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While magnanimously acknowledging that Castro had “his flaws”, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition enthused about that “champion of social justice”.

Allow me to translate from the modern. Social justice actually means social injustice: a transfer of property from those who have a just claim to it to those who don’t – including the arbiters of social justice themselves.

As an essential corollary, those who interpret social justice differently have to be killed, imprisoned, driven into exile or otherwise disposed of. Eventually uniformity of opinion descends on those who remain: they all begin to see social justice in exactly the same light.

By those criteria, Jeremy’s idol isn’t so much a champion as a runner-up. The top spot is shared by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, although Fidel did his level best and it was a close-run thing.

The number of those El Jefe killed never quite reached 100,000. On the plus side, unlike that wimp Lenin, Fidel, his brother Raúl and his acolyte Che took a hands-on approach to executions.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Castro and his jolly friends flattered their role models no end. Like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, they grabbed power in several stages.

First, they took part in a revolution driven by others. Then they ousted their former coalition partners and banned free elections. Then they eliminated the ancien régime by the expedients I outlined above. Then they killed their former allies and, while at it, those of Fidel’s comrades who had ideas above their station.

Where that was done with the benefit of quasi-legal procedure, it sounded like a Spanish translation from the Russian popularised by the 1930s show trials. Defence attorneys would sum up by stating their disgust for the defendants and apologising for having to defend such vermin.

And Guevara came up with a legal insight that repeated practically word for word an earlier revelation by Stalin’s prosecutor Vyshinsky:

“We need no shilly-shallying with court procedures. This is a revolution, and evidence is secondary. We must act according to our convictions. They’re all a gang of criminals and murderers. Then don’t forget we have an appellate tribunal.|”

So they did, which body was presided over by Guevara himself. As a finishing touch, having passed and upheld the death sentence, the multi-tasking Che would often carry it out himself.

As this was going on, Corbyn’s “champion of social justice” smiled an avuncular smile into his shaggy beard. He himself was too busy with his personal harem. Well, at least, unlike his brother, he liked women.

While at it, Fidel was doing to Cuba what he did to his girlfriends. For social justice can’t be achieved all at once. It’s a dynamic process, essentially a journey from Point A to Point B.

When Castro arrived, Cuba under Batista was the second most prosperous country in Latin America. In some categories, such as the number of cars or telephones per capita, it was ahead of Italy.

Call it Point A. Point B is accurately described by a reader of mine, and I hope Mr Bosanquet doesn’t mind my quoting him:

“When I travelled to Cuba just before Fidel’s handover of power, Havana was a decaying slum, the only food around was stale ham and cheese sandwiches, teachers and doctors were living in penury, the people in the countryside were virtually starving, the only way young men could make money was hustling fake cigars – women through prostitution. I visited a friend with appendicitis in hospital and it was a filthy slum with patients dying from infections.”

Verily I say unto you: that free medical care is dear at the price. And judging by the fact that Cuba’s average monthly wage is currently under £15, things couldn’t have improved much since that observation was made, some 10 years ago.

The cause of social justice in Cuba has been served so well that Corbyn’s panegyrics are being echoed and outdone by his likeminded Castratos.

Thus the former MP George Galloway: “You were the greatest man I ever met, Comandante Fidel.”

Lord Hain, the former Labour cabinet minister: “Castro created a society of unparalleled access to free health, education and equal opportunity despite an economically throttling US siege.”

Rob Miller, director of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign: “Certainly Fidel, Raúl and Che Guevara are… revered as the historic generation.”

To the former London mayor Ken Livingston, Castro was an “absolute giant of the twentieth century”.

Transatlantic fans of social justice wouldn’t be outdone. Thus Canada’s PM Trudeau: “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.”

And Obama recalled “the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation.” That he most certainly did, though perhaps not quite in the way Barack Hussein meant.

I don’t know about you, but I have nightmares of our own jefes and comandantes taking over in the name of social justice. I wake up bathed in cold sweat, hoarse from my own screams.

This isn’t a proper Christian sentiment, I know. We’re supposed to love our enemies and all that.

So we must. In that spirit, one hopes God will be merciful on Fidel Castro’s soul, provided he had one. But in this world, all decent people have prayed for half a century that this monster rot in hell.

In its fulsomely well-balanced obituary, The Guardian had the gall to quote Castro’s Cuban sycophant as saying that, for all the material deprivation Castro caused, at least he guided the country through the nightmare of the 1962 crisis.

Well, now we’re on the issue of balance, I’d be tempted to mention that the crisis Castro guided his grateful people through was largely of his own making. It’s by generously turning his island into a Soviet missile base at Khrushchev’s behest, that Castro took the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

I remember 1962 in Moscow as if it were yesterday. As a child, I was taught to sing songs about heroic barbudos and shout “patria o muerte, venceremos” at public gatherings. Yet immediately pro-Cuban hysteria mandated by the Kremlin began to strike some cautionary notes.

The slogan rolled off the tongue quite easily when it was their patria and their muerte. Yet with SAC bombers expected over Moscow at any moment, my affection for the Castro-led barbudos, tepid at best, vanished in an instant.

Actually, I find it tedious to talk about the Kremlin’s blood-thirsty puppet who emulated the Soviet model of starving, torturing, imprisoning and murdering his people en masse, although not quite in the same numbers as his communist role models elsewhere.

People citing the number of those murdered or imprisoned by Castro praise the bearded monster for not having matched the Soviets or Chinese even in percentage terms.

But he certainly went the Soviets one better in the relative number of those who risked (and often lost) their lives fleeing from the cannibalistic barbudos and their loquacious chieftain (he’d orate for hours off the cuff, an impressive achievement to anyone who hasn’t actually read Castro’s incoherent rants).

All in all, 1.5 million Cubans have fled. Considering that Cuba’s population at the time Castro led his gang out of Sierra Maestra mountains was 6.9 million, that was quite good going.

Another praise for Castro that makes me see white (the colour of counter-revolution) is the effluvia over the universal literacy and ‘free’ medical care he bestowed upon Cubans in his munificence.

That people can read is a trivial datum compared to what they read. All communist dictators want people to be literate enough to peruse their speeches and other propaganda.

Literacy thus stops being a factor of learning and becomes one of brainwashing. With the Castrites (Castratos?) in power, the Cubans would have been better off in their former blissful state of illiteracy.

As to the canard of free medical care, it’s one oft-repeated even in countries that ought to know better. There’s no such thing. ‘Free’ in this context means provided by the state, largely for the same purpose as universal literacy – to exert control over the populace.

When the state, especially one that beggars the nation by practising communist economics, provides such services, it has to pinch elsewhere. Hence the average wage in Castro’s Cuba is under $20 a month. If it were even half that in the US ($4,300 a month), I’m sure Cubans would be happy to pay for their own blood tests and appendectomies.

Such wages accompanied by ‘free’ medicine and education don’t mean universal care. They mean universal slavery.

When I first arrived in the US from Russia (43 years ago – doesn’t tempus bloody well fugit?), I was amazed at seeing portraits of Fidel and Che Guevara everywhere, including the co-eds’ beautifully shaped T-shirts.

Chaps, these are mass murderers you’re glorifying, I wanted to scream, and at times did. Criminals who not only stamped their own people into the dirt but who also export their beastliness all over the world. Angola, Mozambique, other African countries, plus the odd ‘wet job’ carried out on behalf of their Soviet masters – don’t you know? Don’t you care?

They might have known. But they didn’t care. Castro and Che were kinda cool.

And it wasn’t just the US. I saw the same thing when coming to Britain 15 years later.

An old friend of mine married a comely English rose, and I was shocked to see a large portrait of Che Guevara adorning her wall.

When I took her to task, she explained that she had had to live through even a worse dictatorship, that of Margaret Thatcher. (Shortly thereafter my friend intercepted her e-mail thanking her boss for having let her perform on him an act that’s still illegal in some American states. I detected a causal relationship.)

Thousands of Cubans are dancing in the streets of Miami and other American cities (they’ve learned to keep such emotions in check in Cuba proper). They never thought Fidel was cool. They always knew what kind of evil was perpetrated on their country. One wishes all those mourning Castro’s death knew that too.

 

A valid test of any political method is the quality of those it elevates to government.

Looking at the parade of nonentities befouling modern cabinets, one can be justified in having doubts about our democracy run riot (if you don’t mind a little self-publicity, I express some of them in my book Democracy As a Neocon Trick).

Sir John Major is a case in point. That he isn’t exactly the sharpest chisel in the toolbox is widely accepted even by his friends. His morals were demonstrated when he stabbed his benefactrix Margaret Thatcher in the back. And his taste in women… well, say no more than Edwina Currie.

Now Sir John is actively campaigning to torpedo Brexit, referendum or no. There’s obviously an element of self-vindication there: it was Major’s signature that put paid to British independence at Maastricht in 1992.

That flourish of the pen damaged the sovereignty of Crown and Parliament more effectively than any other historical event that comes to mind offhand. If that’s not treason, I don’t know what is, although I’m sure casuistic loopholes prevent legal charges against Maastricht John.

That, having staked his whole political life on that act, Sir John now wants to prevent its unravelling is as understandable as it’s deplorable. His excuse is that he may not even understand what he’s doing – or saying.

There exists, Sir John declared yesterday, “a perfectly credible cause” for a second referendum. He then went on to prove that there’s no perfectly credible cause for Sir John. Here’s what he said:

“I hear the argument that the 48 per cent of people who voted to stay should have no say in what happens. I find that very difficult to accept. The tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy and it should not apply in this particular democracy.”

Sir John has heard the catchphrase, which is good, but I’m not sure he either understands its meaning or knows its provenance, which is unfortunate.

Actually, John Adams first warned against the tyranny of the majority during the debates about the American Constitution. Some 18 years later he realised with horror that his warning hadn’t been heeded: “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

Thomas Jefferson agreed with Adams’s low opinion of democracy. Echoing Plato, he remarked: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule [ochlocracy, to Plato], where fifty-one per cent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

You’ll notice that the Founders were talking about democracy in general, not direct democracy in particular. Later “the tyranny of the majority” appeared as a chapter title in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, to be quoted later still in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

Those gentlemen were absolutely correct in decrying unlimited democracy – and absolutely wrong in believing it was preventable by palliative constitutional tinkering, such as introducing an electoral college in America.

The only check on democracy proven effective is reducing it to just one of the mechanisms of power, counterbalanced by others. The proof was provided by England’s constitution, where the unelected power of the monarch was balanced with the elected power of the Commons, with the mediating hereditary power of the Lords making sure the balance didn’t tip too much one way or the other.

That was the greatest constitutional achievement in history, and it was wantonly undone by a succession of governing nonentities like John Major. Yet an argument can be made that removing checks on democracy is anyhow an ineluctable process, intrinsic to any practice of this system in our post-Enlightenment modernity.

One way or the other, given our existing conditions, it’s impossible to argue persuasively against the odd plebiscite, for example when an issue of constitutional import is at stake.

For democracy is self-nullifying. Unless people vote direct on every policy, which is patently impossible, “the tyranny of the majority”, so dreaded by the gentlemen above, is guaranteed to develop into the tyranny of a minority governing in its own interests but in the name of the people. A plebiscite can provide some check, however imperfect.

Every word in Major’s statement applies to democracy in general: in fact, considerably more people voted for Brexit in 2016 than for John Major in 1992 – and no one voted for him in 1990, when he became PM in the wake of a perfidious coup.

People had “no say” in anything he did, such as signing away 1,500 years of England’s constitutional tradition in 1992. One didn’t hear him object about the injustice of it all then.

While Major is intellectually and morally deficient, his successor, in addition to those attributes, is downright wicked. Blair avers we must have a second referendum if the British people decide that “the pain-gain cost-benefit analysis doesn’t stack up”.

To propose deciding the issue of British sovereignty on such criteria isn’t just ignorant, vulgar and crass. It’s evil, irredeemably so.

The two nonentities disagree on the value of arithmetic: one dislikes counting votes, the other supports counting pennies. But they converge in their obvious ignorance of, and contempt for, the best constitution mankind has produced so far.

 

Yes, I know it’s a rotten pun. My only excuse is that it’s applied to the most rotten personage ever to disgrace Westminster.

The scary news is that Blair has launched a political comeback. The scarier news is that he just may succeed.

Blair has spotted “a massive hole in British politics” – and the absolutely scariest news is that he’s right. A hole does exist, although Blair’s toxic presence is more likely to widen, not fill, it.

He regards Corbyn as a “nutter” and Mrs May as a “ total lightweight”, and he’s right on both counts. However, a man who, as prime minister, elevated corruption, cronyism and constitutional vandalism to hitherto unseen levels, commits an unspeakable effrontery when daring to criticise others and suggest he could do better.

Following the Chilcot report, inculpating Blair for lying about Iraq, he should have been charged with treason. I don’t know what else to call Blair’s promise to Bush that “I will be with you whatever”.

‘Whatever’ covered a plethora of obstacles to this unconstitutional commitment: absence of parliamentary or indeed cabinet approval, any thought for the assured consequences, life-threatening shortage of appropriate hardware and training in the armed forces, intelligence data showing that, in Chilcot’s language, there was “no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein”.

Having criminally caused the on-going Middle Eastern disaster now threatening us all, Blair proceeded to vandalise our ancient constitution by creating unnecessary institutions, such as the Supreme Court, and destroying or emasculating necessary ones, such as the House of Lords and the office of Lord Chancellor.

As a side line, in 2004 he flung open doors already ajar by going along with the EU’s suicidal decision to admit unlimited numbers of immigrants from places where hatred of the West is an article of faith.

While the Iraq caper may constitute treason de jure, Blair’s constitutional mayhem was treasonous de facto. As he and his lieutenants have admitted with refreshing cynicism, all that was done with a single purpose in mind: perpetuating his own power and that of his fellow spivs.

I realise that wishing to see Blair behind bars betokens a lack of realism, but it’s natural to expect that this creature be banned from politics for the rest of his miserable life. (Those interested in its auspicious beginning should Google ‘Tony Blair Miranda’. Let’s just say that young Tone added a whole new meaning to the Miranda warning.)

Or rather it would be natural to expect that in a country where some vestiges of political integrity survive. In Britain, however, Blair clearly expects the currently unelectable Labour Party to bring him back, putting all its rotten eggs into one bastard.

To that end he’s about to launch a comeback campaign, marshalling the support of cross-party malcontents, especially those desperate to undermine Brexit.

Blair’s so far unspoken manifesto should start with the words “Spivs of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your brains (of which you haven’t got much to begin with)”. He has already had talks with the former (Tory!) chancellor George Osborne, who’s still smarting from the unceremonious manner in which his own party dumped him.

You don’t win any prizes for guessing the main subject of the Tory-Tony conversation. For keeping Britain in the EU at all costs is the Trojan horse Blair has saddled to ride all the way back to power. The ensign flapping off his lance has ‘second referendum’ written on it.

If that doesn’t work, he and his new friend George will think up something else, and I’m sure Dave will resurface to add a helping hand. You see, Dave and George are biting every reachable portion of their anatomy over their decision to call the first referendum.

With the smug overconfidence typical of that lot, they were sure they’d win, thereby closing the issue of British sovereignty forever. True enough, had the referendum gone the other way, its results would have been declared ironclad in perpetuity: the EU and its Quislings only ever reverse referendums that go against them.

Now Blair is demanding a second vote even after Mrs May manages to invoke Article 50. This only shows that EU laws don’t matter to Blair any more than British ones do: this article of the Lisbon Treaty says that any country triggering it will leave automatically within two years.

According to Blair, “You can’t change this [referendum] decision, unless it becomes clear in one way or another, that the British people have had a change of mind because they have seen the reality of the alternative.”

For the British people to see “the reality of the alternative”, Britain must actually leave the EU. But that’s not what Blair means. His ‘alternative’ to Brexit is the current state of limbo.

This is created by using every casuistic holdup to force Mrs May to continue shilly-shallying until the will of the British people has been denied – not that she takes much forcing, being a Remainer herself.

Should Blair get and lose his second referendum, he’ll be screaming for a third. Spivs of the world are united, and they won’t be denied – barring the sort of cataclysm that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Who will rid us of this loathsome creature?

Two days ago, His Beatitude Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ Kirill turned 70, and I’d like to offer my belated best wishes.

I could also offer a eulogy, but there’s no need. One has already been delivered by Dmitry Kisiliov, the TV dummy to Putin’s Kremlin ventriloquist: “Patriarch Kirill is one of mankind’s leading thinkers. His thoughts on spirituality, duty, good and evil, wealth and poverty, meaning of life provide priceless spiritual supports for millions of people.”

St Paul, St Augustine, Nietzsche and Milton Friedman thus come together in the patriarch’s brocaded breast, and one can only prostrate oneself in awe. Then, having resumed the vertical position, one may dare offer a few comments, in the fear that a smiting lightning may strike at any moment.

Vladimir Gundiayev, as the Patriarch was in the lay world, remembers “that a man is not justified by the works of law but by the faith of Jesus Christ”. As a prelate, he has so much faith that he knows he can get away with anything for which lesser people would face everlasting fire.

For example, poor mortals can’t serve God and mammon, but, according to Gundiayev, that injunction doesn’t preclude other parallel careers. One can indeed serve two masters, in his case God and the KGB (FSB/SVR).

His Beatitude has been serving that organisation faithfully since at least 1972, when he first appears in KGB dossiers as ‘Agent Mikhailov’. Operational reports describe his assignments, always adding they were “fulfilled successfully”. No wonder the KGB then seconded Gundiayev to the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – he earned it.

It’s from the height of Gundiayev’s dual consecration that the other day he addressed Russian abbots with a sermon of asceticism. He was scathing about their lives of comfort and luxury.

For example, he forbade them to decorate their sceptres with “baubles” and to have salaries. Abbots, he thundered, should “think more about heroic asceticism”.

Do as I say, don’t do as I do, goes the old saw, while an earlier one says in Latin that quod licet iovi, non licet bovi. Gundiayev’s flock are the bulls here, with him himself as Jupiter.

For His Beatitude doesn’t exactly practise what he preaches. The Russians began to notice that a few years ago, during what I then called the Watch’s Sabbath.

Gundiayev was photographed sporting a £30,000 Bréguet at a press conference. After the ensuing outcry, His Beatitude produced a doctored version of the same picture, with no watch anywhere in sight.

Alas, his retoucher had overlooked a minor detail: the reflection of the watch on the shiny table top in front of Gundiayev. As befits a prelate, the picture became supernatural with idealistic Platonic touches: only the shadow of an object was perceived, not the object itself.

Nor is Gundiayev immune to delights of the flesh. Even though he’s a monk, the patriarch openly lives with a woman he describes as a distant relation, a kinship for which no documentary evidence exists.

This cohabitation unfolds in multiple residences, some of which belong to Gundiayev outright, while others are variously described as ‘church property’, ‘gifts’ or ‘convents’. Russian researcher Dr Bychkov has published a long list of Gundiayev’s palaces, yachts and jets of which he has either ownership or exclusive use. His Beatitude has confirmed most of the items, which suggests that ‘patriarch’ must be etymologically related to ‘pay’.

I particularly liked the story of a convent converted into a patriarchal residence and stuffed with designer furniture imported from Italy. One table cost €20,000, and its finish must have been specified as matte, just in case.

I shan’t bore you with a full translation of the list, hoping you’ll take my word for it: we’re talking about uncountable millions. A tiny detail: last year Gundiaev won a lawsuit against his neighbour, who lived beneath the patriarch’s personal property, a 1,450 sq. ft. apartment with a view of the Kremlin.

His Beatitude claimed that refurbishment of the neighbour’s flat had produced dust, causing damage to Gundiayev’s furnishings. The damage was estimated at over $1,000,000, leaving us to guess the overall value of said furnishings, not to mention the apartment itself.

But let’s not get hung up on trivialities. For, with Putin’s blessing, His Beatitude has issued himself a patriarchal dispensation to serve mammon on a serious scale.

Gundiayev’s business activities have earned him a personal capital estimated at between $1.5 and 4 billion. As a good businessman, he has diversified his activities since the time he was a simple metropolitan (bishop). Tobacco products, oil, spirits and foodstuffs have figured prominently among his interests.

In 1996 he was party to a ROC deal whereby huge consignments of tobacco products were imported as duty-free ‘humanitarian aid’ and then sold through shops at market prices. It’s estimated that Gundiayev’s cut of that scam alone topped $50 million.

Later he got into the oil business, earning a fortune whose exact size hasn’t yet been documented, possibly because investigators can’t count that high. Then in 2000 His Beatitude made another $17 million flogging caviar and crabmeat – every little bit helps. His other interests include semi-precious stones, banking, stock market and property development.

And so it goes on, ROC around the clock. Happy birthday, Your Beatitude! God bless the good works.

Yesterday I appeared on the BBC Sunday Morning Live show, on the panel discussing imprisonment.

Since this subject, like most others, tends to divide people along political lines, I feared that the other panellists would gang up on me. I was wrong: providing partial support was Andrew Pierce of The Mail.

But then there was Afua Hirsch, a human rights development worker, whatever that means. Propping up her corner with expert opinion by TV link was a gentleman who once served time and has since developed an understandable interest in the penitentiary system.

Miss Hirsch and I differ on the very definition of prison. Rather than punishment for crimes, she sees it more as an educational and therapeutic facility for the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Hence, according to her and the ex-convict, we have too many people in prison: other institutions would serve the educational purposes better.

My contention was that protecting us from criminals is among the state’s few raisons d’être. Otherwise it’s not immediately clear whence the state would derive its legitimacy.

Therefore the number of prisoners is a moot point. We should have as many as it takes for the state to protect us.

Prison’s principal role is to punish and thereby deter crimes. Rehabilitation, a notion dear to my opponents’ hearts, would be welcome, but it comes far down on the list of desiderata, if at all.

The ex-convict was aghast. Didn’t I know that most released prisoners reoffend within a few months? Miss Hirsch nodded vigorously and looked at me in a way that suggested she wouldn’t mind seeing me inside one of the facilities under discussion.

Actually, those sentenced to non-custodial punishments reoffend as often as those sent down, the valid difference being that at least the latter can’t hurt us while inside.

The ex-convict obviously didn’t realise that everything he was saying supported my argument. After all, the commitment to mythical rehabilitation has been practised for at least two generations. Surely the recidivism rates prove it isn’t working?

When a system fails so spectacularly, the fault usually lies with its design, not the mechanics of its operation. There’s this truth impossible for Miss Hirsch’s liberal mind to grasp: rehabilitation isn’t what prisons are for, and some people can’t be rehabilitated anyway.

To realise this one has to acknowledge that evil, like good, is innate to human nature and in some people it predominates. But that route may lead us as far as original sin, and of course Miss Hirsch can’t possibly believe in such retrograde rubbish.

Rates of reoffending can be significantly reduced by one expedient only: imbuing people with respect for, and fear of, the law.

Respect for the law is a cornerstone of any successful civilisation, and creating it is a reciprocal process. The old cliché works: justice must be done (by the state), and it must be seen to be done (by the people).

A crime, especially a violent one, sends shockwaves through the community, and they can only be attenuated when commensurate punishment is meted out. If this doesn’t happen, respect for the law goes down and crime rates go up.

That’s why Britain, formerly one of the most law-abiding Western nations, is rapidly turning into one of the most lawless. We have the highest rate of violent crime in Western Europe, and London is leading New York in every crime category except murder (the gap is closing).

Fear of the law is an essential complement to respect. Those contemplating an imprisonable offence should be afraid of retribution.

Andrew Pierce manfully came to my defence. Prison, he said, should have “an element of punishment”. More than an element, actually: punishment is all that prison is about, but I can’t complain: some support is better than none.

Miss Hirsch was aghast. Being in prison is awful, she said, what with poor people being deprived of their freedom. Quite. That’s the whole point: the bad people inside lose their freedom to enable the good people outside to enjoy theirs.

This isn’t to say that prisons should be hellholes. Civilised countries can’t have that. But what civilised countries must have is prisons that scare potential criminals away.

Because of the prevalent liberal mindset, so vividly exemplified by my opponents, this isn’t happening. We don’t have enough prisons, and those we do have are overcrowded and understaffed.

Over 7,000 warders have been made redundant in recent months, and the power of both governors and officers has been curtailed. Thus prisons are controlled not so much by the authorities as by the most feral convicts.

Really hardened criminals dish punishment out, rather than being on the receiving end of it. Anarchy reigns, with thousands of meeker inmates murdered, drugs flowing freely, and warders being assaulted.

The issue came up of extending sentences already served when the prisoner is deemed to remain a menace to society. This to me is an affront to the rule of law: keeping people in prison on the statistical likelihood of their reoffending violates the notion of due process.

When a man has served his time, justice demands that he be released. Sentences should be long enough to begin with, and they shouldn’t be routinely cut in half by tariffs. Yet judges are instructed to be lenient (550 sentences were toughened up on appeal last year).

Miss Hirsch unwittingly agreed by saying that short sentences are just awful. Alas, she wasn’t arguing in favour of longer ones: she believed that, rather than being sent down for a short spell, a criminal shouldn’t go to prison at all.

Actually, if our prisons worked as they’re supposed to, I’d be in favour of short sentences for a first offence, to give criminals a taste of much longer ones to come if they reoffend. However, I didn’t make that point, nor many others: time had run out.

…and why there’s no such thing (as proved by Pat Buchanan).

An American may well be a cultural or even a social conservative. Political conservatism, however, is problematic.

A conservative is defined by what he wishes to conserve. In the West, that can only be Christendom, whatever is left of it. Its political essence is adequately expressed by the triad ‘God, king and country’, establishing the descending order of loyalties.

Now the US was the first political embodiment of the Enlightenment, brought about by the urge to replace Christendom with a civilisation based on secular desiderata. Hence the conservative triad fell by the wayside directly the USA was first constituted.

God was shunted aside by the First Amendment, which, as Jefferson gleefully declared, erected “a wall of separation” between the church and the state. King vanished by definition. Only country remained, and it had to work overtime to fill the void left by the other two components.

As early as 1630 the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop alluded to Matthew 5:14 by describing the new community as a ‘city upon a hill’. Thus he implicitly likened it to the beacon that shone the word of God onto the rest of the world.

Since he did so in a secular context, the religion based on that premise could only be secular. Hence it was really an ideology pretending to be a religion: simulacrum gone sanctimonious, the transient pretending to be transcendent. Rather than worshipping God, the new nation chose to worship itself.

A secular religion was born, and it affects Americans’ politics more than any other creed. Real religion is relegated to a purely private matter, having little to do with quotidian life.

Imitating Christianity, the faithful exponents of the American religion have bifurcated into hermetic and crusading strains. Nowadays they call themselves, respectively, paleoconservatives and neoconservatives.

The paleocons believe that America should mostly practise her incomparable virtue at home, thereby illuminating the righteous path for the rest of mankind to tread. The neocons believe in America’s mission – and right – to force recalcitrant nations to see the light.

None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, and the two confessions of the American religion are at daggers drawn. This brings us to Pat Buchanan, the paleos’ flag-bearer, now that William F. Buckley is no longer with us.

Buchanan detests the neocons (who are indeed detestable) partly because they’ve won the battle for plum jobs in the academy and media, fields traditionally dominated by liberals (aka socialists).

The liberals sense kindred souls in the neocons. Sharing global ambitions, the two groups are committed to the big, omnipotent state, without which such ambitions can’t be pursued.

The neocons are typologically close, and therefore acceptable, to the liberals and welcome to their media. The paleos, on the other hand, are off limits, and their writers are mostly confined to small journals, such as The American Conservative started by Buchanan.

Buchanan also has visceral reasons to dislike the neocons: many of them are Jewish, and even Pat’s friends can’t deny his virulent anti-Semitism. For example, he once argued that Treblinka, where 900,000 Jews were murdered, “was not a death camp but a transit camp used as a ‘pass-through point’ for prisoners”.

Buckley, who loyally sprang to the defence of every fellow paleo, was unable to do so in Pat’s case. He wrote: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said… amounted to anti-Semitism.”

I don’t think Buchanan should be dismissed simply because he’s an anti-Semite. If we begin to ignore a man’s entire output for that reason, we’d have to shun such brilliant writers as Dostoyevsky, Chesterton, Belloc, Celine, Waugh et al.

However, when a man’s viscera defeats his reason so decisively, one suspects that the latter is flawed in other areas too, such as politics. Indeed, all the writers I’ve mentioned were often unsound in matters political. Buchanan is no exception, as his article on what he calls ‘the Trump Doctrine’ proves.

Buchanan takes this opportunity, as he always does, to lacerate the neocons. Now I dislike neoconservatism as much as he does (see my book Democracy As a Neocon Trick), but being wrong in general doesn’t mean being wrong in every particular.

True enough, the 2003 neocon-inspired invasion of Iraq was criminal and, which is worse, criminally stupid. An attempt to enforce heaven on earth can only create hell on earth, and so that foray has proved.

The neocons got intoxicated on the quasi-religious dogma of democracy and set out to shove it down the throat of every tribal society on earth. The Middle East didn’t swallow, and we’re all suffering from the resulting reflux (and influx).

But it doesn’t follow that everything the neocons support is nonsense, as Buchanan evidently believes: “They want to trash the Iran nuclear deal,” he writes, “though… U.S. intelligence agencies told us, with high confidence, in 2007 and 2011, Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.”

Buchanan’s faith in such agencies is touching. However, he ought to remember that they told us in 2003, with equally high confidence, that Iraq had WMDs, which precipitated the criminal folly of the invasion.

‘The Iran nuclear deal’ must be trashed, even though the neocons think so – the country isn’t developing long-range missiles to deliver Christmas cards, and Islam isn’t really a religion of peace.

Then Buchanan bewails the neocons’ desire “to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the eastern Baltic…”

That’s the kernel of the ‘Trump Doctrine”. Buchanan believes that “America’s vital interests” can be served only internally. Whatever happens outside the country doesn’t matter. This is dangerous folly quite on the par with neocon belligerence.

“Mr. Trump,” continues Buchanan, “has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.”

God help us, the man is mad. For in the same paragraph (!) Buchanan then writes that Truman “adopted a George Kennan policy of containment of the world Communist empire, the Truman Doctrine, and sent an army to prevent South Korea from being overrun”.

This strikes me as rather the opposite of Buchanan’s isolationism. Unlike him, Truman realised that the “Communist empire” threatened the world, including America. Hence America had both a practical and moral duty to contain it by force.

If Buchanan doesn’t know that Putin’s KGB Russia is a continuation of ‘the Communist empire’, and what has changed isn’t the objectives but only the slogans, he’s ignorant. If he thinks that America no longer has a practical and moral duty to contain this empire, he’s mad.

His madcap ‘Trump Doctrine’ echoes in every detail the most nauseating propaganda emanating from Putin’s mouthpieces. (This came two days ago from Soloviov, one of Putin’s favourite TV shills: “Russia sits on a tectonic plate that stretches over the entire Eurasian continent. That’s why we simply can’t be a regional power. The Russians are an imperial people by their very nature.”)

NATO, he writes, should stop its eastward expansion, meaning it should let Putin reclaim all the former Soviet satellites. But there’s no such thing as NATO’s expansion. There’s only a welcome the West extends to the victims of Soviet monstrosity who wish to distance themselves from a KGB Russia – the memory of what the KGB did to them is still fresh.

Neither coercion nor propaganda is involved. Eastern Europeans join the West freely and of their own accord. Obviously Buchanan doesn’t realise that the West has a moral obligation to support their desire to be free. Real politik reigns.

As it did in Munich and Yalta, two exercises in real politik that emboldened two diabolical regimes. Opposing them then cost America hundreds of thousands of lives (never mind the millions of other lives; Buchanan never does), and trillions of dollars.

Considering the technological advances of which modernity is so proud, opposing Putin’s diabolical regime given a free rein would cost infinitely more in both categories. Is that real politik enough for Buchanan? Are we talking vital interests now?

Then he says we should ditch the “obsolete” Article 5 of NATO, which is tantamount to abandoning the concept of collective security and all “war guarantees that have no connection to U.S. vital interests.”

If Buchanan doesn’t see that NATO serves US vital interests, he’s displaying the same myopia as Chamberlain did at Munich and Roosevelt at Yalta. Actually, it’s more like glaucoma, characterised by a reduced field of vision.

Buchanan interprets American interests in terms that aren’t just cynical and amoral, but also practically ruinous. He thinks that betraying all America’s allies is the right thing to do, for at the moment America only needs trade partners, not allies. Such abandonment of morality and honour is incompatible with conservatism, in the real sense of the word.

But practically speaking, what if the need for allies arises, as it certainly will, when the rise of Putin’s empire begins to threaten US interests even as defined in Buchanan’s narrow terms? What then?

The man has served all Republican presidents from Nixon on. I pray that President Trump can find better advisors – and listen to them. Judging by his pronouncements so far, I fear he won’t.

 

 

The other day I read Dr Pemberton’s article The Biggest Problem With Our Crumbling NHS? Everyone Thinks It’s Free.

That reminded me of the American writer William F. Buckley, who once put down a Moscow tour guide proudly telling him that healthcare in the Soviet Union was free. “Nothing is free, child,” said Buckley, in his usual supercilious manner.

Now, being an incurable pedant, I unfailingly turn the page when reading sentences like “One patient of mine failed to show for a Saturday appointment they’d begged for.” Who did the begging, Dr Pemberton? The patient or the mysterious ‘they’?

As a lifelong champion of PC, I naturally accept that unwarranted use of singular personal pronouns (with the possible exception of ‘its’) should be treated as a felony. But presumably Dr Pemberton knew the patient’s sex, which surely would have qualified as a mitigating circumstance if he faced trial for using ‘he’ or ‘she’.

However, the offensive sentence came in the middle of the article, while at the beginning I felt I’d found a soulmate.

“I have absolutely no interest in… ensuring the survival of the current system simply because of ideology,” wrote Dr Pemberton. Neither do I, I thought, overlooking at first the word ‘simply’, which should have put me on guard.

That word suggests that, in addition to ideology, the current system ought to survive for other, more substantial, reasons. But they don’t exist. The NHS was founded by socialists as purely an ideological construct, and it indeed survives “simply because of ideology”.

Socialism is based on lies, and it’s true to form in this area. The impression conveyed by NHS champions is that until 1948, when all NHS services came on stream, people had been dying in the streets like stray dogs.

In fact, when medical care in the UK went socialist, we had about 400,000 hospital beds. Now, 68 years later, we have 150,000, even though the population has since grown by 14 million, and we have millions of visitors for whom the NHS is indeed free.

Nor did outpatients have to wait weeks for GP appointments, which is a norm today – and they were prescribed drugs strictly on therapeutic, rather than financial, bases.

Moreover – are you ready for this? – the rich and the poor received the same drugs, which is far from being the case in the supposedly egalitarian NHS, with its postcode approach to healing.

The problem with the NHS is that it’s a megalomaniac structure sitting on the subsiding, termite-eaten foundation of a defunct ideology. Hence the only solution would be to slide it off that foundation and into the real world, where the private and public components of healthcare complement each other.

To his credit, Dr Pemberton knows how awful the NHS is. He bemoans the on-going closures of hospitals along with emergency and maternity units. The NHS, he says, “is becoming increasingly unsafe”.

And yet: “The NHS is, broadly speaking, the cheapest and fairest system, so it would be wrong to simply try to move to another model entirely”. Not just PC solecisms but split infinitives as well – a soulmate first found and then lost.

And it isn’t just grammar: he doesn’t seem to understand the difference between fair (or ‘equitable’, used in an earlier sentence) and the same for all. A poor man treated by top doctors in a municipal hospital is being treated equitably – even if a rich man is treated by the same doctors in a private room complete with extensive menus and wine lists.

Yes, the NHS costs less per capita than medical care does in most developed nations. But then no medical care at all would be even cheaper – and the NHS is clearly gravitating towards this cost-saving measure.

Yet what Dr Pemberton is proposing is just a bit of tinkering. First, he says, we should solve the NHS’s “biggest problem” by realising that it’s free only at the point of delivery, not in absolute terms.

Really? And I thought that no one had to pay for those CT scans and IVF treatments, that they all came courtesy of Father Christmas. In fact, I didn’t think that – and neither did anyone else with an IQ above 70.

But fine, we’ve solved the metaphysical problem of the NHS by recognising that we pay for it through taxes. What now? How do we translate our new-found wisdom into concrete physical steps?

Dr Pemberton’s suggestions are risible. The government should spend millions on “a national campaign” telling people “how much drugs and treatments cost” – and then admonish them paternalistically whenever they miss an appointment, like Dr Pemberton’s patient with their [sic] plural personality.

That’s it. Sorted. The NHS survives and thrives.

If the first part of Dr Pemberton’s solution treats us like fools, the second seems to assume we’re clinically retarded. How much of the £116.4-billion NHS budget would his penny-pinching save? Would it even pay for the cost of the “national campaign”?

I’m afraid Dr Pemberton is in the thrall of the same ideology he professes to decry. This prevents him from realising that, in his language, the problem with the NHS is systemic, not merely symptomatic.

What he’s suggesting is tantamount to treating brain cancer with two aspirins. I’m afraid improving our pathetic healthcare will take more than ill-considered palliatives.

The news that Trump describes Norman Peale, the author of the self-motivational book The Power of Positive Thinking, as his mentor didn’t surprise me. But it did scare me.

I’d better state my position straight away: I regard such shamanistic self-hypnosis as the height of vulgarity. But then Trump’s photograph, along with representations of his taste in interior design and wives, should be in the encyclopaedia, next to the entry for Vulgarity, n.

Courses in self-motivation are all based on the assumption that, if you will your problems to go away, they’ll obediently do so – provided you repeat your wish regularly and with dervish-like repetitiveness.

This sort of thing is doubtless useful in training insurance salesmen. Trainees are brainwashed to wake up and repeat several times “I’ll make 50 phone calls today”, even though 45 targets will tell them to perform a ballistically improbable procedure on themselves. But their positive thinking would enable them to take it in stride, knowing that the remaining five punters are prospects.

I think even my American friends (and family members) will agree that the salesman is the central figure of American life. It’s inevitable that a land defined by market pursuits will see buying and selling as its focal activity.

That national mindset has made the country materially successful, albeit at some cost to other aspects of life. It has also made most Americans, including those for whom sales isn’t ostensibly their occupation, attach universal significance to what’s essentially designed as a sales training course.

‘Positive thinking’ is thus widely accepted as a virtue, and so it may be for people who flog things to one another, or campaign for political office, which in the US amounts to the same thing. But it’s lethal to statesmanship, as any vulgarity is.

This isn’t to say that a statesman must be a man of subtle mind and refined tastes. Some of the most effective US presidents weren’t. Ronald Reagan, for example, was arguably the best post-war president, and yet he acted in Westerns, dyed his hair and wore brown suits.

But Reagan was endowed with the power of realistic and moral thinking, which is the most essential quality for a statesman. Realistic means neither positive nor negative in itself, but, to remain realistic, it has to gravitate more to the negative end, eschewing bien pensant positivity.

Ever since Augustine told the story of Adam and Eve in Christian terms, the concept of original sin has shaped Western thought, including political thought.

The assumption is that we’re fallible because we’re fallen, and it’s the assumption on which every successful commonwealth was ever built. Conversely, all attempts to erect a political structure on the positive premise of man’s inherent goodness have ended in disaster.

The Enlighteners were influenced by Rousseau’s positive thinking. The Swiss postulated that man’s primordial goodness was compromised by Christendom. Remove that pernicious pimple from the noble sauvage’s face, open the paths for all and sundry, and every problem will vanish.

Inspired by this positive thinking, chaps like Robespierre and Marat culled all and sundry in apocalyptic numbers. They thus expressed their disappointment with people, who yet again frustrated a beautiful ideal, as they inevitably do.

Hence a statesman shouldn’t inspire himself the way a salesman does. Things won’t happen because he wills them to happen, especially in foreign policy. Most other countries see life differently, and they can be safely assumed to be run by imperfect –often evil – people.

Now Donald Trump is an international property developer, which is a salesman par excellence. His stock in trade is talking people into risking millions in the hope of making tens of millions.

This activity can benefit from Peale’s platitudes, and it can also turn one into an effective motivational speaker. Trump certainly is that, although his facial expressions could do with some work – unless he expects to become a professional gurner.

But this ability is secondary in his new job, and I hope his advisors will explain to him what is primary. A statesman must understand the world not in terms of deals and sales, but in terms of power relationships and how they reflect our civilisation.

Unlike a salesman, who doesn’t think beyond his next contract, a Western statesman must think back to the millennia of Western civilisation and forward to at least the next several decades. For a treaty (a deal, in Trump’s parlance) may look good and profitable in the short term, but prove suicidal over the long run.

For example, there’s every indication that Trump plans to do some horse-trading with Putin and arrive at a mutually beneficial division of sales territories… sorry, I mean areas of influence. That would make global extinction a distinct possibility, but perhaps not in the next four or even eight years.

Supping with the devil, which is Putin, Trump needs to bring the long spoon of overwhelming military force. Just delivering a sales spiel and having the punter sign on the bottom line isn’t going to do the job.

I’m not sure that Trump can think in those terms, no matter how positive he is. One just hopes he’ll have advisors who know how to think realistically, which usually means thinking negatively.

 

A few months ago I asked a friend this question, only to be put to shame over being so irredeemably ignorant. Now he’s dead, the sense of shame has come back, deepened immensely by the page-long obituaries in all the broadsheets.

One such obituary described Cohen as a “poet, songwriter and singer, whose intensely personal lyrics exploring themes of love, faith, death and philosophical longing made him the ultimate cult artist”.

It’s when reading about men like Cohen that one realises how futile one’s own life has been. There was no escaping now: I had to listen to the lyrics covering so densely the territory between first principles and last things.

However, Cohen wrote hundreds of songs and, while my own ‘philosophical longing’ is strong, it doesn’t stretch that far. A choice had to be made, and what better aesthetic guide can one wish for than The Guardian, the paper for exactly the kind of people whose own longings overlap with Cohen’s?

So I’ve dutifully listened to what The Guardian described as “10 of his best songs”, and I hope you appreciate the lengths to which I go for your sake. Had I not felt duty-bound to quench your occasionally understated thirst for my insights, I would have quit after the first couple of verses.

For Cohen instantly made me upgrade my aesthetic ranking of our ex-Chancellor’s favourite rap group N**gaz With Attitude. The musical content of both is roughly equal, which is to say equally negligible, but the rap chaps have the distinct advantage of not being cloyingly pretentious, quasi-intellectual pseuds.

 Admittedly, N**gaz and Cohen aim at different, and to me equally alien, audiences. But at least they don’t camouflage their savagery the way Cohen hides behind the mask impenetrable to Guardian readers.

Far be it from me to impose my tastes on you, or to believe that an attempt to do so would have the slightest effect. You can make up your own mind, using The Guardian’s list as a lantern lighting the path leading up to Cohen’s towering genius.

Give me crack and anal sex! Give me back the Berlin Wall// Give me Stalin and St Paul

“Terrible, terrifying fun,” says The Guardian. That’s one way to describe it. However, my first impulse is to suggest that N**gaz With Attitude sue Cohen’s estate for plagiarism – not of words but of the underlying ‘philosophical longing’.

 If you want a doctor// I’ll examine every inch of you

One would think that most people outgrow the desire to play doctors and nurses at some point. Apparently not – philosophical poets retain the urge forever. But I’m curious what kind of doctor we’re talking about here. Gynaecologist? Dermatologist? The public has the right to know.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof// You saw her bathing on the roof// Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya// She tied you// To a kitchen chair// She broke your throne, and she cut your hair// And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

There’s no better proof of one’s own strong faith than to watch a girl bathe on the roof at night (how did she carry the bathtub there?) and then have her tie one to a kitchen chair. I may be missing some of the philosophical subtlety here, being a congenitally insensitive sort. But Hallelujah isn’t the first word this pseudo-poetic rubbish draws from my lips.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin// Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in// Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove// Dance me to the end of love

Given the choice of being touched with a girl’s naked hand or glove, I’d opt for the former, provided said hand isn’t holding a burning violin, doubling as a dance partner. I’ll pass on first-degree burns, thank you very much. Again, the subtlety eludes me altogether.

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning// They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever// While Suzanne holds her mirror

If the heroes are in the seaweed, they don’t mix with children in the morning. The heroes are dead, while the children are presumably alive. And is Suzanne holding her mirror to the drowned heroes or is she using it to spy on the precocious children gagging for love? Art’s fine line between the enigmatic and unintelligible is being overstepped here, methinks.

I’m standing on a ledge and your fine spider web// Is fastening my ankle to a stone [while in the past you] held on to me like a crucifix

It’s a man who holds on to a crucifix, not the other way around. And if there’s nothing but a fine spider web fastening Leonard’s ankle to the stone ledge, he’ll tumble into the abyss, and wouldn’t that be a shame.

You treated my woman to a flake of your life// And when she came back, she was nobody’s wife

Allow me to translate from the intensely personal, poetic and philosophical: somebody bonked Leonard’s girlfriend but wouldn’t marry her, so she came back to Leonard.

Enough? Certainly is for me. If that were the only choice, I’d take N**gaz With Attitude any day.

Leonard Cohen, RIP.