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Theresa May is “deeply disturbed” about the failed coup in Montenegro staged by the Russians, and with good reason. Putin’s kleptofascist junta, mostly made up of KGB officers, is challenging the West all over the globe.

The methods used so far are more KGB than Red Army: using hybrid forces to annex the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine, a coup to prevent Montenegro’s joining Nato, blackmail, recruitment of agents and ‘useful idiots’, electronic hacking aimed at disrupting Western politics and paralysing the will to resist, disinformatsia and so forth.

The West, specifically Nato, even more specifically the US, faces a vital challenge, and the world’s shape, indeed survival, may well depend on how successfully this challenge is met.

Putin’s immediate goal is to undo what he calls “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, the breakup of the USSR. To do that he must first neutralise Nato, of which three former Soviet republics are members.

What with the US financing 75 per cent of Nato’s budget, the position of the American administration is critical. Hence it’s hard not to be concerned about the frankly pro-Putin position adopted by Trump and his people.

Some of them have been compromised by their intimate links with the Russians; some lied about the contacts and had to be sacked. One wonders about Trump’s motives in surrounding himself with people like Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Rex Tillerson, who’ve all made such vast fortunes in Russia that it’s hard to expect them to stay impartial.

The first two, along with National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, have been sacked. Considering that Trump himself has made billions out of Russia, one may well doubt his own objectivity. In fact, by way of a parting shot, Carter Page admitted that Trump himself had authorised the contacts in question.

Lately, the president has had to keep much of his affection for Putin to himself, what with many in his own party, to say nothing of the Democrats, being opposed to any unilateral rapprochement with the Russians. However, for all his meandering, Trump hasn’t really changed his initial pro-Putin course.

But it’s not a course he himself charted. Here one must mention a rather sinister influential figure: Dimitri Simes, president of the think tank The Centre for the National Interest and publisher of the journal The National Interest. That Simes serves national interests is indisputable, the question is whose.

He and I got out of Russia at about the same time, and the mauvaises langues among the émigrés insisted then that Simes was a KGB plant to begin with. I have no idea whether that’s true, but one fails to see how he’d be covering Russia differently if he were indeed Putin’s man.

Back in December he published A Blueprint for Donald Trump to Fix Relations with Russia, a lengthy tutorial for Trump in the art of appeasement and giving Putin a free hand in gluing the Soviet empire back together.

Simes wrote exactly what Putin’s propagandists are screaming off TV screens and newspaper pages, except he couched his rhetoric in the jargon of American political punditry. The hope must have been that such subterfuge would make the propaganda more digestible, but it still causes dyspepsia.

First Simes wrote: “In selecting individuals for key positions dealing with Russia, it will be important to appoint those both willing and able to implement your policy.” Trump has followed that advice faithfully, as Messrs Page, Manafort, Flynn and Tillerson could testify.

Moving right along, Simes reiterated Putin’s nuclear blackmail that has become Russian television’s stock in trade: “First and foremost, Russia remains the only nation that can erase the United States from the map in thirty minutes.”

I doubt that this is technically feasible, but it’s the thought that counts, and it comes right out of Putin’s head. The inevitable conclusion is that, if the USA wants to stay on the map for a while longer, it should get out of Putin’s way.

From nuclear blackmail on to the terrorist kind. Without Putin, claims Simes, the West wouldn’t be able to control international terrorism. He didn’t go so far as to suggest that some of this terrorism is inspired and expedited by Russia herself, but Russian dignitaries routinely drop broad hints to that effect.

Putin’s prime minister Medvedev’s hint was the broadest of all: “terrorist acts in the EU and the rest of the world happen because Western countries pursue the policy of isolating Russia”.

An influential Russian MP has added that he “isn’t sure that one terrorist act in Paris would suffice to initiate [the West’s] talks with Putin.”

The hints shouldn’t be taken as blustery braggadocio: Russia does have some influence with jihadists. Many Isis chieftains are former Iraqi officers trained by Moscow; weapons and training mainly come from Russia; Russia’s Muslim outskirts, especially Chechnya, provide a steady stream of Isis rank-and-file and also of terrorists.

Specifically, one wishes the FBI were more upfront about the obvious links between Russia and brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsranayev, two Chechens who in 2013 launched a murderous attack on the Boston Marathon. The former probably and the latter definitely were trained in Russia, which is kept relatively hush-hush.

Putin’s propaganda, of which Simes is an adept mouthpiece, is bearing fruit, and not just among Trump’s immediate circle. Here’s, for example, what former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said about Putin’s possible aggression against Estonia:

 “The Russians aren’t gonna necessarily come across the border militarily. The Russians are gonna do what they did in Ukraine… I’m not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St Petersburg.”

At its closest point, Estonia, a country roughly the size of Denmark, is 85 miles from Petersburg. Finland is the same distance away, which proximity was used by Putin’s typological predecessor Stalin as a pretext for attacking Finland in 1939.

Gingrich’s statement sounds suspiciously like advice to Putin: do some more hybrid stuff, Vladimir. Pretend it’s Estonians themselves attacking their own country, with the help of Russian paramilitary volunteers over whom Putin has no control.

Simes’s ‘blueprint’ does the same job, though with greater subtlety: “We should put an end to the illusion that… the U.S. commitment to defend even the newest and smallest NATO members must remain unconditional… The goal must be to prevent incidents that could provide a temptation – or excuse – for Russian intervention. There should be no illusions that America accepts responsibility for allies who provoke conflict and then request assistance and reassurance to deal with the consequences.”

Get it? America shouldn’t defend a Nato member that ‘provokes’ conflict. Of course manufacturing such a provocation, or anything construed as such, is a doddle for the Russian KGB junta: there’s plenty of experience, specifically in that region.

The aforementioned attack on Finland started with the Russians shelling their own border village Mainila and claiming that the fire had come from Finland. This was used as a casus belli, even though the evidence of the true origin of the shelling was incontrovertible (shell fragments disperse in the direction of the shell’s trajectory, which in that case came from the south, not north).

Knocking off a dozen Russians living in Estonia and subsequently coming to the defence of the consanguine minority could also do nicely – that sort of thing worked famously for Hitler in 1938 and 1939. Estonia’s brutal insistence that the resident Russians learn the country’s language could also be interpreted as sufficient cause.

Simes co-opts to his cause the nonagenarian Henry Kissinger, who in his dotage has become even more of an appeaser than he was back in the Nixon days: “Kissinger’s alternative – with which we strongly agree – is to seek to integrate Russia into an international order that takes into account Moscow’s minimum essential interests.”

Moscow’s ‘minimum essential interests’ are to divide the world into spheres of interest, with Russia directly controlling half of Europe and ‘Finlandising’ the rest. Incidentally, both the Finns and the Swedes are alert to that threat.

Throughout the Cold War Sweden remained neutral and Finland for all intents and purposes a Soviet satellite (hence ‘Finlandisation’). However, in the face of non-stop Soviet overflights violating their airspace, the two countries are drawing closer to Nato. Both are hastily rearming, and Sweden is reintroducing conscription.

Simes doesn’t mention that, but he keeps stressing that Russia is in the forefront of armament technology. As proof of the Russians’ technological attainment he offers “the cofounder of the most advanced digital company in the world, Google, is Russian-born Sergey Brin.”

Now Brin’s parents emigrated from Russia when he was six. Sergei grew up as an American and has little to do with Russia. One wonders how he’d feel if he knew his name is being used for the purposes of pro-Putin propaganda.

So far Trump hasn’t deviated from Simes’s ‘blueprint’ one iota. One hopes there are enough checks and balances in US politics to keep the president from acting on some of the more cataclysmic veiled recommendations.

It took our pseudo-Conservative government 24 hours to backpedal on the new tax penalising entrepreneurs.

It’s clear why the reverse gear was engaged: the budget has singled out for fiscal punishment precisely the groups that are viscerally Conservative. Realising that, many Tory MPs began to fear for their seats.

A revolt was brewing, and Mrs May decided it would be prudent to put brakes on her Chancellor. What is less straightforward is why Mr Hammond, doubtless with the PM’s support, introduced this budget in the first place.

It helps to imitate God and start with the word. In this case, the word is capitalism, the economic method supposedly practised by Western governments. It’s impossible to understand our state’s motives without first realising that ‘capitalism’ has become a mendacious misnomer.

Western economies are no longer capitalist: they range from corporatist to frankly socialist. For the goal of all modern Western governments is self-aggrandisement by gaining maximum control over the people.

There are obvious differences among, say, totalitarian, socialist and liberal-democratic governments, but these are differences of method, not principle. Some modern regimes rely on coercion, some on brutality, some on more subtle levers of power. But they all have levers, and they all operate them with single-minded focus.

Totalitarian regimes cultivate a sort of mass Stockholm syndrome: they enslave the people and use non-stop propaganda to make the people like their servitude and depend on it. Liberal democracies also cultivate a culture of dependency, mainly by extorting so much of the people’s money that many of them have to beg the state for alms.

This is accompanied by bien pensant jargon of share, care, be aware, with the state subliminally equated with the loving, merciful, occasionally wrathful God. Modern states extort, on pain of imprisonment, a lion’s share of people’s earnings, while brainwashing the robbed into believing the loot serves the common good.

The state’s efforts to rob industrious Peter to reward indolent Paul are portrayed as a form of Christian charity. Today, in a staggeringly disingenuous article, Michael Gove had the gall to argue that Mrs May’s politics can only be understood in the light of Catholic social thought to which the PM is privy thanks to her Anglican background.

That’s why she supposedly uses the phrase ‘common good’ so often. This is either a misunderstanding or a lie. Mrs May uses the phrase in exactly the same sense in which all modern politicians, regardless of party affiliation, use it: common subservience to the state.

The phrase is a calculated lie, designed to make people accept parting with over half of what they earn through backbreaking work. This overall lie spins out a multitude of small ones, such as ‘welfare’ or ‘social security’.

Our dear National Insurance is yet another misnomer camouflaging an extra 12 per cent income tax. That way the government can boast that our base tax rate is 20 per cent, rather than the 32 per cent it actually is.

Add to this local, property, car and road taxes, VAT, TV licences and whatnot, and a person in the lowest tax bracket is robbed of about half of his earnings. And the higher the bracket, the bigger the robbers’ loot.

Before figuring out the politics involved, Mrs May had defended our taxation system for being ‘progressive’. This is like praising paralysis for being progressive. That people who earn more should pay more tax in absolute terms is fair. That they pay proportionately higher rates of tax is gross injustice, but Mrs May’s statist DNA precludes her from understanding that.

Whatever she may be in private life, as a public figure she’s a dedicated, visceral statist. Once we’ve realised this, the budget, inspired by Mrs May and enunciated by Mr Hammond, becomes easy to understand.

Just look at the groups hit the hardest: entrepreneurs, savers, private pensioners, inheritors. What do they all have in common?

Entrepreneurs implicitly rebel against modern corporatism. Their independence of mind and freewheeling approach to life go against the psychosocial type modern states try to spawn: that of a dependent.

Savers and private pensioners display some of the same undesirable characteristics as the self-employed. They realise that a government that does a lot for the people will inevitably do a lot to them. So rather than relying on the state’s tender mercies, they try to take care of their own future.

And of course things like inheritance tax and death duties are meat to our visceral statists. God forbid a successful man can provide not only for himself and his wife but also for his children and grandchildren. Inheritance is the bête noire of the modern state, and the greater the chunk the state can bite out of it, the better shot it’ll have at making more people dependent on government handouts.

The same logic explains why our already crippling social expenditure is going up, even though this makes it impossible to reduce our appalling £1.8 trillion debt. Foreign aid also goes up, extending welfarism to other countries, in the hope that this will increase our ability to control them (it won’t, but this is a different story).

How one wishes for a Tory government… hold on: my wife is telling me we already have one. Could have fooled me.

 

I forgot that yesterday was International Women’s Day and hence neglected to commemorate it properly. Since I’m busy today, I’m going to re-run last year’s piece, to which I really have nothing to add.

First we had Mothering Sunday, a religious holiday Western Christians celebrate on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Then, under the influence of the US, Mothering Sunday was largely replaced by Mother’s Day, a secular holiday without any religious overtones whatsoever. That’s understandable: our delicate sensibilities can no longer accommodate any Christian festivals other than Christmas Shopping.

Now that secular but basically unobjectionable holiday has been supplemented by International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated by all progressive mankind on 8 March. Our delicate sensibilities aren’t offended at all.

Actually, though the portion of mankind that celebrates 8 March calls itself progressive, it isn’t really entitled to this modifier – unless one accepts the propensity for murdering millions just for the hell of it as an essential aspect of progress.

For, not to cut too fine a point, 8 March is a communist event, declared a national holiday by the Bolsheviks in 1917, immediately after they seized power and started killing people with the gusto and on a scale never before seen in history. A few wires were expertly pulled after the war, and IWD also got enshrined in Soviet satellites.

The event actually originated in America, where the Socialist Party arbitrarily chose that date to express solidarity with the 1909 strike of female textile workers. Yet the holiday didn’t catch on in the States, doubtless because the Socialist Party never did.

Outside the Soviet bloc, 8 March went uncelebrated, unrecognised and, until recently, unknown. I remember back in 1974, when I worked at NASA, visiting Soviet astronauts made a big show of wishing female American employees a happy 8 March, eliciting only consternation and the stock Texan response of “Say what?”

The event was big in the Soviet Union, with millions of men giving millions of women bunches of mimosa, boxes of chocolates – and, more important, refraining from giving them a black eye, a practice rather more widespread in Russia than in the West.

But not on 8 March. That was the day when men scoured their conscience clean by being effusively lovey-dovey – so that they could resume abusing women the very next day, on 9 March. For Russia was then, and still remains, out of reach for the fashionable ideas about women’s equality or indeed humanity. As the Russian proverb goes, “A chicken is no bird, a wench is no person.”

Much as one may be derisory about feminism, it’s hard to justify the antediluvian abuse, often physical, that’s par for the course in Russia, especially outside central Moscow or Petersburg. Proponents of the plus ça change philosophy of history would be well-advised to read Dostoyevsky on this subject.

In A Writer’s Diary Dostoyevsky describes in terrifying detail the characteristic savagery of a peasant taking a belt or a stick to his trussed-up wife, lashing at her, ignoring her pleas for mercy until, pounded into a bloody pulp, she stops pleading or moving. However, according to the writer, this in no way contradicted the brute’s inner spirituality, so superior to Western materialistic legalism. Ideology does work in mysterious ways.

The Russian village still has the same roads (typically none) as at the time this was written, and it still has the same way of treating womenfolk – but not on 8 March. On that day the Soviets were housetrained to express their solidarity with the oppressed women of the world, or rather specifically of the capitalist world.

As a conservative, I have my cockles warmed by the traditionalist way in which the Russians lovingly maintain Soviet traditions, including the odd bit of murder by the state, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Why we have adopted them, at a time when communism has supposedly collapsed, is rather harder to explain.

But why stop here? Many Brits, especially those of the Labour persuasion, already celebrate May Day, with red flags flying to symbolise the workers’ blood spilled by the ghastly capitalists. Why not spread the festivities more widely? I mean, May Day is celebrated in Russia, so what better reason do we need?

The Russians also celebrate 7 November, on which day in 1917 the Bolsheviks introduced social justice expressed in mass murder and universal slavery. I say we’ve been ignoring this glorious event far too long. And neither do we celebrate Red Army Day on 23 February – another shameful omission.

But at least we seem to be warming up to 8 March, an important communist event. At least we’re moving in the right direction.

A reader of mine suggested that those who celebrate IWD should perform the ballistically and metaphysically improbable act of inserting the holiday into a certain receptacle originally designed for exit only. While I don’t express myself quite so robustly in this space, I second the motion.

Cherie (Mrs Tony) Blair predictably expressed her support for IWD, ending her letter to The Times with “Count me in”. Well, count me out.

 

“Accident of birth is no reason to be handed a seat in the House of Lords”, says The Times editorial Noble Rot. What follows is an impassioned rant, as opposed to a reasoned argument, in favour of an elected upper chamber.

Actually, if the writer had a modicum of constitutional understanding, he’d know that ‘accident of birth’ is the only valid qualification for the Lords. But since such understanding isn’t to be found at either the left or the right end of the political spectrum, the House of Lords is under attack from both ends.

The rubbishy editorial has two gripes against the Lords: first, it’s undemocratic; second, its members are old. Yet both putative minuses are in fact huge pluses.

Being ‘undemocratic’ is the whole point of the upper chamber, not its drawback. Its historical function is to counterbalance any possible excesses of the Commons, keeping it on the straight and narrow.

In theory at least, their Lordships are impervious to partisan pressures – their appointment doesn’t necessitate currying political favour. They therefore can pass judgement only on the basis of their conscience and vested interest in the country their families have served for many generations.

This isn’t to say that an elected upper chamber can’t work. It can, elsewhere. For example, the US Senate, loosely modelled on the House of Lords, is a reasonably functional institution born out of necessity. After all, all titles of nobility were abolished immediately after the colonies became independent.

But introducing a replica of the US Senate in Britain is tantamount to mocking and abandoning centuries of constitutional tradition. Advocating such a measure is a sign of gaping ignorance enhanced by trendy anomie.

According to the editorial, Blair’s subversive reform of the Lords wasn’t subversive enough. After all, 92 hereditary peers still kept their seats. We don’t want that. We want spivs like Blair and Cameron to inhabit both chambers.

The other gripe, that their Lordships are too old, is another example of left-leaning idiocy. After all, it’s councils of elders, not youngers, that are the oldest form of government, and with good reason.

Few people acquire at an early age the wisdom required for statesmanship, something even the revolutionary framers of the US Constitution realised. That’s why they introduced minimum ages for all political appointments, 35 for the president. I’d suggest that, what with the average life expectancy now being twice what it was 200 years ago, no one under 60 should be qualified for high political office.

We may argue about the specific cut-off points, but not the general principle: in affairs of the state, age is an asset, not a detriment. This principle, however, doesn’t cut much ice with our paedocratic modernity promoting infantilism as a political tool.

If there’s one common feature among different tyrannies, autocratic, totalitarian or democratic, it’s their accent on youth. Tyrants realise that impetuous, unformed brains can be putty in their hands, mouldable into any shape. Brainwash them early, and they’re yours for life.

For example, Trotsky once described young people as “the barometer of a nation”. That may be true, but history shows that the barometer inevitably falls off the wall and shatters, with grown-ups cutting their feet on the shards of glass.

Democratic tyranny of the majority, in Tocqueville’s phrase, is just as paedocratic, and for the same reasons. Wiser, older heads may just notice that a modern politician can pack even a short speech with solecisms and every known rhetorical fallacy. People in their 60s are less likely to scream themselves hoarse with cretinous gusto every time a democratic tyrant utters a meaningless platitude.

If a formerly respectable paper is attacking our constitution from the left, good people on the right do their bit too. There’s even a petition making the rounds on Facebook calling for the abolition of the Lords.

My Brexiteer friends are aghast at their Lordships’ two rulings clearly aimed at slowing and diluting Brexit or, ideally, killing it stone-dead. The rulings are indeed abominable, but the proposed treatment is worse than the disease.

Calling for the abolition of an ancient institution because it has done something we don’t like is neither grown-up nor clever. My fire-eating friends should ponder why they want to leave the EU in the first place.

If the idea is, as it should be, to restore the ancient constitution of the realm, then they must see that what they’re proposing will destroy that constitution with even greater finality than anything the EU can muster. Emotions, however laudable, are a poor guide to political judgement. The mind works much better, chaps; you should try using it.

My zeitgeist-bucking proposal is to reduce House of Lords membership to hereditary peers only, ideally to those whose peerages go back 100 years or more. As a parallel measure, I’d recommend raising the voting age to 25, the minimum age for MPs to 40, 50 for cabinet members and 60 for prime ministers.

This won’t improve our politics appreciably – things have gone too far. But at least it may slow down the decline and delay a gruesome end.

We have thousands of laws, most accumulated over centuries, though some 60 per cent of the new ones have been kindly bestowed on us by the EU.

Since, fingers crossed, we’ll soon be ineligible for such charity, we’ll find that we need no help from the EU to destroy the best legal system the world has ever seen.

Yes, we have thousands of laws, big and small. But that whole sprawling structure rests on relatively few supports, the underlying core principles whose removal would bring the whole structure down.

You know, things like presumption of innocence, double jeopardy, the right not to give self-incriminating evidence (called the Fifth Amendment by Americans, most of whom don’t realise that the English concept predated the US Constitution by some 600 years), habeas corpus – and equality of all before the law.

It’s this last support that has been wantonly kicked out by the Sentencing Council led by Lord Chief Justice Thomas. The Council has issued new guidelines, according to which criminals from racial and other minorities should receive lighter punishments. This is the first time in our legal history that race is officially declared a mitigating circumstance.

I can’t think off-hand of a more subversive measure and one that can do comparable long-term harm. Actually, take that back. There have been a few similar developments lately.

During the tenure of John Major, the concept of double jeopardy was for all intents ditched. The right not to give self-incriminating evidence (and not to have the refusal to do so treated as an admission of guilt) suffered the same fate under Tony Blair.

Neither presumption of innocence until proven guilty nor habeas corpus is doing so well, considering that any number of (admittedly hideous) British subjects have been held at Guantanamo for years without a formal charge.

And now m’lords are burying the sacred principle of equality of all before the law, obviously not realising that the legal buttresses of the realm are being dumped into the same hole.

The new rules tell the courts to give lighter sentences when young offenders have ‘deprived homes, poor parental employment records, low educational attainment, and early experience of offending by other family members’.

Now it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to suggest that few criminals are classically educated youngsters coming from cultured well-to-do families run by successfully employed parents who’ve never as much as received a speeding fine. TV crime dramas may give the impression that tweedy middle-aged gentlemen commit many, if not most, crimes, but reality is alas dramatically different.

However, should such a gentleman now commit a crime, he’d be treated more severely than a ghetto black or a representative of some other minority. Sounds discriminatory, doesn’t it?

I wonder if I qualify for preferential treatment. Hope so. If I ever murder a BBC Radio 3 presenter, this will be my line of defence.

Is this coz I’s from Russia, Your Honour? If you read my book How the Future Worked, you’ll find that, in addition to being an ethnic minority, I grew up in a poorer family than any existing in Britain, lived in a smelly communal flat where six families shared the same loo, bathroom and kitchen, and suffered discrimination throughout my life there. I simply had to strangle that objectionable woman mouthing pseud nonsense in that giggly, plummy voice – it’s on account of my childhood, Your Honour. It ain’t me who done it, it’s the deprived child inside me. Seen The West Side Story? I’s like them criminals there, depraved coz I’s deprived.

According to the guidelines, “There is also evidence to suggest that black and minority ethnic children and young people are over-represented in the youth justice system.” You say children, I say vicious criminals. But yes, the statistical observation is true.

So what? And why do those feral children commit a disproportionate number of crimes? Could it be because of the prevailing liberal mindset waging war on the notion of individual responsibility for one’s actions? Because of the inverse racism of those who believe that blacks must be mollycoddled because they can’t possibly live up to the normal standards of civilised behaviour?

Then Lord Justice Treacy uttered the words that in one fell swoop mocked the millennia of the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition, according to which all individuals are moral agents, rather than puppets whose wires are pulled by society.

“Children,” he declared, “should not be blamed for factors beyond their control.” That denies those ‘children’ their fundamental humanity, with the implication that the crimes they commit are all society’s fault. What about law-abiding, hard-working people from the same backgrounds? How do you suppose they feel? I’d be offended if I were them.

What are the functions of custodial sentences? First, justice: meting out a punishment commensurate with the crime. Second, restoration of social tranquillity: justice is seen to have been done, and respect for the law grows. Third: deterrence, making sure others will think twice before breaking the law. A distant fourth: rehabilitation, making the criminal a better person coming out than he was going in.

The new guidelines fail monumentally on all four counts. And that’s the least of their problems. They attack the very essence of our civilisation, than which no greater crime exists.

 

The discovery that the rather mediocre Easter Sonata, wrongly attributed to Felix Mendelssohn, is actually by his sister Fanny has poked the feminist hornet’s nest yet again.

Out flew the old insects ably led by the BBC, flapping their wings and buzzing the usual politicised inanities about the gross injustices suffered by women composers throughout the ages. The implication is that swarms of female geniuses have only been held back by flagrant discrimination.

Until now Clara Schumann has been the biggest inscription on the banners of musical feminism. It has been suggested, or sometimes actually said outright, that poor Clara had her composing genius suppressed by a regiment of Teutonic MCPs led by her husband Robert. But for such sharp practices, the world would realise she was at least her husband’s equal.

There was a brouhaha about this in 2015, when it was discovered that the A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, all of them despicably male. Clara’s name was held up as the greatest omission.

Now Mrs Schumann herself, one of the best pianists of her time, didn’t consider her compositions to be significant. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her own recitals, as was a common practice then. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

And yes, perhaps in the nineteenth century there existed some prejudice against professional women, although that didn’t diminish Mrs Schumann’s success in something she really was good at, performance. Yet, at a wild guess, women’s rights were even a smaller priority in the twelfth century, when the sublime composer Hildegard von Bingen plied her art unimpeded.

Hildegard’s works survive to this day not because she was a woman composer, but because she was a great composer. Which Clara wasn’t, and neither was Fanny, as her hundreds of known works demonstrate vividly to anyone whose ears aren’t blocked by ideological plugs.

This category demonstrably doesn’t include the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who have embarked on a widely publicised search for ‘lost’ female composers.

They have their work cut out, for, according to the BBC, there are at least 6,000 of those lost sheep, waiting to be found for the delectation of music lovers who’ve had their fill of MCPs like Bach and Beethoven. The suggested number is nothing short of staggering. Let me spell it out for you: SIX THOUSAND.

Now, at the risk of sounding immodest, I know music rather well. My wife, a concert pianist, knows it much better. This morning we put the 6,000 number to the test by compiling our own list of male composers, ranging from sub-minor to minor to major to super-major.

Admittedly, we only spent half an hour on this exercise and, had we spent the whole day and used some reference literature, we could probably have done better. As it was, we barely got to a hundred, scraping the bottom of the barrel, where some 18^th century Russian liturgical composers reside next to the lesser known Dutch and English polyphonists of the Elizabethan era (or whatever it was called in Holland).

Now it’s fair to assume that – due to discrimination only! – male composers must have outnumbered female ones at least 100 to one throughout history. Hence, accepting on faith the 6,000 figure put forth by the BBC, there must be more than 600,000 shamefully masculine composers languishing in the dark dungeons of history, waiting to come out and see the blinding light of fame.

I hope you realise that we’re no longer talking just about ignorance, stupidity and tastelessness. The toxic ideology of feminism has poisoned the brains of our culture vultures, rendering them certifiably mad.

Edwina Wolstencroft, BBC Radio 3’s editor, confirmed this clinical diagnosis when announcing plans to broadcast works by female composers, emphatically including Fanny Mendelssohn. I hope, said Miss Wolstencroft that “the live broadcast contributes towards Fanny’s recognition as a musical genius.”

Right. Fanny is ‘a musical genius’. So what term shall we use to describe those MCPs Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert? Since the verbal scale of human artistic attainment doesn’t really go higher than genius, we can only assume one of three things.

Either those gentlemen were demigods, sitting at the right hand of Apollo atop the musical Olympus, or Miss Wolstencroft et al. genuinely believe that Fanny is every bit their equal, or this lot care not about music but ideology expressed through music.

Dismissing the first assumption as sheer paganism, we have to accept some combination of the second and third ones as the likely cause.

Then we realise what a subversive role the BBC and likeminded institutions play in our culture, of which music is the salient representation. They are the enemy within, cancerous cells gradually eating away at everything that’s healthy and genuine.

As such, they cause even a greater harm than pop excretions. At least no one seriously considers those as the acme of the human spirit. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Wolstencroft does.

I have a confession to make: I like puerile and even prurient humour, provided it’s funny.

Of course what’s funny to me may be offensive to you, tasteless to him and ought to be against the law to them. Fair enough.

But I’d rather a joke were puerile and even prurient than anodyne. Too many times have I been left feeling like a pariah in the company of clubbable gentlemen. One of them would tell a joke sounding as if he’d left the punch line out. All around me would be in stitches, while I’d be unable even to crack a polite smile.

Alternatively, I’d also feel like a pariah when, in a similar company, telling a joke I found hilarious and everyone else present felt like having me arrested.

Sometimes, when I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I can even come up with a decent one-liner myself. I recall some 30 years ago, when I had just moved from New York to London, talking about the race situation in America to the very embodiment of a clubbable gentleman (for the outlanders among you, ‘clubbable’ means fit for membership in a Pall Mall club, not someone you’d like to club, although the two may well go hand in hand).

Anyway, I remarked that most American blacks tend to be left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” suggested my interlocutor. “It’s the other way around,” I replied. “They’re black because they’re left-wing.” (I’ll spare you some of my jokes that fall into the puerile and prurient category.)

This lengthy preamble is an attempt at self-justification. For I have another confession to make: I like Jimmy Carr, the comedian most of my friends find beyond the pale. Obscene, tasteless, foul-mouthed, is what they call him. All true. Yet, to me, also funny. Sometimes.

The other day he appeared on Desert Island Discs. For the outlanders among you, this is a radio interview show first broadcast in 1942. A guest is asked which eight recordings, one book and one luxury item he’d like to have as a castaway.

His selections say a lot about the man. For example, though I still have enormous respect for Enoch Powell, I took it down a notch when, back in 1989, most of the politician’s musical selections were by Wagner. One has to be mad, I thought, to want to listen mostly to Wagner his whole life, or for that matter at all.

What interested me about Jimmy Carr’s appearance wasn’t his selections, but the subject touched upon in the interview. Is there anything he wouldn’t consider a laughing matter?

Obviously the latitude Mr Carr allows himself is practically limitless, as some of his material shows: “They say there’s safety in numbers. Go tell this to the six million Jews.” Or, “My girlfriends keep telling me they’re pregnant. I say, hey, I’m not made of coat hangers!”

He defended such irreverence on the show: “Because people are offended, does not make them right. Nobody should be drawing a line…” No line at all?

Oh well, there’s one exception: the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when 94 people were crushed to death at a football stadium: “You could never joke about Hillsborough, as it’s a tragedy that’s touched people in a very specific way, and I cannot imagine anybody coming up with a joke about that.”

So Mr Carr does draw a line, but he draws it in funny places. Why just Hillsborough, appalling as it is? Why not Dunblane? The Holocaust? Our mutilated soldiers in Iraq (“We’ll have a f****** good Paralympic team,” he once quipped.) Why just Hillsborough?

One can only guess at Mr Carr’s motives, although PR probably has a role to play. As a Cambridge alumnus, he’s seen as rather posh, which nowadays is a failing in need of counterbalancing. It’s conceivably to that end that Mr Carr loads his jokes with swearwords more than do many comedians who only ever went to the school of hard knockers.

It’s conceivably for the same reason that he elevated football fans, generally seen as downmarket, to secular sainthood, putting them off limits for jokes. God isn’t afforded the same exemption.

When offered the Bible as one of his books for the island, Carr said he’d burn it “to help start his fire”. That’s what made me think about humour and its limits.

I hope you won’t think me solipsistic if I again refer to my own experience, that of a lifetime wag. As I grow older, I find that the areas open to my wisecracks are getting narrower. At times I don’t even deliver a funny line because I’m scared of offending. Not so much my immediate audience – I fear offending God.

As a lapsed Catholic and now an atheist, Mr Carr is clearly immune to such concerns. I just hope, for his sake, that before tossing the Bible in the fire, he reads one verse:

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”

Then, to be on the safe side, he may have a Pascal wager with himself – one never knows. Meanwhile, have you heard the one about…

Suppose for the sake of argument that the Navy Seals have joined our own SAS in fine-tuning their urban warfare tactics on a mock-up of the Kremlin. At the same time, Western intelligence services are conducting a full-blown electronic war aimed at paralysing Russia’s infrastructure and disrupting her political process.

How do you suppose the Russians would react? Don’t know about you, but even as we speak I’m hearing hysterical shrieks about the rebirth of Nazi belligerence, Nato’s far-reaching imperialist designs, Russophobia and taking the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

In parallel, I can hear the likes of Peter Hitchens assuring us that the Russians have a point, that they’ve been surrounded by Western enemies throughout their history and are therefore understandably sensitive and, well, yes, Nato is imperialist and, if the Russians respond with ICBMs, we’ll have only ourselves to blame. Unless, or perhaps even if, this happens, we’ve nothing to fear from the strong, Christian, conservative leader Putin we wish we had.

Well, this situation isn’t at all hypothetical, except that the boot is on the other foot. Russia’s defence minister Shoigu has announced that the army is building a full-scale model of the Reichstag for training purposes. In other words, Russian troops are going to practise storming the building of Germany’s parliament.

The initiative has touched a chord in the mysterious Russian soul directly linked to a much-touted superior spirituality. Thousands of cars around Moscow are tastefully decorated with bumper stickers saying ‘To Berlin!’, ‘We can do it again!’ and ‘If you don’t like talking to Lavrov [foreign minister], you’ll talk to Shoigu’.

Drums are rolling and bugles blowing throughout the Russian press, with enough din to bring down the walls of Jericho – or of the Reichstag if you’d rather.

Compared to the hypothetical situation I outlined above, the Germans reacted to the real one rather nonchalantly. The word ‘provocation’ was mooted, but not too loudly, while the government spokesman dismissed the whole thing with a shrug of the shoulders: “This development is unexpected, speaks for itself and requires no comment”.

Yet even that limp-wristed response enraged the Russians. The defence ministry spokesman thundered: “Such attacks by German politicians not only cause extreme consternation but also make one ponder their real convictions as regards the ‘builders’ of the Third Reich in 1933-1945.”

Quite. The Germans’ mild dismay at seeing their parliament building used for storming exercises proves they are crypto-Nazis longing for world conquest and Auschwitz.

One wonders how the Russians would feel if Berlin were inundated with a profusion of bumper stickers saying ‘Wir Schaffen das Nochmals!’, ‘Drang nach Osten’ and ‘Sieg Heil!’. My imagination doesn’t stretch that far.

When it comes to the Russian threat, we don’t have to stay in the subjunctive mood for long. The present features non-stop Russian cyber attacks against Western institutions and infrastructure.

To me, there’s only a distinction without a difference between bombing a command centre and jamming its communications – or between slandering a Western politician into resignation and assassinating him. Both are acts of war.

Critically, this observation is shared by General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, deputy supreme allied commander in Europe. Gen. Bradshaw isn’t averse to treating electronic warfare as cause to invoke Article 5 of the Nato charter, in which an attack on one member state is an attack on all:

“Well Article 5 is when it’s declared to be Article 5… It is a political decision, but no, it is not out of the question that aggression, blatant aggression, in a domain other than conventional warfare might be deemed to be Article 5.”

Gen. Bradshaw emphasised that: “We require the ability to defend our vital assets from aggression in any area.” He then added a remark phrased in the only way the Russians understand: “Do not mess with Nato. You set foot in one of these countries… you’re taking on Nato with all that that implies… so woe betide a nation that does that.”

One wishes that Nato commanders spoke in this fashion when they aren’t as close to retirement as Gen. Bradshaw is (next summer). And that their statements were backed up with resolve on the part of Western governments.

Such resolve should be expressed not just in words but in tangible measures, of which a sizeable increase in defence budget is the most obvious and immediate. Say what you will about Trump’s affection for the Russians, but he seems to understand this, as his announcement of a seven per cent increase in US defence spending testifies.

Yet it’s not all about beefing up the military. It’s also – mostly – about beefing up the resolve to use it should this become necessary. History shows that wishy-washy ambiguity on the part of Western governments serves only to embolden wicked aggressors. The Second World War followed Munich not only chronologically but also causally.

Are we capable of learning the lessons of history? The French poet and thinker Paul Valéry doubted that: “The only thing one can learn from history is a propensity for chauvinism. There are no other lessons.”

Unless we prove him wrong by learning the lessons of the 1938 appeasement, we’ll invite similar consequences. Actually, given the technological advances of which modernity is so proud, the consequences may be far worse.

John Major isn’t the sharpest chisel in the box – in fact, he resembles the box more than a chisel. But at least the box used to be seen as solid and sturdy, if dull-grey.

Yet the man who signed away Britain’s sovereignty and then engineered the ERM disaster, costing the taxpayer £3.4 billion, has gone barmy. As one symptom, he has lost touch with reality.

The other day Major fulminated against Mrs May, Brexit and all the fools and/or knaves who had voted for it. This was followed by the customary litany of disasters to befall a Britain no longer governed by Angie the Merkin and Jean-Claude Junk.

Brace yourself, for the future is gruesome. We’ll have to “change Britain’s economic model”. Now make sure you’re sitting down: we’ll have to run a low-tax, low-regulation economy.

You know, the kind that has proved a stratospheric success everywhere it has been tried. For example, that’s how all those Asian lambs turned into tigers, how Germany produced her post-war economic miracle (snappily called Wirtschaftswunder), how Britain herself had become a global empire before the likes of Sir John took over.

So why is it such a bad thing? Well, you see, “We cannot move to a radical enterprise economy without moving away from a welfare state”. Crikey. No welfare state, fancy that. How did Britannia ever manage to rule the waves without it?

And, a catastrophe of all catastrophes: the NHS will have to be dismantled. Let’s see. The NHS kicked off in 1948. Major signed away Britain’s sovereignty in 1992. How did the NHS manage to survive for 44 years in the interim? It did soldier on, with no Maastricht Treaty yet in sight.

One wonders what part of sovereignty Sir John doesn’t understand. All of them, by the sound of him: “…people who voted to leave Europe in the belief that it might improve their lives… their expectations will not be met and whole communities will be worse off.”

Well, I didn’t vote for Brexit in the expectation of a better life, at least not economically. It’s just that, for historical, constitutional and moral reasons, I want to live in a sovereign Britain, not one bossed by Angie the Merkin and Jean-Claude Junk. And from what I’ve heard, many share my feelings.

Reducing the whole thing to economics is missing the point – even when done by people who understand the discipline, a category that emphatically doesn’t include Major.

His limp grasp of economics was amply demonstrated during his tenure as chancellor and then prime minister. He doesn’t seem to know that these days cutting taxes and regulations isn’t just the best but the only known recipe for prosperity.

Nor does Major have the moral sense to realise that continuing to brainwash people about the NHS is appalling demagoguery. Or rather it’s not just morality that he lacks but also the ability to think sequentially.

Forgetting for a second that, like all giant socialist projects, the NHS was designed to serve not the people but the state, let’s look at it from a practical viewpoint.

Let’s start with the unassailable assumption, born out of empirical evidence, that civilised countries provide adequate medical care one way or another. Though these ways differ from country to country, they fall into three broad groups: wholly or predominantly socialist (Britain), wholly or predominantly private (US), a balanced mixture thereof (Western Europe).

The NHS is therefore not the end but a means, to be weighed against other means. Such a weighing exercise will show that wholly or predominantly socialist medicine is by far the worst possible way of looking after people’s health.

That’s why no other Western European country, some of which are in general more socialist than Britain, has chosen it, relying instead on a mixed system. And medical care in, say, France and Germany is provided more efficiently.

What they have may not be ideal, but the French don’t have to wait three weeks for a GP appointment, nor three years for a hospital bed. We do, which suggests that socialism doesn’t work in medicine any better than anywhere else.

Yet, following 70 years of relentlessly stupefying propaganda, the British attach sacramental significance to the NHS. It’s off limits for criticism, just as God is to believers. And this is the fallacy that Major is exploiting in his fear-mongering.

Tackle Tory hardliners, he hectors Mrs May, or it will be the death of the NHS. Is that a promise or a threat, Sir John?

Supposing, against all available evidence, that Britain regains economic sanity following Brexit, does this mean people will die in the streets with no medical help available? Of course not.

Medical care will be provided, and in a better way. Why, we may even increase our number of hospital beds to a pre-NHS 400,000, from today’s puny 140,000. We may even start building hospitals at the 1930s rate, a decade in which 10 times more hospitals were built than in the seven NHS decades.

Sir John ‘Edwina’ Major ought to be ashamed of himself for appealing to false idols so blatantly. But he won’t be. Shame isn’t something his kind can feel.

Throughout the Obama presidency, George W. Bush stoically refrained from uttering a word of criticism. His respect for the institution of the presidency was so strong that he wouldn’t douse it with the cold water of negativity.

Now either his stoicism has eroded or his respect for the office has diminished, but Dubya has decided to take a swing at the president from his own party.

A cynic might suspect Dubya of waging a personal vendetta, for the Bush clan has a bit of previous with Trump. During the campaign for the Republican nomination, Trump destroyed not just Jeb Bush’s candidature but probably his whole political career.

He took savage and highly effective swipes not just at Jeb, whom he mockingly called Bush III, but at the whole dynasty. The dynasty closed ranks, and now Dubya has lashed out.

He started out by demanding answers to the questions on any contacts that Trump and his men may have had with Russian intelligence officers, which isn’t an unreasonable request. I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times before: any illegal contact of that nature isn’t just an indiscretion but a capital crime.

But, as with any crime, the alleged perpetrator is innocent until proven guilty. So let’s sweep that accusation under the rug for now and see what else has made Dubya break his vow of silence.

We shouldn’t, he said in a thinly veiled reference to Trump’s immigration policy, prosecute people for their religion: “One of our great strengths is for people to be able to worship the way they want to…”

This proves that Dubya has read the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which is remarkable since he isn’t a bookish type. Neither is he a rigorous logician, for one doesn’t see any immediate link between prosecuting people for their faith and limiting for a while immigration from certain countries.

Since these days I’m given to homespun parallels, I’m not prosecuting my neighbours by not inviting them to dinner. Neither am I thereby suggesting even remotely that they shouldn’t eat anywhere else. I’m simply exercising my right to choose my guests.

“I am for an immigration policy that’s welcoming and that upholds the law,” added Bush, displaying yet again his only conspicuous talent: uttering meaningless platitudes.

How welcoming are we talking here? Indiscriminately? But America has never had an unqualified open-door policy, not in my rather long memory at any rate. Nor can America or any other country vet every migrant thoroughly, certainly not those millions coming from uncivilised – sorry, I mean differently civilised – countries. Hence vetting by category is unavoidable.

Anyway, if I were Dubya, I’d shut up about other people’s policies towards Muslims. His first reaction to 9/11 was to say that Islam is a religion of peace because not every Muslim is a terrorist. That’s like saying that Nazism was a philosophy of peace because not every NSDAP member gassed Jews.

His second reaction was to launch a criminally stupid war to promote democracy in tribal Muslim societies, while divesting of WMD those countries that were known not to possess them. It’s largely thanks to that criminal, neocon-inspired folly that the whole world is struggling to deal with the genie let out of the bottle.

But for Dubya’s well-documented inanity, his successors, not to mention Europeans, wouldn’t be trying in vain to keep millions of Muslims (guaranteed to include thousands of jihadists) off their immigration rolls.

“I don’t like racism,” explained Bush, implying that Trump’s meek attempts to reduce the number of potentially murderous arrivals are motivated by that deadly sin. No proof of that transgression was proffered.

How many Muslims would a politician have to admit to absolve himself? One million? Ten? Is racism the only possible reason for the reluctance to do so?

What else? Oh yes, Trump has responded tetchily to the media’s frenzied attacks the likes of which haven’t been seen since Watergate.

Though Trump’s response may have been ill-advisedly peevish, I’m man enough to admit that I probably wouldn’t have displayed greater patience under the circumstances. I’ve been known to tell people much worse things with much less provocation.

In any case, no averagely intelligent person would interpret what Trump said as an assault on freedom of the press. A man attacked has a right to defend himself, and no president has been attacked as vehemently and hysterically as Trump, before he has even had the chance to do anything.

Such considerations didn’t prevent Dubya from regaling us with more meaningless banalities. Freedom of the press, he kindly explained, is a good thing because: “Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive. And it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power…”

Lord Acton once explained the corrupting potential of power more epigrammatically (“…and absolute power corrupts absolutely”), but then he was a clever man, which is more than can be said for some others I could mention.

As to the sly dig at Trump, does Bush think that talking back to the braying press constitutes a greater abuse of power than using false evidence to expose the world to the innate violence of the ‘religion of peace’?

“I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” was another Bush profundity. True. But politicians like him are deadly to it.