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As the founder, chairman and so far only member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I’m fascinated by Sharia law.

Those Muslims certainly don’t proceed from the namby-pamby premises of Western jurisprudence. This is especially noticeable in their laws concerning sexual morality.

The Qatar World Cup currently under way (go, Ingerland!) has brought this divergence in matters legal into focus. One case that has caught my eye in particular involves Miss Paola Schietekat, 28, from Mexico.

She travelled to Qatar in June last year to work for the World Cup organising committee, but got more than she had bargained for.

A Qatari colleague broke into her flat and raped her, an incident Miss Schietekat reported to the police. An arrest ensued immediately – only she was the one arrested.

Miss Schietekat was charged with extramarital sex, which is against the law in Qatar, a country that obviously sets the moral bar much higher than we do in the decadent West. That crime is punishable by up to 100 lashes and seven years in prison.

The charges against her rapist were dismissed because the attack hadn’t been caught on camera. The charges against Miss Schietekat, however, remained in place. She bitterly protested, but Qatari judges couldn’t quite see what she was on about.

She didn’t deny she had had extramarital sex, did she? Fine. So the circumstances under which she had transgressed were irrelevant, as far as Islamic law is concerned. Dura lex, sed lex, as those degenerate Romans used to say. That’s what the rule of law is all about.

Miss Schietekat’s lawyer advised her that the only way she could avoid being flogged to mincemeat and spending the next few years in prison was to marry her rapist. The jurist was sure the man wouldn’t mind: what’s one wife more or less.

However, Miss Schietekat found a different way: escaping from the country. Really, not only do Western whores have their wicked way with Arabs by inflaming their passions, but they also have no respect for the law.

Dr Charlotte Proudman, a barrister specialising in violence against women, is aghast: “Shockingly, everyone has been incredibly silent on Qatar’s horrific sexual assault laws. Qatar’s strict Islamic code outlaws all sexual contact between unmarried couples – making it an offence even if the woman has not consented.”

That’s a neat summation, if somewhat lacking in verbal precision that used to be the hallmark of the legal profession. Surely she meant “sexual contact between unmarried” people, not “couples”? Sex between couples would be a throwback to those degenerate Romans, or else a reference to the current practice colloquially called ‘dogging’.

Anyway, following that incident, Qatar’s laws have been modified ad hoc for the duration of the World Cup, bringing them in line with the customs of the decadent West. Police in Qatar have been told that, contrary to every traditional notion of decency, rape victims shouldn’t be treated as criminals.

And if an unmarried pregnant woman seeks medical help, that’s what she should get, rather than the good flogging she so richly deserves. Oh well, even the last bastions of morality come tumbling down like the walls of nearby Jericho. What’s the world coming to?

I wonder what our champions of diversity, those who don’t belong to the Charles Martel Society, think of such aspects of Sharia law. Or rather what they’d be willing to state publicly.

Two pieties seem to be in conflict here. On the one hand, anyone who finds anything wrong with diversity in all its manifestations is guilty of racism (in this case Islamophobia), one of the two worst crimes imaginable. Yet those who condone violence against women and, even worse, treat victims as criminals are guilty of the other one of the two worst crimes: misogyny.

If diversity comes packaged with misogyny, what’s anyone whose virtue is in urgent need of signalling supposed to say? All I can say is that, much as I sympathise with the problem, I can’t offer a ready solution. Either way you go, you get… well, what Miss Schietekat got.

Meanwhile, large boroughs of several British cities have declared that, as far as their denizens are concerned, Sharia takes precedence over the English Common Law. Local police express their disagreement, but hardly ever translate it into punitive action.

The champion of diversity in me rejoices; the inveterate traditionalist weeps. But then I remember the Society of which I’m the founder, chairman and so far only member, and stamp out those traditionalist notions.

If diversity presupposes the stoning of adulterers, execution of homosexuals, dressing women in Halloween costumes and flogging rape victims, then so be it. Take the rough with smooth, I say.   

“Progress is impossible without change,” George Bernard Shaw said, demonstrating his capacity for stating the blindingly obvious.

And all change, according to his ilk, is for the better. Such as, for example, Shaw’s pet idea that every 70-year-old unable to make a persuasive argument for his continuing usefulness to society should be culled.

Like many of his nightmarish dreams, this one shows every sign of coming true. Euthanasia is rapidly gaining traction in the West, although we still balk at the idea of making it mandatory at a certain cut-off age. Oh well, progress moves slowly at times, but we must be happy in the knowledge that it does move.

GBS also adored socialism in all its manifestations, both national and international. When he was an old man (the 70-year ideal was something he preached but not practised), he made a rousing speech to the effect that he’d die happy that the future of the world was safe in Stalin’s hands.

In the same spirit, he founded the English Spelling Society (ESS), dedicated to the noble cause of making life easier for the illiterate classes. Shaw wasn’t – and isn’t – alone in that quest. Any society dedicated to the advancement of the common man strives to drag the world down into the common man’s comfort zone.

Hence committed egalitarians often direct their attention towards spelling (another fruit by which we shall know them). The traditional version formed over centuries, they claim, is by its nature discriminatory because the broad masses find it hard to master.

Thus the ostensibly different egalitarian regimes in America, Russia and China all set out to reform spelling after they grabbed power. In America this process took a few decades, in China a few years and in Russia a few months, but the ultimate outcome was similar, as was the motivation.

Real literacy was replaced with the virtual kind, as if to remind people yet again that all egalitarianism can only ever be vectored downwards.

ESS is still going strong, and now its members around the world have voted to introduce a universal system called Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR), and I hope you aren’t confused by acronyms piling up.

According to it, language should be based not on rules but on usage. It’s the latter that should determine the former, not the other way around. In other words, all spelling should be strictly phonetic.

But English is pronounced differently throughout the Anglophone world, including within each country. There exist 50 major dialects in Britain alone, and God only knows how many minor ones. So should we spell no as ‘ner’ to reflect the Scottish pronunciation? Or ‘fried’ as ‘froid’ for some Londoners not to feel left out? Or, crossing the ocean, ‘my’ as ‘mah’ (South) and ‘bird’ as ‘boid’ (Brooklyn)?

And what about the ‘r’ at the end of words like ‘motor’ and ‘mother’? In America, it comes across as the retroflexive sound heard in educated speech and omitted in some dialects. In Britain, it’s exactly the other way around: that end sound is a hallmark of dialectal or uneducated speech.

Many regional differences are a result of the Great Vowel Shift that took place between 1400 and 1700, changing the pronunciation of the long vowels. The very length of that process, and the absence of mass communications at the time, explains why different regions and countries proceeded at their own pace.

Before the Shift, the word ‘meat’ was pronounced as ‘met’, while ‘mate’ sounded more like ‘maht’. And Shakespeare pronounced words like ‘path’ in what today is perceived as the American way, even though I don’t think he was a Yank. (Much of the Anglophone migration to America came from regions not yet touched by the Shift.)

Spelling has kept up with phonetic usage as best it could, but at some point people had to agree on a certain uniform standard. Spelling, at least within the same country, became codified, and little tots have since had to toil trying to avoid censure for spelling ‘might’ as ‘mite’ or ‘sleigh’ as ‘sley’.

And what do you know: before the united egalitarians of the world took the sledgehammer to our school system, most tots managed rather well. Some didn’t, but they tended to be the kind of people whose life didn’t depend on spelling one way or another.

If you read, say, police reports from a century ago, you’ll hardly ever see a misspelled word. Today’s equivalents aren’t a patch on that level of literacy, but then cops are now beneficiaries of laudably equal comprehensive education.

“Down with redundant letters”, proclaim Shaw’s disciples, which I suppose is an improvement on “Down with redundant people”. Thus ‘right’ will become ‘rite’, ‘knight’ will get a new lease on life as ‘nite’ and, presumably, both ‘weight’ and ‘wait’ as ‘wate’.

That, according to ESS, will eliminate illiteracy at a stroke, thereby improving the economy. To my reactionary eye their proposal will lead to illiteracy being not so much eliminated as chiselled in stone. However, to keep my mind fashionably open, I’m prepared not only to accept the underlying egalitarian principle, but also to extend it into other areas.

For example, Newton’s laws of motion must all be replaced with one: “Fings move, innit”. That’s all the educationally underprivileged need to know when they are chased by cops. And the first law of thermodynamics can be comfortably reduced to a simple statement: “U get nakkered vever u run or fite.”

This approach easily lends itself to wider extrapolation. If abolishing literacy is going to eliminate illiteracy, then why not apply the same idea to criminal law? Repealing all laws against murder, rape and robbery will at a stroke eliminate any chance of those laws being broken. And legalising shoplifting will offset the growing cost of living, while saving shops money otherwise spent on security.

It’s true that it takes an effort to learn English spelling. But it’s an effort worth making.

For the purpose of education isn’t only or even mainly cramming pupils’ heads with information but also equipping them with mental structures, a sort of skeleton they’ll be able to flesh out by their own efforts over a lifetime.

This requires training in essential mental skills, such as concentration, perseverance, memory, ability to differentiate and also to detect commonalities. That’s why subjects like Latin, for all their lack of any practical payoff, are essential. I’ve also long advocated chess as a compulsory school subject for it develops logic and an understanding of causality.

Spelling is much simpler than those disciplines, and I’d say learning it is the absolute minimum that any child must be made to acquire. And if that will take some precious school time away from advanced condom studies, then so be it.  

P.S. After Russian missiles hit a maternity ward in southern Ukraine, killing a baby, the European parliament voted to designate Russia as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’. I emphatically disagree. Russia is a perpetrator of terrorism, not a sponsor thereof. May I suggest a ‘terrorist state’ instead?

In 1948, Richard M. Weaver published a hugely influential book Ideas Have Consequences in which he showed the devastating effects of nominalism, rejection of absolute truth, on the West.

The book largely shaped the subsequent development of conservatism in general and American conservatism in particular. The case Weaver builds for his self-explanatory title is irrefutable. Indeed, denying the existence of ultimate, absolute truth eventually seeps through the intellectual cracks down to the level of even smaller, derivative truths that all fall prey to petty relativism.

But things are even worse than that. For in parallel people lose track of the very notion of consequences, including those resulting from simple actions, not just involved ideas.

Societies at large suffer the cerebral trauma of not recognising causality any longer, like our distant ancestors who were unaware of the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. Yet elementary causality is one of the first things we learn.

A child knows that if he touches fire he’ll get burnt, if he sticks his fingers into an electric outlet he’ll get a shock, and if he tells his mother to shut up he’ll get spanked. As he grows up, he never loses the notion of basic causality. But these days most grown-ups find it hard to extrapolate to a higher level.

The most obvious example comes from personal finances. In the past, most of Dickens’s readers lived by the simple maxim of his protagonist Wilkins Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Today we routinely spend more, sometimes much more, than we earn. Thus, over the 20 years leading up to the 2008 crisis, the expenditure of an average American household was three times its income.

People, and Americans certainly aren’t the only ones, have clearly lost the ability to correlate their appetites with the likely consequences of fiscal promiscuity. They live according to the old ad, “Take waiting out of wanting”, but along with waiting they also take out their future.

If people can’t grasp the causal link between incontinent spending and bankruptcy, they have no chance of grasping wider issues, those that affect the whole country. That makes them incompetent voters who create incompetent governments in their own image.

And the latter simply ignore any long-term consequences of their policies – the very nature of modern democracy conditions politicians to have little interest in anything that happens beyond the next election.

Like an irresponsible man who borrows huge amounts to go on holidays or buy luxuries, only to find out years later he has no pension to retire on, our governments think on the scale of the current term in office only.

Take the current shortage of labour in Britain. Our educational system doesn’t produce enough people able to function in a modern economy, and our welfare system encourages inactivity.

The most obvious solution is to import labour by relaxing restrictions on immigration, and many European governments have followed that route. Our TINO government (Tory In Name Only) is planning to do just that, hoping to get our sclerotic economy going in time for the 2024 election.

If they do that, they may well succeed – in the short term. But by pulling the economic blanket all the way up to their chin, they leave society’s social and cultural feet freezing cold.

The idea that the superficially attractive economic measure of mass immigration is likely to prove disastrous in every other respect isn’t something they consider and reject. It simply doesn’t cross their minds.

One could cite hundreds of examples, all pointing to the conclusion that the notion of causality has fallen by the wayside. There it’s piled up on top of the discarded concept of absolute truth, a development that worried Richard Weaver so gravely and justifiably.

In fact, the two are so closely connected that, to all intents and purposes, they are one and the same. Both tragedies are themselves consequences, with civilisational collapse being the cause.

For the best part of two millennia, people imbibed from ambient air the understanding that they’ll be held to account in eternity for everything they do in this life. They’d be rewarded with eternal bliss for everything good they did and punished with the fire of hell for everything bad.

That understanding didn’t necessarily deter even many of those who accepted it as fact. And far from everyone ever believed in the underlying spiritual system. But a robust civilisation shapes even infidels and laggards – they may reject the dominant assumptions consciously, but they can’t escape their osmotic power of persuasion.

Many shoved the underlying faith to the back of their minds, while pushing earthly concerns to the front. But any overarching system affects all its derivatives. Hence even those who rejected the spiritual basis of Western civilisation couldn’t help applying its intellectual principles to even the seemingly unrelated aspects of daily life.

When Western civilisation was ousted by another, modern one, new people moved into the old house, discarded its furniture and moved in their own stuff. Yet some of the old furniture was worth keeping, for life became increasingly uncomfortable without it.

Having thrown out the concept of absolute truth, the newcomers gradually lost the notion of any immutable truth whatsoever – everything became relative, negotiable, up for grabs. And when the understanding of the eternal consequences of one’s actions ended up in the dumping ground, it took with it the derivative notion of all causality.

I mentioned uncontrolled immigration as one toxic result of that intellectual calamity, but there exist uncountable others. We bemoan the effects, but, having lost sight of the causes, can’t do anything about it.

Taking that same issue, why do we have a shortage of labour? Because too many Britons lack the marketable skills essential for functioning in a modern economy.

Any why is that? Because nine million of them are illiterate, and twice as many as near as damn.

How did that come about, in a country that just a few decades ago had one of the world’s most effective educational systems? Because that system was destroyed.

How come? Because enforcing socialist ideology became more important than having an educated population. All pupils, whose parents couldn’t afford to pay the exorbitant cost of private education, were lumped together in the name of equality – to have their heads crammed full of useless ideological waste at the expense of real knowledge.

But why did socialist ideology become so powerful? Because it’s so consonant with the post-Enlightenment world that it has more or less vanquished all its competitors.

What makes it so consonant with modernity?.. And so on, with the chain of causal begets becoming longer and longer.

A wise man will form his view of life by grasping the chain and understanding how its links clasp together. A wise government will be staffed with statesmen capable of not only following the chain but also of acting sagely according to that understanding. A wise civilisation will never forget the truth of consequences.

That kind of wisdom is lost, on every level. That people en masse no longer believe in God is self-evident. That as a result they no longer believe in consequences is less obvious. But no less true.   

FIFA president Gianni Infantino feels the pain of Qatar’s slave workers, prosecuted homosexuals and unloved disabled people.

In his speech on the eve of the World Cup, Mr Infantino ascribed that empathy to his own experience of egregious suffering: “As a child I was bullied because I had red hair…”

Mercifully, as the photo on the left suggests, that pain didn’t persist into Mr Infantino’s adulthood. However, in spite of the shared experience of woe, he felt obliged to vouchsafe to his listeners the helpful information that: “I am not Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled or a migrant worker.” Could have fooled me.

Having clarified his identity, Mr Infantino got to the point. The point is that Western football players and administrators who bellyache about the abuse of human rights in Qatar are being hypocritical.

When I read that, I cracked a smile of recognition. Here was a kindred soul, a man as disgusted as I am at the signalling of woke virtue that has attracted the divided attention of so many ball-kickers and their managers.

Driven by the commercial prods wielded by their agents and PR consultants, footballers parlay their fame based on expertise in one narrow area into a presumed right to pontificate on every faddish theme they fancy. Strikers come out in support of Black Lives Matter. Defenders lecture ministers on racism. Midfielders champion LGBT rights.

As a direct result, their following on social and other media goes through the roof, as do their endorsement opportunities and the size of their contracts. PR chaps and agents are happy, while the ball-kickers joyously launch themselves into photo ops and public engagements, even if that reduces their time on the training pitch.

Qatar, whose selection as a World Cup venue pushed corruption in sport beyond its already cosmic level, provides a useful focus for exertions of remunerative social conscience. It’s a country ruled by Sharia law that takes a dim view of such icons of our modern morality as buggery and equal rights of men and women to have abortions.

Also, since Qatar isn’t known as the hub of the world’s football activity, it had no stadiums in which to hold the event. And neither could the World Cup be held in summer, the traditional season. Summer temperatures in Qatar reach 50C, which would have turned matches into bowling alleys, with the players as ninepins.

The second problem was solved by moving the Cup to colder months. And modern stadiums had to be built in record time, a task for which native Qataris lacked both skills and numbers. The problem was solved by importing migrant workers, whose working conditions made them differ from slave labourers only legally but not substantively.

Many died in the process, with the exact number either uncounted or at least unreported. At a guess, it was somewhere between the 37 that the Qatari government acknowledges and the 30,000 serfs who died constructing Petersburg’s hideous St Isaac’s Cathedral in the mid-nineteenth century.

All things considered, sniping at Qatar’s human rights record from the commanding height of Western probity tinged with wokery is almost unsporting. It’s like using high-calibre machine guns to spray the woods crawling with wild boar.

The best way to express revulsion at Qatar’s inhuman practices would have been to decline participation in the World Cup. The world of sport has boycotted major sporting events, such as Olympics, for similar reasons before. So why not this time?

Conversely, if football federations or their employees have no guts or desire to do that, their only other decent option is to shut up and play footie, while respecting the laws of the host country. No matter how reprehensible these may be.

The England team doesn’t have to go as far as did their ancestors at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when our players greeted Hitler with the Nazi salute. All that’s required now is passive acquiescence, not active endorsement.

No rainbow armbands, for example, and ideally no genuflecting in commemoration of a drug-addled career criminal killed in a scuffle with the police. Yet even this seems to be beyond our ball-kickers who like taking their social conscience all the way to the bank, and from there to Bentley and Lamborghini dealerships.

Long story short, Mr Infantino’s charge of hypocrisy is irrefutable. When reading it, I was about to applaud, but then my palms stopped in mid-air. For he proceeded to illustrate one of my pet ideas, that it’s not enough to say the right things. One must also say them for the right reasons, which Mr Infantino’s aren’t.

“I think,” he went on to say, “for what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.”

Mr Infantino must be commended for being able to think on such a lofty historical scale. He starts from the period when the Celts were the dominant European tribe and sweeps over 6,000 years from there.

By the middle of that timeline, Europeans had committed their full complement of atrocities, which now leaves them another 3,000 years to indulge in penitentiary rites. Yet the previous 3,000 years have invalidated any moral judgement any European can ever make.

Finding something morally wrong with, say, cannibalism or Russian brutality or, more to the point in this context, the throwing of homosexuals off tall buildings and the stoning of adulterers is preempted by Mr Infantino’s take on European history.

He didn’t specify the exact crimes committed during that awful period, but there is no need. The mantra is guaranteed to be the same as that mouthed by all progressive people everywhere: colonialism, homophobia, misogyny, slavery – you’ve seen that hymn sheet enough times not to need me to sing from it.

Well, I’m not about to apologise for the millennia during which the greatest civilisation known to man was created. Instead, I’m proud to be part of it.

But there is something I would like to apologise for: my own spineless hypocrisy. Even though I find the whole World Cup show quite disgusting (and made even more so by Mr Infantino’s remarks), I’ll still be watching many matches, including all involving England.

I wish I had the courage of my former colleague who announced on social media his decision to boycott this World Cup – but I’m honest enough to admit that I don’t. So I’ll leave you here: England vs Iran will be kicking off shortly.

Those Islamic perverts don’t know what they are playing with. They think they can ban the sale of beer at or near World Cup stadiums and get away with it.

We’ll see about that, say England’s fans. Not letting an Englishman drink his regulation ten pints during a football match is like not letting a Muslim face Mecca at prayer. A sacrilegious slap in the face.

But not to worry. England fans, such as those in the photograph, are too smart to be thwarted by a bunch of goatherds. They may have to modify their sacred football ritual, but that only means taking a different route to the same destination. They’ll get there one way or another.

The match day ritual, as practised in the absence of Third World constraints, is as rigid as the Order of the Mass, except the spirits involved aren’t exactly holy. This is how it goes.

Get up early in the morning, say around noon, have a restorative half and a bacon sarnie. Ring all your mates, those you think may be already awake. Agree on the choice of pub for the pre-match warm-up session.

Go to the chosen location some two hours before kick-off. Have four or five pints and perhaps a shot or two. Spill out onto the pavement, one hand on the half-empty glass, the other assisting public urination.

Cast a quick glance around, zip up, wave at the cops looking on with an expression of avuncular indulgence. Scan the area for any stray fans of the other team, in the knowledge that their self-preservation instinct will probably keep them away from your usual haunts.

Walk to the stadium, your arms around your mates, your mouth belting out the team song and some stock chants, such as “We win home and away, we win every fucking way” or any other, provided they each contain at least one F-word.

Don’t be a stickler for tune and key – they don’t matter. What does matter is that you and your mates walk in quadruple file, pushing non-football pedestrians out of the way. As you do, say things like “Oi”, “You what, mate?”, “Watcha lookin’ at?” or “Watch where you goin’, you [install your favourite obscenity]”.

Once in the stadium, start on the sacramental ten pints, spacing them evenly through the 90 minutes of regulation time, plus a 15-minute interval at halftime, plus however many minutes the ref (whom you loudly identify as a wanker throughout) adds for the players rolling on the grass in faked agony to get an opponent sent off.

Some five minutes before the final whistle join your mates in pointing at the opposition fans with your arm outstretched in the manner of the Nazi salute, but with the index finger stuck out. Start edging towards the exit to make sure you have the choice of the best battlefield for the subsequent hostilities.

Once you and your mates have closed ranks and vomited excess weight on the ground to make yourselves more mobile, you are ready to engage the opposition fans as they come out.

However, the clash may be delayed by mutual consent, as you agree to proceed to another location where there’s less danger of the ‘filth’ breaking up the fisticuffs. One way or the other, have a nice punch up, leaving blood, teeth and residual vomit on the ground.

Retreat to a pub or, better still, an Indian restaurant. Have another couple of pints and a vindaloo, call the waiter a ‘Paki’, break a plate or two, pay your bill and try to get out before the ‘filth’ arrive. If you are still mobile, that is.

Admittedly, your Qatari hosts (remember to refer to them as either ‘Muzzies’ or ‘towelheads’) have maliciously disrupted your standard routine with their Sharia extremism. But they don’t know what they are in for.

Yes, you’ll have to introduce some changes. Specifically, you’ll now have to tank up fully before the match and top up after it, while staying dry (except inside your trousers) in between.

However, that means you’ll have a score to settle with the locals before the match, and, after a dozen pints or so, you’ll be in the right condition to do so. If the locals hide in coffee houses along your route to the stadium, you can draw them out by tossing outside chairs through the windows.

This knowing that you may be outnumbered in the subsequent mêlée. But the English were also outnumbered in the battles of Crécy and Agincourt, which didn’t prevent their victory. You may not have heard of those clashes, but the same indomitable spirit lives on in your breast.

There the English relied on the longbow, a weapon that caught the French unawares. In your turn, you’ll be able to flummox those coffee drinkers by throwing punches with a clenched fist, a technique rare in the Arab world.

Win, lose or draw, you can wipe your bloodied nose and proceed to the stadium. Once there, start chanting “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be Krauts”, and – since England’s first opponent is Muslim Iran – “Get your face out for the lads” or “You’re Shiite and you know it”. Don’t forget “Ref’s a wanker”, treat it as a refrain after each new verse.

Then walk back beyond the red line separating the dry area from the boozy one. You may be shedding bodies along the way, lost to drink or scuffles with the locals and the towelheaded filth. But nothing will diminish your pride, patriotism and capacity for beer, even at a tenner a pint.

Go, Ingerland!

The text of Article 5 of the Nato Charter is unequivocal: “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 punished with military force as deemed necessary.

That means that three days ago, when two Russian Kh-101 cruise missiles hit the Polish village of Przewodów, killing two, it wasn’t just Poland that was attacked. The other 29 Nato members, including the US, Britain, France and Germany, were on the receiving end too.

Such was the crime, but the punishment is slow in coming. So slow, in fact, that one gets a distinct impression it isn’t coming at all.

For, rather than choosing an appropriate retaliation, Nato leaders banged their heads together trying to figure out the most credible way “not to provoke Putin”, thereby “escalating” the conflict. A little legerdemain, a couple of aces dealt to themselves from the bottom of the pack, and a solution was found.

They decided to tell the world that there had been one missile, not two. And even that missile was Ukrainian, not Russian. Actually, it was an S-300 AA rocket Ukrainians had fired at an incoming Russian missile, but missed.

Joe Biden, speaking with his customary senile vagueness, played along. A Kh-101 missile, he told a credulous world, didn’t have a “trajectory” to hit Przewodów. The world was so credulous that it didn’t ask the natural question: “How come then that those same missiles have the trajectory to hit targets in the west of Ukraine, just a couple of miles east of Przewodów?”

Yet even if that question had been asked, Nato leaders could have been trusted to sweep it under the carpet. Anything less could have ‘provoked’ Putin into an ‘escalation’.

Actually, it’s not just that trajectory thing. You see, when an S-300 rocket misses its aerial target, it self-destructs and breaks down into fragments, none of which can produce a crater the size of the one visible in Przewodów.

Yes, it’s possible, if unlikely, that the self-destruct mechanism of the S-300 failed. That does happen occasionally, but usually when the rocket is used to do a ground-to-ground job, something it isn’t designed to do but, in extreme circumstances, does.

However, there are no Russian troops within hundreds of miles of the Polish border. Hence there were no targets for such misused Ukrainian rockets to hit – unless some bright Nato spark thinks the Ukrainians aimed at Przewodów specifically. Moreover, no S-300 systems were sited in that part of the Ukraine.

Then of course the S-300 is radically different from a Kh-101 in design, size, type of engine. Even a rank amateur, never mind the Nato experts supposedly investigating the incident, ought to be able to tell the remnants of one from the other.

In any case, no such incidentals are allowed to interfere with the ingenuous Nato narrative. Putin wasn’t ‘provoked’, the conflict didn’t ‘escalate’. The show is over, the audience goes home happy.

Except for one minor detail. That obstreperous, not to say provoking and escalating, Zelensky is refusing to play along. He keeps insisting that there were two Kh-101 missiles, not one wayward S-300, and they were fired by the Russians.

Moreover, that spoilsport has the gall to complain that no Ukrainian experts were given access to the site. We are certain the missiles were Russian, Zelensky maintains. But if you think we are wrong, let our people join yours in examining the site.

Now that really gets the biscuit. Nato has accepted magnanimously that the Ukraine isn’t to blame for that wayward S-300. After all, no missiles would have been launched by anyone in the region had the Russians not invaded the Ukraine.

So no one is planning to drag Zelensky before the Hague tribunal, and neither is he asked to compensate the families of the deceased. So what’s his problem?

The FT has quoted an anonymous diplomat from one of the Nato countries as saying, “This is becoming silly. The Ukrainians are undermining our trust. No one is accusing them of anything, and yet they are lying brazenly. That’s more destructive than that missile.”

Stoutly put. Some Nato countries are clearly running out of patience with Zelensky, the leader of a Western-leaning country subjected to the most brutal attack seen in Europe since 1945. Instead of rolling over and playing dead, the Ukrainians had the audacity to fight back, thereby conceivably provoking Putin into an escalation.

So fine, Nato is prepared to arm the Ukraine, up to a point. The country is like a bull in the ring: it’s allowed to fight, but it’s not allowed to win. Nato is prepared to supply it sufficiently for the former, but not for the latter. Otherwise Putin might feel provoked into unleashing a nuclear Armageddon.

I shan’t comment on the unfathomable rudeness of that comment, nor its craven cowardice. Instead I’ll propose a much more likely version of the incident.

Provocation is Putin’s stock in trade. That’s what KGB officers are trained to do, and not only Putin himself but some 80 per cent of his government cut their teeth in that organisation, the most diabolical the world has ever known.

If you look at the whole history of Putin’s tenure, he has always probed, dipping his toe in the water to see how far he could go. That happened in Chechnya, where he sought accommodation when faced with staunch resistance. It happened in Georgia, twice.

It also happened in the Crimea, where he tested the West’s response to that blatant land grab. Having been hit with nothing heavier than token sanctions and expressions of deep concern, he felt emboldened to launch a full-scale offensive on the Ukraine.

That, he kept saying, wasn’t an attack on the Ukraine. It was a preemptive strike against Nato, which is committed to conquering and dismembering Mother Russia. But not on Vlad’s watch.

Now that his war machine is falling apart in the face of the Ukraine’s heroic fightback, he is talking cease-fire, while looking for easier marks elsewhere.

Hitting a Polish village with missiles bears every hallmark of a little test. Nato bigwigs keep talking about Article 5, but do they have the guts to act on it? Or will they come up with a Catch 22, some cowardly excuse not to act?

If they do, perhaps they’ll respond in the same way to another full-scale attack, say on Estonia or Latvia. And tomorrow, the world.

If that indeed was the test, then Nato failed it. I realise I may be wrong in this assumption, as Zelensky may be wrong in insisting that the missiles involved were Russian. But, considering Nato’s refusal to let Ukrainians examine the fragments of the rocket, the scenario I propose looks more plausible.

P.S. The Chancellor’s budget is a poignant and eloquent obituary for the Conservative Party. RIP.

Call it confirmation bias if you must, but last night’s recital of the Takács Quartet at Wigmore Hall vindicated many of my cherished beliefs.

I commiserated the other day with the plight of our state-funded orchestras that are obligated to hire black musicians on pain of losing their state funding. I suggested that classical isn’t the first harbour for which talented black musicians sail, nor even second or third. Hence that mandated recruitment drive is in for a let-down.

Scanning the 500-strong audience before the first note was played, I espied just one black face. Yet upon closer examination even that turned out to belong to an usher.

Now, extremely talented musicians are like extremely tall trees. They typically grow not in a desert but in a large forest of smaller trees.

By the same token, talented professional musicians emerge out of a much larger group of less talented ones. It wasn’t by accident that, from Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, Vienna could boast so much musical genius within a relatively short period. This would have been impossible without the profusion of Picchinis, Salieris, Hummels, Clementis, Eyblers, Süsmayrs and Stamitzes lying thick on Vienna’s ground at the same time.

In their turn, the less gifted professional musicians stand out among amateurs. And amateurs come out of a vast pool of music lovers, those who don’t mind spending their time and money on string quartet recitals at Wigmore Hall.

If we walk up the same path in the opposite direction, the score of 500-0 against blacks in the audience emphasised the sheer impossibility of filling racial quotas at orchestras without sacrificing the quality of what orchestras are supposed to do.

Then there was another telling demographic. Without asking my fellow concert-goers for their ID, I estimated their average age at about 70. There were some young people in attendance, but they were outnumbered by Zimmer frames, walking sticks and hearing aids. The hair of the audience featured 50 shades of grey.

I didn’t need to consult actuarial tables to wonder who’ll be attending string quartet recitals at Wigmore Hall 20 years from now, indeed whether there will remain any such events to attend. Concert-going is, inter alia, a habit cultivated over a lifetime. Those in the audience had obviously cultivated it, but they hadn’t passed the urge on to the next generation.  

Then there was the performance itself. The Takács Quartet is one of the best ones around, and they didn’t disappoint. With their playing, that is.

Yet it took a feat of concentration for Penelope and me to start listening to the music – so irate we were about what had preceded it. As is becoming increasingly widespread, first violin Edward Dusinberre opened the recital by rapping with the audience.

At first he plugged his book, a signed copy of which we were encouraged to buy in the foyer. Then he primed us by saying a few vulgar and condescending words about the music to be played.

None of those words had anything to do with the actual pieces, how they were put together, what unusual harmonies, dynamic shifts or tempi made them interesting. Such recondite stuff must have been deemed to be beyond our ability to grasp.

Instead Mr Dusinberre explained that one composer wrote his quartet because he was happy to return home after a long stay abroad, another was inspired by the sadness of having to leave home and go abroad, and yet another put pen to scoresheet because he loved his Mum and felt guilty about neglecting her.

No one genuinely believing that such are the sources of artistic inspiration will be capable of playing to a high standard. Since Mr Dusinberre manifestly has that ability, he had to know that what he was saying was vulgar bilge pitched down to the presumed level of his audience.

If his presumption was correct, then the future of live classical performance is indeed bleak. One thing I can say for sure is that Penelope and I both whispered “Just play the music” in unison, except that I modified the noun with an adjective of a desemanticised sexual origin.

All told, that one evening summed up some of the core problems of modernity. But since I have no space to tell all, I’ll concentrate on a single theme with but a few variations.

The theme is democracy that has expanded out of its natural political domain into spheres that ought to have been outside its reach. That was predictable.

Democracy is a political statement of equality, one of the founding desiderata of modernity. It stands to reason that, if it’s a self-evident truth that all men are created equal (to quote one of my least favourite documents), they are all equally capable of choosing their governments.

I consider this counterintuitive assumption to be rather divorced from observable reality, and in fact no commercial concern I’ve ever seen determines its policy by a show of hands. But hey, whatever works.

If democracy works better than other techniques of choosing political leaders, fine. What matters isn’t method of government but the kind of society it brings forth.

We all know the key attributes of government we desire: justice, wisdom, courage and prudence are my requirements. If we are satisfied (which I am not) that unrestrained democracy meets our requirements, then we are all happy. If we aren’t, perhaps we ought to consider possible changes – it’s all, or rather should be, sheer pragmatism.

Except it’s not, is it? Democracy isn’t seen as simply a method of government, one of many possibilities. Two-odd centuries of unremitting propaganda has imbued it with a high moral, borderline religious, content.

When the Holy Trinity was declared invalid and nonexistent, another trinity took its place, in which égalité was the central element. Hence democracy, its political expression, couldn’t stay within the narrow confines of its remit. It had to expand into all sorts of other areas, and if they were at first reluctant to accommodate democracy, then they had to be forced.

Democracy of politics thus also became democracy of taste, democracy of thought, democracy of creeds – all this without completely shedding its political skin. That way everything of value became politicised, with a show of hands deciding the choice between good and bad, virtuous and sinful, clever and stupid.

Some of those hands on show clutch wads of banknotes or, these days, packs of credit cards. Commercial consumerism acts in matters of mind and taste the way voting does in democratic politics.

In the arts, it decides who and what will succeed. In thought, what is intelligent and why. In morality, what is virtuous or sinful. In creeds… well, as far as democracy is concerned, it’s best not to believe in anything other than democracy.

All this is camouflaged with the smock of another mendacious shibboleth of democracy – meritocracy, a sort of aristocracy of achievement that has replaced the aristocracy of birth as the dominant social, commercial and political dynamic.

Yet the notion of meritocracy depends on what is widely believed to be meritorious. When that issue is also decided by a show of hands, nothing truly meritorious emerges. Meretricious is what we get.

For any society committed to equality will associate merit with commercial success, a sort of finish line some reach faster than others even though they all start from the same blocks. In effect, meritocracy will become plutocracy, with power measurable in money and vice versa. That stands to reason.

As has been known since the time of Heraclitus, things don’t stand still. Thus democratic majority in large countries is but an icon, not the real wielder of power and authority. The malleable mass of humanity inevitably becomes putty in the hands of expert manipulators, assorted éminences grises spinning the potter’s wheel.

In the West, where the rule of law hasn’t quite become a moot point yet, they’ve had to proceed slowly, watching their step along the way. But they’ve gradually succeeded in putting democracy to work as their instrument of power.

‘Democracy’ itself is a sledgehammer they can bring down on a recalcitrant head, but it’s not the only one. ‘Racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘misogyny’ and so on all pack a mean punch. And, in arts, education and thought, those greyish eminencies whip out the mallet of ‘elitism’.

Swing that mallet, and – skipping a few incremental steps – genuine artists, such as the Takács Quartet, gradually fade away into extinction. And even before they do, they have to patronise their audience by talking rubbish about the great works they are about to perform.

Ugliness, stupidity and vulgarity are democratic. Beauty, sagacity and subtlety are elitist. And when democratic clashes with elitist, you know who’s going to win in our Panglossian world.

Take my advice, chaps: don’t go to concerts. You’ll end up with a head full of subversive thoughts that can land you in trouble if you aren’t careful.

Back in the 1950s, some southern senator, Strom Thurmond if memory serves, said at a party that Eisenhower was a communist (a popular charge at the time). He was immediately corrected by a colleague, who objected that Ike was an anti-communist.

“I don’t care what kind of communist he is,” said the indomitable senator, thereby unwittingly uttering an exemplar of deep philosophical thought.

I remembered that episode a few hours ago when watching the public response to Trump’s announcement of his candidature in the 2024 presidential elections. His speech contained the usual anaphoric litany of making America safe again, rich again, beautiful again and consequently great again (I don’t remember the exact words except the last ones).

The announcement was met with predictable revulsion by the Democrats and equally predictable exultation by the Republicans, those of the MAGA variety. The latter are tangentially closer to me than the former, at least in some respects.

Hence, if I wished to vote in US elections (I still have a dusty, long overdue American passport in the back of my sock drawer), I’d plump for Trump rather than any Democratic candidate. Such are the demands of our binary world: one or the other, black or white, no nuances need apply.

That’s how the game is set up and one must either sit it out or play it by the established rules. This pragmatic consideration, however, doesn’t alleviate my ennui whenever the subject of political tug-of-war comes up. “A plague on both your houses,” I think, while trying to keep my yawning jaw in joint.

And then I recall Strom Thurmond’s unwitting maxim, how it applies to today’s situation. Both the Democratic socialists and the Trumpist anti-socialists believe that the seminal problems of modern life have a political solution. Like Orwell’s animals, they reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialist, with ample justification. Yet socialism is, to use Marxist terminology, only a superstructure erected on the base of statism, a purely modern, post-Enlightenment phenomenon of endowing the state with omnipotent power.

If you divest socialism of its mendacious ‘share, care, be aware’ cant lifted from Christianity and then ripped off its roots, perverted and vulgarised, then that’s all it is: statism run riot.

The state assumes the function of a family, reducing the real one to a quaint irrelevance. It becomes a provider to millions, thereby performing the role of a father, with us as potentially wayward children. It looks after our health. It educates our children. It decides on the size of our allowance, the money we are allowed to keep after taxes. It teaches us what to say and even what to think, punishing us if we go wrong and rewarding us for obedience.

It does all those wonderful things for us – but acquiring in return the licence to do awful things to us. In both parts it’s dramatically different from the traditional state of Western polity, which did little for the people, but then neither did it possess the power to do much to them.

The transition from Western to modern state was effected by a frenzied assault on the very concept of man that was unique to Christendom. That concept was reflected in the explicit or implicit charter of the dominant Western institutions: the church and the state.

Western Man was a creature combining a wholehearted commitment to individual autonomy with a communal spirit springing from the defining concept of Christianity: love.

Reflecting that understanding, the ecclesiastical structure combined two complementary principles: subsidiarity and solidarity. Parishes all over the world enjoyed a great deal of autonomy (subsidiarity) while remaining in communion with all other parishes and submitting to the doctrinal authority of the papacy (solidarity).

The state functioned according to the same understanding. Localism trumped centralism, with local government being the only kind people knew, and local mores the only ones they saw as inviolable (subsidiarity). What brought them together was a shared faith and, usually but far from always, a common language. They only came together in a large group when uniting under the banners of the central state against a common enemy (solidarity).

Every aspect of that arrangement was made possible by the ultimate humility of faith, a realisation that, though man wasn’t nothing, it was God, loving and loved, who was everything. Such was the background against which man judged and measured himself, defined his worth, understood his essence.

The Enlightenment then barged in and turned things upside down. The humility of faith in a supreme being was replaced by the arrogance of belief in man as the be all and end all of existence. If before people knew they were all equal before God, now they were taught they were equal before one another.

That understanding destroyed both subsidiarity and solidarity. Local, parochial government couldn’t be sustained in a country where everyone was presumed to be created self-evidently equal, in the puzzling words of the founding document of political modernity. Equal people might have been, but only under a new entity: the political state, supposedly deriving its power from what Locke disingenuously called ‘consent of the governed’.

That consent was presumed, not actually given. And it was supposed to be given for an eternity: no legal means of revoking it were ever envisaged.

People, in steadily decreasing proportions, would vote for one of two (or sometimes three or four) candidates every few years. The winning candidate, often supported by no more than a third of the population, would then take that vote as a mandate to do anything he wished for the duration of his tenure – with practically no accountability to the people at large until the next election.

Such is the nature of modern politics, such are its systemic problems. The systemic problems may manifest themselves in more or less virulent symptoms. Various politicians promise to alleviate this or that symptom, but without ever diagnosing the underlying disease, much less trying to treat it.

People, arrogantly certain that they are equal to one another in the crude post-Enlightenment sense, look hopefully up to the candidates on offer, hoping their chosen one will relieve the more bothersome symptoms. And he may do just that – until his successor removes the palliative medicine to usher the pain back in.

Both Republicans and Democrats, worshippers of Trump, Biden or any other putative knight in shining armour, believe that their man will ride in on his steed and save the day, like St James Matamoros saving Castilians from the Moors in the Battle of Clavijo.

He won’t, not in the long run. I appreciate that this is how the game is played, but only children take games seriously. This particular one is especially infantile, with the players fiddling with toys while society burns.

No, not that, and I know what you are thinking. The C-word I have in mind is both longer and more pernicious.

It’s ‘Council’, awful just about every time it’s capitalised. I’m sure you can think of an exception or two, but every time I come across the word, I assume I’m looking at an organisation wholeheartedly committed to subverting everything I hold dear.

The UN Security Council, The Council on Foreign Relations, any Council of Ministers, The Equality Council UK, any municipal Council – you name it, it’s committed to reducing the West to a purely geographical concept with no civilisational content whatsoever.

Some 20 years ago I co-owned a magazine funded by the British Arts Council (BAC). When the funding came in, we thought we were in clover. Instead we landed in a considerably more malodorous substance.

To continue to qualify for the funding, we had to appoint a leftist poet as editor who then spiked every article arguing a conservative case. That created unbearable tensions and the publication folded within a few months.

Currently in the news is BAC’s younger sibling, ACE (Arts Council England). Only 28 years old, ACE has brought youthful vigour to its assault on the ‘A’ initial in its nomenclature.

Its published strategy should terrify any sensible person. “By 2030,” said ACE, “we will be investing in organisations and people that differ in many cases from those that we support today.”

They were as good as their word. For starters, they withdrew all funding from English National Opera, London’s second opera house, and the Donmar Warehouse, a lovely and affordable small theatre where I’ve seen some splendid productions.

Those theatres failed to meet the criteria ACE specified as essential to their patronage. Artistic excellence is one of them, but way down the list.

Taking precedence are “inclusivity and relevance” (making sure that “England’s diversity is fully reflected”), “dynamism” (being infantile enough to appeal to aesthetically disadvantaged children) and “environmental responsibility” (self-explanatory).

To reflect England’s diversity fully, as opposed to partially or even predominantly, ACE demands that an institution be multi-culti in its staff, audience and repertoire. No perceived deviation is tolerated, be it in the direction of excessive whiteness or elitism (dread word).

The Britten Sinfonia, an acclaimed orchestra of long standing, failed to meet that criterion and as a result lost its meagre £406,000 annual grant. Actually, purveyors of classical, which is to say real, music find themselves on a losing wicket almost by definition.

This kind of music was created for few by fewer. That’s why it can’t really be wholly supported by box office receipts, not without losing sight of its high purpose. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and so forth all depended on patronage, as did most great 20^th century musicians, certainly in the early stages of their careers.

Patrons, be it private individuals, charities or governments, pay their money and they call their tune, at least to some extent. By choosing the tune and those who play it, they affect public taste and the whole tenor of the musical scene.

Acting in that capacity way back then were aristocratic patrons, who themselves played musical instruments and appreciated those who played them infinitely better. Even then geniuses like Mozart bewailed the pig-headed obtuseness of assorted archbishops, princes and electors.

Yet I wonder what the protagonist of the disgusting play (and film) Amadeus would think of today’s patrons, such as ACE, should he come back to life. My bet is he’d utter one of his favourite scatological obscenities and insist on being taken back, even if that meant being bossed by the Salzburg archbishop Colloredo.

Divesting classical music of elitism (dread word) means reducing it to popular entertainment with pseud pretensions. And seeking predominantly multi-culti staffs presents another problem.

Granted, there are enough reasonably competent Asian musicians floating about to staff every orchestra in the world, with thousands left over for the marching bands and dance-hall combos. But that’s not good enough, is it?

Orchestras can’t fob off their benefactors by hiring mostly Chinese and Korean players, although that would be perceived as a step in the right direction. Yet no organisation is deemed diverse enough without a heavy black presence.

Therein lies a problem. For historical, social and cultural reasons that I shan’t go into, musically talented blacks tend to gravitate to genres other than classical. Such as jazz, which they’ve blessed with countless performers of genius, such as Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker – and I could keep you for hours just listing them.

On the other hand, in my decades of regular concert-going I recall only once having heard a black soloist, and even he was half-Hungarian. Orchestra musicians have to meet less stringent standards, but even so – putting diversity before artistic excellence can only come at a heavy cost to the latter.

ACE vindicates this statement, one I wouldn’t be able to make in any publication other than this one. Having removed its paltry grant for the Britten Sinfonia, ACE then pumped almost five times as much into the Chineke! Orchestra.

To its credit, that setup eschews lofty claims to offering deep musical insights. It’s proud to bill itself as Europe’s first orchestra where most players are black or otherwise ethnically diverse. The word Chineke, explains the group’s brochure, derives from the Igbo word meaning ‘God’.

This must be the deity ACE worships. In the past three years the orchestra’s funding has gone from zero to £2.1 million – this though by all accounts the Chineke! is so beset by internal squabbling that it’s unlikely to survive anyway.

How do those black musicians feel, knowing they just may owe their jobs not to their musicianship but to their race? Some of them may be gifted musicians, but even they may be beset by gnawing suspicions.

They, along with all other cultured people, know that music exists in the ‘ultra’ sphere soaring above petty quotidian concerns, especially politics. Any attempt to pull it down to our infested earth will land music in the putrid quagmire, sucking it into mediocrity.

But then I did tell you that any capitalised Council is out to achieve that very aim – at best. At worst, they all seek to expunge the last vestiges of what used to be history’s greatest civilisation.

We’ve come a long way since the cave life of Victorian obscurantism, so long live progress.

I don’t have enough black paint handy to draw a realistic picture of a 19^th century Britain ruled by an elite lording it over the downtrodden. Workhouses, penury, little urchins toiling as either coal miners or pickpockets and exploited by slumlords in either case.

Oh well, I know I can’t compete with Dickens. I have neither his talent nor his flaming social conscience. But I do have something he didn’t have: the benefit of hindsight and a few telling statistics, specifically in the area of education.

One such datum says that in 1900 Britain could boast a literacy rate of 97.2 per cent. And please remember that in that dark age education was available only to the chosen few. Or so says received wisdom. Oppressed children had to leave school early to make a head start in their careers as coal miners or pickpockets.

Two world wars later progress dawned on Britain. Schools became comprehensive and, until age 16, compulsory. And what do you know, the current literacy level is 87 per cent – exactly 10 per cent lower than in the days of wholesale oppression and elitism.

This is to say that nine million Britons, most, one suspects, young beneficiaries of our comprehensive and compulsory education, are functionally illiterate. (A note to my French friends: don’t feel smug about this. The illiteracy rate in France is even higher.)

This is the kind of tunnel at the end of which no light will shine in any foreseeable future. For 19 per cent of English children between five and eight have not a single book at home. When pressed, their parents explain that books are too expensive, and I can testify from my own woeful experience that they are right.

However, not all books are necessarily bought. Some come down from one generation to the next. Some others are picked up at free public libraries. The first one opened in 1857, also in the oppressive reign of Queen Victoria. Since then they spread like mushrooms after an August rain – but no longer.

In fact, over the past 10 years a fifth of them have closed, which raises the chicken and egg question. Do half of our children hardly ever read outside school because libraries are closing or are they closing because people ignore them?

You don’t need me to tell you that this situation betokens a cultural catastrophe. But that’s not the only kind.

A child growing up in a low literacy area has a life expectancy some 26 years lower than one growing up in, say, a university town. And the life of an illiterate child will be not only shorter but also poorer.

Back in 1900 Britain was heavily industrialised, and industry didn’t run on mainframe computers, automated assembly lines and microprocessors. Hence there was much demand for the kind of labour that didn’t need high levels of literacy.

By contrast, the employment prospects of an illiterate youngster are bleak in today’s post-industrial economy. Whatever jobs are available can’t match the level of handouts generously offered by HM Exchequer as a direct result of widespread illiteracy, at a cost of £37 billion a year.

Some will be tempted to put this calamity down to our multicultural society proudly enforcing the kind of ethnic diversity that didn’t exist in Victorian times. Yet most ethnic groups show a great improvement in school performance. There are only two exceptions: boys of black Caribbean and white working-class backgrounds.

When we talk about education these days, we don’t mean proficiency in languages, living and dead, an easy command of involved philosophical and theological concepts or knowledge of differential calculus. At issue here is the ability to read elementary English texts and add up simple numbers.

Failure to educate children to even such a basic standard has all sorts of deadly consequences, some of which go beyond life expectancy and economic success. For rampant illiteracy leads to democracy of universal suffrage being severely compromised or even downright inoperative.

From Plato and Aristotle onwards, serious thinkers on such matters have been pointing out that an enlightened electorate is a sine qua non of successful democratic governance. That’s why in the past an inability to read and write disqualified people from voting in many Western democracies (such as several American states in my youth). No longer.

How can an illiterate person choose among numerous campaign promises on offer? I don’t know, you tell me. Lee, what’s wrong with a high inflation rate? Or with high taxation, Gavin? Should the House of Lords become an elected chamber, Trish? Oh well, hard luck – for all of us.

Nor is it just black and working-class boys. University-educated grown-ups who write about the plight of the downtrodden masses in our broadsheets do so with the kind of solecisms that wouldn’t have let them within swearing distance of Victorian papers.

In those days basic literacy was an insufficient requirement for journalists, partly because there was nothing special about that accomplishment in a country where practically everyone could read and write. Elegance of style, precision of metaphor, depth of analysis, sterling erudition all had to figure on a columnist’s CV.

These days I can hardly read an article, especially by a young hack, that doesn’t make me cringe at every other paragraph. Many locutions are as grating as the sound of two pieces of glass rubbed together.

I often cite examples of especially awful usages, with one or another attracting my jaundiced attention at different times. My current bugbear is the structure ‘to be sat’, as in “Last night I was sat next to an MP at dinner”.

Any Victorian writer would have known to shun the passive voice unless it was unavoidable. English is a dynamic language propelled by strong, active verbs (this sentence is an example of an unavoidable passive construction). So what’s wrong with ‘I sat’, ‘I was sitting’ or, ‘I was seated?’ Out of which fetid rubbish bin do they pull ‘I was sat’ and, increasingly, ‘I was stood’?

This is no trivial matter for it goes beyond whole herds of hacks suffering from a bad case of tin ear. This aesthetic and educational problem springs from ideologised contempt for aesthetics and education – ugly is the new beautiful for being easily accessible to all classes, ages and races.

Hence a broadsheet columnist writing “I was sat” is as virulent a symptom of cultural malaise as is a working-class teenager who can’t read a primer. They sit (are sat?) on different tiers of the pyramid, but the whole structure is sinking deeper and deeper into the ground.

So let’s end on my lapidary phrase: that’s progress for you.