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Dear Vlad,

You know how it is: you get caught up in the daily grind and let even historical landmarks slip out of your mind.

That’s me, today. I desperately wanted to be the first to wish you a happy 70^th, but then I remembered I had an appointment to have my toenails clipped. By the time I got home, that sycophant Kim had beaten me to it.

So here are my belated good wishes, Vlad. Many happy returns – certainly enough for you not to miss that first case hearing at the Hague. You like to be the star of the show, don’t you? That’ll be your golden moment.

I know the stories of your ill health have been concocted at the FSB headquarters. That’s what I call an op, and a stroke of genius it is too. Cancer, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia – all to scare those Western paedos, homos and transsexuals out of their wits.

Now the paedos are all writing that Putin is dying and he doesn’t mind taking the whole world with him. Meanwhile, you are in rude health, which should last long enough for that Hague event.

Vlad, travel restrictions being what they are, I can’t pop over to give you a hug in person. But, if I may, as an old adman I’d like to offer some friendly advice on your image. Your KGB colleagues are expert at bumping people off, but their PR skills aren’t up to scratch.

If they were better at it, you’d be coming across as, well, perhaps not a Mahatma Gandhi, but at least as a Simon Bolivar, the great liberator. As it is, your detractors, all those homo transsexuals, have a free hand in comparing you to, well, you-know-whom – and not in his heyday either.

Yes, I know you can have anyone who calls you ‘Putler’ whacked. But that’s inside Russia, where your detractors no longer are. Thousands of them have fled for their lives and now they are spreading their venom all over Europe. You must rip their sting out by paying more attention to PR.

Take your living quarters, for example. You want to live in a bunker, which is your privilege. But must the whole world know about this?

By all means, stay in that concrete hole, but have your lads bang out press releases, complete with photographs of you at your desk in the Kremlin, toiling away like what you call a “galley slave”. They know how to use Photoshop, don’t they?

Then there’s this stuff with the “Russian world”, bringing under Moscow’s aegis everyone who has ever uttered a Russian word in his life. (Let’s not forget the million Russian speakers in the US, half of them in New York — they are all gagging for it.) Again, good idea, rotten execution.

Replace ‘Russian’ with ‘German’, and you-know-who said exactly the same things. German speakers being persecuted in Poland and Czechoslovakia, which amounts to genocide; traditional German territories occupied by infidels; German culture outlawed – that sort of thing.

No one can argue against your claims, and certainly not I (you know where I live). It’s the wording that leaves a hole that your enemies can drive an Abrams tank through. And oh, by the way, if you must talk about the Russian Word, don’t quote the fascist philosopher Ilyin — that leaves an opening. Quote Solzhenitsyn instead. He said all the same things late in life, but at least he was a Nobel winner.

Speaking of wording, tell your lads not to scream publicly “One country, one leader, one victory!”. It’s too close for comfort to Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. May I suggest “One Russia, one Vlad”? Or, “They take out, we Putin”? Anything, other than that slogan.

And speaking of them, those evil Anglo-Saxons. Do you realise that a similar replacement exercise gives even more ammunition to Russophobe vermin? Where you say “Anglo-Saxons”, you-know-who said “Jews”. Everything else is the same, word for word. Let’s try to phrase more subtly, shall we?

The same goes for your frequent references to the innate superiority of the Russians over everyone else. No problem with the idea itself – anyone who has ever been anywhere near a Russian block of communal flats and its local boozer will know you are right.

It’s just that, next time you want to say something like that, replace the word “Russian” with “Aryan” and see if it sounds exactly like something you-know-who used to say. If it does, change the wording.

Also, you really want to downplay the parallels between the Anschluss and your Special Military Operation. Actually, you are moving in the right direction already.

When the Austrians tried to call a referendum on independence, you-know-who first demanded they desist and, after they refused, sent his troops in. You did it much better: troops first, referendum second.

But those videos of AK-toting Russian soldiers taking ballot boxes to people’s flats and then making sure they voted correctly are bad PR. A much better move would have been to dispense with voting altogether and then announce it had taken place, with you scoring the requisite 99 per cent.

Now we are on the subject of your soldiers, you’ve missed a PR trick there. You see, you-know-who’s troops occupied the same territory in 1941, and the locals heard all sorts of horror stories from their parents and grandparents.

Then your lads arrive, and they do all the same things: indiscriminate bombing, mass executions, looting, rape, torture, mass graves filled with trussed up corpses. Hey, war is war, and boys will be boys, we all know that. But you know what those Anglo-Saxon paedos are making of the pictures coming out of the Ukraine.

You-know-who had it easy, there was no Internet at the time. Now any Russophobe with a smartphone can cast aspersion on the Special Military Operation – and draw all the same disgusting parallels. Tell your lads to do all the same things, but discreetly. I’d start by knocking out all the mobile phone masts – surely your bombers can manage that.

I do apologise about sounding critical. You know it’s only because I have your best interests at heart. If your friends don’t point out your resemblance to you-know-whom, you know your enemies will. Throw the first punch, as you once described your philosophy of life.

Anyway, Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! – oops, sorry. I mean “all best wishes on your birthday”. And if you see old Adolf before I do, tell him I said hello.

Yours as ever,

Alex

Those old enough to remember this TV show (1974-1981) know that its real title included an offensive word. No, not the one legitimised on TV by Kenneth Tynan in 1965.

By 1974 the world had become progressive enough to relegate Tynan’s pioneering effort to the status of common parlance – but not yet progressive enough to ban the word that did appear in the title: ‘Mum’.

That oversight has now been corrected by a new language guide issued by the Local Government Association. This prescriptive document mandates the elegant locution “birthing parent”, explaining to council chiefs that the role of language is to embed “equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion”.

To that end, the words ‘mum’, ‘dad’, ‘ladies and gentlemen’ and so on are henceforth off limits. After all, “Experiences of trauma, racial trauma and ­exclusion are already experienced at disproportionately higher rates by LGBTQ+, black and neurodivergent people in the workplace.”

Experiencing such experiences upsets the experienced authors of the guide who set out to protect the experiencers from traumatic experiences – while teaching others how to use English.  

They don’t specify ways in which they propose to enforce their oligophrenic fiats, but these can be inferred from parallel developments. One such involves Caroline Farrow, a devout Catholic journalist who let the side down by marrying an Anglican vicar.

That minor glitch aside, Mrs Farrow has the power of her convictions by refusing to recognise as legitimate the mutilation of both language and children’s bodies. As a result, she has had her collar felt twice.

The first time was in 2019, when she had a verbal TV joust with the transgender campaigner Susie Green. To her credit, the latter practised what she preached by having encouraged her son to become her daughter, which made him/her/it the world’s youngest person to undergo sex change surgery.

Yet Mrs Farrow not only referred to the child as ‘him’, not ‘her’, but later also tweeted: “What she did to her own son is illegal. She mutilated him by having him castrated and rendered sterile while still a child.”

Upholding the inchoate tradition of snitching, Miss Green went to the police. That led to Mrs Farrow’s arrest and a four-month investigation that eventually had to be dropped.

But that was three years ago. That’s a long time, considering that everything about modernity is progressive, including its schizophrenia. This time around she may not get off so lightly.

The other day two police officers forced their way into Mrs Farrow’s house without a warrant, dragged her outside and body-searched her for having violated the rules of progressive usage. Having had all her electronic devices confiscated, she was then taken to a police station where she was kept under lock and key for several hours.

Apparently, the police attributed to Mrs Farrow a series of “harassing” and “malicious” posts that appeared anonymously at a time when she was playing the organ at mass in her husband’s church.

Yet DCI Bentley evidently still hasn’t been instructed to disregard the presumption of innocence in such cases (another oversight doubtless to be soon corrected). The police, he said, have confiscated the electronic devices to “gather further evidence and carry out an investigation to prove or disprove the allegation”.

If Mrs Farrow is indeed found to have advocated the subversive idea that women can’t have penises, nor men vaginas, she can get up to two years under the Malicious Communications Act. Since she has previous, the maximum sentences will be practically guaranteed.

As DCI Bentley explained, the police have a duty to investigate every “grossly offensive message” – in preference, he might have added truthfully, to investigating burglaries, muggings, assaults and other things perceived as less offensive than using old-style pronouns.

A problem may arise, you might think, with a precise definition of “grossly offensive”. In fact, some sticklers for casuistic detail may even argue that no definition would ever be precise enough to take to court. After all, what’s grossly offensive to some may be casually dismissed by others – and vice versa.

For example, I’m grossly offended by having pop music played in a restaurant. However, realising that others may feel differently, rather than reporting the owner to the police I simply walk out and look for a quieter eating environment .

It takes cross-checking Mrs Farrow’s case and its relevant laws with others to arrive at a working definition. Here it is: Any statement is “grossly offensive” if perceived as such by a member of a minority group, no matter how tiny, seen as useful in promoting the destruction of our civilisation.

Having written this, I’ve realised that I myself was a serial offender some 30 years ago. At that time I worked with a chap, let’s call him Fred, who suddenly dropped out of sight to come back a few months later as Fiona.

Yet every time I bumped into him at industry functions I automatically said, “Hi, Fred”. It was merely a habit, not a conscious expression of opprobrium.

In Fred’s case, the habit was reinforced by his hint of five o’clock shadow, proving that electrolysis has its limitations. Nor could he get the walk quite right, hampered as Fred was by the difference in the pelvic architecture of men and women.

I shudder to think what would happen if I committed the same indiscretion, nay crime, today. Instead of writing seditious articles, I’d be writing letters of grovelling contrition to judges and prison warders.  

It has taken me years of tortuous self-training to develop the skill, and I’m still not quite finished. But at least I’ve got the basics down pat.

The skill is recognising the sovereignty of an idea, its independence from the enunciator. Once an idea breaks out into the open, it either stands on its own legs or falls down on its own face.

The enunciator has made it public property, he has relinquished private ownership. The idea must be judged on its own merits, not on its author’s merits, or lack thereof.

That’s why argumentum ad hominem is among the worst rhetorical fallacies. Remembering that, I always dismiss out of hand any disagreement starting with the words “You’re only saying this because you…” At this point I invariably forget my manners and interrupt: “Never mind me, feel the idea.”

Sounds perfectly logical, doesn’t it? It does. But that’s where the problems start.

For the corollary to this preamble is often hard to stomach. We must suspend our admiration of a great man and argue against an idea of his that we find wrong. And, alas, the reverse applies as well. We must forget our contempt for a revolting man and agree with an idea of his that we find right.

Rummaging through the bulging bag of examples from my own experience, I find plenty to illustrate both extremes.

Thus I’m second to none in my admiration of Edmund Burke, whom I regard as one of history’s greatest political thinkers. And yet I’ve always argued against his assessment of the American Revolution. In fact, my whole book Democracy as a Neocon Trick is one protracted argument against that one idea.

Conversely, few people detest Putin more than I do. He is the epitome of modernity’s central figure: an important nonentity. Except that this nonentity comes packaged with unmitigated evil, a combination seldom absent from Russia’s political history.

However, when this energumen pronounces, for example, that water is wet and stone isn’t, we must overcome the gagging instinct and, unable to speak to that apparition, nod our agreement. What can you say, the bastard is right.

This brings me to one passage in his puke-making… sorry, I mean epoch-making speech the other day. You know, the one about those satanic Anglo-Saxons whose whole history can be reduced to their sole aspiration to dismember Russia and enslave her people.

This is the passage in question: “Do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, parent number one, number two, number three instead of mummy and daddy? Are they completely off their rocker out there? Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on our school children from the primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are various supposed genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex change operation?”

I’m sure most Russians answered those rhetorical questions with a resounding no. But now let’s replace the phrase “…, in Russia,…” with the name of our own country and ask all the same questions. Do we want any of that?

Any sane person’s reply will be as resounding: absolutely not. And yet we have it, the bastard is right about that.

The requisite exercise I mentioned earlier, separating the thought from its source, is particularly difficult in this case. Here’s a global thug prepared to blow up the world to assuage personal resentments and a richly merited sense of inadequacy. And he has the gall to criticise us, a force for the good – on balance, that is, for all our imperfections.

Who the hell does he think he is… And so forth, in the same vein. You know the drill.

All that is true. But, as I am trying to argue, it’s irrelevant. We aren’t talking about Putin’s personality – that issue was settled even before he moved to Moscow 25 years ago. Nor are we talking about his obsessive hatred of everything Western, apart from offshore accounts, yachts and other luxury goods.

We’ve blanked it all out, concentrating instead on that one bit of criticism. And, much as we hate to admit it, the bastard is right.

The issue he highlighted is a symptom of self-destructive madness afflicting a civilisation bent on self-harm. Like a neurotic girl who cuts herself with a razor blade to release the tension mounting inside, we slash not just the flesh of our society but its very soul.

Could it be because we’ve forgotten the soul and focused too much on the flesh? Or even worse, replaced the soul with some nebulous ‘psyche’? My hypothetical girl may self-harm because she has been indoctrinated to regard herself as the highest, self-contained and self-sufficient stage of life.

When life throws challenges at her, as life is wont to do, she looks inside herself for answers – and finds only herself there. She feels cornered, and then the razor blade sees the light of day.

Extrapolating to our society as a whole, it too seems unable to come to terms with its little demons without breaking out of the confines of its own body. Like that wayward girl, it begins to attach undue importance to little quirks, missing the forest of transcendence for the trees of petty neuroses.

And then it lays itself bare to valid criticism from even evil nonentities like Putin. If you look at the litany of his attacks on the West, you can prove each of them to be nothing but vile drivel. But not this one. Here the bastard is right.

However, there’s always the danger that we can’t help considering the source. We may succumb to the natural impulse of thinking that everything Putin says is wrong because it’s Putin who says it.

Perhaps the impulse is so natural that it’s insuppressible. Well, in that case, forget this particular source. Think of the good, sane, intelligent people who have been railing against the same thing for years – think of conservative thinkers and commentators, or simply of your conservative friends.

Suddenly, the bothersome dichotomy between idea and source vanishes. We no longer have to take rhetorical liberties — for it’s not just the bastard who is right on this score. It’s everyone in his right mind.

If you still think conservatism has a chance of ever becoming a political force again, just read the reports of the on-going Tory conference – and then extrapolate them to your own country if it isn’t Britain.

The conference is in an uproar. Delegates are trying to outshout one another with their scurrilous invective against Kwasi Kwarteng’s quasi-conservative budget.

Dozens of Tory MPs have announced they’d vote with Labour to defeat the plan of scrapping the top rate of 45 per cent for the fat cats making over £150,000 a year. Even the supposedly conservative papers describe the measure as benefiting only the “super-rich”.

That lumps together the billionaire Richard Branson and anyone making a decent middle-class income, a legerdemain one doesn’t normally expect this side of a communist cell. (For the record, a mortgaged Londoner on, say, £170,000 a year would find it hard to send two children to a good public school, and may even struggle with one – something anyone middle class could do without much trouble in the previous generation.)

Evidently the requisite hatred of the upper classes is now aiming downwards in search of targets. That’s good knockabout fun, but not of the kind that used to be associated with the Tories. Let me tell you, those tempora do mutantur, and always for the worse.

As for Labour MPs and their house-trained press, they are positively frothing at the mouth. As a measure of their skill at corrupting the public, Labour has jumped 33 per cent ahead of the Tories in the polls. If the elections were held today, the Conservative Party would have three MPs, and neither Miss Truss nor Mr Kwarteng would be among them.

The Tory rebellion was led by former cabinet minister Michael “Mike the Knife” Gove, who can’t see a dagger without wishing to stick it into the back of any Tory who dares put forth Tory policies. Now his wife has left him (allegedly over his affair with another man), Gove can concentrate all his boundless energy on obliterating any distinctions between the two main parties.

Chris Philp, Kwarteng’s deputy, who just two days ago was effusive about the policy, is now trying to exculpate himself, along the lines of “It ain’t me, Guv’nor, it’s Kwasi what done it.” Another senior Tory, Grant Shapps, has pirouetted even more daringly. An enthusiastic champion of the cut before the conference, he now describes it as “politically tin-eared”.

Faced with such a barrage, Truss and Kwarteng issued a grovelling apology and swore to keep the top rate intact. However, if they hoped to quell the rebellion by making that concession, their reading of modern life is borderline illiterate.

Gove has already said he’ll vote against any budget that includes even a marginal reduction in benefits. And another former minister, Esther McVey, has demanded that benefits go up in line with inflation.

Ay, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare would comment if he were still with us. It’s not about the top tax rate. It’s about the perceived attack on the status quo of the welfare state.

Those of you who read my comments on the Truss-Kwarteng tax-cutting budget a few days ago know that I have severe misgivings. Not about cutting taxes, mind you: if it were up to me, I’d cut them by half.

It’s just that tax-cutting doesn’t work without a parallel reduction in public spending. And funding it by increased borrowing is like treating a running nose with an injection of the Covid virus – especially at a time when both interest and inflation rates are shooting up.

I know it; David Stockman, who tried that sort of thing under Reagan, knows it – and I bet Truss and Kwarteng know it. The latter has a PhD in economic history, and he must have gone over Reaganomics with a fine-toothed comb.

The general tenor of their pronouncements, if not yet the content of all their policies, suggests that Truss and Kwarteng have in their sights not just the taxes, which they want to make lower and flatter. They want to shake, if not necessarily bring down, the whole rickety structure of the welfare state.

I suspect, though can’t prove, that their plan was to lower taxes first and suffer the ensuing economic and political pain for a while. Then they would tell the country that, though they personally were committed to “levelling up” (driving welfare commitments up to a suicidal level), that’s not how the chips had fallen.

Much as it makes their hearts bleed to complete exsanguination, they now have to lower benefits, reduce the NHS budget and in general bring down the aforementioned rickety structure or at least truncate it at the top. Fait accompli, chaps — or sorted, in more democratic language.

If that was their cunning plot, their fellow MPs have seen right through it with the precision of an MRI scanner. Redundancy notes floating before their mind’s eye, they jumped on the PM and Chancellor like so many dogs baiting a bear. Except that in this case the bear himself is more canine than ursine.

They realise something that must have escaped Truss and Kwarteng. The ship of economic status quo has sailed and it’s unstoppably running aground full speed ahead, with the zeitgeist bulging its sails.

In the 2020s neither Liz Truss nor anyone else can get away with what Margaret Thatcher got away with in the 1980s. In the intervening decades the project of corrupting the British public has been completed – with similar developments equally rife on the Continent, or even more so.

Had Truss and Kwarteng been a bit less ham-fisted, they could have made some gradual gains by stealth. But with the general election less than two years away, they had no time for stealth. They had to show their hand straight away, only to have it bitten off by their ‘Tory’ colleagues.

All this vindicates my recurrent lament. Conservatism of any kind, including economic, is dead, and nothing short of a catastrophe (military or economic) could help it do a Phoenix. Or perhaps not even that.

Because cannabis is just as harmful as crack and cocaine, warn our police chiefs, it should be put into the same Class A category – with its use and distribution punished accordingly.

I find the rational case for this argument to be weak. But since we aren’t always, and never merely, rational, I agree with our top cops.

Hence this is a case of rational rejection and intuitive acceptance – yet again semantics and semiotics find themselves at odds. Let’s get reason out of the way first.

The use of psychotropic drugs is coextensive with recorded history. The Therapeutic Papyrus of Thebes of 1552 B.C. lists opium among other recommended drugs. Even further back, Sumerian ideograms of about 4000 B.C. describe poppy as the “plant of joy”. Helen passed illegal substances on to Telemachus and Menelaus and, if she lived today, would have been nicked faster than you can say “let’s see what’s in your amphora, sunshine”.

Having thus passed the test of history, drugs do well on the political test too: not all users are left-wing. For example, though Byron and Shelley were a bit red, Coleridge, who popped opium and drank laudanum, was as conservative as one can get. Freud, who snorted cocaine, was indeed politically unsavoury, but surely Queen Victoria was no subversive, and yet laudanum figured prominently on her diet.

What about the moral argument? Are mind-altering drugs sinful in se? Every time we pour ourselves a cup of strong coffee to start the day or a glass of stiff Laphroaig to end it, we forfeit the right to argue against drugs on that basis.

And if our right foot ever gets heavy on a motorway, we aren’t entitled to say drugs are wrong simply because they are illegal. In any event, drug use in Britain was unrestricted until the 1868 Pharmacy Act and uncriminalised until the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act. So we can’t seriously believe that what was moral in 1919 all of a sudden became a sin in 1920.

One would be on equally shaky grounds with a utilitarian argument. Taken in moderation, drugs are no more harmful than alcohol. Taken in excess, most drugs can indeed have undesirable social consequences, but anyone who has ever been attacked by a drunk will agree that drugs aren’t unique in that respect.

Of course, drugs have some medically undesirable effects as well, including schizophrenia, but we can’t build a rational argument on such a shaky foundation. Again, there is no proof that moderate use of drugs is medically harmful. And there is much evidence that immoderate use of anything, from tap water to Puy lentils, can kill you.

There exists a powerful empirical argument against drug bans. After all, while every government in the world pays lip service to the drug ‘problem’, none has solved it.

The experience of countries like Thailand, where even the speedily enforced death penalty has failed to stem the flow of drugs, shows that policing can’t do the job even in conditions of dubious liberty. And the inability of Western governments to stop drugs in prisons demonstrates that even absolute unfreedom enforced by the state is no panacea.

The history of Britain and especially the US, where every post-war president has waged “war on drugs”, suggests that a relatively free country can’t stop drugs no matter how much it desires such an outcome. That at least six of those presidential warriors were drug users themselves proves the point further.

According to the old wisdom, what can’t be forbidden ought to be allowed. Do we seriously believe that any state can remedy the drug problem, if it’s indeed a problem to anyone but the addict himself?

Thirteen years between 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution put Prohibition into effect, and 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, ought to have been enough time to hammer the point home: large-scale state interference doesn’t solve problems. It either makes them worse or creates new ones (in that case, organised crime).

A war on poverty makes more people poor; an attempt to redistribute wealth destroys it; an overhaul of education promotes ignorance; an all-out effort to end all wars leads to more and bloodier wars. At the end of all that bungling nothing beckons but an even greater expansion of the state, a further reduction of liberty.

It’s undeniable that drugs are a factor in crime. Without digging up any statistics, I’m sure that drug users are disproportionately represented among felons. However, the same argument can be made against alcohol, and yet it can be scored at every corner without any risk of prosecution.

Talking specifically about cannabis, it can even be construed as being better than alcohol. The latter is physiologically addictive; the former isn’t. Quitting cannabis cold turkey causes no withdrawal symptoms typical of barbiturates, opiates and indeed booze.

Our police chiefs call it a “gateway drug”, the first step on the slippery slope leading to heroin and crystal meth. However, you can say exactly the same thing not only about booze but even about coffee.

Young lawyers and stock brokers drink gallons of the stuff to fuel 100-hour work weeks. Before long they start seeking stronger stimulants, usually cocaine or speed. Should we then label Lavazza as a Class A drug?

The argument I find not only unconvincing but actually pernicious is one based on the damage that drug use does to public finances. Since our healthcare is nationalised, it’s the taxpayer who has to fund methadone clinics, the argument goes.

This, to me, is an argument not against drug use, but against nationalised healthcare. Like everything else nationalised, it can – and does – function as an instrument of increased state control over every aspect of our lives. The adverse effects of such runaway statism are worse than the odd acid head going bonkers.

To sum it all up, the rational case against drugs is weak. So why do conservatives override reason and, unless we are out-and-out libertarians, keep insisting that drugs, including cannabis, should be banned?

Yet again, intuition goes beyond reason, aesthetics beyond ethics and semiotics beyond semantics. It’s not drugs as such that we find objectionable, but what they transmit: the signals of the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n roll modernity. And in doing so, they reflect many other dynamics of the collapse of our civilisation.

Instead of St John’s Passion, today’s youngsters are exposed to the soundbites of psychobabble harmonised with the mind-numbing beat of pop in the background. Their inner resources depleted, their senses rivalling their minds for hopeless ignorance, they feel not happy but high, not sad but depressed – so why not use drugs?

Somewhere in their viscera, they feel they are thereby taking a courageous stand against ‘the establishment’, but in fact they are stamping into the dirt the scattered fragments of an imploded Western world.

Unskilled in semantics, they have to use semiotics to scream defiance, to spit in the face of the moribund beauty they despise. It is the dead face of Christendom that they are spitting in.

Drugs have not always had this particular semiotic agenda. But semiotics change with ages. What was good enough for Messrs Coleridge, de Quincey, Collins or Conan Doyle can’t be good enough for the few conservative holdouts still kicking.

Hence, while my reason sneers at our police chiefs’ proposal to treat cannabis as a Class A drug, my intuition screams: “Lock’em up and throw away the key!” A schizophrenic experience, that – and I’ve never even tried cannabis.  

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“… He is blabbering.” This is how a Russian viewer commented on what had been billed as Putin’s historic speech. About 80 per cent of the comments were in the same vein.

That sounds about right. I followed the speech in real time, and that was the only real thing about it. (Having said that, as someone who is older than Putin, I take exception to the ‘Grandpa’ bit.)

Everything else was just like that chap said, drivel. Putin started out by reasserting his unwavering commitment to all human rights, specifically the right of nations to self-determination.

Hence he was happy to announce that the people of four Ukrainian provinces had spoken, through the expedient of referendums. They want to be part of Russia, and Vlad is happy to oblige – just at a time when the satanic Anglo-Saxons are trying to turn the whole world into their colony.

From that moment on, Vlad began to show signs of multiple personality disorder. All of a sudden he slipped into the persona of an African anti-colonial demagogue from the ‘60s, Patrice Lumumba perhaps, or Kwame Nkrumah.

The whole history of the West, he explained, is an uninterrupted chain of attempts to subjugate, loot and exploit the whole world, but especially Africa, Asia and – more to the point – Russia. I’m not sure how the Russians feel about their country being put side by side with Uganda and Mali, but that’s up to them.

Actually, continued Putin, it’s not just African countries that those vile Anglo-Saxons turned into their vassals. They are the masters of the Ukraine, to cite one random example.

And not just that. Even Western European countries are their slaves. The offices and homes of their leaders are all bugged, so the Anglos can monitor everything they say the better to control them.

And now they’ve blown up the Nord Stream pipelines to freeze Europeans into toeing the Anglo-Saxon line. Is there no limit to their perfidy?

For centuries now, they’ve been trying to enslave Russia, but their evil designs have been thwarted by the unmatched spirit of that holy nation.

He, Vlad, is proud that the Soviet Union led the global struggle against Anglo colonialism since the 1960s, and it’s because of that noble stance that Washington and London engineered the 1991 tragedy, the breakup of Stalin’s empire.

Having done that to the Soviet Union, they are now trying to do the same thing to Russia, to dismember her into a multitude of tiny Anglo-Saxon colonies.

To that end, they instigated the genocide of Russians in the Ukraine, only stopped by the heroism of Russian soldiers. (I haven’t done a textual analysis of the speech, but it was peppered with the word ‘genocide’, and the same culprits committed it each time.)

Some Russian warriors have, alas, died heroically, and Vlad suggested the noble assembly honour their memory with a minute’s silence. The noble assembly complied on cue.

In general, the whole atmosphere eerily resembled Communist Party congresses of my youth. Whenever the orating leader made a meaningful pause, an ovation broke out. If the last word before the pause had been ‘Russia’, everyone applauded standing up.

Now it’s the Anglos who are responsible for turning Ukrainian cities to rubble, continued Putin, which is what they did to Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne. Almost imperceptibly Vlad switched from the persona of an Idi Amin and into one of Dr Goebbels ranting in March, 1945, about the unprovoked horrors perpetrated on Germany by those Judaeo-Anglo-Saxons.

And let’s not forget that only America has so far used nuclear weapons, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which, explained Vlad, set a precedent. That was the only oblique reference to the nuclear threat in the whole speech, which raised in my mind the odds in favour of his planning to use them.

In general, never once did Putin refer to the Ukraine as Russia’s adversary in the “special military operation”. The enemy is the West, especially its Anglophone part.

Yet Vlad is a sensible man. For all the evil of the Anglo-Saxons, he is ready to cease fire and start negotiations. Provided, of course, that the four new parts of Russia are off the table. There’s nothing to negotiate there: their people, at least 105 per cent of them, have stated – democratically! – their desire to become Russians. Case closed.

Those of his listeners who had remembered to take their meds must have gone through a mental translation exercise.

Vlad’s army is being routed, and even as he spoke the Ukrainians completed the encirclement of Lyman, a strategic centre in one of the areas that were in the Ukraine yesterday and are in Russia today. A large contingent of Russian troops is surrounded and will soon be routed.

A similar situation can be confidently predicted for the whole frontline, and in the near future. Hence Vlad’s offer.

The Ukraine, prodded by Nato, sues for peace, he declares victory and starts rebuilding. In a year or so, a new army a million or two strong will have been sufficiently trained and equipped to obliterate the Ukraine (Vlad’s commitment to the principle of national sovereignty bypasses that country.)

That’s not going to happen and he knows it. President Zelensky has stated in no uncertain terms that, if Russia conducted sham referendums in parts of the Ukraine, no negotiations will be possible – ever.

This whole thing would be funny if it weren’t so fraught.

One can have some nice clean fun at Putin’s expense, along the lines of the title above. But that deranged villain may well resort to nuclear weapons, for he increasingly has nothing else to resort to. Perhaps not tomorrow or next week, but he’ll almost certainly do that when the Ukrainian army gets close to the Russian border.

Tactical nukes wouldn’t have catastrophic consequences. Their TNT yield isn’t appreciably higher than that of some bunker-busting bombs the Russians dropped on Mariupol. And the half-life of their radiation is short. It would be deadly to anyone close to the epicentre, but neither the radius nor the duration of the contamination would be catastrophic.

Strategic weapons are a different horror story. Since Putin identifies his enemies as not Ukrainians but Anglo-Saxons, he may well decide to bang the big door on his way out. Après moi l’annihilation nucléaire, he may think.

The West can retaliate, but it can’t – or rather won’t – prevent. Many commentators hope that some forces inside the Kremlin may stop the med-less Grandpa from acting on his madness.  Yet, considering that the career KGB officer Nikolay Patrushev is seen as the dove in the circle closest to Putin, one can’t easily see who would personify such mystical forces.

I still hope none of this will happen. However, the odds in favour of a nuclear attack must be upgraded from close to zero last week to perhaps 10 per cent strategic and 70 per cent tactical.

Whatever you may think of my bookmaking credentials, we must act fast. Expressions of grave concern and half-hearted supplies of arms to the Ukraine aren’t going to cut much ice any longer.

Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2 have four pipelines between them.

Three of them were the other day destroyed by underwater explosions, producing kilometre-wide seabed craters, while releasing $2 billion’s worth of gas and 200,000 tons of methane into the Baltic.

This incident raises many questions, which can be answered within the realm of probability. Certainty can only come after a thorough forensic investigation, and no one knows when that’ll be conducted – and, more relevant, by whom.

Since the explosions were obviously pre-planned and carefully timed, the first questions are the lapidary ‘cui bono?’ and its follow-up, ‘whodunit?’. The Kremlin answered both with certainty: America.

Isn’t that self-evident? Because, by cutting Europe off from Russian gas, America makes the continent wholly dependent on her own liquefied gas. Those Yanks will do anything for money, we all know that.

By way of prima facie evidence the Russians played an early February video of Biden threatening to “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2 should the Russians invade the Ukraine.

Clearly, that dyed-in-the-wool enemy of Russia and everything else that’s good in this life could mean only one thing: blowing up the newly completed pipeline. Send a few frogmen in, or perhaps a sub or two – and kaboom! Europe becomes a slave to American oil companies.

The Kremlin’s line was dutifully echoed by Donald Trump, and I’d desperately love to see the hymn sheet providing the lyrics. He saw fit to replay the same video, adding a verbal endorsement of Putin’s claim: “Wow, what a statement. World War III anyone?”

So Putin and Trump agree that terrorism is exactly what Biden had in mind. You, on the other hand, I hope will agree with me that this version of events doesn’t tally with Biden’s making good on his threat.

This was his instant response to the Russian invasion: “Today, I have directed my administration to impose sanctions on Nord Stream 2 AG and its corporate officers. These steps are another piece of our initial tranche of sanctions in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. As I have made clear, we will not hesitate to take further steps if Russia continues to escalate.”

“As I have made clear” is a reference to Biden’s threat to “bring an end to Nord Stream 2”. To suggest otherwise betokens, putting it kindly, bad faith.

Nord Stream 2 was, as it were, already dead in the water. Sanctions against it are so comprehensive that it’s inconceivable that the project will ever be reactivated, or at least not within years. Hence the US can’t derive any profit from its alleged plot.

As for Nord Stream 1, the Russians themselves have stopped pumping gas through it, hoping to freeze Europe into submission this winter. That indeed may benefit the American hydrocarbon industry, but it will have Putin to thank for it, not Biden.

The Ukraine isn’t a likely suspect either. The only countries potentially suffering from this terrorist act are her allies in Europe. Even though they aren’t getting Putin’s gas now, those supplies may resume should the Russian regime change. Now the pipelines are out of commission for years, probably for ever.

Barring a sudden pandemic of madness breaking out in the Ukrainian government, this leaves only one possibility: Russia herself. But why would Putin want to destroy the pipeline that almost singlehandedly has been keeping the Russian economy afloat? What is his bono?

The esteemed émigré Russian expert on the hydrocarbon market, Mikhail Krutikhin, offers an answer I find unconvincing.

By failing to supply the stipulated amount of gas to Europe, he says, Russia is in default of ironclad contracts. That means fines to the tune of tens of billions of euros. Yet having destroyed the pipelines, Gazprom can now claim force majeure, thereby avoiding huge lawsuits – especially if no hard evidence of Russian terrorism is found.

This doesn’t quite work for me. First, the Russians had already violated every conceivable contract even before the explosions.

Second, the country is in a war mode, and the war it’s waging is against the world, especially its western part. Under such circumstances, it’s hard to imagine Putin (de jure owner of a big chunk of Gazprom and de facto owner of the whole company) being overly concerned with legal niceties. If he is capable of threatening the world with nuclear annihilation, he is certainly capable of telling Europe what to do with those contracts.

To digress for a second, the nuclear threat has finally elicited a response from that great Putinversteher, Angela Merkel. Having been a major force behind Russia’s growing power in Europe, she had kept stoically silent until yesterday.

However, sensing that her Freund Vlad needed some extra weight behind his threats, Angie had to come to his aid. “You must take his words seriously,” she said. “Taking them seriously, rather than dismissing them as a bluff, is by no means a sign of weakness. It is a sign of political wisdom that helps protect room for manoeuvre.”

Taking Putin’s words seriously, thereby displaying political wisdom, can in this context only mean forcing the Ukraine to capitulate. Has Freund Vlad issued a personal guarantee to Freundin Angie that he would then desist from further conquests? If so, she shouldn’t be bashful about sharing this with us.

But back to Nord Stream. What does Putin stand to gain from destroying it? Isn’t that a case of cutting off his gas nose to spite his economic face?

One critical thing to understand here is that neither Putin nor his acolytes care about the Russian economy or indeed the Russian people. If they did, they wouldn’t be spending trillions for the privilege of turning those people into cannon fodder.

They do care about their personal economies, but after the first 20 billion sitting in an offshore bank such concerns lose urgency. However, to hold on to those billions they have to win this war – or at least not to be seen to have lost it.

They specify, with commendable honesty that they are fighting not just the Ukraine but above all the West, so it’s the West that has to be vanquished. Since it’s clear to everyone that a military victory over the West is beyond Russia’s capabilities (they can’t even defeat a weak Eastern European country getting but a tiny fraction of the West’s arsenal), they have only one way out: scaring the West into submission.

This can be done with a nuclear threat, but the Russians have gone to that well so often for so many years that the West has stiffened its spine, which even recently was still tilting forward.

US Secretary of State Blinken (seen as an anti-Putin hawk) and National Security Adviser Sullivan (historically a Putinista dove) delivered two speeches speaking in one voice: any use of any nuclear weapons will have deadly consequences for Russia and, more important, Putin personally.

Assuming that Putin takes them at their word, that leaves only one arrow in his quiver of threats: one aimed at Europe’s infrastructure, much of which criss-crosses the seabed. By blowing up their own pipeline, which was already barely functional anyway, Putin may be sending a signal to Nato, most immediately to Britain.

If you persist in your foolhardy resistance to his aggressive designs, he has the will and the means to destroy the intricate network of undersea cables and pipes, those vessels through which blood flows into the body of British energy grids, industry, banking, financial services, communications.

Running parallel to Nord Stream are two pipelines connecting Norway to Britain, through which we get a third of our gas. Much of our own hydrocarbon production is also close to Norwegian waters. All these facilities are under threat, and the terrorist act committed by Russia – as you must have surmised, I don’t doubt that it’s Russia that committed it – is a reminder of the danger.

This is either a replacement of Putin’s nuclear blackmail or a complement to it. One way or the other, I hope he’ll be told in no uncertain terms that, whichever threat he acts on, the consequences will be equally cataclysmic.

If destroying a country’s vital infrastructure isn’t a casus belli, I don’t know what is.

People who dare speak the truth publicly ought to be commended, not censured. And they certainly shouldn’t be forced to apologise.

Yet those misfortunes have befallen Labour MP Rupa Huq who both confirmed and illustrated my cherished view on race (and also sex). Rather than being a biological concept, it has become almost exclusively political.

Belonging to a certain race is no longer a matter of a chromatic incident. It’s upholding and practising the behavioural, cultural and political aspects associated with that race in the public, especially ‘liberal’, mind.

I know this – and much to her credit Labour MP Miss Huq knows it too. Which is why she is no longer a Labour MP, having been suspended by the party, and downgraded to independent status, for her remarks about Kwasi Kwarteng, our new Chancellor.

Mr Kwarteng, whose parents emigrated to Britain from Ghana, looks black to me and no doubt to Miss Huq. But her X-ray vision can penetrate beneath the surface to expose Mr Kwarteng for the impostor he is.

“Superficially he is a black man,” she readily acknowledged, thereby proving that her eyesight is of 20-20 acuity. But only superficially, she added with the benefit of her X-ray capability.

“He went to Eton, I think, he went to a very expensive prep school – all the way through the top schools in the country,” she explained. “If you hear him on the Today programme, you wouldn’t know he is black.”

Negritude, in other words, is an exclusive club for whose membership one must qualify. And colour itself is not a sufficient qualification. The aspiring candidate must also walk the walk (pimp roll for preference) and talk the talk (gangsta patois). If he doesn’t, he’ll be blackballed, as it were.

He must also be a behavioural black: dealing and using drugs, mugging old ladies, sporting the entire gold reserves of smaller republics in his ears, nostrils, on his fingers and around his neck and wrists, driving a car with oversized speakers, shooting hoops – and hating whitey (crackers, honkies?). A few criminal convictions to his name are desirable, but not essential.

Mr Kwarteng doesn’t meet these requirements. As Miss Huq espied with her eagle eye, he did go to Eton. He also speaks four languages, has a PhD in economic history and was on a winning University Challenge team (a trivia contest where most questions take me out of my depth).

He is easily the brightest and most erudite Chancellor we’ve had for a long time. That doesn’t mean he’ll be one of the best of course. It takes more than academic knowledge and a high IQ to be a statesman. A candidate aspiring for that club must have a strong character and much common sense.

I’m not sure to what extent Mr Kwarteng’s decision to increase borrowing at a time when interest rates are going up, and with them the price of every pound borrowed, shows that most uncommon of qualities, common sense. We’ll have to wait and see. For all we know, his veneer of competence may be as superficial as, according to Miss Huq, is his negritude.

I wonder if she herself can be regarded as a real Pakistani. After all, she doesn’t wear a burka, she doesn’t pronounce ‘thing as ‘ting’, and she doesn’t run a corner shop. Since that brings her own racial identity into question, she should leave her own glass house before throwing stones at ‘superficial’ blacks.

Was she was inspired by Joe Biden who also knows that blackness has nothing to do with skin pigmentation? During his 2020 electoral campaign he addressed a predominantly black audience with a lucid explanation of his view on race: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump,” said Biden, “then you ain’t black.”

Negritude therefore presupposes support for the Democratic party, ideally for its left wing. A different political affiliation disqualifies a person from the race into which he was born.

Replace race with sex, and exactly the same happens. Because Margaret Thatcher wasn’t a Leftist feminist, she wasn’t accepted by them as a woman. I think Liz Truss will soon have a hard time proving her sex credentials too – and I do hope she won’t cite the affair she had with a fellow MP a few years ago as evidence.

Meanwhile, I’m grateful to the superficially Pakistani Miss Huq for vindicating my observation that politics has squeezed its bulk into the space previously occupied by, well,  everything. And I am sorry she had to apologise – although the nature of her apology reinforces my faith in her.

She only regretted her “badly chosen words”, but implicitly not the deep thought behind them.

In 1952, when the EU was still barely a twinkle in the eyes of former Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats, one of its godfathers, Jean Monnet, gave posterity an important insight:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

I’m not going to launch into one of my customary diatribes against the EU. My point today is that Monnet laid down a blueprint for modern states in general, especially when run by Leftist governments (and I can’t think of too many others these days).

They all pursue strictly political and ideological ends, using economic arguments for diversion only. Their rationale is as sound as it is underhand.

For most people their money is reality, whereas ideological abstractions are meaningless soundbites. They’ll happily swap them at dinner parties, only to go back to the rough-and-tumble reality the next morning.

One deadly sin, avarice, is the natural destination for this view of life, although some people stop short of it. Fewer people, though, are exempt from another cardinal sin, envy.

Combine the two, and they desperately want to get richer. But, barring that, they’ll make do with their wealthier neighbours getting poorer. Such are the psychological mechanisms activated by today’s politicians.

And taxation is one toggle switch at their disposal. If our economies were just about sound economics, taxes would be half of what they are now. The most successful economies never pump more than 20-odd per cent of GDP into the public sector – and everybody knows that.

Everybody also understands why that’s the case. When people exchange their labour for money, the more money they get to keep, the more and better labour they’ll offer. After all, economic performance is simply an aspect of human behaviour – not the devilishly recondite amalgam of curves, models and paradigms peddled by self-serving economists.

If lower income taxes encourage industry and self-sufficiency, lower business taxes encourage enterprise. Moreover, competitive rates of corporate tax and few government regulations will act as a magnet not only for domestic start-ups, but also for foreign companies seeking broader horizons.

All this means that, in purely economic terms, low taxation and loose regulations are a godsend. They stimulate people to work hard for the benefit of their families and, by ricochet, the whole society.

Alas, the other target sin of government policy, envy, will remain unassuaged, and all modern governments, regardless of their declared politics, are keenly aware of this. That’s why they take economics out of economies, replacing it with parasitical politics and pernicious ideologies.

Taxation policy, one of the most effective mechanisms of economic control, veers away from stimulating and careers towards punishing. Punitive taxes are imposed to mollify corrupted electorates baying for revenge – and all taxation systems in all modern Western states are punitive as their primary function.

Their secondary function is to create a vast underclass of those dependent on government largesse, and thus a broader electoral base for power-crazy spivs. (Mass immigration of culturally incompatible and economically useless aliens can serve the same purpose, as Tony Blair’s boy, Peter Mandelson, once explained in one of his few frank moments.)

The on-going Labour conference has made a special effort to vindicate these comments from its very first day. In fact its slogan told us all we needed to know: “For a Fairer, Greener Future”.

This is an economic suicide note. ‘Fairer’, for those of you whose political jargon is rusty, means higher taxes, bigger state, redistributive policies instead of commitment to growth, and hence as much state control as is achievable this side of concentration camps.

‘Greener’ means eliminating fossil fuels by 2030 (less than eight years from now!). That’s guaranteed to put the economy six feet under all by itself, even without similarly suicidal policies to be pursued in parallel.

This would be the case even if the world were in a state of serene bliss, and energy were cheap, plentiful and easily available. Contemplating such measures at a time of deadly turmoil betokens either hatred of Britain or catastrophic idiocy.

Sir-Comrade Keir Starmer (how on earth can a socialist be a knight of the realm?) caused unrest in the Labour ranks by insisting that the Conference be opened with a rendition of God Save the King, rather than the customary Internationale.

I can see the protesters’ point. The usual song has the benefit of honesty. It’s befitting for today’s Labour members to continue their fine tradition by unfurling the red flag and singing: “Arise ye workers from your slumbers/ Arise ye prisoners of want/ For reason in revolt now thunders…” and so on, in the same vein.

But “God”? “Save our gracious king?” Really. How two-faced can they get?

Mercifully, I’m sure they didn’t sing the second verse: “O Lord our God arise,/ Scatter our enemies,/ And make them fall!/ Confound their politics,/ Frustrate their knavish tricks,/ On Thee our hopes we fix,/ God save us all!” Or maybe they did – they just have a different definition of enemies.

In his opening remarks Sir-Comrade Keir viciously attacked the newly announced Tory economic policy. That’s unobjectionable in itself: there is much to criticise there. There is, however, much to praise as well.

A cut in the top tax rate from 45 to 40 per cent is one such commendable policy, and reversing the planned rise in corporate taxes is another. It’s open to argument whether or not such policies can succeed in the absence of a parallel cut in state spending. I fear they may not, but hope they will, given time.

But time is precisely what Sir-Comrade Keir denies even such modest tax-cutting. When Labour takes over, he vowed, it’ll restore the higher tax rates. Some, albeit flimsy, rationale for that pledge could have been provided by a little conditional clause: “… if the lower ones fail to invigorate the economy”.

But Sir-Comrade Keir never uttered that clause. Never mind that the Tory policy of lower taxation, fewer regulations and a commitment to growth may still become a rip-roaring success. Labour will still reverse it on principle. The economic effect doesn’t even play second fiddle there. It’s not in the orchestra at all.

Thank you, Sir-Comrade Keir, for illustrating my points so helpfully. Socialist economies (and even the proposed Tory economy will remain socialist, if marginally less so) aren’t about economics. They are about punishment, envy and runaway state control.

Everything that followed his speech was redundant, if also helpful. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves added a few lines to the aforementioned economic suicide note. The point of the higher tax rates, she explained, is to make sure the better-off pay “their fair share”.

At the moment, the top 10 per cent of UK taxpayers contribute over 60 per cent of tax receipts. That looks more than fair to me. But my definition of fairness is different from the socialist one (see above).

Having thus dug Britain into an economic hole, Comrade Reeves continued to dig deeper: “The next Labour government will introduce a genuine living wage.”

That’s ideological corporatist economics at its most foul. Companies will be told how much they must pay their employees, even if that commitment beggars them. The next step will be around the corner: telling them how much they should charge for their products.

The net effect of such policies will be higher unemployment: rather than getting “a genuine living wage”, more people will be getting none. But hey, it’s the principle that counts. And the principle is the burgeoning state control that will result.

When economics is taken out of the economy, before long politics will be taken out of governance. It will be replaced with out-and-out tyranny, and if you think today’s West is immune to that sort of thing, you played truant at too many history lessons.

As Georgia Meloni is about to become the prettiest prime minister in Italian history, I have to admit that my interest in Italian politics as such is tepid at best.

But her success raises interesting issues that are worth pondering in a broader geographical context.

Such as immigration, which is already a bugbear throughout the West, and will soon become even more so, what with so many Russians and Ukrainians getting on their bike.

In her recent speech Meloni made it clear that immigration wasn’t her be all and end all:

“Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology… no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration… no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!”

Reading that litany I found myself nodding after every comma and ellipsis. But then my innate cynicism and acquired experience kicked in. Both lead to me to believe that it’s not enough for a politician to have good ideas. He, or in this case she, should also have them for good reasons. Immigration is a case in point.

Only a rank xenophobe will insist that no immigrants should ever be admitted for any reason. For sensible people, a lot depends on what kind of immigrants – and what kind of reasons.

The US prides itself on being a nation of immigrants but, historically, every major nation is just that, to various extents. Indigenous Britishness, for example, is a mishmash of Germanic inputs (the term Anglo-Saxon is a dead giveaway), and also Celtic, Roman, Scandinavian, Scandinavian French, unalloyed French, and I’m sure I’ve left some out.

More recently we had mass influxes from the Commonwealth, né British Empire, and more recently still from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When Britons talk about immigration, they usually mean these groups, not the Norman conquerors or French Huguenots, 50,000 of whom settled in England in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

Neither do today’s Italians look much like Etruscans or ancient Romans. Arabic inputs are more immediately obvious, especially in the South.

Few people I know support unlimited immigration and most think the flow must be tightly controlled. There are many good reasons for this view, and also some bad ones.

Liz Truss announced the other day that our shortage of labour is so dire that we must loosen restrictions on immigration.

All those Polish plumbers have repatriated, leaving behind thousands of leaky taps. Pubs and restaurants are closing down for lack of staff. Shops are running out of assistants, many of whom couldn’t assist anyway because they didn’t understand English. Hospitals are short of both doctors and nurses, although the supply of homegrown Directors of Diversity is still strong .

In other words, our PM is making an economic case for immigration, and it’s a valid one. However, it’s not straightforward.

For immigrants swell not only payrolls but also welfare rolls – and crime statistics, let’s not forget that. Their presence in large numbers puts an extra strain on public services, which are already creaking. And even when a country adheres to strictly pragmatic quotas, things may not work out quite so well.

Germany found that out the hard way back in the 1960s, when their Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder for short) was running out of manpower to sustain it. In 1961 the country struck a deal with Turkey and admitted about a million Gastarbeiteren, young men to work in coal mines and factories.

Initially their family members weren’t admitted, and the men were only supposed to stay for two years, to be replaced by another million. Neither part worked out as expected.

Now 2.5 million Turks live in Germany, and their contribution to the crime rate exceeds their relative number by a factor of four. The same imbalance exists in the groups receiving social assistance.

I don’t know what that does to the net economic effect, but in any case a society doesn’t live or die by economics alone. Economics is only one strain feeding the social and cultural pool.

A nation has to retain its cultural personality developed over centuries, not to say millennia. That personality may well be enriched and made more dynamic by foreign implants. But if these are too numerous and remain too alien, they can well turn into weeds suffocating the field.

Muslims in particular, it has to be admitted with chagrin, don’t seem to adapt to Western mores easily or, for that matter, willingly.

For example, a few years ago, two Germany footballers, both second-generation Turkish immigrants, publicly swore allegiance to “our president” Erdogan. And many Muslim children born in Britain don’t even realise it’s not an Islamic country.

Miss Truss didn’t specify which groups she saw as suited for immigration, which made me fear that she didn’t even consider any factors other than an immediate economic benefit. If so, this is yet another example of what I call totalitarian economism, assigning a paramount, almost exclusive importance to the economy. That approach to life is Marxist at base, even if it yields non-Marxist results.

I’m not proposing to solve the problem here and now. My purpose is more modest: to highlight the lines along which the issue can be discussed. However, many people draw their lines in other places.

They oppose immigration simply because they fear and dislike foreigners, especially those of off-white races. This is a natural human impulse, and few of us are totally immune to it – even among those who preach unswerving commitment to multiculturalism run riot (literally, in many cases).

People tend to be suspicious of outsiders, at least at first. If newcomers keep their heads down and try to adapt, they will eventually be accepted, after a fashion. But one wrong step, and the words “there goes the neighbourhood” begin to roll off people’s tongues with a well-oiled ease.

Such sentiments shouldn’t be demonised, certainly not for ideological reasons, but – and here we come back to Miss Meloni – neither should they be fostered for different ideological reasons.

A politician can, in fact should, make a firm stand against illegal immigration simply because it’s against the law. A strong argument can also be made against even legal immigration when it’s not kept down to a sensible level.

But moving this issue to the top of the list appeals to the less laudable parts of human nature. Thus encouraged, such sentiments can spin out of control – and all the way towards unalloyed evil.

This sort of appeal is easy because suspicion of aliens is close to the surface of mass consciousness. Also, during economic downturns especially, migrants are accused of taking ‘our jobs’ and driving down ‘our wages’. But recent history – of Italy, among other places – shows how evil the spirit thereby released from its bottle can turn out to be.

Pushing the xenophobic button has catapulted many a fascist or fascisoid demagogue to the top, and decent people ought to hear alarm bells whenever they espy such a stratagem – or indeed its opposite extreme.

After all, both ‘right-wing’ nationalism and ‘left-wing’ internationalism have caused more misery in the past 100-odd years than the combined 5,000 years of previous recorded history managed collectively.

Miss Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has its roots in Mussolini’s Republican Fascist Party, a genealogy she has been trying to downplay for electoral gain. Yet the cat tends to claw its way out of the bag, and from time to time Meloni can’t desist from screaming Mussolini’s slogan “God, fatherland and family”.

Her two coalition partners, Berlusconi and Salvini, are both champions of Russian fascism – to a point where they make a credible impression of being Putin’s agents. Meloni has tried to distance herself from that wickedness, and for all I know she may even be sincere.

But most of her party supporters are closer to Berlusconi and Salvini than to her on that subject. This means that the EU’s third largest economy will be run by fascisoid allies of the frankly fascist regime threatening the survival of the world.

Alas, the rise of similar parties throughout continental Europe shows that it’s not only the social democratic model that appears defunct, but also genuinely conservative opposition to it.

It’s that evil of two lessers that comes into play. When Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy are the only counterweight to Leftist subversion, it doesn’t really matter which end of the seesaw will eventually shoot up.

Good causes abound in Meloni’s rhetoric. Yet I for one am concerned about her bad reasons.