Blog

This uncannily accurate cartoon doesn’t paint the whole picture. But it’s an important fragment.

For Messrs Smith, Ricardo, von Mises and Hayek failed to mention one immutable law of economics: If the state sector dominates or even edges towards domination, even the private sector will be tropistically attracted to it.

As the state controlled by bureaucrats grows more corporatist, so do actual corporations controlled by shareholders. At both manufacturing and service companies, those who actually make the products or provide the services are increasingly marginalised by bureaucrats.

Our state-owned NHS provides a ubiquitous blueprint, what with the frontline medical staffs routinely outnumbered by administrative parasites holding positions similar to those lampooned in the cartoon above.

They spend their time issuing counterproductive regulations, writing reams of unnecessary memos and forcing overworked doctors to sweat over endless reports and superfluous administrative tasks. As a result, many excellent doctors, unable to fight permanent nausea, take early retirement, opening doors for immigrants whose medical credentials may not be up to our standards.

That blueprint is dutifully followed in the so-called private sector. The centre of corporate gravity there also shifts towards self-perpetuating managers in sinecure posts who as often as not hamper the actual work. The situation was first diagnosed, with foresight of genius, by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.

Burnham spotted the first signs with the eyesight of a sleuth and predicted the future with the accuracy of a prophet. Written four generations ago, his work still reads as up-to-date reportage.

An attempt to analyse this situation brings together three different disciplines, each posing its own questions. The sociologist asks ‘what?’, the political economist asks ‘how?’, and the philosopher asks ‘why?’

The first question is the easiest, and the cartoon above comes close to answering it adequately. The next question is slightly thornier because it’s closely related to another inquiry: “Can today’s bosses be really so stupid as not to see that a profusion of useless sinecures reduces productivity and profitability, in more ways than one?”

The answer is, no, they can’t be, not as a rule. However, a car whose brakes fail acquires a mind of its own, making questions about its driver’s skill irrelevant. Why our socioeconomic machine seems to have reduced its drivers to impotence is a question neither a sociologist nor an economist can answer.

A philosopher may try, but even he will soon realise that no satisfactory answer lies anywhere close to the surface. Nor is there just one answer but many, and it’s hard, although not impossible, to trace them back to their common origin.

Having taken that task on in several books, I realise that a short article isn’t a fitting medium for it. So let’s just tug on one string in the hope that it will turn into Ariadne’s thread.

Every year, about 800,000 youngsters graduate from British universities. Now, at the time of John Henry Newman a university was an institution accommodating young people with an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

They sought to make our world intelligible, a task, they knew, that involved concerted inquiry into the inner depths of many disciplines, such as theology, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, law, mathematics. Then as now, the number of such savants in the making was low. For example, all British universities combined awarded only 800 degrees in 1850.

At that time Britain’s population was about one third of what it is now. Hence, if the same proportion pertained today, we’d be producing 2,400 graduates a year. Since the actual number is gravitating towards a million, one has to reach some awkward conclusions.

Clearly, admission standards at our universities are no longer designed to filter in only youngsters seeking pure knowledge above all. Equally clear is that an overwhelming majority of aspiring students wish to go to university for some other reasons, typically the hope of a more lucrative career.

In the past, we had technical colleges serving such people, but they have almost all been converted into universities. However, considering the expectations of their students, these schools in fact remain technical colleges, jumped up to university status.

Moreover, since they largely or wholly depend on the students’ fees for their funding, they have to treat students not as charges to be raised to some higher understanding, but as customers to be served.

Since most students crave not knowledge but simply a degree, it’s natural that universities have to make it easier for them to get one – just like supermarkets try to make it easier for customers to part with their hard-earned.

Hence the profusion of non-academic degrees reflecting their holders’ social conscience and TV viewing habits, rather than their learning. Women’s studies, black studies, gender studies, ‘Philosophy and Star Trek’, ‘How to train in the Jedi way’, ‘Harry Potter studies’ and so on figure in most curricula these days.

Now proud possessors of BA degrees, such graduates soon find out that even their original limited purpose for seeking higher education remains unfulfilled. Their degrees are as useless for all practical purposes as they are for all intellectual ones.

So why do they still want to go to university if they have no high intellectual aspirations, nor any realistic hope of converting their degrees into cash (“What do you say to a philosophy graduate?” “I’ll have fries with that.”)? Because the whole ethos of modern society has indoctrinated them to believe they are all equal – no hierarchy of intellect, taste or learning exists, or should be allowed to.

If that’s the case, then a lad who can’t read without moving his lips feels he is fully equal to another youngster who has already perused, if not always understood, The Critique of Pure Reason. And equal not just before God (none of that obsolete rubbish) but in every respect.

Specifically in relation to higher education, they have been encouraged to think that way by intellectual and moral pygmies like John Major and especially Tony Blair, both of whom vowed to make sure half of all Britons have university degrees.

This is one of the few areas in which politicians actually do what they promise. However, this raises the inevitable question: If some eight million graduates, most with useless degrees, are disgorged on the economy every 10 years, what are they going to do? They can’t all wait at tables or deliver pizzas – we have immigrants for that.

The modern ethos lends a helping hand, the same ethos that has brainwashed youngsters who could otherwise become good plumbers or electricians that they are equal to that four-eyed egghead they bullied at school.

That same ethos applies the principle of supply-side economics to a festering social and cultural sore: supply generates demand. But the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who first formulated that law, never suspected it might find such a multifarious future.

Fine, people holding advanced degrees in Harry Potter can’t design bridges or treat patients. But they can drive engineers and doctors potty by lecturing them on diversity, gender equality or faddish appetites disguised as human rights.

That’s the supply, and the ethos kindly provides the demand by indoctrinating prospective bosses in the vital need for such services. And if they are slow to learn, the state steps in with threats of fines and legal prosecution.

That closes the circle, and it’s bound to be vicious. Or else funny, as in that cartoon.

As you may recall, back in August a private plane carrying Wagner Group leaders Prigozhin and Utkin blew up in mid-air.

Both gentlemen were winners of Hero of Russia medals, a distinction equivalent to the Victoria Cross in Britain, but their valour proved helpless against the blast.

Since Prigozhin and Utkin had led an armed mutiny against Putin a couple of weeks earlier, ugly rumours started to spread immediately. The explosion, they were saying, was Putin’s revenge and a little reminder pour encourager les autres.

That was accusing Hitchens’s beloved leader of murder, but I am happy to report the rumours have been conclusively dispelled by Vlad himself. In yesterday’s speech, he explained, inter alia, that all the passengers on board got whacked on vodka and cocaine, and one of them pulled the safety pin out of a hand grenade. Kaboom!

If you doubt this version, you aren’t familiar with the facts of the matter. But Vlad was happy to educate you: “A search of Prigozhin’s office in Petersburg,” he said, “found five kilos of cocaine.”

What better proof do you need, you doubting Thomas you? The logical chain is unbreakable: Prigozhin had five kilos of cocaine, obviously for personal use.

Therefore, he must have had some for on-board entertainment too. Therefore, he and his friends were snorting it. Therefore, they were also drinking vodka – after all, they were known to have indulged in that beverage. Therefore, one of them simply had to see what would happen if he pulled that safety pin out.

In a phenomenon so far uninvestigated by science, the drugs must have also boosted the hand grenade’s yield. After all, the first thing the explosion did was blow the plane’s wing right off. That might have been the initial, albeit accidental, test of Russia’s new secret infantry weapon.

At this moment any averagely educated Russian, and even some supremely educated Westerners, will think of Gogol’s great play Inspector General. There, a corporal’s widow complains to the eponymous inspector that the mayor of her town had her flogged. The latter does a Putin and rejects the calumny: “She lied to you that I had had her flogged; she is lying, as God is my witness she is. She flogged herself.”

So far we haven’t heard that the 51 denizens of Groza in the Kharkov region blew themselves  up in the café where they gathered for the wake of a killed Ukrainian soldier the other day. Vlad must be saving this plausible explanation for later – after all, people drink at wakes. Obviously a few of them overindulged and decided to test the same kind of grenades that had vaporised Prigozhin’s plane. It stands to reason, doesn’t it?

The grenade story wasn’t the only revelation Putin vouchsafed to his audience. He also elucidated the true nature of the on-going war, which he had hitherto kept to himself to throw the enemy off scent.

When the Russian invasion started, the stated objective was to ‘de-nazify’ and ‘demilitarise’ the Ukraine, thereby saving her Russophone population from the genocide perpetrated by those Ukie Judaeo-Banderite Nazis. Since that noble goal couldn’t have been achieved without occupying the country and incorporating her into Russia, this was the actual intention, and everyone knew that.

But in any case, the target was specifically the Ukraine, that Nazi Germany in disguise. However, now Vlad has revealed that stopping the genocide of every Ukrainian Russian speaker (such as many members of the country’s government, including Zelensky) was only an intermediate objective.

The scale of the challenge Russia is facing is infinitely wider, so wide in fact that it can never be solved by blowing up a few civilians here and there, even though they tend to do it themselves. The conflict isn’t local but global, with Russia forced to defend her very civilisation with its culture, traditions and territorial integrity.

Most countries in the world have joined forces to stamp out Russia’s peerless spirituality, but those Western Nazis are in for an unpleasant surprise. Vlad was happy to announce that the Sarmat 2 ICBM, affectionally known as ‘Satan’, is ready to go.

The Satan carries ten 750-kiloton MIRV warheads, each capable of defending a good chunk of Russian civilisation against any enemy within an 11,000-mile range. It goes without saying that, when London, Paris and New York sprout those thermonuclear mushrooms, it will be their own doing – that collective corporal’s widow is already soaking the rods to flog herself.

I’ll leave you to arrive at your own evaluation of a population largely accepting such drivel at face value. I am more concerned with Putin’s agents, witting or unwitting, recruits or volunteers, who spread Kremlin propaganda to weaken the Ukraine’s support in the West.

Their tireless efforts are bearing fruit: it is indeed palpably weakening. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary have already either stopped aid or reduced it to a trickle. France and Germany aren’t far behind, if opinion polls are anything to go by. And the emergency budget passed by US Congress provides no support for the Ukraine whatsoever.

Putin’s Western shills use time-proven techniques I have to appreciate as a former adman. They know that any nonsense repeated endlessly will have a desired effect sooner or later.

Most people don’t read newspaper articles word for word, and very few ever try to analyse them rationally. Like consumers who eventually get to believe that some brand of toothpaste will make them sexually irresistible, they respond to a few buzz words being hammered into their minds by expert propagandists.

The buzz words of Putin’s anti-Ukraine shills are ‘Nazi’ and ‘corruption’. Peter Hitchens, for example, hardly ever mentions Ukraine without those two attachments. This, for example, is from his article last Sunday:

“Bad things about Ukraine – its corruption, its oligarchs, its thuggish factions of Nazi sympathisers, its increasingly feeble democracy and flickering freedom of speech – are simply ignored or suppressed.”

Ergo, runs his implicit – often explicit – conclusion, we have no business helping the Ukraine as she is being bled white by Russian invaders, inspired by their regime which is “hardly not the most conservative and Christian in Europe.”

It doesn’t matter that only between one and three per cent of Ukrainians ever vote for Nazi-like parties, as opposed to 20-25 per cent in Russia – or some 75 percent if we legitimately class Putin’s party as Nazi.

It doesn’t matter that the Ukraine’s democracy isn’t at all feeble – it regularly has open and honest elections, something Russia hasn’t had in at least 30 years.

It doesn’t matter that, unlike the Ukrainian government, Putin’s gang has stamped out free speech altogether.

It doesn’t matter that corruption in Russia puts her way above the Ukraine in every international ranking, and into the territory she shares with particularly nasty African regimes.

Especially, it doesn’t matter that, unlike Russia, the Ukraine has no imperial ambitions forcing her to pounce on her neighbours like a rabid dog. For a propagandist none of this matters. He aims to elicit a Pavlovian response from his audience, not Aristotelean ratiocination.

Disgorge every possible permutation of the words ‘Ukraine’, ‘Nazi’ and ‘corruption’ in every available medium every chance you get, and hey presto – people will start wondering why we should take any part in defending such an awful regime. QED.

“A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”, and what we do know about that country, courtesy of Putin’s Lord Haw-Haws, is that it’s “corrupt” and “Nazi”. That makes an outcome similar to that precipitated by the quotation above exceedingly likely. And for all the similar reasons.

Pope Francis called his latest encyclical Laudate Deum, Praise God. However, a closer examination reveals that he praises not so much God as the wild-eyed fanatics of such groups as Just Stop Oil and the Extinction Rebellion.

They are, lamented His Holiness as if out of the burning bush, undeservedly castigated: “But in reality they are filling a space left empty by society as a whole, which ought to exercise a healthy ‘pressure’ since every family ought to realise that the future of their children is at stake.”

One gets the impression that, if Jesus Christ came again today, he’d join the gangs blocking traffic on the M25 and disrupting sporting events or theatrical performances. At least that’s what His Vicar on Earth wants us to believe and he should know.

The encyclical was released on the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, whose name the Pope took to signal his intention to emulate the saint, identifying Francis’s worship of nature as the aspect worthy of imitation. To my regret, he chose not to go the whole hog, by dropping his vestments on the floor, walking out of his palace naked and becoming a mendicant monk who begs for food.

Since those eco-zealots do God’s work, it follows ineluctably that anyone who as much as doubts the anthropogenic nature of climate change is an enemy of Christ. After all, according to His Holiness, “’It is no longer possible to doubt the human – ‘anthropic’ – origin of climate change.”

I agree it’s no longer possible for leftie demagogues to doubt their own mythology. The rest of us know CO₂ is a trace gas, contributing only one in 85,000 molecules to the atmosphere. And only three per cent of our CO₂ is anthropogenic, making it a small trace of an infinitesimally tiny one.

No evidence suggests that we are going through an unprecedented global warming. In fact, ‘our planet’ has been warmer than it is now for about 80 per cent of its lifespan. Serious scientists – as opposed to assorted shills of man-made apocalypse – identify numerous factors affecting climate, with CO₂ playing a walk-on role, if indeed any at all.

That is to say it’s possible not only to doubt the greenhouse gas theory of climate change but to reject it outright for the politicised nonsense it is. But the fanatical proponents of that swindle don’t really care about the minutiae of science.

Though they talk green, they think red, or rather maroon (red with a touch of brown). Yet they correctly sense that simply coming out and saying they yearn to demolish the West and everything it stands for would compromise their credibility. Hence they pluck some quasi-scientific facts out of the least attractive orifices in their bodies and cite them as God’s own truth.

That requires a certain dexterity of mind, and His Holiness could give any mental contortionist a good run for his money. Thus he cites the fact that CO₂ emissions have increased greatly since the Industrial Revolution, and so have global temperatures.

Crikey, who could have thought. The Industrial Revolution was fuelled by hydrocarbons, first coal, then oil, then gas. So of course mankind started to produce more CO₂.

However, in view of the facts I cited above, attributing global warming to that fact is a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Moreover, there have been extended cooling periods since the Industrial Revolution. That’s why, for example, as recently as in the 1970s the same scaremongering scientists who now bleat about us frying to death were warning about the impending arrival of an Ice Age.

Perhaps sensing he is on shaky scientific ground, the pontiff inadvertently let the political cat out of the bag. In common with other lefties, he is driven not by love of ‘our planet’ but by hatred of the West.

“We can state,” he stated, “that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact.”

Said irresponsibility is turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth”, and the principal culprit is that devil incarnate, the United States. And if you doubt that, here is the clincher: per-capita emissions in the US are twice as high as in China.

Quite. However, if ‘our planet’ is indeed being fried by emissions, then it’s not the relative, per capita amounts that are doing the dirty deed but the absolute values. And in those absolute values China emits twice as much CO₂ as does the US.

Moreover, of the 10 greatest emitters in the world, only two, America and Germany are Western. All the others are Asian plus Russia that herself doesn’t know whether she’s East, West, halfway in between or sui generis.

This statement by His Holiness can only be properly understood if juxtaposed with his 2015 encyclical on the same subject. Then he explained in no uncertain terms that ‘our planet’ could only be saved by a cultural revolution overturning a “structurally perverse” economic system where the rich exploit the poor.

Mr Marx, say hello to Miss Thunberg. That psychopathic dropout also loves to sputter spittle about capitalists who destroy ‘our planet’ for the sake of profits. One should like to hope that the primus inter pares leader of world Christianity would have a higher intellectual capacity and sturdier moral fibre, but that hope is in for a let-down.

The Pope’s grasp of Christian doctrine is sometimes shaky, but his grip on the Left-wing catechism is vicelike. Instead of pontificating on political fads he’d be well-advised to study the works of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Who knows, he might learn what really matters in life.

No? Then you never lived in Russia at the time I did. Then and there such sanguinary awakenings were a routine matter every morning.

You may think my hometown was plagued by nocturnal violence, with some members of the family assailing their somnolent relations, but that wasn’t the case. Moscow was plagued all right, but not by domestic violence. It was catastrophically infested with bedbugs.

Those bloody pests figure in both English and Russian folklore, but note both the similarity and the difference. The two nations refer to the same problem, but the Russians merely established its aetiology, while the pragmatic English offered a concrete solution.

The English reference to that fauna appears in a good-natured nursery rhyme:

Good night, sleep tight
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
But if they do, then take your shoe and
Hit them till they’re black and blue

The first two lines have become proverbial, the way many people wish good night to one another even if they’ve never heard of anyone actually bitten by those nasty creatures. As to the proposed remedy, it strikes me as effective but only of limited practical value.

You see, bedbugs strike mostly at night, and their bites are seldom painful enough to wake one up. When a victim opens his eyes in the morning, the bedbugs are usually sleeping off their blood hangover away from both prying eyes and punitive footwear.

However, if you do hit one with a shoe, my experience suggests it doesn’t turn black and blue. It turns into a red blot, which shows how little exposure to bedbugs Britons had when they came up with that rhyme.

On the other hand, Muscovites responded to the pestilence the way they responded to communist propaganda: with a joke. That one targeted both nuisances: “What do bedbugs have in common with capitalists? They both suck the blood of the working classes.”

For all the much-vaunted English pragmatism, I have to say the Russian joke was more useful than that cute nursery rhyme. It provided solid information, of benefit to sociologist, hygienist and epidemiologist alike.

Bedbug infestations usually occur in congested urban dwellings whose residents have a rather laissez-faire attitude to hygiene. They wear old shabby clothes, often hand-me-downs, their rooms are stuffed with dilapidated furniture, they hardly ever vacuum.

Bedbugs thrive on such environments, which is why they did so well in Moscow. Most of the people there – and not just the working classes – lived in crowded communal apartments, had no money to buy new clothes or bed linen, hardly ever owned a vacuum cleaner, and their only concession to hygiene was taking a bath once a month, whether they needed it or not.

Why am I boring you with such useless information? If you have to ask, not only did you never live in the Moscow of my time, but you are clearly not living in the Paris of today.

That city is suffering a major invasion of bedbugs, and the rest of the country isn’t far behind. Recent data show that one in ten French households have that problem.

More to the point, ten out of ten French households, and the same proportion of British ones, are exposed to an avalanche of woke bilge engulfing every aspect of life. Including, oddly enough, even the presence of bedbugs.

All hell broke loose when a TV news anchor put this question to the founder of a pest-control firm:  

“There is a lot of immigration at the moment. Is it people who don’t have the same hygiene conditions as those in France who bring [bedbugs]…?”

You what?!? That deafening scream emitted in unison from thousands of woke throats. That anchor (and no, it isn’t Cockney rhyming slang) was guilty of hate speech, racism, fascism, along with every other ism you’ve ever heard of, and I’m sure you’ve heard of many.

Instead of bending over and taking his punishment like a man, the hapless journalist made matters worse by trying to defend himself. “Must journalists justify the questions they ask?” he said. A mighty roar delivered a deafening reply: “You bet your sweet cul they do!”

The anchor complained of being “insulted, harassed, defamed” and generally “pilloried” for “refusing to accept the uniformity of thought.” Personally, I’m not aware of any pressure to accept uniform thought on the subject of bedbugs – in fact, I didn’t know such uniformity existed.

But in fact he was probably referring to a broader issue, that of uncontrolled immigration. His TV channel has problems with tectonic demographic shifts that introduce alien cultural and social mores and, as the anchor implied, also unpleasant pests.

For the record, the aforementioned expert on pest control pointed out the presenter’s mistake. Neither immigration nor hygiene, he said, has anything to do with bedbugs: “That is why they affect absolutely everyone.”

Well, not quite everyone, monsieur. It’s true that understated hygiene isn’t a major cause of bedbug infestation, although it’s certainly a minor one. But, like some of my best friends, bedbugs are good and avid travellers.

They can happily hitch a ride with people moving from an infested area to a previously pristine one. They then settle in crowded, dirty, impoverished places – like the Paris ghetto-like banlieues and the communal flats of my childhood.

Having sucked enough underprivileged blood, bedbugs can then travel by local transportation to the upmarket areas, and indeed “affect absolutely anyone”. Yet, conditioned as I am to look for primary causes, I think it’s wrong to say that mass immigration has nothing to do with it.

Other French pest-control experts, those who haven’t yet cottoned on to the profound political implications of bedbugs, concur. They warn that an influx of tourists at next year’s Olympics is likely to increase the population of Paris bedbugs and also of rats.

In fact, they see a direct link between mass tourism – and of course immigration – and the profusion of bedbugs. Those blood-suckers disappeared in France immediately after the war, only to come back some 40 years later with millions of couples wishing to be photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower – and also huddled African masses yearning to be rich.

Then how come, I can hear you ask, Britain doesn’t have the same problem with bedbugs? After all, we have no shortage of either tourists or immigrants.

Honest answer? I haven’t a clue. You can’t expect me to answer every trick question. To quote Russian folklore again, I’m not a magician. I’m only learning.

Like Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert was a tireless propagandist of atheism. Unlike Richard Dawkins, he was a first-rate scientist.

In the former capacity, he didn’t escape yawn-inducing vulgarity, a condition invariably afflicting anyone who argues against the existence of God or insists that science and religion are incompatible.

Yet as a scientist of note, Prof. Wolpert stated in one of his books a thought I found interesting and, more important, useful. Real, especially modern, science always goes beyond common sense, he wrote. If it doesn’t pass this crucial test, it isn’t a real science.

Unlike his trite atheistic animadversions, that rang true.

If we look at photons getting to us from faraway stars by unerringly and, on the face of it, rationally choosing the shortest path of least resistance for millions of years; if we even begin to consider the implications of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity (and how the two may be at odds), universal constants, modern genetics with its undecipherable codes, we’ll see that common sense will help us grasp none of these. It will mislead, not lead.

That stands to reason, especially for a scientific ignoramus like me who fails to come to grips with even the lower reaches of science, those Prof. Wolpert would have regarded as still attainable by common sense. In any case, my interest in natural sciences has always been cursory, leading me only as far as reading popular books on various disciplines, especially those acting as battlegrounds for political jousts.

My interests are primarily confined to the sciences Prof. Wolpert wouldn’t have recognised as such: theology, philosophy (including its political genre), history, aesthetics. However, having stumbled on his comment, I realised it applied to those fields as well.

Just as we can’t fathom the mind of a photon by common sense, neither can we grasp the complexity of human, social interactions by relying on that faculty alone. Common sense is worth having but, if we use it as a sole guide, we’ll soon reach an implicit sign saying “Thus far but no farther”.

This understanding is especially valid nowadays, when common sense has become the buzz phrase of politicians typically described as populists or, incongruously, conservatives. Unlike socialists of various hues, they are supposed to proceed from homespun wisdom, not highfalutin abstractions. Two and two always makes four to them, not any other digit and certainly not the inalienable right to change sex.

To some extent that’s true. If you look at liberal (in the real sense of the word) economics through the prism of common sense, you’ll see it works better than any other kind. Liberating the people’s congenital quest for money, power and social status can lead a nation to prosperity and material comfort that no version of command economy can provide.

This is God’s (or rather Hayek’s) own truth, the part of it within the reach of common sense. This simple mechanism will then ineluctably lead to the realisation that ever-accelerating technological progress increases productivity, which will in turn vindicate the commonsensical faith in liberal economics.

The cogs of the mental machine are meshing smoothly, everything is ticking along nicely. But then a gnashing noise interferes. For, while a modern economy increasingly activated by the push of a button is ravenous for highly qualified labour, it pushes aside with disdain the primitive, muscular kind.

That raises socially existential questions, such as what to do with the millions of people incapable, for various reasons, of functioning in an ever more esoteric economy.

If one button does the job formerly done by 100 workers, what will 99 of them do (one will be needed to push the button)? What will we do to prevent a social situation pregnant with the embryo of revolutionary outburst? How do we reconcile any possible solution with the values we hold as immutable and the rights we hold as inalienable?

Suddenly our commonsensical thought spins out of control. We realise that common sense has reached its limit because coming into play are so many factors that it’s impossible to forestall entropy by basic rational calculations. We relied on common sense to lead us to social virtue and ended up in a cul-de-sac.

We bump our heads against the wall trying to find a way out, only to realise this isn’t one cul-de-sac but many, not just an economic one but also social, cultural, educational, religious, legal, political, generally civilisational. We aren’t really in a cul-de-sac, it turns out. We are in a maze, with no lantern to light up an exit.

We now have to backtrack to the starting point of first principles, hoping that the breadcrumbs we’ve been spreading along the way are still there to signpost a safe route of retreat. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, so we are left fretting and sweating.

None of this is to denigrate common sense as such. It’s a useful tool, even as a sledgehammer is useful. However, basic tools alone won’t get us very far.

Lowly common sense, typically operating on a strictly empirical level, will only ever be useful in solving high tasks if it’s a servant to the master of sound first principles. Interestingly, though common sense can’t do without such first principles for long, the latter sometimes don’t have to rely on the former to arrive at truth.

One example from my own experience, if I may, and I’m only using it because it’s close at hand, not to toot my own horn. My friends and readers of long standing will confirm that I’ve been saying and writing from the early 90s that all those glasnosts and perestroikas hadn’t made Russia any more virtuous or any less dangerous.

That went against the grain of not only public opinion but also common sense. My judgement didn’t tally with the compendium of known facts, that indispensable toolkit of empiricism. Moreover, many of those who held the received view had more facts at their fingertips than I did (I’ve caught up since then).

I proceeded strictly from general principles. Russia, I knew, had for 70-odd years been ruled by evil, possibly the greatest political evil that mankind had ever concocted with the devil’s able assistance.

Yet the devil can be defeated, evil deeds can be forgiven, sins can be redeemed. However, that takes genuine remorse and readiness to pay penance.

None of that was in evidence. The flagbearers of supposed purification were a motley group of CPSU Central Committee secretaries, other high communist officials, a swarm of KGB officers and organised crime figures. They had changed their language but not their spots.

Knowing that, I was immune to ‘common sense’ and all the widely publicised facts of democratic elections, parliaments, free enterprise, disappearing censorship and other wonderful things happening to Russia. Proceeding strictly from first principles, I knew that, even if true, those things wouldn’t last. The evil wasn’t dead. It was only dormant, or yet lurking in ambush, waiting for the right moment to raise its head.

If the devil is in the details, then God is in the first principles – provided they are true. And details put first principles to a test, either proving or disproving their truth. Common sense comes in handy when we gather the necessary facts and arrange them in the right order.

In other words, common sense is a useful tool of first principles. But God help us all when it’s posited as their replacement.

This question springs from a melancholy observation: just about everyone in the service sector seems to speak English as a second language. Many of them hardly speak it at all.

That presents an interesting linguistic challenge for anyone seeking assistance in a supermarket or trying to book a medical appointment. Nor is it just the service sector either.

An unprecedented amount of construction and renovation, mostly residential, is going on in London. The city is densely covered with scaffolding, and the builders putting the scaffolds up and then working on them mostly swear in various Slavic languages.

Also, one gets the impression that all delivery vans must have a security device that cuts off the engine whenever a Briton born and bred gets behind the wheel. And I can’t remember the last time a cold caller tried to sell something to me in unaccented English.

Now you understand the question in the headline. What on earth are the Britons doing while immigrants do all the work? Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, he who often suffers the indignity of having his surname mispronounced by interviewers, has provided a cogent answer.

They live on government handouts, either by ‘throwing a sickie’ or simply refusing to look for work. The former category is so swollen with people on disability benefits, that one can safely conclude Britain has more cripples in 2023 than in the aftermath of either world war.

Mr Hunt has left malingerers alone for now. However, he is targeting professional shirkers for an avuncular rebuke. “Those who won’t even look for work do not deserve the same benefits as people trying hard to do the right thing,” he says.

I’d say that those who won’t even look for work don’t deserve any benefits at all, but such maximalism is alien to our putative conservatives. The government is only proposing to reduce payments for a while, not to stop them permanently.

In parallel, the national living wage will be raised to over £11 an hour, which amounts to over £22,000 a year for someone in full employment. That’s hardly a king’s ransom, but then people on such incomes don’t typically claim royal lineage.

Of course the problem is that those of them who know how to add up can figure out that, if they milk the benefits system for all it’s worth, they can do as well or better without ever doing a day’s work. The choice is a no-brainer: had I been able to make the same living, I myself wouldn’t have spent decades going to the office every morning.

The Chancellor estimates the number of professional shirkers at about 100,000, which strikes me as a huge underestimation. According to the Office of National Statistics, 36 million people (54.2 per cent of the population) now live in households that receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

It’s hard to believe that a mere 100,000 of them refuse to look for work, while the remaining millions are “people trying hard to do the right thing”. Let me tell you: they aren’t trying hard enough.

The jobs I mentioned above can’t be very difficult to get if migrants who can barely make themselves understood in English find them within days of arrival. How hard can it be to push a button and say “Dr Sawbones’s office”? Or ask a customer: “Will you have chips or mixed vegetables with that?”

I’d suggest that a lot more than 100,000 benefits recipients would be able to handle such onerous tasks, and most establishments in need of such personnel complain of woeful understaffing.

Hence I can offer HMG free advice that will solve several problems in one fell swoop. Every able-bodied person of working age should receive no long-term benefits at all, ever.

Just think of the problems such a decisive step would solve. First, there are billions in savings that the Exchequer could use for worthier purposes. Then, even more important, the moral health of society will greatly improve if all current freeloaders start doing an honest day’s work.

Also, while they are out at work they won’t be able to do the asocial things so many of them do to turn whole areas into hellholes. And as a fringe benefit, with less employment available for migrants, fewer of them will have an incentive to settle in Britain, legally or otherwise.

People with compassion in their hearts can be reassured that those on the receiving end of such unspeakable cruelty won’t starve. Given the extra incentive to find work, they’ll do so without much trouble.

Thomas Sowell, one of my favourite living thinkers, has done extensive research showing that people who’d do nothing to improve their current income are instantly energised when their basic necessities are under threat.

Again, my own experience confirms those findings: I used to be stuck in the same jobs for years when I could find better ones with a minimum of get-up-and-go. Yet I’d instantly turn into a beehive of activity whenever my safe jobs turned out to be very unsafe indeed.

My advice strikes me as sensible, and I’m sure Mr Hunt would agree – in private, over a pint. However, judging by the decibel volume of the enraged shrieks already greeting even his palliative proposal, he’d never be able even to hint at such meanness in public.

He’d stay in office for exactly as long as it would take him to write a ‘Dear Rishi’ resignation letter – and he knows it.

I can only conclude with a brilliant aphorism uttered by a retired politician I used to mock mercilessly, Jean-Claude Junker.

“Junk”, as I called him, once said: “We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” Bravo, Junk. I can’t think of a better indictment of our whole political system.

All right, all right, I’ve learned my lesson. No more commending our government for anything. Every time I say something nice about it, it instantly rubs my face right in the dirt.

Just the other day I welcomed a speech on immigration and multiculturalism by Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is familiar with the subject not just from hearsay.

Actually, I still think the speech was good. Where I went terribly wrong with my precipitate praise was in suggesting that perhaps the speech signalled a volte-face in government policy. No such luck.

First, Rishi-washy sanctimoniously repudiated his Home Secretary’s correct statement that multiculturalism is a “misguided dogma” that “has failed”. Not at all, said the PM. We are proud of our “fantastic multiculturalism”, and Britain had “done an incredible job of integrating people into society”.

Rishi-washy should put the incredible job of integration to a test by walking through the back streets of, say, Leeds, ideally at night. He could then testify to the delights of multiculturalism, provided he lives to tell about them.

The Times called Mrs Braverman’s speech “incendiary”, leaving the really bad epithets for The Guardian to utter. That was followed by an outburst of indignation from the two groups she had mentioned specifically, women and homosexuals. Belonging to either group in places where they are held in low esteem, said Mrs Braverman, isn’t sufficient reason to claim refugee status in the UK.

Oh yes it is, screamed the so-called ‘pink wall’, a group of more than a dozen homosexual Tory MPs. They accused Mrs Braverman of “bigotry” and, like kindergarten children, rushed to the chief whip to complain, smearing tears over their contorted faces.

Oh yes it is, echoed the MeToo types, who complained both to the chief whip and to every medium willing to listen and report.

Mrs Braverman seemed to think she was on safe grounds there, being a woman herself, and a child of refugees to boot. Well, she has another think coming, that traitor to her sex. Like Maggie Thatcher in the old days, she no longer qualifies as a woman. And if she really means to be conservative, then, to quote Joe Biden, “she ain’t black” or any other minority.

Nor was it just secular fanatics. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, anathemised Mrs Braverman, or rather would have done if she weren’t a Buddhist. Earlier he denounced the government policy (introduced by Mrs Braverman) to deport all illegal migrants to Rwanda as being “against the judgement of God”.

Since I no longer belong to the Church of England, I can’t confirm or deny that God Our Lord spends his valuable time evaluating British immigration policy and then communicating his feelings to His Grace. Suffice it to say that Christians who worship God rather than fly-by-night political fads tend to believe that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world.

That doesn’t mean God has washed his hands of his creatures’ actions. It does, however, mean that prelates who remain oil traders at heart shouldn’t invoke the deity to justify their own woke heresies.

Apparently, His Grace has sought an appointment with Mrs Braverman on several occasions, but so far she has refused to see him. That raises her even higher in my estimation, but unfortunately my feelings have no bearing on her career.

The rumour mill in and around Westminster insists that Mrs Braverman’s days in her Great Office of State, possibly even in politics altogether, may be numbered. She has offended the God of Multi-Culti, the one Welby worships, and that God is athirst.

However, to the extent to which Mrs Braverman’s beliefs can be inferred from her statements, she is right in her basic assumptions. A major country that has developed organically over millennia may have multiple ethnic groups within its population. But it can only have one culture recognised as her own.

If it’s multi-cultural in any true sense of the word, it no longer has any culture worthy of the name. Whatever it used to have has been fractured and diluted into oblivion.

English culture is a ganglion of hundreds of synapses finely honed and attuned since pre-Roman times. It is a fundamentally Judaeo-Christian culture, but with an idiosyncratic twist. The Venerable Bede (d. 735), writing shortly after St Augustine baptised England, already spoke of the specifically English Church, as distinct from any other.

Just as the English Church, with the culture it spawned, has had its distinct character from the early days, so has the country’s secular culture. Talking specifically about high culture, England reminds us of the biological law that a tree produces its best fruit towards the end of its cycle. Our best music, that of Byrd, Gibbons, Tallis and other polyphonists, and our best poetry, that of Shakespeare and his great contemporaries, were produced towards the end of the Christian period.

But England’s unique contribution to Western culture isn’t so much in arts but in politics, and it continued to thrive even when Christianity stopped being a dominant force.

While they destroyed the political and social structure of their own country, even French revolutionaries were casting envious glances across the Channel. And their American disciples  (in practical terms, precursors) constituted their own revolutionary state largely on English principles going back to Saxon times and refined by sage men since then.

Such is the core of English culture, and there exist hundreds of layers around it. This is the only culture that can sustain Britain qua Britain. Any cultural exotica can exist strictly on the margins, and I for one am happy that they should exist. London would be dull without some ethnic presence.

However, when ethnic presence amounts to 60 per cent of London’s population, the core culture of the capital, indeed of the whole country, is under threat of erosion.

The threat becomes a deadly reality when some ethnic groups not only refuse to accept the traditional culture but are actively hostile to it. When major cities have whole boroughs declaring their allegiance to a legal system other than the English Common Law, we don’t have multiple cultures. We no longer have any.

I don’t know whether Mrs Braverman genuinely realises this or merely angles for Tory leadership by appealing to the traditionalists within the party. Either way she says all the right things and gives every impression of wishing to do them as well, if allowed.

Yet there is every sign that she won’t be allowed to act on her putative convictions. The shamans of the Multi-Culti cult have already started their pyres, kindling them with whatever is left of our culture. I hope Mrs Braverman won’t have to step into them.

That’s right, Penelope fell victim to a heinous assault… Sorry, I’m so overcome with rage I can’t even get started. Give me a second…

No, thanks, I don’t think a glass of water will help. Anyway, I feel better now. So I can tell you what happened.

As we were getting out of a taxi yesterday, the driver sent me on my way by saying: “Good-bye, sir”. He then turned to Penelope and…

Jumped into the back seat to assail her? Reached over to grab some portion of her anatomy that’s supposed to stay off-bounds for strangers? Drove off on screeching tyres, leaving me on the pavement and taking her to some den of iniquity?

No, none of the above. As I was helping Penelope out of the cab, the criminal driver said: “Good-bye, love”. Now if that isn’t sexual assault, I don’t know what is.

Perhaps I’ve put my finger right on it: I no longer know what sexual assault is. Does anyone? The Crown Prosecution Service certainly doesn’t, which it proved by charging former cruiserweight boxer Glenn McCrory with that very crime.

The ex-champ, now almost 60, was a guest speaker at a pre-fight dinner. At some point he felt he was being ignored by the waitresses. Trying to attract the attention of one of them, he touched her elbow and – brace yourself – addressed her as ‘pet’.

Did he then throw the waitress on the floor to have his wicked way with her amidst the noisy crowd? No. That was it, his whole crime, the one that put him in the dock at a criminal court.

Now, in case you are unfamiliar with British mores, the lower classes routinely address female strangers with terms of endearment, such as ‘love’, ‘pet’, ‘darling’, ‘flower’ or some such. Most men choose from a whole glossary of such salutations, their preference often depending on their age and place of origin.

I haven’t conducted any painstaking research but, from aural experience, a Londoner, such as the cabbie who assaulted Penelope so egregiously, is most likely to say ‘love’, whereas a northerner, especially a Geordie, may prefer ‘pet’.

Either of them may opt for some other friendly words, but every Geordie I’ve known addressed women as ‘pet’, whereas only a couple of Cockneys did. All those men would address a male stranger as ‘mate’, no geographic variety there at all.

In case you’re wondering, the word ‘mate’ doesn’t imply a lifelong friendship between the two men. It’s just a friendly proletarian way of addressing a stranger whose name one doesn’t know.

By the same token, the word ‘love’ doesn’t necessarily imply the existence of an amorous relationship, nor a hope for one. And ‘pet’ doesn’t suggest the speaker’s wish to have the woman fetch him his slippers in her mouth or bark to be taken walkies.

Mr McCrory comes from County Durham, which makes him a Geordie. When realising he wasn’t getting any service he bent down from his 6’4” to the diminutive waitress, touched her elbow to catch her attention and, addressing her as ‘pet’, asked for his starter.

That earned him three counts of sexual assault charges from our supposedly overworked legal authorities. The third charge was for what another poor victim described as Mr McCrory winking at her. In fact, thick scar tissue around the former boxer’s eyes makes him blink all the time. No criminal intent there.

The prosecutors laid out their case meticulously. Mr McCrory, they said, used the word ‘pet’ flirtatiously, which constituted sexual assault. Not quite rape, but the next best (sorry, I mean worst) thing.

As to getting tactile, the prosecution saw no valid difference between touching a woman’s elbow and, say, clutching her breasts. It’s a slippery slope thing: first he touches her elbow, then he… well, I’m not going to inflame your imagination with lewd suggestions of subsequent possibilities.

Mr McCrory’s crimes were committed in 2021, whereas the trial took place last week. Thus the CPS took two years to prepare an airtight case guaranteeing conviction. Finally, the evidence was sewn up, and the perplexed Mr McCrory, still unable to understand what he had done wrong, was waiting for his verdict.

Mercifully, it took the jury less than 90 minutes to acquit him of all charges. I’m sure they could have done it in 90 seconds, but that could possibly have been interpreted as contempt of court – not that the court wasn’t contemptible.

In view of all that I’ve decided not to report Penelope’s assailant to the police – this though we have a record of his licence number. Such magnanimity is a sign of civic responsibility on my part – the CPS already has its hands full pursuing men who glance at women’s legs, women who bathe their (naked!) children and anyone trying to flirt with anyone else.

Criminal behaviour of a sexual kind must be stamped out before the authorities can get down to minor indiscretions such as burglary, mugging and pickpocketing. First things first.

So I’m not going to add to the CPS’s work load, for now. But on the off chance the offending cabbie is reading this, let him know he is on a warning.

I must reassure my conservative friends that Suella Braverman’s good work this week is only undone in the eyes of inveterate pedants like me. So far, at any rate.

Other than that, the Home Secretary’s speech was impeccably conservative, which is to say sensible. So let’s have the good news first.

Mrs Braverman delivered the speech on uncontrolled immigration in Washington DC, going beyond parochial boundaries both geographically and substantively. An influx of millions of cultural aliens who don’t even try to integrate, she said, presents an existential threat to our whole civilisation.

If we eschew big words for a moment, essentially she said that, when untold millions arrive over here, over here will eventually become just like over there. If you seek proof, she added, just walk through the streets of Malmo, Paris, Brussels or Leicester.

She could have just as easily cited any other major city in Western Europe and North America, but I admire her self-restraint and sense of timing. A litany of the complete list of overrun cities would have kept her audience there for hours on end.

The present system, said Mrs Braverman, is unsustainable because it provides “huge incentives for illegal immigration”. Even huger ones for the legal kind, I’d suggest, for Western laws are way too generous to new arrivals.

Mrs Braverman estimated that 780 million denizens of downmarket countries could potentially qualify for refugee status in the West. I don’t know how she arrived at such a precise number, but it strikes me as too low.

She probably figured out that at least 10 per cent of the world population would be happy to swap over there for over here. I suspect the real proportion is closer to a third, but that’s nit-picking. Considering that the West has a combined population of about 1.4 billion, it’s reasonably clear that even Mrs Braverman’s lowish number couldn’t be accommodated.

Speaking specifically about the UK and the rest of Western Europe, Mrs Braverman took a richly deserved swipe at the European Convention on Human Rights. This is indeed the millstone sinking any attempt to solve the problem, although I’d be tempted to delve a bit deeper.

The ECHR is a product of the liberal, which is to say dominant, mindset in Europe. This mindset is ossified into a skeleton of orthodoxies, with each little bone having the sinews of stock demagoguery attached to it.

Hence anyone who dislikes the European Union is automatically demonised as a Europe-hating xenophobe (or a Little Englander in Britain). And those who insist that the ECHR damages the cause to which it’s ostensibly committed are accused of hating not only Europe but also human rights as such.

To her credit, Mrs Braverman came out swinging. “Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades,” she said.

And then: “If cultural change is too rapid and too big, then what was already there is diluted – eventually it will disappear.” Hear, hear.

So much for her good work. But then she undid much of it in my eyes with a single word, and I must admit I disagree with Shakespeare on the subject of a rose by any other name smelling as sweet.

That may be, but anyone who refers to a rose as a bicycle raises doubts about his literacy. If the person in question holds a Great Office of State, one is within one’s rights to question his, or in this case her, suitability for it.

Thus, when asked how she could reconcile her position with being a daughter of immigrants from Mauritius and Kenya, Mrs Braverman said:

“What you’re suggesting is because I’m the child of immigrants, I have to adopt a position which is pro-migration and pro the status quo, and I totally and fundamentally refute that.”

Just as totally and fundamentally I insist it’s shocking that our Home Secretary misuses a relatively common word with the blithe ease of a Millwall FC supporter. ‘Refute’, Mrs Braverman, means to prove something wrong, not simply to disagree, reject or deny.

I’m not suggesting that our politicians should all do a Churchill by being able to win the Nobel Prize for literature, but as a loyal British subject and reluctant taxpayer, I think I have a right to demand basic literacy from our governors.

Other than that, one can both detect some positive signs in current Tory politics and understand where they are coming from. Essentially, our Tory ministers have begun to make Tory noises, none too soon.

Their natural inclination these days is to win elections by out-Labouring Labour, but poll after poll shows that therein lie many years in opposition. Labour’s gigantic lead in every survey shows that the public would rather have socialism neat, not diluted with meaningless admixtures.

What the Tories have been diluting successfully is their core support, voters who for old times’ sake still believe that the word ‘Conservative’ in the party’s nomenclature should stand for something.

Realising this, our cabinet ministers, especially Mr Sunak and Mrs Braverman, have started to sound conservative on such vital issues as the economy, climate and immigration. Mrs Braverman also hints that in next year’s elections the Tories will target Labour’s soft stance on Europe.

Actually, it’s not so much soft as perfidious. Expertly prodded by the indescribably hideous Tony Blair, Labour grandees are transparently mapping out a strategy for re-entering the EU, on conditions vastly inferior to those of our erstwhile full membership.

Hence, and I hope you won’t think me too cynical, Mrs Braverman’s frequent jabs at the ECHR. By now I’ve become so jaded, not to say callused, that I simply don’t trust our politicians to do or say the right thing for any other than electoral reasons.

But at least they have indeed begun to say the right things, which beats the alternative any day. One can even harbour hopes that their words will be backed up by deeds, if only for the sake of politicking.

Speaking of ulterior motives, Mrs Braverman, whose current remit after all covers only domestic affairs, is clearly positioning herself as Tory leader-in-waiting. Hence her choice of an American venue for her big speech, and also her frequent references to the global nature of the migration problem.

Actually, I quite like her, considering other available options. I don’t discern any problems in Mrs Braverman that a crash course in English couldn’t fix. And really, when all is said and done, what’s the odd solecism among conservative friends?

P.S. Laurence Fox, actor turned GB News presenter, has caused a massive outburst of rage by saying on air that he wouldn’t “shag” the journalist Ava Evans. I demand he refute the invective by proving publicly that he would.

In case you’ve been living on another planet, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that’s about 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin.

Hence it enjoys booming street cred, making it a runaway marketing success. Because it’s so potent, pushers usually cut it with cheaper drugs. That lowers the street price of fentanyl, while still preserving its heroin-like effects.

All in all, one could say fentanyl gives pleasure-seekers the greatest bang for a buck, or rather three bucks, which is what American pushers typically charge for a hit. They enjoy a great deal of repeat business because fentanyl’s high potency is matched by its addictiveness. (It’s also matched by its ability to kill by overdose, the highest of all drugs.)

I’m not going to delve into the physiological and psychological nature of opioid addiction. Suffice it to say that I myself was once iatrogenically addicted to heroin (intravenous dimorphine, if you wish to be technical) for a short spell. That experience strengthened my conviction that addicts don’t quit not because they can’t but because they won’t.

Be that as it may, fentanyl is highly and quickly addictive, whether physiologically or psychologically or both – it’s immaterial for my purposes. What matters is that, instead of flushing fentanyl down the tubes, addicts send their lives in that direction.

This raises questions about the advisability of legalising fentanyl, or drugs in general. There exist many opinions on that score, but the two most salient ones are libertarian and conservative.

The two groups share many ideas and sentiments, mainly aversion to the big state. Both wish to devolve power to the lowest sensible level, both resent state involvement in private lives. The differences between them are those of degree and passion. Let’s just say that conservatives relate to libertarians the way the latter relate to anarchists.

Another difference is that libertarianism is an ideology and conservatism isn’t. That’s why conservatives are more likely to approach any issue on its merits, rather than relying on general principles, however sound.

When it comes specifically to legalising drugs, libertarians are always for it. So are liberals, the American word for lefties, who support any perversion as long as it strikes against what they call the establishment.

Conservatives – such as yours truly – tend to be against legalisation and even decriminalisation. My main concern isn’t the destroyed lives of the addicts: everyone is entitled to go to hell if he so chooses. What scares me is the unpredictable social effects.

Too many questions remain unanswered. Such as, would legalisation increase or reduce the number of addicts? If the answer is the former, then by how much?

Opioids in general don’t encourage aggressive behaviour, but cocaine and meth do. Would our streets be overrun by unsavoury and dangerous individuals whacked out of their minds? Would crowds of down-and-out addicts turn our streets into slums?

Unless we obtain satisfactory answers to such questions, we shouldn’t leap into the unknown by legalising drugs. So much more must we appreciate any empirical evidence available, no matter how scant.

The American state of Oregon is happy to oblige. In 2021, Oregon became the first state to decriminalise possession of small amounts of such drugs as LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine – and fentanyl.

Libertarians rejoiced and so did their etymological cognates, liberals – and Oregon is one of the most ‘progressive’ states in the Union. At last, the state pulled its fingers out of the drug-laden pie. People were free to make a choice, and most of them were bound to steer clear of the fruit no longer forbidden.

Over 60 per cent of the public agreed, happy that people were no longer risking imprisonment for acting on the old slogan: turn on, tune in, drop out. Surely that had to mean more people would make the right choice and there would be fewer addicts, fewer deaths from overdosing.

Alas, things haven’t quite worked out that way. Rather than solving the problem, the new law made it worse. For example, last year fentanyl caused 209 deaths in and around Portland alone.

A majority of the people now regret their support for the decriminalisation, and not just because of the overdose deaths. The number of homeless people went up by 29 per cent last year, and malodorous tent encampments have covered Portland’s pavements.

Now the people want that law repealed – they’d rather not see their cities turn into shanty towns. Overdoses they could live with, but the squalor is just too offensive.

Meanwhile, addicts are openly smoking fentanyl throughout the city centre, some of them barely conscious. Finally, Portland’s city council has had enough and issued a ban on hard drug use. Not so fast, countered the state. The ban won’t go into effect until the state has ratified it, and no one knows when that will be.

Since Oregon was the first state to decriminalise cannabis, in 1971, proponents of the slippery slope theory feel vindicated. Once cannabis becomes freely available, more people are encouraged to replace a slow spiritual and intellectual quest with a quick high.

Once their inner resources have been sufficiently depleted, and cannabis no longer has the same effect, they may well turn to the hard stuff, especially if it’s easy and, as with fentanyl, cheap. Such is the theory, and Oregon has kindly supported it with empirical evidence.

This is consistent with the experience of other places, such as Amsterdam, where so-called coffee shops have been legally selling cannabis for decades. And what do you know, studies show that 17 per cent of Amsterdam’s population also used hard drugs last year.

Proponents of legalisation argue that we might as well allow what we can’t effectively ban. True enough, whenever any government declares a war on drugs, drugs win.

Yet the same argument can be used for murder: it still happens even though it’s against the law. Does this mean murder should be decriminalised? Laws exist not only to eliminate an objectionable activity, but also to express society’s attitude to it.

Therein lies the problem, for modern societies are running out of moral arguments against drugs. Their growing use isn’t so much the reason for a social malaise as a symptom of it.  

Witness the fact that drug use in Britain was unrestricted until the 1868 Pharmacy Act and uncriminalised until the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, yet there were nowhere near the same number of addicts as there are now. British society was healthier then, even if it was poorer.

Any criminal laws against drugs will be directed against the symptoms, not the disease. Yet anyone who has ever popped an aspirin for a bad headache will confirm that symptomatic relief is worth having.