Blog

Alas, the Liberal Democratic Party didn’t exist in the early days of the Roman Empire. That deprived Jesus of an opportunity to affiliate himself with the LibDem manifesto, which he otherwise would have done with alacrity.

However, should he choose today for his Second Coming, he’d get his chance. Why, if he timed it properly, he could even stand for the party in the general election, in the unlikely event he could pass the preliminary vetting.

That’s the impression one gets reading Prof. Ian Bradley’s article Why Liberalism Stands at the Very Heart of Christianity.

The article was inspired by Tim Farron, who, writes Bradley, “spoke movingly and bravely in last Saturday’s Times about the tensions involved in being an Evangelical Christian and leader of the Liberal Democrats”.

Well, I was moved by Mr Farron’s conundrums too, but in a direction opposite to Prof. Bradley’s. In fact, the first adjectives that sprang to my mind when reading Mr Farron’s article were neither ‘moving’ nor ‘brave’, but ‘vulgar’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘disingenuous’.

It’s both vulgar and theologically illiterate to co-opt Christ for any political platform, especially one of recent vintage. As a self-professed Evangelical Christian, Mr Farron ought to remind himself of Christ’s own words about where his kingdom isn’t.

Surely he must realise that the salvation Christ brought to man wasn’t the kind achievable through redistributive political action and social engineering, both the hallmarks of modern ‘liberalism’, as practised by the LibDems.

“Theological and political liberalism surely go hand in hand,” writes Prof. Bradley, and for once he’s right. One could argue, however, that neither has much to do with Christianity, the former usually and the latter by definition (the modifier ‘political’ should be a dead giveaway).

“Both,” laments Prof. Bradley, “are under assault from the rise of fundamentalism, populism and nationalism across the world and especially in its most powerful nations… Common to [these] groups is a literalist interpretation of scripture, a strong attachment to nationalism, Islamophobia and opposition to gay, transgender and women’s rights.”

Seldom does one see such a mishmash of ontological category errors in one paragraph. For, being political and not religious phenomena, neither populism nor nationalism has anything to do with any type of Christianity.

Christian fundamentalism does have something to do with it, although the same pejorative adjectives I used earlier sometimes apply to it as well. Actually, “a literalist interpretation of scripture” isn’t alien to Evangelical Christianity in general, which shows a certain lack of both theological and poetic imagination.

So is one to understand that, unlike those objectionable groups, Mr Farron isn’t opposed to “gay, transgender and women’s rights?” Does he regard such opposition as un-Christian? If he does, he’s either ignorant or mendacious.

Admittedly, transgender rights didn’t figure in either Testament. In those backward times, people still couldn’t imagine that within a couple of millennia their descendants would praise men born as women getting pregnant by women born as men.

However, taking a wild stab in the dark, somehow I don’t think that either Leviticus or, say, Romans would have welcomed such a development should it have been mooted. As to the other two rights upheld by our liberal Christian, both scripture and ecclesiastic tradition are absolutely unequivocal about them.

Homosexuality is described in both Testaments as an ‘abomination’, which is the traditional Christian position, at least in the apostolic confessions. But it’s not Mr Farron’s position. When asked whether he regarded homosexuality as a sin, he replied “I do not”, adding a silly non-sequitur to the effect that we’re all sinners anyway.

Indeed we are, and homosexuality is one of the sins some of us commit. As a political ‘liberal’, Mr Farron is free to think otherwise, but wrapping that faddish secular stance in a Christian mantle is a vulgar and ignorant category mistake.

As to women, scripture defines them as ‘helpers’ to men, and St Paul says: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.”

Women clearly played a vital role in Christ’s life and Passion, but to talk about them in the crude terms of modern feminism and MeTooism again represents vulgarity at its most soaring. People who do so don’t have much in the way of intelligence, nor, more important, taste.

Not only do Messrs Farron and Bradley misunderstand Christianity, they also stumble over the concept of liberalism. Both use, or rather misuse, the word in the sense in which it’s used by modern socialists, whatever party they represent.

English liberalism, whose roots Prof. Bradley correctly identifies as Nonconformist, has performed an about-face since its inception. It used to stand for individual liberty, a small state, free enterprise and personal charity. Now it stands for exactly the opposite.

Citing biblical usage, Prof. Bradley equates liberalism with “broad, open-minded, gracious, expansive generosity.” Presumably, this fine quality is best expressed not through individual love, but through the good offices of a central, omnipotent state committed to robbing hard-working people for the sake of creating a vast parasitic class and sapping the country’s resources.

No? Sorry, my mistake. I must have been misled by the policies consistently advocated by today’s ‘liberals’, including Mr Farron. His voting record and numerous pronouncements show a loyal commitment to every hare-brained leftie superstition on offer.  

For example, he insisted that 50 per cent of target seats be contested by women and 10 per cent by ethnic minority candidates, regardless of any other qualifications. As a LibDem leader, he practised what he preached by appointing 12 women and 10 men to senior positions.

In the good Christian spirit, he voted not only for homomarriage, but also for extending it to the armed forces. Mr Farron’s voting record also shows that, while considering same-sex marriage essential to our defence, he regards a nuclear deterrent as superfluous.

While describing himself as a Eurosceptic, he logically believes in staying in the EU and flinging our doors open for migrants whose views on Christianity may be rather less liberal than Mr Farron’s.

And of course he supports the complete legalisation of marijuana, although he stops short of suggesting that it could be used as incense. Anyway, his brand of Christianity has no room for those time-honoured bells and smells.

The attempt to usurp Christianity for left-wing politics is nothing new. Yet people who insist that Christianity is some kind of socialism believe in the latter more than the former, and properly understand neither. That’s predictable in our academics, but unfortunate in MPs, whose policies affect our lives.

So far, non-stick frying pans are the only practical benefit of space exploration, and even that benefit is dubious: cast iron usually works better.

Yet every now and then, one observes an eruption of gushing enthusiasm over discovery of something or other in space.

The latest seismic event of this nature concerns the possibility that the recently found exoplanet (one outside the solar system) K2-18b may have enough water to sustain biological, or even human, life.

This morning, two middle-aged women who ought to know better were discussing the possibility on TV in the gasping tones of kindergarten girls who’ve just found out where babies come from.

One of them graciously allowed that it was by no means “guaranteed” that K2-18b is inhabited, and there I was, getting my hopes up sky-high.

One down from guaranteed is highly likely, and even that assessment requires evidence, rather than conjecture. But the two women clearly didn’t know the difference between science and science fiction. Space exploration, one of them said, reflects our desire to learn more about ourselves.

Logically speaking, we could only acquire such knowledge if humanoid creatures were indeed found on some exoplanet. Comparing them to us, we could conceivably learn something, although I’d still maintain that we can learn more from Dante, Shakespeare and Bach – to say nothing of Scripture, and nothing is what’s usually said about it.

Now, all those centuries ago I worked at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston (or rather Clear Lake City), where I often drank with astronauts. I also travelled to the Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, where I drank with older scientists speaking in caricature German accents.

However, the romance of space travel was lost upon me, and it still is. So I have to disappoint the two TV gushers: people didn’t spend trillions on space exploration out of curiosity. They did so because they wanted to spy on other people and kill them more efficiently.

In both the USSR and the US, the space programme was an offshoot of a military build-up. After Wernher von Braun and other Nazi scientists had demonstrated the killing potential of missiles, both post-war superpowers awakened to the possibilities.

Once Germany was overrun, they forcibly recruited Nazi rocket scientists and engineers, dividing them between the two countries. The division wasn’t exactly equal: the Russians got 2,200 of them, while the Americans had to make do with a mere 1,600.

However, arguably the American imports were more senior – after all, they included von Braun himself, who had died before I got the chance to drink beer with his associates in Alabama. The Germans didn’t persevere as long in Russia: they were allowed to go home after Stalin’s death in 1953.

But the Soviets’ own space programme was already up and running, led by such talented men as Korolev and Chalomey. The essence of it was put in a nutshell by Khrushchev (whose son Sergei worked for Chalomey). He ordered Korolev to create a rocket that could carry a nuclear warhead to the US.

Around 1956 Korolev mentioned to Khrushchev in passing that oh, by the way, the same rocket could also put a satellite into space, just for fun. Khrushchev instantly grasped the propaganda potential of such a coup and ordered that a satellite be launched in 1957.

It was then that ideology barged in on space real politik. The Sputnik’s scientific value was nil; its propaganda value was immense. That caught Americans by surprise: their own space programme was developing along strictly pragmatic lines.

However, Khrushchev threw down a gauntlet, and the Americans had to pick it up. They too began to use the space programme for propaganda purposes – with neither side neglecting the military application.

President Eisenhower was lukewarm on space, putting it mildly. But his young and impetuous successor, Kennedy, was red-hot on it. He even lied to the public about the “missile gap”, with America supposedly trailing Russia in the space race.

In fact, the American rocket programme was already far ahead, which was demonstrated by the 1969 Moon landing. A gap in favour of the Soviet Union existed only in the area of ideology and the decibel level of the surrounding noise.

Since then the two countries have largely abandoned space-related propaganda – it has become old hat. Yet the military potential of space exploration remains huge, and it’s driven by the desire to kill people, not to learn more about them.

However, there was another strain to space-related ideology, one that went beyond the tug-of-war between the two powers.

When Gagarin became the first man in space, he also became the poster boy of communism and was hysterically feted (that, incidentally, was the last time I felt enthusiastic about space, which is forgivable for a lad of 13). But at one of the endless galas, Khrushchev, typically tipsy, let the ideological cat out of the bag.

Gagarin, he said, went all the way up to heaven and saw no God there. Wasn’t that proof that God didn’t exist?

I won’t demean either you or myself by pointing out the idiocy of that statement. But Khrushchev inadvertently revealed another impelling aspiration behind space exploration: atheism.

Modern people have taken on the impossible task of proving that man was created not by God, but by Darwin. Yet even some of them are aware that they could do with better proof than our supposed simian descent, which belief is doubtless based on atheists’ frank self-assessment.

Central to the Judaeo-Christian view of the world is the uniqueness of both man and Earth, the sole stage on which man’s drama is played out. Central to atheism is the urgent desire to debunk that view.

Hence atheists feel compelled to find life, ideally sentient life, on some other planet. That way they’d feel justified in insisting that man is nothing special, that he’s indeed nothing more than a jumped-up ape.

From there they’d be able to construct a rickety bridge to the materialist cosmology for which their loins ache. QED.

So yes, in that sense the two TV gushers have a point. The secondary purpose of space exploration is indeed to learn something about ourselves. Or rather to unlearn it.

Had I relied on the NHS 15 years ago, you’d be spared my immoral… sorry, I mean immortal prose.

To be fair, it was a brilliant NHS GP, Guy Lawley, who first spotted something wrong and referred me to a private oncologist for tests, which started within a couple of days.

However, back then I could still get to see him on a day’s notice, as opposed to the fortnight it would take today. And Guy is no longer with the NHS: he retired at 50, in disgust at having to spend most of his time filling useless forms.

Once in the hands of private consultants, and much to their barely concealed surprise, I managed to survive two different cancers, both in Stage 4 (there’s no Stage 5). An NHS patient with a similar diagnosis would almost certainly have died.

He would have had to wait much longer for each diagnostic test, especially exploratory surgery, longer still for hospital admission – and he wouldn’t have received the same state-of-the art treatment that saved me.

One example if I may. The kind of chemotherapy used in my type of cancer wipes out leucocytes, white blood cells, leaving the patient with no immunity to ward off infection and, until the leucocytes are rebuilt, at deadly risk.

That’s why, after each chemo session, a private patient receives a combination shot of three different agents, which takes 48 hours to restore the immune defences. The problem with that shot is that it’s expensive. In my day it cost £1,200 a pop, which was too rich for NHS patients’ blood.

Those poor souls received the same three drugs, but in three different syringes. That much cheaper alternative left them unprotected not for two days but for two weeks. They had to live for a fortnight knowing that any germ flying through the air was a poisoned bullet aimed at them.

This is just a bit of personal background to the impersonal statistics showing that the UK lags far behind other civilised nations in cancer survival rates. In just about all cancers, we’re at or near the bottom of the table.

Yes, I know the NHS is the envy of the world, as all other giant socialist projects always are. But the world clenches its teeth and manfully overcomes envy to get on with the business of saving lives.

Meanwhile, more than 100,000 British oncological patients a year are diagnosed when their cancer has already spread, reducing their chances of survival. The reason for this is given as NHS staff shortages, which I find baffling.

After all, the NHS is the biggest employer not just in the UK, not just in Europe, but in the world. Why then is it short of doctors and nurses saving people’s lives?

Anyone asking this question simply doesn’t understand socialism. It operates according to a law that says that any socialist enterprise, whatever its stated role, exists mainly for the benefit of its administrators and, ultimately. the state.

That’s why, while the frontline medical staffs are shrinking in the NHS, the administrative staffs are growing like mushrooms after an autumn rain. In fact, one gets the impression that doctors and nurses get in the way of the NHS’s real business, that entrusted to directors of diversity, optimisers of facilitation and facilitators of optimisation.

Whatever indispensable things those chaps can do, diagnosing cancer manifestly isn’t one of them. That’s why in 2017 115,000 cases were spotted only in advanced stages.

The same major study shows that three quarters of NHS services don’t treat cancer patients quickly enough. The guidelines call for 85 per cent of patients urgently referred by a GP being treated within 62 days (privately, I was treated within a fortnight).

Yet 94 of 131 cancer services in England failed to do that last year, almost a three-fold increase compared to five years ago. It’s useful to remember here that in some cancers an early diagnosis makes the difference between one in 10 dying and one in 10 surviving.

Every successive government pledges to throw more money at the NHS, and some even manage to do so. Politicians know vote getters and losers when they see them.

Even a hint at the remote possibility that perhaps other methods of providing medical services work better will spell the end of a promising political career – the voting public has been house-trained to worship the NHS with devotion formerly reserved for God.

This subject is impossible to discuss rationally and dispassionately. If you don’t believe me, just mention at a large party that papering the cracks in the NHS will never work, even if it becomes the only, not just the largest, UK employer.

Its problems, to use the medical parlance, are not symptomatic but systemic. The NHS, you might add, is run badly not because its practitioners are inadequate, but because its underlying idea is.

Then hasten to shield your head from the slings and arrows of the outrageous brainwashed. The projectiles will come in a swarm – as they always do when someone commits the ultimate sacrilege.

Meanwhile, the oncological argument goes on – and we are losing.

Replace the word ‘Jew’ in that question with, for example, Englishman, Frenchman or, for that matter, Christian or Muslim, and the answer would be reasonably straightforward.

Yes, a few taxonomic variations may be possible. Yet after some discussion, heated or otherwise, the argument can usually be settled.

The discussion could proceed by the process of elimination. Biting the dust by mutual agreement would be such impossible phrases as “He isn’t English; he’s a Catholic” or “He isn’t German; he looks Dutch” or “He isn’t French; he’s a Christian”.

Actually, France adopted laïcité as her essential national characteristic in 1905, and these days those seeking naturalisation have to prove they are comfortable with the notion. However, espousing Christianity or Judaism is still not seen as a disqualifying characteristic for citizenship, though things may well be moving in that direction.

Anyway, I suspect that Muslim applicants aren’t often ready to abandon their faith for secularism but, judging by their numbers admitted, the French system isn’t without some elasticity.

Some nations use different words for political and ethnic affiliations. ‘English’, for example, is these days an ethnic concept, while ‘British’ is mainly a political and cultural one: it may not include the ethnic element.

An outlander can become British by pledging allegiance to Her Majesty and thoroughly integrating into the British society and culture. But someone cursed with a less fortunate nativity can’t become English no matter how eager he is to swap cold vodka for warm beer.

If, according to Cecil Rhodes, “to be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life”, then the lucky ticket can only be drawn out of the mother’s womb.

The Russians have a similar distinction, which is lost in translation. The words rossiyanin and russkiy are both translated as ‘Russian’, and yet the conceptual difference between them is the same as between, respectively, ‘British’ and ‘English’ – the former may not include an ethnic component; the latter always does.

What about Jews then? Here no such clarity exists for many reasons, some obvious, some less so.

First, until 14 May, 1948, Jews didn’t have a state of their own. Hence they lived all over the world, and no definition of a Jew could have possibly included political or geographic aspects.

Yet, since even now Israel accounts for less than half of the world’s Jewish population, its existence doesn’t entirely settle the taxonomic issue.

Then there was the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered simply for being Jewish. The Nazis, ably assisted by their enthusiastic accomplices from all over Europe, especially its eastern part, therefore had to adopt their own definition of a Jew.

It was purely ethnic, based on what the proto-Nazi philosopher Fichte called jus sanguinis. A person with two or more Jewish grandparents was a Jew who didn’t deserve to live. He might have espoused Judaism or any other religion or none: nothing but das Blut mattered.

This was in marked contrast to the Kaiser, who declared that “We have no Jews in Germany. We only have Germans of the Judaic persuasion.” The German language of the time could have clearly benefited from the nuances available in English and Russian.

The Holocaust has affected the definition of a Jew prevalent in the West, not least among Western Jews themselves, especially in America. Since to Hitler a Jew was defined by his ethnicity, then anyone who deplored Hitler had to drop ethnicity from his definition.

Therefore Jewishness became synonymous with Judaism, and American Jews in particular will insist on this overlap against all logic and every available evidence. Being an argumentative sort, I’ve often tormented them with provocative questions.

“So no atheist Jews exist?” The typical reaction is that of consternation. “Why not?” I’d press on. “If a Jew is defined solely by Judaism, then no atheist can be Jewish. And if an atheist can be Jewish, then why can’t a baptised Jew?”

Another one of my stock questions is: “Is it possible for a person to look Jewish?” The reply based on ideology and emotion is an unequivocal no. One based on evidence before our eyes has to be an equally decisive yes.

What does, say, Woody Allen look like? An agnostic? And what about Sammy Davis Jr, who converted to Judaism? He didn’t look Jewish, and – call me a Nazi and report me to the Equality Commission – Woody Allen does.

Israel’s Law of Return doesn’t clarify matters either. According to it, any Jew anywhere in the world has a right to settle in Israel. But that brings the definition of a Jew into sharp focus.

The Law states that ‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.

The words I emphasised are a late addition to the ancient law, and they sound illogical to me. So worded, the Law of Return would bar such Christian converts as Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler or Simone Weil, while welcoming, say, Leon Trotsky, Yakov Sverdlov or, for that matter, Woody Allen.

In other words, a person may be a Jew for most of his life, but then stop being one by getting baptised. I wonder what the first 17 bishops of Jerusalem, all circumcised Jews, would have had to say about that.

Obviously, centuries of peripatetic existence make it hard to talk about any ethnic purity among the Jews. But then isn’t that also the case about many other, stationary, nationalities?

Some Russians, for example, look like Mongols and some others like Swedes, and yet they are all Russians. Frenchmen born and bred may look like Arabs or like Germans, while Boris Johnson, who’s as English as they come, has an extremely eclectic blood mix.

Yet for all their geographic uncertainty, many Ashkenazi Jews look like, well, Ashkenazi Jews, which has to point to some genetic pool shared at least partially, if not wholly.

This is also proved by a long list of diseases specific to Ashkenazi Jews. For example, they are 100 times likelier than anyone else to be afflicted with familial dysautonomia (Riley-Day syndrome). On a more joyous note, Jews also seem likelier than anyone else to play string instruments in symphony orchestras and win Nobel Prizes for science.

All this shows yet again how ideology can cloud one’s judgement. For, with numerous qualifications and disclaimers, Jewishness is largely an ethnic notion. An Englishman can’t stop being English while retiring to the Costa del Sol, and a Jew can’t stop being Jewish by renouncing Judaism.

That this was a view taken by the Nazis disqualifies it no more than Heidrich’s affection for Beethoven means we should shun the 32 piano sonatas. The crime of the Nazi murderers wasn’t that they defined Jewishness ethnically, but that they deemed that ethnicity sub-human and therefore subject to extermination.

I think – and my Israeli and American Jewish friends may disagree – that, by denying the blindingly obvious ethnic input, they divert the problem into a dead end, where fighting anti-Semitism becomes harder.

It’s impossible to affirm racial equality by denying the existence of racial identity. But, and many of my pieces end on this note, when ideology speaks, common sense falls silent.  

In 1729, Swift wrote A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.

The eponymous modest proposal was that such children be used for food. “A young healthy child well nursed,” wrote the Dean, “is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

The essay caused a backlash; some critics felt Swift’s flight of satirical fancy had taken him too far. Yet no commentators failed to see that it was indeed fanciful satire, not something to be taken literally.

Today A Modest Proposal would read as reportage. Cue in Prof. Magnus Soderlund, of Stockholm School of Economics, who believes that it’s about time society “awakened to the idea” of cannibalism.

Speaking on Swedish television, the good professor cogently explained that only thus can “our planet” be saved. You see, human flesh is more sustainable than meat or dairy products, and producing it has no adverse effects on climate change.

Since I’m pursued every night by nightmares of a planetary catastrophe caused by the consumption of hamburgers and pork chops, I’m sympathetic to the idea.

My only regret is that Prof. Soderlund failed to think his proposal through to its logical end. Unlike our great satirist, he only talked about scavenging, that is snacking on bodies already dead of natural causes.

Fair enough, those carcasses would otherwise go to waste, being either incinerated or buried to rot in the ground. Hence eating them would save our planet in two ways.

First, since Granny would be put to pasture only figuratively, her cultivation and feeding wouldn’t require tilling large tracts of land, which process jeopardises the planet almost as much as using deodorant sprays.

Second, since Granny could be fed on the carcasses of other Grannies who predeceased her, scavenging would in fact constitute recycling, which is tantamount to regeneration not only ecological but also moral.

However, while the planet lover in me applauds, the foodie sulks. For old people’s flesh has to be tough and stringy. Even with super-slow cooking, it would never achieve the juicy tenderness of younger meat.

Hence we shouldn’t ignore the nutritional and gastronomic advantages offered by stillborn children and, especially, foetuses aborted late, say in the third trimester.

The more one thinks about this, the more one appreciates Swift’s genius. For, from there it’s but a small step to slaughtering the post-natal babies of some undesirable people, such as global warming deniers, Islamophobes and Brexiteers.

The benefits would be staggering: promoting responsible nutrition, ecology, recycling – and cleansing society of the spawn of human vermin. I can already see a chain of human abattoirs, can’t you?

Prof. Soderlund graciously acknowledged that, alas, some anachronistic taboos of cannibalism still persist. But these can be expunged over time by “tricking” people into “making the right decision”. All it takes is “conversation” about eating human flesh, with Prof. Soderlund presumably acting as one party to that learned discourse.

This is where he went terribly wrong. For, if the aforementioned conversation is serious enough, no trickery should be necessary. People can be persuaded by rational arguments, and they may take the idea of cannibalism so close to heart that they’d actually eat Prof. Soderlund.

Lest you might think I’m prejudiced against Northern Europe (I am, but that’s a different story), another news item has caught my eye, this one dealing with France, my second home.

In 2013, Xavier X, whose full name can’t be revealed for legal reasons, went on a business trip from his Paris base to the Loiret. There he picked up a local woman, as one does, and took her to his hotel.

As the couple were consummating their budding love, Xavier X suffered a heart attack and, as the crude saying goes, came and went at the same time. His family immediately sued Mr X’s employer, for a hefty lawsuit is a natural by-product of bereavement.

The family’s lawyers, enthusiastically supported by French labour authorities, argued that, since Mr X had gone to the Loiret on his employer’s behalf, his death should be classified as an accident du travail, making his company liable for damages.

The company’s lawyers objected that, although Mr X did indeed die on the job, that wasn’t the job his employer had sent him out to do. However, that argument didn’t cut much ice.

The trial dragged on a bit, but yesterday the court found for the plaintiff. Mr X’s widow and children will receive 80 per cent of his salary until what would have been his retirement age. After that the company will be making sizeable contributions to the pension.

I can only repeat what many others have said before me: modernity makes satire redundant. Today’s Sophocleses, Juvenals and Swifts would be reporters or political commentators. Their readers might still laugh, but only through tears.

No, not that. It’s just that the president has been attacked by Mick Jagger, the leading light of the rather crepuscular Rolling Stones.

This marks a new tendency for Jagger. These days he likes to shoot from the lip, and God knows that’s a high-calibre weapon.

In the past, the Stone used to refrain from political pronouncements, instead choosing to lead by example. The examples he led by included starring in street riots, indulging in highly publicised sexual athleticism and consuming every illegal substance, imaginable or otherwise.

Plying his trade in the extension of the pharmaceutical industry that goes by the misnomer of music, Mick and his illustrious accomplices, such as John Lennon, were the shamans of a new cult: anomic, deracinated nihilism with satanic overtones.

They screamed their hatred for ‘the establishment’ so loudly that in the din no one caught the moment when they themselves became the establishment. They despised capitalism all the way to the capitalist bank.

Now, it’s wrong to dehumanise those one doesn’t like. Some people are too quick to describe their opponents as inhuman, subhuman or less than human, which diminishes not only those on the receiving end but indeed the very notion of humanity.

That’s why it’s essential to state that Mick and his colleagues are human both physiologically and, if you will, theologically. Having established that, and thus warded off any accusations of stridency, one is hard-pressed to define them as fully human in any other senses, especially those involving intelligence and morality.

Even rockers who start out with something approaching three-digit IQs then addle their brains with lifelong drug use. Hence typical rockers’ morality approaches that of a rabbit, while their intellect places them somewhere between a dachshund and a courgette, which ideally qualifies them to act as gurus to youngsters with gonadic minds.

However, unlike Lennon, Jagger was in the past worthy of some respect for merely showing youngsters how to live, rather than teaching them with highfalutin anarchist platitudes. Now he has forfeited any entitlement even to such qualified praise.

For he has come out to attack Donald Trump for his lack of – are you ready for this? – civility. That’s like Adolph Hitler castigating a US president for stifling racial equality.

Jagger bewailed “the polarisation and incivility in public life”, and really he shouldn’t use such long words. He’s better off sticking to his profound aphorisms of the past, such as “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need” or “A good thing never ends”.

“In my own country,” added Mick, things are just as bad, with Boris Johnson calling Jeremy Corbyn names, such as “chlorinated chicken”. (Note to Boris: When sniping at Corbyn, try not to hit Trump by ricochet. American chlorinated chicken is expected to figure prominently among the items specified in any future trade deal.)

One didn’t hear Jagger protest when Corbyn’s flunkeys were comparing Johnson to Hitler, so his championship of civility is selective. It’s also of recent vintage: he used to accuse Britain of being “too moderate” and “boring”. Now that Boris is belatedly trying to correct that image, old Mick is upset.

But never mind civility or lack thereof. Not only does Trump destroy social mores, but he also wreaks the same destruction on the whole planet by his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

Now, contrary to what Jagger thinks (as it were), the president made that decision not out of a perverse urge to annihilate ‘the planet’, but because he felt that other countries neglected the Agreement’s provisions, thereby unduly penalising America and other civilised nations.

China, in particular, produces almost twice as much CO2 emissions as the United States, and the Chinese are churning out coal-fired power stations faster than anyone else. But of course, the Chinese, being both communist and off-white, are above criticism.

This isn’t to say that there should be no serious discussion about responsible environmentalism – only that Jagger isn’t the man to conduct it. Such matters ought to be left to the adults.

Jagger’s whole career was shaped by catering to adolescents, which has done wonders for his bank balance but destroyed whatever little ability he ever had to talk to grown-ups in their own language. Even worse, Jagger still identifies with the young, which is frankly pathetic in a man of 76.

His current idol is the mentally disturbed child Greta Thunberg, whose followers have just attempted to disrupt the Venice Film Festival, that immediate threat to ‘the planet’. “I am so glad that people feel so strongly about that that they want to protest,” said Jagger with his customary eloquence. That, then, is what he means by civility.

Please don’t take this as an attack on Mick Jagger – it isn’t. My problem isn’t with Jagger, but with a world where the likes of him have a wide, gasping audience lapping up their drug-inspired ideological nonsense.

I don’t know what Jagger is on these days but, if it’s cocaine, I wish he switched to heroin. Cocaine boosts activity and loquacity, while opiates have a relaxing, soporific effect and encourage silence. Mind you, he knows infinitely more about such matters than I do.

More than a year ago, I wrote a piece with a self-explanatory title: http://www.alexanderboot.com/the-apparat-is-invincible/.

I wish the intervening 14 months had proved me wrong, but, alas, they haven’t. The apparat has triumphed again, and we must brace ourselves for some 75 per cent of our laws continuing to come from Brussels and the rest from the Corbyn-McDonnell junta.

Parliament is forcing a three-month delay in Brexit, on top of the three years by which it has already been delayed. Out of idle interest, what’s the delay supposed to achieve that the previous three years haven’t managed to?

The only tangible achievement will be a great chaos and a further discrediting of the Tory party, along with the growing contempt of politics in general.

Coming next will be a mournful admission that, much as parliament would love to comply with the British people’s wish to leave the EU, this, alas, is proving impossible.

So good-bye to Brexit – and hello to an evil Marxist gang taking over in a bloodless coup. The apparat will yet again ride roughshod over loyalty to either major party and indeed to Britain, all in the name of democracy and parliamentary sovereignty.

These shibboleths are supposed to make everyone jump up and salute – and certainly not wonder what either democracy or parliamentary sovereignty has to do with this on-going obscenity.

On second thoughts, our MPs perhaps think that, since sovereignty belongs to parliament, it’s free to do with it as it pleases. If you wish to give your book to a friend, you can exercise your property rights and do so, can’t you? Likewise, parliament must feel free to offer its sovereignty as a present to anyone it wishes, including the EU (neither Saudi Arabia nor Putin’s Russia seems a likely receiver of such largesse, yet).

This shameful calamity has been largely made possible by a group of Tory lackeys to the apparat, who, by betraying their leader at a critical moment, proved what hardly needed proving, that they are Tories in name only.

Of that group, Boris’s brother Jo, Minister for Universities, committed an act of multiple betrayal by resigning his post and parliamentary seat. He betrayed not only his party and his people, but also his brother – at a time when Boris was fighting tooth and nail to do what both the people and, subsequently, parliament voted for and what both major parties pledged to do in their elections manifestos.

This sort of thing evokes the memory of Cain and Abel or, to offer a more recent and less dramatic example, Ed and David Miliband. (After all, Ed stabbed his brother in the back only metaphorically.)

A brother’s motivation to betray a brother may vary. It could be simple sibling rivalry for the love of the parents or, in Cain’s case, God. Or it could be boundless careerism, as in the case of Ed Miliband. Or it could be any number of deplorable but humanly understandable reasons. Nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry.

But Jo Johnson’s explanation of his betrayal, while definitely deplorable, has an extra quality of being emetically mendacious and sanctimonious. Apparently, he was torn between “family loyalty and national interest”, and national interest won out.

Being in a generous mood, I may accept that Jo actually does think that staying in the EU is in our national interest. The likelihood of this is less than one per cent, but it’s not nonexistent.

But surely, as an experienced political hand, he must realise that choosing the apparat over his party and its leader at this moment raises the possibility of a Corbyn-McDonnell government from likely to almost certain.

Surely he can’t think that would be in the national interest? Well if he does, the other day I outlined the ramifications of such a disaster, so I shan’t repeat myself. In any case, yesterday John McDonnell made my argument for me.

Comrade McDonnell vindicates his Marxist credentials by hating private enterprise in general and the financial industry in particular. Income, to a Marxist, must be earned by labour, ideally physical, not by manipulating money.

That’s why he froths at the mouth when he sees that the City of London delivers at least a quarter of our GDP, and that some of those who work there receive large bonuses.

Well, “change is coming”, he declared. Referring to the City, the Shadow Chancellor said: “If it hasn’t learnt its lesson, we will take action, I’ll give them that warning now. It’s a reflection of the grotesque levels of inequality that people now find so offensive. Action will be taken, full stop.”

Another action to be taken, according to Comrade McDonnell, is a transfer of £300 billion worth of shares to workers, something that has never been done in a Western country before.

What kind of action does McDonnell have in mind? It might have escaped his attention that both British factories and City firms are accountable only to their owners or, if publicly owned, shareholders. Only their boards of directors are thus empowered to decide whom and how much they pay in salaries and bonuses.

To take the kind of action McDonnell is warning of, that power will have to be wrested out of their hands and transferred to, well, McDonnell. This is consistent with Marxism, but not with anything historically acceptable in civilised countries.

What this ghoul, the greasy eminence of the Corbyn junta, is talking about is wholesale nationalisation guaranteed to reduce Britain to the status of the poorer end of the Third World. Maduro’s Venezuela, much beloved of Corbyn and McDonnell, springs to mind.

Is this the kind of national interest Jo Johnson had in mind? What a disgusting man.   

We all know about history and the subjunctive mood, and how the former has no latter. Fine.

However, we’d be well-advised not to think that, because things happen, they’re bound to happen. Different scenarios are often possible – and always enjoyable – to imagine.

The Second World War, for example, could have easily taken a different course.

It would have required just a few events going the other way. Such as Britain seeking peace with Germany in early July, 1940, just after the Nazis overran France but before they started those air raids on British cities.

Should that have happened, the Duke of Windsor would have again become Edward VIII, and Britain would probably still have her Empire, albeit in a truncated shape. The Nazis, on the other hand, would have attacked the Soviet Union without having to use a great chunk of their armed forces to cover their rear.

Considering how thoroughly they routed the Red Army in 1941 even with that handicap, it’s not hard to imagine Stalin suing for peace in the autumn of that year. Hitler, on the other hand, would have had no reason to press his advantage all the way to Moscow: he could have contented himself with downgrading Stalin’s military capability to a level where it would present no threat.

The Third Reich could then establish its eastern border along the Dnieper, guaranteeing a steady supply of natural resources and more Lebensraum than Germany would ever need. The war would have ended in December, 1941, and by now Europe would have had 78 years of peace.

What would have happened during this time? Hitler would have been ousted in the 1960s, when he became too old and feeble to micromanage all of Europe. Shortly thereafter he would have died under suspicious circumstances: totalitarian dictators seldom die under any other.

Economically, the Third Reich would have begun to suffer by then. Although the grinder of the Holocaust would have run out of material long ago, the memory of it would have been too vivid for the rapidly globalising economy, led by the US, Britain and Japan, to be overly hospitable to Germany.

Hitler’s successors would have then declared that the Third Reich was thenceforth a democracy. In fact, it wasn’t even the Third Reich any longer. It was now a German Federation, with all its constituent republics, from the Ukraine and Poland in the east to France and Iberia in the west, exercising almost as much autonomy as the US states.

The National Socialist Workers’ Party would have been renamed the International Socialist Businessmen’s Party, with its livery changed accordingly.

Germany would still enjoy some control, but she’d certainly loosen the reins. The Gauleiters, who until then would have possessed dictatorial powers in the constituent republics of the German Federation, would remain in place in an overseeing capacity only.

To reflect that, they’d now be called not Gauleiters, but Commissioners. They’d only interfere if a constituent republic refused to adhere to the strict fiscal discipline demanded by the German economy and national character, or else if the nationalist sentiments in places like Hungary became too strong.

Germany would have issued an apology to all her European satraps, now called partners, for the worst excesses of Nazism. To prove that such crimes could never be committed again, Germany would adopt a pan-German constitution demanding that both the metropolis and its partners held regular elections, with the small proviso that every party involved had to accept Germany’s leadership (Führung) and renounce secession.

Between 1965, the year of Hitler’s death, and 1992, the German Federation would have been accepted as an equal partner in the family of nations. It would feature prominently at all summit meetings of world leaders, those whose countries were as democratic as Germany would now have been seen to become.

Tight control over her European partners would no longer have been necessary, and the German government, working hand in hand with its biggest and most willing partner, France, would have decided to recall its Commissioners from the outer reaches of the Federation.

They’d all be put together at a single location in a major European city – say, for the sake of argument, Brussels. The Commission thus formed would still exercise control, but it would now be subtler and less hands-on.

At that point, to reflect the seemingly greater autonomy of the partner nations, the German government would have felt that the reichsmark, the single currency of the Federation, would have to change its name for something less overtly German. It would henceforth have been called the euromark, or the euro for short.

The Federation itself would have outlived its purpose. After all, a federation implies the existence of a metropolis at its core. Germany would have naturally acted in that capacity, but it was felt that the old name might stoke up local patriotism.

The name would have been thus changed for the European Union of Equal Partners, or the EU, as it would have become commonly known.

In line with that development, the Commission would have decreed that the medieval expression ‘all roads lead to Rome’ would henceforth read ‘all roads lead to Brussels’.

You see how interesting the ‘What if…’ version of history could be? Fantasy can sometimes elucidate reality – to a point where we’d no longer know where one ends and the other begins.

This isn’t a coup of parliament against the government. It’s not even one of parliament against the people.

No, for the first time in British history, the coup over the past two days was staged by the apparat against the government, against the people – and against the greatest constitution the world has ever known.

The people’s will has been defied, the government has been rendered impotent, and the apparat has ridden roughshod over party loyalties for the sake of preserving and increasing its own power. All in the name of democracy of course, the upholding of popular sovereignty.

Brexit is now unlikely to happen, while the most subversive opposition in British history, that led by unapologetic Trotskyists Corbyn and McDonnell, is likely to snatch power. It’s already calling the shots even without an electoral mandate.

One can hear corks popping in Brussels even as we speak. And the eurocrats have every reason to be jubilant.

Just imagine you’re an EU leader, and you’ve devoted your whole life to the creation, preservation and expansion of a giant supranational state. What’s your greatest fear?

It has to be that, rather than adding more new members, that contrivance will start shedding those it already has. All it takes is one significant member leaving and actually doing well out of it.

Such a result would fling the floodgates open, and before long the EU will be reduced to a united Franco-German state. Allemance? Francmany? Germance? Call it what you like, it would still spell a disaster, a collapse of your lifelong dream.

Suddenly, Britain, one of the three most important members, holds a referendum, and its people vote to leave. But the country’s cross-party apparat doesn’t want to go. It’s prepared to work with you behind the scenes to achieve what you want, not what the British people want.

Using the kind of perfidy that, according to Napoleon, is the defining characteristic of the British, the apparat manages to trick the country into a situation where it won’t under any circumstances leave without a ‘deal’.

Would you be prepared to offer a ‘deal’ that would make Brexit more likely? Of course not. You’d offer something that’s clearly unacceptable, a sort of new version of the French leave: saying good-bye without actually leaving.

In fact, you’ve already offered such a ‘deal’, and it has been thrice voted down by parliament after three years of deliberate procrastination and nauseating double-talk.

Are you now going to offer one that parliament will accept? Not unless you want not only to cut off your nose but also to rip out your heart.

The upshot is that Britain has now effectively declared it won’t leave without a ‘deal’, while you’ve stated in no uncertain terms that no deal is on offer. The only conceivable result is that Britain won’t leave. Sorted. Brexit is dead and buried.

Alas, the dirge we hear isn’t just for Brexit. It’s for the constitution of the United Kingdom. It has been subverted and prostituted, with the probable effect of the Corbyn-McDonnell junta grabbing power.

The consequences of such a development will be infinitely more catastrophic than even staying in the EU. Unlike a no-deal Brexit, where endless arguments about its aftermath are possible, there’s no arguing about the absolute, unshakable certainty of the disaster befalling Britain should those evil ghouls start running our lives.

Freedom will be curtailed in every possible way, private property will be nationalised or otherwise stolen, foreign currency will be restricted, taxes will skyrocket, borrowing will stop being profligate to become suicidal, crime will be not so much fought as encouraged, new waves of alien immigration will flood the country, capitals will flee – closely followed by capitalists, investors, foreign firms and those Britons who cherish their freedom, brains will drain out, economy will collapse…

Britain, in other words, will suffer calamities a parallel for which could be found in post-Exodus Egypt, but nowhere in British history. But the apparat will survive and thrive, which is all that matters to it.

Johnson, his back to the wall, will seek a snap general election, but he’s unlikely to get it. Two-thirds of MPs would have to support the motion, and the government has nowhere near that kind of majority.

Corbyn and McDonnel have been demanding a general election for years, but now they can smell power without having to risk going to the people. So they’ve changed their tune. No general election then, not until Britain has crawled back into the EU, her tail between her legs, and the Tories have lost all credibility.

Labour, the LibDems, Scottish nationalists and Tory turncoats all have their delegates in the apparatchik cabal, and the apparat is in charge now – supported by the civil service, thoroughly politicised by Blair, the most revolting man and the worst constitutional vandal ever to disgrace Downing Street.

Sorry to be sounding so uncharacteristically impassioned, but I can’t stay calmly detached when my home is going to the dogs. Ghastly, ferocious dogs – of the kind I saw running wild in the country of my youth.

Is this really Britain? Could have fooled me.

Everything in life, from governing a big state to running a small household, must have a hierarchical structure. Remove that, and chaos ensues.

Western civilisation was based on the understanding that, in matters secular, all men aren’t created equal. Modernity overturned this understanding by claiming the opposite was “self-evident” (meaning it could be neither proved nor demonstrated).

Since then the West has been trying to shoehorn reality into the confines of this fallacy. And some things have proved elastic enough to withstand such treatment.

For example, Western economy has benefited, on balance, from the democratic ability to spread wealth as widely as possible. Stratification remains, of course, and always will. But the lower strata are doing better than they’ve ever done at any other time or in any other place.

However, even there democracy isn’t an unqualified success. One of its by-products is a vast parasitic underclass born out of the culture of entitlement implicit in egalitarianism. This creates conditions for economic catastrophes, for Western governments have to live way beyond their means to accommodate millions of economic spongers.

Still, perfection is unattainable in this world. Even in today’s promiscuous corporatist economies, anybody who really wants to make a decent living can do so, provided he applies much – possibly all – of himself to that task.

This is manifestly not the case with the finer things in life, those dealing with the spirit rather than the stomach. There, an attempt to remove hierarchical tiers is tantamount to wanton destruction.

For, while the simple task of making a living isn’t beyond most people, the difficult task of acquiring real culture is. That’s why comprehensive education is an oxymoron: the more comprehensive it is, the less it’ll educate.

Some things just aren’t meant for wide consumption. Music, real music that is, is one example: it was created for few by fewer. Once the culture of patronage by the few went the way of most social hierarchies, music had to be financed by box office receipts.

Hence it had to become democratic, with millions of people voting with their cash for the kind of performances they liked. Music thus had to cater to common (in the sense of both general and crude) tastes, which gradually led it from the sublime to the cor-blime.

These days, concert platforms proudly feature fleet-fingered semi-nude girls as full of breast as they are empty of mind, who succeed in lowering the most magnificent creation of man’s spirit to the level of pop excretions.

The same democratic egalitarianism is ruining languages. There too, a little learning is all that’s widely available, for the simple reason that most people aren’t capable of absorbing more than that.

Alexander Pope warned of the concomitant dangers three centuries ago: “A little learning is a dangerous thing;// drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:// there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,// and drinking largely sobers us again.”

Apart from creating a popular expression, Pope communicated the lamentable fact that most people can’t drink deep – shallow draughts of learning are all they can manage.

Yet democracy promotes a sense of not only economic but also cultural entitlement. The assumption is that, since we’re all created equal, we’re also created equally cultured.

Before that fallacy took hold, language had been as stratified as the social hierarchy. There existed broad swathes of lexicon that were the exclusive domain of seriously educated people. The rest had no access to such vocabulary and thus were in no position to mangle it.

The democratic presupposition put paid to such exclusivity. A little knowledge is now universally available, and people do avail themselves of it. The results can be comic.

Now, I’ve never met an educated person who’d mock an uneducated one for using plain words of one or two syllables. On the contrary, such a chap is often praised for expressing himself clearly and unpretentiously.

However, neither have I ever met an educated person able to suppress a sardonic smile when an ignoramus misuses a long word or a foreign expression.

Actually, the French are even likelier than we are to provide such entertainment. They still teach things like philosophy and Latin at school, which exacerbates the natural French tendency to intellectual posturing.

Thus you can hear French football commentators (football commentators, for heaven’s sake!) utter astounding sentences, such as: “He’s a superlative player a priori, but in extremis he may be grosso modo careless in front of the goal.”

What’s wrong with, say, “He’s a good player, but he misses many sitters under pressure”? If you have to ask, you aren’t French.

Our commentators misuse words too, but at least they shun Latin solecisms – not because they know that a priori means ‘based on a self-evident postulate’, not ‘at first glance’, but because their comprehensive education kept such phrases off-limits. Nor do they share their French counterparts’ compulsion to sound like homespun philosophers.

Nevertheless, we too have to smile at numerous attempts by democratically egalitarian people to sound sophisticated. Thus, every time I hear someone say “it reaches a crescendo”, I have the same involuntary reaction as Himmler is, wrongly, believed to have had when hearing the word ‘culture’.

‘Crescendo’, lads, is a way of reaching a point, not the point reached, but that knowledge has fallen through the cracks in our comprehensive education.

And it’s not just long words but also foreign phrases that are bent out of shape by untutored hands. For example, describing a highly exclusive party in an interview, Helen Mirren once said that “all the hoi polloi were there.”

It would be unnecessarily pedantic to point out that, because ‘hoi polloi’ means ‘the many’ in Greek, preceding it with the definite article is like saying ‘the the many’. But, God bless her, our celebrated actress actually thinks the expression means ‘high society’, which is, well, funny.

For fear of boring you, I’ll spare you a long list of foreign-sounding words and phrases that are routinely disfigured in the public domain where they don’t belong. Suffice it to say that democracy won’t be kept within the confines of politics.

It sends shock waves throughout society, and in some areas they have the same effect as Hurricane Dorian has had on the Bahamas.