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Beware immigration demagoguery

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.

Nice melons, Georgia

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 17th and 18th 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.

Old lies told anew

Those who ‘understand’ Putin or support him outright (a certain Mail communist comes to mind) may be Right, Left or centre. But they have one thing in common. They lie.

A lie differs from any old falsehood by being knowing and deliberate. Thus the people I’m talking about know the pertinent facts as well as I do. Hence they reach manifestly dishonest conclusions by distorting the facts – knowingly and deliberately. They are liars. They don’t just have a different and equally valid opinion. They lie.

The columnist in question keeps rehashing his lies in a repetitive monotone, doubtless believing that repetition is indeed the mother of all learning. That may be. But it’s also the father of all tedium.

Open today’s Mail, and you’ll get another whiff of that rancid, unpalatable concoction. Old lies with a few curlicues designed to dress them up and make them look different from what they really are. Lies.

Lie 1: Putin’s bandit raid was provoked by the westward expansion of Nato because he feared for Russia’s sovereignty.

That would be valid if Nato had any designs on Russian territory or statehood. But it doesn’t. Rather than threatening Russia’s sovereignty, that purely defensive alliance was set up to prevent Russia from threatening the sovereignty of others.

If anyone understands this not just intellectually but viscerally, it’s the people of Eastern European countries who suffered unspeakable misery at the hands of their Russian slave masters.

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, they knew something Western analysts didn’t. Whatever their eastern neighbour is called, be that Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, it remains at heart an imperial predator red in tooth and claw.

That’s why Nato didn’t have to coerce or even invite them to join. The moment they found a window of opportunity, they begged for admission – of their own free will. Nato, being an association of free countries, welcomed them.

It’s that F-word, free, that provoked Putin. He doesn’t want Russia to be an East Germany or a North Korea, a poor boy with his nose pressed to the window of a ballroom where free, prosperous people ostensibly no different from the Russians are enjoying themselves.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to help his own people join the party. The only thing he can try to do is drive a sewage truck up to the window, stick the hose in and drown that metaphorical ballroom with ordure.

Lie 2: Putin was provoked by the ousting of the Yanukovych government (‘putsch’ in the jargon of that Mail columnist), as a result of which the Ukraine became independent de facto, not merely de jure.

Implicitly this is bemoaning the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent sovereignty of each of its 15 constituent republics. Yet Russia has no more right to reclaim ownership of them than Britain has to reclaim sovereignty over the US or, going back further, Aquitaine.

When former colonies break away from the metropolis, there is always some weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters. Tough. Once their new status is recognised in international law, there is nothing anyone can do about it – other than naked aggression. Like it or hate it, but there is no legal or moral option other than accepting it.

Yanukovych was a career criminal whose government was both Putin’s puppet and his doppelgänger. It was as thoroughly corrupt, as criminalised and as tyrannical as Putin’s own. Unlike the Russian government, however, it was perceived by the population as a Quisling gang whose real loyalties lay elsewhere.

Hence it was overthrown by a genuine popular uprising, the Ukraine’s first instalment to buy a ticket for the aforementioned metaphorical ball. That’s what Putin – and, alas, his Western stooges – hated. Those who say his grievance is legitimate are liars.

Lie 3: Since our national interests aren’t threatened by Putin’s bandit raid, we have no business arming the Ukraine at the risk of nuclear escalation.

Here I can only repeat what I’ve said before: listen to what evil dictators say. Since they aren’t accountable to anyone, be it parliaments, free press or the people in general, they usually eschew subterfuge.

Lenin, Hitler, Mao all told the world what they were going to do and then scrupulously did exactly that. Westerners didn’t take them at their word because they were used to making allowances for politicians’ pronouncements.

Certain things, they knew, are said just for show, for political effect. Certain promises are made with no intention of keeping them – that’s how the game is played and we all know the rules. Except that evil dictators play a different game, and for them there are no rules.

Putin has said a thousand times if he has said it once that the Ukraine is only the first battlefield of his war on Nato, the EU, the US, the West in general and the whole architecture of the post-1945 world order.

Restoring the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire to its past grandeur will have to follow victories on that and other battlefields, whose exact geography is unspecified but which clearly go beyond the Ukraine.

Poland and other former Soviet colonies got the message. So did Finland and Sweden. Those countries’ memories of what Russia can do are still fresh. Yet the same message falls on the deaf ears of our Putinversteheneren – they continue to lie that this is strictly a domestic fight in which we have no dog.

That lie is sometimes reinforced by the perceptive observation that “we have no common border with the Ukraine.” That too is a lie for the meaning of ‘we’ is maliciously narrowed. It’s our civilisation that has a common border with Russian barbarism. That frontier, and not the Channel, is the demarcation line to our east.

Lie 4: Our intransigence makes Putin resort to nuclear threats.

Those who have followed the Russian media and the pronouncements of Russian politicians for years will know this lie for what it is. A threat of nuclear annihilation is ever-present in Russian rhetoric at every level.

Gleeful descriptions of the US turning into “radioactive ash” and then into the “Stalin Straight” between Canada and Mexico, or of the British Isles sinking to the bottom of the sea are standard fare on Russian TV.

These are complete with animated diagrams showing the trajectory of Russian nuclear missiles from launch to inferno. Masses of technical details are also provided, validating Russia’s capacity for blowing the West to kingdom come.

Putin has even told his subjects not to fear retaliation in kind. Yes, we’ll be destroyed too, he admitted with characteristic frankness. But there’s a difference, comrades… oops, ladies and gentlemen. Those Westerners will go straight to hell, whereas the saintly Russians will join Jesus in heaven.

Such threats haven’t been made publicly since Mao (d. 1976) and Khrushchev (d. 1971). Even they didn’t wave the nuclear cudgel in the later years of their lives, and neither did they invoke theological motifs. Effectively the West hasn’t been threatened with nuclear holocaust for 60 years, since the Cuban crisis.

Hence it’s not our stubbornness that’s responsible for Putin’s threats but the evil nature of his regime. He is trying to blackmail the West, and consequently the Ukraine, into surrender.

Lie 5: We must do all we can to impose peace as quickly as possible.

This requires a revival of my old translation skills, for the liars aren’t saying what they really mean. Since Putin’s hordes have grabbed a great chunk of the Ukrainian territory that, following bogus referendums, they now claim as their own, for the Ukraine to sue for peace now would be tantamount to surrender,

This would mean that the horrendous devastation visited on the Ukraine would have been all suffered in vain. Evil would conquer, emerging emboldened as a result.

The liars want us to withdraw our aid to the Ukraine, leaving her whole population at the mercy of Putin’s murderers, rapists and looters. This is the only way for us to ensure the Ukraine’s capitulation (‘peace’, in the jargon of Putin’s stooges).

Tacitus described such lying legerdemain as “they make a desert and call it peace”. So the concept isn’t new, and neither is sycophantic adulation of evil.

Good to see Russia is learning from us

No, not parliamentarism – that lesson remains unheeded in Russia. Nor has constitutional monarchy found any traction there.

The press gang

Independent judiciary hasn’t fared much better either, and neither has the rule of law. Even such a mundane practice as putting money in the bank without laundering it first has been derisively ignored.

So much more grateful should we be for Russia reviving a fine British tradition that has been dormant in its native land for over two centuries. I’m talking of course about mobilisation by impressment, known colloquially as the ‘press gang’.

The term describes taking men into the army or, in Britain, especially the navy by compulsion. This could be done either by summons or simply by rounding up strapping lads in the streets.

The practice was widespread in Britain for about 150 years starting from the mid-17th century, when crewing the ships for the growing Royal Navy and merchant marine presented a constant problem. Impressment was one way of solving it.

People liable for press-ganging were described as “eligible men of seafaring habits between the ages of 18 and 55 years”. Such men often displayed understated enthusiasm for being yanked off the street and sent off to sail into broadsides. Public opposition was also strong, and the practice was abandoned when Napoleon was defeated in 1815.

It was then revived by the Somali dictator Siad Barre (d. 1995) and a few other African tinpot despots. And now by Russia, circa 2022.

First Putin and then his Defence Minister Shoigu briefed the nation on the progress of the “special military operation”. Things are going swimmingly, just as planned, they said.

Yes, they admitted mournfully, the Russian army has suffered some losses. Nothing compared to the Ukies’ 100,000 KIA, but still – almost 6,000 Russians have given their lives to protect the Motherland from Nato.

That left some holes in the manpower requirements, and these need plugging. To that end, Putin announced a “partial mobilisation”. How partial?

Funny you should ask. “Military service will apply only to citizens who are currently in the reserve, especially those who have served in the armed forces, have certain military professions and relevant experience,” explained Shoigu.

What sort of numbers are we talking here? Here comes the good news: according to Shoigu, the mobilisation reserve of Russia is about 25 million. But that’s the overall number of those eligible for conscription should the need arise. At present, the need has arisen to draft a mere 300,000, just over one per cent of the possible total.

I, along no doubt with many of those directly affected, did some mental arithmetic and was baffled by the result. Why is it necessary to conscript 300,000 to replace 6,000 dead and some wounded, 90 per cent of whom are, according to Shoigu, back in the ranks already? Such are the vagaries of the mysterious Russian soul that so fascinate Dostoyevsky aficionados.

If the Russian chieftains lost touch with the facts of life so much as to believe that the news would be met with enthusiasm, they got an instant reality check. Queues 20 miles long instantly formed – not at recruitment centres but at airports and border crossing points.

The price of a one-way airline ticket out of Russia quickly jumped to $10,000, paid eagerly by those able to do so. The paupers drove their bangers to the border with Georgia, Mongolia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Mars… just kidding about that last one.

When it became clear that it would take days to get to the top of the queue, many dumped their cars and hired more nimble scooters. Anything not to have to defend the Motherland.

Others discovered they didn’t have to travel that far. Simply moving to a different region within Russia would throw the mobilisation bureaucracy out of kilter. Suddenly, men began to acquire an urgent need to travel hundreds of miles for business or pleasure.

Conscription summonses rained on the population, and in numbers much greater than 300,000. The powers that be know they need a hefty safety margin.

There’s not enough time to train the recruits properly, not enough weapons to arm them, not enough clothes to protect them from cold, not enough body armour – even not enough officers. The way the Russian army is run, it takes over 40,000 officers to command 300,000 men.

Even assuming that some retired veterans could be taken off the mothballs, how effective would they be if they haven’t uttered a word of command in decades? Not very, is everyone’s educated guess.

The important thing to understand is that the desired 300,000 is the difference of subtraction, not the product of addition. The ‘partial’ subscription is planned to proceed in several waves, at least three.

The first batch of ill-trained, ill-equipped and ill-led cannon fodder will be served up to be processed by Ukrainian artillery in short order. Then a second wave will come in, and a third one after that. The hope is that those who survive will indeed add up to 300,000, but it’ll take twice as many body bags to get to that number.

That’s why the mobilisation order has a secret clause, evoking the nice memory of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. Inside sources say that the number specified there is 1,000,000 recruits, which supports the three-wave concept.

Far from being ‘partial’, the mobilisation is already total covertly and soon will be overtly. Russian men are facing a stark choice, and they know it. Either they flee, which is becoming increasingly difficult and in a few days will become impossible, or accept a 10-year prison sentence for draft evasion – or turn into lambs led to slaughter.

Meanwhile the conscription juggernaut has gone straight into top gear, skipping the lower ones. Crowds of Russians accepting the summonses with characteristically Russian servile meekness, are being loaded on to buses and taken to destinations unknown.

Alas, the current estimate is that relying just on such obedient individuals would make the 300,000 quota short by about 270,000. Draft evaders are that good. That’s why the press gang has begun.

Recruitment parties bang on people’s doors at night, pick up the men and take them away. Street raids are also proceeding apace. No one cares whether the men have any military experience or regulation specialities mentioned by Putin. No one cares even if they have medical deferments. Their job is to die, and only the numbers matter.

Yet, to use the Americanism, Putin may be dumb but he ain’t stupid. Press-ganging is under way not in Moscow, Petersburg and other major cities, where inquisitive foreign correspondents may roam (the home-grown ones have been brought to heel).

Men are being rounded up in faraway regions, mostly ethnic. Some villages in Buryatia, for example, have already lost all their men to recruitment parties.

So far few public protests have augmented private escapes. But there have been some, though not in the ethnically pure Russian provinces.

For example, riotous public demonstrations broke out in the Babayurt region of Dagestan, where the federal motorway has had to be blocked. As to Chechnya, its women screamed they wouldn’t let their husbands and sons go off to be killed or, if they are lucky, crippled.

The Chechen dictator Kadyrov, who increasingly resembles a loose cannon hoping to roll all the way to the Kremlin throne currently occupied by Putin, agreed. Chechnya, he said, had already exceeded its quota of conscripts by a wide margin. There would be no more, thank you very much.

As all this fun is going on, I for one am happy that at least the Russians have learned something from the British. Not perhaps the best thing, but hey – at least they are trying.

Tory Whig at Number 10

The nebulous nature of our political vocabulary is one of my pet themes. ‘Conservatism’ is one of the especially tenuous terms, whether or not spelled with the initial capital.

Lower-case conservatism evades the grasp of precise definition with eel-like agility. But even the upper-case version, meaning simply support for Tory policies, is far from straightforward. Neither are Tory policies, which is of course the nature of the confusion.

Cameron, for example, said that his take on Conservatism could be summed up in three letters: NHS. I’m not going to discuss the merits and demerits of that putative quintessence of conservatism, other than saying that the current Health Secretary has identified the shining ideal he hopes to achieve as patients not having to wait more than a fortnight for a GP appointment (non-British fans of socialised medicine, take note).

However, its efficacy, or rather lack thereof, aside, the NHS is a state-owned, tax-fed Leviathan that is already the biggest employer in Europe – and one of its most socialist institutions. Thus Cameron’s Conservatism could be more profitably summed up not in three letters but in nine: s-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-m.

That continued the party’s long tradition (only interrupted for a few years by Margaret Thatcher) of winning elections in the name of conservatism by being as Labour as Labour, and sometimes more so. This political transvestism thrived under the two post-Cameron PMs, who both swore by the NHS, net zero and a big state able to solve all the little problems of life.

The word ‘society’ was bandied about with alacrity, but that term also deviated from its acknowledged semantics. Those Tory PMs were using it in the sense of the welfare state claiming to level up, but in fact guaranteed to level down.

Much as I hate reducing the entire complexity of governance to acronyms, slogans and other shibboleths, one slogan does encapsulate the essence of Toryism exhaustively: ‘God, king and country’ – in that order.

Yet it ought to be plain to anyone with eyes to see that this brand of Conservatism bit the dust a long tome ago. If it survives at all, it’s only as the object of insincere and increasingly rare lip service, mostly at various ceremonial functions.

The only meaningful opposition to Tory socialism is Tory Whiggery. Its most illustrious champion was Margaret Thatcher, and, as her first budget proves, is now Liz Truss.

According to a Number 10 insider, her iconic three letters are ‘GDP’, as in growth thereof. And in the good Whig tradition, with a spoonful of modern libertarianism added for good measure, she seems to realise that economic growth is best achieved by making the state smaller, taxes lower and regulations fewer.

This isn’t alien to the traditional Tories either. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries the differences between them and the Whigs were merely a matter of accent, not irreconcilable, mutually exclusive beliefs.

If the Tories were God, king and country plus free economy and small state; the Whigs were free economy and small state, plus God, king and country.

The notion of individual liberty flows out of the founding tenets of our civilisation as naturally as wine out of a bottle. A Western man weaned on the Judaeo-Christian tradition knows that, whereas he is transcendent, the state is transient. He is the end, the state only the means.

That’s why he finds it hard to accept the diktats of a giant central state that inevitably ends up upholding its own interests at the expense of his own. A Western man is much more comfortable with local associations patterned on his own family: parish, guild, township and so forth.

His intuitive love of, and daily devotion to, tradition remains the primary part of his life. His views on the economy and politics are merely its natural and unavoidable derivatives. The core of his personality is thus more Tory than anything else. But at the periphery his views on the economy and politics aren’t far from the Whigs’.

For them such views are more central than peripheral, and the Whigs have arrived at them by a parallel but different route. Yet the two groups know that what unites them is bigger than what keeps them apart.

Alas, such friendly equanimity went the way of all flesh when the world went ideologically secular and therefore thoroughly, hysterically politicised. At present, the only realistic antidote to Tory socialism isn’t traditional Toryism but traditional Whiggery, brought into modernity by an addition of libertarianism.

This, by the way, is what Americans mean by conservatism. Looking at the traditional Tory triad, they have eliminated ‘king’, downgraded ‘God’ to a marginal private matter and promoted ‘country’ to a deified status.

The economy thus becomes, not to cut too fine a point, the be all and end all. Take care of the economy, and everything else will fall into place – such is the dominant (though not the only) premise of American conservatism.

I call this unswerving faith in the primacy of the economy ‘economic totalitarianism’. The Bible of this creed is Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom, which lays down its commandments with unequivocal clarity.

As Liz Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng prove with their first budget, this is roughly how they see life too. Yes, they will go to the financial markets with their hands outstretched, but they seem to see that as only an emergency, indeed wartime, measure.

At the heart of their policies lies a small (or rather smaller) state, low (or rather lower) taxes and deregulation (or rather less regulation). And they seem intent on going through with all that even though they know that decades of socialism have corrupted the public so much that it’s unlikely to jump up and salute.

Somehow many Britons have been indoctrinated to believe that it’s perfectly fine to remain poor as long as the rich get less rich. The notions of supply side, trickle-down economics grate their thoroughly corrupted sensibilities – as, paradoxically, does the idea of lower tax rates.

It’s a matter of arithmetical fact that lower tax rates are bound to benefit more those in the higher tax brackets. And that’s exactly what our brainwashed masses abhor.

You can explain to them till the economists come home that, when the rich pay less in taxes they invest more in the economy, which ultimately benefits everyone. Recipients of our comprehensive education and watchers of our Leftie television may accept such arguments in their heads but never in their hearts.

And yet, if economic growth is the desired end, then supply side reforms are the means – but not unequivocally so. This may be sound economics, but these days it’s always likely to be defeated by unsound politics.

I wonder if Liz Truss has read the 1986 book The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. It was written by David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, called upon to reshape the economy along the supply side lines worshipped by his boss.

However, when it came to the nitty-gritty, Stockman found out that a drastic reduction in taxation didn’t work unless accompanied by a concomitant reduction in public spending. Having realised that, he began to bang his head against the stone wall of departmental fiscal profligacy, only to find that wall impregnable.

I fear that Liz and Kwasi will suffer similar concussions. So far they haven’t uttered a single word about reducing the state’s share of the economy, which is politically wise.

A politician campaigning for a cut in, say, the NHS budget will remain in his job only until the first airing of BBC Morning News – plus the hour or two for the public to start braying for his head and for him to write his resignation letter.

That’s why I don’t have much hope for the Truss administration and especially the next general election, to be held just over two years from now.

I like Liz’s rhetoric, given the impossibility of my ever hearing things I really like. However, unless she does deliver the growth she adores within the risibly short time she has at her disposal, Britain will be cursed with at least a decade of ruinous, unvarnished socialism.

The political pack is stacked against her. She’ll have to keep her budget commitments by increased borrowing, the cost of which is going up steeply. Our political mandarins and other fruits will be fighting her tooth and nail, either by open warfare or underhand sabotage, and they even got Maggie Thatcher in the end.

Still, a Whig Liz Truss may be, but I wish her success. If she succeeds, so shall we.

Computers for pros and cons

As someone who has been writing on a computer for almost 40 years, I have a lot to be grateful for.

Hans Niemann, the prodigal prodigy

In the old days, when I did most of my writing on holidays, I had to lug suitcases full of reference literature to various European destinations. Now I can get all the same information from a device that fits in my pocket.

My Macs (one in London, one in France, one for in-between) not only give me facts, but they also make it easy to process them into text. Granted, they don’t prevent errors of judgement, but at least they correct errors of typing.

I’m telling you this by way of a disclaimer: I’m no computer Luddite. I am, however, a man who has learned the hard way that everything in life, no matter how seemingly wonderful, has a downside.

The important chess theorist Siegbert Tarrasch (d. 1934) put that piece of homespun wisdom into the context of his game. “Even good moves,” he wrote, “are at the same time bad. For, while taking control of some new squares, the moved piece relinquished control of the old ones.”

Chess itself vindicates such prudent sagacity. Computers burst into it in the 1980s, and by the late ‘90s they reached grandmaster strength. In 1997 the engine Deep Blue beat world champion Kasparov, regarded by some as the best player of all time.

Now, 25 years later, a top grandmaster has as much chance of beating a top computer as I have of beating a top grandmaster. That’s why major computer engines only ever play one another. Human players use them the way I used reference literature, for background research.

Push a button, and you get every game your next opponent has ever played since infancy. Another button, and the computer will helpfully point out gaps in his opening repertoire, along with the best ways of exploiting them.

A laptop computer contains an opening library greater than any physical library every did. An amateur learning the game or a professional expanding his horizons has an invaluable tool at his disposal. All good?

Eh, not quite. For many chess lovers will agree that computers have hurt chess more than they have benefited it. And this chess lover, who played his last competitive game 35 years ago, believes they have killed chess.

The way tournament chess used to be played, each player was given a certain amount of time to make a certain number of moves. At grandmaster level, the usual time control was 2.5 hours each for the first 40 moves.

Assuming that the allocated time was used up, the game would take five hours to that point. If it still remained unfinished, it was adjourned to be finished the next day. The players would then spend hours analysing the adjourned position, trying to find the best strategy.

Those who had coaches, seconds, or simply friends eager to help, used their assistance. That was considered above board, although Bobby Fischer used to complain, justifiably, that the whole Soviet chess establishment pooled their resources to analyse adjourned games between Bobby and one of their own.

See where I’m going with this? Computers make adjournments impossible because the position would be analysed by two computer engines, not two players.

When the Soviet world champion Botvinnik adjourned a difficult position against Fischer in 1962, it took him and half a dozen other Soviet grandmasters a whole night to find the drawing sequence. Today, Botvinnik would push a couple of buttons and go to sleep.

Since games can’t be adjourned, they have to be finished in one sitting. This means that five hours for the first 40 moves simply isn’t on. What if there are another 40 moves to play? Take it from someone who used to fritter away his life in this manner: a few 10-hour games in a row is a shortcut to a loony bin or a cemetery.

Hence more and more tournaments are played at faster time controls, with as little as one hour, half an hour or even ‘blitz’ five minutes for the whole game. When I was a youngster we played a lot of blitz for fun. Now top grandmasters are playing it for hefty cash prizes.

Reduced time tends to lead to reduced quality, and not only in chess. I can write most 1,000-word articles in an hour, but they usually turn out better if I take a little longer. The same goes for chess: the faster it’s played, the more blunders there are, and the less depth of thought.

Then there’s cheating, the laws of human nature still not having been repealed. Grandmasters have been known to claim a call of nature and then play with their mobile phones in the lavatory – either to tap the position in or to call a friend waiting in front of his computer screen at home.

Those were the early days in the battle between fair play and modern electronics. The current cheating scandal erupting in professional chess shows we’ve come a long way since then.

A fortnight ago, the 19-year-old American grandmaster Hans Niemann was accused of cheating when he thrashed one of history’s best players, Magnus Carlsen. In the preceding few months, Niemann’s rating had skyrocketed at an unlikely pace, going up by 200 points.

In tennis terms that would be like a county player becoming a top-tenner within a season – well-nigh impossible. In Niemann’s case it wasn’t just statistical improbability that raised doubts. The precocious youngster had some previous: he had already been caught cheating electronically twice, first at age 12, then four years later.

When he trounced Carlsen, everyone, including the great man himself, was sure Niemann had cheated. In fact, when Carlsen next had to play Niemann the other day, he demonstratively resigned after one move in protest.

The cheating charges are backed up by a fair assessment of the breath-taking advances in computer technology and electronic communications. Tournament organisers are trying to counter with spot checks and even body scans. For today’s miniature electronic receivers can be implanted into various crevices and even the flesh itself.

In Niemann’s case the suspicion is that he inserted a vibrating radio receiver into his anus, raising questions about both his integrity and sexual orientation. That way he is alleged to have been in direct rectal contact with a computer engine operated by a friend off-premises.

As a result, random pat-downs and body scans have been augmented by devices monitoring radio wave frequencies around tournament halls.

So far the idea of employing part-time proctologists (or, in women’s tournaments, also gynaecologists) hasn’t been mooted, although it’s the first one coming to my dirty mind. I wonder how a player entering a tournament hall would react to the command “bend over and spread’em”.

Just in case, Niemannn offered to play naked from now on, in a sealed room equipped with electronic signal scramblers. Kinkier and kinkier, as Alice didn’t say.

I’ll leave it for the experts to argue whether or not Niemann cheated, this time around. Let’s just say that the net effect of computers on the ancient game isn’t unequivocally positive.

And not just on the ancient game. The epistolary genre, for example, is moribund, being ousted by your LOLs, Smileys, OMGs and – presumably – FUs.

Youngsters growing up with computers don’t learn how to write and add up for there is no need. And even if they know how to read, which isn’t to be taken for granted these days, their minds are only tuned to snippets of a few sentences at best. And even those are ungrammatical and typically incoherent.

Computers make our lives easier, which isn’t always a good thing. They can also make our lives miserable by encouraging fraudsters, hackers and trolls – and that’s even before we’ve considered the possibility of a computer error unleashing a nuclear holocaust or, on a smaller scale, guiding our airliner into a mountain.

By trying to iron out some human imperfections, computers may in fact encourage many others. In any case, a tool is only as good as its operator. Computers are like a knife: in the hands of a surgeon it can save a man; in the hands of a criminal, it can kill him.

I wonder what Siegbert Tarrasch would have to say about the modern state of the game he loved. “Das ist verrückt”, would be my guess.

Nuclear war four steps closer

That’s how many Ukrainian provinces will hold referendums within a week, announced the Kremlin.

Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhe and Kherson, all partly occupied by Russia during the bandit raid, will treat the world to sham spectacles staged and directed by Russian troops.

The question posed to the population will be simple: Do you wish to be incorporated into the Russian Federation?

Nobody knows how the votes will be cast, but everybody knows how they will be counted: 90 per cent, give or take, in favour. One wonders how many voters (and commentators) realise that the question could be usefully paraphrased: Do you wish your area to be at the epicentre of a nuclear exchange?

Once the Duma has magnanimously agreed to heed the voters’ wishes and incorporate the four provinces, they will become parts of Russia. That means the Ukrainian troops routing Putin’s hordes won’t be reclaiming their own land but trying to grab someone else’s.

The Ukraine will thus become the aggressor threatening the survival of Mother Russia. That will turn the coyly named ‘special military operation’ into a holy, patriotic war, officially declared. The Kremlin will issue the same battle cry made popular in 1941: “Citizens! The motherland is in danger!”

Russian law, such as it is, provides for two wartime measures, and each will have horrendous consequences for the world. First, the government will be able to declare a mobilisation, possibly total but probably partial.

Second, Russian military doctrine explicitly states that, when fighting a defensive war (and it goes without saying that Russia only ever fights defensive wars), the country is justified in using any weapons at her disposal, including nuclear ones.

The lengths to which the Russians will go in implementing either measure are still a matter of conjecture. But the decision to hold those sham referendums shows they will indeed be implemented, for otherwise there would be no point in burning the bridges.

That’s what the referendums will be tantamount to, for President Zelensky has stated unequivocally that, should Russia go ahead with that obscene show, no peace negotiations, never mind treaties, will ever be possible. The shooting will stop when only one side is left standing.

As the Ukrainian advance is gaining momentum, it is becoming evident that the Russian army can only slow it down, not stop it in its tracks. Military experts are predicting that the cities of Lugansk, Donetsk and Kherson will fall to the Ukrainians within a few weeks. That would spell the end – of Putin’s war, Putin’s regime and quite possibly Putin’s life.

Yesterday the Duma announced a raft of wartime laws stipulating severe punishment for evading conscription, insubordination, damaging military property and so on. These are widely seen as a prelude to mobilisation, but there’s a snag there.

Even if the entire male, and some of the female, population of Russia is conscripted, it will take months before all those mobs can be armed, trained, formed into combat units and deployed. And months is the kind of time Putin may not have.

He needs to stop the Ukrainian offensive within days, weeks at the outside. And the only way he can do that is by using tactical nuclear weapons.

According to the aforementioned military experts, that would indeed ward off the Ukrainian advance. But the political effects of such escalation would be more significant than the military ones by a long nuclear-tipped shot.

Nato, and Biden specifically, have threatened dire, if unspecified, consequences should Putin take that desperate step. Since an all-out Dr Strangelove scenario is too baroque to contemplate, one wonders what kind of consequence they have in mind.

Expressions of grave concern would go without saying – Western leaders have form in that sort of thing. However, brushing those aside, as Putin certainly would, what would be an effective response?

Stepping up the supplies of conventional armaments to the Ukraine wouldn’t enable the Ukrainians to resume their offensive. After all, if the first few battlefield nukes prove effective, what’s to prevent the Russians from firing their remaining 2,000 weapons of this type? These would trump Nato-supplied HIMARs with room to spare.

The only effective response at Nato’s disposal would be one in kind. Either retaliating with tactical nuclear weapons of its own or, more likely, providing such weapons for the Ukrainians to use.

Anything except that would force Zelensky to trade territory for peace. And that would both spell Putin’s victory and whet his appetite for further aggression.

Putin was supposed to deliver a speech ad urbi et orbi last night, but something held him back. We can only guess what that was… Hold on a moment.

Just as I write this, the Führer in the Kremlin has finally spoken. His speech lacked the pathos of Stalin’s radio broadcast on 3 July, 1941: “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Fighters in our army and navy! It is you I address, my friends! The treacherous attacks on our motherland launched by Hitler’s Germany on 22 June is going on!”

But what it lacked in style, Putin’s speech made up for in chilling content. Vindicating my first prediction a few paragraphs above, he announced a “partial call-up” of reservists.

And he hinted that my second prediction just might have been valid as well. The “special military operation”, he said, was thwarted by the dastardly West committed to “the disintegration of Russia.”

However, his country “would use all means at its disposal to defend Russia if its territorial integrity was threatened.” And Putin agreed with me that, when all is said and done, “all means at its disposal” boils down to nuclear.

With cynicism worthy of a composite of Stalin and Hitler, he added: “Those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the prevailing winds can turn in their direction.”

So far the only party using nuclear weapons for blackmail purposes has been Russia. The Ukraine couldn’t have done so for the simple reason that she has no such weapons.

And no Western leader has ever issued a public threat of that kind, which of course doesn’t preclude the possibility that a hint at it might have been made in private. One way or another, I am scared that the predictions with which I began this article will soon come true.

The other day I accused another pundit of nuclear scare-mongering. I hope you don’t think that’s what I am doing now. I am just trying to analyse the possibilities – and it’s not my fault that they are becoming scarier by the day.

New genre in the art of war

Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as ‘Putin’s chef’, has cooked up something new, putting to shame every military strategist in history, starting with Sun Tzu (d. 496 BC).

Sun Tzu, eat your heart out

Prigozhin, a close confidant of Putin, got his name because his catering businesses used to host Putin’s state dinners. But as a true polymath, Prigozhin has branched out into unrelated areas.

Thus he has founded the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the world’s biggest trolling network employing hundreds of reprobate boffins. Push a button, and their computers whirr into action, flooding the waves with Putin’s lies.

The latest one is that the Ukrainians are fighting so courageously because they are really androids, genetically modified in US laboratories. Early in the war, the IRA talked about specially bred killer birds, but the android story is a definite step up.

That Russian answer to Renaissance man has also founded a network of Private Military Companies (PMCs) called Wagner. Prigozhin’s Wagnerians are mercenaries used by Putin for especially dirty tasks. Even before they moved into the Ukraine, they had committed ghastly war crimes in Africa and Syria, which was excellent training for their present activities.

Yet Wagner shares the problem of all Russian units: it’s running out of manpower, and recruitment is difficult. The promise of looted fridges and raped women doubtless appeals to the multitudes, but rumours of growing casualties are off-putting.

No solution to the problem seems obvious, but Prigozhin didn’t get where he is by sticking to the obvious. Sun Tzu titled his seminal book The Art of War, but he didn’t anticipate the arrival of ‘Putin’s chef’ who invented a whole new genre.

Prigozhin, accompanied by armed bodyguards, has started touring prison camps to recruit murderers, bandits, rapists and even the odd cannibal. Fight with Wagner for six months, he promises, and your slate is wiped clean. You can choose between staying on or going home, but one thing he can guarantee: there’s no return to prison.

The logic is solid. If the war is turning Russian soldiers into criminals, why not turn criminals into Russian soldiers? They may not know much about combat tactics, but they already know how to kill, rape and loot. What more can you expect from cannon fodder?

Some hidden camera footage of Prigozhin addressing convicts at a camp in Yoshkar-Ola is currently making the rounds. His message is rousing.

Not everyone will come back alive, says Prigozhin with seductive honesty. But those who do will be free men who have paid their debts to the state.

Should the recruits be killed, they’ll be buried with honours. Such an outcome is highly possible: “our war is difficult” and “we are expending 2.5 times more ordnance than at Stalingrad”. And oh yes, those who arrive at the front and then decide to change their min will be summarily shot for desertion.

Anyone aged over 18 and under 50 is welcome to join up, generally speaking. But particularly robust over-50s are welcome too, provided they can pass a simple test during the interview.

Now, the official term for the bandit raid on the Ukraine is a ‘special military operation’, not ‘war’. Anyone who speaks out of turn and calls it ‘war’ risks joining those convicts for up to five years. So technically speaking Prigozhin is breaking the law, but mentioning such trivialities in the Russian context is silly.

Some other matters are less silly and trivial. For Prigozhin has no official capacity in government. And yet he is allowed to lead armed men into prisons and promise presidential pardons to the convicts if they do as they are told.

I can’t imagine offhand that sort of thing in any civilised country, but then Russia has forfeited every last claim to that modifier. Neither can she be accused of prudent foresight.

At present up to 10,000 convicts are already fighting with Wagner and more will come in soon. At first, most of them were doing time for murder, banditry or robbery, but they have now been augmented by a sex crime unit (don’t you just love the sound of it?).

Now how do you imagine real Russian officers feel, provided that breed isn’t extinct? They have spent years studying Sun Tzu, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Suvorov and Clausewitz. They have been indoctrinated in patriotism, taught leadership and the importance of martial honour.

And now not only do they see their soldiers committing blood-curdling atrocities, but their ranks are also swelling with Yahoos who did such things even in peacetime. Who cares about their feelings? I can hear you ask, and you are right. Certainly not Putin.

Nor does he care about the feelings of his own policemen, investigators and judges who caught and convicted those criminals. I can’t imagine them feeling elated about all their good work being stamped in the dirt, along with the law itself.

But what happens after the war ends, no matter how it ends? Hundreds of thousands of murderers, bandits and rapists, including those who have already been convicted for such crimes, will be hastily demobilised.

Those recruited out of prisons won’t go back there – I’m sure Prigozhin is a man of his word. But where will they go? Along with the lads who had never broken any laws before the war, but murdered, robbed, tortured and raped with gusto during it?

Are they going to become systems analysts and civil engineers? Or will they flood the streets of Russian cities where they’ll go on committing the same atrocities without skipping a beat? Do you think they’ll see a valid difference between their Ukrainian victims and fellow Russians? Quite.

The Russian Empire was subverted and corrupted by the Bolsheviks and other Lefties. But it was physically brought down in 1917 by armed deserters, soldiers returning from the battles of the First World War and those undergoing training in Petersburg and Moscow.

But let me tell you: those men were little angels compared to Putin’s and Prigozhin’s bandits pretending to be soldiers. The screams of their victims in their ears, the smell of cordite in their nostrils and the taste of blood in their mouths, they’ll do to the denizens of Voronezh, Tula and Rostov what they did to those of Bucha, Mariupol and Kharkov.

Prigozhin’s Wagner may be the most combat-worthy unit in the Russian army, but it isn’t the only PMC. Gen. Zolotov’s Russian Guards and Kadyrov’s Chechen militants are also doing their best at the behest of their commanders to whom they are fiercely loyal.

A potential is vast not only for a post-war crime wave the likes of which even Russia has never seen, but also for a nice civil war. When a country’s army is run by war lords, who in this case hate one another, and all of whom are loathed by the FSB and the regular army, sparks will fly – and no one will be left unsinged.

The so-called collapse of the Soviet Union was in effect a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB – but not only to the KGB. The other major beneficiary was organised crime, effectively fused with the KGB to a point where it was unclear where one ended and the other began.

The state that until then had jealously guarded its monopoly on crime encouraged that field of endeavour to go private. In a few short years, that licence criminalised the country top to bottom, from Petersburg slums in which Putin had grown up to the Moscow Kremlin in which he now sits.

We’ve seen other criminal states, along with other fascist, totalitarian and aggressive ones. But we’ve never seen anything quite like this. Russia has always prided herself on being sui generis – and she has even more to be proud about now.

The ghost of Powell still haunts

It was in 1968 that Enoch Powell (d. 1998) made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, in which these much quoted words actually don’t appear.

Liz Truss, as seen by The New York Times

That was the time when Britain’s doors were being flung wide open to Commonwealth immigration, which predictably streamed in. Various ethnic groups tended to concentrate in specific areas, making them unrecognisable visually, depressed economically and distressed culturally.

Powell’s own Wolverhampton constituency was among the worst hit, and the locals were desperate. Many were complaining that England no longer looked like England. Some of his constituents told Powell that the dearest dream of their lives was now to make sure their children moved abroad.

Enoch Powell was among the brightest, best-educated and most honest British politicians during my lifetime. He knew that the social fabric of British society was being torn to tatters, and the holes thus formed couldn’t be darned. They would continue to widen, with potentially awful if unpredictable consequences.

“As I look ahead,” Powell said, “I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.”

The key word there was ‘foreboding’, not ‘blood’. As an educated man, Powell expressed his fears with a reference to classical sources, in this case Virgil’s Aeneid.

But ‘blood’ was the only word his detractors heard, especially since America was in the midst of race riots at the time. In fact, Powell himself encouraged that parallel, by talking in the same speech about “that tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.”

Powell has been proved right: we’ve had our share of race riots since then, although not on the scale customary in the US. He did use some rhetorical hyperbole in his speech, but he could doubtless trace that highly productive oratorial technique back to Demosthenes and Cicero.

Yet the core of Powell’s argument was unimpeachable: Britain was of her own accord creating a destructive racial problem where none existed. Unlike America, Britain had no history of multiracialism and no knowledge of how to cope with it. Yet even in America such experience didn’t come close to releasing the tensions.

The speech exploded on the political establishment, and the shock waves are still with us today. Predictably, the floodgates of Leftie indignation were opened, and Powell was engulfed in effluvia, which are still coming in a mighty stream 55 years later.

Sir Trevor Phillips, former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, commented on that idiocy a few years ago, secure in the knowledge that he could never be accused of either white supremacism or staunch conservatism.

“Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion… Everyone in British public life learnt the lesson: adopt any strategy possible to avoid saying anything about race, ethnicity… that is not anodyne and platitudinous.”

The anodyne and platitudinous Tory leader at the time, Edward Heath, was aghast. He instantly fired Powell from his post of Shadow Defence Secretary. Yet 30 years later, having slid all the way down the greasy pole of politics, Heath admitted that “Powell’s remarks were not without prescience.” (“Enoch was right”, as translated from the political.)

His successor, Margaret Thatcher, made a similar admission close to the end of her political career: “Powell made a valid argument, if in sometimes regrettable terms.”

However, according to The New York Times, both the argument and the terms in which it was expressed betokened nothing but Britain’s innate racism and nostalgia for her imperial past. These are just two of the many reasons to loathe that despicable country.

To vent such sentiments this time around, the paper enlisted the services of another British academic with Third World leanings, Kojo Koram, law lecturer at Birkbeck College, London.

Dr Koram materialised the spirit of Enoch Powell and turned it into a cudgel with which to bust Liz Truss’s head. Not only is she a traitor to the socialist cause she espoused earlier in life, but she has also inherited a full raft of Powell’s policies: “preferential terms of global trade achieved through hardline anti-migrant policies, shrinking the state, undermining organised labour.”

One can infer that the ideal Dr Koram (and evidently The New York Times) sees in his mind’s eye is a Britain reduced to Third World squalor by unlimited immigration, ever-burgeoning central state and unchecked trade union blackmail.

Yet he doesn’t say that in so many words. One can understand his problem: a Leftie ideologue finds it easier to define what he hates than what he loves. On second thoughts, scratch the word ‘Leftie’: any ideology is clearer on its pet hatreds than on any positive ideas.

That is the fundamental difference between an ideology, whichever end of the political spectrum it occupies, and conservatism. A conservative is seldom apolitical but, unlike an ideologue, he isn’t defined by politics.

His view of the world is formed by serene love of the transcendent and the eternal, not agued passion for the transient and trivial. By contrast, an ideologue is strictly a political animal, which typically means a feral one.

Show me an ideology, and I’ll show you “the Tiber foaming with much blood” – literally and not, as Powell meant it, figuratively. Ever since the world turned ideological, the violent death count has been soaring exponentially – and the end is nowhere in sight.

The depth of the NYT’s hatred of Britain is odd. One would think the paper would be happy to see its own ideology thrive on these shores, only ever lagging behind America by a few, and ever-fewer, years.

In any case, I can put its fears, as expressed by Dr Koram, to rest. Liz Truss is no Maggie Thatcher, after whom she tries to model herself, and she is certainly no Enoch Powell.

She way well gnaw at the edges of our dominant ‘liberal’ (illiberal, as translated into English) ideology, although even that is in doubt. But she is unlikely to make any encroachments on its core. That will continue to rot, with the putrid stench tickling the nostrils of Dr Koram – and The New York Times.

Biden, Trump and the broken clock

That even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day isn’t a matter of ideology. It’s a matter of fact.

Anyone who denies this fact will become an object of ridicule. Yet no one who asserts this fact will win any prizes: the observation is too trivial and self-evident to merit accolades.

Yet when it comes to politics, facts play second fiddle to ideologies. Getting back to our broken timepiece, if people look at it from an ideological perspective, some will say that it never shows the correct time, and some others that it always does.

Both will be wrong because an ideology is the wrong starting point of ratiocination. It blinkers the eyes, dulls the brain and turns people into jukeboxes waiting for their buttons to be pushed to bang out a tune.

This takes me back to the events I wrote about the other day: the Biden administration declassifying and releasing intelligence reports on Russia’s impending attack on the Ukraine.

Such reports should be evaluated, analysed and either believed or rejected on merits. But ideologies don’t allow dispassionate assessment. Everything has to be reflected through their own mirrors, and these are both concave and convex, guaranteed to distort reality.

Western politics has been increasingly ideological ever since 1789, when members of France’s National Assembly split into royalists on the right of the hall and revolutionaries on the left. For the first time, conciliation between political factions became impossible.

By contrast, England’s main political parties of the 18th century, the Tories and the Whigs, disagreed on some issues. But they didn’t hate one another. Both knew they fundamentally wanted the same things and only differed in the relative importance they attached to them.

Swift had nice clean fun satirising this essential kinship, with his Big-Enders and Little-Enders arguing about the more convenient way of breaking a soft-boiled egg. That was a caricature, but it was based on reality.

The arch-Tory Dr Johnson and the arch-Whig Edmund Burke were good friends. Both were champions of tradition and such relative innovations as free trade. They just put accents in different places and neither of them proceeded from an ideological premise.

Fast-forwarding a couple of centuries, do you think Trump and Biden, or indeed their ardent supporters, could be good friends? I won’t bore you with a litany of other binary impossibilities because there’s no need. You know anyway that these days politically minded individuals don’t see their opponents as honourable people they happen to disagree with. They see them as objects of hate or at best contempt.

The great adman Leo Burnett made his employees wear lapel pins saying “Maybe he is right”. This possibility is denied political opponents. Anything they say is wrong because it’s they who are saying it. Instead of evaluating facts and weighing arguments we consider the source.

This leads to appalling errors of judgement, as it did in the reaction to the intelligence report I mentioned, which turned out to be correct in every particular. But because it was the Biden administration that released it, it was roundly mocked by Trump’s fans.

They know their man was a better president than Biden is, and they are right. They know most of Trump’s policies were commonsensical and Biden’s are at best flimsy. Again they are right.

But they are wrong in not affording Biden the same courtesy as they do to a broken clock, or as Burnett’s employees afforded one another. Biden may be lacking in every faculty of mind and character, but that doesn’t mean he is always wrong.

Nobody is always wrong and nobody is always right. Hence it’s always more profitable to consider the argument, not the source. Once an argument is made, it either stands proud on its own hind legs or falls ignominiously face in the dirt. The fledgling has flown; whence it came is irrelevant.

The accurate intelligence report was ignored by the Trump-leaning public, though mercifully not by the Ukraine. Zelensky’s government wasn’t caught unawares, but indiscriminate followers of anti-Biden prophets were.

One such prophet was Andrey Illarionov, formerly Putin’s economic adviser, and now an anti-Putin, pro-Trump senior fellow at a Washington D.C. think tank.

I watched that normally sensible man mocking the aforementioned intelligence report on a streamed Russian-language interview. The date was 23 February, the day before Putin’s bandits pounced.

Rarely had I seen an analyst speaking publicly with so much conviction. People are saying the invasion is unlikely, sneered Illarionov, but they are wrong. It’s not unlikely. It’s totally, absolutely, utterly, unequivocally impossible. Read my lips: IM-POSSIBLE.

I’m not trying to say it’s wrong to be pro-Trump or anti-Biden. My point is that it’s wrong to be either, or anything else, for ideological reasons. ‘Ideology’ may be a cognate of ‘idea’, but the two concepts are antithetical.

A couple of years ago I was talking to an American pundit who was in the process of crossing the smudged line between neoconservatism and what Americans call liberalism. His attachment to these doctrines was convulsively ideological in both cases.

The subject was the EU, and I tried to present what I believed to be reasonable arguments against it. But my interlocutor wasn’t interested. Never mind the arguments, feel the ideology.

If you are against the EU, he said, you are a Putin stooge. He hates the EU too. That was an ideology speaking, loudly enough to outshout every voice of reason.

The brazen rhetorical idiocy of that response severed my already tenuous links with gentlemanly civility and I said a few things I shouldn’t have said. We haven’t spoken since. There goes another relationship, trampled underfoot by ideology.

Third World scum rises to First World top

Most of the eponymous scum gloating about the Queen’s death are black, but this isn’t about their race. They are also Left-wing, but it isn’t about their politics either. They are none of them particularly bright, but it’s not their understated intellect that makes them scum.

It’s their culture, which isn’t just alien to our Western one, but aggressively hostile to it. They loathe viscerally everything about Western history, civility and polity. Even more to the point, they lack basic decency and taste, and they are smugly proud of this deficiency.

A society not hellbent on self-destruction wouldn’t let such people within spittle-sputtering distance of any respectable public platform. Their lot would be lonely rants at TV screens, and they should only ever subsist on menial jobs.

Yet the scum in question have all risen to the top of opinion-forming professions in the US. To preempt objections, I’m not singling out America for criticism. We have our own throngs of such internal barbarians, although more of them have tended to keep their revolting views about the Queen to themselves over the past few days.

Professor

I am simply trying to comment on the delights of diversity, enforced by what Americans call affirmative action and we describe, less euphemistically, as reverse discrimination.

Having learned that the Queen was at death’s door, Uju Anya, Carnegie Mellon professor of linguistics, saw fit to share this tweet with her like-minded followers:

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

Speaking here is an American professor. Of linguistics. At a respectable university.

For a professional linguist, her disdain for punctuation is as pathetic as her grasp of basic facts of life. For example, “chief monarch” implies the existence of other, junior ones. I know Prof. Anya isn’t British, but an academic should know better. This woman is stupid and ignorant – and that’s before we’ve even touched on her character.

She later continued in the same vein, and with the same stylistic flair: “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.”

Prof. Anya is from Nigeria, and apparently the calamities she mentions were suffered by her family during the 1967 civil war in that country, when Nigeria had already been independent for seven years.

The war was caused by Biafra separatists eager to kill and die for the independence of the Igbo tribe. I’m sure they were inspired by Prof. Anya’s cultural ancestors disgorging that fetid reflux of the Enlightenment: the right of any ethnic group, no matter how backward, to claim national sovereignty.

The British government did supply the Nigerian government with arms, hoping to put a quick end to the carnage. Unfortunately that didn’t work and a million people died.

This and other tribal massacres in decolonised Africa proved what was clear anyway to anyone not blinded by evil ideologies. Most of those countries weren’t ready to govern themselves. In fact, most of them only became countries because colonial empires found it easier to run administrative units demarcated by geography rather than ethnicity.

Tens of millions of black Africans have since been killed by other black Africans, proving the evils of premature, ideologically driven decolonialisation. But even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the British were marginally at fault, what that woman wrote is savage, hateful drivel that shouldn’t have any place in a civilised society.

I wouldn’t wish an excruciatingly painful death on anyone, even ghouls like Putin, whose demise I’d otherwise welcome. And even if such a vile thought popped up in the back of my mind, I’d have the taste not to air it ad urbi et orbi.

To their credit, many decent Americans expressed their outrage. But the good professor’s response was unapologetic – and as linguistically accomplished as her academic discipline demands: “I said what I fucking said,” she wrote.

She isn’t the only one. Journalists from The New York Times, New York Magazine and The Atlantic, all supposedly reputable publications seen as the flagships of cultured, liberal opinion, have also jumped on that bandwagon.

Editor

Thus, for example, Tirhakah Love, senior newsletter writer for New York Magazine: “For 96 years, that colonizer has been sucking up the Earth’s resources. You can’t be a literal oppressor and not expect the people you’ve oppressed not to rejoice on news of your death… Now I’m supposed to be quiet or, better yet, actually mourn what was a barely breathing Glad ForceFlex trash bag? Please, no.”

This is a professional writer, nay editor, practising his craft, getting tangled up in a string of negatives, while holding the Queen personally responsible for the depletion of natural resources. And yet he is held in high regard by his superiors.

This scum ought to talk among themselves to thrash out a common strategy. If Mr Love hates the Queen for the British record of colonisation, his colleague at The New York Times, Maya Jasanoff, a Harvard history professor, holds decolonisation against her:

“The queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged,” she wrote.

Her character and the timing of that diatribe aside, Prof. Jasanoff’s grasp of her own discipline is as wobbly as her command of logic. The Queen couldn’t have been guilty of both colonisation and decolonisation, bloody or otherwise. That’s scum talking, not someone supposedly qualified to teach at a venerable university.

Journalist

A writer for The Atlantic magazine, Jemele Hill, identified journalists’ duty as covering the “devastating” impact of the Queen’s reign. And a Washington Post hack warded off all objections to the timing of such vituperation: “When is the appropriate time to talk about the negative impact of colonialism?” Never, if it’s scum doing the talking, is the answer to that.

I haven’t read those publications since leaving America 35 years ago. Even when living there I only glanced at them sporadically. In those days I physically couldn’t stomach their Lefty, pseud fare. But I don’t recall such obvious scum on their editorial staffs.

Their writers may have extruded excremental nonsense, but they generally stayed within the confines of our civilisation by observing elementary etiquette. Things have evidently changed since then. Third World scum has risen to the top of the pot, rendering the whole contents unpalatable. Things are even worse than I thought.