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Here’s the situation: dozens of pro-Hamas fanatics have been elected to town councils in local elections last week. In Bradford, to name one city, nine of the 30 new councillors elected fit that judgemental but accurate description.

Most Muslim victors stood as independents affiliated with various organisations, several of which are being investigated for extremism. Some others represented the leftmost parties, such as Labour and Green, but these actually lost seats to independently fanatical Muslims. Practically all of the victorious candidates ran on a pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli platform, paying little attention to local issues.

Some of them wore rosettes in the colours of the Palestinian flag and dedicated their victories to the people of Gaza. A few shouted the celebratory cry of Allahu Akbar.

Meanwhile, the umbrella organisation, the Muslim Vote, has issued 18-point demands to the Labour Party, threatening to withdraw its support if any of them aren’t met. That was going Woodrow Wilson’s paltry 14-points four points better.

You can guess what those points are: no ties with Israel, recognition of the Palestine state, travel bans on Israeli politicians and academics, stop bandying the word ‘extremism’ about, adopt their definition of Islamophobia, adjust pension rules to Sharia law, apologise for failure to brand Israel as a perpetrator of genocide – I could cite all 18, but there’s no need. You get the gist.

The Muslim Vote threatened that this was a taste of things to come in the general election, where their supporters “would punish” candidates who still refuse to equate Netanyahu with Hitler. This isn’t an empty threat: according to the Muslim Council of Britain, Islamic votes can decide 31 marginal seats, enough to swing a close election.

“Labour are worried about their damned polling numbers… We are watching the casualty numbers. We will not support those who have failed to back a ceasefire,” explained The Muslim Vote, adding that they “are a powerful, united force of  4 million acting in unison.”

If you consider this situation normal, I suggest we shake hands and go our separate ways. If, however, you agree with me that a systematic attempt to turn Britain into an ally of, perhaps an adjunct to, Muslim extremism is an abomination, do read on.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg made an obvious point: “People are entitled to their views but foreign affairs is a matter for the House of Commons, not local councils.”

Yet this perversion is by no means new. In the early 90s I worked in the borough of Lambeth, across the river from the Mother of All Parliaments. When entering the borough, one was regaled with a sign identifying Lambeth as a “nuclear-free” zone. This essentially meant that the borough pursued a foreign policy different from one favoured by those toffs on the other bank of the Thames.

But fair enough, local politics under the aegis of the councils should be all about taking out the rubbish, sweeping the streets, filling in the potholes, that sort of thing – not about setting Britain’s policy in the Middle East. But the problem is much worse than just so many councillors going beyond their remit.

Modern politics is increasingly characterised by the factionalism of minority groups, so much so that one struggles to find even a hint of national unity. Different groups with divergent interests have always existed, but in the past they also shared something in common, enough of it to coalesce into what used to be called society.

That word has a distinctly obsolete ring to it. That’s why few people ever use it, and one can see why. After all, an English pub-crawler with a Union Jack sticker on his car’s bumper has nothing in common with his local councillor celebrating an electoral victory with ‘Allahu Akbar’. The politician represents not him but murderous sadistic ghouls out to exterminate our only true allies in the Middle East.

Such local politicians have no interest in making their towns cleaner, their roads smoother, their people more comfortable. They entered politics the better to blackmail the main parties into betraying our friends and strengthening our enemies.

In other words, we have at the heart of our body politic a malignant, malevolent presence of a sort of fifth column hiding machetes under flowing white robes. Such is the nature of identity politics, that darling of the dominant Left.

More and more people think of themselves as British a distant second, if that — increasingly not even that. Others are above all Muslim or transgender or planet-savers or feminists or homosexuals or animal-lovers, Scottish or Welsh separatists, or anything else you can think of.

Of these, the Muslims are probably the most united and definitely the most dynamic group. They are perhaps the only one that can make good their threat to hold the national government to ransom specifically because they indeed “act in unison”.

Millions of people voting as a bloc can dominate tens of millions, each voting his own conscience. Parts of Britain are already ruled by Sharia law taking precedence over the English Common variety. Little is common any longer, and it’s rapidly becoming even less. Our house is divided, just like that Islamophobic book prophesied, and it won’t stand.

Anticipating the lapidary British question, “What are we going to do about that?”, I can rack my brain, put my hand on my heart and honestly say I haven’t a clue.

Or rather I’m dead certain that there’s nothing we can do within the existing system, with its unqualified universal suffrage, indiscriminate commitment to religious freedom, compassionate welcome to the downtrodden of the world, enlightened liberalism, egalitarianism, diversity.

But for those immutable, in theory laudable, features of British polity, one could propose any number of remedies for the festering problem I’ve described. These would be so obvious I’m not even going to specify. Yet none of them is feasible because our system precludes their implementation. Our problem is systemic, and it’s only at that level that it could ever be solved. Which probably means never.

Here perhaps it’s appropriate to suggest that no political system should be a suicide pact. Polities evolve as protective mechanisms ensuring the organism’s survival, at least, and continued flourishing, at best.

When a political system is at odds with such desiderata, perhaps we ought to remind ourselves that politics is created for the people, not the people for politics. ‘Onwards and forwards’ is the wrong cry when a precipice beckons.

If we realise we are on the wrong road, travelling nowhere fast, the only wise thing to do is to backtrack and start again. Mercifully, Britain has somewhere to backtrack to.

Until the 20^th century, the British political arrangement had been the envy of the world. Even French proto-socialists, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, couldn’t conceal their admiration for Britain’s perfectly balanced constitutional monarchy.

Hence we don’t need philosophical hand-me-downs from others. We have a wardrobe full of our own old but still wearable and perfectly styled garments. When Britain was thus clad, I doubt too many local politicians would have screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ at the top of their voice – or threatened HMG with blackmailing sedition.

Alas, no one has taken enough care to keep those clothes from getting moth-eaten. So even if we know what to do, we can no longer do it. Instead of those custom-tailored political clothes, we are wearing a millstone around our collective neck. Or, less metaphorically, our politics only allows change for the worse.   

Most of today’s youngsters will know what this texting acronym stands for. However, if you’re no longer in the first flush of youth, nor even in the second, I’ll give you a clue: the last three letters stand for ‘Beyond All Recognition’, and I shan’t decipher the first two out of decorum.

A survey has shown that a quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer their smartphones. They check the caller’s name and text back (or not), the mode of communication they also prefer when initiating the contact.

One possibility is that they resent spontaneous phone calls because they find them intrusive. This is something I sympathise with, old codger that I am.

At this point I have to make a confession that I know will diminish me in your estimation: I don’t own a smartphone and I don’t even know how to text. We maintain a respectable average in our family because Penelope has two smartphones, which she operates with the digital dexterity of the virtuoso pianist she is.

My phone is antediluvian, and it’s permanently switched off unless I expect a call or wish to make one. The other day a coach at our tennis club wondered what that thing was that I had just pulled out of my pocket.

My natural luddite leanings have something to do with such retrograde preferences, but they don’t extend to e-mail, which I use all the time. You see, I am a writer, as are most of my close friends. And if they aren’t writers, they are musicians.

People in such occupations work all the time, even when they seem to be doing something else. If they don’t have their fingers on a computer or piano keyboard, they ponder what they are going to do when the irritation of quotidian life recedes into the background and they can resume tickling those keys.

An unexpected phone call can derail their train of thought, and sometimes it’s hard to get it back on track. An e-mail, on the other hand, isn’t intrusive. You finish your work, look up your e-mails and answer them at your leisure, without jeopardising your musical discoveries or deep philosophical insights for posterity.

If that’s why youngsters refuse to answer the phone, good on them. This though I haven’t met too many young people constantly involved in febrile mental activity, or at least, FWIW, something I’d recognise as such. But IRL it doesn’t matter what I recognise or not.

So much for giving young people the benefit of the doubt. Alas, one suspects that they refuse to talk on the phone not because they choose not to, but because they can’t. That’s of course rather sinister because generations devoid of basic verbal and social skills will eventually plunge the world into barbarism, if they haven’t already.

Having a conversation is an art and, like any other art, it requires finely honed skills. Such skills can only be acquired by constant practice. Natural aptitude is a factor, but it’ll remain an irrelevant one in the absence of daily toil. And any diminution in such skills spells a social and cultural disaster.

To begin with, when youngsters communicate in ungrammatical snippets abounding in acronyms, they do untold damage to the English language. A comparison between the two languages I know best, English and Russian, is a useful illustration.

English grammar, lacking genders and cases, is much less complicated than Russian, what with its six cases, three genders and a mind-bending system for making them all agree across every part of speech. Yet in my (pre-computer) day, native Russian speakers, even uneducated ones, hardly ever made grammatical errors.

By contrast, even young Britons and Americans blessed with higher education often use atrocious grammar. That turns language into an amorphous, mostly semiotic system of interjections, shortening the distance separating humans from animals.

I don’t think anyone knows the nature of thought and how it’s connected with language. Yet it’s fairly obvious that a connection exists at some subcutaneous level. But physiology and psychology apart, certain empirical observations are indisputable.

Clear, properly structured language betokens clear, properly structured thought. Grammar is verbal discipline, and no cogent self-expression is possible without discipline.

It’s hard not to notice that young people hardly ever speak or even write complete, perfectly parsed sentences, which leads one to believe that they hardly ever think complete, perfectly parsed thoughts. That makes them easy prey for demagogues wielding language as an offensive weapon.

Such chaps are congenitally adept at communicating in truncated bytes of slogans designed to tickle the listeners’ naughty bits, not to withstand rigorous logical tests. This works wonders with an audience used to this mode of expression and no other.

That becomes obvious during elections, with people’s untrained minds unable to separate the wheat of sound policies from the chaff of infantile waffle – even in the area of economics, close to most people’s hearts.

Jones is supposed to represent the future, while Smith stands for change. Jones thinks it unfair that some people make so much more money than others. Smith thinks it disgraceful that some people make so much less than others.

Both promise to do something about that, though they are hazy about the specifics. Unless an economic disaster is upon us, they stand for higher public spending and lower taxes, though they are reticent about how such mutually exclusive ends can be achieved at the same time.

They’d never penalise hard work (as far as they are concerned, extorting, on pain of imprisonment, half of people’s income doesn’t constitute such a penalty). At the same time, they wouldn’t let down the less fortunate (this means increasing taxes on the more fortunate, which is to say the majority, even further, though this is seldom stressed).

The voters, unable to parse sentences, can’t decorticate thoughts. They have developed no analytical ability, something that throughout history has been inculcated by training in logic and rhetoric. So they vote for Smith or Jones, choosing one waffle over another.

Moreover, people who neither speak nor write extended thoughts can’t read them either. They respond ‘TMI’ to a suggestion that they shouldn’t form strong views on, say, global warming without reading a few books on the subject first. It’s so much easier to respond to Greta Thunberg’s drivel with Pavlovian alacrity.

In God’s eyes, erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

Our problem is different: young people do understand one another’s speech. The trouble is that what they understand isn’t really speech. It’s Mowgli-like fragmentary communication in sounds, not words, sentences or consequently thoughts. This is indeed a BFD for anyone who is concerned about the future of our civilisation, based as it is on reason, expressed through structured thought and cogent word.

Computers, be it laptop, desktop or pocket, are valuable tools, but only for those who already know how to do without them. If I had little children now, I’d bar their access to any electronic devices until they’ve left their formative years behind them.

Or rather I’d try, only to find out that such draconian measures are no longer possible to implement. Modernity is FUBAR, and so, I’m afraid, are most young people. LMK what you think.  

Thanks to a different calendar and rather peculiar calculations, Orthodox Easter comes a month and a half after ours this year. So Христос воскрес and all that to my Orthodox readers, and happy Painted-Eggs Day.

Lest you may think I’m mocking exponents of a confession different from mine, think again. I’m only referring to a poll that shows that almost 60 per cent of Russians treat Easter as strictly a sum total of traditional rituals, such as painting eggs and baking the local equivalent of panettoni.

They are aware that the day has some religious significance but aren’t quite sure exactly what it is. When asked to guess, some respondents came up with “Christ’s birthday”, “Christ’s ascension” or even “arrival of spring”. On the plus side, no one thought this was the day for offering human sacrifice, which fills my heart with hope for the country of my birth.

Only eight per cent of Russians were planning to celebrate mass last night (never mind on the other days of the Holy Week), and just a paltry 10 per cent of people identifying as Orthodox had the same intention.

That’s rather shabby for the country our illustrious columnist once described as “the most Christian in Europe”. That extra gene of spirituality ascribed to the Russians by their own propaganda seems to be very recessive indeed.

By contrast, the same sources invariably refer to Britain as a soulless, godless nation mired in rapacious acquisitiveness, drug addiction, sexual perversion and castrating urges. Still, be that as it may, roughly the same percentage of Britons celebrated mass at Easter – and that’s in the population at large.

As to the people my late father-in-law stigmatised as traitors, that is to say Anglo-Roman Catholics, 27.5 per cent of them go to mass at least once a week. I’ve been unable to find any Easter statistics but, judging by my own church, that number must be at least doubled or possibly even tripled.

As a child growing up in a communal Moscow flat, with five of us living in one room and having to share the kitchen, bathroom and loo with 20 neighbours, I liked Easter. That doesn’t make me especially precocious because my interest was purely gastronomical.

All our neighbours, good communists one and all, baked kulich, which did resemble panettoni both in taste and religious significance. While blissfully unaware of the latter, I was gluttonously attracted to the former.

Those of our neighbours who were on speaking terms with my family (which was by no means all of them) sometimes offered me slices of kulich, which I received with gratitude and a promise not to bully their children ever again. Most of our male neighbours, and some of the female ones, got drunk on that day, although, since they also did so on many other days, that didn’t single out Easter Sunday as something special.

Words like ‘God’ or ‘Jesus Christ’ never crossed their lips, certainly not within my earshot. Thinking back, I don’t know whether our neighbours would have yielded different findings from the present vintage had a similar poll been conducted. I rather doubt that: even religious people tended to hide their light under a bushel in a country where faith was, putting it mildly, discouraged.

These days it’s much worse than discouraged, worse even than persecuted. Religion in Russia has been turned into an aspect of political propaganda of a frankly Nazi sort. That extra gene of spirituality is used in a typologically similar sense as superlative Soviet identity was bandied about in the USSR.

Homo soveticus was deemed superior to decadent Westerners because of his dedication to selfless struggle for the liberation of mankind from the shackles of capitalism. Homo russicus claims the same or even greater racial superiority because of his spirituality and faith in Jesus Christ Our Saviour.

By the looks of it, this kind of faith neither teaches people what exactly happened on Easter Day nor drives them into churches nor, most important, affects their behaviour. Orthodoxy these days plays the same role in Russia as Aryanism played in Nazi Germany.

Such emetic vulgarisation of Christianity does more harm to it than the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks ever did. When Putin’s regime collapses, which it will sooner or later, the Russians will dump Christianity into what Trotsky called “the dustbin of history”.

The KGB background of the church hierarchs will be a topic of daily conversations, and people will wear atheism on the same sleeve on which they used to flaunt anti-communism in the 1990s. Today’s fascists will then have achieved what the Bolsheviks never quite managed: put paid to Russian Christianity for generations, possibly centuries, to come.

None of this should be taken to mean that genuine believers are extinct in Russia. They are not, though none can be found among the ruling elite and its hangers-on in the media. The number of real Christians is probably the same as it was in the Soviet Union, though today they don’t have to reserve their faith for private quarters. But real Christians do exist, and this is their day.

It’s the business of their own conscience to reconcile their faith with their support of the fascist, warmongering regime in Russia, if they do support it. I don’t see how such an accommodation can be possible: if the religion of love produces hate in its adherents, one may question the sincerity of their faith.

However, my Orthodox readers are real Christians and, if they were Putin supporters, they wouldn’t be guests in this space. So Happy Easter to you all! Христос воскрес!

P.S. Patriarch Kirill, KGB codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’, offered this Easter prayer: “We are especially praying today for our Russian nation that is going through a hard, perhaps in some sense fateful, ordeal. We are asking Our Lord to protect the sacred borders of our land.”

Allow me to translate: His Holiness is talking about the Russian aggression against the Ukraine, accompanied by mass murder, torture, looting and rape. Not to forget the vicious razing of Ukrainian cities.

If such are their prelates, do you ever wonder what the lay masses are like?

 

Is it possible to limp to a landslide? Evidently yes, because this is exactly what Labour has done in the local elections.

The turnout was just over a third of the electorate, which is why I describe Labour’s victory as ‘limping’. Had more people bothered to vote, the Tory Party could have been thrashed even more decisively. As it is, Rishi Sunak lives to lose another day.

Our first-past-the-post system is inherently binary. No matter how many parties appear at ballot, either Conservatives or Labour is guaranteed to win. I suppose if Kierkegaard had been interested in such mundane matters, he could have described the system as ‘either/or’.

Anyway, the present situation is as normal as in the first two letters of SNAFU. Labour has won; the Tories have lost. What could be more normal than this? If one side doesn’t win it, the other one will. Now it’s Labour’s turn.

Since I voted for the losing side, I could describe the result as bad for me, the Conservative Party or even the country. But why is it bad for democracy? Hasn’t democracy worked as it should?

It has. Yet if we consider why it has worked as it has, perhaps we may detect systemic flaws in this way of deciding who should govern a major country. It’s only when our democracy run riot indeed acts in character that its flaws are laid bare for all to see.

It’s a truism that most people vote not so much for one party as against the other. When a party has been in power for as long as the Tories (14 years, give or take), people accumulate grievances galore. Eventually the sum total of their gripes gets to a critical point, beyond which lies utter frustration.

They no longer want the ruling party to get its act together. They want it out. That’s how it always is: show me a state where everyone is supposed to be deliriously happy with the government, and I’ll show you a totalitarian dictatorship.

Fair enough. But finding the Tories bloody useless, which most people have done, isn’t a valid reason to vote against them. It’s only half the reason.

The other half ought to be a sound justification for believing that Labour will do things better. They will balance the budget while lowering taxes. Solve the immigration problem. Stimulate growth. Put paid to unemployment. Stop ruining the economy with green madness. Put defence on a sound footing. Put a sock into the mouth of wokery. Keep the unions under control – you can expand the wish list on your own.

However, there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that might even remotely suggest that this will be the case. On the contrary, there exists a mountain of evidence that Labour will be much, much worse – in every department.

First, let me correct the misconception I’ve espied in one of this morning’s papers. British voters, wrote the author, always choose between centre-right and centre-left, eschewing either extreme.

That’s how things might have been in the past, but they demonstrably aren’t this way now. The choice before the British electorate is that between centre-left and Marxist.

No Tory government since Maggie Thatcher’s can be remotely described as conservative or even centre-right – socially, economically, culturally or in any other way, including the hypothetical wish list I cited earlier. It’s a straightforward social democracy, with no real conservative candidate having the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell to clear even the early stages of the selection process.

As to Labour, it’s a Marxist wolf in the sheep’s clothing of centrist moderation. With the animal cunning typical of socialists, Labour leaders have learned to mask their true nature with sensible pronouncements, inching closer to the centre as the next election approaches.

Hence the grand gesture of ditching the unvarnished communist anti-Semite Corbyn in 2020 and replacing him with Sir Keir Starmer, who has the nous not to wear his Marxism on his sleeve. But make no mistake about it: he does wear it under his outer garments, the way Thomas Becket used to wear a hairshirt underneath his gilded brocade robes.

Starmer’s earlier job was Director of Public Prosecutions, in which capacity he never saw a criminal he couldn’t exonerate. Commonly regarded as the worst-ever holder of that position, Starmer was finally dismissed in 2013 before he could flood our cities with socioeconomical victims of social injustice, otherwise known as thugs. He got his ‘K’ on the way out, which was a small price to pay for getting rid of him.

Sir Keir then became a regular contributor to a journal with the self-explanatory title of Socialist Lawyer. There he treated his readers to profound insights, such as that trade unions should control “the industry and community” and that “Karl Marx was, of course, right”.

Tony ‘Yo’ Blair, former activist in the KGB front called CND, tricked his way to 10 Downing Street by pretending to be a Thatcherite in disguise. Indeed, on the surface of it his policies, though still a far cry from being Thatcherite, looked more moderate than one would expect from a CND activist.

Hiding behind such appearances, Blair managed to deliver more destructive blows to the British constitution than any other prime minister in history.

Dragging Britain into the awful Iraq war, routing the House of Lords, creating American-style institutions that were at best redundant and at worst subversive, dumping extra billions into the bottomless pit of the NHS, introducing the employment-busting minimum wage, setting the stage for today’s housing crisis that keeps young people off the property ladder, reducing industrial output by three per cent at a loss of a million jobs (a remarkable achievement for a party claiming to represent the working class) – such is the legacy Starmer is proud of.

Yet because he lacks Blair’s charisma and talent for card-sharping trickery, he can’t keep his innate Marxism from showing through the holes in his Blairite trousers. Sir Keir is essentially Jeremy Corbyn pretending to be Tony Blair.

Yet the public doesn’t seem to realise this. One can hear people saying things like “It’s time to let Labour have a go”, but no one can give a cogent answer to the question of “What exactly do you expect Labour to do better?” This isn’t a question they can answer or, in most cases, even ask.

In other words, people fly by the seat of their pants all the way to a Labour government that will undo the few good things the Tories have done and outdo the many bad things. If this isn’t an indictment of elective but unselective democracy, I don’t know what is.

And this isn’t a one-off. Knee-jerk voting is dominant in most elections in most democracies, and only my innate moderation prevents me from replacing ‘most’ with ‘all’.

Let me assure you this isn’t sour grapes. If voters were able to activate a modicum of common sense, never mind something deeper than that, and arrive at their support of Labour on that basis, I might take issue with their choice, but not with the very system.

As it is, this is a bad day for democracy – not just for me, the Conservative Party and Britain.

While Ukrainians fight for their independence and Israelis for their survival, we are manning the verbal ramparts of wokery.

Yet another Christian teacher has been led up to the employment gibbet and strung up for ‘misgendering’ a pupil. Last year, Joshua Sutcliffe was drummed out of his profession by a TRA (Teaching Regulation Agency) panel for failing to treat a trans pupil “with dignity and respect”, meaning forgetting to use the pronouns said pupil preferred at the time.

At that point Mr Sutcliffe let the side down by apologising profusely. That abject surrender had no effect on his prosecutors, predictably.

Now, I turned my own back on an academic career some 50 years ago precisely because I sensed which way the wind was blowing. Following the Delphic maxim of “Know thyself”, I realised I was too bloody-minded to be told what to say and what not to say. So why kill oneself trying to get a job one knows one won’t be able to keep? And that time offered only a vague hint at things to come in the 21^st century.

Now I can afford the luxury of smirking smugly at Mr Sutcliffe’s ordeal and saying that, if I were him, I wouldn’t have apologised under any circumstances. I might have even asked whether I was supposed to bark at a pupil identifying as a dog or neigh at one identifying as a horse. However, the point is that I displayed the same weakness as Mr Sutcliffe but, unlike him, I did that pre-emptively, by refusing ever to put myself in his position.

Now he is appealing to the High Court, citing his Christian faith and referring to freedom of speech and religion, a freedom that’s now defunct or at least severely limited. This is especially noticeable when it finds itself on the wrong side of the pronoun war.

Hence Mr Sutcliffe was deemed to be “unprofessional” because he jeopardised his pupils’ spiritual wellbeing. His transgression was dire: this reprobate praised the work turned in by a group of pupils by saying: “Well done, girls.”

That was ignoring the supposedly obvious fact that one of the ‘girls’ had decided she really wasn’t one any longer. Moreover, even though this nuance didn’t come up at the hearing, the word ‘girls’ can anyway be easily construed as demeaning and traumatising.

Such shamefully binary words must be replaced with open-ended salutations. I’d recommend something like “Well done, persons”, “Well done, beings” or perhaps “Well done, individuals”. These may sound less mellifluous, but hey, we aren’t after sonorities here, are we? We are after protecting young souls from the life-long wounds that words like ‘girls’ can inflict.

The prospects of the court overturning the TRA verdict strike me as dim, especially in light of the defence put up by Mr Sutcliffe’s lawyers. They claim that there is “no legal requirement to use preferred pronouns” and, tautologically, that Mr Sutcliffe had a right “not to believe gender identity belief”.

By the same logic, I have a right to relieve myself in my own lavatory, but I’d be nicked if I did so on Piccadilly Circus in broad daylight. Also, as a Christian, Mr Sutcliffe ought to know that there exists a higher law that transcends the casuistry written into human codes.

In this case, this higher law comes down from the god of wokery, and he is athirst. His commandments, shining from up high, supersede any laws passed by Parliament. Thus, talking about “legal requirements” is futile.

The Department for Education knows this. That’s why it opposes his appeal, saying that the teacher failed “to distinguish between his role as a teacher and his activities as a preacher”.

I often say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim. A bad Muslim can easily adapt to life in any Western country, which a good Muslim, meaning one who follows all the commandments of his religion, can’t. The former can be a valuable member of society; the latter, at best a nuisance.

The D of E seems to apply the same logic to Christianity. The only good Christian under its aegis is a bad Christian.

A teacher is welcome to espouse that outdated cult at home, but he dare not act as a good Christian at work. Specifically, he must ignore the unequivocal commandments to proselytise: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” or “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

The logic may be the same, but the religions aren’t. We aren’t a Muslim nation yet, although we are doing our utmost to inch in that direction. Hence, whenever a Muslim tries to trump our laws and traditions with the Koran, we have every historical, moral and legal right to tell him where to go and where to put that book.

The British nation has been Christian longer than it has been the British nation. Moreover, we are one of the few Western countries that have an established church and no laws separating church and state (such as France’s laïcité). I realise that Britain is Christian only nominally these days, but the weight of 14 Christian centuries can’t be shifted easily and quickly.

Therefore punishing a man simply for being guided by his faith is… I almost wrote ‘unconscionable’, but then realised that ‘only natural nowadays’ would be more appropriate.

We should have more teachers like Mr Sutcliffe in our schools. Instead, before long we shan’t have any. I do hope he’ll get his (their? ze’s?) job back. But I fear he (they? ze?) won’t.

P.S. Speaking of France, TV comedian Guillaume Meurice has caused a bit of a furore there by describing Benjamin Netanyahu as “a sort of Nazi without a foreskin”. His employer subsequently defended Mr Meurice’s right to l’outrance (over-the-top outrageousness).

I agree. Insulting the Holy Spirit apart, jokes are either funny or unfunny. C’est tout, as they say in those parts. If someone is offended by a joke, it’s his (their? ze’s?) problem, not the comedian’s. Yet I doubt that even Mr Meurice’s mother would describe that little quip as a funny joke.

It was an expression of a moronic political opinion tinged with anti-Semitism. Hence I wonder whether the comedian speaks English. If he does, he should tour the tent encampments on our campuses. He’d find a receptive audience there.

Civility. Intuitive politeness (outside New York, that is). Self-reliance. Enterprise. And lots of other good things I haven’t mentioned.

Yet we never learn such good things. We only ever learn bad ones, such as crudeness, egalitarian familiarity, parochialism, ‘body art’, bad grammar – and no such list would be complete without political correctness.

I first heard the term from my son, then a schoolboy in California, where the term might have been, and certainly should have been, invented. I used the word ‘negro’ in his presence, which to me was a stylistically neutral term with no pejorative connotations whatsoever.

That’s when my son taught me that new term, and at first I couldn’t understand why my incorrectness was political. Moral or social perhaps, but what does politics have to do with anything? Another few seconds of contemplation, and I remembered that these days politics has something to do with everything.

I even recalled Thomas Mann’s saying, “All intellectual attitudes are latently political”, and thought he had a point. Anyway, though the term ‘political correctness’ was new to me, the underlying attitude wasn’t. My first job in the US was at NASA, and government outfits race ahead of the rest of the country towards what is now called wokery.

The personnel manager told me in no uncertain terms that my female colleagues were neither ‘women’ nor, especially, ‘girls’. They were ‘persons’, and if I called them anything less I’d get in trouble. I protested that, if I identified a woman in the next room as a ‘person’, my interlocutor wouldn’t know if was talking about a man or a woman.

The apparatchik explained that this wasn’t the point, although he fell short of telling me what the point was. Anyway, I learned how to circumvent that injunction by reserving the word ‘person’ for women only and referring to men as strictly ‘guys’ or ‘fellows’, thereby divesting them of their personhood but finding myself on safer grounds.

Then, some 15 years later, I emigrated to Britain and gratefully inhaled lungfuls of fresh air. By then (circa 1988) political correctness had got out of hand in the US, and some locutions in common British parlance would have been grounds for prosecution there.

Finally, I thought, a spot of sanity unsullied with the miasma of mandated verbal lunacy. Well, that didn’t last long.

Since I like to analyse social phenomena dynamically rather than statically, I’m usually more interested in trends than in the here and now. And the general trend I spotted was that all American perversions migrate to Britain sooner or later. This observation is ironclad, but it raises a question: sooner or later?

How long does it take the British to lap up the perverse crumbs falling off America’s table? (The tasty American bits find little demand here, as I’ve mentioned earlier.)

At that time, it took somewhere between ten and five years, with the lag steadily shifting towards the latter duration. Thus Britain gradually caught up with America in the wokery stakes, and then began to pull ahead, slowly. But then the Internet kicked in, and things began to accelerate exponentially.

Whatever gaps in lunacy existed between the two countries got to be filled within a year or two, then within a month or two, then within a couple of weeks – and now I’m happy to report that we don’t have to wait longer than several days if not hours for the shockwaves of American explosions to reach our shores.

The latest vindication of this observation comes from the scores of tents being pitched on university campuses across Britain, as they have been in America for some time. These encampments are tastefully decorated with Palestinian flags and all the usual placards. Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Warwick have all been taken over by pro-Hamas fanatics spewing hate.

Students at an academically awful Leeds University are refusing to say how long they are going to continue to occupy land around the university buildings. They pledge to remain “indefinitely”, until the university is “no longer complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people and crimes against humanity”.

What they mean by such criminal complicity is their university accepting donations from firms even tangentially involved in arms manufacturing. After all, there’s no guarantee that those weapons won’t fall into the blood-stained hands of Israeli genocide mongers.

Of course, if universities no longer accept funding from technology firms, tuition fees may go up, which will be reason enough to stage more protests. One wonders how students find any time to study their subjects, even if these are conveniently fractured into moronic modules precluding any education worthy of the name.

No student protests would be complete without the accompaniment of death threats to Jews on campus, such as those that forced a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University into hiding, together with his whole family.

Jewish students are complaining about being “harassed and excluded”, which shows how little they understand the newly, if implicitly, amended British constitution. It proscribes racial or ethnic discrimination, except against Jews. It guarantees freedom of any religion, except Christianity. And it stipulates equality before the law, with favourable exemptions for members of putatively oppressed minorities.

I detect a direct link between these student camps and concentration camps, but I realise I’m in a distinct minority there. My only hope is that, having borrowed the idea of pro-Hamas encampments from their American counterparts, our students won’t also borrow the attendant violence.

Some such activities in the US have resulted in battles between pro-Hamas and pro-Israeli groups, but at least the American police still have the guts to do something about the tents. Hundreds of arrests have been made at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, with policemen clearing encampments and occupied buildings.

Our police are so far inert, looking at the tents with indifference and, if past such events are anything to go by, barely concealed sympathy. Who said police have to be immune to brainwashing? Not me.

If push comes to shove in Britain, the copycat situation could turn even worse than in the American original because of the much higher proportion of Muslim students here. I’ve once met a young Muslim who wasn’t sympathetic to the idea of murdering every Israeli (from the river to the sea). His name was Asif.

This is to say that their participation in riotous protests has to gravitate to 100 per cent. Relatively speaking, there are fewer Muslims on American campuses, although exponents of other religions or mostly none are doing their level best to take up the slack.

The upshot of this is obvious: follow American current events with attention, ladies and gentlemen. If there’s something you hate, brace yourself: a few days later it’ll come here.

This isn’t much of an advanced warning, but some. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick… but I’d better not develop this metaphor.

This question used to drive me potty in the days I still spoke at conservative conferences. I knew that even in such august circles, connotation meant more than denotation.

In effect, my listeners were telling me to stop theorising and philosophising. For the English soul, and especially its conservative subdivision, is innately pragmatic. If no itemised plan for action is presented quickly, that soul begins to fidget and yawn.

However, as that founding book of our civilisation tells us, it was the Word and not the Deed that was in the beginning. Translated into quotidian realities, this means that thought, first conceived and then enunciated, should precede action. If the thought goes awry, so will the resulting acts.

This applies to every issue staring us in the face. Just look at the two conflicts endangering the world at the moment, Gaza and the Ukraine. Neither our governments nor most people have grasped the nature of those conflicts and their interconnection.

The title of Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilisations, is an accurate description of the situation. (I haven’t advanced beyond the title: the book is set solid in such microscopic type that I can’t read it even with glasses.)

It’s not just Israel and the Ukraine that are under threat, but our whole civilisation. It lies exposed to barbarian attacks, and much of it is its own fault.

If a fish rots from its head, civilisations rot from their intellectual and moral innards. And once the decay has set in, even a slight push from outside may suffice to bring the structure down.

True enough, over the past few centuries we’ve been busily trying to raze the edifice of our civilisation, mendaciously passing off demolition as innovation. But though it’s tottering, the house still stands, nurturing hope that it may in time become sturdy again.

And the only way to buy it time is to resist the swinging wrecking ball, otherwise known as Russia, Iran, China and so forth. In order to survive we must kick against the BRICS, if you’ll forgive this bowdlerisation of another scriptural quote.

The BRICS countries, led by Russia overtly and China covertly, with the other members in for the ride, are neither reticent in their words nor ambiguous in their actions. They have stated their intention to destroy the West’s standing in the world, relegating it to the status of a playground for barbarians to get their various jollies, a sort of a Ye Olde West theme park.

They seek to replace our civilisation with something else, a world they call multipolar but which will end up as bipolar, a world of oppressed, suppressed and depressed people bowing their heads to evil.

This isn’t to say that our civilisation is unequivocally good, far from it. In this life we aren’t blessed with perfect civilisations, and ours is at present further away from any such ideal than it ever has been. Still, it’s infinitely better than anything that can be conceivably ushered in by BRICS.

We’ve abused the good core of the West, but it’s still there, and so is the hope that one day its rotten periphery will be peeled away. Such a hope doesn’t apply to any BRICS alternative – its very core is rotten, whatever its periphery may look like to an outside observer.

At the moment, BRICS’s assault on the West is spearheaded by Russia and Iran, with China providing tacit and underhanded support. They correctly see the Ukraine and Israel as the flesh of the West’s flesh, whereas we see both as at best our bothersome allies and at worst as drains on our resources.

Unless we change this understanding, we are heading for defeat, capitulation and, for all civilisational purposes, annihilation… Here we are, 700 words in, and not a single one of them has provided a practical reply to the question in the title. However, in the absence of this protracted introduction, no practical reply would make sense.

Once we’ve established the framework of this overarching understanding, then – and only then – can we start talking about specific steps to take. What can we do to ward off this aggression against our civilisation, our liberties, our very essence?

Once the question is worded in this way, only one answer is possible: ANYTHING IT TAKES. This may include committing our troops to battle, but mercifully we don’t have to do that yet. Ukrainians and Israelis are happy to do our fighting for us, while we pretend not to realise that their fight is also ours.

When someone you love would die without an expensive treatment, you wouldn’t be counting the cost. The categories of costs and benefits or debits and credits no longer apply in emergencies. When the survival of a beloved child, wife or mother is at stake, no decent person would hesitate to take out that second mortgage or sell assets even at a loss.

So the question is: Do we love our civilisation? One can have doubts on that score, when observing the horse-trading in Western parliaments, the attempts of Western governments to limit aid to a barely sufficient trickle, or the approving nods of so many Westerners listening to Trump’s pronouncements along the lines of “Putin can do whatever the hell he wants” to any NATO member that doesn’t pull its fiscal weight.

Of course, all Western countries must do their fair share (or “pay up” in Trump’s customary bean-counting parlance). Most of them are beginning to realise this, although their actions are still trailing behind their words. But Trump’s rhetoric is like that of a son refusing to pay for his father’s lung-cancer chemo because “Dad shouldn’t have smoked”.

The looming global problem shouldn’t be fractured into small pieces, be that of silver, gold or any other monetary equivalent. Let’s solve it first and then count the cost.

This doesn’t seem to be the thinking of our powers that be. Either they don’t realise that the Ukraine and Israel are fighting our battle for us, in which case they are mind-numbingly, bone-crushingly ignorant, or they are too impotent to act, in which case they should get some moral Viagra.

The West must repel the on-going and accelerating threat, and I hope we have enough military experts and technology boffins to figure out the specifics of what that will take. In fact, I’m sure such experts exist.

But before generals bend over their maps and engineers over their drawing boards, they must be pointed in the right direction. There have to be some minds in positions of power who understand that it’s not only the Ukraine and Israel but also the West in general that’s fighting for survival.

This is what scares me: those who understand have no power, and those who have power don’t seem to understand. Unless that situation changes, the question in the title won’t have a satisfatory answer.

The acronym stands for ‘People Like Us’, which is to say reasonably cultured, well-behaved, well-dressed, well-spoken folk, the only minority that can be abused with impunity in Britain.

Any British comedian knows he can count on getting easy laughs by simply mimicking educated diction, and no one minds when hearing vicious and unfunny jokes about the toffs.

The PLUs retaliate by striking snobbish attitudes and cracking jokes about the proles, but seldom in public and never in pubs. Make fun of chaps raping their vowels there, and you’ll get punched – no exceptions (good job Penelope never goes to pubs).

Yet every time we drive down to Folkestone on the way to France, we comment on the complete absence of PLUs at the Channel Tunnel terminal. We talked about this once, and Penelope opined that PLUs don’t drive to the Continent. They fly.

However, exactly the same observation can be made at Heathrow, even in the VIP lounge. Every style of legible clothes, tattoos and objectionable accents is represented there, and hardly anything else.

The other day Penelope upped the stakes by suggesting that PLUs take private planes, but since we’ve never been able to afford such luxuries, those fortunate fat cats are certainly not ‘like us’. And in general, class distinctions mostly have to do with culture and style, not money – especially in free-market economies, where refined culture is rather a hindrance.

As Paul Fussell correctly remarked in his seminal 1983 book Class, when JFK said Nixon had no class, he wasn’t talking about money. This must-read book convincingly debunks claims to classlessness often heard in the US.

When we finally get to our European destinations, we have little reason to be proud of being British. Go to Amsterdam, for example, and you’ll see crowds of drunk, drugged up Britons shuttling between coffeeshops (called ‘opium dens’ in the past) and knocking shops. The latter display their wares in ground-floor windows, with gaggles of Britons gawking and trying to decide which STD (called VD in the past) they’d rather contract.

Many bars and restaurants in Prague and elsewhere exhibit signs saying “No British parties”. The owners clearly don’t believe the profits from selling cisterns of lager make up for the smashed furniture, puddles of vomit on the floor, and regular customers being scared away for ever.

And Parisians wince in disgust watching British visitors swill beer and eat nothing but chips in top seafood restaurants (personal observation). One can almost lipread the locals whispering “vulgaire”.

Such is the background against which I evaluate a comment from a regular reader who himself is definitely a PLU — despite being a Scotsman and an Orthodox believer to boot. “Most Americans are vulgar,” he writes. I agree, but with a minor proviso: most American tourists are vulgar, just as most British tourists are prole louts.

Having lived in the US for 15 years and worked in the advertising industry, that paragon of vulgarity, I can testify that most Americans are different in their native habitat. In fact, even the lower classes there treat one another with the kind of civility one has to climb up the social ladder to encounter in Britain.

It’s true that most Americans one meets are woefully ignorant, but let him who has ever chatted with our own comprehensively educated masses cast the first stone.

I also know several Americans who live in France, and they are indistinguishable from our French friends, more or less. I certainly wouldn’t call any of them vulgar, and all of them speak better French than I do.

However, certain traits of the American national character may indeed lead an educated European to the conclusion reached by my PLU reader. Most of these traits come from ideological egalitarianism, with the words “all men are created equal” having by now seeped into the national DNA.

For example, one doesn’t need to have a decibel meter to notice that American tourists tend to talk loudly in public places, much more so than Britons do while they are still sober. When you are in a crowded restaurant, you can often hear every word spoken by Americans sitting at the other end of the large room.

Phonetics may have something to do with that: American sounds are formed deeper in the throat and chest cavity, and hence may take more force to get out. However, I’ve known many soft-spoken Americans in various walks of life: from what passes for aristocracy there to my advertising colleagues.

It’s more likely that the Enlightenment phrase “all men are created equal” has expanded its meaning to “equally interesting”. Thus Americans have been conditioned to assume that anything they say must be of interest not only to their interlocutors but to everyone within earshot. If so, it’s polite to speak loudly enough for the innocent bystanders not to miss a single word.

There you have it: what sounds like vulgar brashness to a Briton may in fact be good manners to a chap weaned on the Declaration of Independence.

It’s not only the volume of American speech but also the style of it that may reinforce the impression of crudeness. The style is also traceable to the aforementioned document: Americans are ideologically committed to using demotic speech.

This is a useful reminder of the universal truth I often mention in various contexts: you can only ever level down, not up. Since the American masses can’t all talk with the patrician style and erudition of people like William F. Buckley, the latter feel obliged to pay verbal obeisance to the former.

This may explain why American speech tends to be more idiomatic than British. Idioms are clichéd phrases to be shared by everyone equally. They are the verbal expression and reinforcement of uniformity, that toxic post-Enlightenment gift that keeps on giving. And since Americans correctly see their country as the flagship of modernity, they like to run idiomatic buntings up the mast as a statement of identity.

Buckley, incidentally, was an interesting illustration to another part of my reader’s comment: “most of those [Americans] who aren’t vulgar are précieux ridicules, like the notorious ‘Boston Brahmins’.”

Since American culture is youthful by comparison to Europe, it tends to display certain provincial parvenu characteristics. These can be summed up in the phrase “if you got it, flaunt it”, the neatest encapsulation of bad taste I can think of. Acting in that spirit, educated Americans are more likely than their British counterparts to show off their culture, specifically the verbal part of it.

Buckley’s articles, books and talk show first taught me how to relate my conservative instincts to corresponding thought, for which I’m eternally grateful. However, he had a tendency to show off his stupendous vocabulary in a rather strained fashion, while trying at the same time to use enough demotic phraseology to preempt too many accusations of snobbery.

That too earned my gratitude because Buckley forced me to go to the dictionary, thereby expanding my own vocabulary. But I can see how British wielders of large lexicons might have felt that was laying it on a bit too thick.

Getting back to the question in the title, PLUs do travel. But these days they are so vastly outnumbered that they get lost in a sea of huddled masses yearning to be well-travelled. But that’s modernity for you, which is another proviso I’d like to add to the comments of my PLU reader.

“The cultural influence of the USA has been disastrous for the rest of the world,” he writes. I’d add just a few words to that statement: “…inasmuch as America spearheads post-Enlightenment modernity”. In other words, America is neither the disease nor the cure. It’s a symptom.

P.S. “With notable exceptions” is a disclaimer I may not always offer but always mean when generalising about various nations and their character.

P.P.S. Headline in The Mail: “Agony for boxer Francis Ngannou as his 15-month-old son Kobe dies just weeks after his heavyweight megafight with Anthony Joshua.”

I hope you’ll join me in protesting against fights between babies and heavyweight boxers. Alternatively, join me in wishing that our papers had sub-editors who’d know how to clarify antecedents in sentences.

“The young,” said Leon Trotsky, that great idol of campuses everywhere, “are the barometer of the nation.”

He could have added that not only do the young indicate pressure, but they can also drive it up to a bursting point. Trotsky was perfectly aware of how to channel destructive youthful energy into the right conduit.

When the first Russian revolution broke out in 1905, he himself was 26. Lenin’s nickname in the Party was ‘Old Man’, and so he was, relative to most revolutionaries. Lenin was 35.

Cross the Atlantic, fast-forward to April, 2024, and you’ll be regaled with the magnificent spectacle of youngsters in the late teens, early 20s, turning American campuses into a sort of Nuremberg rally, minus the torch-lit Riefenstahl pomp.

The Ivy League leads the way, and so it should. Such a role behoves its status in American academic life and, more important, life in general.

The eight universities that form the Ivy League are the smithies of the ruling elite. Their graduates densely populate the editorial rooms of The New York Times and CNN, the offices of the most influential law firms – and of course the Capitol Building, along with its clones in the state capitals.

Hence it’s America’s future that’s rioting on campuses at present, and the future looks bleak. For what’s going on there is more sinister than the usual display of gonadic rebelliousness.

Such emotions always bubble close to young hearts, overriding the brains still short of proper wiring. Yet it takes licence for youthful passions to burst out into a mass disorder, someone or something telling them: “Now you can.”

Reports suggest that student groups have been infiltrated by professional mayhem organisers, and I’m sure that’s the case. Mass revolts are never organised by the masses. Someone has to tell them where to go, at what time, what placards to prepare, what slogans to chant, which friends to extol, which enemies to demonise.

But no organiser, however expert, can exploit the feelings that don’t exist. There has to be something lodged in the youngsters’ hearts already to make them receptive to evil prodding.

So what drives American Ivy League students on those riotous pro-Hamas marches? Definitely not self-identification with the downtrodden: it costs some $80,000 a year to keep a youngster at Harvard, and the other elite universities aren’t far behind. Hence the students are either rich enough for their families to shell out (in which case they are sitting pretty) or academically gifted enough to qualify for scholarships (ditto).

It may be simple ignorance of the nature of the Gaza conflict, its historical, political, cultural and religious background. Many Americans who are aghast with what’s going on are posting comments saying “This proves educated doesn’t always mean smart”. But whoever told them Ivy League students are educated?

I can’t judge their knowledge of natural sciences, and it’s probably rather good – especially if we discount the politicised woke brainwashing going on in biology classes. But what they are fed in the humanities is nothing but that, the sort of thing that probably makes Comrade Trotsky flash a proud avuncular smile from his grave.

So ignorance can’t be discounted, and a strong left-wing, which is to say destructive, bias certainly shouldn’t be. People alliteratively called ‘limousine liberals’ or ‘Bollinger Bolsheviks’ intuitively take sides with enemies of the West, especially those describable as Third World.

So yes, add ignorance, leftist inclinations and youthful impetuosity together, and the picture begins to come together. But not completely.

There’s also the anti-Semitism, seemingly incongruous among youngsters whose brains are supposed to be thoroughly washed of any notions of racial or ethnic inequality. That, however, is one rinsing cycle that evidently isn’t working.

You might say that support for the ‘Palestinians’ presupposes some dislike of Israel and Zionism, and you’d be right. Yet equally right is the observation that anti-Zionism can be a righteous mask hiding the anti-Semitic scowl underneath.

When I was growing up in Moscow, the papers were full of scathing articles about Israel and the Zionists. These were illustrated with the kind of cartoons that would have made Julius Streicher wince at such a lack of subtlety. Obese, hook-nosed, vicious-looking, money-grabbing Jews with blood-dripping hands filled the pages of Pravda and Izvestia.

The grateful public was thus encouraged to indulge its latent anti-Semitism, and in Russia it doesn’t tend to stay latent for long. All it takes for it to come to the surface is that implicit licence I was talking about – “Now you can.”

But that was the Soviet Union, governed by evil men trying their utmost – and largely succeeding – to recast the whole nation in their image. Surely America, that paragon of what Tom Lehrer called “good and motherhood”, is free from such cave prejudices?

Apparently not. For those marching Ivy Leaguers don’t just scream anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas slogans, although these are nasty enough. The one that says “From the river to the sea”, for example, communicates a passion for exterminating everyone so demarcated, which is to say all Israelis.

But side by side with such anti-Israeli invective, one sees placards saying, inter alia, “Jews, go back to Poland”. Now, before the Second World War the Jewish population of Poland was about four million. Now it’s some 4,500. When you recall the reasons for this demographic slide, you’ll realise how monstrous those Ivy League chants are.

It’s quite a banal truism to say, along with Churchill, that “If you’re not a liberal by age twenty, you have no heart. But if you’re not a conservative by age forty, you have no brain.”

This adage makes some sense if one refers to espousing conservative views, but this is a far cry from being an intuitive, temperamental – which is to say real – conservative. Most ex-Leftists are really intuitive Leftists who find out the hard way that socialist policies leave them less money for their families. So, along with the so-called neoconservatives, they add support of free markets to their enduring love of the welfare state. That the two things are mutually exclusive escapes them.

But yes, some people do outgrow what Trotsky’s colleague Lenin called “the infantile disorder of leftiness”. In my experience, however, few outgrow the more deep-rooted resentments of much older provenance, such as anti-Semitism.

However, those campus rioters aren’t yet old enough to have outgrown anything. They get their implicit licence from the adults, such as Joe Biden, who indulge in moral equivalence, that subterfuge of the intellectually deficient and morally defunct.

While condemning the pro-Hamas Walpurgisnacht, they never forget to add a note of disapproval of Israel’s oppression, not to say genocide, of the ‘Palestinians’. The youngsters’ hearing is selective, and that’s the only note that reaches their ears.

The ‘Now you can’ licence has been issued and happily snapped up. Out those Ivy Leaguers go, chanting neo-Nazi slogans with the best of the Neo-Nazis and neo-communist ones with the best of the neo-communists. One can’t shake the feeling that America’s future elite just may be a rather nasty lot.

That barometer so close to Comrade Trotsky’s heart has fallen off the wall and shattered. Careful you don’t cut your feet on the shards of glass.  

According to Tacitus, this is what the Caledonian chieftain Calcagus told his host before taking on the Romans in the Battle of Mons Graupius (83 AD).

Refusing to sue for a truce, that proto-Scot explained to his troops, mostly in words of one syllable, the difference between peace and surrender. Though Tacitus’s account of that rousing speech might have been apocryphal, it was nonetheless eternally instructive.

Whenever a small nation fights for its survival against a mighty invader, there are always some people shedding crocodile tears over the casualties and calling for peace at any price. The price they demand but are too coy to name is capitulation.

Some of those peace mongers are driven by genuine abhorrence of violence, but by and large they harbour a secret sympathy for the invader’s cause. Since expressing it openly would be treasonous, they camouflage their legerdemain as a touching concern for lives lost.

This is the point of my foray into ancient history. For we too have our share of such peace mongers, those who pass their attachment to Putin’s Russia as love of peace. Yesterday I mentioned one such, Richard Sakwa, whom I called “the academic answer to Peter Hitchens”.

Yet, as the French say, comparaison n’est pas raison (loosely and less mellifluously, comparison isn’t an argument). Hitchens obviously took exception to being compared to anyone and set out to prove that, in this respect at least, he is incomparable.

As a journalist, he has to be topical, and no topic is more irksome to Hitchens than the new transfer of US armaments to the Ukraine.

Yet as an aspiring intellectual, Hitchens must add an historical perspective to his pro-Putin propaganda: “And here we are, stuck in a stinking trench-warfare brawl which has already lasted half as long as the First World War.” The implication is that the Ukraine’s attempt to stem the flood of fascism into Europe will end up being as disastrous as the events of 1914-1918.

“Wise people (conservatives, as it happened) sought to end that war with a deal, too. But politicians and many in the media of the day were too proud and high-minded to do so. And so we got more killing, and Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and the Second World War as a result. The same bloody fools are in charge again.”

God save us all, the man is suggesting that Zelensky and his Western acolytes are trying to usher in present-day Lenins, Stalins, Hitlers and Mussolinis. And there I was, thinking we were opposing the typological equivalent of those monsters (all of them, incidentally, socialists).

Then, in commendably brutal self-laceration, Hitchens insists that “shabby compromise is cheaper and safer than a fight to the finish”. I’m glad he realises that the immediate peace he calls for is shabby.

Hitchens is especially concerned about the use to which the Ukrainians may put their new weapons, especially the “powerful new American missiles which can travel almost 200 miles”. Make sure you’re sitting down: “I think we can also be sure that there will be more strikes into Russian territory… .” Crikey.

Contextually, Hitchens thinks it would be wrong for the Ukraine to deter further devastation of her own cities by retaliating in kind. I wish I could gain an insight into his logic, military or moral, that at the moment escapes me.

The only obvious conclusion is that Hitchens wants the Ukraine to surrender to what he once called “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. Otherwise it’s not immediately clear why he objects to the Ukraine striking into Russian territory while her own territory is being turned into wasteland.

He then unrolls a syllogism staggering in its fusion of dishonesty and inanity. Thesis: Hitchens is conservative (in the same sense in which Putin is?). Antithesis: Hitchens wants Russia to win. Synthesis: Anyone who wants the Ukraine to win is left-wing.

“The mystery is why political conservatives these days are so keen on war,” he writes. If he is truly puzzled, I’ll be happy to solve the mystery for him.

We, conservatives, aren’t keen on war in general. We are, however, hoping for the Ukraine’s victory in this particular war because her defeat (peace, in Hitchens’s parlance) would fling the sluice gates wide-open for a torrent of fascist aggression engulfing Europe.

Using a technique popular with all masters of disinformation, Hitchens establishes a correct premise, only then to pervert it to reach false conclusions:

“… Leftists have sound reasons for liking wars. War increases state power and centralisation, imposes regimentation and censorship and – in the past century – has made Europe far more socialist than it would ever otherwise have been. Leftists are also Utopian idealists, ready to kill and destroy for a glowing distant goal. Utopia can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.”

All true. But this correct observation shouldn’t lead to the generalisation that conservatives should reject all wars because they all empower the state and lead to socialism. For example, the Second World War did have that effect, but nevertheless the desire to stop Nazism and defend Britain’s sovereignty wasn’t especially unconservative.

Then came another generalising truism: “The proper conservative (and adult) view of war is that it is a regrettable necessity, costly and destructive, and to be ended by compromise as soon as possible.”

Any war? Should Britain have sought compromise with Hitler to avoid the “costly and destructive” events of 1940? Just wondering.

I’ve mentioned it a thousand times if I’ve mentioned it once that Hitchens is clearly taking his cues from the Kremlin. How he takes them is irrelevant. It could be a response to a direct instruction or merely an osmotic understanding. One way or the other, those who have no time to study Putin’s concerns in detail can do worse than reading Hitchens’s articles.

The one today screams Putin’s fear that the new infusion of American armaments will turn the tide of the war. This means that we, real conservatives, have been right all along when campaigning for the end of America’s vacillation.

That doesn’t make us warmongering, bloodthirsty monsters. It makes us people who cherish other nations’ freedom – especially when its loss may diminish our freedom as well. So congratulations to the US for finally moving in the right direction – and shame on Putin’s quislings in the West, especially those who dare call themselves conservatives.