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Yesterday’s symposium on Traditional Values in the Era of Globalisation was essentially devoted to the interaction between Christianity and secularism.

Chaired by the Rt Revd Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, the symposium was organised by the Russian Embassy, which in effect means the KGB (or FSB as it’s now called).

Both the panel and the audience featured an assortment of luminaries in the C of E, the Russian Orthodox Church, other confessions, the academia and, well, the KGB, aka Russian diplomats led by the Ambassador himself.

Also present in large numbers were those whom Lenin once described as ‘useful idiots’, Western fellow travellers who would sell the Bolsheviks the rope on which the West would be hanged.

The KGB international strategy from the start has been to portray the ghoulish murderers in the Kremlin as the flag-bearers of Old, ‘Holy’ Russia. It speaks volumes both for the Bolsheviks’ cynicism and the idiocy of the useful ones that such canards have always found gasping takers in spite of the on-going persecution of the Church.

Tens of thousands of priests and millions of believers were being murdered while the useful idiots talked about the convergence of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’, with the former moving to the left, the latter to the right, and the two meeting in the middle ground of eternal happiness.

Such talk was actively promoted by the KGB. One of their tricks was to talk about the ongoing Christian revival in Russia, a stratagem that began during the Second World War, when Stalin found out that his army wouldn’t fight for bolshevism. The hierarchy of the Orthodox Church was hastily co-opted to this cause.

Since then the hierarchs of the Church have been combining their pastoral duties with those of career KGB operatives. Thus the uncovered KGB archives show that the current Patriarch of all Russia Kirill, codename ‘Mikhailov’, is a lifetime KGB/FSB agent, as were the two other candidates for the post in the 2009 elections.

This is the background to last night’s spectacle. The principal Russian guest was Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Church’s External Affairs Department. He spoke well about aggressive secularism destroying every traditional, which is to say Christian, value.

A truly accomplished man, he’s also a composer of liturgical music (such as St Matthew’s Passion) and a prolific writer on dogmatic theology. I was so impressed with him that I felt sorry he was tarred with the KGB brush – as, alas, a man in his position has to be.

It rapidly went downhill from there. Lord Green, Dave’s ex-Minister of State for Trade, kindly explained that global trade needs to be ethical to be successful. He then demonstrated the downside of erudition by shaking together an unlikely cocktail of Kant, Smith, Bentham and, amazingly, Francis Fukuyama.  

Mercifully, he didn’t illustrate his truisms with HSBC, whose chairman he was from 2006 to 2010, a tenure punctuated by his bank richly contributing to the credit crisis, breaking US sanctions against Iran and laundering money for Columbian and Mexican drug cartels. Lord Green concluded with a derogatory remark about global-warming denial.

After a short break Metropolitan Hilarion invited brief comments. The invitation was avidly taken up by the Papal Nuncio who possibly didn’t know the meaning of the English word ‘brief’. He took over the pulpit and read a 15-minute statement in what I assumed was Italian, with an unusually large number of English words mixed in. Later I found out His Excellency had actually spoken in English.

Then the floor was yielded to the Revd Dr Walters, Chaplain to the LSE. The youthful clergyman cum scholar explained that all religions have the same core, and he saw his task as that of a translator of the peripheral differences. His multi-culti heart was screaming out for an ecumenical bliss resting on such common ground, and damn the differences. He clearly saw Christianity as just one ingredient in the stew, no better or worse than others.

The LSE, he continued, has always been devoted to finding both inter-religious and inter-governmental accommodation. Personally, I would have been tempted to add that this fine tradition goes back to the university’s founders, the Webbs and GB Shaw. These apologists for mass murder were among those Lenin meant specifically when talking about ‘useful idiots’.

The next speaker, Professor Tolkunov, also represented an academic institution. He’s head of MGIMO University of International Relations. Prof. Tolkunov proudly declared that his university, founded in 1944, had produced a number of noted scholars, writers and theologians. The useful idiots nodded enthusiastically. I, on the other hand, couldn’t recall a single MGIMO alumnus who distinguished himself in such pursuits.

Remembering all the spies trained at that KGB hatchery was much easier. Specifically, most of the 31 spies expelled by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1985 were educated at MGIMO, which no doubt enhanced the University’s academic reputation no end.

Yet again I marveled at the speaker’s cynicism and the audience’s credulity. Why, the blighter actually said that the spy school founded in 1944, when the KGB was outscoring the Nazis in the number of Soviets killed, was wholeheartedly dedicated to the values of Christian universalism. Of course it was, prof, we all know that.

On to another Russian (actually Armenian) academic Prof. Agadjanian, who delivered an incoherent, barely intelligible panegyric to Rowan Williams for his 2008 proposal to incorporate aspects of Sharia into ‘the law of the land’.

Prof. Agadjanian gave the audience to understand that the expression ‘the law of the land’ was a quaint phrase coined by the former Archbishop. As far as one could understand, the good professor felt that the Archdruid blazed the trail we must all follow. After all, British Muslims have as much right to live by their own laws as do British Christians.

As far as I could follow, no specifics were commented upon, such as the stoning of adulterers, the killing of apostates or polygamy, all time-honoured parts of the Sharia law. But then the multi-culti story was so compelling that it ought not to have been spoiled by incidentals.

The ensuing discussion was actually a love-in. One speaker after another, including, alas, our third most senior bishop, extolled the virtues of accommodation with the secular world. This, according to them, would strengthen Christianity.

The two principal confessions involved in the love-in illustrate the point perfectly. One has effectively become an extension of the most evil organisation in history, best exemplified at present by Col. Putin. The other has endorsed female ordination and consecration, homomarriage, socialism, welfarism and the virtual ousting of traditional liturgy (a young man about to be ordained in the C of E told me he had never attended a 1662 mass, for once leaving me speechless).

Birds of a feather and all that, but I felt like getting up to say it was hard not to observe an unbreakable continuity: accommodation – appeasement – collaboration – surrender.

I didn’t though. On the one hand, I didn’t want to mar the festivity of the occasion. On the other, there were too many people trained in martial arts present. 

Do they work their fingers to the bone trying to alleviate the economic crisis that, according to George Osborne, is far from over?

Talk on the phone to Putin and Yanukovych in an attempt to coerce them into stopping the carnage in the Ukraine?

Rack their brains figuring out how to bolster our flood defences to avoid subsequent calamities, like the one devastating the West Country?

Concentrate on repelling the EU’s attempts to reduce the United Kingdom to a loose conglomerate of EU fiefdoms?

Actually none of the above, as I can testify under oath on a stack of Bibles. For I’ve just come home from my tennis club, and guess who was swatting fuzzy yellow balls on an adjacent court?

Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, having a hit with his personal coach under the watchful eye of two athletic young men, each sporting a bomber jacket bulging on the left side of his chest.

A few observations are in order. First, considering that Nick lives next door and fancies himself a tennis player, it’s not surprising that he’d finally join the club (he was turned down in the past, but unfortunately not for any political reasons).

Second, he plays tennis the way he governs the country – trying to look good irrespective of any results. It’s as if in both capacities he performs not as an active participant but as an impersonator of one.

In terms of tennis, someone must have told Nick that good players hit the ball hard. Corollary to that, as he must also have been informed, is the desideratum of keeping the ball in the court not to lose a point every time you swing a racquet.

If his skill doesn’t allow him to achieve both objectives at once, any decent player would take some pace off the ball to keep the rally going. Not our Nick.

His desire to look good far outstrips his technique, but that’s just fine with our new club member. The ball comes to his forehand, he takes the racquet back (too late, incidentally) – crack! – the ball hits the back fence. Backhand now – bang! – bottom of the net. And so forth.

I’ve observed over a lifetime that the way a man plays games reveals more about his personality than anything he says. Sure enough, Nick governs the country the same way he plays tennis: ineptly, with total disregard for results, but hoping to fake his way into making people think he’s good at what he does.

Quite apart from that, those players one ever sees on the courts during weekdays fall into two categories only: retired or self-employed. Which one is our new club member Nick?

I suppose in a way both, at least as far as his self-perception is concerned. His birth and upbringing entitle him to a life of leisure, and what better way to spend a sunny Friday afternoon than hitting a few tennis balls with a coach?

(The coach, incidentally, was just driving the balls at Nick without offering any words of advice. He must have learned from experience there would be no point.)

Of course there’s the slight hitch in that, on the surface of it, Nick is neither retired nor self-employed. In fact he’s employed by us to run our country. But never mind the substance: it’s all about image nowadays, which starts with self-image.

A few weeks ago, Dave Cameron was talking on the phone to someone who was having a long lunch with Nick at a restaurant. Displaying the jocular insouciance that comes so naturally to the alumni of the Bullingdon Club, Dave asked his interlocutor to tell Nick he’s “a f***ing idler”. And there I was, thinking I’d never agree with Dave on anything.

Aren’t you happy how your tax money is being spent? I hate to be beastly about a fellow tennis player, but in this case I’m willing to make an exception.

Now, in common with Martin Luther King, I have a dream, though mine is very modest. I have a dream that one day I’ll be playing doubles against Nick. And I have a dream that I get a short lob with him parked close to the net on the other side. And I have a dream that on that occasion I’ll be able to hit a smash even harder than my usual 80mph-plus…

Why, Nick would be singing soprano for the rest of his life, but at least he’d have a good excuse to skive off at his day job. He’d feel good, I’d feel good and, on balance, the country would be better off.

 

 

 

 

The EU, along with the USA and other Western powers, are responding to the Ukraine crisis in their typically craven manner.

In response to the Ukraine’s special forces using anti-Putin protesters for target practice, they’re threatening sanctions not against Putin, not against Russia and not even against the Ukraine but against Yanukovych’s family.

If he continues to be a bad boy, the EU may fine his son Oleksandr, who has built a £300-million ‘business’ empire in Europe. The quotation marks are inevitable here, for what Oleksandr has really built is an outlet for the ill-gotten gains purloined from the nation by his father and his cronies.

If such a draconian measure doesn’t do the trick, the Yanukovyches and other members of their ‘family’ may even be denied access to European countries, which is apparently seen as a punishment commensurate with the crime of taking 27 lives (with many more doubtless to come).

Meanwhile, in Sochi, 600 miles from Kiev, the man really responsible for the carnage is allowed to have his Olympic triumph. A parallel with the 1936 Nazi Olympics begs to be drawn, and in fact the Russian journalist Viktor Shenderovich did draw it.

In response to his moderate, well-argued article Shenderovich has received thousands of virulently anti-Semitic rebuttals, calling him a ‘Yid snout’ and expressing the regret that Hitler didn’t quite finish the job. Rather than refuting Shenderovich’s analysis, the campaign vindicates every word of it – and sources close to Putin are clearly implicated.

This adds but a slight touch to the backdrop against which Ukrainians are fighting against Putinite fascism in their own country. For this is what the upheaval is all about, and Yanukovych is merely a pawn moved by the chess master in the Kremlin.

The KGB’s own Col. Putin sees the world in the terms defined by his sponsoring organisation. The disintegration of the Soviet empire represents to him “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.” Greater in other words than the two world wars, artificial famines, purges, democide, genocide and so forth – those other geopolitical disasters that collectively destroyed more lives than in all the previous centuries of recorded history combined.

Given this peculiar view of history, it’s no wonder that Col. Putin devotes every ounce of strength (whatever he’s got left over from robbing Russia blind and using the loot to stage emetic extravaganzas) to rebuilding the Soviet Union, if by some other name.

The name he favours, the Eurasian Economic Union, betrays his heritage. For it was the GPU, the KGB’s precursor, that set up the Eurasian movement in the 1920s, with the aim of neutralising anti-Soviet plans being hatched by millions of Russian émigrés in Europe.

The aim of the movement was to portray the Soviet Union as the Russian Empire reincarnated, and many émigrés had sufficiently warm feelings about old Russia to allow themselves to be duped. Those who wouldn’t be duped were murdered or kidnapped – but then that’s how Putin’s alma mater has always done its business.

The EEU is an echo of the same movement, except that this time it’s the whole world that’s being duped into meekly accepting the rebirth of the most awful state Western history has ever known.

We shouldn’t be misled by the term ‘Eurasian Economic Union’. Just like the EU, the EEU is neither driven by economic considerations nor confined to a certain geographical space. Its aims are ideological and geopolitical.

That’s why Putin’s ruling party has far-reaching plans to include not just the former Soviet republics, such as Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Also targeted are countries within the former Soviet sphere of influence, such as Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Mongolia – along with those great Eurasian nations Cuba and Venezuela.

The proposed union would use Russian as its common language and incorporate what Putin has described as “the best values of the Soviet Union”, presumably including concentration death camps, mass murder, torture and obliteration of every conceivable liberty.

The project is proceeding apace. So far only Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed up, their own fascist regimes fitting seamlessly into Putin’s vision. But progress is being made on all fronts. The governments of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia are about to see the light, while Putin’s military aggression succeeded in installing a puppet government in Georgia that’ll do as it’s told.

This is the backdrop against which the events in Kiev and elsewhere in the Ukraine are unfolding. For the career criminal Yanukovych is also running a puppet government, which too is prepared to do as it’s told.

What Yanukovych’s ruling clique has been told to do is join the EEU, not the EU. The words ‘rock’ and ‘hard place’ come to mind, but in any case the Ukraine officially applied to join the EEU in September, 2013.

The trouble started because, unlike the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian people won’t do as they’re told. They have too vivid a recollection of the plagues visited on their nation by Putin’s KGB colleagues.

Specifically, they refuse to forget the 1932 Holodomor, the artificial famine with which Stalin punished Ukrainian peasants for refusing to transfer all their worldly possessions to the state. The Soviet response was both brutal and pioneering, lighting up the path to be treaded by many subsequent despotic cannibals.

In late autumn security troops confiscated all the grain stocks and other food reserves, then sealed the area so tight that no one could get in or out. When the snow melted in the spring, bulldozers moved to remove the frozen corpses, 7,000,000 of them.

Now imagine the 1932 English government doing the same to, say, Scotland. How do you suppose the Scots would feel about the English and national independence? I don’t know if your imagination is vivid enough; mine isn’t.

In today’s Ukraine we’re dealing with a real situation, not an imaginary one. Unlike their government, the people won’t be puppets to the Russians – especially when they’re led by spiritual heirs to the perpetrators of Holodomor.

More and more of them are ready to die fighting KGB stooges, who for the time being are just as ready to kill. Meanwhile the West is assuming the supine position it invariably adopts vis-à-vis tyrannies capable of defending themselves.

It’s not Yanukovych’s family that ought to be boycotted but Putin’s Russia. Yet I’m not holding my breath: the West was too lily-livered to boycott even Putin’s answer to the Nazi Olympics.

Will’s promise to destroy every ivory artefact in Buckingham Palace makes one wonder if propensity towards vandalism is passed on from one generation to the next.

The prince’s late mother didn’t quite manage to vandalise the monarchy in Britain, but not for any lack of trying. Still, though she failed in the short term, it’s conceivable that the damage she did cause may yet prove destructive over time.

While still with us, Lady Di supported every cause the PC Zeitgeist considered worthy, making even old cynics like me paranoid and insomniac.

Pursued by the nightmares of anorexic, HIV-positive lepers splattered all over the rain forest by land mines, I remember lying awake at night, pangs of conscience rattling through my brain (on second thoughts, it could have been the neighbours playing loud music).

Still, I was thanking God I was quite the opposite of anorexic, didn’t indulge in practices leading to Aids, never went anywhere near a rain forest, and neither laid nor was ever likely to step on a land mine.

Now it seems that the apple that’s Will didn’t fall far from the tree that was Diana. He too is bothering his pretty little royal head with PC causes; he too is showing early symptoms of logorrhoea, prime among which is an urge to speak before thinking.

HRH is opposed to illegal trade in elephant tusks, as is every reasonable individual. In fact, said individual is equally opposed to illegal trade in anything, from contraband cigarettes or booze to guns and drugs.

But from this it doesn’t automatically follow that there’s anything wrong with legal trade in such things. For example, the ban on illicit trade in opiates doesn’t extend to the use of morphine as a hospital pain-killer. We don’t want junkies to mainline heroin, but neither do we want cancer patients to writhe in unrelieved agony.

Legal trade in any commodity may encourage a parallel illegal trade. For example, many drinking establishments sell alcohol obtained through channels that don’t rigidly insist on compliance with trade regulations and things like import duty. That, however, doesn’t mean we should have a Prohibition similar to that existing in America between 1920 and 1933.

Moreover, that unfortunate social experiment (and all social experiments are unfortunate) showed a tendency distinctly opposite to one Prince Will sees in his mind’s eye: the ban on legal trade in alcohol didn’t just boost the illegal trade but raised it to a major industry.

President Obama suffers from the same misapprehension as the prince, and for the same reason. He too openly prays to the PC god – and I’d rather not go into the subject of what other gods he may be worshipping surreptitiously. That’s why he wants to ban all commercial sale of ivory.

However, my friend Barack Hussein stops short of the final solution advocated by Will: he isn’t promising to rip the ivory keys off the White House Steinway. Then of course he’s older and less impetuous.

One problem with curbing illegal trade in ivory is that elephants tend to live in lawless lands. The other one is that the greatest consumers of ivory also live in lawless (in our sense of the word) lands, such as China.

This dialectical symbiosis means that poaching is next to impossible to stop – the hand of demand washes the hand of supply. Yet efforts to do so must be made: poaching is vile. Why, it’s even worse than New Yorkers buying duty-free cigarettes brought from New Jersey by muscular chaps in leather coats.

That, however, isn’t what HRH wants. He wants to destroy priceless art works of which he’s a custodian, not owner. This suggests that what he regards as objectionable isn’t just poaching elephants and then selling their tusks illegally.

Diana’s boy actually thinks ivory, whether obtained within or outside the law, is immoral in se, which justifies illegal vandalism. This is simply nonsensical, falling into the same cloud-cuckoo-land area as decrying the wearing of furs or the consumption of meat.

Just as his late mother was obsessed with anorexics, William is deeply attached to elephants. If their tusks are in demand, he fears, the species will become extinct.

This indeed may happen, but what else is new? Over 98 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us, and I don’t think anyone is unduly bothered. Really, Darwin’s book should have been more appropriately called The Disappearance of Species. That way the great man would have stayed in the realm of facts, rather than fanciful hypotheses.

This anthropomorphic affection for animals, cute or otherwise, is recent in origin. It has the same source as the pantheistic adoration of nature in general, one of the gifts we gratefully received from Romanticism (another one is Nazism, but we shan’t talk about that now).

One of the desiderata of that movement was to replace the morality and aesthetics of Christendom with a new vision of the world. This vision did produce some pleasing aesthetic results, mostly in music, but appalling moral ones.

Soppy adoration of nature was one such, and it was animated not so much by the urgent need to hug trees or elephants as by a much more urgent desire to destroy our theocentric heritage. (In that Romantic spirit, the Nazis banned experiments on animals while indulging in experiments on humans.)

That this was how the battle lines were drawn was clear to the contemporaries of the Romantic movement, such as Lord Tennyson who himself wasn’t free of Romantic influences. He wrote: “Who trusted God was love indeed//
And love Creation’s final law//
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw//
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.”

One day HRH may become the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, provided there will still remain a Church of England for him to govern supremely. True enough, the Church and our whole society are taking giant strides on the road to paganism, but there’s no compelling reason to nudge them further along that way.

HRH had better restrain his youthful impetuosity and think hard about such issues before pronouncing on them. Reading a book or two on the founding principles of our civilisation wouldn’t hurt either.

He should be aware of his limitations, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing to remind himself that he’s still a very young, not particularly well-educated man who just may suffer from compromised intellectual heredity on his mother’s side.

 

Over 200 British soldiers have just been sent home from the Afghanistan frontline, and not because they were no longer needed for operational reasons.

They weren’t wounded. They weren’t shell-shocked. They hadn’t experienced the deep emotional trauma our soldiers are encouraged to experience at the very thought of having to murder fellow human beings, especially those who have a multi-culti value.

They were, well, pregnant. And no, our government hasn’t yet managed to override physiology and take homomarriage to the next logical stage.

No physiology had been overridden. The 200 were all women who had got impregnated the old-fashioned way (details available on request), most of them by their fellow (male) soldiers.

At the risk of incurring some predictable wrath, one has to believe that such a result wasn’t entirely unexpected. Thrust a few fit young women among a group of young, physical, hormonally active men and chances are not all of them will treat the women as just comrades-in-arms.

One begins to see why the Romans didn’t allow women anywhere near their frontline troops: they didn’t want the soldiers to be burdened with emotional attachments, especially of the reproductive kind. What the soldiers did for sex is a different matter, and we shan’t go into it now.

But forget the ancient Romans. The interesting question is why on earth we today invite women to join the army, especially its combat units. Actually, the question isn’t all that interesting because the answer is altogether predictable.

Modern piety demands that women be regarded as not just equal to men but identical to them. Anything a man can do, a woman can do as well, if not always better. This applies to absolutely everything: operating heavy machinery, loading ships with 200-pound bags, digging ditches, boxing, high-altitude welding – and leading bayonet charges against entrenched enemy positions.

The sheer idiocy of it all should be plain for all to see. It’s indeed seen by all, except that it might as well not be. When modern PC piety speaks, reason flees and sight loses acuity.

Traditionally men rode off to fight wars while their women stayed behind to make sure our civilisation kept ticking along. Not only did they look after the men’s houses, finances and children, but they also ran schools, hospital, parishes – life.

They also tried to civilise their men when they staggered home from the battlefield, to make sure that perhaps next time the warriors would think twice before deciding to kill others, often for no good reason. That effort typically failed to avert subsequent disasters completely, but it must have reduced their numbers.

In short, men and women have their own roles to play in life, and it takes much ideological fog on the brain not to see that these roles, while always being equally important, aren’t always the same. Women think differently, feel differently, react differently – and thank God for that.

They’re also created to perform sexual roles that are different from men’s, both as far as the actual sex act is concerned and also in terms of its consequences. This observation is neither original nor perspicacious, and I only make it for the sake of our rulers whom it seems to escape.

Religious people have to believe that any extramarital sex (fornication, as it’s known in some quarters) is a deadly sin, and this is an unassailable belief. However, as I don’t feel my biography entitles me to claim high moral ground on the issue, I’d merely suggest that, morality aside, sexual intercourse may have different consequences for men and women fighting in the trenches.

They both may enjoy the experience, and they may both burn in hell as a result, although Christ did talk about those without sin casting the first stone. But while still on earth, men can have their fun and then go on fighting. Women, on the other hand, may get pregnant, and morning nausea isn’t a condition that makes people particularly bellicose.

This, along with many other physical, physiological and psychological considerations, means that having women anywhere near the frontline in any other than auxiliary capacity is frankly idiotic. Actually, it’s even worse than that because the decision was driven not just by stupidity but, which is worse, also by ideological fervour.

Some of the young ladies involved were already pregnant when they were shipped to Afghanistan. This condition could easily have been ascertained by a simple test or, provided the expecting mums were honest, by a three-word question. Either of those options, however, would have violated the soldiers’ human rights, as defined by modern morons. So no tests were done and no questions were asked.

In a parallel development, two WPCs have successfully sued the police for having been removed from the firearms unit guarding a nuclear installation. They suffered that awful injustice because their hands were too small to grip the butt of a Glock 17 pistol and still reach the trigger.

One would think that this would somewhat compromise their ability to defend the installation from, say, a terrorist attack. The young ladies were nonetheless awarded £35,000 each for having been exposed to this blatant act of discrimination.

The reports of the trial didn’t mention why neither the women nor their commanders had thought of switching them to the smaller Glock 19, specially designed for what used to be known as the weaker sex. Perhaps neither were sufficiently familiar with firearms. More likely, the bosses were uneasy about having women in harm’s way, while the young ladies grabbed their chance to turn a quick profit.

On the plus side, neither WPC was pregnant. Maybe neither had much time for men. There were too busy trying to get their hands around a pistol grip.

Having had their fun in the Middle East, 250 British-based (or born) jihadists are coming home.

If you tied a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree when they left for their terror camps, you can untie it now. Our bearded warriors are back – not exactly to heroes’ welcome, but at least to utterly craven complacency on the part of HMG.

These are all highly trained terrorists and guerillas, some of them battle-hardened in Syria and Afghanistan. Don’t know about you, but I’m scared. Well, not exactly scared, but apprehensive. Wary, at any rate.

So is Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner: “Our biggest worry is when they return they are radicalised, they may be militarised, they may have a network of people that train them to use weapons.”

Stoutly spoken and acutely observed, Sir Bernard. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to ban them from entering Britain? Take their passports away? Arrest all those Darren Ali-Jabbars and Wayne Abu-Akbars on arrival?

Perish the thought. Neither Sir Bernard nor any other government officials are going to do anything of the sort. Oh yes, they promise to keep an eye on the murderous thugs as best they can. Other than that – nothing, and we know how easy it is to keep track of those enjoying the support of their large communities.

But not to worry: not all returnees are a threat, says one official. If you’re planning for a career in public service, this is how you talk when you get the job: “This doesn’t mean that all the individuals who have come back are planning attacks. Many will have returned and want nothing more to do with it. Others may be arranging training or simply moving money.”

Phwoa. For a second there I was worried. Silly me. Some of the trained murderers who hate Britain have had their jollies and now, as the American jingle goes, it’s Miller time. Or, in deference to Darren’s and Wayne’s heart-felt religious convictions, orange juice time.

By inference others (most?) haven’t quite got murder out of their system. They’ll “be arranging training”, i.e. teaching others how to blow up our crowded places, and “moving money”, i.e. laundering the funds needed to buy the wherewithal to blow up our public places.

Of course doing anything preventive about our Muslim Waynes and Darrens is impossible. After they’ve blown up a public place, perhaps – provided they didn’t go for the suicide-bombing option, in which case there wouldn’t be enough of them left to arrest. But certainly not before, and shame on you for even suggesting it.

What, lock up British subjects on suspicion alone? Preventively? Without due process? You must be out of your mind, old boy.

Can you imagine the ensuing shrill screams coming from our ‘liberal’ press? Human rights groups? The E bloody U? Really, you must have taken leave of your senses. Why, we’d be hit with fines, sanctions and lawsuits faster than you can say ‘racial and/or religious discrimination against socioeconomically disadvantaged persons’ (sorry, my EU isn’t very fluent).

Far be it from me to imply any criticism of the rule of law. No substitute for it exists in any country perceiving herself as civilized, and especially not in England, which more or less reinvented the concept after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

But wonderful things like the rule of law, democracy and human rights aren’t a suicide pact. At a time when the realm and its subjects’ lives are threatened, even countries perceiving themselves as civilised have been known to suspend some liberties for a while, the better to protect them in perpetuity.

In wartime even the most legally minded nations tend to put their legal minds on the back burner. When survival is the order of the day, Americans elbow their Constitution aside to put 110,000 Nisei Americans into internment camps. And HMG kicks 2,000 years of legal tradition into touch to intern all German and Italian nationals on the Isle of Man – including, incidentally, German Jewish refugees from Hitler who were unlikely to be pro-Nazi.

Few of the internees hated Britain with the fervour of all those Muslim Waynes, Darrens and Lees. But that didn’t matter: presumption of innocence was suspended because the nation’s security was at stake.

Going further back, let’s indulge the wild fantasy of imagining how Lord Palmerston or any other nineteenth-century British PM would have handled a similar situation. One suspects that, say, Barbary pirates or other trouble makers wishing to settle here would have been stopped by every imaginable means. Even if they were born in Britain.

If British blood is spilled, it’ll fall not only on the returnees’ hands, but also on those of our government officials who are ready to sacrifice our lives at their altar of political correctness. For it’s PC rectitude that drives them, not any excessive concern for the rights of Englishmen.

Witness the cavalier disregard with which they treat, say, freedom of speech, of conscience, of religion (unless of course it’s anti-Christian) or the very sovereignty of the realm. Any of those can be curtailed with nary a thought.

But any transgression against PC dicta is unthinkable. In this instance, those who wish us ill have to be treated with kid gloves, rather than the boxing variety. They are minorities, aren’t they? So they can never wrong anyone; they can only ever be wronged.

By the same token our police will soon lose the critical prevention tool of being able to stop and search suspicious representatives of the groups most likely to commit crimes. Search everyone or no one, screams the inner PC voice whose commands HMG obeys. What, it’s impossible to search everyone? Fine. No one it is.

Nations who have lost the will to protect themselves don’t deserve to survive. Britain is rapidly falling into that category, as we meekly watch our country being transformed into a large province (in future, many small ones) of the EU, our police being rendered helpless to prevent crime – and our government welcoming back those who bray for our blood.

It must be contagious. First George enlarged on the advisability of returning the Elgin marbles to Greece, a subject with which he’s manifestly and self-admittedly unfamiliar.

Then Britain’s Catholic leader Archbishop Nichols accused the government of causing mass starvation by introducing some very marginal delays in processing welfare applications. In doing so he made some thunderous statements revealing that his ignorance of economics is similar to George’s of art history.

But this isn’t about knowledge or lack thereof. In both instances the speakers were driven not by reason but by a bien pensant, touchy-feely ideology with a strong red tint.

To see this in a Hollywood actor is predictable and inconsequential. To see this in a Christian prelate is devastating and damaging.

His Grace really ought to stick to his day job and concentrate on pastoral care based on the Gospels, rather than fashionable economic theories that have produced disaster everywhere they’ve been tried in earnest.

Specifically he should remind himself of Christ’s words “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18: 36) and “For ye have the poor with you always” (Mark 14: 7). Really, Your Grace, St Mark is a better guide to life than St Marx.

The first statement doesn’t mean that men of God shouldn’t busy themselves with life in this world. They should – but within their own remit.

In this instance they’d do well to keep in mind Christ’s second statement and accept that it’s not their business to offer economic solutions to material poverty. Their job is to offer Christian solutions to spiritual poverty – not to exacerbate it, as His Grace has done.

A priest should remind welfare recipients that expressing individual responsibility through work is at the heart of Judaeo-Christian morality, which is specifically reflected in God’s command “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3: 19).

St Paul went even further: “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith” (1 Timothy 5: 8). And also, “If any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3: 10).

It’s hard to detect in such injunctions a moral justification for the fundamentally atheist state increasing its own power by creating an army of spongers likely to vote for whomever offers bigger handouts.

Speaking to the poor, a Christian prelate should refrain from deepening the abyss of corruption into which they were pushed by the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent welfare state. He’d do better reminding them of the great Judaeo-Christian virtue of humility and submission to God’s will. If he could quote from the Book of Job, so much the better.

Speaking of the poor, he ought to remind the better-off that some people are poor through no fault of their own, and even those who have only themselves to blame can’t be denied shelter and food. He should then call for an act of individual charity, the giving of alms, in such a way that “thy left hand [not] know what thy right hand doeth” (Matthew 6: 3).

Obviously, in common with the pimpled drug-addled youths of the ‘60s, my erstwhile co-author (His Grace and I both contributed to a collection of essays a few years ago) equates the welfare state with Christian charity.

“Quod licet bovi,” Your Grace, “non licet iovi”, as we would have put it in the pre-Vatican II days. This slight paraphrase means that a would-be cardinal ought to be more rigorous in his thinking than unwashed chaps sporting the likeness of Che Guevara on their T-shirts.

State-run welfare isn’t the same as Christian charity. It’s more nearly its direct opposite.

For the purpose of Christian charity isn’t purely material, but also moral. It’s supposed to elevate both the generous giver and the humble recipient, thereby contributing to their salvation in the kingdom that’s not of this world.

The welfare state, by contrast, corrupts both the giver and the recipient by replacing individual charity with state largesse. Government officials steadily increase the size of the dependent underclass by debauching their economies for the sake of their own power.

Those millions who sponge off the state (and few of them are truly incapable of providing for themselves) are corrupted into a life of sloth, typically adorned with booze, drugs and promiscuous going forth and multiplying.

The economic consequences of this arrangement are there for all to see: rather than producing tax revenue, more and more people end up receiving it. This leads to huge holes appearing in public finances, and these are invariably papered over by extortionist taxation, profligate borrowing and heavy-handed printing of money.

Hence the economic disaster caused by exactly the same philosophy and practices the Archbishop finds so consonant with his religion. And hence also the government’s timid attempts – not to roll back the welfare state, God forbid – but merely to slow down a little bit its ruinous growth.

Grave as the economic consequences are (and will be), the moral damage is much worse. And here we enter the realm where the Archbishop could really offer solace and treatment. Instead he chose to emulate George Clooney.

This at a time when the Anglican church has cast adrift orthodox Anglo-Catholic Christians within its ranks. Pope Benedict’s generous offer of the Ordinariate and the general logic of Western Christianity point them in the direction of Roman Catholicism.

This creates an historic opportunity for the British Catholic Church to regain its ancient status as the main home for orthodox British Christians. And this is exactly the opportunity that His Grace is in danger of blowing, especially since most conservative Christians tend to be conservative in other ways as well.

One is beginning to see why Benedict XVI denied Vincent Nichols a cardinal’s hat – and why Benedict’s successor Pope Francis is about to award it. The words ‘birds’ and ‘feather’ spring to mind. 

This seems to be the logical inference from the most comprehensive study on the subject ever undertaken.

The results show that homosexual men share genetic signatures on the region of the X chromosome known as Xq28 (no such commonality was found among lesbians, which is most unfair, if you ask me).

The findings suggest that a man’s sexuality is 30 to 40 percent genetically predisposed, while the rest of it is caused by ‘environmental factors’.

Dr Lewis Wolpert, the prominent biologist and author of popular books explaining why there is no God, once wrote that scientific discoveries, such as a heliocentric universe or quarks, are usually counterintuitive.

Well, these ones aren’t. Even a rank amateur would nod when reading that homosexuals are genetically predisposed to be that way.

What I found interesting about Dr Bailey’s study is his interpretation of it. “Sexual orientation has nothing to do with choice,” he said. “Our findings suggest there may be genes at play.”

Now I can claim no expertise in molecular biology, but I’m reasonably confident about my ability to count to 100. If genetics accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the story, what about the remaining 60 to 70 percent?

Dr Alan Sanders who led the study can count to 100 too. “We don’t think genetics is the whole story,” he admits grudgingly. “It’s not.”

As uttered, Dr Bailey’s comment is a complete non sequitur, which is most regrettable coming from a scientist. The categorical statement (“nothing to do”) in no way follows from the cautious one (“there may be”).

Nothing at all to do with personal choice, Dr Bailey? Not even a teensy-weensy bit? Remember we still have 60 to 70 percent to account for?

Dr Bailey does remember that. Which is why he hastily explains that the environmental factors he meant may include things like the hormones in the mother’s body during gestation. No social inputs are involved and – certainly, definitely, absolutely! – NO PERSONAL CHOICE.

One wonders if Dr Bailey is aware that he’s making no logical sense. He probably is, the clever chap he must be. It’s just that the two parts of his statement came from two different parts of his personality. The cautious one came from the integrity of a scientist; the categorical one from the effluvia of an ideologue.

That even objective scientists have to combine the two roles is a ringing denunciation of our time. Yet often this doesn’t come from their personal conviction – ideological conformism is forced upon them.

In his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics, Dr Lee Smolin laments that no physicist rejecting the string theory can get an academic post or grant. The same goes for any scientist whose research shows that different races or sexes have different median levels of intelligence.

The issue of homosexuality is equally divisive, with the watershed running mostly along political and religious lines. Religious fundamentalists insist that it’s strictly a matter of choice, while homosexual activists (the existence of this job description is another ringing denunciation of our time) clamour it’s all genetics.

This study proves that both sides are wrong and the truth, as it stubbornly tends to be in most cases, is rather complex. Nevertheless Dr Bailey, who clearly wants to keep his job, felt he had to pay lip service to genetic and environmental determinism.

As a factor of his biography this is strictly a personal matter, and I wish him well. But it’s not just a personal matter – it’s also a comment on our time, which makes it rather more interesting.

In conflict here are two concepts of man: one lying at the foundations of our civilisation, the other reflecting the compulsion to destroy every such foundation.

The first concept is Judaeo-Christian: man is created in the image of God and endowed by his creator with the gift of free will. This makes man unique: he’s different from animals, vegetables and minerals in that his existence isn’t wholly determined by his physical, biological or genetic makeup. He’s a free agent capable of affecting his life by the choices he makes.

The second concept is modern, or post-modern if you’d rather. Man is an automaton whose actions are at the mercy of factors beyond his control. Such factors may be economic (Marx et al), biological (Darwin et al), psychological (Freud et al) or, as is fashionable today, genetic.

From the ideological standpoint it doesn’t really matter which. Pick one or another, mix some or all together – as long as what comes out in the wash is the debunking of our Judaeo-Christian heritage. That reason is thrown out with the same bathwater doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

Personally, any religious faith aside, I find the idea that man is created by a loving God in His image to be more aesthetically pleasing than one postulating our descent from a randomly self-created cell via a rather unsavoury mammal. The latter, I think, is based on our professional atheists’ frank self-assessment, and one has to concur with that if not with their conclusions.

In my rejection of any determinism I go so far as to take issue with Augustinian (and Calvinist) predestination. If our salvation doesn’t depend on anything we do, then it’s not immediately clear why God bothered to give us free will or indeed to create us at all. But at least subsequent, mainly Catholic, thought has managed to reconcile Augustine (if not Calvin) with free will.

No such reconciliation is possible between secular determinism and the traditional, which is to say sensible, view of man. Science, such as the Northwestern study, shows irrefutably that factors beyond his control affect a person’s behaviour. It’s just as irrefutable that they don’t predetermine it.

Exactly how does this apply to homosexuality? It has been clear to me all along, and this study confirms it, that genetic factors have a role to play. But believing that free personal choice isn’t involved at all agrees with neither philosophy nor religion nor logic – nor indeed science.

In fact, just like any other form of determinism, such a belief is deeply offensive to our humanity. I for one resent being insulted that way.

The Swiss have decided to introduce quotas on migrants from the EU, thereby incurring the wrath of The Times and specifically its columnist Roger Boyes.

Oh well, Boyes will be Boyes, but there has to be a limit to ideological rants complete with frothing at the mouth, especially when the vehicle for such is a formerly respectable newspaper.

Generally speaking, in my approaching dotage I no longer mind people holding any views, no matter how ridiculous, ill-informed or different from mine. However, when they defend such views, I do expect to hear some intellectual rigour or at least a modicum of logic.

Neither was on offer in Mr Boyes’s article Britain Shouldn’t Copy the Xenophobic Swiss. Instead we were served the complete kit of federastic EU invective against anyone daring to disagree.

“Xenophobic” set the leitmotif nicely and the word was oft-repeated throughout the diatribe. But no theme can be truly effective without its variations, and these were aplenty:

…“Fear of the foreigner” (thanks for letting us know what xenophobia means, Roge)… “searching for foreign scapegoats”… Scapegoats for what exactly?

The prosperous, free Swiss seem to be doing all right, better than just about any other nation on earth, but never mind. They must still need scapegoats, someone to carry the can for their prosperity and freedom. If you’re confused, don’t ask me, ask Roger.

…“Barely concealed racism’, “anti-EU racism”, “casual racism towards foreign workers…” Now we’re talking. So it’s not just any old foreigners the Swiss fear but specifically those of different races?

Well, that depends on how you define racism. My friend Roger defines it rather broadly: “Is being anti-German racist? Yes, it is.” In other words racism to him means the same as xenophobia, but never mind the meaning, feel the zeal.

If the Swiss really suffer from this inordinate fear of foreigners, they have a funny way of showing it, as Roger himself demonstrates self-refutingly: “…about 24 per cent of Switzerland’s population is made up of foreigners”.

They “remain foreign simply because of tough naturalisation rules”. Crikey. Fancy the injustice of it all. So what percentage of the Swiss population would Roger see as being in agreement with his flaming conscience? We’ve already seen that 24 percent is too low. What wouldn’t be? 30 percent? 50?

Obviously the only way for the Swiss to get back into Roger’s good books would be to naturalise this quarter of their population, then remove all restrictions on immigration, admit another quarter and naturalise them as well.

Moreover, the Swiss must follow the example of the Germans who cloyingly repent their recent past. The Swiss too must apologise and seek forgiveness for their own atrocities, quite on a par with the Holocaust.

Are you ready for this? They “banned the building of new minarets and deported foreigners who have committed crimes.”

We shouldn’t copy them but they ought to copy us. The number of mosques in Britain has grown from about 60 half a century ago to about 1,600 now, thereby setting a fine model for the Swiss to follow.

As to deporting foreign criminals – perish the thought. We need them right here, where we can see them spitting venom at everything British and recruiting suicide bombers in many of the 1,600 mosques.

Mr Boyes (I renounce all claims to his friendship) may not realise this, but he’s sounding like an apparatchik preaching the party line. The party in this instance is EU fanatics, most of them informed by Marx’s pronouncement that “the proletariat knows no national borders”.

For Europe to unite into a single state, every European nation must cease to exist qua nation. This could be achieved with nuclear bombs, but such a solution would rather defeat the purpose. The only bomb that could do the job properly is the demographic one, clustered with the cultural variety.

In other words, all European nations must be tossed into a cauldron of bubbling EU emanations and boiled together until they form a homogeneous, amorphous, foul-smelling mass. Then no nation would be able to resist the rule of denationalised EU Marxists who, like Marx’s ‘proletarians of the world’, are united in their hatred of European tradition – particularly the last 2,000 years of it.

European tradition was indeed universal, defined as it was by a universal religion. But this universality was expressed through, and enriched by, the particularity of every European nation, each with its own language, culture, history, ties of kinship and genetic commonality.

Trying to preserve nationhood in no way contradicts what Boyes bizarrely calls “our tradition of curiosity about the outside world”, displaying yet again his party’s well-honed intellectual integrity. The simpletons among us tend to believe that such curiosity would be best satisfied by studying and visiting other countries, not by swarms of foreigners flooding into ours.

I’d like Boyes to explain how the 300,000 French people living in London can teach me anything about their country I haven’t learned by going there for decades and now spending half my time in France. Ethnographic curiosity, Roger, can only be vectored outwards, as it was in the days of the British Empire.

Of course we must copy the Swiss, and of course they’re not xenophobic. They are patriots who wish to preserve their patria. Having half of their population made up of those alien to their culture and civilisation means that eventually they’ll have no patria left.

We too must put a limit on minarets, we too must deport foreign criminals, and we too must tighten naturalisation laws. Foreign workers must be allowed in only if their application for entry is sponsored by a potential British employer. They should be allowed to stay for as long as their employer needs them.

While here, they must be treated kindly and politely, as cherished guests. But they mustn’t be allowed to take over the house.

An application for naturalisation must be accompanied by an honest desire to become British. For an applicant to become a British subject some years later, he must demonstrate that he has indeed become British.

This means native fluency in English – and native understanding of the complex cultural, historical, ethnic, folkloric and social strands out of which the British nationality is woven.

As to The Times, it had better arrest its leftward slide before long. Otherwise its accelerating momentum may soon take the paper crashing down into the swampy territory presently occupied by The Guardian, if not The Morning Star.

George is currently gracing London with his august presence. He’s here to promote his latest film that deals with Americans saving… well, not the world this time, but merely some art treasures looted by the Nazis.

(The actual saving was done by an Englishman, but what’s an insignificant detail like that among friends enjoying a special relationship?)

Now the dominant beliefs these days are that a) everyone is entitled to his own opinion, no matter how offensively ignorant, b) expertise in one field automatically makes one an expert in any other and c) a celebrity of any kind is worth listening to no matter what gibberish he’s mouthing.

In this ABC spirit a Greek reporter asked George at a Berlin press conference whether he thought the Elgin marbles ought to be returned to Greece. George honestly admitted he knew nothing about it, which to you and me would be sufficient reason to shut up.

Alas, neither of us is a celebrity and George is. Therefore he feels justified to shoot from the lip, as he did in this case. Sure, he said. The Elgin marbles, of whose existence he was at the time blissfully unaware, must go back where they belong.

To his credit George anticipated that the same question would be certain to come up in London, in whose British Museum the marbles have been for the last 200 years. So it did, but George was forewarned and therefore forearmed:

“I stepped into one the other day,” he said with his pearly smile. “I had to do a little bit of research to show I’m not completely out of my mind. Even in England the polling is in favour of returning the marbles to the Pantheon.”

Er… it’s actually the Parthenon, George. There’s a Pantheon in Paris, and another one in Rome, but none in Athens. Easy mistake to make, but methinks a little bit more research is in order before running off at the mouth, wouldn’t you say?

I don’t know how much George’s co-stars Bill Murray and Matt Damon know about the subject. They may know more about it than you and I, or they may know sod-all. Having grown up among actors (my grandfather was one), I rather think the latter is more likely. But in this instance it makes no difference: they’ve been on the telly, which means they are experts on anything they wish to enlarge on.

So yes, they’re with George on this one. Whatever those damn things are, the Greeks must have them back.

I’m not going to argue the intricacies of the international law involved, simply because, not being a celebrity, I only ever try to talk about things I know at least something about.

It’s possibly out of such ignorance that I’m willing to accept that the Greeks may have a legal right to get their marbles back. Then again, they may not. What is absolutely undeniable is that, in view of their history, our moral right to the sculptures is unimpeachable.

The Earl of Elgin first got involved with them in 1799, when he was appointed His Majesty’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, of which Greece was then part.

Upon his arrival he went into the archives and noticed that many of the sculptures listed were no longer extant. An utterly civilised man, Lord Elgin approached British officials to ask if they would underwrite the effort of making plaster casts and drawings of the sculptures before they all disappeared.

The response, according to Lord Elgin, “was entirely negative”. He then decided to finance the effort himself, starting with cataloguing the sculptures in the Parthenon and elsewhere in the Acropolis.

He then discovered that the Turks, whose reverence for such things wasn’t the same as Lord Elgin’s, were burning the marble sculptures to obtain lime for construction purposes. Aghast, Lord Elgin began to have the sculptures removed (and excavated) in 1801, completing the project in 1812.

This cost him £70,000 (almost £70 million in today’s inflated cash), a huge outlay only partially offset when Lord Elgin sold the sculptures to the British museum, which had been his intention all along. That he was driven not only by aesthetic appreciation but also by patriotism is evident from the fact that he rejected much higher offers from Napoleon and others.

It’s a fair bet that, had the marbles remained in Greece, which is to say in the Ottoman Empire, they wouldn’t have survived for us to admire. As it is they delight six million people every year, all of whom ought to be grateful to Lord Elgin.

As I mentioned before, the legal casuistry of the dispute between Britain and Greece goes over my head. Suffice it say that the world’s museums are full of treasures looted by erstwhile conquerors in ways, and for reasons, much less benign than Lord Elgin’s.

Russian museums, for example, are full of treasures Soviet soldiers looted from German owners either before or after raping and killing the women of the house (not always in that order). Napoleon’s booty adorns the museums of France and Belgium. Some of those works of art found their way to Sweden courtesy of Napoleon’s marshal Bernadotte who became King of Sweden and founded the currently reigning dynasty.

Perhaps all those masterpieces ought to be returned to their original owners. Perhaps the Elgin marbles ought to be as well, even though the Earl’s motives were a great deal more noble than those of assorted looters and rapists.

However, one way or the other the issue must be decided by lawyers and diplomats, not by vox populi to which George Clooney referred. And certainly not by silly ignoramuses who feel they’re entitled not only to their own opinion but also to an audience.