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The best way of hurting Putin would be for the West to take a more direct part in arming and supporting the Ukraine. That would entail either sending troops out there or, barring that, giving the Ukraine all the tools to do the job.

But let’s be serious here, now that’s it’s just us boys. That’s not going to happen, is it? You know it, I know it – more important, Putin knows it.

The hope that Russia will eventually bleed out in the on-going war of attrition is only marginally more realistic. Blood is one thing that’s always in ample supply in Russia. The country lost 27 million people in the Second World War and still didn’t exsanguinate.

A human life is worth next to nothing there, which the rulers assert with cynicism and the masses accept with fatalism. If the Russians have lost about 1.5 million people since 2022, it’ll take another 20 years at the same casualty rate for anyone there to worry.

Sanctions? There Russia resembles a boxer who smiles at his opponent after being rocked with a hard blow. Russia too pretends she isn’t hurt by the sanctions imposed by the West, but she is.

Yet she still remains upright, able to go on fighting. The only sanctions that really sting are those that limit the flow of high-tech products into Russia, especially those vital to armament production. Sanctions on Russian hydrocarbon exports are painful too, but countries like China, India and some EU members provide helpful analgesics by buying Russian oil and gas at dumping prices.

Commentators who insist that the Russian economy is tottering ought to descend from the ivory tower of Western economic criteria. Yes, the inflation rate is high there, the people’s living standards are rapidly going down, some staples including petrol are in short supply, the average monthly salary outside Moscow is around £200 – and millions don’t even get that.

Should a similar situation arise in Europe, Frenchmen, Spaniards and perhaps even Britons would be building barricades, torching cars and attacking politicians. But Russia isn’t like France, Spain or even Britain.

Her rulers don’t care about the plight of the people and never have. And the people are either too docile, too brainwashed or too scared to do anything about it.

No money, no jobs, no prospects? Not a problem. Young men, egged on by their mothers and wives, seek income opportunities by enlisting to kill Ukrainians or, more likely, to be killed by them. The mothers and wives don’t mind either way: wages are high on the frontline, while death benefits make their loved ones even more valuable dead than alive.  

So how can the West really hurt Putin, perhaps enough to force him into acting less aggressively? I have an answer, or rather 300 billion answers. That’s how many Russian dollars are currently frozen in the West.

These assets shouldn’t be frozen or impounded. They should be punitively confiscated and used as military aid for the Ukraine.

When this idea is floated from time to time, politicians, lawyers and bankers wince and throw up their hands in horror. Confiscating privately owned assets smacks of illegality, which isn’t a nice thing at all. We don’t do that sort of thing.

Such concerns shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. If civilised countries stop being ruled by law, they stop being civilised. Fine legal points matter, especially these days, when legality often replaces and sometimes contradicts morality.

But what if all legal obstacles in the way of confiscation were removed? What if it could be shown that taking that money isn’t only moral but also legal? This is what I propose to do, step by step.

The first step is to state that the Russian economy defies all the categories used by political scientists and economists. It’s not capitalist, socialist or corporatist because the sui generis Russian state is none of those things.

Russia is ruled by an organised crime group (OCG) formed by a fusion between assorted mafias and the secret police, KGB/FSB. No major country has ever had such a government, which makes null and void all the criteria, standards and terminology used to classify other economies.

One such defunct term is ‘privately owned assets’. This term has some validity in Russia only at the lower economic tiers, at the level of personal savings or income from a corner shop, a small one.

Any assets reaching millions and especially billions can be owned by private individuals only nominally. In reality, they belong to the OCG, which has total control of the money. Like any other mafia, it’s set up as a pyramid, with the godfather, in this case Putin, sitting at the very top.

Most major wealth in Russia derives from businesses linked to either natural resources, finance or infrastructure. As we climb up the steps of the aforementioned pyramid, we’ll find that ultimately and in effect they all belong to Putin.

All such businesses without exception have got rich by methods that would have produced multiple criminal convictions in any civilised country. By our standards, every Russian ‘oligarch’ is a felon – but he isn’t really an oligarch.

That term describes a man whose financial virility buys him political power. That’s not the case in any OCG and it’s certainly not the case in Russia. Power in Russia belongs to Putin, and he exerts it through intermediaries. The latter have influence for only as long as Putin lets them have it.

The same goes for their wealth. Russian ‘oligarchs’ don’t really own the capital currently in their possession. They are simply money launderers, frontmen given the task to legitimise the money by passing it as their own.

Their role is especially important because a great deal of those assets are invested in the West, impervious to the vagaries of fickle Russian politics. The nominal owners of that capital are people close to Putin, his accomplices in every crime committed by Russia, including her pouncing on her neighbours.

Some of them become Western citizens, like Leonard Blavatnik. Others may even ascend to the upper House of Parliament, as Lord Lebedev will testify. And they all live high on the hog off Putin’s money.

That means they are allowed to use some of it, calling it their own. Their cut varies depending on their proximity to Putin and their status in the OCG. According to experts, the range runs from 10 to 25 per cent, but never higher than that.

All these frontmen use some of their ill-gotten lucre to buy Western politicians, judges and journalists retail and wholesale. Such efforts differ in scale but not in kind from the usual mafia practices everywhere. There is a salient difference though.

Most of the Putin frontmen who hold his assets in Western institutions are under personal sanctions. They aren’t allowed to travel to the West and, if already living here, are denied access to their assets, other than paltry amounts (by their standards) they need for basic living expenses.

Those who manage to buy or trick their way around the personal sanctions use the money to fund the war in the Ukraine whenever Putin tells them to do so, and in the amount Putin specifies. The money belongs to him after all.

Some of those ‘oligarchs’ occasionally fall out with Putin and then, as a rule, out of the window. This pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched The Godfather and its sequels.

It’s important to realise that those personal sanctions would be instantly removed if the ‘oligarchs’ publicly severed all ties with Putin’s OCG, denounced the criminal war in the Ukraine, left Russia if still living there and refused to fund the Russian war effort. However, the Russian version of omertà, reinforced by the certainty of retribution, doesn’t allow them to do that.

When I refer to Putin’s war on the Ukraine as ‘criminal’, this isn’t just a figure of speech. On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) found Russia guilty of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, and issued arrest warrants for Putin and his closest associates.

The upshot of all this is that the $300 billion sitting in Western banks (a number that doesn’t include vast property holdings, many at some of the best London addresses) is money acquired by criminal means and used to perpetrate further crimes, on an increasingly greater scale. Practically all of it belongs not to private individuals but to the OCG run out of the Kremlin – and ultimately to its boss, Putin.

Every Western country has a law allowing confiscation under such circumstances. This is what British jurisprudence says: “The primary British law allowing the confiscation of criminally acquired assets is the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA). POCA provides powers for criminal confiscation… The Act’s goal is to deny criminals the use of their assets, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has a specialised unit to handle asset recovery”. 

I say let’s get that specialised unit busy. Considering that a good chunk of the OCG’s assets are held in Britain, it’ll have its work cut out for it.

How many wars does Trump have to bring to a peaceful conclusion for him to win the coveted Nobel Peace Prize?

More to the point, how many peace treaties has María Corina Machado, this year’s winner, negotiated? Has she ended the Punic Wars, the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, either World War?

She hasn’t – and Donald Trump has. Or, if you insist on being pedantic about it, none of those wars would have started had he been US president at the time. I can just see him calling his best friend Hannibal and telling him, “C’mon, Hanny, give me respect and I’ll give you a zillion dollars. Yeah, yeah, I know Scipio is a douche, but lay off and I’ll owe you a favour. One hand washes the other, know what I mean? Pony up, okay?”

And just look what Donald has done for the Gaza conflict. Israel has signed the peace treaty, Hamas so far haven’t but have said they would, and 20 hostages will be returned to Israel dead or alive. Moreover, Trump has agreed to put 200 US servicemen in harm’s way by deploying them on the demarcation line, where any chap with a dinner napkin on his head and an AK in his hands will be able to take potshots at them.

Trump has also appointed our own dear Tony Blair as his peace-keeping viceroy in the region, but that’s where Hamas have drawn the line. Thereby they’ve shown a great deal of discernment, and for once I applaud their decision. No undertaking headed by Tony can ever succeed, other than his prodigious efforts to enrich himself.

Still, though I doubt Trump has brought lasting peace to the Middle East (to achieve that he’d have to get rid of the feral hatred ‘Palestinians’ feel for Jews, which is an impossible task), he has certainly done more than Joe Biden. That, admittedly, isn’t saying much, but it is saying something.

Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded for less, as Barak Obama could confirm, not to mention such a tireless champion of peace as Yasser Arafat. So what do those Scandinavians have against Trump?

At this point, I have to withdraw myself from any consideration as a potential winner of this accolade. If nominated, I’d have no chance – according to insiders, most of the things that turned the Nobel Committee off Trump are the things I like.

He cut US foreign aid, which would have won the approval of the late Peter Bauer. Prof. Bauer defined foreign aid epigrammatically as a transfer of money from the poor people in rich countries to the rich people in poor countries. Trump is reluctant to transfer money into the numbered Swiss accounts belonging to assorted tinpot tyrants, and I can’t blame him.

Then Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation, much to my enthusiastic approval.

His executive order said the US was withdrawing “due to the organization’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states”. And that’s putting it mildly.

My shouts of approval went up several decibels when Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. I share his conviction that this whole net zero nonsense is an elaborate unscientific scam perpetrated by professional malcontents who hate the West and everything associated with it.

As circumstantial support for this point of view, consider the ease with which eco-zealots float from one anti-Western cause to another. Just look at Greta Thunberg, and you’ll know what I mean.

Meanwhile, our own fanatics led by Ed Miliband, a worthy son of his Stalinist father, are dead set on destroying what’s left of the British economy by making us all drive electrical appliances and go back to the good old times, when energy was only produced by sun, wind and water.

Obviously, the Nobel Committee disagreed with me and, more important, with Donald Trump. Neither party is likely to concede the point, meaning that the Donald will have to redouble his peace-making efforts if he wants to have another shot at that prize.

The Committee had more legitimate concerns as well. Trump’s wholehearted attempts to start a global trade war, whatever their economic justification (which I think is scant), can hardly be described as peaceful. The Donald has been laying about him like Macduff, wielding the broadsword of tariffs, smiting friend and foe alike but, unlike his prototype, failing to kill the murderous king, this time called McPutin.

One way or another, the Donald has lost this time around – and to a woman, which adds insult to injury. Boy, would he like to grab that Venezuelan by her Nobel medal and show her who’s boss…

But not to worry – not all has to be lost if the Nobel Committee were to act on my modest proposal. If the Peace Prize has so far evaded Trump, the Committee ought to consider endowing a new category: the Nobel Gurning Prize.

Trump would be the odds-on favourite for this accolade, something he deserves for his talent and life-long application. No other politician I know, indeed no other person, boasts such a vast array of unlikeliest facial expressions – and does so naturally, without any visible signs of effort.

Endowing this new category would enable the Committee to reward Trump’s efforts without courting any controversy. This is what the potential winner would describe as a “WIN-WIN SITUATION!!!”

As the price of gold has surged over $4,000 an ounce, economists whip their trusted calculators out and moan about Gordon Brown.

Between 1999 and 2002, when he was Chancellor, Brown sold 395 tonnes of gold, about half our reserves, at an average price of $275 an ounce. That was low even then, as Brown knew perfectly well.

In today’s money, $275 is about $550, a meagre two-fold increase, whereas the price of gold… Stop it, don’t make me weep. Had Brown held on to that gold, the Exchequer would today be £35 billion better off – just think how many more illegal immigrants we’d be able to put up at four-star hotels.

Let’s make one thing clear. Gordon, for all his abominable socialist traits, is no moron. In fact, compared to his current counterpart, Rachel Reeves, he is a genius of Smithian proportions. So why did he do something even rank amateurs knew was foolhardy?

The answer is, dumping that gold only seems stupid to you and me. To Brown, it made perfect sense: he was acting on an inner imperative of all modern governments.

This is encapsulated in the title above, but I’ll rephrase that statement to make it airtight: because governments love inflation, they hate gold. For you to agree, you have to accept the hypothesis I invariably use as the starting point of probing into governments’ motives.

A hypothesis is vindicated when it explains all the available facts, as this one does. So here it is: the only thing modern states are after is a steady increase in their own power at the expense of the power of the individual.

It doesn’t matter whether the state in question is totalitarian, authoritarian or, as in this case, democratic. They all share the same overarching goal even if they may pursue it in different ways.

Not all state officials arrive at this realisation by a rational process. But all of them understand it viscerally – and act accordingly.

That’s why, even though all governments make noises about reducing inflation, none has ever succeeded in doing so long term. Market fluctuations may sometimes push inflation down, but state action never does.

The motivation is clear: inflation is a tax that requires no legislative approval. By inflating the currency, the government effectively transfers money from the people’s accounts into its own, with a parallel transfer of even more power the same way.

It was only in the 20^th century that governments realised that inflation could be a useful power tool. Once that realisation, or rather post-rationalisation, sank in, they cranked up printing presses to high gear and buried sound money under an avalanche of virtual, effectively counterfeit, currency.

Wishing to bind its citizens hand and foot, the state itself had to slip the tethers of fiscal responsibility. Thus promiscuous public spending achieves a dual purpose: it makes more people dependent on the state while also ushering in high inflation. The upshot is the same: greater state power. Job done.

This explains the innate hostility to gold all modern states feel in their bone marrow. An economy based on gold deprives modern governments of their flexibility to meddle in the economy.

The difference between people keeping their assets in gold or in currency is critical to my hypothesis. Gold coins or ingots sitting in a bank vault are a factor of their owner’s 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, its hand on the printing press button, has an almost absolute control over its value.

Hence the attraction of the gold standard to those who value their freedom above an ability to ride the economic rollercoaster through hair-raising rises and dips. It puts people, as opposed to 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 make it more stable and free. For that reason, it’s anathema to any modern government – and the more socialist a government, the more it hates gold.

That’s why all such governments, whether totalitarian socialist or socialist democratic, declare war on gold the moment they take over. Thus immediately after the Revolution, the Bolsheviks confiscated all gold owned publicly or privately. Anyone caught hoarding gold was summarily shot (if he was lucky).

However, when FDR took over, he did exactly the same thing, and replacing execution with fines was his only sop to democracy.

In 1933 Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates” by US 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 then 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, as we have seen, was treading a well-beaten path: the Bolsheviks had shown the way.

Having forced Americans to sell their gold to the treasury for $20.66 an ounce, the next year FDR used the Federal Reserve machine to ratchet up the price to $35, a level at which it stayed fixed for the next 38 years. However, at that point it was allowed to float, which is to say to rise in parallel with the practical pulping of paper money.

Now the price of gold has floated upstream to $4,000 an ounce, which means the economy is heading for the rocks. A sharp increase in gold price is almost always a sign of impending economic catastrophe.

The markets lose faith in the states’ ability to manage their spending and service their mounting public debt. Hence they rush out of government bonds and currencies, seeking instead the relatively safe haven of gold.

Since the law of supply-demand hasn’t yet been repealed, the price of gold shoots up. But explaining this in purely economic terms will never work. It takes not economists but philosophers and, yes, theologians to explain why the combined British inflation in the second half of the 19^th century was 10 per cent, while in the second half of the 20^th century it was 2,000 per cent.

Both the public and especially the state had to change their economic behaviour drastically to effect such a cosmic shift. And the current price of gold is among the most reliable indicators of a shift gone wrong.

Its present jump to $4,000 an ounce screams calamity loudly enough for even our deaf (and dumb) government to hear. Yet its love of inflation and hatred of gold are the spots this particular leopard can never change.

To make the economy sound and gold cheaper the modern state would have to stop being modern. This is a logical and, if you will, ontological impossibility. So brace yourself for a rough ride. It’s definitely coming.

The concept of taking the rough with the smooth comes alive every time I watch football, which, I’m ashamed to admit, is quite often.

Alas, the occasionally enjoyable visual experience comes with an invariably irritating aural one. You see, matches have commentators, usually a professional journalist in tandem with an ex-footballer, with the former trying to keep the latter on the straight and narrow.

Not all retired ball-kickers graduate to TV commentary. Judging by those who do, the selection criteria include the ability to speak with at least a marginally comprehensible accent and without obscene intensifiers.

The second criterion is met more widely than the first, but with some training one can learn to follow the general thrust of remarks made by Scousers like Jamie Carragher or Scotsmen like Ally McCoist. As a lifelong student of English, I’m even grateful to them for widening my dialectal horizons.

Also required seems to be a knack for uncovering a deep intellectual content not wholly encompassed by the phrase “he hit it first time, and there it was in the back of the net.” By such standards, Sky and BBC commentators do a good enough job.

I for one don’t mind hearing them drone on in the background, especially when they make technical observations escaping rank amateurs like me. Yet at times I wince as if two pieces of glass were rubbed together to produce a grating sound.

This happens every time they say ‘melodramatic’ to mean ‘dramatic’, ‘decorative’ to mean ‘beautiful’, ‘lacksadaisical’ to mean ‘lackadaisical’, ‘amount’ to mean ‘number’, ‘willy-nilly’ to mean ‘at will’, ‘fortuitous’ to mean ‘fortunate’ and so on, ad nauseam.

I realise that most viewers are less sensitive to solecisms than I am, with me and other such pedants languishing in a distinct minority. But minority rights being such a burning issue these days, we must insist on upholding ours.

Hence my first proposal: not just sports commentators but all public speakers in mass media should be fined every time they misuse a word, utter an ungrammatical sentence or maul English in any other way.

Fines ought to be means-tested. Thus football commentators drawing seven-digit salaries should be fined thousands for each solecism; billionaires like Donald Trump, millions.

No, come to think of it, forget that second one. We don’t want the president of a great nation to end up on the bread line after just a handful of speeches.

You’ve doubtless detected a note of levity in my first proposal, and it is indeed there, if only to protect my anguished soul of an inveterate pedantic snob. My second proposal, however, is dead serious. It has to do with political statements public figures make on- or off-camera.

I realise I’d be on a losing wicket proposing to ban politicians like Donald Trump from talking about politics. Though some things they say are unconscionable, we have to suffer in silence – talking is what those chaps do for a living (apart from launching cryptocurrencies on the side or promoting their family businesses in variously iffy countries).

So let’s limit ourselves to sports commentators, specifically those who can’t contain their logorrhoea in social media. It’s our hurricane-strength zeitgeist that forces people to believe that anyone who has achieved success in one field, no matter how trivial, is qualified to lecture the public on all others.

Even footballers whose IQ seldom creeps into three digits – and that’s before they’ve headed thousands of balls – find a ready audience for their political pronouncements. Considering such humble beginnings followed by repeated cerebral trauma, it’s hardly surprising that most of their declarations are left-wing, and all are inane.

Enter Gary Neville, right back turned pundit, property developer, club owner and Labour activist. Gary tirelessly campaigns for worthy causes, such as the human rights of putatively oppressed minorities.

To his credit, he doesn’t let his passions interfere with the business at hand, which is business. Thus, when the 2022 World Cup was held in Qatar, Neville formed a lucrative partnership with that country’s government, whose record on human rights is less than exemplary. Then again, Gary must have looked at the Qatari links of the Trump family and decided that he could be the gander to their goose.

The other day, Gary drove through Manchester, the site of a recent terrorist Muslim attack on a synagogue. He was appalled but managed to control his emotions long enough to analyse the situation the way he analyses football formations.

In a subsequent video, Gary put his finger on the real culprits in that outrage: “I just kept thinking as I was driving home last night that we’re all being turned on each other. And the division that’s being created is absolutely disgusting. Mainly created by angry, middle-aged white men, who know exactly what they’re doing.”

That statement drew much criticism, with many an irate viewer unable to get his head around the logic. A Muslim killing Jews outside a synagogue is an act that seems to exculpate angry, middle-aged white men. Unless, of course, Gary means that those Jews in the crowd who fit that description had only themselves to blame.

Come on, fellows, give Gary credit for some nous. He doesn’t mean that at all. All he is saying is that people to the right of Jeremy Corbyn are creating a climate conducive and clement to rampaging Muslims thirsting for Jewish blood.

Just listen to his own explanation, will you?

“Brexit has had a devastating impact on this country and the messaging is getting extremely dangerous. 

“All these idiots out there spreading hate speech and abuse in any form, we must stop promoting them.

“We must stop elevating our voices towards them and it needs to stop now, and get back to a country of peace, love, harmony and become a team again.”

That’ll be a ten grand fine for the grammar, Gary. As to his nostalgia for the Garden of Eden that Britain used to be, does he mean during his lifetime? Now I’ve lived in England almost as long as Gary has lived, but I can’t recall any semblance of paradise.

Things were indeed more peaceful and harmonious a few decades ago, fair enough. But then, according to Gary, angry, middle-aged white men began to arrive in droves, disturbing the peace and destroying the harmony by egging Muslims on to kill Jews.

I’m not sure I’ve got it right, but that’s how it sounds. But hold on a moment, Gary doesn’t blame all white middle-aged men, only those who put up Union Jacks all over the place:

“Funnily enough on one of my development sites last week there was a Union Jack flag put up and I took it down instantly,” said Gary. Personally, I don’t find this funny, but then Gary’s sense of humour must be different from mine.

However, now he makes sense. Angry, middle-aged white men put up Union flags, which has the same effect on the oppressed Muslim community as a red rag has on a bull. Justifiably incensed, Muslims go out and kill Jews. There, I’ve finally got to the bottom of it.

I can also heave a sigh of relief because I’m not on Gary’s hit list. Though shamefully white and occasionally angry, I’m beyond middle age and neither do I have a Union Jack hanging out of my window.

By this circuitous route we’ve arrived at my second  proposal.

Former football players working as TV pundits must undertake to refrain from public pronouncements on politics or any subject other than their sport. Failure to comply should be punished by summary dismissal and a fine equal to the chap’s annual salary, £1.1 million in Gary’s case.

Should my two proposals be acted on, I’ll be able to watch a football match without feeling the urge to throw a slipper at the screen. And I don’t even wear slippers.

In welcome contrast to his predecessor, Pope Leo XIV has so far kept a rather low profile, refraining from comments on quotidian issues.

However, His Holiness has recently delivered himself of a statement I find puzzling:

“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion, but I am in favour of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says, “I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

Let’s see if I can decipher this message, and if I can’t I’ll appreciate all the help I can get.

Starting from the end, the Pope seems to believe that immigrants to the United States are treated inhumanly, which denies their right to life. The statement is so earth-shattering that I for one would like to see some supporting evidence.

To begin with, I can testify from the personal experience of someone who arrived in the US as an immigrant 52 years ago, that no inhuman – nor indeed inhumane – treatment was anywhere in evidence. Granted, unlike illegal arrivals in today’s Britain, I wasn’t put up at a four-star hotel. All I got was a Broadway fleabag with a carpet of cockroaches that made a crunching sound whenever I got out of bed.

Still, I didn’t suffer from any encroachment on my essential rights. Quite the contrary, for the first time in my life I found myself in a country where my essential rights were recognised and upheld.

I don’t know whether that situation has changed in the intervening half century, but, even if it has, I’m convinced that new arrivals aren’t slaughtered en masse. If they aren’t, then I can’t see how their treatment violates their right to life.

From where I sit, the US government is indeed trying to limit the right of illegal immigrants to life in the US, but that’s hardly the same thing. Unless, of course, His Holiness can demonstrate, facts in hand, that all those huddled Mexican masses legitimately fear for their lives in their native land.

Barring such proof, let’s charitably put the tail end of the Pope’s statement down to a rhetorical flourish that amounts to little more than a non sequitur. However, the rest of what he said deserves closer examination.

His Holiness clearly finds opposition to abortion incompatible with support for the death penalty. Someone who combines both beliefs is thus disingenuous if he insists he is pro-life. Decide, my son, he seems to be saying to me, if you are against abortion or in favour of the death penalty. You can’t be both.

I’m afraid I disagree, with every requisite deference.

We have to assume that the head of the Roman Catholic Church is anti-abortion. If we can’t make that assumption, we might as well pack up and go home. That would be worse than believing that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner sees no need for law enforcement, although at times one can be forgiven for getting that impression.

Logically then, His Holiness thinks that both abortion and the death penalty constitute the denial of the right to life, which makes them wrong. Any Christian, actually anyone capable of logical thought, will agree that abortion discontinues a human life without due process, which violates that sacred right.

However, an argument can be made that the death penalty actually asserts the value of a human life, rather than denying it.

By sentencing a murderer to death, society sends a message orbi et urbi that the wanton taking of a life is a crime so heinous that it can’t be offset by any length of imprisonment. Only the death penalty is a punishment truly commensurate with the crime.

Neither a theological nor historical argument against the death penalty cuts much ice. Yes, the Church has always taught that the taking of a human life is wrong. However, it may be righteous if it prevents wrongs that are even worse.

Logic and any understanding of human nature suggest that the death penalty has deterrent value: any sane person would risk prison more readily than the chair. Any murder statistics in states or countries practising capital punishment are a priori meaningless. While irrefutably showing the number of murders the death penalty didn’t deter, they give no inkling as to the number of murders it did deter.

While no statistics are available on the number of lives taken by recidivist murderers who’ve served their sentence and then killed again since the death penalty was abolished in Britain, it’s generally believed that number runs into hundreds, possibly thousands. Any number greater than one proves the positive net effect of the death penalty, and any newspaper reader will agree it’s much greater than one.

But deterrence apart, since at least the time of St Augustine of Hippo, the Church has recognised the doctrine of just war. Since any war, just or unjust, presupposes killing, no Christian prelate can argue persuasively that any killing is ipso facto abhorrent.

Most theologians believe the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” means “Thou shalt not murder”. This leaves room for capital punishment, with the state acting as a divine agent. (As Burke wrote in his Reflections, “He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed therefore the State”.)

This view is supported by the distinction between the Hebrew words for lawful killing and murder, as well as by Scriptural accounts legitimising lethal force used in self-defence, warfare and under divine law.

To use the expression borrowed from His Holiness’s native variant of the English language, any unequivocal statement on capital punishment invariably opens a can of worms. These invertebrates crawl out and curl around logical and theological inconsistencies.

This isn’t to say that no opposition to the death penalty can ever be sound. One could, for example, cite the corrupting effect it has on the executioner, or else doubt the right of mortal and therefore fallible men to pass irreversible judgement.

Such arguments are noble, but they aren’t modern arguments. For it’s not just the death penalty that the modern lot are uncomfortable with, but the very idea of punishment as such.

More and more, they betray their Enlightenment genealogy by insisting that people are all innately good and, if some behave badly, they must be victims of correctable social injustice. More and more, one detects a belief that justice is an antiquated notion, and law ought to be only an aspect of the social services.

Far be it from me to suspect His Holiness of holding such essentially irreligious views. One can only wish he recognised that the issue of capital punishment has to be discussed in a broad secular and theological context. It can’t be resolved with a simple yes or no statement.

Good job then that the Pope wasn’t speaking ex cathedra, and infallibility doesn’t apply.

Our established church has just received a coup de grâce, which could be loosely translated in this context as a blow delivered by Her Grace Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London.

At least, that’s what she had been until yesterday. Now she has been consecrated to the highest clerical post in the Anglican Church, she is the Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.

Or scratch that ‘Lord’ business. As a self-described feminist, Dame Sarah will doubtless insist on being called ‘Lady Archbishop’. And since she sits in the House of Lords, that chamber should drop its misogynistic, transphobic name and call itself the House of Lords, Ladies and Others.

I’m not sure Dame Sarah will insist on making such changes, but I do know they would be close to her heart. She is also described as a ‘theological liberal’, which, again contextually, means theologically illiterate and aggressively antagonistic to church tradition.

Dame Sarah claims to respect those who are less theologically liberal than she is, specifically on the subject of female ordination, but her “belief is that Church diversity… should flourish and grow; everybody should be able to find a spiritual home.”

You could see me genuflecting even as we speak. Yet no one disputes that “everybody should be able to find a spiritual home”. However, for some that home is at the altar and for others it’s in the pews, and for over 2,000 years women resided in the latter.

And of course she finds nothing wrong with blessing homomarriage. “We can offer a response that is about it being inclusive love.” Dame Sarah has missed her true calling, She’d be perfect running a DEI department at some corporation.

The Church, she adds, “reflects the God of love, who loves everybody.” True.

God does love everybody. But He doesn’t love everything, which even cursory familiarity with Scripture would establish. In fact, He positively loathes those little transgressions He calls sins. If Dame Sarah is unsure whether that rubric covers sexual perversions, she should read Leviticus or, in the second half of the Bible, Romans and Corinthians.

The new Archbishop can be equally woolly on a whole range of subjects. Such as abortion, which is abhorrent to any Christian, and has been for the same 2,000 years. But it’s not abhorrent to the Most Reverend Lady. Neither, by the looks of it, is talking gibberish:

“I would suspect that I would describe my approach to this issue as pro-choice rather than pro-life although if it were a continuum I would be somewhere along it moving towards pro-life when it relates to my choice and then enabling choice when it related to others.”

One can never be sure what this lot mean, but it sounds as if she finds no theological objections to abortion. She herself would rather not scrape a foetus out of her womb, but she has no problem when other women do that if they so choose. Considering Dame Sarah’s age, her personal pro-life preference doesn’t amount to a meaningful commitment.

I could go over Dame Sarah’s views one by one, but there is no need. Just name a woke abomination, and she’ll support it. Deportation of illegal immigrants, for example? You know exactly where she stands. The Tory government’s Rwanda policy should, to her, “shame us as a nation”.

Do you ever wonder why just about every woman ordained or especially consecrated in the Anglican Church is a raving leftie? Many of their male counterparts are too, but a sizeable minority remain conservative politically, socially and certainly theologically.

The minority of such fossils among the female clergy isn’t sizeable. It’s infinitesimal to the point of being non-existent, and I have a ready explanation for this tendency.

Any woman seeking ordination invokes a purely secular fad, and a perverse one to boot, defying scriptural authority and church tradition. Both have chiselled in stone the rule that apostolic ministry is the business of men.

Contrary to what hysterical advocates of female priesthood claim, this doesn’t mean women should play no role in church life. No Christian would ever suggest anything like that – the examples of hundreds of great woman saints, starting with the Mother of God, speak for themselves.

It was women who, when the male disciples cowered out of sight, had the courage to witness the Crucifixion; women who attended Christ’s burial; women who found his tomb empty – women who kept the Christian tradition alive by running convents, monasteries, schools; women who inspired the Crusades; women who were martyred for Christian proselytism.

Women’s contribution to Christianity is equal to men’s, but that doesn’t mean women should be priests. Any woman who insists she has a right to ministry has little knowledge of Christian tradition and no respect for it. What she does respect and enforce is woke diktats, in this case feminism.

And any woke person is ipso facto wicked, which failing has to reveal itself in any activity such a person undertakes. This is my a priori conviction, and Dame Sarah has done nothing to disprove it.

Her consecration may be the final blow to finish off the Church of England – at least as the Church of England. While parishes all over Britain are haemorrhaging communicants, various Anglican communities in Africa and Asia are doing well.

Unlike the mother Church, they tend to be conservative, which means properly Christian. This is the only thing any Church should be, the only way it can survive.

I’m not an Anglican myself, but our established Church is an essential part of British polity. Hence what’s happening to Anglicanism has the makings of a constitutional catastrophe, not just an ecclesiastical one. That’s why even those Britons who don’t care about the latter, should care about the plight of the Church of England. And weep.

It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Even secular Jews, those who give the synagogue a wide berth 364 days a year, feel compelled to offer their devotions on Yom Kippur.

Crowds gather outside synagogues, people’s eyes lowered, their heads bowed, their expressions solemn. For some, this is a chance to come to terms with God and expiate their sins. But others see the crowd as easy pickings, a target to hit by way of venting their own hatred as demanded by their own God.

One such evil man was appropriately named Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, who, as the papers hastened to inform us, was a British citizen of Syrian descent, naturalised as a child. A perfect Briton, in other words, bred if not born.

You know what happened. Al-Shamie drove his car into the crowd of worshippers outside the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. The fallen bodies acting as a brake, he jumped out of the car and went to work with a knife. Two people died and four were injured before the police arrived and shot the murderer dead.

No one was surprised that his name wasn’t something like Nigel Smith or Kevin Jones. Jihad Al-Shamie? Of course, he was. He was a Muslim, wasn’t he? That’s what Muslims do. No, hold on, officer, I didn’t mean to say that most Muslims kill Jews. What I meant was that most people who kill Jews are Muslims.

But most people who root for Muslim murderers aren’t Muslims themselves. They are what Americans call liberals, Europeans call left-wingers, and I call scum. They may espouse any religion or usually none, but the adhesive gluing them all together is hatred of Jews as an extension of wider animosity.

These are the yahoos who march through great Western cities chanting “From the river to the sea!”, thereby demarcating the killing field for millions of Jews. Or are they really demarcating it?

The usual assumption is that they mean ‘from the Jordan to the Red Sea’, but this is unnecessarily limiting. Like their hatred, the slogan is open-ended. They might as well mean from the Thames to the North Sea, or from the Rhine to the Mediterranean. The scum want to kill Jews wherever they can be found, everywhere, not just in Israel.

Muslims may act as the catalyst of this anti-Semitic rampage, but they don’t make up its greatest numbers. Most faces contorted with venomous hatred on Free Palestine marches belong to the kind of scum who might as well be named Nigel Smith or Kevin Jones.

They are the ones who cancel concerts of Israeli musicians throughout Europe, most recently in Holland. They are the ones who refuse to invite Israeli scientists to conferences or Israeli lecturers to campuses. And they are the ones who densely populate our governing party.

They are also the ones who last night went on anti-Semitic rallies in Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and elsewhere, openly celebrating the murders. The police were watching on with bored insouciance, as they always do unless they themselves are attacked.

If Israel and Hamas didn’t exist, the scum would have to invent them. Without that eternal conflict in the Middle East, they’d have to resort to scrutinising birth certificates, taking cranial measurements and drawing swastikas on Jewish-owned shops. That, however, may still be frowned upon in the wider community.

But as long as they use Zionists or Israelis as the shorthand for Jews, they are on safe grounds. They can claim the usual scum affection for noble, which is to say Third World, causes. They can insist they are driven by love for the oppressed Hamas terrorists, not by hatred of Jews.

When they aren’t out screaming “Free Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea!”, they put on sanctimonious expressions and pronounce on diversity, equality and inclusion – but not for the Jews, is the unspoken refrain.

This is yet another conflict of scum pieties, far from the only one. The same pro-Hamas marchers swear by feminism, even though their ‘Palestinian’ idols treat women as livestock. They regard rape as the worst crime but welcome the mass immigration of those most likely to commit it. Their feminism happily coexists with their commitment to transsexualism, which real feminists abhor. They scream their support for LGBT rights, while professing solidarity with those who throw LGBT practitioners off tall buildings.

I call this a conflict of pieties, but the term somewhat misses the mark. No pieties exist for real, they are merely rhetorical window dressing, an outer expression of inner hatred.

The scum don’t really love ‘Palestinians’; they hate Jews. They don’t love LGBT; they hate traditional morality. They don’t love ‘the underprivileged’; they hate those they see as privileged. They are an anomic, deracinated mob, a rudderless ship cast adrift and propelled by winds of hatred.

It’s telling that the Manchester outrage occurred days after Starmer’s government rewarded anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, anti-Western hatred by recognising the non-existent Palestinian, aka Hamas, state. This inconceivably idiotic act can be partly understood in light of domestic British politics.

Apparently, Labour has been losing support in communities with sizeable Muslim populations, who now have their own parties to vote for. Recognising Hamas and treating Israel as an enemy state are thus the sops thrown to potential blocs of votes.

But this is only a part of it. Starmer, a man of little intellect but much cunning, has a visceral understanding of the scum ethos from which he himself comes. It’s not just about the rivers and the seas, but about the undercurrents of hatred and resentment sloshing underfoot in a vast group shaped, directly or otherwise, by Marxist tenets.

Jew hatred is but a brook flowing into a raging maelstrom of anti-Western animosity, where it joins the vortex drawing in throngs of malcontents. They are told loud and clear that they no longer have to be coy about hating Jews. They can do so openly and to the accompaniment of ‘liberal’ hosannas, provided they scream abuse of Israelis, not Jews.

That’s today. Tomorrow their hatred many be channelled into other conduits, besides, not instead of, anti-Semitism. Give them the cause, and they’ll find the mob.

The ambient air is full of hateful electricity, and some scum individuals are occasionally galvanised to do murder. Starmer will shed crocodile tears and promise support for the victims, this time the Jews. But he’ll do nothing because he himself is whirled around by the same vortex, imbued with the same ethos.

Starmer and his ilk are the epicentre of this ethos. The likes of Jihad Al-Shamie are merely its cutting edge.

What’s the greatest sin of all, one that’s unconscionable, unforgivable and irredeemable? A transgression, as one must assert with uncompromising vigour, that has been negligently omitted from those biblical commandments and lists of deadly sins?

Correct. It’s racism, and I’m proud of you for giving this answer without any hesitation. You are a man of your time, the most progressive time in history.

And what’s the greatest possible crime, perhaps even more heinous than murder? If you instantly thought of rape, full marks. Forcing sexual attentions on a woman leaves a wound festering over a lifetime, one much worse, as we all know, than any physical injury and arguably even death.

Now we’ve agreed on the two most fundamental tenets of modernity, we must accept with hand-wringing anguish that they are at odds. Though racism doesn’t necessarily presuppose a proclivity to rape, rape, or rather rape statistics, may turn even some impeccably progressive people into racists.

How do I define racism? If you have to ask this question, my faith in your progressive credentials gets a dent. Obviously, I don’t just define it as hatred of other races. Such a narrow understanding goes back to the time when racism was still called racialism.

No, I define it as Sir Keir Starmer does: a racist is anyone who resembles Nigel Farage in his urge to reduce immigration of cultural aliens. After all, Sir Keir is our prime minister, while Farage is but a lowly MP. Whom would you rather trust in such sensitive matters? Exactly.

Regrettably though, it’s this definition of racism that’s in conflict with rape statistics. What if a racist like Nigel Farage were to claim, data in hand, that incidents of rape increase pari passu with a growing immigrant population? Would we then have to admit that curtailing immigration isn’t such a bad idea after all? Would we then incline towards racism?

No, of course not. As progressive people, we are impervious to facts. We know that only one explanation can possibly exist for wanting to reduce immigration: xenophobia, racially expressed.

But what if some retrograde individuals out there still aren’t fully paid-up members of the progressive community? What if they are still trying to decide whether or not they are racists? Well, rape statistics from different countries may deepen their confusion.

Just compare two sets of figures for four of the five most populous European nations, England & Wales, Germany, France and Poland. (Rape statistics for the Ukraine are artificially skewed upwards by the presence of Russian soldiers on her territory.)

The first set of figures is the number of rape reports in the year 2000: England & Wales, 8,593; Germany, 8,133; France, 7,500; Poland, 2,399.

The second set is made up of the same statistics for 2023: England & Wales, 68,109; Germany, 32,029; France, 42,400; Poland, 1,127.

The numbers differ so drastically that they call for an explanation. Why, for example, did the number of rapes in the three Western European countries increase by an order of magnitude, while halving in Poland?

Did our population increase during that period? It did, but not that much, not enough to account for a seven-fold hike. Did testosterone levels go up so much in Western Europe that men there became more aggressive and more virile? There are no data to that effect, nor to the effect of Polish men growing more docile and effeminate.

Help me out here, I’m struggling. Were rape victims in Western Europe more likely to report their ordeal in 2023 than in 2000? Possibly. But we aren’t talking orders of magnitude there. In any case, why would Polish women become more reticent by half?

Logic suggests that, if one variable changes dramatically and most of the others don’t, we must search high and wide for another variable that undergoes a similar change at the same time. Once we’ve found it, we’ve found the explanation for the first variable. Sherlock Holmes would be proud of us.

Let’s not bother the great detective though. We don’t need his prodigious skills to identify our culprit. Between 2000 and 2023, millions of Muslim immigrants arrived in Britain, Germany and France. Hardly any chose Poland as their destination.

Therefore, at the risk of being accused of, or even charged with, racism, we have to accept mournfully and apologetically that there is only one explanation for the statistical disparity in question. Western Europe being overrun with swarms of new arrivals who flout our laws and ignore our tradition of pursuing amorous favours.

They bypass such silly preliminaries as flowers, chocolates and dates at overpriced restaurants, instead taking a shortcut to gratification. To quote the old commercial, they take the waiting out of wanting.

But where are the cops when we need them? Glad you’ve asked. They are busy attending DEI classes and indoctrination sessions on racism, institutional bias and Islamophobia. They are taught to respect the customs of other cultures, and, when such customs clash with ours, they are trained to believe ours are in no way superior.

Most of them despise all that nonsense, but, like you and me, they don’t want to complicate their lives. They know that arresting a Muslim on suspicion of rape, especially if the chap wasn’t caught in the act, may get them in trouble with their DEI department.

Even if it doesn’t, there will be endless forms to fill, countless interviews to sit through, more training sessions to suffer – all for a case that may never even go to court or, if it does, will probably end in acquittal.

So good cops, those who lost their idealism years ago, wash their hands on the crime or else chew on that old chestnut about the woman egging hotblooded males on by wearing suggestive clothing. Life’s easier that way.

Suddenly I’ve realised that I am myself sounding like a rank racist. I assure you that’s not the intention. I’m just not imaginative enough to think of any other explanation for the cited rape statistics. My fault entirely.

I’m also worried that such statistics may turn progressive people away from progress and towards its enemies. Such as Nigel Farage and everyone else Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t like.

Dr Frankenstein, call your office. You are about to be put out of business.

American scientists in Oregon have put young Victor to shame. They’ve found a new way of producing sapient human beings, one that involves no hanky-panky, in fact no human contact whatsoever.

They harvest DNA from people’s skin cells, fertilise it with sperm, and Frankenstein is your uncle: there we have it, a human embryo. The story was first broken in Nature Communications and then migrated to other journals via the BBC website.

The journals politely give credit where it’s due, as in: “Normally, reproduction happens when a man’s sperm meets a woman’s egg, creating an embryo that grows into a baby after nine months, as reported by BBC.”

Crikey. So that’s where babies come from? Who coulda thunk. Thank you, BBC, for opening our eyes to that startling fact.

Oh well, yes, but not quite. That’s where babies used to come from, normally. Now they’ll come abnormally, from a tiny cell scraped off human skin. From there they’ll go into a test tube, replacing in vivo with in vitro. A fertilised cell will become an embryo, then presumably a baby, then an adult, then even perhaps a stem cell biologist, but only if his genetic makeup allows for no scruples.

When they grow up, those vitreous babies will be able to describe themselves proudly with the words in the title above. And they won’t even have to refer to the glass jars as ‘Mum and Dad’.

All such dystopic discoveries are invariably hailed as science’s gift to mankind. This skin flick is no exception.

The BBC is effusive: Now even old women can have babies. Splendid news. I for one look forward to watching octogenarian ladies push prams down the King’s Road. That conveyance could also act as a Zimmer frame, which is an extra benefit any way you look at it.

Infertile women and impotent men can all rejoice: help is on the way. And you can forget about women: fertile or otherwise, they’ve been made redundant.

Now two homosexual men can have a baby genetically related to both of them. One man’s skin can be used to produce an egg, which will then be fertilised by the other man’s sperm. Don’t ask me how, I’m way out of my depth in this field.

This discovery, gushes the BBC, “re-writes the rules of parenthood”. I’ll say. It definitely does that, in spades.

“We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” says Prof Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the director of the Oregon Health and Science University’s centre for embryonic cell and gene therapy.

Applause all around, the audience stands up and chants “Test tube, born and bred!” until every throat goes hoarse. The scientific journals where I’ve read the story echo the ovations as best they can, although they feel duty-bound to commiserate that so far the success rate is lamentably low, nine per cent or thereabouts.

It’ll take at least another decade before Grannies can become Mummies, and two men can have babies they can each rightfully call their own. I just hope I’m still around to take part in the celebratory festivities.

However, as a lifelong proponent and occasional practitioner of the archaic, so-called ‘normal’, reproduction method, I have to admit to feeling some sadness. And as a commentator, I must feign surprise at a notable omission in every story I’ve read on the subject.

My surprise is only feigned because deep down I’m feeling none. It’s par for the course that apolitical journals and the politically woke BBC would only talk about the feasibility of this method, never giving a second’s thought to its morality.

They never do: the prevailing thought is that, if something can be done, it must be done. For example, experiments in interbreeding humans and apes have been going on for decades.

The idea is to produce a ‘pithecanthropus’, thereby plugging the missing-link hole in Darwin’s theory. I’m not privy to any technical, or shall we say amorous, details of such experiments, but I do know that they stubbornly continue to fail. This, though the primates involved share 98 per cent of their DNA with humans.

Apparently, it’s the remaining two per cent that account for our humanity, and no number of people copulating with chimpanzees will change that. But trust scientists, such as Prof Mitalipov, the pride of Kazakhstan and Oregon, to deliver another slap in the face of decency.

As decency is defined in our Judaeo-Christian civilisation, I hasten to add. It insists that human life is made in the likeness and image of God, not in the image and likeness of a skin cell reared in a jar.

Someone living within that civilisation, whether or not a religious believer, feels sorry for infertile women who can’t have babies the normal way. For many it’s a tragedy they suffer, but suffering is an unavoidable part of life, not to mention the starting point of our civilisation. Re-writing the rules of parenthood (and thereby re-defining humanity) isn’t a price worth paying for relieving those women’s distress.

Cry for them, pray for them (if such is your wont), feel their pain by all means. But let whatever is left of traditional propriety survive – even if it means no grannies using baby prams as Zimmer frames.

However, more and more people find themselves, willingly, enthusiastically and often unwittingly, outside our civilisation. Such people see nothing wrong with a world in which Mary Shelley’s fantasies read like reportage. A world inhabited by Igors, run by Frankensteins and sooner or later destroyed by them.

Sooner rather than later, I’d suggest, but that’s progress for you.

Switzerland hasn’t just given the world timepieces, chocolates and money laundromats. It also boasts two of the greatest 20^th century playwrights, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch.

It was Frisch who wrote arguably the century’s most significant and eternally universal play, The Arsonists (also known in English as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers).

If you ever wonder why the West is meekly looking on as Russia advances on it step by step, just read the play written in 1953, six years after the Second World War. Switzerland hadn’t taken part in it, Hitler was dead, and Putin was a year old. Yet, in common with other products of artistic genius, The Arsonists transcends its time and place.

Anyone doubting this is possible has to believe that Antigone is strictly about burying Greek war casualties, Hamlet about dynastic succession in Denmark, and The Master Builder about the state of Norway’s construction industry.

Whatever their immediate subjects, those plays shine a light on the otherwise inaccessible recesses of human nature, elucidating traits that escape philosophers and psychologists, especially the latter. The Arsonists is another such play.

Frisch hints at universality by naming his principal protagonist Biedermann, which means Mr Everyman, a worthy philistine. You know the type: self-satisfied, happy with how he and his life have turned out, certain that great upheavals befalling others will pass him by.

There he is, reading newspaper articles about a spate of arson haunting his town. Apparently, firebugs pretending to be hawkers insinuate their way into someone’s home and settle down in the attic, only then to set the house on fire.

Biedermann shakes his head. How stupid and gullible can people get? He’d never be taken in by such ruses. The warm, cosy aura of his dwelling would never be punctured by evildoers with or without matches. Let them turn up – he’ll show them what’s what.

And what do you know, a hawker does appear on Biedermann’s doorstep within minutes. Expertly combining persuasive arguments with veiled threats, he talks himself into spending a night – just one night, Herr Biedermann! – in the attic.

Don’t sell Biedermann short: no dummy, he. He senses something is wrong, suspects that the hawker is one of the firebugs. But a suspicion isn’t a certainty.

What if he is wrong? What if the poor fellow indeed only needs a bed for the night? Confronting him now, before he has really done anything wrong, would be churlish and, well, improper. It could also be unnecessarily dangerous: the fellow looks quite muscular and there’s a touch of cruelty in his grin.

Considering what’s going on in the town, Biedermann would find it hard to convince anyone with such lame arguments about no danger threatening his house. Anyone but himself, that is. He falls for his own craven musings because he wants to fall for them. Not doing so would mean taking decisive action, but that’s not what the Biedermanns of this world ever do.

Before long, another hawker joins the first one, and they begin to cram the attic with oil drums full of petrol. And still Biedermann does nothing to stop the criminals. Moreover, in common with many sedentary philistines, he succumbs to the gravitational pull of evil, readily falls under the spell emanated by wicked men.

Rather than trying to expel the arsonists, he helps them by giving them matches and making sure the detonating fuse is the right length. By now Biedermann knows his lodgers are harbouring evil designs, but surely they are after other townsfolk, not him. He feels a sense of safety ever so slightly tinged with excitement and the pride of belonging with such men of action.

Due to his cowardice, Biedermann becomes an agent of his own downfall. His house burns down to cinders, and the flames segue into the fires of hell. Meeting Biedermann and his wife at the gates are their two lodgers, who turn out to be aspects of Beelzebub. They sneer at the couple, refusing to waste their satanic time on what they call “small fry”.

There are hints strewn all over the narrative that Frisch meant it as a metaphor for Nazism and the shilly-shallying acquiescence of civilised countries in the face of evil rapidly gaining momentum. But great plays, or works of art in general, are never strictly topical even when the author wants them to be.

Like Gospel parables, they only seem to be telling stories of good Samaritans, bad tenants, mustard seeds and bakers. These may be the narrative strains but not the real subjects. The real subject is always human nature, fallen and therefore fallible, courting perdition and needing to be saved.

The stories of Antigone, Hamlet or the Master Builder could have been just as easily set in any other place and at any other time without losing any of their poignancy. So could The Arsonists, which makes it worthy of mention in the same breath as other sublime plays.

I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining how the play applies to our time, who are today’s Biedermanns and arsonists. This must be as transparent to you as the Nazi references were instantly grasped by Frisch’s contemporaries.

Art joins history on the faculty of a great educational institution teaching how people and societies perish, and how they can save themselves. The teachers are knowledgeable, eloquent and in full command of the relevant facts. But their best efforts are invariably undone by their indolent, complacent, harebrained pupils – us.

We never learn the lessons or, even when we do, we never heed them. So there is Biedermann, Mr Everyman, hospitably opening his doors to the firebugs, hoping against all hope that they really may be door-to-door salesmen. And even if they aren’t, surely they must be after his neighbour’s house, not his own comfy nest.

And then the flames burst out, consuming Biedermann and consigning him to hell. The tale is eternal; the message, up-to-date.