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Manny Macron, thunders Le Figaro, has relegated France to the lower league of “small nations”, and French to the status of a “regional, provincial language”.

That mournful assessment has to do with the new French identity cards that aren’t, well, wholly French. Some rubrics feature the English translations of such bog-standard words as nom, prénoms and nationalité. And England isn’t even in the EU any longer.

This assails French national sensitivity, which is on the extreme side of brittle under the best of circumstances. Hence the cri de coeur in Le Figaro, followed by a similar outcry in all other media.  

Most of the diatribes are animated by nostalgia for the good old times, when French was the world’s lingua franca. When German and Italian academics conversed even 100 years ago, chances are they were doing so in French. Today they are almost guaranteed to be speaking in English, such as it is.

That hurts, for the French love their language more than the English love theirs, and they attach even more weight to it as an essential part of their national identity. Yet people who love something are often dismayed that others may not share their feelings. And dismay leads to bitterness.

So this kind of resentment has been seething for quite a while. Yet those French hacks who resent les anglo-saxons for their cultural appropriation and linguistic imperialism are missing the point.

For the record, I share their anger over English becoming the universal medium of discourse. Yet my problem isn’t the downgrading of French or other tongues, but the damage this promiscuous use of English does to the language itself.

Every lingua franca in history has suffered attrition first and extinction eventually. Admittedly, English is unlikely to disappear the way, say, Latin did.

It will, however, suffer systematic oversimplification and vulgarisation. Since we are told, incessantly and wrongly, that language is nothing but a means of communication, it has to be reduced to a basic level for a communication between two foreigners to take place unimpaired. Otherwise a game of Chinese whispers may ensue.

(I recall asking a fishmonger in Amsterdam if he could prepare my red mullet for me. He laughed at what he thought was a funny joke – in Dutch, as in Russian, ‘to prepare’ also means ‘to cook’. On another occasion, I agreed with an English-speaking Frenchman that our times are indeed rotten – only to recall that in French temps means both ‘time’ and ‘weather’.)

But this is neither here nor there. The problem that the French feel so acutely has nothing to do with English. It has everything to do with the EU.

The immediate explanation for the new French identity cards saying nom (name), not just nom, is that the EU has issued a directive that all identity cards within its borders should feature at least two languages. Yet one has to delve deeper to find the real problem.

The EU seeks to create a single European superstate, which in effect means a single European empire. And a single empire presupposes a single official language, tying all the disparate groups together.

Every European empire in history has always had a central metropolis with outlying nations radiating from the centre. The languages of those peripheral nations were reduced to the status of local dialects used mostly by the lower classes.

Thus Latin was universal within the Roman Empire, with some Greek used in academic discourse. And all denizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had to know at least some German – if only to be able to follow commands in the army. (The Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek has much fun with that in his classic satire Good Soldier Švejk.)

Now, my friends may refer to the EU as the Third Reich, but it really isn’t, is it? Germany is the most economically virile and technologically fecund nation in the EU, but it certainly isn’t its strongest military power – France is.

And in any case, German, or for that matter French, can’t be adopted as the single language of a single state for all sorts of cultural and political reasons. That means in effect that not only French but every other language in the EU is reduced to the lowly status of a “regional, provincial language”. With the fine nuance that no central language exists.

Hence the demand for all EU identity cards to be at least bilingual – and English is only one possible candidate for the second language. I can’t quite see, say, Finnish cards featuring Romanian translations, can you?

Though the issue may seem trivial, it’s anything but. Rather it’s an indication of the cultural time bomb ticking away under the EU.

The desire to cock a snook at les anglo-saxons is all good and well, but it can’t function as the cultural adhesive binding the EU together. Christianity could conceivably act in that capacity, but no one considers this possibility seriously these days.

And in any case, relations among Orthodox, Catholic and various Protestant confessions, all present in the EU, have never been sufficiently cordial for any of them to have much unifying potential. None as hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed.

No one knows the time setting on the aforementioned bomb, but it’s bound to go off sooner or later, and my guess is sooner. The EU is a dead state walking – and it hasn’t even been properly born yet.

I’m not going to quibble with the need to save our planet. All things considered, it’s a nice planet and, if it’s in danger, it deserves to be saved.

And I’m even prepared to accept, against all evidence, that fossil fuels present just such a danger, one from which our planet needs saving. What I find hard to get my head around is the logic of it all.

Looking at the energy policies of just two European countries, Germany and France, one finds much of what misogynistic Russians call ‘women’s logic’, meaning, misogynistically, no logic at all.

Both countries, especially France, have large deposits of shale gas that they refuse to explore for fear of endangering our planet. Fine, I understand: natural gas is the work of the devil.

However, both countries have either shut down their coal mines and, more important, nuclear power stations or have undertaken to do so soon. Considering that nuclear energy hasn’t caused a single death in the West, it’s hard to understand what the problem with it is.

After all, nuclear is by far the safest form of energy, of those that can realistically be expected to fuel a modern economy. It hurts me no end to admit this, but neither wind nor sun can do that – at best, they can only complement the amount of energy produced by realistic means.

Then again, most Western countries are phasing out vehicles powered by fossil fuels. Instead, they are saving the planet by switching to electric cars powered by batteries. Presumably, the planet would thank them if it could talk.

But here’s the rub: our planet is quite large. In addition to Western countries, whose burning concern is saving our planet, it also houses any number of downmarket places, or even whole continents, where the burning concern is saving their people’s lives.

Those countries understand that the two objectives may be in conflict and, when they clash, survival wins every time. That’s why those countries, some of them quite large, such as China, India and Russia, continue to produce and use oodles of hydrocarbons, such as coal, oil and gas.

Moreover, some of them stubbornly hold on to their nuclear power stations, where the safety levels aren’t quite up to Western standards. And since we all share the same planet, a meltdown in a low-rent part of the world may well produce radiation sickness in wealthier neighbourhoods. If you don’t believe me, talk to the Swedes who found themselves downwind from Chernobyl.

Logically, if we all share the same planet, we also share the same atmosphere. If it’s true that carbon monoxide poisons the atmosphere, then our planet doesn’t care where CO₂ is produced, in Britain or China. The supposed effect is the same. We are all going to be fried by global warming (and ‘global’ is the operative word).

Regarded in that light, Germany’s eagerness to get the Nord Stream 2 pipeline going strikes me as incomprehensible. Whether or not those Russian pipes carry atmospheric poison is debatable. Yet there’s no doubt that pumped through them will be large amounts of political poison.

But forget about politics. Let’s concentrate on the good of our planet.

Currently, Germany gets 49 per cent of her natural gas from Russia. Yet the new pipeline, which will bypass the Ukraine and Eastern Europe to pump directly into Germany, will double that proportion.

I don’t get this. It’s an article of woke faith that burning fossil fuels is steadily turning our planet into a fiery hell. And it’s actually the burning of them that’s diabolical, not getting them out of the ground. 

Hence, I must file a ringing protest on behalf of our planet. For Germany, France and Britain don’t seem to be in any hurry to stop burning fossil fuels. They only want them to come from elsewhere – even at a vast political and strategic cost.

Will someone please explain to me the logic of it all? Our planet doesn’t care where the gas that’s poisoning it was extracted from the ground. It only cares about the amount of CO₂ dumped into it.

I can see that, from the standpoint of politics (that dread word again), Britain, Germany, France and their friends feel good about themselves. They make all the right noises about saving the planet and brainwash their populations accordingly, while continuing to perform dastardly violence on our planet that’s supposed to be creaking at the seams.

The same goes for electric vehicles. These are powered by large batteries using rare metals. In addition to driving up the costs, these metals are quite toxic to those who mine them, to the areas surrounding the mines and consequently, over time, to our planet.

Here Western countries practise the same NIMBY attitude. Most of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Congo, most of the lithium in South America, and about half of all manganese in South Africa and China.

Since those miners, many of them children, don’t vote for Western politicians, our leaders don’t care about their mortality rates. But what about our planet? When the number of electric vehicles reaches, say, nine digits, so much unhealthy stuff will have to be dug out that the planet will suffer even more than it is already.

One has to conclude, mournfully, that the West is displaying most refreshing hypocrisy. It has devoured its own canard of global warming so avidly that it has instantly entered the West’s gastrointestinal tract. But, by way of reflux, all we are getting is meaningless twaddle.

People’s brains have been scoured so thoroughly that they are expected to believe that the fuel used by the German economy doesn’t harm our planet if it comes from Russia and not, say, from France, which has Europe’s largest deposits of shale gas.

But the dumbing-down PR campaign has been won. Not only do people accept the climate hoax as reality, they are also prepared to overlook the gaping holes in the intellectual trousers of the ecofanatics.

Propaganda corrupts, ladies and gentlemen, and total propaganda corrupts totally.   

BBC sports presenter Alex Scott is the quintessential modern woman. She is illiterate and proud of her illiteracy.

That unfortunate situation was highlighted by the exchange between the former footballer and Lord Digby Jones, the former minister in Gordon Brown’s government.

Lord Jones took exception to Miss Scott’s inability to pronounce her g sounds at the end of words like ‘runnin’ and ‘playin’. “Competitors,” he tweeted, “are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin.”

Kaboom! The skies opened, thunder roared and a million tweeted lightnings smote Lord Jones for what another ball-kicker turned presenter, Gary Linaker, identified as his snobbery.

Not that Miss Scott needed much help – she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. She fired back by saying: “I’m from a working class family in East London, Poplar, Tower Hamlets & I am PROUD.”

I wonder what the object of her pride is. The neighbourhood she mentioned isn’t especially nice even now, after millions have been pumped into redevelopment over the past couple of decades. And 36 years ago, when Miss Scott was born, it was a regular hellhole.

Still, we aren’t responsible for where we start in life. However, we are definitely responsible for where we end up. One would think that the distance separating runnin from running could be covered in 35 years even from such an inauspicious start. And failure to do so is cause for shame, not pride.

It’s just that neither Miss Scott nor her defenders think that trip is worth making. They see nothing wrong in butchering what T.S. Eliot called “the dialect of the tribe” with their barbaric phonetics, grammar and lexicon. On the contrary, functional illiteracy is something they proudly wear on their sleeve as a badge of belonging.

In my younger days, BBC presenters, including those who presented sports, used to speak in educated accents gravitating towards the upper end of the social spectrum. They were then replaced by a new breed enunciating their vowels in a flat middle-class manner.

Now some BBC correspondents and sports presenters are increasingly and proudly communicating in the patois of the urban underclass. And I don’t mean, say, former footballers offering their insights as expert commentators.

I may have a laugh at the solecisms with which, say, Glenn Hoddle liberally peppers his speech, but I don’t really mind it. One doesn’t expect the same elocution and syntax from retired midfielders as one does from TV journalists fronting BBC shows.

Miss Scott also used to be an expert commentator, although, unlike Mr Hoddle, she didn’t offer any penetrating insights into the men’s game she never played. Yet the god of diversity, Multi-Culti Almighty, demands that women enjoy equal time with men in the commentary booth.

Since then, Lord Jones’s sensitive ear has been sacrificed at the totem pole of that deity. For Miss Scott has been promoted to the ranks of full-time presenters, professional BBC journalists who used to set the standards of spoken English.

Now no standards exist, and those few that still hang on are being expunged. Whole generations of young people, whose language is shaped by television and Twitter, grow up as little Mowglis, communicating in grunts and interjections not resembling English even remotely.

To his Lordship’s credit, he didn’t take his public flogging lying down. “This has got nothing to do with her upbringing. This is not about accents,” he said. 

“It is about the fact that she is wrong. You do not pronounce the English language ending in a ‘g’ without the ‘g’ and I don’t want her as a role model…”

Lord Jones then somewhat spoiled the impression by establishing his impeccable credentials (he is a Labour Lord after all): “I came from very modest beginnings in Birmingham… I am not someone who was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and is standing here as a snob.”

Fine, he’s qualified to defend proper English. But God forbid someone like Rees-Mogg offered similar criticism. Good luck to him trying to plead that he too is common as muck.

P.S. Speaking of footballers, it’s not only how they speak, but also what they say that bears the approval stamp of modernity.

In the runup to the European championship, many fans didn’t think defender Tyrone Mings was good enough to play for England. As a result, he says his “mental health plummeted”.

If you aren’t fluent in modern, that means he was upset, or ‘gutted’, as he’d probably describe it if he weren’t such a sensitive soul. But not to worry: help was on its way.

“So I did a lot of work on that with my psychologist. I was given a lot of coping mechanisms – whether it was breathing, meditation, or just learning how to bring yourself into the present moment. To stop letting your subconscious take over.”

Tyrone, never mind the psychobabble bollocks. Let your subconscious take over and go on breaking strikers’ legs for England. Do what comes naturally.

Blood is thicker than water, goes the old saying. Yet that maxim doesn’t always hold true. For example, any civil war provides countless examples of men killing their brothers, parents and any number of their countrymen with whom they were at ideological odds.

Perhaps that adage should be amended to say that blood may be thicker than water, but ideology is thicker than blood. And if you don’t believe me, look at Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the Ben & Jerry of the ice cream fame.

The eponymous Ben and Jerry sold the chain to Unilever in 2000, but they still take it close to heart. And, using the same organ, they “unequivocally support” the company’s decision to boycott Israeli settlements by refusing to sell ice cream in the West Bank.

“We are the founders of Ben & Jerry’s. We are also proud Jews…, supporters of the State of Israel,” explained Ben and Jerry. “But it’s possible to support Israel and oppose some of its policies, just as we’ve opposed policies of the U.S. government.”

By way of a nuance that’s beyond that duo’s comprehension, boycotting trade with a country goes beyond political disagreement. For example, I despise most EU policies, which doesn’t prevent me from washing down my pasta with burgundy.  

Anyway, no ice cream for the “occupied territories, which the international community, including the United Nations, has deemed an illegal occupation… Ben & Jerry’s took the step to align its business and operations with its progressive values.”

One of the ironclad progressive values is sympathy with the Muslims’ sacred vow to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate every Jew living there. This stands to reason: progressive values are always aligned in opposition to Western civilisation, of which Israel is the sole bulwark in the Middle East.

It’s in those Arabian sands that the line is drawn between those who support Israel and hence the West – us – and those who detest both.

The first group, in addition to most Jews, includes everyone committed to the defence and preservation of a civilisation that used to go by the name of Judaeo-Christian. Such people may be conservatives, Christians, Christian conservatives, secular conservatives or simply decent folk who are appalled by the Holocaust and don’t wish to see a repeat performance.

The second group includes most Muslims, most anti-Semites, most lefties, and idiots who recognise UN directives as moral dicta or else don’t realise that Israel is in the vanguard of a civilisational clash.

Muslims apart, such is the composition of the group that’s these days called progressive or liberal, whereas in fact it’s the opposite of both. And, as Ben and Jerry prove, their ideology can indeed be thicker than blood. It may well triumph when clashing with other allegiances.

Messrs Ben and Jerry also bear out my lifelong observation that business acumen doesn’t always go together with general intelligence. To wit:

Equating opposition to American and to Israeli policies is simply daft. Unlike Israel, America isn’t involved in a day-to-day struggle for physical survival. Some of her policies may be worse than others, but none has a life-or-death significance. Even the invariably inane policies of the present administration will only make America poorer and more crime-ridden. They won’t make her non-existent.

Why, America can even afford to lose the odd war, such as the one in Vietnam, and still live to tell about it. No such luxury for Israel: any lost war will spell Holocaust Mark II.

This ought to determine the angle from which one looks at Israel’s policies, including the occupation of the West Bank. The advance that so upsets Ben and Jerry was made possible by Israel’s stunning six-day victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967.

That war ensued after the Arab coalition, armed, trained and supported by the Soviet bloc, decided to make good its promise to “drive Israel into the sea”. Israel – and the Israelis – managed to survive, claiming some territories as spoils of war.

Most of those have since been returned to the Arabs, but Israel has kept some of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Those areas have since become home to about 400,000 Israelis, who have turned that arid desert of hateful barbarism into an oasis of civilisation.

Quite apart from securing more space for Israel’s burgeoning population, the settlements have a strategic significance. They prevent that area from becoming a springboard for yet another barbaric onslaught, with the settlers acting as the first line of defence, or, if you’d rather, a tripwire device.

I’m not privy to the fine points of Israeli strategic planning, and neither, I’m sure, are Ben and Jerry. However, I think a country that in my lifetime has fought and won six wars against its enemies – our enemies – deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to survival.

But Ben and Jerry haven’t formed their views on the basis of strategic analysis. Their double knee simply jerked in the direction of ‘progressive’ values.

“We believe this act can and should be seen as advancing the concepts of justice and human rights, core tenets of Judaism.”

So they think that the murderous wild-eyed fanatics advance human rights every time they fire a rocket at Israelis, or indeed when they stone adulterers and push homosexuals off tall buildings. How about their terrorism in Europe? Is that just too?

As to the core tenets of Judaism, I wonder when they last read, say, Exodus. I don’t think Moses, Aaron and Joshua were overly concerned with the human rights of the pagans inhabiting the Promised Land. But then of course they weren’t champions of progressive values.

I hope you’ll join me in boycotting Ben & Jerry ice cream. Buy Häagen-Dazs instead – it’s better anyway.

Hacks have uncovered a staggering scoop, to much self-congratulatory din: regular heading of a football can cause neurological disorders. Professional players are 3.5 times more likely than average people to suffer conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s in later life.

This is one of those startling discoveries that have been common knowledge for yonks. When I played footie for my school, a friend’s mother told me never to head the ball. “You’ll scramble your brain,” she said with solicitous disdain, “provided you have one”.

Even if common knowledge were lacking, common sense would take up the slack. For it stands to reason that repetitive impacts can have a detrimental cumulative effect.

During his career, a footballer hits between 50,000 and 100,000 headers in training and matches. Each time the jelly-like mass inside his cranium is shaken, if not stirred. This can’t be good for the ganglion of nerve cells and synapses – any rank medical amateur could tell you that.

That established, pragmatism for which the British are so widely known demands the posing of the lapidary question: “So what are we going to do about it?”

Since these days we all seek immortality through ‘elf and safety, answers come in a steady stream. Ban heading altogether and penalise it like a hand ball. Do so only in training. And perhaps only for children. Make footballers wear mouthguards. Or headguards. Or helmets.

And finally, the measure actually being put into effect by the FA and the Premier League: no more than 10 high-force headers per week’s training. This in the knowledge that many players hit some 100 such headers per day, not 10 per week.

One wonders how this rule will be enforced. A new coach will have to be hired whose sole responsibility will be keeping the count of headers hit by every player in every training session. Or else an honour system could be introduced, with each player keeping his own count and then refusing to go for corners whenever he has filled his week’s quota.

I can just see a central defender letting a corner kick float by him and then telling the manager, “Sorry, boss, it does me ‘ead in”. Decorum prohibits citing the manager’s likely response.

An unenforceable law does more harm than good, and not just in football. So perhaps the lapidary British question I asked earlier is wrong or at least premature.

As is almost always the case, the first question should be not pragmatic but philosophical: “Should we do something about it?”

After all, no one has suggested banning head blows in boxing – this though the damage there can be both catastrophic and instant. While a footballer may get the shakes in his old age after having headed the ball 100,000 times, a single boxing blow can paralyse or even kill. Moreover, while producing concussions is only a by-product of football, in boxing it’s the deliberate objective.

In most bouts there’s a rule that a boxer knocked down three times loses the fight by technical knockout. Though it’s called the three-knockdown rule, the more appropriate name would be ‘the three-concussion rule’ – a fighter suffers a concussion each time he hits the canvas after a blow to the head.

So should boxing be banned? Or turned into a non-contact sport, like exhibition karate contests? Should points be awarded for artistic impression, like in figure skating?

Palliative measures don’t really work. For example, amateur boxers have been wearing headguards for decades, with only a marginal reduction in the number of concussions.

Even the three-knockdown rule is a half-measure. A boxer may remain upright, while still suffering the cumulative effect of hundreds of blows.

This isn’t an exaggeration: the great boxer Manny Pacquiao once landed 474 blows in one title fight, without knocking his opponent out. How many of those blows had a concussing effect? Ask his opponent’s neurologist.

There are only two logical solutions to this problem, one authoritarian, the other libertarian.

The authoritarian solution in any sport where neurological damage is possible or even, as in boxing, almost certain would be a partial or total ban. For example, boxers could be penalised for a head blow the way they are now penalised for a headbutt. Alternatively, boxing could be banned altogether, on the assumption that the human body deserves enough respect not to be used for gratuitous pummelling.

Bans at various levels could also solve the problem in football. Here one could even argue that eliminating ‘high-force’ headers could make the game more watchable by encouraging the more attractive skills.

The libertarian solution would be no solution, or as near as damn. Youngsters choosing a career in football, boxing or any other high-risk sport are free agents entitled to make their own choices in life. Once they’ve been informed of the risks, the decision is up to them.

They can choose a potentially lucrative career offering the kind of rewards they can’t realistically hope to get in any other occupation – knowing in advance that they may be in for an early and miserable old age.

One could also argue that a concerted effort to eliminate all risks may dilute the human strain, producing generations of wimps unfit to survive in life’s rough-and-tumble. One could argue all sorts of things without arriving at a definitive conclusion.

Proceeding deductively from the general to the specific, neurodegenerative diseases were a factor in 42 per cent of the deaths among top-flight footballers playing in England in the 1965-66 season. And by the looks of them, most boxers suffer from Dementia pugilistica in their old age.

The problem is real, but is it worse than in many other sports, such as car racing, mountain climbing, sky diving? You know the old saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, sky diving isn’t for you.” At least a footballer is unlikely to be killed by a single headed clearance.

Flippancy is often used to hide vacillation, as it is, I’m afraid, in this case. The argument has at least two sides, each further fractured into multiple fragments.

My tendency would be to go all out either way: let people be or ban headers altogether. Patently unenforceable and useless solutions, like the one mandated by the FA, may have a good PR effect, but no other.

Students at the London School of Economics, one of our most exclusive universities, have issued a manifesto that must have been inspired by Mao’s Red Guards.

The manifesto, put forth by the LSE Working Class group, demands a full raft of radical measures. These include, inter alia:

• A ban on all students educated at independent schools
• Eradication of a student society devoted to the study of Friedrich Hayek (HyekSoc)
• No-platforming of speakers who “are harmful to marginalised students”
• Introducing minority quotas for the faculty, with an accent on hiring more black professors (this is called “decolonisation”)
• The right to review the directors’ salaries

They stopped just short of a call to smash their professors’ “dog’s heads”, as their Chinese counterparts did. However, on the positive side, they also demanded that the LSE “install a David Graeber lecture series, to celebrate the life of the revered professor.”

Graeber, who died last year, was an anarchist activist who inspired the Occupy movement. Both he and Occupy may indeed be revered, but perhaps not as universally as LSE students would wish.

What I like about the manifesto is its laudable honesty. Those students haven’t yet learned to camouflage their diabolical views with quasi-liberal verbiage. Perhaps they should learn less from David Graeber and more from Herbert Marcuse or, closer to our own time, Tony Blair.

Now, you might think that no university listing economics as its main field of study could abolish Hayek, Mises and other Austrian champions of free markets. Think again.

As the manifesto explains, “HayekSoc promotes free market fundamentalist views which outwardly call for the oppression of working class people.”

Now, I’ve read most of what Hayek wrote, but – and it pains me to harbour such suspicions about students of this august institution – I wonder if they have. For nowhere does Hayek call, outwardly or otherwise, for such oppression.

This great champion of libertarian economics believed that, on the contrary, free markets promote upward social mobility by creating endless opportunities for social advancement. Moreover, his ideas have been empirically vindicated everywhere they’ve been tried (or rather approached) by indeed spreading prosperity wider than any other economic system ever has.

But I did compliment those students for their honesty, didn’t I? Hence they made a pronouncement that not many socialists have ever dared to make, even though most would agree with it tacitly:

“LSE Class War is opposed to the concept of ‘social mobility’. As we have noted before, social mobility means that only a few of the working class can transcend their class position. We want all working class people to rise together.”

In other words, there should be no working classes at all. All proletarians must ascend to middle-class comfort together, leaving a social and economic vacuum behind them.

One would be interested to know which historical economic model those youngsters see as a precedent to follow. For every society where similar ideas were proclaimed ended up enslaving the working classes, starving them to death and mowing them down with machineguns when they protested.

Here we come to the LSE’s heritage coded into its DNA. For its founders were outspoken champions of precisely such societies.

The LSE was founded in 1895 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb on behalf of the socialist Fabian Society, and the university was explicitly devoted to spreading socialist ideas.

The Webbs visited Stalin’s Russia in 1932 and produced two gushing books extolling what they called a “new civilisation”. They thus joined a small army of Westerners whom Lenin ungratefully called “useful idiots”.

The Webbs admired the Soviet prison system and especially Stalin’s secret police OGPU (KGB’s precursor), featuring a “strong and professionally qualified legal department”. I won’t insult your intelligence by describing how that body demonstrated its legal qualifications.

I’m confident that such facts are known widely enough. The point is that they were just as widely known then. Malcolm Muggeridge, who was related to Beatrice Webb, visited Russia at the same time, at the height of the artificially created famine that starved at least 10 million to death, mostly in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Unlike the Webbs, he was appalled by what he saw – and reported it in The Manchester Guardian, a Fabian paper. That piece of reportage put Muggeridge’s journalistic career on hold for decades, and he had to scrape a living by writing novels.

No such problem for the Webbs. They could have repeated the words of Lincoln Steffens who wrote, after a similar visit, “I have been over into the future and it works”. G.B. Shaw, perhaps the most revolting of the Fabian useful idiots, denied that a famine was killing millions, citing by way of proof the feast to which he had been treated at the Kremlin.

Such is the heritage of the LSE, and no nurture has been allowed to interfere with its nature ever since. For appearances’ sake, it has always had the odd token conservative among its professors, such as Michael Oakeshott and my late friend Ken Minogue. But its overall course has never changed, and it’s still steered with a firm hand.

In the late ‘80s my son did a semester at the LSE as an exchange student. On his first day he was regaled with the sight of a poster advertising an upcoming debate: “Resolved: this house shall assassinate Thatcher”. It’s always good to see an academic tradition lovingly maintained.

Today’s LSE students don’t yet call for violence against those who cling on to sanity. But give them time: I have every faith in our higher education.

Not according to Twitter.

When the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) cited hundreds of anti-Semitic tweets similar to the one in the title above, Twitter ruled that such posts didn’t breach its guidelines.

If so, that platform sounds remarkably permissive at a time when using a word like ‘niggardly’ may stigmatise the offender as an unemployable bigot. So, being an inquisitive sort, I actually looked up those guidelines, that putative last oasis of unrestrained speech.

And what do you know, the company states unequivocally that: “Racist behaviour, abuse and harassment have absolutely no place on our service.”

Righty-ho. The line is drawn. Now we find ourselves in the area of subjective interpretation. Which tweets overstep that line, and which don’t?

When it comes to “gas the Jews”, one can’t help detecting some ill will towards Jews communicated thereby. Since, in the generation previous to mine, gassing was one of the methods by which half of the world’s Jews were murdered, some Jews may take exception to such a cri de coeur for a repeat performance.

In fact, I doubt that tweet can ever be interpreted as either philo-Semitic or even neutral. Unless, of course, Twitter insists that the author merely wished for all Jews to have a good supply of fuel gas to their homes, especially in winter.

Then there’s the oft-repeated “Hitler was right”. Here Twitter has more latitude to argue that there’s not a trace of anti-Semitism to be found in that tweet. After all, the author didn’t specify where exactly Hitler was unerring.

He might have been referring to Hitler’s affection for his dog Blondie. Or he might have praised the Führer for the autobahn network built in the 1930s. Or else he might have been extolling the Nazi chemical industry that created the Zyklon B gas… No, not that, but the possibilities are endless.

Then there is this worthy attempt to place modern politics within a historical continuum: “Wow. Biden’s now over 81 million votes? It’s like the Holohoax: you can just keep making up numbers.”

‘Holohoax’ is a portmanteau neologism, displaying the kind of linguistic ingenuity that’s regrettably missing in most tweets. However, I’d like to see how Twitter would argue its way out of this one.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that Holocaust denial should be criminalised. Yet it’s indeed a crime in some European countries, and frowned upon in all others. Yet, playing Twitter’s advocate, perhaps one could point out that the author doesn’t deny that the Holocaust actually happened.

He is only implying (not very subtly, it has to be said) that the commonly accepted figure of six million victims is exaggerated. For example, one likeminded individual made use of his advanced university degree to argue that no more than four million were murdered.

Oh well, that’s all right then. Nothing to get worked up about. The CAA should get its knickers out of a twist.

Now, “fake Jewish Holocaust”, another popular phrase, is more problematic. Rather than merely quibbling about the numbers, the author flatly denies that the Holocaust happened at all, which seems to defy historical evidence.

However, I find it impossible to imagine that a responsible individual (I’m sure no other kind appear on Twitter) would make such an assertion without being able to support it with a corpus of data. Perhaps, if Twitter asked him to cite his sources, the conflict could be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.

What I find baffling is that anyone could take exception to this statement: “Jews control our government, mainstream media, social media, Hollywood [and] financial institutions”.

The compliment paid to the Jews therein may be undeserved, but it’s definitely sincere and it’s indeed a compliment. Alas, Jews clearly don’t control Twitter, but that may be portrayed as the sole exception to their otherwise complete domination.

Yet a naysayer might look, for example, at some of our banks and argue the impeccable gentile credentials of their chairmen, such as Lord William Waldegrave (Coutts) Sir Howard Davis (NatWest), Nigel Higgins (Barclay’s) or Lord Norman Blackwell (Lloyd’s).

But the author may argue, and Twitter would agree, that hiding behind those assumed names may well be Waldstein, Davidson, Horowitz and Schwartz. And even if that’s not the case, he didn’t say Jews own or run all those institutions – only that they control them. And control can be exercised by all sorts of means, subtle, invisible or even non-existent.  

When reached for a comment, a Twitter spokesman categorically denied the CAA’s accusations of anti-Semitism. “Speaking for myself,” he said, “some of my best friends are Christ killers.”

Sorry, I made that one up, as I sometimes do. But I promise to give up that habit: these days there’s no need for fabricating evidence. Straight reportage will outpace the most fecund imagination any day.

By winning an Olympic gold medal, swimmer Adam Peaty momentarily blinded us all with a ray of sunshine.

That temporary disability was welcomed by the aesthetically sensitive souls among us. For that fleeting moment at least, we were spared the sight of Peaty’s arms, densely tattooed from the shoulders all the way down.

However, having regained my eyesight, I was left feeling sorry that my hearing remained intact. For the English language suffered yet another defeat in the aftermath of Peaty’s victory.

When interviewed by the BBC, Peaty, still struggling for breath, explained how he got his triumph and what it meant to him: “It’s the best person on the day, who’s the most adaptable – and really who fucking wants it more. It just means the world to me. I knew it was going to take every bit of energy and I’m just so fucking relieved.”

This isn’t the first gold medal Peaty has ever won, and he is used to being interviewed. Hence one would think that by now he should have learned to refrain from the use of that intensifying expletive on live TV.

Such a hope is naïve. He should have, and could have, learned to express his joy less obscenely – but he doesn’t feel he has to. Nor does the BBC evidently feel the need to bleep out four-letter words. After all, Peaty has made us all proud, and the lad has earned the right to use his natural idiom.

But that’s not the affront to the English language I felt most acutely, although it’s offensive enough. What came later was worse, much worse.

After all, while being ubiquitous in everyday speech (sometimes even mine, I have to admit), crude terms for sexual intercourse, sex organs and certain Oedipal practices are still relatively rare in journalism, if not in films.

And, while wholeheartedly sympathetic to those of my friends who cringe on hearing swearwords, I am not particularly shocked by them. I know I should be, but I am not. And nor am I going to pretend otherwise, hypocritically.

What really did shock me was Kate Burley’s programme on Sky News. She interviewed Peaty’s parents, trying to get to the bottom of their proud elation. Both the mother and especially the father were rather monosyllabic in their replies, although there was no doubting their joy.

However, never once did Miss Burley refer to the parents as ‘mother’ and ‘father’. It was always ‘mum’ and ‘dad’.

Now, the obscene intensifier hasn’t yet ousted others, such as ‘very’, ‘extremely’ or, in a more rarefied social atmosphere, ‘jolly’. But have you noticed that nobody says ‘mother’ and ‘father’ any longer?

‘Mum’ and ‘dad’, or the more upscale variants ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, aren’t grown-up speech. No one whose age has reached double digits should use such words to describe his or anyone else’s parents, even if he addresses them in that fashion.

Yet the grown-up, stylistically neutral and time-proven ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have practically disappeared from English. Medics talk about care for expectant mums, social services about dads’ disappearance, hacks apparently feel that anything other than coochy-coochy-coo mawkishness would bespeak gross insensitivity.

Christians still refrain from praying to “Holy Mary, Mum of God”, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all major denominations were to switch to such usage. Modernity is like God; it must be obeyed.

Now, regular visitors to this space know that I regard many manifestations of modernity as emetic. But few are more stomach-churning than its inexorable tendency towards creeping infantilism and cloying sentimentality.

‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ ousting ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ is an embodiment of both. Could it be that Britain is suffering from some sort of aesthetic Covid, whose principal symptom is loss of taste?

Good taste is to me the most lamentable casualty we have suffered, worse even than the pervasive deficit of intellect and morality. Or perhaps it’s wrong to separate them.

Taking their cue from Aristotle, Western thinkers have regarded the transcendentals (beauty, truth and goodness) as coextensive ontological properties of man. The deficit in one would lead to a shortage of the others, and the subject in question is a good illustration.

No grown-up using ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ as neutral descriptors can possibly have good taste in anything. Nor can he approach any kind of truth – and I’d even go out on a limb by questioning his moral sense as well.

That’s what reverting to childhood does: children typically haven’t yet developed their taste, mind and morality. And with the adult world around them eager to meet them halfway, chances are they never will.  

The latest news brings to mind the old Soviet joke about an intrepid American spy.

He was trained at the CIA (officially military) language school in Monterrey, Ca, to sound authentic in any Russian dialect. After years of intensive study, he was deemed to be ready to go into the field.

Parachuted into rural Russia, he walked through a forest for days before emerging at the outskirts of a village, where an old woman was getting water out of a well.

“Grandma,” said the spy in his perfect peasant accent, “could you spare a sip of water?” “Get away from me, you dirty American spy!” shouted the woman. “Grandma, how did you know?” “Coz you’re black, that’s how.”

That little story perhaps communicated more contempt for Western intelligence than it merited, but make no mistake about it: it did merit some contempt. Neither the CIA nor SIS managed to predict a single major change in Soviet policy during the decades of the Cold War.

Even the death of the Soviet Union caught them off guard, as did the subsequent realisation that the Soviet Union came back as Putin’s Russia. (Which I, and just about everyone else who knew and understood Russia, saw coming – this without spending billions on intelligence.)

There was a problem there somewhere, but it took Richard Moore, the new chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, to identify it. Having landed the job only nine months ago, Mr Moore has unerringly put his finger on what’s wrong with our intelligence gathering: not enough diversity.

The impelling force came from his blind wife, and trust women to guide their men through life. “Married as I am to an inspiring blind woman,” tweeted the new C, “I feel particularly strongly about making #SIS #MI6 a better place for disabled people.”

A worthy goal if I’ve ever seen one, but, being a natural spoilsport, I have to mention that a disability like blindness might have held James Bond back. This isn’t to suggest in any way that Mrs Moore isn’t a paragon of fortitude and good cheer.

Nor is it to say that people with disabilities, be that blindness, cerebral palsy or shortage of limbs, can’t be great servants to their country. If Homer could write the Iliad without being able to see his handwriting, then there’s no reason disabled people can’t have desk jobs at Vauxhall Cross.

However, call me an unimaginative cripplophobe (a neologism whose time has come), but I still can’t quite see some people with some disabilities as field operatives evading FSB spy catchers. For example, I doubt Mrs Moore, formidable though she undoubtedly is, could service dead drops, photograph the top secret documents left there or indeed establish their value.

That only goes to show how antediluvian my outlook on life is. Why, I even think it’s outrageous that everybody knows the name of our top spy.

The general public didn’t know the name of the first C, Sir Mansfield Cumming, until he died. That gave Ian Fleming an opening for an inside joke: he named James Bond’s boss M, rather than C. The latter was based on his surname, the former on his Christian name, but no one outside SIS got the joke.

Mr Moore has decided to do away with such secrecy. As far as he is concerned, since we are all Facebook friends, there can be no secrets among us. Hence he has embraced social media, including Twitter.

It’s through that medium that he has signalled his virtue, as the word is nowadays defined. Mr Moore is “keen to see even greater diversity of skills and backgrounds”. That determination has drawn much praise from his employees who seem to know which side their bread is buttered.

One such source said: “Richard Moore arrived at MI6 like a breath of fresh air. Everyone in the intelligence community is very pleased that he has said this. But you might ask why it has taken so long for a head of MI6 to take this stance.”

Even though I’m a rank amateur in such matters, I may attempt to answer that seemingly rhetorical question.

Such tardiness on the part of SIS might have been caused by its erstwhile preoccupation with other tasks that at the time took priority, but evidently no longer do. Such as keeping the country – the whole damn lot of us – safe.

MI6’s website states that its “core belief [is] that any person with a disability is capable of achieving their ambitions.” Note the woke usage: a singular antecedent “any person” is followed by the plural pronoun “their”.

But never mind that gust of zeitgeist. For I’ve always cherished the hope that the core belief of MI6 staffers was that they must uncover our enemies’ fiendish plans before they could carry them out. However, they have more important things to worry about.

Anyway, why should the SIS be any different from its counterintelligence equivalent, MI5? That organisation can’t keep our vital services safe from foreign spies and hackers, but, on the plus side, it can restate its commitment to diversity.

That dedication was celebrated by a valuable accolade last year: MI5 won a Business Disability Forum Smart Award for Workplace Experience. First things first, eh?

Like any instructive story, this one has a moral. Anyone who says, “That’s it, thing can’t get any crazier,” must be hanged, drawn and quartered, if only metaphorically.

In fact, I ought to perform that triple procedure on myself for uttering those silly words every now and then. Mea culpa: we live at a time when madness is boundless.

Democracies. Monarchies, constitutional or otherwise. Autocracies. Totalitarian regimes. Dictatorships. Did I leave out any other mechanisms of power?

I did. For no such list is ever complete if glossocracy isn’t on it: controlling the masses by controlling their language.

No glossocrat inherits his throne, no one votes glossocracy in, no one marches in its support, few even realise it’s there. But it is, and it can be more effective than any other form of power for being more pervasive and perfidious than any of them.

Philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, knew glossocracy was a danger, even though they didn’t use the term I might have coined. But, as is often the case, an artist got to the truth before philosophers did.

The artist in question is Lewis Carroll, who made Humpty Dumpty conduct this dialogue with Alice: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

That was nothing short of prescient for it’s Humpty Dumpty who is beginning to wield real power. He can force his warped phraseology on anyone, especially those who have to worry about jobs, posts or careers. In due course, he then gains power over people’s thoughts.

Humpty Dumpty has his own police, working through most media and a growing number of volunteers and snitches. Utter one word that Humpty Dumpty doesn’t countenance, and you have a case to answer.

The latest example is Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons. He was dragged before a Humpty Dumpty tribunal for using a perfectly inoffensive figure of speech.

Inoffensive, that is, to any normal person. But normal persons don’t seek to impose their rule on all and sundry, and Humpty Dumpty does. As far as he is concerned, Rees-Mogg is a criminal.

During a parliamentary debate he described the Liberal Democrats, whose logo and rosettes are yellow, as the yellow peril. This is what linguists call metonymy, describing something by referring to something else associated with it.

In no way did Mr Rees-Mogg try to suggest that his political opponents all come from China, Japan or Southeast Asia, nor that there’s anything wrong with the natives of those places.

Mr Rees-Mogg correctly identified every policy ever mooted by the LibDems as a peril to Britain, which peril he described by their party colour. It’s true that his metonymy got its currency from a racial slur, but that’s certainly not what he had in mind.

But Humpty Dumpty doesn’t care what Rees-Mogg or anybody else has in mind. Anybody’s words mean what Humpty Dumpty decides they mean because he is to be master. He issues his own Miranda warning: anything you say may brand you a racist.

Humpty Dumpty’s loyal servants immediately ganged up on poor Rees-Mogg. The Shadow Commons leader by the unlikely name of Thangam Debbonaire accused him of racism and demanded an apology – even though she acknowledged magnanimously that Mr Rees-Mogg committed his crime unintentionally.

Labour MP Sarah Owen, who is half-Chinese, then provided a helpful chronological frame of reference by saying: “It’s 2021 not 1821”. Yes, when England was ruled by George IV, not Humpty Dumpty.

She then added, displaying a command of English that must have come from her mother’s side: “There is simply no excuse for it and it was made worse by the fact the only two MPs of ESEA (East and South East Asian) descent were sat on the front-benches as the words ‘yellow peril’ left his mouth.”

Leave his mouth though they did, there was no putting them back. Sensing that his political career was about to be sacrificed at Humpty Dumpty’s altar, Mr Rees-Mogg pleaded ignorance and offered grovelling and profuse apologies.

Since he is an educated man, he must be familiar with the ancient legal principle of ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorance of the law is no excuse). He might have got away with his offence that time, just. But there’s now a black mark on his CV, guaranteed to scupper any loftier political ambitions he might harbour.

Although I doubt he harbours them: everything about Rees-Mogg is offensive to the new masters: accent honed at the best schools, breadth of cultural references, Catholic piety, Savile Row suits, wealth, double-barrel name. Actually, it’s amazing he has got this far.

Mr Rees-Mogg is perfectly capable of telling Humpty Dumpty where to stick his diktats, and I bet he desperately wanted to. But since he has his political career to worry about, he was suitably contrite.

I have no such limitations, which is why, whenever someone takes exception to my defiance of Humpty Dumpty, I invariably reply with a three-word colloquialism, where the first word is Go and the third one is yourself.

That’s in speech. In writing, I may cite the endless list of words and expressions that may conceivably be proscribed by Humpty Dumpty for being racially offensive.

For example, calling someone a blackguard or ascribing a black heart to him may imply that evil is uniquely a characteristic of the black race. Speaking of the red menace may be offensive to American Indians. (In fact, calling them ‘American Indians’ is offensive in itself. Repeat after me: NATIVE AMERICANS.) Stigmatising someone as a yellow-belly implies that all ESEA persons are cowardly.

It’s a game Humpty Dumpty will win every time because he’s the one who sets the rules. And then we’ll all become one collective loser, the worst kind, one who no longer even realises that there was a game played, and he lost.

Earlier I described Humpty Dumpty as perfidious because he spreads his evil designs over such a broad and seemingly nebulous area that focused resistance is difficult to marshal.

When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, the enemy was there for all to see: the communist authorities. Every decent person resisted them as best he could, which was both easy and hard. Easy, because they were clearly identifiable. Hard, because they could kill you.

Humpty Dumpty doesn’t yet possess the power of life and death, but he speaks in such a multitude of tongues that one doesn’t know how, or whom, to resist. I do anyway, but I can’t in good conscience recommend my methods to anyone who has something to lose.

I make a point of correcting woke usages wherever I hear them, and you already know how I respond to anyone, and I mean anyone, who corrects my diction for not being woke enough. But I do realise that not everyone is as truculent as I am, and that middle-class people (and who’s not middle-class these days?) are mortally scared of giving offence.

So let me just quote the American thinker Harry Jaffa who wrote the line that lost Barry Goldwater the 1964 presidential election: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Or in other words, if we don’t get Humpty Dumpty, he’ll get us.