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One would think that the bloodiest century in history, the twentieth, would have taught us a lesson.

When thugs become a viable political force in Western countries, they always take ‘civilised’ out of ‘politics’. Always – not sometimes or occasionally.

And when a country’s politics isn’t civilised, neither is the country – it’s as simple as that.

Allowing thugs to enter the political mainstream, even at its margins, is bound to have the same effect as adding a spoonful of vinegar to a glass of wine.

You’ll no longer taste the wine, even though there’s more of it in the glass. All you’ll taste is vinegar.

For thugs are by definition more dynamic and violent than either end of mainstream politics. Open the door ajar, and they’ll kick it in, chain and all.

Thus it’s impossible to win a political victory in alliance with thugs. Such a victory is always illusory. In reality it’s a defeat.

That’s why social democratic parties must never enter into coalitions with communists – the communists will eventually take over. A short-term political gain will turn into a long-term loss, possibly a catastrophe.

Just look at the alliance between soft-left Labour and hard-left, mostly Trotskyist Momentum in Britain. It has taken the Trots thugs a while, but they’ve eventually gained control.

Now the thugs are jettisoning the softies, giving the formerly respectable (if severely misguided) party a distinctly thuggish character. Labour now has a lethal case of the Trots.

It’s true that without the support of the hard left, or rather of the unions behind it, Labour would find it harder to win political office. And of course one would have to be terminally naïve to believe that any modern political party is capable of thinking beyond the next election.

But if Labour really cared about the good of the country, it would have consigned the Trotskyist thugs to what their spiritual father used to call ‘the garbage heap of history’.

UKIP are no better than Labour at learning from history. But one hopes they are still capable of learning from Labour, as it has become.

An alliance with thugs is tantamount to losing the last vestiges of civility, thereby compromising our whole civilisation. If that’s what it takes to win an election or a referendum, I’d rather lose.

There’s always a comeback after a lost election. There’s none after a lost civilisation.

Thugs don’t necessarily say wrong things or propose bad policies. In fact, if you look at groups going by the misnomer ‘far right’, they often pursue ends that appear sensible to any civilised conservative.

They want to leave the EU – so do we. They’d like to dismantle that contrivance altogether – we would too. They say mass Muslim immigration is socially, culturally, demographically and economically suicidal – we nod our agreement.

Then what? Let’s assume we’ve left the EU, with most other members following suit. The EU is no more. We’ve stopped Islamic immigration and even deported many Muslims whose presence here is illegal or dangerous. What happens then?

More precisely, who’ll munch the fruits of such a political victory? If thugs were the main driving force in the triumph, they’ll gorge on such fruits and regurgitate them into a society made in their own image.

Drawing historical parallels, the alliance between democratic socialists and Bolsheviks against the Russian monarchy produced a Bolshevik society. And when German conservatives joined forces with the Nazis to defeat Weimar, what emerged wasn’t a decent, conservative Germany. It was the Third Reich.

That’s why I don’t cheer electoral advances gained by fascisoid groups in countries like Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary and Sweden. I do like what they say about the EU and Islamic immigration. I just don’t like them.

And when I read about German thugs beating up an elderly Jewish woman to the accompaniment of a mighty choir yelling Judensau (Jew pig – a popular term of endearment in Nazi Germany), I don’t just feel outrage. I feel the taste of things to come.

Politics isn’t a force majeure or a natural science. It’s a result of human action, and what it ultimately achieves depends on what kind of humans do the acting. This is a crude rephrasing of a passage from a book that used to be quite popular:

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits… A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.”

That’s why, for example, I’ll never be an admirer of Trump, even if he’s exonerated from collusion with Putin. This although I like most of Trump’s policies, especially domestic ones.

I don’t like him because he has spent his whole career walking, talking and acting like a thug – mostly in company with other thugs. Those gurning facial expressions Trump habitually wears are the biographic imprint of lifelong thuggery.

And thugs are those corrupt trees that bring forth evil fruit – even if until then they produce a decent impersonation of a good tree.

American political conservatives, if such a thing can exist in a country that started life as a revolutionary republic, swear by Trump because they, like me, approve of many of his policies.

What they don’t realise is that style, decorum, probity, nuance matter more than today’s policies in the long run. A great country shouldn’t allow thugs to be at the helm. If it does, it’ll stop being a great country – sooner rather than later.

As I write, UKIP is getting close to admitting our own thug, a different genus naturally, into the party. Tommy Robinson, a convicted felon, has been closely associated with such fascisoid groups as the BNP, British Freedom Party and English Defence League, having held high positions in some of them.

If an odious figure like Robinson joins UKIP, the party will have blown any chance of ever becoming a serious, mainstream opposition to our spivocratic, Europhile establishment, rather than a marginal heterogeneous group brought together by a shared hatred of the EU and Muslims.

And it’ll certainly lose my vote which it attracted in every election where UKIP was on the ballot. Now if that isn’t a deadly threat, I don’t know what is.

Fewer than one in seven Britons now describes himself as an Anglican.

That proportion stood at 40 per cent in 1983. Now it’s 14 per cent – and, at a mere 11 per cent, even lower among the middle-aged.

I hate to compare the salt of England’s earth to rodents – and resort to a clichéd saw – but when rats abandon a ship, it’s a fair guess that the ship is sinking.

Like any other statistics, these data must be treated with caution. In the past many people wrote ‘C of E’ in questionnaires simply out of social convention, not because they were ardent believers or, God forbid, churchgoers.

However, the very fact that the social convention no longer operates is telling in itself. Writing ‘none’ in the same rubric has evidently become not only acceptable but, well, cool – especially among young people, aged 17 to 24.

Only two per cent of them call themselves Anglicans, and the number of proud atheists among them stands at about 70 per cent.

Add to that exponents of non-Christian creeds, along with dubiously Christian sectarians, and the two traditional Western confessions can’t boast big battalions. Nor even big squads.

However, during the same period the Catholic denomination suffered a considerably smaller attrition, having gone from 10 to eight per cent. Thus, while suffering pain, Catholicism in Britain isn’t exactly suffering death throes.

Anglicanism clearly is, which must be seen as catastrophic not only by Anglicans, nor even by other Christians, but by all subjects of Her Majesty. For, as an established religion, the Church of England is an inseparable part of our constitutional dispensation.

Our monarchs and consequently their parliaments derive a great part of their legitimacy from divine, or at least ecclesiastical, ordination. In its turn, the Church of England has derived much of its appeal from being established.

However, there’s a danger inherent in this status. When the embrace between the state and the church grows too tight, the state may crush the church under its weight. Rather than being a partner to the state and the moral authority over it, the church may become its concubine, always at her master’s beck and call.

As a result, the church may sacrifice its core business to the task of following the meandering, or rather violently zigzagging, secular trends.

When that happens, the church begins to duplicate numerous secular institutions, but without the concomitant power of enforcement. A redundancy note awaits just round the corner.

That, I’m afraid, is exactly what has happened to the Church of England. It has become an extension not only of the secular state, but of its least commendable aspects.

That doesn’t mean that any Christian confession should refrain from trying to affect politics in any way. People who express this popular but erroneous view never fail to cite Jesus’s teaching that his kingdom is not of this world.

But what Christ meant was that his kingdom is higher than this world. And a higher authority must judge (within its remit) a lower one to keep it on the straight and narrow.

Actually the parenthetical phrase above is critical. In its dealings with the secular world, the church must not only bring the uninitiated to Christ but also pass moral judgement on secular affairs, including politics.

For politics, even at its most amoral, which is to say most modern, has a moral dimension in its very flouting of morality. Hence it’s the church’s business to pronounce on how the morality of politics agrees with the founding tenets of our civilisation.

However, as someone who has written several books, each trying to look at various aspects of modernity from a Judaeo-Christian perspective, I know how difficult this task is. Many disciplines have to come together for any chance of a comprehensive picture emerging.

Yet difficult tasks promise the highest rewards, and, though I’m not going to claim an unreserved success in that undertaking, I’ve learned something vital in the process:

That Judaeo-Christian perspective alone can function as a universal basis for the theory of everything, to borrow Stephen Hawking’s phrase. Nothing else can, certainly not anything Stephen Hawking conceived.

This, in addition to straightforward proselytising, is the church’s mission: to show how Christianity relates to every part of modern life. This is one service that only the church can provide, and it’s one that the Church of England is demonstrably not providing.

Rather than trying to elevate quotidian life to heaven, it tries to bring heaven down to earth. Rather than showing the way, it meekly trails in the wake of every modern fad, no matter how idiotic or perverse.

The feeble excuse favoured by church dignitaries is that religion must change, as it has always done. This is intellectual larceny, pure and simple.

Of course, unlike the other Abrahamic religions, Christian doctrine wasn’t delivered all at once. It developed over centuries by incorporating some new dogma at the expense of the old.

Yet every new change was believed to be, and explained as, something divinely inspired and therefore congruent with the Christian revelation.

Some of history’s deepest and most brilliant minds wrote thousands of exegetic treatises explaining how the proposed change fits into the general framework of Christian doctrine.

Some of history’s saintliest individuals pronounced on the issue, each time enriching one another’s understanding until a consensus was reached. They didn’t always succeed, but they always tried.

No one who knows anything at all about today’s Church of England will claim it goes through the same process.

It certainly doesn’t when, for example, creating female priesthood and episcopate, abandoning the traditional liturgical texts and language, encouraging the use in church of such anti-Christian musical genres as pop and rap, de facto endorsing every manner of sexual perversion or having its prelates mouth subversive leftist twaddle.

No wonder young people will have nothing to do with it. Even more worryingly, many middle-aged people, most of whom were raised as Anglicans, are wandering off.

Anglicanism has lost its aura of solemn mystery wherein salvation lies. By following secular fads – each morally subversive and intellectually puny – it finds itself in competition with secular institutions specialising in that sort of rubbish.

And mere dabblers don’t stand a chance against the pros: if a youngster can hear the same music at a rave as he hears at mass, why should he choose the latter? A rave is easier, it doesn’t even pretend to impose any obligations on the participant.

And if the spiritual head of Anglicanism starts preaching a ‘Christian’ economic sermon that falsifies in equal measure both economics and Christianity, what’s the point in staying in his church? That’s what we have schools, newspapers and TV for.

In conclusion, I wonder if anyone would notice any difference if Justin Welby and Jeremy Corbyn swapped jobs. Somehow I doubt it.

What price principles? Honour? More appropriate, what price sovereignty?

These questions naturally come up whenever the word ‘Brexit’ is mentioned in my presence.

Now I seldom feel I’m enunciating majority opinion, but in this case I’m sure just about everybody in Britain will agree with me: we’ve had it up to here with all the incessant bickering, wrangling and squabbling about Brexit.

And we’re sick of all that talk about a whole raft of ‘deals’ covering every possible permutation, each propped up by sky-high columns of figures proving that either we’ll end up eating house pets post-Brexit or become rich beyond our wettest dreams.

Such disciplines as history, political science, philosophy, constitutional law have all fallen by the wayside. Accountancy reigns supreme: the whole issue has been reduced to a balance sheet, with the bottom line pointing one way or the other.

Enter the greatest adman who has ever lived, Bill Bernbach, who came up with the maxim in the title above. It’s fully applicable to the situation at hand.

Brexit may make us richer or poorer, no one knows for sure. Actually, now we’re on the subject, I suspect we’ll suffer a bit, for the first few years at any rate.

The EU is bloody-minded enough to cut off its economic nose to please its political face. That vile setup is guaranteed to try to punish Britain even at a huge cost to itself, pour encourager les autres, as Napoleon I said and Napoleon IV, aka Manny Macron, doubtless keeps repeating.

If Britain leaves the EU painlessly and profitably, those dominoes will start falling one after another. And they’ll continue to do so until that awful contrivance is reduced to a single Franco-German state, with Angie as its Queen and Manny as her consort (he fancies older women).

The readjustment of our trading patterns will take a few years, and we may be worse off in the interim. Then again we may not – if I could predict economic trends, I’d be living in the house currently occupied by Roman Abramovich (not that he acquired it thanks to his economic prescience – Google ‘organised crime’ for details).

My point, oft-repeated, is that the decision to regain our sovereignty and to have all our laws passed by our own Parliament should have nothing to do with money. Nothing. Nil. Zilch.

Sovereignty is neither an incremental nor a relative concept. A great nation can’t be almost sovereign or partially sovereign. It can be either sovereign or subjugated.

If the choice between the two is made on the basis of pounds and pence, we might as well not bother.

For, if that’s all it boils down to, we’re already subjugated in perpetuity, Brexit or no Brexit. We’re for ever enslaved morally and intellectually – we’ve already done an Esau and sold our political soul for the mess of rancid EU potage.

A rich slave who fears becoming a poor free man, remains a slave in either case.

This reminds me of the story of a bear born and raised captive in a cage 10 feet square. For years he moved back and forth within that space, 10 feet this way, 10 feet that.

Then he was set free, and what do you know? He continued to pace the same 10 feet back and forth. The cage wasn’t around his body; it was in his mind.

How could any Englishman attach his signature to the Maastricht Treaty? A document that in one fell swoop prostituted Britain’s constitution and debased the memory of the millions who gave their lives defending their country’s independence over two millennia? I don’t know; I’ve only lived here for 30 years.

But I do know that Brexit is an attempt to undo the constitutional catastrophe created by one flourish of John Major’s pen. It’s the only honest thing to do and – for those who understand the vital significance of the British constitution for the British nation – the only intelligent thing.

Yet what do we do? We argue whether acting on sound moral and intellectual principles will make us a few pounds richer or poorer.

Call me an incurable optimist (one charge that’s seldom levelled at me), but I don’t believe the British have become completely corrupt. Partially corrupt, for sure. But not completely.

I don’t believe my countrymen have calculators for brains and spreadsheets for hearts.

The thought that our politicians have neither hearts nor brains comes more easily. But I still believe the nation has enough spunk left to force our spivocrats into acting with a modicum of decency.

And the upshot of it all? Simple. The only good deal is summary exit with no deal – and damn the torpedoes.

It has been proved beyond any doubt that the Novichok attack on British soil was perpetrated by two GRU agents, whose identity, if not real names, has been established.

Britain now holds the distinction of being the only Western power targeted for both nuclear (2006 polonium murder of Litvinenko) and chemical attacks on its citizens.

Yesterday Theresa May delivered a scathing attack on Putin’s junta, hinting at retaliation, probably involving cyber warfare, further sanctions and travel bans. However, her attack wasn’t scathing enough.

While saying that the authorisation for the crime had to come from the highest tiers of the GRU, Mrs May stopped short of naming Putin himself as the culprit.

Security Minister Ben Wallace tried to fill that blank, or rather pretended to. Asked if Putin himself bears responsibility for the murders, he replied: “Ultimately he does, insofar as he is president of the Russian Federation and it is his government that controls, funds and directs the military intelligence…”

This sounds as if he actually said something, whereas in fact he said nothing at all. Nicely done, Ben. That’s the stuff political success is made of.

Yes, in some oblique way a dictator is responsible for all crimes committed on his watch. This much goes without saying, meaning it didn’t have to be said.

In fact, Mr Wallace fudged the issue as much as Mrs May did. Putin is responsible for the nuclear and chemical attacks on British subjects on British soil not in some oblique way, but in a most direct one. He was the one who issued the orders.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the chain of command in Russia will know that no GRU officer, no matter how high up, has the authority to initiate an action with far-reaching geopolitical ramifications.

Such an order in today’s Russia can only come from the Botox Boy, who sits at the top of what he calls ‘the vertical of power’. Russia’s power structure has eschewed horizontality from time immemorial, so Putin continues a fine tradition there.

I realise that diplomatic protocol doesn’t encourage referring to the leader of a foreign state as a murderer. Yet this protocol isn’t always followed, and at times it’s more honoured in the breach than the observance.

Assorted US presidents and British prime ministers haven’t shied away from describing in such an uncomplimentary way Messrs Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad – and even Erdoğan, president of a country that happens to be a NATO member.

What has Putin done to deserve a special dispensation? He, after all, combines in his person a KGB thug and a global gangster, and he leads a state blended out of the same ingredients, one that’s demonstrably hostile and threatening to the West.

Of course the aforementioned gentlemen didn’t possess nuclear weapons, and Putin does. But refusing to point an accusing finger at him for that reason would brand our leaders as cowards and flat track bullies. Surely they can’t be such awful things?

Even articles calling for stiff measures against Russian gangsters who live, or keep their loot, in Britain have to dilute the message with the kind of disclaimers that bespeak ignorance.

A piece in yesterday’s Times, for example, says that not all Russian money sitting in London banks is ill-gotten gains, though much of it is. Fair enough, a Russian computer programmer who works in London and keeps a few thousand in a NatWest current account is no mobster.

But if we’re talking about millions, never mind billions, such amounts can’t be made in Russia without at least passive collaboration with the ruling mafia. And typically the collaboration is far from passive – those Russian billionaires are to a man Mafiosi themselves.

Choosing targets for financial sanctions, such as the impounding, freezing or – my personal preference – confiscating of Russian assets is thus a no-brainer. It’s like firing a sawn-off shotgun point blank at a flock of pigeons pecking breadcrumbs in Trafalgar Square: you can’t miss.

Some pundits do say all the right things, but one questions their moral right to say them. Dr Mark Almond of Oxford is one such man.

In today’s Mail he bemoans that Putin’s strategy seems to be working in that he has already succeeded in recruiting allies among EU members:

“Last month, he was a guest at the Austrian foreign minister’s wedding, and Vienna’s Right-wing government is one of the loudest voices in the EU clamouring for improving relations with Moscow.

“In Italy, the new government is led by a critic of sanctions against Russia, so imposing new ones is unlikely to win Rome’s support.”

All true. But Dr Almond forgot to mention that his is another loud voice “clamouring for improving relations with Moscow”. The difference between him and those European countries is that he does so not in the national media but on RT, Putin’s propaganda channel, where he’s a frequent guest.

That’s like a British academic c. 1938 writing articles in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer. No honest man, especially one who seems to know what’s what in Putin’s Russia, would ever agree to take RT’s rouble. If such an offer were made, he’d reject it indignantly and then wash his hands afterwards.

I happen to know Dr Almond: in 1995 we met in Minsk, where we and a few others were observers at the Byelorussian election.

Over what the Russians call “a shot of tea”, I said that all those glasnosts and perestroikas hadn’t changed anything in Russia. They were nothing but window-dressing on a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.

Dr Almond was horrified. “We aren’t allowed to say that,” he said with a quiver. “The most we can get away with is regret that the march of democracy in Russia is slightly slower than expected.”

That was opportunism, nowadays a necessary job qualification for academic success in Britain and elsewhere in the West. But being a willing tool of what in effect is enemy propaganda is much worse, as William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, could have testified.

One can only ask how many more crimes Putin has to commit before his ‘useful idiots’ in the West stop being useful. Would an airborne Spetsnaz landing in Kent do the trick?

Archbishop Welby has delivered himself of views on the economy, proving yet again that the popular description of the Anglican Church must be revised.

It’s no longer the Tory Party at prayer, as it once was. The economic ideas enunciated by His Grace more readily belong on the hard left of Labour. And indeed they do come from the leftie Institute for Public Policy Research.

It’s the same old saw about our economy being unfair because some people are better off than others. Hence class war must be waged until everyone is equally poor, while the state grows mighty and omnipotent.

That’s justice, as understood by Messrs Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Corbyn. Hence if the Archbishop cited such references in support of his notions, he’d only show a poor grasp of economic history, theory and practice.

Alas, he cites Jesus Christ, showing that his understanding of his chosen discipline is as feeble as his grasp of economics, with the added disadvantage of being dishonest. To wit:

“As a Christian I start with learning from Jesus Christ that people matter equally, are equally loved by God, and that justice in society matters deeply – a theme that runs throughout the Bible.”

That theme does run through the Bible, but to interpret it as a call for all people to have equal wealth is ignorance and vulgarity at their most soaring.

Nowhere in the Scripture does Jesus or any of his apostles call for economic egalitarianism. Quite the opposite.

Jesus teaches that “the poor will be with you always”, and he doesn’t seem to mind that state of affairs.

Moreover, he implicitly doesn’t mind wealth either, and his metaphor about the camel and the eye of the needle was merely a polemical riposte against the rabbinical teaching about riches being a reward for righteousness.

Incidentally, Calvin, the major influence on Anglican theology, revived that idea – even though it came from the Jews whom he cordially loathed.

During the time our civilisation was being formed, seeking wealth for those who weren’t heirs to large estates was tantamount to selling the fruits of their labour. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker bartered their products for other people’s.

Money was sometimes involved as a means of exchange, and when that was the case it was natural to expect that more money would eventually end up in some hands than in others.

Thus labour implicitly presupposes the possibility of enrichment. Yet in spite of that the New Testament contains direct endorsements of work.

These come across in the Lord’s Prayer (“give us this day our daily bread”), in Jesus the carpenter talking about “the labourer worthy of his hire” and in St Paul the tent maker stating categorically that “if any would not work, neither shall he eat.”

Thus being “equally loved by God” doesn’t mean being equally enriched by the state. Nor does it mean that people unable to work because of their age or health shouldn’t eat.

Such cruelty is incompatible with Christian love and therefore justice. But it’s yet another example of congenital leftie mendacity to confuse welfare with the welfare state, and the latter with Christian charity.

Christian charity – especially if offered anonymously – not only helps the taker, but also elevates the giver. It therefore has to be a voluntary act inspired by love.

However, when the modern state talks about helping the less fortunate, it really means ripping off the more fortunate, to make them less independent from the state.

This is done by coercion, which alone disqualifies the welfare state from any claim to Christian antecedents.

Thus Welby’s pronouncement is bad Christianity – and it certainly is rotten economics. The underlining principle comes straight from Corbyn’s book: tax the rich to help the poor.

This stratagem has been tried uncountable times in innumerable countries, and everywhere it has succeeded only in the rich either spending all their time looking for tax shelters or fleeing the country – taking with them their capital and therefore jobs.

As a result, state revenues actually decrease, and Arthur Laffer with his curve showed the inverse relationship between high tax rates and tax income.

Where such cracker-barrel economics has failed miserably and universally is in helping the poor. It merely turns the poor into the idle, while increasing their number no end.

Welby’s ideas have nothing to do with either Christianity or sound economics or for that matter justice.

Justice means getting one’s due, what one deserves. If our economy were run on this principle, much of the population would starve to death – unless you believe that a young, able-bodied man who has never worked a day in his life deserves his keep, complete with the latest electronic kit and designer trainers.

Speaking of fairness, I’d argue that inheritance tax is the most unfair of all. The state re-taxes the money already taxed every which way during a man’s lifetime, thereby reducing his ability to provide for his family.

Yet this is precisely the tax that our seeker of Christian justice wants to jack up, by reducing the threshold of tax-free gifts.

He also wants to bring capitals gain tax and taxes on dividends in line with income tax – which is guaranteed to discourage investment and thrift, while encouraging irresponsible and profligate spending.

His Grace’s bugbear is that “The wealthiest 10 per cent of households own more than 900 times the wealth of the poorest 10 per cent, and five times more than the bottom half of all households combined.”

Justice Welby-style demands that this outrage be stopped. However, elementary honesty would call for mentioning in the next breath that the top 10 per cent also pay 60 per cent of all taxes, and the top one per cent contribute 28 per cent.

Nicky Morgan, chairman of the Commons Treasury committee, welcomes Welby’s ideas: “Our aim should be to make the whole nation wealthier.”

Now Miss Morgan matches the Archbishop’s formidable intellect and economic nous. If that weren’t the case, she’d realise that such socialist measures are guaranteed to make the whole nation not wealthier but poorer.

I wonder if Miss Morgan is an Anglican. If so, she has a perfect spiritual leader.

The great dialectician preached unity of opposites. For every thesis, he argued, there’s an antithesis, and then they come together in a synthesis.

If hate is the thesis, then love is the antithesis, which relationship must pertain even when the two words are used attributively.

Thus ‘hate crime’ presupposes the existence of ‘love crime’. Assuming that a hate crime is motivated by hatred, one also has to assume that there must be crimes motivated by love.

Since I’ve never heard of a person mugged, maimed or killed lovingly, I have to believe that all crime is motivated by some negative emotions, often including hatred. Therefore we can safely drop the modifier ‘hate’ and just talk about crime qua crime.

I doubt this speculation would pass the most rigorous of dialectical tests, and Hegel would certainly punch it full of holes. But compared to the mass hysteria about ‘hate crime’, my facetious musings have to be the paragon of sound reason.

One general observation: whoever talks about hate crime is incapable of nuanced thought. When such differently intelligent people (is this PC enough for you?) talk about crime, they confuse two different things: aforementioned crime motivated by hate and hate as a crime in se.

The distinction is critical: the first is a criminal act, the second is a criminalised thought.

What kind of criminal act? Oh, you name it. Murder, assault, GBH, harassment, that sort of thing.

The law does prosecute palpable acts, not the nebulous thought behind them. The thought may at times figure as a mitigating or aggravating consideration, but that’s strictly background stuff.

Hence what intellectually challenged people (this definitely must be PC enough) mean when talking about hate crime is the crime of hate. Hating a person or especially a group of persons is to them a crime in itself, especially when such feelings are put into words.

There’s something suspect about the very notion of criminalising intangibles like feelings and thoughts, and something decidedly spooky about trying to police them. This evokes fond memories of my Soviet youth, and whenever that happens at night I wake up in a jolt, hoarse from my own scream.

Fair enough, hateful words may sometimes be upsetting, but even there popular folklore distinguishes words from sticks and stones.

Granted, it’s not nice to find oneself on the receiving end of slurs based on one’s race, religion, ethnicity, colour or absence of hair, sexual preference or stature. But that’s where those nuances come in: ‘not nice’ doesn’t fit any traditional definition of ‘crime’.

A victim of murder can’t ignore that crime, but a ‘victim’ of a slur can just pay it no notice. Or, if such is his nature, respond in kind, for example by suggesting that the offender take two words, of which the second is ‘off’, and arrange them in the right order.

All this hate crime business would make even a lesser mind than Hegel wince. Yet there’s something the philosopher wouldn’t understand if he were miraculously transplanted to modernity.

His experience wouldn’t have prepared him to grasp the thought I’ve expressed a thousand times if I’ve expressed it once: ‘hate crimes’ are committed not against individuals but against the state.

The very category was thought up as a means for the state to put its foot down and control things that civilised countries used to leave to people’s own discretion.

The state aggressively promotes the ethos of victimhood, offering protection to the self-professed victims. But such protection comes at a price as it does with gangster families. For gangsters, it’s money; for the state, it’s liberty.

I don’t necessarily mean just our state. In fact, like most modern perversions, the culture of hate crime started in the US, which makes me wonder why we never borrow good things from the Americans, such as their enterprising dynamism and polite conviviality.

The disease afflicts the West in its entirety. And it’s getting worse.

Parliament is about to debate a bill proposed by the Labour MP Stella Creasy to make misogyny a crime. Miss Creasy and her likeminded allies define misogyny broadly: not just hatred of women, but also contempt or prejudice.

Now in my long and varied life on two continents and in four countries I’ve never met a straight man who hates women. Some, far from all, homosexuals do, but one can understand them: women with their jutting attractions sidetrack men from the real thing.

Admittedly I’ve heard men mention reservations about women’s intellect, emotional sturdiness and driving ability. I’ll refrain from coming down on either side of this issue but, whichever side that might be, I can’t for the life of me see such men as hardened criminals.

Typically such remarks are just banter offered in jest. But even if there’s some deep feeling behind them, only extremely stupid, or else ideologised, people can possibly take serious offence.

I have, however, met a few women who are hostile to men in general, and some of those women aren’t even lesbians. That creates another opening for Hegel to poke his head in.

If misogyny is a crime, then surely misandry must be too. And what about misanthropes, those who don’t differentiate between women and men and hate them all equally, along with everyone in between? Should they be banged in the slammer?

The proposed bill is actually an amendment to another one, about ‘upskirting’ (aiming a camera up a woman’s skirt). I can only admire our legislators for concentrating their attention on really important matters.

Never mind Britain fighting for her sovereignty, becoming the most crime-ridden country in Europe, having a Third World health service and facing foreign threat. What really must be nipped in the bud is adolescent cretins snapping pictures of women’s knickers.

I see another dialectical problem here, although Hegel probably wouldn’t identify it as such. If upskirting draws legislative attention, what about downblousing? Men, those hateful creatures, peeking down women’s low-cut blouses?

So far no reports of men taking downward photos have been filed, but isn’t preventing crimes the most important part of policing? Today they peek, tomorrow they’ll snap – unless some MP rides in on a white steed and preempts the outrage.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, where are you now that we need you? Come back, all is forgiven: your iffy philosophy, turgid prose and too many Christian names. And please bring Aristotle with you – this is a plus-one invitation.

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has sent a memo to the Cabinet Office, insisting that tax avoiders must be shunned for knighthoods and similar awards.

“Poor tax behaviour,” says the memo, “is not consistent with the award of an honour.” Media personality Libby Purves agrees: “Of course rich people who ingeniously avoid paying adequate tax should find that there is a penalty.”

Now I suspect that most conservatives disagree with both Miss Purves and HMRC emphatically and not necessarily respectfully.

One realises that these day words mean what the government says they mean. Thus our ruling spivs use the terms ‘tax evasion’ and ‘tax avoidance’ interchangeably.

Yet in actual, as opposed to our virtual, reality these terms are more nearly antonymous than synonymous. Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion isn’t.

I hate to second-guess such august authorities as HMRC and Miss Purves, but I get the impression that they fall short of making that distinction.

‘Poor tax behaviour’? Tax avoidance is no poorer than looking for bargains in supermarkets. I’d call it sensible management of one’s finances, wouldn’t you?

If HMRC snoops consider some loopholes unfair, they should petition the Home Office to close them. If they don’t, they don’t consider them unfair, which means we’re free to use them. So what’s the beef then?

And how does Miss Purves define ‘adequate’ tax? To someone who, for old times’ sake, still insists on using words in their real meaning, adequate means sufficient.

Thus a person who pays a legally sufficient amount of tax is paying an adequate amount.

If Miss Purves’s burning conscience flames up at such casuistry, she should follow the example of Charles Lindberg, the famous pilot who always added 10 per cent to his tax bill because he was “proud to be an American”. (He was also proud to be a Nazi, but that’s by the bye.)

None of this transcends elementary logic and basic common sense, commodities that are rapidly becoming as rare as whale dung. But I’d like to expand the argument.

We’ve been conditioned to see nothing wrong about the state extorting more than half of what we earn by honest labour. This is seen as the state’s God-given right.

It’s nothing of the sort, and never was during the entire history of Britain, bar wartime and the last century or so.

When income tax (of a staggering 10 per cent for those earning more than £200 a year) was first introduced in Britain in 1799, it was widely opposed as an unacceptable governmental intrusion into citizens’ private affairs and a threat to personal liberty.

That’s exactly what it was – and is. This isn’t, however, an argument against taxation in general. Some intrusion into citizens’ private affairs and even some curbs on personal liberty are necessary for the state to fulfil its primary function: keeping citizens safe.

Hence there can be no valid argument, this side of the libertarians’ and anarchists’ good offices, against a level of taxation that’s consistent with that desideratum – and perhaps a little extra for other essential governmental needs.

Such is the theory. In practice, however, the British (or any other Western) government doesn’t use taxation for such useful purposes. Citizens’ safety is the least of their concern, as witnessed by our justice system.

Since 1950 violent crime rates have gone up 100-fold, making Britain one of the most violent European countries. In his book Licence to Kill, David Fraser cites stacks of data placing the blame for this outrage squarely on Whitehall.

The whole justice system we buy with our taxes favours the criminal over the victim. Most crimes go either uninvestigated or unpunished. And when some punishment is meted out, it’s typically derisory, putting violent recidivists back on the streets within months and leading to appalling reoffending rates.

The government doesn’t do any better protecting us from external threats. The defence budget is now lower than the cost of servicing the national debt, leaving Britain defenceless – or suicidally relying on her outdated nuclear arsenal.

The state is thus in default of its principal function. And yet it still insists on its moral right to extort half of our income or more.

Moreover, it’s the state that’s guilty of ‘poor tax behaviour’. Our national debt is rapidly moving towards two trillion pounds, with the government continuing to spend more than it extorts. In fact HMG sees it as a huge achievement when in some years it overspends by less than in most others.

In short, there’s no useful purpose for exorbitant taxation. There is, however, a pernicious one: increasing the state’s power over the individual by making people more dependent on the state. This is out-and-out tyranny.

One tell-tale sign is the state’s unquenchable thirst for looting our pension funds. The more financially independent older people are, and our population is aging, the less power does the state have over them.

Private pensions are thus the state’s terrifying bugbear. That’s why both Labour and Tory governments launch devastating raids on them. In fact, our – Conservative! – Chancellor Hammond has just announced another one.

All things considered, every pound the state collects in taxes is a bullet for the gun of tyranny. Conversely, every pound remaining in the individual’s wallet is armour against that bullet.

That’s why finding legal ways to diminish our tyrannical tax burden isn’t just our right, but our civic duty. Hence I’d propose a measure opposite to one favoured by HMRC and Miss Purves.

No candidate should be considered for honours, especially knighthood and peerage, unless he can prove that he has exhausted every legal possibility of paying less tax. People who strike a blow for liberty must be rewarded – even if they do so for selfish reasons.

In May, 1939, a French socialist appeaser wrote an article arguing that Hitler’s claim to Danzig was just.

And even if it wasn’t, Danzig was so far outside France’s national interests that no sane Frenchman would want to die for it.

In fact Mourir pour Danzig? was the article’s title, and it soon became a popular slogan. Left Bank lefties led by Jean-Paul would mouth it sneeringly while sipping their kirs at Les Deux Magots.

Four months later they received a tangible proof that appeasement doesn’t work. On second thoughts, perhaps it would have been better for a couple of thousand soldiers to die for Danzig than for some 40 million to perish over the next six years.

The outbreak of history’s bloodiest war also illustrated the danger of interpreting national interests in a narrowly selfish way. If no man was an island to John Donne, surely no country is “entire of itself”, not in modern times.

Ours is an age of blocs and alliances, not two families jousting with the support of their retainers. When evil giants get bellicose, no single country can resist them on her own.

Or perhaps this general statement can be slightly modified. Conceivably, should China or Russia attack the West, the US could possibly resist either one (not both together) on her own – but shouldn’t have to.

For the US is a member, and the leader, of the Atlantic alliance. And Article 5 of the NATO Charter specifies that an attack on one member is tantamount to an attack on all.

One hopes that NATO’s commitment will never again be put to a test. But if it ever is, let’s remember that NATO, along with its Charter and its every article, has little other than symbolic value without America’s wholehearted commitment.

Only the United States has a nuclear arsenal to match that of Russia (China is a threat too, but a less immediate one). And only the United States can beef up NATO’s conventional capability to a point where it can stop any Russian aggression.

As Russia is about to launch a military exercise involving 300,000 men and 2,000 units of armour, now is a good time to contemplate the danger Putin’s junta presents to her former satellites and Europe in general.

Only an ignoramus, idiot or fanatic would ignore the demonstrable fact that Putin regards the West, the US in particular, as a deadly enemy. Yet no member of those three groups can be persuaded by either reason or facts, so I shan’t even bother.

If I did bother, I’d focus especially on the nuclear blackmail practised at every level of Russian government with monotonous regularity. Putin and his stooges like to brag about Russia’s ability to turn America to radioactive ash, wipe Florida off the map or even to create a North American Strait, meaning clear blue water between Canada and Mexico.

Throughout the Cold War, the West relied on the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine as a means of containing Russia. The terrified public was treated to calculations of how many times over the combined nuclear arsenals of the US and the USSR could destroy the globe.

Only a madman would ever consider using nuclear weapons at the risk of creating a global apocalypse, was the prevalent thinking in the West. That thinking was questionable then, and it’s criminally wrong now.

The Soviet military doctrine proceeded from the assumption that nuclear war was winnable. The current Russian thinking is similar, if more nuanced and perfidious.

Keeping the cosh of nuclear blackmail behind his back, Putin probes the West time after time, putting his toe in the waters of military conflict, going a bit deeper each time.

While one should be careful about comparing Putin to villains of yesteryear, a parallel with Hitler’s strategy in the late 1930s is obvious.

The Nazi führer also refrained from plunging into a full-blown war at once. He’d take a tentative step and watch the Allies’ reaction. Ruhr, Austria, Munich ultimatum, Czechoslovakia, Nazi-Soviet pact – no action on the part of the Allies. Attack on Poland – the Allies declared war, but only of the phoney variety.

Then and only then did Hitler launch a frontal assault on the West, after the Allies had ignored numerous opportunities to nip Nazi aggression in the bud.

That’s how evil dictators work: they pounce only when reasonably certain of impunity. Putin has to play evil dictator, for without a good performance in that role he wouldn’t be able to remain what he is: the chieftain of history’s first global mafia family.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, he adopts, mutatis mutandis, Hitler’s strategy of a step at a time.

Attack on Chechnya precipitated by Putin’s lads blowing up Moscow blocks of flats and blaming it on the Chechens – the West is silent (note the parallel with Hitler’s using the false flag raid on the Gleiwitz radio station as a pretext for the offensive against Poland).

Unprovoked attack on Georgia – hardly even noticed in the West.

Poisoning a British subject with polonium in London – feeble protests only.

Annexation of the Crimea – some token sanctions. Subsequent stealing of a chunk of Ukrainian territory – slightly stiffer sanctions, hitting mostly regular Russians, an insignificant group to the ruling mafia.

Murdering 298 people aboard Malaysian Flight MH17 – a slap on the wrist.

Indiscriminate bombing of Syrian civilians – nothing but thanks from the West.

Attempted murder of more British subjects in Britain, followed by lethal collateral damage – more sanctions.

Hybrid war on the West, including meddling in elections… well, you get the gist.

Putin’s aggression is on an upward escalator that’ll never end. No one knows where the next stop will be, but suppose for the sake of argument that it’ll be an attack on one of the Baltic republics, all NATO members.

This supposition isn’t a stab in the dark. Putin has pledged to restore Stalin’s empire to its past borders, and so far the Botox Boy has been true to his word.

So what about Article 5 then? Will NATO comply with it and defend the victim by force? Will anyone want to die for, say, Tallinn?

I doubt it – and would even if a different man occupied the White House. With Trump in residence, I’m sure today’s heir to Hitler and Stalin will get away with it.

For Putin’s nuclear blackmail is succeeding. Many indirect signs suggest that Western leaders believe that, if the Russian juggernaut is stopped by conventional means, Putin won’t hesitate to go nuclear.

Whether he will or won’t is a moot point. In such matters, perception is reality, and the West’s perception seems to be that Putin just may be mad enough to use nuclear weapons – while we aren’t mad enough to respond in kind.

Iron resolve on the part of NATO, especially the US, is the only possible deterrent, but, during this presidency, America’s resolve to comply with Article 5 is more cotton wool than iron.

A Fox News interviewer asked recently if Trump, whose admiration for Putin is only matched by his contempt for his NATO allies, would be prepared to defend Montenegro (a NATO ally since last year) should it be attacked by Russia.

In response, Trump seemed to discount the possibility that Russia would attack Montenegro (a country that had only barely survived a Putin-inspired coup), while seriously considering the possibility that Montenegro might attack Russia.

At least that’s what his gibberish meant, when he said: “No, by the way, they [Montenegrins] have very strong people – they have very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III.”

But, Mr President, if those aggressive Montenegrins do launch an assault on Moscow, Article 5 doesn’t say we must jump in. NATO is a defensive compact, and that Article could only be invoked in the marginally likelier event of a Russian attack on Montenegro.

Now Trump has on numerous occasions refused to commit America to Article 5, or indeed to continued membership in NATO. He’d utter words to that effect, then reverse himself after a public outcry. But it’s clear where his heart is.

Of course the example of Montenegro was purely hypothetical. What Russia sees as an immediate target is the post-Soviet space, especially the Baltics.

Trump has a definite view on those countries too. “Estonia,” he once explained, “is in the suburbs of St Petersburg,” meaning that Putin’s claim to her is as valid as Hitler’s was to Danzig.

Considering that Tallinn is 200 miles from Petersburg, the same distance as between Paris and Brussels, the suburbs of Putin’s native city are rather sprawling. But the message wasn’t geographical. It was geopolitical.

Be sure that Putin got it in every tonal detail: while Trump is president, the risk of war over expansionist aggression towards Russia’s neighbours is minimal. Proceed with caution and all that, but do proceed.

However, those strong and aggressive Montenegrins should watch their step: they can’t count on NATO’s help if they drive their tanks 3,500 miles to Russia, violating en route the sovereignty of Romania, Moldova and the Ukraine.

They stand warned – and so are we. I don’t know if the Montenegrins will heed the warning. I doubt we shall.

Of course it is. Unequivocally. Absolutely. Unreservedly.

All God’s children know that a free economy will outperform a command one every time, making people more prosperous and freer.

The devil’s spawn, communists, know it too. They just pretend to hate free markets for ideological reasons.

Now that’s rotten by definition. Any ideology is faith without God and thought without reason. Therefore, an ideology is always pernicious, even – and this is a key point – if we happen to agree with its central tenet.

For unequivocal, absolute and unreserved faith in free markets becomes pernicious too, if lowered down to the level of ideology. Suddenly we’re looking not at sound thought but at reductio ad absurdum.

This highlights the fundamental difference between conservatives and libertarians. And this difference doesn’t become any less fundamental just because the two groups share most of their ideas.

Both believe in individual freedom and property rights. Both are prepared to worship at the altar of free enterprise. Both want to reduce state power to the lowest sensible level.

And yet they’re as typologically different as different can be.

A conservative becomes one because of certain character traits, distrust of extremes being one, capacity for sound dispassionate thought another, tendency towards Christian love another still – this, even if he’s no churchgoer or indeed a believer.

As such, he’s not an ideologue, though at his best he may be a philosopher.

A libertarian, on the other hand, is an ideologue par excellence. He sees any moderation as apostasy, any deviation from his fiery beliefs as treason, any balanced thought as a sign of weak-kneed hesitancy.

Though he’s different from communists in everything he believes, temperamentally and, if you will, methodologically, he’s closer to them than to conservatives.

Allow me to illustrate. A week or so ago, I returned to London after three months away. Driving down my end of the King’s Road (both New and Old), I observed a scene that appalled me as a conservative, but one that would gladden the heart of a libertarian.

Until a couple of years ago, the King’s Road had been free of High Street chains, the Old end mostly, the New end entirely. At our, New, end every shop was a one-off, including a row of antique shops at the point where Old becomes New.

Then the commercial rents went up, or rather shot up. Overnight, individual shops began to go out of business one by one: they couldn’t cope with the rent hike. But national chains could.

At the Old end, one business whose rent wasn’t raised by much was the wallpaper shop Osborne and Little. As an inveterate believer in the good of human nature, I refuse to believe that their bit of good luck had anything to do with the scion of the Osborne family being Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time.

Now For Rent signs are all over the place, soon to be occupied by national chains. Many of the great antiques shops are boarded up, which is awful to see even though I could never afford to darken their threshold.

The libertarian would rejoice, or at least see nothing wrong in the development. The owners of the commercial properties exercised their rights within the framework of free enterprise. The properties are theirs, and they can set the rents at any level they wish.

The ideology was thus served. But was the good of the community?

If we define it in monetary terms only, then yes, probably. However, if we shift our vantage point, things appear to be less clear-cut. I’ll illustrate this on the example of food shopping, which is the only kind I ever do.

First, though a supermarket can offer a greater variety of food than a local butcher, fishmonger and greengrocer, the small shops generally offer better quality.

When old people complain that tomatoes have no fragrance these days and chicken no taste, they’re not just grumbling for the sake of it. And, contrary to the popular adage, nothing is worse than sliced bread peddled by supermarket chains.

Supermarkets have to buy centrally, which means that, say, fish would first be delivered to a central distributorship and only then taken all over the region. This normally takes several days, and by the time the fish reaches your frying pan it’ll have lost much of its taste, texture and nutritive value.

By contrast, a local fishmonger goes to a wholesale market at six in the morning, opens his shop at 10 and sells you fish caught within the last 24 hours.

He and his colleagues, dealing in other foods next door, thus offer a valuable service, which supermarkets can’t match. And even the price difference can be reduced in a variety of ways.

This brings us to another benefit of local shopping, one that goes beyond the freshness of the food you buy: the local shop provides a personal service.

The fishmonger knows his customers; they’re also his neighbours, occasionally friends. He is aware of what they like and what they can afford.

If some of them live in strained circumstances, he could perhaps charge them a little less, especially if they came in just before closing time. In addition, he’d be pleased to give them things like heads and bones for stock free of charge.

(Conversely, I know a fishmonger who always – objectionably!!! -overcharges customers who pull up in a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.)

Customers may still perhaps pay a little more than at a supermarket, but that could be worth it to those who’d rather be treated as individuals than as ciphers, and also to those cursed with sensitive taste buds.

Old people also used to look forward to their daily shopping outings as a chance to have a friendly chat with the owner and other neighbours who happen to be there at the same time.

In short, the local shops promoted the community spirit and a sense of togetherness – something one wouldn’t normally expect from a sprawling U-Save miles away. Add to this the better quality of their food, and we see a clear incentive to curb the natural tendency to monopoly so typical of big modern businesses.

The only way to stop this shopping landslide is for the local government to fix commercial rent rates, in ways in which residential rates are controlled in, say, New York.

A libertarian would throw his hands up in horror: this would be a gross affront to the ideology of free enterprise. A conservative just might be prepared to compromise his general principles for a particular benefit – he’s used to weighing things in the balance.

Hence the conservative answer to the question in the title is yes, usually. But he’ll refrain from obtusely insisting on yes, always.

P.S. Philip Collins, writing in today’s Times, takes exception to Lord Sacks’s equating Corbyn and Powell (see my article the other day). Powell, he says, was much worse. I’d suggest that such views are best aired in The Guardian or, better still, the Morning Star. Just to think that The Times used to be a conservative paper.

The title reflects my wild guess of the size of Alizé Cornet’s breasts, which she didn’t really expose at the US Open tennis championship.

However, judging by the worldwide response she got, Mlle Cornet might as well have done just that.

What she actually did do was go to the dressing room between the sets and change her wet shirt for a dry one. However, when play resumed, Mlle Cornet realised she had put the new shirt on back to front.

Since the rules didn’t allow her to leave the court again, she nonchalantly took her shirt off and put it on the right way, exposing her sports bra in the process.

For that the umpire hit her with a code violation: the rules allow the men to change their shirts in full view of the spectators, but not the women.

It was as if Mlle Cornet had performed a slow, rhythmic striptease, with the male fans baying: “C’mon, baby, take it all off!!!”

The face value of the incident is next to zero. Yes, the letter of the rule was violated, but the circumstances were exceptional, and really – when all is said and done, it was no big deal.

Passers-by all over London are routinely regaled with the sight of female joggers wearing nothing but an identical garment above the waist. And a sports bra is positively chaste compared to the gowns worn by film stars and pop performers.

Anyway, Mlle Cornet objected to the code violation, and the organising committee sensibly apologised to her. Open and shut case, one would have thought.

So it would have been in a sane world. In our world, however, connotation trumps denotation, and the connotation of this incident is, well, sexism. Though ranking below, say, homophobia, this is among today’s worst crimes against the prevailing ethos.

Thus Mlle Cornet retweeted Billie Jean King’s post condemning the “policing of women’s bodies” on court. The catsuit worn by Serena Williams at the French Open was much worse, added Alizé.

That much is true. Miss Williams’s suit revealed every detail of her ample secondary sex characteristics, and some details of the primary ones as well. That’s why the Roland Garros officials banned it for future tournaments.

Meanwhile the groundswell of protests was swelling to the sky. How come, went the outcry, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic are allowed to be bare-chested at changeovers, and women aren’t? Fair’s fair – either we’re all equal or we aren’t.

Pipe down, ladies. We are definitely equal – but we aren’t the same. Not yet anyway.

That rule does make sense. In our civilisation, a different significance is attached to male and female chests. Part of the reason is physiological: a woman’s chest is indeed her secondary sex characteristic, whereas a man’s chest isn’t.

That’s why exposing a woman’s chest in public is still regarded as indecent, but exposing a man’s chest isn’t. A man walking naked to the waist down King’s Road is guilty only of poor taste, while a woman doing the same thing would be guilty of a punishable misdemeanour.

I apologise for stating the bleeding obvious. My only excuse is that, in the madhouse called modernity, the old certitudes no longer apply, and nothing is obvious any longer.

That’s why the aforementioned groundswell has brought on its crest calls to change the code and allow women players to take their tops off at changeovers. Equality comes before sanity.

Now, unlike Mlle Cornet, some women play braless, a fashion started by Chris Evert back in the 70s. Over the years, tennis fans have been treated to many wardrobe malfunctions, with a woman’s breast(s) popping out of a low-cut top when she had to reach down for a drop shot.

Call me a sexist troglodyte, but I quite enjoy this added frisson, mainly because the women’s game is short of any other kind of excitement. And an exposed breast goes well with the orgasmic shrieks that are now par for the course in the women’s game.

Maria Sharapova’s screams, for example, reach 101 decibels on even routine shots. That’s roughly the noise an airliner makes at 1,000 feet when taking off. If she’s as loud during sexual intercourse, I can only congratulate her and her partner(s) – and commiserate with her neighbours.

However, I wonder if all those equality hounds would allow a braless girl to change her shirt in full view of the panting fans? My guess is probably not: even fanatical feminists can’t be as crazy as that.

Hence, if they want to change the offensive rule, the only way out is to obligate all female players to wear sports bras.

But wouldn’t that constitute ‘policing women’s bodies on court’ in Billie Jean’s jargon? I mean, men players are free not to wear jockstraps, although they do tend to prefer them to Y-fronts.

Modernity throws up interesting conundrums of conflicting pieties, don’t you think? With ‘throws up’ being the operative words.