Category: Blog

This isn’t an ad for some ingenious contraceptive device. Nor is it, God forbid, a call to sexual teetotalism. It’s not even a complaint about young people becoming too hedonistic to have children.

Admittedly, however, this title could mean any of those things. That’s the occasional ambiguity of written language for you. If one is reluctant to italicise words for emphasis, there’s the danger of being misunderstood.

Had I spoken, rather than written, that phrase, you’d know what I mean. Because the operative and therefore accented word there would be not ‘pregnancy’, but ‘women’.

For, according to HMG, it’s not women who get pregnant. It’s people.

Now any dweller of a sane world, if either such a dweller or such a world could be found, would be perplexed. Please, sir, he’d say, addressing the government official responsible for creating this conundrum.

It’s true that all women are people, but it’s also true that not all people are women. In fact, about half of the people aren’t. Yes, sir, I realise that the word ‘man’ has been outlawed, either as a stand-alone unit or especially as part of offensive composites, such as fireman, postman or mankind.

But we don’t have to concern ourselves with that injunction now, do we? We’re talking about the other, better half of personkind, aren’t we? You know, those people who are born blessed with the reproductive organs uniquely suited to pregnancy.

Traditionally such people are called women, and that word hasn’t yet been outlawed, has it? In fact, a possible shorthand definition of women is people who can get pregnant. And a possible one-word definition of people who get pregnant is women. Or am I getting something wrong?

What planet are you from, mate? replies the official in the rude idiom we’re learning to expect from our civil servants. Yeah, fine, you can say ‘woman’ in some contexts, such as ‘abused woman’, ‘beaten woman’, ‘raped woman’.

But you bloody well can’t say ‘pregnant woman’ any longer. Haven’t you heard of the latest advances in medicine? We can now turn men into women and, more to the point, women into men.

Except that in the latter case we don’t have to go all the way. We can pump a woman full of testosterone to give her a luxuriant beard, cut her breasts off and sew on a penis of her choice (please, sir, may I have more?). But at the same time, we can keep all her female reproductive organs intact.

Hence she’ll look like a man, sound like a man, possibly brawl like a man, while still being able to get pregnant like a woman. What’s there not to understand?

And please keep to yourself all those scabrous jokes about this procedure giving a physical embodiment to the previously metaphorical expression ‘go f*** yourself’. We’re being serious here. There’s no call for puerile humour.

Hence the word ‘woman’ becomes as non-inclusive as the word ‘man’, and therefore, in this context, just as offensive. It offends women who exercise their human right to become men, while retaining their human right to give birth. Now you don’t want to be done for a hate crime, do you, mate?

No, sir, I certainly don’t. However, out of idle curiosity, how many freshly minted men have so far given birth in Britain, thereby claiming the right not to be offended?

Er… in round numbers, well, two. But so what? Numbers don’t affect the principle, do they? Anyway, before long we may have three or even four, and laws must be forward-looking, providing not only for the present but also for the future – while making a mockery of the past.

This is the essence of the latest development in the British version of the degenerative mental disorder called modernity. HMG has issued a stern objection to the wording of the UN’s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that refers to protection for “pregnant women”.

While recognising the need for protection, our Foreign and Commonwealth Office opposes the term “pregnant women” because it may “exclude transgender people who have given birth”. So you see, I wasn’t being facetious.

This is yet another gender-bender initiative making the world safe for freakishly dystopic sideshows and disgusting for everyone else. “Yet another” means not the only one, and it certainly isn’t.

Last week, our PM, formerly a woman, but now any old part of the people, announced plans for amending the Gender Recognition Act to include a provision for people to “self-certify” their gender.

And there I was, thinking that ‘gender’ was strictly a grammatical category. Moreover, I was also under the impression that a duly instituted authority certifies a person’s sex according to the combination of chromosomes the person got from their [sic!] parents and ultimately from God.

However, as a lifelong champion of progress, I welcome this amendment and everything it signifies. But, not to get it terribly wrong in the future, I’d like some clarification.

If a person can ‘self-certify’ their [sic!] sex, is this a one-off chance, or can the person exercise maximum freedom and change the self-certification back and forth?

For example – and I hope my wife realises this is purely hypothetical – can I change my self-certification just for this afternoon, when I’m playing mixed doubles at my tennis club?

This would enable me – hypothetically, Penelope! – to get into the showers with my partner Sally, who, as our new crop of civil servants would probably describe her, is well fit. Just this once? And in the evening I could re-certify myself?

No? Well, I feel that my human rights are being violated. The UN Commission on Human Rights is going to hear about this.

During Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe, a million British homes were destroyed and 43,000 of their inhabitants killed.

Britain just manage to muddle through on the strength of her indomitable ‘Blitz’ spirit, which apparently needs to be taken off the mothballs again.

For, according to Angel Gurria, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the economic devastation of Brexit will be fully comparable to that inflicted by the Luftwaffe.

Mr Gurria was kind enough to opine that the British just may survive again, but not without straining every sinew to breaking point. Of course we could avoid all the hardship by holding a second referendum and this time voting right.

Since it’s Britain that finances the OECD, it’s good to know that our money is well spent. For good advice is often invaluable, and in this case Mr Gurria offers insights not only into the present and future, but also into the past.

With the unerring acuity of hindsight, he shows how the lessons of today’s Blitz could have kept Britain safe during the first one. One such lesson could be derived from the unseemly haggling between HMG and the EU on the amount of ransom Britain must pay if she ever wants to see her freedom again.

My friend Junk displays all the nous of a barrow boy by demanding £90 billion. “Listen,” he says, “The same deal I’d offer my mother I’m offering to you. Giz 90 billion quid like a goodun, and you can have your country back, djahmean? Or else…”

“Or else it’ll be the Blitz all over again,” cuts in my new friend Angel ‘Of Doom’ Gurria. “Why don’t you just come to your senses and surrender?”

If only Churchill had been as reasonable way back then. Britain could have offered the Nazis a few billion (retrospectively corrected for inflation) to keep the Luftwaffe on a leash. Alternatively, once the bombs started falling, Britain could have promptly surrendered and agreed to become a province in the Third Reich.

Those 43,000 peaceful Britons, not to mention the 600,000 soldiers who went on to die, could have been safe and sound, counting their blessings and pieces of silver. Splendid idea. Why didn’t Churchill think of that?

He could have delivered a typically eloquent speech, saying, for example: “I could offer you blood, sweat and tears – or I could offer you peace, prosperity and beer under Herr Hitler’s strong leadership. That’s a no brainer, isn’t it? And rather than fighting them on the beaches, you could instead play tug-of-war with beach towels, while turning yourselves the red colour so characteristic of Britons on holiday.”

Here apologies are due to cabinet minister Damien Green. Mr Green has condemned the “sad and completely ridiculous rise of routine comparisons to Hitler” whenever the EU is mentioned.

Sorry, Damien, but do tell that to the Angel of Doom. He said the ‘B’ word first – I would never have thought of it on my own. To show off my schoolboy Latin yet again, “quod licet jovi, non licet bovi”, is that what you think? What’s allowed to those federasts isn’t allowed to us?

Speaking of history, if we leave the Romans and Charlemagne out of it, in modern times there have been five serious attempt to unite Europe politically.

First, there was Napoleon, wishing to bestow on the whole continent the sterling benefits of the Enlightenment, rational thought and his own dictatorship. Enter Waterloo.

Second, there was Lenin, sending the Red cavalry on a glorious road to the Channel in 1920. Enter Warsaw, where the Poles reduced the Red hordes to coleslaw, thereby saving Europe from the advent of social justice expressed through mass shootings and concentration camps.

Third, there was Stalin, who created the world’s largest and best-equipped army in roughly 10 years. This economic miracle was achieved by the expedient of killing millions and turning the whole country into a fusion of military and concentration camps, but the prize was glittering: uniting Europe under the red flag.

To that end Stalin helped Hitler build up his own army and pointed him in a westerly direction. Hitler promptly obliged, with Stalin patiently waiting for the Nazi invasion of England to get his own juggernaut rolling.

But Hitler, realising what was going on, left Britain alone and launched a preemptive strike on Russia. That put Stalin’s pan-European ambitions on hold for another four years, and even then he had to content himself only with the low-rent half of Europe.

Fourth, there was Hitler himself, who at first successfully created a proto-EU, with Britain again playing hard to get. Enter the notorious bunker followed by Nuremberg.

Fifth, there’s the EU, seeking to unite Europe under the strong leadership of Junk, Angel, Angela and Brigitte Macron (acting through her foster son Manny). And this time we can buy our way out of trouble, provided we offer the right price.

“What djamean 90 billion? ‘Ow much?!?” screams Tessa May, throwing up her arms in despair. “You bonkers or what? I’ll give you 20 billion, and not a penny more.”

“You know where you can stick your twenty?” object Junk and those two cherubs, Angela and Angel. “You want another Blitz, or what? We’ll cut Britain up and send her back to you, piece by piece. You’ll be opening your post in rubber gloves for the next twenty years.”

Such is the level to which discussions about our ancient sovereignty have descended. Since I find this whole business distasteful, I hereby propose myself for the role of Brexit negotiator.

I’d tell my EU counterparts that my opening and closing bids are the same: zero. And if you want to try another Blitz, by whatever means, go ahead. See you at Nuremberg.

“Obsessed by hate crime – but giving up on burglars. How I despair of our police’s daft priorities,” writes Stephen Glover in his excellent Mail article.

His despair is justified. The new guidelines issued by London’s Metropolitan Police tell officers to stop investigating ‘low-level’ crimes, such as burglary, car theft or grievous bodily harm.

The police don’t have enough staff to pursue such minor indiscretions. So much more is it surprising then, writes Mr Glover, that they can devote practically unlimited resources to investigating so-called hate crimes.

You’ll probably agree that the crimes mentioned in the title aren’t exactly motivated by love either. So what exactly is a hate crime? This is where it gets interesting.

One telltale sign of a tyranny is its loose and open-ended legal definitions. My favourite illustration is provided by Lenin.

He once amended the proposed text of the USSR Criminal Code, stipulating the death penalty for “aiding and abetting the bourgeoisie or counterrevolution.” The great legal mind knew instantly something was missing, but at first he didn’t know exactly what.

Then it dawned on him: the article wasn’t broad enough. Lenin whipped his trusted blue pencil out and inserted, after the words ‘aiding and abetting’, an invaluable amendment: “…or capable of aiding and abetting.” And behold, it was good: anyone could now be deemed so capable and shot.

Working within the same fine legal tradition, Tony Blair’s Criminal Justice Act defined hate crime as: “Any incident . . . which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice or hate.”

The death penalty isn’t mentioned, this being a liberal democracy and all that. Yet note that this Act can be easily used to criminalise most of HM’s subjects.

Some 78 per cent of the 80,393 ‘hate crimes’ committed in England and Wales last year had to do with race, with a mere 22 per cent left over for sexual orientation, religion or physical attributes.

Since, according to the Act, a hate crime is anything the person on the receiving end says it is, the possibilities are endless. For example, I could have my wife arrested several times every day.

Whenever she says I do something beastly because of my Russian heritage (which is often), she’s committing a hate crime if I choose to regard it as such. Ditto, whenever she suggests I could lose some weight. That’s like calling me a lardarse, and if that’s not a hate crime, I don’t know what is. Off to the pokey with you, Penelope.

Such egregious insults have to be motivated by hatred – as opposed to GBH, which inferentially is inspired by love and therefore doesn’t merit police attention.

Well, given the choice between being called, say, a ‘Russkie fatso’ and being beaten within an inch of my life or, for that matter, having my car stolen, I know which I’d prefer.

According to Mr Glover, most people agree with me. If asked whether they’d prefer the police to investigate real, as opposed to most hate, crimes, their choice would be the same as mine.

Even the Crown Prosecution Service feels that way: only 16 per cent of  hate crimes reaching it via the police’s good offices are ever prosecuted. Yet the police have no choice but to follow the guidelines.

“What a sorry, and deeply shaming, tale this is,” concludes Mr Glover, and he’s right. Yet he doesn’t proffer an explanation, confining himself to answering the question ‘What?’ rather than the one that interests me most: “Why?”

Why, for example, is a murder motivated by racial hatred any worse than a murder inspired by money? Doesn’t that deny the absolute and equal value of every human life?

Why is robbing an old black woman of her food money any worse than doing the same thing to her white neighbour? Shouldn’t personal property be treated as equally inviolable in both cases?

The answer is really straightforward. A thug, a thief or a burglar commits a crime against the insignificant individual. But someone offending, say, a Muslim, a fat bespectacled gentleman or a black commits a crime against the state. And in our progressive time, the state counts for much more than the individual.

The ethos of political correctness, whence the notion of a hate crime derives, is actually a power tool, a way for a democratic state to control the populace by imposing uniformity. I call this method of government glossocracy, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.

A dictator whose power is based on the bullet is most scared of bullets; a glossocrat whose power is based on words is most scared of words. Therefore, to protect our glossocracy, purveyors of political correctness create virtual reality and shove it down people’s throats.

Nobody in his right mind thinks that, for example, maiming the English language by eliminating masculine personal pronouns would solve any real social problems, even supposing for the sake of argument that they exist.

The idea is not to protect the delicate sensibilities of women but to reassert the glossocratic power of the state.

It’s as if the state is saying to the people: “Yes, we know and you know that insisting on such ridiculous constructions as ‘every man must do their duty’ is silly. “But we want you to remember that we can bend your will even to idiocy if such is our desire.”

Our ruling glossocrats don’t realise, or perhaps don’t care, that debauching the whole legal tradition of the West diminishes respect for the law, thus creating a fertile ground for crime.

By effectively decriminalising burglary, car theft and GBH, the state creates a crime-ridden society that will grow more and more dangerous by the day. (Incidentally, GBH is more than just the odd punch in the face. That would be regarded as ABH, actual bodily harm. GBH involves broken bones and general maiming – hardly the ‘low-level crime’ of the police nomenclature.)

But the state doesn’t care about that. Our glossocrats are so blinded by powerlust that they don’t detect the danger presented by a lawless society to everyone, them included.

They think that sending Tom, Dick and Harry to prison for trumped-up crimes, while denying them protection from real ones, will increase their own power. So it may, for a while. But that penny will drop sooner or later and, when it does, there will be a mighty bang.

Don’t get me wrong: Islam is deadly enough. Moreover, in its consistent enmity to the West, it has seniority over anyone else. More than 1,400 years’ worth of seniority, to be exact.

At present, however, the West is so superior in military muscle that Islam has to rely on guerrilla tactics, such as terrorism and demographic attrition.

These are potentially dangerous, especially since the West refuses to acknowledge both the gravity and existence of the threat. Our newly developed ethos of obtuse egalitarianism doesn’t allow our powers that be to treat a whole civilisation as an enemy.

Even Christendom still receives occasional lip service, although our modern ideological warriors are indisputably committed to destroying it.

Islam, however, has one advantage over Christendom: it fits into the modern cult of Third World victimhood underpinned by exotica. Hence we refuse to acknowledge we’re at war with Islam, only licensing alienated, deranged loners as our accredited enemies.

That’s why we’re on course to lose that war over a long term, but ‘long term’ are the operative words. Yet the threat of Putin’s Russia, just as unacknowledged, is even deadlier and much more immediate.

Interestingly, the same people on the political right who are alert to the Islamic threat tend to ignore the Russian one. Moreover, they long for a strong leader just like Putin, whom they see as a friend.

Well, he certainly doesn’t behave in a friendly fashion. Witness the fact that under his strong leadership Russia unfailingly supports enemies of the West and tries to undermine the West from within.

Recently I wrote about Russia’s contribution to both N. Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programmes. Such N. Korean ‘miracles’ as developing ICBMs and the high-yield hydrogen bomb in record time would have been impossible without a massive transfer of Russian technologies and core modules.

Yet equally worrying is Russia’s support for our other deadly enemy, Islam, specifically the Taliban.

Russian weapons, although so far less cataclysmic than nuclear bombs, constantly flow across the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Still, nuclear bombs so far haven’t killed anyone since 1945, whereas the heavy machine guns and snipers’ rifles supplied by Russia to the Taliban are killing Western soldiers every day.

And such kit isn’t the worst part of it. For the Russians are also financing the Taliban to the tune of $2.5 million a month. The money is laundered white through surreptitious supplies of free oil, which the Taliban then sell and use the proceeds to inflict even heavier casualties on America and her allies.

This is par for the course. Putin is simply acting according to the Sanskrit proverb coined in the fourth century BC: my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

The Russians, both in the Kremlin and at the grass roots, have little affection for the Muslims, or indeed anyone south of Rostov-on-Don. (Except Kadyrov’s Chechen thugs, used to ‘whack’ Putin’s political opponents.) But they recognise geopolitical necessity when they see it.

They recognise something else too, an understanding that escapes so many in the West: the Taliban, Iran and N. Korea are the Russians’ friends specifically because the West is their enemy. And it’s an enemy they engage over a broad front.

Only cowardice prevents our commentators – and, more frighteningly, politicians – from publicising Russia’s belligerent meddling in every Western election, including the recent one in the US.

The facts of meddling are reluctantly accepted. The only argument is about the effect it had on Trump’s election, and about his campaign’s complicity in the electronic sabotage. Germany, France and Austria have similar stories to tell, showing that Putin doesn’t just single out America for his attentions.

And now new facts have come to light, showing that the Russians are using their Petersburg troll factory to foment racial unrest in the US. Over the past two years, a Russian front group BlackLivesMatterUS has funded 40 protest rallies.

More than 100 Americans have been recruited to this cause, mostly using the false-flag stratagem Putin honed to razor sharpness during his time in the KGB. Some of the recruits were receptive to such overtures, having served their time in the seditious Occupy Wall Street movement.

Such tactics aren’t new. Used to undermine the enemy since time immemorial, they are widely regarded as a legitimate wartime ruse.

What is however new is that only one side knows there’s a war on. The other side meekly sits back and listens to the thunder of drums and bugles emanating from Russia.

Putin’s media, which is to say all Russian media, are screaming about the need to revive the Russian and Soviet imperial past. Stalin statues are going up all over Russia, like so many Phoenixes rising from the ashes.

And this is the Kremlin’s official position on another mass murderer, Lenin, enunciated by its official TV spokesman Dmitry Kisilev:

“I believe that his volcanic energy, outstanding intellect and indisputable charisma were inspired by a romantic impulse. He was like an impassioned lover… Within his own moral system, by spilling blood and confiscating property he enforced a higher justice… He built a new morality on the word ‘freedom’ and inspired millions with it… We today can’t, nor should, condemn everything Soviet… Our Lenin. And our USSR. Lenin moved Russia towards realising a megadream…”

Quite. And the essential part of the ‘megadream’ was to conquer the West and the rest of the world. “I don’t care,” the ‘impassioned lover’ once said, “if 90 per cent of our population perish if the remaining 10 per cent live under communism.”

Since that time Russia has occasionally put the realisation of that ‘romantic impulse’ on hold, but she has never abandoned it. Moreover, it has penetrated the nation’s collective consciousness and, under the expert prodding of Putin’s KGB propagandists, is now accepted as an essential part of what makes Russia Russian.

That same impulse is actuating Russia’s current war on the West. You know, the one we pretend doesn’t exist.

All those end-to-end Harvey Weinstein stories are losing novelty appeal, which is another way of saying I’m fed up with them.

Anyway, I’ve already said everything I could about Harvey’s boorish priapism and his critics’ emetic hypocrisy. Or so I thought.

However, the story of Lysette Anthony is so iconically typical of our time that it positively screams out for a comment.

As the actress tells the story, at first it followed your traditional rape scenario. Harvey perfidiously befriends Lysette in 1992. Harvey stalks Lysette. Harvey arrives at Lysette’s flat unannounced. Lysette naively lets Harvey in. Harvey rapes Lysette against the coat rack.

Lysette tried to fight Harvey off, but “Finally I just gave up.” Lysette then describes (too graphically for my taste) Harvey’s ejaculation, her own revulsion and her subsequent weeping in the bathroom.

So far so good, or rather so horrible. As classic a case of rape as one can imagine. If the crime leaves no hard evidence, it may be hard to prove in court, but it should definitely end up there.

But it didn’t. Lysette didn’t even call the police. “I thought I should just forget the whole incident… I was an idiot to think he and I were friends.”

Well, this is hardly a happy ending. In fact, it’s neither happy nor an ending, for Lysette continued to have consensual sex with Harvey for the next 10 (ten!) years.

Harvey would ring and “No one turned down an opportunity to meet Harvey Weinstein – no one.” Excuse me? This doesn’t sound at all like a rape victim speaking.

As a confirmed feminist with strong lesbian tendencies, I accept the widespread cri de coeur that rape is the worst possible fate a woman can suffer. Worse than being disfigured, having every bone in her body broken and becoming paraplegic as a result – worse even than death itself.

Fine. I understand, although I doubt I’d feel the same way if I were a woman. But hey, de gustibus… and all that.

And yet a victim of the most blood-curdling crime that could possibly be perpetrated against a woman continues to see her rapist voluntarily because she can’t turn down the opportunity. It’s as if someone maliciously swapped the script Lysette had been reading from.

The new script is all too familiar. Lysette would turn up at Harvey’s hotel suite, Harvey would appear in a dressing gown and demand a massage, followed by sex. “By then I’d just given up. I knew I was powerless…”

She wasn’t. Lysette could have gone to the police the first time. She could have avoided Harvey like the plague thereafter. She could have pasted the story of his criminality all over the papers. At the very least, she could have refused to have sex with that animal “until 2002, when he finally let go of me” – whatever the career ramifications.

She wasn’t powerless. She was – and remains – a cynical careerist whose current jumping on the bandwagon of Harvey’s accusers brands her as fully his moral equal. If Lysette’s story is true, Harvey comes out of it as a troglodyte rapist, while she’s a truly modern figure, plugged into the prevalent nauseating ethos.

Another emetic aspect of modernity is medicalising rotten behaviour. What’s that ‘sex addiction’ for which Harvey is getting treatment? If half the stories one hears about him are true, what Harvey needs isn’t therapy but surgery (unlike Lysette, I won’t go into the gory details).

Treating his criminal, or at best barbaric, behaviour as an illness effectively absolves him of personal responsibility. If he suffers from a medical condition, he’s no more guilty of beastliness than a Tourette’s sufferer is guilty of swearing in public.

These days, people are no longer stupidly irresponsible gamblers – they are addicted to gambling. They’re no longer revolting drunks – they suffer from dipsomania. They’re no longer brainless hedonists who use drugs to mask their complete absence of inner resources – they’re drug addicts.

And the most popular plea of innocence in court is “It’s all society’s fault, Your Honour”, closely followed by “The defendant had a tough childhood, he needs help”.

This whole nonsense only goes to prove the extent to which we’ve debauched history’s greatest civilisation based on the notion of free will. We’re free to choose between right and wrong. Some of us choose the former, some the latter, but in neither case do we relinquish our humanity – with all the responsibilities it entails.

 While we’re on the subject of sex, I don’t know about you, but I welcome the NHS diktat that from 2018 all questionnaires in GP surgeries will include a question about the patient’s sexual proclivity.

It’s not immediately clear how my shameful heterosexuality is relevant to the treatment I’m currently getting for a tennis injury, but that’s not the point.

I look forward to having some nice, clean fun filling those forms in. The possibilities for amusing myself (if no one else) are endless: “livestock and domestic pets”, “potted plants, Harvey-style”, “goslings, snapping their necks at the moment of truth to produce most satisfying internal contractions”, “corpses, provided they are female (I’m no pervert)”.

If anyone still thinks the NHS is about treating people, this idiocy proves that’s only its secondary purpose. Like all gigantic socialist Leviathans, whatever their pronounced purpose, the NHS is mainly dedicated to increasing state control all the way to absolute.

If the state does a lot for you, it’ll do a lot to you – to this law of nature there are no known exceptions.

As a lifetime student of language, I pay attention to how people use figures of speech, such as similes or analogies.

My observation is that, when they search for a telling comparison by way of illustration, the first thing that springs to their mind is something from their areas of expertise.

Thus, speaking of someone making a mistake, a musician is likely to say “he struck a false note”. A football coach, on the other hand, would probably opt for “he missed a sitter from five yards”, whereas a physician would probably prefer “he misdiagnosed the condition”.

The upshot of it is that the language people use gives a clue to their personality, experience and the kind of things they hold dear.

That’s why I find so elucidating what Jean-Claude Juncker (Junk to his friends) said about Brexit the other day. Fair’s fair, he explained. You’ve got to pay the bill before leaving.

That was the message, and it’s straightforward enough. But the way Junk worded this perfectly sound idea caught my eye:

“If you are sitting in a bar and ordering 28 beers and then suddenly one of your colleagues is leaving and is not paying, that is not feasible. They have to pay.”

Now, having drunk enough booze with Junk to float an aircraft carrier, I know he likes his jar. Usually his tipple of choice is single malt whisky, but he often perpetrates an indignity on that noble beverage by chasing it with a stein or two.

However, he doesn’t seem to be familiar with bar etiquette, which isn’t surprising. After all, Junk has spent most of his life on an expense account, so I don’t think he has ever been out of pocket when sinking toxic amounts of booze.

As a close friend, I don’t mind plugging this hole in his education.

Junk is referring to the situation of every drinker paying his share of the bill, or going Dutch as we say. That’s a fairly widespread arrangement, but not the only one.

For example, when I was a board director, I’d occasionally take my whole department out for a drink or lunch and pick up the whole tab afterwards. I’d then claim the amount on expenses, which is an arrangement Junk knows only too well.

On other occasions, I or a generous friend would buy a round of drinks for everybody present. The implicit understanding under such circumstances is that what goes around comes around: you pay today, I’ll pay next time, that sort of thing.

Now, true enough, sometimes people do go Dutch. If they all have drunk roughly the same amount, they divide the bill by the number of people, and each pays his share. If, on the other hand, one of the drinkers is Junk, his fair share would be more than all the others’ combined, for obvious reasons.

Now the analogy Junk used involves 28 drinkers sinking beers in a bar and going Dutch. For the analogy to work, each should pay 1/28^th of the bill.

However, Britain has been paying at least twice her fair share since the EU was formed in 1992 (having retroactively prevented every European war that could have broken out before).

That means the drinks of one of the 28 are on us. But hey, we’re wealthier than, say, Romania, so we can afford it. By all means, let’s tell Romania to keep her wallet in her pocket.

But Junk isn’t just talking about Britain paying 1/14^th of the bill today. He seems to want us to keep paying for the drinks the others will be consuming without us long after we’re gone.

In other words, he isn’t talking about going Dutch. We must coin another term to describe what he has in mind. May I suggest going EU?

‘Going EU’ isn’t at all like going Dutch – Junk’s analogy doesn’t work. ‘Going EU’ is more akin to a slave buying himself out of servitude. This is such a rare event that no going rate exists, and each slave pays for his freedom whatever price the master sets.

Or perhaps even that analogy is wanting. For the EU is demanding that the slave pay large amounts before the master even agrees to talk about the terms of his release.

“I’m not in a revenge mood. I’m not hating the British,” explained Junk. In fact, he quite likes us: “The Europeans have to be grateful for so many things Britain has brought to Europe, during war, after war, before war, everywhere and every time.”

That’s very good of him: if there’s one thing I hate, it’s ingratitude. But then came the clincher: “BUT YOU HAVE TO PAY!!!” Junk positively sounds like a tricky boozer who always claims to have left his wallet at home when the bill arrives.

Okay, forget drinking (Junk never does). Let’s go back to another analogy he favours, that of a divorce settlement.

I don’t know how many divorces Junk has been through, and on what grounds (him coming home every night pissed as a skunk?), but they don’t work that way either.

The two parties, or rather their lawyers, sit down and hold talks. As a result, one party (usually the husband) agrees to part with some part of his estate. Junk, on the other hand, is demanding a vast amount as a precondition for even opening the talks.

Otherwise, he says, “We cannot find for the time being a real compromise as far as the remaining financial commitments of the UK are concerned.”

I’m eager to help, as I always am every time Junk can’t get home under his own steam after a night out. The real compromise is that we exit, bang the door and leave Junk stuck with the bill.

Or rather we’ve already paid, by financing Junk’s wicked employer disproportionately for decades. Londoners pronounce this word like ‘dickheads’.

And Junk? Don’t mention the war, there’s a good lad. Your German masters don’t like it.

The political establishment, both home and abroad, hates Trump, and the feeling seems to be mutual.

The president seems to reject modern pieties. He may be unaware of some, and those he knows he doesn’t like.

They are indeed unlikable, but perhaps it takes a look from the outside to see that. And Trump is an outsider to the establishment.

Consequently he’s attacked by all and sundry with unrelenting vehemence. Even if I didn’t know anything about him, I’d be well-disposed towards Trump simply on the strength of the kind of people who sputter saliva at the very mention of his name.

There are more substantive reasons too, but, before I go into those, my requisite disclaimers first.

Trump exhibits many traits I dislike. He’s vulgar, narcissistic, brash, tasteless, too prone to look at complex issues strictly in mercantile terms. He thus wouldn’t be my choice of a dinner guest, but I probably wouldn’t be his choice of a host either.

Then of course there’s the Russian connection, the role it might have played in Trump’s election, and the possible quid pro quo Putin expects. Nothing criminal has been proved, but even the facts we know make me uneasy. Blowing through my mind like a wind through a draughty room are words like ‘smoke’, ‘fire’ and ‘Manchurian candidate’.

Trump doesn’t go out of his way to allay such fears. It took resolute action on the part of Congress to stop him from lifting richly merited sanctions against Russia, and so far he hasn’t said one word against Putin. Since the president is hardly taciturn, such silence may not speak louder than words, but it does speak.

Having thus absolved myself of any suspicion of favourable bias, I admit I like most things Trump does. I also like the inspiration behind his policies: unconcealed contempt for everything held dear by the kind of people who in Britain would be Guardian readers.

His refusal to accept at face value the UN hoax of anthropogenic global warming is commendable, and his consequent pulling of America out of the Paris Agreement even more so.

Currently in the news, as targets of the establishment’s venomous diatribes, are two other policies: his refusal to countenance the Iran nuclear deal (without, alas, cancelling it altogether) and his withdrawal from UNESCO.

During his campaign, Trump described Obama’s Iran deal as America’s worst in history. The 1945 one in Yalta is right up there too, but the Iran deal is indeed rotten.

It opens the way for the mullahs to acquire nuclear weapons and, in a country where ‘Death to America!!!’ and ‘Death to Israel!!!’ have replaced ‘Hello’ and ‘Good morning’, this has to be prevented at all cost.

Trump is way too soft on one evil state, Putin’s Russia, but at least he’s reasonably firm on two others: North Korea and Iran. Yet displaying such firmness punches a hole through the sanctimonious fog of virtual reality emitted by the ‘liberal’ establishment.

And then Trump pulled America out of UNESCO. Again, I like not only the act, but also the motivation behind it. Trump doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for multi-purpose international organisations, and they are indeed contemptible.

His gross mistake was to extend the same animus to NATO, which is neither multi-purpose nor really international. It’s purely a military bloc confined to Western countries or those aspiring to become Western.

Trump has said some silly things about NATO, although he had a point when complaining about America’s paying a disproportionate part of its budget. That’s a legitimate concern, although one could argue that pursuing ambitions of global leadership always tends to cost.

Anyway, either Trump has revised his views on NATO or at least he has been refraining from saying silly things about it. But his feelings about UNESCO – and no doubt the UN in general – are amply justified.

Actually, Trump’s decision simply puts an official stamp on the status quo. For the US and UNESCO have been going their separate ways since 2011, when Trump was still hustling Putin for property development contracts.

According to a US law, there can be no American funding for any organisation that accepts Palestinian territories as an independent member state. UNESCO did just that in 2011, thereby triggering the aforementioned law.

In 2013 the US lost its voting rights after missing several rounds of payments, and is now held to be in arrears. Hence Trump simply turned de facto into de jure.

On a broader issue, the US still pays 22 per cent of the UN’s budget, and plays host to that organisation’s headquarters. Unfortunately, even Trump isn’t brave enough to pull America out of the UN and expel it from New York.

But that would be a good idea. As a child of the League of Nations, the UN’s DNA includes an urge to create a world government, which is an old socialist dream. That’s why it consistently opposes the West, which isn’t yet completely socialist, if moving that way.

The inner sanctum of the UN, the Security Council, has five members, two of which are communist China and Putin’s kleptofascist Russia (née the Soviet Union). Its 10 non-permanent members currently include Bolivia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and Senegal – a certain bias is evident, wouldn’t you say?

Essentially, all international organisations are useless and some are wicked, which is why our political establishments have a warm feeling of kinship for all of them.

The EU straddles both categories, useless and wicked, and hence it’s instructive to observe how our own establishment clings to it. Even those who are supposed to be institutionally committed to Brexit are trying to undermine it, and they don’t care how underhand their tactics are, or how idiotic the words.

Chancellor Phillip Hammond said the other day that we must prepare for ‘the worst case scenario’, such as that after Brexit there would be no more flights between Britain and the continent. He then generously allowed that such a development was unlikely.

Following the ensuing outcry, he swung to the other extreme by, inadvertently yet correctly, referring to the EU as an ‘enemy’. That’s like Hassan Rouhani describing Hezbollah the same way.

The political establishment is internationalist because it strives to increase the distance between itself and the people. This is both immoral and destructive, running as it does against the grain of traditional Western polity.

Knee-jerk internationalism is a virus Trump hasn’t caught specifically because he has never ventured into the infected area of the political establishment.

That’s why he has some healthy instincts, and our own politicians have much to learn from him. Not that they will, of course.

If Hollywood is the distillate of modernity, Harvey Weinstein is the distillate of Hollywood. His whole affair is enough for anyone to fill a sick bag.

Harvey is the star of the unfolding sex scandal, taking up more column inches than the very distinct possibility of nuclear war. This stands to reason: bombs can only kill people, while the Harvey brouhaha exposes the evil of the modern ethos for what it is.

For make no mistake about it: Harvey comes out looking less vile than his accusers – or indeed his brother Bob.

This isn’t to say that I doubt for a second that Harvey is a scumbag. Even before we talk about his sexual indiscretions, the very fact that he’s a lifetime supporter of the Democratic Party is a sufficient qualification for that epithet.

But, as far as I’m concerned, he’s squeaky clean compared to his righteous, or rather self-righteous, accusers. Suddenly it appears that one letter has fallen out of the megalomaniac Hollywood sign to turn it into Holywood. This is about as emetic as hypocrisy can possibly get.

Consider the facts, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The defendant is a vulgar, oversexed upstart obsessed with power and money, who has made it to the top of one of the world’s most competitive industries.

His one word can turn into a major star an aspiring actress who supplements her income by serving drinks or, as is often the case, accepting gifts from gentlemen friends. Or, to take a less extreme situation, he can push an established but strictly B-movie actress over the cusp of stardom.

I’d suggest that any man fitting Harvey’s description above would behave in exactly the same manner, if perhaps favouring less direct methods of courtship.

But, as the cliché goes, it takes two to tango. For every Hollywood mogul dangling a role as bait, there have to be countless beauties gasping “I’ll do anything to get this part…” A swap of a roll in the hay for a role in a movie is par for the Hollywood course.

Genuinely talented actresses may or may not join this queue by way of a shortcut. But for every one of those, there are hundreds of pretty girls who are much of a muchness. They’re interchangeable for most parts available, and suggesting they wouldn’t use sex as an extra inducement would be presuming too much on human virtue.

So far we’ve heard from dozens of actresses who supposedly rejected Harvey’s heavy-handed advances. Only one admits to having had consensual sex with him months after the alleged rape attempt.

I’d like every one of the others to put her hand on her left breast (suitably bulging as per Hollywood’s job requirements) and swear that she has never advanced her career by sleeping with either Harvey or some other producer (agent, director, studio executive, co-star).

And even if they haven’t used sex in such a straightforward fashion, how many of them have done naked erotic scenes for the sheer purpose of indulging men’s onanistic fantasies?

A few years ago, a prankster asked Demi Moore: “If it wasn’t gratuitous in any way, and it was tastefully done, would you consider keeping your clothes on in a movie?” The same question could be addressed to many of Harvey’s accusers.

Harvey is 65 now, and he has been a powerful producer for at least 30 years. Since it’s a lamentable fact of nature that a man’s libido is stronger at 30 than at 60, one can safely assume that Harvey has been requesting massages all this time.

Now, Hollywood isn’t only one of the most competitive places in the world, but also one of the most scrutinised. It thrives on gossip and exposition, and it’s absolutely impossible that Harvey’s amorous pursuits haven’t been common knowledge for decades.

How come they’ve only now come to light? In fact, all those fighters for women’s rights stabbing fingers at Harvey have until now been avidly kissing his backside, even if they supposedly refused to kiss another part of his anatomy.

The papers are full of photographs of his beaming, half-naked would-be accusers wrapped around Harvey at various award shows. Why didn’t they denounce him then?

For the same reason they’ve cultivated their pouting sex appeal: career. When Harvey’s hold on power was secure, these sanctimonious hypocrites eagerly indulged in paying him labiogluteal tributes.

But then something happened to turn Harvey into a soft mark, giving his accusers an opening to establish themselves as fearless upholders of every ‘liberal’ value in the eyes of TV cameras.

That something was, according to unanimous reports, a signal from Harvey’s brother and Miramax partner Bob.

Harvey and Bob had their business disagreements. Both wanted to produce films that made profits, but Harvey was also interested in those that won Oscars.

When there was the slightest conflict between the two desiderata, Harvey was ready to sacrifice some of the profits, while Bob wasn’t. The arguments weren’t always peaceful: Harvey, the alpha male in the family, once publicly knocked Bob down.

Bob decided to get his own back and did a Cain – all purely selflessly of course. I suspect that, in addition to leaking the saga of Harvey’s satyriasis, he also reassured the potential accusers that they had nothing to lose and much to gain by speaking out.

Thus emboldened, they pounced on Harvey like a pack of she-wolves defending their pups. Except that they were defending the same vulgar, voyeuristic ethos that has turned them into stars – the same ethos that has replaced real culture.

Now they’re seen as courageous defenders of ‘liberal’ values, an image that rivals large breasts as a sine qua non of their profession. And Harvey has been thrown to the she-wolves. He has lost his job, his wife, much of his family and possibly his sanity.

Now I’m congenitally incapable of feeling pity for Lefty vulgarians, and Harvey deserves all he gets – especially if those stories of attempted rapes are true.

But, as he screamed at the braying mob, “We all make mistakes! Second chance!”. He’s not going to get it. The mob’s trumped-up rage isn’t leavened with mercy, and Harvey isn’t a woman taken in adultery.

“Balliol blacklisters are only following Christian tradition”, writes Catherine Nixey in The Times, referring to Oxford students who banned the Christian Union from their freshers’ fair.

I wrote about that outrage yesterday, so I won’t repeat myself. But Miss Nixey invokes broader issues than the shenanigans of some post-pubescent youngsters, and these merit a comment.

The tradition she refers to is that of censorship, and she co-opts St Augustine to support her argument. Accusing those Balliol youths of suppressing freedom of speech, she writes, is dishonest because Christians did it too.

I haven’t read Miss Nixey’s book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, but the title is self-explanatory. Now she says that what was sauce for the Christian goose should be sauce for the atheist gander.

If I were making the same argument, I’d cite an even earlier source than St Augustine: “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

Miss Nixey uses an old trick. She holds something she finds distasteful, in this case Christianity, to some nonexistent absolute standard. Then she uses non-compliance to argue the moral equivalence of all creeds (provided they don’t impinge on liberal orthodoxies).

Christians had censorship, so did Soviets, so did Nazis – what’s the difference?

She clearly dislikes Christianity and adores the classical world that Christianity supposedly destroyed. That’s fair enough: she’s entitled to hold that view, much as I find it dubious.

What shouldn’t be an automatic entitlement is the crepuscular thinking she deploys, nor the selective treatment of history she favours. Both are typical of the Left, which Miss Nixey’s article demonstrates yet again.

For, contrary to the liberal cliché, freedom of speech can’t possibly be absolute. It has to be a matter of consensus, which by definition makes it relative. Every civilisation is justified in censoring speech it finds deleterious to its survival.

Hence freedom of speech isn’t always good, nor is censorship always bad. It depends on how we feel about the civilisation using it.

Specifically in culture there are two types of censorship: proscriptive and prescriptive. The former tells artists what they can’t do; the latter tells them what they must do.

While the latter kills art stone dead, there’s no evidence that the former unduly inhibits self-expression. In fact, one could argue that the greatest masterpieces of art and literature were created in the conditions of some censorship, while its absence seems to have a stifling effect.

Comparing, say, the Russian literature created in the nineteenth century under conditions of strict censorship to contemporaneous American literature free of such constraints, it’s hard to insist on the stifling effect of any censorship – and the liberating effect of its absence.

The argument in favour of free speech über alles doesn’t work in politics either.

Free speech can’t be allowed to act as a weapon in the hands of those who wish to destroy free speech. A group promoting fascist, jihadist or communist propaganda thereby relinquishes its right either to defend free speech or to claim its protection.

It’s civilised people who should do so, and at times they may also have to limit free speech within the law. However, they must be careful not to overstep the line beyond which justifiable social self-defence ends and tyranny begins. Yet they’re unlikely to confuse the two – for otherwise they wouldn’t be civilised.

Using Augustine as a witness to Christianity’s oppressive tendencies is disingenuous, to put it mildly. When Augustine wrote, in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity was struggling for survival, and it was touch and go.

Advocating unbridled freedom of speech then was tantamount to letting any heresy run unopposed, thereby destroying the religion. Expecting Augustine to cling to liberal abstractions some 1,500 years before they became fashionable is expecting him to sign up to a suicide pact.

However, even then debate certainly wasn’t nonexistent within the ranks of the Church, as anyone who knows anything about the great Councils will tell you. And when Christianity gathered strength, debate became common currency.

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, great Christian thinkers, from Anselm to Aquinas, not only conducted the liveliest of debates with their adversaries within or without Christianity, but also used the tools of Greek philosophy to do so.

Accusing Christianity of destroying the classical world is wrong on many counts, historical, intellectual and moral. In fact, Christendom always was an asset-stripping civilisation: it took from other civilisations what it found useful and dumped the rest.

Miss Nixey obviously wishes Christianity had kept such practices of Hellenic antiquity as killing feeble children (Sparta) or leaving unwanted baby girls by the roadside to be devoured by wild animals (Rome). She’d probably also welcome a return to paganism, with its false metaphysical premises that made real science impossible.

But to say that Christianity destroyed the classical world means ignoring the very nature of Christian thought, formed as it was by Jerusalem and Athens coming together.

It would also take a myopic eye not to notice the classical antecedents of Christian architectural styles, such as Byzantine (VI to early XV centuries), Romanesque (XI-XII), Renaissance (XV-XIV) and Neo-Classical (XVII-early XIX).

And it would take a Van Gogh ear for music not to discern the debt Christian music owes to classical modes. That would be a useful accompaniment to the ignorance of not realising that Christian poetry owes so much to Virgil, Horace and Ovid as to owe them practically everything.

Christianity has always relied on discernment, and therefore some discrimination and censorship, to create the greatest civilisation the world has ever known. That was based on a tradition of free thought unmatched by any other creed – including liberalism, which is the modern term for illiberalism.

That Balliol lot are driven by the urge not to create a new civilisation but to destroy the old one. Hence their censorship proceeds not from love, as Miss Nixey claims, but from hate – not from a desire to protect, but from the itch to dominate.

As I said earlier, our view of censorship can’t be absolute. It all depends on how we feel about the agents, purposes, nature and scope of censorship.

Deploying it in defence of a great civilisation is no vice; using it to put a tyrannical foot down is no virtue. Miss Nixey and those pimply Balliol youths obviously feel differently. One just wishes they could make their case in an intellectually sound manner.

Reading newspapers these days provides all the entertainment I can handle within a whisker of apoplexy.

Who needs satire, stand-up comedy, erotica or studies of human pathology when we have The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and so forth.

Satire in particular can never keep pace with reports on everyday life. To wit:

For decades now, Harvey Weinstein has been one of Hollywood’s top producers. He has made more Oscar-winning films than many producers have made films.

Now the boom has come down on his head: hundreds of actresses have accused him of using his position to try to coerce them into sex.

Alas, it’s a widely known fact that most Hollywood actresses have had to bonk their way to the top. This tradition is doubtless demeaning to women, but also to the men who have to rely on such tricks to get sex.

By the looks of Harvey, he would be hard-pressed to get women into bed if he produced not international blockbusters but, say, loo seats. So those accusations ring both true and, for anyone who knows anything about the cinema business, almost superfluous.

What I do find astounding is that none of those indignant accounts features a woman who actually succumbed to Harvey’s unsolicited advances. Surely there must have been some? Over the past 30 years?

Or perhaps not: today’s aspiring Hollywood starlets are too robust of morals and too committed to women’s rights to gratify a chap whose one word can make the difference between stardom and waiting on tables.

So much more damning it is that, after being contemptuously dismissed hundreds of times, the frisky mogul kept trying. Some people just never learn their lesson.

Russell Fuller, the BBC tennis correspondent, defends equal prize money for women players. The gap between them and the men used to exist, he writes, but it doesn’t any longer: the women have as much athleticism and weight of shot.

On reading this I heaved a sigh of relief. Now we could stop the offensive, sexist discrimination of men and women playing in separate tournaments. Let them all play together – the women will win their fair share of prize money, weight of shot and all. Mr Fuller and I have no doubt about that. I wonder if the women players share our confidence.

At least Russell stayed within his area of expertise, such as it is. Martin Samuels, probably our best football writer, ventured outside – with the same pathetic results such forays by sports hacks always produce. This is what he wrote:

“Brexit, Catalan nationalism, Scottish nationalism, I see it all pretty much as flips of the same coin. This desperate, misguided belief to see us all as different, when we are largely the same. Differences in culture. Yes, sure. But the day after the Brexit vote I sat in my Paris hotel and looked out of the window at the junction below and saw thousands of people who looked exactly like us…

“The differences are historic, cultural, the similarities are human… Why do tiny regions wish to break away and live in isolation wrapped around a flag? Who becomes stronger by getting smaller?”

If Martin, who’s rather corpulent, believes that bigger equates stronger, he should challenge a professional middleweight to a fight and see how he gets on.

Applying the same principle, he must also believe that the Ukraine is stronger than Switzerland; Nepal, than Singapore; and Ethiopia, than Israel.

Though it’s true that people in different countries tend to have the same number of limbs and similar internal organs, sovereign statehood springs precisely from “historic and cultural” differences.

To use the former as an argument against the latter is, well, ignorant, to put it kindly. And equating Brexit with Catalan separatism isn’t something that can be described kindly. Is Martin aware that Britain isn’t technically a province of the EU, the way Catalonia is a province of Spain?

Really he ought to stick to wingbacks and holding midfielders. But he won’t, will he? And Martin? Do look up the difference between ‘historic’ and ‘historical’.

Students at Oxford University banned the Christian Union from attending a freshers’ fair to protect new undergraduates from “harm”. Christianity, they explained, is “an excuse for homophobia and neo-colonialism”. The implication is that it’s all Christianity is.

On that basis they should have banned all Muslims as well. Christians regard homosexuality as a sin, but at least they don’t toss homosexuals off tall buildings. That practice is the unique property of Muslims – and their record on colonialism isn’t exactly pristine either.

Except that in their case the colonialism wasn’t just geopolitical but also religious: as the Arabs conquered new territories, they converted their new subjects to Islam at sword’s point. That’s how their religion spread: one doesn’t hear about too many Muslim missionaries risking their lives to preach to the uninitiated.

Jews should be excluded as well: while their record on colonialism hasn’t been too bad since the time Moses led those ancient Hebrews to the Promised Land, their feelings about homosexuality are similar to the Christians’.

People who venerate scripture describing homosexuality as an ‘abomination’ shouldn’t be allowed to sully Oxford halls with their malevolent presence. In fact, the only group that should be welcome are militantly atheist Corbyn voters, ideally anti-Semitic (tautology?).

Those self-righteous young cretins (another tautology?) ought to remind themselves that, without Christianity, their university wouldn’t exist at all. Nor would any other similarly old educational institution.

But for those Mediaeval friars, these religion haters would now all be studying at polytechnics. Perhaps that’s where they belong anyway, devoting themselves to less challenging academic subjects, such as plumbing.

Interestingly, Frederick Potts, who led the anti-Christian campaign, was a star of Balliol’s University Challenge team. This proves yet again, if any proof is needed, that there’s more to education than the knowledge of trivia.