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I know I’m repeating myself, but, as we all know, repetition is the mother of all learning.

Not everyone has yet learned that we’re living in a lunatic asylum run by its inmates, and so, at the risk of repeating myself, I have to produce more factual evidence.

Mercifully, the newspapers never disappoint. The current big story picked up by all our broadsheets is that some of J.S. Bach’s best works were actually written by his second wife Anna Magdalena.

Specifically this multi-talented woman is supposed to be given credit for parts of the Goldberg Variations, the six cello suites and, according to one source, the B Minor Mass.

If true, this is a remarkable achievement reemphasising the endless potential of womenfolk, whose talents have been suppressed by beastly men throughout history, a gross injustice feminists are undoing even as we speak.

One would have thought that Anna Magdalena would have had her hands full, looking after Bach’s four surviving children from the seven he had fathered in his first marriage, giving birth to 13 of her own, running the rather crowded household, continuing a professional vocal career and acting as Bach’s amanuensis, especially in his later years when his eyesight failed him.

But this indomitable lady still found time in her busy schedule to knock off some of the greatest music ever written. It’s only because of the inherent misogyny of the world that her contribution has gone unrecognised for 400 years.

Until the Aussie academic Martin Jarvis came along. Using expert graphologists he came to the only possible conclusion: Anna Magdalena didn’t just write down her husband’s work on lined paper – she actually composed much of it.

All ye of little faith, sit up and listen. Mrs Bach’s handwriting didn’t show the strain of someone copying written documents and, if that doesn’t convince you, editing marks show she had to stop and correct the music as she went along.

Case made, beyond not just reasonable doubt but any other kind as well. Of course inveterate sceptics might argue that an alternative explanation just would be possible. And, dare one say it, it would be rather more persuasive than the cock-and-bull story peddled by Dr Jarvis.

For example, since in his later years Bach couldn’t see well enough to write, he composed at his clavier, with Anna Magdalena writing the music down. And even before he went partially blind, Bach was known to dictate his music as he composed it. This would explain both the editing marks and Anna Magdalena’s handwriting showing no signs of a copyist.

Then again, the cello suites were written between 1717 and 1723, while Bach married Anna Magdalena only in 1721, almost immediately after his first wife’s death. So can we please give him credit for at least some of the suites?

(Thankfully, no one has suggested yet that Mrs Tolstoy actually wrote War and Peace – a remarkable restraint, considering that no fewer than seven copies of the manuscript were written in her hand.)

The amazing thing is that Jarvis himself is well aware of the falsity of his claims: “My conclusions may not be wholly accurate,” he says, “but the way in which tradition has put Anna Magdalena into this pathetic role… is rubbish.”

For the benefit of those of you who aren’t fluent in Australian, allow me to translate. Jarvis’s isn’t an open and shut case. In fact, he has no case at all.

What he does have is a thirst for publicity, a keen nose for the potential appeal of any feminist gibberish, no matter how insane, and the ready outlet of major newspapers experienced in translating feminism into sales.

It’s not just feminism either. Another clinical symptom of modern madness is egalitarianism, the desire to bring everyone, ideally including sublime geniuses, down to the level of the masses who are all ‘self-evidently’ supposed to be ‘created equal’.

Thus Mozart, who was not only one of history’s greatest composers but also one of the cleverest men in his contemporaneous Vienna, has to be depicted as some kind of idiot savant, an Asperger sufferer who, although stupid in every way, was somehow able to compose some pretty mellifluous tunes.

It takes monumental ignorance to be unaware of the gigantic intellectual effort that goes into musical composition to believe that any great composer could ever be the infantile cretin of Schafer’s fancy. Or else it takes the craving so powerfully described by the Russian poet Pushkin when talking about the public depiction of Byron:

“The crowd greedily reads confessions, memoirs, etc., because in its baseness it rejoices at the abasement of the high, at the weakness of the strong. It is in rapture at the disclosure of anything loathsome. ‘He is small like us; he is loathsome like us!’ You are lying, you scoundrels: he’s small and he’s loathsome, but not the way you are – differently.”

Jarvis obviously feels the same need. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the kind of genius that goes into composing works like the cello suites, not to mention the B Minor Mass, takes over its possessor.

Had Anna Magdalena indeed written several pieces of immortal music, we would have had ample evidence of her spending every waking moment writing – or at least trying to write – more. She wouldn’t have been able to run a perfect bourgeois household and look after a crowd of children the size of a football squad.

Yet her real, historical role as wife and mother, the great man’s faithful friend and assistant, the bedrock of his life seems ‘pathetic’ to modern sensibilities. Hence the concoction of the frankly idiotic fairy tale about a sublime composer who never received due credit for her attainments.

Hence also the alacrity with which our previously respectable papers have picked up the non-story. What a mad world we live in!

 

 

 

 

 

Political correctness also existed back in the USSR, so nostalgically remembered by the Beatles. The basic concept was the same as in today’s West, but the interpretation was different.

Far from being proscribed, jokes about racial minorities, Jews, women and cripples were actively encouraged.

The political correctness the authorities enforced really was political. Hence a joke about communism or any of its figureheads would act as a starting gun for a race.

The listeners, including the joker’s close friends, would fall over themselves rushing to report the offender to the KGB (or its precursors).

The winner of the race would receive an accolade, doing his career no harm. The losers could well be prosecuted under Article 58.12 of the USSR Criminal Code, covering ‘not reporting counterrevolutionary activity’.

Colloquially called ‘knew but didn’t tell’, the Article left much leeway for the prosecution. Its strict letter provided for a maximum punishment of six months in prison, which in those days only qualified as a mild rebuke.

But if the spirit moved the prosecutor, he could link Article 58.12 to others, including those calling for the capital punishment or, more usually, a tenner in the camps (which for all practical purposes amounted to the same thing).

In my post-Stalin youth the Article changed its number, and it got to be evoked less frequently. Yet a political joke laughingly told in boozy company could still be punished by imprisonment or, more often, expulsion from a university or sacking from a job.

It’s refreshing to see how rapidly today’s West is moving in the same direction.

Jokes aren’t yet treated as treason against the state, although that may come in due course. For the time being they’re only punished if they betray the diktats of the modern ethos.

Nor is criminal prosecution practised yet, though we shouldn’t hold our breath. Yet an unfortunate joker may already suffer a campaign of public opprobrium and concomitant career repercussions.

Two current cases, one Russian, the other British, illustrate the point.

Chronologically, the first one involved Shamil Tarpischev, president of the Russian Tennis Federation and admittedly an unsavoury character.

Russia’s pre-Vlad president, Yeltsyn, was a tennis buff, and Tarpischev was his favourite coach. As such he belonged to the presidential coterie that differed from a mafia only in insignificant details.

Proximity to the godfather, at that time Yeltsyn, was both a necessary and sufficient condition for advancement, and Tarpischev advanced all the way to the post of Sports Minister.

Now if you’ll allow some background, the sports establishment in the USSR was run by the KGB. The reason is self-evident: world-class athletes by definition had to travel the world, which was the highest privilege ever afforded a Soviet citizen.

Hence the ranks of athletes had to be heavily infiltrated by those whose mission in life was to enforce loyalty and ideological purity. Thus every Soviet sports ‘delegation’ travelled in the company of numerous KGB minders under the guise of interpreters, team doctors, administrators, tour guides and whatnot.

The USSR Sports Committee effectively was a KGB department, and the fusion of sports and secret police was maintained when history ended and Democracy vanquished.

Except that by then the secret police itself had fused with the criminal underworld to such an extent that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began (Col. Vlad, he of a $40 billion fortune, is a prime example of this amalgam).

The mafia potential of sports is endless, what with betting on results being rife in most Western countries. Tennis in particular, as an individual sport with heaps of funding in it, offers a perfect arena for throwing matches for money.

Followers of the sport must have caught a whiff of many such scandals, typically featuring Eastern European and Russian players. US authorities certainly did when in 1993 they denied Tarpischev an American visa for his alleged links with organised crime.

Though he vehemently denied the charges, the poor chap missed the Olympic games in Atlanta and narrowly made the semi-finals of the Federation Cup, even though he captained the Russian team.

All this is par for the course. Let him travel to the Crimea, I say. Tarpischev deserves everything the West can throw at him.

But he doesn’t deserve the censure to which he was subjected simply for a joke – stupid, unfunny, but still only a joke nonetheless.

Speaking on a Russian TV chat show, Tarpischev referred to the Williams sisters as ‘Williams brothers’, alluding to the masculine power of their game.

A worldwide scandal erupted, and the WTA banned Tarpischev from women’s tennis for a year, fining him $25,000 into the bargain.

Serena Williams, whose body shape doesn’t resemble any man of my acquaintance, issued a public statement describing Tarpischev’s joke as racist. Having read the text of his remarks, I found no references to race, but then of course any offence to a black person is ipso facto racist in our politically correct world.

After all, didn’t our own courts rule that a racial offence is anything the offended person says it is? Hence, if the Williams sisters feel insulted, then anyone saying, for example, that Serena looks overweight or that Venus’ game is in the doldrums is a racist.

Come on, ladies, a joke is a joke. Tarpischev will never make it as a comedian, and he’s a nasty bit of work, but surely in this instance Serena and the WTA have overreacted?

Now Jimmy Carr has made it as a comedian, in spades (no racially offensive pun intended). His stock in trade is jokes treading a fine line beyond which humour ends and savagery begins.

It’s a matter of personal taste, but I like him. Though I wouldn’t be able to defend this view, for me a joke is funny or not. I apply no other judgement to it, although others are perfectly within their right to do so.

Thus I laugh when Jimmy says, for instance, “They say there’s safety in numbers. Go tell that to the six million Jews.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t laugh, but I do. Moreover, though others may not find this joke humorous, only a self-righteous moron… sorry, I meant ‘modern’ would attack Jimmy for endorsing, or even trivialising, genocide.

This time he got in hot water over a joke about Pistorius. Talking about a lavatory queue, Jimmy quipped:

“So frustrating. All I’m saying is I can see it from Oscar Pistorius’ point of view. That’s not the controversial bit. Here it comes… I blame her. If she hadn’t been in that disabled toilet none of this would have happened.”

An explosion of public indignation ensued instantly. Thank God all the characters in that tragedy were white. Had they been black, Jimmy would be branded as a racist, with career-ending implications.

We all hold certain things to be off limits for jokes. However, exactly what those things are may cause a divergence of opinion.

I might suggest that jokes about Christianity, coming in a non-stop stream from every stand-up venue, overstep the limit. But the gods of old civilisations invariably become the demons of new ones.

New civilisations demand new gods, and hence today’s deification of political correctness. How long before it dawns upon us that, largely for that reason, our civilisation isn’t worthy of the name?

 

 

The EU has just told Britain to top up her net contribution to the EU coffers by another 20 per cent or, in absolute numbers, £1.7 billion. The deadline is 1 December.

This being close to a by-election in which Ukip is leading the Tories by 13 points, Dave felt called upon to throw that extortionist demand back into those Euro mugs.

“If people think I am paying that bill on 1 December, they have another think coming,” he intoned, both mendaciously and incorrectly.

The mendacity should be visible to the naked eye. Dave pretends to be someone he isn’t: a statesman capable of facing up to the EU.

If he were such a statesman, he would have simply refused to pay the money, full stop. Being what he is, a cynical, self-serving spiv, he only said he wasn’t going to pay on 1 December.

Like someone responding to a ransom demand, Dave complained he hadn’t been given enough time to put the sum together. “C’mon, at least give me until the middle of the month,” seems to be the implication.

His outburst is also factually incorrect. He won’t be paying anything on any date – we will. I know this thought may sound quaint to our spivocrats, but they actually don’t own public funds. The public does. We. Us.

We’re the ones picking up the tab for Britain’s EU ‘contributions’, which is more accurately describable as us paying protection money without getting the protection.

The arrangement has been depicted in various films and TV shows, starting with The Godfather and starring fine Italian-American actors. The difference between a Mafia shakedown and Britain paying the EU is that it’s generally believed that we proffer our hard-earned voluntarily.

That, of course, is another lie. I for one don’t recall consenting to pay a part of my income to subsidise the Common Agricultural Policy, which is to say French farmers. I already pay them enough each time we go to our local market in France.

Anyway, José Manuel quite reasonably said that the shakedown “should not have come as a surprise” to Dave.

He was absolutely right, though not exactly in the way he meant it. Barroso was suggesting that the demand naturally flowed out of all sorts of agreements Britain had entered into, which is God’s own truth.

But it’s only part of the truth, and an infinitesimally small part at that.

The shakedown is a natural aspect not only of the EU, but also of any other giant socialist project, which is exactly what the EU is.

Tossing aside the mythology of socialism and focusing instead on its essence, we’ll identify a plethora of traits. Then we’ll realise that the EU shows every one of them, in spades.

Politically, socialism (and so-called social democracy dominant in all Western European states is no different) is all about transferring power from the periphery to the centre – both geographically and, more important, essentially.

While enveloping itself in the smokescreen of slogans along the lines of ‘all power to the people’, socialism takes power away from the people and concentrates it in the hands of a small, more or less homogeneous elite.

Aggressive socialism effects this transfer quickly and violently; ‘democratic’ socialism does so gradually and bloodlessly.

But the result is the same: whatever power people think they have is illusory. They can’t, for example, vote the ruling elite out. They can only shift power from one party within the elite to its virtual twin, albeit bearing a different name.

One key lever the elite uses to prise power away from the people, in whose name it supposedly governs, is financial. It’s in the elite’s interests to take as much money away from those who have more of it than others, for money spells independence from the state.

The less money people have left, the more they are dependent on the state, which is precisely the idea. That’s why, for example, the state constantly increases the underclass dependent on it directly and wholly.

To any reasonable person, such social engineering is ruinous financially and, even worse, corrupting morally. But the state has its own reason, its own inner imperative, and, when judged by its own criteria, it proceeds from unassailable logic.

Exactly the same principles apply internationally. Socialists have always craved a single world government, a global cosmos activating the same mechanisms as each national microcosm.

The logic of socialism demands an ad infinitum growth of the state. This presupposes the government outgrowing its national boundaries and removing itself even farther away from the people it governs.

If a national state applies socialist principles to bullying its subjects, the resulting supranational entity applies them to bullying its constituent national states.

Money plays exactly the same role here, but obviously on a much grander scale. Just as a socialist state seeks to renders its financially virile citizens fiscally impotent, so does a superstate, in this case the EU, seek to lessen the power of the financially stronger states – especially those outside its Franco-German elite.

Hence our money will go straight to Germany and France, who’ll get it in the form of rebates. A socialist nation state taxes its wealth producers at a higher rate than everyone else; the supranational state the EU is in all but name taxes a temporarily more successful Britain in favour of the temporarily less successful France and Germany.

When our economy has been brought down to the level of France, it’s conceivable that less money will be extorted from us. There would be no point: Britain will have lost even a semblance of financial independence and hence room for manoeuvre.

Whenever we contemplate the EU’s actions, we must remember that, like any other socialist enterprise, the ends it pursues aren’t so much economical as political. Money is only a tool, or rather a weapon.

So Barroso is right: since Britain is the only European economy that seems to be growing at the moment, it has to be brought down a peg. Otherwise, Ukip and much of the Tory party would start getting ideas beyond their station.

They would find it easier to argue that Britain would be better off without the EU, which of course is true in any case. But the point is that the EU would be worse off without Britain, and this is the only point that matters.

It would be easier for Dave, Ed, José Manuel or whomever to argue that Britain needs the EU if we were as impoverished as France is rapidly becoming.

Hence the new shakedown. And hence also Dave’s frankly pathetic objections to it.

The theme of madness keeps recurring in this space, and it’ll continue to do so.

Madness is of course a clinically imprecise term, what with mental disorders coming in all shapes and sizes.

However, common to many patients, such as those suffering from schizophrenic and paranoid delusions, is losing touch with reality.

As with any other illness, the symptoms may vary from mild to severe, and psychiatric patients must be grouped together accordingly.

So let’s accept that today’s news is actually a series of dispatches from a mental hospital, and let’s further imagine that we’re walking through it ward by ward. In that spirit:

WARD 1 (MILD TO MODERATE): The Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu, the second most important Anglican prelate, insists the C of E should break the confidentiality of confession when the parishioner confesses paedophilia.

What about mass murder? High treason? Group rape resulting in life-threatening injuries? His Grace obviously believes paedophilia, a vile crime as it is, trumps them all, which means reality makes no inroads on his mind.

If further proof is needed to nail the diagnosis down, Dr Sentamu has manifestly blocked out of his consciousness some fundamental Christian doctrines, such as the sanctity of confession.

The confessor isn’t a police informer, Your Grace. He’s the intermediary between the confessing Christian and God. And God has his own ways of punishing sinners, which punitive measures don’t include summary arrest and speedy trial by jury.

Only in places where the Church forfeits its mission and acts as an adjunct to the state do confessing priests act as snitches. Russia, for example, developed this arrangement under the tsars and perfected it under the Bolsheviks.

If this is the model the good Archbishop sees in his mind’s eye, his mind urgently requires medical attention.

WARD 2 (MODERATE TO SEVERE): The Times ‘Friends’ cartoon, subtitled ‘Unholy Alliances’, is symptomatic of worrying paranoid delusions.

The cartoon depicts six great villains: Hitler, Mao, Kim, Putin, Assad and… well, who do you think belongs in this company? Lenin? Stalin? Amin? Attila the Hun?

No, Nigel Farage. One infers that Nigel must advocate democide, aggression against foreign countries, the cult of his own personality, no free press, artificial famines, genocide, concentration camps, political assassination…

You don’t think so? That’s because you’re sane. The editorial staff of The Times, on the other hand, are suffering from malignant anxiety and paranoia.

They are so scared of Ukip consigning the Tories to a third position in the polls that they’ve developed the kind of delusions against which psychotropic drugs are helpless. Frontal lobotomy seems to be the only solution, but then by the looks of it these chaps have undergone it already.

WARD 3 (SEVERE): Our own dear parliament often debates, and occasionally passes, crazy bills. But the symptoms hardly ever go beyond the moderate category.

Russia’s parliament, the Duma, goes us one better. Thus Dr (jurisprudence) Yelena Mizulina, head of the Duma Commission on Women’s Affairs, justifies the most extreme of diagnoses with room to spare.

Russia is currently experiencing both quantitative and qualitative problems with childbirth. The country’s population is going down at an alarming rate, and much of the new brood is genetically compromised by the parents’ affection for liquid refreshments.

Dr Mizulina proposes to solve both demographic problems in one fell swoop by the expedient of every young Russian woman conceiving Putin’s children.

Now even though Russia’s population is declining, she still boasts millions of women of childbearing age. Hence, without casting aspersion on Vlad’s well-publicised virility or doubting that his offspring would indeed represent a breeding triumph, his busy schedule probably would prevent him from doing the honours across the board.

Not to worry: Dr Mizulina keeps abreast of modern scientific advances: “My proposal is essentially simple,” she says. “Every female citizen will receive Putin’s genetic material by post, get pregnant by him and give birth. Such mothers will receive special benefits from the state.”

In due course Putin’s children will be brought up in military schools to be imbued with the spirit of devotion to the motherland in general and the president in particular.

“The children born to Russia’s president,” says Dr Mizulina, “will in future form the military and political elite of the state.”

Considering the length of the proposed breeding cycle, I’m unlikely to see it to its conclusion. That is a pity, for I (along, no doubt, with Peter Hitchens and Christopher Booker) would love to see such a state in action.

However, I must compliment Dr Mizulina on having removed the last remaining doubts on the historical genesis of Putin’s Russia.

Not that I expect everyone to see the light immediately. After all, some still deny, for example, that Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were ideological twins.

For the benefit of those doubting Thomases, here’s a link to a graphic comparison of Soviet and Nazi posters: http://fototelegraf.ru/?p=173168 Not only are they practically identical in pictorial subjects and captions, but, a more reliable telltale sign, they obviously proceed from the same aesthetic and hence philosophical premise.

Dr Mizulina may suffer from many mental disorders, but monomania isn’t one of them. A true Renaissance woman, this academic parliamentarian applies herself to a multitude of issues.

For example, she has proposed a bill to expel all Jews from Russia on the grounds that “we have enough of our own problems.” (I’ll spare you the historical parallels.)

Dr Mizulina also believes that childless women should be barred from access to higher education. The underlying notion of a woman’s role in society could be described in English, but this wouldn’t have the alliterative ring of the German Kinder, Küche, Kirche. (No historical parallels, I stand by my promise.)

All these proposals have reached the level of Duma debate, strongly suggesting that Dr Mizulina isn’t the only MP in need of psychiatric help.

Rejected so far is her draft bill on Banning sexual intercourse on the territory of the Crimean Republic and Sebastopol, which Dr Mizulina justifies by stating that “it’s not what we annexed the Crimea for”.

No, of course not. The purpose of said annexation must have been to depopulate the peninsula by both short-term and long-term measures. The immediate objective was achieved by the mass exodus resulting from Putin’s conquest, and trust Dr Mizulina to think many moves ahead.

This concludes our today’s tour of the madhouse of modernity. There will be many more, I promise.

 

 

If you read about as fast as I do, it has taken you three seconds to read this headline.

During the same time the UK national debt has grown by £15,510, which is, you must agree, pretty good going.

Or, depending on your point of view, pretty bad going. Catastrophic, come to think of it.

Our debt is currently but a cat’s whisker under £1.5 trillion. If it continues to accelerate at the same rate, over the next five years it’ll grow by £8,152,056,000,000. Before long we’ll be talking serious money.

Still, the money may be serious, but the way we, well, I mean the government and the press, talk about it isn’t. In fact, the remarks one reads are downright frivolous.

The papers report that George Osborne has just discovered that our borrowing has in the first six months of the year overshot the target by £20 billion.

Both George and the papers that are in thrall to his party find this situation unacceptable, as well they should.

Yet what troubles them isn’t that the economy is rapidly heading for a massive crash that’ll make us think of 2008 with nostalgic longing.

No, the problem as they see it is that they’ll find it hard to bribe the voters with pre-election giveaways, such as a sizeable tax cut.

By now we’ve become sufficiently fluent in the modern jargon to know that, when a government talks about a giveaway, its intention isn’t to give but to take marginally less.

By the same token, a mugger who cleans you out but, out of the goodness of his heart, leaves you three quid for the bus fare home isn’t actually giving you something. He’s just robbing you by a slightly smaller amount.

Those who understand the jargon don’t of course expect any key words to be used in their real meaning. Thus the word ‘liberalism’ is widely used to denote transfer of power from the individual to the state, which is exactly opposite to what the word really means.

Staying with economics, we’ve learned that ‘austerity’ is the new meaning of profligacy, ‘quantitative easing’ means deepening the fiscal abyss by printing money, and ‘growth’ stands for shifting cash from one pocket to the other while claiming that each shift is tantamount to GDP growth.

Still, call it a giveaway, a tax cut or a cynical attempt to buy our votes with our own money, our present austerity, otherwise known as profligacy, means the Tories can’t afford it, whatever you call it. Hence they can’t bribe their way to power, and that’s naturally all they care about.

Never mind that the country is bankrupt, if we define bankruptcy as liabilities exceeding assets. Never mind that the state is chronically unable to pay its own way. Never mind that we spend more on servicing the existing debt than on defence of the realm. Never mind that future generations will be beggared by the ruinous debt. May 2015 is all that matters.

This unfolds to the accompaniment of bleating coming from Keynesian economists, talking about ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘new models’.

Essentially, they are saying that spending more than you earn is good for you. Not you personally, mind you. Irresponsible urination of money against the wall isn’t good for you individually – it’s good for the collective you, the people at large.

Somehow the big numbers are supposed to invalidate Adam Smith’s common sense he evinced by remarking that “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great Kingdom.”

A private family knows that, if its outgoings keep exceeding its income, things will be fine for a while. But sooner or later they’ll become less fine, then not fine at all, and then the bailiffs knock on the door.

We are expected to believe that the state operates to a different ‘model’, but it doesn’t really. It’s just that the state has a greater power than an individual to defer the day of judgement – but not indefinitely. Sooner or later the penny will drop and, to mix the metaphors ever so slightly, the balloon will go up.

The only way for Britain to regain its erstwhile solvency is to change the whole ‘liberal’ basis of our economy. Without going into too much detail, we should do things that are known to work, not those that are solely founded on bien pensant wishful thinking of the ‘liberal’, which is to say socialist, genre.

Keeping public spending down, ideally under 25 per cent of GDP, works. So does offering welfare only to those who legitimately can’t work, as opposed to won’t. So does denationalising most of the health service. So does reducing government bureaucracy. So do income-tax rates at least half of their present extortionist level. So does not having to pay tribute to foreign powers.

Every country that introduced such policies thrived as a result (the Asian ‘tiger economies’ spring to mind). Every country that followed our ‘model’ more or less closely developed the same problem sooner or later.

But those statesmen who knew that Smith was right and acted accordingly didn’t do so because they wanted to bribe the electorate. They did it because they wanted their countries to do well.

I am not so naïve as to think that any measures I’ve touched upon would be politically feasible. Our democracy run riot corrupts not only the politicians but also the voters.

A Chancellor bold enough to suggest anything along those lines would stop being Chancellor at the end of his speech plus three minutes, tops. The whole cabinet would probably follow in his footsteps on the road to political oblivion.

That’s why, barring a calamity that doesn’t bear thinking about, we’ll be for ever stuck with chaps willing to beggar the nation for the sake of the next election or, even worse, some abhorrent ideology.

Meanwhile, if you’ve read all of this article, you’ve missed a major economic event: during this time our national debt has grown by £1,706,100.

 

 

 

 

 

If you still doubt we’re living in a lunatic asylum run by the inmates, read today’s papers, especially our domestic news.

World news does occasionally introduce a faint touch of sanity, this time supplied by France.

The cast of Opéra Bastille in Paris stopped singing La Traviata halfway through, and not in protest to its demotic music.

The singers objected to the sight of a burka-clad woman in the audience. And – make sure you’re prepared for the shock – no one called the police to have the reactionary vocalists arrested.

Instead the ushers evicted the woman over her loud protests, and the performance resumed. The evictors were on safe grounds because wearing garments that conceal the person’s face is illegal in France.

But, having spent much of my life in the company of musicians, singers and other artists, I rather doubt that the cast felt they had to strike a blow for legality.

I suspect their reaction was purely aesthetic: vive la différence and all that, but too much différence is unsettling, especially if it’s supplied by a civilisation openly and aggressively hostile to ours.

A burka in a public place makes an aesthetically unacceptable and philosophically aggressive statement. It’s an open challenge to our civilisation, even at its low end represented by Verdi. And performers hate to have to contend with any challenges other than artistic ones – hence the reaction.

Turn the page to domestic news, and the spirit of sanity instantly evaporates.

A private Christian school in the Home Counties has been threatened with closure and had its Ofsted rating downgraded from ‘good’ to ‘adequate’ because it is, well, Christian.

As such, it emphasises Christianity at the expense of other faiths, such as Islam, which are all supposed to be equal, especially Islam (Chesterton’s quip – I wish I had said it first).

Thus the school’s assemblies are led by Christian priests rather than, say, Muslim imams, a practice that supposedly teaches the pupils to disrespect other faiths.

This constitutes an egregious affront to the clinical condition going by the name of modernity – though not, one suspects, to the pupils and their parents.

After all, they must have known what they were in for when deciding to select a private Christian school and pay good money in tuition fees. It’s conceivable, though abhorrent to me as a lifelong champion of political correctness, that they actually feel that Christianity isn’t just one of the equally valid options on the table, but the only true religion.

And even if it isn’t, it’s still the faith that produced our civilisation. Parents sending their children to Christian schools perhaps lament the demise of this civilisation and are desperate to cling on to whatever is left of it.

That doesn’t mean that they want their little ones to grow up as bigots hating proponents of other faiths. It does, however, mean that they probably regard the government’s demand for equal time to be afforded to, say, Islam to be intrusive, tyrannical and, well, insane.

To verify that diagnosis they are probably asking all sorts of probing questions. Such as, how many Muslim schools have their assemblies led by Christian priests or Jewish rabbis? Surely what’s sauce for the Christian goose ought to be sauce for the Muslim gander?

And if it isn’t, our supposedly Christian country is insisting that a religion openly hostile to Christianity and Christians be given not just equal but indeed preferential treatment. Any competent psychiatrist will diagnose such insistence as a reliable symptom of a mental disorder.

Turn the page, and the clinical report is getting more detailed. A London bus driver and a Brighton supermarket are being ‘investigated’ for trying to stop, respectively, a male and a female homosexual couple engaging in foreplay on their premises.

The bus driver is reported to have shouted “Oi, you two don’t do that on my f****** bus or you can get off, I don’t want to watch that.”

The loving couple couldn’t believe their ears. To check their hearing, they asked the driver if he was speaking to them.

“Yes,” he replied, “it’s my bus, it’s my rules and I don’t want to watch that, it’s disgusting, get off the bus.”

I realise that in our mad world it’s impossible to have anything against any form of public behaviour, provided it’s not endangering innocent bystanders’ life and limb.

Yet, at the risk of being branded a retrograde fascist homophobe (yet again), I’d suggest that any sexual activity, penetrative or otherwise, homo- or heterosexual, is best practised in private.

However, while I’d find the sight of a boy and a girl French-kissing in public to be annoying, my reaction to two men doing it would be exactly the same as that bus driver’s. I’d be disgusted.

Now the veneer of good manners I’m trying, with variable success, to keep in place would probably prevent me from expressing my disgust in the same forthright manner. But it’s not just the driver’s locution that made the two homosexuals disbelieve their ears.

They felt or, in all likelihood, feigned incredulity at the very fact that someone might find what they were doing objectionable.

Homosexual activists pretend that they want their ‘lifestyle’ to be treated tolerantly, which is fair enough. But tolerance, as I never tire of repeating, isn’t a suicide pact.

Homosexuals engage in a practice that most civilisations, including our Christian one, regard as a mortal sin. It’s not the worst sin, for if it were it would have merited a place either among the biblical commandments or the patristic deadly sins.

But a sin it is, in both Testaments on which our civilisation rests. Hence tolerance to it has to be a two-way street: the sinners undertake not to flaunt their transgression and others agree not to harass them.

That’s how things have been in England for many decades, when the country was still sane. The bilateral compact was honoured bilaterally, and perfectly clubbable gentlemen got their jollies without anyone being too exercised about it.

This is no longer good enough in our loony bin. Homosexuals now insist on being accepted on their own terms. The distinction between virtue and sin, normal and perverse, right and wrong not only is no longer recognised, but those who draw it are about to be criminalised, if they aren’t already.

However, though ideology can trump any sane beliefs, sane visceral responses are more stubborn. And most heterosexuals do find homosexual canoodling to be disgusting, even though few would say so openly.

For example, without running a survey one can still venture a guess that most heteros would be offended by an explicit homosexual scene in a film, but not by an erotic scene featuring a man and a woman. That’s just how things are.

The bus driver is likely to be censured, possibly sacked, for enunciating, albeit in a crude form, a normal response of a normal person. But a sane man isn’t normal in a lunatic asylum.

And if you doubt that’s where we live, just read the morning papers.

 

 

 

 

Obviously the outgoing gauleiter of the European Commission didn’t make that argument in so many words.

However, he does make it in his person. For an organisation that brings the likes of him to the fore has to be fatally flawed, not to say downright evil.

José Manuel Barroso began his political career in the ranks of an underground Maoist party committed to terrorism as a valid form of political self-expression.

His aim then was to destroy the sovereign government of Portugal, and he pursued it with youthful vigour.

Age has diminished the vigour, as it usually does, but the aim has remained essentially the same. The scale, however, is different: these days Barroso works tirelessly to destroy the very concept of national sovereignty within Europe’s borders.

In his student days he advocated a mix of violence and agitprop, which is to say strident drivel lacking any intellectual content. In his new role he seems to eschew violence, but the drivel remains.

Yesterday he attacked Cameron’s government for failing to highlight the benefits of the EU, thereby allowing anti-EU sentiment to go “largely unchallenged”.

Specifically, Dave has earned the gauleiter’s rebuke for making vague, Ukip-inspired noises on the subject of unlimited immigration from the EU.

The only sound thing Barroso said was that any restrictions on migration would be illegal under EU law. This is true, and thank you, José, for pointing this out to Dave, who pretends we’ll be able to circumvent the EU while remaining in it.

Limiting migration is indeed illegal under EU law. That’s why we must leave the jurisdiction of this ridiculous contrivance and restore the English Common Law to its erstwhile status of unchallenged sovereignty within our borders.

In his testosterone-fuelled youth Barroso would spout any nonsense, provided it advanced his ideological goals. Thus, for example, he clamoured that the capitalist government of Portugal was fanning a conflict between students and workers.

Today is no different: the message has changed, but the intellectual level hasn’t. Thus Barroso claims that unrestricted migration is a two-way street:

“British citizens have freedom of movement all over Europe. There are 700,000 living in Spain,” he said.

In the good tradition of Marxist propaganda this is a lie, both factually and conceptually. The official number of British subjects (a more accurate term than ‘citizens’) living in Spain is 297,229, less than half of Barroso’s claim.

But let’s not be pedantic about a few hundred thousand here or there. Instead let’s ask a few questions begging to be asked.

How many of those peregrinating Brits are taking jobs away from the local population? How many sleep rough in some of Madrid’s best neighbourhoods? How many are driving the crime rate sky high? How many are collecting social benefits in Spain, which they share with their families back home?

The fact is that most Brits living in Spain are retirees who import capital into Spain without taking anything out. A majority of them live in self-contained, poorly integrated communities where the only Spanish they ever attempt is “dos cervezas por favor.”

The locals welcome their presence because the Brits freely spend their pension funds and make the natives richer by driving property prices up. Similarly, I doubt many denizens of, say, Hull would object to elderly Spaniards moving in, bringing their money with them and improving the food quality at tapas bars.

However, many Englishmen cringe when realising that their communities are being disfigured, in all likelihood irretrievably, by swarms of European riffraff bulging the welfare rolls, placing an unsupportable burden on the NHS and other social services, and in general reducing England to a faceless gau of the EU.

This isn’t to say that all, or perhaps even most, EU migrants fit that description. Far from it. Many indeed enrich our neighbourhoods and the country in general.

For example, thousands of the French have moved into my part of London, and one doesn’t hear too many locals complaining. On the contrary, I dare say our neighbourhood appears more civilised as a result, and the food, bread especially, has certainly improved.

But many of us are aghast to realise that we collectively have lost the sovereignty we all possess individually: the right to decide whom we wish to welcome as guests in our house and whom we’d rather turn away.

This bears much eerie resemblance to the Moscow of my youth, where the authorities could ‘densify’ families deemed to have too much living space. If a family had more than the mandated nine square metres per person, the council could move into the same flat any number of strangers who’d bring the residency down to the target level.

No doubt such an arrangement would be close to Barroso’s Maoist heart, but one wishes he argued his case with more than just Maoist logic.

“It may be a revelation to some, but the vast majority of people living in Europe are also rather attached to their national identity” is another example of his rhetoric. The irony is a bit feeble, but the factual accuracy can’t be faulted.

Similarly, there were many Soviet children who were sufficiently attached to their parents not to wish to have them taken away for ever in the middle of the night.

Many Jews were doubtless also rather attached to their lives, which they then went on to lose in Nazi gas chambers.

Closer to Barroso’s spiritual home, many Chinese peasants were rather attached to their plots which were then taken away, often along with their lives, during the Great Leap Forward.

However none of them were given any choice in the matter, and neither are the European citizens of today. To be sure, on occasion the EU gauleiters propose they vote on yet another surrender – a privilege denied to the groups I’ve mentioned above.

But the privilege is illusory: any anti-EU vote is immediately invalidated, and the people are asked to vote again until they get it right. A pro-EU vote, on the other hand, is irreversible.

My favourite paragraph in Barroso’s diatribe is this: “If people read only negative… portrayals in their newspapers from Monday to Saturday, you cannot expect them to nail the European flag on their front door on Sunday just because the political establishment tells them it is the right thing to do.”

Barroso apparently realises that our political establishment is on his side, and he ought to be complimented on this perspicacity. Also praiseworthy is his honesty: he doesn’t deign to conceal his wish that the EU stellar ring should adorn every British front door.

But accusing British newspapers of anti-EU bias betokens either ignorance or mendacity. A study of our mainstream papers’ editorial content will show that The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent are pro-EU unwaveringly, The Times mostly and The Telegraph intermittently.

It’s true that The Mail seldom runs pro-EU articles, which Barroso doubtless finds vexing. But Britain isn’t quite Mao’s China yet. Our papers can’t be forced to toe the line, although we’re moving in that direction.

Anyway, which benefits of the EU would Barroso like us to highlight? Social unrest? Economic stagnation? Stifling labour laws? Being ruled by Maoists and other assorted socialists craving world government? Impotent foreign policy? Protectionism?

One just wishes we were governed by the kind of people who’d have the courage to say “No way, José” and leave the EU without as much as saying good-bye.

But one fears that this walking argument against the EU will get what he wants: a giant superstate run by the likes of him.

 

During a Formula One race in Sochi Bernie Ecclestone was sufficiently impressed with Col. Putin to suggest he could run both Europe and America if he could find time in his busy schedule.

Bernie didn’t specify what made the good colonel’s schedule so busy, probably deciding it would be impolite to suggest that his host’s time is mostly taken up with ripping off his own country and attacking his neighbours.

Col. Putin is indisputably very proficient in those areas, but he isn’t a natural administrator. Few Russians are – organisation, enterprise and discipline aren’t among the nation’s most salient strengths.

Now the Germans in general and Frau (Madam) Merkel in particular are different. They know how to run things efficiently and profitably.

Their secret is eschewing cottage industries and organising production on a grand scale – this without any detriment to efficiency.

Of course Germany isn’t immune to economic force majeure, which is why her unemployment rate is now the highest it has ever been since Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard got a grip on the economy in 1950.

The force majeure directly responsible for this unfortunate state of affairs is called the EU. You see, the Germans decided to do what Bernie thinks Putin could do better: run Europe, before proceeding to take over America as well.

Alas, while Germany was running Europe, Europe was running up debts and, like any loving vater, Germany had to assume responsibility for the debts of its wayward children. Hence the 4.5 million unemployed.

But if any country can solve such problems, Germany can. And my friend Angela, with her housewifey touch, knows how to run a household.

Thus at least one German industry is already showing a spectacular growth. Since the previous government legalised prostitution in 2002, the number of German sex workers, to give them their official name, has grown to 400,000 and the whole industry is adding €16 billion to the country’s economy every year.

Germany has sprouted a number of industrial-scale brothels, some occupying 12-storey buildings, with each floor dedicated to its own thematic motif.

Many have introduced innovations based on the concept of American all-you-can-eat restaurants. You pay your €100 at the door, and the delights of all 12 floors are yours without any limit on consumption. To make the transaction cost-effective, customers no doubt use various stimulants, but that’s no one’s business other than their own.

Angie certainly doesn’t care. All she wants is that the thriving concerns function according to the legal requirements imposed on all German businesses. Specifically, they are expected to pay taxes and provide the statutory package of benefits for the employees.

In return they are treated like any other business, which extends to their having access to job centres’ data bases.

Now these establishments are much more rigorous than their British equivalents. Working hand in glove with the social services, they follow a simple and, this being Germany, ironclad rule.

If a centre’s referral produces a job offer, a person unemployed for a year or longer has to accept it or lose half of his unemployment benefit. Another refusal, and he loses the other half. If he proves to be so picky, he can starve for all the job centre cares.

That’s how a 25-year-old woman found herself in a spot of trouble. Having lost her job as computer programmer, she registered with a job centre and began to wait for offers. To stack her bets she also listed other qualifications on her CV: before learning programming the young lady had done stints as waitress, bartender and hostess.

Germany’s unemployment being what it is, no offers came for a year. At last the centre sent the woman a long-awaited letter, saying that a potential employer felt that her profile fit the requirements expected to fill a vacancy.

The woman hopefully contacted the prospective employer and was invited for an interview at what she thought was a night club. It wasn’t, not quite.

The outfit turned out to be one of those licensed bordellos that comply with every legal requirement and are therefore granted access to employment data bases. At the interview the woman was politely asked to demonstrate her qualifications by taking her clothes off and playing with a vibrator.

That she indignantly refused to do and stormed out in a huff. The very next day she was informed that, since she had declined a legitimate job offer, her unemployment benefit was thenceforth cut in half.

Without waiting to lose the other half in a similar situation the girl sued, or rather tried to. However it was explained to her that there were no grounds for a lawsuit since the job centre had followed both the spirit and letter of the law.

And, following the reforms introduced by Madam Merkel, if any woman under age 55 can’t get a job in her profession for a year, she is obliged to accept any job on offer, including that of a prostitute.

As far as the law is concerned, an employer seeking a prostitute of either sex is no different from one looking for an engineer or a nurse. No honest work is immoral, the labourer worthy of his hire and all that.

Moreover, a job centre attempting to bar a bordello’s access to its data bases breaks a law and can be punished for it. “Why should I be denied access?” asks, rhetorically, Tatiana Ulianova, the Russian owner of a brothel in the centre of Berlin. “I pay taxes just like any other business.”

Quite. And when her German colleague Ulrich Koperkoch was indeed kept away from the data bases, he sued, won his case and was awarded sizeable damages.

All those stories date back to 2005. Since then Madam Angela’s government has been running a propaganda campaign to the effect that sex services are no different from, say, physiotherapy or massage.

As a result many young women, regardless of their marital status, no longer stick to their outdated prejudices and gratefully accept any job going, emphatically including prostitution.

Really, Angie has missed her true calling. Still, the opportunity isn’t lost irretrievably. Sooner or later she’ll retire from politics, and running a knocking shop could offer her a chance to remain a valuable member of society.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

The impression that we now live in a lunatic asylum, with the lunatics running it, is getting stronger by the day.

It’s impossible to open a paper, even a supposedly conservative one, without reading at least one article whose author shows every symptom of being not just intellectually backward but downright insane.

Today’s prize in the madness stakes goes to The Mail’s Jan Moir for her article Football’s Vile Rapist Must Never Get His Old Job Back (author’s underline).

What got Miss Moir going is today’s release from prison of Ched Evans, former Wales international.

Allow me to recap the main circumstances of the case for those of you who have negligently missed this week’s most important news item.

Back in 2012 Ched and another footballer went out on the town with the explicit purpose of – are you ready for this? – getting laid. That, in the eyes of the prosecutor and all right-thinking, which these days means self-righteous, people by itself constitutes corpus delicti.

To that criminal, or at least highly unorthodox, end the two culprits checked themselves into a local Premier Inn, thus laying themselves open to a charge of malice aforethought.

The only thing missing at that point was a willing participant, but the two handsome, wealthy footballers didn’t anticipate any trouble finding one.

So it proved. They went to a nightclub and one of them picked up a girl who had had a couple of drinks too many. The girl happily agreed to accompany the ball-kicker to his hotel, where they had sex.

Then, in the good ‘roasting’ tradition of the footballing profession, Ched Evans joined the fun and had the girl as well.

She woke up the next morning naked and alone in bed, after which crying rape seemed like the only possible thing to do, especially since the perpetrators clearly weren’t short of a bob or two.

The two men were arrested and tried for rape. The prosecution’s case was based on the claim that the girl was too drunk to consent to intercourse.

Personally, I find that a bit suspect. The girl was fully conscious, able to walk unaided, consume pizza that she carried across the hotel lobby, get in the lift.  As someone who used to get drunk on occasion, I can see how booze could have removed some of her inhibitions, provided she had any in the first place, but not how her free will could have been completely overridden.

But fair enough, the jury accepted the prosecutor’s claim, and the law spoke.  The girl couldn’t say no, and the subsequent amorous activity therefore constituted rape.

Yet here’s the weird part: the first man who had sex with the girl was acquitted. Hence the jury accepted the defence’s argument that the girl had consented to sex. Logic would then suggest that she was sober enough to consent.

I don’t know how long the act of consensual love lasted, but let’s assume it was about 10 minutes. During this time the victim supposedly lost her capacity to say no, which means that when Evans then climbed aboard he committed rape.

It was of course possible that the girl fancied the first suitor but not the second. It’s also possible she drew the line at group sex, which is why she rejected Evans’s advances and he had to resort to coercion.

If that’s what the prosecution had claimed, the second act would have been clear-cut rape. But the prosecution claimed nothing of the sort.

The accusation remained the same: the girl was too drunk to reject the second lover even though she hadn’t been too drunk to accept the first one. As she consumed no alcohol in between the two, this sounds odd.

One way or the other, at the end of that extremely soft case Ched Evans was sentenced to five years in prison. Earlier today he was released, having served half his term.

The real fun began a few days ago. The TV personality Judy Finnigan (don’t ask me what she does on TV for I don’t have a clue) had the temerity to suggest that now that Evans had paid his debt to society he should be allowed to resume plying his trade.

That by itself would have been sufficient to impale Miss Finnigan on the stake of what these days passes for public opinion, and what in the relatively recent past would have been called the braying of a mob.

But she made things far worse by saying the public should take it easy on Evans because after all the rape he committed wasn’t violent.

All hell broke loose. For Miss Finnigan implicitly rejected the received opinion, nay diktat, that rape is the only crime that has no gradations and no extenuating circumstances.

When it comes to the taking of a human life, the law accepts such nuances as murder, manslaughter, unintended or accidental homicide and what not. But what’s killing compared to unauthorised hanky-panky?

Thus a savage who jumps a stranger in a park, beats her up, has sex with her while she’s unconscious and leaves her for dead is a rapist in exactly the same sense as someone who forgot to breathalyse a girl before sex.

In other words, Miss Finnigan committed a crime that’s much worse than even Mr Evans’s: he violated one person, she violated the whole modern ethos.

Defenders of women’s rights were aghast enough to unleash a torrent of hate mail, targeting Miss Finnigan even more than Mr Evans.

Refusing to accept her hastily offered apology, the crazed mob… sorry, I mean champions of women’s rights, threatened to rape Miss Finnigan’s own daughter Chloe, which seemed to them like a just thing to do.

A bunch of loonies, you’d think, and you would be right. But here speaks Jan Moir, a columnist in a respectable newspaper committed to the defence of tradition:

“While I have great sympathy for Chloe feeling ‘violated’, her experience doesn’t compare with the 19-year-old girl raped by Evans…” Neither does it compare with the experience of Jews gassed at Treblinka, which has about as little to do with the issue at hand.

Perspective is important, concludes Miss Moir. So is sanity. And a sane person would realise that, since Chloe presumably wasn’t holding the victim down while Evans was having his wicked way with her, that parallel simply doesn’t work. Chloe did nothing to deserve finding herself on the receiving end of criminal threats.

Unless, of course, Miss Moir feels, which she assures us she doesn’t, that Miss Finnigan’s sin is visited upon her daughter, who should therefore grin and bear it.

Of course the title of Moir’s piece is self-explanatory: she doesn’t think Evans should be allowed to make a living in his chosen field. Again, a sane person would know that punishment in a way wipes the slate clean. A released prisoner must be rehabilitated, and easing him back into work is the best way of achieving that.

But Miss Moir isn’t a sane person, she’s a modern one. As such, she isn’t able to put some kind of limit on her sanctimonious hysteria.

Such uncontrollable incontinence used to be regarded as a symptom of insanity. Now it only means that the lunatic is civic-minded and therefore normal.

 

       

Generally, it takes American perversions five to ten years to reach our shores.

This happens invariably and inexorably. The self-appointed leader of the free world mandates political correctness, homomarriage, reduction in greenhouse gases, reverse discrimination in favour of racial minorities or women, multi-culti rectitude, vegetarianism as a political statement – give it a few years and we’ll follow suit with obsequious alacrity.

The same goes for smoking. First, Americans banned smoking in all but specially designated areas. Then in all public buildings. Then in bars and restaurants. Finally, seven years ago, smoking in New York parks was deemed too dangerous to public health.

And what do you know, the Atlantic Ocean failed to provide a sturdy enough barrier for each ban to bless us with its eventual presence.

The latest of these is the proposed ban on smoking in city parks, which is guaranteed to become law in the next few weeks.

The British, however, have retained the last vestiges of sanity, which is why we aren’t making the patently deranged claim that a chap puffing on a Silk Cut in Hyde Park is jeopardising public health.

We don’t want every tobacco company to hire a regiment of doctors able to prove, convincing figures in hand, that someone who believes such nonsense presents a much greater threat to society than even clouds of tobacco smoke enveloping the Serpentine.

It’s so much safer to rely on an argument that, in defiance of logical positivism, can be neither proved nor disproved by any empirical method.

In this instance, the argument is that smoking sets a bad example for children, and I can see the point. Why rely on parks to teach tots rotten habits? That’s what we have schools for.

Children tend to go to schools much more often than to Hyde Park, and that’s where they learn all they need to know – or rather all that our powers that be think they ought to know.

Thus the little ones learn about French letters long before they learn the letters of the alphabet. The are taught that any judgement is wrong by definition because, by insisting on one postulate, we deny the validity of others that may be just as true. They are expected to express themselves long before they have anything to express. They grow up convinced that all religions are equally good, which is to say equally irrelevant. They… well, you can compile your own list.

Then they go home, and few are the parents who don’t pass on bad habits to their progeny. Mum and Dad swear, drink, fight, watch moronic TV shows, listen to music that isn’t music, eat food that isn’t food – and smoke.

That last bad example is set at a frequency that increases as we go down the social scale, but talking about this would set another bad example to be avoided. God forbid we teach children to say what’s true rather than what’s politically correct.

You decide whether smoking is the worst vice children could possibly imbue from the ambient air. My contention is that a brief walk through a London park (I have to plead ignorance of parks in other English cities) will expose children to many things that are a lot worse than lighting up.

For example, by listening to grownups passing by they’ll learn to talk with Third World grammar and demotic pronunciation. Yet we’re unlikely ever to see a notice saying “No glottal stops allowed beyond this point” or “No dropping aitches”.

They’ll see plenty of adults eating and drinking as they walk, which is rotten both aesthetically and digestively. So do we see injunctions against munching on the hop? Do we hell.

They’ll even – are you ready for this? – encounter many men wearing socks with sandals or women not wearing much of anything at all, and what kind of example does this set?

And let’s not forget men and women sporting facial metal and covered head to toe with tattoos. A child constantly exposed to such walking exhibitions of body art is likely to grow up with the aesthetic sense of a savage, and surely this is a worse fate than having one’s lifespan abbreviated by a few fags.

Music resembling elephantine flatulence interspersed with orgiastic gasps blares from ghetto blasters in every corner of our parks – what does that teach children? To be savages who are proud of their savagery? To pay no attention to those whose tastes may be different from theirs?

It’s frightening to observe how quickly the stupidity and amorality of modernity can degenerate into sheer lunacy, definable in clinical terms. A ban on smoking in public parks is a most clear-cut symptom.

Our society no longer needs just a good government. We need a good psychiatrist with an advanced degree and plenty of experience in collective madness.

Meanwhile allow me to offer a slight embellishment on our new ban. Before they pass through a park’s gates, children have  to walk in the street: public transportation tends to stop some distance short.

Thus even on its own crazy terms the ban will miss the mark unless we also prohibit smoking in the street – along with smoking anywhere else where children could possibly observe it, emphatically including private homes.

Stands to reason, doesn’t it? But reason is off limits in the loony bin going by  the name of modernity.