Category: Blog

No? Not a good idea? Well, let’s at least discuss it as mature adults, in Parliament for preference.

Don’t even want to do that? Fine, I have lots of other ideas.

Selling human flesh in supermarkets, replacing the Houses of Parliament with a replica of the Gherkin, having one Open Rape Day every month, banning white men from public service – you name it.

I realise you may disagree with these ideas, but that’s good. A clash of ideas, with truth emerging at the other end, is the essence of our parliamentary democracy, isn’t it?

That’s why a company-strength contingent of our pundits welcome with thunderous hosannas Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent to Labour leadership and, potentially, premiership.

To be sure, our so-called conservative columnists state they have no time for ‘most of’ Corbyn’s ideas, leaving the reader with the task of guessing which of his ideas they find acceptable. This disclaimer usually comes at the beginning, both to confirm the writer’s conservative credentials and to set the scene for the inevitable ‘however’.

However, and here the pundits triumphantly toss their hats up in the air, they love our parliamentary democracy with the passion some men reserve for women, the erotic element and all. And for our beloved democracy to function properly, it must feed off a debate on conflicting ideas.

A generally sound thought, that, but few generally sound thoughts this side of the Bible can survive without an attached set of nuances and qualifications. This particular thought will die in the absence of a satisfactory answer to the question “What constitutes an idea worthy of the name – or of debate?”

Obviously those I proposed above don’t fall into that category. They aren’t ideas, I hear you say, they are manifestations of various mental disorders. They should be dismissed out of hand.

Fine. But then I submit that Corbyn’s ideas aren’t ideas either. They are a manifestation of a deep-seated and lovingly cultivated hatred of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, along with everything this commonwealth stands for.

Compared to his cherished notions, my proposals begin to look positively benign. Yes, if acted upon, they’d upset most people and bring the country into disrepute. But they wouldn’t destroy it, as Corbyn’s ‘ideas’ would.

Wholesale nationalisation, maximum wage, a great hike in taxes on the productive classes, printing money as fast as the presses can manage, uncapping welfare benefits – such measures would create not so much an economic crisis as an economic wasteland.

Disbanding our army, abandoning the Trident nuclear deterrent, leaving Nato would take Britain several rungs down from her current second-rate status in the world. For the first time in her history Britain would be unable to defend herself against enemies from within or without.

Imposing a boycott on Israel and strengthening ties with Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis and all other Corbyn’s self-acknowledged friends in the region would almost certainly lead to a major, possibly world, war in which we’d play the role of disarmed targets.

Uniting Ireland under the aegis of Corbyn’s IRA friends and getting rid of the monarchy would put paid to the United Kingdom. It would then become an Islamic republic thanks to Muslim immigration, which, according to Corbyn, should be unlimited.

These are the kind of ideas that our respectable pundits believe ought to be debated in Parliament as a vindication of our cherished democracy. Chaps, are you out of your  minds?

Someone who mouths such ‘ideas’ should do so in a saloon bar, at a street corner, with pedestrians giving him a wide berth, or – ideally – in the rubber room of a reliably secure psychiatric institution. Parliament isn’t the place for deranged rants.

The problem with our pundits, with only a handful of exceptions, is that – how shall I put it without offending anybody – they aren’t very bright. Oh I’m sure their IQ scores are stratospheric, but IQ only measures potential.

To develop a potential into intelligence, a person should train himself how to think, and this is a lifetime endeavour, at the end of which the trainee will learn not to take on faith certain axioms of modernity.

By far the most pernicious axiom is that “all men are created equal”. By inference, so are all ideas – regardless of their enunciator’s competence.

As an illustration, back in 1979 the American public was following a debate on the safety of nuclear energy. The opposing parties were Edward Teller, a great nuclear physicist, and Jane Fonda, who probably thought physics was what one did in a gym to make sure those breast implants settle properly.

Teller had his ideas, Fonda had hers, so let the public decide who’s right. All ideas are created equal, aren’t they? They all deserve to be heard, discussed and either accepted or rejected.

Of course in a sane world only sane ideas would qualify as such. But who says we’re living in a sane world? Hence our columnists getting their rocks off over Corbyn’s ideas serving parliamentary democracy, especially since the subversive cretin espouses them in all sincerity.

So what’s wrong with the idea of reintroducing slavery then? Corbyn’s ‘ideas’, if brought to fruition, would make slaves of us all anyway.

Let’s face it, voting in a general election is like buying a pig in a poke. How do we know that the new government won’t make a pig’s ear of its job to lead the nation?

In a way, one could say that these days the electorate is prepared to act as so many guinea pigs – and have as much of a chance to end up in clover.

Dave has now been conducting his experiment on Britain for six years, every one a vindication of the old adage that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

We are well justified in thinking that his idea of leadership is all about leading the nation like so many pigs to the slaughter. Part of the problem is that Dave has soft principles, which leaves him unable to make hard choices.

A vacillating prime minister who doesn’t have the power of his convictions because he has no convictions may initiate any number of promising measures, but he’ll never go the whole hog.

Whatever is promising runs the risk of being unpopular, and do you think Dave will ever risk his own political future for the sake of doing the right thing? Yes, and pigs will fly.

Yet trying to explain to a modern politician that he should place the nation’s interest before his own is like casting pearls before swine.

I must say I share Dave’s amazement at the ease with which he and his jolly friends took over the Tory party. He didn’t say it was like stealing acorns from a blind pig, but he might as well have done. That is a comment not so much on him as on the party, which has Conservative in its name but not at its core.

The popular tendency is to blame Dave’s ineptitude on his class. Class envy, not to say hatred, comes naturally to today’s masses, who seem to believe that living high off the hog one’s whole life from birth ought to disqualify one from high office.

True enough, being raised in an ivory tower may give a man a rather skewed view of life – but it doesn’t have to. Intelligence and sensitivity could fill the gap left by insufficient experience, preventing the man from being pig-ignorant of hard realities.

However, when a man with neither intelligence nor sensitivity looks on life from the vantage point of an ivory tower, the result can be devastating – not so much for him as for the nation he gets to lead. He will never bring home the bacon.

One look at Britain’s great PMs of the past will show that few of them were either paupers or proletarians. Churchill, for example, proves that living in hog heaven doesn’t automatically mean making a pig’s ear of leading the country at a time of troubles.

In a similar situation, could Dave be relied on to save Britain’s bacon? Somehow one doubts it. All he’s good at is telling us porkies about the country’s state and prospects, or his own intentions.

The porky he has been trying to sell the nation most persistently is that somehow he can force enough reform on the EU to make it consonant with Britain’s interests.

“Ja,” commented Frau Merkel with a wink and a sly smile. “Und schweinen will fly.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York, 25 September, 2015.

In a move that surprised most observers, Pope Francis has delivered a fiery oration calling the West to arms in defence of our civilisation against an increasingly militant Muslim world.

In the part of the speech dealing specifically with the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, His Holiness said:

“If it were announced to you that the enemy has invaded your cities, your castles, your land; had ravished your wives and your daughters, and profaned your temples – which among you would not fly to arms? Well, then, all those calamities and calamities still greater, have fallen upon your brethren, upon the family of Jesus Christ, which is yours. Why do you hesitate to repair so many evils – to revenge so many outrages? Will you allow the infidels to contemplate in peace the ravages they have committed on Christian people? Remember that their triumph will be a subject of grief to all ages and an eternal opprobrium upon the generation that has endured it. Yes, the living God has charged me to announce to you that He will punish them who shall not have defended Him against His enemies.

“Fly then to arms; let the holy rage animate you in the fight, and let the Christian world resound with these words of the prophet: “Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood!” If the Lord calls you to the defence of his heritage, think not that His hand has lost its power. Could He not send twelve legions of angels or breathe one word and all His enemies would crumble away into dust? But God has considered the sons of men, to open for them the road to His mercy. His goodness has caused to dawn for you a day of safety by calling on you to avenge His glory and His name.

“Christian warriors, He who gave his life for you, today demands yours in return. These are combats worthy of you, combats in which it is glorious to conquer and advantageous to die. Illustrious knights, defenders of the Cross, remember the example of your fathers who conquered Jerusalem, and whose names are inscribed in Heaven; abandon then the things that perish, to gather unfading palms, and conquer a Kingdom that has no end.”

It didn’t take you long to detect the hoax, did it? Of course not. The speech was indeed delivered, but I used a wrong attribution.

The speaker wasn’t Pope Francis but St Bernard of Clairvaux. The place wasn’t the American city of New York but the Burgundian town of Vézelay. And the date wasn’t 25 September, 2015, but  31 March 1146.

Bernard had been asked by Pope Urban II to preach a Second Crusade. So he did, outside the St Mary Magdalen Basilica overlooking the town from the top of a steep hill.

A huge crowd, including Louis VII of France and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, gathered and, looking down from St Bernard’s vantage point, the basilica close and the hill slope must have looked like a sea of human heads. The sea was still: everyone was hanging on to every rousing word.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not wishing for another Holy Crusade – and I’m certainly not going to advocate anything like that in print.

It’s just that… well, don’t you wish sometimes that our civilisation were still animated by the same indomitable spirit, still led by the same type of men?

Instead we have an utterly corrupted populace enthusiastically applauding Pope Francis’s sermons of political correctness, multiculturalism and nonviolence – whatever the provocation.

Well, that’s progress for you. St Bernard didn’t even know the word. It probably didn’t exist in his backward time. And if it did, it certainly didn’t mean a civilisation cutting its own moral and spiritual throat.

 

 

 

It has been a dozen years since the Americans (with us in tow) set out to introduce democracy in the Middle East. Twelve being a round number in the non-metric Anglophone world, it’s time to draw up the interim tally of what this noble expedition has achieved:

A death toll of at least 2,000,000. Some will say it’s a fair price to pay for democracy. Others will argue that this mass slaughter is then a fraud: the product paid for was never delivered.

Injecting passion into the Islamic world and making it universally committed to jihad.

Getting rid of tyrants who alone managed to keep a lid on said passions and prevent the region from sinking into a blood-soaked chaos, which it has since done.

Creating ISIS, a well-armed, well-financed and well-trained gang, at present 250,000-strong and growing fast.

Having Europe inundated with masses of migrants of whom some have a good reason, and most a good pretext, to move to sunnier economic climes.

Turning to Iran for assistance. Lifting, as a fair price for it, the economic sanctions, thereby giving the ayatollahs new billions to spend on global trouble-making. More crucially, in effect giving Iran a cart blanche to develop nuclear weapons.

Glorious achievements all, but one takes the baklava: inviting Putin’s kleptofascist regime to become a powerful, potentially dominant, force in the Middle East.

Western observers, even those who lament this last achievement, don’t think it as towering as the others. In fact, however, it may well shift the strategic balance in Europe towards its most evil regime.

Back in the 19^th century, when Russia was infinitely more benign than she is now, Britain and her allies fought the Empire’s southward expansion several times, in the Balkans, the Black Sea and Central Asia.

In the 20^th century it was understood that Western bases south of Russia would have a restraining effect on Soviet ambitions, in the Middle East and elsewhere, while Soviet bases there would present a strategic danger to Western interests in many areas, including Europe.

In 1940 Britain used the RAF base at Mosul to prevent Russia from occupying Finland at the end of the Winter War. The threat was simple and direct: stop or we’ll take out the Baku oil fields, then the principal source of Russia’s hydrocarbons.

Russia, on the other hand, perfected the strategy of establishing military bases in a region and then using them as the spearheads of conquest. That’s how the three Baltic republics were incorporated into the Soviet Union: Soviet bases came first, invasion second.

Putin seems to have learned the lessons taught by his role model Stalin. Faced with the West’s meek but still annoying opposition to Russia’s attack on the Ukraine, he decided to check the offensive and get entrenched in the parts already occupied.

To that end, Russia is busily creating in Eastern Ukraine and Kaliningrad a network of heavily armed bases. At the same time, Putin has issued an ultimatum to Belarus to accept Russian air force bases on her territory.

Hence Belarus may be next in line for Russia’s bases-first-conquest-second treatment, but Syria may just beat her to it. Russia has established several bases there, filling them to the brim with jets, tanks, artillery and soldiers.

Although no official agreement has been published, it’s clear that America has struck a Faustian deal with Putin, selling her soul (and commitment to sanctions against Russia) for the chance to leave the Middle East with a portion of her face intact.

Putin is all too happy to pose as the intrepid fighter for Christian interests (as represented by the KGB junta he fronts) against the Islamic threat (as represented by ISIS) – and, revoltingly, the West plays along.

Meanwhile confusion reigns. ISIS threatens Assad, who has always been Russia’s client. Hence for Putin stopping ISIS also means defending Assad.

On the other hand the West, while wanting to stop ISIS, also wishes to get rid of Assad. Fair is fair: what’s sauce for the Saddam goose is also sauce for the gander of his ideological Ba’athist twin.

In fact, before ISIS acquired its name Dave was ready to commit British troops on its side, and only a last-ditch stand by Parliament prevented that criminal idiocy.

Now John Kerry hypocritically objects to Russia’s military build-up in Syria because it may lead to clashes with Western forces there, presumably as they leave. “These actions could provoke a further escalation of the conflict,” declares Kerry, conveniently forgetting that it was America that invited Putin in.

Even more hypocritically, or else ignorantly, Kerry allows that Putin might only want to safeguard Russia’s naval base at Taurus, her sole foothold on the Mediterranean.

Yes, and Stalin only attacked Finland because he wanted to safeguard Leningrad, occupied the Baltics to safeguard Russia’s western borders and raped Poland to safeguard her Ukrainian and Byelorussian minorities.

Chalk this up as the West’s crowning achievement: Putin is on the way to becoming the principal Middle Eastern warlord. Our leaders should be pleased with themselves. Twelve years well spent.

 

Now that Ashcroft’s book has come out, everyone and his brother is talking about Dave Cameron’s youthful indiscretions, throwing stones as if they themselves were without sin.

Being a kind, liberal and forgiving man, I feel like saying to them, come on, fellows.

Who among you wasn’t a bit wild during your university years? Who didn’t drink like a whole school of fish? Who didn’t trash the odd restaurant or two? Who didn’t use every known drug, either naturally or synthetically derived? Who didn’t try to score some of those drugs off two KGB officers on a Crimean beach?

Who, I ask you, didn’t copulate with everything that breathed – and a few things that didn’t, like a dead pig’s head (I assume Dave didn’t go the whole hog)? Rather than ganging up on Dave, you should praise him for his necrophiliac prudence.

Let’s be honest, if a young man bursting with testosterone has to corrupt someone’s morals, a dead pig is preferable to a live girl. After all, 50 years later the girl could, at the same time, complain to the police and sue her abuser for zillions, something a dead pig won’t do because a) it’s dead, b) it’s a pig and, most important, c) it won’t have the money to instruct a shyster lawyer.

Actually I’m inadvertently slandering Dave by suggesting that the porcine episode had something to do with amorous gratification. In fact, it was at base social rather than sexual.

Doing that to a dead suckling (not to be confused with a live sucking) pig was part of the initiation ritual at some quasi-masonic Oxford student society, not dissimilar to Yale’s Skull and Bones.

There the aspirant is supposed to masturbate publicly in a coffin surrounded by Skull and Bone members. I always picture that ritual when looking at the list of famous Boners, which includes both Bush presidents and the current Foreign Secretary John Kerry. And no one in the States bats an eyelid! How come we are so prudish?

Who among you… Well, actually, on second thoughts I’m sure that most of you have not done all the things Dave is alleged to have tried in his young days. Specifically those things, that is.

Yet most of us did all sorts of wild and crazy things in our salad days – and those indiscretions don’t even show as much variety as Dave can boast. We all did roughly the same stupid things.

The difference is that some of us still managed not to grow up as total nonentities and some, like Dave, didn’t. And that, rather than his drinking, drugs and dead farm animals, is what we should be talking about.

The question we should be asking is not ‘did he or didn’t he?’, but how is it that a man so openly devoid of any qualifications, be it those of intellect, morality or character, is in a position to lead a nation caught at the crossroads of a dying civilisation.

What is it about our system of government that allows this particular substance to rise to the top with unfailing regularity, only once interrupted in the post-war years by the emergence of Margaret Thatcher? One could say all sorts of negative things about her, but what she definitely wasn’t was a self-serving, spivocratic featherweight.

So what have we done to deserve all those subsequent Johnnies, Tonies, Gordies and Daves? I try to answer such questions in my book How the West Was Lost, the second, paperback, edition of which is coming out in a couple of weeks.

You can either read it or, better still, come up with your own answers. What none of us should do is dismiss the question as inconsequential. It isn’t. It’s a matter of life or death.

 

 

 

 

 

I was sorry when the great Pope Benedict XVI retired. So much so that I actually questioned whether this is the kind of job in which retirement should be allowed.

However, Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, has made me warm up to the notion on several occasions. The last time was yesterday, when His Holiness saw fit to thank Fidel Castro for “his contribution to world peace in a world saturated with hate and aggression.”

Yes, and I’d also like to thank Hitler (posthumously) for his contribution to race relations, Lenin (posthumously) for all he did for Russia, Pol Pot (posthumously) for having solved the problem of overpopulation and Jeremy Corbyn for his staunch royalism. Thanks all around.

One wonders if Pope Francis has any advisors to point out in advance that certain things he plans to say are not just ridiculously ideological but factually incorrect.

Probably not, for otherwise he would have been reminded that back in 1962 Castro aided and abetted Khrushchev’s efforts to bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. Or else that Castro is a mass murderer. Or that he created his own GULAG. Or that he can be credited with originating the concept of boat people. Or that he sent Cuban troops to Africa to act as the Soviets’ proxies in their attempt to dominate the continent. Or that, in general, Castro’s negative contribution to world peace is rivalled by few of his contemporaries.

On second thoughts, perhaps the Pope didn’t need advisors to point out these universally known facts. I’m sure that he praised Castro not in spite of his crimes but specifically because of them.

You see, after the Second World War the Soviets no longer spoke about their mission to bring about world revolution, or in other words to conquer the world. That remained their goal, but they now gave it a different name: struggle for peace.

The underlying canard was that the West was trying to unleash a world war, and only the valiant efforts of Soviet concentration-camp keepers managed to avert a global catastrophe. ‘Struggle for peace’ became the new Soviet term for their campaign to spread concentration camps all over the world.

The campaign was conducted through the most gigantic propaganda machine in history, putting Dr Goebbels’s amateurish efforts to shame. The machine was operated by hardened professionals, but it was helped along by millions of volunteer supporters around the world, of the type to whom Lenin had ungratefully referred as “useful idiots”.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as he then was, grew up as a leftie even by the standards of his generally left-leaning continent. To him the notion of communist Russia fighting for peace was an article of faith, possibly as firmly ingrained as the articles of the faith to which he pledged his professional life.

I don’t know if he used to spread Soviet propaganda, but it definitely affected him the way propaganda does at its best: not by appealing to reason but by conditioning reflexes.

It must have been by pure communism-equals-peace-struggle reflex that the Pope blurted out his plaudit for the mass murderer who has done as much as any man alive to undermine world peace.

Accidents do happen, even though one wishes that the world’s greatest Church were at this turbulent time led by a man whose reflexes are different. One also fears that, barring the Pope’s premature retirement, the Church won’t remain the world’s greatest for long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suppose for the sake of argument that back in 2003 the US powers-that-be, with their British counterparts in tow, did some soul-searching and set themselves ten long-term goals.

Goal 1: Removing or at least destabilising every Middle Eastern government that has a sporting chance of keeping the region under control.

Goal 2: Turning the region into a blood-soaked chaos, with the rule of heavily armed mob as the sole discernible authority.

Goal 3: Making sure the chaos expands rapidly, threatening to engulf the West’s allies in the region and beyond.

Goal 4: Injecting murderous passion into the whole Islamic world, giving them a common sense of purpose that may eventually trump their internal strife and unite them against the West.

Goal 5: Creating the right conditions for Iran to develop nuclear weapons and use them to blackmail, and possibly attack, Israel first and the West second.

Goal 6: First washing their hands of the region, then not just allowing but positively begging Putin’s fascist regime to take charge, establish a massive military presence, create puppet states and found a naval base compromising Nato in general and its southern flank in particular.

Goal 7: In exchange for Putin’s generous agreement to accept a huge strategic advantage, taking steps towards removing Western sanctions and thereby perpetuating Putin’s brand of kleptofascism at a time it looks wobbly.

Goal 8: Inundating Europe with a flood of Muslim immigrants, thereby drowning the continent’s historical demographics, culture and social order.

Goal 9: Creating every precondition for a series of murderous terrorist attacks by Muslims on the West, with the use of nuclear devices a distinct possibility.

Goal 10: Making Israel’s existence ever more precarious.

Now imagine the same powers, with a slightly different cast of characters, rubbing their hands with glee as they go over the above list, item by item: done… sorted… accomplished… achieved… fulfilled… attained… tick… tick… tick… another tick… Congratulations! We’ve managed to do everything we set out to do.

No, I hear you say. No such meeting ever took place, and nor could it possibly have taken place. The suggestions that it did could only have come from a deranged mind.

To which my answer is, how do you know? I base my supposition on hard evidence, analysis of every step taken by the USA, with Britain in the capacity of the proverbial poodle, since it embarked on the criminal venture going by the name of nation-building and democracy-installing.

What do you base your counterarguments on? General belief in the goodness and wisdom of Western governments run by assorted Dubyas, Tonys, Baracks and Daves? Really.

In fact, my view of these lads is a great deal more optimistic than yours. I give them credit for planning every detail of the ensuing global catastrophe and executing the plan with unwavering commitment and ingenuity.

You, on the other hand, seem to suggest that they are so stupid and immoral that they plunged into these troubled waters without even considering the consequences.

Shame on you. And congratulations to them.

 

 

 

If this title caught your eye, it’s because such a scenario isn’t just implausible but impossible.

Americans are perfectly able, indeed almost guaranteed, to elect nonentities to variously high public offices. But they’ll never allow anyone to uphold the constitution who is ideologically committed to undermining it.

For better or for worse, the USA is a republic. Hence no one who, like me, believes that hereditary monarchy is the only form of government consonant with our civilisation, will be allowed to play an active role in American politics. That’s how it should be. Fair is fair.

Now let’s cross the ocean and land close to home. Her Majesty’s opposition is now led by a communist who hates Her Majesty and everything she (and her realm) stands for, whose chosen newspaper is the Morning Star, founded and financed for decades by the Soviet secret police, who voices support for Britain’s enemies, who is committed to destroying the world’s oldest – and best – constitution.

And who doesn’t mind advertising all that by demonstratively refusing to sing the national anthem.

Should we react the same way as Americans would in my far-fetched hypothetical situation? More specifically, how should our conservative pundits comment on Corbyn’s ascent?

Certainly not the way some of them do.

Dominic Lawson, he of the family where daughters are named after their fathers, thinks there’s nothing wrong with Corbyn’s vocal strike. Our national anthem, he says, is “an uninspiring dirge” that, “unlike the anthems of other constitutional monarchies… praises neither the nation nor people.”

Tastes differ, and I find God Save the Queen to be supremely inspiring. But that doesn’t really matter, for it’s crass stupidity to discuss the melody and the lyrics of the anthem in this context. Does Lawson think Corbyn refused to sing it for aesthetic reasons? Of course he didn’t. He thumbed his nose not to the words but to everything they represent.

“It is a repugnant idea,” continues Lawson, “that someone should be bullied into uttering words he doesn’t believe.” Absolutely. But I’d still be tempted to make the point that someone who doesn’t believe those particular words shouldn’t sit in Her Majesty’s Parliament and have a shot at becoming her prime minister.

Lawson then quotes approvingly an RAF veteran who admires “Mr Corbyn for sticking to his principles… That is what democracy is all about and what we all fought for in the war.”

Now an RAF veteran may be assumed to be a hero, but being an intellectual giant isn’t his job requirement. He may not realise that sticking to one’s principles is praiseworthy only if the principles are. He may not be aware of the fine constitutional nuances of British politics or of the fundamental difference between constitutional monarchy and democratic republic. That’s why it’s a columnist’s duty to explain those things to him. Instead this particular columnist actively encourages ignorance.

The RAF fought the war not for democracy but for God, king and country – for the sovereignty of the realm whose divinely anointed head reigns through Parliament. This is what we all should still be fighting for, in our own ways. And fighting for it logically presupposes fighting against those who wish to destroy the realm from either without or within.

That doesn’t mean that Comrade Corbyn isn’t entitled to hold his perverse beliefs, or that he should be harassed for holding them. It only means that we are equally entitled to protect ourselves from the cannibalistic ideology he espouses.

Peter Hitchens, who shares Corbyn’s Trotskyist temperament if no longer his views, is even more emphatic: “To hell with all the superpatriots who condemn Jeremy Corbyn for not singing God Save the Queen. What are they patriotic for, exactly, if not for the freedom to dissent, the crown of all our liberties and our greatest achievement.”

He then praises Corbyn for being “open and honest”, much as Hitchens himself disagrees with his ideas. But hey, “nobody is right all the time.”

I never tire of saying that Lenin and Hitler, the most evil politicians of all time, were equally “open and honest” about their ideas. I’d rather have statesmen who enunciate and act on the right ideas insincerely than those who honestly state their intention to destroy this country, as Comrade Corbyn does, if not yet in so many words.

Oswald Mosley also exercised his freedom of dissent, which is why he was interned for the duration of the war. A clear understanding existed at the time that commitment to that particular freedom mustn’t be tantamount to a suicide pact.

The realm was in grave danger then, but who in his right mind wouldn’t see that the danger is as great if not greater now, even if it doesn’t take the shape of Luftwaffe bombers? The constitution is being steadily eroded, not to say subverted, and without her constitution Britain isn’t Britain any longer.

Let the likes of Corbyn expand on their evil ideas in pubs or at home. And is it too much to ask that those who write for our papers have a modicum of intelligence and a firm grasp of their subjects?

 

Are you cultured? I am not, judging by the 40 questions asked by a recent survey. Then again, 29 of them have nothing to do with culture, as I understand it.

Surveys in this genre must be taken with a grain of salt and, ideally, also with a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila. However, they do reflect the popular perception of the area under investigation and, when it comes to culture, the popular perception is frankly idiotic.

For cultured people, aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual pursuits define their personalities. For today’s lot, they are an aside, something to chat about at a party once food, money and DIY have been exhausted.

For our philistines, culture denotes what tasteless vulgarity used to mean to civilised people. At best, philistines identify with culture something that has nothing to do with it, such as preference for some TV shows over others or being obsessed with food.

In fact, 11 of the 29 silly rubrics have nothing to do with food. To wit, you aren’t a cultured person if you don’t: host dinner parties; know about cheese; know about cuts of meat; visit farm shops; drink ‘proper’ coffee (not instant); grow your own fruit and vegetables on an allotment; know how to pronounce ‘quinoa’; use chopsticks over a knife and fork; only eat local produce; get food from supermarket ‘finer’ ranges; drink herbal tea.

None of these has anything to do with culture, properly defined, and some reflect nothing but tree-hugging faddism, with a slight leftward slant.

For example, show me a man who drinks herbal tea, and I’ll show you a man who can talk seriously about alternative lifestyles. And, much as I’d like to establish my cultural credentials by keeping an allotment, doing so in London would mean an expenditure of time that can be more profitably used writing, reading and listening to music.

One of my most cultured friends would fail on all those foodie criteria, except using chopsticks – and then only because he plays concerts in the Far East. Conversely, it’s easy to imagine a rank philistine ticking every one of those boxes with a flourish of his Mont Blanc pen.

Then we have several TV rubrics supposed to separate the cultured wheat from the barbarian chaff: watch documentaries; watch Question Time; don’t skip the news when it’s on TV; watch tennis or cricket; watch Antiques Road Show.

I watch tennis and some of my friends watch cricket, but we wouldn’t lay a claim to culture on that basis. It’s just some mindless entertainment a busy mind needs as much as sleep. I also know ignoramuses who devote their lives to watching sports.

TV news, Question Time and Antiques Road Show are the antithesis of culture, while any decent book will tell you more than any documentary about any subject. And some refined people I know don’t own a TV set at all, which presumably places them in the culture stakes below any council-estate dweller.

Then there’s ‘cultured’ entertainment: go to the ballet; go to the theatre; read a book before the film comes out; watch films with subtitles; go to music festivals.

As the low end of high culture, ballet has more to do with entertainment. Some people have no access to ballet performances, some have no money to pay the extortionist prices – and some of them are infinitely more cultured than any ballet master I’ve ever met.

Going to the theatre is also difficult for people who live in the country or those whose budgets don’t stretch to £50 a ticket. Reading a book before the film comes out betokens ignorance of the incompatible difference between the two genres.

If a film is based on a classic, cultured people would have read the book anyway. If it’s based on trash, as most are, then the book isn’t worth reading. In either case a film should be assessed on cinematic merits, not faithfulness to the book.

Stressing films with subtitles presupposes that any foreign film is better than an Anglophone one, which is nonsense. Most French films I’ve seen in the last 20 years are pretentious rubbish, and I could name dozens of superb English and American films produced during the same period.

Music festivals, especially nowadays, are designed not for music lovers but for philistines who need to be seen or have nothing better to do on holiday.

Our reading habits are tested by only two useless rubrics: own a library card; read Wikipedia articles. I doubt any one of my well-read friends owns a library card. And though Wikipedia is a useful source of reference, its effect on culture is more negative than positive.

A cultured person is also supposed to be characterised by his shopping habits: go to vintage markets (why on earth?); collect music on vinyl (what kind of music, and what’s wrong with CDs?); wear bow ties and brooches (not many people wear both, some wear one or the other, and some of them are cultured, with no causative relationship anywhere in sight.

Then there are miscellaneous items, such as: enjoy crosswords or Sudoku (?), get the conundrum on Countdown (I’ve no idea what Countdown is) and – my favourite – put on an accent to pronounce foreign words.

This is tolerable only when someone is a native speaker or at least fluent in the language. Otherwise it’s nauseatingly pretentious, as in the case of broadcasters who insist on replacing every ‘z’ in a Spanish name with a ‘th’, often incorrectly.

So there you go: I’ve been put to shame. My only consolation is that I’m in good company.

 

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley got the ball rolling when he apologised for saying that white lives matter as much as black ones.

I don’t know how closely you follow US politics, but saying something like that could end the career of any presidential candidate. By ‘something like that’ I mean anything that in any way, no matter how inoffensive, may be perceived as ‘insensitive’.

Insensitive, that is, to any faddish passion consuming any mob, provided that said passion is febrile, widespread and, above all, politically correct.

In this instance the politically correct passion wasn’t just febrile but downright explosive. It was set off by the activist movement Black Lives Matter, meaning the lives of black criminals shot by white policemen.

An officer may be returning fire, saving a hostage’s life, trying to protect himself from a knife thrust – the circumstances of each such case are unimportant. If the policeman is white and the criminal is black, America will be consumed by fiery riots expertly whipped up and stoked by professional rabble-rousers – such as the Black Lives Matter group.

Speaking at a rally of leftie (‘liberal’ in American political slang, where words tend to mean their exact opposites), Mr O’Malley was greeted with the thunderous braying of “Black lives matter!”

The candidate, erroneously feeling amply protected by his impeccably ‘liberal’ credentials, decided to expand the notion. “Black lives matter,” he agreed – and then added the potential career-ender: “White lives matter. All lives matter.”

You what!?!? White lives?!? All lives?!?!? Who do you think you’re talking to? Where do you think you are, you insensitive whitey? This is a LIBERAL gathering! Context, man! In this context ONLY black lives matter, and if you don’t apologise you won’t get away with your own white life, at least its political incarnation.

Following a nation-wide fit of hysterics, a grovelling apology ensued. “I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or to communicate,” wept O’Malley, “that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to the issue.”

Especially those of us who seek the Democratic presidential nomination, which Mr O’Malley can now kiss good-bye. Upholding the sanctity of human life, whatever the colour of the body housing it, isn’t just insensitive or archaic. It’s borderline criminal.

Our lot wouldn’t be outdone in the apologies stakes. We have our own context, much more advanced than the Yanks can boast. There the typological answers to the Black Panthers and the Weathermen of yesteryear provide the deafening din to accompany politics, but they don’t yet control either major party.

In Britain, our second largest party, Labour, officially called Her Majesty’s Opposition, is already in the hands of the extreme, loony Left. Obviously, in the course of their distinguished careers, all its senior figures have said publicly things that a civilised person wouldn’t even utter at a boozy dinner party.

A short catalogue of their aphorisms would make the party unelectable even in the likely conditions of a financial meltdown come the next general election. Hence it’s important to get the mendacious apologies in early.

Shadow Chancellor (Labour’s second in command) John McDonnell led the way. He didn’t mean to say back in 2003 that IRA terrorists should be “honoured” for their “armed struggle”. Presumably he meant to say they should be hanged, but his tongue committed one of those Freudian slips that can be ever so embarrassing.

Neither did Mr McDonnell refer to Bobby Sands, him of the chicken supper fame, as a hero. Or, if he did, it was another slip of the tongue for which he apologises most abjectly, “from the bottom of my heart”. He was actually giving his recipe for a hero sandwich, and Bobby’s name came up inadvertently.

While at it, Mr McDonnel also apologised for his “appalling joke” about Margaret Thatcher. The humorous aside had been an expression of his heart-felt desire that he could go back in time for the sole purpose of murdering Mrs Thatcher, as she then was.

What he really meant was that he wanted to perform this unlikely backward leap in order to honour Mrs Thatcher and rebuke those IRA consumers of hero sandwiches who almost succeeded in murdering her with that Brighton bomb in 1984, which was one thing you can’t pin on Bobby Sands, who died in 1981, but wasn’t a hero anyway, while Margaret Thatcher was.

The joke, said Mr McDonnell (or should one call him ‘Comrade’?) has “ended my career in stand-up”. He really shouldn’t give up so easily: I’m sure his full economic programme will be a laugh. And if he ever becomes our Chancellor, we’ll all be rolling in the aisles – of the airliners taking us as far away from The People’s Republic of Britain as one can get.

Now, in the spirit of the time, I’d like to apologise unreservedly yet insincerely for any offence my remarks might have caused. I don’t know what came over me.