Category: Blog

If you want to know what’s wrong with Britain, look no further than the Nowak murder case. On second thoughts, do look further, all the way to Minneapolis.

That trans-Atlantic glance will help you compare the public reaction to the Nowak murder with the genuflecting hysteria following the death of George Floyd.

Floyd was a drug-addled career criminal whom the police tried to arrest while he was robbing a convenience store. In the ensuing scuffle, Floyd was accidentally killed. Since he was black and the cop involved was white, riots broke out all over the country, eventually spilling over to Britain.

“Black lives matter!” screamed the thugs as they vandalised, looted and burned their way through city centres. Since the arresting officer tried to subdue Floyd by kneeling on his throat, public genuflection became a badge of woke probity.

English footballers ‘took the knee’ before every match. So did our Marxist PM (then Labour leader) and his deputy. And yes, of course, Derek Chauvin, the possessor of the original, unfortunate knee, was tried and sentenced to 21 years in prison (remember this numeral).

Sowing discord between races is a customary stratagem of the woke Left. It’s used as both a battering ram to punch through the wall of social order and a hoist to propel subversive Marxists over the top.

Both the mob and the professional rabble-rousers egging them on screamed that the killing wasn’t accidental. It was a reflection of racism, than which no worse crime exists. That was arrant nonsense, of course, but it took unrealistic courage for a public figure to demur.

Even a timid attempt to defend Chauvin, stating the obvious fact that the killing was accidental, and the culpable party was Floyd, would have been tantamount to career suicide – political definitely, academic probably, any other most likely.

Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student at the University of Southampton, was on his way home after having a drink with his friends. Subsequent reports said the alcohol content in his blood was under the drink-drive limit. That probably means he had no more than one pint of beer.

Some exchange of words followed, between Nowak and Vikrum Digwa, a Sikh carrying an 8-inch ceremonial knife. That he used to stab the boy five times, with one of the wounds proving fatal.

The murderer’s brother called 999, and the police arrived. As the wounded boy lay on the ground bleeding his life away, the two brothers lied to the police that the victim had abused them racially and even knocked Vikrum’s turban off.  

Once the cop heard the word ‘racism’, he sprang into action. Ignoring the victim’s pleas for help, they arrested him, putting his lifeless wrists into handcuffs. Bodycam footage shows Nowak said four times, “I’ve been stabbed”, to which one cop replied, “I don’t think you have, mate”. As if to prove him wrong, Henry Nowak then died.

His murderer wasn’t cuffed – he had said the magic exculpating word, ‘racism’. He was only arrested after his victim breathed his last.

Yesterday, the trial of the murderer came to a conclusion. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum of 21 years to be served. Remember that numeral? That’s the same sentence Derek Chauvin, the cop who accidentally killed that Minneapolis criminal, received in the US.

So far I haven’t heard of any action taken against the officers at the scene, who should be treated as accomplices. If they are eventually tried, I’d recommend that their barrister take the lapidary line of defence: “It’s all society’s fault, m’lud.”

Our society has to be rotten to the bone for officers of the law to regard presumed racism as a worse crime than murder. Incessant propaganda of wokery has conditioned cops to fear any accusations of racial bias – even patently false ones.

A boy bleeding to death in front of them is in their eyes a worse criminal than his murderer, provided the boy is white and his stabber isn’t. Society tacitly agrees, as evinced by its muted reaction.

No demonstrations are held, no one shouts “White lives matter too”. Our moral receptors have been cauterised by wokery so much that it took our Marxist PM six months after the murder to issue a half-hearted statement of regret.

His obscene genuflection for the camera in his office followed the Floyd killing almost immediately. As for the cops involved, the released official statement says they “are treated as witnesses”. I’d lock them up and throw away the key, to use the old expression.

And I’d put Starmer and his whole cabinet into the same cell… no, forget I’ve said that. They are inhaling the zeitgeist, but they aren’t the ones who fanned it into a storm.

If we start pointing the finger at all the academics, journalists and politicians who foster the toxic climate of wokery, we’ll have to imprison practically the whole humanities faculties of all universities, the entire staff of the BBC and all other ‘liberal’ media outlets, the complete membership of the Labour and Green parties and half the membership of the Tories.

Since this is clearly impossible, it’ll have to remain a cherished fantasy. Too bad.

P.S. Speaking of wokery, a fourth-round women’s match at Roland Garros was put into a night spot, TV prime time. That was the first time in three years that a women’s match enjoyed that privilege, much to the consternation of the three giggly girl commentators.

One of them, the former player Anne Keothavong, just couldn’t understand why women had to suffer that indignity for so long. “We must ask the organisers for an explanation”, she said, “so that the rest of us could understand”.

No need to bother the organisers, dear – I’m happy to resolve this conundrum for you. You see, TV audiences would rather watch men’s tennis because the quality of it is infinitely better. Glad to have been of help.

Another commentator came up with an air-tight argument. “Women,” she said, “get the same prize money. So it’s unfair they shouldn’t get the same viewing time.” I couldn’t agree more with the implication: it’s grossly unjust that women are paid the same for spending half the time on court and, judging by the way they play, one-tenth the time practicing.

Some 90 per cent of our gas came from Norway last winter, when the demand was at its peak. And Norway’s gas comes from the North Sea, as did ours in the recent past.

In fact, close to 100 per cent of our gas was produced by British North Sea companies at the turn of the century. Not only was Britain self-sufficient in energy, but we exported about 12 per cent of that production.

Oh the good old days. Now we pay some £20 billion a year for Norway’s North Sea gas, plus some £7 billion for American LNG. And things will get worse before they get much worse.

Our production of oil and gas is falling by 15 per cent a year, while Norway’s is racing in the opposite direction. The country has recently opened a major new gas field, while taking three others off the mothballs.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband has banned new drilling and production licences, whereas his cabinet accomplice, Rachel Reeves, is taxing oil and gas companies at 78 per cent.

Both policies add a whole new dimension to imbecility. For one thing, oil companies are notoriously mobile. When it’s no longer profitable for them to operate in a country, they up sticks and leave for sunnier economic climes.

Rachel’s 78 per cent tax rate will then produce a big fat zero in tax revenue, but such incidentals never stop Marxist ideologues. As far as they are concerned, 78 per cent of nothing is better than, say, 30 per cent of something, provided they can punish the fat cats and drive them out of the country. And if I went against my instincts and tried to look for any logic in Miliband’s policies, I’d fail miserably.

British industry, public services and private households need to burn oil and gas to survive – this is a fact. Another fact is that much of those hydrocarbons have to come from the North Sea for simple logistical reasons. Geography shows that the existing pipeline from there to Yorkshire is shorter than would be a hypothetical one from, say, Texas to Cornwall.

Thus, since much of our energy will come from the North Sea anyway, why not produce it ourselves and save a few bob? Oh well, you see, Ed’s full job title, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, contains the exhaustive answer to that question.

It also contains an oxymoron: the two parts of his title are mutually exclusive. Energy security means uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price. Net zero means saving ‘our planet’ from the supposedly harmful effects of the greenhouse gases produced by, well, burning oil and gas.

However, since we have to continue to burn oil and gas to stay afloat, or rather alive, pursuing that policy with Ed’s kind of zeal means uncertain availability of energy and its exorbitant cost. Hence Ed’s title is oxymoronic, not to say moronic.

It makes no difference whatsoever to ‘our planet’ who produces the North Sea hydrocarbons we burn. The net effect on net zero is exactly the same whether the drilling platforms belong to Britain or Norway. Hence banning British companies from exploration and production, while taxing them out of existence, makes no sense at all.

No practical sense, that is. But I’ve always repeated, and will continue to do so till I’m blue in the face, that our Marxist government isn’t motivated by common sense, as evinced by its approach to the economy, morality, law, defence, health, education and of course energy policy.

When they express their concern about any of those, they are lying. This is a classic example of the rule by simulacrum: nothing they say or do can be taken at face value. Everything that even remotely resembles an attempt to make things better is crude disguise.

When contemplating a new policy, this lot don’t ask themselves how its likely outcome will affect the country. The only question that concerns them is whether or not the policy agrees with their ideology and promotes their in-built imperative: gaining more control over the population by punishing its more successful and independent-minded part.

That’s why the fallacy of global warming was such a godsend for them. Some of them may believe the flimsy evidence behind it, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Even if they suspected or even knew for sure that the whole thing is a swindle (incidentally perpetrated by some of the same scientists who back in the 1970s were scare-mongering about an impending ice age), that wouldn’t change their behaviour one iota.

Such a glorious opportunity to impoverish the people the better to lord it over them simply couldn’t have been passed up. And, as always, the assault had to be launched from a moral high ground. They aren’t pursuing any nefarious purposes, Marx forbid. Theirs is the noble cause of saving ‘our planet’ from the depredations of rapacious profiteering.

Notice how their poster retard, Greta Thunberg, always linked global warming to capitalist excesses. You are destroying our planet and my future, she frothed at the mouth, to make more money. How dare you!

That evil child was simply enunciating in clear, hysterical tones the strategy appealing to many a grown-up Marxist heart. If plentiful, inexpensive, domestically produced energy could make people wealthier and more independent of the state, it had to be made to stop being plentiful, inexpensive and domestically produced. And if that dastardly objective could be couched in bien pensant waffle, then so much the better.

Unfortunately, even our left-leaning royals try to march in step with the villains who’d get rid of the monarchy in a second if they got the chance. Thus, back in 2009, Prince Charles, as he then was, warned world leaders we had just 100 months before global warming did irreversible damage.

Then, 120 months later, he repeated the warning of the coming fiery doom, this time shortening its ETA to 18 months. And in 2020, Prince Charles couched the same doom-mongering in colloquial terms, saying “we really do have to pull our fingers out now because the theory is we have this decade left” before we all fry. HRH, as he then was, left the idiom incomplete by omitting to mention the place we ought to pull our fingers out of.

His son William agrees wholeheartedly: our royals seem to worry that, unless they mouth vox sinistri platitudes, King Charles III will have to suffer the fate of King Charles I. We have to decide whether such sermons are sinister or merely gauche, but they undeniably issue from the Left.

Apparently, what we pay Norwegians for the energy we could easily produce ourselves amounts to £3,500 a year for every Norwegian. I expect a letter of thanks from a Nordic chap in receipt of my £3,500. What’s the Norwegian for sucker?

P.S. Regrettably, Nigel Farage is being ‘no-platformed’ by the leftist propaganda outlet, the BBC. Also regrettably, he was ‘platformed’ 17 times by the Putin propaganda outlet, RT. I’m appalled by the former and frightened by the latter. Aren’t you?

“I reject the incomprehensible trinity”, wrote Tolstoy in his letter to the Synod, protesting against his excommunication. He then proceeded to explain that what made him such a uniquely good Christian was his rejection of all other doctrines and sacraments as well, including the Eucharist.

The Count doth protest too much, methinks. If he didn’t believe in the Holy Communion, then what was his problem with being denied it?

I once wrote a whole book, God and Man According to Tolstoy, trying to come to grips with the writer’s elusive – or, not to cut too fine a point, non-existent – logic. But the question to ask today is whether the Holy Trinity is indeed incomprehensible. Can we understand it?

First we must try to understand understanding. What do we mean by it?

If we mean grasping triune God in the same way in which we understand, say, Newton’s three laws of motion, then the answer is no. No matter how high a ladder of logical steps we construct, it won’t lead to the very top: by His very definition, God will for ever remain beyond that kind of understanding.

But there also exists revealed, intuitive understanding vouchsafed to the initiated, and this is what was denied Tolstoy and other hubristic agnostics. Even those who were originally privy to such knowledge, Fathers of the Church, took quite a long time expressing it in coherent theological terms.

They created the most profound and nuanced system of thought the world has ever known. But it was so much more than just a philosophy – to them theology was like a mirror held up to reflect Christ onto the world, illuminating it until He came again.

However, the mirror is only an approximate simile, for the reflected light didn’t bounce into people’s eyes at once. The issues involved were so deep and subtle that it took centuries for their true meaning to sink in. The greatest difficulty was presented by the dual nature of Christ whence comes the great synthesis of Christianity, its unique dialectical balance.

Several Councils of the Church battled with the task, but it wasn’t until the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD) that the church managed to define the true nature of the Trinity.

Understanding, or rather defining, the nature of Christ took even longer. The matter was settled at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD: Jesus Christ is neither just God nor just a man – and nor is he a centaur-like creature, half-man, half-God. He is fully divine and fully human.

But why did this knowledge take so long to dawn on people? Some Christians may say that the revelation wasn’t given to the people at once; it came gradually and piecemeal.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky, whose book, Jesus Unknown, is infinitely superior to anything Tolstoy wrote on the subject, went even further. He argued that the truth was always going to come down to us in three major instalments, corresponding to the three hypostases of the Trinity.

The first, the gospel of the Father, was laid down in the Old Testament; the second, the gospel of the Son, in the New; and the third, the gospel of the Holy Spirit, is yet to come in some future, and last, Testament.

We may come up with a strong argument against this theory. What, however, is undeniable is that faith in Christ inexorably leads to belief in the Holy Trinity.

The word ‘Christ’ means ‘the anointed one’. Without stepping outside the boundaries of logic, the term thus presupposes the existence of both the anointer (the Father) and the medium of anointment (the Holy Spirit).

Since the three hypostases are equal, and since the first two were revealed in two separate Testaments a thousand years apart, while the third one so far hasn’t been confined to a separate document, logic would suggest that another Testament will come sooner or later.

Some might reject this hypothesis, but even they would struggle to dispute the gradual nature of Revelation. And even if that hypothesis was mistaken, the mistake was understandable.

The human mind is conditioned to think in tripartite units. When a writer puts down a sequence of examples on paper, it’s likely to be made of three elements, not two or four. The syllogism, that bedrock of reason, is a three-part logical argument. The dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is tripartite. Plato’s transcendentals, those of Virtue, Truth and Beauty, were three in number.

In each case, three elements make up a single indivisible entity, something that comes naturally to us. Perhaps our mind was created that way for us to be ready to receive at some point the truth of the Holy Trinity.

However, we can’t receive it by relying solely on the everyday receptors and mechanisms of our reason. Inspiration and imagination must come to the aid of ratiocination, but then that’s true of any thought seeking a higher plane on which to operate.

A mind mired in the petty puddles of quotidian morass may be highly adept at logical thought. However, the logic of an average taxpaying citizen relates to the higher mind of a religious thinker the way the diatonic scale relates to a Beethoven sonata. The former is a useful tool; the latter, a sublime achievement incorporating it.

Christ embodies the trinitarian principle in His person, which opens our minds to the Trinity, in which He is the second, creative hypostasis. Without achieving the impossible, ultimate understanding, we still find it easy to accept a unity of three, with the third element proceeding from the first two.

We push our reason as far as it can go, knowing in advance it’ll never reach the ultimate destination. Even getting anywhere near will require some inspiration to release intuitive understanding. Only an obtuse materialist like Tolstoy could insist that, if his reason by itself couldn’t comprehend the Trinity, it was incomprehensible.

Had he applied to his thought the same tools he so sublimely used in his art, he would have had a sporting chance of reaching the understanding he sought. He would also have been spared the indignity of writing some 50 volumes of pseudo-philosophical drivel, a time he could have used more profitably to produce more literary masterpieces.

Even great men sound like vulgarians when they take issue with higher truths while refusing to let their minds soar above the lower strata of thought where empirical logic will suffice. And the Holy Trinity is the highest truth of all, which is something to remember this Sunday.  

Andy Burnham, our would-be prime minister, does sound dumb. Worse, he sounds insane if you agree with Albert Einstein’s definition of that condition: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

However, I’m going to pay Andy a compliment: he is neither dumb nor insane. He is merely evil.

No one is so dumb as to write this: “Lest we forget: the principal cause of the 2008 crash was a failure of regulation. So how can a new wave of deregulation plausibly be the answer to the problems we have experienced since?”

Anyone with an IQ creeping into three digits must realise that the 2008 crash wasn’t caused by deregulation. It was caused by promiscuous borrowing, both public and private.

Runaway public borrowing is the bedrock of socialist economic policy, so is Andy proposing statutory limits on deficit spending? Or even, Marx forbid, a law demanding a balanced budget?

No, of course not. Anything like that would go against the grain of his communist viscera. What he wants to regulate isn’t the state borrowing but banks lending. You see, Marxists loathe banks and bankers with unmitigated passion.

The notion of money making money is as abhorrent to them as usury was to medieval Christians. But while those Christians were inspired by love, however misconstrued, Marxists are inspired by hate – and wilful ignorance of how economies work.

Credit is the lifeblood of a successful economy, meaning that any serious infringement of it will lead to economic exsanguination. Every sector of our economy, including the financial one, is already so regulated that the economy is dying of anaemia.

I don’t believe Andy can possibly be so stupid as to propose that regulations be ratcheted up. It’s just that powerlust ideally producing a totalitarian tyranny is coded into the Marxist DNA, and this is the blood coursing through Andy’s veins. For him and his ilk, regulations have a value independent of the outcome they produce.   

According to Burnham, Margaret Thatcher is to blame for our current economic ills: “The new forward-looking thinking is to have a clear-eyed analysis of how Britain changed in the four decades after the new economic settlement initiated by the Thatcher government, and develop a plan from there to lift people’s living standards. This must be the defining mission of now.”

Thatcher’s “economic settlement” wasn’t especially new; it was merely sane. She inherited a Britain universally known after a decade of Labour rule as “the sick man of Europe”. Correctly diagnosing the aetiology of the disease as too much socialism, she tried to cut it down.

Her guiding light was Hayek, not Marx, and she achieved spectacular results. That’s not to say that Maggie was flawless in every detail – she wasn’t. But she understood the core principle of all successful modern economies: they succeed in spite, not because, of state interference.

The reason Britain is in dire economic straits now is that all subsequent governments, both Tory and especially Labour, have gradually reverted to the same socialist practices that had produced the shambles of the 1970s. Labour did that out of conviction; the Tories, out of cowardice.

However, according to Burnham, even Labour didn’t go far enough: “The Labour government in which I was proud to serve did many great things. It did not, however, take us off the direction set by Thatcher.” Yes it did, Andy. That’s the trouble.

We haven’t had what Burnham describes as “40 years of neoliberalism”. Assuming he means commitment to market economy, we’ve had 40 years of its accelerating debauchment.

According to Burnham, “you can’t just leave it to the market… . If you want higher growth in areas that don’t have it, you need strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy, such as transport, energy, water, education and housing.”

In other words, we need to revert to wholesale nationalisation because “trickle-down economy doesn’t trickle”. Been there, done that. Rampant socialism has produced economic misery everywhere it has been tried, including Britain.

Even two demonstrably evil regimes, those in Russia and China, showed the miracles achievable by introducing even limited market mechanisms. Both countries, especially China, became prosperous by comparison to their abject poverty punctuated with intermittent famines during the decades of untethered socialism.

Britain too, for all the efforts of the post-Thatcher governments, managed to achieve a measure of prosperity and economic respectability comparable to that of any other European countries. This is rapidly disappearing – precisely because of the policies Andy desperately wants to multiply.

He and his Marxist colleagues in the Labour party are committed to the zero-sum fallacy proved as such throughout the world. I still maintain that no one can possibly be so stupid as to believe that, since the size of the economy is constant, it’s only possible for some to become rich at the expense of others becoming poor.

This is arrant nonsense, which the briefest of looks at any dynamic economy will confirm. For example, during the 1970s, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the stock index of top 30 US companies) fluctuated between 600 and 1,000. Today, it trades at around 50,000.

Even a small slice of this pie will be bigger than a doorstop wedge of the pie in the 1970s. So doesn’t it make more sense trying to get an economy from 600 to 50,000 than to try dividing 600 more equally among the population?

I feel embarrassed having to talk at this pre-primer level. Anyone with a modicum of common sense, including our friend Andy, knows all this – he’d be insane not to, and Andy isn’t mad. It’s just that common sense means nothing to Marxist ideologues – if you want to argue with them, it’s a gun, not data, that you should have close to hand.

I’m not advocating violence, as I hope you understand. I’m simply pointing out the sheer futility of trying to defeat Marxism with rational arguments. These chaps are possessed with an evil energumen impervious to reason. And they govern our country.

P.S. I’d describe Andy Burnham as nauseous, but that word has been hijacked by the illiterati. Thus a headline in today’s Times talks about Dizzy, Weak and Nauseous Sinner.

‘Nauseous’, chaps, means having an emetic effect on others, but Sinner strikes me as quite nice. ‘Nauseated’, on the other hand, means vomiting or feeling like it. It’s not Sinner but those who don’t know the difference, especially professional writers, who are truly nauseous.  

In Cambridge, they are also our present. For a paltry cost of a few million, Adams Road there has been reconfigured to give cyclists priority over motorists.

Drivers have to give way to cyclists across the entire width of the road, and no on-street parking is allowed. That way cyclists are protected from car doors opening in their path, and I can just see you heaving a sigh of relief.

According to Brian Milnes, head of the Greater Cambridge Partnership, “This project is about putting people first, making everyday journeys safer and easier for everyone.”

Well, not quite for everyone, Brian. Some of us, intractable car drivers, still intone a modified version of the Orwellian chant: Four wheels good, two wheels bad. I doubt that many Cambridge motorists agree that this innovation will make their journeys easier.

But I do find it touching that every blatantly socialist, which is to say subversive, project is sold to the public as “putting people first”. Then again, expecting lefties to say honestly that they put ideology first would be presuming too much on human goodness.

That said, this particular project isn’t without some intrinsic, if perverse, logic. And in more ways than one.

Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen cycle lanes first appearing in even major thoroughfares and then getting wider and wider. This has turned many streets even in London into single-lane roads, whereas in the past they boasted two or even three lanes.

Logically, this steady widening of cycle lanes, with the concomitant strangulation of car traffic, has to culminate in some, later most, still later all, streets converted to nothing but cycle lanes. Cambridge ought to be congratulated on taking the first step on that pioneering pathway.

Cyclists occupy a special place in the leftie heart because they are freeloaders: they don’t pay to use public roads. Motorists do, in London some £500 a year on average.

Then there is an additional £440 annually for the first five years if the car’s list price when new exceeded £40,000. Plus, there is an £18 congestion charge for entering London’s centre, plus £12.50 daily if the vehicle exceeds certain arbitrary emission levels, plus MOT… plus a hell of a lot. Penelope is in charge of our family finances, so I must ask her.

Bicycles, on the other hand, are neither taxed nor registered. That means socialists love them so much that they are prepared to put their innate taxing rapacity on hold.

Giving priority to tax consumers over tax payers comes naturally to them, so no surprises there. But the notion of putting people, meaning cyclists, first doesn’t quite add up.

You see, incessant propaganda of cycling as the morally superior alternative to driving has made many bike pushers smug and self-righteous. Hence they not only routinely flout good road manners, but, certain of their impunity, break the Highway Code. Every time I drive out in London, I see cyclists running red lights, ignoring zebra crossings, hogging the road by going two or three abreast even when a cycle lane is present.

Drivers, including me, turn puce with rage, which doesn’t add either to their cardiac health or to the gaiety of the nation. Neither does it add much to road safety, with drivers often having to swerve when a cyclist insouciantly floats into their lane.

This endangers not only drivers but also cyclists. It’s not for nothing that doctors at London’s A&E departments often refer to them as ‘organ donors’.

Socialists have always hated cars and drivers, an animus that predates the net zero idiocy. When cars first appeared on public roads, only well-to-do people could afford them, and loathing of such ‘capitalists’ defines socialism.

But inspired by their urgent need to save ‘our planet’, the lefties have now raised that emotion to fervour pitch. They climb onto their non-existent moral high ground to look down on common folk who like the speed, comfort and safety of their cars.

Reason has nothing to do with any of this, a point that recently has been confirmed by the councils of several villages in our part of France. People who know that corner of north Burgundy will confirm that the only time one can see any cyclists is when the Tour de France passes through.

In the 26 years that we’ve been going there, that momentous event has occurred exactly once. The rest of the time the roads (beautifully maintained, by the way, with nary a pothole anywhere in sight) are free for drivers to use.

There are so few of them in relation to the road miles available that, according to my visiting Dutch friends, the traffic is lighter than anywhere else in Europe. Hence, when we go somewhere, we know exactly how long the journey is going to take.

Adding sacrosanct if empty cycle lanes will remove that certainty and, considering the modest driving skills of local motorists, increase the number of accidents. But such rational considerations need not apply when socialists are in the throes of their punitive and bureaucratic zeal.

In defiance, all good people should launch a campaign of harassing cyclists. One good trick, especially if the chap has his earphones on, is to put the car into neutral when some 100 feet behind. Then, rolling noiselessly almost level with the cyclist and still keeping the car in neutral, you rev up the engine and hit the horn at the same time.

With good luck, you’ll drop the chap into the gutter. But, alas, with bad luck you may drop him under your wheels, in which case there will be some trouble with the police. Hence I don’t recommend you do any such irresponsible thing, However…

First, let’s agree on the terms, as the Greeks used to demand. In that Hellenic spirit, let me say that I use both terms loosely, for want of others in our impoverished political lexicon.

In today’s European context, I use ‘fascism’ to denote a broad ‘populist’, nativist, archaic trend oriented towards Putin’s Russia as its shining beacon. And communists are for my purposes extreme Left ideologues, with Starmer signposting the rightmost end of that group.

Those who insist on pedantic quibbling are welcome to indulge that quirk. But now I’ve defined my usages, I feel on safe ground. That’s more than I can say for Britain, a country facing the stark choice in the title above.

It’s our political tragedy that the erstwhile loony fringe has become the mainstream, while the erstwhile mainstream has become well-nigh non-existent. People are talking about the crisis of the Conservative Party, but things are actually much worse than that. It’s not just the party, but conservatism itself that’s in crisis, or rather at death’s door.

The situation is beginning to resemble, mutatis mutandis, that in Germany circa 1933. There too the mainstream made up of conservatives and milder socialists had collapsed, and the choice people faced was between Hitler and Stalin (acting through his German proxies).

The situation in the Makerfield by-election is a case in point. Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate, fits my definition of a communist. Since, should he win, Burnham is almost guaranteed to become prime minister, it’s not just the good people of Makerfield who’ll suffer the dire consequences.

Trailing Labour by a wafer-thin three per cent at the moment is the Reform candidate Robert Kenyon. The Restore Britain party, a splinter group of Reform, currently polls at seven per cent. Neither party is likely to be able to stop Burnham by itself; should they form a bloc, they probably could.

However, the personal clash between Nigel Farage, Reform leader, and Rupert Lowe, his Restore counterpart, makes any such alliance impossible. Neither man is capable of putting his ego aside for the sake of the country.

However, my subject today isn’t the political ineptitude of the Right. It’s the extremist notes struck by many functionaries in both parties.

Robert Kenyon, the great right hope, doesn’t inspire confidence in any conservative. Active on social media, Mr Kenyon once agreed with the statement that Russia’s annexation of the Crimea was “democracy in action” because 95 per cent of the Crimean population voted to become part of Russia.

Kenyon commented: “I agree totally, Russia are well within their rights to do what they have done as we did with the Falklands.”

Mr Kenyon must have learned not only his politics but also his grammar from Donald Trump. But reason wasn’t involved in that statement. Comparing the Crimea to the Falklands is so crass and ignorant that one suspects an ideological afflatus at full blast.

Did Mr Kenyon not know that the Crimean election was held at gunpoint, with Russian invaders toying with their AKs as people went to the polls? Or that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Tartars were driven out of the peninsula on pain of deportation or death?

Or perhaps he didn’t realise that the Falklanders chose to remain British in a free election, with no coercion whatsoever? If so, he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near elective politics. But I suspect that at play there was a latent affection for Putin, which usually tends to co-exist dialectically with hatred of the European Union.

(Let’s add parenthetically that Putin hates the EU because he mistakenly thinks it makes Europe stronger. Conservatives, on the other hand, oppose the EU because they correctly think it makes Europe weaker.)

However, this candidate of a party that made Brexit the centrepiece of its policy didn’t – are you ready for it? – vote Leave. That’s what he wrote on social media: “So anyone who thinks I love Trump, voted Brexit, read the Daily Mail, live in the 1950s, a Tory and 103 is wrong. I’m none of the above.” And, in a related message, “I woke up the day after Brexit sh—ing myself to what was voted for.”

When these elegant messages came to light, Reform hastily announced the incontinent Mr Kenyon was a “proud Brexiteer”. This made me wonder what proud Remainers were like.

Having thus blotted his copybook, Mr Kenyon proceeded to befriend obvious neo-fascists electronically and re-post statements of Holocaust denial. There he converged with some prominent supporters of Restore, such as Steve Laws who has 140,000 followers on X.

Mr Laws describes Hitler as a “misunderstood politician”, denies that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and calls for mass deportations of all off-white Britons and Jews whom he calls “foreign”. He and his followers also suggest that Nigel Farage has been bought by the Jews.

Mr Farage angrily retorted that he “can’t be bought”, but Restore’s campaign director Charlie Downes posted a photo of Farage lunching with Reform’s Jewish Alliance Group. The caption said: “MPs should serve their constituents and Britain’s national interests, not foreign lobbies and minority advocacy groups.”

Thus, according to this senior Restore official, Jews serve not Britain’s national interests but those of Israel, which is a stock accusation in the repertoire of anti-Semitic invective. And speaking of being bought, much of Restore’s funding comes from Elon Musk.

The party’s leadership refused to disavow Laws’s wishes to deport Jews, saying that “we are not going to police our membership”. Why not? A bit of policing would come in handy, if only to protect the party from accusations of crypto-fascism. A public disavowal wouldn’t go amiss either, but none has so far been proffered.

Where are the Tories in all that, specifically in the Makerfield by-election? Languishing on two percent in the polls. The election is contested by the communists (Burnham, with the Greens bringing up the rear) and Reform, badly wounded by the rift with Rupert Lowe’s Restore.

I wouldn’t describe either Farage or Lowe as fascists, but it’s clear that their parties attract an inordinate number of fascisoid members, such as Steve Laws. Also, I’d guess that most members of the two parties, including Reform’s candidate in Makerfield, are more sympathetic to Putin than to the Ukraine.

Nigel Farage’s attitude to Putin’s Russia can only charitably be described as ambivalent. Lately he has been trying to distance himself from his past comments on the issue, and also from his 17 appearances on Russia Today, a channel solely devoted to Kremlin propaganda.

This is especially worrying now, when the possibility of Russian aggression has moved from fantasy land into the outer reaches of reality. Farage’s best friend, Trump, has made it abundantly clear that, should Putin pounce, Europe won’t be able to count on America’s help.

He has cancelled the planned deployment of an armoured brigade in Poland, and also pulled back from Europe large numbers of jets, destroyers and submarines. This sends a signal to Putin, who is doubtless watching the political landscape in Britain with a gleam in his beady eyes.

There is a gaping chasm in the centre of British politics, with its traditional right and left components. That vacuum is being filled with extreme parties, or at least those that appeal to vast numbers of extremists, most of them pro-Putin. (Just compare statements on that subject issued by Reform, Restore, Labour and Green members, occasionally even their leaders.)

One can’t readily imagine a wartime government of national unity coalescing around the Tory Party, like the one formed during the Second World War. Extreme parties don’t do national unity – they are too busy fighting one another and steadily lowering the tone of British politics.

Meanwhile, Makerfield voters are facing a Hobson’s choice between a communist in all but name and an illiterate plumber with fascisoid sympathies. I fear that this is the pattern the whole country will follow in the years to come. God spare us.

The excellent and, for once, perfectly curated exhibition of James Abbot McNeil Whistler at the Tate gave me more than just intense pleasure.

It made me think, which, admittedly, isn’t mainly what painting is for. Yet Whistler was so much more than just a master of his art. All his paintings were philosophical statements in their very rejection of philosophical statements in art.  

“Painting from nature,” wrote Whistler, “needs to be done at home”. This, for me, is one of the deepest statements on the nature of art.

A painter who sets his easel on a riverbank dissembles if he claims to be painting the river as it is. In the hours he spends adding new touches to the canvas, the sun will be moving east to west, taking its light and shadows with it.

The painter doesn’t have the luxury of such a movable view. He can only depict the river as it was at one moment possibly hours ago, when the sun shone at an angle that’s no longer there. This means the painter can capture not that precise moment but only his memory of it brought back by his retroactive imagination. His claim to the contrary notwithstanding, he is painting the river as it flows in his mind, not as it flows in front of him.

Whistler simply went a step further. He looked at the river, or whatever he was out to depict, let the image wash over his mind, then went to his studio and painted the memory. Whistler was no less realistic than the other painter, he was simply more honest.

Let’s follow his lead in taking a step further, actually this time away from painting altogether. Now we’ve entered the realm of lyrical poetry, a literary genre that, at its best, is free of novelistic rationality. Poetry too is an art of memory of the past appearing to be a vision of the present.

Sappho didn’t long for another woman’s body as she wrote her Ode to Aphrodite; she put down on paper (or whatever medium she used) what she had felt when in the throes of passion. Petrarch didn’t suffer the unrequited love he felt for Laura at the moment of writing his sonnets; he wrote from the memory of that love. And Pushkin made that point unequivocal when writing, in his textbook love poem, “I remember that wondrous moment…”. It wasn’t love as such, but the trace it left in the poet’s memory.

Now we are beginning to see why music is the quintessential art, one that all other arts aspire to. Whistler certainly knew that, even though I’ve read no statements he made on this subject. Music is also the most religious of all arts, which Whistler also knew but would never have allowed himself to utter such words.

Literature says, painting shows, but music suggests. Like faith, it’s not without, but within us, waiting to be released.

A performance can unshackle the inner resources of a listener’s imagination and lead him towards an intuitive, non-verbal understanding that’s his own and not necessarily the artist’s.

In fact, one can say that music lives in the same compartment of the soul as faith, while literature by-passes this area either wholly, as does prose, or at least to a large extent, as does even great poetry. If we are seeking the kingdom of God within us, then an external physical stimulus can act not only as help but also as distraction.

Such physical objects as a canvas, sculpture or book are all such distractions, in that they exist objectively, quite apart from the site where the kingdom is located within us. Music, on the other hand, not just appeals to man’s inner self but actually lives there. That’s why, whatever its explicit intent, even secular music is always implicitly metaphysical, while literature is implicitly materialistic – even when dealing with metaphysical subjects.

Music, even more than any other art, comes from the artist’s memory and talks to the memory of everyone in the audience. The very fact that music is the most abstract of all arts makes it the most universal of all arts, the magnet attracting other genres.

A pianist plays through a new piece he plans to programme, say a Chopin mazurka. The music is ineffably beautiful, moving him deeply. As he runs through it time after time, he feels inspired.

He keeps finding new things in the piece, new harmonies, perhaps a different kind of fingering, another way of bringing the left hand out, removing rubato from some passages and adding it to another, perhaps changing the overall pulse and so on.

With each finding, the pianist gets more excited in the solitude of his studio. But then comes the visible, culminating part of his job: conveying his excitement from the concert platform, as if telling his public: “Listen, this is why I find this mazurka a sublime and moving piece. Are you moved? Are you as excited as I am?”

The pianist is dissembling of course. He was, not is, excited. What he is conveying to the public isn’t his excitement but his memory of it.

If he were as excited during the performance as he was when first playing through the score, he’d lose the artistic and physical control he needs to convey all the intricate nuances of the piece. If he were excited when playing, a discerning audience wouldn’t be excited when listening.

That’s why male pianists with their coital gyrations, or their female counterparts with their gasping mouths and heaving semi-exposed mummeries, are swindlers. They are out to trick the audience by faking their crude emotions, and today’s audiences are only too happy to oblige.  “He feels the music so deeply,” they say on the way to their post-concert supper.

He doesn’t. What he does do deeply is offend music – by faking excitement that should have stayed behind when he was refining the piece at home. When Prokofiev wrote his Visions fugitives, he was recalling those fleeting glances, not casting them.

Whistler, the most musical of the great painters, knew all that and much more besides. Much of his work is an attempt to write musical compositions by using touches of his brush like tonal sonorities. Whistler clearly wanted his work to appeal the way music does, by evoking abstract, seemingly indistinct images lurking in the viewer’s own mind.

It’s not for nothing that he gave musical names to his cycles of paintings: Arrangements, Harmonies, Symphonies, Studies and Nocturnes. The exhibition devotes a whole room to the latter, each painting showing a scene dimly lit by the gradually dying sun.

The curator wisely hung the Nocturnes in chronological sequence, with the light gradually receding from painting to painting as the sun sets. In these and most of his other works, Whistler went beyond the Impressionists before the Impressionists (most of his great work predates the first exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874).

He saw fogs over the Thames more musically and therefore more poignantly than Monet saw them later, but much of Whistler’s work uses – and refracts – an idiom from two centuries earlier.

Many of his portraits feature dark, monochrome backgrounds reminding one of Zurbarán and Rembrandt. One small portrait of an old woman, La Mère Gérard, is clearly Rembrandtesque – it’s probably the way the Dutchman would have painted had he lived in the 19^th century.

Since I saw this exhibition only a few days after seeing Zurbarán’s, I’d hesitate to say this is the best exhibition I’ve seen for a long time. So let’s settle for one of the best – but the most musical and therefore thought-provoking.

Before I say nasty things about Trump’s foreign policy, I must complement the US president on his business acumen.

During the first 18 months of his second term, Trump has increased his wealth by 165 per cent, which is to say by billions. As a good family man, Trump has also looked after his kin, with his sons parlaying their father’s tenure into hundreds of millions, and his wife into even more hundreds of them.

This instant upswing in the Trump family fortunes may be called conflict of interest in some quarters and corruption in others. Yet if Trump’s detractors think they’ll be able to get him and his after 2029, they have another think coming.

It’s almost certain that Trump’s last presidential act will be to pardon himself, his family and friends for any wrongdoing. All will be forgiven and eventually forgotten: that dubious gilded airliner, the cryptocurrency that made billions even though Trump himself once described such digital assets as a “scam”, the sheik-and-bake deals Trump’s sons struck in the Middle East.

To use the American expression, Trump hit a home run with all the bases loaded – well played, Donald. Alas, the president hasn’t displayed the same clarity of thought and single-mindedness of purpose when it comes to US foreign policy.

We none of us can escape our past altogether, which becomes especially clear when we change occupations. Mea culpa: my dissipated advertising past, hard as I’ve tried to live it down, left an imprint on my writing style. And I only wrote ads for less than 30 years.

Trump developed properties, struck deals, built and ran casinos for you-know-whom in places like Atlantic City, and rubbed shoulders with Russian gangsters in and out of government for almost twice as long. Hence we aren’t talking imprints there – we are talking personality formed and mentality circumscribed.

If you forget about Trump for a moment, imagine a hypothetical Mr Someone with that kind of CV and describe him feature by feature, you’ll end up with a perfect psychological profile of Trump.

Eye on the main chance? Tick. A knack for self-promotion no matter how vulgar? Tick. Adoration of power and contempt for weakness? Tick. Defining legal as anything he can get away with? Tick. Denominating human worth in monetary units? Tick. Rating personal loyalty to himself above all virtues? Tick.

Add to this some extra touches Trump adds to this identikit portrait, such as pathological narcissism, crudeness beyond even that expected in a property developer, functional illiteracy, and you’ll have a full complement of the qualities he brings to bear on US foreign policy.

It’s hard to know when narcissism ends and delusions of grandeur begin – even psychiatrists among my friends can’t pinpoint the exact moment. Here’s some more clinical data for them to ponder. The other day, Trump wrote: “Nobody knows God better than me. And NOBODY is loved more by God than me!”

The only man in history who had a right to make that claim was Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, son and hypostasis of God. Hence I fully expect Trump to climb on the roof of one of his gaudy towers and deliver his own version of the Beatitudes: “Do unto others before they can do it unto you,” and so on.

Since I don’t live in America any longer, I don’t know from any personal observation how such traits play in Trump’s natural habitat. I do know that, like many other leaders who exude manic energy (I’ll spare Trump some unflattering comparisons), he has many zealous adherents.

However, I can see what his policies are doing to the outside world, especially the part of it I love, Europe. Since Trump perceives, not incorrectly, Europe as weak, he has nothing but contempt for it and its leaders. However, some of them can redeem themselves by offering him what I call labiogluteal tribute (I try to avoid crude terms).

Conversely, those who dare contradict him, no matter how respectfully, slip a notch down in his estimation. Mild contempt gives way to active enmity, and US foreign policy changes accordingly.

The whole devilishly complex game of geopolitical relations is thus reduced to personal relationships. If Trump likes his counterpart in another country, that country moves up in the rating of America’s friends – and vice versa.

In common with the dog-eat-dog business of property development, political foes can become friends overnight and the other way around. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is a case in point.

When Trump was elected to his second term, Merz was effusive in his praise. He rushed to Washington to congratulate Trump in person, laid compliments on ten layers thick, brought the right gifts and assured Trump that he saw both him and his country as indispensable partners for Germany.

The meeting went swimmingly, and Merz was as good as his word. Unlike other major European countries, Germany supported Israel’s and America’s actions in the Middle East, including the 12-day war, and refused to recognise the Palestine State.

At first, Merz also supported the on-going war on Iran, and Trump was happy: his pal Friedrich was a stand-up guy. But then things rapidly went from good to bad to worse.

When it became clear that no regime change in Iran was going to happen quickly, Merz’s feelings changed. He even had the temerity to reject Trump’s request for assistance in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, the pesky chancellor justified his treachery by posing a rhetorical question: “Did they ask us when they started the war?”

Since Trump sees himself as at least a divine man, if not fully God, he had to visit Merz’s sins upon his country. Immediately announced was the withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany, which was in line with Trump’s general belief that national US interests don’t include NATO and its pusillanimous European members who “rip off” America by refusing to “pay up” for their own defence.

One country that pays up at a rate even higher than America’s own is Poland, but that alone wasn’t enough for Trump to relent. A personal touch was needed, and the other day Trump provided it with his usual grammatical flair:

“Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland.”

Nawrocki, a nationalist who is widely rumoured to have mafia connections, is clearly a man after Trump’s own heart. So much is par for the course. But here’s an interesting detail: Nawrocki was elected in August 2025, almost a year ago. Why did Trump have to wait so long to display his generosity?

At little cost to the US, one has to add. In all likelihood, Trump simply saved on transportation costs by shifting that 5,000-strong contingent sideways from Germany to Poland. Still, why that gesture? Why now? And why the obviously disingenuous explanation for it?

Go back to the sketchy personality profile I tried to draw above. Trump isn’t beefing up Poland’s defences; he is sending a message urbi et orbi. His friends will be rewarded; his foes, punished. Any European country whose leader is the former may receive America’s help. Other countries won’t – it’s as simple as that.

So next time Europeans go to the polls, they’d better decide whether their country needs US assistance, military or economic. If the answer is yes, they MUST Vote for Candidates who Trump is proud to Endorse. Scratch Trump’s back, and he’ll scratch yours – such is the gist of US foreign policy.

It’s not business, just personal. This approach may work like a charm in property development, but staking the future of the world on Trump’s likes and dislikes is tantamount to courting disaster. Dividing the world into pezzonovanti, like Xi and Putin, and nobodies, those reduced to the role of vassals and eulogists at best or enemies at worst, may play in Atlantic City.

But world politics calls for a sager, more nuanced approach. At issue are war or peace, liberty or slavery, life or death – not the bottom line at the end of a quarter. And not even Trump’s list of names for this year’s Christmas cards.

As the Labour Party is gearing up for a leadership contest, Andy Burnham is emerging as the runaway leader in every poll.

Of course, there is the small matter of the Makerfield by-election the Manchester mayor must win before he can stand, and Reform is polling high in that constituency. However, Andy seems confident, and I have no reason to question his judgement.

However, I have every reason to question, or rather despise, his politics. Burnham is generally to the left of Keir Starmer, which puts him into the territory currently inhabited in spirit by Leon Trotsky, Fidel Castro and Chairman Mao.

However, while steadfast on general ideology, Burnham displays flexibility on specifics. That evokes not so much those villains but the utterly sympathetic Groucho Marx, who once said: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

Acting in that spirit, Burnham declared a few days ago that he’d fight that local by-election not on such petty issues as potholes, policing and rubbish bins, but on Britain’s urgent need to rejoin the EU. That spooked Labour MPs who instantly felt Nigel Farage’s fingers tightening on their throats.

“Closer links with Europe, Andy, for crying out loud,” they cried out loud. “Not re-joining, you halfwit. Do the deed but never say the word, what’s there not to understand? Get those keys to 10 Downing Street first – then crawl on your hands and knees all the way to Brussels. First things first, eh?”

Andy got the message and made a swift 90-degree turn, thereby putting himself forward as a potential star of the Royal Ballet.

Once on a roll, he then said he saw no need to put any limit on public borrowing, indirectly accusing Rachel Reeves of being Milton Friedman in disguise. Considering that servicing our current debt already costs way over £100 billion a year, almost twice the defence budget, Burnham’s planned promiscuity sounded a trifle reckless.

The IMF screamed bloody murder, and Andy deftly executed yet another pirouette. Rachel’s prudence [some prudence!] was fine by him, he said. Can’t a chap crack a joke?

Sorry to be talking about Burnham’s views on such inconsequential matters as defence, Britain’s sovereignty, public finances and incandescent bond market. These can’t be described as pivotal – Britain’s future as a nation doesn’t depend on such trivialities one way or another.

Fine, I’ll grant you that they are marginally important. But if we were to single out just one issue that’s central to Britain’s future, political, geopolitical and economic, it would be none of those.

No, the most fundamental question that Andy has to answer to his party’s satisfaction is different: Should men with or without penises be allowed to use women’s loos?

Sorry about wording this delicate problem so crudely. It’s trans rights I’m talking about, in case you are wondering, specifically the lavatorial aspect thereof. This boils down to a question that was never asked even a few years ago: How do we define a woman?

The old, reactionary and discredited answer was based on the chromosomes: if it’s XX, you are a woman; if it’s XY, you are a man. Asked and answered.

Not so fast, said our progressive modernity. What matters is how a person identifies, and never mind chromosomes. When a woman says she is a man, that’s what he is. If a man says he is a woman, she is just that.

That theory was put to a test yet again a couple of weeks ago, when an NHS hospital put a trans man (meaning a woman) into a men’s ward. The rightful inhabitants of those quarters took one look at their new wardmate and saw something that didn’t quite add up. It took them only an hour to ponder that dichotomy, after which the new arrival was gangbanged.

In a similar, earlier development, a violent criminal was put into a women’s prison because he identified as a female. However, he still kept all his male appendages, which that freshly minted woman put to good use by immediately raping half the inmates and even some of the guards.

Those and many similar cases involving trans men and women stoked up the fire of feminists who pitted their pet piety against the lavatorial rights of transsexuals. Hell hath no fury like a feminist forced to share a loo with a man, and the feminists’ superior numbers carried the day.

Following a Supreme Court ruling last year, Bridget Phillipson, women and equalities minister (remind me, who held that post in Walpole’s cabinet?), confirmed yesterday that henceforth men posing as women, however they identify, would be barred from entering women’s loos.

That puts Andy Burnham sharply in focus. For back in 2022 he expressed unequivocal views that were rather different from the present Labour position. Biological men who identify as women, he said, have a right to use women’s loos.

Anyone who disagrees expresses a “minority view” to be ignored, said Burnham. And feminists “supposedly advocating for [sic] women’s rights” are trying to start “culture wars” that Andy had no intention of joining.

My advice to Andy would be not to fight the Makerfield by-election on that issue, but I don’t pretend to be a Labour strategist. That job belongs to Peter Mandelson by right, or would do if he weren’t otherwise occupied with trying to keep himself out of prison.

Step in Rosie Duffield, independent MP who resigned the Labour whip over this very issue. Much as Miss Duffield appreciates Andy Burnham’s stance on such minor issues as defence, sovereignty and public borrowing, she can’t support him until his stance on issues lavatorial has been clarified.

Actually, clarification isn’t what Miss Duffield is after. She wants Burnham to make another U-turn, after which she’ll be happy to submit to the Labour whip again. If Andy agrees to keep trans women (biological men) out of women’s loos, she’ll be happy for him to lead the party and the nation.

As far as Miss Duffield is concerned, Burnam is welcome to bankrupt the country, destroy what little is left of its defences, eliminate border controls, turn Britain into the EU’s vassal – do anything he wants and everything Labour stands for.

But having women who are really men in women’s loos – that’s where Miss Duffield draws the line. God forbid those sideshows do to women what Andy Burnham, Miss Duffield, Keir Starmer and the rest of the Labour Party are doing to Britain.

P.S. Yes, I know Thomas Mann was a great, prophetic writer. Yes, I know his Doctor Faustus is a work of genius. And yes, I used to read him (even the impenetrable Joseph and His Brothers) when I was young. However, call me a philistine, but in my dotage I’m just too old to wade through sentences like this, sage though they doubtless are:

“It is work: art-work for appearance’s sake – and now the question is whether at the present state of our consciousness, our knowledge, our sense of truth, this little game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, still to be taken seriously; whether the work as such, the construction, self-sufficing, harmonically complete in itself, still stand in any legitimate relation to the complete insincerity, problematic conditions, any lack of harmony of our social situation; whether all seeming, even the most beautiful, even precisely the beautiful, has not today become a lie.”

The one our Labour government has just issued will allow imports of diesel and jet fuel produced by third parties from Russian oil. The ones Labour MPs blocked were UK oil and gas licences.

Let’s try to get to the bottom of it. Easing sanctions on Russian oil is a knife in the Ukraine’s back because that imported oil won’t just fuel our cars and airliners. It’ll fuel Putin’s murderous war on the Ukraine, the country heroically fighting for her freedom – and ours.

That perfidious decision to sell the Ukraine down the Dnieper has even triggered some sibling rivalry within Labour ranks.

Emily Thornberry, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, said that Ukrainians “feel very let down… Just because other countries are behaving in the wrong way does not mean that we should join them. It really doesn’t. We are Britain, one of Ukraine’s strongest allies, and we have led the fight against Russia.”

You aren’t going to win any prizes for guessing which “other countries” Dame Emily had in mind. Trump has been doing everything constitutionally possible and more to help his friend and role model Vlad run the blockade of sanctions designed to stop Russian exports.

For example, Trump exempted from sanctions Russian tankers already at sea. Another licence permitted Russia’s gas exports from her Far Eastern ports.

While Trump thus mollified Putin, Starmer showed steadfast resolve: whatever Trump does or doesn’t do, Britain, he said, would continue to exert “maximum economic pressure on Russia.”

One thing that Trump did do was start a war against Iran that, while irreproachable in theory, has so far produced few tangible long-term effects.

‘So far’ are the operative words: it’s possible that Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons has been terminally degraded. It’s possible that Iran will now have to think twice before resorting to aggression and terrorism. It’s even possible that pigs will fly, though, out of respect for diversity, not over Muslim countries.

Meanwhile, the most immediate result of the war is an oil crisis threatening to ground the planes carrying British holidaymakers to Costa del Sol, Ibiza and Benidorm. And those who’ll decide to brave traffic on continental motorways will have to pay 50 per cent more to fill their Chinese-made cars.

Dame Emily was right in accusing her Parteigenosse Keir for betraying the Ukraine. It’s true that, since 2022, Britain has been the staunchest supporter of the Ukraine this side of Poland and the Baltics. The support has been somewhat heavier on words than on deeds, but Ukrainians have had every reason to regard Britain as their friend.

Lately though, the deeds have been more or less supplanted by words, and even promises supposedly chiselled in stone turn out to have been scribbled on sand.

For example, HMG crossed its heart and hoped to die when promising to board and capture any sanction-busting Russian ships entering British waters. However, those ships continue to cock a snook at Starmer’s promises by sailing through the Channel as if it were the Volga.

Now comes another inexcusable betrayal, which Dan Tomlinson, the exchequer secretary, nevertheless tried to excuse: “When there are international conflicts … what we have to do as a government is make sure that we’re protecting the UK national interest, that we’re protecting individual families and looking after their finances.”

One can just see Churchill making that statement in 1940, when the first Luftwaffe bombs (many of them made in the USSR, by the way) fell on Britain. It would have been unquestionably better for family finances to accept a negotiated peace on Hitler’s terms. Family finances circumscribe British national interests, Churchill would have orated, and never mind defending the country’s sovereignty.

However, if Starmer cares so much about our family finances, how does he explain the licences his government has refused to issue, those for producing more oil and gas in the North Sea?

Our spivs have cottoned on to a fact straight out of the economic primer: increasing the supply of a commodity will lower its price if the demand stays stable. When the commodity in question is oil, then God has created only two ways of increasing its supply: either buying more or producing more.

Starmer’s government, spearheaded in such matters by that swivel-eyed net zero loon, Ed Miliband, has rejected the second option. Hence Ed and his accomplices have chosen saving ‘our planet’ over family finances. Some things, they seem to imply, are more important than money.

Fair enough, some things indeed are. But evidently not keeping up financial pressure on a fascist regime openly stating that it’s waging war on the West, not just the Ukraine.

What’s more important to that lot than people’s finances is an ideology based on the latent Marxist urge to destroy our country. Any constituent of that ideology, including unwavering commitment to the climate swindle, is sacrosanct. The survival of our ally, the bulwark against Putin’s hordes, isn’t. Those flights to Ibiza come first.

This kind of logic isn’t just immoral, shortsighted and strategically inept. It’s also idiotic on its own terms.

Why not do more drilling in the North Sea, Ed and Keir? Oh well, you see, producing and burning oil increases the carbon footprint on the throat of ‘our planet’. Fair enough, I’ll buy that. But does burning oil produced in Russia spare ‘our planet’ from that awful fate?

You see, chaps, the atmosphere is like Russia: it doesn’t recognise national borders. We are all breathing the same air, and it doesn’t matter exactly where ‘our planet’ catches fire and burns to extinction. Wherever hydrocarbons burn and wherever they are produced, the effect on ‘our planet’ will be exactly the same – even assuming, for the sake of argument, that effect is deleterious.

So let me try to clasp together different links in the Labour logical chain. First, they are going to buy Russian oil. Second, the Russians will use the proceeds of such transactions to kill more Ukrainians. Third, this is unfortunate but unavoidable because Britons’ junkets to Ibiza take priority over Ukrainian lives.

It’s what Kierkegaard would describe as an ‘either… or’ situation, isn’t it? Either we continue to “exert maximum economic pressure on Russia” or we pay less for fuel and jet travel. Can you fault this logic?

Yes, we can, says the government, and Kierkegaard can take a long walk off a short pier. It’s a case of ‘both… and’, not ‘either… or’.

This is how a government spokesman worded this illogical claim: “We are committed to strengthening our sanctions on Russia to degrade its ability to wage war in Ukraine, whilst protecting critical supply chains and maintaining market stability.”

Sorry, chaps, you can’t have both. The two desiderata are mutually exclusive, which ought to be clear even to any averagely intelligent 10-year-old. What’s also clear is that we are governed by imbeciles short on brains but long on ideological chicanery.

So I hope you’ll join me in hoping that Starmer hangs on. Alas, all available Labour alternatives are even worse, hard as that may be to imagine. Any chance of Zelensky becoming British prime minister?