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Every day provides new evidence for the statement in the title, but none so irrefutable as Olivia Petter’s article in The Times.

Hers is a veritable manifesto of today’s youth, the generation called Yips (‘Young Illiberal Progressives’). Each of the three words in that nomenclature is, according to Olivia, a badge of pride, to be shoved into the wrinkled faces of old fogeys.

Actually, the ‘I’ initial in that acronym should more appropriately stand for ‘Idiotic’. Olivia is a living argument in favour of this small adjustment, for she doesn’t even realise that, contrary to her intended braggadocio, she actually condemns the Yips with every word.

The idea of a generational conflict is nothing new. Back in 1862 Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Sons, perhaps the most famous novel on that subject. The eponymous sons were the proto-revolutionary nihilists (Turgenev’s coinage), out to destroy the world of their elders.

Considering the nightmare created by the ‘sons’ 55 years later, the novel was nothing short of prophetic. And young Olivia proves that the prophecy transcended not only its time but also its geography.

Her generation, she boasts, is educated by “TikTok, Instagram and Twitter”, which institutions of high learning give a voice to “marginalised communities”. She could have added that such communities have a dominant share of the voice. That’s hardly surprising: research shows that Yips are “more censorious than their elders”.

That, according to Olivia, “is surely a good thing. My 15-year-old sister, Juliet, lives in northern California and recently lectured my British baby boomer father about why it’s offensive to deadname a transgender person (that is when you refer to a trans person by the name they used prior to transitioning).

“She also regularly talks to him about women’s rights, racism and the environment. Whenever I hear Juliet pontificate on an issue, I’m in awe. No, she isn’t tolerant of transphobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia or climate change denial. And thank goodness for that – because it shows my dad that he shouldn’t be either.”

Now, if a 15-year-old tried to lecture me in that manner, I’d tell her to shut up, have a quick Number One, go to bed and forget that hare-brained rubbish by morning — or else. Such a dictatorial response wouldn’t constitute denial of free thought, for the two sisters haven’t had a single thought, free or otherwise, in their whole lives.

They wouldn’t know a thought if it came up behind them and bit them on their shapely rumps (I’m inferring the shapeliness of Olivia’s rump from her photograph. In fact, her rump may actually be her face, hard to tell.)

These people aren’t sapient human beings. They are jukeboxes with a full complement of buttons, each corresponding to a subversive fad. Push one, and out comes transphobia, and how it’s simply wonderful and progressive to castrate prepubescent children. Push another, and you’ll hear a monotonous drone about ‘our planet’ being destroyed by aerosol sprays.

One can argue with people, but not with jukeboxes. For there are no other tunes linked to the same button. No matter how many times you push it, you’ll get the same set of disembodied slogans and shibboleths.

If you pretended, for old times’ sake, that you are actually talking to a person and tried to argue against a slogan by pretending it’s actually a thought, you’d be howled down. For, though Olivia and her ilk don’t really know what a thought is, they instinctively hate it when they hear it.

So next time you tried to push that same button you’d be zapped with an electric charge. Just like the nihilists in Fathers and Sons and the eponymous Possessed in Dostoevsky’s novel, this lot aren’t just brainless but fascistic – and proud of it.

“I’m not interested in tolerating the views of others,” declares Olivia, superfluously. “Nor do I think I should be. Rather, I believe it’s the older generation that needs to become more tolerant of us.

“We are the ones growing up in the modern world, don’t we have a greater sense of the issues that define it? It’s not about obstructing freedom of speech, it’s about becoming a more progressive society. Anyone more concerned by the former than the latter is the one that needs to become more tolerant.”

Remember Cabaret with its mighty chorus of “Tomorrow belongs to me”? This is another reference to the history of evil raising its young head above the parapet of civilisation. Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and similar regimes show what happens when youngsters, with hormones flooding what passes for their brains, get the power to impose their gonadic urges on society.

Does Olivia realise she marches in step with other young people who didn’t tolerate the views of others either, all those Red Guards, Black Shirts, stormtroopers, hongweibings, Barbudos, Khmer Rouge? No, she probably doesn’t. She’s too dumb.

Paedocracy is an unfailing sign of incipient fascism (I’m using the term broadly). That’s why it’s actively promoted by evil grown-ups seeking power.

“Youth is the barometer of a nation,” explained Trotsky, who knew a thing or two about destroying civilisations. Alas, these days it’s more than just that. It’s also the spokesman of a nation, perhaps even its helmsman.

And the worst thing is that grown-ups play along. They listen to the impetuous youngsters, nod sympathetically and even publish their gibberish in formerly respectable papers like The Times.

On second thoughts, perhaps they aren’t really grown-ups in any other than the chronological sense. For history shows that the dominant group can impose its ethos on the whole society.

This explains the growing infantilisation of Britain (and the West in general), with childish babble passing for speech, hysterics for feelings, sloganeering for thought – and Olivia Petter for a journalist.

Priests used to be suspended for perverting the Gospel. In today’s Ireland they are suspended for preaching it.

That’s exactly what happened to Fr Sean Sheehy, of St Mary’s Church in Listowel, County Kerry.

He could have preached multiculturalism, the catastrophe of global warming or the delights of MeToo and BLM. Instead he had the audacity to use his homily as a platform for denouncing sin.

One would think that doing so is part of the priestly remit, and I’m sure Fr Sean’s parishioners would agree with this general statement. The problem arises in the movement from the general to the particular.

For Fr Sean displays a singular lack of imagination in defining sin the way it has always been defined, both in Scripture and in Catholic doctrine. His parishioners, however, have moved way beyond such antiquarian rubbish. They, unlike Fr Sean, know that yesterday’s sins are today’s virtues and tomorrow’s diktats.

Thus, when Fr Sean vouchsafed to them the traditional understanding of sin, they were aghast. At least 30 of them stormed out in a huff, presumably to treat their wounded sensibilities with a liberal injection of Guinness (sorry about the ethnic stereotype — make it celery juice).

One of the traumatised souls complained on social media: “’That hateful man does not represent Listowel and the people of Listowel.”

That no doubt is true. Fr Sean’s job is to represent God, not the people of Listowel. And looking at his homily, I can’t for the life of me see where he was in default of that task.

This is what he said: “You rarely hear about sin but it’s rampant.

“And we see it, for example, in the legislation of our governments. We see it in the promotion of abortion. We see it in the example of this lunatic approach of transgenderism.

“We see it, for example, in the promotion of sex between two men and two women. That is sinful. That is mortal sin.”

He also added that free distribution of condoms and other contraceptives were “promoting promiscuity.” Both common sense and empirical evidence support that statement, but it’s not about that, is it?

Now, I don’t know how this incident was covered in the left-wing press, but even our most conservative paper, The Mail, has described the homily as a “bizarre rant”. And Bishop Kerry Browne publicly apologised for Fr Sean’s comments as he took him off the roster.

Is the bishop Catholic? One wonders. No such doubts about Fr Sean: he could have supported every word he uttered with scriptural references, with no dissenting views expressed anywhere in either Testament.

On the subject of homosexuality being a mortal sin, he could have quoted Genesis 19: 4-8,  Matthew 10: 14-15, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Corinthians 6: 9-10,  Romans 1:26 – and I am only scratching the surface.

Now God was too backward to acknowledge either the plethora of the 72 sexes we’ve since identified or free transition between them as an essential right. However, both Testaments preemptively if implicitly disavow 70 of those sexes.

Thus Genesis 5: 2: “Male and female created he them.” Jesus had numerous opportunities to take issue with such doctrinaire intransigence. He did indeed diverge from some OT dicta. But not this one: “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning made them male and female.” (Matthew 19: 4)

Jesus did tend to see life in clearly defined terms, which goes against the grain of modern conscience. We like to keep things fluid, open to any quirk, and flight of fancy, any appetite. And you may even welcome such licence for all I know (although I’m guessing that most readers of this space probably won’t).

Moreover, you may not be a Catholic or any other Christian or a believer of any kind. Fair enough, it’s a free country. However, even if you don’t believe in God, you must believe in elementary logic.

And this discipline will unerringly lead you to the realisation that Fr Sean was simply doing his job. Which is neither to represent the people of Listowel (that’s what their MP does) nor to promote modern atheist superstitions (that’s what our media do). It’s to act as mediator between his parishioners and God, helping them to save themselves by steering clear of sin.

They ask God to do just that when reciting the Lord’s Prayer: “…and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil…” Fr Sean lends them a helping hand by reminding them that they aren’t free to define sin and evil as they see fit.

All such definitions are helpfully provided by the Scripture and doctrine. A priest’s job is to reiterate them and explain what they mean if any unclear areas exist. That’s exactly what Fr Sean was doing – and that’s what even our conservative papers describe as a “bizarre rant”.

That dutiful priest refused to offer any mea culpas when a radio interviewer asked if he was going to do so: “Not at all – why would I apologise for the truth?

“My answer basically is that I’m giving the teaching of the scriptures and the church regarding homosexual sexual relationships: that they’re sinful and that’s it,” said Fr Sean.

Ireland used to be in the forefront of Catholicism in the Anglophone countries. Yet every report one hears points at a dramatic turnaround. These days Irish priests refrain from sporting their clerical garb in public for fear of being abused or attacked.

By the sound of it, even their job description is changing. They can now be struck off, perhaps even unfrocked, for teaching Christian doctrine. The Church is supposed to act as an extension of social services and a promulgator of every perverse idea of modernity.

I have an idea. Perhaps every Irish church should display on its façade a quotation from Ernest Hemingway: “If it feels good, it’s moral”. There, that would simplify matters, wouldn’t it?

Following the fire bombing of the refugee centre at High Wycombe, immigration is very much topical again.

All news outlets agree: the crime was motivated by hatred. Seriously? And I thought it was love that motivated people to toss fire bombs into crowded buildings.

That particular building was crowded because 40,000 people have so far crossed the Channel illegally this year, which is five times the number in 2020. Since 50,000 is confidently projected for next year, one can’t help noticing a certain escalating tendency.

This brings into focus the shrill attacks on Home Secretary Suella Braverman, fired by Truss, reinstated by Sunak and now in danger of another sack.

Quite apart from minor procedural violations, Mrs Braverman’s sin is recognising that illegal immigration is a problem and trying to do something about it. This, according to our liberal (meaning illiberal) media, disqualifies her not only from high office but also from her Indian ethnicity. To paraphrase Joe Biden, who is my oratorial role model as much as Neil Kinnock is his, if she is a real Tory, she ain’t Indian.

Parenthetically, I am relaxed about the ethnicity of both Mrs Braverman and her boss Mr Sunak. We’ve had so many cowboys recently, we might as well give Indians a chance.

This particular Indian, however, has strong principles, which makes her suspect in the eyes of our media, especially since Mrs Braverman’s principles are at odds with the rhetoric of the Bollinger bolsheviks resident in the smarter parts of North London.

As to her rhetoric, don’t get me going on that. She had the temerity to use the word ‘invasion’ when talking about the swarms of illegal aliens currently housed in our hotels at a cost of over £6,000,000 a day. The received wisdom is that their numbers mustn’t be limited in any way, provided they are kept out of the smarter parts of North London.

This raises a question. If 40,000 a year is the point of departure, what is the destination? 400,000? 4,000,000? 40,000,000? This ancient method of reductio ad absurdum illustrates the necessity of curbing immigration at some point, ideally not one of no return.

Those who don’t have the exalted privilege of working for the BBC or Sky News do see a massive problem there. And in the congenitally pragmatic British manner they are asking the lapidary question: What are we going to do about it?

We could start by studying the experience of other countries, such as Australia. In this world we aren’t blessed with perfect systems, but, looking from afar, the Australian quota system seems to come pretty close.

Australians admit a certain number of skilled workers every year and a smaller number of genuine refugees, those fleeing for their lives. Once the quota has been filled, everybody else is put on a ship and sent to the Pacific island of Nauru. When practised for a few years, that system severely compromised the criminal business of smuggling people.

Alexander Downer, Australia’s former Foreign Minister, describes the system in today’s Mail and comes up with recommendations. His advice is worth heeding, most of the time.

In fact, when she was Home Secretary in one of the half-dozen Tory governments we’ve had lately, Priti Patel tried to do just that, follow Australia’s example. She chose Rwanda, rather than Nauru, thereby adding a whole new meaning to the film Hotel Rwanda.

A pack of wolves was instantly formed and it attacked Miss Patel with red-toothed ferocity. She was a racist barbarian who saw something wrong in Britain’s population growing at a million a year largely thanks to uncontrolled immigration. She didn’t merit the honourable badge of her ethnicity either, that went without saying.

Mr Downer correctly identifies the origin of the ammunition fired at Miss Patel: “After Brexit, Britain needs to find a lasting legal basis for exemption from European Court of Human Rights diktats. The nation has to be free to control its own borders.”

But then came a real downer [Yes, I know it’s a feeble pun. But if I don’t amuse myself, who will?]:

“Exiting the ECHR should be a last resort. Britain could draw up its own human rights legislation, but it could set a dangerous precedent for other countries to ditch their commitment to human rights.”

Using simple mathematical tricks, one figures out that Mr Downer equates commitment to human rights with ECHR membership. I wonder how we had managed to survive as a reasonably civilised nation until 4 November, 1950, when Europe was first blessed with the arrival of the ECHR.

One can understand the impetus behind it. After all, until five years previously most European nations had been either actively perpetrating, or at least collaborating with, monstrous crimes against humanity. Hence they felt an urgent need to have some pan-European watchdog to keep them on the straight and narrow in the future.

But Britain’s history, both recent and ancient, gave no reason for such concerns. Rather than perpetrating the crimes that gave rise to the ECHR, the British had done their best to stop and punish them.

Mr Downer, I’m afraid, shares the misconception of most politicians and modern Westerners in general who assign undue significance to politics and the institutions produced thereby. In fact, most seminal problems of life have no political solutions. And the solutions they do have come from a very different provenance.

The idea that human beings possess inalienable rights simply because they are indeed human beings is fundamentally Christian. Implicit in that is the notion of real, as opposed to today’s bogus, equality.

To their wide-eyed amazement, the Romans, to whom people had rights as citizens, not as simply people, heard that those inalienable rights didn’t derive from birth, wealth or social status. Everyone was equal before God and therefore the law (the link between the two still existed).

That was the ideal and, what with the laws of human nature always in force, it was sometimes violated, in some places more than in others.

But the ideal itself was perhaps the most revolutionary one ever accepted by mankind. And Britain led the world in putting that ideal into practice, much to the envy of even those European thinkers who started from a different philosophical premise. (Montesquieu and Voltaire come to mind.)

The problem started with that gross misnomer, the Enlightenment. Its principal stratagem was looting the rightful property of Christendom, shifting it into the secular domain and converting it into a tool of political rhetoric and, ultimately, civilisational subversion.

That instantly expanded the idea of human rights, which tendency continued until the idea burst with a mighty bang. Now human rights are used in the meaning of human desires and appetites. Instead of saying “I want” or “I need”, people have been brainwashed to say “I have a right to…”.

Since human rights became political, they had to be enshrined in, and enforced by, political institutions. Hence the ECHR, heir to the French 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.

A notion politicised is a notion perverted. Thus the larcenous shift of human rights from the religious and therefore legal domain to the political one produced an endless potential for abuse.

That potential has since been richly realised by two world wars, systematic murder by government (Prof Rummel’s phrase), artificial famines, murder camps, gas chambers, SS and KGB. Some 300 million people died horrific deaths in the 20^th century alone, the first century in which secular politics reigned supreme.

The ECHR is part of the problem, its natural development. As such, it can only make the problem worse, not solve it.

Perhaps Mr Downer should give the matter another thought – he comes across as a man capable of it. I hope he’ll realise that ditching the ECHR isn’t only the most practical thing to do, but also the most moral one.

As radical thugs wreak havoc on London traffic by blocking key roads, some hacks write scathing articles and some others churn out sympathetic ones.

However, no one makes a big deal of the name the thugs go by, Just Stop Oil. That’s a pity, for in some important ways the name establishes historical continuity.

Back in the 1960s, American radicals protested against the Vietnam war by chanting “All we are saying is give peace a chance”.

Of course they chanted more incendiary things too, such as “Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF are gonna win” and “Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” But it’s the “All we are saying” sing-along that must have inspired our own thugs.

“All we are saying” sounds modest, understated, reasonable. The implication is that we could be saying other, equally justified, things, such as calling for violence against the police, terrorist attacks on life and property, poisoning the water supply.

But we aren’t, are we? All we are asking is a chance of peace, which is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? So it can’t be that much to ask. Hence any attempt to disperse us would be an attack on reason and moderation, launched by murderous warmongers.

I don’t know whether the organisers of the Just Stop Oil movement have studied historical precedents. But the word ‘Just’ suggests they might have done. They could have simply said “Stop oil” without distorting the meaning of their demand. But the tone would have been wrong: too harsh, bossy, peremptive.

Yet the word ‘Just’ makes it sound sensible. Just comply with our little request and we’ll go home.

However, if you don’t comply, we’ll paralyse city traffic, superglue ourselves to some museum paintings, throw tomato soup on some others, paint public buildings orange and in general commit all sorts of excesses. But whose fault is that? Yours, for refusing to see reason.

Ostensibly the thugs are protesting against new oil licences, but that’s only their immediate objective. The ultimate aim is to get rid of all fossil fuels, and if that plunges Britain into icy darkness, then so be it. At least ‘our planet’ will be saved.

Arguing against the face value of the argument is pointless, for there is no face value. Much more interesting is to consider the response from our police, sworn to uphold public order.

After all, the disruptions have been going on for months, and only recently have the police begun to remove the road blockers and make some perfunctory arrests. Until now police officers haven’t even tried to conceal their sympathy for the Just Stop Oil cause. Instead of whipping their truncheons out, they’d dole out cups of tea and share a good chuckle with the thugs.

Drivers stuck in central London try to plead with the road blockers, appealing to their nonexistent good side: “I’m an ambulance driver, with a patient in the back.” “I’ve got to feed my family by driving this cab.” “I’ve got to get to work.” “I’m visiting my dying mother in hospital”.

None of these makes a dent, not even the plea that the patient in the ambulance is about to die from a heart attack. Unfortunate, runs the stonehearted reply. But if we don’t stop oil, many more people will die.

Desperate motorists have to resort to DIY policing. They grab the thugs by the ankles and drag them off the road. Some punches are also reported to have been thrown, but surprisingly not many. My first impulse would be to drive right through those thugs, but Penelope assures me that this would be ill-advised.

She is doubtless right, for the Met takes a dim view of even people removing the thugs from the road, which the police tag as “taking the law in your own hands.” Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said as much:

“The police must work within the clear legal framework and secure evidence for the offence of highway obstruction,” he said. One would think that securing such evidence would require no elaborate investigative work. After all, the road blockers are in plain view.

One would think wrong though. For it takes a law enforcement professional of high rank to appreciate the legal subtleties involved. According to Mr Twist, proper, usable evidence includes “showing clearly that there is an obstruction, that it is deliberate, that it is unlawful, and finally within the context of protest, that it is unreasonable in all of the circumstances.”

Only the last part of that litany of requisite corroboration gives a clue to the Met’s good-natured treatment of road thuggery. The other parts are self-evident: an obstruction is there for all to see, it’s undeniably deliberate (the thugs don’t block roads by accident), disrupting public thoroughfares was against the law the last time I looked.

However, and here we get to the crux of the matter, the state manifestly doesn’t regard these actions as “unreasonable in all of the circumstances”. The reason is simple: the state and the thugs share the same suicidal commitment to eliminating fossil fuels.

The only difference is that the state pretends to go about this task in a deliberate, grown-up fashion, while the thugs act with youthful impetuosity. The state thinks in terms of a few years; the thugs want to get their way instantly. But even if their methods and timelines differ, they share the same aim.

Therefore the state can’t possibly treat the thugs as criminals. They are likeminded allies pulling in the same direction, if perhaps tugging too hard. A mild reprimand is in order accompanied by avuncular advice to show some patience. But no harsh punishment is on the cards.

Police officers were seen taking the knee during the BLM riots for the same reason. The state has a vested, divide et impera, interest in sowing racial discord. A house divided against itself can’t resist a steady growth of state power, which is the principal – increasingly sole – desideratum of all modern governments.

On the other hand, private individuals trying to use their own meagre resources to protect their property or, as in this case, to drag antisocial thugs off the roads are working against the state. They are the real enemies.

This should answer the question in the title above. Two short words will suffice: not yours.

When Kate Middleton first appeared in royal circles, some of our dissipated aristos smirked behind her back: “Doors to manual”.

That snobbish reference to her mother who used to be an airline stewardess was supposed to be funny, but the joke was on the jokers. For the Princess of Wales, as Kate now is, has shown that one doesn’t have to be born noble to be noble.

What a contrast with the seriously aristocratic Diana and the mildly aristocratic Fergie. Unlike them, Kate understands that she has entered a life of service, where her personality is subsumed by her job. And she has gone about her job with dignity, grace – and mercifully, until now, relative silence.

Alas, she has now broken that pattern by uttering unmitigated woke bilge on the subject of drug addiction. That’s the sort of thing one would expect from any young woman of her generation, and there I was, thinking Kate wasn’t just any young woman of her generation.

Addiction, said Kate, is nothing to be ashamed of. “[It] is a serious mental health condition that can happen to anyone, no matter what age, gender, race or nationality.”

A reference to age, gender, race or nationality is a glaring non sequitur here, but no public speech can these days be complete without one. I’m not even sure the redundant phrase is factually correct. For example, how many people first become addicted to drugs in their 60s or 70s? I don’t know, but then probably neither does Kate.

“No one chooses to become an addict,” she added. “Recovery is possible,” provided addicts are treated with compassion and understanding.

And then: “Please do not let shame hold you back from getting the help you so desperately need.” What’s there to be ashamed of anyway? It’s just a disease, like any other.

Every one of those statements, other than recovery being possible, is false. Addiction isn’t a disease like any other. It is something to be ashamed of. Every addict does choose to become one.

Addiction is self-inflicted, the destination of a journey embarked on in the full knowledge of the consequences. Do you think anyone who mainlines heroin doesn’t realise that addiction beckons? He’d have to be an alien on a flying visit from another planet.

That a condition is self-inflicted shouldn’t disqualify a person from treatment. Smokers, for example, are treated for lung cancer, even though they may have brought it on themselves. But there is a valid difference.

Ever since Nazi physicians discovered the causative link with cancer, smokers have known the risks they take by lighting up. Yet many consider the risks worth taking, and some of those intrepid individuals will end up with lung cancer or emphysema.

Once a smoker is stricken, that’s it. Doctors may be able to help him, but he can no longer help himself. His life is out of his hands.

That’s because lung cancer and emphysema are genuine, if self-inflicted, medical conditions. Drug addiction is self-inflicted too, but it isn’t genuinely medical: the addicts can cure themselves by giving up narcotics.

If they don’t stop, it’s not because they can’t but because they don’t want to. Most of them will mask that reluctance by talking your ear off about the nightmarish withdrawal symptoms, drawing a mental picture worthy of Goya at his most macabre.

They lie, as I can testify from personal experience with opiate addiction. Mine was iatrogenic, caused by hospital doctors who kept me hooked up to a heroin (dimorphine, in scientific) IV for a month. They then discharged me with an ample supply of OxyContin tablets, another opiate. (It has acquired much street cred under the cuddly nickname of ‘Oxy’.)

How anyone can possibly find those substances pleasurable escapes me. They addle one’s brain, keeping one in a permanent semi-somnolent state. That negates the advantages of being human, or at least that’s how I felt.

When the pain was no longer too bad, I went off Oxy and immediately developed withdrawal symptoms. Since I had written on that subject before, I knew them for what they were. I also knew they were trivial, similar to cold symptoms.

I went back on and gradually titrated the dose down to nothing over a week. That was it. No more addiction, no more withdrawal symptoms. I was clean because I wanted to be.

Speaking of advantages of being human, one of them is a unique property of Homo sapiens: free will, an ability to make free choices between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong. As a corollary to that, we get kudos for choosing right and take responsibility for choosing wrong.

That’s why I find the Princess’s speech dehumanising. Kate seems to deny free will, which suggests that she missed the whole point of her grandmother-in-law’s moving funeral. That was above all a sacred rite of a religion that holds free will as its key philosophical postulate.

As I have pointed out on numerous occasions, such negligence can numb a mind and produce downright silly statements. “No one chooses to become an addict”, Your Royal Highness?

That’s like saying that a chap playing Russian roulette doesn’t choose to shoot himself. He is just out for some cheap thrills, but then the hammer just happens to fall on the loaded chamber.

An addict ought to be ashamed of his stupidity, hedonism, absence of self-restraint, irresponsibility. These are his real problems, and none of them is medical. Medicalising this failure of character is tantamount to legitimising it, which is exactly what Kate did.

Her show of compassion may drive more people to addiction. After all, they have been absolved of guilt.  

In 218 BC the mighty Carthaginian army led by Hannibal, one of history’s greatest generals, crossed the Alps and invaded Italy.

Rome’s army was weaker, her navy practically nonexistent, and yet Carthage didn’t stand a chance. For Rome’s was a proto-Western civilisation, already displaying many aspects of its glorious successor: inchoate liberty, individualism, rationalism, free expression, private initiative.

Carthage, by contrast, was what we today would describe as a totalitarian society. Moreover, it practised human sacrifice, which Romans regarded as monstrous.

Hence they preferred death to submission, for defeat spelled a triumph of evil, not just of a hostile power. And the head of Hannibal’s superior talents smashed against the stone wall of a superior civilisation and superior motivation.

That scenario has been played out many times throughout history. As it’s being played out now, in the Ukraine, with the Russian army displaying – and magnifying – every evil of Russian society.

The other day I listened to the tape of an intercepted phone conversation between a Russian soldier on the front line and his wife. We have nothing to eat, complained the grunt. Those who have any money manage to sneak out into town and buy some food. Others can only eat raw wheat they pick in the fields.

That little exchange suggested certain logistic problems in supplying the troops, which is by no means new in the history of Russian warfare. During the Second World War, for example, the Soviet army marched on American Spam and condensed milk, without which it would have starved. But this time around Western allies support the other side, which explains the diet of raw wheat.

Another throwback to that war, however, is more telling. In the same intercepted conversation, the Russian soldier says that his comrades are deployed in three lines, with him part of the second one.

Those in the first line are mostly convicts enlisted in prisons and raw recruits, there to provide a steady supply of cannon fodder. Since their commitment to acting in that capacity is apparently less than wholehearted, the soldiers in the second line have been ordered to “whack” (Putin’s favourite word) stragglers, deserters and simply those fleeing combat.

And, added the soldier, “there’s a third line behind us”, with the same orders. “So it’s impossible to run away,” he said. “We shoot our own.” He then used the word zagriadotriady, blocking detachments, and the ghost of the Second World War came wafting in.

For the term is familiar to any Russian who knows anything at all about the big war. At the beginning of it, Red Army soldiers felt reluctant to die for communism, the same regime that had murdered and imprisoned their families, robbed them of even meagre possessions, turned them into slaves. So they would desert, vanish in the vast forests and surrender en masse.

During the first four months of the war the Germans took 4,000,000 POWs (my father among them), which would have spelled a humanitarian disaster even for a civilised nation, never mind the Nazis.

No nation in the world would have been able to feed and house such throngs of humanity, especially since the Germans were under no obligation to do so: the USSR wasn’t a signatory to the Geneva Convention. As a result, 2.5 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity, and some 1.5 million switched sides to fight against Stalin – a pandemic of treason unprecedented in Russian or any other history.

Meanwhile, the Soviets had to suppress what was in fact a rebellion against their evil rule. They did so by relying on their default expedient: unrestricted violence. Military tribunals went into high gear passing verdicts, 2.5 million of them during the war. Of those convicted, 157,000 were shot – that’s 10 full divisions (by contrast, the Nazis executed just over 8,000 of their own soldiers during the war).

And then there were the zagriadotriady, NKVD troops deployed behind the front line to encourage martial valour with machinegun bursts aimed at anyone daring to retreat. How many were killed that way?

No one bothered to count. Definitely at least as many as those 157,000 executed by the documented verdicts of military tribunals. All in all, the Soviets inflicted greater losses on their own troops than the US suffered altogether when standing up to the combined might of Japan and Germany.

Both Japan and Germany have since divested themselves of the worst aspects of their civilisations. The Russians haven’t, and by using the term zagriadotriady that young soldier served a useful reminder.

Nor is it just the custom of mowing down their own retreating troops. After the regular Red Army was wiped out by the lightning strike of the Wehrmacht, the personnel holes thus formed were plugged by mobilising men of all ages and throwing them under the Nazi tanks untrained and practically unarmed.

Exactly the same is going on now, if on a smaller scale and with a modern twist. Over the past few weeks the Russians have mobilised about 300,000 recruits, some 85,000 of whom have already been thrown into the meat mincer of the frontline.

Reviving a feudal practice of centuries ago, many of them have to buy their own kit, including body armour, night vision scopes and supplies of tinned food. And, according to Putin himself, the recruits are thrown into battle after just a few days’ training. Many haven’t even had the chance to test fire their weapons before facing a well-trained and highly motivated Ukrainian army.

So far the Russians have suffered 210,750 casualties, 70 250 of them killed. Yet most of them happened before the current intake of ill-trained and ill-equipped recruits. It’s anyone’s guess how many of them will go back home in body bags, or how many will be killed by the zagriadotriady. Whatever that number will be, Putin and his henchmen won’t care.

They keep banging on about reviving “traditional values”, and for once they aren’t lying. For contempt for individual lives is one traditional value of the Russian civilisation, lovingly upheld even in peacetime.

As for war, burying the enemy under a mountain of Russian corpses is a time-honoured strategy, and Putin’s regime is true to its word. Russian tradition is in safe hands.

Much as I hate to claim prophetic powers, sometimes the urge becomes irresistible. For every time I write about an outburst of acute madness in public life, said life confirms the diagnosis immediately.

Thus, just a couple of days after I wrote about the catastrophic state of the humanities departments at our institutions of higher learning, the University of Cambridge obligingly illustrated the scale of the catastrophe.

The illustration came from what one would expect to be the least ideological discipline of all humanities: foreign languages, in this case German.

As someone who used to teach languages, I can testify that the task is straightforward, if by no means easy. You teach students the grammatical structure of the language, words that flesh it out and the way to pronounce those words in a manner understandable to the native speakers.

Ideology can make inroads only on the selection of reading material. For example, at my Moscow University we were taught received pronunciation on the kind of taped phonetic texts that would strike any Englishman as odd.

They featured a man named Mr Sanford, a volunteer who sold the communist paper the Daily Worker. Sounding like King Charles in his younger days, he’d engage his neighbours in such dialogues:

“I say, Mr Cavendish, do you receive the Daily Worker at all?” “No, can’t say I do, old boy, can’t say I do.” “Oh dear, rather a shame, that. One learns so much about the working class shedding its shackles in the struggle for liberation.” “Well, I never! Quite behind the times, aren’t I, what? Suppose one has to give it a go…” and so on in the same vein.

We weren’t told that people who sounded like that were unlikely to flog the Daily Worker door to door, although they might well have financed it behind the scenes. However, though Soviet communists played fast and loose with the texts, they left grammar alone. It was what it was, and that was that.

That’s too meek for today’s Cambridge University. It has unilaterally abolished the gendered nature of German nouns as being too offensive to the brittle sensibilities of today’s students. They have been given a carte blanche to escalate the war of linguistic liberation beyond just the pronouns and even beyond their own language.    

Undergraduates have been urged to “to use gender- and non-binary-inclusive language when we address or refer to students and colleagues, both in writing and in speech in English and in German”. That’s a tall task even in English, and one would think such commendable probity is impossible to achieve in German.

The problem is that English stands alone among European languages, at least those I’m familiar with, in that, with minor exceptions, it has divested its nouns of the gender category. In German, French, Russian and so on all nouns have one of two or three genders (unlike the other two I mentioned, French has no neuter).

This creates a chain reaction because the gender of a noun also affects the form of its modifiers, related verbs and pronouns. They all change their suffixes and spelling to agree with the noun’s gender. Where a language has a case system, that too has to follow suit.

Abandoning the gendering of German nouns is like getting rid of the conjugation of the verb ‘to be’ in English. Just imagine someone saying, “I be five when I be at kindergarten, learning what a condom be,” and you’ll begin to see the problem. Except that ditching the category of gender in German would be even worse.

To their credit, Cambridge’s present-day answers to Samuel Johnson and Daniel Jones are aware of the pitfalls. The University acknowledged that: “Gender as a grammatical category is part of native speakers’ language competence, and overlaps only partly with gender as a real-world phenomenon and a lived identity.”

But, as Comrade Lenin taught, there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks can’t storm. Thus the problem ruefully acknowledged by Cambridge notwithstanding, the university still insists that students should use gender-neutral terms if their conscience demands such usage.

Looking at the statement above, my first reaction is that its authors should be publicly drawn and quartered. However, such just desserts being a tad too sanguinary for our progressive times, I’d settle for summary dismissal. But one thing for sure: that blithering idiocy mustn’t be allowed to go unpunished.

Chaps, grammatical gender doesn’t overlap with “gender as a real-world phenomenon” at all, not even “partly”. There’s no existential correlation between a noun and its gender. If there were, every object would be the same gender in all languages. But that isn’t the case. Thus the piece of furniture on which dinner is served is masculine in German, Italian and Russian, but feminine in French and Spanish.

However, to avoid the confusion do what I do: only ever use the word ‘gender’ to describe the grammatical category. Everything else is called ‘sex’, as in “in the past we only had two sexes, three at most, but now we have 72, and all these sexes are equal as far as Cambridge University is concerned”.

No doubt the German language could use some help. But out of tact and good manners, shouldn’t we allow the Teutons to sort themselves out on their own? From what one hears, they are doing a pretty good job of it without our help, specifically in the area of perverting the gender of plural nouns.

Give them a little time, and they’ll befoul their language as much as we’ve befouled ours. The two languages are different, but the ideological urge to debauch them is the same, and that’s all that matters.

I’ll leave you to ponder this radical, but probably unavoidable, step towards sanity: all humanities departments of all British universities are to be closed, effective immediately. The dons made unemployed thereby should be retrained to fill vacancies in the service industry.

Just think of all the pubs going out of business for lack of barmaids and dish washers. My little proposals would keep the boozers open and our universities healthier. That’s hitting two birds with one stone, nicht wahr?

At last, something Putin is doing has a positive side effect.

Apparently, the Russians have been stealing speed cameras in Sweden, to use their radars and processors in their homemade drones. So far over a hundred have been nicked, at a cost of just under £20,000 each.

That way the Russians get around sanctions by using the expertise they have lovingly nurtured since the country got its name. Stealing has always pervaded Russian society at every level.

In a well-known story, Alexander I once asked his courtier, the historian Karamzin, what state officials were doing in the provinces. “Ils volent, sire,” was the reply (“Thieving, your majesty”).

In those days, a pandemic of theft stopped at the office of the head of state, the Tsar. Since all of Russia was his patrimonial estate, he had no need to nick things: that would have been stealing from himself. These days, no such barrier exists.

After all, most members of the Russian government, including Putin himself, have come up through the ranks of not only the KGB but also organised crime. “He who doesn’t steal, neither shall he eat” is the proverb they live by. So if they can’t get those processors in any other way, ripping them off is their natural reaction.

Granted, they’ve been buying drones from Iran, but that supply isn’t unlimited. Iran is also under sanctions after all.

So far so good. But I do have a minor quibble. What have Swedish drivers done to deserve the benefit of driving freely, without invasive cameras clocking their speed? What have they got that we haven’t?

It’s not as if their need is greater than ours. For example, every time I go to the Channel ports, my journey includes about 10 miles of the A3. That little stretch features seven speed cameras, preventing smooth progress and making me slam on the brakes every couple of minutes. Just think how much those blasted things have cost me in brake shoes alone.

I’m sure our devices are every bit as sophisticated as those found in Sweden, and I recommend them to Vlad wholeheartedly. To save him time I’d even be prepared to draw a camera location map for the A3.

Actually, forget that. The idea did sound attractive until I remembered what those stolen components do. They go into drones, which then do something else that comes naturally to the Russians: wanton, senseless mass murder.

On balance, I’d rather those A3 cameras stayed in place, keeping my speed down to a risible 50 mph. Meanwhile, let’s chalk the theft of those Swedish cameras down as yet another crime Putin’s gang has committed. The list is long – and getting longer by the minute.

When he was PM, Tony Blair promised to make sure 50 per cent of all Britons got a university education. An overly ambitious goal you might think, but one that’s nonetheless in sight.

At present, 22.6 per cent of Britons aged 25 to 64 boast a bachelor’s degree or higher. You can be forgiven for heaving a sigh of relief and wiping your brow: we’re only halfway towards Blair’s desired destination.

But looking at a different subset changes the picture: 52 per cent of those aged 25 to 34 attained some form of tertiary education. Another burst of speed, and the country will throw its chest at the finish tape, winning the race towards perdition.

Such inclusivity (dread word) has been achieved at a cost: universities qua universities no longer exist. They have become either trade schools or indoctrination centres.

The trade schools train students to make a living in fields like computer science, IT, engineering, science, finance, business administration. The sole purpose of the indoctrination centres, otherwise known as humanities departments, seems to be pumping students’ heads full of woke ideological dynamite, turning them into walking time bombs primed to blow up any semblance of sound thought.

Both parts fail to come anywhere near what one of our finest minds, John Henry Newman, saw as the essence of higher education. In his 1852 book The Idea of a University Newman identified the eponymous idea as teaching students “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse”.

In the end, students were to acquire a “perfection of the intellect… the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things”, a goal that what passes for a university nowadays not only misses but manifestly doesn’t even set.

Our humanities departments don’t teach students to think, understand and argue. They indoctrinate them to despise thought, eschew understanding and reduce argument to hysterical, often violent, shrieks.

Instead of debating subjects like nominalism or being and existence or politics and (or versus?) statesmanship, today’s university students froth at the mouth defending an unlimited number of sexes and a prescribed set of pronouns.

Not only do they choose ideologies over ideas, but they are also increasingly incapable of telling the difference. This has deadly consequences for the country, for upon graduation such half-witted, ill-bred ideologues will inhabit our media, arts establishment, political institutions and of course university faculties. Gonadic, ideological sub-culture devoid of any intellectual or moral content becomes a gift that keeps on giving.

Times change and, alas, today’s universities can’t be expected to conform fully to Newman’s worthy ideas. But one would still hope that neither would they be spewing out graduates who resemble en masse China’s Red Guards during the Great Leap Forward.

There is a difference, however, between their cultural revolution and ours. Chinese Hongweibings denounced, shouted down and even assaulted their professors for being too reactionary.

Their typological British equivalents have no need for such excesses: their professors are just like them. They egg on their students and join them in rooting out every sapling of sound, free thought. Such is the natural effect of recycling brainless radicalism: yesterday’s campus firebrands become today’s dons.

Dominic Sandbrook cites telling data: “In a revealing survey two years ago, the think-tank Policy Exchange found that just nine per cent of academics had voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, while only seven per cent identified themselves as ‘right of Centre’. 

“Most disturbingly, only half said they would feel comfortable sitting next to a Leave supporter at lunch, while just a third said they would be comfortable beside somebody who questioned their transgender dogma.”

I have no doubt that the same or similar proportions hold true at all our mainstream TV channels including the BBC, institutions like the Arts Council, the National Trust, the Church of England – even Parliament. Why wouldn’t they?

After all, how many structural engineers and microbiologists are employed at those institutions? Very few, I’d suggest. Most of our opinion formers have been extruded by the mincers of humanities departments, expertly grinding down the meat of thought into the manure of kneejerk, febrile idiocy.

Hence I find it hard to share Sandbrook’s optimistic conclusion that in no way follows from his own perceptive analysis: “But I’m convinced there are countless sane, sensible people in the arts, the media, publishing and education who are sick of this nonsense, and of the shrieking and howling that accompanies it.”

No doubt. Yet exactly the same could be said about the Soviet Union of my youth and even China during the Cultural Revolution. The problem is that, when totalitarian ideology holds sway, such people are impotent.

The best they can do is save their own souls by trying not to go along with the dominant evil. Active resistance may be heroic to the point of being suicidal but it’s also futile. Once totalitarians reach critical mass, they stamp out resistance without working up a sweat.

In communist countries, “sane, sensible” people putting up resistance lost their freedom, often their lives. In Britain, they so far risk only ostracism and a life of self-contained obscurity. Yet their resistance is as doomed to failure as it was in the countries I mentioned.

An analogy from a different field may elucidate matters.

Agrarians have an effective method of stopping blights, such as locusts. They catch large numbers of male insects, sterilise them with radiation and release them back into the wild. The males follow their instincts and mate with the females, yet no impregnation occurs. This destroys the reproduction cycle, thereby stamping out the threat to the crops.

Our universities apply the same technique to the cultural and intellectual life of the nation. “Sane, sensible” students are howled down, marginalised and ultimately sterilised. They are then released into life to push their country into the swamp previously inhabited only by communist and fascist creepy-crawlies.  

Over the past few days I’ve read it a thousand times if I’ve read it once: Liz Truss was knocked down and out by the invisible hand of market forces.

No human agency was involved, as it isn’t involved in hurricanes, earthquakes and tornados. It’s all that force majeure at work business. Nothing personal.

This approach to economics has always bothered me, and now more than ever. To begin with, exactly what were Truss’s sins that made that putative invisible hand lash out? What did she do that was so awful?

She didn’t want to raise the rate of corporate tax, which seems sensible, especially for a country that heavily depends on attracting foreign investment. In parallel, she sought to get rid of the 45p tax rate that didn’t exist even under Blair. That would have stopped her ‘Conservative’ party from sliding to the left of Labour, which doesn’t strike me as a felony.

Granted, Truss wanted to pay for the very marginal tax cuts with increased borrowing, without the necessary cut in public spending. But she saw that as strictly a temporary measure, made necessary by the combined effect of two blights: Covid and Putin. Once the nation caught its breath, Truss was going to take a chisel, if not a sledgehammer, to the social budget.

She promised as much, and there was no obvious reason to disbelieve her. After all, she was trying to put into effect exactly the policies she had campaigned on, those that the Tory rank and file had voted for when choosing Truss as their leader.

If that’s what made that invisible hand swing with so much deadly force, one is justified to doubt its sanity. But is it really invisible? Perhaps if we focus our eyes, we can actually see it in all its three-dimensional glory.

The expression was popularised by Adam Smith, even though he didn’t coin it and only used it three times in The Theory of Moral Sentiment and The Wealth of Nations. Since Smith treated his economics as a derivative of his primary discipline, moral philosophy, the concept of the invisible hand was supposed to merge the two.

Smith essentially attributed demiurge powers to the market, whose invisible hand unerringly guides private individuals to public virtue. He saw an economy as a giant cauldron into which individuals toss their private self-interests to produce a stew of collective goodness.

That was a sort of alchemy, with the gold of morality extracted from the base metal of amorality. Such unalloyed idealism can only work in ideal conditions or something close.

Edmund Burke, a deeper thinker than Smith, anticipated that such conditions would remain unattainable, and he knew why: “The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.”

At that time, in the 18^th century, government couldn’t “appear at market” as it saw fit. The simple expedient of a currency pegged to the gold standard acted as a natural restraining mechanism. (Opponents of the gold standard say, correctly, that it inhibits the state’s ability to react to economic emergencies with sufficient flexibility. What they leave out is that the gold standard also prevents the state from what Burke identified as “subverting the principles of the market”.)

Since then government has slipped such tethers by abandoning the gold standard and replacing it with the printing press. Instead of acting as merely a referee, the state has thus become both the star player and the coach, with all other players modelling themselves on its patterns of play.

Currency stopped being merely a way of denominating the amount of goods and services available, a means of their exchange. Instead it became a lever with which governments and government-like setups could control the workings of the market.

It then transpired that simply adding millions of private self-interests together didn’t produce public virtue (any more than pooling millions of individual votes delivers wise government). It produced instead a frantic traffic in buying and selling with no red lights, except those found in the district known for such fixtures, with the state combining the function of policeman and pimp.

This emphasised the fundamental difference between nature and market. The first is impersonal, the second is made up of people.

That was the case in the 18^th century too, but the people making up and driving the market were different then. In those days they were mainly, almost exclusively, those who produced goods and provided services. Today they are predominantly state officials and economists, either academic or hands-on, those working in financial companies.

State officials impose, with economists happily accepting and fostering, a whole raft of ideological constraints under which the market is supposed to operate. At some point, the machine inevitably becomes overloaded, sputters, slows down to a crawl or even crashes.

Faced with such downturns, those chaps heave a sigh, shrug their shoulders and, taking a leaf out of Adam Smith’s book, make some vague noises about inexorable market forces and the invisible hand. However, in this instance the metaphorical hand is very much visible: all they have to do is look at their own.

It’s not an invisible hand that has been steadily debauching Western currencies with inflation; it’s state officials and economists. It’s not an invisible hand that created a huge dependent underclass that consumes without producing; it’s state officials and economists. It’s not an invisible hand that is smashing to bits the energy driver of our economy; it’s state officials and economists. It’s not an invisible hand that has turned finance into a casino where blackjack is played with marked cards; it’s state officials and economists.

They have effectively turned democracy and free market into spivocracy, where Smith’s principles no longer apply, certainly not at any macro level.

Smith, along with his followers in Austria, Chicago and elsewhere drew up an ideal towards which all economies should strive. The closer they get to that ideal, the healthier they’ll be.

Yet those ideals, along with all others coughed up by modernity, have parted ways with reality. They survive only as empty phrases looted from their original owner and distorted beyond any recognition. ‘Invisible hand’ is one such purloined phrase; ‘market forces’, another.

Such forces do exist, but it’s not they that crushed Truss’s modest, bungling attempts to introduce a modicum of sanity to our economic behaviour. At play there were other forces, those of ideological tyranny imposed by the dogs of spivocracy that modernity has let slip.