Blog

Contrary to the popular misapprehension, Sir Keir Starmer isn’t just trying to take a leaf out of Marx’s book, presumably Das Kapital.

Fair enough, he too is driven by what Nietzsche called ressentiment, a psychological state produced by suppressed feelings of envy and hatred, otherwise known as socialist longings. In due course, Starmer may indeed remove the prefix crypto- from Marxist and go the whole hog.

But the historical figure exerting a more immediate influence on Sir Keir seems to be not Marx but Ramesses II, the pharaoh of Biblical infamy. The parallel is so obvious it’s hard to believe Starmer doesn’t genuflect every night before the picture of Ramesses on his bedroom wall.

As you recall, Ramesses’s country was blessed with a large diaspora of successful, enterprising people keeping Egypt’s economy in clover, or manna if you’d rather. Yet the pharaoh too was possessed of ressentiment, some 3,000 years before the word was coined.

Thus he mistreated that diaspora with singular disregard for their well-being and, more to the point, for his own country. The result was predictable: those frustrated people upped sticks and left, leaving ten plagues behind them.

Read Starmer for Ramesses, non-domiciled residents of Britain for the ancient Hebrews, and the similarity becomes impossible to ignore. For Starmer has also mistreated his non-dom diaspora, and he too has pushed the button for their exodus.

Non-doms are wealthy foreigners who live in Britain and pay £30,000 a year for the privilege if they’ve stayed here for a certain number of years. That system, which goes back almost to the time of Ramesses, makes their offshore assets and income exempt from British taxation.

There are some 37,800 fee-paying non-doms in the UK, out of the total number of 74,000. Multiply 37,800 by £30,000 and you get, in round numbers, a hell of a lot. Yet Starmer and his merry men (I go against biology by including Rachel Reeves in their number) wanted more than a paltry £30,000 a head. They wanted many times that amount, and thought they could get it by taxing non-doms on their global assets.

Predictably, the merry men were taught a simple arithmetic: £30,000 may not be good enough but it’s better than nothing. And nothing is what the Exchequer is going to get.

What ensued has been an exodus of millionaires, with 10,800 fleeing in 2024 and many more packing up. Thus Britain lost more wealthy people in one year than any other country in the world except China, which is rather more populous.

That’s just the beginning. A survey has revealed that two-thirds of the remaining non-doms are planning to leave for sunnier economic climes. That would constitute a huge hit on tax revenue, not to mention charitable donations.

The net cost to the public purse will be about £1 billion a year. Add to this the lower VAT receipts and council taxes, factor in the job losses (those leaches on the body of the ‘working people’ do create jobs for the said working people) with the subsequent swelling of the welfare rolls, and the picture acquires even a darker tint.

Here we approach a significant difference between ancient Egypt and today’s Britain. The Egyptian elite did all they could to prevent their non-doms from leaving. But the British elite jump on the bandwagon.

You see, our own Ramesses set out to punish with extortionist taxes not only non-dom entrepreneurs but also the home-grown kind. They too are leaving, taking jobs them, at least 23,000 to be lost by the end of Starmer’s first term. The demand for overseas residence permits has grown 57 per cent on 2023 – and 580 per cent on 2019.

The Plagues of Britain don’t end there. In fact, they barely begin. The same ressentiment drives Starmer’s gang, with Milibandit as their frontman, to expose whole industries to their insane obsession with net zero.

The oil industry is the most immediate victim, with tens of thousands of jobs lost already, and many more to be lost in short order. Even assuming, unsafely, that some of the newly unemployed will be able to retrain for a new trade in the long run, the short-term pressure on social services is crippling.

Moreover, car manufacturers are increasingly taught that making cars in Britain is no longer viable. The most immediate prompt comes from the government’s punitive tax hikes, but the cost of shifting to electric cars is also unsustainable. Hence hardly a day goes by without yet another car manufacturer announcing the closure of yet another plant, with thousands of job losses each time.

I struggle to come up with another example of so much economic damage visited on Britain in such a short time for purely ideological reasons. The sums involved are so simple that even people as manifestly stupid as Starmer and Reeves should be able to figure them out on their own.

The salient point is that they aren’t crippling the British economy because they know not what they do, but specifically because they know it very well. Ramesses couldn’t have predicted the plagues Egypt had to suffer as a result of the Exodus. But the economic devastation wrought by socialist ressentiment was entirely predictable.

If there exists one economic constant raised to the level of an unbreakable law, it’s that people flee from socialism, and the bolshier the socialism, the faster they run. Nor does it take an Adam Smith to figure out that punitive taxation coupled with the destruction of whole industries can’t produce an economic boom.

That’s why it’s wrong to say that the economic policies of Starmer, Reeves et al. are failing. In fact, if you define success as achieving the desired result, they are succeeding famously.

Their socialist loins ache for revenge against their traditional bogeymen, starting with ‘capitalists’, which pejorative term covers all wealth creators in the country. If all such objectionable people leave in emulation of the Exodus, then so much the better for this lot – and so much the worse for the country.

The ideal they see in their mind’s eye is reversion to the golden-age economy before the Industrial Revolution, when all energy was produced by renewable sources, such as wind, sun, water and human muscle. Most of the people, their rulers apart, were then paupers, but our present-day pharaohs wouldn’t mind that.

Private wealth makes an individual more independent from the state, which is why it’s anathema for people devoted to increasing state power ad infinitum, which is to say for socialists. They are equally opposed to bono publico and bono privato. It’s their own ideological bono that they pursue, and they do so with the kind of fanaticism that would make even the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs turn green with envy.

The pharaohs were blissfully unfamiliar not only with the concept of ressentiment but also with that of ideology. They did their level worst, but still managed to create a great civilisation.

Today’s answers to Ramesses can’t create anything. They can only destroy, so it’s a good job that’s exactly what they really want to do. When they die, they’ll go to the socialist heaven, while the rest of us will wail, weep and gnash our teeth.

The other day I saw an article in a mainstream newspaper in which some ‘celebrity’ regaled her readers with a frank and clinical discussion of her problematic labia. I wish I could tell you what the nature of the problem was, but I didn’t read far enough to find out.

The celebrity obviously felt, and her editors must have agreed, that the subject of one’s genitalia is fit for public airing. That could be easily dismissed as an exercise in solipsistic bad taste, but I think it’s more sinister than that.

The woman and the paper both proceeded from ideological premises they regard as universal and uniquely correct. The desirability of letting it all hang out, literally if need be, springs from the urge to smash up the old order, replete as it was with repression, body-shaming, religious superstition, alienation, misogyny, suffocating ethics, anally retentive etiquette, retrograde morality and so on, all the way down the list.

This brings me yet again to my recurrent theme: the eerie and growing similarity between the communism of my youth and the liberal democracy of my adulthood. Both are ideological, and both ideologies aim to replace the old, deficient world with a new, progressive one.

Since a world is made up of people, the aim of any ideology is to create not only a new and improved political order but also a new and improved man, as defined in the terms of the received ideology. Step by step, the whole complexity of man is reduced to a simple binary proposition: with us or against us.

Communist ideology was simpler than liberal democracy, but both are simplistic (that is an essential attribute of any ideology). However, in one respect communism was better: as it went along, the fervour of ideological commitment attenuated.

In the beginning, the masses, with notable exceptions, were quite gung-ho. But by the time I became a sentient person, in the 1960s, no one in Russia took communism seriously, although most people continued mouthing meaningless clichés by rote.

With liberal democracy, it’s the other way around. Rather than becoming gradually less ideological over time, it becomes more so, and at an ever-accelerating tempo. And, unlike communism, it attacks on many fronts because its enemies come in all shapes.

Stalin’s pet idea was that, the closer the shining ideal of socialism, the more intensive the class struggle. That didn’t happen in communist countries. On the contrary, communism there steadily became more and more anaemic and less and less belligerent. However, a related idea worked out perfectly in liberal democracies.

As they became more liberal and democratic, their enemies were coming out of the woodwork in greater numbers and types, and the dominant ideology had to grow more aggressive by the day.

Allegiance to the communist ideology boiled down to a simple pro or con. If one accepted the sole truth of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, one was a friend eligible for some latitude. If one didn’t accept it, one was an implacable enemy slated for destruction. That ideology was embodied by the communist party, whose doctrine changed day to day, but it was up to every citizen to follow the ideological zigs and zags vigilantly.

The task of creating a new, which is to say ideological, man has a vital political dimension because most people stubbornly cling to the old and familiar version of humanity. They can only be made to see the light by political action, and there democracy of universal suffrage comes in handy.

By drawing every citizen into elective politics, democracy predisposes them to expect a political solution to every problem. Ideology then moves in to claim the crumbs of the pie.

The ideology of liberal democracy is as comprehensively politicised as communism, but it’s broken down into multiple strains. It too strives to create a new human type, but its criteria for belonging are more multifarious than a simple statement of allegiance.

An aspiring adherent has to demonstrate that he accepts every aspect of the ideology, and these constantly become more numerous. One has to pledge allegiance to climate change, transgender rights, women’s rights, homomarriage, anti-colonialism, anti-racism and any other pet idea of the moment. Moreover, one must make that pledge vociferously.

Passive acquiescence isn’t good enough, as it wasn’t under communism. Ideologues demand enthusiastic support, not merely non-resistance. And they brook no argument, mainly because they don’t even know what constitutes one.

Even though ‘idea’ and ‘ideology’ are etymological cognates, they are antonyms. An idea, which becomes an argument when expressed, submits itself to a test of true or false. If the argument is persuasive, the idea is accepted as fact; if not, it’s rejected.

Conversely, the only test imposed by an ideology is loyalty to it. That’s why there is no point arguing, say, that changing sex is impossible at any biological level. An ideologue won’t engage you on your turf.

He’ll simply comply with the demands of his ideology by identifying the pernicious roots of your disagreement with it. Thus he won’t try to prove that a transsex operation does change the biological makeup of a person. He’ll simply dismiss you by saying “you believe this because you are…” Whatever follows in that phrase means “a rebel against my ideology and therefore my enemy.”

The same goes for any attempt to present, say, scientific evidence proving the ideology of climate change is based on false and bogus evidence. Your opponent won’t relate to any real argument. His response will be: “You are saying this because…”  

In the incident I cited at the beginning, ideology was working overtime. A new, ideological man must pass the test of renouncing his old prejudices. What in the past was considered common decency affirming the dignity of man is now seen as sexual repression, which is a fatal failing of character and ideological probity.

When Marcuse and other Frankfurters concocted an organic blend of Marx and Freud, they formed perhaps the most vital aspect of the new ideology. Everyone, according to them, was driven by his unconscious class prejudices (Marx) and sexual urges (Freud).

The former are fine if the prejudices are those of the lower classes. If you have any others, you are… [fill in the blanks]. But any sexual self-expression, especially of a kind that used to be frowned upon, is healthy and ideologically sound. Suppressing such urges, on the other hand, means rejecting the liberating effect of the new ideology. If you are guilty of such shameful repression, you are…

No subject is taboo any longer. If you refuse to indulge the public’s taste for intimatemost details, you implicitly reject the liberal-democratic ideology, which makes you an oddity at best, an enemy at worst.

A woman discussing her labia in a family newspaper makes thereby a statement of allegiance, at the same time submitting her readers to a test of ideological purity. If you wince, as I did, and refuse to read any further, then you are… well, you know what you are.

If, however, you lap up every tasteless word – even if you may be cringing somewhere deep down, around your pancreas – you pass the test. You’ll be an ideological man, my son, as Kipling didn’t quite put it.

In this area too, the communist ideology was vectored differently from its liberal democratic sibling. One of the first decrees of the Bolshevik government was the abolition of family. Prominent Bolsheviks, such as Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand and Karl Radek, proclaimed sexual liberation and called on every true communist to express himself with multiple partners.

Radek founded the Shameless League and personally led nude marches through Moscow. Marriage was declared a bourgeois perversion, a way of enslaving women in their men’s bondage. Every woman was now community property, and she had to accept the advances of any Party member who fancied her.

However, as the Soviet system matured, it became puritanical. Even though divorce and abortion remained easily available, marriage was reinstated, and sexual licence discouraged.

Back in the 1970s a Soviet woman involved in a TV debate with her American sisters even declared that “there is no sex in the Soviet Union”, much to my hilarity as I watched from the safety of my Houston house.

But the dynamic of liberal-democratic ideology is exactly reverse. At the beginning, some erstwhile reticence held firm as a throwback to Christian morality. Yet the revolutionary outburst of the ‘60s put paid to that. The poet Philip Larkin even wrote: “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me).”

That was followed by a rapid escalation all the way to today, when formerly serious newspapers happily talk about labia and various ballistic possibilities ensuring orgasmic bliss. Ideology is laying about it, and I for one wonder what comes next.

When Lenin wrote about eliminating whole social classes, everyone thought it was a figure of speech. Surely not? Alas, most definitely yes. The chap wasn’t carried away by his own evil rhetoric, he really was evil.

Neither did people believe Hitler was going to exterminate all Jews. Fine, he didn’t like them, but then who did? But murdering millions of people? Preposterous. Of course he wouldn’t. But he did.

In that spirit, I suggest you take mainstream Russian propagandists at their word. When they say Britain has no right to exist, and it’s up to Russia to do something about that, they mean it.

Such is the view of Gen. Andrey Gurulyov, a member of the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, where his low opinion of Britain is shared widely enough to be considered mainstream.

The other day the Ukrainian Army launched its biggest rocket attack on Russian territory, and Gen. Gurulyov believes that the wages of that sin should be a complete obliteration of that bothersome neighbour. But all in good time.

Because the Ukrainians used British Storm Shadow missiles in the attack, the good general insists Britain should be wiped off the face of the Earth first. “This attack,” he insisted, “is a direct reason for Britain simply not to be on Earth”, but to be nuked out of existence, a view he believes is universally shared all over the world.

“I think 80 per cent of the world will clap for us. Make it 100 per cent,” he said. With all due respect, I have to disagree with the general’s calculations. I have no data at my disposal to contest the 80 per cent estimate, but 100 per cent means everybody. However, I probably know a couple of hundred people in various countries personally, and I can guarantee that none of them wants Britain to suffer such a gruesome fate.

Still, far be it from me to hold against anybody a slight exaggeration caused by polemical zeal. We’re all capable of saying things in the heat of an argument that we later regret.

In this case, however, Gen. Gurulyov has a bit of previous. Unleashing nuclear holocaust on Britain is his recurrent theme, which either means emotions have little role to play in his statements, or else the general’s emotional state is permanently febrile.

When Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2022, and it became clear that all NATO members supported the victim of the aggression as best they could, Gurulyov suggested they should all be nuked. But already then he put Britain at the top of his pecking order.

Yes, he said, Russia should definitely bomb Warsaw, Paris and Berlin. But let’s take out London first.

Later that year, Gurulyov encouraged Putin to “launch missile strikes on the British Isles,” which “would spell the end of the British Crown.” At that time, my good and worried friend in Holland suggested I should move out of London for the duration of the war. He’d rather I wasn’t incinerated by a nuclear bomb.

In June last year I was able to return the favour when Gurulyov suggested that Russia attack the Netherlands with nuclear weapons to disrupt energy supply to Europe. However, both my friend and I courageously stayed put, displaying the resolve of the British royal family who refused to depart for Canada during the Blitz. So you see, commoners can be brave too.

Gurulyov offers penetrating geopolitical insights in support of his explosive ideas. As he explains, Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine is “a war for survival, for the survival of civilisation, for the survival of our Russia, but not just of Russia – of the countries around us too.”

Let me see if I understand correctly. And correct understanding is essential because a man of such high rank can’t be just talking drivel. He must have a serious argument to put forth, and it behoves any analyst to get to the bottom of it.

So, Russia is coextensive with civilisation. This view has been enunciated so often and by so many Russian officials that it has to be axiomatic. Thus any existential threat to Russia is tantamount to putting civilisation in peril, and it’s precisely that kind of threat that the Ukraine posed and still does.

Hence, Russia’s aggression was a selfless act, a noble attempt to save civilisation, along with 14 countries at Russia’s borders, from Ukrainian depredations. There, I hope I got that right.

Hence the whole world is clearly demarcated between good and evil. Russia represents the former, and everyone who doesn’t see her as the saviour of civilisation, the latter. I know I’m not just speaking for myself when thanking Gen. Gurulyov for clarifying the previously complex view of civilisational geopolitics.

Forces of evil are at work not only in the Ukraine and the 141 countries that voted against Russia in the UN (compared to seven voting in favour) but regrettably within that citadel of civilisation itself. Thankfully, very few such vermin dare speak out blasphemously against Russia’s demiurge and his deeds.

But ‘very few’ doesn’t mean ‘none’, which is why back in 2023 Gen. Gurulyov advocated the idea that Putin should outdo Stalin’s internal terror of the 1930s. All Russians who disagree with his policies should be imprisoned or, better still, exterminated.

The good general is a regular fountain of such constructive ideas, but Britain is never far from the front of his mind. It doesn’t matter how the war goes, nor how persistent Britain remains in her dastardly assault on the guardian of civilisation.

One way or another, “There’s still going to come a point where we’re going to strike. It is inevitable. The question is simply a matter of time and decision-making. And there is no other way.”

Anyone dismissing Gurulyov’s animadversions as simply deranged rants would be making a serious, possibly fatal, mistake. He is the voice of the Russian mainstream, not only in the Kremlin but in the country at large.

Spurred on by the death cult that used to be known as the Moscow version of Russian Orthodoxy, many Russians – and certainly most parliamentarians – share Gurulyov’s views and hail his plans. They know that the demiurge in the Kremlin thinks along the same lines, and they never question his right, nay sacred duty, to strike out with vengeance against anyone or any nation that dares to think differently.

Gurulyov’s tirades are no more extreme than those pouring into Russian ears from every TV channel around the clock. The desirability of turning, say, the US into “radioactive ash”, thereby creating an empty space called the American Strait between Canada and Mexico, was first mooted on Russian television in 2014. Since then it has become the leitmotif of official propaganda, and Putin himself has seconded the motion many times.

Don’t know about you, but I’m tired of this wicked nonsense. Such unvarnished barbarism hasn’t been seen and heard in Europe since the blessed time of Stalin and Hitler.

When I was growing up in Moscow, anti-Western propaganda was standard and uncontested fare. But neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev maintained their hysterical nuclear threats at anywhere near the current level. Khrushchev did say once that he could wipe out the US with just one huge bomb developed by Soviet scientists, but that was child’s play compared to today’s rhetoric.

All I can do is beseech Western governments to take the Gurulyovs of this world seriously. The West made the mistake of not doing so with Lenin and Hitler, and paid an awful price for it.

And Putin enjoys a greater popular support in Russia than his evil predecessors did in their countries. It appears from where I’m sitting that the proportion of Putinistas among today’s Russians is much greater than the eight per cent of the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany or roughly the same percentage of communists in the Soviet Union.

If evil could express itself with wars and murder camps in those countries, it may yet express itself with nuclear weapons in Russia. This is reality, not just Gurulyov’s or Putin’s bluster.

Unfortunately, these days forewarned doesn’t necessarily mean forearmed. That takes more than an early warning.

We must arm ourselves in such a way that Russian evildoers realise it’s not the West but Russia that will be razed to the ground in any nuclear exchange.

I don’t know how this can be achieved, but I hope that we have enough experts in relevant offices who do. And that, push come to shove, they’ll have the nerve to act.

Labour’s reforms of workers’ rights have reached that sacred British institution, the pub. If the bill to that effect becomes law, customers could be ejected or even sued for speaking on contentious subjects that might hurt the brittle sensibilities of staff.

Topics like religion, women’s rights, transgender issues are protected by equality law, and it’s about time landlords and their boozy customers realised that. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) says that the bill has “the potential to reduce workplace inequalities”.

If liberally oiled pub crawlers can’t steer clear of their troglodyte views on female penises, at least they must keep their voices down. They can be obscene, but they can’t be overheard.

Now, every time I mention ever-increasing similarities between today’s Britain and the Soviet Union of my youth, people helpfully point out the differences. Actually, I’m well aware of those. However, the tendency is unmistakable: Britain, along with the rest of the West, is imposing tyrannical restrictions on free speech that resemble more and more those I unfortunately remember only too well.

When I broached any political subject at home, my mother always covered the telephone with a blanket. Muscovites believed, rightly or wrongly, that all phones were equipped with listening devices transmitting every word to the KGB in real time. Still, I laughed at my mother’s political hypochondria.

Her life was poisoned by fear (also by my father’s philandering, but that’s a separate story). She grew up under Stalin, and every day served up proof of how mortally dangerous speaking out of turn could be. A joker making fun of the regime could be easily sent to die of hunger and neglect in a labour camp, and Moscow wags lived a life of strict self-censorship.

I was only five when Stalin died, and my subsequent 20 years in Russia were spent under a more vegetarian regime. An injudicious word could still be all one’s career was worth, but as a rule no longer one’s life. Yet even young people were always vigilant: one never knew who of one’s nearest and dearest was a KGB snitch.

This is the sort of atmosphere our woke powers that be are successfully creating in Britain, and I cringe at the memories this evokes. Similarities with history’s worst tyranny dwarf the differences, and one can sense we’re on course to a situation where the differences will disappear and only the similarities will remain.

According to EHRC, a frank opinion expressed on, say, transgender rights constitutes harassment of pub staff, whose tender ears must be protected from such filth. The government’s definition of harassment applies at boozers just as everywhere else: harassment is “unwanted conduct that has the purpose or effect of violating the recipient’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.”

That this is an example of woke tyranny is self-evident, and I’ve learned not to be too upset about this ubiquitous outrage. But what really saddens me is the absence, nay mockery, of logical rigour in that definition.

For it to have legal force, it must be objective, that is apply equally across the board. Yet one man’s verbal meat is another man’s poison, and vice versa. What you and I think offensive may well differ from him and her, and don’t even get me started on them.

Not so long ago I found myself at an unavoidable dinner party where some of my fellow guests extolled the virtues of Biden and Starmer who, respectively, worked miracles for their countries or would do so in time. I found that environment “hostile and offensive” if not quite “intimidating” and “humiliating”.

Am I entitled to report my fellow diners to EHRC? Did they overstep the legal boundary and violate my rights?

Along the same lines, I mentioned yesterday that I detest both pop music and especially what it represents. When exposed to it in a public place against my will, I find that experience consonant with the EHRC definition of harassment.

Do I have any legal recourse? Don’t answer that, I’m just being silly. People like me aren’t covered by anti-harassment laws, so any cretin pontificating publicly and loudly on the desirable wonders of women with penises is welcome to harass away.

The government magnanimously concedes that the proposed bill may be in conflict with certain core principles Britain was the first country to introduce into law. The Office for Equality and Opportunity acknowledged that “free speech is a cornerstone of British values but of course it is right that the Employment Rights Bill protects employees from workplace harassment, which is a serious issue.

“As with all cases of harassment under the Equality Act 2010, courts and tribunals will continue to be required to balance rights on the facts of a particular case, including the rights of freedom of expression.”

If I understand correctly, my right to say that Britain has to be a fundamentally Christian country if it’s to be anything must be balanced against a waitress’s right not to overhear such statements because she knows there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.

I can’t see offhand how a workable balance can be found. Either I have a right to say what I damn please, or the waitress has a right to sue me under the Employment Rights Bill. No third possibility comes to mind.

Good manners demand that anyone speaking in a public place keep his voice down, but even if one spoke in a whisper, one could still be overheard in a crowded pub. Should every member of staff exhibit a tag specifying not only his pronouns but also his aural acuity?

A spokesman for the British Beer and Pub Association pointed out the nuances of the proposed law to be considered: “Any legalisation must be carefully drafted to make sure it does not have unintended consequences, such as pub workers expected to decide whether private conversations between customers constitute a violation of law.”

Who told them such consequences are unintended? To paraphrase Lenin, the purpose of tyranny is to tyrannise, and the problem highlighted above doesn’t exist. If a pub worker overhears something he considers offensive, it is offensive and hence illegal. What’s there to discuss?

This isn’t supposed to be a carefully drafted law. It’s merely despotic wokery putting its foot down on the throat of supine sanity. The very fact that officials seriously discuss whether anything said in a private conversation “constitutes a violation of law” shifts Britain 1,554 miles east, which happens to be the distance between London and Moscow.

Please, chaps, NIMBY. Been there, done that.

P.S. The Australian Open, the year’s first tournament of the tennis Grand Slam, is upon us, and it sounds as if organisers have invented a new competitive category: triples, as opposed to just singles and doubles.

That’s the impression I got when hearing the public announcer introduce the players as “Novak Djokovic, blah-blah-blah. And their opponent is…” That sounded as if Novak had someone else on his side of the net, helping him out of tight spots. Since Djokovic has never given any signs he is in need of such assistance, I’m perplexed.

Seldom does an article appear that describes with eerie precision my own experiences and feelings. Yet, writing in The Mail, Dominic Lawson managed to achieve that rare feat.

Apparently, St John’s Wood, one of London’s more salubrious neighbourhoods, was overrun with drug pushers who, as a sideline, vandalised the parked cars – and believe me, few of them were old bangers.

When the residents sought police help, they didn’t get police action. Our cops are too busy enforcing DEI rules to waste their valuable time on drug dealers. However, they offered advice that I find remarkable: “You can also contact your housing association/the council and ask them to play classical music, as this has been proven to deter and prevent crimes.”

The residents found the advice unhelpful and actually stupid, but their ivory tower clearly doesn’t offer a good view of the lower social strata. I can testify from personal experience that modern youngsters – not just drug-pushing criminals but even well-behaved girls from decent families – flee from real music the way demons flee from the cross.

When I still abased myself by running the creative department of an ad agency, I had several designers, most of them good-looking girls from good-sounding families, working for me.

The girls were all pretty because they had been hired by my predecessor who treated that aspect of their personality as a sine qua non qualification. He called it a “positive hiring policy” and didn’t mind sharing that term with the girls themselves. They didn’t mind, but that was 25 years ago. Today they’d sue him or possibly even have him arrested.

They all did their designs in one large room where pop music was blaring at all times. Since that musical genre never fails to produce an acute physical pain all over my body, I pulled rank and told them to switch the bloody thing off whenever I walked into the room.

The young ladies saw that as a quaint peculiarity and alternately put it down to my foreign origin or snobbishness. It never occurred to them that their colleague, albeit a senior one, could possibly find anything wrong with that anti-musical din. What did occur to them was that I had some kind of aversion to vocal music as such.

To prove them wrong, the next day I brought a CD of a Bach cantata to the office and put it on in their room. Only one of the girls, a stunning beauty who had spent most of her youth in discos and gone almost totally deaf as a result, showed no negative reaction.

The others suffered physically, with their faces contorted in pain. After a minute or two one girl couldn’t stand that assault on her senses any longer. She got up and left the room to save her sanity.

Let me repeat that those young ladies all came from what used to be called lower-middleclass families. They were all educated at art colleges, had well-paid jobs (too well-paid, according to my partners) and had neither tattoos nor facial metal that one could see. If they reacted to music the way they did, I can easily believe that the yobs terrorising St John’s Wood would run for their lives when exposed to Mozart or Beethoven.

In fact, Mr Lawson cites several examples of that crime-busting stratagem achieving a great success. One involved playing classical music (the easy-listening end of it, opera areas sung by Pavarotti) at a London tube station so crime-ridden that staff refused to work there.

The report quoted by Mr Lawson says: “Within 18 months, robberies were cut by 33 per cent, assaults on staff by 25 per cent, and vandalism by 37 per cent as the voice of Pavarotti made troublemakers scarper.”

When the same tactic was deployed in Seattle, Washington, the local paper commented that: “The reason certain types of music work as a crime deterrent, neurologists say, may lie in people’s neurobiological responses to things they don’t enjoy or find unfamiliar.”

I suspect the problem is deeper than simply a lack of enjoyment and familiarity. Today’s youngsters grow up in a culture where ugly is the new beautiful, and beautiful is a universal source of distress.

Initially, the response was more ideological than neurobiological, but several generations of aggressive brainwashing have shifted aesthetic inversion from ideology to physiology.

People intuitively associate beauty, in this case real music, with everything revolting in life: social hierarchy, tradition of any kind including aesthetic, toffs, buildings unmarred by graffiti, human flesh not disfigured with ink and metal. The revulsion they feel lives in the subcortex, and they’d find it difficult to express it in words, especially since their verbal skills have been honed on monosyllabic interjections, four-letter words and Internet slang heavy on acronyms.

In short, my advice to St John’s Wood residents would be to follow the police recommendation. Of course, it’s not certain that their own aesthetic sense is all that different from the yobs’.

One problem with modernity is that these days wealth and taste seldom coexist in the same breast. The typical line of demarcation nowadays runs not between people with and without taste, but between yobs with and without money.

Mr Lawson then commented on another one of his – and my – bugbears. He can’t stand pop music blaring in restaurants. Whenever he finds himself in such an eatery, and they are thick on the ground, he asks a staff member to turn it down, with variable success.

I sympathise with his predicament, which is also mine – and not just in London. Once Penelope and I misread the roadmap and found ourselves somewhere near Place Pigalle in Paris. It was past normal lunchtime, and the only restaurant still open played some sort of prole music at full blast. When we asked the waiter to turn it down or ideally off, he replied with the explanation Mr Lawson cites: “The other customers would object.”

Actually, there were no other customers there, except another couple our age who almost certainly wouldn’t have complained. But concern for other people’s feelings isn’t the reason for waiters’ obstreperousness. It’s only a pretext. The real reason is the urge to deliver a victorious cry into the ears of the vanquished foe, throwbacks to a civilisation long gone.

These days we don’t even try to negotiate with waiters. When the background music is too loud, we simply walk out and eat elsewhere.

Actually, we object to such music even when it’s classical. Perhaps we object to it even more, because that music wasn’t written to accompany the jangling sounds of silverware and the chomping sounds of chewing.

We’ve been known to ask our hosts at dinner to turn background classical music off – or else turn it up so we’d listen to it and neither eat nor talk. These are questionable manners, but respect for the greatest achievements of the human spirit trumps etiquette as far as I’m concerned.

All in all, I sympathise with Mr Lawson’s ordeal. Yet neither of us can do anything about it: it’s piped, hurricane-strength zeitgeist itself that’s blaring at restaurants. It can sweep away all before it, me and even him.

As I write this, the outside temperature languishes at four degrees below zero. Londoners describe the weather as “bloody freezing out there”, which proves yet again that material things are all relative.

This sort of temperature in mid-January wouldn’t even qualify as cold, never mind bloody freezing, where I come from. As Messrs Napoleon and Hitler could testify, Moscow’s climate can be rather inclement in winter.

However, there’s a salient difference between the Moscow of my childhood and the London of my dotage: when it got cold, Muscovites talked about their climate, whereas Londoners are only allowed to mention weather.

The weather sections of our newspapers issue this injunction in no uncertain terms. Some of you ignoramuses out there, they explain (if not in so many words), think the sub-zero temperatures give the lie to the noble concept of global warming.

They don’t, and if you still persist in your subversive ignorance, you risk getting done for global warming denial. What we are having at the moment is merely a cold snap, which has nothing to do with the issue in hand. It’s weather, you moron, not climate.

The more obdurate naysayers among us may remark that, whenever we have a heatwave, the same papers insist it’s invariably climate, not just weather. Still, I’m happy to know that global warming is still on. Otherwise we’d have to think our energy bills are skyrocketing for no good cause.

Ed Miliband never doubts the cause. For our Secretary for Energy Security and Net Zero, to spell out his title in every excruciating detail, his position isn’t just a job. It’s his sacralised ideology, the very essence of his being, his soul totally dedicated to wreaking as much destruction on his hated ‘capitalism’ as he can manage.

In what passes for his mind, Ed sees no upper limit for the number of wind and solar farms carpeting Britain. Cover every square inch, see if he cares: every farm strikes a blow for ‘our planet’, and Ed doesn’t care how much misery he has to cause to save that heavenly body from capitalist depredations.

After all, all those turbines cost an awful lot to build and install, up to £70,000 each. But then we’ve always known that. What we – well, I – didn’t know is that those turbines also cost millions to turn off, £400 million last year, to be precise.

This reminds me of a rude but true story involving Marilyn Monroe. One location shoot was dragging on and on, and the star was getting exasperated. Finally, she called her agent and asked: “Who do I have to f*** to get off this picture?”

See what I’m getting at? The parallel with the extortionist cost of stopping those damn things from turning is obvious, to me at least.

The problem is that too much energy may be as problematic as too little. When the wind blows with gusto for days on end, the system can’t cope. The National Grid can no longer use the glut locally, and it can’t export it to areas where more energy is needed.

Consumers have to bear the onus of ‘constraint payments’, those imposed on them to make the turbines less hyperactive when the wind picks up. As renewable energy proliferates, constraint payments alone will run to billions, which is to say thousands for every household.

The grid needs to expand significantly to accommodate the forests of turbines being planted by Ed Miliband and his accomplices. Such expansion will be extremely costly, but cost is never a problem for chaps like Ed. The money isn’t theirs, is it?

It’s not the money but the delay that they find unbearable. After all, their tenure has certain in-built limitations. If the Tories sort themselves out, possibly by reaching some arrangement with Reform, Ed may not have more than another four years in office.

This is a risibly short time to inflict as much damage as he craves on the fat cats, defined as any Britons who have any discretionary income at all or – dread word – investments. Their cupidity cries out for punishment, and Ed is the man to administer it.

As a former leader of the Labour Party, he could have become prime minister but didn’t, even though he had to stab his brother David in the back to get ahead. Had Ed moved to 10 Downing Street, his punitive zeal would have found a vast arena for self-expression. But, as Ed is proving every day, even his present, more limited, brief is rife with possibilities.

All one has to do is roll back, ideally eliminate, the production of oil and gas, while also closing old nuclear power stations and refusing to build new ones. That puts paid to cheap energy and leaves the people at the mercy of renewables that attack consumers from several directions.

First, the grid will have to be expanded, and guess who’ll bear the ultimate cost? Then it’ll be necessary to create adequate storage facilities, a little detail that escaped the attention of net zero zealots. Then provisions will have to be made for generating energy on the days when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine – and I must inform you that such days do happen in Britain.

This means consumers bearing the staggering cost of building battery farms, with household energy bills rising steeply every step of the way. And that’s not the end, nowhere near.

For even if Miliband succeeds in building the extra 3,500 wind turbines by 2030 and doubling onshore wind capacity to 30GW, that’ll be not even close to the amount necessary to power modern industry. That means British consumers will have to pay exorbitant amounts for imported oil and gas, while also seeing huge rises in the cost of most goods.

But never mind consumers, feel the ideology. The kind Ed Miliband swears by got a galvanising jolt from the larcenous swindle of global warming. With their eagle’s eye the Milibandits of this world saw their great chance to make Marx’s prophecies come true.

There it was, the crisis of capitalism within easy reach. If that loathsome abomination stubbornly refuses to collapse under its own weight, the Milibandits can use climate according to Archimedes’s adage: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Climate change provided both the lever and the fulcrum to prise capitalism off its foundations and dump it into what Trotsky called “the rubbish bin of history”.

Hence the Milibandits’ legerdemain with weather and climate. They know from their long history of chicanery that statistics can yield any result you want, provided you choose the right subset.

When analysing climate, serious scientists looking for truth consider centuries or even millennia. Venal scientists funded by the Milibandits can make do with a couple of decades or even a few years here and there. Once they’ve identified a period that fits, no matter how short, they construct their bogus ‘hockey stick’ graphs to illustrate the plight of ‘our planet’ reeling from the blows of capitalism.

Here I have to disagree with Joseph de Maistre, which I seldom do. Not every nation gets the government it deserves, and Britain is a woeful proof. No Western nation deserves to have Milibandits on the prowl, looking for another back to stab.

Most people believe that political taxonomy is essentially binary: Right-wing or Left-wing.

Some will grant that these two colours have multiple shades described by adding forms like far-, extreme-, moderate-, loony-, populist- and so on. Sometimes party affiliation comes into play too, such as Tory or Labour in Britain, Republican or Democratic in the US and some such.

Right-wing is sometimes mistakenly confounded with conservative and Left-wing with liberal – in the former case, to a great extent, in the latter case, totally. Conservatives do overlap with Right-wingers on a few issues, but Left-wingers are about as illiberal as it’s possible to get this side of concentration camps.

Now that we’ve established these premises, let’s play the game of ‘What Are My Politics?’ As a sporting man, I’ll give you a few clues.

I am a firm believer in tradition, specifically Western, which is to say Christian, tradition.

I’m certain that a series of mass rebellions against apostolic Christianity going by the names of the Reformation and the Enlightenment were unmitigated tragedies, steering the West towards a spiritual abyss, if by delayed action.

Western governments, I believe, should unequivocally identify themselves as Christian. Yet exponents of other religions shouldn’t be persecuted or denied the freedom to practise their faith – as long as they don’t encroach on the predominantly and unapologetically Christian nature of Western nations.

I believe states should evolve organically, not by revolutionary outbursts. In that spirit, I dislike all modern revolutions: English, American, French and Russian. They, especially the last three, delivered a blow to reason and morality from which the West is still reeling. That’s why I generally dislike post-Enlightenment modernity.

Along with Plato, Aristotle and every subsequent political thinker of any importance, I’m a firm believer in a monarchy counterbalanced by aristocracy and parliamentary democracy. Mixed governance, what in the past was called res publica, is the most reliable guarantor of freedom.

I regard unbalanced, totalitarian democracy as an abomination guaranteeing that those fit to govern will seldom get, nor will usually seek, the chance to do so. Unchecked democracy inevitably develops into a factor of tyranny, even if it doesn’t start out that way.

If we must have such democracy, I believe it must be limited by various qualifiers, such as those of age, property, education and so on. On the subject of age, people under 25 ought not to be allowed to vote because their brains aren’t yet even wired properly. A push for lowering the voting age is and has always been motivated by nefarious urges.

I believe the right and ability to control the country’s borders are essential aspects of sovereignty. Immigration must be tightly controlled, especially when it comes to cultural aliens, and the state must have the resolve and wherewithal to impose such controls.

That, however, doesn’t mean all immigration should be stopped. Some new arrivals offer vital skills for the host economy, and it’s silly to keep them at bay. However, before they are admitted, their potential for subversion must be carefully assessed.

Schools should be free of ideological indoctrination. Pupils must only be taught traditional disciplines, such as religion, history, literature, mathematics, rudimentary philosophy, natural science, at least two modern languages and either Latin or Greek (ideally both).

Not all pupils are equally gifted academically. Those who’d find such a curriculum too difficult should receive a different education, stressing practical skills needed to survive the rough-and-tumble of a modern economy.

The grammar and secondary modern schools of Britain’s past made British education the envy of the world, rather than the laughingstock it currently is. A return to that or a similar model is desirable. In general, equality must be roundly renounced as a virtue and a desideratum, except equality before God and the law.

University education should be set up in line with Newman’s ideas laid down in his book The Idea of a University, with courses designed to develop students’ ability to think, analyse and synthesise.

If students also wish to take courses in more practical subjects, such as computer science or engineering, these too could be offered at universities, but their proper domain is trade colleges.

Classical music can’t survive by box office receipts while maintaining its quality. Patronage is essential, and if private donors fail to provide sufficient funding, the state must take up the slack. Yet state financing for pop music and other arts perfectly capable of supporting themselves must be stopped.

Defence of the realm from foreign aggressors and domestic criminals is the paramount function of any sovereign country. National budgets should allocate as much funding for these as it takes – off the top, before other expenditures are even considered.

The state has a role to play in the economic game, but it should be that of a referee, not an active player. If history teaches anything, it’s that national prosperity is inversely proportionate to the state’s cut of the economy. The freer the economy, the greater and more widely distributed are the gains.

Taxation should never exceed 20 per cent of GDP, ideally 15 per cent. Low taxation and regulation have been irrefutably shown to stimulate economic growth and hence practically universal prosperity. Green taxes must be summarily ditched, based as they are on ideological bias and no sound scientific evidence.

The state should always pay its way, and deficit spending must be outlawed at peacetime. Public debt must be steadily reduced, which too comes under the rubric of defence of the realm. Having, and serving, debts in the trillions means courting economic disaster that may be as damaging as a military defeat.

A free economy has winners and losers, but, in a civilised country, people shouldn’t lose too badly. Provisions must be in place to care for the old and infirm, widows and orphans, those genuinely incapable of working. How this is achieved, and whether it’s the state or private charities or both that should provide such a safety net, is up for discussion. But traditional, which is to say Christian, mercy dictates that the net must be provided.

This shouldn’t be equated with the welfare state, which must be summarily disbanded. A thriving economy offers endless opportunities for able-bodied adults to support themselves. If they are unwilling to take advantage of such opportunities, they have only themselves to blame.

Now, I could give you plenty more clues, but these should suffice. In case you are still undecided, here’s one last clue that should obviate any doubt: I consider myself a conservative, perhaps with a touch of reactionary here and there.

However, I’m wrong – and so are you if your guess agreed with my self-identification. At least, we are wrong according to the Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon.

If he played the game I proposed, he’d describe me as a raging Leftie. That’s because I despise Tommy Robinson and think his American champions, such as Elon Musk, should just shut up and not poke their noses into things they are too ignorant and too vulgar to understand.

Tommy is portrayed by MAGA zealots as a champion of free speech and a martyr to the cause of upholding true-blue Englishness.

He is in fact a fascisoid thug with a string of criminal convictions to his name, including those for assault, football hooliganism, public disorder, the use of a false passport, mortgage fraud and contempt of court (for which he is currently serving an 18-month sentence).

Robinson has the gift of the gab, especially when it comes to spitting out Right-wing chestnuts, such as protecting English identity against Muslim colonisation. These resonate with the MAGA crowd and to some extent even with real conservatives.

Yet no conservative would want to be associated with any cause championed by that yahoo. If Musk et al. see Robinson as a selfless fighter for freedom and national sovereignty, they are welcome to him. Most of his money already comes from North America, and Tommy should be reunited with his benefactors. I’m sure Musk could use his influence to swing a green card for Robinson, if not honorary citizenship (Congressional Medal of Honor?).

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” says the founding document of Western conservatism. By that logic, Tommy Robinson’s heart and the rest of his body should be in the US, although that country already has her fair share of thuggish, half-crazy demagogues.                                      

A couple of years ago, Putin laid claim to subsequent canonisation by adding a new touch to the outdated concept of heaven and hell.

The would-be St Vladimir explained that the Russians needn’t fear a world war and subsequent nuclear holocaust. “We’ll go straight to heaven,” he promised, “whereas they’ll just croak.”

Thus the two final destinations became separated not along the lines of virtue and sin, and not even according to God’s will, but strictly by ethnicity. All Russians go one way, those of a less fortunate nativity, the other.

This novel take on Christianity was begging for further development, and it duly arrived. Pectoral crosses worn by Russians are now engraved with Putin’s initials, and  priests are consecrating these new symbols of faith with alacrity.

Orthodox Christianity, as interpreted by the Moscow Patriarchate, has thus morphed into a particular cult focused on death and the ruler seen as a living God.

The Russian Orthodox Church expanded on this innovation, or rather return to the faiths of ancient Egypt, Babylon and Rome, by issuing the Creed of the 25^th Council of the Universal Russian Church.

This document refers to the Special Military Operation (invasion of the Ukraine) as the “Holy War” and defines the spiritual mission of the Russian World, whose borders go far beyond the borders of the Russian Federation. (A note to Eastern Europe: you are within this newly signposted territory.) Heroes of the invasion are defined as martyrs, and Putin’s immediate entourage as his apostles. Hence the logical next step of putting Putin’s initials on crosses.

Now, I’ve heard of the sacralisation of power, but this strikes me as a trifle excessive. Then again, over the past 52 years I’ve been regretfully out of touch with the superlative spirit of Russia. According to Medinsky, Putin’s former Culture Minister, it has a physiological origin: the Russians, according to him, are blessed with an extra spiritual gene.

A country where the culture minister is well-versed not only in his immediate field but also in microbiology is invincible. What does our own Lisa Nandy, Medinsky’s counterpart, know about genetics? About the same as she knows about culture, I’d suggest, which is the square root of sod-all.

The new religion demands its own theology, and the Orthodox hierarchs are happy to oblige. For example, the Murmansk Metropolitan Mitrofan offered a new doctrinal vision of death: “If you find a favourable occasion to die, take this step without hesitation because you never know if you’ll get another such chance.”

I dare say the chance to die is a dead cert, as it were, what with death being an unavoidable part of the human condition. Since His Eminence must be aware of this, he had to have something else in mind. The key word there is “favourable”: dying of old age in one’s bed clearly doesn’t pass muster. Only the living God will create propitious opportunities for dying, such as those offered by aggressive war.

Archpriest Igor Fomin, the dean of St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, clarified the matter in line with scriptural sources: “Liberals will tell you now that even the ruler has no right to dispose of people’s lives. We have been brainwashed in this vein for a long time. But the Holy Scripture says exactly the opposite.”

Fr Igor’s flock must be much better versed in matters scriptural than I am, which is why he felt no need to provide specific references. This leaves me in the dark for I can’t recall offhand any biblical verses saying that the Caesar can dispose of his subjects’ lives as he sees fit.

I do remember quite a few verses saying “exactly the opposite”, to use Fr Igor’s phrase. Specifically, they say that only God has dominion of people’s lives, and his realm is separate from the Caesar’s. Then again, that objection becomes null and void when God and Caesar come together in one man, in this case St Vladimir to be.

While other priests are busily blessing the rockets to be fired at Ukrainian civilians, the Savtyvkar Archbishop Pitirim expressed this theological innovation poetically, by bringing the two Testaments of the Christian canon together: “He leads us like Moses, Putin, He guards Christ’s spirit in His heart.”

Now, Moses took 40 years to lead his people to the Promised Land. Putin has been doing a Moses for merely 25, so we have at least 15 more years of roaming through the desert and hoping for manna to come down from heaven. On second thoughts, Christ’s spirit in Putin’s heart may enable him to shave off a year or two.

All this should bring into focus the view that has gained wide currency in Western Right-wing (as discrete from conservative) circles, whereby Russia is undergoing a religious revival, making her, according to a particularly toxic columnist, “the most Christian country in Europe”.

Russian thinkers of the 19^th century, from Chaadayev (d. 1856) to the seven authors of the seminal Vekhi (Landmarks) collection of essays (1909), didn’t see Russia as a religious country even then, long before the advent of Bolshevism.

Unlike today’s Western commentators, they knew the difference between religion and superstition, with Russian peasants shunning their local churches but happily leaping over fires on high holidays. That’s why, when offered the chance to abandon the old cults for the new, they jumped at it.

Lenin and his gang, including the notorious League of the Militant Godless, ordered the extermination of religion, but they weren’t the ones who bulldozed churches and machinegunned their parishioners. It was the pious folk of yesteryear who did that.

And they did so with the kind of enthusiastic industry that usually escapes the Russians when they try to do something productive. On Lenin’s watch (d. 1924) some 40,000 priests, monks and nuns were murdered, which was only the beginning. History books say they were shot, but most weren’t so lucky (I’ll spare you the gruesome details).

Another 80,000 priests were executed in 1937 alone. Altogether by 1941 some 350,000 believers, 140,000 of them priests, were killed either quickly or slowly, by starving them to death in concentration camps.

During the war, Stalin realised that the masses were somewhat reluctant to die for him. In the hope they’d be more amenable to dying for Mother Russia, he decided to take the Church off the mothballs and put it to work.

But, to be allowed to live, the Church had to be tamed. When applied to Soviet realities, that term effectively meant turning it into a department of the KGB. All the hierarchs of the Church were appointed by the government’s Council for Religious Affairs, headed in my day by a KGB general.

The Russian representative to the World Council of Churches, Metropolitan Nicodemus, held the slightly lower rank of colonel, but then the WCC was a Soviet front anyway. To be fair, not all Orthodox hierarchs were full-time KGB officers. Some were merely part-time employees, either informers or agents.

The current Patriarch Kirill, né Gundyaev, was known in the KGB annals as ‘Agent Mikhailov’, whose assignments were meticulously documented in operational reports. The last sentence invariably stated that the assignment “had been successfully fulfilled” – by the mercy of God no doubt.

What the Bolsheviks did to Russian Christianity was monstrous. But what the current lot are doing is even worse. Rather than proudly declaring themselves to be the Satanic atheists they actually are, they choose instead to prostitute Christianity by turning it into a death cult and leader-worship.

They’ll burn in hell for that, but I’d rather not wait that long. I’m sure Putin and his accomplices will be happy to burn at the stake as a shortcut on their road to heaven. And I’d be happy to add some kindling to the pyre.

Say what you will about Trump and his team, but boring they aren’t. Every day they say something to make me gasp and reach for my keyboard – and they aren’t even in power yet.

Most of their domestic policies, with the possible exception of import tariffs, sound sensible, but almost everything they say about foreign affairs oscillates between unspeakably rude and deranged. An illustration of the former extreme was served up yesterday by Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s anti-terrorist chief.

Mr Gorka suggested, or rather ordered, that Britain bring back UK members of Islamic State currently held in Syria – or else.

“Any nation which wishes to be seen as a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment,” he thundered. “That is doubly so for the UK, which has a very special place in President Trump’s heart, and we would all wish to see the ‘special relationship’ fully re-established.”

‘Re-established’ means it’s currently gone, but politicians in general and MAGA people in particular sometimes use words loosely.

Britain does want to be America’s friend. Friendship is a wonderful thing, and I can attest to that from personal experience. I have several very close friends I know I can count on, as they can count on me. Moreover I value their views and take their advice and opinions seriously.

However, if any of them stated that their friendship is contingent on my running my life according to their peremptory guidelines, I’d suggest they take two words, one of which is ‘off’, and arrange them in the right sequence. America may be “the most powerful nation in the world”, but that’s precisely what any British government should tell US officials who talk to Britain as their subordinate, not just a friend and ally.

The other day America got her own taste of Muslim terrorism, and Britain has had to suffer many more incidents of that nature. Far be it from me to regard any Muslim as a potential terrorist, but there’s nothing potential about the miscreants who have stated and proved their allegiance to the terrorist cause.

By fighting on the side of evil they have forfeited their right to British citizenship, and their potential for recidivism is high. However, if Mr Gorka is so concerned about their plight, perhaps he should use his influence to help them migrate to the US. He made that move himself as a young man, so it’s a well-trodden path.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk continues to dictate lenience for another British criminal, Tommy Robinson, thereby showing he knows next to nothing about British law and understands even less. Now, Mr Musk has self-acknowledged problems with mental health, and he should really seek qualified help before he goes off the rails completely.

Someone calculated the number of messages Musk put on his X platform in just one day. Turned out he was posting once every six minutes on average, and half of his posts concerned Britain’s domestic policies.

It’s heartwarming to see such a busy man taking so much interest in helping the country of his grandparents out of its mire. After all, Mr Musk continues to run three mega-companies, while also trying to come to grips with his brief of cutting trillions out of America’s public spending.

Add to this his obsession with populating faraway galaxies and implanting AI wires into every earthling’s head, and one would think Musk has enough on his plate already. However, he displays nothing short of insane energy in finding time to harangue Britain and demand the ousting of His Majesty’s government. (A note to Elon: ‘His Majesty’ refers to King Charles III, not Donald Trump.)

To be fair, Britain isn’t the only country whose affairs the MAGA crowd wants to run on pain of losing America’s friendship. The other day, Musk’s future boss Trump demanded that NATO members increase their defence spending to five per cent of GDP.

Since America herself only spends 3.4 per cent, this seems unfair, but Trump explained it isn’t: “We have a thing called the ocean in between us, right? Why are we in for billions and billions of dollars more money than Europe?”

There I was, thinking we were talking proportions, not absolute numbers. Considering that America’s GDP is almost twice that of Europe, the greater number of billions may still add up to a smaller proportion. But yes, Europe’s defence does depend on the US to an inordinately great extent, and yes, Europe definitely should beef up its defences – at any cost, given the current geopolitical situation.

Then again, in an age of ICBMs and electronic warfare, “a thing called the ocean” doesn’t offer as much protection as it did in the past. America appointed herself as the leader of the free world, but she depends on the rest of the free world as much as the other way around.

And if Trump chalks up America’s defence spending in the debit column, he should also use his much-vaunted business acumen to figure out the benefits of his country’s leadership position. It doesn’t bear thinking about what would happen to the US (and the rest of the West), for example, if the dollar were no longer the world’s reserve currency. What if the 36-trillion-dollar US debt were denominated, say, in yuans?

It’s like the ledger sheet of a property development project, Donald. You spend so much, you borrow so much more, such is the return to expect – pluses and minuses, debits and credits, that sort of thing. Let’s count the beans on both sides, shall we?

Over the past few days, Trump has also made other pronouncements on foreign affairs that make his mental health as suspect as that of his underlings. Some of his ideas are sound, such as America regaining the control of the Panama Canal she relinquished in 1978 courtesy of Jimmy Carter. (“We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours,” American conservatives were saying at the time.)

But that idea came packaged with other revelations that collectively add up to Trump’s intention to embark on a campaign of territorial expansion, by force if necessary. He has made no secret of the low esteem in which he holds NATO, both as a concept and definitely as it currently is. Yet now he has begun to make thinly veiled threats to invade a NATO member, trying to outdo Putin in that activity.

In his first term, Trump attempted to buy Greenland, the world’s largest island, which is currently an autonomous province of Denmark. Greenland’s prime minister replied the island wasn’t for sale, and the matter was dismissed as an unfunny joke.

Now Trump has declared that Greenland is vital to America’s security, which is why he must buy it, not just continue to use it as home to several US bases. When asked whether he ruled out an invasion if America’s overtures were again rejected, Trump gave an evasive answer.

Even though the territory left the EU after a referendum in 1985, Denmark still controls its foreign and defence policies. Moreover, the EU has stated its commitment to providing “aid and assistance” in the case of an “armed aggression” against Greenland.

Now I was under the impression that Europe should strengthen its defences against such likely adversaries as China and especially Russia. Trump’s hints, dropped with his usual logorrheic irresponsibility, suggest that we should fear an attack from the west as well.

He probably didn’t mean it the way it sounded, and every time Donald shoots off the lip, MAGA zealots insist he should be judged by his deeds, not his words. This ignores the fact that, when uttered by world leaders, words become deeds – and in this case, extremely dangerous ones.

Once he got on his imperial hobby horse, Trump refused to dismount. He also suggested that, since the US is Canada’s biggest trade partner, Canada should become America’s 51^st state. By the same logic, the US should become a province of China, a country leading other countries by a comfortable margin as America’s partner in trade.

Canada also happens to be a member of the British Commonwealth, and King Charles is her head of state. Thus Britain may have something to say on this subject, provided Musk allows her to speak.

Trump didn’t say whether he contemplated doing an Aaron Burr and leading a military expedition into, say, Quebec. I wouldn’t put it past him: he seems perfectly capable of saying anything. So there’s another NATO country, quaking in her boots in anticipation of an American invasion.

Compared to that, Trump’s desire to re-baptise the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America sounds rather tame. Indeed, if the French can refer to the English Channel as La Manche or to the Channel Islands as les Îles Normandes, why can’t Trump call that gulf whatever he wishes?

But he ought to give more thought to the new name. After all, technically speaking, Mexico is America too. Perhaps calling it the Gulf of Texas or the Gulf of Dixie would be more apposite, but the possibilities are endless.

I look forward to Trump’s second shot at presidency, if only because I know I’ll never run out of topics to write about. On balance (a word that seems not to figure in Trump’s lexicon), I think his tenure will be a success, certainly domestically.

But if Trump plans to act not as the leader of the free world but as its dictator, he will damage America not only internationally but domestically as well. He is definitely a man of action, but it wouldn’t hurt if occasionally he acted as a man of (prior) thought too.

Call me a latent Luddite, but I wonder what will happen when automation makes millions of blue-collar workers redundant.

I realise that similar concerns were voiced when the first machines were installed to turn manufacturies into factories. The concerns led to action, and back in the early 20^th century some French labourers gave rise to the word ‘sabotage’ by throwing their wooden shoes (sabots) into the works.

And what do you know, they needn’t have worried. After the first growth pains, industrial productivity increased no end, new factories, even new industries, popped up like mushrooms after an August rain, and blue-collar workers became relatively prosperous rather than absolutely impoverished.

Those who used to make candles began to produce electric bulbs, wheelwrights and carters learned how to make cars, and chaps who were wizards at building windmills switched to constructing power stations (they may now have to switch back, but that’s a separate conversation).

Yet Bertie Russell stated, correctly, that something that happened in the past is no guarantee that it’ll happen in the future. The thought is generally sound, although the illustration he offered was slightly bizarre: the sun, he said, may still not rise tomorrow even if it rose yesterday.

But yes, similar fears have been voiced and allayed in the past. However, the automation revolution may not be as benign as its industrial precursor, which actually wasn’t excessively benign.

If hundreds of workers toiling at a conveyor belt can be replaced with a couple of computer geeks adept at pushing the right buttons, we are talking about eliminating, rather than rechannelling, blue-collar employment. And, contrary to liberal wishful thinking, not everyone can become a computer geek.

There exist millions of people not endowed with the mental faculties required to perform in an economy defined by information technology, robotic automation and artificial intelligence. We may all be created equal in the eyes of God and the US Declaration of Independence, but we aren’t all created equally intelligent.

One difference between now and then is the speed at which change occurs. Thanks to tremendous technological advances, what used to take years now takes months, weeks or even days. So even assuming, counterintuitively, that millions of blue-collar workers can retrain to be systems analysts, they may not have enough time at their disposal.

Computers can now fly planes, navigate ships, drive trains and even cars, with some gadgets easily performing tasks that used to keep thousands employed. Where will those thousands go, now that their skills are no longer needed?

Globalisation is another factor that exacerbates this problem. Manufacturing industries, those that tend to employ muscle, move to places where muscle is cheap, outsourcing production to Third World countries.

After all, we can’t survive by just selling software packages to one another. Someone has to make things we use every day, and the natural tendency is for manufacturers to look for those who can make those things cheaply.

That puts more pressure on blue-collar employment – even assuming workers could learn how to make widgets by operating robots, they’ll still come up empty if those widgets are now made in China or Brazil. Moreover, shifting manufacturing to Third World countries creates a strategic risk.

Some of those countries may like our money but not necessarily us. They can become, or side with, our enemies at the drop of a bomb. At least that would solve the problem of blue-collar workers – they could all go into battle, thereby keeping their numbers down to a sensible level.

Such doomsday scenarios apart, there is no denying that accelerated automation will produce crowds of people passing over from employment to the tender mercies of the state. The innately tyrannical modern state wouldn’t mind: the more people depend on it for their livelihood, the more powerful will the state become. And rapacious appetite for ever-growing power is a feature of all modern states without exception.

Here the interests of the state overlap with the urges of our exceedingly work-shy masses. We depend on millions of migrants doing menial jobs because British people don’t want to do them. They’d rather draw the King’s shilling by malingering and claiming disability.

Thus, burgeoning automation may well become an instrument of state tyranny, general social malaise, corrupted morality and reduced national security. And now come the first words I think British babies, destined to become pragmatic adults, learn in their cribs: so what are we going to do about it?

I’m not going to equivocate about this. My reply is resolute and unequivocal: I haven’t a clue.

If the history of technology teaches one lesson, it’s that, if things can be done, they will be done – regardless of the attendant concerns. We’ll continue to automate and computerise every step we take in life, even if it means producing a net loss in the areas I’ve outlined.

Other than that, I really have no answers. But I do have lots of questions, and I count on those better-versed in the relevant disciplines to enlighten me. Let’s just say that so far such questions haven’t been answered, and they aren’t even often asked.

That’s a pity because problems of catastrophic proportions may well be looming. We may be automating our way to disaster – and I did tell you I’m a closet Luddite.