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The case of Shamima Begum raises interesting questions about citizenship in general, and its links with other aspects of nationality.

Home Secretary Javid has stripped Begum of her British citizenship, though I’m not solipsistic enough to claim he was following my recommendation.

I did argue in favour of this measure (http://www.alexanderboot.com/welcome-back-miss-jihad/) a week ago, but I shan’t insist on a causative relationship.

However, some good men disagree with Mr Javid’s decision and by inference with my recommendation. One such good man is Stephen Glover, who sums up all the arguments contra in today’s article.

Its title is so long and so clear that the subsequent text seems almost redundant: “The Jihad Bride Is a Monster, But She’s OUR Monster And Must Return Home to Face British Justice”.

What makes Begum OUR monster is the little booklet that enabled her to travel the ISIS way: the British passport, to which she was entitled by birth.

“She is as British as I am,” writes Mr Glover in his typically thoughtful piece. “Mr Javid can’t change that.”

In arguing against this respectable but in my view mistaken position I may belie my earlier repudiation of solipsism. For Mr Glover touches on issues that involve me personally.

Like Mr Glover and Miss Begum, I’m a British citizen (or rather subject, which is my preferred term). Unlike them, I wasn’t born in Britain, even though I’ve lived here more than twice as long as Miss Begum, if not quite as long as Mr Glover.

Yet I maintain, perhaps presumptuously, that I’m as British as Mr Glover. More to the point, I’m British and Miss Begum isn’t.

That gets us back to the title of this article, implicit in which is the belief that the issue isn’t quite as simple as all that.

Now I have first-hand knowledge of four countries that can be divided into two groups: Britain and Russia in one, the US and France in the other.

In the second group, there’s no semantic distinction between ethnicity and political allegiance; in the first group, there is.

In the case of Russia, this distinction doesn’t come across in English, but it exists in Russian. An ethnic Russian is called ruskiy, a Russian citizen is called rossiyanin. Both words are translated as ‘Russian’, but they mean different things.

One either is russkiy or not, that’s just an accident of birth. However, one can become a rossiyanin even if born, say, Scottish (although I can’t for the life of me imagine why any good Scot transplanted to Russia would want to be eternally mocked for wearing a ‘skirt’).

Similarly, one can’t become English – one either is or isn’t, and I’m not prepared to discuss every possible ethnic admixture an Englishman might have acquired over the millennia.

However, contrary to what Cecil Rhodes thought, one can become British and “win first prize in the lottery of life” even without being born in the British Isles.

In the US and France the semantic distinction doesn’t exist. The same word describes all Americans, whether native-born or naturalised, and this is the case in France too.

But connotations are just as important as denotations. The two words, ‘American’ and ‘français’ imply both political allegiance and cultural affinity, but that’s where the similarity ends because these nations put a different emphasis on the two components.

An American must hold not only an American passport but also American beliefs. The concept is thus defined mainly politically and ideologically, with culture a distant third and ethnicity even further down.

One often hears the phrase “Americanism isn’t a race; it’s an idea”. Therefore accepting that idea and pledging allegiance to its political embodiment make one an American even in the absence of any other qualifications.

Hence it’s possible to become an American and yet speak only rudimentary English, know next to nothing about American history or culture and prefer slow to fast food.

In fact, if memory serves, the US citizenship exam asks no questions at all about American culture. It’s all “How many states are there?”, “What are the three branches of government?” and “Who was the first president?”

By contrast, the French nationality test includes at least 60 questions on French culture and history. For the French, the linguistic and cultural aspects of their nationality are at least as important as the political one, perhaps even more so.

Thus, watching French TV one often hears described as français Francophones from, say, Senegal or Algeria who aren’t French citizens. However, one never hears a former British colonial, say a Nigerian citizen, described as British even if English is his mother tongue.

And a foreigner in America may sound like John Wayne, but, unless he’s a citizen, he won’t be regarded as American. The political component is much stronger in ‘American’ and ‘British’ than in ‘French’.

So let me reiterate that, while it’s impossible to become English, it’s possible to become British.

When that honour was bestowed on me by a magistrate who happened to be a friend, I pledged allegiance to the Crown and sang God Save the Queen in its entirety, including that egregiously reactionary verse (Oh Lord our God arise,// Scatter our enemies,// And make them fall// Confound their politics// Frustrate their knavish tricks,// On Thee our hopes we fix// Oh save us all.)

That was a deeply emotional experience, I’m man enough to admit, because I actually believed every word I sang, including the politically incorrect verse. I felt British, and I always will.

On that day I entered into a bilateral contract with Her Majesty’s realm, and so far both parties have followed its terms and conditions. Most of the other British subjects may enter into the same compact at birth, but they do enter into it.

Yet every contract includes, implicitly at least, cancellation terms providing for situations under which it could be declared null and void. Hence it stands to reason to suppose that, if British citizenship can be given, it can also be taken away.

In other words, there’s more to British citizenship than that little booklet – even if it’s not stated in so many words.

As I understand it, the implications go beyond political allegiance, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition. There’s also a raft of meaning hiding behind a simple personal pronoun: we.

Who’s the person’s ‘we’? Again speaking for myself, Britain is the third country whose citizenship I’ve held. Yet the British are the first people to whom I refer as ‘we’.

I won’t go into the numerous cultural, linguistic and family ties I have with Britain. Suffice it to say that I feel British – emotionally, intellectually culturally, linguistically. I pass the Tebbit test with flying colours.

Why, I’ll even go so far as to say that I’m as British as Mr Glover, if considerably less English than he is. And I’ll go even further and say that, while Mr Glover and I are British, Miss Begum isn’t – regardless of where she was born.

Would she include my wife Penelope, my friends Peter and Tony, or for that matter members of HMG into her ‘we’? No. Does she have any cultural affinity for Britain? No. Does she maintain political allegiance to Britain? No. Would she mourn the deaths of British soldiers more than the deaths of their enemies? No.

In Mr Glover’s eyes none of that matters. To him Miss Begum is British because she holds that little piece of paper. Sorry, but it takes more than that.

Before you gasp with wrath, let me reassure you that anti-Semitism doesn’t figure on my list of virtues. Anti-Semitism in general, that is.

However, in particular, we have to be grateful for Labour anti-Semitism. It’s thanks to that charming bias deeply felt and avidly fostered by Corbyn and his entourage that we just may be spared the most evil government in British history.

Eight Labour MPs have left the party in disgust, and more will doubtless join the independent group they’ve formed. Even though three Tory MPs, all dripping wet and Remainers, have followed suit, Labour will probably suffer greater attrition.

Then, much to Tony Blair’s fear and my delight, Corbyn’s wicked party may well become unelectable for a generation.

Though I rejoice, I can’t add my voice to the dithyrambic chorus about the magnificent eight, with Daniel Finkelstein as both soloist and choir master.

First, their action had an element of jumping before being pushed – all those moderate MPs (moderate by Labour standards, that is) were about to be deselected anyway.

But that apart, I’m amazed that anti-Semitism seems to be the only thing they dislike about Corbyn’s party.

By inference, they don’t mind the class war the Corbynistas are trying to conflagrate. They are happy with their economic policies, which aren’t just likely but absolutely guaranteed to beggar the country in a matter of weeks. They have no objections to Corbyn hating all our friends and loving all our enemies (as a kind man, I shan’t give you the list of the latter so close to night-time).

They may be a bit unhappy about Corbyn’s dislike for the EU, but that by itself wouldn’t have made them leave the party and scupper its electoral chances. Only the virulent and burgeoning Labour anti-Semitism could do that – so thank goodness for Labour anti-Semitism.

Another thing I find astounding is that so many people are surprised at this little trait rearing its head within the ranks of a socialist party. They wouldn’t be so surprised if they understood the nature of both socialism and modern anti-Semitism – and how the two enjoy a symbiotic relationship.

The most immediate link comes from the socialists’ deeply held belief in the intrinsic injustice of capitalism. Since Jews manifestly succeed within that system better than just about any other group, they have to be seen – and hated – as transmitters and propagators of injustice.

Moreover, pushing that logic to its extreme, a success within an unjust system can only be achieved by unjust means. Hence the Jews do so well because they collude to trick everybody else, cheating them out of their birthright.

This is roughly what Marx, the patron saint of socialism, preached, and he did use the words ‘Jew’ and ‘capitalist’ interchangeably. Such is the most immediate impulse to Jew-hatred, which naturally flows out of the very essence of socialism.

(I’m specifically talking here about modern Jew-hatred, the most virulent form of anti-Semitism. Many other forms exist too, such as the petty snobbery often displayed by clubbable gentlemen, or the contempt exponents of other religions feel for infidels.)

Yet there are also deeper, less obvious impulses, those that explain why in modern times the worst anti-Semitic atrocities have been committed by socialists, of either a national or an international hue.

All such ideologies see mankind collectively, as an agglomerate of friendly or hostile groups. The key word there is neither ‘friendly’ nor ‘hostile’, but ‘groups’. International socialists define these by class; national ones by nation or sometimes race.

Both presume homogeneity within each group, or at least enough commonality to reduce any individual differences to trivial idiosyncrasies. Both swear by the good of a strong state, sometimes reduced to the personality of the leader.

Reduction, in this and many other cases, spells seduction. Ideologues of collectivism (or populism, which is its variant) use simple slogans to overcome the resistance of potential recruits.

For resistance can be fierce. Western civilisation lives and breathes an entirely different ethic, one based on the unique, sovereign value of each individual, no matter how meek and insignificant, or how rich and strong, or how foreign and alien.

Collectivists’ survival then depends on their ability to introduce a different ethic, which is impossible to do without consigning the other one to oblivion.

That other, formative ethic of our civilisation rightly goes by the name Judaeo-Christian. It was vouchsafed to Jews who then, after some essential Christian refinements, spread it all over the world.

Hence zoological hostility to Judaeo-Christianity, especially the first part, is a collectivist’s quest for survival. He knows – or simply senses instinctively – that, for his ethic to live, the other ethic has to die.

That’s why when Jews become socialists, they have to renounce their Judaism. Marx’s anti-Semitism was thus nothing but logical, and he isn’t the only example.

During the Russian civil war, a delegation of Russian Jews begged Trotsky, as a Jew himself, to stop the pogroms being perpetrated by the Reds. “I’m not a Jew,” replied Trotsky, “I’m a Bolshevik”. He too was logical. One precluded the other.

This doesn’t mean that people who vote Labour or even belong to the party are all anti-Semites. Far from it. But it does mean that the inner logic of their ideology escapes them.

Most of them don’t think their politics through. They just respond to some vague signals emitted by Zeitgeist-shaping propaganda.

To their thoroughly scoured minds, socialism equates general share-care-be-aware goodness, a condensate of Christian virtue, mercifully minus Christ. They may be good people, but they’re bad socialists.

Of all schools of political thought, only conservatism, tightly defined and properly understood, is incompatible with anti-Semitism. Scratch an anti-Semite, and you’ll always find a collectivist.

For example, though I defer to no one in my admiration of Belloc and especially Chesterton, their anti-Semitism was directly linked to their politics of distributism, a sort of vulgar Christian socialism.

However, when the evil of anti-Semitism can stop the evil of Corbyn, one is perversely grateful. Small favours indeed, but favours nonetheless.

Members of the royal family should know better than to marry American women of an eventful past and objectionable politics.

Or, to be on the safe side, any American women full stop. It may be impossible for an American to fathom the ethos of an institution going back many centuries.

Some 80 years ago one such marriage caused a constitutional crisis and almost put paid to the British monarchy.

Given the choice between his country and lurv, Edward VIII chose the latter. He abdicated and married a twice-divorced American woman who tickled his naughty bits with a virtuosity honed in Chinese brothels.

To be fair, it wasn’t just sexual compatibility but also political commonality that lay at the foundation of that luv: both HRH and Wallis shared admiration for the wonderful things Hitler was doing in Germany.

Unlike Wallis, however, HRH had – or rather should have – imbibed with his mother’s milk a sense of royal duty. He should have known that kings’ lives aren’t entirely their own.

Realms no longer belong to their monarchs, but monarchs do belong to their realms. Their undivided loyalty is pledged to their country, their people and their dynasty.

Hence lurv shouldn’t be a primary consideration in their choice of bride, nor even a secondary one. The only criterion should be the extent to which the marriage would contribute to the duty of service.

Prince Harry’s marriage can’t be as potentially damaging to the monarchy as the Duke of Windsor’s was – for the simple reason that, barring some catastrophe, Harry will never be king.

But, regardless of how low he is in the succession pecking order (Harry is currently sixth), he’s still the Queen’s grandson – and his wife is Her Majesty’s granddaughter-in-law. Hence their marriage has far-reaching ramifications for the realm and its constitution.

Our constitution blended with custom limits the extent to which royal personages can vent their political views – to my occasional regret.

I’d dearly love to know, for example, how Her Majesty felt in 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty set her on a path at the end of which she was going to become Elizabeth Windsor, EU citizen. But she won’t tell us because she can’t.

Prince Charles is rather more loquacious, but he too limits his public self-expression to marginal matters, such as the horror of our architecture or the plight of our environment. He steers clear of hot political issues and, though one could guess what his politics are, one can’t know for sure.

With the Duchess of Sussex, there’s no doubt whatsoever. She’s an American actress who, in common with most of her colleagues, subscribes to every hare-brained ‘liberal’ fad – without realising how crushingly illiberal they all are.

And being a celebrity, particularly an American one, she feels entitled to share her views with a public still drooling over her steamy scenes in Suits.

Hence, when visiting City University of London, the freshly baked duchess felt duty-bound to suggest that its curricula be “decolonised”. Implicit in that suggestion is her disapproval of the British Empire.

She is of course entitled to her opinion – as a private person. But as a very public member of the family that presided over that empire, she should keep that view to herself.

But what exactly does she mean by decolonisation? Well, for one thing, she wants British universities to devote as much attention to black studies and some such as American universities do.

Universities, said Meghan, should “open a debate” to avoid “continuing with the daily rote” because “sometimes that approach can be really antiquated and needs an update.” By inference, she’s the one to update it.

Meghan, do you have a feeling you’re not in Hollywood anymore? Academic affirmative action, shoving down students’ throats subjects of dubious academic value, has wreaked havoc on American universities, devaluing most BA degrees to a status of, at best, high school diplomas of yesteryear.

The same trend is under way in Britain, if at a slightly slower pace. We have an ample supply of our own intellectual saboteurs, thank you very much.

Given her background, Meghan may not realise this, but our civilisation has been predominantly created by white men – at least they are the ones who have made visible contributions to it. Women and non-white races have had a role to play, but, to put it in Meghan’s language, those were mostly support roles and often walk-ons.

If someone wants to study, say, African culture, he should be able to do so, and I’m sure we can all learn quite a bit about the human condition that way. But such courses belong at the margins of academic curricula in a Western university.

The worst was still to come. When shown the demographic breakdown of British professors, Meghan gasped “Oh my God!”

That religious utterance came straight from puerile tweets and it reflected a puerile emotion. To her horror Meghan realised that only 8.5 per cent of British professors are black or minority ethnic (BME).

Considering that blacks make up about 3.5 per cent of the population, that proportion doesn’t strike me as particularly unjust, even though the overall BME proportion is higher. But that’s not the point.

For lying behind Meghan’s OMG are two notions that, out of chivalry and respect for the royal family, I’ll only call misconceived.

First, in the good tradition of her profession and her ideology, she clearly believes that the demographic makeup of any institution should faithfully reflect the demographic makeup of the population.

Second, in the same fine tradition, she also believes that any disparity has to be caused by discrimination, in this case of the racial kind. In other words, BME persons only occupy 8.5 per cent of academic positions because bigoted whites keep them out.

The picture she has in her mind’s eye is that of a brilliant black academic losing a job to a less qualified white because the university administrators are all honorary Ku Klux Klan members who hate blacks.

Now if Meghan thinks for a second that something like that can happen at a British (or for that matter American) university often enough to affect the statistics, she’s away with the fairies.

She should really study this at greater depth than that of a Hollywood sound bite. This endeavour would take some time and effort because the issue impinges on numerous disciplines, such as history, sociology, culture, philosophy, political theory etc.

Meghan could do worse than begin by reading the books by the American sociologist Thomas Sowell (himself incidentally black). Perhaps then she’ll learn that no institution in the world ever mirrors the overall population demographics – disparities are always present.

In today’s West these are hardly ever caused by bigotry and discrimination. On the contrary, employers bend over backwards trying to attract as many BME employees as possible.

But then, like all her co-ideologues, Meghan isn’t against discrimination as such. She’d be perfectly happy even if it could shown convincingly that the proportion of BME dons could only be increased by discrimination against better-qualified whites.

But even if she were to study the complex issues involved and then undergo a Damascene experience, she should still follow the advice in the title above.

She’s not a Hollywood starlet anymore. She’s a member of a vitally important institution and should act accordingly.

It’s refreshing to see how ecclesiastical and secular lefties agree on most things, these days even including the nonexistence of God. And they talk nonsense on most things, most emphatically including the economy.

Starting with ecclesiastical drivel, last month the Archbishop of Canterbury established an ironclad link between taxes and happiness: the higher the former, the greater the latter.

In his previous life in the oil industry, His Grace must have met multitudes who tossed and turned through the night because their taxes were too low.

My experience is rather different. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who desperately wanted to pay more tax, while I wished I had a tenner for each person I’ve known who moaned about taxation.

But we aren’t talking empirical evidence here. We’re talking ideology, and neither facts nor economic theory applies.

Trying to elucidate the issue, His Grace only succeeded in obfuscating it: “Prosperity depends on the security and quality of work, and the balance of work and life, the quality of our relationships, and not just about the amount of income we receive… .”

One would expect our prelates to phrase more precisely. Prosperity is indeed all about money, that’s what the word signifies. What Welby means is quality of life, which indeed isn’t all about prosperity.

But let’s not be pedantic: the man is speaking from the heart, so his semantics gets blurred. But how would higher taxes contribute to a better quality of life and hence happiness?

Funny you should ask: “Public safety and security, clean air and beautiful natural environments, public parks and spaces, arts and culture, the sense of belonging to a community – these are all important contributors to individual wellbeing…?”

Amazing what things the state can achieve by extorting even more money from people. I’m particularly interested in how high taxes would improve arts and culture.

Looking at the kind of art the government finances through the good offices of the Arts Council, one gets the distinct impression that the arts would benefit tremendously if all state funding were withdrawn – especially since most of it promotes things like rap, ‘conceptual’ art and multi-culti effluvia.

Then again, the people who contribute most to the Exchequer are already robbed of over half of their income. What proportion would satisfy the Archbishop’s quest for happiness? Eighty per cent? A hundred?

Here he gets hit by the Laffer Curve that shows that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher tax revenues. If our eudemonic government raised the marginal rate to the 100 per cent His Grace apparently prays for, it would derive the same income as with a zero per cent rate: zilch.

Anyway, re-enacting the Sodom story, could His Grace produce one righteous man who’s desperate to see his taxes going galactic, as opposed to merely stratospheric? If he can, I may spare Lambeth Palace sulphuric destruction.

Now as far as I know, Oliver Kamm hasn’t yet been ordained. That doesn’t prevent him from writing gibberish with the same air of ex cathedra authority.

There’s good news and bad news about Ollie. The good news is that he has stopped writing about grammar, which puts a smile on the face of those who take English seriously. The bad news is that he’s now writing about business instead, which puts a scowl on the face of those who take economics seriously.

This time Kamm spies with his little eye that the housing market has slowed down, which means that “far from assisting an efficient economy, the British housing market is an impediment”.

If a 3.3 per cent annual growth is seen as an impediment to an efficient economy, our whole economy is an impediment to itself because it hardly ever grows at that rate.

However, Kamm’s beef is about the plight of young professionals who can no longer afford houses because housing prices outstrip incomes. That confuses me no end.

Why is he then upset about the slower growth in the housing market? The slower it grows, the faster young people’s salaries will catch up. There, problem sorted. And negative growth would be best, wouldn’t it, Ollie?

If he’s at sea over the problem, he hits the rocks at full speed over the solution. That, according to Kamm, would be to charge a capital gains tax on the sale of the primary residence.

This measure would cure the economy of all its ills because it would promote “intergenerational equity”. Translating it into the language even I can understand, the wrinklies have it too easy.

They buy their two-up-two-downs dirt cheap, then sell in their dotage 50 years later and roll in clover on the huge proceeds. Hit them with, say, a 20 per cent CGT, and young people will no longer be priced out of the market.

My confusion deepens. A CGT would make selling a house less lucrative, wouldn’t it? If my understanding of human nature is correct, some crumblies who would otherwise want to sell would then refrain from doing so.

That means fewer, rather than more, houses will go on the market. Since Ollie hasn’t yet repealed the law of supply-demand, housing prices will then go up, making them even less affordable for the struggling Yuppies.

I wonder if Ollie has ever wondered why property inflation has outstripped money inflation by a factor of 10 over the past 70 years or so. It does pay to look at historical trends if one seeks understanding.

Logic suggests that people have more trust in property than in money as a guarantor of their future.

That hasn’t always been the case: money used to be quite reliable. A baby born in 1850 with a solid middle-class income of £500 a year, could live his whole life in reasonable comfort even if he never made a penny of his own.

That’s because £100 in 1850 equalled £110 in 1900, a negligible inflation of 10 per cent over half a century.

Conversely, £100 in 1950 equalled £2,000 in 2000 – a wealth-busting inflation of 2,000 per cent. To take another currency as an example, in the last 100 years the US dollar has lost 95 per cent of its value, a marginally better, though still abysmal, performance.

That means that most baby-boomers had to invest their earnings aggressively, not to see them turn to dust. Hence the huge demand for bricks and mortar, with a concomitant rise in prices. It’s that law of supply-demand again that Ollie still hasn’t got around to repealing.

So money inflation promotes property inflation. But what promotes money inflation?

In his book The Time of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan put it succinctly: “[Prof. Arthur Burns of Columbia University]… went around the room asking, ‘What causes inflation?’ None of us could give him an answer. Prof. Burns… declared, ‘Excess government spending causes inflation!’.”

This is actually axiomatic. But where does the government get the wherewithal for its excess spending? Three sources: printing, borrowing – and taxation, all of them inflationary.

Hence the higher taxation that Welby desires and Kamm proposes will achieve exactly the opposite purposes to those they claim to yearn for. Seems incongruous, doesn’t it?

Well, yes. But only if we forget that, when the lefties demand higher taxation, their purposes aren’t ameliorative but punitive. They want to punish those who seek greater independence from the state’s tender mercies.

Whether they wear cassocks or suits is immaterial. They’re all cut from the same cloth.

Siegbert Tarrasch (d. 1934) was a great chess player who loved his paradoxes.

One of them was that there’s no such thing as an unequivocally good chess move because, to take control of new squares, a piece has to relinquish control of some old ones.

Could this be a cautionary tale about not just chess but any kind of progress? For nothing in this world comes free, and progress is no exception.

I’m specifically talking about scientific and technological progress because, unlike any other kind, it’s real and observable.

Nineteenth century Luddites certainly felt that the price of progress was too steep. Those textile workers had spent years learning their craft – only to be replaced by machines serving the god of productivity better.

Quite a bit of violence followed, and one can understand both sides. Nor was the problem limited to textile workers and England – in fact, the etymology of the word sabotage goes back to a similar conundrum in France at the same time.

The god of productivity is athirst, and his thirst must be slaked. Since greater productivity usually involves more product being produced with less effort, it stands to reason that the higher the productivity, the lower the demand for workers.

A Ford assembly line in Dagenham produces more vehicles per unit of time than the number of carriages crafted by cooperatives of cartwrights and wainwrights of yesteryear.

Thus the latter two crafts were first marginalised and then wiped out. So what did those newly unemployed tradesmen do?

What did chandlers do after most candles had been replaced with light bulbs? What did all those people do after their jobs had fallen victim to progress?

Let’s just say that their plight was eased by the slow tempo of change. Cars didn’t replace carriages overnight; it must have taken at least a generation.

That was enough time for an old cartwright to tell his son that perhaps now wasn’t a good time to pursue the family trade. People won’t be riding in carriages for much longer, lad, they’ll be getting into those new-fangled noisy and smelly things. Let’s think what else you could do.

Also, all such changes happened at a time of unprecedented industrial expansion, when more and more hands were needed to perform myriads of simple operations. So whatever pain was caused was mitigated.

What’s happening now is altogether different. To mention but one small thing, technology, in the shape of kitchen appliances, washing machines, answerphones, vacuum cleaners has well nigh destroyed a major source of living for the lower classes: domestic service.

In the past even middle-class families routinely employed several servants, and such service wasn’t just a job but actually a career. A man could work his way up from groom to valet to butler to steward; a woman, from scullery maid to cook or from chambermaid to housekeeper.

That whole industry has practically faded away since the First World War, although technological progress wasn’t the only, perhaps not even the main, reason for it.

Where technology is the sole culprit is in the demise of millions of low- to medium-skilled jobs that can now be done more efficiently by machines. The problem isn’t just that such jobs disappear; it’s that they disappear instantly.

It’s arguable whether life has become better, but it has definitely become faster. A factory owner may buy a computerised system that makes hundreds of workers redundant overnight. Where will they go?

Or else a country may decide that in our global economy some commodity, say coal, is cheaper to buy abroad than to produce at home. Thus it took Margaret Thatcher what in historical terms was an instant to close the coal mines.

But what happened to all the miners? Where do such cast-offs of modern economies ever go?

They can’t go to another factory because exactly the same thing is happening there. They can’t go to another mine because it too is closed. In fact, there are hardly any jobs in the market that don’t require extensive training and education.

So what will happen to those people? Are they all going to become fund managers, systems analysts and computer programmers? Most won’t. Some may – but not straight away. Retraining will take years, but they don’t have those years.

They haven’t had the luxury of adapting to changes that take decades to come about. Last week the computer system came in; this week they’re out in the street.

Hence they’re left with only one option: going on the dole. This is an individual problem in each case. But, when welfare rolls swell to bursting, it becomes a huge social problem.

In some European countries, a quarter of young people are unemployed, and overall unemployment figures are kept down only by statistical chicanery. At the same time, people in work have to pay half of their income or more to provide for those out of work, which is neither just nor conducive to social health.

The inestimable effects of a vast dependent underclass are destructive economically, socially, morally and in every way imaginable. And, as progress rolls along like an unstoppable juggernaut, this time driven not by a man but by artificial intelligence, things will only get worse.

At some point they’ll come to a head, and post-industrial Luddites will start doing to computers what their ancestors did to those textile machines.

In this dystopic scenario, much featured in literature and on film, progress will destroy itself – and this isn’t the worst that can happen.

Let’s not forget that killing technology has also progressed beyond tanks and machineguns, and in the next world war more people may be killed in one day than the two previous world wars managed altogether.

The only thing that can prevent such doomsdays is the same thing that could have prevented every catastrophe in history: prudence and wisdom.

A measure of restraint has to be applied to our appetites – we may feel like gorging ourselves on the goodies delivered by progress just like we may feel like scoffing three pounds of chocolates or drinking three bottles of whisky. But we must check our appetites in the first case just as we do in the other two.

To paraphrase John Muir, I’m advocating not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress. But for such opposition to become effective, it requires sage and farsighted leaders, especially in government.

Thus Margaret Thatcher, arguably our best post-war prime minister, should have closed the pits gradually, perhaps over 10-20 years, while investing into retraining and relocation. The immediate economic effect would have been less beneficial, but the long-term social effect would have been much better.

Alas, the very nature of modern unchecked democracy run riot precludes foresight and planning for the future. The only future our politicians can plan for is the next election – and even that they don’t do very well.

The economic benefits of instant change will come during their tenure; the resulting social – and ultimately economic – erosion, during someone else’s. Easy choice, isn’t it?

Speaking specifically of Britain, the cumulative effect of the social alienation produced by blithe commitment to progress may soon bring to power the ultimate Luddite party that hates not so much the technological progress delivered by capitalism as capitalism tout court.

The resentful, uneducated, corrupted underclass votes, and it tends to vote as a bloc. So hold your breath – and risk suffocation by holding your nostrils as well.

Back in 2009, a Hungarian doctor practising in England misread a label and injected a boy with a near-lethal dose of carbolic acid, leaving him crippled for life.

Dr Rakoczy knew his medicine but he didn’t know his English, which he proved by consistently failing the language exam. Yet he was finally suspended only last year, making one wonder how on earth he was allowed to practise here in the first place.

Surely free movement of people shouldn’t be interpreted as a licence to kill? Yet this thought is clearly too simple for the EU to understand, and the same problem keeps recurring.

In fact, I first wrote about it seven years ago, and doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun. Since there’s little I can add, I’ll plagiarise myself and recycle that piece, changing only a few words:

In the judgment of his peers, my friend Boris was one of the most brilliant neurosurgeons in Houston, Texas. That was no trivial accolade, considering that at that time, some 40 years ago, Houston was to neurosurgery what Paris is to haute cuisine.

Boris’s colleague at the hospital readily admitted that my friend’s skill was much superior to his own. Dr Thomson was modest, but his income wasn’t – he made well in excess of $1,000,000 a year. Boris made $22,000.

You see, Boris was from Russia and, though a genius with a scalpel in his hand, he had no linguistic ability whatsoever. Alas, the qualification exam for foreign-trained doctors in America consisted of two equal parts: medicine and language.

Sitting the blasted thing year after year, Boris would sail through the first part and, with the certainty of night following day, fail the second. After a few years he gave up trying and accepted his humble role as surgeon’s assistant, though his million-a-year colleagues had no reservations about letting Boris operate every now and then.

One day he showed me the examination papers, with several hundred questions designed to test the prospective doctor’s English. Until then, my impression had been that the test would merely determine the doctor’s basic ability to understand and be understood.

That impression turned out to be wrong. For the test covered the kind of grammatical and stylistic subtleties that would defeat most native speakers.

I recall one example. Choose the right word: He is one of those people who [a) demand, b) demands] attention. I have no doubt whatsoever that you’ve unerringly picked the right answer, which is a). But I’ll bet my $1,000,000 against your $22,000 that you know many Englishmen who wouldn’t.

Now imagine many similar questions together, and you’ll probably agree that only a small minority of even native Anglophones would pass such an exam.

You may think this is going a bit too far, and I may agree with you. You may further think that, to keep foreigners out of a highly lucrative field, the test was designed partly as a sort of protectionist tariff – and I may agree with you again.

But there’s no doubt that, since a doctor’s ability to communicate with patients can be a matter of life or death, this ability must be an essential part of his qualifications.

That’s where the EU comes in.

Its laws mandate free movement of labour throughout the ‘zone’, a desideratum that apparently allows foreign doctors to treat the English test as merely an advisory statement of intent.

The EU gauleiters feel so strongly about this law that they’ll defend it to the death – though naturally not their own. They’ve already defended it to the death of the pensioner David Gray, who died after wrongly receiving an industrial dose of dimorphine (heroin, in common parlance) from a Germany-trained locum.

Equally deadly may be nurses who, like a foreign godfather, make you an offer you can’t understand.

If you’ll forgive another personal recollection, some years ago I was in hospital, receiving about 40 drugs at the same time. In addition to intravenous dimorphine (in the right dose), one of them was a cocaine mouthwash, brought to me by a nurse twice a day in a 50 ml tub.

One of the nurses could speak very little English and, my propensity for infantile jokes enhanced by boredom, I asked her if I should drink the mouthwash in one gulp.

“Trink?” she asked, obviously perplexed. “Trink in vun gulp? Yes, trink in vun gulp.” Had I followed that medical advice, you wouldn’t have the dubious pleasure of my company.

Perhaps, if we let our fantasies run away with us, a time will come when not just doctors, but anyone serving the public will be expected to do so in comprehensible English – in Britain, that is.

In fact, I’ve met many waiters and shop assistants in France who can’t speak English – but have yet to meet one who can’t speak French, and that includes those who manifestly aren’t French.

Would it be too much to ask for something similar in Britain? Yes, it would, if we let the EU have its way.

That’s another reason, one of many, big and small ones, to leave and bang the door on the way out. And I still have to hear of a single reason to stay.

Four years ago, Shamima Begum of Bethnal Green, London, 15, was your typical rebellious teenager.

Except that she didn’t express her rebellion by smoking the odd spliff, listening to rap and telling her parents to shut up. Instead she went to Syria to fight with ISIS.

As far as she was concerned, the world was strictly binary: there were the righteous (Muslims) and the infidels (everyone else). Since her native Britain was still predominantly infidel (even though her part of London wasn’t), she knew whose side she was on.

Her side blew up public transport, raped women, burned people alive, tortured them, tossed them off tall buildings, cut off their heads. That was just fine with young Shamima. In fact, “When I saw my first severed head in a bin, it didn’t faze me at all,” she says.

“I thought only of what he would have done to a Muslim woman if he had the chance.” What would that be? And who was the late possessor of the head in question?

Western soldiers don’t typically rape and eviscerate Muslim women, and was she even sure the victim was a soldier? As opposed to an intrepid tourist? An aid volunteer? One of those Doctors Without Frontiers?

Shamima didn’t know and didn’t care. All she needed to know was that the murdered man was white, quite possibly her British countryman.

We, on the other hand, would like to know something else. Was Shamima by any chance the one who had beheaded the victim? She’s a big girl, strong enough to swing a machete and obviously undeterred by any scruples.

I especially like the word ‘first’ in her chilling admission. How many more severed heads did she see? How many did she cut off?

Shamima is rather reticent on such details. Then again, Arafat once said, and the Algerian president repeated, that Islam’s best weapon is the womb of every Muslim woman.

It was that demographic weapon, rather than machetes and AKs, that Shamima verifiably wielded for Islam. In short order she produced two children, and don’t youngsters grow up fast these days.

Alas, postnatal care in ISIS isn’t quite up to even NHS standards. Both her children died, which didn’t prevent Shamima from getting pregnant with a third.

When recently, now 19, she realised that ISIS was being smashed to smithereens, and the chances of enjoying the sight of more severed heads were slim, Shamima decided she now wanted to come home (to Britain, that is), give birth in an NHS hospital and “live quietly with my child”.

My hearts’ strings are properly tugged, and I’m not the only one. A lively debate is under way as to whether Britain should welcome Shamima and other jihad brides back.

Those in favour argue that Shamima was only 15 at the time, and she was brainwashed. That doesn’t quite explain why she stayed with ISIS until its end, when she was already legally adult.

As to brainwashing, that argument is often used indiscriminately. Implicit in it is the denial of both free will and the demonstrable fact that some people are irredeemably evil.

I doubt that a youngster good at heart could be swayed to any cause by pictures of torture and mayhem, which abound on Islamic websites. And if she was so swayed, she isn’t good at heart.

Nevertheless Philip Collins of The Times is in favour of the red carpet. This even though he deplores what Shamima did and acknowledges she isn’t a nice girl.

Moreover, “she has not yet reached a state of repentance”. ‘Yet’ is a short word long on meaning. It suggests that in due course Shamima will reach such a blissful state, especially if “offered the counsel of the various rehabilitation programmes sponsored by the government”.

Mr Collins’s faith in such programmes is touching, unsupported as it is by any significant corpus of evidence. But when it comes from the heart, true faith is impervious to facts.

Since my faith is somewhat different, I’d be more open to a different possibility. Such as that, once Shamima’s child is taken care of, she’ll start blowing up other women’s children.

To his credit, Mr Collins acknowledges this risk, and agrees it should be assessed. He doesn’t seem to realise he has already done that, by admitting that Shamima remains an unrepentant jihadist:

“The only time that Ms Begum uses the language of shame it is about her own decision not to stay resolute in support of the caliphate. She is explicit that she does not regret going to Syria.”

However, she is a British citizen, argues Mr Collins. Therefore not letting her come back would violate the law and, when all is said and done, the rule of law is what separates us from ISIS.

I wonder, with all humility and respect, how well Mr Collins understands the English Common Law. I’m specifically referring to citizenship – and to one key precedent that elucidates the issue.

In 1946, William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, was hanged for treason, the last (I secretly hope the latest) person to suffer that fate in the UK.

Before the war this US-born Irishman led the National Socialist League, competing with the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley. Shortly before the war, he cheated his way to a British passport and slipped off to Germany.

There he became Goebbels’s leading English-language broadcaster, torturing British ears with his put-on toff accent: “Jahmany calling…”

After the war, he was charged with treason in Britain, but the case was far from clear-cut. Since Joyce had obtained his British passport on false pretences, his citizenship was null and void, argued the defence.

He was thus still a US citizen and as such couldn’t be guilty of treason to Britain because he owed no allegiance to it.

What hanged Joyce was a technicality springing from the ancient legal principle invoked by the prosecution: protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem (protection entails allegiance; and allegiance, protection).

Joyce might not have been entitled to a British passport, but he did use it to travel to Germany. Therefore he was under the protection of the British crown and owed allegiance to it.

That case is relevant to the Shamima situation because it establishes an unbreakable link between protection and allegiance, fully equating a British passport with protection.

That document, in other words, is a bilateral contract. One party exchanges its protection for the other party’s allegiance. Either party’s failure to comply with the terms of that contract thus constitutes forfeiture.

Since Shamima has manifestly withdrawn her allegiance from this infidel realm, the realm is within its right to withdraw its protection, otherwise known as citizenship.

Hence if she were to return, she should be charged with treason and spend the rest of her life in prison. Otherwise, harsh as it may sound, she belongs in that refugee camp or else Guantanamo. We can’t have too many jihadists here.

P.S. Ben Jaffey QC, acting for the Department of Health, told the High Court, “being a mother is no longer necessarily a gendered term… a man can be… a mother”. Just shows how backward the British are. Americans have been calling men ‘mothers’ for decades.

 

Shadow Chancellor McDonnell, Corbyn’s cardinal rouge, described Winston Churchill as a villain for his role in the Tonypandy riots.

Many people took issue with that, instead describing Churchill as a hero for his role in saving Europe from Hitler.

Weighing these two positions in the balance, I have to assume an uncharacteristically relativist stand by suggesting that Churchill can be regarded as either hero or villain. It all depends on one’s frame of reference.

Clearly, in a parliamentary career spanning the reigns of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II and comprising a number of cabinet posts, including the highest one, Churchill didn’t quite manage to avoid sin altogether.

Then again, his defenders only ask that he be respected, not canonised. People are fallible, and politicians tend to be more fallible than average. Hence, when pondering whether to place Churchill into the villain or hero category, one should weigh his sins against his achievements.

Since neither side seems willing to consider his whole career, they, in the person of McDonnell, reduce the dichotomy to just one sin, the Tonypandy riots, or just one achievement, making sure that Trafalgar Square isn’t called Ludendorffplatz, or some such.

Since the latter hardly needs further praise and gratitude, let’s concentrate on the former.

In 1910 coal miners in South Wales went on a go-slow strike, or so the management thought. The miners objected they had only slowed down because the new pits were harder to chip away at.

Now miners have always gone on strike so readily that one is tempted to think the explicit grievances have largely been mere pretexts. Their real problem – and here I sympathise wholeheartedly – is that they have to do just about the worst job imaginable.

Few of us would fancy spending our working lives in back-breaking, claustrophobic subterranean toil, breathing coal dust and dying of silicosis at a young age. Anyone doing that can be expected to display heightened sensitivity to any real or imaginary injustice.

It could be the working conditions, hours, pay or for that matter their misreading of the law penalising sex with minors. Whatever the face value of the dispute, colliers tend to be a hairbreadth removed from strikes, often violent ones.

In that case, the management responded by closing the site down to all 12,500 workers, not just the 70 most vociferous protesters. A real strike followed, and riots after that. Shops were smashed up and looted, and even the houses of the owners and managers came under attack.

The police fought back with baton charges, and violence escalated – on both sides. Responding to pleas from the police, Churchill, at that time Home Secretary in a Liberal government, reluctantly agreed to send in a couple of army units.

The aim was to moderate excesses on both sides, and it worked. The army never opened fire, nor had been instructed to do so. But its sheer presence quickly put an end to the strike, keeping the casualty count down. Altogether, 500 rioters and 85 policemen were injured and one miner died after being hit on the head with a police truncheon (not a bullet).

I’d suggest that Winston Churchill ought to be praised more readily than rebuked for his role in the affair. But I did say that my frame of reference here is relativist.

By contrast, Mr McDonnell’s clearly proceeds from some absolute moral standards. Applying them to the issue at hand, he feels that Churchill’s 1910 villainy, such as it was, outweighs his wartime heroism (I assume McDonnell sees it as such, though one never knows).

Since we differ so sharply, I feel justified in examining Mr McDonnell’s frame of reference in light of what he considers villainous or commendable.

Mr (Comrade?) McDonnell identifies Marx, Lenin and Trotsky as his “most significant” intellectual influences. On numerous occasions he has expressed admiration for the state created to those gentlemen’s specifications.

Hence it’s apposite to see how that state handled a similar situation, if only to admire the high moral ground from which Mr McDonnell looks down on Churchill’s villainy.

In 1962 workers in Novocherkassk (in whose garrison my uncle was an officer at the time) went on strike protesting the unaffordable food prices that had put them on the verge of starvation. Unlike the Tonypandy riots, the protests were peaceful: no shops or private residences were molested in any way.

In response, KGB troops were summoned to the North Caucasus city and fired several salvos of live rounds at the crowd. The official death toll (the unofficial one was several times higher) was 26 killed on the spot with machine-gun fire, 87 wounded (of whom three later died).

Then the trials began, with seven death sentences passed and immediately executed – none of that American shilly-shallying with years on death row. Many others went to concentration camps for up to 15 years.

Considering that McDonnell’s role models murdered over 60 million in the Soviet Union alone, mentioning such a small episode may sound churlish. I’ve only done so because of the obvious parallel with Tonypandy.

Now I consider Churchill a hero even before we start drawing such obvious comparisons. But then I did admit to being a relativist.

However there’s nothing relative about the dread I feel at the possibility that McDonnell may well be our next Chancellor. Then we’ll learn all we need to know about villainy – actually quite a bit more than we need to know.

I bet you can’t tell me what ‘enabling access to information’ means. To make it easier for you, I’ll give you ten attempts. Or a hundred – you still won’t get it.

I suppose I’d better tell you then. In Googlespeak, ‘enabling access’ means ‘blocking access’. Didn’t get that one, did you?

“We’re committed to enabling access to information for the benefit of our users in Russia and around the world,” declared a Google spokesman, proving my point.

A worthy commitment, one would think, but why did Google feel the need to reassure the public on that point? Well, you see, following a Russian demand, Google has agreed to delete links to websites banned in Russia.

Over 70 per cent of the links have already been deleted, and the Russian censors will be regularly updating Google on the list of sites that have incurred their displeasure.

The Russian censoring agency, Roskomnadzor, described this arrangement as establishing a “constructive dialogue” with Google. I’d call it revoltingly abject surrender to tyranny.

For the sites banned in Russia aren’t like those banned in the West. We’re not talking about child pornography here, nor illegal sales of drugs and arms, nor terrorist networks.

Putin’s kleptofascist regime bans practically all media critical of it, including on the net. Thus I regularly read Russian on-line magazines that my friends in Russia can’t read, at least not without some fancy footwork ideally aided by computer virtuosity.

Google links provided one bypass available to those Russians who aren’t satisfied with the nauseating Goebbels-style propaganda one gets through official channels. Now that bypass is no more.

Those who’ve never lived under a tyranny imposing an information famine may not appreciate the despair this outrage will cause the Russians whose views of kleptofascism differ from Peter Hitchens’s.

It’s not that they won’t be able to get real news any longer – modern technology combined with human ingenuity will probably find a way. Even back in the 60s we managed to circumvent Soviet jammers and tune in to the crackling, barely discernible voices of Western radio stations.

Technology is more sophisticated now, and the regime isn’t yet quite as oppressive as it was then, although moving in that direction. But that’s not the whole point.

People thirsting for freedom don’t just need information sustenance. They need hope – and since time immemorial that came from that semi-mythical, idealised, loving, caring demiurge: the West.

We weren’t so naïve as to believe the West would provide some tangible help. It’s just that, when we were gagged, imprisoned, committed to punitive madhouses, denied in the twentieth century the kind of liberties Englishmen enjoyed in the thirteenth, we desperately needed to know that somebody cared.

That there was a normal, human world “over the hills”, in the Russian expression, that knew of the horror we lived under and tried to help. We believed there were some people out there, whose morals and principles weren’t wholly denominated in convertible currencies.

The West did little in practical terms, but it did enough for us to know we weren’t alone in the world, face to face with the scowling beast of the worst tyranny ever known.

Those crackling voices of the Voice of America, the BBC or Radio Liberty were a lifebelt we clung on to, knowing that without it we’d drown in the engulfing sea of vomit.

Back in the early 90s Russians no longer had to rely exclusively on Western sources for their intellectual sanity. There existed in Russia some real journalistic outlets, not just on the Internet but also in the papers and even on TV.

However, as the kleptofascist regime so beloved of our ‘right-wingers’ and ‘left-wingers’ alike gathered strength, such outlets were smashed one by one. Independent TV channels were taken over, real newspapers shut down, and the Internet became the most, not to say only, reliable source of information and opinion.

That too came under attack, and all ‘liberal’ on-line publications were blocked, with but a few loopholes remaining. Now Putin’s gang has declared a war of mass annihilation against the net too.

Last week the Duma passed (I mean rubberstamped) a law allowing the government to turn off sites based on foreign servers, supposedly to counter the threat of a cyberattack.

Media watchdogs will be able to filter traffic, blocking undesirable sites at will. Effectively the Russians will follow China’s example by cutting off their Internet from the global networks, creating a ‘sovereign’ domain called RuNet.

Yes, the nineteenth century satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote, “The harshness of Russian laws is softened by the slackness of their enforcement”. But then he didn’t live in Soviet or even post-Soviet Russia.

The kleptofascist regime is constantly tightening the information noose around people’s necks, and oppression is the only activity at which it excels. Now the noose will receive an extra tug from Google, that paragon of Western virtue.

There, I thought you’d like to know what ‘enabling access to information’ really means.

One should never recount personal experiences – unless they lend themselves to extrapolation.

Hence I’d never mention meeting someone I’d regard as sui generis, say a sixtyish man wearing short trousers, a school blazer and socks with sandals. However, meeting someone so typical as to throw light on a  cultural phenomenon is a different matter.

Such people are more (sometimes actually less) than individuals. They’re paradigms, personifications, illustrations. They elucidate by typifying, which makes them, well, not exactly interesting but useful, at least to a commentator on social mores.

In that spirit, the other day I found myself at a dinner party sitting next to an exceedingly successful and rather attractive woman, late 50s at a guess, but doing a good job trying to look younger.

Talking to such people, one realises how woefully one’s own life has been wasted. From the scant biographical details my dinner companion (let’s call her Libby) divulged, she grew up in South Kensington, which to a Londoner is what Fifth Avenue is to a New Yorker.

Libby was privately educated, which hardly needs mentioning. A degree at Oxbridge followed (I think) and then another one at Sciences Po in Paris, the hatchery of France’s political class.

She’s now a high-rolling international lawyer. Libby’s boyfriend is French, she told me, as is her divorced husband. Neither was present.

Once everyone’s travel stories had been exchanged, the conversation around the table veered to matters of shared interest: the EU, politics in general, monarchy and so forth.

When the first subject came up, Libby raised her eyebrows when I expressed views distinctly different from hers. That naturally prompted a query of my credentials.

“Do you know much about the EU?” asked Libby. “A fair amount, actually,” I replied to her obvious incredulity.

“Where were you educated?” was the next question and, realising that my modest Moscow university could compete with neither Oxbridge nor Sciences Po, I described that rubric in my CV as “the School of Hard Knockers followed by Screw U.”

Such levity only reinforced Libby’s sense of superiority, both innate and acquired. She voted Remain, she announced proudly, because Britain derives numerous benefits from EU membership.

Name one, I begged, at least one that justifies sacrificing our sovereignty, not to mention billions of pounds every year. Libby then proved her formidable intellectual background by demanding that I define sovereignty.

Self-government, I suggested, with all laws passed by our Parliament, rather than foreign legislative bodies. But all our politicians are inept, objected Libby, the implication being that Messrs Juncker, Tusk and Macron are intellectual giants of Aristotelian proportions.

Moreover, many of the EU laws are better than our own. That may be, I agreed, and I share her dim view of our governing elite. But this is a separate subject, and there I was, thinking we were talking about sovereignty.

Thus it’s conceivable that, had the Nazis won the war, they could have run France better than the French. But that wouldn’t have meant that France remained a sovereign country.

The lines were drawn. Libby had established her upbeat, interesting credentials that alone could be seen as socially acceptable, whereas I had shown myself to be an uncouth troglodyte mouthing ideas that weren’t just uncool but antediluvian.

And as to the benefits of EU membership, continued Libby, just look at how vibrant the City of London is. That would only mean something, I countered, if it could be shown that the City had been dormant in its torpor until 1992. But hadn’t it been the hub of Europe’s financial activity at least since the Congress of Vienna?

Libby took a dim view of that historical reference and went on to prove in the course of the evening that no such allusions cut much ice with her. The EU, she reiterated, is simply wonderful. It’s just that our successive governments handled it badly.

Thus Major shouldn’t have signed the Maastricht Treaty, Blair shouldn’t have agreed to a closer union, and Cameron shouldn’t have been born. At that point I added another blot to my copybook by drawing another parallel.

That’s the logic of Western communists, I said. Communism was a world-saving idea, but it was compromised by the Russians’ brutality and incompetence. Should Western communists get the chance, they’d get things right.

Wouldn’t it more logical to believe that, if an idea proved monstrous everywhere it was tried, it’s a monstrous idea? And, if every British government failed to work the EU properly, could it be that it’s unworkable?

That logic was way too spurious for Libby’s taste. As far as she was concerned, the inexorable march of history began in 1992, and it was pointless looking backwards or even sideways.

That’s why, she explained, she detested monarchy in general and the British monarchy in particular, although she simply adored the Queen. Had she met her? Well, no. So how did she know the Queen is adorable? Surely one couldn’t separate a monarch from the monarchy?

Yes one could, insisted Libby and effortlessly segued to Jacob Rees-Mogg, whom she loathed. Why? Because “he speaks from a position of privilege”.

Libby liked that turn of phrase so much that, facing my objections over the next five minutes, she repeated it 12 times. I kept the score and congratulated her each time she ran it up.

Which of his ideas are based on his privileged background? Rees-Mogg speaks from a position of privilege.

Does that disqualify anything such a person says? We’ve had a few decent PMs who were even more privileged, Churchill for one. Rees-Mogg speaks from a position of privilege.

But I thought all Leavers were lowly, illiterate louts, not privileged individuals. Rees-Mogg speaks from a position of privilege.

But ad hominems are rhetorical fallacies. One should address the intrinsic value of a man’s ideas, not his personality. Rees-Mogg speaks from a position of privilege.

And so forth, ad infinitum. I wasn’t talking to a person. My interlocutor was a mouthpiece for stock mantras, easily replaceable with any other mouthpiece of the same mantras. In fact, I could have scripted every sentence Libby said before she said it.

The mantras are dominant among the illiterati at London’s smarter parties; they are the password one has to utter to gain admittance to the smarter parties.

This dovetails neatly with the theme of my yesterday’s article on social envy and hatred.

The fashionists, the reflux of the social digestion in their country and their class, can’t sound interesting to their own kind unless they profess contempt for both the country and the class. They use a ladder to climb high up and then kick the ladder away.

Their supposedly towering, but in fact clichéd and dull, minds feel suffocated within any narrow confines, be those of their nation with everything that makes it national, their own upbringing (“For a second there I thought you grew up in Peckham, not South Ken,” I teased Libby) – even elementary logic.

Their amour propre co-exists in dialectical symbiosis with haine propre. Like a prostitute pretending to be virginal to please some clients, they try to keep their true selves away from prying eyes.

Yet both the girl and her customer know this is make-believe, not real life. It’s just the game they play. Oh well, personally I prefer tennis.