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When Uganda has more tanks (239) than Britain (227), one begins to wonder which world we’re living in. Let’s see: Uganda is definitely Third World…

If such residual questions still lingered, they’ve received a resounding answer: Britain’s entire force of tanks and armoured vehicles will be scrapped. This in a country that, on 15 September, 1916, was the first to use tanks in anger.

Much has changed since the Somme: military technology and tactics, geopolitical balance – and the understanding Britain used to have that the state’s prime function is to protect its population.

Our battle tank, the Challenger II, was born in the 1990s, and it needs upgrading. The cost of that, however, is seen as unaffordable. We’d rather spend our money on throwing benefits at freeloaders from the world over and propping up lame nationalised Leviathans.

It would be almost bearable, if no less reprehensible, if the government came out and honestly admitted that Britain can no longer afford playing a viable role in Nato and therefore the defence of the West. We are skint, and if that makes us a Third World weakling, then so be it. See if we care.

Instead, however, the government is making mendacious noises about rechannelling the funds into cyberwarfare, aviation and other modern tools. This is bilge.

There’s no question that tanks can no longer be used as they were in the First World War, when they played an auxiliary role, or in the Second, when they dominated the battlefield.

In the Second World War, tanks were practically invulnerable to air attacks because even low-altitude bombing didn’t then provide enough accuracy to hit even a stationary tank. Typically, dive bomber aces counted themselves lucky if they could hit a 100x100m square.

That could have been marginally effective against masses of tanks advancing in close formations, but not against tactically astute tank commanders who knew how to spread out and manoeuvre evasively. Throughout that war, tanks could really only be defeated by other tanks, anti-tank artillery or infantry weapons such as the German Panzerfaust.

The situation is different now. Precision bombing with laser-guided ordnance has made tanks exceedingly vulnerable to air attacks. That, however, hasn’t made them useless. It only means that new weapons require new tactics.

An enemy ability to turn advancing armour into sitting ducks can be downgraded or even negated by achieving air superiority before pushing the tanks through. After all, if the warplanes’ ability to hurt tanks with precision bombing has improved, then so has the ability to wipe out enemy airfields with similar weapons.

Coordinating the efforts of different army branches is as paramount now as it always has been, perhaps even more so. Yet no military man will claim that wars can be won from the air only, with armour relegated to the scrap heap.

With one exception, no modern war has ever been ended without tanks rolling in and clearing the way for the infantry. For example, both Hitler’s Germany and Saddam’s Iraq were bombed flat, with Germany gratefully receiving an almost three-megaton present from the Allies.

Yet neither war was won until armour moved in to claim the prize. Air attacks had made victory possible, but without the tanks they would have been merely an exercise in vindictive cruelty.

The one exception I mentioned earlier was Japan, which capitulated after those two well-known air raids. The atomic weapons used were so apocalyptic that the Japanese realised their country could be obliterated and then invaded at little cost to the invader.

That situation hasn’t changed since 1945: a confrontation with a strong adversary can’t be won by air attacks only – unless nuclear weapons are involved. If our government thinks tanks have outlived their purpose because they are vulnerable to laser-guided bombs, what about our small island’s vulnerability to nuclear bombs? These are bound to come if we solely rely on such weapons for our survival on the battlefield.

Since the Challenger II first saw the light of day, the Russians have introduced five new generations of tanks. They now have 12,950 of them in active service – and tens of thousands of older models mothballed.

If that increasingly aggressive country decides its time has come to recreate the Soviet Union, it would take the Americans weeks if not months to supplement their current force of 87 tanks in Europe. Since the Channel is rather narrower than the Atlantic, British tanks could be on the continent within hours, to help Nato defences.

With our armour scrapped, what help are we going to offer, assuming that a nuclear strike is off the table? Computer games with cyberwarfare? Some air support?

The military understand how ridiculous this is. One senior source said: “We simply will not be viewed as a credible leading Nato nation if we cannot field close-combat capabilities. It places us behind countries such as France, Germany, Poland and Hungary.” And Uganda, which isn’t even a Nato member. Perhaps she could take our place.

There’s no doubt that Covid has strained the Exchequer, but there are others in the same boat. Yet only Britain is planning to disarm in response to the financial squeeze.

Our governing spivs aren’t bothered about defence of the realm. They have more urgent concerns: how to bribe the electorate into voting the right way at the next election. They forget that neglecting defence is akin to playing Russian roulette – with an automatic.

P.S. We are good at cultural surrender too. It has just been announced that Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory will after all be played at the Last Night of the Proms – but without the lyrics. The cultural spivs are confusing something: it was Felix Mendelssohn, not Thomas Arne, who wrote songs without words.   

“Dalia is a big supporter of Black Lives Matter,” explained a BBC source.

He was talking of the Finnish-Ukrainian conductor Dalia Stasevska, 35, who will conduct this year’s Last Night at the Proms for the BBC.

Dalia’s commitment to BLM must be her main qualification for playing such a prominent role in Britain’s musical life. After all, looking at her CV and listening to her performances, one doesn’t detect any instantly apparent professional qualifications.

Now, Dalia will compile the programme for this concert, which is traditionally seen as the musical answer to Trooping the Colour, a celebration of Britain culture and history. That’s why the anthems Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory have always provided a rousing choral finale to the Proms.

Considering Dalia’s origin and age, perhaps one could opine that British traditions in general and this one in particular don’t strike a chord in her heart. And even if they do, the chord is nowhere near as thunderous as the cacophony produced by a BLM riot.

That’s why Dalia will axe those offensive anthems from the programme with the BBC’s blessing. The time is propitious for that hatchet job since, due to Covid, there will be no live audience. “A ceremony without an audience,” explained Dalia, “is the perfect moment to bring change.”

Lest you may think it’s only foreigners who treat British traditions in such a dismissive fashion, Dalia is building her subversive structure on a solid ideological base provided by Richard Morrison, an impeccably British columnist for the BBC Music Magazine.

According to Morrison, it would be “insensitive, bordering on incendiary” to chant the “nationalist”, “jingoistic” songs that are deeply offensive to the BLM movement. One has to infer that any other than pejorative reference to Britain’s history constitutes such an offence.

It’s true that both songs have good things to say about the British Empire, which, according to the BBC, constitutes a shameful period of British history. However, shameful as that period might seem to the BBC, it was rather long, lasting about 500 years from the reign of Elizabeth I.

It had its ups and downs, but most historians will agree that, on balance, the British Empire was the most successful commonwealth in history, this side of Rome. For all intents and purposes, it produced everything the West is proud of: just laws, a uniquely balanced political system free of tyranny, scientific and industrial progress.

The Empire spread her achievements all over the world, leaving behind a legacy of equitable institutions, parliamentarism, independent judiciary, irrigation systems, hospitals and schools. That proliferation wasn’t always achieved in the nicest possible ways, and the Empire has much to be rebuked for retrospectively.

However, most (I feel tempted to say “all”) of the former British colonies were better off – economically, politically or at least culturally – under the Empire than after her demise.

It takes obtuse nihilism to deny that – again, on balance – the British Empire is a legitimate source of pride for every Briton, except for those who are sufficiently inflamed by ideology to assess history from the BLM perspective only.

That Dalia Stasevska falls into that category is neither here nor there, and not just because she isn’t British. Her musical studies, which, incidentally, finished only eight years ago, must have left her little time to study and contemplate British history (or indeed anything else) in any depth. Loving BLM, however, requires no depth. Pavlovian reflexes will do: the knee jerks unaided by the brain.

However, when the BBC, a British institution licensed by HMG, promotes the same ignorant and idiotic ideology, it’s a serious matter. As to Mr Morrison, he ought to peek into the dictionary and learn the difference between ‘jingoistic’ and ‘patriotic’. The first implies hatred underpinning love; the second, love unadulterated.

With that in mind, I read and reread the lyrics of both Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory. There, I found much that’s patriotic and nothing that’s jingoistic.

The essence of Rule Britannia is encapsulated in the line “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.” There isn’t a scintilla of a hint that such freedom from slavery will be achieved by enslaving others.

And the key verse of Land of Hope and Glory is “Thine equal laws, by Freedom gained/ Have ruled thee well and long;/ By Freedom gained, by Truth maintained/ Thine Empire shall be strong.” By freedom and truth – not slavery, racism and insistence that black lives don’t matter.

I realise that the Empire committed the gross faux pas of failing to anticipate the advent of a new morality superseding the old Judaeo-Christian ethic. The Empire functioned according to the standards of its time, not ours, which is why it was so successful.

But that, according to the likes of the BBC and Dalia, is no excuse. BLM, MeToo and LGBTQ+ have taken the blue pencil to the entire British history. If it’s to be remembered at all, it’s only as a source of eternal shame and repentance.

Still, the axing of those two objectionable anthems creates a vacuum that must be filled. Morrison knows how: according to him the BBC should change the Proms finale so it “reflects the attitudes of its 21^st-century performers and audiences, not their Edwardian predecessors”.

Actually, Rule, Britannia, predates the Edwardian period by 161 years, but let’s not quibble. Instead, let’s help the BBC in its search for a rousing anthem that indeed reflects the attitudes of modern audiences and performers like Dalia.

Since the BBC has been steadily shifting the Proms towards modernity, there’s nothing better than rap, especially as personified by its true maestro, Stormzy. So, in conclusion, may I suggest this song:

“Look, Don’t make me slap you/ Like, like, wait till I catch you/ Like, man are like ‘that’s that black yout’/ Went Jools Holland in my tracksuit/ Rep for the scene like yeah man, I had to/ Just run a sick beat I can rap to/ Everybody calm down, it’s a tracksuit/ What the fuck, man? I ain’t gonna stab you/ Look, I don’t wanna argue/ But if you talk shit, man’ll par you/ Look at the size of my fist, I will spark you…”

I’m not sure what this means, but it’s definitely not racist. So the BBC will approve, giving Dalia a chance to create a moving musical rendition that wouldn’t test her talent too much.

People no longer fear God, hell or eternal damnation. Yet human nature is such that they have to fear something, the more apocalyptic, the better. That need opens up countless opportunities for scaremongers, those who peddle wholesale fears at the exorbitant price of social and economic stability.

What the fears are doesn’t really matter: put enough resources behind a campaign, and people will be quaking in their boots at a mere mention of, well, Ebola, flu, pollution, nuclear energy, Covid, GM crops, fracking – and of course global warming, or climate change, as it’s now called.

Not all of such mass-marketed fears are completely without foundation. None, however, merits a panicky response. And climate change merits no response at all, other than telling Greta Thunberg to shut up when grown-ups are talking.

Yet climate change peddlers can package their product with a sermon about the evils of capitalism, which adds much subversive value to the offering. That’s why all progressive (i.e. subversive) people swear by climate change.

They are prepared to sacrifice not only our prosperity but indeed the survival of millions at the altar of this anti-scientific, inhumane, ideological hoax. That’s why grown-ups who ought to know better, and secretly do, get up and salute whenever that demented child Greta harangues them rudely and demands that all – ALL!!! – carbon emissions be stopped now. Not by 2030, not by 2050 – NOW!!!

Should those transfixed adults attempt to comply with that Lord of the Flies diktat, the West would instantly sink to the level of the Third World, whereas the Third World would simply die out, just as instantly. But never mind the people – ideologues never do.

Such fanatics can be found anywhere, but especially in the intellectual jungles they roam in vast herds: The Guardian, the Independent, the BBC, Sky News and other similar (de)formers of public opinion.

Thus, one of the first items on this morning’s Sky News dealt with the low yields suffered by our cereal farmers this year. A wet autumn combined with a hot and dry summer produced what in the expert opinion of Sky presenters betokens a calamity.

The blame can be placed squarely at the door of Climate Change, always pronounced with initial capitals. That, of course, is another name for Global Warming, an unprecedented catastrophe that’s going to destroy all our crops, melt both Arctic and Antarctic ice, flood the landmass everywhere and eventually – no, SOON!!! – lead to the extinction of life on Earth (aka Our Planet), with Homo sapiens the first to go.

Sky presenters and their ilk have no doubt that the catastrophe we are facing due to rapacious capitalist greed is indeed unprecedented. When told that Our Planet has been hotter than now for three-fourths of its life, they treat that as a conversation stopper. One can’t talk to reactionaries, even – especially!!! – if they have facts on their side.

Having worked capitalised Climate Change into their narrative several times in a few short sentences, the presenters then commiserated with consumers, who’ll soon have to take out a mortgage to buy a loaf of bread. After all, it’s the common folk who always find themselves at the receiving end of the capitalists’ sharp practices.

They then introduced an expert, Tom Bradshaw, Vice President of the Farmers’ Union. I reached for the remote to turn the spectacle off – if Sky people were mouthing such twaddle, I thought, I could only imagine what a union man would be saying.

However, before I had time to push the OFF button, Mr Bradshaw began to speak – and he was talking sense. A farmer himself, he hasn’t just seen wheat fields through the window of a first-class carriage carrying him to the Edinburgh Festival, and he displayed unsentimental common sense typical of his profession.

Mr Bradshaw agreed ruefully that farmers are indeed at the mercy of weather vicissitudes. But it has always been thus, nothing new there.

A shortfall in yields? Well, yes, though last year we had great yields, this year’s weather has let us down. But not to worry. We’ll just import some more grain from elsewhere.

You see, Western Europe has suffered a bit, but they’ve had good harvests in Eastern Europe, the Ukraine and Russia. Even farther afield, Canada and Australia have had no such problems, and they’ll be happy to export their surplus.

Cost to consumers? Negligible. The extra imports will only add half a penny to the price of a loaf – nothing we couldn’t handle.

Here the Sky people must have wanted to scream: “Are you out of your mind, Tom?!? What do you mean, we had great yields last year? Didn’t we have global warming then? Next thing you know, you’ll say we just may do all right next year too.

“And what’s with all those places, from Australia to Canada and everything in between, minus Western Europe? What part of GLOBAL warming don’t you understand? Global, Tom, means everywhere, not just Britain and her neighbours.”

All in all, Tom Bradshaw somehow managed to get through that rather lengthy segment without once mentioning global warming or even climate change. But what can you expect from those yokels who have been tilling the land for generations? What do they know about climate, compared to the founts of wisdom at Sky News?

By the end, my fear deepened – but not of climate change. I was mortified that our woke opinion (de)formers will end up getting their way, and not just in shoving the climate change hoax down our throats. Theirs is the god of ideology, and it’s a wrathful deity, always athirst. Only real God knows how much damage this lot will wreak.

Joe Biden’s religion informs his politics. “For him,” says his friend, Sen. Chris Coons, “they’re rooted in faith… that’s sustained so many ordinary Americans.”

Since Biden is a practising Catholic, one must infer that this confession has historically “sustained so many ordinary Americans”. In fact, from the time of its founding, the American state has been perhaps the most anti-Catholic one in the West.

In fact, hatred of apostolic confessions was largely what united many Americans in the first place, and indeed brought them to those Atlantic beaches. That’s why, of the original 13 colonies, only Pennsylvania didn’t have anti-Catholic laws, and in most of the others the practice of Catholicism was banned on pain of death.

Only one of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence was a Catholic, while most of the other Founding Fathers were deists at best. They tended to loathe apostolic confessions with different degrees of intensity, with Jefferson perhaps representing the most febrile.

That situation began to change somewhat with the arrival of numerous Irish, Italian, Polish and Hispanic immigrants, but the US remains a predominantly Protestant country. Only 22 per cent of her population are Catholics, a religion so far espoused by just one of her 45 presidents.

It’s hard to claim on these bases that allegiance to the Vatican is an election winner in America. If anything, it may well be an election loser.

So much more should one appreciate the subtlety with which Joe Biden offset that drawback in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. By sending masterly oratorical signals worthy of Demosthenes and Cicero, he reassured the voters that they shouldn’t worry.

He’s a Catholic in name only. In his heart, he embraces a Gnostic cult that was, for many centuries and in various guises, the deadliest threat to Catholic Christianity, one that almost succeeded in destroying it in the early Middle Ages.

The signals Joe sent the public show that he is a fully paid-up Manichaean. Those who believe in reincarnation would even be justified to suspect that he is Prophet Mani himself, even though Joe doesn’t look one bit Persian.

Even a believer who doesn’t wish to advertise his faith is nevertheless bound to let it slip out. Thus a Christian who recites the Bible every Sunday or a Jew who does so every Saturday will inadvertently use Biblical words and phrases even in everyday speech. Moreover, he’ll manifest a way of thought shaped by his faith even if he tries not to.

I don’t know how closely Americans are going to analyse Joe’s speech, but I’m sure they’ll receive the Manichaean messages subliminally. The choice of words and imagery will tip them off.

Manichaean theology denies the omnipotence of God and therefore the derivative nature of evil. It postulates the dualism of good and evil, each emanating from its own god, one good, the other bad. Man, to the Manichaeans, is the battleground on which those two deities square off.

What’s important for my purposes here is the terminology with which a committed Manichaean will inevitably betray his background. Prominent in that lexicon is recurrent juxtaposition of light and darkness – with the Manichaean himself usually representing the former and his adversaries, the latter.

With that in mind, I invite you to read Joe’s speech and appreciate the numerous tell-tale signals he so cunningly sent the voters.

To start with, Joe branded his opponent as an enemy of everything good in life: “Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy – they’re all on the ballot.”

By inference, Joe is a force for good, defending all its manifestations from evil. This is good knockabout stuff, even though it’s not instantly obvious how Trump threatens science. I had to think about that one for a second, but then I realised that the science Joe meant is the kind that shaped the Paris Accords, which Trump left and Biden promises to re-enter.

But never mind the message, feel the idiom. For Joe didn’t express himself in the Christian terms of good and evil. Instead he consistently relied on the contrast between light (him) and darkness (Trump).

“Give people light and they will find the way…,” Biden said. “The current president has cloaked America in darkness for far too long.”

That crepuscular situation was about to change: “History will be able to say that the end of this chapter in American darkness began here, tonight.” That is, with Joe’s speech at the Democratic convention. His words, therefore, have the magic power of light, a sort of Manichaean fiat lux.

And then: “’Hope is more powerful than fear and light is more powerful than dark.” That’s good news: God’s proxy, whom Mani called the Primal Man, and Mr and Mrs Biden called Joe 77 years ago, will triumph over the devil.

In that capacity, Joe represents “hope for our future, light to see our way forward, and love for one and other.”

There, I hope I’ve thrown some light on the shrewd subtext of Joe’s speech, clearly designed to reassure the anti-Catholic Americans that he isn’t really a Catholic, but a Manichaean.

He’s guaranteed to carry the Manichaean vote, but I don’t know if that will be enough to get Joe elected. I am sure, however, that it’s enough to get him excommunicated. He probably wouldn’t mind: it’s a small price to pay for the White House.  

If you travel to Russia, don’t drink the tea, whatever you do. Be especially careful at airports or in flight – they are regular death traps.

To wit: after campaigning in the Siberian city of Tomsk, Alexei Navalny, the most influential critic of Putin, was on his way back to Moscow. For years now, Navalny has been exposing the Putin gang as “a party of crooks and thieves”, which qualifies as a high-risk pastime by any sensible standards.

Before boarding his flight, he stopped for a quick cuppa at the airport’s Vienna Coffee House. Like most Russians, Navalny likes his tea black, straight as it comes. But that particular tea didn’t come straight. It was laced with a dollop of hallucinogenic poison, believed to be sodium oxybutyrate.

Navalny collapsed on the plane, which then had to make an emergency landing at Omsk. The campaigner, who had slipped into a coma, was rushed to hospital and put on a ventilator. He is fighting for his life and, as I write, his condition is described as grave.

Let me tell you, if Lucretia Borgia lived in Putin’s Russia, she wouldn’t be short of gainful employment. Before going to work, however, she’d have to brush up on modern toxins and the up-to-date methods of their administration.

Navalny isn’t the first of Putin’s detractors to be poisoned, and he won’t be the last. Actually, this wasn’t even the first time Navalny himself was poisoned.

Last year, while in police custody for the umpteenth time, he developed what the FSB doctors described as an “acute allergic reaction”. The allergen wasn’t specified, but one rouble gets you ten it had come courtesy of Laboratory 1, the poison factory established by the Soviet secret police in 1921.

The laboratory has made many valuable contributions to the field of applied toxicology. Its extensive research on human subjects was facilitated by an unlimited supply of enthusiastic volunteers recruited through GULAG’s good offices.

Numerous successes followed, such as Bulgaria’s leader Georgi Dimitrov (1949) and his dissident compatriot Georgi Markov (1978). The latter was murdered with a ricin pellet administered through an umbrella tip on Waterloo Bridge.

Gen. Kutepov, the White émigré leader in Paris, was killed inadvertently in 1930. His kidnappers only wanted to drug the general and ship him to Moscow, but they accidentally overdosed him, and Kutepov’s heart gave way.

Several secret police bigwigs also got the taste of their own poison. They included the Cheka founder Dzerzhinsky possibly, his successor Menzhinsky probably, and the foreign intelligence chief Slutsky definitely.

It has even been widely alleged that both Lenin and Stalin had their passage to hell hastened by Lab 1 concoctions, but that has never been proved. As to the smaller fry, people like the Abkhaz party secretary Lakoba, Afghan communist chieftain Amin or the KGB defector Kokhlov, they are too numerous to mention. The last two actually survived the poisonings, suggesting a lapse of quality control at Lab 1. Or else a lethal outcome wasn’t actually intended.

Fast-forward to the Putin era, with Lab 1 as its prominent feature, and you’ll find this long tradition lovingly maintained.

In 2003 the dissident writer Yuri Shchekochikhin was fatally poisoned with a radioactive substance, probably thallium. In 2004 another dissident writer, Anna Politkovskaya, prefigured the Navalny incident by also drinking a cup of poisoned tea on a flight. She lived, only to be shot dead two years later. Dissident politician Vladimir Kara-Murza barely survived two poisoning attempts, in 2015 and 2017.

And of course two defectors, KGB’s Alexander Litvinenko and GRU’s Sergei Skripal, were both poisoned in Britain by Putin’s agents. Litvinenko perished, Skripal and his daughter miraculously survived, but two Britons died as collateral damage.

Litvinenko’s murderer, Alexei Lugovoi, was hastily ‘elected’ to the Duma, which gives him parliamentary immunity from the extradition requested by the British government.  

Litvinenko was killed with polonium, which qualifies his murder as nuclear terrorism, albeit so far on a small scale. The Skripals were poisoned with an equally exotic compound, novichok.

Yet Putin’s chaps don’t ignore ancient remedies either. In 2012, the Russian whistle-blower Alexander Perepelichny collapsed while jogging in Surrey. The autopsy showed a heart attack, but two years later tests ordered by Legal & General, Perepelichny’s life insurance company, found traces of Gelsemium in his stomach.

The extract of this Chinese plant has been used as a poison for centuries. Nicknamed ‘heartbreak grass’, it triggers cardiac arrest if ingested, with poisoning a less certain verdict than in the case of polonium or novichok.

It’s for a good reason that Putin’s conservatism is praised in some Western quarters. After all, his chosen method of settling political disputes has a long and venerable pedigree.

Bernie Sanders regaled the Democratic convention with a long speech of refreshing honesty. At a time when Trump’s best strategy is to portray the Democratic party as radically socialist, Bernie did his job for him.

“Many of the ideas we fought for,” he declared proudly, “that just a few years ago were considered radical, are now mainstream.” [In his party, that is.]

The ideas that Bernie and his comrades fought for so courageously are collectively designed to turn the USA into a USSA, with the extra ‘S’ for Socialist.

Specifically, Bernie opposes free enterprise and the economic inequality it produces. That it also produces widely spread prosperity on a historically unprecedented scale is a fact that Bernie doesn’t let interfere with good ideology.

That general philosophy is broken up into various policy ploys. For example, Bernie favours greater unionisation, apparently envious of the success this delivered in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

He also supports free or at least universal everything, including tertiary education and healthcare. ‘Free’ is the socialist for ‘paid out of the public purse’. Now, that receptacle is mainly filled with tax revenue. Thus, rather than paying for such services direct, people will be paying more to the state, which will act as a general contractor with megalomania.

Since the state can’t match the efficiency of private institutions, ‘free’ effectively means things costing more than they otherwise would, with the added benefit of penalising the most productive individuals.

Sensitive to the economically destructive potential of green policies, Bernie plugs them with the persistence of a used-car salesman, but without the subtlety. He is in favour of an instantly ruinous Green New Deal, running much of the economy on the premise of accepting the global warming hoax at face value.

Yet Bernie can’t be accused of concentrating on strictly parochial issues. As a true socialist, he thinks globally for, as his mentor Karl Marx taught, “the proletariat has no motherland”.

Hence he believes the United States should reduce military spending to a level where she might as well not bother to have any. Rather than relying on brute force, America should pursue negotiations and international treaties with all and sundry, putting an added emphasis on labour rights and environmental issues. Talleyrand and Metternich must be turning green with envy in their graves: it never occurred to them that a foreign policy could be run on that basis.

Put all those ideas together, and they add up to a national suicide note. Moreover, Bernie is so forthright about it that most Americans, even those who haven’t yet benefited from free tertiary education, will know his ideas for what they are.

Hence the Democrats’ best chance is to pretend disingenuously that such suicidal notions still reside only on the extreme left of the party. Yet Bernie’s candid admission that radical socialism tinged with pacifism now floats in the party’s mainstream makes that pretence less sustainable.

“But let us be clear,” continued Sanders, “if Donald Trump is re-elected, all the progress we have made will be in jeopardy.” Is that a threat or a promise, Bernie?

If I were Trump, I’d be rubbing my hands with glee: a better fillip for the incumbent is hard to imagine. Trump may still lose, but Bernie Sanders and his comrades give him a realistic hope of winning. Biden’s campaign would love to push them aside, but there’s the rub: you can’t marginalise the mainstream.

According to an NYPD report, shootings are up 82.1 per cent and murders, 30.2 per cent. Most of both murderers and victims are black or Hispanic.

In 2019, these groups provided 96 per cent of suspects arrested for shootings, with 57 per cent of murder victims being black. And the present NY Governor Cuomo admits that more than 90 per cent of the victims “are black and brown”. 

One gets a distinct impression that black lives matter only when one of them is taken by a white cop. When hundreds of blacks are murdered within their own ghettos, no one really minds.

However, some people, such as Cuomo and NYC mayor de Blasio, claim they do mind. Yet they steadfastly refuse either to acknowledge the reasons for the surge or revert to the proven methods of putting an end to it.

The most important reason is therefore Messrs Cuomo and de Blasio themselves. The magnitude of the crisis shows that these gentlemen have successfully defanged the police, even if they haven’t yet complied with the BLM demand to defund it.

Actually, even though Cuomo grudgingly admits that policing is necessary, he has threatened to defund the NYPD should it fail to establish a meaningful dialogue with racial communities. He directly blames the surge on either the absence of said dialogue or at least its insufficient eloquence.

The subject of the mandated dialogue is the nitty-gritty of police reform, which, judging by Mr Cuomo’s ideas, is bound to convert the NYPD into an extension of the social services. For sensitive dialogue is the stock in trade for such services. Conversely, the business of police is, well, policing.

That mainly includes investigating crimes, arresting criminals and making good cases for the prosecution. Sentiment, and especially woke sentimentality, should play no part in that process. Yet now, rather than kneeling on criminals’ throats, cops will be expected to kneel before them, and not just metaphorically.

Any sensible politician genuinely concerned about black and other lives lost would look at history and see what has worked and what hasn’t in reducing crime rates. Thankfully, New York City provides a perfect basis for such a retrospective.

When I lived there (until 1988), the city was crime-ridden. New Yorkers used to heave a sigh of relief each time they got home safely and threw multiple locks on. Walking after dark even in some parts of Manhattan, never mind such hellholes as Bedford Stuyvesant, was all one’s life was worth.

Then in the 1990s Rudolph Giuliani took over as mayor, and things began to change. Violent crimes dropped by more than 56 per cent in NYC, twice the decline in the country as a whole – all thanks to the unsentimental ‘get tough’ policies carried out by the mayor’s administration.

Because Giuliani’s heart didn’t bleed, neither did the bodies of New Yorkers. Crucially, the mayor understood that crime rates have an escalator built in. If low-level infractions are tolerated, the law is neither respected nor feared. That encourages other crimes, including violent ones.

As Giuliani explained in 1998, “Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.” Hear, hear.

Giuliani and his successor Bloomberg were aware of the inverse proportion between arrest rates and crime. Enacting their zero-tolerance policies, they filled the prisons to the gunwales, and the crime rate went down even in the absence of racially sensitive dialogue.

Governor Cuomo talks a very different language: “You want to talk about social justice? You want to talk about civil rights? You want to talk about social equity? How do you explain that [violent crime in racial areas]?” It’s the deficit in criminal justice, Mr Mayor, rather than social justice, that explains it. 

Social justice is the modern for social injustice, giving some people more, and others less, than they deserve. The underlying ‘liberal’ belief is that the wrongs historically done to the blacks can only be righted by throwing billions on welfare programmes, while in parallel cultivating a climate of white guilt and black entitlement.

Children growing up in a family where no one has ever done any work, and where fathers have gone walkabout for generations, aren’t just likely but guaranteed to turn to crime in vast numbers. The ‘liberal’ response is to throw good money after bad, which is akin to treating syphilis by HIV injections.

In parallel, the police are widely portrayed as bigoted troglodytes out to do the Ku Klux Klan’s job. Each time they rough up a black suspect resisting arrest, screams of “Racists!!!” reverberate through the air. And when a black criminal is killed even in a shootout with the police, never mind accidentally, the rioting season kicks off.

Because Lady Justice is blindfolded, she has to be colour-blind. It’s as reprehensible to give blacks a special dispensation as it is to discriminate against them. Until that realisation sinks in, and New York reverts to Giuliani’s methods, the guns won’t fall silent.

We ought to remember that the lessons of New York are just as useful for London or any other major Western city. “Tough on crime, tough on causes of crime” was Blair’s campaign mantra. Alas, because the likes of him, Cuomo or de Blasio refuse to understand the true causes of crime, they are powerless to get tough on it.

As children, we all played the silly game of endlessly repeating the same word until it lost all its meaning. That was quite innocent, but it’s not innocent when grown-ups do it, especially with words that denote ideas leading to actions.

Newly meaningless words always denote feeble ideas, and indeed may be responsible for enfeebling ideas in the first place. Any subsequent action is then guaranteed to fail, sometimes on a socially destructive scale.

Culture is one such word. It’s repeated ceaselessly, and its meaning is constantly broadened, to a point where the word stops denoting anything at all. It thus becomes useless as a building block for ideas, but a regular boon for any ideology. Ideologies thrive on words that have lost their meaning, if they had any to begin with.

People forget to follow Descartes’s advice to agree on definitions first. That’s why they talk about things like pop culture, black culture, white culture, women’s culture, drinking culture, Asian culture, drug culture – you name it.

Culture becomes the common denominator at which all the diverse numerators equalise, making multiculturalism not only acceptable but inevitable. Such mayhem comes from a word so inflated that it bursts like a balloon with too much hot air pumped in.

What is culture? Since the question may be too difficult to answer, let’s simplify it. What is a cultured man? If we agree on that definition, the definition of culture will follow, for a cultured man is one who possesses culture. So what kind of animal is he?

I’d suggest he is defined by three attributes: manners, learning and aesthetic sensitivity. A cultured man has to possess all three. If he doesn’t, he isn’t cultured.

By manners I don’t just mean using the right fork or taking one’s hat off indoors, although such things are important. Cultured manners are above all defined by consideration for others, an intuitive or acquired sensitivity to other people’s feelings, comfort and security.

Thus a man who has read everything of note and can tell a Vermeer from a de Hooch at a glance is still not cultured if he beats his wife, breaks wind in public or, through his neglect of personal hygiene, makes other people in the room pinch their nostrils.

By the same token, an impeccable English gentleman who can’t tell Bach from Beethoven may be a very good man, but not a cultured one. Nor will the same chap qualify if he can tell the Goldberg Variations from the Diabelli Variations after the first note, but confuses Emily Dickinson with Emil Durkheim and thinks George Eliot was a man.

We may argue about the odd particular here or there, but in the end we’ll agree that this triad of manners, learning and aesthetic understanding defines a cultured man, not to be confused with a good one. A cultured man may or may not be good, and vice versa.

As a by-product of this exercise, we’ve stumbled on a workable definition of culture, as an aggregate of those three components. However, each of them differs from one place to another.

A cultured Englishman may not have heard of, say, de Vigny or Batyushkov, whereas, respectively, a cultured Frenchman or Russian will know their work, while being ignorant of William Cowper’s.

However, the behavioural, intellectual and aesthetic components of culture differ little from one Western country to another, and practically not at all within each country. Cultured people everywhere in the West behave in more or less the same way, and share more or less the same corpus of book knowledge and aesthetic understanding.

How culture is acquired is too complex a subject. All sorts of factors of nature and nurture combine: genetic predisposition, intelligence, upbringing, education – above all, a lifelong effort to develop one’s mind, hone one’s senses and cultivate proper behaviour.

However, as we move farther and farther from the West, known formerly and more appropriately as Christendom, we’ll notice all our three components assuming a different, often unrecognisable shape.

We notice that an Iranian, justifiably regarded as cultured at home, mistreats his wife (wives) and knows nothing about de Vigny, Batyushkov or Cowper, although he can recite every line by Saadi or Hafiz. A cultured Chinese sees nothing wrong in asking strangers how much money they make and thinks all Western music sounds like marching tunes. And a cultured African may horoscope every step he takes and only respond emotionally to percussive music.

The difference has nothing to do with race. Provided they are innately intelligent and sensitive, the same Iranian, Chinese or African will become cultured Englishmen if born, raised and properly educated in England – and provided they set their minds on becoming cultured Englishmen.

Where does all that leave multiculturalism? Especially if it gets to imply, as it does these days, some fundamental equality among all cultures?

In the same place where all useless concepts are kept, I’d suggest. No matter how cultured an Iranian, Chinese or African may be in his native habitat, his culture won’t be recognised as such in a Western country unless he meets the conditions I’ve specified.

Now, cultural tolerance is a different matter. A cultured Englishman by definition can’t despise a cultured (or for that matter any decent) outlander, nor especially persecute him for his culture. Yet the very word ‘tolerance’ implies grudging acceptance of something alien and potentially suspect.

No tolerance is required when one meets a cultured Englishman, and very little when one runs into a cultured Frenchman or Dutchman. One doesn’t tolerate them; one just feels intuitive Mowgli-style cultural kinship: We be of one culture, ye and I (sorry about the paraphrase, Mr Kipling).

Multiculturalism, some kind of crucible in which all kinds of alien elements can be boiled together to produce an edible stew, is a figment of an ideologically inflamed imagination. The stew is bound to come out tasteless, lacking in nutritional value, perhaps even toxic.

Sooner or later our champions of multiculturalism will choke on it. The problem is, they may take us all with them.

As a Soviet child appropriately indoctrinated at school, I took interest in politics. My main, or rather only, source of information was Pravda, the paper my parents read.

In the autumn of 1956, Pravda was screaming about the imminent sword of Damocles hanging over the head of communist Hungary. West German troops were poised at the border, ready to take advantage of the mutiny staged by some anti-communist vermin.

It went without saying that the mutiny was instigated by the West German neo-Nazi government and the CIA, along with MI6 and every other body the Soviets didn’t like very much. Therefore it was the USSR’s moral duty, and also in her national interest, to help the fraternal regime as best she could.

All that was missing was a formal plea from the fraternal regime, and on 23 October Hungarian communist leader Ernő Gerő requested Soviet military intervention “to suppress a demonstration that was reaching an ever greater and unprecedented scale”.

The Soviets obliged by invading, drowning the Hungarian Revolution in blood and managing to prop up the evil regime for another 35 years. Sorry we had to do that, explained the grown-ups to me, but otherwise those neo-Nazi panzers would have rolled.

Replace Hungary with Belarus, Gerő with Lukashenko and Khrushchev with Putin, and today’s situation is eerily similar.

Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians are out in the streets, staging peaceful protests against the blatantly rigged elections and chanting “Leave!”. Though every exit poll showed a roughly 70 per cent majority for the opposition candidate, the final ‘count’ delivered an 80 per cent majority for Alexander Lukashenko.

Having had the pleasure of witnessing, as one of the British observers, Lukashenko’s first electoral triumph in 1995, I must compliment him on the giant strides in rigging elections he has made since then.

In 1995 the process was unnecessarily encumbered by a whole bag of time-honoured tricks: denial of TV time to the opposition, withdrawing dangerous opponents from swing ballots, stuffing the ballot boxes and so on. By now, however, Lukashenko has taken on board Stalin’s maxim: “What matters isn’t how votes are cast, but how they are counted.”

Or not, as the case may be. Why bother with involved calculations, when it’s so much easier to decide in advance on a desirable majority and then declare it has been achieved?

Alas, Lukashenko has discovered that his innovation isn’t universally popular with the people. Forgetting about the fatherly care he had provided them for 26 years, those ingrates felt cheated. Incensed, they took to the streets.

Lukashenko responded like any caring father does when faced with his offspring’s unruly behaviour. He sent in his police and special forces to maul, kill and imprison the peaceful demonstrators.

At least 7,000 of them were arrested – which in Belarus also means being savagely beaten up, tortured and threatened with truncheon rape. Of course truncheons also saw the light of day in their primary function, leaving hundreds writhing on the ground in their own blood.

The situation was reminiscent of the 2014 revolution in the Ukraine, but with one salient difference: Putin’s Ukrainian stooge Yanukovych didn’t dare do a Gerő, whereas Lukashenko has no such compunctions.

The other day he went on TV, saying that the events in Belarus threatened not just his rule, but “the whole post-Soviet space”. The choice of words is telling.

The “post-Soviet space” is another term for the former Soviet Union of 15 republics run from the Kremlin. Today’s ruling KGB junta is committed to restoring it to its past grandeur, thereby undoing what Putin honestly called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century.”

The trouble is that the inhabitants of the “post-Soviet space” aren’t quite so nostalgic about the good old times. Specifically, one doesn’t detect any worry on the part of, say, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that the rebellion against Lukashenko can have a domino effect on them.

They, on the other hand, are being portrayed in the Russian press exactly as West Germany and the US were depicted in the Pravda of my childhood. The Baltics are Nato members, and the Russians have been expertly indoctrinated to believe that Nato, along with the EU, is the instigator and abetter of any opposition to any post-Soviet regime Vlad Putin doesn’t favour.

Thus I’ve heard from even educated young Russians that the naked aggression against the Ukraine in 2014 was prompted by the dire necessity to preempt Nato and EU aggression. Those Dutch and Italian tanks were as ready to roll as the West German panzers had been in 1956.

Wary of a similar threat to Belarus, Lukashenko emulated Gerő and asked Putin for help. Should external military threats be deemed imminent, “Putin and I,” he declared yesterday, “have agreed that, on our first request, Russia will provide comprehensive assistance in protecting the security of the Belarus Republic.”   

Specifically, Lukashenko is concerned about the military threat of the Nato exercises taking place in Poland and Lithuania. Their only possible aim has to be a frontal attack on Belarus and the rest of the “post-Soviet space”, emphatically including Mother Russia.

I don’t know to what lengths Putin will go to honour the putative agreement. His own popularity slipping in Russia, he may want to flex his muscles again – even at the risk of making his country even more of an international pariah than she is already. Then again, he may hope that the mere threat of a Russian invasion may suffice to quell the rebellion.

One way or the other, the situation is fraught. One can only hope Western governments can show more resolve in dealing with this threat than they did over Hungary (c. 1956), the Ukraine (c. 2014) and for that matter Czechoslovakia (c. 1938).

That last example ought to have taught the West the awful consequences of appeasement. Alas, like all such lessons, it’s unlikely ever to be learned.

“Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans,” wrote Noel Coward, and I disagree. If we can’t be beastly to the Germans, whom else can we possibly be beastly to?

Well, the French, wrote the Swiss-British musicologist Eric Blom in his brilliant 1928 book The Limitations of Music. That is, he didn’t call for beastliness to the French in so many words. He just practised what he didn’t preach.

Before I cite some of the appropriate excerpts, I wish to issue a disclaimer for the benefit of my French readers: I emphatically and unreservedly disavow every Francophobe remark Blom saw fit to make. In fact, if I were French, and he hadn’t died in 1959, I’d sue him for libel.

Actually, since I know for a fact that some of my French readers are lawyers, perhaps they may want to investigate the possibility that Blom’s estate may still be liable. If it is, I volunteer as witness for the plaintiffs, the entire French nation.

I’m only publishing Blom’s diatribes to illustrate the depths to which even a naturalised Briton can sink in denigrating that great country and its wonderful inhabitants. Portraying them, as Blom did, as facile, humourless, obtuse nationalists with a short attention span is so inexcusable that I hate myself for even bringing those libellous remarks to your attention.

With that in mind, here comes:

“The typical Frenchman, though more than intelligent enough to see another point of view, is rendered incapable of doing so by a perverse cleverness which always infallibly puts him in the right. You cannot argue with him, or if you do, there are but two possible results to the discussion: either he is victorious or you have been tactless.”

“The French are too keenly cognisant of their national virtues to possess as much as a vestige of what we understand as a sense of humour, though of course they have a highly developed sense of fun and of ridicule. Voltaire, typical Frenchman…, is the very archetype of Gallic humourlessness, which the musician may find summed up with unconscious accuracy in a letter from Bizet to his mother: ‘Or, tout en aimant beaucoup à blaguer les autres, je ne pas supporter qu’on se fiche de moi.’ [Now, although I love making fun of other people, I cannot stand other people mocking me.] But the composer who illustrates it with more immediate relevance to the present issue is Debussy when he styles himself musicien français on the title pages of his last works. We dare hardly smile, ever so indulgently, at a great composer’s deadly seriousness in performing so utterly naïve a piece of self-appraisement.”

“France produces the greatest amount of poor music admirably presented.”

“The school which is most sensitively aware of the difference between innate and superficial nationalism is the French. France has always been a country artistic to the point of artificiality, and the art of revealing life has always been of negligible importance there compared with the art of concealing art. Hence the crudity of the French naturalist school of writers…”

“On listening to composers brought up in the school of delicious frivolity that is called Paris, we readily understand that a French audience soon grows weary of a Symphony by Brahms or Elgar, in fact of any art that takes thought more seriously than the manner in which it is uttered. One even sympathises with this attitude if one takes the trouble to understand a nation which objects to nothing as much as to being bored, even if the boredom may be more due to the attitude of the listener than the nature of the work heard.”

Now, I was going to thank my posthumous guest columnist for helping me out on a slow news day, but anger constricts my throat and paralyses my two typing fingers. So I’d better say à bientôt and sign off.