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Every time Chancellor Reeves delivers yet another knock-down blow to the economy, she is accused of economic illiteracy.

The implication is that ‘Rachel in accounts’ tries her best to invigorate the economy, failing only because of some unfortunate lacunae in her economic education. This charge is unfair, and even if there is some truth to it, it’s an irrelevant truth.

Failure means inability to achieve the intended result. My contention is that our Labour government, with Rachel in charge of the Exchequer brief, is succeeding famously. The current state of the economy, about which one can say nothing that hasn’t already been said about Stage 4 cancer, is precisely what they were trying to achieve.

If you don’t believe me, take the word of Rachel’s front-bench colleague, Education Minister Stephen Morgan. As she is putting the final touches on the economic coup de grâce, otherwise known as the Autumn Budget, Morgan allayed the interviewer’s fears: “I want to make sure that our Budget is based on our Labour values, and that is what Rachel Reeves will deliver.”

What’s there not to understand? The operative words are ‘Labour values’, and Comrade Morgan is honest to a fault. The upcoming budget, along with everything Labour have done since taking over a year ago, is Labour, which is to say socialist, values in action.

Rachel, her boss Keir and all their accomplices in the cabinet are commendably loyal to their principles, which is more than one could say for the Tory opposition. Unlike them, Labour uphold their values. Rachel Reeves isn’t economically illiterate. She is principled and consistent.

If you wish to contest this conclusion, I suggest you look at everything the Chancellor has done in the past 12 months, along with things she has announced she’s going to do in the upcoming budget.

If you recall, during the election campaign Rachel kept pointing an accusing finger at the Tories’ record in government. Due to their mismanagement, she thundered, the incoming Labour government was stuck with a £20 billion hole in the public purse.

Even though the Tories tried to dispute her calculations, the charge was fair. During their 13 years in office, the Tories did manage to produce that £20 billion hole in public finances. Rachel promised to do something about it, and she has fulfilled her pledge. The hole is now £51 billion.

In a mere year, Rachel has managed to go the Tories 2.5 times better – and those nincompoops took 13 years to achieve their result. This alone is sufficient proof that such a staggering performance had to be deliberate.

Anyone who tries to shoot down Rachel’s economic record will misfire unless he realises that the government is beggaring the country on purpose. Rachel, Keir and Ed are acting in character, and the character is Marxist.

The Chancellor is about to impose the National Insurance tax on rental income, which, in the fine Marxist tradition, she calls “unearned”. When accused of breaking her campaign promise not to increase NI on “working people”, she parries such slings and arrows with enviable legerdemain. She isn’t increasing the NI rate, is she? She is only extending the group to be hit by NI taxation.

Job done; promise kept. Such are Labour values.

First, “working people” earn wages for their labour, ideally physical. Rather than belonging to that category, landlords, on the other hand, suck the blood of “working people” by forcing them to pay rent. Rachel didn’t say so in as many words, but this is the standard Marxist line.

And not only Marxist. Marxism in its purest form calls for the abolition of all private property, and any self-respecting Marxist will tell you that making money from investments (including those in rental property) isn’t just immoral but criminal.

Yet this is echoed by other, ostensibly non-Marxist, doctrines. It was the founder of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Prudhon (d. 1865) and not, as many mistakenly believe, Marx who uttered the famous phrase, “Property is theft”.

However, the most vociferous argument against private property specifically of land was made by the American Henry George (d. 1897). He was perhaps the most influential economist in the last quarter of the 19^th century, whose books sold millions of copies worldwide.

Leo Tolstoy was one of his followers who repeated ad nauseam George’s maxim, “We must make land common property.” Tolstoy went only as far as trying to give up his own estate, but various champions of George converge with Marx and Prudhon by having other people’s property (not their own) in their crosshairs.

Enmity to private property in general, but specifically property producing ‘unearned’ income, has been encoded into the DNA of all socialists, and certainly those gravitating towards the extreme end of that evil doctrine.

That’s why it’s pointless arguing that adding NI to rental income will have a negative effect – mainly on those ‘working people’ who live in rented accommodation.

Their rents, already sky high, especially within striking distance of London, will go up immediately. Some landlords will have to sell, reducing the number of properties available for rent. Since Rachel hasn’t yet repealed the law of supply and demand, this will drive rents further up.

She knows all that and doesn’t care. With socialists in charge, the main purpose of taxation is punitive, not pecuniary. The important thing is to punish the fat cats and, if ‘working people’ become collateral damage, then so be it. You don’t believe that socialists are really out to improve the lot of the poor, do you?

Where many critics see madness in Labour’s sustained assault on the economy, I see method. No one is so mad or so ignorant as to do what the government has been doing for a year now.

Any first-year student of economics knows that extortionate taxation throttles the economy into death by suffocation. I’ll give Rachel credit for knowing this economic primer. She keeps devastating the economy with some of the highest peacetime taxes in history not because she doesn’t know what that does. She knows – and likes it. It’s those ‘Labour values’ all over again.

The same goes for the government’s regulatory strangulation imposed on manufacturing, financial and labour markets. That alone would have been sufficient to bring the economy to its present standstill, but there’s also the noose of net zero woven out of crypto-Marxist strands.

Only Marxists are prepared to use a pseudo-scientific, in fact larcenous, ideology to impoverish large swaths of the population – emphatically including those who work, the ‘working people’.

The government is using, systematically and deliberately, every mechanism at its disposal to discourage the kind of economic behaviour that’s known to produce prosperity. Working hard, spending frugally, investing readily yet prudently – all such practices are punished by Labour’s tax, spend and regulate policies.

Idleness, on the other hand, is encouraged: 6.5 million working-age adults in Britain receive benefits not to work. This is part of one of the most promiscuous spending sprees in British history, and the country hasn’t paid its way for a long time, whichever party was in charge.

But at least the Tories made some token gestures to make deficit spending less rapacious. For Rachel and her merry men, public funds are reins to be used to control the public, making as many people as possible dependent on the state and therefore receptive to its diktats.    

And I haven’t yet mentioned the black hole of the socialist NHS, into which the government is throwing sackfuls of freshly printed (or borrowed) cash without even coming close to filling the hole – or making our health service perform to civilised standards.

No one can possibly cause so much damage so fast out of ignorance, and I’d like to absolve Rachel Reeves of this charge. She isn’t a hapless ignoramus running into blind alleys. She is a malevolent Marxist, steadily moving to her desired destination.

This realisation ought to be the starting point of any criticism. For no one can cure a disease if he doesn’t understand its aetiology.

Let me begin by saying I don’t believe that countries should be ruled by philosopher kings.

For one thing, this is a moot point: a typical king (president, prime minister, dictator) can’t be a philosopher, whereas a real philosopher wouldn’t want to be a king.

The concept first appeared in Plato’s Republic, but the republic he knew first-hand, Athens, only had 250,000 inhabitants at its peak. That’s roughly the population of Exeter, the county town of Devon.

So yes, hypothetically a mayor of Exeter could be a closet philosopher, while discharging his low-level duties with distinction. But when you look at countries the size of the US, Britain or France, the appearance of a philosopher leader is unlikely to say the least.

I’d even go so far as to suggest that, should one such leader miraculously appear, he’d quickly turn despotic. Philosophers tend to believe that their doctrines represent absolute truth. When they find themselves in power, they realise that isn’t the case, become disappointed and usually take it out on the people.

Plato believed that philosophical study could produce absolute knowledge, which he considered a job requirement for a king. Actually, the only philosopher king I can think of was Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 BC), the Roman emperor who was a Stoic thinker in the afterhours.

Still, Rome in his day had roughly the population of today’s Birmingham, and at a stretch I can imagine a philosopher running its affairs. He certainly couldn’t do a worse job than today’s city council. Still, the same objection applies: a million inhabitants is one thing, but 50, 100, 300 million is quite another – qualitatively, not just quantitatively.

Having said all that, let’s agree that, while today’s politicians can’t and shouldn’t be expected to possess absolute knowledge, they must be knowledgeable relatively, say within the limits of a secondary school curriculum.

That’s not too much to expect, is it? Yet even this modest expectation doesn’t seem to be met in the country that’s supposed to lead the West.

For example, when the Ukraine and Russia swapping territory was the talk of the town, or at least the talk of Trump, the president promised that he’d make sure the Ukraine got “oceanfront property”. Since the Ukraine has never in her history had access to any ocean, I thought Trump was perhaps planning to cede to the Ukraine the north-western part of Spain.

It’s called Galicia, as is a western province of the Ukraine. However, I doubt the Spanish government would be sufficiently convinced by such nominalist considerations to agree to that transaction. Of course, another, likelier possibility is that the Donald has never bothered to look at the map of the world in general and Europe in particular.

The other day, he confirmed that suspicion. “Crimea,” he said, “is the size of Texas, washed by the ocean.” I think doing business with casinos in Atlantic City has given Trump a fixation with large bodies of salt water.

In fact, unlike Atlantic City, the Crimea is washed not by an ocean but by the Black Sea. And Texas is 26 times larger than that picturesque peninsula.

If I were in the business of offering unsolicited advice, I’d suggest that the president acquire some knowledge of secondary school geography before taking on the role of the world’s saviour. Otherwise, he might indeed end up demanding that Spain’s Galicia become part of its Ukrainian namesake.

Trump’s VP, JD Vance, is widely believed to be his likeliest successor – provided of course that the Donald doesn’t refuse to leave the White House when his term expires. One way or the other, the dynasty of woeful ignorance is to live on.

“If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation,” said old JD, trying to keep up with his boss.

To be fair, his knowledge has a different lacuna: so far, Vance has proved his ignorance of history, not geography. But give him time.

In fact, neither war he mentioned ended “with some kind of negotiation”. Both Germany and Japan unconditionally capitulated in 1945, while Germany and her allies also surrendered in 1918, when the Western Front collapsed.

It’s hardly profitable trying to drag history into current politics, especially if the former is falsified and the latter is pernicious. For Trump and Vance use the word ‘negotiation’ as shorthand for the Ukraine’s capitulation.

This is what Vance meant when, speaking of the Ukrainian government the other day, he said that all Trump can do is “ask them to negotiate in good faith.” That is to stop being bloody-minded and accept Russia’s terms – ending the war with the kind of ‘negotiation’ that supposedly concluded the two World Wars.

It’s scary to think that these two ignoramuses believe they can tell the world, or at least the Ukraine, what to do. And the scarier thing is that they may be right.

At least, Trump and Vance are relative newcomers to the field of international politics, which is partly why they so often spout drivel. Peter Hitchens doesn’t have that excuse: he has been writing on the subject for decades.

To be fair to Hitchens, not all the drivel he writes is motivated by ignorance. His affection for Putin’s Russia, which he calls “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, is a more significant contributor.

Yet he too makes ignorant references to older wars, perhaps trying to go old JD one better. Thus: “As in the equally futile 1914-18 war, too many passions have been unleashed for anyone to accept the sort of shabby deal that used to end wars in the old days.”

We’ve already established that the two World Wars didn’t end in any “sort of shabby deal”, unless this term stands for capitulation. But then Hitchens explained the nature of the on-going war, taking care not to say anything to upset Putin.  

“The conflict really belongs to the US, which goaded Russia for years, and to Russia, which eventually lost its temper and moronically did what the US wanted it to. Poor old Ukraine just serves as America’s battering ram and as the scene for their quarrel, as Vietnam did in another age.”

Anyone boasting even cursory familiarity with the on-going war knows that every word in that passage is either a lie or a display of ignorance.

The US never baited Russia, nor has Russia ever swallowed America’s bait. The moment the current KGB government fronted by Putin took over Russia, their boy made explicit his mission to reverse what he called “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”. That was made manifest in every pronouncement he made, especially the so-called Munich Speech of 2007.

Everything that has happened since is Russia carrying out that KGB mission. This is criminal, but not necessarily “moronic”, at least not the way Hitchens means it. Poor naïve Russia didn’t do “what the US wanted it to do”. Her KGB government is systematically carrying out its plan to subvert the West and reconstruct the most evil empire in history.

The reading public gets it coming and going. Trump, Vance, Hitchens et al. are feeding it a bunch of porkies, some springing from ignorance, others from malevolence. We aren’t well-served by either politicians or hacks, let’s agree on that.

P.S. To be fair to Hitchens, he can talk ignorant rubbish on any subject, not just Russia and the Ukraine. In the same article, he attacked Lucy Connolly, who was unjustly sentenced to prison for an intemperate tweet.

Not so, writes Hitchens. “She pleaded guilty to a criminal offence and was sentenced according to law, and then released in due time…”

What kind of criminal offence? “Mrs Connolly had gone on Twitter to urge others to set fire to buildings full of people.” She didn’t.

I wrote about this case the other day, but, as a reminder, this is what Mrs Connolly wrote: “Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all that I care. While you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them.”

To any objective reader this only means that Mrs Connolly wouldn’t have minded to see something like that happening. “For all I care” is a dead giveaway – she didn’t urge rioters to set fire to migrant hotels or to “the treacherous government and politicians”.

She did plead guilty to writing that tweet, but it was up to the woke court, instructed by our woke government, to declare it illegal. To put it in a context close to Hitchens’s heart, if one day the pro-Putin nonsense he writes is criminalised, as I sincerely hope it will be, he’ll have to plead guilty to having written it. But it will be up to the court’s interpretation to decide whether he committed a crime.

Now I’m dispensing unsolicited advice, here’s some for Hitchens. Don’t try so hard to be original, mate. Originality is something you’ve either got or haven’t got. When you haven’t, but try to force it, you end up sounding ignorant – and often much worse.

If we look at Britain, £100 in 1850 equalled £110 in 1900, a negligible inflation of 10 percent over half a century.

That meant a British baby born in 1850 with a silver spoon in his mouth, say a solid middle-class income of £500 a year, could live his whole life in reasonable comfort independent of the state’s largesse even if he never made a penny of his own.

By contrast, £100 in 1950 equalled £2,000 in 2000 – a wealth-busting, soul-destroying inflation of 2,000 percent. This meant that the silver spoon would quickly drop out of the mouth of a similarly hypothetical baby born in 1950.

The fact is that a modern state doesn’t really want people to be independent of it. The underlying logic is simple: control over people’s money spells a large measure of control over the people.

That’s why all modern states are counterfeiters, not to cut too fine a point on it. The lever of the money-printing press is the sledgehammer the state can take to any nest egg. A pull on the lever, and the egg is reduced to an empty shell.

The only way of keeping money real would be to limit the state’s ability to counterfeit it. This used to be achieved by pegging paper money to an objective equivalent, usually gold.

Step by step, Western governments adopted a system whereby the paper money they issued was backed up by their gold reserves. Every banknote was instantly redeemable in gold, and both the paper and the metal were equally tangible. This introduced stability into economies and greatly simplified international trade.

However, the gold standard was hard to maintain during major wars, when deficit spending was unavoidable (“Unlimited money is the sinews of war,” as Caesar wrote to Cicero).

Thus, Britain suspended the gold standard during the Napoleonic Wars, the USA during its Civil War, and most countries during the First World War. But afterwards they all returned to the gold standard to bring some deflationary sanity to the runaway inflation caused by wartime spending.

That was before modern governments realised that inflation could be a useful power tool. Once that realisation sank in, the gold standard had to go. Wishing to bind its citizens hand and foot, the state itself had to slip the tethers of fiscal responsibility.

To be fair, the gold standard has its downside. For one thing, it limits the government’s ability to increase the money supply as a means of combating recessions. This time-honoured salvage operation has often been successful in the short term, though some eminent economists, such as Joseph Schumpeter, have objected to it on principle.

They would argue that, unless an economy climbs out of a recession organically, it’ll show a remission, not recovery. This argument rings true, but there is an even stronger one. For the gold standard limits not only the state’s flexibility but also its capacity to increase its own power by using inflation the way Robin Hood used his longbow for redistributive highway robbery.

We don’t want the modern state to have the short-term flexibility to steer the economy into safe havens because we can be certain that in the long term the state can only steer it into dire straits. We must do all we can to deprive modern governments of their flexibility to meddle in the economy.

Hence the attraction of the gold standard, at least to those who value their freedom above an ability to ride the economic rollercoaster through hair-raising rises and dips.

It puts people, not the state’s whim, in control of their own pecuniary destiny. The gold standard may make an economy less upwardly mobile, but in return it will definitely make it more stable and free. For that reason, it’s anathema to any modern government.

America led the way. In April, 1933, shortly after his inauguration, FDR abandoned the gold standard. In this. he displayed the same speed of action as did Lenin, who ‘monopolised’ (which is to say confiscated) all gold and silver plate in Russia in December 1917, a mere couple of months after the revolution.

The methods the two men chose to enforce their decrees were different, but rather less so than one would expect considering their different politics.

Roosevelt operated in a country that perceived itself to be free. Consequently, such Leninist expedients as summary executions were beyond his reach, as was Lenin’s favourite trick of having men tortured until they surrendered every gram of gold in their possession.

Robbing the churches of their valuables, and murdering the priests for good measure, à la Lenin, would also have been frowned upon in the US. Given such annoying limitations, one has to admire Roosevelt for doing his level best.

In the same April of 1933 he issued Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates” by U.S. citizens and demanding that they sell all their gold to the government at the price set by the buyer. Failure to comply was punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 or imprisonment of up to 10 years, or both.

The amount of the fine is staggering, especially in relation to the one dollar a day being paid to the millions employed in public works. As to the threat of a tenner in prison for failure to hand in all privately owned gold within a month, Roosevelt was treading a well-beaten path: the Bolsheviks had shown the way in Russia.

But FDR added an elegant touch that was beyond the crude Bolsheviks: having forced Americans to sell their gold to the treasury for $20.66 an ounce, the next year he used the Federal Reserve machine to ratchet up the price to $35 an ounce, a level at which it stayed fixed for the next 38 years.

At that point it was allowed to float, and in the 45 years thereafter the price of gold has increased almost fifty-fold, in parallel with the practical pulping of paper money.

The difference between people keeping their assets in gold or in currency is vital. Gold sitting in a bank vault is a factor of personal independence: the money is beyond the state’s reach, more or less. Not so banknotes: we are welcome to stuff suitcases full of paper, but the government has an almost absolute control over its value.

The gold standard is thus a factor of freedom, while its absence is a potential factor of tyranny. Since all modern governments are tyrannical in their aspirations, and as tyrannical in their actions as they can reasonably expect to be able to get away with, we ought not to be unduly surprised that a totalitarian Russia and a liberal-democratic USA followed the same course of action, if by different means.

However, until 1971 some tenuous link between paper money and gold still existed, as America was still prepared to settle her foreign debts in gold. In fact, once Western countries had abandoned the gold standard, the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 established a version of the same system.

The signatories agreed to peg their post-war exchange rates to the dollar, while the US government undertook to keep the price of gold fixed at $35 an ounce, thus linking all the participating currencies to gold at one remove. Not a bad idea, considering; but, as such a link ran against the grain of the modern world, it couldn’t last.

In 1964 this point was emphasised by the French president Charles de Gaulle, who sent to the US a cargo ship loaded to the gunwales with paper dollars. He then demanded that his right to exchange the banknotes for gold be honoured.

This was consistent with the French president’s understanding of economics and, truth be told, also with his well-documented dislike of Anglo-Saxons. The world, he explained, needs “an indisputable monetary base, and one that does not bear the mark of any particular country. In truth, one does not see how one could really have any standard criterion other than gold.”

Other countries began to follow suit, and a run on Fort Knox looked like a distinct possibility. Added to the staggering cost of President Johnson’s egalitarian ‘Great Society’ reforms, to say nothing of the Vietnam War, this attack on the dollar left Bretton Woods dead in the water in any real sense.

In 1971 Nixon severed the vestigial link between gold and the dollar by declaring that thenceforth the US government would only settle its foreign debts in paper, either dollar banknotes or treasury bonds and bills.

Since its debts were denominated in dollars, this gave the US government an ability to run up its sovereign debt to its present level of some $34 trillion. Other Western governments followed suit (Britian’s national debt is around £3 trillion, France’s even higher), pushing the button for a potential catastrophe as destructive as any nuclear war.

The term ‘fool’s gold’ originally referred to iron pyrite, which is commonly mistaken for gold. It can now be used to describe our funny, which is to say paper, money. Its constantly inflated supply is making us less secure and, more important, less free.

Our prosperity is phony: it’s a rudderless ship cast adrift to float on a raging sea of paper. Sooner or later, it’ll run aground, but let’s enjoy the ride while it lasts, shall we?

The other day I argued that, in substance, Marxism and fascism largely converge.

The outward manifestations of the two cults may diverge slightly, but then so do those of different exponents of the same cult. For example, for all their substantive kinship, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy behaved differently, as did Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

One of the features that all Marxist and fascist states share is that they are all glossocracies. They control bodies by violence and minds by keeping a tight rein on the word.

Ideologies live or die not only by coercion but also by imposing their verbal content on everyone. That’s why they tend to punish seditious words more severely and surely than crimes against person or property.

That’s how one can recognise a Marxist or a fascist state. If people are thrown in prison for something they say, not something they do, the state is either Marxist or fascist.

There exist exceptions to this observation. For example, inciting murder is a crime in itself, even if no one gets killed. But then there are exceptions to everything. By and large, if a state punishes words, it’s either fascist or Marxist.

That brings me to Britain, specifically the case of Lucy Connolly who walked free yesterday after 10 months in prison.

Mrs Connolly, the wife of a Northampton Tory councillor, is living proof of my statement. His Majesty’s Government is definitely Marxist, and it isn’t averse to acting in the spirit of its ideology, where it converges with fascism.

To take matters in turn, last summer three little girls were stabbed to death at a dance party in Stockport. The media falsely reported that their teenaged murder, Axel Rudakubana, was an illegal migrant. That led to an outbreak of anti-immigrant riots, and tempers were running high.

In fact, Rudakubana was merely a cultural alien, not an illegal one. He was born in Wales to Rwandan parents and grew up enamoured of Al Qaida and everything it stood for. One way or the other, riots did ensue, crowds attacked a mosque and some hotels occupied by migrants, clashing with the police.

So did Mrs Connolly go along for the ride? Did she throw bricks at that mosque or at police officers? She didn’t. Had she done so, she could have got away with a mere slap on the wrist.

He crime was worse: she attacked the Marxist glossocracy, not any particular person or building. Specifically, Mrs Connolly posted this tweet:

“Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all that I care. While you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist then so be it.”

You’ll agree that the language is rather intemperate, and even some people – well, me – who share her sentiments may deplore the way they were expressed. This mode of self-expression would exclude Mrs Connolly from the list of the privileged few rating the honour of being invited to my house for dinner.

Still, should Mrs Connolly be considered for such an invitation, I’d have to take into account the mitigating circumstances: she was reacting emotionally on the spur of the moment to a vile, horrific crime.

Moreover, blunders committed by another state institution, the NHS, had recently taken the life of her son. She projected her own bereavement on the grief felt by the victims’ parents, which added a few degrees to the temperature of her remarks.

However, the court didn’t accept any mitigating circumstances. Mrs Connolly was arrested, charged and denied bail – this in spite of her being a first-time offender who presented no flight risk.

Sorry, did I say ‘offender’? This woke contagion must have rubbed off even on me. What exactly was her offence? Hard as I look, I can’t find any corpus delicti in that tweet.

Mrs Connolly didn’t incite violence. She didn’t write, you are cordially invited to such and such place at such and such time, Molotov cocktails will be served, we’ll have some fun. She only wrote that she wouldn’t shed any tears if those hotels were burned to the ground, not that she’d happily do so herself.

Then she expressed a rather uncomplimentary view of illegal immigrants, but, uncomplimentary or not, it’s shared so widely as to be practically universal. And even if the authorities find such opinions ill-advised, since when are Britons arrested for objectionable opinions?

Since Britain became a Marxist country, is the answer to that one.

A trial ensued, Mrs Connolly was convicted and received a draconian sentence of 31 months in prison. An article in today’s Mail helpfully provides a long list of real, heinous crimes that have recently been punished with shorter sentences or none at all.

However, the author seems to proceed from the assumption that Britain is still a civilised parliamentary democracy ruled by law. That assumption is way out of date: the country is governed by a Marxist cabal using glossocracy to bend the historically free people to its will.

It’s led by Keir Starmer who has promised Parliament he’ll “always support” the courts in such cases. What he means by ‘such cases’ is gross miscarriages of justice, where people suffer horrendous punishments for saying something Starmer et al. don’t like and expressing views they don’t condone.

Those scoundrels accuse Mrs Connolly of being a racist, than which it’s to them impossible to be anything worse. Since our Marxist lot actively foment racial strife as one line in their frontal attack on what’s left of Christendom, they demonise as a racist anyone daring to resist.

Mrs Connolly may or may not be a racist, someone who hates other races, but nothing she wrote in that tweet is prima facie proof one way or the other.

She clearly dislikes the fact that swarms of legal and illegal aliens are inundating Britain, but such sentiments are both valid and widespread. Ditto her statement about our “treacherous government and politicians”. This is neither racist nor wrong. Our governing cabal are indeed treacherous, in that they betray the fundamental tenets of our civilisation – such as the right to free speech.

It’s also clear that Mrs Connolly doesn’t regard herself as a racist: “If that makes me racist then so be it.” What this says to me, though obviously not to Starmer’s courts, is that she is only racist within the warped ideology our government preaches with criminal abandon and enforces with singular cruelty.

In the end, this victim of glossocratic injustice served a third of her sentence, one that no civilised country would have imposed. So what does it make Britain then? You tell me.  

When asked this question a few months ago by the host of a MAGA podcast, I replied with another question: “What’s wrong with extremism?”

For me, just about everything. Extremism is too much of something, and it’s a mental pathology regardless of what it is that extremism is too much of. This is the case with all sorts of things, not just politics.

A glass of wine with every dinner is delicious, but a bottle of whisky every day is toxic. Dieting to keep your weight down is advisable, but not to the point of developing anorexia. Driving fast is a pleasure, but driving too fast is a risk.

Nationalism is patriotism pushed to an extreme, turning one’s country from an object of love to a cult. That’s why patriotic, especially intelligent, conservatives wince at any display of nationalism. We detest it on aesthetic, religious, philosophical and historical grounds.

The latter is significant because any student of history will know how easily a political cardsharp can pull the ace of patriotism out of his sleeve. That’s what Dr Johnson meant in 1775, when he described patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel”.

He was talking not about patriotism as such, but about his political opponent, William Pitt, who Johnson felt was constantly invoking patriotism for nefarious political reasons. More recent examples of such misuse are too numerous and too widely known to cite.

Suffice it to say that every manner of scoundrel has been known to manipulate patriotism, turning it into nationalism and putting it to evil use.

And even when evil men start out as internationalists, they often turn to nationalism as their stratagem for controlling the masses. Stalin, for example, discovered in 1941 that his slaves wouldn’t fight for workers of the world as readily as they would for their slave master, Russia.

One key difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the former is a deep but usually silent feeling, whereas the latter is always loud-mouthed. Patriots love silently; nationalists screech, often to drown out voices of moderation and decency.

As the Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin (d. 1889) quipped, “If you hear someone shouting about patriotism, be sure that something has been stolen somewhere.”

It’s a curious phenomenon that an uxorious man who’d never dream of telling all and sundry how much he loves his wife may still be prepared to scream his nationalism off the rooftops. However, taking this juxtaposition a step farther, such a man may indeed begin to tell people how much he loves his wife when he realises that all his friends and relations dislike her.

A similar onset of defensive patriotic loquacity is reactive, and it can easily become overreactive, with nationalism beckoning at the end. Such nationalism may still be reprehensible, but it’s now understandable.

It’s instructive, I think, to compare British and American brands of patriotism. Both nations are patriotic, but Americans are more susceptible to nationalism.

Most Englishmen I know find American hand-on-heart patriotism a tad vulgar, but then parvenus usually are. By European standards, the US is a rich Johnny-come-lately, and such countries are similar to such people in their urge to self-assert.

Moreover, Americanism isn’t so much a national, much less ethnic, identity as an idea. And cultish loyalty to an idea demands frequent reiteration more than, say, does the quiet affection an Englishman feels for English things and character traits.

That’s why the US has more national flags per square yard, why American pupils start their day (or at least used to) by reciting the Oath Of Allegiance, why American politicians end every speech with a shout of “God save America”, why every American puts his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played.

Nations whose identity has been formed over millennia don’t require such visible tokens of patriotism. That’s partly why English patriotism is less likely to overstep the demarcation line beyond which healthy patriotism turns into malignant nationalism.

Englishmen are self-confident enough not to become defensive about their identity – unless they feel it’s under attack and in need of defending. When pushed, they’ll push back, and their patriotism can then indeed turn to nationalism.

That insipient tendency is observable now, and it can become rampant before long. For decades, schools, universities and politicians have been busily indoctrinating Englishmen to be ashamed of being English.

Any affection for England felt or especially expressed instantly got them branded as Little Englanders, parochial fanatics deaf to the delights of multi-culturalism. The glorious history of their country, which taught the world the meaning of just government, is depicted as nothing but a continuous chain of violent oppression, colonialism and racism. Their neighbourhoods are being turned into something they no longer recognise as England.

That creates a fertile soil for the sprouting of violent nationalistic demagogues like Tommy Robinson. They spread their poisonous seeds, but the earth is increasingly ready to receive them.

And even such traditional symbols of national identities as flags are becoming more ubiquitous – and not just when the England football team is involved in an international tournament. That’s an offence to our authorities, who are all complicit in indoctrinating public contempt for things English.

That’s why council officials in our two biggest cities have armed themselves with secateurs and started cutting down Union Jacks and St George’s Cross flags. And not just in those two cities: the same is going on in Newcastle, Bradford, Norwich, Swindon – all over the country.

Lest you think those officials suffer from an acute case of vexiphobia, put your concern to rest. It’s only British and English flags that they are averse to.

Thus, as they were taking down British flags, council officials in the East London area of Tower Hamlets and in Birmingham happily left Palestinian flags fluttering in the wind.

Now, Tower Hamlets has a Muslim population of 40 per cent, and all of Birmingham some 30 per cent. Still, the last time I looked, those places are still in England, not in Sinai, Gaza or the Arabian desert. If their streets are to be hung with any flags and bunting, these should be British or English, not Palestinian, Russian or North Korean.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s in nature. In politics, some actions produce an opposite but a much stronger reaction.

The action of stamping national pride in the dirt and, even worse, trying to offer an alien ideology as a replacement, may turn the quiet, deep-seated English patriotism into a thunderous, eventually violent nationalism.

When this happens, violent thugs like Tommy Robinson may end up sitting not in prison but in Parliament, and England will lose her admirable quality of moderation and a sense of balance. That means England will turn into something else, and whenever a nation suffers such metamorphoses, the result is never pleasant.

Why, before long a chap standing for a parliamentary seat in Fulham and Hammersmith will start ending every speech with “God bless the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!” And, what’s worse, no one will laugh.      

Everybody, his brother and second cousin thrice removed have been drawing historical parallels, comparing the current round of negotiations about the Ukraine with Munich or alternatively Yalta.

I understand the temptation, but I’m not going to succumb to it. As an innately lazy man, I’m not going to draw parallels, seek analogies or make comparisons. I’ll just let historical facts do all the work for me.

The following are excerpts from Hitler’s speeches delivered in the immediate runup to the Munich Agreement, signed on 30 September, 1938.

In those speeches, Hitler laid out the reasons for his claims on the Czech territory, specifically the ethnically German Sudetenland. The governments of Britain and France found the claims valid, or at least pretended they did.

They agreed to twist Czechoslovakia’s arm into ceding the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for ironclad security guarantees issued by Germany herself, and also by Britain, France and Italy.

You know what happened next, but I’ve said enough for the moment. Now it’s Adolf Hitler’s turn to have his say:

“The Czechs had never been an independent nation until peace treaties raised them to a position of unmerited, artificial superiority over minorities more numerous than they themselves are. In the Middle Ages, Bohemia was a German Duchy. The first German university was founded in Prague two hundred years before Queen Elizabeth.”

“The creation of a multi-national Czechoslovakian republic after the war was sheer madness. She had no characteristic of a nation, from neither an ethnological nor linguistic nor economic nor political standpoint.”

“For some twenty years, all Germans, and also other various ethnic groups in Czechoslovakia, have had to suffer the worst possible treatment, torments, economic annihilation. Above all, they have been denied any chance of self-fulfilment and also the right to national self-determination. Every attempt of the oppressed to improve their lot has failed in the face of the Czech crude urge to destroy. In my Reichstag speech, I declared that the German Reich is taking initiative in putting an end to any further persecution of Germans.”

Europe was at the time still reeling from the devastation of the First World War. That’s why Britain and France agreed to let Germany have the Sudetenland – the part of Czechoslovakia where impenetrable fortifications had been built, stronger by some evaluations than the Maginot Line.

But, Herr Reichskantzler, this stops at the Sudetenland, doesn’t it? But of course, swears Hitler: “These are my last territorial demands.” All he cares about is the fate of the Sudeten Germans. He isn’t a conqueror; he is a “liberator” who only wants to correct “the injustice of the Versailles Treaty” and unite all Germans in the same Reich. “I have no interest in the Czechs.”

Sighs of relief all around. The Czechs are unhappy, especially because all those ruinously expensive fortifications in the Sudetenland will fall into Hitler’s hands without any shots fired and without Germany suffering any casualties.

But they can’t take Hitler on by themselves. The support of Britain and France is vital – and it isn’t just offered. It’s solemnly guaranteed. Britain and France promise that they “will issue international security guarantees for the new borders of Czechoslovakia against an unprovoked aggression.”

The Czechs winced. The deal smelled foul, but at least they could take solace in the promise issued by two great powers to defend Czechoslovakia, what’s left of it.  

That ironclad security guarantee did its job – from 30 September, 1938, to 15 March, 1939, when the Nazis occupied the whole country. The Czech army, demoralised by Munich, didn’t put up any resistance. It could no longer count on the Sudeten fortifications to buy it enough time to set up a meaningful defence.

There’s no need for me to put in my penny’s worth, telling you, for example, that, mutatis mutandis, Putin says exactly the same things about the Ukraine as Hitler said about Czechoslovakia.

Nor do I have to remind you that Putin also claims he has no territorial designs on Europe; that the unoccupied part of Donbas the Russians demand is where Ukrainian fortifications are; that the US and Britain already issued security guarantees to the Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for the country giving up her nuclear weapons.

All those parallel lines have already been drawn by bare facts. What I find both worrying and amusing is how reticent NATO countries are about their possible plans for enforcing such guarantees.

A lifetime spent in the world of Anglophone realities has heightened my interest in specifics, while increasing my distrust of generalities. Thus, after the Alaska fiasco, US spokesmen hinted at the possibility of using American army contingents as a peacekeeping force.

When I read about that, I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop until the next day, when Donald Trump said no such development was on the cards. For once, he was being completely honest.

For Putin to accept the presence of Western troops on the border is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with an automatic. One of the key mendacious pretexts he cites for the brutal attack on the Ukraine is NATO’s eastward expansion. The presence of Western troops on Russia’s border would spell the country’s crashing defeat – and Putin’s premature death ‘of natural causes’.

What else? Another mooted possibility is NATO’s planes enforcing a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. Lovely. But let’s imagine – all purely hypothetical of course – that several Russian bombers penetrate the Ukraine’s airspace and start firing missiles at Kiev.

Will NATO pilots be ordered to intercept the bombers and shoot them down? If you can believe that, you haven’t been keeping track of NATO’s cowardly response to every aggression committed by Putin’s Russia, specifically against the Ukraine from 2014 onwards.

Are we supposed to expect that, having refused to supply the Ukraine with enough weapons to repel the aggression, next time around NATO will start shooting Russian planes out of the sky? No? Then what do those guarantees mean, specifically? What – excuse my tautology – do they actually guarantee?

As I suggested before, I’m tempted to say it’s Munich all over again, but I don’t have to. The facts have said it for me.  

This is what I tried to explain to a French friend, but failed. It’s tempting to ascribe that failure to the inadequacy of my French, and God knows it’s inadequate enough.

However, my English is fairly competent, and yet I’ve been known to suffer similar defeats in an Anglophone environment. This encourages me to look for the problem elsewhere, starting with the observable fact that most people, including intelligent ones, don’t bother to ponder political concepts as deeply as it takes.

My French friend, a retired financier, is certainly nobody’s fool. Throughout his career, he always found some time away from fund management to read Le Figaro every day, and even a book or two every now and then.

Yet his interest in extraneous matters has always lacked the single-minded focus of unwavering concentration. Things like politics, philosophy, religion, art are merely hobbies to him, welcome diversions from debits, credits and market fluctuations.

That’s why, when I mentioned in two separate conversations that Starmer’s regime is at base Marxist and Putin’s fascist, all I got was an indulgent smile, a shaken head and a “mais non”. My interlocutor clearly thought I was an extremist devoid of the uniquely Gallic ability to appreciate nuances.

In fact, the difference between us is that I use ‘Marxist’ and ‘fascist’ as technical terms, while to him they are merely imprecise colloquial designations. ‘Marxist’ is fully synonymous with ‘Stalinist’, and ‘fascist’ with ‘Nazi’. (Thank God for small favours: at least he doesn’t describe conservatives as fascists.)

True, as my friend pointed out, Starmer isn’t guilty of mass murder, he hasn’t established a network of hard labour camps, he neither exterminates whole social classes nor imprisons his critics. Yes, he is a Left-leaning politician, but that doesn’t make him a Marxist. Calling him that, explained my friend, is emotive and unhelpful.

My interlocutor considers Putin a thoroughly nasty man, and he certainly doesn’t condone Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. He is also aware of certain despotic tendencies in Russia’s domestic affairs, such as curbing free speech and imprisoning Putin’s critics.

Yet Putin boasts neither Treblinka nor Auschwitz, he neither gasses Jews nor castrates homosexuals, he doesn’t conduct experiments on people, he doesn’t even pour gallons of castor oil down the throats of dissidents. Yes, he is an aggressive, murderous authoritarian. But so were Russian tsars, and no one called them fascists.

We left it at that: a boozy dinner party isn’t an appropriate place to delve into philosophical depths. Yet this is a subject that can be elucidated by Thomistic metaphysics of substances and accidents.

Aquinas borrowed it from Aristotle because it explains the essential Catholic concept of transubstantiation. Since non-Catholics reject transubstantiation, they also reject St Thomas’s thoughts on this matter.

I’m not proposing to debate the intrinsic value of such metaphysics here. In this context, all I’m saying is that I find it a practically useful cognitive tool.

To sum up schematically, a species’ substance defines what it is. Substance is the unvarying, immutable property of a species, the key to its identity. Accidents, on the other hand, are various non-essential manifestations of the substance. They can come and go without the species losing its identity.

For example, a dog may be big or small, ferocious or cuddly, brown or black, fast or slow, with a loud bark or more of a yelp. All of these are accidents. The dog’s substance is that it’s a Canis lupus familiaris, and this is the essence of the very concept of dog.

All the characteristics my French friend ascribed to Marxism and fascism are accidents. For, in substance, Starmer is indeed a Marxist, and Putin is indeed a fascist. This will become clear once we’ve established the substance of Marxism and fascism, discarding in the process their self-vindicating rhetoric.

They are both secular cults preaching absolute, sacralised state power or its maximum approximation. Both seek to achieve it by fostering a revanchist hysteria of collective resentment against some alleged injustices committed over history to suppress the natural superiority of the controlled population.

The substantive difference between Marxism and fascism is that the former preaches resentment against allegedly oppressive classes, which have historically exploited the downtrodden but inherently superior masses. Fascism, on the other hand, defines the downtrodden yet superior masses in terms of a nation or race historically oppressed by other, inherently inferior, nations or races.

In substance, Marxism and fascism are close to each other. They are two different branches of the same tree, the mass rebellion against Christendom going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment. Where they diverge, more or less, is in the derivative accidents.

Both are egalitarian, preaching universal equality before (and beneath) the state, as embodied in a small élite or sometimes a single leader.

But, while Marxism denies the formerly oppressive classes the otherwise equal status of all, fascism advocates the equality of every member of a nation or race, regardless of social class. Hence the two doctrines use different methods of imposing state control over the economy.

Marxism seeks to reduce the private sector to a minimum or, better still, to eliminate it altogether. Ideally, a Marxist state should own the entire economy, and this ideal is actively sought and sometimes closely approximated.

Fascism, on the other hand, tends to be corporatist. A fascist state controls the economy, but it doesn’t technically own it. In practical terms, while Marxists seek to dispossess private entrepreneurs (‘capitalists’), fascism effectively turns them into managers. Officially, they still own their businesses, but that status is contingent on their compliance with the state’s diktats.

Politically and culturally, both Marxism and fascism seek total control, or as much of it as is achievable within the limitations imposed by the current ethos. Marxism tends to restrict freedom of speech more than fascism. The former seeks to control self-expression in every area of life, whereas the latter allows its subjects some latitude – provided they don’t abuse it by criticising the state.

I hope you accept these attempts at precise yet unavoidably prolix definitions. If you do, I won’t have to go over Starmer’s and Putin’s regimes point by point, showing why the former is inherently Marxist and the latter fascist.

Putin operates in an ethos largely shaped by Marxism and hence conducive to fascism. All he had to do was re-direct public resentment away from alien classes and towards alien nations or blocs thereof.

Those Untermenschen have historically exploited saintly Russians, not letting them achieve the global supremacy to which their unmatched spirituality entitles them. And only the heroism of the Russian people has prevented those beasts from conquering and enslaving the country.

The collective passions are thus re-channelled into the conduit of racial superiority, demanding the nation’s historical due and seeking revenge against those who have kept the nation down.

The sacralisation of the supreme leader wasn’t especially difficult to impose either, what with several generations of Russians growing up accustomed to worship the mummified relics of another supreme leader. All the other accidents of the fascist substance followed naturally: brutal suppression of dissent, political murders, elimination of free media – and of course external aggression.

By contrast, Starmer operates in an environment not organically conducive to Marxism. Commitment to parliamentary democracy, free press and essential civic liberties are all obstacles in the way of Marxist purity. These can be systematically eroded, but they can’t be cast aside in one fell swoop.

But Starmer and his government get full marks for doing their best, given the limitations. If you read that bible of Marxism, The Communist Manifesto, you’ll see how much headway the Labour government is making towards the ideal outlined there.

Systematic debauchment of free speech and private wealth, education that indoctrinates rather than educating, the state extending its tentacles into every aspect of culture, politics and family life, increasingly subjugating the law to the state’s diktats, falsifying history by portraying it as nothing but continuous capitalist/colonial oppression, imposing economic policies that have little to do with the economy and much to do with revanchist Marxist levelling – all of these come straight out of that same playbook, The Manifesto.

In substance, Starmer’s government is as Marxist as Putin’s is fascist. These aren’t just any old words used pejoratively or otherwise. They are technical terms designating specific phenomena – and technical terms thrive on precise definitions, while dying a slow death when used loosely.

Now you see the problem I had with my French friend. It has taken me 1,400 words to make here the same point I tried to make in a maximum of 20 allowed by the etiquette of a noisy dinner party. Predictably, I failed, and it’s all my fault. I ought to have known better.  

When I left America in 1988, that was an idiomatic New York sneer at something worthless.

Since that time, most subway fares in New York have gone up to $2.90, which makes the idiom too unwieldy. I mean, who’s going to say “that and two-ninety will get you on the subway”? Too much of a mouthful, that.

Whatever the numeral in the expression, in those days it wasn’t often uttered in reference to American security guarantees. Europeans, especially those in NATO countries, were confident in the knowledge that, push come to shove, America will rush to their aid.

Many of those hopes were associated with the US nuclear umbrella. But not only that. Ever since the Cold War started, the US Army Court of Engineers had been busy turning West Germany into a terrain friendly to heavy American tanks.

New bridges and hundreds of miles of new roads were built, old roads were widened, old bridges fortified. Fulda Gap, the lowland corridor running from Thuringia to Frankfurt, was identified by Western strategists as a possible route for a Soviet invasion. Hence it was fortified to become a death trap for Soviet armour.

It wasn’t just America’s military might that helped the Europeans sleep peacefully, while making the Soviets toss and turn through the night. It was the certainty that, regardless of who was the US president, America would use her strength to repel a Soviet aggression.

However, while the subway fare in NYC has since been inflated almost three-fold, the value of the American security guarantee has gone down to a square root of sod-all. And it’s that New York native, Donald Trump, who is largely responsible for this crash.

I don’t know how many Ukrainians are familiar with the expression in the title above. But those who are must be uttering it to react against Trump’s latest bright idea of how to extinguish the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Having had his emetic powwow with Putin, Trump has summoned Zelensky to the White House, where the Ukrainian will be given an offer he can’t accept. Perhaps ‘offer’ is the wrong word here.

Trump will issue an ultimatum to the Ukrainian president, and unlike his ultimatums to Russia, that one will be ironclad. The US will withdraw all support from the Ukraine and instead will form an economic alliance with Russia – unless Zelensky agrees to the peace terms on offer.

Russia will get all of Donbas, including the parts her troops have been unable to occupy despite suffering horrendous casualties. The Ukrainians have turned the unoccupied section of Eastern Ukraine into a fortified zone putting all those Maginot and Mannerheim Lines to shame.

If the Russians are ever able to take those areas, they’ll have to bury it under an avalanche of Russian corpses – tens if not hundreds of thousands of body bags travelling back east. And these are the fortifications that the Ukraine is supposed to cede without a shot. In exchange for what, exactly?

Here comes Trump’s lightbulb moment. Sign the deal, he’ll tell Zelensky, and the US – well, he, Donald Trump – will give the Ukraine NATO-style security guarantees. No, the Ukraine wouldn’t be able to join the alliance because that would upset Vlad too much. She’ll have to remain neutral in perpetuity.

But not to worry: the umbrella of Article 5 will cover the Ukraine as securely as it covers all full-fledged NATO members. Now, is that a great deal or what?

I hope Zelensky will be able to withstand the ensuing harangue delivered in the tones often heard on the NY subway and tell Trump in words of one syllable what he could do with his ‘deal’. For the umbrella in question is already leaking, and it may soon be folded altogether.

That is, if Trump’s earlier pronouncements on that subject are to be believed – and, when it comes to his denigration of America’s NATO allies, I find those statements utterly believable.

Trump has for years made his feelings about Article 5 known: as far as he is concerned, its application is strictly contingent on Europe’s behaviour. Unless America’s European allies “pay up” for their defence, that Article is null and void.

Moreover, if European NATO members fail to pay up, Trump will actually encourage Putin to attack them. As he put it in February 2024, Trump “would encourage the Russians to do whatever the hell they want.”

Encouraging the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” goes beyond simply withdrawing American protection from NATO members. It means Trump would be prepared to form an alliance with an aggressive fascist regime threatening a global nuclear holocaust.

The US president is known for uttering incoherent and irresponsible phrases in the heat of the moment. It’s possible he didn’t mean that threat (and countless others in the same vein) the way it sounded. He might have merely tried to emphasise the need for Europe to take more of a hands-on approach to its defence. If so, the point is perfectly valid.

Europe has been criminally negligent for decades, relying on American protection rather than its own resources. Most European countries are belatedly coming to that realisation, largely because of Trump’s pressure. They are now prepared to commit up to five per cent of GDP to defence, which is higher than America’s own spend.

But translating that commitment into an actual defence capability will take years, especially if the US doesn’t go all out to help. If Trump refuses to recognise the provisions of Article 5 in the interim, that effectively gives Putin a carte blanche to pounce.

Thus, Zelensky has every reason to believe that the deal on the table means the Ukraine will have to cede much of her territory for nothing, or rather for a certainty that Russia will come back in force within a couple of years, possibly sooner. And America won’t lift a finger to help.

The Ukraine has tangible reasons to feel that Trump sees NATO as a yoke around America’s neck, something he’d happily shed to carve up Europe Yalta-style with Putin.

Commentators indulge in such historical analogies with abandon. Munich, Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam all get an airing, but this only goes to show how imprecise such parallels are.

Much closer to the current situation, both chronologically and substantively, is the 1973 Paris Peace Accord between the US and North Vietnam. That was supposed to end the Vietnam War, with South Vietnam keeping its sovereignty. In fact, that was America delivering South Vietnam to the communists on a platter, and the only surprise was that it took Hanoi two years to claim its prize.

Even closer and much more relevant to the Ukraine’s plight is another security guarantee that has turned out to be a sham. On 5 December 1994, the USA, Britain and Russia (!) signed the Budapest Memorandum, guaranteeing the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her relinquishing nuclear weapons.

The nuclear weapons were duly given up, and as for that security guarantee, the less said about it, the better. President Zelensky and all Ukrainians must be cursing the day on which their country tossed away her only real security blanket, agreeing to cover herself with nothing but a piece of paper worth even less than the New York subway fare.

Now, after 11 years of Russian aggression, escalating to a full-scale invasion on 24 February, 2022, the Ukraine is expected – let’s not mince words – to capitulate in exchange for another worthless security guarantee.

I don’t know how far Zelensky’s English goes, but I hope he’ll have the testicular fortitude to tell Trump exactly where to put his ‘deal’. That and a buck, okay, make it 2.9 bucks, will get you on the subway, Donald. You can scream till you’re blue in the face, but the Ukraine isn’t going to fall for another bogus ploy.

If, as I suspect, Zelensky’s English isn’t quite up to such idiomatic scratch, I’m hereby offering my services as ventriloquist. Free of charge.   

Some, however, will call it treason, and I may well join that chorus.

This morning, I had to look at the calendar to make sure I got the date right. Yes I did. It’s indeed 16 August. Eight days since the expiration of Trump’s latest ultimatum to Putin.

Trump proclaimed he was “pissed off” with Putin’s “bullshit”. He might have added a few of his favourite intensifiers, but these were omitted from the reports.

As a result, Trump issued an ultimatum. If Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire by 2 September, no, make that 8 August, Trump would visit any number of Egyptian plagues on Russia and her trading partners.

The Ukraine would get a new batch of American weapons, implicitly including long-range cruise missiles. Russia would be hit with new sanctions from hell. And whoever keeps Russia’s economy afloat by buying her oil – are you listening, China and India? – would be thumped with secondary tariffs of 500 per cent. No make that 100 per cent. Whatever, high enough to hurt, was what Trump meant.

The U-Day came and went, but none of that happened. What did ensue was the bafflement of commentators who failed to see any rhyme or reason in Trump’s actions. The ultimatum sank into the Lethe, that river of oblivion. All the deadlines were forgotten too.

Instead of agreeing to stop his aggression, Putin accepted Trump’s invitation to lose his international pariah stigma, come in from the cold and be reinstated as a legitimate world statesman. He magnanimously agreed to fly to Alaska for a heart-to-heart with Trump.

The flight from Moscow to Anchorage took nine hours. The meeting itself, just three. And the subsequent press conference, 12 minutes. There wasn’t much to say, other than Putin repeating, and Trump pretending to believe, the same lies. Actually, Trump has met many world leaders, but he never sounded so servile as he did with Putin yesterday.

The meaningless noise was harmonised with the background of Russian missiles raining on Ukrainian cities. But the solo part was unmistakable: Putin was manipulating Trump like a spy master running a two-bit agent blackmailed with naughty off-focus photos.

I don’t know whether Trump has been coerced into doing Putin’s bidding. I’m sure the truth, one way or the other, will out eventually. However, even if Trump isn’t Putin’s agent, I can’t imagine what he’d be doing differently if he were.

Trump is manifestly accepting at face value Putin’s lies about the “root causes” of the war. The Russian chieftain was supposedly so worried about NATO’s eastward expansion that he simply had to lash out. As himself a man of his word, Putin couldn’t forgive America for breaking her promise not to draw Eastern Europe into the alliance.

It was in 1990 that US Secretary of State James Baker supposedly assured Gorbachev that the unification of Germany wouldn’t entail the expansion of NATO. Gorbachev’s subsequent accounts of that event differed. In some interviews he said the assurance had taken place; in some others, that it hadn’t.

One way or the other, no formal agreement was reached. It’s laughable that Russia, which has broken every treaty she has ever signed (full list available on request), would try to hold the West to an informal oral flourish that might or might not have taken place.

Everyone not doing Putin’s bidding for one reason or another knows that there exists only one “root cause” of the brutal Russian aggression: the Ukraine’s independence.

It’s not for nothing that Putin’s foreign minister Lavrov showed up at Anchorage with the letters CCCP on his T-shirt, the Russian for USSR. Amusingly, the outside two letters were covered by his gilet, with only CC visible, the Russian for the SS.

Some commentators had a good time with that, saying that the latter acronym was closer to the truth. Such fun can be had, but the actual reality is even worse: Putin is dead set on rebuilding the Soviet empire. This noble aim is impossible to achieve without the Ukraine returning to the fold as the bigger and more important version of Lukashenko’s Belarus.

It’s not about getting a part of the Ukraine’s territory. It’s about turning the Ukraine as a whole into Russia’s stooge, a sham ‘republic’ run by a quisling like Yanukovych or Medvedchuk.

Anyone who thinks Putin genuinely wants peace, especially at a time his troops are inching forward over piles of their comrades’ corpses, is sorely misguided. What he wants is Trump’s acquiescence in pursuing that objective. And the Alaska travesty showed yet again that this is exactly what Putin is getting.

“The war wouldn’t have happened had Trump been president in 2022,” lied Putin, and Trump beamed from ear to ear. That’s exactly what he has been saying for years.

Of course, he has also been saying he’ll end the war in 24 hours (three days, three months, six months and so on), but Putin never confirmed those deadlines. He did confirm that Don Trump could have prevented – and now can stop – the killing. What further proof of Trump’s genius can anyone, including the Nobel Committee, possibly want?

Putin was playing Trump’s ego like a violin virtuoso plying his trade. That favour was repaid: both the Ukraine and Europe were reduced to the role of extras floating in and out behind the two stars of the show.

The only tangible result of the meeting was that, courtesy of Trump, Putin shed the striped clothes of a war criminal under an international arrest warrant. Overnight, he regained the status of a world leader, equal partner to Trump if perhaps not quite yet to Xi.

That was his reason for going to Alaska, but Putin’s reason was Trump’s treason. He betrayed the Ukraine, NATO, the West in general. He allowed the fascist regime threatening Europe to gain time for continuing its aggression, with all ultimatums forgotten, all deadlines buried.

Now Trump will meet Zelensky, trying no doubt to bully him into surrender. He’ll then probably accept Putin’s invitation to have another pointless chinwag, in Moscow this time. There we’ll go, round and round, to and fro, while the Ukraine bleeds white.

Eventually, she’ll bleed out, with Putin claiming his spoils and Trump his Nobel Peace Prize. And the epigram by the Elizabethan poet John Harrington will be vindicated yet again: “Treason doth never prosper? What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

As Trump and Putin meet in Anchorage to carve up the Ukraine, I can’t help remembering the KGB myth involving Alaska.

As a career KGB officer of a certain age, Putin certainly remembers it, as I’m sure he remembers many others. His parent organisation was known for indulging in that genre on a vast scale.

One of the few words Russian contributed to English is ‘disinformation’. The components of the word are Latin in origin, but the concept is Russian, something to make that nation proud.

Much of KGB disinformation was meant for internal consumption, not just to dupe the West. I was a little boy when I was exposed to a KGB myth I still remember.

Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956 to drown the anti-Communist revolution in blood. As our schoolteachers, all of them willing conduits for KGB lies, explained to us, that action was in fact a pre-emptive strike. West German and American troops had been poised at the Hungarian border, ready to pounce on our fraternal regime, and only prompt action by our heroic army saved the day.

I don’t recall whether I believed that lie at my mature age of nine, but I probably did. I definitely believed some of the others.

They were assiduously spread to reassure the people that their abject poverty wasn’t as bad as all that. The West might have had a higher standard of living on average, but that level was made up of contrasts between a few fat cats and many paupers.  

And anyway, some, if not quite all, Soviet products were superior to any Western equivalents. For example, every Soviet citizen of my generation knew for sure, and was happy to repeat to all and sundry, that Soviet ice cream was the best in the world.

The KGB created that myth secure in the knowledge that no one would be able to disprove it by a comparison test.

Most Soviet citizens weren’t allowed to travel abroad. Those few who were deemed sufficiently trustworthy to be granted that privilege weren’t going to abuse it by contradicting the KGB. They knew which side their bread was buttered.

When I grew up, I no longer believed anything the authorities said on any important subject. But the unsurpassed excellence of Soviet ice cream was such a trivial point that I never bothered to question it. Then, in 1973, I found myself in Rome, and the first taste of gelato shattered that myth to smithereens.

Another one involved Armenian brandy, which, according to another myth, was superior to any alcoholic beverage available in the West. Supposedly, both Winston Churchill and the Queen wouldn’t even consider drinking anything else. They had to have crates of that rather revolting treacly beverage shipped to London, for otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to slake their thirst.

Again, that was a free hit for the KGB – drinks like French cognac and Scotch whisky were unavailable to common folk. The same went for Soviet sparkling wine, which they larcenously called ‘champagne’ (just as they called their brandy ‘cognac’).

Even when marked ‘dry’, it was nauseatingly sweet and had bubbles the size of peas. Typically, every sip would get stuck in one’s gullet and create an unpleasant reflux – at best.

Some 30 years ago, a friend gave me a bottle of Sovetskoye shampanskoye he had brought from Russia. Ever since, I’ve been using it as a meat mallet, trying not to pound too hard lest it explode in my face.

Yet another myth involved the Russian language, supposedly by far the richest in the world. Actually, the English vocabulary has roughly three times more words than Russian, but that fact wasn’t widely advertised. Something else was, and that myth actually had a kernel of truth to it.

It concerned swearwords, and there I can testify to the relative paucity of English. A Russian speaker can express most ideas, including some rather involved ones, using nothing but four-letter words in different combinations and with variable affixation.

You may think that isn’t much to be proud of, but every little bit helps. That’s why the KGB insisted on spreading the news about the superlative quality and variety of Russian obscenities.

That part of it was actually true, but they also said that Anglophone capitalists, frustrated by their own puny language, routinely swore in Russian. Having now lived in English-speaking countries for 52 years, I know that claim was false, as I actually knew it when I still lived in Moscow. But many of my former countrymen insisted on repeating that nonsense, and some still do.

The myth relevant to current events involved Alaska. The government of Alexander II sold it to the US in 1867, for today’s equivalent of $130 million. Nicholas II, Alexander’s grandson, lived to regret that transaction.

In 1896, local miners discovered gold in the Klondike, which started a major gold rush. The sum those Yankees paid for the largest peninsular in the Western Hemisphere began to feel like a slap in the Russian face. And the slap became a punch when vast deposits of oil were found in Alaska in the 1960s.

But not to worry, went another KGB myth, which everyone believed. Russia didn’t actually sell Alaska to the US. That risible sum paid not for a purchase but only for a 100-year lease. The lease was to run out in 1967, and as a child I often wondered whether the Soviet Union would reclaim Alaska when I turned 20.

Long before that age, I knew that Alaska gained statehood in 1959, which made it unlikely that the US government would honour the conditions of that lease. It was only closer to the supposed deadline that I found out that the mythical lease was indeed a sale.

I wonder if Putin will test Trump’s knowledge of such arcana by suggesting that Alaska rightfully belongs to Russia. He is certain to make that claim about the Ukraine, and – call me a pessimist – I doubt Trump will reject that myth outright.

P.S. Actually, Trump did say in his press conference that he was going to Russia to meet Putin. Was it a slip or a reflection of an agreement on the table?