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The other day I argued that people’s political views on international matters are seldom based on strictly economic considerations.

This certainly goes for our domestic politics as well.

We are viscerally predisposed towards supporting some parties and, even more strongly, towards rejecting some others. Most of us are capable of explaining rationally the choice made intuitively, but this will only fall into the domain of post-rationalisation.

Such a bias is seldom mainly, and never merely, rational. Nor is it ever based solely on a cold-blooded calculation of financial odds.

I can prove this assertion by simply pointing out that, if people saw their voting forms as nothing but balance sheets, we’d never have a single Labour MP, never mind prime minister.

To realise this one doesn’t have to delve deep into economic theory – just looking at history would clinch the argument. For Labour governments have always, with predictable monotony, destroyed the economy they ran. No crystal ball is needed to realise that, if they’ve always done so in the past, they’ll always do so in the future.

Tory governments have had a spotty economic record, but it has never been as disastrous as Labour’s. And it would have been even better if the Tories hadn’t always had to take over a ruined economy bequeathed to them by their predecessors.

There’s no sound economic reason for those who aren’t subsisting on welfare ever to vote Labour – yet many do. It would be naïve to think this is because they’re too stupid to figure out where their economic interests lie.

I worked for many years with Labour-voting advertising executives whose six-figure salaries were nicely padded with hefty bonuses, stock options and all sorts of perks. And they were perfectly aware that under a Labour government they’d pay higher taxes and have every manner of spoke stuck into the wheels of their business.

And yet my partners persisted in their urge to “punish those bastards”, meaning the well-off. When I pointed out that they themselves were “those bastards”, and they themselves would be punished, they simply shrugged. “I don’t care,” was the typical answer.

In other words, another man’s pain is a more attractive prospect than their own benefit. This explains the alacrity with which Ed Miliband is outlining his electoral platform. If realised in government, it’ll spell the greatest economic disaster this country has ever seen, and yet he feels that enough people won’t care about that and return Labour to power.

Just think: we’d have a doctrinaire authoritarian government hell-bent on bleeding us white with taxes, increasing the national debt even beyond its present catastrophic size, attracting even more immigrants while introducing taxation policies guaranteed to keep foreign business at bay, spending even more on foreign aid and madcap green projects, nationalising all they could (starting with the railways), controlling our eating, drinking and smoking habits, destroying what little is left of our education, disarming the country in the face of growing foreign threats – and I’m only mentioning the policies about which the Milibandits are talking openly.

Add to these those they keep up their sleeves, as everyone knows they do, and on any rational level a Miliband victory would spell an unmitigated economic calamity, one that no subsequent Tory government would be able to reverse.

This would be almost acceptable if one felt confident that we’d learn our lesson and next time elect a sensible government. Yet we know already that this won’t be the case. The Brits are still keeping Labour at the top of the polls even though Miliband is promising more of what plunged the country into an economic abyss just a few years ago.

I’m not adopting a holier-than-thou position here. True enough, at the risk of sounding immodest I probably know more about politics and economics than the average voter. And I can rationalise my political judgement in the form of soundly argued book-length essays.

Yet I’m as guilty as anyone of disregarding logic and voting from the heart. If this weren’t the case, I wouldn’t even contemplate voting UKIP in national elections. After all, as a formidable battleaxe of a former Tory minister once told me, a vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour.

We all know Nigel Farage’s party won’t carry the 2015 elections. We also know that people who are ever likely to vote UKIP are intuitive conservatives like me and, if you’re reading this, probably you.

If they cast their vote that way, it won’t be the vote that’ll win UKIP the election, but it may well be one that’ll lose it for the Tories. Yet I and many others like me are so disgusted with Cameron’s take on conservatism, that we may well go against reason and put Miliband into 10 Downing Street by voting UKIP.

It’s interesting to observe how the strategies pursued by the two main parties are diametrically opposite.

Cameron’s Tories are ignoring their core support, intuitive conservatives like you and me. I won’t bore you with citing a list of Dave’s policies, such as his fanatical push for homomarriage, that have made many a conservative stomach churn.

Rather than going for depth, fortifying its position with the core support, the party is going for breadth: trying to appeal to those whose hearts are in a different place. This runs the obvious risk of haemorrhaging votes the UKIP way and not replenishing them from elsewhere.

Miliband’s Labour are doing exactly the opposite: they’re ignoring intuitive and even marginal Tories, who they know aren’t likely to vote Labour under any circumstances. Instead they’re trying to shore up their position among intuitive socialists.

Socialism is demonstrably animated by class and economic resentments, and every policy Miliband has announced so far is aimed at boosting those. While the Tory message bypasses the voters’ heads only partly, the Labour message does so entirely.

It goes straight to the rotten heart of those who’d want to “punish the bastards” even at a loss to themselves. A vote for Labour would thus mean that the nation has sunk deep into a moral and intellectual hole. But if you think this makes the Labour victory unlikely, don’t hold your breath.

 

 

 

 

 

The spread of vulgar materialism is one of the main characteristics of modernity. Actually no modifier is necessary: materialism is vulgar by definition.

As a derivative of that, we live in the middle of what I call totalitarian economism. Or rather that’s what politicians, economists and political economists try to make us believe.

Now that we know for sure that man descends from a rather unsavoury mammal via a path whose existence is strictly a matter of materialistic faith, metaphysics has been banned.

Our behaviour, our thoughts, our lives are supposed to be wholly describable in strictly physical terms. Man, taught Enlightenment gurus, is a rational animal who only ever acts irrationally because he doesn’t know any better.

Marx translated this line of thought into economics, and his followers into politics. The upshot is that even those who profess contempt for Marxism seem to think that on polling day voters coolly weigh the economic pros and cons, and only then tick their voting forms.

Hence James Carville’s maxim “It’s the economy, stupid”, meaning that an election or a referendum is decided exclusively by economic considerations. Yet this belief is itself stupid, disproved by just about any election just about anywhere.

For example, those politicians who correctly perceive that Scotland voting for independence would spell the end of the United Kingdom cite one balance sheet after another, each proving beyond doubt that the Scots have nothing to gain and all to lose by casting the ‘out’ vote.

QED. Or is it? Then how come every poll conducted so far shows that the referendum is balanced on a knife’s edge, and the result could go either way?

We may legitimately use this example to question the very notion of universal suffrage. In support we can cite Churchill’s statement on democracy – not the popular one about it being the best of everything that has been tried so far, but the one where he says that “The greatest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Such scepticism is perfectly valid in general, but not when it comes to economic self-interest. Most people, especially Scots, are perfectly capable of looking at a set of policies and figuring out which one will suit their finances better.

The Scots, ineptly led by Alex Salmond, know they’re likely to lose the pound, certain to lose massive payments into their social budget, guaranteed to lose freedom of the City of London and what not.

Not to cut too fine a point, opting out of the UK will mean opting out of relative affluence, and the parsimonious Scots are perfectly aware of this. So why are the polls so close?

Because the Scots hate the English. Well, not really hate, even though one often hears this phrase delivered with the maddeningly narrow vowel in the verb. It’s just that they prefer the Braveheart Mel Gibson to those actors with cut-glass accents who acted the roles of villainous Englishmen.

That utterly dishonest film reminded the Scots of various chips they’ve been carrying on their shoulders ever since the 1706-1707 Acts of the Union. Their blood boils, their eyes steam up, their ears get plugged.

Cold financial calculations need not apply, and three cheers for the Scots. Not because their separatist sentiments aren’t ridiculous – they are. But because they give the lie to totalitarian economism. They prove that people aren’t electronic calculators – we are human: sinful, sentient, fallen, gloriously free people created to seek not philistine comfort but immortality.

Or look at the Irish. Unlike the Scots, they have a legitimate claim to having been conquered and cruelly abused by the English, specifically during the 1649–53 Cromwellian expedition.

Even though the English have played demographic tricks for three and a half centuries, trying to populate Northern Ireland with Anglo-Protestants, the anti-English sentiment is still strong. To test this proposition, go to the centre of Belfast, raise an Up the Republic! placard and see enthusiastic crowds gathering around you in minutes.

Do they think they’d be better off financially if Ulster were to secede? I bet that consideration doesn’t even enter their minds. Call this sectarianism, nationalism, vengefulness, religious strife – call it anything you wish. I’d simply call it human.

Are they wrong? Probably. But then Seneca did say that errare humanum est, and he knew a thing or two about human nature.

Now if the Irish are still smarting from the massacre of Drogheda that happened three-and-a-half centuries ago, is it any wonder that the Ukrainians haven’t forgotten those 8,000,000 of their countrymen who were deliberately starved to death by the Soviets in 1932-1933?

And the Holodomor was far from being the only democide perpetrated by the predominantly Russian Soviets during Bolshevik rule. How do you suppose the Ukrainians feel when they see that Russia is still run by the same unrepentant organisation that murdered millions of their grandparents?

I’m sure some, though not most, of them would be prepared to forgive – there still are some Christians in the Ukraine. Except that no one has asked for forgiveness, and in fact the Russians only owned up to the Holodomor a few years ago. So when an opportunity to settle accounts presented itself, the Ukrainians grabbed it.

Do you think they care about the Russian loans that will be recalled, the Russian gas that will triple in price, their own economy that’ll suffer egregiously?

If so, think again. The Ukrainians don’t even care about the possibility of another massacre perpetrated by the Russians. And you know why? Because they’re human and as such endowed with the ability to rise above material concerns.

Reading the Russian papers these days brings back what honesty prevents me from calling happy childhood memories. Recurrent childhood nightmares would be more like it.

The same shrill propaganda to put Dr Goebbels to shame, the same visceral hatred of the West, the same absence of divergent views, the same schizophrenic touting of a ‘national identity’, the same howling panegyrics for the top dog, the same paranoia about being encircled by enemies, the same drums and bugles thundering from every word.

Some words have changed. In essence everything is the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

In the old days any foreigners who didn’t much care for their countries being overrun or at least dominated by the Soviets were routinely called fascists.

That designation had a certain binary simplicity to it. The world was broadly divided into us (the Soviets) and them (fascists). The two principal groups had some sub-divisions, but not many.

‘Us’ drew a broad support from ‘all progressive mankind’. ‘Them’ relied on ‘capitalists’, ‘imperialists’ and ‘so-called democracies’. (Democracies were always ‘so-called’).

It’s refreshing to see the old watershed still in place. Thus those Ukrainians who’d rather not be ruled by Putin and his stooges are consistently and roundly described as ‘fascists’, ‘Banderites’ (followers of the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera murdered by the KGB in 1959) or, in a nice portmanteau neologism, Banderofascists.

Quite a few of them are Jews, which somewhat belies the fascist nomenclature. Hence yet another portmanteau  neologism: Judaeo-Banderites. This is rather incongruous, considering that Bandera’s people didn’t manifest any particular fondness for Jews during the German occupation. But never mind: anti-Putin means fascist, and Jews are no exception.

The implied syllogism is beautiful in its streamlined simplicity. Everyone who opposes Putin is a villain, that is a fascist. Putin’s Russia is an encapsulation of virtue. Ergo, Russia is anti-fascist.

This is a good story, but unfortunately facts have a tendency to interfere. One such fact is a dramatic rise in the number and virulence of fascist groups within Russia herself – on a scale not even approached in the Ukraine.

Some of these groups have risen to the status of major parliamentary parties. Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s quaintly named Liberal Democratic Party is one such group, with millions voting for it in every election.

Zhirinovsky’s cherished, and regularly declared, aim is to see Russian soldiers wash their boots in the Indian Ocean. This worthy desideratum still being out of sight, though approaching fast, he entertains the public by staging fisticuffs in the Duma and delivering drunken diatribes about Western politicians.

Those who are female are invited to visit Spetznaz barracks, where virile Russian soldiers will rape sense into them. Those who are female and black are called ‘black slags’. In the manner of a thief screaming ‘Stop thief!’ louder than his pursuers, male Western politicians are collectively described as fascists.

Numerous other fascist groups don’t yet enjoy parliamentary representation. They are, however, well-organised and highly motivated. Their flags tend to feature graphic variations on the swastika theme, under which institutional symbol they bring together Russian Orthodoxy, anti-Semitism, fascism, jingoism and bellicosity.

This video is a compilation of marches by one such group, the Orthodox Fascist Party:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rHvt199fKc

The Russophones among you can appreciate the clip in all its beauty, but even those whose Russian is rusty can revel in the visual images.

Crowds of people clad in military and paramilitary uniforms carry swastika flags and icons, screaming the kind of slogans that would get them long prison terms in any Western country.

Their führer extends his right arm in the Nazi salute and screams, “Christ is risen!” The marchers replicate the salute but instead of the customary ‘Heil Hitler!’ shout, “Indeed he is risen!”

A young man equipped with a megaphone recites his own poem (Pushkin or Pasternak he ain’t): “Being a Russian means being a saint, a racist, an extremist and a Jew killer…” The poetry-loving marchers roar their approval of this concept of sainthood. The policemen by the roadside yawn their indifference.

A young man wearing the uniform of Spetznaz (a would-be rapist of Condoleezza Rice) explains that the movement is driven by “love of people”, except naturally the Jews. “We need a strong leader who makes decisions without all that parliamentary pussyfooting. We need to have the Orthodox Church at the helm! We’ll see all our enemies in Red Square with bullets in the back of their necks!”

These chaps would be easy to dismiss as a bunch of nutters on the way to the lunatic asylum, but such a conclusion would be too hasty. For the fact is that Putin is exactly the type of leader they yearn for.

Putin’s message urbi et orbi (but mainly urbi) is exactly identical to the marchers’, if couched in slightly more moderate terms. No parliamentary pussyfooting for him – even his close associates acknowledge that Putin makes decisions single-handedly.

Nor does the good colonel shy away from claiming that God, as represented by the KGB hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, is on his side. His message of blood-and-soil chauvinism is exactly the same as that punctuated by the marchers’ outstretched arms.

And it’s working: Putin enjoys the support of almost 90 percent of his countrymen, which is a ringing mandate if I’ve ever seen one.

Actually, what concerns me isn’t so much Putin’s countrymen as my own, along with other Westerners, particularly those of the conservative persuasion. Taking their cue from Peter Hitchens, they praise Putin for hating Muslims, homosexuals and internationalism – and for loving God and country.

Replace Muslims with Jews, and all the same things can be said about Hitler or, if you’d rather, Osama bin Laden. Yet my conservative friends don’t profess any affection for such political figures.

What exactly makes Putin different? That he’s still alive? That, my friends, isn’t a point in his favour.

A Russian-speaking French UMP supporter told me the other day that she wanted “Putin to take over everything”. “Including France?” I asked. “Mais non!” she stated categorically.

So what’s the Ukraine’s meat would be France’s poison. Let’s hear it for the double standard.

 

The laddish petrol head Jeremy Clarkson is in deep trouble.

His own fault, really. Trying to make a point that there wasn’t much to tell two cars apart, the host of Top Gear declaimed the old counting rhyme that unfortunately contains the objectionable – nay, criminal – ‘n’ word.

Why couldn’t he just say, “Catch a male person of the Afro-Caribbean descent by the toe…”? So fine, this would have erred against metre and rhyme. But at least such usage wouldn’t have hurt our brittle sensibilities.

Or else Clarkson could have followed the officially approved version of the hitherto offensive rhyme: “… catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers let him go…” The metre and rhyme would have been intact, though sticklers for zoological detail might object that a tiger has no toes.

He has claws, and catching him by one of them may elicit a more decisive response than just hollering (which, incidentally, tigers don’t do either). But never mind all this nitpicking: propriety would have been observed and that’s all that matters.

By the same token, we must all be made, on pain of imprisonment, to talk about a tiger in the woodpile, even though the stripy ones seldom bury themselves in one of those when they wish to be stealthy.  

Clarkson’s excuse? He claims he didn’t really say it and, if he did, it wasn’t meant to be racist. Pull the other one, Jeremy. Anything is racist if we say it is.

Never mind how you use the ‘n’ word. To a modern moralist weaned on sanctimonious political correctness, someone who unthinkingly utters an ancient phrase never meant to be offensive in the first place is as culpable as a thug who screams the ‘n’ word at a black chap on a bus.

The context doesn’t matter; only the text does. To us the word itself is well-nigh criminal, regardless of the intent behind it. Then again, if the offensive intent is there, any word can work as an egregious insult.

For example, you might think that ‘turnip’ has no more  offensive potential than any other root vegetable. Yet, when the tabloid press used the word to describe Graham Taylor, the hapless manager of the England football team back in the ‘90s, ‘turnip’ was used pejoratively.

When ‘dumbbell’ is used to describe an exercise weight, it’s stylistically neutral. When it’s used to describe the person who exercises with it, it’s an insult. When denoting smelting waste, ‘slag’ is fine. When describing a woman, it’s rude. In the context of Swiss Alps, the word ‘slope’ is neutral, in the context of the Far East it isn’t – and so forth.

But the ‘n’ word is denied such latitude. So what if Clarkson wasn’t trying to convey a negative view of multiculturalism? So what if the counting rhyme has existed for over two centuries? This only goes to show how much progress we’ve made.

In the barbaric times of Byron, Coleridge and Keats people still thought that words are insulting only if they’re meant to insult. Aren’t you glad we know better?

These days the worst insults aren’t personal; they’re collective. Insulting an individual is fine, and it’s no use seeking recourse if a drunk lout calls you a f***ing c*** out of the blue. But insert the word ‘black’ between the two obscenities, and it’s not a person but a category that’s insulted. A bit of nice innocent fun becomes a criminal offence.

Only groups are allowed to have dignity these days, and this must be jealously guarded by everyone, not just the group members. Thus a young Englishman once took offence when I referred to American Indians as just that.

The youngster contorted his features in a symbiotic message of opprobrium and said indignantly, “You mean native Americans?” Now my reply was indeed an insult, but a strictly individual one (I’ll give you a clue: the second word was ‘off’).

The truly emetic part of it all is that the guardians of linguistic probity don’t really care about the presumably offended group. They simply know that they gain a greater power every time they win a linguistic skirmish.

The face value of the issue doesn’t even come into it. Thus since 1999 there have been numerous instances in the United States when a public official has had to apologise for using the word ‘niggardly’.

Never mind that it has no etymological link to the racial slur – in fact, ‘niggardly’ comes from an Old Norse root, whereas the person to be caught by his toe got his name from the opposite end of Europe. It’s not just semantics but also phonetics that can be used as an offensive weapon against sanity.

We are rapidly catching up in this madness with the USA, the pioneer of political correctness. It has to be said that the Americans guard their primacy assiduously. To that end, Mark Twain’s American classic Huckleberry Finn has been removed from most school libraries because it contains a character named Nigger Jim.

It takes some doing for us to keep up, but we must try. Our next step should be to flog Jeremy Clarkson publicly on the bonnet of a Ferrari. And then we can start a campaign to rename Nigeria. May I suggest Sanctimonia?

 

 

In Borken, Germany, 11-year-olds were ordered in class to draw the cross-sections of male and female genitalia.

Apparently, however, children in that sleepy town hadn’t yet acquired the sophistication we expect from our progeny. This they proved when two impressionable tots fainted, while the others hyperventilated. All in all, 10 children were taken to hospital.

In France the parents of a little girl were fined a hefty amount. Their crime? They failed to bring their daughter up properly. The little one rushed out of the classroom when shown an “educational” (pornographic) film about coitus. Such squeamishness was treated as culpable absenteeism.

In Switzerland parents demonstrated against their four-year-olds receiving graphic tuition in the facts of life. As part of that valuable education, the precocious tots were taught “how it is, when one doesn’t know exactly whether one is male or female. They can then consciously choose their sexuality, just as they do with religion.”

So how does the lesson go? “Last week, class, we learned about the birds and the bees. Today, we’re going to learn about the birds and the birds.” Sounds all right to me.

However, I’m aghast at the suggestion that children can choose their sexuality. There I was, thinking that one is born one way or the other, with no conscious choice involved. Therefore, say, Peter Tatchell can’t be blamed for being what he is, a fanatical propagandist of homosexuality.

Now it turns out it’s all a matter of choice. From this one may conclude at a weaker moment that a person can be blamed for choosing wrong. Since in our enlightened time this is patently impossible, the only other conclusion is that there’s no such thing as right or wrong. There, that works.

By order of the Swiss Education Ministry, the Swiss cherubs were also given soft-toy penises and vaginas to play with, presumably sticking one into the other. This has to be much more educational than tops or bouncy castles. One can only regret that the ungrateful parents saw fit to form a coalition, whose goal is the “protection against sexualisation in kindergartens and primary schools”.

Isn’t that what kindergartens are for? Children are going to learn sooner or later anyway, and sooner is better than later. Really, there’s no understanding some people.

In Greymouth, New Zealand, 11-year-olds were taught about various amorous possibilities, including anal and oral sex. Some retrograde parents threw a wobbly and, for the time being, that part of education was put on hold. Clearly, there’s still some more pedagogic work to be done.

Queensland primary schools teach Aussie youngsters that abortion can be “a relief”, a bit like aspirin, and hormones make “you feel sexy”. They certainly do, and trust all those previous generations to insist mistakenly that there ought to be some moral considerations involved as well.

In Spain, the Extremadura regional government produced a sex-education video designed for the “development of healthy habits, self-esteem and safety.” As one of the safe, healthy habits, the video covers “sexual self-exploration and erotic self-knowledge.” Or, in other words, masturbation.

Not to be outdone, our own Department of Education has produced the Living and Growing DVD aimed at five-year-olds. Speaking to the target audience in the language they understand, the video uses the format of a pornographic… sorry, I mean educational, cartoon showing a couple going at it hammer and tongs, with the man ejaculating at the end, presumably not prematurely.

That’s truly disgusting. I mean, shouldn’t those 5-year-olds be taught how to contain ejaculation within condoms? Of course they should.

Unfortunately, condoms aren’t yet made in that size, but this oversight can be corrected easily enough. After all, teaching aids are essential to education. When such undersized products become available, our educators will be able to produce another kindergarten video, working title “Little johnnies for little Johnnies”.

Had enough? I certainly have. Far be it from me to use such an uncool, unfashionable word as ‘satanic’, but my lexicon isn’t broad enough to find any others.

Perhaps it would be better to leave the domain of philology for that of history to remind the united educators of the world that the Roman Empire was brought down by the kind of decadence that, comparatively, was indeed child’s play.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

First Dave said Britain is a Christian country because the other lot are atheists, and he needs to be different to win the next election.

Then 50 ‘intellectuals’ wrote an open letter saying Britain isn’t a Christian country at all because they don’t run into many Christians in Mayfair (or especially Peckham, where AC Grayling lives).

Then Nick said that church and state need to separate, on the off chance that an Anglican prelate might find something wrong with Nick and his jolly friends.

Then Rowan Williams said Britain is in fact a post-Christian country, meaning (I’m guessing) that she used to be Christian but isn’t any longer or, another possibility, that no country where a mentally challenged Druid became the head prelate can possibly take Christianity seriously.

Such a mishmash of views was difficult to bring to an unequivocal conclusion, but trust a philosopher to tackle this ungrateful task. 

Prof. AC Grayling has written some 30 books on philosophy and, though I’m man enough to admit I haven’t read a single one of them, he must have some education and possibly even intelligence. Not necessarily much, but some.

Alas, he proves my lifelong observation that, whenever even educated and intelligent people try to argue the atheist cause, they unfailingly descend to the intellectual level of Lenin’s League of the Militant Godless.

Those chaps would bust Christian shrines to show yesterday’s believers that the bodies of saints rot just like anyone else’s. Not to confuse the issue, those bodies that remained incorrupt were simply destroyed. 

They’d put QED smirks on their faces and say, “If God exists, how come we have [insert a disaster of your choice]?”.

They’d point out that Christians had the Crusades, the Inquisition and religious wars, during which many people were killed – not as many in all those centuries as the Bolshevik atheists massacred in their first couple of years, but that superfluous detail was left out.

They’d remind us of the Church’s attempts to suppress science, which presumably explains why no civilisation other than Christian ever produced much science worthy of the name.

Verily I say unto you, when God wishes to punish someone, he takes his mind away. There may be a more scientific explanation for the fact that otherwise intelligent adults turn into kindergarten underachievers whenever this subject comes up, but I can’t think of one.

In his Times article AC Grayling repeats all those ‘arguments’, shrouding them in pseudo-intellectual cant. But he must have sensed that somehow the debate was missing a clincher.

Old AC is just the man to deliver it. Britain, he explains, isn’t a Christian country, this goes without saying. Nor is she a post-Christian one, for the simple reason that she never was Christian in the first place. Neither is, or was, any other country. Because – are you ready for this? – Christianity doesn’t exist.

“Christianity is not Christianity but borrowed Greek philosophy,” is how Grayling puts it, and one has to admire his forthrightness, so rare among philosophers.

The dastardly Christians didn’t just rip off Greek philosophy. They stole from the Greco-Romans everything they ever knew about “government, military strategy, ethics, political theory, management of an empire, social conditions, education, law and much besides.”

No wonder. “Christianity,” after all, “provides little instruction – beyond a few bland generalisations about being nice – for dealing with life’s complexities.”

The stupidity and ignorance of this statement is truly baffling. I wonder, for example, if Grayling has read Plato’s dialogues, especially Republic and Laws, in which the chap who presumably taught the Christians political theory sketched the blueprint of the totalitarian state.

This was fleshed out not by Christians but by the Soviets and the Nazis who, to be fair, have never been accused of being pious believers.

And “ethics”? “Social conditions”? One “bland generalisation about being nice” that Christianity demonstrably didn’t get from Hellenic antiquity is that every person is an autonomous human being, to be cherished not because of any towering achievement or superior character but simply because he’s indeed human.

People short of achievement or incapable of it, like those frail boys routinely drowned by the Spartans or those unwanted baby girls left to die in the woods by the Romans, began to be seen as God’s creatures to be loved before all others.

Hence the institutions for the care of the old and infirm, widows and orphans, lepers and cripples that rapidly spread already during Constantine’s reign. In fact, the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate reluctantly praised the ‘Galileans’ for looking after the weak and needy, “not only theirs, but ours as well,” so much better than the pagans did.

Moreover, rather than being regarded as merely chattels of their fathers and then their husbands, women began to play an important, often decisive, role in society. In that aspect it’s not the Christians but Muslims who are true followers of classical antiquity.

As to providing “instruction for dealing with life’s complexities”, Prof Grayling must be confusing the New Testament with Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Surely even our philosopher can’t be so stupid as to believe that’s what Christianity is for?

Actually, the Old Testament, an integral part of the Christian canon, provides ample, though admittedly not exhaustive, instruction of this sort, a fact that must have escaped Grayling’s attention. No wonder: he’s got the atheist bit between his teeth.

Had he stayed within the confines of his own discipline, he would have been on safer, if overtrodden, grounds. For Christian thinkers, especially in the early days, indeed amalgamated their faith with the methodology of Greek philosophy.

After all, they needed to plant Christian saplings in the soil ploughed by Hellenic thought and, as testimony to their success, they managed to create not only the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen, but also the subtlest philosophy.

To conclude on this basis that “Christianity isn’t Christianity” isn’t just factually wrong but intellectually feeble. But then Pascal said it all before: “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.”

He had Descartes in mind, who was merely misguided, not strident and ignorant. Unlike some other philosophers one could mention.

 

 

   

 

 

According to our self-admittedly atheist Deputy PM, “In the long run it would be better for the Church and better for people of faith, and better for Anglicans, if the Church and the State were to stand on their own two separate feet.”

Here one has to admit mournfully that, while disagreeing with people one respects is always hard, agreeing, even partially, with those one despises is harder still.

This is one of such thorny situations for, as a matter of abstract principle, I agree that Church and state should not have any institutional power over each other. They are, after all, responsible for different realms.

This assertion has the weight of scriptural authority behind it: “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18: 36) or “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22: 21)

General historical observation also suggests that whenever a state lorded it over the Church or, come to that, vice versa, this compromised both by pulling them out of their natural realms and into uncharted territory.

When after the disintegration of the Roman Empire the Church had to assume secular authority by default, it was filling a dangerous vacuum of power. In a way the Church had to usurp secular authority as Europe was falling into the kind of free-for-all chaos that could threaten not only civic order but indeed the survival of the Church itself.

The Church thereby descended to a level where it found itself on the receiving end of the slings and arrows hitherto reserved for lay authority. Its core business suffered as a result, and that’s when the seeds of the Reformation were planted.

Conversely, when the Church becomes an addendum to the state, the latter invariably rides roughshod over the former. Anyone wishing to contest this observation would have to find some doctrinal justification for homomarriage, which the Church of England has more or less countenanced.

Such a search would be in vain: in this instance, as in many others, the state imposed secular values on the Church – and not just any old secular values but those egregiously contravening Christian doctrine.

Russia, as she so often does, provides the most grotesque example of the state subjugating the Church. Ever since Peter I grabbed the reins of ecclesiastic authority, the Russian Church has been a state puppet, to the point of most of its current hierarchs being life-long agents of the secret police.

Even in pre-Bolshevik times the state tended to embrace the Church too tightly, mauling it in the process. This was illustrated by the comic clerical error as a result of which Nicholas I put the Metropolitan Philaret in command of a hussar regiment.

So all in all I agree that separating Church and state is an arguable abstract idea. But if we eschew generalities and put the concept within the specifically English context, both historical and present, the situation changes – especially if we consider the current source of this idea.

As a confirmed socialist, Nick, after all, is heir to the revolutionary tradition of the Enlightenment. For those within this tradition, separation of Church and state is among their most cherished dogmas.

Since atheism (sometimes camouflaged as deism) has always been integral to this tradition, one is tempted to think that revolutionaries like Robespierre, Jefferson or Lenin didn’t have the best interests of Christianity close to heart.

What they craved was power over their residually Christian flock, a desideratum that necessitated undermining the Church’s moral authority over the state. For, while its claim to secular authority was dubious, the Church was entitled to sit in moral judgment over the state.

When Christ spoke of his kingdom being not of this world, he left his listeners in no doubt that his kingdom was higher than this world. Therefore, when the West was still called Christendom, the Church’s remit was to keep the state on a moral straight and narrow, mitigating its excesses.

Since all modern states came out of the Enlightenment, they found this situation intolerable. Hence the idea of separation of Church and state, acting not so much as a means of protecting the Church from state tyranny as a stratagem for marginalising the Church as a moral and social dynamic.

Larceny being a telltale sign of any post-Enlightenment state, the US Constitution coyly eschews the phrase ‘separation of church and state’. Instead the First Amendment states only that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

But in his comments both before and after the ratification Thomas Jefferson was unequivocal: this amendment, he gloated, built “a wall of separation between Church and State”. Since Jefferson, along with most other Founders, was a visceral hater of Trinitarian Christianity, he felt that this construction project had been completed none too soon.

Jefferson was an Enlightenment revolutionary, but the American version of this tradition was milder than the French and the Russian ones, if ultimately as detrimental to the survival of Christendom. Clegg, on the under hand, comes from a much more radical heritage, and his advocacy of disestablishment must be viewed in that context.

He doesn’t really mean that disestablishment would be “better for the Anglicans”. Given today’s situation, it’ll only be better for the likes of him, those who have devoted their whole careers to constitutional vandalism.

England’s ancient constitution is based on a monarch whose right to reign is under the auspices of Parliament amalgamated with, indeed derived from, the English Common Law.

The monarch’s person links the generations past, present and future along essentially the same timeline as the Church. Both are inseparable parts of the constitution of which Parliament is the repository, guardian and enforcer.

Removing the Church from the constitutional settlement would mean neutering both the monarchy and Parliament, which would leave England’s constitution lying in ruins.

This is exactly the end Clegg craves. Our constitution, whatever is left of it, is the last obstacle in the way of Britain becoming a province of the European Union – with Nick possibly shaking the dust of Little England off his feet to claim a post in the government of Greater Europe.

For anyone aware of this context, Nick’s advocacy of disestablishment precludes any serious discussion. One’s knee jerks and the words ‘not on your Nellie!’ spurt out as if by themselves.

A pity, that. For the issue does merit serious discussion.  

 

 

 

Yet, with the modesty for which he’s so justly famous, Tony forgot to say why. Allow me to refresh his memory.

Tony ‘Yo’ Blair chose to play poodle to the Americans when they embarked on their ill-advised, probably criminal, aggression against Iraq. The combined forces of the two countries in a somewhat one-sided ‘special relationship’ overran Saddam’s army, took over Iraq and then rolled into Afghanistan.

As a direct and immediate result, ghastly secular regimes were throughout the Middle East ousted by ghastly jihadist ones. Violence among various factions and sects, always bubbling just underneath the surface, splashed out. Hundreds of thousands died, with more predictably to follow.

The violence had been kept more or less in check until then because those countries were run by military juntas, effectively the only, or at least the most potent, force for secularisation in the Islamic world.

Atatürk in Turkey, Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya all ran military-based dictatorships in different countries and at different times.

Such governments would never be accepted in England or even in Scotland, but occasionally it wouldn’t hurt to remind ourselves that some countries may be ever so slightly different.

At their worst, or rather these days at their normal, free elections in Western countries throw up self-serving nonentities like Obama, Hollande, Blair or Cameron (and wait till Ed takes over). Enforcing the same democratic principles in the Middle East has always brought to power fanatical international terrorists prepared to blow up the world for their quaint faith.

It takes a particular set of qualities for a man, first, not to know that this has always been the case and, second, not to infer that this historical pattern will never change.

Clinical idiocy would be ideal, but ideals are seldom realised in this life. Thus we were treated to the second-best characteristic, proudly displayed by Tony and his American friends: power-hungry hubris overriding whatever modest intelligence there was to begin with.

Assad’s ghastly but secular regime is still holding on by the skin of its teeth, as it tries to keep at bay the kind of chaps who dine on human organs. It thus stands to reason that last year Tony took enough time off from making millions to agitate for Britain to oust Assad.

In other words, he wanted us to do to Syria what he and his friend Dubya had done to Iraq, Afghanistan and, by ricochet, much of the rest of the Middle East.

Now, in a cynical, not to say schizophrenic, about-face, he’s saying that, when all is said and done, Assad is the lesser evil. Radical Islam is the real menace, and it must be stopped at whatever cost.

All true, but Tony’s conversion is too sudden not to make one suspicious about his motives, or else concerned about his mental health. After all, a few months ago he was clamouring for bombing Assad out of existence. So what exactly has changed in the interim?

Oh well, if you insist, what has changed is that only the comatose in the West have failed to wake up to another major threat: Putin’s Russia.

In fact, this threat is much greater for the simple reason that Russia is the only country capable of turning the West “into radioactive dust”, in the colourful phrase of Putin’s mouthpiece on Russia’s state-controlled television.

In the good tradition of Soviet post-war diplomacy, this capability is being used like the flick-knife the local thug keeps in his pocket. He hasn’t stabbed you yet, but you know he can.

The West doesn’t wish to be stabbed with the knife of ICBMs, which reluctance explains its measured response to Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine. (For those of you who aren’t fluent in newspeak, ‘measured’ means cowardly.)

So how does Blair link Russia to Syria, and specifically to his newly discovered urge to stop the march of ‘radical Islam’?

“We should be building alliances to achieve this,” he says, “including the recognition that on this issue, whatever our other differences, we should be prepared to reach out and co-operate with the east, and in particular, Russia…”

Yet again I have to offer my unsolicited translation services, for the parenthetical phrase “whatever our differences” needs deciphering.

We differ with Putin on a number of issues. He wants to rebuild the Soviet Union to all its past power and inglory, which we don’t want to happen. He thinks he’s justified in using violence to that end, and we don’t. He’s prepared to risk a major war in Europe, and we aren’t. He’s clearly ready to attack not only the Ukraine but also the Baltic republics that belong both to the EU and NATO, which isn’t something we welcome. He’s using Russia’s energy resources to blackmail both his immediate and more distant neighbours, which we find objectionable.

Underneath it all, we resent his kleptofascist state, but this isn’t among our most urgent concerns. The other ‘differences’ are, and presumably they’re the hatchet Blair wants us to bury.

Why? Because according to Tony we need an alliance with Putin to stop the threat of ‘radical Islam’ in Syria. Yet only a few months ago Tony screamed for us to duplicate in Syria what his government had done in Iraq, which created (or at least magnified) the threat in the first place.

Putin, on the other hand, is happy with Assad because under the Ba’ath government Syria has become Russia’s client state and a potential springboard for the extension of Putin’s power through much of the Middle East.

By now my head is spinning, and I’m no longer sure whether what Tony sees as differences are actually similarities and vice versa.

Is he suggesting that overlooking our differences with Putin should include delivering much of Eastern Europe to his tender care? Again I’m not sure. 

One thing I am sure about is that Blair’s cynicism and dishonesty go beyond what one expects even from today’s politicians. Lace those qualities with intellectual mediocrity, and my urge to reach for that bucket becomes irresistible.

Our Attorney General thought he was supporting Dave’s assertion that Britain is still a Christian country, even though neither Dave nor most people take its formative faith very seriously.

Instead he dug the hole even deeper.

People, said Dominic Grieve, are “turned off” from religion by the “disturbing” and “very damaging” rise of fundamentalism, defined as “deep intolerance” of other people’s views.

“I do think that there has been a rise of an assertiveness of religious groups across the spectrum,” he explained, which spectrum to him includes both Islam and Christianity.

Actually it’s somewhat wider than that. It also comprises Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, atheism and what not.

All those are to a varying degree intolerant to other people’s views for the simple reason that faith presupposes belief in the truth. The truth, not one among many.

Thus an exponent of one religion has to believe by definition that he’s right and exponents of other religions are wrong. If he possesses a modicum of intelligence, he’d know that others feel the same way about his own faith.

And, if he does satisfy that minimum cerebral requirement, he wouldn’t be unduly bothered by such diversity of belief. To each his own, live and let live, that sort of thing. Such is the way of the world. Others are entitled to their ridiculous opinions.

Thus a believer wouldn’t be upset by other people’s intolerance of his faith unless, of course, such intolerance is manifested through certain unpleasant actions. These can vary from oral insults to physical harassment, from assault to murder, from shrill propaganda to a forceful imposition of alien values.

People who resort to such affronts are usually called ‘religious fundamentalists’, although nowadays the term tends to broaden its meaning to include those who accept not only the moral precepts of their religion but also the dogma whence the morality comes.

Since Mr Grieve lumps all ‘fundamentalists’ together, one has to presume that he must have been jostled in the street by militant Buddhists, attacked by bolshie Christians, harassed by uppity Confucians, forcibly converted by crazed Taoists and assaulted by fanatical Jews for buying pork sausages.

He must have been forced to diet during Lent by fundamentalist Christians, dragged away from a bus on a Friday night by fundamentalist Jews, made to marry in a certain way by fundamentalist Buddhists.

No? None of those calamities has befallen him? Well, then he surely must possess numerous case studies of fundamentalist Anglicans maiming their daughters for dating Catholics, fundamentalist Jews picketing restaurants for not serving kosher food, fundamentalist Chinese insisting that Confucian law must take precedence over the English Common Law in assorted Chinatowns.

No, not even that? So what on earth is he talking about? What kind of religious fundamentalism is such a sharp burr under Mr Grieve’s blanket?

He must realise that failure to provide a satisfactory answer to this simple question may make some feel that, in common with most politicians, he just runs off at the mouth, making politically expedient noises with no substance to them.

Actually Mr Grieve’s problem is neither rare nor hard to understand. Many people these days have been brainwashed by our atheist modernity into talking about religion in general.

Yet there’s no such thing. Every religion is sui generis. Different religions differ from one another as much as any of them differs from atheism.

If there is no such thing as religion in general, then there’s no such thing as religious fundamentalism in general. Then, since Mr Grieve will probably agree that pious adherents of the creeds I’ve mentioned aren’t in the business of shoving their faith down other people’s throats, what kind of sui generis fundamentalism does he have in mind?

There’s only one answer to this question, because there’s only one religion in Britain that’s being practised not just devoutly but aggressively. Islam.

One can understand why Mr Grieve doesn’t want to put it this way. He’s the Attorney General and wants to keep that post at least, if not to move up. Such an aspiration is incompatible with even hinting that one religion is worse than another. The enforcers of political correctness won’t allow it.

So a government official can’t attack Islamic fundamentalism specifically. He can only talk about religious fundamentalism in general, even though everyone with ears to hear will know exactly what he means.

However, even had he come out and actually said it, the statement still wouldn’t make sense. Granted, in some parts of Britain espousing Christian beliefs may expose one to intimidation and even assault. But since most of us don’t live in predominantly Muslim areas, it’s unclear how Islamic fanaticism can turn anyone but a morbidly timid soul off Christianity.

And we’ve already seen that any other fundamentalism tends to be unobtrusive, if not exactly nonexistent. Thus if Britain is indeed a Christian country, as Messrs Grieve and Cameron correctly assure us she is, then how come church attendance is going down, while fewer and fewer self-professed Christians practise the faith they claim to possess?

To find who (and what) is to blame we’d have to go back a few centuries and then slowly move towards Britain circa 2014. At some point along this meandering path we’d find our culprits. But whatever they are, they won’t be ‘religious fundamentalists’.

They are much more likely to be those who, like Messrs Grieve and Cameron, think society can feast on the fruits of Christianity while diligently severing the roots of the tree that has borne the fruits.

They too are fundamentalists, but not of any religious sort. Their cult is our vulgar, anomic, soulless modernity, and they serve it with unwavering piety. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His Eminence, ever the politician, didn’t name UKIP specifically.

But his remarks on immigration were clearly inspired by the party’s poster campaign saying “British workers are hit hard by unlimited cheap labour.”

“The reality,” countered His Eminence, “is that the vast majority of migrants to this country add to our well-being.”

Some of us would like to see his sources, and also some more precision of phrasing. How vast is this majority? More important, does His Eminence see in his mind’s eye some cut-off number beyond which migrants may reduce our well-being?

One of the UKIP posters says the EU boasts 26 million unemployed, which claim Cardinal Nichols doesn’t dispute. Juxtaposing this number with the fact that Britain’s economy is growing faster than any other in Europe, it’s not an unfair supposition that some of those 26 million will end up here.

Assuming that some of them have families in tow, let’s calculate conservatively that, should they all come to Britain, the country’s population would double overnight.

That clearly would be unsustainable – even assuming that no immigrants from outside the EU would follow suit. So what about half that number? A quarter? Ten percent?

I dare say we’d be overrun even at my lowest hypothetical level. If His Eminence has information to the contrary, then by all means he should share it with us. If not, then – how can I say this without offending anyone’s innermost feelings – some people may think he’s indulging in empty bien pensant phrase-making.

His Eminence doesn’t strengthen his case by making further claims, to the effect that “We have grown to appreciate the richness that immigration brings… to the life of hospitals and many public sector areas…”

Going back to my conservative estimate, does the Archbishop think that the NHS has so much spare capacity that it could effortlessly accommodate, say, another five million patients? If so, one would like to see some concrete proposals on how our infection-infested hospitals killing people en masse through neglect and incompetence would pick up their performance when their workload increases.

They already produce 1,200 preventable deaths every month – how would an extra five million patients reduce that number? I don’t know. Neither, I’m afraid, does His Eminence.

His is therefore a general statement of political allegiance, which is redundant. We already know that the Archbishop’s sympathies are broadly on the left, and no further confirmation was necessary.

One can only hope that his unfortunate bias won’t interfere with his ministry, which is more important than politics. After the ecclesiastical damage done to the Church of England by a succession of wishy-washy ‘liberal’ prelates, it would be a shame to see the Catholic Church going the same way.

As to the UKIP campaign, it’s decent advertising and good politics. After the decades of the two major parties converging not just in their policies but also in their philosophy, such as it is, it’s good to see a party that sets out to emphasise its divergence from the others.

Evidently the party’s strategists don’t feel UKIP can engage the main parties in a frontal assault along the entire line of policies. Instead they’re engaging in a guerrilla warfare, trying to derail a few ideological trains on the flanks.

Staying faithful to its heritage, UKIP naturally chooses to concentrate on the horrendous damage caused by Britain’s membership in the EU.

By far the greatest and deadliest damage isn’t economic but constitutional, and this doesn’t depend on the number of new arrivals. An inordinately brisk immigration will undeniably cause some economic attrition, with more cultural and social damage to follow.

But Britain could conceivably survive such casualties and remain Britain. What the country can’t survive is the destruction of her ancient constitution that reflects the nation’s political genius.

The constitution isn’t written, or rather it’s not written in a single document. That is its strength: rather than being a flimsy ideological contrivance, the British constitution has evolved over many centuries by gradually accumulating bits of wisdom and prudence.

These are reflected in a number of common-sensical statutes, laws and practices that have withstood the test of time – a millennium of it. The nation’s sovereignty has developed alongside with, or probably out of, the English Common Law, and it’s vested in the strong alloy of Parliament fused with the crown and the judiciary.

This edifice of constitutional sovereignty isn’t so much undermined as blown to smithereens by Britain’s having to comply with a huge number of laws originating outside Parliament. By signing his name to the Maastricht Treaty, John Major thrust a dagger through a millennium of British political history. The life’s blood of the nation flowed into the ground.

UKIP leaders know all this better than I do. Yet, unlike me, they’re practical politicians who need to reduce their message to the kind of sound bytes our comprehensively educated masses can understand.

I’m sure UKIP must have tested the constitutional message and found it wanting. For the message is too involved to be reduced to sound bytes.

It has taken me almost 300 words to outline the skeleton of the argument, without adding much flesh to it. Perhaps a better writer could cut a few words out – but not many more than a few.

Such loquacity may be sound political philosophy but it’s rotten politics. Democratic politicians, and this is a huge drawback of universal-franchise democracy, have to talk in slogans if they want to be elected.

The flanking manoeuvre undertaken by UKIP is based on a simple, not to say simplistic, message aimed at people who have to work for a living. There are only so many jobs to go round, the campaign says, and one of them is yours. Unless we regain control of our borders (that is, leave the EU) it may go to an immigrant willing to work for less. 

Not being a mechanic of political rough-and-tumble, I can’t judge if this is the right tactic. But being a voter, I’m happy to see that not all parties are saying the same things, give or take a couple of percent. A feeling obviously not shared by Cardinal Nichols.