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“What’s in a word?” asked Shakespeare, who then answered himself along the lines of not very much. The great man thus predated by four centuries Jacques Derrida with his silly deconstructionism.

I disagree, most respectfully. Not wishing to step on the toes of either our national poet or France’s faux-philosopher, I still maintain that in our prosaic life words are crucially significant.

Take the term ‘illegal migrants’, which is always in the news these days. Most people who use it in the media tend to slide over the adjective and stress the noun, evoking horrific images and appealing to our charitable instincts.

True enough, vast areas of Africa, the Middle East and, these days, Eastern Europe are suffering horrific wars, genocide and famines. That compels thousands, or rather millions, of people to save themselves and their families by fleeing.

The safest harbours they identify are all in the West, emphatically including Britain known for her munificence. And it’s also true that whatever is left of Christian charity (or, barring that, basic decency) should make us welcome those poor people and do as much as we can for as many as we can.

Yes, politics tends to be based not on Christian charity or even basic decency, but on cold-blooded pragmatism (however misconstrued). Yet there have to be exceptions. Shrugging our shoulders when proverbial women and children are being slaughtered means betraying everything good in our civilisation.

That’s why we have generous immigration quotas, and it could be argued that they should be made even more generous in some situations, with extra provisions for cases of genocide. Agreed? Good. We’ve now milked the noun part of ‘illegal migrants’ for all it’s worth.

Now let’s talk about the adjective. My trusted dictionary defines ‘illegal’ as “contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.” That’s where the word game comes in, called ‘transformation’ in linguistics.

This means replacing lexical or grammatical structures with their full equivalents that clarify their meaning without distorting it. Thus, using the above definition as the starting point, we can transform ‘illegal migrants’ into ‘criminal migrants’. Rather than relying on our generous immigration quotas, they choose to break the law.

People who cross the Channel in small boats and then seek asylum in Britain aren’t legitimate migrants or refugees. They are law-breakers, otherwise known as criminals. And their numbers, though still short of the D-Day force going in the opposite direction, are still significant.   

In 2020, 8,466 crossed over in small boats, which number increased to 28,526 in 2021 and more than 40,000 in 2022. This year it’s estimated to grow to 56,000, creating an unmanageable backlog in asylum applications.

That’s a lot of criminals to swell the ranks of the rapidly expanding homegrown variety. This raises the question of what to do with them.

The most obvious stratagem would be to prevent them from landing in Britain in the first place, and the Royal Navy has a fair amount of relevant experience. At different times in our history, it prevented the invasion of such formidable adversaries as Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler.

While admitting that firing broadsides at those small boats would be ill-advised, one still likes to hope that the Royal Navy could do something to turn those boats around. After all, they aren’t shooting at our ships either.

That hope seems to be forlorn. The Royal Navy lacks either the incentive or orders or capacity to stop the influx of small boats carrying criminals to our shores. So what happens next?

The government started out by spending millions to accommodate the arrivals at hotels boasting a various number of stars (up to four). Alternatively, they are housed in abandoned military bases – due to Britain’s lackadaisical approach to defence, there exist many of those.

This creates all sorts of problems, and funding is the least of it. You see, many, I’d even dare say most, of the new arrivals are – what would be an inoffensive term? – differently civilised. Their hygienic, amorous and acquisitive practices are often at odds with the local mores, which creates conflicts.

The locals sign petitions, demonstrate outside migrant centres and sometimes even resort to violence. So far no deaths have been reported, but that situation is likely to change.

I don’t think people in the Home Counties are blood-thirsty Little Englanders, but they do have legitimate concerns about their tranquil neighbourhoods turning into hellholes. They feel their home is where charity should begin.

The most obvious solution is to remove those criminals from Britain, send them somewhere where their habits would be less jarring to the ambient mores and ban them from ever applying for asylum in Britain. Rwanda was mooted as a possible destination first.

That sounds like a good idea to me, but not to those who accentuate the noun in ‘illegal migrants’ at the expense of the adjective. Thus possible deportation to Rwanda was tied up in legal challenges. And in June the Court of Appeal ruled it unlawful because the Rwanda asylum system wasn’t deemed to be up to scratch.

Ascension Island is the current candidate, which also strikes me as appropriate. After all, if St Helena was good enough for Napoleon, Ascension Island in the same part of the South Atlantic should be good enough for those criminal migrants. And if they find that not being the case, then many others could well be deterred from entering Britain illegally.

Yet I fear that any deportation scheme, to Ascension Island or elsewhere, will suffer the same fate. After all, it goes against the grain of the dominant ethos declared and enforced by our lumpen intelligentsia.

This group spouts humanitarian slogans with the best of them, but in fact it’s driven by neither Christian charity nor even basic decency.

As one of their intellectual leaders, Peter Mandelson, once explained with refreshing candour, importing large groups of cultural aliens expands the electoral base of the leftmost parties. Thus, what his boss Blair described as “the forces of conservatism” would be neutralised.

Neither Blair nor Mandelson nor their current followers have bothered to put any upper limit on their generosity. That’s a serious oversight, considering that billions of people worldwide would rather live in Britain than in their own countries. The size of our island suggests that some sort of limit is necessary.

The seminal difference between legitimate and criminal migrants also seems to be moot. Thwarting the forces of conservatism is vital; upholding the law isn’t. Those gentlemen are, however, adept at camouflaging their cynicism with bien pensant jargon.  

Thus Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, is appalled by the Ascension Island scheme: “This is more shameful demonisation of men, women and children fleeing from countries such as Afghanistan, the bloodshed in Syria and Sudan and persecution in Iran.

“It is time for the government to stop its obsession with unworkable and inhumane schemes that treat people like human cargo and address the shocking mismanagement of the asylum system with seriousness and accountability.”

In other words, let’s fling our doors wide open and admit them all, legal or otherwise. Never mind legality, feel the empathy.

The causal relationship between crime and punishment immortalised by Dostoyevsky has fallen by the wayside – the noun in ‘illegal migrants’ has trumped the adjective. That’s like arresting a man who has stolen £10,000 and, instead of sending him down, awarding him the same sum by court order.

If you think this is a spurious simile, I suggest you look up the meaning of ‘illegal’ in any dictionary you trust.

Generally speaking, the BBC deserves every plaudit for keeping a vigilant eye on any possible affront to diversity.

As a life-long champion of letting it all hang out, I applaud the corporation for its comprehensive diversity training programme. All staffers must attend and thus learn to be on the lookout for “170 different forms of unconscious bias”.

I wish I could attend that course because I can’t count so many on my own. I happen to know that one form of unconscious bias identified for BBC employees is based on their colleagues’ hobbies.

Not being privy to the specifics, I can only make a general admission that I too display a bias, both conscious and unconscious, against certain hobbies, such as putting live kittens into the microwave. However, if I were able to attend that course, I’m sure I’d be cured of my propensity to discriminate.

One way or another, when it comes to diversity, no amount of vigilance is excessive. For any lapse can have catastrophic consequences, scarring affected individuals for life.  

That’s why the Corporation deserves a light rap on the knuckles for the diversity survey recently circulated to its staff. It was a multiple-choice questionnaire, yet some of the important choices were left out.

Specifically, the question “What is your sexual orientation?” featured some omissions that many BBC staffers may find inexplicable, if not deliberately offensive. The answer options included only “bi/bisexual”, “lesbian/gay woman”, “gay man”, “other sexual orientation” and “prefer not to say”.

The questionnaire drew thunderous criticism for its wilful omissions, and quite right too. Only three of the 101 known sexes… sorry, I mean genders, were listed. The remaining 98 were unceremoniously lumped together under the rubric ‘other’, which reduced those valid options to a marginal status.

What about BBC employees who are proud of being, say, endosex, cisgender or demi-flux? They are fully justified in feeling slighted at best, mortally offended at worst. And you know what happens to cisgender people who feel slighted or, God forbid, offended?

Well, neither do I. But it’s a safe bet they may go to pieces, thereby jeopardising the quality of the BBC’s output, of which all Britons are rightly proud. And don’t get me started on the hurt feelings of fa’afafine and bissu Beebers. They’d be within their rights to demand that the Board answer the question bursting out of their wounded hearts: “And what am I, chopped liver?”

I think the BBC should either not list any options, instead just offering an empty space to be filled by the recipients, or, better, list all 101 of them. That would make the document bulkier, but at least the danger of offending a member of a respected minority would be averted.

Let’s remind ourselves, and keep reminding, that the whole purpose of diversity training is to avoid even the slightest possibility of causing offence. My proposal would serve this purpose, whereas the BBC questionnaire, while definitely making a step in the right direction, falls just short of the destination.

That’s why so many people subjected our national institution to just criticism. I’m sure the critics singled out such neglected but valid options as FTM, hijra, kathoey…

Wait a minute, Penelope has just looked over my shoulder and told me to read the papers more diligently. Turns out I’ve got it woefully wrong (“yet again”, as she put it). The BBC indeed came under fire for omitting a certain option, but it was none of those I’ve mentioned.

The option left out was “heterosexual”, aka “straight”. Apparently, some BBC staffers still identify themselves in that quaint, anachronistic and decidedly uncool fashion. And they are the ones who have complained.

I for one don’t see what their problem is. The questionnaire did include the “other sexual orientation” rubric, didn’t it? All they had to do was scribble “straight” in and go back to sweeping the floor, or whatever such sticks-in-the-mud do at the BBC.

How long before straight people start lying about their ‘orientation’ to have any chance of getting a job at the BBC? This is a multiple-choice question, and the answer options are “soon”, “in the immediate future” and “faster than you can say Jack Robinson”.

These words, I would have thought, were as likely to cross my lips as “Perhaps Hitler was on to something”. Yet here I am, defending the Corporation against slander.

Don’t get me wrong: the BBC violates its Charter not just every day but in practically every programme, including Match of the Day. That document commits Beeb to impartiality, which it delivers only when talking about two woke causes at the same time.

Most of its employees vote for the leftmost parties, and those few who don’t are typically technical personnel: cameramen, grips, technicians and so on. On-camera Beepers are consistently, impeccably and – which is worse – openly left-wing in everything they say, or rather preach.

Hence I am generally sympathetic to the idea of defunding the BBC by scrapping its annual licence fee. Definitely, let’s do it – but not for the wrong reasons.

These thoughts have been inspired by the mighty storm breaking out in the teacup of a single word. The offensive word was uttered by Sally Nugent, BBC Breakfast hostess.

The word was ‘infamous’, which Miss Nugent used in what many irate individuals and organisations saw as an offensive context. This is what she actually said: “Eighty years after 19 Lancaster bombers took part in the infamous Dambusters Raid, tonight a special anniversary flypast will take place over Lincolnshire.”

She was referring to Operation Chastise, a 1943 attack on German dams with so-called ‘bouncing bombs’. The attack breached two dams and destroyed two hydroelectric power stations, causing widespread flooding in the Ruhr valley. Some 1,600 civilians died, along with 53 RAF flyers.

Because of the large civilian losses, the raid isn’t without its critics. But the canonical consensus in Britain is that it was heroic, self-sacrificial and strategically justified. Hence calling it ‘infamous’ is like calling Nelson a libertine pirate or Wellington a Francophobe bandit.

Predictably, all hell broke loose, with the Defund the BBC Campaign leading the way. The BBC hastily issued an apology, saying it had been just a slip of the tongue, but Campaign director Rebecca Ryan would have none of it:

“If this awful error, which tarnished the memory of a heroic military operation that helped boost British morale during World War 2, was ‘a stumble’ it should have been immediately corrected on air.”

She concluded by succinctly stating the mission of her organisation: “The broadcaster must be cut loose and made to stand on its own feet financially.”

I second the sentiment, but not for this reason. In fact, I’d like to defend both the BBC and, chivalrously, Miss Nugent against this attack. However, if you feel my defence will be tantamount to damning with faint praise, who am I to argue?

I strongly suspect that all Miss Nugent knows about Operation Chastise comes from the 1955 film The Dam Busters, if that. I looked into her educational credentials and found no compelling reason to believe she is especially erudite.

Miss Nugent graduated from University of Huddersfield. Several websites claim she did so in 1971, which, considering that was the year she was born, strikes me as unlikely. Dismissing the possibility that this venerable institution issues degrees to neonates, one has to assume it’s a typo, and her real graduation year was 1991.

If that’s the case, then Huddersfield wasn’t a university at the time. It was still a polytechnic, only upgrading its status in 1992, following the Higher Education Act.

That was an exercise in egalitarian legerdemain, enabling the downtrodden to claim they have gone to university instead of a lowly polytechnic. Thus, if Britain had 22 universities in 1960, today she has 160 – supposedly. In reality, we still have 22, or even fewer, since upgrading the status of polytechnics has produced a growing inflation in the value of a university degree.

Why do I go into this in such detail? Because I believe the BBC’s apology that Miss Nugent made a slip of the tongue. She meant to say ‘famous’, which inadvertently came out as ‘infamous’.

It’s not only possible but likely that an alumna of Huddersfield ‘University’ may genuinely not know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’. She may well think that ‘infamous’ is the more refined way of saying the same thing.

This is widespread: I’ve heard many people say ‘simplistic’ when they mean ‘simple’ or ‘risqué’ when they mean ‘risky’. This is what linguists call ‘genteelism’, a verbal attempt to sound more educated (or, in Britain, higher class) than one is.

This is a predictable outcome of egalitarian education: people feel entitled to the higher status they have done little to attain. Treating a university degree as a licence to kill the real meaning of words, they believe, along with Humpty Dumpty, that words mean what they want them to mean.

Thus they say ‘peruse’ instead of ‘scan’, ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, ‘disinterested’ instead of ‘uninterested’, ‘electrocuted’ instead of ‘got a shock’, ‘momentarily’ instead of ‘shortly’, ‘enormity’ instead of ‘immensity’, ‘refute’ instead of ‘deny’ – and these, along with many others, are the solecisms one hears regularly from all and sundry, including TV journalists.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be snobbish here, rating people’s education on the basis of their CVs. In fact, I’ve seen total ignoramuses boasting Oxbridge degrees and highly educated people who have gone to lowly universities or none at all.

In fact, I believe that, when all is said and done, there is no education other than self-education. Someone who has spent a lifetime perusing (rather than scanning) by the yard books written by great stylists will know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’.

Yet simple observation suggests that most people tend to devote their valuable time to pursuits promising a more immediate payoff. Thus English is being mangled so widely and consistently that one begins to suspect lifelong self-education isn’t in the forefront of most people’s minds.

In fact, many people hardly ever increase their erudition beyond the level they attained at school or university. That being the case, the better schools and universities they attend, the less likely they will be to say ‘infamous’ when they mean ‘famous’.

Miss Nugent’s excuse may or may not be truthful. Yet I for one find it perfectly plausible.

As to defunding the BBC, by all means let’s. But for all the right reasons.

Many commentators are asking this question, and not out of idle curiosity.

Some are convinced that from the start the Russians saw the conquest of Ukraine as the first stage of their invasion of Poland, and only the courage of the Ukrainian army has made them suspend their plan.

But suspend doesn’t mean abandon. There are signs, and their number is growing, that Putin is about to launch a false-flag operation against that Nato member. The false flag will show the colours of either Belarus or the Wagner Group, with the Kremlin claiming innocence.

The same strategy was given a trial run in 2014, when the occupation of the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine was supposedly carried out by the ‘little green men’, who had nothing to do with the Kremlin. That stratagem could have duped only those wishing to be duped, such as Nato governments scared witless of any direct confrontation with Putin.

Shortly after the Wagner Group staged its mutiny in June, at least 4,000 of its militants were transferred to Belarus, setting up camp near Mogilev. Apparently they are armed only with infantry weapons, having left their armour and artillery behind. Yet even infantry weapons could be sufficient to stage a deadly provocation.

The SS troops in Polish uniforms that on 31 August, 1939, attacked the Gleiwitz radio station didn’t have tanks and cannon either, which didn’t prevent them from providing a pretext for the Nazi invasion of Poland the next day.

One would think that the Belarussian dictator, Putin’s stooge Lukashenko, would feel uneasy about the presence on his territory of thousands of armed bandits who recently almost succeeded in taking Moscow. He has to realise that taking Minsk would be an easier proposition, but Lukashenko doesn’t have a choice in this matter.

According to him, the Wagnerians are chomping at the bit and looking westwards. This is how he describes the situation: “I said, ‘Why do you want to go west?’ So they say, ‘We control what happens: let’s go on an excursion to Warsaw and Rzeszow.”

The former is of course the Polish capital, whereas the latter is a key military hub through which supplies are flowing into the Ukraine. Rather than being a sightseeing trip, that ‘excursion’ would constitute an invasion of Poland.

At the same time the Russians deployed tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus. This violates every known non-proliferation treaty, but Putin assured the world that Russia remained in control of those weapons.

However, Lukashenko then spoke out of turn, claiming the decision of when to go nuclear, and against whom, was his to make. It isn’t. But should the Russians support Wagner with a tactical nuclear strike, they could cite that pronouncement as proof of their innocence. It’s all that ghastly Lukashenko’s fault.

If Nato decided to retaliate, it would have an excuse to accept Putin’s lies and strike at Belarus instead. Russia would then see it her moral duty to come to the aid of her loyal ally, screaming all over the world about Nato’s dastardly aggression.

Americans are trying to preempt that ploy by telling Putin they can see right through it. Asked about the presence of Wagner mercenaries on the Polish border and whether she sees it as a real threat to Nato, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN, said: “We certainly worry that this group… is a threat to all of us.”

She then added that “any attack by the Wagner Group will be seen as an attack by the Russian government.”

These are fighting words, but so far they have been uttered only by a relatively minor official of one Nato member. Though we don’t know what sort of messages are being sent through unofficial channels, so far we haven’t heard a statement to that effect from Nato at large, all for one and one for all.

However, the messages sent by deeds rather than words are unequivocal: the West is willing to do all it can, and possibly even more, to avoid a military conflict with Russia come what may. Drip-feeding just enough aid for the Ukraine to fight but not enough for her to win is about as far as Nato seems willing to go.

Now, I have always assumed that Article 5 of the Nato Charter says it all loud and clear: an attack on one member is an attack on them all. I – and I am sure some of you – saw that as a sort of tripwire arrangement. One shot fired at any Nato member pushes the button for cruise missiles flying in the opposite direction.

Then a friend of mine, who is more meticulous in such matters, suggested I read the actual text of the Article rather than relying on generally accepted inference. And what do you know: no tripwire is anywhere in evidence.

Not to bore you with its turgid prose, I’ll put the full text in the post-scriptum. But the upshot is that the use of armed force is only one option, and each member will decide whether to exercise it either individually or in concert with other members. What they unequivocally undertake to do is to report the situation to the UN Security Council, of which Russia is one of the five permanent members with veto power.

In other words, Article 5 doesn’t warn any potential aggressor that any ‘excursion’ on his part will bring about an instant violent response. In fact, one struggles to see how the existence of that provision changes the current situation, one involving the Ukraine.

Nato has always had the option to interfere militarily, but has chosen not to do so because it has no appetite, nor any obligation, to fight Russia. Fine. But the way I read it, Article 5 neither obliges Nato to stop Russian aggression by force nor boosts its appetite for such a confrontation.

Hence Putin, unable to make much headway against the Ukraine, may feel he has little to fear if he decided to test Nato’s resolve by an ‘excursion’ into Poland, false flag or otherwise. The situation is fraught with lethal danger, and the West’s vacillation makes it more so.

P.S. The full text of Article 5, as promised. See what you make of it: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

“Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.”

Considering that US productivity is growing at 10 times the rate of Britain’s, there is a lot we could learn from the Americans.

So we do – but only the wrong things. One such is the critical race theory, according to which our whole history has been about racism, slavery, colonialism and little else.

Now, if you’ll forgive a personal note, one of the things that struck me when I moved from the US to Britain 35 years ago was how little racial rancour was noticeable. Blacks and whites were colour-blind the way they seldom were even in New York, to say nothing of Texas, the two places I knew well.

That was to be expected, considering how different the histories of the two countries were in that respect. Yet our ‘educators’ refuse to recognise this.

British children as young as five are taught about police brutality in the US as if Britain were an American state. Teachers are instructed that: “Police brutality and incidents like the death of George Floyd might not seem age appropriate for primary school pupils, but children of all ages are likely to have heard about these issues in the news or discussed them at home.”

I’m not sure how many British families discuss the George Floyd case (which The Times describes as “murder”) with their little tots. I suspect the number is small, and the frequency of such discussions smaller still.

I doubt this subject figures prominently in American families either, not three years after the fact. However, even supposing that some parents do choose that topic at beddy-bye time in preference to, say, a bunny rabbit going hop-hop, at least it has some marginal relevance there.

Yet an average British child doesn’t hear many stories of murderous police brutality, has never heard of Minneapolis, and wouldn’t know George Floyd from Pink Floyd.

Nevertheless, teachers are supposed to indoctrinate British five-year-olds on strictly American material (which is mostly false even in that context, but that’s a separate subject).

The same document directs teachers to a US infographic showing that white five-year-olds are more “strongly biased in favour of whiteness” compared with their black and “Latinx” (Latino) classmates.

Latino classmates? What, like Puerto Rican or Mexican? In Britain? Whenever I see a bevy of schoolchildren in London, they are mostly white, with a smattering of blacks, Indians and Muslims. There is never a Mexican or Puerto Rican anywhere in sight, to parade his lack of bias in favour of his race.

Another guidance tells teachers how to tackle the issue of “white privilege”, especially when talking to council estate urchins who don’t feel particularly privileged.

Our educators are expected to state in no uncertain terms that the original sin of whiteness isn’t redeemed by belonging to any other “disadvantaged” group, such as women, homosexuals or the poor. That, children should know, “doesn’t erase their white identity”.

Children are also taught to spurn “white saviour narratives” focused on white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce. Presumably it was Martin Luther King who freed the slaves in England.

Quite apart from the subversive and unsound nature of the critical theory in general, equating the race situation in Britain and America is pernicious demagoguery at its most soaring. And it’s ignorant demagoguery to boot.

Slavery was practically nonexistent in metropolitan England, though it was important to the economies of her colonies, including the American ones. Even in Elizabethan times slavery was already seen as abhorrent – three centuries before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

A report of a case as far back as 1569 states that: “… it was resolved that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.”

Though Britain officially banned the slave trade only in 1807, unofficially the Royal Navy had been harassing slave traffic for decades. And you know what? The ranks of those Elizabethan jurists and Georgian sailors showed no multi-culti diversity whatsoever. Fancy that.

Those ‘educators’ who corrupt children’s minds with the critical race theory indirectly prove all that by dragging in strictly American material. They wouldn’t have to do so if they could illustrate their hateful drivel with enough examples from British history.

Children, exposed to a deluge of American TV and Internet, are already confused anyway. When my friend scolded his son for something or other, the lad replied in his Essex accent: “Okay, don’t make a federal case out of it.” Another child, who refused to own up to some transgression, told his mother he’d like to “take the Fifth”.

That boy was 15, not five, and he still hadn’t been taught that the right to silence had been enshrined in the English Common Law for over a century before American colonists used it to formulate the Fifth Amendment to their Constitution.

That knowledge is clearly deemed superfluous. Children don’t have to know anything about their country other than its history of racism and colonialism. Such education ideally prepares them for a lifetime of deracinated ignorance, possibly laced with subversive activities.

Now it’s time for the Church of England to follow suit, if it hasn’t already. It could take its cue from the Haitian slaves who rose against the French in 1789-1793. Widespread violence against the French colonial administrators proceeded under the slogan “The whites killed Christ. Let’s kill all whites!”

That may be a little extreme for our Anglican schools. Perhaps “let’s condemn all whites” would be more moderate.

Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun. But it’s not a bad one because it works in both meanings of the expression.

One is the current state of affairs, and socialism qualifies in spades. All Western European economies are largely socialist, and ours is no exception.

Free enterprise hasn’t yet been banned, but it has been hogtied by strangulating regulations and bled white by extortionate taxes. At the same time Western European states all have a bloated public sector, siphoning out of the economy about half of what the nations earn, plus or minus a few per cent.

This isn’t an earth-shattering discovery – the facts are in the public domain, and they are widely known. However, they are just as widely ignored because the public has been brainwashed to overlook the other meaning of ‘lie’ in the title.

Socialism has been sold to the masses as a sort of secular Christianity: helping the poor, looking after the downtrodden, the last shall be first, that sort of thing. This is one of the biggest lies of modernity, a smokescreen concealing the real nature of socialism.

The ideal towards which socialism gravitates, if at different speeds in different countries, isn’t a Christian commune but the Soviet Union. Its principal desideratum is infinite growth of state power at the expense of individual liberties. That’s all. Everything else is hogwash, with lies acting as the hose.

There has never been any shortage of proof for that definition, but three current examples spring to mind. All three show that socialism (with wokery as its subset) both increases the number of the poor and hurts them more than the rich.

Recently published data show that even the poorest US state, Mississippi, has a higher per capita income than France or Britain. Without delving too deeply into the maelstrom of economic currents, let’s just say this is yet another proof that the prosperity of a country is inversely proportional to the amount of socialism in it.

Socialists are so eager to help the poor that they do their utmost to increase their number, thereby acquiring more beneficiaries of charitable socialist impulses. Again, this is a fact so amply supported by historical evidence that I’m ashamed of even mentioning it.

Socialists typically hurt the poor at one remove. Their egalitarian zeal compels them to penalise wealth producers, thereby making sure they produce less wealth to spread around. But at least socialists don’t often target the poor specifically and directly, bypassing any intermediate steps.

So much more egregious are the two recent attacks on motorists launched by London’s socialist mayor and endorsed by Britain’s (socialist?) High Court. Both attacks proceed from the entrenched position of barefaced lies.

First, the mayor introduced a 20 mph limit on most London roads, including those that had a limit twice as high a couple of years ago. The justification for it is carbon emissions that are supposed to go down in line with the speed.

But they don’t. Depending on the make, IC cars deliver the lowest carbon emissions in the 35-50 mph range. Emissions at 20 mph are higher than at 30 mph, and these are higher than at 40 mph. Since such data are available at the touch of a computer key, the mayor can’t plead ignorance as an excuse.

One has to conclude that this speed limit is nothing but a disguised tax: since it’s next to impossible to maintain a steady 20 mph on some London roads, especially at night, the council will rake in greater amounts in fines. That’s who benefits. But who is hurt?

Affluent people tend not to drive in London – depending on how wealthy they are, they rely on limousines, black cabs or car services. It’s their drivers who are punished by this wicked measure, along with other poor sods who drive for a living, including the proverbial White Van Man.

Car service drivers are getting points on their licences, and it doesn’t take many for them to lose their livelihood. And even if they manage to evade fines by religiously observing the extortionate limit, the number of fares they can serve (and hence their income) goes down.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife had to catch an early Eurostar train, and a car service picked her up at 5 AM. Yet she barely made it because the apologetic driver couldn’t go over 20 mph even on an empty six-lane road straight as an arrow.

The driver idled away the time by entertaining Penelope with horror stories of his colleagues paying fines or even losing their licences. The narrative was richly interspersed with curses aimed at the London mayor Sadiq Khan. (Lest you accuse the driver of racism, he was a Muslim himself).

The other example is even worse. Starting in a fortnight from now, all London drivers of IC cars eight years old or older will have to pay £12.50 every time they get behind the wheel. The whole city has been included into ULEZ, the Ultra-Low Emission Zone.

This is a socialist (woke) policy that targets the poorer people openly, directly and unapologetically. For, as I mentioned, the fat cats so hated by our affluent middle classes rarely drive in London. And if they do, it’s usually not in clapped-out bangers 10 years old.

However, if they do favour such cars out of reverse snobbery, they can afford to pay £12.50 for the privilege – as they can afford the current £15 congestion charge for entering Central London. Yet some people aren’t so fortunate: an old woman driving to church, a low-paid clerk living in an area not covered by public transport, a family that can’t get to a supermarket in any other way.

At the same time, Transport for London is spending millions on a nauseating TV campaign, with the slogan “Every trip counts”. You bet it does – for the fleeced majority.

Socialist lies have been swallowed hook, line and sinker, with the duped masses thrashing about trying to wiggle free. Various aspects of socialism have become orthodoxies that, like Caesar’s wife, are above suspicion.

One can still criticise isolated excesses, such as those I’ve mentioned, but not the underlying assumptions. All the biggest lies spun out of the Enlightenment are now sacrosanct.

And if you don’t believe me, stop a random passer-by in London and ask him what he thinks of, say, the NHS. He’ll be happy to regurgitate the relevant socialist lie – Londoners are very obliging.

Great men are often seers, and the two gentlemen in the title are no exception. Put together their two adages, both uttered about a century ago, and the jigsaw puzzle of our time is complete.

Thus G.K. Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

In other words, atheism narrows the mind and widens the range of credulity. In still other words, when a man decides to take the Pascal wager, he gains a particle of Logos, the incarnated reason. That gift is denied an atheist, who thus joins the ranks of men one of whom, according to P.T. Barnum, is born every minute.

In practical terms, an atheist rejects intellectual discipline and discernment. He will rejoice in his newly opened mind, not realising that it has in effect become a tabula rasa ready to receive any scribbled message, sound or not. Alas, in most cases he’ll lack the ability or even desire to tell the difference.

A mind needs the discipline of the absolute as much as a general needs a strategy, a traveller needs an itinerary or a builder needs an architectural drawing. Firm belief in the existence of absolute truth equips a man to look for reasonable approximations in any task he sets himself.

A general can change his strategy in response to a sudden turn in the battle, a traveller may decide to take a different road, and a builder may choose to adorn the drawn structure with all sorts of ornaments. But rather than debunking the need for the original plan, such modifications confirm it.

Replacing the overarching absolute with a melange of little relativities will eventually lead to chaos. The general will confuse his troops with mutually exclusive orders, the traveller will find he is going around in circles, the builder will erect a rickety structure ready to tumble at any moment.

People sense this, either consciously or intuitively. Hence, if they can’t satisfy their ontological craving for the absolute by worshipping God, their fashionably open minds are bound to look for other options.

The menu of such options is vast, and it changes every day, with different specials highlighted in bold type. Which ones should they choose? Some of them? All of them? That’s where the trouble starts: they lack the discernment that can only come from a disciplined mind structured hierarchically.

A believer starts from the knowledge of absolute truth, which enables him to think vertically. God sits at the very top, and the believer will use him, wittingly or unwittingly, as the ultimate arbiter not only of moral choices, but also of intellectual and aesthetic ones.

By contrast, an atheist tends to think horizontally. All the dishes on the menu are sitting on his table, cooked, served and looking equally tasty. He’ll choose a few almost at random, only then to post-rationalise his choices by insisting that the dishes he picked have more taste and nutritional value. But he doesn’t really know that, and he has no mechanism for arriving at such knowledge.

That doesn’t mean an atheist can’t be any good at solving the quotidian problems of life. He can – purely practical thought may tick along nicely without any need for the absolute. Thus one can easily imagine an atheist programmer, an atheist banker or an atheist accountant. But an atheist philosopher is an oxymoron. And even, more generally, an atheist thinker is suspect.

Philosophy, when all is said and done, is the science of first principles and last causes – it’s the science of the absolute. Therefore an atheist, no matter how adept he is at double-entry accounting, can’t be a philosopher any more than a man who can’t add up can become good at double-entry accounting.  

That’s Chesterton’s aphorism, decorticated. An atheist culture will gradually disintegrate into a hodgepodge of cults. Each will be at first asserted with quasi-religious fervour – only then to be replaced with another adored with the same passion.

This is where Thomas Mann adds his pfennig’s worth: “All intellectual attitudes are latently political.” Simple observation will confirm this is so, these days. But why is it?

Why do all modern cults demand – and these days usually get – political action? For example, the sustained effort to bowdlerise English in the name of bogus equality is called political correctness. But what are the political implications of, say, following a singular antecedent with a plural personal pronoun? If the crazy idea that otherwise someone will get offended crosses a modern mind, why not call it moral or ethical correctness?

The answer, I think, is that all modern cults are strictly secondary and derivative. Their primary cause was an outburst of negative energy, the urge to destroy the civilisation brought to life by universal commitment to the absolute.

Anything directly attributable to that civilisation made the new breed reach for the wrecking ball. The dominant emotion wasn’t passive, academic rejection – it was a destructive animus demanding action.

That energy had a constantly repleted reservoir and hence a steadily growing level. Over a relatively short time, it produced an anthropological shift. Western Man, the dominant creative force of the old civilisation was ousted by a new species, Modern Man.

The new type could operate productively only at the lower reaches of thought, those involved in producing the material paraphernalia of life. The absolute was beyond his reach, it was something Modern Man perceived as hostile and sought to destroy – while intuitively craving a satisfactory surrogate.

None of his hodgepodge of little cults can function in any creative capacity. But put together, they can chip away at the edifice of the old civilisation. To do so more effectively they have to draw in the powers that be – the state. And a state can only be enrolled as a supporter, protector and promulgator of cults by political action.

That’s how seemingly apolitical feelings, such as preference for some kind of music or art, belief that no type of sexuality is perverse, suspicion of some chemical elements and so on are translated into aggressive political activism.

A sculptor taking a chisel to a slab of marble is driven by rational and aesthetic impulses. A vandal taking a sledgehammer to the resulting sculpture is immune both to reason and beauty. No matter how smart he may be otherwise, how good at his job and sensible with his investments, his reason doesn’t just play second fiddle to his hatred – it’s not even in the orchestra.

This explains why today’s political activists run up their flag posts whole buntings of absurd notions incapable of withstanding even a minute of rational inquiry. It’s not that they don’t realise, for instance, that CO2 is a trace gas of a trace gas whose role in climate changes is minuscule, while man’s role in producing it is smaller still. Such thoughts don’t even come into it.

They see through the red mist blinding their eyes a gigantic, if vaguely outlined, image of a receding civilisation and know viscerally it’s their target. Obsession with CO2 is just one arrow in their quiver, along with many others, such as doctrinaire Darwinism, reducing churches to social services, indoctrination of children in abnormal sexuality, ugly aesthetics and harebrained intellectual ideas – anything will do as long as it hits the mark.

That’s why it’s next to impossible to argue with paid-up Modern Men. That would be like arguing with a cannibal about the delights of a vegan diet. He wouldn’t even know what you are talking about. All he’ll know is that you are his enemy to be silenced – and it takes political action to do that.

That’s why, while accepting Chesterton’s maxim verbatim, I’d modify Mann’s with a qualifier: “All modern intellectual attitudes are latently political.” Come to think of it, they aren’t as latent as all that either. Rather, they are aggressively, destructively political. That’s what makes them modern.

Tacitus has come back to life thus to describe Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine. But let’s look at the full quote:

“These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by
their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

I knew you’d find me out. You are right: Tacitus hasn’t resurrected, and the tirade he quoted was aimed not at Russia, which didn’t exist at the time, but at Rome. Yet every word applies to Putin and his fans’ idea of peace.

As the Ukrainian counteroffensive gathers momentum, Putin’s propagandists both in Russia and in the West are shedding crocodile tears about the on-going loss of life and property. Let’s stop the carnage and negotiate, they whine. We all want peace, don’t we?

Yes, we do. But let’s not confuse peace with the Ukraine’s surrender, which is exactly what those Putin mouthpieces want. They want Russia to keep the areas occupied during the bandit raid in exchange for a cease-fire.

This after the Russians have done to the Ukraine exactly what the Romans did to the ancestors of today’s Scots (see the quotation above), a thousand times over.

If Zelensky were to sue for peace now, he’d betray all those thousands of Ukrainians murdered, tortured, raped and looted. He’d let the Russians get away with destroying Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, blowing up her dams, bombing her grain ports – all in an act of brutal and unprovoked aggression.

Zelensky won’t do any such thing. The only peace he’ll accept is a just one: Russia withdrawing to her pre-2014 borders, relinquishing her capacity to relaunch the raid once she has caught her breath and regrouped, and providing real security guarantees – not the Mickey Mouse ones of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

Thus, when you hear a Western pundit or politician call for immediate peace negotiations, make no mistake about it: he is a Putin agent, witting or unwitting. And something tells me those creepy-crawlies will be coming out of the woodwork in force over the next few days.

For, after two months of positional, or rather attritional, balance, the Ukraine seems to have achieved a strategic breakthrough.

In preparation for a Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Russians created what essentially is two lines of defence. The first is extensive minefields, making any armoured advance difficult and costly. The second line is fortifications and other facilities for the troops to dig in.

In theory, there is also a third line, but it’s designed merely to slow down a Ukrainian advance, not to stop it. It was mainly the dense minefields that kept the Ukrainian offensive in check, supported as they were by air raids on those who tried to clear the mines.

Now it appears that the Ukrainian army has managed to punch through that first line in at least two, possibly three, places and accelerate its assault on the dug-in Russian troops. The cluster munitions recently supplied by the West are playing a key role – to the accompaniment of wailing on the part of aforementioned Putin agents.

The new offensive started at dawn on Wednesday, and yesterday Ukrainian forces liberated the village of Staromaiorske, an important launchpad for a breakthrough in the southerly direction towards Berdyansk. Even Putin had to admit begrudgingly that Ukrainian attacks in the south have intensified.

He claimed, however, that Ukrainians are making no headway, which statement can only be understood in the context of his incessant assurances that the ‘special operation’ is developing as planned. Quite. He did plan to get bogged down for 17 months, suffer hundreds of thousands of casualties and achieve the improbable feat of uniting practically the whole world against Russia.

In parallel, Ukrainian forces are advancing on Robotyne, Zaporozhye province, heading in the direction of the city of Melitopol near the Sea of Azov. Should Melitopol be liberated, Ukrainians will effectively cut the Russian army in half, breaking the supply lines to the Crimea.

It’s way too early to tell, but every indication is that before long Ukrainian armour will break through into operational space, at which point Russian troops will face a rout. The Institute of the Study of War (ISW) confirms that Ukrainians are steadily advancing to the east of Robotyne, which means they have broken through the minefields, making such a success possible.

While Putin isn’t doing so well on the battlefield, he has stepped up the propaganda war, conscripting his Goebbelses, foreign and domestic, to launch another ‘peace’ offensive. To that end, the Russians have invited Zelensky to Moscow, guaranteeing his safe passage.

The Ukrainian president treated that trap with the disdain it deserved, but this gave Putin’s propagandists more ammunition. You see, they are screaming, Zelensky is rejecting Putin’s peace initiative. He is the aggressor, he is the warmonger.

No amount of cynical hypocrisy on the part of those mouthpieces surprises me. They are the ones, after all, who have described a handful of Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory as acts of terrorism. That’s like Hitler accusing Western governments of mistreating racial minorities.

However, I await with bated breath a Western counterpoint to such tunes. Specifically, I look forward to a certain Mail columnist calling for peace and accusing the Ukraine of undermining it. If I were a betting man, I’d wager that a statement along those lines will appear this weekend. But I’m not, so let’s just wait and see.

Hot summers, is it? Ignoramuses! Global warming deniers! Repeat after me: IT WAS A CLIMATE CRISIS! Our planet was on its way to extinction. And if you don’t believe me, ask Greta Thunberg. She’ll tell you.

It’s good to know that the Leader of the Free World is a polymath, whose interests and erudition extend even into such technical areas as medicine.

However, before punching the air with ebullient joy, we ought to track his foray into such areas to make sure he arrives at a legitimate destination. If he doesn’t, then rejoicing should be replaced with concern.

That, I’m afraid, is the case with Joe Biden’s recent speech on medical care, in which he made some statements that make it hard not to fear for the Free World of which Joe is the Leader.

The president tackled two branches of medicine of personal interest to him: oncology, because his son Beau died of brain cancer; and mental health because… well, you know.

Speaking on the first subject, Joe laudably insisted on reviving the American can-do spirit: “One of the things I’m always asked is, you know, why Americans have sort of lost faith for a while in being able to do big things.”

Such big things, for example, as curing cancer. “Why cancer? Because no one thinks we can, that’s why. And we can. We ended cancer as we know it,” Joe told his stunned audience.

The 19^th century Russian satirist Saltykov-Schedrin once quipped that: “The government’s task is to keep the populace in a state of permanent amazement.” Joe must have taken that prescription to heart.

The people in the audience were duly amazed. The mortality rates of some cancers may be going down, but an average of over 1,600 Americans still die of cancer every day. Their families must feel relieved to know that the Biden administration has expunged that ghastly disease once and for all.

I imagine Biden’s press secretaries have to work their fingers to the bone every time Joe offers one of his staggering insights. In this case, they must have gasped and taken the name of Our Lord in vain, possibly with the addition of obscenities.

Having got that off their chests, they replaced “ended” with “can end” in the version released to the press. But it was too late: video cameras had preserved Joe’s braggadocio for posterity.

Having taken care of oncology, Joe bravely attacked psychiatry. Specifically, he took exception to insurance companies that are reluctant to offer complete coverage for the treatment of mental problems. Joe then promised his administration would end this iniquity the way it had already ended cancer.

“We’re working to improve insurance coverage for mental health in America,” said Biden.

“And folks, you know, I don’t know what the difference between breaking your arm and having a mental breakdown is,” he added. “It’s health – there’s no distinction.”

As an aside, I always admire the mock-folksy tone American politicians feel called upon to adopt. They sound as if speaking not just in public but in a public bar – I’m surprised they don’t interrupt their press conferences to growl at a reporter: “Whatcha lookin’ at, pal?”

Getting back from the form to the substance, there’s one helluva lota distinction between a cracked bone and a cracked psyche, Joe. The former shows up on an X-ray, the latter doesn’t.

Thus diagnosing, or these days even defining, a mental disorder is seldom straightforward. For example, a man grieving for his dead wife may be considered mentally ill, whereas a man claiming to be a woman is seen as a perfectly sane individual exercising his right to identify as anything he wishes.

Conditions that in the past called for a talk with a friend over a couple of stiff drinks have now been medicalised. Lack of self-restraint and responsibility has been upgraded to ‘gambling addiction’ calling for medical interference. And as to the craven refusal to face the very mild symptoms of withdrawal from opiates, no amount of money thrown at it is too big.

Such rampant medicalisation makes mental conditions rather open-ended and therefore extremely expensive to treat. In fact, Americans spend over $200 billion a year on mental problems – more than they spend on heart disease, diabetes and indeed cancer.

Not only does the cost of treating mental conditions exceed any other, but it’s also growing faster – as it’s bound to do when the boundaries of the problem are being pushed wider and wider by the burgeoning weight of psychobabble.

I’m sure insurance companies wouldn’t quibble about covering legitimate psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia or dual-personality disorder. Yet one can understand their reluctance to shell out every time a self-indulgent housewife complains about being in a lousy mood lately.

Biden has in effect committed his administration to twisting insurers’ arm into going against their commercial interests. Such bossiness is to be expected on the part of any left-wing government, in America or anywhere else.

But insurance companies are still commercial concerns that have to answer to their shareholders. If new regulations force them to expose themselves to inordinate risks, they are bound to transfer their new costs to customers suffering from cancer, heart disease, diabetes and, well, broken bones.

Government expenditure will have to follow suit, which means higher taxes. American consumers of medical services will thus be hit with the double whammy of higher insurance premiums and greater taxation. I’m sure they won’t mind, secure in their serene knowledge that true equality has been achieved between mental and physical disorders.

Their plight saddens me, but not nearly as much as the future of the Free World. After all, Joe Biden, who clearly wasn’t compos mentis even before his first term, is running for a second one. And he may well win.