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Have you recovered from the initial shock? Well then, you must be eternally grateful to the Office for National Statistics for breaking the news.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the ONS has vindicated Ernest Hemingway who reported this dialogue. Scott Fitzgerald: The rich are different from you and me. Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

This exchange never actually took place but, even so, it’s hard to argue against its main thought. After all, its veracity was presaged by that well-known proto-conservative: “For ye have the poor with you always…”.

Implicitly ye also have the rich always – or at least that’s the conclusion to which ye are led by the subsequently developed dialectical method.

The ONS confirms: just 10 percent of the Brits own – are you ready for this? – almost half the country’s wealth! Now if that isn’t an outrage, I don’t know what is. And that’s not all (make sure you have a cardiac arrest unit standing by):

Only a meagre 10 percent of us are millionaires, with barely more than that owning a second home. That’s disgraceful. Just spare a thought for all those who own less than £1,000,000 in assets and have to make do with a single residence. Think of their plight. Think of the inequality!

Rachael Orr, Head of Oxfam’s Poverty Programme certainly does: “This is another shocking chapter in a tale of two Britains… We need politicians… to make the narrowing gap between the richest and the poorest a top priority.”

Miss/Ms Orr probably meant ‘narrowing the gap…’ for, the way she put it, one may get the subversive idea that the gap is actually narrowing already. But let’s not pick any nits. It’s the thought that counts, and I second it with hear-hear enthusiasm.

Moreover I can go even further than my new friend Rachael by making a concrete proposal. Let’s start by cutting, or ideally eliminating, the salaries of Oxfam executives, most of whom, including my new friend, are comfortably within the top five percentile of the income scale, and some in the top one.

While we’re at it, let’s perform a similar surgical procedure on the salaries in all other top charities… Forget I said it. Didn’t the same proto-conservative I quoted earlier teach that charity begins at home?

Our charity bosses are therefore theologically justified in using donations and huge state subsidies to pay themselves at the top of the scale. Mind you, Oxfam’s charity both begins at home and practically ends there, but at least they’re halfway to the summit of virtue. Who of us can make the same claim?

The report follows in the footsteps of another exercise in the economics of envy, the book Capital in the 21^st Century that’s likely to earn its author, the leftwing French economist Thomas Piketty, the Nobel Prize.

Isn’t it dommage, complains Piketty, that capitalist Western democracies tolerate, and can’t reverse, the inequality of wealth? The implication is that other forms of government have sussed out how to make everyone equally rich, even though the evidence for this finding is somewhat limited.

But evidence-schmevidence, as New York economists would say – it’s like the simian origin of man. Yes, there’s a missing link, but that’s only because we haven’t discovered it yet. A few more grants to Richard Dawkins’s fans, and we will. After all, we know it must exist for, if it doesn’t, there goes a beautiful theory and we can’t have that.

So give us time and we’ll find a way of creating a paradise of equality on earth. So what if no previous generation has managed to do so? We’re much cleverer. Time is all we need.

Implicit in all such animadversions is the presumption that equalising wealth across the board is a goal that’s both achievable and desirable. It isn’t, on both counts.

Count 1: Those who hold this view are typically atheists who worship at the altar of reason, understood in a most primitive, empirical sense.

Operating within their own pathetic system of values, one should point out that empirical evidence is absolutely unequivocal: a state making economic egalitarianism its ‘top priority’ never enriches the poor. It murders many and impoverishes all, with the exception of the loyal servants of the state, especially those who do the murdering.

Count 2: A government economic policy is only ever desirable when it brings out the best in people by discouraging cardinal sins and encouraging cardinal virtues.

These notions have Judaeo-Christian antecedents, but then so does our whole civilisation. So let’s humour those who justly feel they have 2,000 years of history on their side, shall we?

The cardinal sins are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. I maintain that economic egalitarianism aggressively caters to at least six of the seven, with gluttony being the possible exception and envy taking the pride of place.

Prudence, justice, temperance and courage are the cardinal virtues, and our economic Robin Hoods shoot arrows through each of them, especially justice.

Descending from the dizzying theological heights to the ground level of common sense and decency, one would suggest that the figures riling the egalitarians so ought to be juxtaposed with those of tax contributions to the Exchequer.

These are telling: even though the top 10 percent only own 50 percent of the nation’s wealth, they contribute 91 percent of income-tax revenue, and the top one percentile fill 30 percent of the country’s piggy bank. Are we going to be worked up about this glaring inequality as well?

By any historical standards most of our ‘poor’ are rich beyond the imagination of most earlier generations. And only a wicked man would resent his neighbour’s wealth, especially provided he himself isn’t deprived of what Dr Johnson called ‘the necessaries’.

The real problem we face isn’t economic but spiritual poverty, which our egalitarians don’t understand. But they do exemplify it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People’s nicknames are usually true to life in however tangential a way (mine is mercifully only based on my surname). But the true meaning of a nickname may vary depending on who’s talking.

For example, a member of the Petersburg KGB gang, otherwise known as Russia’s government, recently wrote a gushing article about the gang’s chieftain.

Among other sentimental recollections he divulged that back in the old days Putin was “affectionately, lovingly nicknamed ‘Stasi’.” Now you may remember that the Stasi was East Germany’s secret police that was second only to the KGB in murderous efficiency.

Without doubting for a second Col. Putin’s entitlement to that nickname, one may still marvel at the degree of sycophancy required to describe it as affectionate. One doubts that, for example, any EU functionary would be happy to be called ‘Gestapo’, even if he felt he merited such a moniker.

Now Ca’Foscari University of Venice has awarded an honorary doctorate to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin’s Culture Minister and, by all accounts, former colleague in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence).

Some feel the award may have had something to do with the university’s brand-new Centre for the Study of Russian Art, financed by Putin’s government, but you and I can’t possibly countenance such cynicism.

Dr Medinsky is widely known in Russia as ‘Putin’s Goebbels’, which is terribly unfair – to Dr Goebbels, that is. At least Hitler’s propagandist got his PhD from Heidelberg University fair and square in 1921, long before he acquired any political weight.

By contrast, Dr Medinsky, who fancies himself as an historian, was awarded his first doctorate in 2011, when he was already Putin’s top mouthpiece. Thus the academic council had to overlook the inane and largely plagiarised contents of Medinsky’s dissertation Problems with Objectivity in Covering Russian History in the Second Half of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.

Mr Medinsky, as he then was, proceeded from the scholarly proposition that history is nothing but retrospective politics. Since his political job involved shilling for Putin, he treated history exclusively in that light.

To that end Medinsky based his treatise wholly on foreign sources, which he divided into two sharply demarcated categories: those that said nice things about Russia and those that didn’t. The first were all true, the second all false – hence the eponymous ‘problems with objectivity’.

Of course some of his sources presented a balanced view, pointing out both positives and negatives. This created a bit of a conundrum, which Medinsky handled with characteristic élan: “The same source may contain both true and false information on various subjects.”

Unfortunately, the same mental agility didn’t come through some of his other narrative. To wit, “Mounted warriors making up the Russian army were unable to run, they had to ride”.

Or else these two sentences, of which the first is factually wrong and the second is a rank non sequitur: “The Russian army had no common soldiers, it only included noblemen. Also the tsar did not wage lengthy wars in wintertime.”

Among other startling discoveries, one has to be thankful to Dr Medinsky for bringing objectivity to the historical reputation of Ivan IV, known (affectionately?) as The Terrible. Putin’s Goebbels argued that historians have given Ivan a bum rap.

He claimed that Ivan, who only ever laughed when watching people being fried or flayed alive, and whose murderous war on his own country is amply documented by every contemporaneous chronicle and eyewitness account, was in fact a humanitarian. With Ivan as the reference point of moral rectitude, Putin, who so far hasn’t killed or tortured many people, positively seems like Archangel Gabriel. QED.

To be fair, one can’t accuse Dr Medinsky of inconsistency: his other pronouncements faithfully maintain the same level of scholarly integrity.

For example he describes as a malicious lie any suggestion that Russia has a strong history of anti-Semitism – this in spite of such rather unpleasant historical facts as the Pale of Settlement, numerous ghettos, pogroms, Stalin’s attempt at a ‘final solution’ only thwarted by his death, percentage quotas in Russian and Soviet universities.

In case you don’t know, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that pushed the button for the Second World War was “a very timely solution thanks to which we overtook everyone else by half a length on a curve.”

Following the secret protocol of the pact, Soviet troops occupied and thoroughly purged the three Baltic states, the eastern half of Poland and big chunks of Finland and Romania – none of which ever happened according to Dr Medinsky.

Following Stalin’s groundbreaking declaration that “there are no Soviet POWs, there are only Soviet traitors,” the Soviets shot or imprisoned thousands of returning POWs  – but not according to our doctor honoris causa.

The Russian historical mission, as he defines it, is “to reconstruct a single, united space if only on the basis of an economic union and maximum political integration of Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.|”

This mission is currently being fulfilled, which is excellent news not only for the Ukraine, but also for the world at large. After all, according to Dr Medinsky (and, not in so many words, our own Peter Hitchens), Russia is the last bulwark of true culture and Christian values.

And oh yes, it’s malicious Western slander that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual. Tchaikovsky was good, Putin says homosexuality is bad, ergo Tchaikovsky was straight as an arrow.

It’s to the credit of Ca’Foscari’s faculty that 100 of its members wrote an open letter, protesting the decision of their Senato Accademico. Italy still being a marginally free country, the University cancelled the award ceremony, ascribing the cancellation to “the Minister’s busy schedule.”

Russia’s leading academics, writers and artists have issued a similar letter of protest. However, Russia being Putin’s fiefdom, the letter was ignored and the ceremony is to go ahead in Moscow today.

Since my invitation was lost in the post and I wasn’t even informed of the exact time of the festivities, I fear that my congratulations to Putin’s Goebbels may be belated – but none the less warm for it. 

 

 

The influx of Romanians and Bulgarians has been ‘reasonable’, according to Dave.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not an oxymoron like ‘reasonable influx’ can exist in the English language, one still wonders about the information on which this conclusion is based.

Let’s see. In the first quarter of 2014 the number of Romanians and Bulgarians working in Britain has gone down from 144,000 to 140,000. Yet at the start of last year that number stood at a mere 112,000.

Ignorant as I am of the finer aspects of maths, I’d suggest that the longer the investigated period the more reliable the result. Thus it would seem sensible to disregard the shorter-term stats and remark mournfully that the number of employed Romanians and Bulgarians has gone up by 31.36 percent.

I don’t know the top limit of a ‘reasonable influx’ Dave sees in his mind’s calculator, so let’s just say that the increase has been quite high, though not yet catastrophic.

If that seems reasonable to Dave, he’s entitled to his opinion. Equally Nigel Farage is justified in describing this statistic as a ‘huge rise’. It’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose.

From where I’m sitting my perspective suggests that the statistic is well-nigh meaningless either way. It would only begin to mean something if it were a subset of a wider finding, that of the total number of immigrants from those two countries, employed or otherwise.

Out of idle curiosity one would also be interested to know if the contribution of these people to Britain’s crime rate has risen, both in proportional and absolute terms. The number of those seeking the jobseeker’s allowance and other benefits is also significant, as is the number of those who do odd jobs for cash in hand (there has to be a large overlap between these two groups).

Actually, my curiosity isn’t exactly idle. You see, I spend a few months every year in France, which my UKIP (and conceivably even French) friends probably regard as a scouting mission behind enemy lines.

Well, over the last few years France in general, and over the last few months our sleepy corner of Burgundy in particular, has been inundated by a far from ‘reasonable influx’ of Romanian and Bulgarian gypsies.

These chaps move in, set up their nomadic camps and begin to terrorise the immediate area. Before you contact the thought police, I’m not suggesting that this has anything to do with the racial, ethnic or even cultural peculiarities of these groups. I’m simply making a factual observation.

My next-door neighbour is a chef de brigade at the local gendarmerie, a job that until recently he admits had been a sinecure. Then Bulgarian and especially Romanian gypsies began to move in, and suddenly the police are desperately short-handed.

Many houses in our area are used as second homes, mainly by Parisians and, well, me. That means they remain empty for prolonged periods, making them easy prey for burglars.

I hope you won’t accuse me of indulging in the rhetorical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc if I remark that, in spite of that, burglaries had been practically nonexistent until the ‘influx’. Now they’re rife.

And if you do decide to accuse me, I’ll blame it on the horse’s mouth from which I got this information: my good neighbour. According to him, those gypsies break in, help themselves to everything floggable and then trash everything else. By way of a farewell gesture they densely cover the slashed carpets with faeces, in volumes suggesting they don’t suffer from malnutrition.

The traditional gypsy pastimes of picking pockets and rustling horses aren’t practised as widely around us – the former, because exponents of this fine trade prefer to operate in Paris and other crowded cities; the latter, because internal combustion has reduced the use of equine transport.

Call me an alarmist, racist or, if such is your preference, Little Englander, but I’d rather not see the same outrages that happen around my second home starting to happen around my first.

Coming at the problem from this shamefully selfish angle, the number of Romanians and Bulgarians in work seems of real relevance. It’s the number of those out of work that’s cause for concern.

Will Dave be kind enough to elucidate the issue? You see, statistics don’t have to be used for party-political propaganda only. Sometimes they may tell you something important.

 

 

 

 

 

The word ‘totalitarian’ crops up in my pieces more and more often.

It may be a simple reactionary paranoia. Or, and I prefer this possibility, having grown up in a totalitarian state I know what it looks and smells like.

One telltale sign is a curtailed freedom of movement: for their own good, citizens are told where they can travel or live and where they can’t.

It’s obvious that for a state to put its foot down this way it must be able to monitor the citizens’ whereabouts at all times. The knowledge of where they are is the first step towards acquiring the power of telling them where they shall be.

In the USSR it was the internal passport that acted as the monitoring tool. Stamped into it was the ubiquitous propiska, residence permit issued for a specific location.

A change of address required a new permit, which could be granted or more usually denied. And if a citizen stayed anywhere for longer than a month, he had to report to a local police station and receive a temporary stamp.

The internal passport also had to be produced when buying rail or air tickets, so the state knew at every moment where its slaves were even if they only travelled for a few days. Travelling by personal transport hardly ever came into it because cars were owned by statistically insignificant numbers of Soviets. 

The system wasn’t exactly foolproof but it functioned better than just about anything else in the Soviet Union, including things like food supplies or medical care. The only institution that could rival the internal passport for sheer efficiency was the GULAG, but then the former often acted as the anteroom for the latter – and the KGB controlled both.

It’s in this context that the new EU diktat must be viewed. From October 2015 every new car we buy will be equipped with a tracking microchip, a ‘black box’ that will tell the police or whomever else wants to know where you’ll be at any moment.

Car travel is rather more widespread in the EU than it was in the Soviet Union, so in effect the measure will close the loop that existed even in the most cannibalistic state in history. A comforting thought, that.

In some rather unsavoury states of the past the family of an executed man had to pay the cost of the bullet that had killed their loved one. In a gruesome parallel we’ll have to pay for the privilege of our own enslavement: the black box will add about £100 to the car price.

If anything, the USSR was more honest than today’s EU. The Soviets didn’t offer any explanations and hence didn’t have to lie. The EU feels it’s safer to explain, which is why it does have to lie.

This is for your own good, the explanation goes. Suppose you have a crash or breakdown in a desert? At night? With no mobile-phone coverage? No food or water? What if you’re bleeding? Having a heart attack? Freezing to death? Wouldn’t you want the police to know where you are?

Even though I can’t think offhand of too many deserts in Europe, the rationale rings true. Except that it isn’t true.

It would be if the tracking technology were offered as an option, like electric seats or bum warmers. In fact the black box already exists and it is indeed available as an extra on BMWs and Volvos.

Thus any lily-livered driver who’s ready to sacrifice his very tangible liberty for the sake of protecting himself from an extremely hypothetical danger can do so. Those whose priorities are different don’t have to.

However, by making the technology mandatory the EU shows its true colours, most of them red. It doesn’t want to help stranded drivers. It wants to put its tyrannical foot down. The black box is a cultural equivalent of the Soviet internal passport.

Our reaction to this outrage? Oh, we’re opposed of course. Transport Minister Robert Goodwill conveys our feelings in a characteristically wishy-washy manner: “The basis for our opposition is that costs to the UK outweigh the benefits.”

Fair enough. So no black box then? Er, don’t be too hasty. “Unfortunately, there is very little support for the UK position and no possibility of blocking this legislation.”

Of course, how silly of me. Our own government is working towards enslaving us individually, while the EU strives to enslave us collectively. Our Parliament is no longer sovereign even in such small matters, which means we’re no longer a sovereign nation but a gau of some sort of foreign Reich, never mind its number.

If you think it’s unsound to reach such a sweeping conclusion on the basis of this one detail, allow me to remind you of the devil and exactly where he lives. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Chancellor has announced plans to slit your freedom with Occam’s razor.

Before philosophers among you accuse me of ignorance, I’m using the term in its colloquial sense, meaning that a simple solution is usually best.

Dave and George clearly favour simplicity when it comes to reducing our suicidal budget deficits. Having pondered the issue, our sage rulers must have built a straightforward syllogism in their expensively trained minds.

Thesis: the state is spending much more than it’s extracting from people in taxes. Antithesis: people try not to pay the tax they’re supposed to owe. Synthesis: Ergo, HMRC must be empowered to raid people’s bank accounts to claim its pound of flesh – or make it a few thousand pounds.

The only alternative – I repeat, the only one – to this measure, explained Dave and George, is to raise taxes. And you won’t like that, will you?

No we won’t, that much is true. What is a self-evident lie is that squeezing more tax out of the public is the only solution to the budget shortfall.

We too are capable of simple thought and, unlike Dave’s and George’s, ours is unassailable. Because we too face the prospect, or indeed reality, of budget deficits in our family finances.

When the problem arises, it’s clear-cut: we spend more than we earn. Now any housewife will tell you that there are two possible solutions to this problem, not one. The first is to bring in more money. The second is to spend less. Another possibility, borrowing to finance everyday expenses, doesn’t solve the problem. It both defers and exacerbates it.

Now Adam Smith, who knew a thing or two about economics, explained that the macrocosm of a state is subject to the same principles as the microcosm of a household: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

Of course Smith lived at a time when England still retained some residual sanity. That no longer being the case, Dave and George can’t even consider a substantial cut in state outgoings.

What, a year before the elections? Where are the cuts going to come from? Defence has already been slashed to a point where we have practically no army left. So where else? By far the biggest areas are the NHS and welfare. You aren’t seriously suggesting we cut there?

Just imagine the Milibandits squealing like stuck pigs that the Tories don’t care for the common man, or rather person. The NHS is a sacred cow that can be milked but not slaughtered. And the steadily growing welfare budget, especially if we pretend it isn’t growing, is a sign that we care (about our electoral chances, that is).

For similarly high-minded reasons, a hike in tax rates has to be off limits. That would alienate what’s left of the Tories’ core support and drive the middle classes into the Milibandits’ embrace at a wrong time.

Thus the only viable possibility is to make every taxpayer pay the amount the state demands – no avoidance, no evasion, no discussion. Now that’s where simplicity comes in.

How do you make the bloody-minded blighters pay? You could go about it the long way, historically preferred in societies listing liberty among their desiderata. Send the non-payer a few progressively sterner demands and, if he still persists, start legal proceedings. You know, due process and all that.

Or, in the flotsam washed ashore by Dave’s brainstorm, HMRC can simply break into people’s bank accounts and help itself to whatever it feels it’s owed. Simple, isn’t?

It is. Almost as simple as a single Leader making his own decisions without wasting time on things like accountability. Or sending wrongdoers to prison without wasting time and money on court proceedings. Or telling people where they must live, thereby protecting them from their own costly errors.

Such simplicity also goes by another name: despotism. The word has a few synonyms, all equally applicable: tyranny, authoritarianism, totalitarianism. Shades of meaning differ, but the underlying principle is the same: the state’s power over the individual is absolute.

Gone are the times when it was considered improper for HMG to know how much a subject had in the bank. Gone is the sacred constitutional principle of privacy to which each individual is entitled. Gone is the equally seminal principle of secure property.

What our spivs’ idea amounts to is seizure of private property without due process. This effectively puts a big, fat cross on 1,000 years of English constitutional tradition – and you know what’s the scariest thing? Practically no one minds.

To be sure, there were a few protests in the press here and there. But most of those focused on practicalities, such as the time-honoured custom of clerical errors leading to overcharging. Both the pundits and their readers were penny-wise and freedom-foolish.

But then Dave and George already knew we would be. These chaps don’t empty their bladders without checking the polls first. And the polls must have told them that Brits who don’t want the welfare state shrunk outnumber those who want their civil liberties preserved.

It goes without saying that any modern government, devoid as they all are of any moral or philosophical sense, strives to expand its power ad infinitum. The only check is ever provided by a society willing to keep tyranny at bay.

And that is the truly worrying part: evidently the number of those who cherish freedom has dropped below the critical mass needed to protect it. If true, and I pray to God it isn’t, we live in a corrupt society.

This means a corrupt, despotic government is the one we deserve. If so, things will only get worse.

It’s as if the Weimar Republic has come back with a vengeance, and we all know what happened next.

The post-Weimar Walpurgisnacht called Eurovision has just befouled Copenhagen and outdone its predecessor a hundred-fold, but then the EU isn’t yet reeling from a military defeat.

If Weimar was naughty, Copenhagen was wicked. If Weimar was decadent, Copenhagen was degenerate. If Weimar presaged totalitarianism, Copenhagen showed it in all its glory.

For totalitarianism doesn’t have to include concentration camps to be what it is. Its defining feature is producing the same crude stencil to which everyone must be cut. Reason, morality, good taste all have to be sacrificed at the altar of naked, stupefying, ugly power. And power can be projected by propaganda and art as effectively as by firing squads.

If you have any other explanation for the popularity of this obscene spectacle, I’d like to hear it. But it had better be good: the outburst of pan-European enthusiasm for this perversion on wheels is well-nigh incomprehensible. 

Before even my time every self-respecting county fair featured freak shows, offering for the bumpkins’ delectation such thrills as Siamese twins (who afterwards happily went their separate ways), men with breasts and women with beards.

One of those hermaphroditic apparitions has just won the Eurovision contest, and how sane people didn’t all throw up at the disgusting sight is another phenomenon that requires a good explanation.

To say that the apparition had not an ounce of musical ability, never mind talent, would be redundant. The appeal of pop music of any kind not only doesn’t rely on such outdated attributes but actively discourages them.

This isn’t music – it’s the pagan victory dance of vanquishing savages, and its appeal isn’t artistic but ritualistic. Real art brings out the best in people; this blend of a Nuremberg rally and an orgy brings out the worst.

And right round the corner from these spiritual totalitarians lurks the muscle-bound totalitarian ready to pounce, his fangs bared. The resurgent Russia, and specifically its Leader so beloved of Peter Hitchens, is watching on with his cold, expressionless eyes.

He knows a bit of German history, and he knows what happens to a Europe softened up by Weimar decadence. It’s Putin’s mission to make sure it does happen, and Eurovision can serve Putin’s purposes famously.

If you think this is far-fetched, here’s a clip from the show aired on Russia’s equivalent of BBC1, Rossia 1 TV, on 7 May, the day after the Russian act had made it to the Eurovision finals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoc1DySBqu8&feature=youtu.be

The act was the Tolmachyov girls, sequined, slit-skirted 17-year-old twins whose musical accomplishments wouldn’t get them a job in a brothel, although some other talents they appear to possess might.

My commiserations to those of you who can’t understand the language of the show, but the pictures speak louder than the words.

The principal shills, by the way, included celebrated poets, actors, artists and even the leader of one of Russia’s main parliamentary parties Mr, né Comrade, Zhirinovsky.

The MC, a young man clad in an electric-blue suit, kicked off the proceedings by punching the air and screaming hysterically, “It’s happened!!! The sun rose over Copenhagen!!!! We’re in the finals!!!!! The light is shining on all our souls!!!!!! We’re all crying because we’re all one big family!!!!!!! We’re all happy to have been born in this great, wonderful country!!!!!!!!”

Before I run out of exclamation marks, the others, all waving Russian flags, put in their penny’s worth, reaching the kind of heights seldom seen this side of a lunatic asylum.

“Our strong, powerful, dynamic country has shown she can bring America to her knees!!!” – this contribution was delivered in broken Russian by a well-trained Cameroonian married to a Russian woman who looked as if she had successfully passed the vetting at the brothel I mentioned earlier.

The African then explained to the Russian audience that even they don’t understand the God-like beauty and power of their native land. The others must have taken exception to that putdown and tried to prove that they did unxderstand their country perfectly well:

“And it’s not just our girls who’ve made the finls!!! It’s also singers from the Ukraine and Armenia!!!! These too are our lands!!!!!” (Or rather soon will be, I have to add for the sake of geopolitical accuracy.)

“This is our Victory Day! As important and smelling of gunpowder as the other one!”

Then, in reference to the Kursk origin of the slit-skirts, “The Battle of Kursk happened 70 years ago!!! So it’s only fitting that these two Kursk maidens have again cemented the motherland together!!!!”

“Our girls have shown the beauty and innocence of Russian womanhood to the West! They’re going to infect the West with their innocence and pristine purity!!!”

In addition to innocence and pristine purity the twins look as if they might also infect the West with other things I shan’t mention for fear of sounding slanderously malicious. But that’s not the point anyway.

The point, ladies and gentlemen, is that I don’t recall chauvinistic spectacles pitched at the same level of fervour even in my Soviet childhood. That was Orwell; this is a schizophrenic rant.

Aren’t you glad that these madmen are armed with an up-to-date nuclear arsenal? That they’re led by a proud scion of history’s most murderous organisation? That he’s commissioning such emetic displays to whip up the whole nation to martial enthusiasm?

I’m not. But I respectfully doff my hat to Peter Hitchens who must be detecting in this obscenity something that escapes me. A truly perceptive man, our ex-Trotskyist.

 

Uniformity of opinion as expressed by the press is a telltale sign of a totalitarian state.

A discreet signal from high above, and suddenly all papers begin to sing in unison. The general political bend of the paper doesn’t matter: they all have the same marching orders and they all follow them religiously.

Britain is like any other totalitarian country, at least as far as the press coverage of UKIP is concerned. Papers whose loyalty is pledged not to certain principles but to certain parties are united. UKIP is an ideological irritant to Labour and electoral threat to the Tories – that’s all our hacks need to know.

When it comes to, say, The Guardian and The Independent, one considers the source and realises that such canine devotion to the master, in this instance an ideological one, is par for the course.

But anyone who expects The Telegraph to be conservative, which is to say intelligent, will soon be frustrated. The odd article here or there notwithstanding, the paper has lost whatever philosophical backbone it ever had. That has been replaced by party loyalty: The Torygraph would campaign for a bull terrier if he sported a blue rosette on his collar.

Conversely, when the paper smells a threat to the Tories’ electoral chances, it cries havoc and lets slip the dogs of war. This brings me to the vituperative and, which is worse, feeble-minded attack Alice Arnold launched the other day against the UKIP parliamentary candidate Roger Helmer.

I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mr Helmer, but he sounds like the kind of man who speaks his mind, which comes close to being a disqualifying characteristic in our political life.

Most people who always say what they think run the risk of offending someone, and a few pronouncements attributed to Mr Helmer, specifically those on Catholic priests, are offensive even to thick-skinned me.

But those Miss Arnold sees in the sights of her popgun seem to be unassailable either factually or morally.

Here are the verbal daggers that wounded her delicate sensibility: “At the risk of offending the politically correct, I will argue that homosexual behaviour is abnormal and undesirable.”

To argue against this statement one has to demonstrate that such behaviour is perfectly normal and desirable. But that’s simply not the case even if we disregard for a moment the religious, moral and social traditions of the West.

At a purely practical level the best such behaviour can aspire to is being tolerable. Considering that only between one and two percent of us are homosexual, it isn’t normal; and considering its non-reproductive nature, it isn’t desirable.

To her credit, Miss Arnold didn’t even attempt to maintain the pretence of journalistic objectivity, although out of girlish modesty she didn’t cite her own interest in the matter. Allow me to correct this oversight: she lives in a civil ‘partnership’ with the sports presenter Clare Balding.

Her indignation is thus humanly understandable, if not unquestionably laudable. But simply saying ‘As a lesbian I hate anyone who says anything at all against homosexuality’, does not an article make. This genre requires an argument, and that’s where Miss Arnold falls flat.

In fact, she doesn’t seem to know what an argument is, if this attempt at one is anything to go by: “I have just applied my ‘substitute-the-word-homosexual-for-black-or-disabled’ test to see if it is in any way acceptable. Guess what? It’s not.”

This non sequitur brings into question the author’s IQ. It’s absolutely true that being either black or disabled is neither abnormal nor undesirable. But from this it doesn’t follow that being homosexual is both desirable and normal.

In other words this substitution proves nothing other than Miss Arnold’s idiocy – and poor command of English (it should have been ‘substitute-the-words-black-or-disabled-for-homosexual’, not vice versa).

The word ‘homosexual’ could be replaced with an infinity of words, each of which would make Mr Helmer’s statement nonsensical. How about ‘redheads’? ‘Fat bastards?’ ‘Cyclists’? ‘Bus conductors?’ All of those would render the original statement meaningless. None would invalidate it.

Miss Arnold is deaf to such elementary logic. That’s why she used that demonstration of her own mental inadequacy as the starting point of a long string of hysterical epithets aimed not only at Mr Helmer but also at the party he represents.

These she presaged with the remark that she wouldn’t want to attack UKIP because “the target is simply too big and too easy”. Then she proceeded to do just that, unsportingly shooting arrows at a putative sitting duck.

Alas, given the rhetorical weapons at her disposal, Miss Arnold wouldn’t be able to hit a target as big as Buck House. And if the target is so easy, how come the combined efforts of considerably cleverer propagandists have so far failed to stem the UKIP tide?

At the risk of sounding a misogynist, homophobic, Holocaust- and global-warming-denying, sexist, politically wrong, child-abusing, raping fascist, I really don’t think Miss Arnold should bother her pretty little head about subjects on which she can’t sound coherent.

Just go home, love, have a nice cup of tea – and say hello to Clare for me, will you? And by the way, you know what totalitarian means, don’t you?

I was about to write ‘this morning time stood still’, but then changed my mind, and not just because the phrase is a lazy cliché.

It’s just that time didn’t really stand still. It went back some 50 years when I, a teenage non-person, would catch some TV glimpses of military extravaganzas in Red Square.

In those days I gagged after five minutes or so and turned the bloody thing off. This morning I watched the spectacle to the end, even though the emetic reaction was exactly the same.

Only one thing has changed. Today’s leaders overlooked the proceedings from an ad hoc dais rather than the stand in Lenin’s mausoleum, as if to remind me that this is 2014, not 1964. Other than that the illusion of time warp was complete.

First a detail of goose-steppers carried in the flags of today’s Russia and yesterday’s Soviet Union. The electronically enhanced brass band accompanied the solemn processions with the tune of the song The Sacred War. One could write a whole book on the basis of this song alone.

Anybody who ever lived in the Soviet Union knows that it took a song, especially a patriotic one, months from conception to performance. Writing it was the easiest part: aesthetic standards applied to such works were low, while the authors’ rewards were high.

Most of the time was taken up by the song working its way through multiple stages of approval, from the Composers’ Union to the Writers’ Union to the Ministry of Culture to the Censorship Bureau (I’ll spare you the Soviet acronym) to the Ideology Department of the Central Committee to, typically, the Leader himself.

But The Sacred War appeared on 24 June, 1941 – two days after Germany attacked the Soviet Union and wiped out most of the regular Red Army. Every government institution, every Soviet official (starting with Comrade Stalin himself) was in a state of abject panic – so are we to assume that the circles of censorship suddenly started to turn at record speed?

Of course not. The song had been signed off in advance, which means Stalin’s clique had planned the war in advance. But not the war they ended up fighting: from the early 1930s, Stalin had been preparing the Red Army for a conquest of Europe.

To that end the whole country had been converted into a labour-military camp inhabited by slaves. Some of the slaves served in the army, some worked in military factories, some designed weapon systems, some – millions at a time – were dying in concentration camps. The differences were minute. They were all slaves.

Stalin worked tirelessly to turn Hitler against the West, leaving his back exposed to the thrust of the Soviet dagger. At first Hitler swallowed the bait and agreed to the notorious ‘Non-Aggression’ Pact dividing Europe between the two predators.

The criminal document was signed on 23 August, 1939. A week later Hitler attacked Poland from the west to claim what was stipulated in the Pact’s secret protocol. On 17 September Stalin attacked Poland from the east to claim what was left.

Thus it wasn’t one aggressor who started the Second World War but two. Yet interestingly Britain and France declared war on Germany but not on the Soviet Union.

In fact, not only American but also British supplies to Stalin continued even while the Luftwaffe planes flying on Soviet-made fuel rained Soviet-made bombs on London, and while the Kriegemarine operated from a naval base in the Soviet Kola Peninsula.

Meanwhile the Soviets amassed on their western border a military force never before even imagined by any belligerent in history. The Soviet tanks, including the T-34s and KVs of which no other country had even approximate equivalents, outnumbered the tank forces of the rest of the world combined, and Germany’s seven to one.

The Red Air Force, artillery, cavalry and infantry also enjoyed a prohibitive advantage in numbers and quality over the Wehrmacht, and not only Germany but indeed the rest of the world combined had nowhere near the Red Army’s million paratroops.

That juggernaut was strategically deployed in two long and narrow salients, the Byelostok and Lvov – two prongs ready to pierce Germany and the rest of Europe. But the juggernaut didn’t roll in time, mainly because Stalin was labouring under the misapprehension that Hitler was planning an invasion of Britain.

That indeed would have been a perfect moment, except that it never came. Hitler had neither the desire nor, more important, technical means to launch such an invasion. Instead he launched a pre-emptive strike, beating Stalin to the punch, cutting off the two Soviet salients at their bases and routing the armies inside.

To his horror Stalin discovered that wars weren’t fought by tanks, planes and cannon. They were fought by people, and Soviet people didn’t want to fight for Stalin. Almost every Soviet soldier had had someone in his family executed, starved to death, imprisoned and tortured by Stalin’s henchmen – now came the payback time.

Whole regiments were surrendering their arms to the sound of marching bands similar to those performing this morning in Red Square. Millions simply fled, deserted, surrendered individually. Most of those youngsters weren’t cowards – they were desperate. In fact, hundreds of thousands volunteered to fight against Stalin whom they saw as the lesser evil.

It wasn’t Stalin’s army but Beria’s Chekists who turned the tide. If soldiers wouldn’t fight for the Motherland, the Motherland would make them fight – using the same violence with which she had always treated her subjects.

Mass executions behind the lines began immediately, with even returning POWs treated as traitors. All in all, Beria’s heroes shot or hanged 157,000 Soviet soldiers following tribunal verdicts – and probably three times as many without even that travesty of justice. Thus the Soviet army suffered heavier casualties from its own side than the British army suffered altogether.

Faced with Nazi brutality before them and Soviet brutality behind, the soldiers began to fight, eventually ending the war in Berlin. More than 26 million died along the way, many because no effort to reduce casualties was ever made by a single Soviet commander, starting with the sainted Zhukov himself.

In fact, Dwight Eisenhower recoiled with horror when Zhukov casually mentioned that his favoured method of clearing a minefield was to march some infantry across, thus making it safe for the precious tanks.

The Germans capitulated to the Soviets on 9 May, 1945, and this was the event commemorated with such pomp this morning – but wait, we’re still on the opening song.

What followed was the show I saw several times a year since I was little: the Defence Minister and parade commander slowly inspecting the troops in their convertible limousines. “Hail, Comrades!” “Hail, Comrade Defence Minister!!!” Even the form of address was the same – and there I was, thinking that ‘Comrades’ has communist associations.

Then came the Leader’s speech, this time shorter than I remember from the time of Brezhnev and especially the loquacious Khrushchev. But never mind the length, feel the content.

For Leaders don’t just say things. Every word is replete with meaning, cryptic or otherwise. This time Putin informed the listeners that “continuity of generations is Russia’s greatest treasure”. Those who have ears will hear: the Soviet Union lives on.

“We won’t allow the memory of our fallen heroes to be betrayed!” [Translation: more heroes will have to fall.] Then followed a highly meaningful reference to the sites on which the heroes had fallen (Cheka cellars didn’t get a mention).

Their sequence was pregnant with meaning. Any war historian will tell you that the three crucial battles of the Great Patriotic War were, in chronological order, Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. You’d expect that the Leader would mention them first, but you’d be wrong.

For the first two battles mentioned were Leningrad and Sebastopol – the first, presumably because it’s the Leader’s birthplace; the second, definitely because it’s in the Crimea. “We won’t let you down!” intoned the Leader before stepping back.

The rest of it unfolded to the same old script: the troops representing various branches of service marched past the dais, with the announcer commenting on their heroic deeds, past but tactfully not present.

I was particularly pleased to watch a goose-stepping Andropov Division, so named after the longest-serving chief of Putin’s sponsoring organisation, the KGB. The announcer’s solemnly rotund voice withheld any specifics, only saying that the division had distinguished itself in “numerous operations on home and foreign soil”. Quite.

Then the Cossacks marched by, which was a miracle in itself, considering that Putin’s role model Lenin decreed that the Cossacks were to be “wiped out to the last man”. Evidently they weren’t, which testifies not so much to the Cheka’s mercy as to its inefficiency.

And of course no celebration would have been complete without the armoured personnel carriers conveying the glorious army of the Republic of Crimea. Considering that said republic was only founded a few days ago, it’s amazing how quickly its army was put together and kitted up.

Footsteps died out, engines roared, and various weapon systems, 115 of them, rolled into Red Square. The announcer informed the admiring audience that “President Putin is personally overseeing the modernisation of our armed forces, and equipping them with state-of-the-art systems.”

I’m sure that came as welcome news to the Ukrainians who are hastily trying to put together a ragtag army able to slow down, if not repel, Putin’s aggression. So the modernisation isn’t yet complete? I can see the Ukrainian commander wiping his brow even as we speak.

Compare these obscene festivities with yesterday’s understated commemorations in Britain and you’ll grasp the key difference. The British bowed their heads to the past; the Russians raised their heads to the future. Britain becomes bellicose when she has to; Russia remains bellicose at all times.

The Marquis de Custine travelled to Russia in the 1830s and gasped with horror: “This country is always at war; it knows no peacetime!” Custine didn’t say plus ça change, but he would today, had he lived this long.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

  

The announcement that a British designer is bringing out a line of female clerical wear has come none too soon.

“Today more than ever women in ministry are complaining about the boxy, shapeless shirts on offer,” commented the designer Camelle Daley.

Of course one way to solve the problem would be for women to choose careers offering a greater sartorial latitude, but we know that’s not on the cards.

The Church has to be inclusive, upbeat, modern and, well, cool. This was more or less the message preached ex cathedra by the Archbishop of Canterbury more than a year ago.

Service attendance is declining precipitously, the Church is haemorrhaging communicants to Catholicism and so, according to His Grace, must do all it can to attract more and younger worshippers.

The way he worded this goal left one wondering what exactly those coveted youngsters should be worshippers of. Implicitly it didn’t matter: anything went as long as it put bums on pews.

Specifically a wider use of pop music was mentioned along with a liturgical language steering the middle course between the archaisms to which youngsters can’t ‘relate’ and the council-estate slang to which they can relate very well indeed.

Though specifics didn’t come up, His Grace ought to take a closer look at some versions of Scripture widely in use across the Atlantic. Wouldn’t it be nice if we too could replace “Thou shalt not kill” with “Don’t waste nobody, it ain’t cool”?

Only old fogies wouldn’t be able to relate to such a lexical shift, but they aren’t the target. The target is young people who ought to be made comfortable with the idea of not dissing their Mums and Dads or not nicking nothing. That’s what cool is all about.

At the time I proposed a few other measures, all admittedly unorthodox. In fact, had the stated aim been to entrench orthodoxy, I wouldn’t have proposed them. But if we’re after simply boosting attendance, my modest proposals have merit.

For example, since we now have the better part of 2,000 woman ministers in the UK, why shouldn’t they use their femininity more aggressively to achieve the Archbishop’s goal? That would be ignoring an opportunity that’s too good to miss.

To this end a female vicar should celebrate mass wearing nothing but her clerical collar and, as a sop to tradition, shawl. This would add a touch of delicious naughtiness to the words “Take, eat: this is my body”, especially if accompanied by a lascivious wink.

Moreover, our vicars could put their femininity to an even more direct, tactile use, taking their cue from Babylonian priestesses who knew exactly how to increase temple attendance.

Lest you might think I’m unfashionably sexist, male vicars could resort to similar ecclesiastical populism in some areas of London, such as Hampstead and Camden Town or, in the USA, all of San Francisco.

These proposals pursue a long-term strategy, a shining ideal at the end of the road, and should not be construed as a call to immediate action. Ideals are seldom achievable all at once – more often one edges towards them by a series of incremental steps.

This patient approach was taught by such role models for our prelates as Marx and Mao. The former emphasised the crucial distinction between a minimum and maximum programme, while the latter taught that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Replacing ‘a thousand miles’ with the EU-friendly ‘1,609,344 kilometres’, we get a call to action that works well in the present sartorial context.

One such initial step would be to dispense with the dull clerical garb or at least to jazz it up. After all, sex appeal is at its strongest when conveyed subtly.

A discreet two-foot slit on the side of a clerical skirt, for example, could enable a servant of God to flash a shapely thigh when kneeling at the altar. (Discretion is advised for not many shapely thighs are in evidence among our current female vicars.)

This could unlock young parishioners’ imagination, and we know that the brain is the most powerful erogenous zone. One can just see pimply parishioners half-rising from their pews to catch the delectable sight and then clearing their electronic week-planners for next Sunday.

But then Miss/Ms Daley doesn’t need fashion advice from rank amateurs like me. She knows what she’s doing and as proof of that she already has hundreds of customers.

“The style,” she says, “…is about clothes that accommodate the female shape in cut and fit.” Quite. Accommodate and accentuate, I’d suggest.

Far be it from me to offer advice to other Christian confessions, such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, but they should watch out lest they be overtaken by the progress pioneered by the C of E.

Since they still haven’t dispensed with monasticism, they ought to give serious consideration to the fashion statements made by nuns’ habits. A bit of décolletage would surely make the ladies, and hence their orders, more attractive.

Those sandals need work too. If they must wear them over bare feet, fine, although fishnets would work better. But why not add a few inches to the heels?

For the time being, the newspaper articles about Camelle Daley’s fashion breakthrough are accompanied by photographs of heavily made-up clerical babes sporting dog collars and skirts cut about six inches above the knee.

This, I dare say, is a move in the right direction. Upwards and upwards, Camelle, inch by inch. Godspeed to you and your devout customers.

 

 

 

A self-satisfied philistine invariably makes the mistake of assuming that everybody else is, or longs to be, just like him.

Since philistine mentality is now dominant, it’s mainly for this reason that the West always misunderstands nations that aren’t like us at all.

Russia happens to be in the news today, and suddenly our philistine mentality is being shaken out of its torpor. After an uneasy lull, the current events are reminding us yet again that the Russians are different.

Yet our smugness won’t cede its position without a fight. As we worship at the altar of democracy, we assume that so do the Russians. We assume they share our affection for the rule of law, as opposed to the arbitrary rule of a dictator. We’re certain that, like us, today’s Russians dislike the Soviet Union.

All these assumptions are wrong, which goes beyond intellectual folly. For none of the Western countries is currently blessed with governments whose thinking is superior to that of the statistically average philistine. Hence they pursue misguided policies, and the voting public doesn’t mind because it thinks along the same lines.

All this is predictable, and protesting against it is as pointless as protesting against natural disasters. One-man-one-vote democracy inevitably brings to the fore those the average voter recognises as his moral and intellectual kin.

This voter projects his own personality on his leaders and insists that they comply. A few generations of such symbiosis will ineluctably produce public officials who no longer have to pretend they’re carbon copies of the average voter – they actually are.

What upsets me is that this philistine contagion has infected many otherwise respectable, intelligent and moral people known as conservatives.

They too show every symptom of the same malaise: looking at Putin’s Russia through the prism of their own preferences, frustrations and disappointments.

British conservatives specifically still miss the British Empire, as well they should. Yet because of that they identify with Putin’s empire re-building, as well they shouldn’t.

The Russian Empire was no more similar to the British than cold vodka is similar to warm beer. A successful empire doesn’t just conquer and rule other territories. It civilises them by giving them the benefit of the same just institutions that have made the metropolis what it is.

This is what the British Empire tried to do, if with variable success. Its successes included equipping some former colonies, such as the USA, for surviving as independent nations. Its failures included some violent episodes, along with insufficient sensitivity to the innermost feelings of the conquered peoples.

The Russian Empire also displayed violence and insensitivity, the difference being that there was little to counterbalance them. The Russian metropolis itself was never ruled by law, its people’s interests were never adequately represented in the political mix, many of its colonies were Russia’s cultural and political equals (not to say superiors). 

Still, if Putin and his Russo-Ukrainian bandits wanted to restore the Russian Empire as it was, say, in the nineteenth century, there would be something to discuss, some pros to weigh against the cons. But they don’t.

They want to restore the Soviet empire that, though it undoubtedly evolved out of its Russian predecessor, raised evil to a level never before seen anywhere in the world – and not even in Russia herself, although Ivan IV presaged many of the Soviet practices and institutions.

The Soviet Union was the first and only imperial metropolis that was systematically exterminating and enslaving its own people, never mind those it conquered.

In parallel it destroyed the nation’s culture, religion and whatever passed for its civilisation. At least 60 million Soviet citizens perished in Cheka cellars and concentration camps, but the psychological and cultural damage was even greater.

This reminds me of a story I’ve read somewhere about a bear who spent all his life pacing his zoo cage, 20 by 20 feet. Then all of a sudden the cage was removed, and the animal was free to roam.

Yet he continued never to overstep the 20 by 20 boundaries that no longer existed. The cage was no longer around him; it was within his head.

The metaphorical Russian bear, the Russian nation, suffers from the same deprivation. The Russians overwhelmingly support Putin’s brutality, because they miss the Soviet Union, and this goes even for the youngsters who’ve never lived in the country bearing that name. Technically, the Soviet Union is dead. In reality it lives on in the people’s heads.

Yet British conservatives praise Putin’s commitment to ‘conservative values’, his ‘Christian faith’ and his ‘patriotism’. They are desperate to see in him the conservative leader they can’t have in their own country.

Putin is indeed a conservative, but not in our sense of the word. What he wishes to conserve, or rather to reinstall, is the same cage cum abattoir that was the Soviet Union. The abattoir ideally wouldn’t have the same throughput, but the cage would be just as strong.

Yet our conservatives see in the KGB colonel the strong leader they wish we had. This is sheer folly.

Churchill, my friends, was a strong leader, but so was Stalin. Putin is very similar to the latter. He has nothing in common with the former.

Wishful thinking comes together with ignorance to produce a particular desensitisation, where we lose our sight, hearing and olfactory sense.

We don’t see that fascism is on the march. We don’t smell the rat running around Putin’s propaganda. And we don’t hear desperate shrieks coming from those few Russians who refuse to live in a cage.

Such as the Moscow columnist Alexander Skobov who the other day correctly described Putin’s Walpurgisnacht in the Ukraine as ‘fascist’ and stated, again correctly, that it presents “the same threat to the Russian as to the Ukrainian people: the threat of totalitarian restoration”.

Every time we pine for a Putin-type strong leader, we betray Russians like Mr Skobov – as in the past we betrayed those Russian officers who in 1918-1920 fought the Bolshevik hordes to the last bullet, the last drop of blood, the last breath.