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The ongoing war in the Ukraine is generally perceived as a clash between Russia and the West. The latter is using the Ukraine as its proxy, while the former is supposed to be a free agent answering to no one and moved by nothing other than national interests.

Both parts are open to debate because the situation is far from being so straightforward.

First, the West got drawn into the conflict by default and not as part of some long-term strategy. When the Russians started their ‘hybrid’ war on the Ukraine by annexing her Crimea and some other provinces in 2014, even myopic analysts saw that Putin was out to restore Russia in all her imperial (or Soviet) grandeur.

Western leaders weren’t united in their opposition to that plan, with, for example, Angela Merkel being broadly sympathetic to it. But eventually NATO, the EU and the US reached a vague consensus: Putin must be defeated. Well, perhaps not quite defeated, but stopped. Or barring that, slowed down. All without provoking him into an apocalyptic response, naturally, that went without saying.

Such vagueness of purpose has produced ambivalence of action. On the one hand, the West has kept training and arming the Ukrainian forces, but on the other hand every effort has been taken not to do too good a job of it. Hence the arms supplies to the Ukraine were intermittent and insufficient, certain types of weaponry were off the list, no attempt to use NATO’s air force to protect Ukrainian cities from destruction was made or even mooted.

Neither does one detect any clear idea anywhere in the West of how the war should desirably end. Bien pensant generalities about peace and negotiations remain nebulous, and understandably so. Negotiations only mean something concrete when the desired end is crystal clear. This is far from being the case.

Zelensky talks about Russia retreating to the 1991 borders, which Putin would regard as a shattering defeat ending his political career and, in all likelihood, life. (He knows his boys on the muscle end of things play for keeps. Cross them, and suddenly a hand grenade goes off on your flight, all purely accidental of course.)

Putin is making vague noises about calling it quits on the existing frontline, with the eastern part of the Ukraine ending up as a sort of buffer zone. Now such an outcome would spell defeat for the Ukraine and also for Zelensky’s political (though probably not physical) life.

Ukrainians would be able to console themselves with Finland’s experience. Having heroically taken on the whole might of the Red Army in 1939-1940, that tiny country defended her sovereignty but ceded nine per cent of her territory – more than Stalin had originally demanded.

The Finnish model could be regarded as the most realistic and honourable way for the Ukraine to find peace, but for a few details. First, Finland kept her sovereignty but not really her independence. She became a Soviet satrap, with the Soviets keeping veto power over cabinet appointments and foreign policy decisions. Some of the top Finnish officials were openly KGB agents – and proud of it. That situation produced a new geopolitical term: finlandisation.

In the scenario I’ve outlined, the Ukraine would definitely be finlandised, meekly awaiting a new Russian invasion when the moment would be judged right. Yet indications are growing that most Western leaders find such an outcome acceptable. If they didn’t, Ukrainian F-16s would already be keeping their skies safe and Russian skies less so.

All in all, yes, to some extent, the Ukraine may be considered a proxy of the West. But only to a rather small extent, and with numerous reservations and qualifications.

But what about the other half of the story, Russia acting exclusively in her national interests and taking her cues from nobody? Here we must widen our field of vision to include the vast tracts of terrain east of the Urals.

China is rapidly colonising the Russian Far East, getting mining concessions, inspiring demographic displacement, building new settlements that increasingly take the shape of cities, buying up Russian oil at dumping prices and in general moving in deeper and deeper. China and Russia may be partners, but there’s little doubt as to who is the senior one.

The relationship between the two countries looks increasingly like that between the Golden Horde and Russian principalities in the 13^th century. It’s not for nothing that Putin likes to compare himself to Alexander Nevsky, a prince whose heroic battles against Western invaders have turned out to be mere skirmishes, but whose subservience to the Horde was nothing short of Quisling treachery.

It’s against this background that the on-going reshuffle of the Russian leadership begins to make sense. For years, the most aggressive hawk in Putin’s war party, other than Putin himself, has been Nikolai Patrushev, KGB general and former head of the FSB.

He is commonly regarded as the chief architect and major inspiration of the full-scale aggression against the Ukraine. Patrushev is also credited with reliance on nuclear blackmail as a way of keeping the West in check.

Since 2008 he has held the post of Secretary of the Security Council, effectively the second highest position in Russia. A position that he dramatically lost on 12 May, being demoted to an honorary post as Putin’s aide. Overnight the tone of Russian anti-West propaganda changed.

If until 12 May the common theme had been reducing the US to radioactive ash and sinking Britain under a typhoon wave, since that date the threats have become practically vegetarian. If NATO dares to send its soldiers to the Ukraine, say Kremlin propagandists, they’ll be killed. Is that all? What about turning New York, Paris and London to smouldering stones?

At the same time, another close associate of Putin, Sergei Shoigu, was removed from his post of Defence Minister. But unlike Patrushev, he wasn’t demoted – quite the opposite. Shoigu was moved to Patrushev’s job at the Security Council, thus getting infinitely more power.

This looks surprising to anyone who has been watching the purge of Shoigu’s bailiwick, the Defence Ministry, over the past few days. His deputy Ivanov, known for his addiction to living high on the hog, is now in prison awaiting trial for corruption. Joining him in the same dock will be the Ministry’s head of personnel, Lt Gen Kuznetsov.

One doesn’t have to be an expert investigator to know that both generals are guilty as charged. After all, their incomes are in the public domain, and their salaries don’t stretch to Bentleys, private planes and villas in the nicer parts of the Mediterranean, to which the two warriors have become accustomed.

Hence their arrest is motivated by political considerations, not a quest for justice. They could have been arrested with equal justification years ago, along with their immediate superior, Shoigu. Yet, rather than having to explain his own billions, Shoigu has received the second highest post in Russia.

Before, his immediate superior was Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who has emerged from the reshuffle unscathed, holding on to his position, the third highest in government. Now what do the two men occupying the two rungs immediately under Putin’s have in common?

They are both so close to China that some commentators refuse to mince words and refer to them as Xi’s agents. And Xi has been controlling the temperature of Putin’s war from the start. For example, when Putin and Patrushev were ready to resort to tactical nukes, Xi put a quiet word in their shell-like that this wasn’t a good idea.

Both Shoigu and Mishustin are frequent visitors to Peking, where they emulate Nevsky and other Russian princes by seeking instructions. The princes also sought licences to rule, and there are indications that the glorious duo pursue those as well.

Apparently, Patrushev, with his KGB nose for intrigue, cottoned on to what was going on and demanded that Putin sack Mishutin. Yet Vlad saw the frown on Xi’s face and sacked Patrushev instead.

If this analysis is correct – and there are no guarantees in the murky haze of Kremlin politics – then Putin’s days are numbered too. Xi seems to realise that he has got as much political capital out of the war as he could, and there’s no more point suffering economic losses: deterioration of China’s economic relations with the West, growing prices of raw materials, restrictions on exports and so on.

The shadow cast by China’s bulk on Russia is widening by the minute. Like an erstwhile khan of the Golden Horde, Xi may only allow his Russian vassals to be independent up to a point. He may well decide it suits him to call an end to the war, which means getting rid of two of its most fanatical proponents.

One of them, Patrushev, is already gone. The other, Putin… Well, according to some Russian commentators, he is next on the way out, with either Shoigu or Mishutin getting Xi’s licence to rule. Let’s wait and see, shall we?

P.S. On a seemingly unrelated note, Concergebouw, Amsterdam’s top concert hall, has just cancelled two performances by the Israel-based Jerusalem String Quartet. The next step will probably be cancelling Jewish musicians regardless of where they come from. What’s Judenfrei in Dutch?

Ten years ago – and time does fly even when you’re not having fun – I wrote this piece, mocking French driving: http://www.alexanderboot.com/french-manual-of-defensive-driving/

It was a satirical spoof and, like all works in that genre, had to have some link with reality. And the reality is gruesome.

The French suffer twice the number of road deaths we have in Britain, and the two statistics are diverging: ours is going down, theirs is going up. This though the two populations are roughly equal, French roads are infinitely better and as a rule straighter than ours, and they have 10 times our number of road-miles per car.

Obviously, when millions of people propel tonnes of metal at high speeds, a certain number of accidents, including fatal ones, will happen. But when such numbers climb above realistic expectations, governments feel they must do something about it.

Now, most European governments – hell, down with understatement – all European governments are socialist, which means anti-car. This bias must go back to the time, a century or so ago, when only wealthy people could afford to drive. That put class war on the road, and hostilities have been raging ever since, even though the car has since become basic, often indispensable, transportation.

However, just as iconoclasm persists long after the icons have been smashed, socialists act in character by ignoring reality. As far as they are concerned, no truce is on the cards.

That’s why European governments have been busily trying to drive cars off the road, as it were. They impose extortionist taxes on motorists, introduce frankly unrealistic speed limits, suffocate traffic with bus and cycle lanes or unnecessary islands, charge the earth for parking or entering city centres.

Such punitive measures have always been sold to the public as touching concern for lives, but these days officials can pull another larcenous card out of their sleeve: air quality and climate, both being irredeemably damaged by selfish people who’d rather not get to work by three buses and two underground lines.

Nevertheless people still grit their teeth and get behind the wheel – even in London, where driving to work every day may cost more than the average family income in Britain. And with so many cars on the road, the number of road deaths will never drop down to zero, much as governments may insist this is their ultimate goal.

Since empirical evidence proves that the state can only ever change undesirable situations for the worse, no government can ever make driving safer. But individual drivers can, even in France, with its carnage on public roads.

Yet the French government has to indulge its traditional dirigisme by attacking the problem from its height downwards, which stratagem only works in infantry warfare. As the starting point of the campaign, the government took the universal male derision of woman drivers.

In France, this sentiment is expressed with a little rhyme: “Femme au volant, danger au tournant” (woman at the wheel – danger around the corner). Nonsense, says the French government, and misogynist nonsense at that. In fact, if men drove like women, drivers wouldn’t be dying in their droves.  

Easier done than said. Hey presto, and France has been inundated with the slogan “conduisez comme une femme”, drive like a woman (and never have an accident, is the implication). To support this recommendation, the French manipulate statistics with the legerdemain of a cardsharp.

Women, they say, account for 46 per cent of drivers and yet are eight times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Here one recalls the old adage about lies, barefaced lies and statistics.

What matters isn’t how many women have a driving licence, but how many miles they actually drive compared to men. In my own two-member family, 50 per cent of the drivers are (is?) female, and yet the male half (well, me) do over 90 per cent of all driving. The same goes for just about every family I know, other than those where the husband is incapacitated, banned, alcoholic or wimpish.

Looking at the French couples I know, it’s true that the men (with one shameful exception) do drive faster than the women but, since none of them has ever been killed, this limited sample can’t be held in evidence. So let’s leave statistics to the sociologists and concentrate on some home truths, uncomfortable as they may be to the modern conscience.

The first such is now controversial but used to be self-evident: men and women are different – biologically, physiologically, psychologically, physically, intellectually and in every other way. Hence a man can no more drive like a woman than he can walk like one, although some do try and look pathetic for it.

Testosteronal aggression makes men more susceptible to the competitive aspect of driving and the lure of an open (or not so open) road. That’s why, for example, only two women have ever raced F1 cars, compared to 776 men, a difference that can’t be wholly ascribed to discrimination.

Moving from the race track to public roads, men do tend to use cars as penile extensions, which in theory will get them into dicey situations more often. However – and it’s not me but physiology speaking – men tend to be more decisive and their reflexes are quicker, which means they can get out of danger more often.

These, however, are generalities. If we now stick to specifics, the problem with French drivers isn’t that they indulge their masculinity, but that they are shockingly bad compared to the English. Hence the disparity in road deaths.

One observation is baffling to me. The French are much more polite than the British when on foot and much less so when behind the wheel. Having driven the best part of a million miles, two thirds of them in the two countries I’m comparing, I feel I’m entitled to such a generalisation.

Where an English driver magnanimously lets you into the lane, a French one is prepared to die defending his right of way. Many do, with drivers overtaking on a single carriageway unable to force their way back in and colliding with an onrushing car head on.

Driving on French motorways, one can’t relax for a second. Lane discipline is abysmal, with cars routinely and blithely venturing into your lane at 100 mph. Tailgating is also widespread, and my heart has sunk many a time when, driving at that kind of speed, I’d see in my rear-view mirror a jalopy steered by a white-knuckled driver an inch behind my bumper.

French drivers are more likely than their British counterparts to come out, change lanes or reverse without looking. Thus any competent driver can safely negotiate, say, Hyde Park Corner, considered the hardest place to drive in London. But driving around l’Etoile in Paris is all your life is worth even if you happen to be Stirling Moss in disguise.

I mentioned jalopies earlier, and this is another factor of road safety. Cars in France tend to be in a terrible state compared to Britain. For one thing, a car in Britain must undergo an MOT test after its first three years and each year thereafter. In France, it’s after the first four years and then every two.

As a result, one sees many cars in the French countryside sputtering, belching black smoke and, most dangerous, breaking down at speed. Many of those cars are grossly underpowered to begin with, which isn’t that much of a problem on a motorway but can be deadly when trying to overtake on a single-lane road. And France being a more agricultural country, overtaking on such roads is essential if you don’t want to be stuck behind a tractor for miles.

On the basis of extensive personal experience, I don’t subscribe to the theory that the French are miserly. But, unlike the British, they’d definitely rather spend their money on things other than cars. In general, this reluctance to show off is commendable, but at a certain point an old car that wasn’t that good to begin with can become a death trap.

Advice to the French: don’t drive like women, nor like men. Instead make sure you have a road-worthy vehicle and drive it well.

That doesn’t necessarily mean driving slowly. There’s no such thing as too much speed – only too much speed for the conditions, including your driving ability and reaction time. Driving fast can be fun, and there’s no need to deprive yourself of it, as long as you know when, where and how to indulge that passion.

And yes, I suppose men are more likely to enjoy driving, rather than just treating it as a way of getting from A to B. But road fatalities aren’t caused by sex differences. They are caused by a nation in need of a remedial driving course – for men, women, other.

The US definitely and the UK probably will hold general elections this year, and both will be ‘either… or’ binary.

One party will win, the other will lose, with some Americans and Britons regarding the outcome as triumph and others as disaster. The split between the pros and cons will be about even, with a couple of percentage points on either side.

There’s no such ambivalence for the Ukrainians and Israelis. Those two nations fighting for survival may be indifferent to the results of these elections, but the very fact they are being held this year is cause for concern.

Both nations are heavily dependent on Western aid, especially with arms. The Ukraine’s survival hinges on it totally, Israel’s to a large extent. That’s why both nations follow the vicissitudes of British and American internal politics with equal apprehension.

They know that vital aid for their war efforts is held hostage by such outfits as Gallup, YouGov, ICM, Mori and so forth. These keep a watchful eye on the cursor of public opinion, informing the candidates of the slightest fluctuations.  

The candidates watch such oscillations with equal intensity. As things stand now, the polls suggest a close race in the US and a Labour landslide in Britain. But politicians have their own pollsters and, above all, their own instincts. They know that any election can be decided by a few swing votes.

Now, our politicians tend to be highly specialised creatures with single-track minds focused on electoral success. Hence they base their pronouncements and, if currently in power, also their policies on what they perceive as the good of their political careers.

Thus, to paraphrase an Anglo-American football coach, polls are everything for them; but in the immediate runup to the elections, polls become the only thing.

By and large, the two electorates seldom gear their vote to the competing foreign policies. In Britain such interests are lukewarm; in the US, ice-cold. That, however, is talking about the populations at large. Yet within each electorate there exist groups that treat some foreign policies as a matter of vital interest.

Moreover, they may well vote as a bloc for a candidate whose foreign policies appeal to them. For example, New York’s large Jewish population may vote against anyone perceived as anti-Israeli regardless of any other considerations. Britain’s and America’s large Muslim population, on the other hand, may well punish a candidate advocating continued assistance to Israel.

This explains why Joe Biden’s administration has issued a ban on the supply of certain weapons to Israel. Biden’s advisors have probably done the numbers and found out that, though such stinginess may upset some New Yorkers, the city and especially the state as a whole aren’t going to vote for Trump anyway.

However, Michigan and Pennsylvania both have large Muslim populations who are practically guaranteed to vote as a bloc for the less pro-Israel candidate. Thus denying Israel some vital armaments may put Biden on the good side of voters in two swing states.

Now, in Britain the almost four million Muslims make up 6.5 per cent of the population. And Muslim organisations have already kindly informed the two leading parties that their political survival may well depend on their Middle East policies.

Neither party has so far openly stated its intention of cutting off arms supplies to Israel. But the anti-Semitism scandals within the Labour Party probably stand it in good stead with British Muslims. They may sense Labour is their safer bet and, if they do, the projected Labour landslide may well become a reality.

Hence it amuses me no end watching Labour and Tory politicians zigzag around this issue with the elegance of professional figure skaters. There’s no doubt that, if the polls suggest a close election, both parties will move towards the Hamas side, but Labour can do so with greater ease.

In the US, Trump has been consistently pro-Israel, whereas Biden, just as consistently, has been more, shall we say, open-minded. If the polls show that the election hinges on Michigan and Pennsylvania, which in turn swing on the Muslim vote, Biden’s mind will probably open so wide that the last vestiges of pro-Israeli policies will fall out. And even Trump may decide that perhaps superimposing the odd swastika on the Israeli flag may not be such a bad idea after all.

The situation with the Ukraine is more complex. America has close to three million Russian immigrants, but they are unlikely to vote as a bloc. The Russian population of Britain is relatively small, but it’s heavily concentrated in London. From what I hear, most of the 150,000 Russian immigrants living here are pro-Putin, and I’m sure such hearsay has reached the ears of potential candidates.

Yet Putin’s war on the Ukraine affects internal politics in ways other than just ethnic voting. The ghost of Neville Chamberlain is wafting over Britain, hissing the old story about war in a faraway land about which we know nothing and care even less. Appeasing Putin seems like an election winner if it can be positioned as the only way of avoiding a major war – or even a minor one that may involve British forces.

This argument may hold sway in the US as well, where isolationist attitudes have always been strong, especially within the Republican Party. Yet there, aid for the Ukraine may also be seen as sacrilege to the hallowed American Taxpayer. The arithmetic of such a claim may not add up, but its demagogic potential is high.

I don’t know whether I’ve identified the subterranean political tremors caught by the polls accurately. Yet one thing I’m sure of: neither side in either election cares about the survival of Israel and the Ukraine as sovereign states. Not really.

Those two heroic nations are merely pawns on the electoral chessboard, to be promoted or swiped off depending on internal poll results. These days, politics, foreign and even domestic, isn’t just immoral but amoral. Neither, speaking specifically of the treatment of Israel and the Ukraine, is it particularly clever.

Those two nations are spilling their blood not only for themselves but also for us. But, reviving the chess metaphor, our politicians must be able to calculate more than one move in advance to see that.

Such an ability is beyond them. The blinkers of forthcoming elections are in place, and the candidates can see only one square, the shape of the ballot box.

Every year, come the second week of May, I marvel at the difference between the 8^th of that month in the West and the 9^th in Russia.

A visitor from another planet to London would have missed the significance of the former date altogether. That was the day when the Allies accepted the capitulation of Nazi Germany in 1945, and yet the anniversary passed unnoticed this year, as it always does unless there’s a zero on the end.

Victory Day in Russia is celebrated a day later because the Nazis surrendered to the Red troops on the 9^th. And there, though my hypothetical alien might wonder about the reason for the festivities, there’s no way he’d miss them.

For the 9^th of May has always been treated there as an occasion to celebrate, rather than a tragedy to mourn. Moreover, it’s an occasion for reaffirming Russia’s towering superiority over the decadent West. Last Thursday that ascendancy was encapsulated in the deafening roar of “We can do it again!”

Exactly what? Few Russians ask that question because the big war is the lynchpin of the most massive and successful propaganda effort in history. Thus even those Russians who oppose Putin and detest his wars have to repeat by parrot-like rote that they are proud of their fathers/grandfathers/great-grandfathers who did Stalin’s bidding in the Second World War.

They are especially proud of the Soviets, the best part of 30 million of them, who gave their lives so that red fascism triumphed over the brown variety. Moreover, such horrendous losses are used to deliver a contortionist slap on their own back.

Look, Soviet and Russian propagandists have been shouting since 1945. The British and the Americans barely lost a million between them. This proves they practically didn’t fight and, if they did, they did so in a cowardly fashion. The Soviet Union won that war on its own and, if need be, “We can do it again!”.

Translating from propaganda into English, they can again die in their millions to impose their brand of fascism on Europe. Except this time around they’ll be imposing it not on other fascists but on free people desperate to stay that way.

Let’s cast a quick retrospective glance at what it is the Russians are proud of, stripping the chaff of lies from the wheat of the truth.

The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 as a Bolshevik reincarnation of the Russian Empire, one dedicated to world conquest. It’s not for nothing that the Soviet escutcheon showed hammer and sickle superimposed on the globe.

Early setbacks in Poland, Hungary, Finland and Germany persuaded the new leader, Stalin, that such a worthy goal could only be achieved by military means. If undefeated in a world war, foreigners couldn’t be expected to see the light.

At that moment the country was put on a war footing, just as demob-happy Europe was rejoicing in peace. Step by step, the Soviet Union was turned into a sinister combination of war factory and boot camp.

Peasants were enslaved first de facto, then de jure, which went by the name of ‘Collectivisation’. In effect, the state confiscated all the food produced in the villages to keep factory workers half-fed. In the countryside, nothing was done by halves: the peasants starved and died in their millions. Cannibalism was rife in the midst of the world’s most bountiful agricultural regions.

Factories worked in three eight-hour shifts, cranking out killing machines of ever description. (By contrast, factories in Nazi Germany continued to work single-shift days even a year after the war started.)

Politically, the Soviets identified Hitler as what Lenin called ‘the icebreaker of the revolution’, someone who could smash the old European order, laying it open for a Soviet thrust. To that end, Stalin prohibited his puppet German Communist Party from forming a block with the Socialists, which effectively brought Hitler to power in 1933.

The two rogue states formed a friendly alliance, building up each other’s military muscle. The Soviets were supplying the Nazis with raw materials, including grain (at the time Soviet peasants were starving to death), while the Germans paid back in technologies and equipment the Soviets couldn’t produce on their own.

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was the culmination of that process, rather than its beginning. The Second World War started a week after that aggressive pact was signed, with the Nazis and the Soviets going into the war as allies dividing Europe into zones of subjugation.

Thus the Soviets attacked Poland 17 days after the Nazis did, with the two predators holding joint victory parades. The Soviets then claimed the Baltics, eastern Poland, parts of Romania and went after Finland that was supposed to be theirs under the Pact’s terms. But the Finns fought heroically against Stalin’s hordes, managing to hold on to their sovereignty and most of their territory.

The Soviets started as they meant to go on. That was the first half a million Red soldiers dying in human-wave attacks on fortified positions – and the first source of pride for their descendants. Imperial madness leaves few Russians unscathed. Even Victor Suvorov, who first exposed Russia’s role as one of the two warmongers, writes he is proud of the Red soldiers happily freezing to death in Arctic conditions or perishing in the hail of Finnish bullets.

While all that was going on, Stalin was continuing his preparations for conquest. Hitler was smashing one European country after another, while Stalin was amassing millions of soldiers and tens of thousands of tanks on the new German border. He was waiting for the propitious moment to strike, and eventually that intent became impossible to hide.

Having failed to take Britain out of the war, Hitler now had to launch a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union, thus getting what every German schoolboy knew would be catastrophic: a war on two fronts. But Hitler knew he no longer had a choice. His only hope was to stop Stalin’s juggernaut before it started to roll.

What ensued was four years of blood gushing at a rate never seen before. The Soviets fought with total disregard for human lives, a traditional aspect of Russian military doctrine blown out of proportion by communist cannibals.

Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs how stunned he was when Marshal Zhukov casually mentioned that his favourite way of clearing a mine field was to march some infantry over it, thereby protecting valuable armour with valueless lives.

Soviet commanders only began to acquire some basic professional skills after many months of action, which partly explains why the Nazis captured over four million POWs (my father among them) by the time they reached Moscow in December, after less than six months of action.

As Stalin later admitted, the Soviets would never have won that war without Allied help. Without American and British supplies, they would have had nothing to win that war with. But win it they did – in the east, while the Allies won their victory in the west, Far East and North Africa.

As a result, red fascism enslaved Eastern Europe directly it was liberated from the brown variety, and with the same totalitarian brutality. Ask Eastern Europeans how happy they were from 1945 to 1991, when they were oppressed by the victorious Soviets. They’ll tell you.

And now descendants of the horde that rolled over Europe, murdering, looting and raping every step of the way (not just in Germany but also in ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe), go hoarse screaming “We can do it again!”

They are as good as their word. They haven’t lost their knack at murdering, looting and raping – usually at tremendous cost to their own lives. They’ve proved that in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, ‘hybrid’ war in the Ukraine, Syria – and now a full-scale aggression against the Ukraine.

They are proud of the victory their red fascism won over Nazism, the victory of Magadan over Majdanek, of Kolyma over Chelmno, of the Gulag over the Gestapo.

The day that should be reserved for tears and silent prayers for the millions who died in the war in which Russia was equally complicit is used instead as an occasion for pathetic triumphalism and thunderous threats to “do it again”.

The obligatory parade in Red Square was only attended by guests from Russia’s satellites: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau and Laos. The rest of the world showed by its absence what it really thinks of Putin and his attempts to impose fascism on Europe again.

There’s much to weep about and pray for on 9th of May – and nothing to be proud of. Especially when such pride inspires Russians to “do it again”.

Here’s the situation: dozens of pro-Hamas fanatics have been elected to town councils in local elections last week. In Bradford, to name one city, nine of the 30 new councillors elected fit that judgemental but accurate description.

Most Muslim victors stood as independents affiliated with various organisations, several of which are being investigated for extremism. Some others represented the leftmost parties, such as Labour and Green, but these actually lost seats to independently fanatical Muslims. Practically all of the victorious candidates ran on a pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli platform, paying little attention to local issues.

Some of them wore rosettes in the colours of the Palestinian flag and dedicated their victories to the people of Gaza. A few shouted the celebratory cry of Allahu Akbar.

Meanwhile, the umbrella organisation, the Muslim Vote, has issued 18-point demands to the Labour Party, threatening to withdraw its support if any of them aren’t met. That was going Woodrow Wilson’s paltry 14-points four points better.

You can guess what those points are: no ties with Israel, recognition of the Palestine state, travel bans on Israeli politicians and academics, stop bandying the word ‘extremism’ about, adopt their definition of Islamophobia, adjust pension rules to Sharia law, apologise for failure to brand Israel as a perpetrator of genocide – I could cite all 18, but there’s no need. You get the gist.

The Muslim Vote threatened that this was a taste of things to come in the general election, where their supporters “would punish” candidates who still refuse to equate Netanyahu with Hitler. This isn’t an empty threat: according to the Muslim Council of Britain, Islamic votes can decide 31 marginal seats, enough to swing a close election.

“Labour are worried about their damned polling numbers… We are watching the casualty numbers. We will not support those who have failed to back a ceasefire,” explained The Muslim Vote, adding that they “are a powerful, united force of  4 million acting in unison.”

If you consider this situation normal, I suggest we shake hands and go our separate ways. If, however, you agree with me that a systematic attempt to turn Britain into an ally of, perhaps an adjunct to, Muslim extremism is an abomination, do read on.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg made an obvious point: “People are entitled to their views but foreign affairs is a matter for the House of Commons, not local councils.”

Yet this perversion is by no means new. In the early 90s I worked in the borough of Lambeth, across the river from the Mother of All Parliaments. When entering the borough, one was regaled with a sign identifying Lambeth as a “nuclear-free” zone. This essentially meant that the borough pursued a foreign policy different from one favoured by those toffs on the other bank of the Thames.

But fair enough, local politics under the aegis of the councils should be all about taking out the rubbish, sweeping the streets, filling in the potholes, that sort of thing – not about setting Britain’s policy in the Middle East. But the problem is much worse than just so many councillors going beyond their remit.

Modern politics is increasingly characterised by the factionalism of minority groups, so much so that one struggles to find even a hint of national unity. Different groups with divergent interests have always existed, but in the past they also shared something in common, enough of it to coalesce into what used to be called society.

That word has a distinctly obsolete ring to it. That’s why few people ever use it, and one can see why. After all, an English pub-crawler with a Union Jack sticker on his car’s bumper has nothing in common with his local councillor celebrating an electoral victory with ‘Allahu Akbar’. The politician represents not him but murderous sadistic ghouls out to exterminate our only true allies in the Middle East.

Such local politicians have no interest in making their towns cleaner, their roads smoother, their people more comfortable. They entered politics the better to blackmail the main parties into betraying our friends and strengthening our enemies.

In other words, we have at the heart of our body politic a malignant, malevolent presence of a sort of fifth column hiding machetes under flowing white robes. Such is the nature of identity politics, that darling of the dominant Left.

More and more people think of themselves as British a distant second, if that — increasingly not even that. Others are above all Muslim or transgender or planet-savers or feminists or homosexuals or animal-lovers, Scottish or Welsh separatists, or anything else you can think of.

Of these, the Muslims are probably the most united and definitely the most dynamic group. They are perhaps the only one that can make good their threat to hold the national government to ransom specifically because they indeed “act in unison”.

Millions of people voting as a bloc can dominate tens of millions, each voting his own conscience. Parts of Britain are already ruled by Sharia law taking precedence over the English Common variety. Little is common any longer, and it’s rapidly becoming even less. Our house is divided, just like that Islamophobic book prophesied, and it won’t stand.

Anticipating the lapidary British question, “What are we going to do about that?”, I can rack my brain, put my hand on my heart and honestly say I haven’t a clue.

Or rather I’m dead certain that there’s nothing we can do within the existing system, with its unqualified universal suffrage, indiscriminate commitment to religious freedom, compassionate welcome to the downtrodden of the world, enlightened liberalism, egalitarianism, diversity.

But for those immutable, in theory laudable, features of British polity, one could propose any number of remedies for the festering problem I’ve described. These would be so obvious I’m not even going to specify. Yet none of them is feasible because our system precludes their implementation. Our problem is systemic, and it’s only at that level that it could ever be solved. Which probably means never.

Here perhaps it’s appropriate to suggest that no political system should be a suicide pact. Polities evolve as protective mechanisms ensuring the organism’s survival, at least, and continued flourishing, at best.

When a political system is at odds with such desiderata, perhaps we ought to remind ourselves that politics is created for the people, not the people for politics. ‘Onwards and forwards’ is the wrong cry when a precipice beckons.

If we realise we are on the wrong road, travelling nowhere fast, the only wise thing to do is to backtrack and start again. Mercifully, Britain has somewhere to backtrack to.

Until the 20^th century, the British political arrangement had been the envy of the world. Even French proto-socialists, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, couldn’t conceal their admiration for Britain’s perfectly balanced constitutional monarchy.

Hence we don’t need philosophical hand-me-downs from others. We have a wardrobe full of our own old but still wearable and perfectly styled garments. When Britain was thus clad, I doubt too many local politicians would have screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ at the top of their voice – or threatened HMG with blackmailing sedition.

Alas, no one has taken enough care to keep those clothes from getting moth-eaten. So even if we know what to do, we can no longer do it. Instead of those custom-tailored political clothes, we are wearing a millstone around our collective neck. Or, less metaphorically, our politics only allows change for the worse.   

Most of today’s youngsters will know what this texting acronym stands for. However, if you’re no longer in the first flush of youth, nor even in the second, I’ll give you a clue: the last three letters stand for ‘Beyond All Recognition’, and I shan’t decipher the first two out of decorum.

A survey has shown that a quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer their smartphones. They check the caller’s name and text back (or not), the mode of communication they also prefer when initiating the contact.

One possibility is that they resent spontaneous phone calls because they find them intrusive. This is something I sympathise with, old codger that I am.

At this point I have to make a confession that I know will diminish me in your estimation: I don’t own a smartphone and I don’t even know how to text. We maintain a respectable average in our family because Penelope has two smartphones, which she operates with the digital dexterity of the virtuoso pianist she is.

My phone is antediluvian, and it’s permanently switched off unless I expect a call or wish to make one. The other day a coach at our tennis club wondered what that thing was that I had just pulled out of my pocket.

My natural luddite leanings have something to do with such retrograde preferences, but they don’t extend to e-mail, which I use all the time. You see, I am a writer, as are most of my close friends. And if they aren’t writers, they are musicians.

People in such occupations work all the time, even when they seem to be doing something else. If they don’t have their fingers on a computer or piano keyboard, they ponder what they are going to do when the irritation of quotidian life recedes into the background and they can resume tickling those keys.

An unexpected phone call can derail their train of thought, and sometimes it’s hard to get it back on track. An e-mail, on the other hand, isn’t intrusive. You finish your work, look up your e-mails and answer them at your leisure, without jeopardising your musical discoveries or deep philosophical insights for posterity.

If that’s why youngsters refuse to answer the phone, good on them. This though I haven’t met too many young people constantly involved in febrile mental activity, or at least, FWIW, something I’d recognise as such. But IRL it doesn’t matter what I recognise or not.

So much for giving young people the benefit of the doubt. Alas, one suspects that they refuse to talk on the phone not because they choose not to, but because they can’t. That’s of course rather sinister because generations devoid of basic verbal and social skills will eventually plunge the world into barbarism, if they haven’t already.

Having a conversation is an art and, like any other art, it requires finely honed skills. Such skills can only be acquired by constant practice. Natural aptitude is a factor, but it’ll remain an irrelevant one in the absence of daily toil. And any diminution in such skills spells a social and cultural disaster.

To begin with, when youngsters communicate in ungrammatical snippets abounding in acronyms, they do untold damage to the English language. A comparison between the two languages I know best, English and Russian, is a useful illustration.

English grammar, lacking genders and cases, is much less complicated than Russian, what with its six cases, three genders and a mind-bending system for making them all agree across every part of speech. Yet in my (pre-computer) day, native Russian speakers, even uneducated ones, hardly ever made grammatical errors.

By contrast, even young Britons and Americans blessed with higher education often use atrocious grammar. That turns language into an amorphous, mostly semiotic system of interjections, shortening the distance separating humans from animals.

I don’t think anyone knows the nature of thought and how it’s connected with language. Yet it’s fairly obvious that a connection exists at some subcutaneous level. But physiology and psychology apart, certain empirical observations are indisputable.

Clear, properly structured language betokens clear, properly structured thought. Grammar is verbal discipline, and no cogent self-expression is possible without discipline.

It’s hard not to notice that young people hardly ever speak or even write complete, perfectly parsed sentences, which leads one to believe that they hardly ever think complete, perfectly parsed thoughts. That makes them easy prey for demagogues wielding language as an offensive weapon.

Such chaps are congenitally adept at communicating in truncated bytes of slogans designed to tickle the listeners’ naughty bits, not to withstand rigorous logical tests. This works wonders with an audience used to this mode of expression and no other.

That becomes obvious during elections, with people’s untrained minds unable to separate the wheat of sound policies from the chaff of infantile waffle – even in the area of economics, close to most people’s hearts.

Jones is supposed to represent the future, while Smith stands for change. Jones thinks it unfair that some people make so much more money than others. Smith thinks it disgraceful that some people make so much less than others.

Both promise to do something about that, though they are hazy about the specifics. Unless an economic disaster is upon us, they stand for higher public spending and lower taxes, though they are reticent about how such mutually exclusive ends can be achieved at the same time.

They’d never penalise hard work (as far as they are concerned, extorting, on pain of imprisonment, half of people’s income doesn’t constitute such a penalty). At the same time, they wouldn’t let down the less fortunate (this means increasing taxes on the more fortunate, which is to say the majority, even further, though this is seldom stressed).

The voters, unable to parse sentences, can’t decorticate thoughts. They have developed no analytical ability, something that throughout history has been inculcated by training in logic and rhetoric. So they vote for Smith or Jones, choosing one waffle over another.

Moreover, people who neither speak nor write extended thoughts can’t read them either. They respond ‘TMI’ to a suggestion that they shouldn’t form strong views on, say, global warming without reading a few books on the subject first. It’s so much easier to respond to Greta Thunberg’s drivel with Pavlovian alacrity.

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

Our problem is different: young people do understand one another’s speech. The trouble is that what they understand isn’t really speech. It’s Mowgli-like fragmentary communication in sounds, not words, sentences or consequently thoughts. This is indeed a BFD for anyone who is concerned about the future of our civilisation, based as it is on reason, expressed through structured thought and cogent word.

Computers, be it laptop, desktop or pocket, are valuable tools, but only for those who already know how to do without them. If I had little children now, I’d bar their access to any electronic devices until they’ve left their formative years behind them.

Or rather I’d try, only to find out that such draconian measures are no longer possible to implement. Modernity is FUBAR, and so, I’m afraid, are most young people. LMK what you think.  

Thanks to a different calendar and rather peculiar calculations, Orthodox Easter comes a month and a half after ours this year. So Христос воскрес and all that to my Orthodox readers, and happy Painted-Eggs Day.

Lest you may think I’m mocking exponents of a confession different from mine, think again. I’m only referring to a poll that shows that almost 60 per cent of Russians treat Easter as strictly a sum total of traditional rituals, such as painting eggs and baking the local equivalent of panettoni.

They are aware that the day has some religious significance but aren’t quite sure exactly what it is. When asked to guess, some respondents came up with “Christ’s birthday”, “Christ’s ascension” or even “arrival of spring”. On the plus side, no one thought this was the day for offering human sacrifice, which fills my heart with hope for the country of my birth.

Only eight per cent of Russians were planning to celebrate mass last night (never mind on the other days of the Holy Week), and just a paltry 10 per cent of people identifying as Orthodox had the same intention.

That’s rather shabby for the country our illustrious columnist once described as “the most Christian in Europe”. That extra gene of spirituality ascribed to the Russians by their own propaganda seems to be very recessive indeed.

By contrast, the same sources invariably refer to Britain as a soulless, godless nation mired in rapacious acquisitiveness, drug addiction, sexual perversion and castrating urges. Still, be that as it may, roughly the same percentage of Britons celebrated mass at Easter – and that’s in the population at large.

As to the people my late father-in-law stigmatised as traitors, that is to say Anglo-Roman Catholics, 27.5 per cent of them go to mass at least once a week. I’ve been unable to find any Easter statistics but, judging by my own church, that number must be at least doubled or possibly even tripled.

As a child growing up in a communal Moscow flat, with five of us living in one room and having to share the kitchen, bathroom and loo with 20 neighbours, I liked Easter. That doesn’t make me especially precocious because my interest was purely gastronomical.

All our neighbours, good communists one and all, baked kulich, which did resemble panettoni both in taste and religious significance. While blissfully unaware of the latter, I was gluttonously attracted to the former.

Those of our neighbours who were on speaking terms with my family (which was by no means all of them) sometimes offered me slices of kulich, which I received with gratitude and a promise not to bully their children ever again. Most of our male neighbours, and some of the female ones, got drunk on that day, although, since they also did so on many other days, that didn’t single out Easter Sunday as something special.

Words like ‘God’ or ‘Jesus Christ’ never crossed their lips, certainly not within my earshot. Thinking back, I don’t know whether our neighbours would have yielded different findings from the present vintage had a similar poll been conducted. I rather doubt that: even religious people tended to hide their light under a bushel in a country where faith was, putting it mildly, discouraged.

These days it’s much worse than discouraged, worse even than persecuted. Religion in Russia has been turned into an aspect of political propaganda of a frankly Nazi sort. That extra gene of spirituality is used in a typologically similar sense as superlative Soviet identity was bandied about in the USSR.

Homo soveticus was deemed superior to decadent Westerners because of his dedication to selfless struggle for the liberation of mankind from the shackles of capitalism. Homo russicus claims the same or even greater racial superiority because of his spirituality and faith in Jesus Christ Our Saviour.

By the looks of it, this kind of faith neither teaches people what exactly happened on Easter Day nor drives them into churches nor, most important, affects their behaviour. Orthodoxy these days plays the same role in Russia as Aryanism played in Nazi Germany.

Such emetic vulgarisation of Christianity does more harm to it than the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks ever did. When Putin’s regime collapses, which it will sooner or later, the Russians will dump Christianity into what Trotsky called “the dustbin of history”.

The KGB background of the church hierarchs will be a topic of daily conversations, and people will wear atheism on the same sleeve on which they used to flaunt anti-communism in the 1990s. Today’s fascists will then have achieved what the Bolsheviks never quite managed: put paid to Russian Christianity for generations, possibly centuries, to come.

None of this should be taken to mean that genuine believers are extinct in Russia. They are not, though none can be found among the ruling elite and its hangers-on in the media. The number of real Christians is probably the same as it was in the Soviet Union, though today they don’t have to reserve their faith for private quarters. But real Christians do exist, and this is their day.

It’s the business of their own conscience to reconcile their faith with their support of the fascist, warmongering regime in Russia, if they do support it. I don’t see how such an accommodation can be possible: if the religion of love produces hate in its adherents, one may question the sincerity of their faith.

However, my Orthodox readers are real Christians and, if they were Putin supporters, they wouldn’t be guests in this space. So Happy Easter to you all! Христос воскрес!

P.S. Patriarch Kirill, KGB codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’, offered this Easter prayer: “We are especially praying today for our Russian nation that is going through a hard, perhaps in some sense fateful, ordeal. We are asking Our Lord to protect the sacred borders of our land.”

Allow me to translate: His Holiness is talking about the Russian aggression against the Ukraine, accompanied by mass murder, torture, looting and rape. Not to forget the vicious razing of Ukrainian cities.

If such are their prelates, do you ever wonder what the lay masses are like?

 

Is it possible to limp to a landslide? Evidently yes, because this is exactly what Labour has done in the local elections.

The turnout was just over a third of the electorate, which is why I describe Labour’s victory as ‘limping’. Had more people bothered to vote, the Tory Party could have been thrashed even more decisively. As it is, Rishi Sunak lives to lose another day.

Our first-past-the-post system is inherently binary. No matter how many parties appear at ballot, either Conservatives or Labour is guaranteed to win. I suppose if Kierkegaard had been interested in such mundane matters, he could have described the system as ‘either/or’.

Anyway, the present situation is as normal as in the first two letters of SNAFU. Labour has won; the Tories have lost. What could be more normal than this? If one side doesn’t win it, the other one will. Now it’s Labour’s turn.

Since I voted for the losing side, I could describe the result as bad for me, the Conservative Party or even the country. But why is it bad for democracy? Hasn’t democracy worked as it should?

It has. Yet if we consider why it has worked as it has, perhaps we may detect systemic flaws in this way of deciding who should govern a major country. It’s only when our democracy run riot indeed acts in character that its flaws are laid bare for all to see.

It’s a truism that most people vote not so much for one party as against the other. When a party has been in power for as long as the Tories (14 years, give or take), people accumulate grievances galore. Eventually the sum total of their gripes gets to a critical point, beyond which lies utter frustration.

They no longer want the ruling party to get its act together. They want it out. That’s how it always is: show me a state where everyone is supposed to be deliriously happy with the government, and I’ll show you a totalitarian dictatorship.

Fair enough. But finding the Tories bloody useless, which most people have done, isn’t a valid reason to vote against them. It’s only half the reason.

The other half ought to be a sound justification for believing that Labour will do things better. They will balance the budget while lowering taxes. Solve the immigration problem. Stimulate growth. Put paid to unemployment. Stop ruining the economy with green madness. Put defence on a sound footing. Put a sock into the mouth of wokery. Keep the unions under control – you can expand the wish list on your own.

However, there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that might even remotely suggest that this will be the case. On the contrary, there exists a mountain of evidence that Labour will be much, much worse – in every department.

First, let me correct the misconception I’ve espied in one of this morning’s papers. British voters, wrote the author, always choose between centre-right and centre-left, eschewing either extreme.

That’s how things might have been in the past, but they demonstrably aren’t this way now. The choice before the British electorate is that between centre-left and Marxist.

No Tory government since Maggie Thatcher’s can be remotely described as conservative or even centre-right – socially, economically, culturally or in any other way, including the hypothetical wish list I cited earlier. It’s a straightforward social democracy, with no real conservative candidate having the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell to clear even the early stages of the selection process.

As to Labour, it’s a Marxist wolf in the sheep’s clothing of centrist moderation. With the animal cunning typical of socialists, Labour leaders have learned to mask their true nature with sensible pronouncements, inching closer to the centre as the next election approaches.

Hence the grand gesture of ditching the unvarnished communist anti-Semite Corbyn in 2020 and replacing him with Sir Keir Starmer, who has the nous not to wear his Marxism on his sleeve. But make no mistake about it: he does wear it under his outer garments, the way Thomas Becket used to wear a hairshirt underneath his gilded brocade robes.

Starmer’s earlier job was Director of Public Prosecutions, in which capacity he never saw a criminal he couldn’t exonerate. Commonly regarded as the worst-ever holder of that position, Starmer was finally dismissed in 2013 before he could flood our cities with socioeconomical victims of social injustice, otherwise known as thugs. He got his ‘K’ on the way out, which was a small price to pay for getting rid of him.

Sir Keir then became a regular contributor to a journal with the self-explanatory title of Socialist Lawyer. There he treated his readers to profound insights, such as that trade unions should control “the industry and community” and that “Karl Marx was, of course, right”.

Tony ‘Yo’ Blair, former activist in the KGB front called CND, tricked his way to 10 Downing Street by pretending to be a Thatcherite in disguise. Indeed, on the surface of it his policies, though still a far cry from being Thatcherite, looked more moderate than one would expect from a CND activist.

Hiding behind such appearances, Blair managed to deliver more destructive blows to the British constitution than any other prime minister in history.

Dragging Britain into the awful Iraq war, routing the House of Lords, creating American-style institutions that were at best redundant and at worst subversive, dumping extra billions into the bottomless pit of the NHS, introducing the employment-busting minimum wage, setting the stage for today’s housing crisis that keeps young people off the property ladder, reducing industrial output by three per cent at a loss of a million jobs (a remarkable achievement for a party claiming to represent the working class) – such is the legacy Starmer is proud of.

Yet because he lacks Blair’s charisma and talent for card-sharping trickery, he can’t keep his innate Marxism from showing through the holes in his Blairite trousers. Sir Keir is essentially Jeremy Corbyn pretending to be Tony Blair.

Yet the public doesn’t seem to realise this. One can hear people saying things like “It’s time to let Labour have a go”, but no one can give a cogent answer to the question of “What exactly do you expect Labour to do better?” This isn’t a question they can answer or, in most cases, even ask.

In other words, people fly by the seat of their pants all the way to a Labour government that will undo the few good things the Tories have done and outdo the many bad things. If this isn’t an indictment of elective but unselective democracy, I don’t know what is.

And this isn’t a one-off. Knee-jerk voting is dominant in most elections in most democracies, and only my innate moderation prevents me from replacing ‘most’ with ‘all’.

Let me assure you this isn’t sour grapes. If voters were able to activate a modicum of common sense, never mind something deeper than that, and arrive at their support of Labour on that basis, I might take issue with their choice, but not with the very system.

As it is, this is a bad day for democracy – not just for me, the Conservative Party and Britain.

While Ukrainians fight for their independence and Israelis for their survival, we are manning the verbal ramparts of wokery.

Yet another Christian teacher has been led up to the employment gibbet and strung up for ‘misgendering’ a pupil. Last year, Joshua Sutcliffe was drummed out of his profession by a TRA (Teaching Regulation Agency) panel for failing to treat a trans pupil “with dignity and respect”, meaning forgetting to use the pronouns said pupil preferred at the time.

At that point Mr Sutcliffe let the side down by apologising profusely. That abject surrender had no effect on his prosecutors, predictably.

Now, I turned my own back on an academic career some 50 years ago precisely because I sensed which way the wind was blowing. Following the Delphic maxim of “Know thyself”, I realised I was too bloody-minded to be told what to say and what not to say. So why kill oneself trying to get a job one knows one won’t be able to keep? And that time offered only a vague hint at things to come in the 21^st century.

Now I can afford the luxury of smirking smugly at Mr Sutcliffe’s ordeal and saying that, if I were him, I wouldn’t have apologised under any circumstances. I might have even asked whether I was supposed to bark at a pupil identifying as a dog or neigh at one identifying as a horse. However, the point is that I displayed the same weakness as Mr Sutcliffe but, unlike him, I did that pre-emptively, by refusing ever to put myself in his position.

Now he is appealing to the High Court, citing his Christian faith and referring to freedom of speech and religion, a freedom that’s now defunct or at least severely limited. This is especially noticeable when it finds itself on the wrong side of the pronoun war.

Hence Mr Sutcliffe was deemed to be “unprofessional” because he jeopardised his pupils’ spiritual wellbeing. His transgression was dire: this reprobate praised the work turned in by a group of pupils by saying: “Well done, girls.”

That was ignoring the supposedly obvious fact that one of the ‘girls’ had decided she really wasn’t one any longer. Moreover, even though this nuance didn’t come up at the hearing, the word ‘girls’ can anyway be easily construed as demeaning and traumatising.

Such shamefully binary words must be replaced with open-ended salutations. I’d recommend something like “Well done, persons”, “Well done, beings” or perhaps “Well done, individuals”. These may sound less mellifluous, but hey, we aren’t after sonorities here, are we? We are after protecting young souls from the life-long wounds that words like ‘girls’ can inflict.

The prospects of the court overturning the TRA verdict strike me as dim, especially in light of the defence put up by Mr Sutcliffe’s lawyers. They claim that there is “no legal requirement to use preferred pronouns” and, tautologically, that Mr Sutcliffe had a right “not to believe gender identity belief”.

By the same logic, I have a right to relieve myself in my own lavatory, but I’d be nicked if I did so on Piccadilly Circus in broad daylight. Also, as a Christian, Mr Sutcliffe ought to know that there exists a higher law that transcends the casuistry written into human codes.

In this case, this higher law comes down from the god of wokery, and he is athirst. His commandments, shining from up high, supersede any laws passed by Parliament. Thus, talking about “legal requirements” is futile.

The Department for Education knows this. That’s why it opposes his appeal, saying that the teacher failed “to distinguish between his role as a teacher and his activities as a preacher”.

I often say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim. A bad Muslim can easily adapt to life in any Western country, which a good Muslim, meaning one who follows all the commandments of his religion, can’t. The former can be a valuable member of society; the latter, at best a nuisance.

The D of E seems to apply the same logic to Christianity. The only good Christian under its aegis is a bad Christian.

A teacher is welcome to espouse that outdated cult at home, but he dare not act as a good Christian at work. Specifically, he must ignore the unequivocal commandments to proselytise: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” or “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

The logic may be the same, but the religions aren’t. We aren’t a Muslim nation yet, although we are doing our utmost to inch in that direction. Hence, whenever a Muslim tries to trump our laws and traditions with the Koran, we have every historical, moral and legal right to tell him where to go and where to put that book.

The British nation has been Christian longer than it has been the British nation. Moreover, we are one of the few Western countries that have an established church and no laws separating church and state (such as France’s laïcité). I realise that Britain is Christian only nominally these days, but the weight of 14 Christian centuries can’t be shifted easily and quickly.

Therefore punishing a man simply for being guided by his faith is… I almost wrote ‘unconscionable’, but then realised that ‘only natural nowadays’ would be more appropriate.

We should have more teachers like Mr Sutcliffe in our schools. Instead, before long we shan’t have any. I do hope he’ll get his (their? ze’s?) job back. But I fear he (they? ze?) won’t.

P.S. Speaking of France, TV comedian Guillaume Meurice has caused a bit of a furore there by describing Benjamin Netanyahu as “a sort of Nazi without a foreskin”. His employer subsequently defended Mr Meurice’s right to l’outrance (over-the-top outrageousness).

I agree. Insulting the Holy Spirit apart, jokes are either funny or unfunny. C’est tout, as they say in those parts. If someone is offended by a joke, it’s his (their? ze’s?) problem, not the comedian’s. Yet I doubt that even Mr Meurice’s mother would describe that little quip as a funny joke.

It was an expression of a moronic political opinion tinged with anti-Semitism. Hence I wonder whether the comedian speaks English. If he does, he should tour the tent encampments on our campuses. He’d find a receptive audience there.

Civility. Intuitive politeness (outside New York, that is). Self-reliance. Enterprise. And lots of other good things I haven’t mentioned.

Yet we never learn such good things. We only ever learn bad ones, such as crudeness, egalitarian familiarity, parochialism, ‘body art’, bad grammar – and no such list would be complete without political correctness.

I first heard the term from my son, then a schoolboy in California, where the term might have been, and certainly should have been, invented. I used the word ‘negro’ in his presence, which to me was a stylistically neutral term with no pejorative connotations whatsoever.

That’s when my son taught me that new term, and at first I couldn’t understand why my incorrectness was political. Moral or social perhaps, but what does politics have to do with anything? Another few seconds of contemplation, and I remembered that these days politics has something to do with everything.

I even recalled Thomas Mann’s saying, “All intellectual attitudes are latently political”, and thought he had a point. Anyway, though the term ‘political correctness’ was new to me, the underlying attitude wasn’t. My first job in the US was at NASA, and government outfits race ahead of the rest of the country towards what is now called wokery.

The personnel manager told me in no uncertain terms that my female colleagues were neither ‘women’ nor, especially, ‘girls’. They were ‘persons’, and if I called them anything less I’d get in trouble. I protested that, if I identified a woman in the next room as a ‘person’, my interlocutor wouldn’t know if was talking about a man or a woman.

The apparatchik explained that this wasn’t the point, although he fell short of telling me what the point was. Anyway, I learned how to circumvent that injunction by reserving the word ‘person’ for women only and referring to men as strictly ‘guys’ or ‘fellows’, thereby divesting them of their personhood but finding myself on safer grounds.

Then, some 15 years later, I emigrated to Britain and gratefully inhaled lungfuls of fresh air. By then (circa 1988) political correctness had got out of hand in the US, and some locutions in common British parlance would have been grounds for prosecution there.

Finally, I thought, a spot of sanity unsullied with the miasma of mandated verbal lunacy. Well, that didn’t last long.

Since I like to analyse social phenomena dynamically rather than statically, I’m usually more interested in trends than in the here and now. And the general trend I spotted was that all American perversions migrate to Britain sooner or later. This observation is ironclad, but it raises a question: sooner or later?

How long does it take the British to lap up the perverse crumbs falling off America’s table? (The tasty American bits find little demand here, as I’ve mentioned earlier.)

At that time, it took somewhere between ten and five years, with the lag steadily shifting towards the latter duration. Thus Britain gradually caught up with America in the wokery stakes, and then began to pull ahead, slowly. But then the Internet kicked in, and things began to accelerate exponentially.

Whatever gaps in lunacy existed between the two countries got to be filled within a year or two, then within a month or two, then within a couple of weeks – and now I’m happy to report that we don’t have to wait longer than several days if not hours for the shockwaves of American explosions to reach our shores.

The latest vindication of this observation comes from the scores of tents being pitched on university campuses across Britain, as they have been in America for some time. These encampments are tastefully decorated with Palestinian flags and all the usual placards. Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Warwick have all been taken over by pro-Hamas fanatics spewing hate.

Students at an academically awful Leeds University are refusing to say how long they are going to continue to occupy land around the university buildings. They pledge to remain “indefinitely”, until the university is “no longer complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people and crimes against humanity”.

What they mean by such criminal complicity is their university accepting donations from firms even tangentially involved in arms manufacturing. After all, there’s no guarantee that those weapons won’t fall into the blood-stained hands of Israeli genocide mongers.

Of course, if universities no longer accept funding from technology firms, tuition fees may go up, which will be reason enough to stage more protests. One wonders how students find any time to study their subjects, even if these are conveniently fractured into moronic modules precluding any education worthy of the name.

No student protests would be complete without the accompaniment of death threats to Jews on campus, such as those that forced a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University into hiding, together with his whole family.

Jewish students are complaining about being “harassed and excluded”, which shows how little they understand the newly, if implicitly, amended British constitution. It proscribes racial or ethnic discrimination, except against Jews. It guarantees freedom of any religion, except Christianity. And it stipulates equality before the law, with favourable exemptions for members of putatively oppressed minorities.

I detect a direct link between these student camps and concentration camps, but I realise I’m in a distinct minority there. My only hope is that, having borrowed the idea of pro-Hamas encampments from their American counterparts, our students won’t also borrow the attendant violence.

Some such activities in the US have resulted in battles between pro-Hamas and pro-Israeli groups, but at least the American police still have the guts to do something about the tents. Hundreds of arrests have been made at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, with policemen clearing encampments and occupied buildings.

Our police are so far inert, looking at the tents with indifference and, if past such events are anything to go by, barely concealed sympathy. Who said police have to be immune to brainwashing? Not me.

If push comes to shove in Britain, the copycat situation could turn even worse than in the American original because of the much higher proportion of Muslim students here. I’ve once met a young Muslim who wasn’t sympathetic to the idea of murdering every Israeli (from the river to the sea). His name was Asif.

This is to say that their participation in riotous protests has to gravitate to 100 per cent. Relatively speaking, there are fewer Muslims on American campuses, although exponents of other religions or mostly none are doing their level best to take up the slack.

The upshot of this is obvious: follow American current events with attention, ladies and gentlemen. If there’s something you hate, brace yourself: a few days later it’ll come here.

This isn’t much of an advanced warning, but some. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick… but I’d better not develop this metaphor.