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Five hours ago 45,000 junior doctors went on strike in protest over the new NHS contract on offer.

The contract doesn’t look half-bad: a 13.5 per cent hike in salary and a cut in the maximum weekly hours from 91 to 72. However, to comply with the campaign promise of a seven-day NHS, the government proposes to pay the hours worked between 7 am and 7pm on Saturday at a normal rate, rather than the premium doctors currently receive.

The heirs to Hippocrates and Florence Nightingale like the first part, but hate the second. That’s why they’re on strike, with ambulance paramedics to follow in short order.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt reminded TV audiences of the campaign pledge. The NHS must be available seven days a week, he said, making one wonder what had happened to anguished patients on weekends before that promise was made.

Then Jeremy added a touch of melodrama. People will die, he confidently predicted, and their deaths will be on the greedy strikers’ hands. The NHS is skint. Jeremy is already throwing an extra £3.2 billion into that bottomless pit, and what do those greenhorns suggest he should use for even more money? He stopped just short of charging the strikers with multiple attempted murders.

Actually, if the experience of Belgium is anything to go by, things aren’t as bad as all that. Back in the 1960s, all Belgian doctors went on strike for several months. Counterintuitively, the mortality rate during those months showed a statistically significant decrease, prompting the oddball Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich to opine that all diseases are iatrogenic, meaning caused by doctors.

So people probably won’t die just yet, but the NHS surely ought to. Every day, strike or no strike, vindicates my belief that any giant socialist project, even if supposedly dedicated to public service, will end up dedicated to personal self-service.

The strikers are a case in point; the oath they took isn’t so much Hippocratic as hypocritical. They want their overtime pay and, if they don’t get it, those patients may bleed on the A&E floor for all the medics care.

Want to find some extra funds, Jeremy? I have an idea: fire 90 per cent of the administrators, those directors of diversity, optimisers of facilitation and facilitators of optimisation, all on six-figure salaries.

Not so long ago, a hospital was run by the head doctor and the matron, with a backroom accountant doing the sums. Now administrative staffs come close to outnumbering frontline medics, with hospital beds routinely cut to accommodate yet another director of diversity.

This stands to reason: any giant socialist project must spawn a vast freeloading bureaucracy taking care of the business at hand. That, contrary to the traditional belief, isn’t medical care any longer. The purpose of the NHS is the same as that of any other giant socialist project: increasing the state’s power.

Frontline medical staffs are not only extraneous to that purpose but can be downright threatening to it, and even those NHS employees who aren’t intelligent enough to realise this rationally feel it viscerally.

Hence the selfishness of the striking doctors. And hence also the generally pathetic state of our medical care, placing Britain firmly into the third world rubric.

It’s not just secondary care either – GP practices are nothing short of useless now. A mere dozen years or so ago I could get an appointment the next day or even, with some grovelling, the same day, and I always saw the same doctor.

These days it takes a fortnight if I’m lucky, and then I have no choice of which of the five GPs (and God knows how many locums) I’ll see. Any doctor will tell you that continuity of care is a significant factor: it helps if a doctor knows the patient inside out. Continuity is out of the window now, closely followed by care.

Ex-Chancellor Nigel Lawson quipped once that the NHS is the closest most Brits come to a religion. If so, and I do think he was right, they’re worshipping a false God.

An otherwise intelligent doctor (his intelligence slightly dimmed by a few glasses of Burgundy) once screamed at me that the NHS is the envy of Europe. If so, those envious Europeans must use up every ounce of willpower not to follow our example: ours is the only comprehensively socialised health service on the continent.

Every other country has a mixed system of public and private care. This is much more effective than the NHS – and much cheaper than our private medicine. But yes, I know that deep down they’re all turning green with envy.

As I keep saying, the NHS isn’t a disaster because it’s badly or corruptly managed. It’s a disaster because it’s based on a bad, corrupt idea, one that has been shown up for what it is everywhere it has been tried in earnest.

Underneath it all, this issue, as well as just about all others, isn’t technical but moral – and therefore also technical. The powerlust of our governing elite is as robust as ever, which is why the udders of this sacred cow have run dry.

 

“I say there is no darkness but ignorance,” wrote Shakespeare and, if that’s true, ours is the darkest age ever.

How pathetic that the term ‘Dark Age’ is now used to describe the Middle Ages. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

That was the time when men of the Carolingian empire began to aim those sublime cathedrals at the sky, when Hildegard von Bingen was composing those piercingly beautiful sounds, when Gregorian chant was filling the most glorious edifices ever built, when iconography not just presaged Renaissance painting but practically created it – the time of Anselm, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Bernard of Clairvaux, when some of history’s greatest minds uncovered some of the mystery of God.

There was less information to go around then, but infinitely more knowledge. And ours is an age that reminds us every day of the gaping chasm that exists between the two. It’s as if they nowadays exist in an inverse relationship: the more of the former, the less of the latter. Our is the real dark age.

To paraphrase ever so slightly, some are born ignorant, some achieve ignorance, and some have ignorance thrust upon them. That’s what modernity does, thrusting ignorance on the masses, having first primed them by egalitarian non-education.

To be fair, the illiterate have always been with us. And, if we define illiteracy strictly as the inability to read and write, there must have been more of them in Shakespeare’s time than now. But never before have the cultural barbarians been so proud of their barbarism. Never before have they been so smug.

Such unfashionable thoughts crossed my mind this morning, when I watched my customary 10 minutes of Sky News at breakfast. Two guests, a man and a woman, were commenting on yesterday’s news, and during my 10 minutes they talked about Shakespeare, specifically about the TV special dedicated to the 400^th anniversary of the Bard’s death.

As I found out to my bilious amazement, that programme, featuring Dame Judi Dench and some other great actors, was handily beaten in the ratings by a concurrent rerun of a Dad’s Army episode from 40 years ago.

Now, over my 30 years of living in London, I’ve probably watched my lapidary 10 minutes of that series. Admittedly, that’s not sufficient to form a qualified judgement but, for what it’s worth, I quite liked what I saw. I found the show reasonably inoffensive, if not captivating enough to make me want to watch another 10 minutes.

That’s about as much as I can say about Dad’s Army in good conscience. There’s quite a bit more I can say about the commentators’ reaction to the good news about the ratings war.

Rather than raving and ranting about the advent of a new Dark Age, they were quite good-natured about it. Most people, they said, find Shakespeare quite boring, which rather makes him irrelevant to modernity weaned on Dad’s Army, Neighbours and Eastenders.

Horses for courses and all that: Shakespeare was fine for the time of Elizabeth I, but not for the time of Elizabeth II, enlightened as it is by Google and Microsoft. We live in a democracy, don’t we? Majority rules, and in this case majority prefers Tey-Vey to Shakespeare. That’s what modernity is all about. People vote for politicians once every few years at the booths, and they vote for products every day at the till.

Shakespeare is our greatest contribution to world culture, acknowledged the commentators jovially, but let’s face it – he’s a minority taste now. That’s why he has lost, Dad’s Army has won, and that’s all there is to it.

The most obvious thought didn’t occur to either commentator or, even if it had, they knew better than to express it: Shakespeare is our greatest contribution to world culture specifically because he is, and always has been, a minority taste.

The greatest achievements of the human spirit have never been accessible to the majority, but this isn’t something that’s any longer possible to say with impunity. One can just about utter something along those lines when talking about nuclear physics or microbiology (both actually much easier to appreciate than a Shakespeare sonnet or a Bach fugue).

But say it about art and, depending on your interlocutor’s upbringing and temperament, you’ll be branded an elitist, a reactionary or even a fascist. You like Macbeth, I like Dad’s Army, they like hard porn – who’s to say one taste is better than others? They’re just different.

Like all great art, Shakespeare’s work can be enjoyed on many different levels. But it can be appreciated only on the highest one, where refined aesthetic, cultural and spiritual sensibilities reside.

That is the lot of the few, and always has been. However, a defining characteristic of our Dark Age, inaugurated by that great misnomer, the Enlightenment, is that it’s the crude, illiterate and uncultured who set the tone – to a point where their cultural betters are widely mocked as ‘irrelevant’.

Oh well, one can say so much on this subject. But getting worked up isn’t good for my health – and anyway, as we all know, “brevity is the soul of wit”.

No US tourist can do London without paying respect to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and my friend Barack Hussein is no exception.

Anyway, he told me he deserved a bit of relaxation and a bit of culture: the former was sorely needed, while the latter was a chance to show the world that Barack Hussein had interests and aspirations beyond politics. After all, soon he won’t be in politics for much longer.

The culture tour didn’t disappoint. The company put on a show featuring bits and pieces of Hamlet, with the slings and arrows soliloquy taking centre stage. To make Barack Hussein feel at home, it was delivered by a black actor, and Barack was nodding approvingly.

After all, Shakespeare is a universal genius, isn’t he? So who says that Danish prince always has to be played by a honky? After all, black people had to suffer from transracialism for centuries, with whitey crackers putting shoe polish on their faces to play Othello. Now it’s the whites’ turn to moan about the incongruity of it all.

Speaking of slings and arrows, Barack Hussein had flung quite a few of his own before venturing across the river, all aimed at those Limeys who just won’t do as they’re told about Europe. Get out indeed. Don’t they know that most Americans, including, truth be told, Michelle, have always seen Europe as a single country anyway?

They go to Florence and ask for directions to the Colosseum, Rialto Bridge or even the Parthenon, as testified by the Scotsman who owns an English-language bookshop next to the Duomo. The Colosseum is in Rome, he’d explain patiently to yet another lost lamb wandering into his shop, Rialto Bridge is in Venice, and the Parthenon is, well, in Greece. This often perplexes the visitors even more, eliciting desperate follow-up questions, along the lines of “And where are we?”

In those guys’ minds Europe is already a single entity, and Barack Hussein has no intention of disillusioning them. Make no mistake about it, being a Harvard man, he knows that, say, Bulgaria and Sweden are as different from each other as either of them is different from Guatemala.

But Barack Hussein, he don’t give two flying bucks about that. His advisers done told him it’s in America’s interests for Britain to remain in the EU, and that’s that. What’s good for America is good enough for the world, and it’s certainly good enough for the Limey racists who used to oppress Kenya, specifically its Nyangoma-Kogelo part.

One idea Barack Hussein’s advisers floated by him had a huge commercial potential for the good old US of A. With Britain mainlined into the EU, they said, we could put a fence around Europe, call it Disney EU and charge admission. One ride could be called ‘Europe’s Mickey Mouse politicians’, 20 euros to get on, but hold on to your wallet all the time you’re riding.

Barack Hussein’s buddy Dave, he knows what’s what. That’s why he asked Barack Hussein for help. Lay it on thick, blood, you’re my main man, Dave said, or words to that effect. Actually what he did say was, let’s take up arms against a sea of UKIP troubles and by opposing end them.

He sure talks funny, thought Barack Hussein at the time, but then what do you know? He went to the Globe and heard that actor brother recite those very words on stage. So Dave hadn’t just asked for help. He was being a hoity-toity Limey, showing off his education, just like those racists who oppressed Kenya, specifically its Nyangoma-Kogelo part.

Perchance to dream? Well, dream on, Dave, my main man, thought Barack Hussein. The insolence of office, my ass. Dream about being a player on the global stage, like Barack Hussein. You ain’t nothing but a flunky, bro, to both the EU and the US of A. You want me to lay it on thick, to save yo political ass? You’re my man.

Unless Britain be in the EU, declared Barack Hussein, it can whistle Dixie for the next trade deal with the US of A. Well, maybe not Dixie, maybe whistling north of the Mason-Dixon line would be better. But that’s the general idea.

So Europe cracks the whip, Britain makes the trip. And if the referendum goes the wrong way, he, Barack Hussein, will personally see to it that it’ll be like post-WWII – Britain on the breadline with all the US chits called in, and this time it’ll be cash on the nail. If the Limeys have any cash left by then, that is.

And them Limeys mustn’t think that things will change when Hilary gets in. No, Siree Bob. Hilary, she be a cracker but she has the same advisers as Barack Hussein. So she’ll know what to do. She’ll tell the Limeys to stay mainlined into Brussels or else.

To be or not to be, my ass, thought Barack Hussein. To be, that’s the answer to that. You be part of the EU, you walk the line, you be fine. Or else you’ll see them slings and arrows like you done never seen’em before.

 

 

 

 

Madonna, devastated by Prince’s death, summed it up beautifully and irrefutably: “He changed the world!! A true visionary.”

That was a relatively subdued response to the global tragedy, but then Madonna is known for her self-restraint. Others were more effusive, with the word ‘genius’ bandied about more than any other.

TV news talked about Prince for days, with his immortal music providing the background noise. Genius! The world of music will never be the same! The world will never be the same!

The panegyrics filled me with admiration – mainly for the announcers, whose taste in music was clearly much better than mine. To me, all those pop geniuses sound exactly the same, but the announcers evidently have such refined tastes that they can tell who is a genius and who isn’t.

One could get the impression the eulogists only stopped short of describing Prince as God by a massive exertion of will. However, oblique references were made to his martyrdom, which is how a pop star’s death by overdose, AIDS or suicide is subliminally perceived.

It’s as if dying a natural death would mean letting the side down. Let those establishment sell-outs succumb to cancer or heart attack. For a true pop giant, that’s too banal for words.

A great military leader has to die in battle to be truly consistent. A great Sumo wrestler must die of obesity, ideally in his 30s. A divine musical genius has to OD, kill himself or die of AIDS to fulfil his destiny.

Prince satisfied that requirement, along with many others. There has never been a musician like him, there’s never been a genius like him, the story went. Piers Morgan described the OD victim as ‘truly great’, partly because he could play 27 instruments.

That makes Prince at least five times the musician Mozart was, who never even heard of the bongos, much less played them with unmatched virtuosity. And Prince has Chopin thrashed 27 to one – poor old Frédéric never even touched any instrument but the piano.

Yet there’s more to Prince than just musicianship of stratospheric attainment. Being hopelessly retrograde, I insist that, if songs are to mean anything, the lyrics are as important as the music. Those whose pop sensibilities are of a higher order than mine insist this isn’t the case with electronically enhanced music – no one can make out the words anyway.

I beg to differ. If words are only part of the incoherent noise, then why have them at all? I mean Prince wasn’t Felix Mendelssohn, he didn’t do songs without words. He must have felt that his genius was conveyed verbally as well as musically, and he was right.

I’ve looked at the lyrics of some of the songs, and they confirm the prevailing assessment of the dead genius: each word communicated his near-divine message to the world with nothing short of unparalleled philosophical depth, fully matching his musical mastery. But judge for yourself:

“2night why don’t we skip all the foreplay, mama,// And just get down here on the floor?”

Love is absolute, the artist seems to be saying. As such, it abhors incremental steps and preliminaries. Its expression must be immediate and, critically, independent of bourgeois comforts, such as a bed. And to Prince philosophical absolutes aren’t merely profound. They are “pretty”, meaning imbued with an ineffable aesthetic sense:

“We can f*** until the dawn// Makin’ love ‘til cherry’s gone// Erotic City, can’t you see?// F*** so pretty, you and me.”

I won’t presume to give true credit to the poetic refinement of Prince’s lyrics. Suffice it to say that, as a true philosophical poet, he’s never predictable in his rhymes or absence thereof:

“Pussy got bank in her pockets// Before she got dick in her drawers// If brother didn’t have good and plenty of his own// In love pussy never did fall.”

This allows us another fascinated peek into Prince’s complex Weltanhschauung: by thus glorifying a feline, he makes a neo-Franciscan point about animals being our siblings in that we all share the same Father – and indeed many commentators singled out Prince’s deep religiosity as his most salient characteristic.

I’ve mentioned before that Prince’s rhyming patterns are unpredictable and they are often hidden and implied. It’s as if the religious philosopher in Prince suggests that we can only ever be vouchsafed so much of God’s design. Note also the unorthodox spelling, reinforcing the enigmatic effect:

“Gett off, 23 positions in a one night stand// Gett off, I’ll only call you after if you say I can// Gett off, let a woman be a woman and a man be a man//Gett off, if you want to, baby here I am, here I am.”

I’ve never, and neither have you I’m willing to bet, ever realised that it takes trying 23 positions in a one-night stand to express the true nature of woman and man, that divine ontological dialectic going back to the Garden of Eden. But then neither of us is a genius of cosmic proportions. Oh what an irreplaceable loss the world has suffered!

Prince, RIP.

Unsound arguments can make even very intelligent people sound daft, and there are no sound arguments in favour of the EU, at least I have yet to hear one.

The best one can hope for is dubious but not grossly offensive generalities. For example, an otherwise intelligent Frenchman told me the other day that at this perilous time “we must stand together”.

This raises all sorts of questions, such as: “Stand together with whom and against whom?”, “What does standing together mean in practical, rather than idealistic, terms?”, “Since when does ‘standing together’ have to mean forming a single state?” or “Has the EU demonstrated any ability to cope with our perilous time?”

None of these can be answered with any rhetorical rigour, and neither can any other probing questions about the EU. Still, one must recognise the difference between a certain deficit of logic, as displayed by my friend, and clinical idiocy.

Alas, many arguments proffered by EU champions are clearly inspired by precisely that medical condition. What’s worse, those who suffer from this handicap don’t mind sharing their cretinous views with the public, in the confident belief that the public will gobble up any intellectual droppings it’s served.

Enter Sir Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican Centre. “The contribution Europe has made to the arts in London and the UK is very significant,” wrote Sir Nicholas in The Evening Standard. (For Europe read the EU, which to the likes of Sir Nicholas, are fully synonymous.)

The expedient by which said contribution has been made is, according to him, “free movement of labour”.

By way of illustration, Sir Nicholas came up with an anecdote from his own recent success at the Barbican. That was a new production of Antigone by Sophocles (Greek!), starring Juliette Binoche (French!), directed by Ivo van Hove (Belgian!) and in association with the theatre company Toneelgroep (Dutch!).

Anyone refusing to abandon logic as an intellectual tool will then have to make certain ineluctable inferences. Such as to assume that, until the Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats hatched the plans for a wicked European federation that Britain has since joined, artistic labour never moved freely enough to reach London.

Yet that’s not the case. French actresses especially were a big hit in London even in Victorian times, when the Brits were still pig-headed enough to think they just might survive without belonging to the same state as Romania and Greece.

Mademoiselle Rachel, for example, was a huge success in London as early as in 1841, and in the 1880s Sarah Bernhardt captivated London audiences with her explosive rendition of Cleopatra. At the end Cleopatra demolished her palace and rolled over the debris in a paroxysm of rage. “How different,” an elderly English woman was overheard commenting, “how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.”

And not so long ago I got the chance to glance at London concert programmes from the late 1940s, when the EU was already a twinkle in Jean Monnet’s eye but not yet a fully gestated reality.

And what do you know, in just one season the German Furtwängler was conducting all nine Beethoven (another German) symphonies, Cortot (French) was playing Chopin (Polish), Szigeti (Hungarian) was playing Bloch (Swiss), and dozens of other foreigners were playing works from all over the world – with no free movement of labour anywhere in sight.

So what point was Sir Nicholas making, other than indirectly complaining of an early onset of dementia? The point was that he loves the EU, but can’t come up with any other than spurious arguments in its favour.

Neither can anybody else, not even, by the looks of it, that giant intellect Gordon Brown, who managed to destroy Britain’s economy at a lightning speed seldom equalled by any other Chancellor. But he did rival Kenyon for most refreshing idiocy.

Brexit, explained Gordon, won’t restore Britain’s sovereignty. Sovereignty proceeding from Westminster is a 19^th century utopia, he added. This ignores the millions of Britons who died for our sovereignty in two 20^th century world wars. Little did they know that they were a century too late.

And now it’s definitely too late for political independence, according to Gordon the Moron. The world is too globalised for that. Just look at America, the world’s biggest superpower.

You think it’s independent? Not one bit, according to Gordon. America too has dissolved her sovereignty in such supranational organisations as Nato and the WTO.

It takes an advanced state of mental retardation not to know the difference between entering into a military alliance or a trade association and forming a single state. It takes dishonesty on a scale one doesn’t expect even from politicians to know the difference but still spout such rubbish.

Do you think that I’m being too harsh? These people aren’t idiots? Well, in that case they have to think we are. And we can prove them right by not tossing their inanities into their faces on 23 June.

 

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is 90 today, meaning that best wishes are in order. Yet what’s also called for is contemplation tinged with regrets.

Outsiders, especially those who, like the French and Americans, live in republics, simply don’t get the Queen. Nor do they get our constitution, which they foolishly say is nonexistent because it’s unwritten.

That’s like saying that, because a mother hasn’t expressed love for her children in a sonnet, she doesn’t love them. Her love is written not on paper but in the heart, and so – as Joseph de Maistre argued so convincingly – is any constitution worth having.

If a constitution does live there, a written document is redundant. If it doesn’t, a written document is useless and even slightly vulgar, like a marriage contract stipulating the frequency of sex.

Our constitution is the highest political achievement in history. That is so specifically because it wasn’t codified in a single founding document, because it represents two millennia of careful sifting of precedents and customs that withstood centuries of scrutiny.

These seeped into the nation’s bloodstream, each writing a word, a sentence or a paragraph in the people’s hearts, that eternal and most reliable depository for constitutional wisdom. Nonexistent? This cardiac document puts to shame any written one, be that the US Constitution or the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.

Lord Asquith once put it with limpid lucidity: “… the great bulk of… our constitutional practices do not derive their validity and sanction from any Bill which has received the formal assent of the King, Lords and Commons. They rest on usage, custom, convention, often of slow growth in their early stages… but which in the course of time received universal observance and respect.”

The two things outsiders and, alas, some Brits don’t get are so intertwined as to be one and the same. The monarch personifies the constitution and the constitution embodies the monarch. One is impossible without the other.

Americans and Frenchmen often say that the Queen is a mere symbol, lacking any real power. First, that’s not exactly true. Second, those same people who pour scorn on Her Majesty worship their own symbols with nothing short of idolatry.

What can incense an American more than seeing the Old Glory abused? Yet a flag is nothing but a symbol, it has no other value.

The Queen is so much more than that. She sits atop a time-proven structure of power delicately balanced among the monarch, elected representatives of the people, and the unelected peers, there to make sure the balance doesn’t tip too far one way or the other.

What we’re witnessing now is a gross distortion of the traditional balance. The House of Lords has lost its historical role, with the peers now as susceptible as the MPs to political pressures, the Commons exercising almost dictatorial powers only made less so by pernicious EU diktats, and the Queen having next to no physical power. This isn’t to say she has no power at all.

As head of the state church, Her Majesty unifies the country within a vital institution, this irrespective of other confessions or religions practised on the British Isles. As head of the Commonwealth, she’s the Head of State in 51 countries with a combined population of 2.1 billion souls. In both capacities, she is the essential adhesive, for without her the Church of England would be disestablished and the Commonwealth wouldn’t exist at all.

But the Queen’s significance goes beyond such material aspects. For every state needs to have a legitimising raison d’être, without which its sovereignty would be subject to speculation and doubt.

St Paul taught that “all powers that be are ordained of God”, and one finds it hard to believe that such God-given powers are vested in parliaments and prime ministers. Yes, it’s possible to establish a line of historical descent linking today’s Parliament with the Witenagemot or our PM Dave with William Cecil.

But predating Cecil and even the Witenagemot is royal power whose origins are impossible to pinpoint to a specific date or event. Referring to de Maistre again, royal power goes back so far that we might as well assume it’s derived from God.

In other words, the Queen may not have much material power, but she is the current link in the historical chain tying our sovereignty together – she is the only constituent of power that unites the physical with the metaphysical. As such, she’s the essence of Britain’s political soul.

Even for that reason alone, divesting the Queen of her vital role by transferring her sovereignty over the realm to the wicked foreign contrivance going by the name of the European Union is an act of treason.

The British have the chance to undo it on 23 June, but one fears they won’t take it. Too many of them have become as alien as Americans or the French to our political tradition. Too many don’t get our constitution and the Queen.

But meanwhile, Happy Birthday, Your Majesty! Long may you reign over us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few days ago Pope Francis visited the island that gave its name to the ‘L’ in LGBT. His Holiness could have taken this opportunity to reaffirm the Church’s position on sexual morality.

That chance went missing though. Instead the pontiff picked 12 Muslim refugees out of the thousands huddled on Lesbos and took them home to the Vatican. The Holy See will pay for their upkeep until they get ‘a new life’, as the grateful migrants put it. The refugees hailed the Pope as ‘a saviour’, stopping short of calling him ‘the Saviour’, that term not being part of their religious lexicon.

This was supposed to be an act of Christian mercy, and so it could have been had any private individual done it. When done by a hugely influential public figure, this one-man salvation trick strikes me as an ill-advised publicity stunt.

“All refugees are children of God,” said the Pope, which is true. Yet currently over a million such children are cooped up in Europe, having arrived there illegally. Millions more will doubtless arrive soon.

Moreover, I’d suggest that at least two billion people in the world would like to settle in Europe, and a good proportion of those must be hatching plans for doing so. How many of them should we encourage? How many should Europe welcome? All of them?

According to our Chancellor’s calculations, three million will have arrived in Britain by 2030. Though he didn’t say so in as many words, probably most of them will be Muslims. Germany and France, those unwavering champions of the free movement of people, are likely each to receive a similar number.

And we aren’t even talking yet about the 75 million Turks brought into the Schengen Agreement as a bribe for not sending even more Muslims to Lesbos. How many of them will grace us with their arrival? I’d suggest six zeroes at least, more likely seven – this on top of the 40 million Muslims living in Europe already.

Does His Holiness think this is a good thing? Does he want Europe to be inundated with people who not only aren’t part of our civilisation but hate it cordially? Does he want Europe to become a caliphate, a goal to which many migrants are explicitly and doctrinally committed? Does he want more Europeans to fall victim to terrorist acts, which at least 10 per cent of the new arrivals are trained to perpetrate?

His gesture, admitted the Pope magnanimously, is only “a drop in the ocean”, but he hoped that as a result “the ocean will never be the same again”. His hope is my fear. The ocean may “never be the same again” because its waters will be poisoned.

When Jesus showed mercy, for example to the woman taken in adultery, it was partly to make a point. In that case, the point was that laws must be leavened with mercy because all of us are sinners who should never forget the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness.

What point was Pope Francis making? He is, after all, heir to the throne first occupied by one of Jesus’s most prominent disciples.

I’d humbly suggest that the Vatican’s first aim should be to guard, protect and spread Christianity. Therefore its first responsibility ought to be to protect the secular realm that historically fosters Christian faith.

Does His Holiness seriously think that either desideratum will be best served by implanting new Islamic saplings into the soil already contaminated by atheism?

If he does, then his action is laudable. But those of us who think differently fear that such stunts will further undermine the moral authority of the Church at a time when it could do with some bolstering.

Yesterday, for example, I put forth a completely secular argument against abortion because, I wrote, non-Christians wouldn’t accept one based on the moral authority of the Church. But then I wondered, why not?

When all is said and done, moral authority, as opposed to moral sense, must be outside us to have any value universally recognised and deferred to – to have any practical value, in other words. Now even atheists, provided they’re intelligent atheists, must realise that restoring the Church to her historical role of moral arbiter would have a resuscitating effect on society.

Whence else would a universal authority come? The Equalities Commission? LGBT publications? Environmental crusaders? The government, God forbid?

The first step in this mental process is to recognise the need for a universal, unifying moral authority. The second step is to realise that, in the West, only the Church can act in that capacity.

And the third step is to lament that, by performing perverse publicity tricks to indulge his leftward inclinations, the Vicar of Christ squanders even more of the moral capital accumulated by the Church since the time Francis’s job was done by Peter.

 

 

 

 

 

For two Christians there’s nothing to argue about: abortion is wrong because the Church says so. Why waste time debating?

Yet Christianity is a rational religion. Hence reluctant as a Christian may be to waste breath discussing abortion, he could if he had to. And he’d have to when talking to an infidel. The Christian wouldn’t then be able to invoke the authority of the Church: his interlocutor simply wouldn’t accept it.

Therefore, if a rational Christian wanted to win the argument, he’d have to step outside religion. Or so he might think. Yet no Westerner, even a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, can help touching upon Christianity, if only tangentially.

For ultimately the pros and cons of abortion can be crystallised to a simple question: does the foetus possess a human life or is it merely a part of the mother’s body? Is it typologically close to you and me or, say, to the appendix?

If the answer is the former, then any moral person would have to be anti-abortion: a human life mustn’t be taken arbitrarily. But why not?

We’ve shut the door on Judaeo-Christian morality, but it has climbed in through the window. Because the answer is that our fundamental laws derive from the Decalogue, in this case from the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”.

Either this commandment is part of our congenital make-up, as Kant believed, or an acquired taste, but it’s so firmly ingrained that even atheists agree that yes, taking a human life arbitrarily is wrong.

If so, a logical pro-abortion debater has only two ways to go: he has to claim either that a foetus isn’t human at all or at least that it’s not yet human enough. The first option is illogical: a developing human life is still a human life.

Hence the pro-abortion chap must insist that a foetus only has a potential for human life, not life as such. This moves abortion morally close to contraception: a life not so much destroyed as prevented. Here the pro chap curiously joins forces with the Church, although of course the Church believes that preventing life is wrong, and he doesn’t.

Since nobody denies that sooner or later a foetus will become fully human, even if it isn’t already, the argument can be further reduced to a simple question: at what point does a foetus become fully human?

Because abortion is always discussed in America more vigorously than elsewhere, especially at election time, this brings us to a landmark decision by the US Supreme Court: Roe v. Wade (1973).

The Court ruled that the right to privacy extends to a woman’s decision to have an abortion. However, the Court illogically ruled that this right must be balanced against “protecting the potentiality of human life”. In the third trimester this ‘potentiality’ reaches a point of no return.

Thereby the Court implicitly claimed it pinpointed exactly when life begins during pregnancy: six months plus one day. This is patently ridiculous, and in 1992 the third trimester was replaced with ‘foetal viability’, defined as “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid.”

That point, according to the Justices, occurred at 23-24 weeks, or, depending on medical advances, even earlier. The UK Abortion Act reached the same conclusion in 1967, setting the legal limit at 24 weeks, with no potential medical advances mentioned.

Alas, any limit is so arbitrary that it holds no logical water whatsoever. So at 167 days no human life exists, only to appear miraculously a day later? Or, acknowledged the Supreme Court, it could even be 161 days but not a minute earlier, barring ‘medical advances.’

Well, the medical advances have been such that a foetus can be created and grown artificially, with no mother’s womb in sight. Conversely, if we disregard artificial methods, a foetus can no more survive on its own two months after birth than two months before. The difference between prenatal and postnatal abortion stops being immediately obvious.

When intelligent people can’t argue a case logically, there’s something wrong with the case. So there is, for conception is the only indisputable beginning of life. Any other moment is subject to doubt – and any doubt should swing the argument towards the anti end. If it’s at all possible that abortion represents an arbitrary destruction of a human life, it must be banned.

I once made this argument to a pragmatic thinker who then asked a practical question, as pragmatic thinkers will: “So, if abortion is unlawful, should the woman be prosecuted for murder?”

My reply was that, if an anti-abortion law exists, then the law-breaker must be punished, though I’d be more inclined to treat as the perpetrator not the woman, but the abortionist.

However, even the staunchest Catholic would admit that abortion isn’t identical with murder. For a doctor charged with performing an abortion may present a valid medical defence. The choice, he may plead, was between preserving either the mother’s life or the foetus’s, not an uncommon situation.

Abortion then moves morally closer to justifiable self-defence, which isn’t a crime. The conclusion is that, even as not every taking of a human life is prosecuted, neither should every abortion. But laws against killing still exist – and so, rationally speaking, must laws against abortion.

Our Chancellor George Osborne outlined the problem that’ll never arise. But, just in case it did arise, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron offered a promising solution.

The problem according to George is that Brexit will cost every British family £4,300 per year for any foreseeable future. It has to be said that, though George is an accomplished liar, he still has a lot to learn.

When you lie verbally, George, you can say any old thing. You may, for example, suggest that Brexit will make every British man impotent and every British woman promiscuous. Or that continental policemen will be ordered to shoot on sight anyone with beer on his breath who calls them ‘mate’.

But if you lie numerically, avoid round numbers. The more precise the numbers you quote, the more believable they’ll be. So it was a mistake to say that we’d be £4,300 poorer every year: the two zeroes at the end bespeak slapdash calculations.

How much better it would have been had you used a more precise numeral, such as £4,297.63. The way you put it also sounds as if you made no allowances for the inflation rate. It’s negligible now, but it’s likely to go up sooner or later, isn’t it George?

So you should have specified that Brexit will cost each potentially despondent British family £4,297.63 as a down payment, which sum will then grow… no, let’s put it more officially, it will be subject to an annual incremental upward augmentation at 2.74 per cent over the inflation rate.

That would have worked a treat, George, and no one would even think to question the mental processes by which you arrived at £4,300. But the way you put it, even our innumerate victims of comprehensive education are beginning to smell a rat.

The rodent still isn’t as big as it would have been had you refrained from putting a number on the imminent disaster altogether. Had you said “Brexit will cost every family a whole lot of dosh”, the rat would be the size of an average golden retriever. This way it’s still manageable.

Anyway, not to worry. The referendum is still a couple of months away… no, 66 days away (precise numbers do carry more weight). You’ll be able to get your act together and lie with much greater credibility – or rather with a 26.8 per cent increase in credibility.

However, should George’s darker prediction turn out to be right in principle, if not in every detail, Manny (the name by which Finance Minister Emmanuel Macron likes to be known to his friends) has charted a straight thoroughfare to economic salvation.

Should Britain be insane enough to abandon the celestial economic benefits of EU membership, said Manny, she’ll end up like Jersey. As an erstwhile New York resident, I was tempted to ask ‘Which exit?’, but then I realised Manny was talking about the Channel island, not the American state.

As a current resident of France (under six months a year, Mr Taxman, in case you’re wondering), I was tempted to ask Manny to pinpoint the benefits more accurately, with the kind of precision I recommended to George.

For the economy over which Manny presides provides a less than convincing illustration. Not to cut too fine a point, it’s a basket case, with a soul-destroying unemployment rate (25 per cent for young people), negligible growth that only politesse prevents one from calling stagnation, the single currency suffocating exports, unsupportable social costs made catastrophic by uncontrollable migration (to get much worse, now Schengen has been extended to Turkey), constant strikes and riots – you name it.

As to Britain becoming like Jersey, is that a threat or a promise, Manny? You mean we, like Jersey, will have a maximum tax rate of 20 per cent, as opposed to 45 per cent we have now or 75 per cent in some countries that’ll remain nameless (restent anonymes)?

By injecting new energy into the economy, that measure alone will shave quite a few pounds off the putative (in reality nonexistent) cost of Brexit. Why, if taxes were just 20 per cent, tops, people would no longer annoy Dave by looking for offshore shelters. Here, Dave, have your 20 per cent and choke on it, would be the common reaction.

And would we, like Jersey, become an international tax haven, albeit on a vastly greater scale? That would elevate the City of London from its present position of global financial dominance to that of global financial monopoly.

A parallel raft of corporate tax breaks would act as a powerful magnet to foreign investment, which, according to both George and Manny, would disappear the second after we vote Leave. Manny didn’t mention this Jersey-like measure, but it was definitely in the back of his mind.

Also, are we going to have Jersey-like social tranquillity, unlike in some countries one could mention (Manny knows one very well)? Strict residence requirements? Negligible crime rate?

Anyway, I thank Manny from the bottom of my heart (je le remercie de tout coeur). What a lovely idea, being more like Jersey and less like, well, France.

The title of Niall Ferguson’s article Brexit Happy Morons Don’t Give a Damn About the Costs of Living is so self-explanatory that I’m surprised he felt the need to write any text below it.

Yet write it he did, with every word shattering the American glass house in which Prof. Ferguson lives. The house already reduced to shards, he concludes the article by saying, “Perhaps, as the old poem says, I am the one who is the moron. But I do give a damn about this country’s economic future. And when I see the risks of Brexit being glossed over in ways that would disgrace an undergraduate essay, I feel anything but happy.”

While this devotion to the economy of the country in which he hasn’t lived for years may strike some as hypocritical, the ending does elucidate the thought in the title for those with learning difficulties. But the text in between only reinforces my conviction that writers should disclose their political beliefs.

I favour a rating symbol accompanying every piece. For example, mine would be ‘C’, standing for ‘conservative’ and not for the epithet flung by some of my detractors. Other ratings could be ‘LW’ for ‘left wing’, ‘or, say, ‘NF’ for ‘neo-fascist’ (and not ‘Nigel Farage’, although his detractors can’t tell the difference).

Ferguson’s rating should definitely be ‘NC’, for ‘neocon’. He’s one of those annoying Brits who’ve pledged loyalty to probably the most objectionable and definitely the most influential movement in American politics.

The neocons have discovered the knavish trick of combining conservative-sounding phraseology with Trotskyist cravings realised through appropriate policies. (I expand on this in my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick.)

The essence of Trotskyism is ‘permanent revolution’, non-stop aggression aimed at spreading a certain ideology around the globe, thereby unifying it under the aegis of a central authority.

In Trotsky’s case, that ideology was communism; in the neocons’ case, it’s democracy, American style. In neither case does the ideology matter.

Even as the real purpose of mass murder is to murder masses, the real purpose of aggressive internationalism is aggressive internationalism. This doesn’t change whatever colour flag the aggressors run up the pole.

The neocons’ innate internationalism makes them natural champions of European federalism. This dovetails with their American jingoism.

Perhaps they feel that the global US domination they crave will be easier to achieve if Europe presented a single target. Or else they think that American trade would benefit from Europe being a single customer.

Either way, this is the context in which Ferguson’s Sunday Times article must be read. Rather than analysing a complex problem, he’s but a dummy to his neocon ventriloquists.

This unenviable role makes Ferguson drop even below his normal intellectual standards, which fall somewhat short of dizzying heights under the best of circumstances.

For example, he first correctly castigates IMF predictions for being notoriously unreliable. Then, with the absence of logic lamentable in an academic, he gives unquestioning credence to their doomsday forecasts for Brexit.

Freguson’s rationale for such childish credulity is that “the IMF’s intrinsic optimism matters because if the organisation is pessimistic about something, it is very likely to be understating the problem.” Yet what matters about both the optimism and the pessimism is that this organisation tends to be wrong and borderline incompetent.

Then he laments that the pound is 12 per cent down on the euro since November. “Could it fall further? You bet,” forecasts Ferguson, taking his cue from the optimistic-pessimistic IMF.

Such concern for the value of our currency in someone whose income is denominated in dollars betokens laudable selflessness. As someone who pays for half his life in euros, not in pounds in which my income is denominated, I grieve with Ferguson.

However, I rejoice in the knowledge that a weaker pound spells good news for our exports. This may just protect them from being totally wiped out by Brexit, which is part of the party line mouthed by Ferguson.

In general, everything he says about economics, and his argument is wholly economic, betrays both his ignorance of the subject and his willingness to march in step with his neocon Parteigenossen.

Then again, Ferguson isn’t an economist. He is an historian, which makes it odd that he’d want to base his rant on a discipline about which he knows next to nothing, rather than on one about which he’s supposed to know next to everything.

While better and more credible organisations than IMF predict mostly trivial economic effects of Brexit, one way or the other, anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge knows that EU membership puts paid to a millennium of British constitutional tradition.

As Hugh Gaitskell once put it, joining the Common Market would be “the end of a thousand years of history.” What was true then is a thousand times truer now. But Gaitskell wasn’t a professional historian. Ferguson is, and I’d be interested to hear him comment on this line of thought. But he can’t. His party discipline won’t let him.

“Perhaps, as the old poem says, I am the one who is the moron,” he says self-effacingly. Relax, Niall, you aren’t, not exactly. You’re just an immoral party hack.