Category: Blog

As a keen student of language, I’m always happy to learn a new word or, barring that, a new meaning of an old word.

Hence I’m grateful to the EU in general, and Greece in particular, for expanding my vocabulary. It turns out ‘save’ is a synonym for ‘steal’.

When used that way, the verb refers to the Parthenon sculptures, the Elgin Marbles, which the eponymous Lord Elgin saved from extinction at a vast personal cost.

When in 1799 he was appointed His Majesty’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (to which Greece then belonged), the Earl of Elgin noticed that many of the sculptures supposed to be at the Parthenon and elsewhere in the Acropolis were no longer there.

He then discovered that the Turks, whose appreciation of such treasures was less heightened than Lord Elgin’s, were burning the marble sculptures to obtain lime for construction purposes.

A civilised man, Lord Elgin appealed to the British government for help in preserving the masterpieces. Finding no sympathetic ear there, he decided to finance the effort himself.

It cost him a whopping £70,000 (some £70 million in today’s money), but he did manage to ship the surviving sculptures to Britain between 1801 and 1812.

He then sold them, for a fraction of his outlay, to the British Museum, where they have remained every since. There, the masterpieces saved from the vandals are admired by six million visitors every year.

Lately the Greeks have been demanding the sculptures back, claiming Lord Elgin stole them. ‘Stole’ is thus a synonym of ‘saved at a ruinous cost to himself’.

Their cause has so far been championed only by assorted leftist ignoramuses, such as George Clooney and his activist wife. George’s appreciation of fine culture was highlighted when he insisted that the sculptures belonged in the Pantheon – presumably to be buried next to Voltaire, Rousseau and Zola.

All that is par for the course. Those as restless of conscience as they are feeble of mind will always find a way of signalling their virtue. However, now the EU itself has got into the act.

At Greece’s insistence, that awful contrivance has made the return of the Elgin Marbles one of the bargaining chips in the negotiations about the post-Brexit trade deal. “Return the Marbles or no deal,” is the message.

“This is just not happening,” responded a No 10 spokesman, “and it shows a troubling lack of seriousness about the negotiations on the part of the EU.”

The spokesman is wrong: the EU is dead serious. That would become clear if we put the word ‘negotiations’ in quotation marks.

A negotiation is a process by which two parties arrive at an equitable solution acceptable to both. This is only possible when they both negotiate in good faith, a condition that’s manifestly not met in this case.

The EU doesn’t want an equitable trade deal. It wants to make Britain’s life so difficult that other disgruntled EU members will think twice before following suit.

Hence the marbles game, used as yet another wrench tossed into the Brexit works. If that doesn’t work, the federasts will think up something else.

Anything at all will do. They may demand free access to Carrie Symonds’s bedroom. Putting Her Majesty on public display in a cage. A permanent presence of the EU flag on Big Ben. Prince William switching his allegiance from Aston Villa to PSG. It really makes no difference.

That they’ll hurt their own economies by sabotaging the deal won’t matter to them as long as they’ll also hurt ours. The EU, as I never tire of saying, is a political project, not an economic one. If the economy has to be sacrificed for political gain, then so be it.

Nor does it matter to them how idiotic they sound in the process. Thus, responding to Mr Johnson’s reasonable suggestion of a Canada-type arrangement, Michel Barnier, chief EU negotiator, cited Britain’s “close geographical proximity” to the EU as a disqualifying characteristic.

Since when does geographical proximity preclude a trade deal? If anything, it should facilitate it. After all, our goods only have to cross the Channel on the way to the EU, not the Atlantic, as Canadian goods must.

Since I can’t believe Mr Barnier is mentally retarded, he must believe we all are. Otherwise he’d say honestly that: “Britain isn’t like Canada not because it’s closer to the EU geographically, but because it was an EU member and then had the audacity to leave.”

Then the whole world would see that what’s going on isn’t a bona fide trade negotiation, but an underhanded attempt to prop up a misbegotten ideological construct.

Yet only a naïve romantic would expect honesty from EU officials. That organisation is a pack of cards balanced on a pack of lies. And, as the Russians say, like priest, like parish.

However, we must be reasonable and accommodating. So I suggest we do return the Elgin Marbles to Greece – provided France and Belgium return to the original owners the works of art Napoleon looted from all over Europe. Fair’s fair, eh, Mr Barnier?

Admittedly, I can’t think of many sensible ideas coming from any other than the Conservative Party during my lifetime. However, numerous examples of inane ideas generated by that party aren’t hard to find.

It has all been a bit hit and miss, mostly miss. And even if you contest the ‘mostly miss’ part, it’s hard to argue against the proposition in the title: Tory doesn’t always mean good.

However, it does always mean Tory. Yet Boris Johnson’s grandiose plans make one doubt that lexical relationship.

In a way one can understand his motives. One can’t be a statesman in the absence of power. And, in a parliamentary democracy, power can only be acquired and maintained by deploying a full arsenal of political weapons.

Hence, even assuming generously that the PM is a statesman in the making, he has to find a workable balance between his statesmanship instincts and the rough-and-tumble of political life.

Boris Johnson may or may not be a statesman; it’s too early to tell. But there’s no denying he’s a politician, and some of his political steps contradict the concept of a statesman, certainly a Tory one.

As a politician, Mr Johnson feels called upon to reward the traditional Labour areas in the north of England for voting Tory. That intention doesn’t bother me; the mooted methods do.

The government has come up with the term ‘levelling up’, making every pair of Tory eyebrows go up. Real Tories are suspicious of the word ‘levelling’, and scathing when it’s followed by ‘up’. For large-scale state programmes only ever succeed in levelling down, not up.

In any case, it takes two to level: levelling implies catching up. Hence, even if one party to it grows richer, it’ll only achieve parity if the other party grows poorer or at least stagnates.

That, however, may be just a matter of sloganeering semantics. Mr Johnson may simply mean he’d like to inject new energy into the economies of the northern counties, hit hard by the arrival of the post-industrial age.

That’s a worthy goal. Yet its worthiness may be compromised and even obliterated by the methods chosen to achieve it.

Mr Johnson seems to favour regeneration through giant infrastructure programmes financed out of the public purse. Since that container can only be replenished by either taxes or borrowing, and since the PM seems to dislike the latter, taxes will have to go up.

In fact, considering the amounts involved, they’d have to rise way beyond the presently mooted ‘mansion tax’ and reductions in pension tax relief. The recently approved HS2 alone will cost £150 billion (in reality, probably more), which is a steep price to pay for shaving an hour off the journey from London to Manchester.

All this should be worrying to Mr Johnson, a student of history. One wonders, however, if he has studied modern times as deeply as Hellenic periods.

If he had, he ought to know that all this has been tried and found wanting. The two politicians involved both came to power in 1933 and, though Roosevelt and Hitler differed in many essential respects, their approach to the economy was startlingly similar.

Both had depressed economies to contend with, and both chose the socialist way of dealing with the problem. Both achieved an immediate success, but it was short-lived.

Leaving Hitler out of it for the time being, the New Deal did provide some temporary relief. All those publicly financed construction projects relieved unemployment, or so it seemed.

Roosevelt, waving the megalomaniac Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in one hand and the National Relief Administration (NRA) in the other, rode in on his white steed and saved the day. At least that’s what many thought.

They were wrong though. After Roosevelt’s hasty and ill-advised measures had run out of steam, trouble came back in force.

By 1938 unemployment was again nearing 20 per cent, recession returned, and suddenly it became clear that the depression hadn’t really gone away. It had merely been camouflaged.

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, admitted as much: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!”

America’s economy was saved by the war, while Germany’s was destroyed by it. That distorted the results of the economic experiments both countries had tried in the 1930s.

Yet, operating in that notoriously suspect subjunctive mood, one can be sure that, but for the war, both economies would have failed. Certainly when the time came to rebuild the Federal Republic, Erhard and Adenauer chose a distinctly non-socialist path, which proved spectacularly successful.

History is a useful but not infallible teacher, and analogies can’t be allowed to go too far. Yet some lessons must be drawn.

Mr Johnson hasn’t inherited a depressed economy, but there are some tectonic tremors capable of producing an earthquake. Most of them deal with excessive taxation, spending and public debt – the same problems that produced the 2008 crisis.

Experience shows that such problems can’t be alleviated, nor a crisis preempted, by higher taxation, more promiscuous spending and greater debt. Yet this is what Mr Johnson seems to have in mind.

None of this is necessary to improve the economy of the North. The government has at its disposal many economic weapons known not to backfire.

It could turn the North into a haven for investment and free enterprise by offering companies – especially manufacturing concerns – tax and financing incentives to operate in the region. Off the top, lowering the corporate tax to, say, 10 per cent or even suspending it altogether for a few years could work miracles.

Whatever the Exchequer would lose in immediate revenue would come back ten-fold as the tax base expands. This isn’t speculation but a simple reference to the great success stories provided by low-tax economies everywhere, including Britain.

Tight money, fiscal responsibility, stimuli to private initiative, encouragement to hard work and thrift – these are essential parts of Toryism. Throwing public money at a problem is the socialist way, and it spells disaster, certainly in the long term.

No, Tory isn’t always a synonym for good. But in this area they overlap, and Mr Johnson could do worse than remember it.

Greta Thunberg and other ecologically sound people must have a certain ideal in mind, a country that shares their views and does its best to act accordingly.

Ideals are, alas, unachievable in this life. But one country came so close that it established in eternity its claim to being regarded as the greenest ever.

Since we are playing a guessing game here, see if you can figure out what that virtuous country was. I’ll give you a few hints.

This nation’s commitment to green politics was presaged by a man who protested against the environmental vandalism of the inchoate Industrial Revolution. In 1815 he wrote: “When man sees nature in all its connections and interconnections, then everything is equally important – a bush, a worm, a plant, man, a stone – nothing is either first or last, everything becomes a single whole.”

It was this seer’s countryman who in 1867 coined the word ‘ecology’ and began to establish it as an academic discipline devoted to a study of links between man and environment.

Moving right along, in 1913 a practitioner of the new science wrote a seminal essay that was later hailed by his colleagues:

“The essay Man and Earth presaged practically every theme of the modern ecological movement. It castigated the accelerated disappearance of species, the distortion of the global ecological balance, deforestation… and the general alienation of people from nature. The essay condemned in no uncertain terms Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, overconsumption… It even decried the ecological destructiveness of unrestrained tourism and whaling, while demonstrating a clear view of the planet as an ecological whole.”

In due course, a party animated by these visionary ideas formed the country’s government and stated its principles forthrightly:

“Anthropocentric views must by rejected as such. They would be valid only if we supposed that nature was created for man only. We categorically reject this supposition. According to our concept of nature, man is but a link in the living chain of nature, just like any other organism.”

The leader of the ruling party agreed: “When people try to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they find themselves in conflict with the very principles to which they owe their existence as people. Their assault on nature is bound to bring about their own downfall.”

The same politician confirmed his green credentials by writing back in the 1930s that fossil fuels would eventually be replaced by renewable sources of energy: “Hydro-, wind and tidal energy are the energy of the future.”

The country’s minister of agriculture put environmental principles into practice. He introduced large-scale organic farming, described as “land-tilling in accordance with the laws of life”.

Under his influence, the nation’s environmentalists secured a level of state support for ecologically sound agriculture that had no analogues in a single country before or since.

Some of the country’s policies, such as forest renewal, protection of animal and plant species, restraints on industrial development, were without a doubt “among the most progressive measures at the time”.

Yet the country’s virtue, as signalled to the world, wasn’t limited to ecology. Many of its leaders, including its head of state, were vegetarians, animal lovers and champions of homeopathy.

Vivisection, experiments on animals and general cruelty towards them were outlawed. The country’s anti-smoking campaign was supported by the government: smoking was banned for all women, enabling the country’s womenfolk to maintain Europe’s lowest rates of lung cancer well into the 1960s. Moreover, it was the country’s doctors who first established the link between smoking and that disease.

How are you doing so far? Have you guessed the name of the virtuous country yet? If you haven’t, I can’t keep you in suspense any longer.

That El Dorado of goodness was Nazi Germany. The quotations I’ve cited came from the writings of Hitler, Hess, Rosenberg, Darré (the agriculture minister I mentioned), Heidegger (the greenest of all philosophers) and their precursors in the 19^th century Blood and Soil movement.

All of them were fire-eating nationalists and virulent anti-Semites. Darré described Jews as “weeds”, characteristically choosing a term from his agricultural brief, while the German sylvan romanticists of the 19^th century tended to prefer more robust names.

Jews were seen as despoilers of the German race, using as their tools capitalism and rampant industrialisation. The Nazis, especially their green wing ably led by Hitler, Himmler and Hess, were anti-capitalists to a man – it’s not for nothing that their party had Socialist in its name.

They saw industry and technological progress as necessary evils and insisted that, if such pernicious activities had to go on, they should not be allowed to cause any damage to the environment.

That was part of the Nazis’ general commitment to a biological basis of their Weltanschauung. In fact, their movement has been aptly described as a political extension of biology.

At the heart of it lay their atheism, liberally laced with paganism, which saw man – other than the Aryan demigod – as nothing but a part of nature’s continuum. The Genesis teaching that nature is there only to serve man was repugnant to the Nazis. To be fair, they had no time for the rest of the Bible either.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, German ecoactivists instantly saw kindred souls. A study of various conservation groups (Der Naturschutz) shows that, by 1939, 60 per cent of their members had joined the NSDAP – as opposed to only 10 per cent in the overall male population.

None of this is to say that any of today’s ecofanatics are by definition fascists. Yet many of their premises and desiderata overlap with the Nazis’ – and the overlap is neither small nor inconsequential.

Journalists who like to juxtapose a photo of Greta with a Nazi poster of a young fräulein do have a point, although this particular horse ought not to be flogged to death.

P.S. The seminal work on Nazi environmentalism is Ecofascism Revisited, by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier.

A police ‘community cohesion officer’ visited Harry Miller at work and said: “I’m here to check your thinking.”

This showed laudable self-confidence, for even neuropsychologists equipped with every manner of scanner are defeated by the task of monitoring the purity of human thought.

Yet the constable was undaunted. He scrutinised Mr Miller’s thinking for 34 minutes and allowed that it fell just short of a felony.

However, the tweets posted by Mr Miller will be recorded as a “non-crime hate incident”, which will tarnish his CV for ever. But he should count himself lucky: he could be doing porridge.

In fact, I’m amazed Mr Miller is at large. For he committed an offence against the very essence of modernity, sacrilege against the dominant secular cult.

Mr Miller obstreperously clings on to the outdated belief that a person’s sex is solely determined by a combination of chromosomes, not by consumer choice expressed through surgery and hormonal treatments.

Such thoughts are dangerous enough even if held in private. But Mr Miller had the gall to commit them to social media. He posted some doggerel accompanied by a satirical entreaty: “I was assigned mammal at birth but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me.” 

I feel slighted. For I’ve been cracking such jokes for years, and yet no policeman has paid me a visit yet. As they say in New York, what am I, chopped liver?

Actually, I’m glad I’ve been spared. For my temperament isn’t as placid as Mr Miller’s seems to be.

If a ‘community cohesion officer’ came to investigate my thoughts, I’d tell him to perform the contortionist feat that only an exceptionally well-endowed man could contemplate. Now, that would be an offence in itself, and I could be prosecuted even if my thoughts passed muster.

Anyway, Mr Miller got off easy. He even went so far as to sue the police force involved, along with the College of Policing. And – are you ready for this? – Mr Justice Julian Knowles found for the claimant, citing freedom of speech.

In his ruling His Honour said: “The effect of the police turning up at [Mr Miller’s] place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated… In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi.”

He forgot to tag on a key word at the end of his sentence: yet. It’s also indicative that he described Mr Miller’s opinion as political.

It strikes me as more aesthetic, commonsensical and, if you will, scientific. For any scientist uncorrupted by ideological afflatus will confirm that, no matter how many bits one has cut off or sewn on, one’s sex won’t change.

Actually, I’m behind the times here, for no structural alterations are necessary any longer. One can simply ‘identify’ as a member of a different sex and expect everyone to accept the new identity on pain of punishment.

While applauding Mr Judge Knowles for his wisdom and courage, I can confidently predict that before long judges will be instructed to treat indiscretions like Mr Miller’s as felonies.

The judge was technically right: we don’t have a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. Yet our ‘community cohesion officers’ are similar in their goals, even if different in their methods. All such types project state power – and all modern, post-Christian, states are tyrannical in their quest to enforce uniformity.

A state imposing tyranny by unrestricted violence is called totalitarian. One imposing tyranny by appeals to some contrived moral standards is called democratic. Yet the salient point is that they both impose tyranny.

I refer to the mechanism employed by democratic states as glossocracy, government by words, typically those used in any other than their dictionary definitions, or else neologisms.

For, proceeding at a steadily accelerating pace, our civilisation first loosened and then eliminated the previously unbreakable bond between word and truth, a bond made explicit in the opening verse of St John’s Gospel.

Starting modestly, with Occam’s 14^th century nominalism, and culminating in Derrida’s 20^th century deconstructionism, the West gradually pushed St John aside and replaced him with Humpty Dumpty, thereby testifying to Lewis Carroll’s prophetic genius:

“ ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

“ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

“ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all’.”

This is the essence of glossocracy laid bare. Carroll understood that whoever controlled language also controlled thought, thus becoming master.

His dystopic prophecy has come true. For modernity outpaces the darkest of fantasies and the bitterest of satires, as any reader of Huxley, Zamyatin or Orwell will confirm. To us, their books read as reportage.

Mr Miller’s post didn’t pack even a modicum of the punch to be found in the political cartoons by Gillray (d. 1815) or Rowlandson (d. 1827). Yet the government of George IV, himself often the target of savage satires, didn’t send out constables to check on the artists’ thinking.

Glossocracy might already have been making inroads, but it hadn’t yet conquered. Thus the state didn’t have to police words, nor the thoughts designated by words.  Such a victory had to wait until the arrival of our fully democratic state, practising what Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority”.

Actually, the majority doesn’t tyrannise. But it does make tyranny possible by acquiescing to the diktats of today’s Humpty Dumpties, who lord it over word and thought.

At first, I rejoiced at the news that two Catholic Universities in Belgium, those in Leuven and Louvain, will offer imam-training courses. How wonderful, I thought, that imams will be trained to be good Catholics.

My joy was premature. It turned out the two universities will train imams to be, well, good imams. Now, I’ve heard of ecumenism, but this goes too far even for my wokish liberalism.

One would think that Catholic universities would have a Catholic, or at least broadly Christian, slant to their curricula. Or perhaps Belgian academics confuse Belgium with 12^th century Spain, where the three Abrahamic religions managed to get along, after a fashion.

One can just see the Jew Maimonides (aka Rambam) getting together with the Muslim Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes) and their Christian Cordoban neighbours to discuss the fine points of Aristotelian scholasticism.

The atmosphere was friendly, apart from Maimonides occasionally taking exception to the others’ chanting “Rambam, thank you ma’am”, and both him and the Christians holding Averroes personally responsible for the infidel tax they had to pay in Al-Andalus.

However, since then too much water has flowed under the bridge, and too much blood into the gutter, to make such academic fellowship a natural fit. Too many chaps indoctrinated by imams have had fun with AKs and suicide belts in Belgium and elsewhere for such cooperation to thrive.

Koen Geens, Belgium’s justice minister, defended the programme with rather specious arguments. “We are building a Belgian training program for ministers in the Islamic faith in order to reduce foreign influence,” he said. “It’s important that we know what they are studying.”

He may have a point in that it’s better for imams to matriculate at Catholic universities than at ISIS. Yet one doesn’t preclude the other, and Mr Geens will have no control over his students’ extracurricular education.

By day they may get credits for learning about Anselm, Averroes and Maimonides, while by night they may still be cramming for advanced degrees in The Meaning of Jihad, Bomb Making and The 72 Virgins in Heaven (Allah knows, finding as many in Belgium would be a losing proposition, this side of kindergartens).

Moreover, upon graduation they’ll be paid by the government, which is what Belgium does for ministers of all faiths if educated at accredited universities. So will they then be teaching Anselm, Averroes and Maimonides or some of those other courses I mentioned?

The Catholic University of Leuven and the Catholic University of Louvain are located in the same city, called differently by the Flemings and the Walloons. Hence the two universities used to be one.

However, acting in the spirit of unity fostered by the EU, they split up and are now located some 18 miles apart. But not to worry: the EU might have failed to keep two parts of a small country together, but we know it’ll succeed in homogenising, say, Bulgaria and Holland or Finland and Greece.

I can’t help wondering how the two universities will reconcile their ecumenical ambitions with their Catholicism. But not to worry: their allegiance to it isn’t as fervent as their commitment to multi-culti virtue.

A couple of years ago, the Catholic University of Louvain suspended a professor for his opposition to abortion. The administration closed ranks behind a ‘right to choose’.

“The Catholic University of Louvain recalls that, in the spirit of the law decriminalising abortion passed in 1990, it respects the autonomy of women to make this choice…,” ran the official statement.

The woke liberal in me rejoices. Yet the pedant in me can’t quite square the circle here. For abortion explicitly contradicts Catholic doctrine, even if secular doctrine sees nothing wrong with it.

One would hope that in case of a conflict between the two, a university calling itself Catholic would refrain from making anti-Catholic statements and punishing its professors for making devout ones.

Yet this hope is bound to be forlorn: Catholicism isn’t what it used to be. Then again, what is?

In a revolting, possibly illegal, display of racial stereotyping, The Times has seen fit to publish this photograph of the Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford (below).

Rage is constricting my throat, my unashamedly wokish consciousness is rolling on the floor frothing at the mouth, the overpowering sense of my world collapsing around me is driving coherent thoughts from my mind .

How can our broadsheets be unaware of the binary black-ape image every white person – which is to say racist – already has in his mind, without having it reinforced?

If Satan was the ape of God to Augustine (who himself was off-white), a simian can mean just one thing to a modern sensibility: a black man. This outrage is only partly mitigated by another fact self-evident to a modern sensibility, that originally we are all apes.

While congratulating those who don’t doubt this scientific fact on their capacity for frank self-assessment, I must still insist that no white person, which is to say racist, should be allowed to hide his racism under Darwin’s beard.

For this is the thin end of the wedge. The same editor who saw fit to publish this obscenity yesterday will tomorrow throw bananas at Afro-Caribbean persons, only to advocate and then perpetrate genocide the day after.

Hence, by registering this protest, I not only vent my virtue-signalling conscience but also, one hopes, prevent genocide. This may partly expiate the indelible sin of whiteness from which I’ve suffered my whole long life.

As to Marcus Rashford, I refuse to believe that an Afro-Caribbean person would pose for such a Nazi shot voluntarily.

Say it ain’t so, Marcus! Say they were aiming a gun at you from behind the camera! Say it’s a Photoshop job! Say you didn’t acquiesce in this raceploitation (I’m proud of having just added this new word to the glossary of righteousness).

Please say something along those lines before a build-up of virtue implodes my head. And do bankroll my forthcoming lawsuit against The Times. At £10.4 million a year, you can jolly well afford it.

The other day I watched a video of Roger Scruton addressing an Oxford Union audience.

During the Q&A, one student asked him how to counter the widespread view that conservatives are stupid.

Roger replied with the words in the title and then suggested this isn’t a bad thing. After all, we all know how much harm intellectuals have caused.

I’d field the same question differently.

First, I’d say that this common perception isn’t supported by statistical evidence. However, even to begin to garner such evidence, one would have to define intelligence, which is no easy task.

After all, a functionally illiterate computer boffin may well have a higher IQ than Roger or me. Would that make him more intelligent? Not according to my definition.

If we narrow the concept of intelligence to a capacity for coming up with deep thoughts, which was Roger’s stock in trade, the task becomes easier. Since I like my tasks easy, these are the confines within which I’ll remain here.

I’d say that not only are people of the right deeper thinkers than those of the left, but that the left aren’t serious thinkers at all.

If we take economics as an example, let’s see how the conclusions reached by the two groups are justified by observable facts. How well, in other words, they wield the basic cognitive tool of induction.

Accepting for the sake of brevity Marx’s crude juxtaposition of capitalism and socialism, the facts are unequivocal.

Wherever they’ve been tried in earnest, the former has proved a spectacular success and the latter an unmitigated disaster. It’s a demonstrable fact that, the more capitalism and the less socialism in an economy, the better it’ll perform.

Now, how would you describe a person who, on the basis of this empirical fact, reaches the conclusion that a socialist economy is a desirable ideal? Not to cut too fine a point, I’d describe him as daft.

Proceeding from the simple to the complex, the starting point of left-wing anthropology is that the state can – and therefore must – mould human nature by legislative and administrative means.

Even socialists who’ve never read Rousseau agree with him vicariously that man is born perfect, a noble sauvage in all his primordial beauty, a clean slate on which [choose your own bogeyman: the church, monarchy, capitalism, conservatism, Roger Scruton] then writes a corrupting message.

It’s then the state’s job to write on that tabula rasa its own meliorative message, dictated by the current political vogue. When the vogue changes, so will the message. But the presumption of the state’s unwavering wisdom won’t change with it.

This contrasts with the conservative assumption of original sin, held, if not in so many words, even by agnostic conservatives. That sin, man’s manifestly imperfect nature, can only be counteracted not by fiat, but by a lifelong personal effort at virtue as it’s understood in our civilisation.

Again, tasting both slices of the pudding (and God knows, mankind has done plenty of tasting throughout its history) should produce two types of conclusions: one intelligent, the other stupid – words I use interchangeably with conservative and left-wing.

The taster is bound to notice that, whenever a state starts from the presumption of human perfection, it eventually gets bitterly disappointed: human nature holds firm. Out of its sense of frustration the state often decides that, since people have let it down, it has to kill them all.

How would you rate the intellect of a person who still clings to the underlying philosophy or even its close approximations? Quite.

Then there’s the notion of change, desirable or otherwise. Conservative thinkers from Falkland (“if it’s not necessary to change, it’s necessary not to change”) to Burke (“a state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation”) never opposed it as such.

They simply advocated prudence, especially if a planned change was irreversible. Even when it isn’t, any drastic change always produces unintended and unpredictable consequences, so care must be taken.

Again, how would you describe those who eschew prudence and advocate large-scale social experimentation, with millions of people as guinea pigs? This, in the knowledge that most such bold experiments have ended in disaster? Yes, I agree.

Morality also comes into this. Even an agnostic conservative is weaned on a culture shaped by Christianity. Hence he intuitively believes in the need for some outside moral authority, accepted as such by the whole society.

This, he realises, is an adhesive without which a society will fall apart. His supposedly smarter opponent, on the other hand, believes in his own moral infallibility – or, barring that, his own right to arrive at a voluntarist and arbitrary moral judgement, even if it goes against the grain of custom, consensus and common sense.

Which approach do you think is more intelligent? Indeed.

And so forth: take anything on which the right and the left disagree, and the conservative view will always be more sound and defensible.

As to the damage supposedly done by intellectuals, this myth is often repeated by many conservatives, including such brilliant ones as Roger. Yet this statement is meaningless if left unqualified.

For the history of the greatest civilisation ever is signposted by sublime minds who gave it structure, tone and a sense of direction. Many, though far from all of them, worked in Roger’s own discipline, philosophy, and Western civilisation simply wouldn’t have survived without them, at least not in any shape we’d recognise as Western.

Some people called intellectuals have indeed caused much harm, often of the carnivorous kind. But that gets me back to the original proposition: name some of those pernicious people.

Whether we come up with five names or fifty, we’ll find they are all of the left. That makes them pseudointellectuals, which is to say not very bright. (See above.)

It’s true that bad ideas can have destructive consequences if they appeal to a certain critical mass of humanity. It’s also true that stupid ideas are easier to encapsulate in a catchy slogan: they by definition lack the subtle nuances characterising deep thought.

But saying that stupidity isn’t so bad because intellectuals are responsible for blood-stained revolutions and collapsing economies simply doesn’t add up.

Obviously, the quick-fire format of a Q&A period wouldn’t accommodate such prolixity. In the same situation, I too would say something facile. But my facile would be different from Roger’s.

I’d probably suggest that, if we take the 50 top conservative thinkers and the same number of left-wing ones, the first group will be incomparably more intelligent. Or I’d simply say that the opinion implied in that question may indeed be widespread, but only on the left.

My purpose here isn’t to criticise the late Roger Scruton, whose invaluable contribution to conservative thought can’t be gainsaid. I only want to point out that conservatives shouldn’t accept the terms of debate imposed by their adversaries.

The truth is on our side, which should make our position easier to argue. Every core assumption of the left is intellectually weak, and we should never tire of pointing this out and proving our point.

God knows, Roger Scruton did more than his fair share. But perhaps not on that occasion.

Neither do we want men, blacks, whites, Jews, Muslims, Indians, cripples, homosexuals and heterosexuals. Provided that, after each such undesirable category, we add the magic words as such.

There’s only one characteristic that should entitle a person to a ministerial position: statesmanship. All else is irrelevant – or rather it would be if common sense hadn’t fallen by the wayside in our virtual reality of identity politics.

That’s why two cabinet members, one present, the other former, have cried bloody murder on hearing that Boris Johnson is planning to sack several women in the upcoming cabinet reshuffle.

Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom was the first off the blocks, insisting that “gender equality should be the absolute norm”. Since it’s widely rumoured that Mrs Leadsom’s name is high on the sacking list, one might detect a touch of self-interest in that statement.

Diversity, continued Mrs Leadsom, should be the “watchword… not for its own sake, but because of the excellence that a diverse range of views bring to decision-making.”

I question the Tory credentials of anyone who uses the word ‘gender’ in any other than the grammatical sense. But I agree with the sentiment: a person’s sex shouldn’t be a disqualifying characteristic for any job. Yet, and this is what seems to escape the Business Secretary, neither should it be a qualifying one.

It’s also true that, generally speaking, “a diverse range of views” may indeed “bring excellence to decision-making”. Then again, it may not. It all depends on the calibre of the people enunciating the views, not on their sex.

I doubt that even the rankest misogynist would object to a cabinet fully staffed by Margaret Thatcher’s clones. Yet even the most passionate feminist would think twice before having even one Mrs Leadsom in a position of power, never mind a whole cabinet filled with her likes.

There can be no male or female perspective on government. There can be no male or female views. Views can be either sound or unsound, and never mind the source.

This is so blindingly obvious that even Amber Rudd, a disgruntled former Home Secretary, is familiar with the argument. “ ‘Surely we just want the best candidate for the job,’ ” she writes, “is the typical response when you point out the need for more women at the top of politics.

“Yet there’s another, rarely discussed, argument: that diversity is a good thing in itself. Diversity fosters a broader mix of experience and priorities, leading to better outcomes. Many private-sector studies have demonstrated that diversity improves business decisions. It is the same in politics. No one is going to fight for women like a woman.”

Every word in this statement is either false or idiotic, and most are both. A rarely discussed argument, Miss Rudd? We must read different papers, or indeed live on different planets.

All one hears these days is a demand for ‘diversity’ irrespective of other qualities, of the kind that, according to Miss Rudd, is “a good thing in itself”. And it pains me to remind someone who held cabinet-level positions for years that it’s not the government’s job “to fight for women”. Its job is to fight for the realm and its subjects.

Also, I’d like to see the studies that allegedly demonstrate the positive effect of ‘diversity’ on decision-making. I have, however, seen some brilliant studies by serious scholars like Thomas Sowell (himself, incidentally, black), showing that such considerations hardly ever come up in private enterprise.

I myself spent over 30 years in advertising, one of the most cut-throat industries. And never once did I see anyone hired or fired on the basis of any factors other than the ability to do the job.

This isn’t to say I never saw a single manager harbouring prejudices against various groups. In fact, I hardly saw one who didn’t.

But, as Dr Sowell demonstrated by his ground-breaking research, people running competitive businesses simply can’t afford to indulge their petty bigotry or, conversely, misconstrued ideas of social justice. The cost of doing so is too high.

Businesses compete not only for markets but also for competent staff. From my own experience, the difference between hiring, say, a good and bad creative team or account handler can be the difference between winning accounts and losing them. And the difference between winning and losing accounts is the agency thriving or going under.

Dr Sowell offered invaluable insights supported by a vast corpus of data. He found that the higher the stakes, the less likely would hiring and firing be dictated by extraneous considerations. That’s why, he showed, incidences of discrimination are much higher in the public sector, where the stakes are presumably lower.

Well, they may be lower for a paperclip counter in the lower reaches of the civil service, but at the level of ministerial, especially cabinet, positions they are as high as high can be.

Someone elevated to that tier just to satisfy idiotic demands for actuarial diversity can put the whole country, not just an advertising agency, out of business. So, no, diversity isn’t a good thing in itself.

It’s one of the cancer cells metastasising all over our body politic. Unless a powerful therapy is found, the disease will spread even further, killing every healthy cell along the way.

In search of the more visible symptoms, just look at Andrea Leadsom and Amber Rudd.

A stand-up comedian has fled Russia after making tasteless jokes about Christianity and funny ones about Putin. He correctly surmised that his act might cost him his liberty or possibly even his life.

Those new faux-Christians in the Kremlin take blasphemy against either God or his earthly envoy Putin seriously, mainly because they feel the two have merged into one. Hence they enforce the concept of the Russian state tersely worded in 1833 by Education Minister Uvarov: “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Folk”.

Since the three elements of the triad exist in organic unity, an attack on one is an attack on all. Thus a public expression of atheism, no matter how mild, constitutes sedition and therefore grounds for criminal prosecution.

Criminal courts are happy to oblige. “No one in his right mind would write anything against Orthodox Christianity,” declared a Russian judge in 2016, sentencing a man to punitive psychiatric care for writing “There is no God” online.

Allow me to clear up any possible linguistic confusion. The Russian term православие used therein does mean Orthodox Christianity, but it’s always used in a narrower sense to denote Eastern, especially Russian, Orthodoxy. Neither an anti-Vatican II Catholic nor a 1662 Anglican would be described as an Orthodox Christian in that sense.

I’m not sure I agree with the Russian judge that atheism really is a sign of mental instability. If it were, we’d have to regard as mad, rather than merely misguided, chaps like David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Francis Crick or the recently deceased Roger Scruton, and something in me balks at doing that.

Writing “anything against Orthodox Christianity” in Russia evidently betokens not so much madness as an understated self-preservation instinct. But here, in London, one can still find something wrong with the Russian church and expect to remain at large.

I’m not going to delve into the vital doctrinal differences between Western and Eastern Christianity. Suffice it to say they exist and, as I argue in one of my books, they produce distinctly different ecclesiastical and civilisational archetypes.

The Eastern archetype is embodied at its most extreme in Russia, where, since the time of Peter the Great (d. 1725), the church has acted as an adjunct to the state and, increasingly, its secret police.

Solzhenitsyn complained that the Bolsheviks forced priests to report secrets vouchsafed to them at confession. Yet this practice predated Bolshevism by some two centuries at least.

Alas, before the advent of universal equality and social justice, the church had attached itself to the wrong state and therefore had to share its demise. This was executed in the style traditionally associated with universal equality and social justice: mass murder.

Some 200,000 priests were killed in all sorts of imaginative ways during the first 25 years of Bolshevism, 40,000 of them when Lenin was still in charge.

Yet the church survived, thanks to Hitler. When the war started, Stalin found to his dismay that the people wouldn’t fight for the bright future of communism, underpinned as it was by its monstrous past and present.

Holy Russia had to be taken off the mothballs, in the hope that it would command more loyalty. It was then that the moribund church was restored to some subservient but extant status.

Its role was refined, compared to pre-revolutionary Russia. If then priests had to cooperate with the secret police, they now became its operatives. The church hierarchs were appointed by the Central Committee of the Party in partnership with the KGB.

Since Putin has created a state seeking legitimacy in a version of Uvarov’s formula, Orthodox hierarchs have become the state’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, but without the embellishments. When Vladimir Gundyaev was elected patriarch, not only he but also the other two candidates were career KGB operatives.

If under Stalin the church was seen as a necessary but marginal evil, under Putin it’s an almost equal partner in the ruling camarilla. As such, the church has acquired the same endearing traits, such as untrammelled greed and acquisitiveness.

Acting in their new mode, the hierarchs were granted the privilege of importing duty-free alcohol and cigarettes, which they parlayed into billions. His Holiness the Patriarch, for example, has amassed wealth estimated at $4 billion.

Yet that was only one money stream flowing into the church coffers. Others ranged from mighty rivers, such as an interest in oil-trading companies, to small but pleasant brooks.

Among the latter is the Sretensky Monastery in central Moscow that has been found to house a hard-working brothel, charging $35 a pop. One wonders whether the holy fathers confused missionary work with the position of the same name.

It’s good to see that the concept of monasticism continues to evolve in Russia, mostly in the direction of getting in touch with lay life, as it were. But then, as the Russian saying goes, “like priest, like parish”, with the state here acting in the capacity of the priest.

An interesting touch is added by the personalities involved. The vicar of Sretensky Monastery, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), is Vladimir Putin’s confessor, while Patriarch Kirill is the monastery’s superior.

On balance, I don’t think I’m mad or, if I am, my feelings about the Moscow patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox church aren’t among the symptoms. I’m only amazed that some honest Christians – and they do exist in Russia – can remain loyal to that affront to their faith. But then Russia is indeed a rather peculiar place.  

Looking drawn and haggard, Manny Macron kindly illustrated the points I made the other day about the delusions plaguing the EU in general and France in particular.

Actually, I’m paying them an unwarranted compliment by assuming they are delusional, rather than duplicitous.

It’s the former if they think any British government could accept the despotic conditions the EU puts forth as preconditions for a trade deal. It’s the latter if they only put forth those conditions as a way of punishing Britain for what many Frenchmen see as treason and many others as apostasy.

Personally, I recall neither pledging allegiance to the EU nor being baptised in its holy water, but French people tend to have a different perspective on things European.

On Thursday I mentioned one shibboleth bandied about with maniacal persistence: ‘level playing field’. Evidently there are others as well, namely ‘dynamic alignment’ and ‘undercutting’, with the first designed to preclude the second.

A level playing field means that Britain won’t get a trade deal unless she maintains the same regulations and red tape that the EU enforces in such areas as workers’ rights, environmental protection and state aid.

Dynamic realignment means that, whenever EU bureaucrats decide to make the tape redder or the regulations tighter, Britain undertakes to follow suit in perpetuity.

Undercutting is self-explanatory. By submitting to such egregious tyranny, Britain must lose whatever competitive edge she might otherwise have.

Now, operating within the rarefied linguistic atmosphere Dubya once made famous, the French indeed have no words for entrepreneur or competition, not in our sense anyway. The letters of the words may exist, but the spirit evaporated long ago.

If England’s economic legislation, starting from the repeal of the Corn Laws, has generally aimed to encourage competition, the corresponding French laws have tried to stifle it.

It’s France’s restrictive labour, social and environmental laws that are responsible for her catastrophic levels of youth unemployment and the precipitous decline in industrial production. Hence Manny should really mind his own business, rather than ours.

He should step on the unions, make it possible for employers to fire (and therefore to hire), reduce taxes (both business and personal), replace untenable social commitments with something closer to the real world, abandon the profit-busting 35-hour work week – and in general communicate to the populace that words like entrepreneur and patron (boss) have been taken off the list of popular insults.

In fact, he could do worse than ‘dynamically aligning’ France’s economy with Britain’s, as it is now and will be in the future. That’s what he’d do if he were more decisive and less of an EU fanatic prepared to sacrifice his citizens’ well-being for an ill-conceived ideology.

However, one has to commend Manny for making a startling economic discovery, France’s greatest since Jean-Baptiste Say wrote in 1803 that supply generates demand (forgetting to add that sometimes it doesn’t).

Manny’s contribution is to stigmatise ‘undercutting’ as a tool of economic competition. As with most economic ideas emanating from the EU, this one is highly selective, applying to Britain only.

For example, France annually imports some $60 billion’s worth of goods from China, whose whole economy is built on using cheap, as near as damn slave, labour to undercut other producers.

However, just as Britain isn’t Canada according to that bird-brained Mme Loiseau (I resisted this pun the other day, but can’t contain myself any longer: l’oiseau is the French for bird), neither is Britain China according to Manny.

In fact, Britain is like no other country in the world in that she dared leave the confines of the EU, having first accepted them. Tyrannical states, such as the EU, hate to see their subjects break free, and they’ll do all they can to keep them in.

Perhaps the time has arrived for the EU to put the East German experience to good use by building a wall all along its borders – and, for the time being, use economic weapons rather than firearms to discourage escape.

Speaking of East Germany, Angela Merkel’s response to the Thuringian elections added a new touch to the EU’s concept of politics. Until now its common practice has been to treat voters in EU-related referendums as pupils sitting exams.

When they cast their vote the wrong way, they were made to vote again until they got it right. Yet Frau Merkel has shown that the same approach can be profitably used in strictly internal elections as well.

Because her own party, the CDU, won the minister-presidential elections by forming a bloc with the AfD nationalists, Angie simply overturned the result and told Turingia to have another go, this time concentrating better.

While largely sharing her dim view of the AfD, I still have a constitutional query. Is this sort of thing allowed under the Federal Republic’s constitution?

If it is, the constitution is flawed. If it isn’t, this act is tyrannical. I don’t know which is worse.

Yet such practices fit into the nature of the EU as snugly as does its attempted economic blackmail of Britain. An organisation erected on a foundation of lies is simply acting in character.