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What’s the greatest sin of all, one that’s unconscionable, unforgivable and irredeemable? A transgression, as one must assert with uncompromising vigour, that has been negligently omitted from those biblical commandments and lists of deadly sins?

Correct. It’s racism, and I’m proud of you for giving this answer without any hesitation. You are a man of your time, the most progressive time in history.

And what’s the greatest possible crime, perhaps even more heinous than murder? If you instantly thought of rape, full marks. Forcing sexual attentions on a woman leaves a wound festering over a lifetime, one much worse, as we all know, than any physical injury and arguably even death.

Now we’ve agreed on the two most fundamental tenets of modernity, we must accept with hand-wringing anguish that they are at odds. Though racism doesn’t necessarily presuppose a proclivity to rape, rape, or rather rape statistics, may turn even some impeccably progressive people into racists.

How do I define racism? If you have to ask this question, my faith in your progressive credentials gets a dent. Obviously, I don’t just define it as hatred of other races. Such a narrow understanding goes back to the time when racism was still called racialism.

No, I define it as Sir Keir Starmer does: a racist is anyone who resembles Nigel Farage in his urge to reduce immigration of cultural aliens. After all, Sir Keir is our prime minister, while Farage is but a lowly MP. Whom would you rather trust in such sensitive matters? Exactly.

Regrettably though, it’s this definition of racism that’s in conflict with rape statistics. What if a racist like Nigel Farage were to claim, data in hand, that incidents of rape increase pari passu with a growing immigrant population? Would we then have to admit that curtailing immigration isn’t such a bad idea after all? Would we then incline towards racism?

No, of course not. As progressive people, we are impervious to facts. We know that only one explanation can possibly exist for wanting to reduce immigration: xenophobia, racially expressed.

But what if some retrograde individuals out there still aren’t fully paid-up members of the progressive community? What if they are still trying to decide whether or not they are racists? Well, rape statistics from different countries may deepen their confusion.

Just compare two sets of figures for four of the five most populous European nations, England & Wales, Germany, France and Poland. (Rape statistics for the Ukraine are artificially skewed upwards by the presence of Russian soldiers on her territory.)

The first set of figures is the number of rape reports in the year 2000: England & Wales, 8,593; Germany, 8,133; France, 7,500; Poland, 2,399.

The second set is made up of the same statistics for 2023: England & Wales, 68,109; Germany, 32,029; France, 42,400; Poland, 1,127.

The numbers differ so drastically that they call for an explanation. Why, for example, did the number of rapes in the three Western European countries increase by an order of magnitude, while halving in Poland?

Did our population increase during that period? It did, but not that much, not enough to account for a seven-fold hike. Did testosterone levels go up so much in Western Europe that men there became more aggressive and more virile? There are no data to that effect, nor to the effect of Polish men growing more docile and effeminate.

Help me out here, I’m struggling. Were rape victims in Western Europe more likely to report their ordeal in 2023 than in 2000? Possibly. But we aren’t talking orders of magnitude there. In any case, why would Polish women become more reticent by half?

Logic suggests that, if one variable changes dramatically and most of the others don’t, we must search high and wide for another variable that undergoes a similar change at the same time. Once we’ve found it, we’ve found the explanation for the first variable. Sherlock Holmes would be proud of us.

Let’s not bother the great detective though. We don’t need his prodigious skills to identify our culprit. Between 2000 and 2023, millions of Muslim immigrants arrived in Britain, Germany and France. Hardly any chose Poland as their destination.

Therefore, at the risk of being accused of, or even charged with, racism, we have to accept mournfully and apologetically that there is only one explanation for the statistical disparity in question. Western Europe being overrun with swarms of new arrivals who flout our laws and ignore our tradition of pursuing amorous favours.

They bypass such silly preliminaries as flowers, chocolates and dates at overpriced restaurants, instead taking a shortcut to gratification. To quote the old commercial, they take the waiting out of wanting.

But where are the cops when we need them? Glad you’ve asked. They are busy attending DEI classes and indoctrination sessions on racism, institutional bias and Islamophobia. They are taught to respect the customs of other cultures, and, when such customs clash with ours, they are trained to believe ours are in no way superior.

Most of them despise all that nonsense, but, like you and me, they don’t want to complicate their lives. They know that arresting a Muslim on suspicion of rape, especially if the chap wasn’t caught in the act, may get them in trouble with their DEI department.

Even if it doesn’t, there will be endless forms to fill, countless interviews to sit through, more training sessions to suffer – all for a case that may never even go to court or, if it does, will probably end in acquittal.

So good cops, those who lost their idealism years ago, wash their hands on the crime or else chew on that old chestnut about the woman egging hotblooded males on by wearing suggestive clothing. Life’s easier that way.

Suddenly I’ve realised that I am myself sounding like a rank racist. I assure you that’s not the intention. I’m just not imaginative enough to think of any other explanation for the cited rape statistics. My fault entirely.

I’m also worried that such statistics may turn progressive people away from progress and towards its enemies. Such as Nigel Farage and everyone else Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t like.

Dr Frankenstein, call your office. You are about to be put out of business.

American scientists in Oregon have put young Victor to shame. They’ve found a new way of producing sapient human beings, one that involves no hanky-panky, in fact no human contact whatsoever.

They harvest DNA from people’s skin cells, fertilise it with sperm, and Frankenstein is your uncle: there we have it, a human embryo. The story was first broken in Nature Communications and then migrated to other journals via the BBC website.

The journals politely give credit where it’s due, as in: “Normally, reproduction happens when a man’s sperm meets a woman’s egg, creating an embryo that grows into a baby after nine months, as reported by BBC.”

Crikey. So that’s where babies come from? Who coulda thunk. Thank you, BBC, for opening our eyes to that startling fact.

Oh well, yes, but not quite. That’s where babies used to come from, normally. Now they’ll come abnormally, from a tiny cell scraped off human skin. From there they’ll go into a test tube, replacing in vivo with in vitro. A fertilised cell will become an embryo, then presumably a baby, then an adult, then even perhaps a stem cell biologist, but only if his genetic makeup allows for no scruples.

When they grow up, those vitreous babies will be able to describe themselves proudly with the words in the title above. And they won’t even have to refer to the glass jars as ‘Mum and Dad’.

All such dystopic discoveries are invariably hailed as science’s gift to mankind. This skin flick is no exception.

The BBC is effusive: Now even old women can have babies. Splendid news. I for one look forward to watching octogenarian ladies push prams down the King’s Road. That conveyance could also act as a Zimmer frame, which is an extra benefit any way you look at it.

Infertile women and impotent men can all rejoice: help is on the way. And you can forget about women: fertile or otherwise, they’ve been made redundant.

Now two homosexual men can have a baby genetically related to both of them. One man’s skin can be used to produce an egg, which will then be fertilised by the other man’s sperm. Don’t ask me how, I’m way out of my depth in this field.

This discovery, gushes the BBC, “re-writes the rules of parenthood”. I’ll say. It definitely does that, in spades.

“We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” says Prof Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the director of the Oregon Health and Science University’s centre for embryonic cell and gene therapy.

Applause all around, the audience stands up and chants “Test tube, born and bred!” until every throat goes hoarse. The scientific journals where I’ve read the story echo the ovations as best they can, although they feel duty-bound to commiserate that so far the success rate is lamentably low, nine per cent or thereabouts.

It’ll take at least another decade before Grannies can become Mummies, and two men can have babies they can each rightfully call their own. I just hope I’m still around to take part in the celebratory festivities.

However, as a lifelong proponent and occasional practitioner of the archaic, so-called ‘normal’, reproduction method, I have to admit to feeling some sadness. And as a commentator, I must feign surprise at a notable omission in every story I’ve read on the subject.

My surprise is only feigned because deep down I’m feeling none. It’s par for the course that apolitical journals and the politically woke BBC would only talk about the feasibility of this method, never giving a second’s thought to its morality.

They never do: the prevailing thought is that, if something can be done, it must be done. For example, experiments in interbreeding humans and apes have been going on for decades.

The idea is to produce a ‘pithecanthropus’, thereby plugging the missing-link hole in Darwin’s theory. I’m not privy to any technical, or shall we say amorous, details of such experiments, but I do know that they stubbornly continue to fail. This, though the primates involved share 98 per cent of their DNA with humans.

Apparently, it’s the remaining two per cent that account for our humanity, and no number of people copulating with chimpanzees will change that. But trust scientists, such as Prof Mitalipov, the pride of Kazakhstan and Oregon, to deliver another slap in the face of decency.

As decency is defined in our Judaeo-Christian civilisation, I hasten to add. It insists that human life is made in the likeness and image of God, not in the image and likeness of a skin cell reared in a jar.

Someone living within that civilisation, whether or not a religious believer, feels sorry for infertile women who can’t have babies the normal way. For many it’s a tragedy they suffer, but suffering is an unavoidable part of life, not to mention the starting point of our civilisation. Re-writing the rules of parenthood (and thereby re-defining humanity) isn’t a price worth paying for relieving those women’s distress.

Cry for them, pray for them (if such is your wont), feel their pain by all means. But let whatever is left of traditional propriety survive – even if it means no grannies using baby prams as Zimmer frames.

However, more and more people find themselves, willingly, enthusiastically and often unwittingly, outside our civilisation. Such people see nothing wrong with a world in which Mary Shelley’s fantasies read like reportage. A world inhabited by Igors, run by Frankensteins and sooner or later destroyed by them.

Sooner rather than later, I’d suggest, but that’s progress for you.

Switzerland hasn’t just given the world timepieces, chocolates and money laundromats. It also boasts two of the greatest 20^th century playwrights, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch.

It was Frisch who wrote arguably the century’s most significant and eternally universal play, The Arsonists (also known in English as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers).

If you ever wonder why the West is meekly looking on as Russia advances on it step by step, just read the play written in 1953, six years after the Second World War. Switzerland hadn’t taken part in it, Hitler was dead, and Putin was a year old. Yet, in common with other products of artistic genius, The Arsonists transcends its time and place.

Anyone doubting this is possible has to believe that Antigone is strictly about burying Greek war casualties, Hamlet about dynastic succession in Denmark, and The Master Builder about the state of Norway’s construction industry.

Whatever their immediate subjects, those plays shine a light on the otherwise inaccessible recesses of human nature, elucidating traits that escape philosophers and psychologists, especially the latter. The Arsonists is another such play.

Frisch hints at universality by naming his principal protagonist Biedermann, which means Mr Everyman, a worthy philistine. You know the type: self-satisfied, happy with how he and his life have turned out, certain that great upheavals befalling others will pass him by.

There he is, reading newspaper articles about a spate of arson haunting his town. Apparently, firebugs pretending to be hawkers insinuate their way into someone’s home and settle down in the attic, only then to set the house on fire.

Biedermann shakes his head. How stupid and gullible can people get? He’d never be taken in by such ruses. The warm, cosy aura of his dwelling would never be punctured by evildoers with or without matches. Let them turn up – he’ll show them what’s what.

And what do you know, a hawker does appear on Biedermann’s doorstep within minutes. Expertly combining persuasive arguments with veiled threats, he talks himself into spending a night – just one night, Herr Biedermann! – in the attic.

Don’t sell Biedermann short: no dummy, he. He senses something is wrong, suspects that the hawker is one of the firebugs. But a suspicion isn’t a certainty.

What if he is wrong? What if the poor fellow indeed only needs a bed for the night? Confronting him now, before he has really done anything wrong, would be churlish and, well, improper. It could also be unnecessarily dangerous: the fellow looks quite muscular and there’s a touch of cruelty in his grin.

Considering what’s going on in the town, Biedermann would find it hard to convince anyone with such lame arguments about no danger threatening his house. Anyone but himself, that is. He falls for his own craven musings because he wants to fall for them. Not doing so would mean taking decisive action, but that’s not what the Biedermanns of this world ever do.

Before long, another hawker joins the first one, and they begin to cram the attic with oil drums full of petrol. And still Biedermann does nothing to stop the criminals. Moreover, in common with many sedentary philistines, he succumbs to the gravitational pull of evil, readily falls under the spell emanated by wicked men.

Rather than trying to expel the arsonists, he helps them by giving them matches and making sure the detonating fuse is the right length. By now Biedermann knows his lodgers are harbouring evil designs, but surely they are after other townsfolk, not him. He feels a sense of safety ever so slightly tinged with excitement and the pride of belonging with such men of action.

Due to his cowardice, Biedermann becomes an agent of his own downfall. His house burns down to cinders, and the flames segue into the fires of hell. Meeting Biedermann and his wife at the gates are their two lodgers, who turn out to be aspects of Beelzebub. They sneer at the couple, refusing to waste their satanic time on what they call “small fry”.

There are hints strewn all over the narrative that Frisch meant it as a metaphor for Nazism and the shilly-shallying acquiescence of civilised countries in the face of evil rapidly gaining momentum. But great plays, or works of art in general, are never strictly topical even when the author wants them to be.

Like Gospel parables, they only seem to be telling stories of good Samaritans, bad tenants, mustard seeds and bakers. These may be the narrative strains but not the real subjects. The real subject is always human nature, fallen and therefore fallible, courting perdition and needing to be saved.

The stories of Antigone, Hamlet or the Master Builder could have been just as easily set in any other place and at any other time without losing any of their poignancy. So could The Arsonists, which makes it worthy of mention in the same breath as other sublime plays.

I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining how the play applies to our time, who are today’s Biedermanns and arsonists. This must be as transparent to you as the Nazi references were instantly grasped by Frisch’s contemporaries.

Art joins history on the faculty of a great educational institution teaching how people and societies perish, and how they can save themselves. The teachers are knowledgeable, eloquent and in full command of the relevant facts. But their best efforts are invariably undone by their indolent, complacent, harebrained pupils – us.

We never learn the lessons or, even when we do, we never heed them. So there is Biedermann, Mr Everyman, hospitably opening his doors to the firebugs, hoping against all hope that they really may be door-to-door salesmen. And even if they aren’t, surely they must be after his neighbour’s house, not his own comfy nest.

And then the flames burst out, consuming Biedermann and consigning him to hell. The tale is eternal; the message, up-to-date.

You probably notice that political movements are at their most coherent when defining what they are against, not what they are for.

They know what they hate and have no trouble identifying their bugbears in concrete terms. By contrast, when outlining things they love, they often begin to talk in slogans and utopian generalities.

In that sense, British conservatives are lucky. While sharing most of our hates with conservatives elsewhere, we have our positive desiderata delivered to us on the platter of history. A British conservative wishes to conserve whatever little of Christendom the Enlightenment has so far neglected to destroy.

The pre-Enlightenment triad of ‘God, king and country’ is thus a slogan, but not, as it were, a very sloganeering one. Unlike most slogans, it’s not general but specific and substantive. British political conservatism is out to preserve what’s left of Christendom, including the country’s constitution built around church, monarch and Parliament.

American political conservatives face a harder task. They can’t possibly advocate conserving pre-Enlightenment virtues because their country is essentially a post-Enlightenment construct. The Founders rejected throne and church as the linchpins of statehood, concentrating instead on such Enlightenment entitlements as liberty, rights and widespread happiness.

Since they couldn’t ground such good things in the traditions of Christendom, they had to create a secular, materialistic republic – this regardless of how many Americans remained pious. That’s partly why Locke became more influential in America than in his native land.

Guided by his hand, American conservatives moved protection of property higher up the pecking order of political virtues than it traditionally was in British conservatism, where it was regarded as a vital derivative of the country’s ethos, not its centrepiece.

There was still plenty of room left for cultural conservatism in America. The country’s state, constituted along secular, materialist lines, had to co-exist with a largely religious population – just as the British state, largely constituted along religious lines, co-exists with an increasingly irreligious population.

But American political conservatism, bereft of positive ideas it didn’t share with libertarianism, found itself in the doldrums of an identity problem. However, it came to life when Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal gave it a target to snipe at. Unable to define itself as anti-Enlightenment, American conservatism now happily defined itself as anti-New Deal.

Once the world began to rush towards a major war, conservative opposition to the New Deal turned isolationist. The America First Committee led the way in attempts to keep the US out of the war, with some of its spokesmen, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, openly expressing pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic sympathies – just as many MAGA adherents are today sympathetic to Russian fascism.

(Ford had been financing Hitler’s movement since before the Putsch, which was first reported by the New York Times in December, 1922. In recognition, Hitler had a wall of his private office decorated with a portrait of Ford. In 1938 Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi decoration for foreigners.)

Not that the AFC was just conservative. It was a broad coalition including many Republicans, Democrats, progressives and even communists who had all arrived at a common isolationist destination from different starting points. But until 7 December, 1941, conservatives occupied the largest wing in that house.

Three days after Pearl Harbor the US declared war on Japan, and the AFC had no way to go but out. New Deal interventionism laudably won the argument about foreign policy in the 1940s, just as it had regrettably won one about the economy in the 1930s.

In the 1950s, new conservatism began to take shape. The anti-Communist cause championed by Sen. McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities had a galvanising effect, injecting new energy into the conservative cause.

It was in the 1950s that conservatives like Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Leo Strauss and especially William Buckley became household names. They wrote best-selling books, made speeches attended by thousands, debated liberals in all media, published articles and essays, founded journals and began to command a sizeable share of voice.

That was perhaps the most prosperous decade in American history, and conservatives couldn’t credibly attack the government as insufficiently capitalist. It was however possible to attack it as insufficiently anti-Communist, and even poor old President Eisenhower was accused of being a crypto-commie.

The danger of defining conservatism in largely negative terms was inadvertently highlighted by Strom Thurmond who once said that Eisenhower was a communist. “Not at all,” objected his interlocutor. “Ike is an anti-communist.” “I don’t care,” retorted the indomitable senator, “what kind of communist he is.” He probably didn’t mean that the way it sounded but, as an initiator of political thought, anti-communism is indeed nothing but communism with an opposite sign.

Still, the anti-communist crusade coalesced the conservative movement into a cohesive entity, giving it a sustaining momentum that lasted for four decades. But when communism collapsed, or rather transformed itself into fascisoid imperialism, US conservatism found itself at a loose end.

The time came to ask the perennial Quo vadis? question. The old interventionist mantra had been usurped by neoconservatives, who harmonised it with essentially statist, welfarist strains. The genesis of neoconservatism was described by its founder, Irving Kristol:

“I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neosocialist, a neoliberal, and finally, a neoconservative.” That is why, “… in 1964, only a few neoconservatives supported Barry Goldwater while the rest of us went along with Hubert Humphrey.”

Kristol evidently saw no contradiction in reconciling what he tried to pass for conservatism with supporting liberal candidates for high political office. He sensed the inner logic of neoconservatism: habitual interventionism to either evangelical or imperial ends cried out for a big, powerful state.

That being anathema for conservatives, they had no way forward. They had to shift into reverse and move back, towards the area that used to be occupied by America First.

This explains the current MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. The idea of America’s greatness as a goal to achieve or, if somehow lost, restore isn’t unique to Trump. It’s the essence of America’s self-deifying creed, first succinctly enunciated by the first settlers.

America was to them a collective apostle called upon to carry out a divine mission. However, even as monasticism eventually split into hermetic and proselytising strains, so did the concept of America’s greatness, as understood by conservatives, acquire aspects of both interventionism and isolationism.

The collapse of communism left conservatively inclined Americans gasping for air. Russia was no longer an enemy threatening the American way of life. Moreover, the noises coming out of Russia were consonant with their own beliefs: traditional values, religiosity, strong family leaving no room for assorted perversions, private enterprise.

That sounded as if new Russia was closer to their heart than their own governments jammed to the gunwales with liberal Ivy Leaguers. And yes, subsequent developments suggested that Russia wasn’t such a close friend of American conservatives after all. But the initial momentum still wouldn’t let them regard Russia as an enemy.

Hence the urge to leave those senile Europeans to their own devices and concentrate on what it was that made America great in the first place: thrift, enterprise and Weberian Protestant work ethic. And America didn’t need any foreign stimulation to practise such virtues. If any country could be a successful autarky, America was it.

The moment any country begins to clamour for grandeur, the door is flung open for demagogues defining greatness in ways that suit them best. For example, an equally persuasive argument could be made that it was Wilsonian and Rooseveltian interventionism that was largely responsible for turning America into a global empire, the world’s greatest superpower.

But that argument was now associated with liberal internationalism, something alien and hostile. America, a conservative, great America, was happy to stay in her own comfy shell for the whole family. That’s what greatness meant.

American political conservatism thus found itself at a crossroads with every arrow pointing backwards, and it’s happy to let Trump do the driving. Getting closer to current issues, this explains MAGA’s widespread reluctance to come to the Ukraine’s aid. But there is also a wider, more general lesson to learn.

Opposed as it is to the Enlightenment view of the world, real Western conservatism is incompatible with the post-Enlightenment world. Everything we see in Britain, Europe and especially the US is a melange of conservative simulacra, be it neoconservatism, liberalism, anarchism or MAGA.

British conservatives are also bereft of self-confidence, but at least we have something to hang on to, a frayed rope we can still use to climb back to a conservative Britain of yore. Alone among Western nations we combine a monarchy with an established church, and our head of state is still anointed, not elected or appointed.

Such are the pitons we can use for a successful ascent before the rope snaps. The likelihood of any such rise is slim, but it’s still better than none. And British conservatism, unlike its American counterpart, doesn’t have to rely on the catalyst of a foreign enemy to come back to life.

In the absence of such a foe, MAGA just may be the best America can hope for. I wish the country the best of luck – when all is said and done, America’s success is to some extent ours as well. But America’s understanding of conservatism isn’t ours. To borrow Mark Twain’s phrase, it’s our second cousin thrice removed.

Below is the letter written by a secondary school pupil in Samara, industrial city on the Volga. The boy wrote it in hospital, where he was recovering after a failed suicide attempt.

His suicide note was a poem, the last line of which said, “Life in Russia is nothing but rot”. I learned about this from an article the boy’s teacher wrote for a dissident on-line magazine.

When the teacher visited him in hospital, the boy asked, “Why are intelligent people hated so much in this country?” Though not himself Jewish, he couldn’t stand casual anti-Semitism everywhere, he felt suffocated in a country waging a criminal war.

The teacher wisely advised the boy to keep silent about his thoughts on such matters, not sharing them even with his doctors. In the good tradition of Soviet psychiatry, they could confine him to a prison loony bin. Instead, he should write his thoughts down. Hence this letter:

“I began to hate Russia all the time after the start of the ‘special military operation’. It dawned on me that Russia is a country alien to me. A country of liars, in which the lying president and members of his government aren’t the worst. It’s much worse when the whole nation is mired in lies, though it’s not really a nation but a herd of imbeciles. Plebs, as the liberals call them.

“I live in a bog standard five-storey pre-fab, where my neighbours are out-and-out scum. They spit in the stairwell, talk loudly at all hours. They consider it normal to poke one in the chest when one runs into them. I’ve told them it’s rude, to which they replied, ‘Just being neighbourly’. When I found out that my teacher published on a dissident website, I realised I wasn’t alone in the view that my townsfolk have turned into rabble.

“But my teacher is an optimist. I believe that Russia is a country where the level of scum has reached the critical mass.

“I experienced a shift after the start of the ‘special military operation’. I wanted literally to run away from this concentration camp. What I want to say to Russia is ‘Begone!’.

“I’m ashamed of being a Russian. My ancestors worked diligently for the good of this country. But I walk down the street, see how people behave and feel disgust.

“My classmates are all engrossed in their mobiles, impossible to have a conversation with them. The teachers talk twaddle, mouthing ideologically correct tosh even in literature classes, where Solzhenitsyn’s works are off limits. I visit my relations on weekends, where I have to smile listening to them gushing about the war and ‘the real men who bomb and whack the Ukies’.

“I’ve often wanted to spit into the mug of my motherland which regards as the highest patriotism mindless repetition of the ideological crap streaming out of the TV set. In general, I avoid talking politics with my family: they wouldn’t understand and simply think I’m mad. Since my childhood, I’ve been an idealist, dreaming of becoming a teacher or engineer and working for my country. But looking at the scum around me, I want to have nothing to do with these people.

“I’m not political. I’ve always dreamt of acquiring a profession and working normally. But after the special military operation started I no longer want to work for this fascist state. I decided to top myself, but even that didn’t work out. And, having restored my nerves, I realised that the only way out is to leave this cesspit called Russia.

“Meanwhile, I’ll continue to despise the people of this country, with their bigotry, prison-guard habits, criminal ideology raised to the official creed. I despise them for acquiescing to the murder of Nemtsov and Navalny, Kasparov’s emigration, Yashin’s and Kara-Murza’s languishing in prison.

“I wanted to quit school and go to the Ukraine, to fight against Russia. But that’s not an option. If I did that, my family would be persecuted back home. Becoming a pro-Ukrainian saboteur within Russia is also impossible: I’m not much of an extremist and then again, Russia as such hasn’t harmed me. But I hate the people of this country; I don’t see them as my people, my country; I feel nothing in common with this rabble.

“The only thing left to do is finish school and emigrate. But how can I do it if I’m not even a Jew who could go to Israel? Ours is a regular family, there isn’t much money. But I do want to emigrate, even to the Ukraine, to say ‘Begone!’ to this land of crooks and thieves. And to pray to all gods that Russia perish as soon as possible.”

This is perhaps not the best prose I’ve ever read, but the boy wants to be an engineer when he grows up, not a writer. However, he is obviously intelligent and sensitive, and Russia has seldom been a natural home for such people, and never over the past century.

What’s good news for the country though, and rotten news for the rest of the world, is that intelligent, sensitive, cultured people have always been in an infinitesimal minority there. That’s why it’s wrong to generalise on the basis of heart-rending accounts seeping out of Russia, similar to this one.

The temptation should be resisted to suggest that such sentiments are prevalent or even widespread, and for precisely the reasons the boy outlined. The trouble with Russia has always been its people, not just its government. The former is primary, the latter secondary and derivative.

The myth of the saintly Russian peasant in direct touch with God is just that, a myth. And the best Russian writers, though not all of them, knew it perfectly well even when assisting the government in spreading that falsehood around.

The best-known mythologists were Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who were never short of emetic panegyrics for the hidden spiritual depths lurking in the breast of the Russian muzhik. Tolstoy in particular was full of gooey sentimentality, with his unerring eye of a genius artist suddenly going blind whenever he cast a glance at Russian peasantry.

But Gogol desperately tried to create a single positive Russian protagonist and burned the second volume of Dead Souls because he couldn’t. Chekhov, Bunin and Gorky didn’t even try: they described peasants, at that time over 80 per cent of the population, as feral, degenerate beasts red of tooth and claw.

Chekhov’s novella Muzhiks takes no prisoners, neither does Bunin’s book Accursed Days, while Gorky’s long 1922 essay On Russian Peasantry talks about his subjects’ ignorance, superstition and cruelty in the darkest terms. And he was writing as their social equal, not, as Tolstoy, their lord and master.

The boy who wrote the letter above lacks the mastery of those literary giants, but not their sensitivity. He grasps perceptively what has happened to the nation now formed by the descendants of the yahoos so poignantly described by Russian writers of the past.

These descendants are still semi-Asian yahoos, now clad and shod like Europeans, and operating the same gadgets, but still untouched by European civilisation, nor really any other. The small minority of good, cultured, morally perceptive people have few options at their disposal.

They can flee the country, which hundreds of thousands have done in the past few years, and millions in the past couple of decades. They can meekly go about their daily business, keeping themselves to themselves and suffering in silence. Or they can commit suicide, and I’m glad that the author of the cited letter failed in that attempt.

I hope he can get out of what he calls a concentration camp of a country and go West. We need more people like him – even if his own country doesn’t.

You may never be able to walk into the same river twice, but no matter how the river changes, you can still drown in it. This is a metaphorical way of rephrasing the French epigram, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I grew up in a country where most of the economy was nationalised, the state had vast powers and individuals next to none, freedom of speech – along with all other civil liberties – was curtailed, people could be imprisoned for what they said or wrote, religion was despised but the state’s ideology was supposed to be worshipped – and all citizens older than 16 were supposed to carry ID cards on pain of arrest.

We grumbled, some of us dissented and took their concomitant lumps, but deep down everyone knew that was par for the course. We lived in a Marxist state, and Marxist states do as Marxist states are.

Expecting such a state to act differently was like expecting dogs not to chase cats, the sun to rise in the west, and winters to be warmer than summers. A leopard and a Dalmatian may have different spots, but neither is going to change his.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I still live in a country like that. No, not quite. Then again, political systems are never static, they are always in flux. They turn, twist and meander, but they always develop. And the curve of their development may look jagged, but an attentive observer can always detect the overall vector, the destination towards which the state is moving.

If the observer can justifiably say “been there, done that”, his power of discernment becomes more acute, the analogies he can spot more obvious. It’s on the basis of such experience that I can state with absolute certainty: the country in which I grew old, Britain, is inexorably moving closer to the country in which I grew up, the Soviet Union.

Look at the features of a Marxist state I enumerated above, and you’ll see that Britain already shows all of them, or at least is conspicuously moving in that direction. Labour’s plan to introduce compulsory ID cards puts another tick on that list.

I keep repeating like a broken record that trying to find rhyme or reason in anything Starmer’s government does is a pointless exercise, akin to an attempt to figure out why dogs chase cats. They do so not because they think it’s a jolly good idea, but because they are dogs.

The overarching urge of socialism is to transfer the maximum amount of power from the periphery to the centre, and ultimately from the individual to the state. The ideal every socialist sees in his mind’s eye is the omnipotent state lording it over the impotent individual. And Marxism is the extreme version of any socialism, one towards which it endlessly gravitates.

Marxists, especially those running what used to be civilised countries, are glossocrats, rulers relying on language as the instrument of power. Unlike their totalitarian brethren, they can’t yet back up glossocracy with concentration camps and execution cellars, which makes them ever so more loquacious.

They’ll never say outright that everything they do is solely designed to increase state power. Instead, they’ll wax sanctimonious and solicitous round the clock, explaining how citizens will benefit from yet another turn of the thumbscrew.

That’s why those who put forth rational arguments against compulsory ID cards are merely spinning their wheels without moving any closer to reality. And the reality of this Marxist measure is that it’s Marxist. That’s all.

Yes, Starmer and his accomplices may not be excessively bright, but that’s not the point. They aren’t so stupid as not to realise that none of their declared aims for this totalitarian law holds water. ID cards won’t prevent illegal aliens from coming to our shores. They won’t stop anyone from working in the black market. They won’t reduce crime. They won’t curb tax evasion.

They’ll do nothing but enable the state to say in English what totalitarians of yesteryear used to say in Russian or German. Instead of Dokumenty or Papiere, it’ll be “Let’s see your ID card”. But the meaning, both text and subtext, will be exactly the same.

I’m not sure I agree with Joseph de Maistre’s maxim that every nation gets the kind of government it deserves. Not without reservations at any rate, not where modern democracies are concerned.

The statement would be unequivocally true if the people casting their votes understood clearly what kind of government they are ushering in. But they don’t, for two reasons.

First, glossocrats are useless at creating free, secure, prosperous commonwealths, but they are real wizards at duping people with pious pronouncements and phony promises. Show me incoming government officials who don’t make grandiose promises they have no means or intention of keeping, and I’ll show you a fairy tale.

Second, people fall for such canards because they haven’t been trained and educated to think properly. There again, some well-meaning commentators talk about the failure of our education system. They are wrong. If we define failure as an inability to achieve the desired outcome, then our education is a huge success.

A one-eyed man can become king, but in order to do so he must blind everyone else. It’s on this logic that our education system is designed. Our socialists, Lite or full Marxist strength, don’t want Britons to be able to invoke studies in economics, political science, history, philosophy or, God forbid, theology to challenge and defeat glossocracy.

They want people to lap up whatever falsehood is tossed their way off the top table of the glossocrats. And our system of comprehensive ignorance is a perfect training ground for such uncomprehending docility.

British democracy has degenerated to a level where ignoramuses cast their votes for nonentities and predictably get governments that are both incompetent and increasingly evil. But with this damnation sometimes comes a blessing in disguise, as it does in this case.

Marxist governments are not only wicked but also incompetent. Hence it’s almost certain that the ID card project will never get out of the foreplay stage. This government will take years and squander billions of pounds devising the system, but then the democratic blessing in disguise will kick in: Labour will almost certainly lose the next election before this totalitarian scheme can come on stream.

It’s far from guaranteed that the next government will be much better but, in the good democratic tradition, one can be certain it’ll undo most things done by its predecessor. One of its easiest and most visible claims to virtue will be to ditch the ID card scheme and write off all the billions wasted.

I can’t cover every aspect of this exercise in sinister Marxist tyranny, nor is it my intention. I’m only proposing a methodology for decorticating anything this government does. And the starting point is realising that things like ID cards can only be analysed in the light of Marxist ideology. An evil ideology practised by evil people to achieve evil ends.

P.S. The other day, I saw a video of a Russian Archpriest whose name I didn’t catch railing against the soulless, godless materialist West. Nothing new there, but the sample list of principal Western culprits gave me a start.

Father Whatsisname singled out Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Duns Scotus. I can understand Darwin or, stretching things a bit, perhaps even Smith. But Duns Scotus?

That important Scottish theologian was a contemporary of Aquinas, with whom he sometimes disagreed. Yet even a confirmed Thomist would hesitate to describe anyone who isn’t one as a godless materialist. Duns Scotus was a Franciscan friar, for God’s sake.

This goes to show that, when a church attaches itself to a wicked state, it itself becomes wicked – and in this case also moronic.

If you think that, you may be right. Or you may be wrong. I really have no way of knowing and, much as it hurts me to have to say this, neither do you.

Neither – and this is the salient point – do Western economists who pronounce on the matter with all the weight of authority conferred by their degrees, grants and tenures. And you can confirm this scathing conclusion by giving them a simple test.

You’ll find that these chaps know exactly how to assess the state of an economy. They read charts, graphs, and indicators as easily as you read your morning paper.

They can juggle 10-digit numbers as dexterously as you can move the 10 fingers on your hands. Ask them anything about debt-to-GDP ratios, inflation rates, manufacturing indices, exchange mechanisms, stock market quotations, and they’ll talk your ear off, telling you more than you want to know.

And most of the time, they’ll be right – not necessarily in their predictions, but certainly in their analysis of the data in the public domain. That way they’ll pass the first half of our test, earning some right to pass judgement on the economy of any country from Spain to Sweden any everywhere in between.

That gives them the reason, albeit a rather spurious one, to look down on economic ignoramuses like you and me.

Want to wipe that smug smirk off their faces? Then ask them all the same questions about the drug economy in Venezuela, the people-smuggling economy in the south of Europe or the mafia economy in Italy. What exactly are their gross turnovers and net profits? Personnel costs? Staff fluidity? Growth prospects?

Ask them anything at all – they won’t have a clue. Yet they pass confident judgement about the state of the Russian economy, which is much closer to that of a mafia than that of any country from Spain to Sweden and everywhere in between.

The criminal government in the Kremlin casts a giant shadow on the economy, and it’s in this shadow that the economy operates. The Kremlin gang may have more or less accurate answers to the hypothetical questions we’ve asked our hypothetical economists. But no one else does.

That’s even in Russia herself, never mind the proverbial groves of Western academe or assorted consultancies and think tanks. They may know that a giant shadow economy exists there, but they have no idea about the production rates of shadow factories, the shadow profits enterprises derive by selling their goods in the shadow world.

But in spite of their understandable ignorance, they look at the figures published by the official Kremlin sources or in the Russian and Western economic journals, and make confident predictions about how soon that country’s economy will bite the dust.

They’ve been coming up with such prognoses since massive Western sanctions were imposed in 2022, supposedly giving the Russian economy just months before collapse. Yet there it is, still ticking along nicely, still churning out enough hardware to kill a most satisfying number of Ukrainians.

Speaking of the Russian armament industry, a groundbreaking report in the Italian newspaper Linkiesta has shed some light on the aforementioned shadow. Apparently, vast amounts of Russian infantry weapons, including both assault and sniper rifles, are reaching the Italian mafia through Sicilian ports and the Friuli province to the north of Venice.

The Kalashnikovs were manufactured by the state-owned Tula factory in 2010-2020, which makes them newer than most of the weapons used by the Russian frontline troops in the Ukraine. All these rifles miss a small but telling part: serial number.

Experts believe that at least 20 per cent of Russian weaponry is made specifically for international mafias and the black market. Moreover, mountains of arms and ammunition reach Russia from sanction-busting factories in China, North Korea, Azerbaijan and other countries. A good chunk of those illegal exports go straight into the shadow economy.

All this creates mighty financial streams, with numerous rivulets diverted into the shadow economy and, which is roughly the same thing, into the Kremlin coffers. The Russian army is doing its best to keep up.

As the war escalates, more and more weapons and ammunition reach army units, which then sell some of the arms on to third parties – and I bet these don’t include legitimate states. That’s partly why Russian troops often have to fight with antediluvian weapons: the newer ones disappear in the maelstrom of the shadow economy.

In fact, Linkiesta estimates that the army is right up there in the long list of corrupt Russian institutions.

The routes of arms traffic are roughly the same as those for transporting fuel, oil and other contraband. The principal transit points used to be in Syria, but now Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are the main intermediaries. Though Linkiesta’s investigation focused on Italy, it’s obvious that Russian weapon contraband reaches other European countries as well.

An important point is that this isn’t just a display of unsanctioned entrepreneurial spirit. The management of the state-owned Tula factory would never dream of making vast numbers of rifles without serial numbers barring a direct order from the Kremlin.

Illegal traffic in weapons and oil has always provided a source of finance for Russia’s war on the Ukraine. This has been going on for at least 10 years, since before the full-scale invasion.

Actually, the Italian mafia may not be the end user of illegal Russian weapons, not all of them at any rate. These days it’s not just legitimate economies that go global, but criminal ones as well.

In fact, more and more organised crime is so seamlessly fused with rogue states that it’s hard to tell them apart. Russia has taken advantage of some aspects of this convergence and pioneered some others.

Rogue regimes and criminal gangs flood international markets with arms and drugs, while residually civilised countries look the other way. Trump, for example, finds it easier to chastise Canada and Mexico for the smuggling of the synthetic narcotic fentanyl than to take issue with China that manufactures much of it.

Most of the income generated by smuggling bypasses the usual monitoring channels by being denominated in cryptocurrencies. This is an ingenious tool custom-made for contraband and money laundering. The Russians take full advantage.

Over 80 per cent of all Russian commercial transactions, including the official ones, are denominated in cryptocurrencies. This detail escapes the eagle eyes of Western economists, those who can’t understand why the Russian economy hasn’t collapsed yet, but nevertheless keep insisting that it soon will.

The Russian state is unique in history. It’s formed by a homogeneous blend of secret police and organised crime, combining the knowhow, methods and resources of both components. That’s why normal standards applied to above-board economies are useless when trying to understand Russia.

There is only one way to assure the collapse of the Russian criminal economy: destroying the criminal Russian state. But that’s a task for statesmen and generals, not economic consultants insisting that another tranche of sanctions will bring Putin to his knees. I hate to break the news, but it won’t.

Reacting to Trump’s remarks, both oral and written, Zelensky sounded optimistic: “I think we have better relations than before,” he said. “I see very positive signals that Trump and America will be with us to the end of the war.”

The president of a country locked in a desperate fight for its survival has to inject a positive note into his remarks. His job is to rally his people, not to provide a dispassionate analysis.

I don’t work under similar constraints, which is why I’m asking the question in the title. And the answer is: nothing much, nothing new, nothing encouraging, nothing upbeat.

Back in the old days, Sovietologists used to analyse the abstruse speeches of assorted Party secretaries, trying to discern hidden meanings and decipher encoded subtexts. There’s no such need with Western leaders.

Though they don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean, they tend to be more forthright and less Aesopian. Their meaning may not always be on the surface but usually it’s not far beneath it. One doesn’t have to delve too deeply to uncover the nugget of substance or at least realise that none exists.

Trump regularly breaks this tendency, either deliberately, to obfuscate his message, or accidentally, due to his uncertain grasp of the English language. Sometimes he sounds like an old man lost in the verbal thicket; at other times like what Americans call a Polish godfather (he makes you an offer you can’t understand).

In any case, Trump is the president of a major military power that’s supposed to be on the side of the angels. That’s why a new genre of textual political analysis is called for. Let’s call it Trumpology by analogy with Sovietology. Let’s also admit that any budding Trumpologist faces a challenging task.

A good diplomat knows how to say nothing, but say it well. Trump’s recent remarks on Putin’s war against the Ukraine show he is only halfway there. He said nothing. But it sounded like something.

First, he complained that Putin had let him down. The choice of words is telling: one can be let down only by a friend, not an enemy. If the betrayal isn’t too bestial, the friend may be forgiven, brought back into the fold, and cordial amity may survive.

Further, Trump told reporters: “I thought [ending the war] was going to be the easiest one because of my relationship with Putin. Unfortunately, that relationship didn’t mean anything.”

That’s saying the same thing in different words: with his unerring instinct of a career KGB recruiter, Vlad paid gluteal obeisance to Don to establish a “relationship”. However, fancy that, much to Don’s surprise the KGB officer then indulged in underhanded dealings that put the relationship on hold.

It wasn’t damaged beyond repair though. Asked if he still trusted Putin, Trump said he would have an answer in “about a month”. This means he is uncertain whether Vlad is still “a great guy”.

He didn’t specify what momentous events would occur in a month to make Trump certain whether Vlad still was his friend, one way or the other. If I were to venture a guess, Putin has been given another deadline, twice the length of the several fortnightly others that friend Don has announced and friend Vlad has ignored.

When asked if the US would support Europe should it come under Russian attack, Trump answered “Yes”. But not unreservedly so:

“Depends on the circumstance. But, you know, we’re very strong toward Nato. Nato has stepped up. You know, when they went from 2 per cent to 5 per cent, that was great unity. Trillions of dollars is being pumped in and they’re paying us for the weapons that we sent.”

“Trillions” is a slight exaggeration, but what’s a couple of orders of magnitude among friends? But do let’s continue.

“I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, Nato, the original borders from where this war started, is very much an option.”

In my self-appointed capacity of Trumpologist, this is what I think Trump said. He is prepared to sell weapons to European NATO members, perhaps not quite trillions’ worth, but a lot.

What those Europeans then do with those weapons isn’t Trump’s concern. If they choose to give them to the Ukraine, he won’t say no. And if they want to shoot marauding Russian planes down, by all means, they should go ahead — ‘they’ being the operative word.

So what exactly has caused Zelensky’s fulsome joy? Nothing new was said. What was said is that selling “trillions’ worth of weapons” to Europe is the extent of American support for the Ukraine. Using those weapons, and “the support of the European Union”, the Ukraine can WIN all of its occupied territories back and, as Trump also suggested, even go beyond.

What, all the way to Moscow? Even the most gung-ho champions of Ukrainian independence don’t suggest that as a possibility. Trump isn’t suggesting it either, not really. He is just restating, in his own semi-literate manner, the status quo.

He likes the profits America is getting from arms sales to the EU, but those who think the US would step in to thwart Putin’s aggression have another think coming. Nor is America going to arm the Ukraine directly and free of charge. In other words, yet again Trump said nothing new, and he didn’t even say it well.

P.S. Unemployment looms large in America: Trump is doing his level best to make satirists and parodists redundant.

Even on the rare occasions when he doesn’t say something objectionable, like calling Putin “a great guy” or claiming that the Punic Wars wouldn’t have happened had he been president, his oratory never fails to make one wince. It’s as if his objective were to MAKE AMERICA GRATE AGAIN.

Sometimes the effect isn’t just grating but also risible, so much so that no satirist would find it easy to add anything to it – and that’s with Trump’s prepared speeches, never mind those he delivers off the cuff.

This point was made with admirable subtlety in this little video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxECyQO5y-8

An English woman with a perfect upper-middleclass accent and a vacuous upper-middleclass smile reads the speech Trump delivered at the state banquet in Windsor the other day. The mischievous woman didn’t change a single word, and she put all the emphases in the right places.

And still there was much weeping and wailing in the corner of the earth inhabited by parodists. No matter how witty and waspish they might be, they couldn’t extract any more comic mileage out of Trump’s waffle overladen with superlative modifiers.

Keir Starmer and his accomplices from several other Western countries colluded to commemorate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in their own special manner.

They’ve officially recognised Hamas as a sovereign state. “In the face of the growing horror in the Middle East,” explained Starmer, “we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace and a two-state solution. That means a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state.”

This takes pride of place in the long list of other statements made by the prime minister, which span a full range between cynical and idiotic, with ignorant, subversive and Marxist in between.

First, ‘Palestinians’, the received term for Hamas, don’t want a two-state solution. They want a single-state one, from the river to the sea. All Jews currently living in that territory or – according to the Hamas Charter – anywhere else are to be exterminated.

That constitutional intent is hardly conducive to keeping “the possibility of peace” alive, unless all Israelis decide to enter into a national suicide pact. In the absence of that decision, Starmer’s recognition won’t add a single jot or tittle to peace in the region.

However, it will almost certainly enable the new ‘state’ to seek reparations for the egregious oppression ‘Palestinians’ suffered during the 30 years of the British mandate (1917-1947). Those dastardly British mandarins tyrannised the local Arabs by not letting them slit one another’s throats and do to the Jews what their descendants did on 7 October, 2023. How much more oppressive can you get?

More to the point, how do you attach a monetary value to the suffering of those poor people whose fingers itched for the knives to carve up some Jews?

Denominating anguish in pounds sterling seems hard, but it’s not impossible. Trillions have been mentioned in that context, so Starmer had better nationalise the whole economy and pay Britons whatever is left after the new ‘state’ has been properly compensated.

All in all, the effect of the recognition will be either nonexistent or, more likely, negative. This isn’t just a probability but an ironclad guarantee.

So why did Starmer (along with Macron et al.) do it? There are several reasons, and I assure you the desire to bring peace to the Middle East isn’t one of them.

First, Labour politicians, both nationally and locally, depend on the Muslim vote. And Muslims vote as a bloc for the party most hostile to Israel — that’s a given.

It’s in the confident expectation of boosting their electoral chances that Labour governments have always flung Britain’s doors open to welcome culturally alien immigrants. When Mandelson was Blair’s consiglieri, he openly admitted to this stratagem with his unmatched cynicism.

A voting bloc of millions of Muslims may or may not anoint a king, figuratively speaking, but they can certainly become a king maker. Millions of Muslims can also paralyse cities by staging riotous pro-Hamas (or anti-Israel) rallies, causing serious economic and social damage.

Second, Starmer and his government are Marxists, viscerally if not institutionally. And, taking their cue from their founder and patron saint, Marxists are ideologically anti-Semitic. For many of them, anti-Zionism is a more socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism.

“I recognise the Palestinian state” has a nicer, more self-righteous ring to it than “I hate Jews”, but for most British Muslims and many Labour members the two phrases are synonymous. Starmer’s disgusting decision thus has everything to do with Labour’s intraparty and domestic politics and nothing at all to do with any peaceful urges.

The third reason also springs from their Marxism. Marxists are prepared to love Britain as an abstract ideal they see in their minds’ eye, while meanwhile hating Britain as she is and especially has been throughout her history.

The Labour Party doesn’t mind affirming its Marxist credentials by flying the communist red flag at its conferences and singing the Italian communist song Bandiera Rossa, occasionally breaking into a rousing rendition of the Internationale.

The former has sinister lyrics, such as “From the country to the sea, to the mine/ To the workshop, those who suffer and hope/ Be ready, it’s the hour of vengeance/ Red flag will triumph.” Meanwhile, the latter declares war on tradition: “Servile masses arise, arise/ We’ll change henceforth the old tradition/ And spurn the dust to win the prize.”

This is the vocal expression of visceral hatred extending to every aspect of British history, but especially its imperial phase punctuated by the Industrial Revolution. This is depicted as nothing but rapacious, acquisitive exploitation of the downtrodden masses at home and downtrodden colonies abroad.

‘Colonialism’ and ‘capitalism’ stand side by side on the Marxist hit list, and all socialists are emotionally committed to atone for the former and destroy the latter. This explains Labour’s intentionally ruinous economic policies and, more to my point today, their febrile affection for what they perceive as the colonies those dastardly mandarins used to oppress.

Ignorant of history, and ideologically unwilling to learn, they dispense with details and broadly sympathise with the Third World in its every confrontation with the First. Israel, in their eyes, exacerbates the sins of the Mandate by stubbornly insisting on her own survival. Hamas, on the other hand, emits a warm glow of anti-Western animosity our Marxists share.

And not just our Marxists. Anti-colonial, anti-Western sentiments predominate in every international forum, including the UN.

Since 2023, the subject of Israel violating the human rights of the ‘Palestinians’ has come up 60 times in the General Assembly. And the human rights of the Ukrainians on the receiving end of Putin’s murdering, torturing, raping, looting hordes? Not even once.

Such are the more obvious streams flowing into the mighty river of the socialists’ deracinated hatred for their own countries and Western civilisation in general. Starmer’s willingness to recognise the nonexistent Palestinian state is consonant with his reluctance to recognise the benefits of free markets.

Both can be traced back to the Marxist longings of our ruling elite, its lust for the slogans sung in Bandiera Rossa and the Internationale to become calls to action. We must be able to see through the smokescreen of bien pensant waffle they emit to hide their wicked impulses.

And yes, a very Happy New Year to all my Jewish readers — with none of the sarcasm implied in the title above.

Over the past few days, Putin has been treating NATO’s airspace as his own training ground.

First, 23 Russian drones flew over Poland. A day later a Russian drone appeared over Romania. Then, four days ago, the Russians switched to manned aircraft, sending three MIG-31 fighter jets on a mission over Estonia.

NATO’s responses to those flagrant violations of its members’ sovereignty have varied from feeble to nonexistent. Most commentators treated the overflights as ‘provocations’, which raises a question.

Exactly what was Putin trying to provoke? A diplomatic rebuke? NATO’s customary expression of deep concern, later to be upgraded to a warning? Not likely. He has already gathered such a large collection of such things that I doubt there’s any room left for more in his trophy cabinet.

Western commentators and, worse still, governments act like scared children who cover their eyes in the hope that the perceived danger will thereby disappear. It won’t, and grown-ups should know that.

Allow me to spell it out, chaps: Putin is preparing for war. An aggressive one. With NATO. And this preparation is in its final stages.

Every offensive in history has started with a scouting mission to determine the target’s strength, deployment and likely response. For the past 100 years or so, overflights of enemy territory have figured prominently among such stratagems.

They test both the enemy’s ability to resist aerial attacks and its resolve to do so. If the ability is unimpeachable and the resolve unshakable, the aggressor may have second thoughts or perhaps change tack. If, on the other hand, the enemy shows neither ability nor resolve, the aggressor’s finger will inch closer to the ‘Go’ button.

Putin’s finger is twitching at the moment. For in all three cases NATO failed both tests, showing that neither its air defences nor, more important, its morale is battle-worthy.

It probably hasn’t escaped commentators’ attention that Russia is already fighting a war against a NATO ally, though regrettably still not its member. And over the past three and a half years, the nature of that war has changed dramatically.

Generals, goes the saying attributed to Churchill, always fight the last war. That was said in 1940, when Rundstedt, Manstein and Guderian showed Gamelin and Weygand how hopelessly behind the times they were. Modern war was all about lightning strikes with massed armour, not suicidal infantry attacks on fortified positions.

That was the last war for the Russian high command in 2022, and at first their invasion of the Ukraine followed the same pattern. Columns after columns of Russian armour poured into the Ukraine, only for the Ukrainian artillery, missiles and drones to turn them into heaps of charred scrap metal.

Ukrainians too tried to use their own tank thrusts as counteroffensive, with largely the same result. Both sides have since learned the lessons, paying their tuition fees in hundreds of thousands of lives and billions’ worth of wrecked kit. Step by step, they turned their battle stations into PlayStations.

Unmanned aircraft, drones, are for modern war what tank pincer movements were for the Second World War and cavalry charges for the First. Costing next to nothing in the general scheme of things, drones, augmented with manned aircraft, can paralyse a country’s economy, terrorise populations and negate any possible counteroffensive.

That’s why anti-aircraft defences in general and anti-drone defences in particular become vitally important. Both the Ukraine and Russia are churning out thousands of the blasted things, with the Russians also importing them from the friendly ayatollahs.

And Ukrainians have learned how to deal with those deadly locusts. They shoot down close to 90 per cent of them, which is impressive even though, considering the numbers involved, the remaining 10 per cent still cause horrendous damage.

When 23 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace, the response was pathetic. The combined efforts of Polish, Dutch, Italian and German AA defences managed to down only four of the drones, falling far short of the Ukrainian ratio.

Can you imagine what would have happened to Poland had it been attacked not by 23 unarmed drones but by 2,400 armed ones? I can’t.

The key question there isn’t just ‘how many?’ but also ‘how?’. NATO scrambled fighter jets that fired at the Russian drones with their air-to-air missiles. Each AIM-120 AMRAAM missile costs about $1 million, while the next-generation AIM-260 will cost several times that.

If it takes a million-dollar missile to hit a Shahed drone costing a few hundred dollars, one realises that even if NATO countries increase their defence spending to 100, not five, per cent of GDP, they’ll run out of money within days of combat.

Ukrainians have learned a more cost-effective method. They use YAK-52 training planes made between 1979 and 1999. These cheap aircraft, some with wooden propellers, have open cockpits from which gunners fire their rifles at the drones with devastating effect.

That particular recce yielded another encouraging finding for Putin. Even though three US bases are sited in Poland, American forces took no part in the action. One can just see Putin grinning ear to ear: his friend Donald may occasionally talk tough but, push come to shove, he’ll just coo like a dove of peace and do nothing.

When a Russian drone appeared in the sky over Romania, the pilots were authorised to shoot it down but decided not to. The country’s defence ministry said it “assessed the collateral risks and decided not to open fire”.

What collateral risks exactly? Since the drone didn’t overfly any densely populated areas, downing it wouldn’t have endangered life and property. The only collateral risk I can imagine would have been Putin’s displeasure, meaning that yet again NATO couldn’t conceal its cowardly tendency to appease the evil aggressor.

Oh yes, I forgot, Romanians did respond to that criminal attack by summoning the Russian ambassador and berating him in no uncertain terms. Who says NATO leaves aggression unanswered?

As for the violation of Estonia’s airspace, an historical reminder is in order. On 24 November 2015, a Russian SU-24M fighter-bomber penetrated Turkish territory to a depth of 1.36 miles and stayed there for 17 seconds. That was enough time for a Turkish F-16 to shoot it down.

In the aftermath, Putin huffed, puffed and threatened every manner of apocalypse. Soon thereafter, however, he and Erdogan kissed and made up, though I’m not sure about the kissing part. Like all bullies, the KGB dictator respects leaders who speak his language, using missiles in lieu of words.

On 19 September 2025, three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated the Estonian airspace near Vaindaloo Island (not to be confused with an Indian curry). There they stayed for 12 minutes (as distinct from 17 seconds) before two Italian F-35s intercepted the invading MiGs and…. shot them down?

Don’t be silly. What do you think this is, Turkey c. 2015? No, the Italians gallantly escorted the MiGs back to the border and waved their wings good-bye.

Understandably irate, Estonia invoked Article 4 of the NATO Charter, which initiates discussion among members but without mandating any response.

When the doors of that talk shop opened, Estonia correctly stated that the incursion into its airspace was “part of a broader pattern of testing Europe’s and NATO’s resolve”, and “another dangerous act to further escalate regional and global tensions as Russia continues its war of aggression against Ukraine”.

The situation is so fraught with danger that nothing short of an expression of concern or perhaps even a stern warning will do. Make it grave concern and final warning to emphasise the magnitude of the problem. That’ll send Putin back to his bunker, tail between his legs.

As far back as the 6^th century BC, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu formulated this principle: “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” The idea of the former was to lure the enemy into precipitate action, the better to rout its forces.

NATO got it almost right: it appears weak when it is weak. Unless this situation changes quickly – and I don’t know what kind of timetable Russian generals are plotting – well, you don’t need me to tell you what can happen.

Take it from someone who grew up with Russian bullies, schoolyard to KGB. As Turkey showed in 2015, they retreat from a show of force. And, as I’m afraid we’ll soon find out, they pounce on a show of weakness.