Why, did you think it was free?

Inflation is spinning out of control. So are energy costs. Interest rates are going up. Growth is heading in the opposite direction, with the standard of living manfully keeping up with this plummet.

All in all, the situation is worse than it was in 2008, when everyone was screaming bloody murder and catastrophic crisis. These days everyone would rather talk about prosecco parties at Number 10. (Can’t those spivs afford champagne, for heaven’s sake?)

Our government is profoundly corrupt, in all the wrong ways. That’s not to say that there are right ways to be corrupt – there aren’t. But while some corruption is peripheral, only offending our moral sense, some is fundamental, undermining the core business of governance.

The first kind includes fiddling expenses, pushing through a bill favouring a friend, ignoring restrictions they themselves imposed, bestowing posts and honours for ulterior motives. It’s all sleazy, dishonest and self-serving, but it can’t damage the country in any substantial sense.

By contrast, the second kind, fundamental corruption, can destroy the country, not just damage it. All our post-war governments confirm this observation, more or less. Perhaps Thatcher’s tenure could be exempt, although that’s debatable.

What’s not debatable is that all subsequent administrations have been falling over themselves trying to administer lethal injections to Her Majesty’s realm. The current administration is making a good fist of it too.

It calls itself Conservative, but I can’t think offhand of any Labour government more committed to runaway statism, that hallmark of socialism. To be fair, the Johnson administration was hit by the force majeure of Covid, which necessitated some governmental activism.

Its handling of the pandemic was heavy-handed, perhaps unnecessarily so. But one could argue that under those circumstances overreaction was better than no reaction at all.

Yes, practically shutting the economy down for the better part of two years was ill-advised. But I can’t in good conscience blame the government for its mild case of hysteria – I’m not sure I myself would have been able to keep my sangfroid under those circumstances.

But I definitely blame the Johnson administration for exacerbating the consequences of the pandemic – nay, multiplying them tenfold.

Covid or no Covid, Johnson’s two pet projects, levelling up and net zero emissions, would put the economy under intolerable stress. But pushing on with them at this time is criminally irresponsible, borderline suicidal.

This, even if Johnson genuinely believes that the economic North-South divide can be erased by political action, or that fossil fuels must be phased out within a decade because they destroy ‘our planet’.

The second belief is patently unscientific. All Johnson would have to do is look at the carbon content in the atmosphere (one-eighteenth) and the manmade proportion of it (three per cent). Next he should look at the climatic effects of solar activity, the Earth’s orbit in relation to other planets, tectonic shifts, oceanic and volcanic activity, and thousands of other factors affecting climate.

Then he’d know the whole global-warming theory for the pernicious swindle it is. But he has neither the mind nor, more important, the character to go against the grain of woke orthodoxies, especially those championed by his henpecking wife.

As to the levelling up nonsense, it’s not conservative and therefore not sensible. Markets are like some wild animals; they don’t reproduce, or in this case produce, in captivity. The government should be only the referee, not a player, in the economic game.

This has been known since at least the 18^th century, and not only to professional economists like Smith. Thus, for example, Burke: “The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.”

The examples of aggressively statist economies, none of which has ever succeeded, turn that observation into empirical fact. Another fact, firmly established by experience, is that a government can’t tax its way out of trouble.

When the economy has been dug into a hole, the government should stop digging. That means lowering the taxes to remove, or at least loosen, the yoke they have placed on the nation’s economic neck.

Yet the Johnson administration is doing exactly the opposite. It’s ratcheting up the taxes to administer a coup de grâce to an economy already writhing in pain on the ground. What would be foolhardy at any time is nothing short of criminal in our current situation.

Johnson takes pride in his green credentials, the really pornographic part of the Carrie On film in which he co-stars. The damage he (and the previous governments) is causing goes way beyond economic suicide. It’s also geopolitical self-harming.

For energy isn’t just an economic resource. It’s also a strategic one. Any self-respecting country must strive to be as self-sufficient as possible in securing an uninterrupted supply of strategic resources, especially energy.

Yet not only does Johnson embark on a patently ridiculous campaign to replace domestic fossil fuels with the notoriously fickle sun and wind, but he wants to do it so fast as to guarantee Britain’s dependence on foreign producers of hydrocarbons.

That makes Britain an easy mark for blackmail on the part of those hydrocarbon producers who are our avowed enemies. No, I don’t mean France, although she isn’t acting as a devoted friend. I mean Putin’s Russia, to whose aggression we can’t respond with sufficient vigour for fear of freezing in the dark.

I realise that Johnson and his jolly friends aren’t committing high treason in the technical definition of the term. But what they are committing is tantamount to the worst kind of treachery: they are denuding the country’s defences against both economic and political cataclysms.

As Richard Weaver argues in his 1948 book, ideas have consequences. These days, Westerners in general and Britons in particular find it hard to realise this.

Due to a combination of economic greed and geopolitical myopia, the West has turned both Russia and especially China into global superpowers able to challenge us on every terrain in every part of the globe. Neither country would have been able to do so without the massive influx of Western technology, knowhow and capital.

Russia’s oil and gas production, for example, would be barely sufficient for domestic needs without Western (not exclusively American) exploration, drilling and production technology, and the transfer of the relevant equipment.

Apart from our thirst for immediate and potential superprofits, we have proceeded from the philistine fallacy that every nation is either already like us at heart or desperately wishes to be.

Yet, had we started from the general (and therefore un-British) understanding that nations governed by the KGB (Russia) or communists (China) are evil regardless of the liberal noises they may make, we would have thought a thousand times before building those evil states up to their position of geopolitical prominence.

And now the two evil states are forming an anti-Western axis, with one of them giving Britain a stark choice: either beggar yourself with soaring energy costs or play ball. Johnson’s (or is it the Johnsons’?) energy, and general economic, policy doesn’t just turn Britain into an easy target. It’s practically inviting our enemies to hit it.

Virtue signalling has its price, which is especially steep when there is no real virtue to signal. And now by all means let’s talk about that prosecco.

A vile drink, if you ask me, but that’s neither here nor there.