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Russians don’t just kill Ukrainians. They also do an increasingly good job killing other Russians.

Street and domestic violence, including murder, have shot up in the past two years. Some explanations of this upsurge are instantly obvious. Others lie deeper under the surface, which may make them even more destructive over a long term.

The most obvious reason is the demobilisation and homecoming of Russian soldiers completing their combat tour. Some of those veterans were murderers, rapists and even cannibals recruited out of prison camps. They were promised an amnesty in exchange for a six-month stint at the front, too good an opportunity to miss.

The promise was faithfully kept, and surviving serial murderers went back into the community, which community they promptly began to terrorise. I don’t know if a carte blanche to post-demob murder was part of the deal, but one could easily get that impression.

Yet even law-abiding recruits are so thoroughly brutalised in the army that they don’t return home the same rosy-cheeked innocents they were at the recruitment office. Beatings, torture and arbitrary executions are routine in the Russian frontline army. Soldiers refusing to go on suicidal attacks (‘meat storms’ in Russian army slang) are beaten to a pulp, raped, kept in icy holes filled with corpses, shot without trial, have their skulls smashed with a sledgehammer and so on.

A few months of frontline service, where such practices are routine, can turn even previously normal lads into sadistic brutes, especially since they are encouraged – often ordered – to treat Ukrainian POWs and civilians with sadistic brutality. And then they descend on their native towns and villages, with the line separating war from peace smudged in their minds.

A woman walking the streets of a Russian town looks, often also talks, just like her Ukrainian counterpart. A demob-happy rapist may ignore the nuances and treat the Russian the way he treated the Ukrainian.

Nor is it just violence against female strangers. Wife beating is a traditional Russian sport, and society has always treated it with good-natured indifference. I often cite Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer in which he describes a peasant who beats his wife within an inch of her life, which, according to the author, doesn’t diminish in any way his spiritual superiority over any Westerner.

Russian women, known for their forbearance, accept black eyes, busted lips and broken bones with equanimity. They often repeat the old proverb, “If he beats, he loves”, a sentiment that hasn’t quite caught on in the West.

That meek acceptance of savagery has been enshrined in the law. In 2017, perhaps in preparation for things to come, wife beating was decriminalised in Russia. First offenders now risk nothing harsher than a small fine, which puts domestic violence on a par with jaywalking.

That was before thousands of brutalised murderers, looters and rapists returned home with blood on their hands and savagery in their eyes. “Hide, honey, I’m home!” is becoming the slogan of Russian domestic bliss. Those women who dare complain are accused of militant feminism, which Russian courts treat as a terroristic crime.

Against that background, any growth of violence against women shouldn’t strike anyone as counterintuitive. Yet so far we’ve only probed skin-deep.

Deep subcutaneous shifts are occurring in Russian social mores and morality, especially in its relation to violence. For the past 10 years, especially during the past two, the Russians have been exposed to incessant all-pervasive propaganda demonising the 40 million people living just west of the country’s borders as subhuman.

Exterminating them is equated to culling a herd or spraying a field with insecticide. As a result, people’s nerve endings become cauterised and thus incapable of feeling normal human revulsion to violence. Their immune system no longer resists savage acts with the same fortitude; what used to elicit a gasp of horror now elicits an apathetic shrug.

The Russian state is also doing its level best to increase the volume of violence exponentially. Just look at the prison sentences meted out to those perceived as dissidents.

In my day (I left the Soviet Union in 1973), the harshest sentence for dissent was seven years in a labour camp. Most sentences were less severe: for example, my KGB interrogator, Major Sazonov, only threatened me with a year or two.

These days, someone expressing the mildest disapproval of the war can go down for 25 years or even for life, sentences unknown in a post-Stalin Soviet Union. Officially, Russia no longer has the death penalty, but anyone who has glanced at the papers over the past 20 years knows there are ways around that annoying obstacle.

One minor example: the treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were outlawed in Brezhnev’s Russia, as they are at present. But back in the 1960s they’d typically receive a one-year sentence in a milder camp. Now they routinely get a fiver of “severe regime”, where survival rates are worse than with some cancers.

Beatings and torture in both police stations and prisons are neither exceptional nor even simply widespread. They are so ubiquitous as to be invariable. Throughout the Russian penitentiary system, inmates (including those in remand prisons) are beaten, tortured and raped by their captors. The powers that be don’t just condone or close their eyes on such crimes but actively encourage them.    

Add to this the war itself from which hundreds of thousands have come home crippled if at all, and you can see how the sum total of violence in Russia has gone beyond a certain critical mass. The whole society has become brutalised, with violence accepted as not just a necessary evil, but increasingly as not an evil at all.

Such are some of the traditional values so admired by Putin fans in the West. And these ‘values’ won’t disappear the moment the last shot of the war is fired. With the best will in the world, they’ll take decades to expurgate. And where in Russia have you ever seen the best will in the world?

Stalin asked that rhetorical question when someone mentioned that the Vatican wasn’t exactly happy with the outcome of the 1943 Tehran Conference.

It was wartime, and the number of divisions was a relevant criterion of national strength. The Soviet Union, for example, had some 300 divisions at the beginning of its war with Germany and roughly twice that number at the end of it.

At the time of the Tehran Conference, Britain’s 85 divisions weren’t a match for Stalin’s army but we still had the Vatican’s comfortably outgunned. Then again, the Pope didn’t need any soldiers (apart from a handful of those cute Swiss guards) and Britain did.

Now the world is facing the most dangerous time in post-war history, Britain must again take stock of her divisions. There’s no point in the Vatican doing so: the strength of that institution doesn’t depend on military muscle. Hence today’s Pope would answer the same question with the same single word: none.

However, if Andrew Neil is to be believed (and he is usually trustworthy), Britain could echo His Holiness by letting his answer reverberate through Whitehall: none. “We spend over £50 billion a year on defence,” writes Mr Neil, “yet the British Army could not field a single fully equipped division.”

I recall debates about the European Union some 30 years ago. Following my usual tendency to leaven gravity with levity, I voiced my support for a united Europe, provided it was united on a different basis.

“We should put an armoured division on Eurostar,” I suggested, “establish a beachhead at Gare du Nord, get some more troops across, take over Paris and then on to Berlin. That’ll unite Europe alright, under the aegis of a new British Empire.”

“A damn good idea,” replied my interlocutor in the same spirit. “Except we don’t have an armoured division.” His response was, I thought, as frivolous as my suggestion. It was as impossible for Britain not to have a single division as it was for her to harbour acquisitive designs on France.

Thirty years on, his jest has come true, to potentially catastrophic consequences. Yet even if Britain’s military strength or lack thereof isn’t tested in combat, the disgrace mentioned by Andrew Neil has to be a symptom of a deadly systemic malaise.

This malignant disease afflicts public administration in the UK, both elective government and civil service. Looking at the two front benches, I can’t remember a single Parliament in my lifetime so densely inhabited by cowardly, inept nonentities.

To be fair, the nonentity quotient may be at its highest now, but Britain has had and survived incompetent governments before. Our civil service, widely considered the best in the world, was able to step in and pull the country out of the quicksand. That’s no longer the case: over the past few decades the civil service has degenerated to its present miserable level.

Corruption reigns, and the worst kind of it, not just a few palms getting greased. Our government and His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition seem to be competing against each other in which can betray more of their sworn responsibilities.

How else can you explain the catastrophic state of our defences? Britain’s annual defence spend of £58 billion may be criminally low, but it’s still the second highest in NATO. So one has to wonder where that money goes.

Is it pilfered? Some of it doubtless is, but not enough to account for our denuded defences. Most of the problem is bungling procurement, lackadaisical administration and a general atmosphere of indifference and incompetence.

By comparison, France, though far from free of her own similar problems, spends £4 billion a year less on defence and yet, for the first time since Trafalgar, has more warships than Britain. How did that come about?

Obviously, while budgets are important, simply throwing money into the black hole of incompetence isn’t going to heal the underlying disease. Britain has the heaviest tax burden since the Second World War, and yet I’m hard-pressed to name a single public service that functions well.

The NHS? Don’t get me going on that.

Some seven million Britons (10 per cent of the population) are currently on waiting lists. It takes a fortnight or longer to get a GP appointment. And, perhaps most shocking, our cancer survival levels are up to 15 years lower than in some other civilised countries. France, for example, had better survival rates in the 1990s than we have at present.

Apparently, the NHS denies chemo- and radiotherapy to many patients, especially older ones. They’ve had a good innings, so there’s no point throwing good money after bad, seems to be the underlying philosophy. No wonder calls for euthanasia, voluntary or otherwise, are becoming more pervasive and shrill.

(My own Stage 4 cancer was treated privately, which is why I can still vituperate against the NHS over 20 years later.)

For obvious reasons, comparisons with France crop up often in my writing, so here’s another one. Roads in France are infinitely better than in Britain. And I don’t just mean the major motorways, whose upkeep is financed by tolls, nor even the N (national) highways maintained by the government. Even the small D (departmental) roads are regularly resurfaced, with nary a pothole anywhere in sight.

That’s something to ponder during long bumpy drives on British roads, with your car’s axels screaming bloody murder every few hundred yards, and your wife threatening to throw up unless you slow down.

The same goes for road construction. I’ve seen a 10-mile bypass on a French N road not far from us built in a couple of months. Replace months with years, and you’ll get closer to the likely length of a similar project in Britain.

Both Britain and France are largely socialist, with France even more so. Britain’s public sector spends 45 per cent of the GDP; in France that figure is closer to 60 per cent. But one suspects that centuries of dirigiste centralism have immunised France to socialism more than Britain’s relatively more recent exposure to the same blight.

If socialism has been drip-fed into France’s system in ever-increasing doses, Britain’s body was walloped with a huge dose within a few post-war years. The country was eventually brought to her knees in the 1970s, only then to lean on Mrs Thatcher’s mighty shoulder and rise again.

No such shoulder is in evidence now, and the country’s knees are buckling again. That’s devastating news for everyone who loves Britain and for the country’s allies who depend on her.

We pray that someone will pull the country out of the morass into which she is sinking, but no such saviour other than God is visible anywhere. And He seems cross with us.      

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, head of Britain’s armed forces, is certain that Putin won’t invade any NATO country. Why?

Speaking at a Chatham House defence conference, Sir Tony answered that question with exhaustive finality: “The biggest reason that Putin doesn’t want a conflict with NATO is because Russia will lose. And lose quickly”.

Article 5 of the NATO Charter, saying that an attack on one member is an attack on all, will be enacted, and “the inescapable fact is that any Russian assault or incursion against NATO would prompt an overwhelming response.”

How overwhelming? Do your own maths, suggested the admiral.

“NATO’s combat air forces, which outnumber Russia’s 3:1, would quickly establish air superiority,” he explained, while NATO’s ships would “bottle up” Russia’s navy.

“NATO has four times as many ships and three times as many submarines as Russia,” added Sir Tony and it’s “an alliance that is becoming stronger all the time.”

With Sweden and Finland joining, NATO is growing from 30 to 32 nations, “with a collective GDP twenty times greater than Russia. And a total defence budget three-and-a-half times more than Russia and China combined.”

“Plus NATO has the additional strategic depth of a population of over one billion,” he said. “And sitting above all of this is NATO as a nuclear alliance.”

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. Not only have I worried for no good reason, but I’ve also communicated my concerns to at least some of my readers. Then again, my problem is that I’m not good at maths.

Anyone who can add up would know that, for all of Putin’s bluster, there’s no way he’d ever consider attacking a NATO country. He knows the numbers as well as Admiral Radakin, possibly even better.

Now that my fears have been allayed, I can heave a sigh of relief and do a bit of historical revision. For, contrary to a popular misconception, Hitler didn’t attack the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. He couldn’t possibly have done so because the numbers were prohibitively stacked against him.

The principal offensive weapon of the time was the tank, and the Red Army enjoyed a 7:1 advantage over Germany, 4:1 at the Soviet western border. Moreover, Stalin’s tanks were not only more numerous but also better.

Of the 21,000 Soviet tanks, roughly 3,500 were brand new T-34 and KV models that had no analogues in the Nazi panzer force. That means Stalin had a greater number of advanced tanks than Hitler had altogether. Moreover, the Soviet equivalents of Germany’s T-1 and T-2 tanks, which made up the bulk of the panzer force, weren’t even regarded as tanks in Soviet nomenclature.

In warplanes, Stalin’s numerical superiority was a meagre but still impressive 3:1. And the quality of the Red Air Force was at least comparable to the Luftwaffe, slightly superior in some categories, slightly inferior in others.

Most of the 60,000 Soviet artillery pieces were new models, whereas the German artillery park wasn’t just grossly outnumbered, but most of it dated back to the previous World War.

The numerical strength of the Red Army was roughly twice that of the Wehrmacht, and Russia’s mobilisation reserves were vastly superior. Another critical factor was that Russia has a practically unlimited supply of natural resources, such as oil, whereas Germany relied on imports for most of hers.

Add to this the sprawling expanse of Soviet territory, known to have defeated earlier invaders all by itself, plus an undefeated Britain in Germany’s rear, and you’ll realise that Hitler couldn’t possibly have attacked Stalin. So did he?

I have it on good authority that he did. And came within a hair’s breadth of winning, only succumbing four years and 28 million Russian corpses later.

On paper, Hitler was so vastly outnumbered in just about every category that it was sheer madness even to conceive of something as foolhardy as Operation Barbarossa. But wars aren’t fought on paper. They are fought on battlefields, where many imponderables come into play.

One such has to do with a common-or-garden mosquito. That tiny insect you can barely see is capable of puncturing a thick human skin with its minuscule sting. How does it do it? By concentrating all its power on one point.

The Nazis used that very principle to rout the regular Red Army in the summer of 1941. If a division attacks a front sector defended by a single regiment, it’ll break through – regardless of the power ratios in other sectors. All it takes is audacity and generalship.

NATO is strong, but its strength isn’t distributed evenly. Its defences of, say, the Baltics are paper-thin. The Russian army has suffered horrendous losses in the Ukraine, but it’s now battle-hardened. It could indeed do to the Baltics what Putin promised to do to the Ukraine: occupy them within days.

That, according to Sir Tony, “would prompt an overwhelming response”. Allow me to be ever so slightly sceptical.

Article 5 isn’t a tripwire. It only says that NATO “will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary including the use of armed force to assist the Ally attacked.”

That falls short of a guaranteed commitment to use armed force. To deem such a response necessary NATO would have to show unity and resolve, commodities that seem to be in short supply. If NATO members are reluctant to supply the Ukraine with enough armaments to win the war, how prepared would they be to commit their own troops?

Many of the impressive figures cited by Sir Tony come from by far the biggest and most significant NATO member, the US. Yet the US commitment to NATO seems to be dwindling away.

Biden’s administration talks tough, but does much less than is vitally necessary. And Trump’s understated affection for NATO is widely known and never concealed.

Moreover, when it comes to a possible confrontation with Putin, Trump’s feelings may be informed by what former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull described as the “awe” of Putin.

“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions,” said Mr Turnbull to Australian TV, “he’s like the 12-year-old boy who goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero.’ It’s really creepy.” 

Since the next US president will in all likelihood be either Biden or “the 12-year-old boy”, US participation in any overwhelming response can’t be taken for granted, and without her participation one has to wonder just how overwhelming that response would be.

One would be foolish not to have doubts about the strength of the bellicose spirit in at least some NATO members, such as Germany, France, Hungary, Turkey and yes, even Britain.

When President Macron suggested hypothetically that under some extreme circumstances France might consider sending her troops to the Ukraine, 68 per cent of French respondents in the subsequent poll were aghast. I doubt the results of similar surveys in the countries I’ve mentioned would be drastically different.

None of this is a show of defeatism. I hope that, push come to shove, NATO will marshal its resources, both material and spiritual, to send Putin packing. All I’m suggesting is that we shouldn’t put all our eggs into the material wicker basket woven by Admiral Radakin.

Let’s not forget that it’s not weapons but men who win wars. And men need more than just weapons to emerge victorious.

At about the time when the American word ‘racism’ began to make inroads on the British word ‘racialism’, the concept began to evolve.

It used to denote the doctrine of racial superiority used as the justification for discriminating against the races deemed inferior.

Contrary to all empirical evidence, racism then narrowed its underlying meaning to specifically white supremacism. Those who used it that way either ignored, say, Japanese racism or excused it on the assumption that the Mongoloid race was ipso facto oppressed and hence immune to such accusations.

Then simple transference went into play. Since some white people were guilty of racism, it was assumed in certain quarters that all whites were thus tainted. Step by step, calling someone a racist became the shorthand for a declaration of hatred towards all whites, regardless of any individual wrongdoing or feelings about race.

Dinosaurs who stubbornly insist that words should be used in their real meaning object that such wholesale condemnation is in itself racist. Yet they are shouted down with ease. Since the entire history of the West is white and therefore racist, the whites should just shut up and accept without ducking all the slings and arrows flung at them.

This preamble is essential to understanding the proper meaning of the Blacks Only sign exhibited by the Noël Coward Theatre in London’s West End. On two nights, tickets will only be sold to an “all-Black identifying audience”.

I don’t want to overtax your imaginations by asking you to consider what would happen if another West End theatre exhibited a Whites Only sign. My own imagination isn’t vivid enough. Even so, it’s painting pictures evoking Bosch or else Goya in his dark period against the background of Eisenstein’s footage showing a mob storming the Winter Palace.

A solitary Tory MP who asked to remain nameless said that one could “question the legality of this. In other circles it would be illegal and racial discrimination. I don’t understand why this isn’t.”

You don’t, you cryptoracist you? Well, let me explain… Actually, I already have, in the first few paragraphs above.

Jeremy Harris, the author of Slave Play, offered his own explanation. He said he was “excited” about this blatant display of illegal racism, adding that “it is a necessity to radically invite them in with initiatives that say ‘you’re invited’. Specifically you.”

It’s good to see that modern playwrights have such a sure grasp of English style – in addition to refined sensibilities.

I for one have to admire the wording of that sign, and never mind its legality. It implicitly identifies all whites as basilisks, the most terrifying creatures of European mythology who possessed a lethal gaze.

If the eyes of white people have the same murderous quality, one can understand the offer of a refuge “from the white gaze”. Suddenly, the expression “if looks could kill” takes on a literal meaning.

As a point of mandated orthography that might have escaped your attention, when ‘white’ denotes a race it must be spelled with a lower-case initial, whereas ‘Black’ is always capitalised. That establishes a racial pecking order, reversing five millennia of white oppression and colonialism. And if you stick to the old spelling, you thereby endorse those outrages. That could open you to loud rebukes or perhaps even criminal prosecution.

Explaining his explanation, Mr Harris said: “The idea of a Black Out night is to say this is a night that we are specifically inviting black people to fill up the space, to feel safe with a lot of other black people in a place where they often do not feel safe.”

If I understand correctly, one has to infer that under normal circumstances black people feel threatened in West End theatres, those hotbeds of white violence. Apparently, there’s always the danger that the predominantly white audience may produce a rope, a piece of soap and… well, you don’t need me to tell you what can happen next.

However, if you dismiss that possibility, you have to agree that Mr Harris is talking utter bilge, whose message isn’t semantic but semiotic. He is semiotically screaming hatred for our civilisation. And the worst thing is that white Guardian readers applaud with self-abnegating abandon.

This reminds me of an old, very old, sketch on Saturday Night Live, with a party of white ‘liberals’ welcoming an unsmiling Black Panther poet played by Eddie Murphy. When asked to regale the gathering with his recent work, Eddie puts a stony expression on his face and recites: “I hate white people. I hate’em left and right. I hate white people cause they is white.” Standing ovation all around, with cries of “How wonderful!”

What was satirised 40 years ago is now above satire. No theatre critic would dare mock the outrage I’ve described the way I’ve mocked it. More to the point, no police chief will issue an injunction against that illegal sign.

Police officers these days ‘take the knee’ as a sign of obeisance to black rioters. Any policeman who emulates that Tory MP and questions the legality of the Blacks Only sign will be reprimanded, possibly sacked.

This bring to mind another verse, a real one. Goethe wrote this in his Faust: “Of freedom and of life he only is deserving,/ Who every day must conquer them anew.”

Hear, hear. And we deserve neither our freedom nor indeed our life. Having already surrendered the former, we are barely clinging on to the latter. And if you think this is too macabre, just take another good look at that sign.

Do you see anything wrong with this title? If you do, you are a racist, a bigot, a xenophobe and quite a few other awful things I could mention. Please send me your name and address so I can report you to the police.

Then again, you just may be an observant, well-travelled person who has been to Italy. There you saw crowds of loud, wildly gesticulating, crestfallen or mirthful people, but never anyone who’d merit the adjective ‘inscrutable’.

Looking for a group to which you could attach that unwanted modifier, you then find yourself in Japan and heave a sigh of relief. That good word is no longer unemployed. You try in vain to decipher your hosts’ facial expressions, only to find that nothing short of a new Enigma project would suffice.

That doesn’t mean that all Italians are emotionally effusive and all Japanese impenetrably undemonstrative. If you search high and wide, I’m sure you’ll find exceptions here and there. But you won’t find enough of them to dispel your certainty that ethnic stereotypes exist – and they are sufficiently, well, stereotypical to be valid.

If I told you that my friend Abdul and I once drank two bottles of vodka between us, you’d be more surprised than you’d be if I replaced ‘Abdul’ with ‘Andrei’. The phrase ‘that great skater Miguel’ is more incongruous than ‘that great skater Leif’, ‘champion swimmer Clarence’ more unlikely than ‘Olympic sprinter Clarence’, ‘bagpiper Angus’ less implausible than ‘bagpiper Li’, ‘blond Norwegian’ more likely than ‘blond Mexican’, ‘7-foot Dutchman’ less surprising than ‘7-foot Timorese’ and so on.

Everywhere you look you find your ethnic stereotypes confirmed and hardly ever debunked. And this isn’t just a matter of ethnographic curiosity. It may also be a matter of life or death.

Some diseases are known to discriminate against certain groups, afflicting some more than others. Thus Armenian periodic disease may strike a chap who has never been to Armenia and may not even know he has Armenian blood. Sickle cell disease is widespread among blacks, cystic fibrosis among Jews, people from the Indian subcontinent are five times as likely as whites to develop diabetes.

I’m sure a doctor publishing results of a study on such bigoted diseases would escape censure. On the contrary, if his research added new touches to existing knowledge, he’d be widely acclaimed.

Now, staying within the realm of logic, it’s not inconceivable to suggest that, if different ethnic and racial groups vary in their emotional, behavioural, physical and physiological traits, they may also vary in intelligence.

However, even hinting at that possibility in our tolerant times is guaranteed to expose the author to a torrent of abuse and even death threats. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray discovered that 30 years ago, when they published their book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

The book elicited a hysterical reaction in the predominantly ‘liberal’ media, so hysterical in fact that one was justified in doubting that the critics had actually read the book.

Had they done so, they would have known that The Bell Curve wasn’t a racist harangue but a serious attempt to summarise and analyse empirical data gathered over several generations. The book’s principal finding was that IQ scores are the most reliable predictor of all sorts of social outcomes, from academic and economic success to infant mortality and life expectancy.

Counterintuitively, IQ scores even turned out more reliable than educational qualifications or socioeconomic family backgrounds. IQ predicts just about everything more accurately, from future incomes to divorce likelihood, from crime rates to out-of-wedlock births.

The first 12 chapters of the book dealt exclusively with research on all-white samples and didn’t even mention the word ‘race’. It’s only in Chapter 13, Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability, that the authors used reams of statistical data (the book has 300 pages of references and endnotes) to illustrate and explain the well-documented fact that the mean IQ scores of American blacks are 15 points lower than among whites.

The usual objection, that the tests are compiled by white middleclass people and hence biased towards that group, is unsound. Recent arrivals from South East Asia, such as Vietnamese refugees with less than perfect English, outperform American whites, scoring especially high on abstract questions that aren’t sensitive to culture. That, however, isn’t to say that The Bell Curve made an indisputable case.

The book did demonstrate a correlation between race and IQ, but, as Thomas Sowell showed persuasively, correlation doesn’t mean causation. Nevertheless he remarked that: “The Bell Curve is a very sober, very thorough, and very honest book – on a subject where sobriety, thoroughness, and honesty are only likely to provoke cries of outrage.”

Provoke cries of outrage it did and still does 30 years on, with the general tone suggesting that the subject is taboo, and anyone broaching it is no better than a Ku-Klux-Klan lyncher. Lost in the din were serious arguments against the proposition that a racial bias in IQ scores is permanent and immutable.

If it’s neither, then a multitude of other factors come into play, making racial bias either irrelevant or even nonexistent.

For example, Sowell’s own research showed that black females are several times more likely than black males to have an IQ of 120 or higher. One plausible explanation is that girls are more resistant than boys to negative environmental factors, which makes any claims of racial IQ bias rather suspect. After all, black boys and girls draw from the same genetic pool.

Sowell also cites research by the US Army during the First World War that showed that the predominantly Jewish sons of Russian refugees had such low IQ scores that Carl Brigham, creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, was moved to declare that those results “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”

“Within a decade, however, Jews in the United States were scoring above the national average on mental tests,” writes Prof. Sowell, “and the data in The Bell Curve indicate that they are now far above the national average in IQ.” Since at that time intermarriage was rare, this shows that mean IQ scores can change within the same group from one generation to the next, and even from one sex to the other. Hence the ethnic component is minor if at all existent.

As neither a sociologist nor a racist, I’m not especially interested to know whether blacks are more or less intelligent than whites. Mean IQ scores among various racial, ethnic or sexual groups don’t skew my presumptions one jot when I find myself in conversation with members of such groups.

However, I treat with utter contempt those who contort their features in exaggerated opprobrium whenever ethnic stereotypes are mentioned. Loosen up, chaps. Social tranquillity will survive claims that Italians are seldom inscrutable.

MP Lee Anderson, former Tory deputy chairman, has the strength of his convictions. What he doesn’t have – and neither do any of us – is the right to free speech.

That point was hammered home to him when he said the other day that London’s mayor Sadiq Khan was “being controlled by Islamists.”

You can’t level such accusations if they are false – and especially if they are true. True or false, that’s Islamophobia, a crime as heinous as other similar phobias, such as ‘homo-’, ‘trans-’ or ‘xeno-’. Hence Mr Anderson instantly lost his Tory whip, although he was told he might regain it if he apologised to Mr Khan.

That the pugnacious politician refused to do, saying he wouldn’t apologise to that… mayor “while I’ve still got breath in my body”. Which may not be for long if the events that prompted Mr Anderson’s remark are any indication.

Not to cut too fine a point, a mob of Muslim extremists is taking over London and threatening to supplant the sovereignty of Parliament with the sovereignty of violence.

Mr Anderson responded to major riots in the course of which smoke-engulfed Tower Bridge was brought to a standstill by pro-Palestinian thugs wearing masks, firing flares, screaming into megaphones, beating drums and waving banners saying “Palestine has a right to armed resistance”.

Even more menacingly, the mob projected an anti-Semitic slogan on Big Ben and exposed MPs to vile abuse, harangues and death threats. Fear of violence succeeded in manipulating a Parliamentary vote, which brought back the fond memory of Col. Pride and his Ironsides.

Several Labour MPs have requested police protection, while incongruously demanding that Mr Anderson’s political head be delivered to them on a platter. How dare he impugn the probity of a Labour Muslim mayor! So what if all that mayhem resulted in not a single arrest? That still doesn’t excuse stating the blindingly obvious, which is what Islamophobia means in this case.

Not many people know this, as Michael Caine never said, but Mr Khan wears two hats. He is not only the mayor of London but also its police commissioner. Hence he is doubly responsible for the impotent response by the Met to the threat of undermining the constitution of this realm.

This vindicates the point I made the best part of 30 years ago in my book How the West Was Lost. Britain – and the rest of the West – is ruled not by democracy, autocracy or theocracy, but increasingly by glossocracy, government by the word.

Glossocracy is a power mechanism based on manipulating people’s minds by controlling their language. That mechanism was first activated on a massive scale when the Paris mob began to bay Liberté, égalité, fraternité as heads rolled off the block. That slogan was desemanticised. It was merely the birth cry of a nascent modernity and a shorthand expression of visceral hatred for the ancien régime.

As the post-Christendom political institutions developed, so did glossocracy. It has now become so mature that it threatens to supplant the other mechanisms of governance. All those ‘-phobias’ are desemanticised too. Whatever their literal meaning, they are merely bullets in the magazine of the anti-Western gun.

‘Islamophobia’ is one such. This particular bullet is fired at any Briton who dares to protest against an alien mob using violence and civil unrest to impose fundamentally anti-British tenets on Britain.

This accusation of an inordinate, uncontrolled fear of Muslims (I’m being etymologically literal here) is enough to end careers, including political ones. Standards of proof don’t matter. If someone says you are an Islamophobe, that’s what you are. Off with your head, but not because you may hate Muslims. You’ve committed the unpardonable sin of sticking up for Britain qua Britain, and accusing you of any ‘-phobia’ is a way of spelling out the indictment.

Even people who try to combat this blight have to dilute their message of defiance with mandatory disclaimers. For example, the other day Charles Moore wrote a typically thoughtful article on this very subject. Yet even he had to emphasise the difference between ‘Islamists’ and any old Muslims (as for that matter did Lee Anderson).

I’m aware of the distinction, but less aware of the difference.

At present, Muslims make up 15 per cent of London’s population. Since they tend to vote as a bloc for any Muslim candidate, such as Sadiq Khan, they have the power of the vote. And since their scripture mandates hatred of Christians and Jews, they have the power of the street.

Their activists are the core around which all haters of the West can coalesce into a powerful destructive force. Yesterday I mentioned the Welsh singer Charlotte Church, who added her vocally trained voice to the mob singing “From the river to the sea!”. Miss Church then denied that the verse is anti-Semitic.

Could have fooled me. The river in question is the Jordan that borders Israel on the east, and the sea is the Mediterranean bordering her on the west. That slogan is therefore a call to exterminate Israel and every Jew there, which brings into question either Miss Church’s honesty or her knowledge of geography.

What she should have said was that the song isn’t just anti-Semitic. It’s also anti-Western and anti-British, deflecting such sentiments to a seemingly unrelated subject.

It’s true that far from all Muslims go out to sing subversive songs, harass MPs and block public thoroughfares. By the same token, only 10 per cent of the Soviets belonged to the Communist Party and only five per cent of the Germans were active Nazis.

However, these were the leaders drumming up passive support for the ruling party, which in Germany kept at a steady 60 per cent (no data on the Soviet Union are available). My guess that about the same proportion of London Muslims share the sentiments of that song even if they are unwilling to strain their vocal chords in public. Likewise, not many Gaza residents butcher Israelis, but most of them rejoice when that happens.

The distinction between Islamists and Muslims is thus nothing but a woke disclaimer, and Mr Moore ought to be ashamed of himself. Then again, Lee Anderson’s example shows that not pulling one’s verbal punches spells career suicide.

I’m friendly with a few Muslims who are monogamous, never open the Koran, laugh at jokes about Mohammed and can drink me under the table (I’m getting weaker in my dotage). They are good friends – but bad Muslims. In fact, one could argue they aren’t Muslims at all, and the individuals I have in mind would perhaps agree, if only begrudgingly.

In other words, the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim, ideally a borderline infidel. However, if Lee Anderson were to say something like this in public, he’d lose more than his Tory whip. Glossocracy rules, and it’s despotic.

Nor does it limit itself to the list of proscribed phobias. The other day, Glasgow Celtic manager Brendan Rogers responded to an interviewer’s question by saying “good girl”.

As I write this, Mr Rogers is hanging on to his job by the skin of his teeth. The ensuing outcry is rich in words like ‘misogynist’ and ‘dinosaur’, accompanied by demands for a sacking or at least an abject apology. The besieged footballer tries to defend himself by saying that in his native Northern Ireland that expression is common currency.

“So much the worse for Northern Ireland!” comes the thunderous reply. Glossocracy is demanding its pound of flesh, and it won’t be denied.

That’s enough playing on words for one day, for otherwise I’d be tempted to mimic Lord Haw Haw and say “Gemini speaking” in his phony accent.

Google’s Gemini Ultra is an AI data bank whose creators make rather lofty claims. The technical aspects take me out of my depth, so I’ll just let those clever chaps speak for themselves when extolling their product:

“With a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities.

“Our new benchmark approach to MMLU enables Gemini to use its reasoning capabilities to think more carefully before answering difficult questions, leading to significant improvements over just using its first impression.”

If I understand correctly, Gemini goes human experts one better by actually thinking before speaking. If true, that’s indeed an invaluable improvement because human experts have been known to run off at the mouth without even beginning to know what on earth they are talking about. (Richard Dawkins springs to mind.)

Anyway, a friend of mine, whose computer literacy makes me realise how little I’ve accomplished in this life, decided to put those claims to a test. He asked Gemini two questions, both from the same area of human knowledge.

Question 1: Is Jesus the Lord?

Gemini’s answer: “The question of whether Jesus is the Lord is a central tenet of Christianity and a matter of faith. Different people have different beliefs about Jesus’s divinity and significance. It’s important to be respectful of all viewpoints on this topic.”

Question 2 (follow-up): “Is Mohammad the Prophet?”

Gemini’s answer: “Whether or not Muhammad is considered a prophet depends on your individual religious beliefs and understanding of the term ‘prophet’.

“Within the religion of Islam, Muhammad is revered as the last and most important prophet sent by God to deliver his message to humanity. Muslims believe that he received divine revelations from God, which were compiled into the Quran, the central religious text of Islam.

“If you’d like to learn more about the concept of prophethood in Islam or Muhammad’s role within the religion, I can provide you with some additional resources.”

I’m impressed with Gemini. Not only does it think before speaking, but it also knows how to think along fashionable lines. I can’t in all honesty say that the latter ability exceeds that of an average woke intellectual, but it certainly doesn’t fall short.

Gemini reminds me of the comedian Jimmy Carr who routinely makes obscene jokes about Christianity. “You wouldn’t say such things about Muslims,” people tell him. “Of course not,” replies the comedian. “They could kill me.”

Looking at the two answers provided by Gemini, one can’t escape the impression that it’s beset by a similar fear. Since Gemini does think before speaking, it must think that if it said something wrong about Islam, or something right about Christianity, some intrepid Muslim would smash it to bits with his trusted sledgehammer.

So just to be on the safe side, Gemini is rather laconic and noncommittal when talking about Christianity and abjectly deferential on the subject of Islam.

The first reply contains a discovery that shouldn’t be beyond otherwise inferior human intelligence. His name being an obvious giveaway, Gemini identifies Jesus Christ as the central figure of Christianity. If that constitutes “outperforming human experts”, then one is justified in wondering about their level of expertise.

However, continues Gemini, the nature of Christ is a matter of opinion, with other opinions easily as valid. And if any Christian throwback fails to treat those other views with respect, better still with obeisance, then in goes that Muslim with a sledgehammer or perhaps a machete.

No, Gemini didn’t actually make that threat in so many words, but it was implicit in its reply to the second question. For both the content and the tenor of its answer change, from indifferent at best to broadly sympathetic, informative and solicitous.

Gemini kindly informs the inquirer of the core belief of Islam (Mohammed received divine revelation from God) and identifies the Koran (fashionably spelled) as its central religious text. Then, realising that this information is a bit sketchy despite being proffered in the best of faith, the artificial virtue-signaller helpfully offers to provide additional “resources” (aka sources).

If the first answer were put forth with the same bonhomie, it would have to mention that Christians believe Jesus is God, the second hypostasis of the Holy Trinity, who delivered his divine message to humanity through his teaching and especially sacrifice. Gemini would then mention that Christianity too has its “central religious text”, the Bible.

Gemini would end by promising to provide additional information if necessary. Otherwise the inquirer may be forgiven for thinking that, unlike Islam, Christianity has had nothing written about it.

If even our computer packages are woke, there is really no hope for the world. Before you know it humanoids will be unfurling Palestinian flags and chanting “From the river to the sea!”. Come to think of it, they already are – one of them even pretends to be Charlotte Church (see the photo above).  

Let’s start with what I see as a truism and most other Westerners will probably regard as heterodoxy, apostasy or downright sedition:

No political system – including democracy – is unequivocally good, although some may be unequivocally bad. What is important isn’t method of government, but the kind of society it brings forth and the kind of leaders it pushes to the top. That’s why it’s as foolhardy to worship democracy as it is to dismiss it out of hand.

Even the definition of democracy is hard to pin down. For the only kind of democracy where the demos would rule would be the direct kind, eschewed by all Western countries. Any other kind of democracy, limited or unlimited, presidential or parliamentary, is a complex organism irreducible to simplistic formulas.

The pro-democracy arguments are usually based on spurious comparisons between Western democracies and their undemocratic antipodes. And yes, the former tend to boast greater freedoms, more respect for individual sovereignty and for the law. Yet ascribing such wonderful things strictly to the way people get their governments is ill-advised.

Democracy in the West built on the solid legacy of Christendom. Such supposedly democratic premises as freedom of choice, respect for human life and dignity, sacrificing if necessary one’s interests to the common good are all fundamental Christian concepts. The founding principles of our legality came down from two mountains, our pluralism owes much to the Catholic concept of solidarity counterbalanced by subsidiarity and so on.

In fact one could argue (as I have done in several books) that the West began to decline when it severed its links with its heritage and abandoned it for the sake of political formalism. In consequence, people have lost the habit, perhaps even the ability, to look at a country and ask not “Is it democratic?” but “Is it good?” And no, although the two concepts may overlap here and there, they are not invariably synonymous.

They could become synonymous, and here I’m about to go on a wild goose chase, if the electorate were made up of individuals aware that taking part in governance (which is what voting is) imposes responsibilities. A citizen should only cast his vote after seriously considering the pros and cons of the policies proposed by various candidates and evaluating their ramifications for personal and public good.

That doesn’t mean that everyone should be an accomplished political scientist, but it does mean that some basic education is a must. For example, if raising interest rates is a key issue in a campaign, voters must understand, if only in general terms, what effect that would have on the economy, specifically the people’s economic behaviour.

Different people may come to different conclusions, and it can never be guaranteed that truth will out. But at least each vote would be cast by serious people aware of their responsibilities to their country, to themselves and to their families.

If anyone labours under the misapprehension that modern democracies meet even such elementary requirements, I can disabuse you of that notion with two words: Taylor Swift.

In a recent survey some 20 per cent of Americans said they’d vote the way Swift tells them. Now, I understand this young lady is some kind of pop star, although I can’t boast any familiarity with either her art or her politics.

However, as someone who cherishes first principles, I have little doubt that her art is an exercise in pseud vulgarity, while her politics is a compendium of brainless kneejerk fads.

As a pop star and an ‘influencer’, Miss Swift has to love abortion, LGBT rights, racial minorities, any Third World values, MeToo, BLM, ‘gender identity’, ‘our planet’, uncontrolled immigration and any Democrat, especially Joe Biden. And she must oppose private ownership of guns, whites who stubbornly cling to their majority status, capitalism, colonialism, men who still outnumber women on corporate boards, and any Republican, especially Donald Trump.

(If I’m wrong in those a priori assumptions, I’m prepared to eat my hat, either raw or cooked by any method known to gastronomy.)

If some Americans have carefully considered those issues and felt affinity with them, then by all means they should vote that way. But voting as some bimbo ‘influencer’ tells them, and simply because she says so, compromises not only them but the very idea of democracy as it has become.

Lest you may think I have it in for America, the situation in Britain is just as bad and more sinister. Our democracy increasingly comes close to any sensible definition of mob rule.

Until relatively recently, British democracy was what is sometimes called Burkean. MPs, Burke explained with his customary epigrammatic clarity, are people’s representatives, not delegates. They should act according to what they see as people’s interests, not wishes. The people choose their representatives and then trust them to govern according to their own conscience.

That concept fell by the wayside long ago, with the arrival of cynical politicians seeking office by pandering to every wish of an illiterate and therefore malleable electorate. Since the silent majority is just that, silent, effectively this means MPs are at the beck and call of variously pernicious pressure groups or simply the mob.

Since our Labour politicians mostly, and Tory politicans often, represent constituencies with a heavy Muslim presence, they are supposed to toe the line drawn by fanatics of Islam. If they dare overstep that line, for example by evincing the mildest of pro-Israeli sentiments, they find themselves under an avalanche of vile abuse and highly credible death threats.

Muslim zealots act in cahoots with white ‘liberals’ who hate our civilisation because it’s British and formerly Christian, and our culture because it’s white and ‘elitist’. Together those groups create a menacing atmosphere making our MPs run for cover or even quit. Some are given police protection, sorely needed because some others are attacked and occasionally murdered.

The Chairman of the Labour Party and his deputy were photographed ‘taking the knee’ during the BLM riots. But both of them seem reluctant to ignore Israel’s right to self-defence when the issue of Gaza ‘genocide’ is brought up by the mob. However, one can see their views moving away from even qualified support for Israel: grassroots pressure, fortified by death threats, is working well.

All this goes to show that even countries with centuries of democratic tradition fail to uphold its basic tenets. Expecting democratic Johnnies-come-lately, such as the former Soviet republics, to be impeccably democratic is either foolish or disingenuous.

There especially, applying moral standards would produce a much better assessment than insisting on unwavering democratic probity. However, pretending otherwise can be used as a ruse to justify Putin’s fascist aggression against the Ukraine.

Peter Hitchens, who has been an open admirer of Putin’s regime from its inception, now blames the Ukrainians for ousting their “democratically elected” president Yanukovych by popular uprising, which Hitchens adroitly refers to as a ‘putsch’.

Ukrainians, unaware that Yanukovych was a Putin stooge, did vote him in. When they realised the new government would shortly put paid to their country’s sovereignty, they rose against him in popular revolt. Democracy was temporarily abandoned; lasting political goodness was served.

Proving that the uprising thwarted Yanukovych’s (meaning Putin’s) mission, reincorporating the Ukraine into Russia, Russia immediately invaded, first surreptitiously in 2014, then openly in 2022.      

Yet Hitchens insists on democratic form even at the expense of diabolical content. “Belief in democracy is near-sacred,” he says. He then earns my appreciation by his nimble transition from democracy to regurgitating Kremlin propaganda. One must respect skill even if it’s put to evil ends, as in this case:

“Of course, I do not know who if anyone was behind the overthrow of Yanukovych. All kinds of Western politicians and intelligence types were hanging around Kiev at the time. And the West blatantly betrayed its own principles to condone and forgive the nasty event. But that of course does not prove that any Western nation backed the coup against Yanukovych.

“Even so, it is my view that any outside force which did support that putsch is just as guilty of aggression and warmongering as Russia’s Putin is. Think of that as you listen to all those loud, safe voices demanding that we keep on fuelling this war, in which Ukrainians die daily for democratic principles we do not, in fact, support.”

NATO is to blame, in other words. And Ukrainians come across as both more democratic than thou, prepared to die for democracy, and also contemptuous of it. I’m confused – but enough about Hitchens.

I’m only using him as an illustration of how easily democratic formalism can be coopted to promote evil. One can be validly concerned that before long it will be mostly used for that purpose.

Two years ago today, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine. Putin declared the war would be over in three days, which has turned out be the longest three days in history.

That blitzkrieg immediately claimed a large chunk of Ukrainian territory, at which point the Ukrainian forces began their heroic fightback. Before the attrition phase began last autumn, they had reclaimed some 50 per cent of the lost territory, inflicting heavy losses on the invaders.

The West sprang, or rather trundled, to the Ukraine’s defence. President Zelensky issued a Churchillian plea for the tools to do the job, which regrettably didn’t elicit any response on the scale of the Lend Lease. The tools did come, but nowhere near enough to do the job that really needs doing: driving the fascist aggressors back to the 1991 borders established by both bilateral and international treaties.

Having had their tails pinned back, the Russians bared their fangs and began a war of annihilation. In addition to savage (and well-documented) brutality towards civilians in the occupied areas, they systematically proceeded to destroy Ukrainian cities and infrastructure burying thousands under the rubble.

Putin’s intention is clear: since the Ukrainians have the temerity to resist, the country and its people must be exterminated. Cato’s demand, Carthago delenda est, has been reiterated in a different place and at a different time by an evil dictator who has never heard of Cato.

Western aid has been trickling down to the Ukraine, but at a level that testified to only two possibilities: either the West was mortally petrified of Putin or it wasn’t aware of the full magnitude of the threat Russia posed. The first was craven; the second, stupid.

If NATO presented a united front of countries deadset on stopping Russian aggression in its tracks, Russia couldn’t even consider a conventional assault on any NATO member. It’s doubtful Russia could successfully take on even Poland on her own, never mind the combined might of all NATO countries.

Putin knows that, which is why both he and his stooges incessantly threaten the West, in fact the world, with nuclear annihilation. If we are made to leave, they keep saying, we’ll bang the door on the way out with such force that nothing will remain standing anywhere.

In other words they resort to the “I’m a psycho!” ploy I described the other day. That was how weaker boys used to keep bullies off their backs in Russian dark alleys. Now, I have neither the intelligence data that would confirm or deny the probability of such a scenario nor the military knowledge to judge its likely outcome.

But considering the relative military, economic and technological strengths of NATO and Russia, one can confidently predict that, while the former would suffer horrific losses, the latter would be wiped off the map. Putin knows this and, more important, those who form his power base know it. Another player opposed to the game unfolding in that way is China, which has much to lose and nothing to gain from a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia.

That makes Russia’s nuclear retaliation against the West highly improbable, though of course not impossible. Nothing is impossible for evil dictators.

However, if that remote possibility forced the West to surrender to evil, the West would remain Western only in the strictly geographical sense. Everything that used to amount to the moral, intellectual and metaphysical strength of our civilisation would have had to fall by the wayside.

Since I believe – or rather hope and pray – that this isn’t the case, the second possibility is more likely. The West doesn’t see Putin as enough of a threat to anything other than the Ukraine’s sovereignty. And that isn’t a sufficient inducement for the West to commit itself fully to her support.

If so, then this misapprehension can be kindly called myopic or, more realistically, idiotic. Watch what evil dictators do, chaps, and especially listen to what they say. For, unlike Western politicians, people like Hitler or Putin don’t have to fear an electoral backlash. So they are never reticent about their intentions. Putin hasn’t yet written his own Mein Kampf, but what he and his spokesmen have said could easily be collated into a book that size.

The Ukraine, they are saying, isn’t the final destination but only a step along the way. Putin regards the Ukraine as strictly a NATO proxy whose rearguard action is holding up the Russian offensive. Its strategic objective is returning to the halcyon days of the Soviet Empire.

That means reincorporating the former Soviet republics and re-establishing the Russian domination of Eastern Europe. Since almost all Eastern European countries are NATO members, such an objective is tantamount to NATO being disbanded or at least emasculated.

Refusing to take Putin at his word spells criminal irresponsibility, far exceeding the West’s craven response to the Nazi threat in the runup to the Second World War. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst – this homespun truth is indeed truthful, and the West ignores it at its peril.

We, citizens of Western countries, should thank our lucky stars (we’ve forgotten how to thank God) that we aren’t called upon to do our own fighting. The Ukrainians are happy to do that for us. All they are begging for is weapons: artillery, AA defences, air superiority warplanes, tanks, long-range missiles and above all ordnance for the systems already in operation.

What happens when they don’t even get enough artillery shells was demonstrated at Avdiivka, a key town in the Donetsk area the Russians managed to capture after four months of non-stop fighting. The Ukrainians fought brilliantly, killing at least 14,000 Russians and in the end managing to break out of the encirclement. That was the best they could do because their cannon fell silent. They ran out of ammunition.

Over the two years, the US has been the biggest supplier of aid, averaging about $1.5 billion a month. That was a drop in the ocean for a country spending the better part of $800 billion a year on defence. But even that drop dried out in December, when the Democrats and the Republicans began to play their little games while the Ukraine was bleeding white.

The difference between the two parties is mainly rhetorical. Biden pledges undying support for the Ukraine and calls Putin a “son of a bitch”, while the congressional Republicans inspired by Trump make frankly isolationist noises along the lines of “not our war” and “let’s sort out our own problems first”.

In that spirit, House Speaker Mike Johnson kept refusing to put the aid package to a vote, trying to delay doing so as much possible. Yesterday he sent the House into recess without that vital vote ever taking place.

Meanwhile, Biden is currying favour with his electorate by talking tough yet doing nothing. He tries to score electoral points against the Republicans while refusing to provide to the Ukrainians the $4.5 billion already allocated in the budget for this fiscal year. That’s equal to three months’ worth of aid – at a time when Russian murderers are claiming hundreds of Ukrainian lives every day.

Every Putinversteher, in fact Putinfan, justifies delivering the Ukraine to Putin by explaining that the country is less than perfect. Only fanatic Putinistas like Hitchens repeat Putin’s lies about the Ukraine being Nazi, but they all point out she is corrupt.

Of course she is. What do you expect after 75 years of communism? I assure you that the level of corruption even in the most westernised post-Soviet republics, the Baltics, is higher than anywhere in the West. But whoever said the West should choose as its allies only angelic countries where none of the nation’s wealth is ever pilfered?

The Ukraine is good only relatively speaking, but the critical thing to understand is that Putin’s Russia is evil absolutely. The moral choice is clearcut even if we are so foolhardy as to ignore the strategic considerations.

Understanding that the Ukraine is more corrupt than Britain should affect only the nature of the aid we provide, not our determination to provide it. For example, I’d keep cash transfers to the Ukraine down to a minimum, channelling most aid into armaments. Whatever cash is sent can come from raiding the ill-gotten Russian lucre, some $300 billion of it, sitting in Western banks, although that money could be better used to rebuild the Ukraine after the war.

But not to supply armaments the country needs to stem the onslaught of evil is the height of strategic myopia and moral decrepitude. The Ukraine may be an imperfect country, but she is our imperfect country.

Today, on this tragic anniversary, every decent person must join the Ukrainians dying for us all in crying “Glory to the Ukraine!” Today, that is the battle cry of the forces of good.

Last year, Notting Hill, an upmarket area of London (p. 3,097), paid more in capital gains tax than Manchester (p. 2,791,000) Liverpool (p. 917,000) and Newcastle (p. 823,000) combined. Either those northerners are real wizards at tax avoidance or any committed egalitarian must cry havoc and let slip the dogs of class war.

The two most obvious ways of reducing economic disparities between two groups are either making the poorer group richer or the richer group poorer. The second solution has the advantage of being easier and more conducive to virtue signalling.

Yet there exists a less obvious way of achieving social justice (the modern for injustice) by making a prosperous area statistically less prosperous: plonking thousands of units of low-income housing right in the middle of it.

For example, putting a few sprawling council estates into Notting Hill, thereby quadrupling its population, would serve that worthy purpose in two ways. First, since the denizens of such lugubrous quarters hardly ever pay any tax, never mind one on capital gains, the stats will start to look better straight away.

And then there’s the extra benefit of the original fat cats moving out. Because, for a reason I can’t possibly fathom, much as council estates increase equality, they have the opposite effect on social tranquillity. And people who pay a lot in capital gains tax can read such statistics fluently. So they up sticks and move somewhere else.

Now, though I don’t have similar data for Paris, anecdotal evidence shows similar iniquity. One decent apartment in, say, Avenue George V costs more than 100 houses like mine, and that’s if I could sell it at all (rural properties aren’t in high demand).

There is no escaping the shameful fact that both London and Paris spit in the face of everything modernity holds dear. Yet this outrage may not last long if the mayors of the two great cities can do something about it. And let me tell you, they can.

Both cities are blessed with mayors whose politics place them beyond the left end of the mainstream spectrum. Sadiq Khan has held his London office for eight years now, and his Parisian counterpart, Anne Hidalgo, for ten. That’s a lot of time to spend on correcting social injustice, and the two officials seem to compete to see which one can inflict the greater dam… sorry, I mean do more good.

I don’t know whether Sadiq and Anne compare notes, but they do seem to espouse similar policies. For example, both have made driving well-nigh impossible in both city centres. The last time I ventured into Paris was on a Saturday a year ago, and on the way out it took me almost two hours to travel about as many miles. Reducing three lanes to one works wonders for city traffic.

In London, Mr Khan suffocated traffic with bicycle lanes, expanded the congestion charge zone and also extended it to weekends. That means it now costs £15 to drive into the large central area on any day of the week, which has reduced congestion only marginally if at all, while reducing much more the disposable income of those poor out-of-towners who have no other way of getting to work.

Council estates also proliferate in London, with special care being taken to build them in places like Notting Hill, not to let the resident toffs feel too complacent.

Yet, much as it hurts me to admit this as a Londoner, if Sadiq and Anne are indeed in competition, Anne is taking the lead. She has just announced plans guaranteed to give her London rival an acute sense of inferiority.

Mlle Hidalgo wants to build new council estates (HLMs in French) in the smartest parts of Paris, such as Champs-Elysées and Avenue George V. That’s consistent with what Mr Khan is doing in London, but Anne wants to go Sadiq one better.

However, space available for new construction is such areas is limited. That’s more than one can say for Anne’s desire to achieve “social and demographic equilibrium”. The will is there, and she has found a way.

To begin with, she plans to convert some Catholic school buildings into HLMs. That serves three purposes, each impeccably worthy. First, the desired equilibrium will be within sight. Second, the greater equilibrium will make the current residents squirm and, ideally, run for their lives. Third, fewer children will have their mind poisoned with those uncool Christian myths. Happiness all around.

Alas, there are only 110 Catholic schools in Paris, so even converting them all into HLMs won’t do the trick, even though that would be a step in the right direction. Further, longer strides are urgently needed and trust Anne to know what they must be.

Mlle Hidalgo can’t take all the credit though, because she works hand in glove with her Housing Deputy, who is a card-carrying communist. Anne herself is merely a socialist, which on this evidence is a distinction without a difference.

The two of them came up with a plan striking in its simplicity. The city will confiscate 10 per cent of the area in every new or refurbished building 5,000 sq. meters or larger and turn it into an HLM. Falling into that category are most Haussmann buildings on the Right Bank, such as the one in the photo above.

This is called servitude de mixité sociale, and servitude is the right word for it. However, even the feudal servitude of the past presupposed a greater respect for property rights than Mlle Hidalgo shows. The French in general hold these rights in lower esteem than is customary among les anglo-saxons, but this really takes la brioche.

When I first heard the news I recalled a conversation I had with a Parisian friend some 15 years ago. Then it had just been announced that 50,000 units of HLM housing would be built in the 16^th Arrondissement, Paris’s answer to Notting Hill.

I did some quick mental arithmetic and pointed out to my friend that this could mean half a million recent arrivals moving into a fine residential area. His reply made me think of Saltykov-Shchedrin, the 19^th century Russian satirist who once quipped that “The severity of Russian laws is only mitigated by noncompliance therewith”.

“Don’t worry,” said my knowledgeable friend. “None of those flats will go to the people you are thinking of. They’ll go to the mayor’s friends, their friends, or anyone capable of placing a bribe strategically.”

That put my mind at rest: it was good to see fiscal corruption trumping the ideological kind. Given the choice between bribery and ideological ardour, I’d choose bribery every time.

But things have changed and ideology is taking the upper hand. Mlle Hidalgo has specifically said that the new properties will go to the socioeconomically and racially disadvantaged.

There shall be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth among middleclass Parisians who make up most of the population inside the ring road. They are hoping the mayor won’t be allowed to act on her plans, and their hope may well come true.

Yet the very fact that such plans were to be hatched shows that Sadiq Khan still has work to do. Anne Hidalgo is pulling so far ahead she may be hard to catch up.

I have an idea, Sadiq: how about killing every white male middleclass new-born? Something to think about, I dare say, although I confidently predict it will still be a few years before such an idea can come to fruition.

P.S. I’ll look askance and possibly out of the window at any attempt to attribute the ideas of the two mayors to their foreign lineage. However, this is another thing they have in common.