, such as physical exercise, more sleep, less worrying – whatever.

That way the malfunctioning mechanisms, existing mostly in the fantasy of the therapist and his brainwashed patient, will be repaired and recalibrated. The patient will be cured or, to use my opponents’ language, rehabilitated.

When the patient happens to be a prisoner kept under lock and key, he has no choice whether to undergo rehabilitation or not – just as he is presumed not to have made the free choice to commit his crime. He does, however, have a vested interest in faking therapeutic success. If he can convince prison authorities that he is now a new man full of the milk of human kindness, he can get an early release, and never mind what he did to those hitchhikers.

After all, if rehabilitation is the main aim of imprisonment, it would be both inhuman and irrational to keep an inmate inside after the aim has been achieved. Justice is thus put on a quasi-professional basis. It’s up to professional therapists (or officials acting in that capacity) to decide whether or not the prisoner is sufficiently rehabilitated to be released into society.

Society, on the other hand, has no say in the matter. Made up as it is of rank amateurs in rehabilitating therapy, it’s not deemed competent enough to decide whether or not justice has been done.

However, in Britain at any rate, the decision to convict a defendant in the first place is left to amateurs, ‘twelve good men and true’. They are a microcosm of society and their job is to assess the arguments presented by professional jurists and then pass their verdict on society’s behalf.

In other words, it’s society that decides whether the defendant deserves to be punished. The ancient understanding is that in such matters it’s society’s interests that must be protected first and foremost.

It was a commonplace that crimes unsettle society, making it uneasy and agitated. Social tranquillity can only be restored by the criminal getting the punishment he deserves – the punishment for the act he freely chose to commit as a man created in the image of God but subject to original sin.

That’s why back in 1924 Lord Chief Justice Hewart uttered these wise and oft-repeated words: “Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done”. Rest assured that he didn’t mean society being satisfied that imprisonment has had its desired therapeutic effect.

By punishing a criminal for his act, society pays him the ultimate compliment of accepting him as a man made in the image of God and hence endowed with free will. This is the proud affirmation of humanity, that of the criminal and man in general.

By contrast, treating a criminal not as a man serving the punishment he deserves, but as a patient who was compelled to act by some treatable psychological quirk, deprives the criminal – and also all of us – of humanity, mankind’s most proud possession.

Pervert the understanding of man’s nature, and perversion of justice is just round the corner. There it is, staring us in the face.

Read Marx to understand Starmer

My friend’s father owned a successful mid-size factory in London. That gave him an acute sense of guilt because he was a communist.

The old man must have cursed himself for being a hypocrite. After all, his ideology said that businessmen didn’t just hire workers. They exploited them, sucked their blood.

Yet there he was, committing the sin of enterprise in direct contravention of his innermost beliefs. But in another, alien culture it was possible to repent sins and atone for them.

Taking his cue from his enemies, the man embarked on a lifelong programme of expiation. He regrettably continued to make a handsome income from his factory, but in recompense remained loyal to another tenet of his faith.

He might have been a manufacturer, but at least he wasn’t a capitalist. That is, he refused to invest his money, making it multiply without the use of manual labour. He forswore any securities, such as shares and bonds, or properties for rent. And when his collection of Victorian paintings began to increase in value, he did a Savonarola and lit up his own bonfire of the vanities in the garden.

The old man’s aim was to make sure that his heirs wouldn’t have sizeable legacies after his death, and he succeeded to the best of his abilities. All my friend inherited was an extensive knowledge of Marxist literature and an enduring hatred of Marxism.

I acquired both such knowledge and such sentiments via a different route, having had to study Marxism academically at my Moscow university. Allow me to boast about my erudition: I sat through courses in The History of the Communist Party, Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism, Scientific Atheism, Marxist Aesthetics and Marxist Political Economics.

That was a schizophrenic experience in that both my professors and I knew that those disciplines had nothing to do with reality. And yet they – and after them I – had to repeat Marxist inanities by rote. Apparently, I didn’t do so with sufficient conviction, which is why I acquired an early reputation as an anti-Soviet vermin.

But on the plus side, I did learn enough about Marxism to understand exactly where Starmer, Reeves, Rayner, Lammy et al. are coming from. They are the ones who took that vile ideology seriously, even though I doubt they studied it in any depth.

Luckily for them – and unluckily for us – no serious study is required. For Marxism has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with viscera, where hatred and envy reside. All Marxism does is channelling it into the conduits of specific targets and policies.

Like my friend’s Marxist father, our rulers detest the very notion of money making money. Along with Marx, they subscribe to the labour theory of value. Marx borrowed it from Smith, but added his own touches. Without going into detail, that theory says that capital must only reflect the amount of labour that has gone into its generation.

Capital produced by any other means is criminal usury. Such illegitimate gains must be confiscated and the money-grubbing fat cats punished, ideally by death but, barring that, repossession and redistribution.

This explains why Starmer struggles so much when asked to define “the working people” who, according to him, won’t suffer higher taxes. He doesn’t really mean “working people”, such as doctors or lawyers putting in 100-hour weeks. He means the working class, defined by Marx as strictly urban proletariat.

Never mind that the term has become anachronistic in our digitised economies. We are talking ideology here, not reality. However, political decorum still prohibits using overtly Marxist terminology and venting characteristic Marxist resentments.

Hence Starmer sweats whenever asked to define the working people. He can’t tell us who they are for fear of being branded a Marxist, still not an election-winning tag. However, he can state unequivocally who they are not: people deriving their income from securities, rental properties or private pensions.

Even though Starmer isn’t an especially bright man, I’m sure he realises that most of those reprobates had to work hard all their lives to make the capital that now gives them some income. But that’s reality, which isn’t the terrain inhabited by ideology. Those people have capital, which makes them capitalists. And Marx taught that all capitalists are bottom-feeding bloodsuckers. QED.

The ghost of my friend’s father came wafting in, but we’ve already established that he was a sinner. While breaking the commandment proscribing ‘unearned’ income, he illogically still indulged in exploitation, which is another deadly sin – and one Starmer is set to stamp out as decisively as he can.

That’s why, while slapping new taxes on capital gains, he is also set to increase the cost of doing business by hiking a whole raft of corporate taxes. It’s no use proving to him, figures in hand, that such policies will backfire on the very ‘working people’ he claims to venerate. He knows all that, and doesn’t care.

The principal dynamic of Marxism isn’t love of the poor but hatred of the rich, however loosely and arbitrarily defined. Love of the poor only ever manifests itself in the Marxists’ wholehearted attempts to increase their number.

That’s why this month alone 1,600 business owners have shut up shop – even before the first Labour budget is announced. And that’s why wealthy people are fleeing Britain in droves, taking their capital with them, along with the jobs the capital produced and the tax revenue it generated.

Again, economists long on fundamental concepts but short on street smarts are crying havoc, but they have no dogs of war or, more to the point, of reason, to let slip. Reason has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this. This Marxist lot are driven by visceral, ideological predisposition, of which hatred is the main component.

Their attitude to capital fleeing the country was neatly encapsulated by Dale Vince, the green energy tycoon who donated five of his millions to Labour. “If people only live here because they pay less tax, they should f*** off,” said Mr Vince, somewhat hypocritically. “This is a brilliant country,” he added. “There’s no way people won’t live here because of a fairer tax system.”

A fairer tax system to this lot is one that acts on Marxist dogma by stealth. Alas, the electorate has been so thoroughly brainwashed and dumbed down that people don’t realise their vote ushers in Marxism through the back door.

And of course Starmer evokes the memory of my friend’s father by making sure ‘the rich’ can’t pass on their ill-gotten gains to their families. Marxism loathes dynastic succession not only in monarchies but also in common families. The dial must be reset in every generation, with a capitalist’s offspring making their living on the conveyor belt.

Hence the steep hikes in inheritance taxes to be announced in the budget. As far as Marxists are concerned, the state is the only legitimate heir to any legacies. My friend’s father is smiling from his grave.

Just three months into the Labour tenure, if another election were held today, they’d lose it. But it won’t be held today, nor for at least the next four years. That’ll give Britons enough time to get the full flavour of Marxism in action.

They’ll find out that in any class war it’s the whole society that becomes collateral damage. And class war is the Marxist dogma our government lives by. My friend’s late father would approve and rejoice.

Is America warming up for civil war?

Never again

On 27 September, 2024, the US Department of Defence issued a document that went largely unnoticed in Britain. America, on the other hand, is abuzz with troubled – some will say alarmist – comments.

No wonder. Called DOD Directive 5240.01, the document gives every indication of a country preparing to go to civil war. In broad strokes, the Directive makes the vast bank of military intelligence data available to civil law enforcement.

It also explicitly states that, under certain circumstances, the armed forces can be called upon to quell civil unrest, by lethal force if necessary. This effectively invalidates the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which removed the military from civil law enforcement.

The Act was deemed necessary during the Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the army was widely used against obstreperous American citizens and went about its task with a hand too heavy for some tastes.

When I wrote “explicitly states”, it was a figure of speech. The Directive is so loaded with legalese jargon that little about it is really explicit. One has to decipher the obtuse cant to prise the kernel of meaning out of the jumbled prose.

Legal terminology can be used to elucidate the precise meaning of every word, but also to obfuscate it. The second stratagem often serves to leave the message open-ended, allowing room for interpretation and also for convenient disclaimers.

One such was offered by Pentagon spokesman Sue Gough (yes, I gather she isn’t a man, but verbal probity takes priority over woke virtue). Her press release stated that: “The policies concerning the use of force by DOD addressed in DoDD 5240.01 are not new, and do not authorise the DOD to use lethal force against U.S. citizens or people located inside the United States, contrary to rumours and rhetoric circulating on social media.”

Having cast a quick glance over that disclaimer, a resurrected William Shakespeare would say: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”. Indeed, such denials by the Pentagon are extremely rare. So rare, in fact, that one smells a giant rat running around trapped among the building’s five corners.

I may be missing some fine points but, as I read the Directive, it seems to do exactly what Miss Gough says it doesn’t do. Here are a couple of salient points.

According to the document, the Secretary of Defence can approve “assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality, or any situation in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury.”

Those chaps do have a way with words, don’t they? But to this unbiased reader, the text is unequivocal. The US Army is authorised to help out the police by firing at misbehaving Americans. This, in a country that’s always at pains to point out that even intelligence agencies such as the CIA have no jurisdiction within the country.

I don’t know about the CIA, but military intelligence, including the vast resources of the National Security Agency that can give you chapter and verse of every phone chat you’ve ever enjoyed, can now be used to spy on US citizens.

Perhaps I’m misreading the directive – I did tell you its language is at times impenetrable. But it does provide for “Defence Intelligence Component intelligence assistance to any Federal department or agency, including a Federal law enforcement agency, or to a State or local law enforcement agency when lives are in danger.”

Let’s remark parenthetically that the reference to situations “when lives are in danger” leaves much room for arbitrary interpretation. A stampeding crowd of unarmed protesters, for example, may conceivably trample people to death. Does this mean the DIC may forewarn the army about the protest march, with the latter then going in with guns blazing?

That’s how the much maligned conspiracy theorists read it. Thus, for example, Robert F. Kennedy, who upset his august family by his apostasy from the sainted Democratic Party: “… Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power –  for the first time in history – to use lethal force to kill Americans on U.S. soil who protest government policies.”

Much as you, I and all God’s own people may detest conspiracy theories and those who spread them around, it’s hard to deny that perfectly practical and not at all theoretical conspiracies do happen. That boy perhaps shouldn’t have cried wolf, but this doesn’t mean there are no wolves on the prowl at the outskirts of the village.

What upsets many commentators, including those considerably saner than Mr Kennedy, isn’t just the contents of the Directive but also its timing. Issuing that document just six weeks before the presidential election gives some people unpalatable food for mournful thought.

My serious American friends – and all my American friends are laudably serious – fear that civil unrest will ensue no matter who wins the election. Trump’s supporters and their demigod of a candidate already hinted at that possibility last time, when a MAGA mob tried to take the Capitol building by storm.

However, there are many indications that, this time around, it’s the Harris crowd that may revolt should their candidate lose, and they are indeed revolting. Harris herself and her staff give rise to such fears by their inflammatory rabble-rousing.

They portray Trump not as an unfit candidate for the presidency, but as a villain whose return to the White House would spell an end to democracy, along with such sacred American accoutrements as motherhood, baseball, apple pie and verbs made out of nouns. Words like ‘fascist’, ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘Hitler’ and ‘dictatorship’ cross their lips with increasing regularity.

Fair enough, Trump doesn’t even bother to conceal his disdain for the traditional political class on either side of the aisle. But if he aims to rule by decree, one wonders why he didn’t do so during his first term, when he supposedly had ample opportunity to put his foot down.

My impression is, and I hope I’m wrong, that Biden (who will remain president for two months after the election) and Harris are setting the stage for overturning the results of the election if it goes the wrong way.

When the Republic is in mortal danger, democratic niceties may fall by the wayside – as they did during the Second World War, when thousands of Nisei and German Americans were interned without due process. If the Democrats succeed in portraying Trump’s victory as a similar threat to everything the nation holds dear, they may use the two-month window of opportunity to set things right, from their perspective.

The Directive in question may then be invoked as the legal justification for any action, including the use of lethal force. The document certainly has that kind of ring to it, and it was put forth at a suspiciously opportune time.

This is all pure speculation, you understand. But something does smell foul, like that proverbial rodent. I hope the smell is all it is and remains to be. For the consequences of another American civil war are too awful to contemplate.

Such a massive explosion would produce shock waves wreaking destruction not only on America but on much of the world, emphatically including Britain. Let’s just pray that the Directive is as innocuous as Miss Gough will have us believe.