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In 1965 a line was crossed: theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was the first to say ‘fuck’ on live TV.

Since then the line has been crossed so often that it has become smudged. Words beginning with just about every letter of the alphabet have flooded the airwaves, drowning the stultifying norms of public decency.

That proved yet again that the march of progress is unstoppable, while also adding a facet to our current understanding of progress. Take technology out of it, and progress is essentially mass brainwashing in the severing of all traditional roots of morality, reason, decency and etiquette.

Since television, now abetted by social media, has effectively replaced education, Tynan’s pioneering effort has borne rich fruit. These days obscenities are ringing throughout the land, and one can routinely hear even little tots describe one another in a language that suggests intimate familiarity with genital anatomy and the more recondite sexual variants.

As a result of overuse, words that used to act as shockers and intensifiers have lost the power to either shock or intensify. Their inappropriate use in public (I’ve forfeited the right to object to their use in private) only serves the purpose of branding the speaker as a tasteless, ill-mannered boor. Or else, depending on the audience, as a free-thinking rebel who can soar above convention.

Still, flouting convention is what progress is all about, and the sewer of torrential obscenity never gets plugged on our TV. However, our media watchdog has hypocritically banned swear words before the 9 PM watershed – pretending that today’s children dutifully go to bed at that time and have no TV sets or computers in their bedrooms.

Having paid perfunctory lip service to propriety, our TV networks can safely continue to ignore it in every way that matters. A new world has no room for old morality.

Instead new morality has barged in to take up the slack. Its rules are enforced fanatically, and deviations are punished cruelly.

The new line was drawn on the football pitch in 2011, when one player, John Terry, called another a “fucking black cunt”. The only word in the triad that isn’t an obscenity is the middle one, and yet it was only that word that got Terry banned. Had he limited his self-expression to the two outside terms, he wouldn’t have even drawn a caution, nor raised an eyebrow.

The message was clear. It was acceptable to insult people in the foulest possible way, impugning the sexual behaviour of their mothers, accusing them of having oral or anal intercourse with their fathers – whatever. And the offended parties could have no recourse.

But any reference to their race, even without using overtly pejorative terminology, and the offender will have to face the slings and arrows of outraged modernity. As to real racial slurs, they will draw not just slings and arrows but the executioner’s axe, at this point still only metaphorically.

Our media regulators responded with decisiveness hitherto associated with rather unsavoury regimes. Their laisser-faire attitude to post-watershed obscenity remained in place, but racial insults were banned at any time – whatever the mitigating context.

Stricter standards are now applied to racial slurs than even to homicide, where extenuating circumstances may be taken into account. To our progressives, racism, however contextual or tangential, or however broadly defined, is a worse crime than murder.

What makes the new morality more tyrannical than any traditional Western tyranny is that it’s mostly imposed not by the state but by the people themselves. They’ve been brainwashed into enthusiastic self-policing. Before too long they’ll be sufficiently indoctrinated to arrest themselves, rough themselves up and then put themselves in prison.

The BBC’s social affairs correspondent Fiona Lamdin got a taste of it when reporting a vile racist attack of two thugs setting upon a black man. They deliberately drove their car at the victim, leaving him with a broken leg, nose and cheekbone.

In the process they hurled racist abuse at the man, which Miss Lamdin reported. She told her ideologically sensitive viewers: “Just to warn you, you’re about to hear highly offensive language… Because as the men ran away, they hurled racial abuse, calling him a nigger”.

That didn’t violate the injunction issued by watchdog Ofcom in 2016, to the effect that, though the word was “highly unacceptable at all times”, it could be used when “strong contextualisation is required”.

‘Contextualisation’ could hardly have been stronger than that, but Miss Lamdin’s viewers weren’t into such nuances. They knew they had been ordered to be offended by that word, however used, and offended they obligingly were.

The BBC received 18,656 complaints, of the kind that in the country of my youth were called denunciations. The Corporation explained that the decision to include the criminal word was taken “by a team of people including a number of senior editorial figures”, but that only made matters worse.

Yet for once, those senior BBC figures were right: the word made the report even more poignant – just as saying that the thugs broke the victim’s leg was more effective than saying that they caused grievous bodily harm.

Just compare these two sentences: “They screamed ‘nigger’ as the man tried to run away” and “They screamed racial invective as the man tried to run away”. Which one condemns the thugs more strongly? Which one represents accurate reporting, as opposed to wishy-washy woke waffle?

These are moot questions as far as our morbidly sensitive public is concerned. The OFFENCE toggle switch has been implanted into their minds, and each time it’s flicked they are offended on cue.

Well, they offend me no end. Can you suggest where I should post my complaint?

P.S. Wearing face masks, especially on a hot day, has one definite advantage: it enables a man to concentrate on what’s really important in a woman. Her soul, that is, and what did you think I meant?

John, a tiler from Hackney, doesn’t know. But he knows exactly what’s bad about it. A Londoner born and bred, John finds himself in a minority in his native city.

He often spends his holidays in Ibiza, which he pronounces ‘Ibiffa’. But while there, John wears Union Jack shorts and a T-shirt saying: “Two World Wars One World Cup So Fuck Off”. He means no harm by it, just one of those things you do in Ibiffa. He quite likes Spaniards.

Back home John doesn’t mind people who look or sound unlike him either. In fact, he often goes down the pub with Andrzej the plumber and Anand the roofer. They’re good blokes. It’s just…

Well, John knows he isn’t supposed to say it, Andrzej and Anand being his mates and all, but London just doesn’t feel English anymore. That doesn’t seem right, although he may be hard-pressed to explain why in any depth. So perhaps those who have spent a lifetime putting thoughts into words can give John a helping hand.

A nation or, my preferred term, society is a collective entity uniting individuals on the basis of some common elements. Language is the most obvious one, though it can divide as well as unite. G.B. Shaw pointed this out in the preface to Pygmalion: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

Language can be divisive because it acts as a badge by instantly betraying the speaker’s class, education, culture, geographical origin and other potentially problematic characteristics. In fact, people like John often refer to toffs as very English, implying that Englishness comes in class-sensitive degrees.

Hence language, English more than any other, can encourage some deadly sins, and not just those of the misdemeanour variety. The same goes for culture in general. For it to function as a social and national adhesive, a country has to have the kind of educational system Britain hasn’t possessed for at least several decades.

In the absence of education that truly educates, rather than instructs, trains or indoctrinates, culture becomes even more stratified and fractured than language. When half the school leavers (a conservative estimate) don’t know in what century the Battle of Britain took place, can’t quite place Wellington’s name or understand a single joke in 1066 and All That, it’s hard to hail the unifying potential of culture.

A society worthy of its name will always have more or less educated people, but there will still exist some corpus of knowledge they can all be confidently presumed to share, some well from which they draw their commonality. Britain doesn’t seem to have anything of the sort.

In fact, the only reliable social adhesive for any Western country has been proved to be the national Church. It alone lacks the divisive potential of language or culture. When the priest offers communion wafers to his parishioners, he doesn’t reserve the better morsels for the rich or well-spoken.

Everyone is equal at the altar – and only at the altar. Communion isn’t just between the people and God; it’s between the people themselves.

However, this great adhesive has been for all intents and purposes dissolved. The Church has lost its power to unify a national community. It’s now tolerated, at best, as strictly an individual idiosyncrasy. You go to church, I go to pop concerts, he goes to football matches, they go to raves – it’s all a matter of personal choice.

Yet personal choices are two a penny; their number is roughly coextensive with the country’s population. Take the Church out, and the atoms of every social molecule spin out of control. Society becomes atomised, which is to say it stops being a society.

So what can hold a nation together at a time of rampant ignorance, egoism, solipsism, materialism and deracination? Here someone who knows how to put thoughts together holds no advantage over my fictitious friend John. We become like children who have a first mystical experience. We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s something.

All we can do is guess. It could be some genetic memory. Or a tribal instinct. Or love of the land. Or pride in being different from foreigners. Or some shared, subliminally perceived historical experience. Or ethnic commonality working in mysterious ways. Or a combination of them all – I just don’t know.

But I do know that, unlike faith, language, culture and a shared body of knowledge, all such imperceptible things are vulnerable to a huge influx of outlanders, accompanied by an ideological commitment to increasing the flow rate.

A colonial administrator of the Raj could spend decades in India without becoming one jot or tittle any less English. He had his language, culture and the local Anglican church to fall back on – those acted as his sources of strength, the earth to his Antaeus.

John the tiler is short in those departments, and he feels his Englishness is being diluted by the rapidly changing demographics. And people he considers, with typical English diffidence, to be cleverer than he is are telling him there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s diversity, innit?

That brings back the question in the title: what’s good about multiculturalism? I’ve argued what’s bad about it, and my argument may or may not be persuasive. But at least I’d like to think it’s intrinsically cogent.

So what’s the intrinsically cogent argument in favour of multiculturalism? If it exists, I have yet to hear it. All I do hear is rabid ideological waffle. John would call it a load of bollocks.   

P.S. The freshly made lord, Evgeny Lebedev, is everywhere described as a “newspaper proprietor and son of a former Russian KGB spy turned multi-millionaire oligarch”. That description is false on several counts.

First, “There’s no such thing as former KGB. This is for life.” Thus spoke Col. Putin, and in this area at least he knows his onions. Second, the word ‘oligarch’ is misleading. Since no Russian billionaire made his fortune legitimately, ‘gangster’ would be more to the point. Third, since Evgeny bought his newspapers still in his twenties, without ever having earned any serious money, it’s Lebedev père who’s the real owner.

Thus the freshly made lord ought to be described, accurately, as “the quasi-legit front for his KGB gangster father and therefore his sponsoring organisation”. Hope this clarifies matters.

Both individuals and nations are better at judging their adversaries’ weaknesses than their own. Our enemies, on the other hand, are much more dispassionate and objective: our weaknesses are their strengths.

That’s why we can get valuable material for self-scrutiny by examining what our enemies see as our weak spots they can exploit. This may then make us reassess our policies or, better still, the thinking behind our policies.

I’ve often remarked that many of our political failings spring from the gross inadequacy of our political taxonomies. It’s not only the Creation itself that began with the word.

We are so hung up on political terminology that we fail to realise it doesn’t designate anything actual. Take liberalism, for example, which used to have a direct link with its cognate, liberty.

Yet in the West today liberalism means, mutatis mutandis, socialism: replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, as much state control and as little personal liberty as is achievable without concentration camps.

For the 19th century liberal, the 10 percent of the nation’s income the government was then spending was too high. For today’s liberal, the 40-odd percent it spends now is too low. So if one wants to use ‘liberal’ in its proper sense, then one must either modify it with ‘classic’ or replace it with ‘libertarian’, thereby rendering the word useless.

Thus confused, we try to get a sense of direction, only to find our heads spinning like a top: both ‘right’ and ‘left’ really mean nothing at all.

Faschisoid parties seeking state power based on nationalism are described as ‘right-wing’; fascisoid parties seeking state power based on nationalisation are ‘left-wing’. Yet both are in fact socialist, and the difference between them is merely adjectival, not substantive.

At their extremes, they converge on a unifying characteristic: both are disruptive at best, subversive at worst. That’s the only thing that matters: not right or left, but right or wrong.

Yet we are so in thrall to false taxonomies that we argue ad nauseam about the exact place our parties and politicians occupy on the fictitious continuum: A is right; B is left; C is in the middle, but closer to the right; D is in the middle too, but tending towards the left – and so forth.

Labels get stuck, serious thought comes unstuck, and we gradually lose the ability to ask the really important question: What’s right and what’s wrong? In fact, we’ve forgotten even how to think in such categories.

That seminal question has many answers in many contexts, but when it comes to dealing with our enemies, the realpolitik answer is simple. Whatever suits their interests in our countries is wrong; whatever suits our interests at the expense of theirs is right.

Nobody this side of Peter Hitchens doubts that Putin’s Russia is an implacable enemy of the West in general and Britain in particular. And the Russians aren’t fooled by our names for political groups. They don’t care who’s right, left or centre. All they want to know is who can help them destabilise the West, making it impotent to resist criminal Russian neo-imperialism.

That should indirectly clear up our own thinking, perhaps encouraging us to ditch our whole political classification and concentrate instead on deeper issues. If our enemies assess our political mix strictly on the basis of their strategic interests, we ought to assess it on the basis of ours.

We should ponder why Putin’s Russia is an equal opportunity recruiter. The Russians don’t care if a party comes from the far right, far left or the mainstream. Just look at the list of European groups they support with finance, logistics and electronic intelligence.

On the right one could mention Germany’s AfD, Austria’s FPÖ, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, France’s Front National, Italy’s Northern League, Poland’s PiS and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang – along with some elements within our Brexit movement and most political groups that have words like British or English in their nomenclatures.

On the left, Putin’s largesse is bestowed on Cyprus’s AKEL, Germany’s Die Linke, the Czech Republic’s KSCM, Poland’s Zmiana, Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza, Italy’s Five Star Movement and Croatia’s Human Shield Party.

Politicians on both right and left have benefited – or at least were meant to benefit – from the hacking expertise of Russian intelligence services. Let’s remark parenthetically that, though the Russians are still incapable of making their own electronic equipment, they are real wizards at using our exports for subversive purposes.

Here too they are laudably even-handed. First, they used hackers to find dirt on Hillary Clinton to make sure Trump would get elected. (It’s immaterial for my purposes here whether Trump was complicit in this crime or indeed whether it worked. It’s the intent that counts.) Then they provided the same service for Corbyn.

Now Trump is widely perceived as a man of the right, which charge can hardly be levelled at Corbyn. Yet KGB/SVR hackers tried to give him a helping hand by hacking the e-mail account of Liam Fox, former International Trade Secretary, and stealing classified material about our negotiations with the US.

That enabled Corbyn to scream publicly that the Tories were planning to sell the NHS to the US, which could have had the same effect as telling Catholics that the Pope was trying to flog the whole Roman confession to Disney Europe. Corbyn was so hideous that the ploy didn’t work, but otherwise it could have done.

If you look at the list of British politicians who have appeared on Putin’s propaganda channel, RT, more than once, you’ll again see that the Russians don’t play party favourites. Along with Corbyn and other lefties, such as Grace Blakely and Ken Livingston, one finds on that list the SNP’s Alex Salmond, Tory David Davies and Ukip’s Nigel Farage.

Regardless of what they say there, the very fact that our politicians agree to take RT’s £750 appearance fee is damning. That’s like, say, Anthony Eden giving an interview to Der Stürmer in 1938. But our chaps go beyond just appearing: they give their hosts value for money.

Thus, immediately after Russia’s invasion of the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, Nigel Farage told his RT audience that the real culprit was the EU that “has blood on its hands”. And Alex Salmond must ask himself why he was invited to host a regular RT show just when the KGB/SVR was using its resources to prop up Scottish separatism – Britain’s poison is Putin’s meat.

Commenting on the cooling in the Russo-British relations, the Russian Ambassador Andrei Kelin said: “I feel that Britain exaggerates, very much, its place in Russian thinking.”

That was a calculated putdown, highlighting Britain’s diminishing role in the world. Be that as it may, her place in the thinking of Putin and his camarilla isn’t just prominent, but dominant.  

Britain is where their billions are laundered, their children are educated, and they themselves are treated. Hence any cooling of relations will hurt them personally, which to that lot is all that matters.

A proper response to Russia’s concerted effort to subvert Britain would be to cut off access to all those facilities and impound all Russian billions. Yet to our craven, spivocratic elite it comes more naturally to elevate Russians with KGB connections to the House of Lords.

Then again, Russia is teaching us a valuable lesson in strategic thinking and realpolitik that goes beyond party names or slogans. Perhaps one day we may get a government that would heed it.    

CBBC broadcasts programmes aimed at children aged between six and 12. With that audience, most shows can be assumed to have some didactic content, not always explicit but real nonetheless.

Hence a story about a violinist may pique the tots’ interest in music; one about explorers may interest them in geography; one about RAF pilots… well, you catch the drift.

At the same time, films showing a triumph of good over evil may, if nothing else, teach them the difference between the two or, as a minimum, that one exists.

It’s not for nothing that Aristotle once said (and Francis Xavier repeated), “Give me a child and I will show you the man”. The Greek knew that the best opportunity to educate people for life is when they are young.

By the looks of it, CBBC knows it too. That’s why its children’s drama The Next Step showed a graphic depiction of a lesbian kiss.

That’s par for the course these days. What’s surprising is that some residual resistance is still mounted, as witnessed by a flood of complaints inundating the BBC.

Modernity clearly still has work to do: some individuals seem to punch breaches in its totalitarian indoctrination in amorality. Defending such ideological ramparts, the BBC came out swinging.

Its children’s network, declared the Corporation, “could and should do more to reflect the lives of LGBTQ+ young people… This is an important part of our mission to make sure that every child feels like they belong, that they are safe, and that they can be who they want to be.”

It would be a much more important part of the BBC mission to make sure that every child knows not to follow a singular antecedent like ‘child’ with a plural personal pronoun ‘their’.

That, as a matter of fact, would be more in keeping with the BBC Charter: “The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.” Not a word there about reflecting “the lives of LGBTQ+ young people”.

Being way outside the target audience, I can’t judge the entertainment value of The Next Step. Its informational aspect is doubtless superfluous if it indeed exists. By the time they reach the mature age of seven or eight, children have already learned about the delights of homosexuality at school. However, the drama’s educational value is worth discussing.

The key to that discussion is provided by the BBC’s exercise of moral equivalence in the next paragraph of its defence: “CBBC regularly portrays heterosexual young people dating, falling in love, and kissing, and it is an important way of showing children what respectful, kind and loving relationships look like.” 

This is where amorality comes in: the Corporation effectively denies that sex, and by extrapolation anything else, has a moral content. Children, according to them, “can be who they want to be”, except agents exercising moral judgement.

Showing a romantic relationship between a boy and a girl is, for an organisation committed to “high-quality and distinctive output”, the same as showing a romantic relationship between (or presumably among) people of the same sex.

Children can choose one or the other, leaving me feeling sorry for those who gravitate towards, say, bestiality or necrophilia, which have yet to be condoned by our “high-quality” broadcaster. It’s consumer choice gone mad: if the little ones can choose their computer games, why can’t they choose their sexual perversion to “feel they belong”?

I’m not suggesting intolerance of homosexuality. In England specifically, it has been tolerated for centuries. Everybody knew that Geoffrey was ‘a confirmed bachelor’ and Harold ‘not the marrying kind’, and nobody cared.

However, tolerance isn’t the same as endorsement. Things to be tolerated are by definition less than praiseworthy. If they weren’t, no tolerance would be needed.

Hence, though homosexuals are to be protected from abuse and generally tolerated, society too must be protected from propaganda of homosexuality as a valid, morally neutral exercise of free choice.

A society in which such basic things don’t go without saying, and those who do say them risk censure, is in dire straits indeed. It has lost its moral, and therefore any other, way. Those interested in the practical ramifications of aimless moral meandering could do worse than reread The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

P.S. Some of my readers, being of sound empirical disposition so characteristic of the English, may ask about the possible remedies for this malaise.

This format doesn’t allow a protracted exposition of this theme – nor am I sure that such remedies exist any longer or, if they do, that I’m capable of prescribing them in all their complexity. I can, however, propose the essential first step: take the BBC licence away. Let it peddle its notion of morality in the open commercial market.

P.P.S. I hope you can join with me in prayers for the great Pope Benedict XVI, who is very ill and frail.

All progressive people, among whom I proudly number myself, must rejoice. We live at a time of heightened moral sensibility, and our standards are higher than they’ve ever been.

Yet standards mean nothing if compliance isn’t rewarded and deviation isn’t punished. That’s why writers and academics who say or write things progressive people find objectionable lose their book contracts, jobs and careers.

However, and here rejoicing ought to become thunderous, we also apply our exacting standards to history, which is a good thing. Moral laws differ from criminal ones in that they can – indeed must – be retroactive, and no statute of limitations should exist.

Moreover, speaking of writers specifically, they ought to be censured for what they wrote not only in their books, but also in private correspondence. One wrong word, on race especially, and their books must be banned. Ideally, they should also be burned, even if the historical associations are a bit of a turnoff for some wimps.

When I say one wrong word, that’s exactly what I mean. Context doesn’t matter: the writer may be making anti-racist points in his book and indeed his whole life, but if he does so by putting racist words in his protagonists’ mouths, he deserves no mercy.

In that spirit, Loyola University Maryland has removed the name of Flannery O’Connor from one of its residence halls because the Southern writer consistently depicted the dignity of blacks and enormity of racists… sorry, I got that wrong. O’Connor did do all that, but it’s not what got her punished posthumously. It was her use of a racially derogatory term in her letters.

She was weighed against today’s standards and found wanting. This isn’t baseball, chaps; no three strikes for you. Just one, and you’re out.

That’s what Mark Twain got for his novel Huckleberry Finn, out of which, according to Hemingway, all American literature came. This is a passionate anti-slavery book, and the black protagonist there is perhaps the most sympathetic character. But because he’s referred to as Nigger Jim, our new morality can no longer tolerate the novel’s toxic presence in school libraries.

Anti-black racism in Europe is a relatively new phenomenon for the simple reason that there used to be precious few blacks on the continent. But Jews have resided here for many centuries, and not all great writers have treated that fact with equanimity.

Eschewing understatement, one could even say that most of them erred against the standards of our time, some consistently, others sporadically. In fact, so few of them can pass muster that abolishing literature altogether seems to be the most sensible solution.

As a side benefit, the billions of books accumulated in Europe could be used to fire power stations, thereby providing an instant source of energy to tide us over until all the windmills have gathered speed.

If you think this recommendation may be too harsh, just look at the three great literatures: Russian, French and English. You’d have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find any writers there who either weren’t virulent anti-Semites or didn’t depict Jews pejoratively or at least described them by ethnic slurs.

Thus, with the possible exception of Chekhov, most great Russian writers were either rank Jew-haters (Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Rozanov) or at least prone to striking anti-Semitic notes in their books and correspondence.

Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev are all culpable there, as is the subject of one of my books, Tolstoy. The good Count tended to regard himself as a world authority on any subject he had studied for a couple of weeks, such as education. When the famous pedagogue Friedrich Froebel had the temerity to argue with him, Tolstoy was aghast: Froebel was “just a Jew” who ought to have known his place.

Into the bonfire go War and Peace and Anna Karenina, followed by the rest of Russian literature: we don’t want to waste time digging through an anti-Semitic dung heap in search of a few rare pearls of philo-Semitism.

And please don’t get me going on English literature, just bring that box of matches out. Shakespeare, Dickens, Waugh, Greene, Belloc, Chesterton, Buchan, Kingsley Amis… need I go on? I needn’t – by now you must be ready to strike the first match.

But, as you do, please don’t forget those Frenchmen: from Voltaire and Diderot to Sand, Balzac and Céline, they all belong in the pyre. Of course, when the fire spreads it’s also likely to consume even works by innocent writers, but that’s acceptable collateral damage.

If we go to such (justified!) extremes, I hear you ask, what will our young people read? That’s an odd question to ask, considering the profusion of social media that provide such a broad panoply of life’s intellectual and moral content.

Who needs Dostoyevsky and Chesterton when we have Twitter and Facebook? Only dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries and intellectual snobs. So perhaps the time has come to consider tossing them too into the bonfire of books.

I do hope that the corpus of my work and this piece specifically have established my progressive credentials clearly enough for me to be spared. Just in case, let me repeat: Heil progress!

Rape prosecutions fell by 30 per cent last year, which, according to angry campaigners for women’s rights, effectively means the “decriminalisation of rape”.

If so, you can count on my support, ladies: rape is a heinous crime, and decriminalising it can’t be justified. But first I’ve got to look at the facts and figure out what they mean. It’s that little idiosyncrasy of mine: I must go through that routine before forming a view.

The numbers come in two sets. The first is the infuriating fall in rape prosecutions in the past 12 months, which indeed amounts to 30 per cent. Even a bit more.

A sip of Laphroaig to settle my nerves, frayed by that discovery, and I’m ready to look at the second set. And yes, the 1,439 convictions obtained over the past 12 months is the lowest number in five years.

However, we find out that the conviction rate for rape over the past 12 months was 68.5 per cent – compared to 63.5 per cent last year and 57 per cent five years ago. In other words, more than two thirds of the men tried for rape over the past year were convicted.

However, the aforementioned campaigners make an irrefutable mathematical point: if two thirds were convicted, a third were acquitted. And to them anything under a 100 per cent conviction rate constitutes a denial of justice.

While the progressive person in me desperately wants to agree, the cold-blooded thinker puts the dampeners on. For no crime category produces the conviction rate all progressive people crave.

Overall, prosecutions for all crimes in the UK deliver about an 80 per cent conviction rate, which is somewhat higher than the almost 70 per cent in rape cases. But rape isn’t really like all other crimes.

For one thing, prosecutions are still brought, and conviction obtained, on an evidential basis. Thus, if the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) feels the evidence is weak, it won’t prosecute. If the evidence is good enough for prosecution but not for conviction, the jury won’t convict. Agreed?

Good. Then you must also agree that, whatever the crime, if every accusation resulted in prosecution and every prosecution in a conviction, we’d be miraculously transported to a very different country from Britain. That country would be a tyranny to end all tyrannies. Such a high rate was never obtained even in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

A country ruled by law insists on strong evidence of wrongdoing before it punishes the wrongdoers. And getting such evidence in rape cases is notoriously hard.

That crime is usually committed without witnesses, which already makes things difficult. Unless some physical evidence exists, it’s the woman’s word against the man’s. The woman’s word may be her bond, but neither the CPS nor the courts can proceed solely on that assumption.

Even if physical evidence existed in the first place, it tends to disappear over time. In most cases, it disappears within days, to say nothing of weeks, months or years. However, for variously valid reasons, many victims are reluctant to report the crime immediately, sometimes waiting weeks, months or years.

Simon, a barrister friend of mine, recently had to try an 85-year-old man charged with rape committed over 60 years ago. As a result, Simon is seriously considering quitting criminal law.

Moreover, and I hurt inside for having to say this, some women bring up accusations of rape or sexual assault frivolously – at times, and here the inner pain becomes unbearable, fraudulently. In this they are helped by the steadily broadening concept of such crimes.

For example, two colleagues may check into a hotel room after work (not a hypothetical case), undress, get in bed, engage in prolonged foreplay followed by intercourse but, if the woman gasps ‘stop’ at the very point of no return and the man doesn’t stop, he goes to prison for rape.

If a husband assumes that a marriage licence is a licence to hanky-panky and dismisses his wife’s claim of a headache, he’s a rapist, barely distinguishable from a savage who jumps a passerby in a dark street. And so on.

Sexual assault is even worse. An uninvited pat on a woman’s behind at a party or a hand on her thigh at dinner are now treated as felonies, not just overly aggressive courtship. As we speak, a senior Tory MP is about to be charged with assault for trying to kiss one woman, putting his hand on another’s leg and using his position to have a year-long affair with a parliamentary staffer.

The latter woman claims rape because she feared that turning the libidinous MP down might damage her career. I must say I don’t understand.

The current belief is that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman, worse than even maiming or death. If so, a damaged career looks rather trivial by comparison, wouldn’t you say? I know what my choice would be.

Then again, an exchange of sexual favours for career advancement, a leg-over for a leg-up, goes back at least to Abraham’s wife Sarah, who pretended to be his sister so she could become the pharaoh’s concubine (“And he entreated Abraham well for her sake” Gen. 12-16).

None of this is to deny that rape, sensibly defined, is a brutal crime. However, rape is unlike any other brutal crime not just because it’s often hard to prove. Like racism and homophobia (also defined so broadly as to lose any meaning whatsoever), rape is a crime committed not just against its victim, but against the dominant ideology of our time.

All such ideologies are concocted to create fault lines in society by fostering alienation between classes, races – and sexes. Hence it’s essential to indoctrinate the populace in the belief that the relationship between men and women is inherently adversarial, not complementary.

Broadening the definition of rape and sexual assault is as instrumental there as insisting, against common sense and indeed sanity, that a woman’s statement is all the proof needed for prosecution and conviction. Never mind the rule of law; feel the ideology.

Going back to the two sets of numbers cited above, they represent a step in the sane direction. The CPS is beginning to apply tighter standards to rape evidence, which is why the number of prosecutions goes down but the conviction rate goes up.

The CPS has been allowed to get away with that so far, but I fear that before long a simple denunciation will suffice for prosecutions and convictions. As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I’ve seen it all before.  

By elevating Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords, Boris Johnson has just done the most revolting thing in his eventful life.

His very friendship with that man ought to have raised awkward questions, especially now, when KGB/FSB infiltration of Britain is hot news. (Oops, sorry, it isn’t hot news any longer – that was last week. Our attention span has the length of a gnat’s penis.)

But ennobling a man with links to history’s most ignoble organisation makes it hard to decide where KGB/FSB ends and British politics begins. Let’s just say that Johnson’s cynical act smudges the line to a point where it’s not always visible.

Anyway, I sat down to write about this emetic development, only to remember that I already wrote about Lebedev some nine months ago. Having looked up that piece, I realised I couldn’t improve on it, certainly not this morning when I’m slightly the worse for wear (one just can’t stop drinking Burgundy at a Burgundian dinner party).

So, in the spirit of responsible recycling, here’s that article, in a somewhat abbreviated form:

“Britain has been infiltrated by an ugly strain of Russia phobia,” complains Evgeny Lebedev, owner of The Evening Standard, The Independent and other media interests in Britain.

Anyone else would have written not Russia phobia but Russophobia. The difference is important – the latter is an irrational fear of Russians; the former, only of Putin’s Russia and those who do her bidding.

Lebedev’s name-calling was prompted by the current scandal of rich Russians meddling in British elections, just as they’ve been proved to meddle in US ones.

He himself has suffered traumatising abuse: “Newspapers that pride themselves on tolerance… have written… that Russians like me are a ‘fifth column in modern Britain’. One obscure publication… has called me a Russian spy.” Wounding words indeed.

Now, groundless accusations of a crime, such as spying for a foreign country, strike me as libellous. Is Lebedev going to sue? He should, for otherwise some sceptics might think the accusations aren’t as libellous as all that.

He then proceeds to unravel his own argument by uttering two seemingly innocuous phrases: “I have lived [in Britian] since I was eight years old” and “I bought The Evening Standard in 2009 and The Independent in 2010.”

Lebedev has such long residency in Britain because his father, Alexander, was a KGB spy working at the Soviet embassy under diplomatic cover. Actually, the past tense in that sentence contradicts Putin’s frank admission: “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life.”

If Vlad is to be believed, Alexander Lebedev only ever left his KGB/FSB job supposedly. Like many other KGB officers, including Putin himself, he was infiltrated into legit life by his lifelong sponsor.

Following in the footsteps of Putin and his colleagues, Alexander became a billionaire overnight, ostensibly displaying a business acumen that puts to shame the likes of Bill Gates and Jim Ratcliffe, who both took years to make their fortunes.

In fact, they all – including Putin – acted as conduits for transferring KGB and Party funds, along with oil revenues, out of Russia and into the West. They can live high on the hog off the proceeds, but they only have the use of their money, not the ownership of it.

Theirs is a leasehold, with the freehold remaining in the firm grasp of the ruling KGB camarilla. Those people know that money can do so much more than buy yachts and palaces in the West.

It can also serve their nefarious ends in all sorts of other ways: by enabling them to penetrate political circles, skew Western elections, draw influential Westerners into blackmailable activities, spread Putin propaganda – and in general poison the air with the emanations of their putrid cash.

Lebedev’s “I bought…” is a barefaced lie exposed by a simple question: Where did the money come from, Evgeny? Where did a man still in his 20s and without any lucrative business experience find the funds to acquire major British media?

Oh well, he actually ‘co-owns’ the papers with his KGB father. In other words, those media outlets are in fact double-fronted. Evgeny acts as the front for Alexander; Alexander provides the same service for the KGB/FSB camarilla running Russia.

That’s why Lebedev’s indignant protests along the lines of “I have never met Vladimir Putin” are risible, if true. I don’t think Kim Philby ever met Stalin either, and I doubt Robert Maxwell ever broke bread with Andropov. Yet they both served the Soviet cause each in his own way.

The influx of filthy lucre pilfered by the ruling kleptofascist gang from the Russian people has a deeply corrupting effect on the host country. British politicians and other influential figures are being seduced and bought, wholesale or retail.

That’s why HMG has threatened to invoke unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) to seize the assets of rich Russians suspected of having profited from the proceeds of crime. But there’s nothing unexplained about their wealth. No one can make billions in Russia without being in cahoots with, and accountable to, the KGB camarilla. The wealth of every ‘oligarch’ is contingent on Putin’s good graces, which are in turn contingent on their toeing the line.

How they do so varies. I doubt, for example, that many of them engage in common-or-garden spying. More typically, they are agents of influence, talent spotters or simply bacilli of corruption slowly dripped into the veins of our society.

The new arrivals come bearing billions, and we welcome the loot. But, contrary to Emperor Vespasian’s adage, the Russians’ money does smell. It comes packaged with global laundering, regular assassinations and other criminal activities.

Thanks to Russian ‘oligarchs’, London has become the money laundering capital of the world, which corrupts the whole society. Filthy money sullies every hand that touches it.

Those purloined and laundered billions buy political clout, not just Belgravia mansions (the Russians purchase close to 80 per cent of London houses worth £10 million-plus). Today’s politicians lack the moral fibre to steer clear of ill-gotten loot.

This is a cross-party phenomenon. A few years ago, Osborne and Mandelson enjoyed hospitality on the yacht belonging to the mobster Deripaska (banned from entry in the US, by the way). Later, when Osborne lost his cabinet job, he had a soft landing as editor of Lebedev’s Standard.

And last year, Boris Johnson stayed with the Lebedevs at their Umbrian estate. “I am proud to be a friend of Boris Johnson,” boasts Evgeny. That’s no doubt true. But if Mr Johnson is equally proud of this association, he ought to remember what friendship with Putin and his emissaries has done to Trump’s entourage.

The Conservative Party follows its leader’s lead and avidly accepts campaign contributions from Lebedev’s friends, if not, if he’s to be believed, from Lebedev himself.

Those accepting their donations ought to remind themselves that the Conservative Friends of Russia (later renamed the Westminster Russia Forum) was launched by the senior diplomat Sergey Nalobin, who was subsequently expelled from Britain for espionage.

So Evgeny Lebedev should spare us his bogus indignation. He knows what’s what, and so do we. Well, some of us do, at any rate.

Joe ‘Kinnock’ Biden is a rara avis among politicians: with him, what you see is precisely what you get. Zero.

However, it seems increasingly likely that Americans will let Covid elect their new president, a man who has lost much of his already puny eloquence to senility, but little of his intelligence: he had none to begin with.

Voting choices are these days mostly knee-jerk decisions based on the latest news headlines and the resultant ‘feel-good factor’. Thus, natural disasters have often hurt the incumbent.

Before the pandemic, the US economy was doing reasonably well, and President Trump had a winning hand. All he had to do was sit quietly and wait until his challengers folded.

Then Covid reshuffled the pack. The economy suffered a blow, and Trump found himself holding at best a low pair, rather than a flush. However, even a low pair beats no pair, but we aren’t talking poker here. We are talking elections, where emotions trump reason, as it were.

In a rare display of self-awareness, Trump has attributed his low approval ratings to his personality. He has a point: I for one find his personality repulsive. However, given the choice between Trump and Biden, I’d vote for Trump – even, turning the tables on the Democrats’ time-proven strategy, more than once.

The president ill-advisedly hitched his wagon to the Dow Jones index, which is a notoriously fickle horse. Even without Covid, shares could have suffered a downturn, taking Trump’s chances the same way.

But Covid not only devastated the US economy, but painted a bull’s eye on Trump’s chest that his detractors can’t miss: accusing him of not handling the pandemic properly is the easiest thing in the world.

I’m not qualified to judge the advisability of the anti-Covid measures taken by the US administration. However, whatever they are or could have been, the president was on a losing wicket.

No matter what he did, people would have died and the economy would have suffered. Had he chosen the economy over public health, he would have been portrayed as a heartless murderer. Had he gone the other way, he would have been pilloried for destroying the livelihoods of millions of American families.

The same goes for Trump’s response to the BLM movement. Too soft, and he would have undermined his reputation for commitment to law and order. Too hard, and he would have been damned with all the same epithets he did attract even for his halfhearted response: racist, fascist, polarising, insensitive, supremacist and so forth.

Both Covid and BLM were such godsends for Biden that one can be forgiven for suspecting that the latter was organised specifically for that purpose. Operating in that wretched subjunctive mood, a pretext for such a campaign could have been found even without the brutal death of that drug-addled criminal George Floyd.

One way or another, Joe Biden, easily the biggest nonentity in US history to be a frontrunner at this stage, is leading Trump by eight points in the omnibus polls of voting intentions. Amazingly, he’s even leading in Texas, a state that would be impoverished if Biden were in a position to act on even some of his plans.

Texas derives much of its income from hydrocarbons, and Biden’s plans in that area are dominated by his touting of the climate-change hoax. He is promising “no new fracking”, “100 per cent clean energy” and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

If realised, such plans would reduce my former home state to penury, but Texan voters don’t seem to mind, yet. Their state is hit hard by Covid, emotions are running high and reason dips to a new low.

Biden’s campaign for the Democratic nomination was off to a faltering start. But then his strategists made a startling discovery: the less their candidate appeared in public, and especially the less he spoke, they better he would do.

Every time such exposure couldn’t be avoided, Biden mouthed inanities at best and downright bloopers at worst. At one point, he urged the crowd to vote for him in the Senate race, and it took a timely intervention by one of his staffers to remind the poor man that he was actually standing for a different office.

This explains why Biden carried some states in which he didn’t even campaign, and where his flacks could portray him as a moderate, nerve-soothing establishment candidate with the best chance of unseating that boat-rocking upstart in the White House.

It says a lot about today’s Democratic Party that someone like Biden, who in just about any other previous election would have been considered dangerously left-wing, is now seen as a moderate.

He himself has publicly stated his ambition to “go down as one of the most progressive presidents in American history”. If your political jargon is rusty, ‘progressive’ means, among other things, promiscuously high-spending.

In that sense, Biden is right: his announced plan to provide a further $150 billion to boost the black community will take the projected total spending to four trillion, and few people can even imagine that numeral. Tax increases are bound to follow, which prospect doesn’t seem to scare voters as much as it used to.

Biden’s campaign heavily depends on blacks voting for him as a bloc. By itself, this is nothing new: since 1968 no Republican presidential candidate has polled more than 13 per cent of the black vote, and most have received less.

That makes black voters the most significant swathe of the Democratic electorate, which is just a fact of life. But, in light of the BLM movement, this fact becomes sinister.

For, as the black activist Angela Davis explained, “[This election] will be about choosing a candidate who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement… Biden is far more likely to take mass demands seriously.”

So far Biden has resisted the most extreme of such demands, those for defunding the police, closing down all prisons and legalising marijuana. The last demand is especially amusing because this is one area where libertarians and left-wing subversives agree.

The former support legalisation out of their fanatical commitment to free personal choice; the latter, because that would reduce the number of blacks going to prison. This concept of law and order makes up in logic what it lacks in sanity.

Indeed, the best way of reducing the numbers convicted of any crime would be to decriminalise it. Britain shows how, by effectively decriminalising burglary. A friend of mine, who often acts as a court expert, has calculated that an average burglary is punished by about three-day’s imprisonment – our shining example that America, for once, can follow.

On balance, I have no doubt that Miss Davis is right – trained by the Frankfurt School, she has perfectly honed instincts for Marxist subversion. A senile, vacillating, intellectually inadequate president with ‘progressive’ aspirations will indeed be putty in the evil hands of those who wish America ill.

Say what you will about Trump, and I do say many things about him, but I’d support him for precisely the same reasons Davis supports Biden: he’d be able to keep her ilk at bay for a while longer.

As to Biden, the only arguments about him are revolving around which black woman he’ll choose as his running mate. That chap wouldn’t dream of considering a candidate of a less fortunate race and sex – regardless of any other qualifications.    

I take a personal interest in the on-going debate on the data showing that musicians tend to have higher than the median IQs.

After all, I’ve spent much of my life in the company of musicians, having had the chance to observe dozens of them at close quarters. And true enough, some of them are highly intelligent. (By way of protecting my social and family life, I hasten to state unreservedly and unequivocally that both my wife and one of my closest friends fall into that category.)

However, most musicians I’ve known, including some famous ones, don’t strike me as intellectual giants. And some of those who can get around keys or strings at supersonic speeds, and command stratospheric fees, are simply daft.

Then, as any logician will tell you, correlation doesn’t equate causality. Music may not necessarily make people smarter, but those with high IQs are more likely to gravitate towards the concert platform.

Moreover, those who do make it to the concert platform typically start to prepare for that feat at a time when they haven’t quite learned to talk yet, much less make choices about their career plans. They were led to music by their parents, which at that stage says more about the parents than the offspring.

No such grown-ups can possibly have a pecuniary interest in encouraging their tots to study music seriously. After all, it takes years of lessons to decide whether a child has a professional potential, and more years to judge whether that potential is likely to be realised.

Hence it’s mainly for cultural reasons that parents spend oodles of time, effort and money to guide their children to Bach and Beethoven. They must love music, understand how vital it is to our culture and therefore believe that exposure to music will make their children better people – even if it doesn’t make them international stars.

It’s likely that parents who accept much personal sacrifice to pursue that educational goal are themselves intelligent people. And intelligent people are more likely to spawn clever children.

Also, an intelligence quotient measures not intelligence, but merely the potential for developing it. IQ relates to intelligence the way musicality relates to musicianship – musical people may never become musicians, and people with high IQs may never become thinkers.

For example, everybody considered Bobby Fischer one of the best chess players ever, but nobody – including probably even his mother – considered him an intelligent man. Yet his IQ was off every known scale. (Incidentally, many chess players are musicians and vice versa. The two skills are related: chess players develop the cognitive skills to arrange elements in space; musicians, to arrange them in time.)

This is yet another example of how deceptive statistics can be. An unvarnished datum may be a matter of interest, but it seldom elucidates an issue in all its complexity. That, however, doesn’t make statistics useless. They just need to be treated with caution.

In this case, the link between music and intelligence can’t be dismissed just because statistics don’t paint the full picture. For, combining logic with personal observation, I’m convinced that music makes some people more intelligent.

For example, it’s certain that musicians of the calibre of, say, Gieseking, Menuhin, Gould, Szigeti, Yudina or Grumiaux (and of course the two individuals mentioned in the second paragraph above) had their innate intelligence further developed by music.

The abundance of musicians who acquire the biomechanical skills necessary for virtuoso performance suggests that such talents are spread rather wide. However, great musicians are few because they go beyond that. They combine virtuosity with a deep analytical ability and a broad cultural outlook.

A great musician has to have the intricate mind to analyse the complex relationships of harmonies, tempi, sonorities and dynamics within a piece – and also to understand how the piece fits into the overall work of its composer, how the composer relates to the music of his time and over history, and how music expresses the ethos of our civilisation.

A mindless virtuoso can have a brilliant career without such intelligence. But he’ll never reach the level of the musicians I mentioned above, at random.

For all those Genome Projects and Decades of the Brain, the human mind remains a mystery, unsolved and probably unsolvable. Scientists don’t even know what a thought is, which is understandable. Natural sciences deal with the natural, which is to say material, world. And thought lives in another world, one that materialists stupidly insist doesn’t exist.

That’s why the questions similar to those I’ve touched upon will never be answered definitively. Not in a lab, not by a sociological survey – and, much as I hate to admit this, not even by me.

One thing is beyond doubt, to me at any rate: music too resides in that other world. And, if I can be forgiven wild conjecture, it may well live on a higher floor than even the rational mind.

Universal prosperity (otherwise known as ‘happiness’) is the implicit legitimising promise of post-Enlightenment modernity.

Dedicated as it is to the advancement of the common man, it has to promise the common man things he needs. And, snobbish but true, that breed has mostly material aspirations – especially now that its traditional metaphysical concerns have been roundly swept aside.

Such is the widespread belief. However, it’s not always, and never wholly, true. For the system best suited to fulfilling the implicit promise of modernity, what Marx called capitalism, comes in conflict with the ideology of egalitarianism begotten by modernity as an accompaniment to prosperity.

Arranging the demography of modern prosperity in any country will produce a pyramid, tapering from economic hoi-polloi up towards the rich. Nevertheless, by any historical standards, Western prosperity is as universal as humanly possible: most of those at the base of the pyramid still enjoy lives that most earlier generations would have regarded as luxurious.

However, ideology isn’t about double-entry accounting. It’s about activating the least laudable human qualities in pursuit of some pernicious purpose, usually political. It’s not for nothing that modern correctness is called political.

People’s ability to earn money varies widely, making it inevitable that some will have more than others. But ideologues promised equality, didn’t they?

And it wasn’t that obsolete namby-pamby equality of all before God either. Since God was replaced by Darwin, equality got to be mostly understood as an entity denominated in units of currency. Alas, while old equality followed from the essence of Christianity, new equality not only didn’t follow from the essence of capitalism, but was made impossible by it.

Hence it was easy to portray any capitalist system as inherently unjust and hostile to modernity’s cherished ideal of equality. By inference, that made everybody who did well out of the unjust system themselves unjust. They were increasingly portrayed as blood-sucking leeches on the body of a nation.

(This, incidentally, explains the predominantly socialist nature of modern anti-Semitism. Christian anti-Semitism went the way of Christianity, while conservative, clubbable anti-Semitism has more to do with snobbery and the desire to keep outsiders outside. As an old Tory explained to me once, “Anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than necessary”.)

Thus modernity differs from Christendom in one critical respect. If the latter tried, with variable success, to encourage the better part of human nature, the former implicitly fosters – and expiates – the full array of deadly sins. Envy and pride lead the way, with greed and anger following closely behind.

In parallel with inculcating such vices into the metaphysical makeup of society, modern Western nations extended egalitarianism to politics by both expanding the democratic franchise ad infinitum and downgrading all competing forms of power.

Specifically in Britain that manifested itself in steadily lowering the voting age and debauching both the monarchy and the upper, hitherto unelected, House of Parliament. That way the masses, brainwashed about the injustice of the traditional economy, could elevate to government those made in their own image.

Such developments can be observed, mutatis mutandis, in all Western countries. As a result, Western governments had to renege on the founding promise of modernity, that of comfort and a steadily improving standard of living. Ideology has begun to rule the roost.

Contrary to what Clinton’s strategist James Carville once said, it’s no longer the economy, stupid. It’s now ideology, stupid. That’s the new god and it’s athirst, demanding greater and greater sacrifices. The economy is one such.

Modern governments, largely made up of spivocratic nonentities capable of only following, not shaping, popular demands, demonstrate time and again their willingness to throw the economy under the wheels of the ideological juggernaut.

For example, it will cost Western governments trillions in any currency you care to name to cater to the climate hoax perpetrated by those who have an anti-capitalist axe to grind. Never in the history of human economics has so much been sacrificed by so many on so little evidence.

The less sophisticated mouthpieces of the hoax, such as that poor retarded child Greta, don’t even bother to conceal the anti-capitalist animus behind their crusade against warm weather. The clever grown-ups behind the scenes are more circumspect, trying to hide their true motives behind pseudo-scientific cant and the kind of arguments that any clever secondary school pupil could blow out of the water.

It’s too early to calculate the damage done by our response to Covid, which is probably incalculable anyway. Yet it’s easy to discern an ideological component in the drive for destroying the economy for the sake of rather nebulous health benefits.

Unlike with climate, this isn’t pure ideology, what with some of the dangers being quite real. Yet, comparing Britain with Sweden, where the government’s response was more restrained, one would find it hard to make a persuasive argument for the economic devastation chosen by HMG.

These are just the most recent and visible examples. But there exist many others.

The egalitarian ideology of modernity attacks the economy in all sorts of ways, most camouflaged with bien pensant waffle. If our governments were driven by economic goals, they wouldn’t have accepted the ideologically inspired welfare state – and the attendant ruinous burden of debt.

It goes without saying that civilised governments will make provisions for looking after the old and infirm. But our welfarism run riot goes well beyond civilised decency. Instead it enters the realm of economic madness that has dire social consequences as well.

Everywhere one looks, one can observe a clash between economy and ideology, with the latter running up a huge winning score. For example, ideology demands that all obvious differences between races and sexes be ignored, and the economy docilely complies to its own detriment.

The essence of capitalism, the system that has produced unprecedented, if unequally distributed, prosperity, is competition. And the essence of competition is offering the market the best goods and services at the lowest possible price.

That involves each business hiring the best talent it can afford, which in turn leads to competition not only for markets but also for labour. This is economics at its most basic, but in barges ideology at its most virulent.

It demands that, regardless of talent and ability, all races and sexes be represented in the workplace in proportion to their numbers in the population, or in some cases way beyond such numbers. That makes a travesty out of competition for labour and ultimately for markets.

Forced to hire not the best but the most ideologically acceptable, businesses reduce their productivity, with the quality of their offerings going down and the price heading in the opposite direction. That has a knock-on effect on everything: when businesses become less profitable, the tax base shrinks.

The government then has to borrow even more, and the merry-go-round never stops. Nor is it possible to jump off without risking life and limb.

The upshot is that capitalism is taken away from capitalists and placed in the tender care of ideologues. That means capitalism becomes corporatism at best, outright socialism at worst.

“The moment that Government appears at market,” wrote Burke, and I repeat these words of wisdom often, “all the principles of market will be subverted.” Replace ‘Government’ with ‘ideology’, and the statement will ring even truer.

The world does go round, but it’s not money that makes it do so. Those who insist it is ought to know better, and by and large they do. But ideology doesn’t let them tell the truth.