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It’s one of life’s little mysteries that Ollie Kamm has got to be regarded as an authority on the English language. That he regards himself as such is no mystery at all: ignorant effrontery is almost an ironclad job requirement for today’s hacks.

Ollie’s usual output preaches a relativistic vox populi approach to language: if people say it, it must be right. Today’s offering has some of that: “he don’t know nothing is ungrammatical in standard English, but grammatical in some other dialects”.

What he means is that this ungrammatical solecism is used in some other dialects, or rather in the most widespread one: illiterate English. That doesn’t make it grammatical, which concept presupposes adherence to a certain universal standard. But then our language guru is deaf to such subtleties.

The main thrust of his piece today is a vituperative attack on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “a political commentator with absolutely no qualifications in language”.

It’s true that Mr Wheatcroft read history rather than English at Oxford. However, one could argue that an author of countless articles and half a dozen books written over the better part of 40 years has at least some qualifications. Then again, when Ollie gets on his high horse, there’s no dismounting him.

What made Ollie saddle his trusted steed this time is Mr Wheatcroft’s innocent remark that English is “ideally suited to be the global lingua franca” partly because of its “rudimentary grammar”.

When Ollie’s in the saddle, no remark is innocent. If English grammar were rudimentary, Ollie shrieks, “the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language” wouldn’t comprise “1,800 closely typed pages”.

Actually, the definite article before Cambridge Grammar should be capitalised, but let’s not be too harsh on our self-styled pedant. What’s amusing here is that his argument is a non sequitur, reminding one of a Chekhov character arguing that, “if Pushkin hadn’t been a great psychologist, he wouldn’t have merited a statue in Moscow.”

English grammar is nuanced and subtle, sufficiently so to justify writing many more than 1,800 pages of an academic study. However, it’s indeed rudimentary and relatively easy to learn for everyday use, which is one of the reasons English is “ideally suited to be the global lingua franca”.

Ollie is ignorant in such matters, but he suspects his readers are even more ignorant than he is. That explains his next argument: “A clause like Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an idiot demonstrates the importance of fixed word order in English.”

First, the cited group of words isn’t a clause but a stand-alone sentence. Second, because it’s a citation, however hypothetical, it should be in quotation marks. And third, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw the word ‘idiot’ about so gratuitously.

Words have specific meanings, Ollie, if you’ll forgive a truism. Hence rudimentary grammar means just that – it doesn’t mean no grammar at all. English does have some rules, of which a fixed word order is one. Sometimes it’s ignored for stylistic purposes, which is called inversion.

By way of illustrating this stylistic device, it’s used in the clause of the sentence “Ignorant though Ollie is, he pontificates on the fine points of English with an air of ill-deserved authority”.

That Ollie is neither excessively bright nor averse to truisms follows from his next statement: “It’s absurd to say that English has less grammar than an inflected language like Latin. Rather, different languages make similar grammatical distinctions using different sorts of grammatical devices.”

By contrast to synthetic languages like Latin, Russian, Hungarian and so forth, English is analytic, meaning it largely conveys grammatical relationships not morphologically but lexically and stylistically.

Rather than inflecting words with morphemes, English achieves the same purpose by using lexical units, such as prepositions, particles, modifiers, possessives etc. It also heavily relies on stylistic devices, such as word order, context and idioms.

The example Ollie proffers with the smugness of someone who has just blazed a new trail illustrates just that: “attributive adjectives of size precede those of colour. In English… the girl has long blond hair, not blond long hair…”

Well done, Ollie, even though in the country where English originated a girl’s hair tends to be blonde, not blond. But in either case this is an example of achieving a grammatical objective by stylistic means.

English eschews whole grammatical categories that make synthetic languages so difficult to learn, such as gender, conjugation and case. I don’t know how many foreign languages Ollie knows (not many, would be my guess). But my wife, who’s fluent in two Romance languages and competent in two more has trouble with Russian because learning its grammar requires more time than she’s willing to spend.

Russian has six cases, and words in a sentence must agree not only in case, but also in gender and number, which indeed makes learning Russian grammar a time-consuming proposition. But that’s nothing compared to synthetic Finno-Ugric languages, such as Hungarian that boasts 18 cases.

The upshot of it is that Mr Wheatcroft is right, and Ollie is wrong, yet again. English grammar is indeed rudimentary, making it easy for a foreigner to learn well enough to communicate basic thoughts even if he gets something wrong.

By contrast, synthetic languages, such as Russian or Hungarian, are devilishly hard to learn because, until a learner comes to grips with the interrelationships among all those cases, genders and numbers, he won’t be able to communicate at all, understandably at any rate.

However, once he has mastered the grammar rules, he’ll be able to speak the synthetic language reasonably well. Not so with English: learning the grammar rules is but a start.

Because English grammar relies so heavily on stylistic and idiomatic nuances, it may be easy to learn adequately but extremely hard to learn really well. That’s why even university-educated Englishmen (to say nothing of Americans) routinely utter ungrammatical sentences, which is extremely rare for a similarly educated Russian.

Ollie concludes with a sentence impossible to take issue with: “In grammar… it seems that unqualified commentators can always get away with assertions that haven’t been checked and make no sense.” Quite. He’s one such unqualified commentator.

Facts may speak for themselves or through an interpreter. However, these days no one listens either way – ours is an age of ideology, not truth.

Having discarded the only truth that can be seen as absolute, people have settled for a raft of relativistic simulacra. Yet the passion with which they used to worship the truth has morphed into the fervour with which they cling to their ideological falsehoods.

The nature of an ideology doesn’t matter: they’re all false by definition. None of them can stand up even to cursory examination, never mind scrutiny. Regarded in the cold light of intellectual rigour, they all show faults and fissures.

At best, ideologists’ thinking is a curate’s egg. They may sound coherent on some subjects, yet talk gibberish on others. That’s how one knows they proceed from an ideology, not a sound moral and philosophical system.

Therefore I’m often scathing about the so-called Western conservatives who admire Putin’s Russia. This ipso facto means that their conservatism is but an ill-considered gonadal ideology, not the upshot of a lifelong contemplation of God, man and the world the former created and the latter inhabits.

An ideology is immune to facts. Facts might have been stubborn things to John Adams, but Stalin, propagator of the most evil ideology the devil has ever disgorged, put him right: “If facts are stubborn things,” he said, “then so much the worse for facts”.

For all that, when writing about Putin, Stalin’s able disciple, I continue to cite facts – this in the full knowledge that the armour of ideology is impervious to chinks.

But for those who aren’t fully paid-up members of the Putin fan club, the small fact I’m about to cite may trigger an inductive process at the end of which truth will emerge.

The Levada Centre, Russia’s sole half-credible polling organisation, has conducted an extensive survey asking respondents to identify the 20 most outstanding figures in world history, as distinct from just Russian history.

Yet just three outlanders made it to the list, and then only close to the bottom: Napoleon (fourteenth place), Einstein (sixteenth) and Newton (nineteenth). That by itself is telling: according to the Russians, their country has practically monopolised human greatness, with no close seconds.

This is rather parochial, not to say deeply provincial. But then Russia is provincial, hugging the outskirts of both European and Asian civilisations, not really belonging to either and, according to her first philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev (d. 1856), combining the worst traits of both.

Hence such ethnocentricity is to be expected, as it would be expected from the US, another land stuck at the margins of Western culture. However, should Americans be asked to compile a similar list, it may include mostly Americans but, at a guess, no evil Americans. George Washington would make it, but the Boston Strangler wouldn’t.

The Russians are different. Their top five choices include four mass murderers. First place, Stalin, chosen by 38 per cent. Tied for second and third, Putin and Pushkin, 34 per cent each. Fourth, Lenin, 32 per cent. Fifth, Peter I, 29 per cent.

Pushkin found himself in this company for the same reason Shakespeare would make the English list: he has been canonised as Russia’s greatest poet and co-creator of her literary language. Hence he dominates school curricula and is the first, sometimes the only, name coming to mind when a Russian is asked to name a great cultural figure.

Peter was another mass murderer who used traditional Russian methods to “chop a window into Europe”, succeeding mostly in chopping off a pile of heads, many, including his own son’s, with his own axe. Still, it’s possible to argue about Peter’s merits and demerits.

No such arguments are, or should be, possible about the other three frontrunners. Lenin and Stalin created the most satanic regime in history and waged war not just on the West but above all on their own people, murdering 60 million and enslaving the rest.

Where inductive reasoning would come in handy is in imagining the volume of nauseatingly cloying, non-stop totalitarian propaganda required to corrupt people’s minds so deeply that they come up with a list like this.

Dr Goebbels, the acknowledged master of the genre, is a rank amateur compared to Putin’s Goebbelses, all those Kisilevs, Soloviovs and Surkovs. Any meaningful opposition to their effluvia destroyed or at least marginalised, they run unopposed in their concerted effort to warp Russian minds.

Just like Soviet Goebbelses in the 1930s, who screamed themselves hoarse that “Stalin is today’s Lenin”, Putin’s Goebbelses communicate loud and clear that Putin is today’s Stalin.

Stalin? Murderer of millions? Enslaver of the whole population? Creator of deadly artificial famines? Builder of a vast system of concentration camps, who effectively turned the whole country and half the world into one giant concentration camp?

No, the Stalin reincarnated in Putin isn’t as he was but as he’s portrayed in Russian history books: effective, if at times stern, manager; vanquisher of Hitler; loving, if at times wrathful, demiurge; father of his people.

The Russian Goebbelses are right: Putin is indeed today’s Stalin. True, he hasn’t yet achieved the same level of violent repression, although that may yet come.

But typologically he’s a similar figure: an evil tyrant who viscerally hates the West and uses rabble-rousing to shove down the people’s throats a peculiar combination of Russian chauvinism, fascism, militarisation and kleptocracy – all wrapped up in a tissue of lies about democracy, free enterprise and the unmatched spirituality of Holy Russia.

Wholly Russia indeed, ever susceptible to Putin types, never having really known anything much better. It’s baffling, though, how some Westerners swallow the same canards, cheering the vertically challenged KGB Lt. Col., not realising that this nonentity isn’t a leader of his country but its reflection, puppet and puppet master rolled into one.

Apparently, the Tories failed to get an overall majority because they’re committed to austerity and the electorate wants to end it.

Surveys bear this out: 48 per cent say the government should raise taxes and spend more, while 44 per cent are happy for things to stay as they are. That leaves a meagre eight per cent for the undecided and those who’d like to see taxes and spending cut.

Here I have to disagree with those who claim that polls are worthless. This one provides two invaluable insights into the state of Britain, one primary, the other secondary.

The primary insight is that 92 per cent of the electorate are economically illiterate morons unfit to vote. The secondary one is that universal suffrage no longer works in a country where 92 per cent of the electorate are economically illiterate morons unfit to vote.

Allow me to elaborate in simple words even those 92 per cent have a sporting chance of understanding: It’s impossible to end austerity for the simple reason that IT NEVER BEGAN.

Austerity means spending less than you earn. This earth-shattering economic discovery was tersely expressed by Dickens’s Mr Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Now let’s start small and then extrapolate to a larger scale. What are the annual spending options of someone who nets £30,000 a year?

Spending less than £30,000 would spell austerity. And the further he goes below that sum, the more austere he gets.

Spending £40,000 a year would be madness. He’d have to borrow £10,000 every year to cover the difference. Add to this compounded interest, and before long bailiffs will come banging on his door.

But what about spending £33,000? Ten per cent more than he earns? Would that get him into the area of austerity? Of course not. It would still be madness, if slightly less severe than in the previous hypothetical case.

Now according to Adam Smith this homespun economics applies to the state: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

So how austere is our great kingdom? The answer is: exactly as ‘austere’ as my last hypothetical man who spends 10 per cent more than he earns. Our government does just that and, like him, it has to borrow the difference.

True, the government won’t receive a visit from a bailiff, but that doesn’t mean it can’t go bankrupt. It will, when it can no longer service the national debt. Ours currently stands at close to two trillion pounds, and it’s rushing towards that new threshold of misery at a rate of £5,170 per second.

Our hypothetical spendthrift would borrow from the bank or credit card companies, and he’d have to pay interest. A government borrows from the money markets, which too charge for that privilege. At the moment it takes HMG 10 per cent of its tax revenues to service its debt.

So where does austerity come in? If you have to ask that question, you aren’t in the 92 per cent. Moreover, you obtusely insist on using words in their real meaning, rather than the one assigned to them in the pernicious jargon of modern politics.

The way all political parties use the word, it doesn’t mean spending less than the government earns. It means continuing to spend more than the government earns, but at a slightly lower rate than before.

We’re now slightly less economically insane than under previous administrations, and the moronic 92 per cent want us to stay at least as insane as we are now, or preferably become more so.

As a result of tax-and-spend insanity, Britain is teetering on the edge of economic calamity, for all the bogus forecasts the government releases, with the words ‘smoke and mirrors’ springing to mind. We’re staying afloat, just, only because our current policies are marginally less insane than before.

A drastic increase in taxation and public spending can easily kick us into an abyss compared to which the 2008 crisis will seem like halcyon days. Our moronic 92 per cent don’t realise that. They think they’ll enjoy the spending while someone else will suffer the taxation.

In fact, extortionate taxes will ruin everybody: those in the high marginal rates directly; others indirectly – by destroying the economy.

In my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis I describe the destructive mechanisms in quite some detail. Suffice it to say here that the ruinous effect of profligate tax-and-spend policies has been empirically proved in every country they were tried, including Britain.

The pattern recurred over and over again: a Tory government would leave the economy in decent shape by trying to reign in the insanity. Then a Labour government would come in and wreak havoc in a few months or at most years.

Now the situation is much worse. If you look at their economic policies, the Tories are effectively Labour, and Corbyn’s Labour are effectively communist. That means the Tories are running the economy into the ground, while Labour are digging the grave in which they’ll bury it.

Already under Brown the Exchequer went further than even leftwing orthodoxy demanded. Having inherited a reasonably healthy economy from the Tories, they remained almost sane for the first three years.

An economic boom ensued (how real is a different story), but then the Labour economy gurus Brown, Balls and Miliband confounded even the Keynesian rule that a government needs to run a surplus at boom time. Instead those subversive chaps started borrowing at three per cent of GDP, the maximum allowed under EU rules.

That had nothing to do with economics – modern politics only pretends to be about that. Modern politics is solely about politics, which is to say staying in power by any means, no matter how criminally destructive.

Given an electorate utterly corrupted by the culture of something for nothing (otherwise known as the welfare state), that means issuing any promises politicians can’t keep, nor even intend to.

The most calamitous effect of such politics isn’t economic, bad as it is. It’s moral and intellectual: that’s how 92 per cent of the electorate have got to be illiterate morons.

All it took was for a sinister figure like Corbyn to appear on the scene for them to rise in revolt against what’s mendaciously called austerity. They want the state to extort even more money from those who earned it and transfer it to those who didn’t.

Bizarrely the desired recipients of government largesse don’t even include pensioners, those who worked for decades hoping to provide for their old age. They can starve for all the 92 per cent care. The extra money must instead be pumped into the pockets of parasites who haven’t done a day’s work in their lives.

Oh yes, we must also spend more on the NHS, education and just about everything else, you name it. None of this has anything to do with reality; none of it is sane. It’s wicked politicians exploiting the mass idiocy they themselves have fostered for their own nefarious ends.

Mr Micawber, where are you when we need you?

Manny Macron tried to prepare properly for his meeting with Ukrainian president Poroshenko. I suppose he must have taken seriously Brigitte’s threat to send him to bed without supper if he didn’t.

But then Manny made the mistake of taking extracurricular history lessons from Poroshenko as he went along. That got the poor lad terribly confused.

Both the preparation and confusion were reflected in his concluding statement. Speaking of Putin’s theft of Crimea, Manny said he understood that Russia is the aggressor in that conflict. That rated an A.

As Brigitte was smiling with maternal pride in the background, Manny rephrased the same thought by saying that Ukraine isn’t an aggressor. France doesn’t recognise the illegal Crimea annexation and knows who started this war between the Ukraine and Russia.

Since he was saying the same thing over and over again, a maximum of a B was merited. However, Brigitte had taught Manny that repetition is the mother of learning.

But then she winced and made a mental note to mark Manny’s performance down. She realised that, against her explicit instructions, Manny had picked up some history from Poroshenko on the hop. That’s where things went awry.

“I must tell you,” Manny said to Poroshenko, “that our two countries have relations of very long standing, going deep into history. You’ve devoted some time today to paying tribute to Anne of Kiev. You’ve shown how important this very old eleventh-century history is, how deeply rooted our ancient relations are.”

In other words, Poroshenko taught Manny that Princess Anne of Kiev was a Ukrainian lass who married the French king Henri I and thereby cemented the budding friendship between the Ukraine and France.

Here Manny showed a bit of confusion and much inconsistency. For, meeting Vlad Putin a few days earlier, he had accepted with alacrity the latter’s assurance that friendship between France and Russia also goes back to that versatile (polyvalente) Kievan girl.

Manny must decide whether Anne was Ukrainian or Russian to avoid future confusion. Perhaps a few more history lessons wouldn’t go amiss. Above all, he should learn neither to play politics with history himself nor to let others get away with doing so.

It has to be said that the French themselves aren’t above a little sleight of hand when it comes to relating events of yore. Thus France won every battle she ever fought. Some victories were military but, when that couldn’t be claimed, they were moral. One way or the other, there were no defeats.

If the victory was merely moral, the absence of a military triumph has to be ascribed to treason. Thus the French never say “We were beaten”. They say “We were betrayed” (Nous sommes trahis).

In that spirit, the French won resounding moral victories against the English in such landmark battles as Crécy, Agincourt and Waterloo.

In the first two, merely half a century apart, perfide Albion employed treacherous, unsporting tactics of putting archers armed with longbows on high ground. As aristocratic, heavily armoured French cavalry trundled uphill, getting stuck in the mud, those perfidious English yeomen picked them off one by one, cutting down what French history books describe as the “fine flower of French nobility” (la fine fleur de la noblesse française).

And at Waterloo the French, led by that genius sans pareil Napoleon, won a resounding military victory over the English, only to have to settle for the moral kind when the Prussians arrived. A victory by any other name, in other words.

However, even though the French may play fast and loose with history, they don’t use such academic shenanigans to score political points. No doubt Manny thinks that, likewise, there’s no harm in the Russians and Ukrainians both claiming Anne for their own. So it’s back to school for him – and perhaps Brigitte ought to give him six of the best (actually, he might like that).

As I’ve written in the past, it’s easy to settle the argument about whether Anne was Ukrainian or Russian. She was neither.

Anne was a Scandinavian princess of the Rurik dynasty that founded and ruled Kievan Rus. The historical roots of both the Ukraine and Russia can be traced back to that principality, but to refer to it as either Ukrainian or Russian is like referring to Saxony as English.

In due course Kievan Rus was wiped out and the centre of eastern Slavic lands shifted to a newly founded Moscow. In 1240 Muscovy was conquered by the Golden Horde, while the territory west of it fell under the sway of Lithuania and eventually the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Following the Cossack Rebellion (1648–1657) led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, that territory was incorporated into the Russian Empire. In the process, Khmelnytsky’s men murdered 300,000 Jews, establishing a record of anti-Semitic atrocities that stood until Hitler.

The word ‘Ukraine’, meaning ‘outskirts’ in Slavic languages, was unknown until the seventeenth century, while the word ‘Russia’ in the geopolitical sense is only about a century older. Elizabethan maps identify the place as either Muscovy or even Tartary, and what is now the Ukraine was in English known as Ruthenia until 1804.

I hope next time Manny has to follow either Poroshenko or Putin on their forays into history, he’ll be able to catch them out in bastardising history for political purposes.

At least Poroshenko doesn’t use this ploy for aggressive purposes. Putin does, as he did when justifying the theft of Crimea by claiming it was originally Russian. That’s like saying that Bolivia was originally Spanish.

Crimea was traditionally the frontier between the civilised classical world and the savage steppe. As such, it was colonised by the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths, the Genoese and the Ottoman Empire.

It was from the latter that Russia claimed Crimea roughly at the same time as Britain conquered India. As a result of Khrushchev’s gerrymandering, Crimea was transferred to the Ukraine in 1954, again but a few years after India gained her independence.

Crimea is thus Russian in the same sense in which India is British, and Putin was no more justified in his geopolitical larceny than Britain would be in trying to occupy, say, Bengal. Hence what in the hands of the French is an innocent, if slightly silly, game of historical chicanery, in the hands of the Russians becomes an offensive weapon claiming human lives.

Bad boy, Manny. But not to worry, you’re still young enough to learn. Brigitte will see to that.

 

The common misapprehension is that madmen show signs of their condition at all times. Clinical practice and Peter Hitchens prove this isn’t so.

Most deluded people sound normal when discussing subjects that don’t trigger their delusion. Usually only one topic sets them off, although, Hitchens can evidently afford two.

He tends to make sense on most other subjects. But when a sore subject is mentioned, he’s away with the fairies. Since he controls the content of his Sunday column, one of those topics comes up regularly, but yesterday Mr Hitchens regaled us with both.

With the obtuseness of a certifiable maniac, he prefaces the first one with a veiled suggestion that it’s not he who’s mad but just about everyone else: “Plenty of people hate me for daring to point it out. Tough. I’ll say it once again…”

Well, I for one don’t hate Mr Hitchens. I’m genuinely concerned about his mental health, and also about the sanity of the publications that allow him to indulge his delusions.

The one reason plenty of people are supposed to hate him for concerns a startling discovery for which he takes credit without false modesty. Apparently psychotic people may commit violent acts, and psychotropic drugs may make people psychotic.

If that’s where Mr Hitchens left it, everyone would agree and some would say he’s stating the bleeding obvious. But he doesn’t leave it at that. Scanning the past 1,400 years and especially the last few, Mr Hitchens tends to suggest that Islamic violence has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with cannabis.

This tends to provoke comments about his sanity, or shortage thereof. I myself have written about this worrying situation a few times and, to obviate a need to repeat myself, you can easily look up those pieces (for example, 26 March, 2017).

Hitchens’s column yesterday is mostly a reaction to the reaction. He indignantly denies any charges of trying to vindicate Muslim terrorism. He has never done it and would never do it.

However, and that’s where the mania kicks in, he goes on to demonstrate that some murders, namely the one of Jo Cox, were indeed perpetrated by deranged chaps with a history of drug abuse.

By itself this illustration is a meaningless truism. It’s like saying that earthquakes sometimes happen. However, the statement becomes crazy if it’s augmented by a hint that earthquakes sometimes happen because there are too many black cats about.

On this occasion Mr Hitchens spares us his usual, somewhat illogical, extrapolation to the effect that, because some acts of terrorism are perpetrated by dopeheads, Islam has nothing to do with any of them. But this conclusion follows from the whole corpus of his writing on this subject.

Suddenly we leave the realm of rhetoric to enter one of psychiatry, especially since Mr Hitchens then segues into his parallel, unrelated mania. This has to do with his almost erotic adulation of Col. Putin, who wages a noble single-handed war against Nato’s attempts to blow up the world.

As proof of this dastardly intent Hitchens cites some facts. But then all madmen do that – it’s only in the spin they put on the facts that their disease reveals itself.

In this case, Mr Hitchens observes correctly that: “American nuclear bombers flew to the Baltic. Nato heavy artillery let rip close to the Russian city of Kaliningrad. A Nato jet buzzed the Russian Defence Minister’s plane.”

He then asks a presumably rhetorical question: “Who is actually turning up the heat here?”

Why, certainly not the KGB-run regime that pounces like a rabid dog on its neighbours, annexes their territory, murders tens of thousands, starts three wars in the last decade, amasses hundreds of thousands of troops on its western border, spends half its budget on the military, directly threatens at least three Nato members thereby creating a threat of nuclear war, constantly violates the airspace of Nato countries, foments trouble around the world, launches cyber attacks on Western institutions, conducts hysterical non-stop anti-Western propaganda in all media.

Of course not. It’s Nato, silly. You know, the organisation that has protected our freedom for the past 68 years.

This infernal organisation has a charter whose Article 5 says that an attack on one member is an attack on all. Since Putin’s regime has an overwhelming superiority in conventional capabilities over Nato in Europe, the latter would have only two options should the former pounce on the Baltics the way it has already pounced on Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine.

One, not to respond at all. Two, to respond with nuclear weapons.

The first option would neuter Nato out of existence, leaving Putin in control of Europe. The second one could spell nuclear holocaust. That’s why the most realistic option isn’t to respond to Putin’s aggression, but to try to prevent it.

To that end, following the decision taken at the 2014 Nato summit, in the immediate aftermath of Putin’s theft of the Crimea, the Western alliance has put a 5,000-strong contingent into the three Baltic members of Nato. They’re there to act as a tripwire in case of a Russian attack, and their presence is designed to discourage such an attack by demonstrating Nato’s commitment to Article 5.

Even such a tiny force, however, needs to be in a state of readiness. That’s why Nato has conducted the training exercises that our clinical case equates with “turning up the heat”.

Now hardly a day goes by that Russian planes don’t buzz Nato planes or installations. Yet Hitchens regards as an act of unprovoked aggression one of the few such incidents initiated by Nato.

Nato commanders are understandably tense every time Russian fighter-bombers appear in close proximity to the Baltics. In the case that pushed Mr Hitchens over the edge, two such warplanes materialised in the region, escorting an airliner that happened to carry Putin’s defence minister Shoigu.

This is how Nato explains the incident, first pointing out that the two fighter-bombers didn’t respond to air traffic control or requests to identify themselves:

“As is standard practice whenever unknown aircraft approach Nato air space, Nato and national air forces took to the sky to monitor these flights. When Nato aircraft intercept a plane they identify it visually, maintaining a safe distance at all times. Once complete, Nato jets break away.”

Moreover, Nato stated it had no information about who was aboard the passenger plane. All in all, it takes an advanced case of derangement to interpret the incident as Nato “turning up the heat”.

Actually, I’m paying Mr Hitchens a compliment by suggesting he’s unwell. Otherwise I’d have to wonder why a sane British hack feels called upon to repeat Putin’s propaganda verbatim.

The great racing venue has changed since a few decades ago and certainly since the time of Queen Anne. That otherwise ineffectual monarch willed Royal Ascot into existence and it has become one of the highlights of England’s social calendar.

All subsequent monarchs, including the reigning one, have always graced the Royal Enclosure with their presence, conferring an aura of dignity on the proceedings. By royal decree the racecourse has always been open to the public, and the public flocked in.

Champagne was sipped, cigars smoked, bets placed, and ladies and gentlemen would cheer the thoroughbreds, some of them their own, some belonging to their social superiors.

And then, step by step, Britain showed the Bolsheviks how to make their cherished dream come true. There was no need to shoot the ladies and gentlemen. It was sufficient to marginalise them for the proletariat to emerge victorious.

Enough has been written about the demographic catastrophe England has suffered in the last few decades. Yet the parallel social and cultural catastrophe is largely ignored, mainly because it’s no longer possible to resist the creeping proletarianisation. It’s best to keep silent in the hope of avoiding chastisement and re-education.

I’m not using the word ‘proletarian’ in the Marxist sense of factory or manual worker. We have precious few of them left, and those still extant don’t necessarily display the cultural symptoms of déclassé anomie.

Such anomie is the sub-cultural property of the mob, whose members may nowadays hold any job at all, from taxi driver to lawyer, from salesman to fund manager, from advertising executive to cardiologist. Prole anomie has become a badge of honour, proudly worn by all who strive to belong.

Those who don’t belong had better be good at subterfuge or, if they’re not, at least keep their mouths shut. The mob may forgive a meek outsider, but it’ll pounce on a fierce critic.

Step by step, the mob has succeeded at either vulgarising or destroying every institution through which some checks on it could be applied. The House of Lords is the most conspicuous casualty, having fallen victim to the mob’s idea of ‘democracy’. No thought is ever given to the ancient constitution of the realm, which they don’t understand, and those few bits they do understand they hate.

The less eye-catching losses may be less lethal, but they rankle as much. Just look at a newsreel of the crowd at a football match some 60 years ago. See those working class chaps wearing their Sunday best, cheering their team enthusiastically but with hallmark English restraint?

Now compare them to the savage tattooed mob of today, screaming obscenities at the top of their voices, waiting to pick a fight with their counterparts rooting for the other team. See the difference?

Or listen to disgusting, anti-musical prole din blaring in public places, making it impossible to have a quiet meal in any restaurant where one doesn’t have to pay a fortune. Look at the vomit-inducing and vomiting throng tumbling out of pubs at night, scan the newspapers the morning after a public holiday for the photographs of revolting public displays in every city centre – listen to the way people talk on buses, listen to they way their children talk.

It would be unrealistic to hope that an ancient institution like Royal Ascot would be spared the effluvial flood. Indeed it hasn’t been.

At first the mob began to use it for their pathetic attempts at jumped-up gentility. For one day in a year those feral accountants and sales supervisors, accompanied by their wives or girlfriends, would don their pseudo-toff garments and try to impersonate aristos.

In parallel, the aristos, including the younger members of the royal family, were avidly adopting the manners and mores of the proles. At some point the two tectonic plates clapped together in the middle, and Ascot was turned into a Walpurgisnacht, and, which is worse, a pretentious one at that.

Yesterday provided evidence for this observation. All those savages, some fathers of multiple children, some stock brokers, all equally barbaric, staged a mass brawl, with tables flying, fences tumbling, chairs used for their ballistic properties. Welcome to Royal Ascot, ladies and gentlemen.

That being Ladies’ Day, the ladies weren’t far behind. They too brawled, their tasteless slag dresses slipping off their loose, milk-white, often tattooed flesh.

Today’s papers are jammed full of photographs preserving this mobfest for posterity. Drunk men trying to kill one another. Slags passed out pissed. Couples with their tongues stuck down each other’s throats. Middle-aged women in ridiculous slapper outfits cheering on. Welcome to Royal Ascot, ladies and gentlemen.

People who say they love England really don’t. They love the memory of what England was, the greatest and most civilised land on earth. Well, that England is gone, stamped in the dirt by the rampaging victorious mob.

That so many brainwashed British voters opted for Corbyn may be a harbinger of impending disaster, but it’s not exactly a disaster in itself.

After all, there are enough sensible people in the UK to rally together and explain to the public the evil nature of the ideology Corbyn’s lot are inflicting on Britain.

Or are there? One begins to revise this optimistic outlook when observing the number of supposedly reasonable, conservative people not only blind to the deadly threat presented by Putin’s kleptofascist regime but actually enthusiastic about it.

This shows a vast capacity for “useful idiocy” and moral decrepitude among the very people who should be counted on as a force for good. For only two types of people can admire Putin’s regime: fools and knaves.

Neither can be relied upon to mount serious resistance even to domestic political evil. Suddenly the impending troubles take on calamitous proportions: in the absence of intelligent, moral opposition, evil may well triumph.

The evil of Putin’s regime is evident from its internal practices, placing Russia close to the bottom of every list rating countries for freedom of speech, civil liberties, the rule of law and all other vital categories. A regime that routinely murders political opponents, and whose police torture and kill people in their custody, is an evil regime.

Putin fans who form a political judgement without learning the relevant facts are fools. If they don’t want to know the facts, they’re knaves. And those who know such facts and still support Putin are as evil as he is.

But let’s make allowances for the traditional Anglo-Saxon indifference to what’s going on in less fortunate countries. The widespread feeling is that even a naughty regime is acceptable provided it doesn’t threaten us directly.

So, ignoring both the moral and intellectual paucity of such nonchalance, let’s concentrate on Russia’s crimes committed in our own country.

In 2006 Putin’s government passed a law giving its agents an 007-like licence to kill its enemies abroad. Since then Putin’s hitmen may have “whacked” at least 14 people in Britain alone.

Tellingly, US intelligence services have been passing on information implicating Putin’s FSB in a string of assassinations on British soil. However, Theresa May, as both Home Secretary and Prime Minister, deliberately delayed or sidelined public inquiries into definite or likely hits, citing “national security” grounds and the need to protect “international relations”.

The 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 was the first ever case of nuclear terrorism, and as such couldn’t be hushed up. Many less spectacular murders have been, with the government all too eager to accept suicide or natural causes as the explanations of deaths.

Thus the British toxicologist who diagnosed the polonium poisoning of Litvinenko is supposed to have killed himself by multiple stab wounds – this though suicide by stabbing is rare this side of Japan, and suicide by multiple stabbings rarer still.

HMG displays touching credulity when investigating a spate of almost simultaneous accidents, suicides and heart attacks befalling British subjects and Russian immigrants who find themselves on Putin’s wrong side. To wit:

Alexander Perepelichny, young man blowing the whistle on Russian money laundering, dropped dead while jogging in Surrey. Official ruling: heart attack.

Boris Berezovsky, oligarch who financed political opponents to Putin, found hanged in his bathroom. Official ruling: suicide.

Scot Young, facilitator of Berezovsky’s money laundering, defenestrated in London. Official ruling: suicide.

Young’s partners Paul Castle, Robbie Curtis and Johnny Elichaoff all died violently. Official ruling: suicides.

Badri Patarkatsishvili, Berezovsky’s business partner, dropped dead. Official ruling: heart attack.

Yuri Golubev, co-founder of Yukos, the oil company stolen by Putin, ditto.

Stephen Moss, 46-year-old lawyer working for Putin’s oligarchs, ditto.

Stephen Curtis (no relation to Robbie), British launderer of Russian money, dead in a suspicious helicopter crash. Official ruling: accident.

Putin’s sponsoring organisation teaches its agents to distrust coincidences: when they number more than two, they’re no longer coincidental. And when an enemy of the Russian state suffers an apparent heart attack, one ought to remember that the Russian secret police has been running a poisons lab since 1918.

Some of their best poisons induce heart attacks without leaving any traces. Perepelichny’s heart specifically had been doubtless weakened by his grassing up the players in the newly traditional Russian game of money laundering.

Anticipating the onset of heart trouble, Mr Perepelichny had taken out a multi-million-pound life insurance policy, with the attendant medical examination missing any cardiac defects. At the same time he had reported multiple death threats.

The few released results of the chemical analysis show that the grass died by, well, grass. This may qualify as a natural death in that it was caused by a naturally occurring substance.

The culpable toxic plant is called gelsemium, found only in remote areas of China. In the spirit of burgeoning Sino-Soviet alliance, the Chinese kindly make their native flora available to one of Russia’s few thriving industries, contract killing.

At least, in Britain Putin’s men kill only individuals. In the US they try to kill the whole political system.

In his testimony to Congress, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said: “In 2016 the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, orchestrated cyber attacks on our nation for the purpose of influencing our election – plain and simple. Now, the key question for the president and Congress is: What are we going to do to protect the American people and their democracy from this kind of thing in the future?”

The answer is, pathetically little.

Mr Trump assures Americans that Russian meddling didn’t affect the presidential and state elections in any way. That may be, but it’s the thought that counts. And the thought is tantamount to war.

Cyber attacks are a vital part of modern warfare. They can be used to jam communications, silence command centres, sabotage guidance systems – or, as in this case, to subvert the country’s political system.

If there is a substantive difference between a cyber and a missile attack, it escapes me. Yet even assuming that it exists, surely the Russians provided sufficient grounds at least for the summary severance of diplomatic relations.

Instead the Trump administration merely expanded the existing sanctions, placing 160 individuals and some 400 companies on its sanctions list. However, even this namby-pamby response enraged Putin’s KGB junta.

Its prominent member, foreign minister Lavrov, said: “I can only express my regrets at the Russophobe obsession of our US colleagues.” Consonant with this refreshingly cynical rant is the response of our own pseudo-conservative useful idiots to any criticism of Putin’s Russia, no matter how factual.

All such critics are immediately accused of irrational Russophobia, as no doubt I’ll be following this article. We’re sleepwalking into disaster.

 

 

Every self-respecting company has a corporate charter. And every corporate charter says “Our people are our greatest resource” or words to that effect.

The phrase is a bit hackneyed, but who says people who compose such documents have to be accomplished stylists? Yet the sentiment is doubtless true. Any company is only as good as its employees.

That’s why it makes sense to hire intelligent, well-behaved, well-educated youngsters blessed with work ethic, sense of responsibility and social skills. Or so one would have thought.

However, in thinking so one would be overlooking a problem growing in significance by the day. For, statistically speaking, most of such youngsters come from solid middle-class families or – hold on a second, let me make sure nobody’s listening – even higher.

Employment practices tend to reflect this statistical probability, which isn’t to be confused with certainty. It’s possible for someone raised on a council estate by a single mother to be a brilliant, conscientious, successful employee. But, alas, that’s not the way to bet.

That’s why 61 per cent of successful applicants at top firms attended one of the country’s 24 most selective universities. And, at a guess, most such alumni come from middle-class families.

That’s not good enough for those who, like me, believe in progress above all. That’s why I’m in complete sympathy with the principles driving the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) and the government’s Social Mobility Commission (SMC).

Working hand in glove, they have come up with the Social Mobility Index, to be applied to all top companies. The goal is to make sure that most employees come from what our illustrious prime minister Tessa calls “just about managing families” (JAM).

To merit a satisfactory index, a company has to consider numerous criteria when interviewing a prospective recruit: his accent, the school and university he went to, his family background and parents’ occupation, the area he grew up in, whether or not he was eligible for free school meals and so forth. The lower the better is the guiding principle.

Education Secretary Justine Greening is almost as ecstatic about this initiative as she is about her girlfriend. Having companies compete for the prolier-than-thou accolade, she says, “is the collective goal we must all have if we are truly to tackle poor social mobility”.

I agree wholeheartedly – what other goal can we possibly have? Surely not making sure that our top companies remain internationally competitive.

Of course some might cite historical evidence showing that Britain used to be blessed with higher social mobility than any other European country. But that was achieved by unfair means, such as providing excellent education for anyone capable of receiving it. As a lifelong egalitarian, I’m aghast.

Equal education should be equally force-fed to all, regardless of ability. Hence I’m glad Mrs May and Miss Greening have abandoned their reactionary plan to bring back grammar schools. We don’t want 25 per cent of the pupils to be well-educated and the rest competent. We want them all to be equally ignorant, ideally unable to function in the modern economy, and that’s another “collective goal” towards which to strive.

Meanwhile, now that the Social Mobility Index is becoming a de rigueur employment criterion, I’ve done my modest best to promote this invaluable initiative.

If young persons of your kin or acquaintance are seeking a job, perhaps this advice will help them pass the interview with flying colours. I’ll highlight some possible questions (Q) and offer advice on wrong and correct answers (WA and CA).

Not to have to repeat mysel1f, every reply should start with “You what, mate?” and, after the question has been repeated, end with “innit”. The T sound in “what” must be replaced with the glottal stop. Warning: to pronounce this sound authentically, the youngster should spend hours practising, ideally with the aid of any Ray Winstone film. So:

Q: Where did you grow up? WA: Chelsea. CA: Under Chelsea Bridge.

Q: What does your father do? WA: He’s a financial consultant. CA: You mean me baby favva? Ain’t got no other favva, mate.

Q: What does your mother do? WA: Charity work. CA: Me muvva, she do it all, mate. Coke, meth, skunk – you name it.

Q: What kind of school did you go to? WA: Public school. CA: School of hard knockers, mate.

Q: And after that? WA: Exeter U. CA: Bugger U.

Q: Did you get free meals at school. WA: No, I’m afraid I didn’t. CA: Kin’ell, only grub I had, mate.

Q: Have you travelled widely? WA: My parents made sure we spent every holiday in a different country of great cultural interest. CA: Been to Shepherd’s Bush once, mate, to visit me bruvver at them Scrubs. He then ate a lightbulb, innit, and bled to death like.

Q: What is your favourite music? WA: Bach cantatas. CA: N**gaz Wiv Attitude.

Q: What is your favourite food? WA: Foie gras on toast. CA: Burger King on a bus.

Q: Do you smoke? WA: Absolutely not. CA: You mean fags?

This is just a small sample of the training programme I offer to all aspiring candidates for jobs at top companies. I can’t guarantee success, but I could definitely help a middle-class youngster reverse the statistical odds against him. Djamean?

The public reaction to the Finsbury Park incident reminds me of Russia, circa 1903. Now historical parallels are never quite exact, but they may be useful for illustrative purposes. This one certainly is.

In that year a wave of 600 anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. Kishinev and Kiev were hit especially hard. Thousands of houses looted, thousands of people beaten up, thousands of women raped, 48 people dead in Kishinev alone.

By the time the pogroms ended in 1906, 2,500 Jews had been killed, most of them in Odessa. (Russian chauvinists like Solzhenitsyn always precede such numerals with the word ‘only’.) But meanwhile it was 1903, and, in the wake of Kishinev and Kiev, the Jews of Gomel knew it was their turn next.

In preparation, they organised armed self-defence groups, which sprang a nasty surprise on those Russian patriots. When the marauding mob rampaged through the streets of Gomel, it was met with pistol shots.

As a result, ‘only’ 25 Jews died, and about as many murderous thugs. Now the term ‘moral equivalence’ hadn’t been coined yet, but, on the basis of the public reaction in the Russian press, it should have been.

Most papers insisted that both sides were equally to blame. Some, that the Jews even more so because they had fired the first shots. Phrases like “violence breeds violence” streamed off newspaper pages, along with regrets that the Jews hadn’t absorbed the Christian notion of turning the other cheek.

The subsequent court proceedings reinforced that line of thought. Eighteen Jews defending themselves were sentenced to penal servitude, and only 12 Russian thugs leading the rampage.

As I said, the parallel with the Finsbury Park aftermath isn’t quite exact. But neither is it nonexistent.

Unlike those Gomel Jews, Darren Osborne (no relation to George, as far as I know) wasn’t in any immediate personal danger – he wasn’t pre-empting or warding off an attack. However, he was justified in feeling threatened as a member of the group routinely and indiscriminately targeted by Muslim terrorists – just as Jews were targeted in Russia circa 1903.

That feeling he had, however justified it might have been, doesn’t excuse his criminal action. But it certainly mitigates it.

I’m not a physical coward – growing up in the tough neighbourhood otherwise known as Russia didn’t allow me that option. But nowadays I tense up slightly every time I find myself in a Central London crowd. And – call me a racist and report me to the Commission for Racial Equality – I automatically examine every young Muslim coming my way.

Is he carrying some work tools or a gun in that satchel? Is it food or a bomb in his Sainsbury’s bag? Unlike Mr Osborne, I’m a civilised man, so I don’t go beyond looking with apprehension. But I can understand his action, even if I can’t excuse it.

It’s not Islamophobia that has put the electricity of fear and tension into the atmosphere, but Islamic terrorism. So surely our response to the Finsbury Park attack should distinguish between action and reaction.

Both may be reprehensible, but it takes a broken moral compass to suggest they are equally reprehensible. Or else it takes a conscience warped by what some call political correctness and what could more appropriately be called our civilisation’s suicide wish.

This is a dangerous disease, and our prime minister is showing advanced symptoms of it. She assigned an equal measure of “hatred and evil” both to the Finsbury Park attack and the numerous and more deadly acts of Muslim terrorism that had provoked it.

The former, said Mrs May, is “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the latter. That’s why “We will stop at nothing to defeat it.”

Nothing, Mrs May? That’s good to hear. So let’s begin by admitting that we’re at war – not with alienated loaners on cannabis, not with Islamists, not with Islamofascists, not with Islamic fundamentalists, but with Islam.

This war has been going on for 1,400 years, and it has had lulls alternating with flare-ups. We’re going through a flare-up now, and unless HMG does something about it, people like Darren Osborne (no relation to George) will.

If they start doing it en masse, that could spell disintegration of public order, with vigilante justice replacing the rule of law. And then, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

When Enoch Powell thus quoted Virgil in a similar context, he was instantly vilified, and our progressive press still sputters spittle at the “rivers of blood” speech. But, even though Powell didn’t have specifically Muslims in mind, he saw the dangers of multi-culti diversity.

His moral compass hadn’t gone haywire, as Mrs May’s has. If she really will stop at nothing to defeat violence, she should start by stopping the Muslim action first, and the reaction to it second. This isn’t just a temporal sequence, but a moral pecking order.

 

 

Observing a fortnight ago the aftermath of yet another Muslim atrocity, I suggested a couple of stock acronyms for expressing public condolences.

Since all politicians use the same platitudes, there’s no point in spelling them out in full. Hence T&P and IV are time-saving ways of saying ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘innocent victims’.

In that spirit my T&P go to the IV in Finsbury, where a gentleman shouting “I’m going to kill all Muslims” and “I did my bit” drove his white van through a crowd of worshippers outside a mosque.

The driver obviously never attended the Muslim Offensive Steering Course (MOSC for short), for his IV score was meagre by comparison to those usually achieved by the alumni of that educational establishment: a mere one dead, 10 injured.

In spite of that underachievement, the Muslim Council of Britain described the incident as “the most violent manifestation” yet of Islamophobia. That offended my sense of fairness.

Haven’t we already learned that suicide bombers or van drivers manifest nothing but their own madness? Aren’t they all alienated, cannabis-addled loners pursuing no ideological or religious objective?

Therefore this particular van driver is entitled to the same consideration. His pusher must have given him some skunk instead of his usual milder weed, and off he went.

The driver certainly didn’t mean to ‘do his bit’ by ‘killing all Muslims’. It was skunk talking, not Islamophobia. White people are a race of peace and they can’t all be tarred with the same Islamophobic brush. I mean, fair’s fair.

Not everyone sees it that way. Toufik Kacimi, chief executive of the Muslim Welfare House, told Sky News that “he is not mentally ill, he is conscious, he did what he did deliberately to hit and kill as many Muslims as possible.”

And not a single spliff anywhere in sight, no symptoms of derangement – just a perfectly sane, calculating Muslim-hater, symptomatic of a most worrying trend threatening every Englishman of the Mohammedan persuasion.

Comrade Corbyn doesn’t pray, so the ‘P’ part of my acronym doesn’t apply. Thus his “thoughts are with… the community affected by this awful event.” As I’m sure they are with the victims of the atrocities committed by Comrade Corbyn’s friends from Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA.

Our future prime minister hasn’t limited himself to stock condolences. He also said: “I’ve been in touch with the mosques, police and Islington council regarding the incident.”

He isn’t the only one concerned. Neil Basu of the Metropolitan Police has promised to put extra security around mosques, even though “it is an incredibly challenging time for London”, with emergency services already “stretched”.

The Deputy Assistant Commissioner wisely refrained from mentioning what it is that they’re stretched by, which suggests he’s going places in politics. Anyway, the task he has set himself and the Met is difficult, but not unduly so.

There are only (!) 427 mosques in London, so a thousand or so armed officers may suffice to provide the extra security. Doing the same for millions of other Londoners risking their lives every time they find themselves in a crowded place is a different matter altogether.

No sane person would condone the Finsbury act of terrorism. No intelligent person would say it was unpredictable, especially if he studied physics at school. Didn’t Newton explain that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?

It’s axiomatic that, if the state won’t protect the people, the people will protect themselves. The laws of political correctness superseding all other laws, the state has done nothing to solve the problem of Muslim terrorism or even to acknowledge that this is what it is.

This problem, it’s useful to remember, is of the state’s own doing. Both main parties are implicated in this, but especially the one so ably led by Comrade Corbyn. For, as Peter Mandelson has admitted with his customary cynicism, Blair’s government deliberately set out to admit millions of Muslims, whom they correctly saw as future Labour voters.

At the same time no efforts were made to integrate the Muslims into British society. On the contrary, Islamic particularism was encouraged in the name of diversity. Nor has anything been done to make sure that none of Britain’s 1,600 (!) mosques would be used as recruitment grounds for mass murderers.

Specifically, from 1997 until 2003 the Finsbury Park Mosque, the site of this morning’s crime, provided a platform for Abu Hamza to preach Islamic hatred for our hospitable country. And this was far from the only mosque used for that purpose.

Those impassioned youngsters, many of whom can’t even speak proper English despite being born in Britain, are easy clay to mould. They go out and kill in the name of Allah, with people in Britain becoming increasingly desperate and insecure.

Pressure has been building up in the cooker for a long time, and everyone knew the top would be blown before long. Actually, the only thing that surprised me was that the first act of unsanctioned counter-terrorism took place in London: I thought a northern city, such as Leeds or Manchester, would be more likely.

How long before Muslims are routinely attacked in the streets? How long before order turns to ordure? It’s anybody’s guess. But this is a matter of when, not if.

I’m genuinely sorry for those poor people in Finsbury. But I’m even more sorry for Britain.