Miss Paine the Elder and her life partner have chosen the name of my granddaughter - due to join us on December 9th - but will not share it with anyone until she is actually born. So for now she is codenamed "Boudicca" – Miss Paine the Younger's jocular suggestion when told they wanted a "traditional English name, not too commonly used." I have been thinking of her as Boudicca now for so long (and, trust me, I think about her a lot) that I may keep calling her that.

Regular readers will recall my unalloyed joy at the news of her impending arrival. She's not even born yet and she's making me a better man. For the first time in years, I'm thinking about the future. It will be her world now and I want it to be great. I also want to live long enough for her to remember me and am constantly planning ways to be as memorable and beloved a grandfather as my dad was to my girls.

That's the good news. The bad news is that our civilisation is still in jeopardy. Our enemies mass at the gates. Our leadership is execrable. It's so stupid it can't understand the importance of the freedoms that made the West. It lacks morals. Its public policy ideas would shame a sixth-form debating society - even one formed (as my admissions tutor – looking at the crap comprehensive I was "educated" in – rightly guessed) just to look good on an application to a law faculty. 

I had resigned myself to the fact that a great civilisation was coming to an end (as all must) and that it was my destiny to live in its final years. Statistically Boudicca is likely to live more than a century however, so my concerns now reach beyond that feared end. I'd always assumed my American-educated daughters could flee there if Britain and Europe fall into a new Dark Ages. Now I have to pay attention to trends in American politics that make it seem doubtful as a refuge.

Arguably the most optimistic thing I ever did – a decade and a half ago in Moscow – was to start this blog. I uttered the optimist's favourite cliché: that it was better to light a candle than curse the darkness and set out quietly to try to change minds. I remembered how one pamphlet – Tom Paine's "Common Sense" – had shaped a new world and took his as a pen-name in the hope of pamphleteering digitally to similar effect.

How many minds have I actually reached? A few thousand at best. A few hundred regulars. Remember how the internet was going to allow us all to escape the wicked grasp of press barons and those whose spittle they lick? Well it kind of happened – consider the reach of Guido Fawkes or Ian Dale these days, let alone Elon Musk on X – but it wasn't to be for most of us. My candle is still a candle and the ideas it was supposed to illuminate – Enlightenment notions that were uncontroversial for centuries – are more in the dark than ever.

I would love it if you, gentle readers, could help me back from the negative mindset to which, in such circumstances,  I have descended. I don't hope to recover the arrogance or optimism of my youth. I quite accept that the wisdom of age largely consists of realising how little you really know and how stupid you used to sound. There's nothing wrong with a bit of humility or perspective, for sure. I just need to recover some hope that, for the sake of my Boudicca and yours, good ideas can prevail.

The only hopeful straws I see in the current winds are Elon Musk, a friend's son's explanation to his dad of all the "bullshit you have to pretend to believe at school to get marks" and the fact that – last July – the utter collapse of the Conservative vote in Britain didn't increase the numbers voting Labour. In fact, in the only part of this realm with a Labour administration (my native Wales) their vote went down. Only in Scotland did Labour gain – from the laughably incompetent (and left-wing) SNP. 

Also, while critical thinking has been hounded out of the Establishment and the dreaming spires of academe by the clerisy of a new religion rivalling Scientology for weirdness and stupidity, it lives on among the laity. The ordinary people of the West lack leadership however. The more thoughtful among us live in fear that they may acquire some of a nefarious kind. The more the Leftist Establishment cries wolf about the "far right" the more likely a real wolf is to spy an opportunity. All non-leftists have now been called Nazis so often that it's lost the shock it should command. I hate to end on a negative note, but that seems almost as dangerous as the religious and ideological threats calling such demons forth.

So, gentles, if you have seen other straws in the wind that might give me hope, please let me know in the comments. 

As I walked home from casting my vote, I felt sad. I live in a solid Labour seat so had no hope of my vote counting. I am used to that. In my life as a voter, I have rarely – under Britain's first-past-the-post system – been on the winning side. The only big win of my democratic life was the vote to leave the EU.

I watched people passing on their way to the polling station and wondered what they were thinking. This is leafy West London. By any logic familiar to the minority of us who live here who were born in this country, my neighbours are not voting Labour from self-interest. Perhaps I should be ashamed to know them so poorly as to have no idea what drives their choice. I am certainly not ashamed not to know the hundreds of them who celebrated on our local streets last October 7th.

credit: Evening Standard | click to enlarge

It looks like Labour will command a majority of about 160 seats in the House of Commons on the basis of a national vote in England & Wales that is down on last time. They've won no votes from the Conservatives - only from the SNP in Scotland.

They have achieved their majority without disclosing what they actually intend to do with it. The Conservative Party has lost the support of its voters so comprehensively that all Labour had to do was sit quietly and wait.

As an experienced older voter, that's not really a problem to me. I know what Labour will do from a lifetime of bitter experience. Their ideology is envy and their policy is armed robbery. They'll waste money, they'll attack and impede the productive, they'll raise taxes, they'll diminish liberty and they'll subsidise (and therefore encourage) failure.

Labour always leaves both society and the economy worse than it finds them so I know the final decade of my life will be poorer and less pleasant than it would have been. I won't be alone in that. Life will be poorer and less pleasant for Labour voters too, unless they are on the state's payroll.

Labour did not deserve to win this election, but the Conservatives richly deserved to lose it. Labour is the accidental beneficiary of the Tories' national vote losses to Reform UK. The Conservatives comprehensively betrayed their principles over the last fourteen years and have been duly punished by the voters they arrogantly thought of as their own. The one thing they did that "their" people wanted was done with obvious reluctance and under pressure from Reform under its former name of the Brexit Party. They should feel profoundly ashamed for delivering us into the hands of scoundrels. They're to blame for what will follow as Britain lurches left just as the rest of the free world turns right.

Are there any signs of hope in today's results? Perhaps. The Overton Window has moved so far left in my lifetime that the entire national discourse now fits within the policies of the Labour Party when I was young. The Reform Party's vote share suggests this is unjustified. Most people in Britain are some kind of small-c conservative. Most of the time they're not just disregarded by the Establishment, they're sneered at and denounced. That's not going to change anytime soon as the political wing of the public sector unions takes office, but Reform has the chance to give them a voice in Parliament for the first time in decades. Farage is a principled conservative and a skilled orator and I confidently predict he will make some of the most listened-to speeches in the coming Parliament.

I don't yet see any sign yet of the Conservatives understanding what's happened. There must be hope that in the weeks and months ahead, they will work out that Labour only won votes in Scotland from the hopelessly incompetent SNP. In England their vote is unchanged. In Wales, where people have a Labour government, it went down. If the Conservative Party is to survive it needs to win votes back from the right. There are none to be had from the left. 

As I type this, I'm listening to Ed Miliband promising to prove to a disillusioned electorate that Government can do good. That's Labour finally making a concrete promise and it's one it can't possibly deliver. Government is a necessary evil, even when confined to reasonable bounds. Our government burst those bounds decades ago and Labour is not the Party to change that. The evils of government can therefore be expected to grow and there'll be no-one but Labour to blame.

Young voters who don't know Labour are about to learn some very painful lessons that will contradict the propaganda they heard in the course of their education. I place my hope in our young people. They've had a bad deal economically and they're about to get a worse one. If they are shaped by their experiences, rather than by their education, there's always hope.

As the chairman of my university Conservatives in England, I led my members on a march to legalise homosexuality in Scotland and Northern Ireland. That dates me. The law was not changed for Scotland until 1980, or for Northern Ireland until 1982. It was of course already legal in England & Wales where the law changed in 1967. I’m old but not that old.

We marched neither for self interest nor self promotion. There was no social benefit for us — indeed we were made most unwelcome by leftists on the march, because we didn’t fit their narrative. Already in the 1970s, among student politicians, no one gave a damn about the “content of your character” or even the correctness of your policies if you were not of the Left. 

We were small state, low tax Conservatives. The national party would shortly thereafter close down the Federation of Conservative Students to which we belonged for advocating the legalisation of drugs, for example. We wanted Liberty to reign and people to make their own choices wherever possible — and express them mostly through the economic democracy of markets.

So my rationale for leading my members that day was not to win homosexual votes,  nor to feel cool for being an ally. Their sexual urges were as icky to me as mine were, I assumed, to them but they were of just as little concern as they were of interest.

My objective that long-ago day was to reduce the number of unnecessary laws. What consenting adults did to each other in bed was (like all other aspects of our private lives) none of the state’s damn business. If, as they liked to sing back then, homosexuals were “glad to be gay”, we were glad for them. The “crime” was victimless so should never have been a crime at all.

The legal reform we sought was an excellent one, not least because it was (unlike much legislation since, which actively and anti-democratically seeks to shape thought) driven by changing attitudes. Few people cared if their neighbour was gay as long as he or she didn’t “do it in the street and frighten the horses”. The law opened gays to abuse and blackmail. It did much harm and no good. It was clearly better to restore some Liberty and let people be. 

Since then my only involvement with the gay rights movement has been to be delayed in traffic by a “Pride” march on a visit to New York City once. If I’ve thought about it at all, it’s been to worry that rights specific to particular groups are dangerously divisive insofar as they undermine the key concept of equality before the law. I’ve advised gay people professionally, worked alongside them and employed a fair few of them without ever thinking about their sexuality. Why would I?

So why am I thinking about them now? Firstly because they are insisting upon it. I’m no more proud to be straight than I am to be tall or white. It’s just one fact among many. Yet activist gays insist that not only are they proud to be what they are, but that I should be proud for them too. That’s frankly nuts.

The Pride march in NYC that once prevented me getting to lunch as quickly as I would have liked has become a global festival that lasts a bloody month. Gays literally want us to celebrate them more than we celebrate our great inventors, poets or the warriors who died for our freedoms. How can that be a good look in PR terms? Frankly, if you think your sexuality is thirty times more worthy of celebration than Shakespeare’s genius, you are off your tastelessly-painted trolley.

Secondly, they're using their bully pulpit unwisely. LGB, a standard TLA (three letter acronym) is getting perilously close to consuming the entire alphabet. The minute a plus sign was added, I wondered why they don’t just settle for G+ and save some trees. 

By adding more and more letters to that alphabet soup and insisting not on a general human right to be harmlessly different, but on category-specific rights for ever smaller and wackier groups, the movement has weakened the consensus that drove legalisation all those years ago. We were with you (or at least benignly indifferent to you) until you embraced people waving their dicks in our faces while insisting they’re women. Or until you advocated life-changing surgeries for confused minors (more than most of whom were on track to be happily gay).

What were you thinking?

The sloppy “born that way” arguments deployed to support that excellent reform back in the day are being stolen and abused. You ignored the risk of reductio ad absurdam until it morphed into reductio ad fastidium. 

Are you looking for trouble? Did you learn nothing from the damaging attempts of the Paedophile Information Exchange (supported by Harriet Harman in her stupid youth) to ride on the coattails of gay rights back in the day?

To try to answer my own question I attended an online Pride Month seminar yesterday. It was not pretty. The three presenters were variously queer. One was — of course — transgender. I knew more history of the gay rights movement than they did. They spoke of decades as if they were aeons and words as if they were cannons. They were wedded (in complete ignorance of the struggles of their pre-legalisation brothers and sisters) to a sense of oppression. They saw no logical conflict between despising heteronormativity and bemoaning how much unhappier and more suicidal they were because they were outside that norm.  

Rather than being glad to be gay and celebrating the world of opportunity opened to them by their oppressed predecessors, they made it clear they could never be happy until everyone else approved of them. They wanted us all to learn the minutiae of their kinks and waste great chunks of our lives proving the depth of our useless knowledge. They want us to respond to them in total sensitivity to a sense of self that one of them said varied from day to day according to his/her/its “vibe”.

These are luxury beliefs no society is rich enough to afford.

If you want to be happy, accept yourself. Most people don’t know or care about you anyway. If you try to force them to look at you and then tell them you can only be happy if they approve of you, you are “cruising for a bruising”.  

It is a recipe for lifelong misery. Pack it in. 

Yes, I know the movie character was Ratched. Bear with me. According to Wikipedia, she is also;

a popular metaphor for the corrupting influence of institutional power and authority in bureaucracies

She's a symbol of what I want to write about today and her name echoes the essential problem. 

Sir Keith Joseph was a key influence on what became known as Thatcherism. He coined the phrase ratchet effect to describe the way in which each new Socialist government moved policy leftwards, whereas a Conservative government never moved it back. If the UK State was a car, then the Labour Party was the accelerator (gas pedal), the Conservative Party was the brake and there was no steering wheel.

The direction of political travel was never in doubt and only the speed could be adjusted by the electorate. Sir Keith's point, well-taken by Margaret and constantly railed at by Tory wets was that the ratchet had to be broken if the Conservatives were actually to move towards their goals. For all that Leftists call themselves "progressives" (perverting the language as they love to do in order to thwart honest discussion) real human progress should be in quite another direction.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the end result of the ratchet effect must be that everything either belongs to the state or is under state control. Democratic Socialists and Communists have always had the same ultimate goal. The former are just more patient. They will cheerfully discuss each step of the journey with the electorate, as long as the planned route never changes. All it takes to see the destination is to zoom out a little and observe the completely consistent direction they and all their predecessors have taken. 

Margaret's achievement in breaking the ratchet was significant. For a while, though she had no such intention, the Left even feared that it had been reset so that the wheel would turn the other way. Tony Blair certainly felt the need to reassure voters that Thatcher's reforms would not be endangered by electing the Labour Party under his leadership. He even claimed to be her ideological heir; a bold lie even by political standards. 

It has been clear for some time however that Sir Keith's ratchet has been refurbished, well-oiled and set back as it was before Thatcher. This is why, as I made clear in my last post, I had no interest in the Conservative Party's choice of new leader. It turns out I was wrong that it didn't matter at all, however. The choice of the political naïf Truss has at least shone a searchlight on the situation. She tried to be a sort of Thatcher mini-me and failed dramatically. At the first hint of any movement rightwards, all hell broke loose. Even though another self-absorbed leadership contest will surely scupper the Tories for the foreseeable future, her position is already in doubt. 

I am not sure if it needs a conspiracy theory to explain why a nation that keeps voting Conservative keeps moving leftwards. I don't believe there are dark cabals planning it. I don't think they're even needed. Someone like me, who believes – along with my namesake – that 

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

is simply never going to apply for employment by a state as huge and pervasive as the UK's.

I have horrified state employees in conversation by saying, in perfect truth, that my conscience would not allow me to sleep at night if I had their job. Not because what they do each day is necessarily always bad, but because every penny they are paid to do it has been taken from others by force. My proudest boast is that every penny I ever earned came from contracts freely entered into by clients with choices. If I had ever worked for the state, that would not be true. 

So it's not surprising that, when the state apparatus has grown to be – as it is in the UK – a gorilla in a flea circus, that the people working for it are broadly in favour of a state on such a scale. No conservative or classical liberal could possibly wish for that, but it's the highest aspiration of a Leftist. So the Prime Minister may be "Conservative", her cabinet may have some "Conservatives", and the electorate may be mostly conservative by instinct, but the state apparatus rolls leftwards regardless. It's going to take leadership by someone with more of a personality than Truss to take on that mighty foe and win.

If you're in a minority in cabinet (and, if you're thinking at all, you probably are quite often) you must let your colleagues know about your concerns. However you mustn't say anything to undermine the agreed policy in public. You stand behind the decision. This isn't dishonesty in a broad sense; it's basic teamwork. Most voters have been part of a team in their lives and understand this well. A minister who thinks a policy is very wrong has the option to resign. If it's morally wrong or likely to cause serious damage to voters, that's what the minister should do.

"Cabinet responsibility" is therefore not a problem to voters. We get it. We would probably take against a minister who was disloyal in this way. We might even sympathise (while of course – for we are only human – enjoying the PM's discomfiture) when a dissenting minister briefs the press anonymously.

This is one reason why the recent Conservative Party leadership election has been so problematic for the government. Like a primary in the US, it has provided endless ammunition to the opposing party as candidates tried to differentiate themselves. A bit of Blue on Blue was inevitable. It's an index of the poor quality of the Reds that no more serious damage was done. The fact that modern Leftists seem to look more for opportunities to insult their opponents than to engage them in reasoned argument is a gift that keeps on giving.

Some interesting data emerged – for example as to the COVID 19 lockdowns – but the fact that the people claiming they'd opposed them were in Cabinet at the time – and didn't resign – prevents them gaining the moral high ground. We're still left feeling betrayed that the "the science is clear", "there is no alternative," "Save the NHS"  propaganda was a lie, of course. It just doesn't make us love the people claiming they always knew. And of course it's embarrassing data HM Opposition can't exploit, because its stance on democidal lockdowns was consistently "sooner, harder and for longer". 

As a supporter of Austrian economics and a proponent of minimal Government/maximal Liberty, I couldn't take seriously the various candidates' sloganising about free markets and free societies. The Johnson regime was wrong on pretty much everything but Brexit in ways that suggest that – though the Left can't win an election in Britain because most Brits are conservative – they're winning all the arguments in the corridors of power. Until a "conservative" government actively purges the Deep State including the Civil Service, the police, the NHS and the education "blob", it will always now be conservative in name only. To these "Conservatives", "Liberty" is a nostalgic name to call your daughter, not a principle to die for. 

On such issues, for example, as Net Zero (the ultimate cause of the current cost of living crisis;  the proximate cause being the actions of a Russian leadership emboldened by our suicidal energy policies) this Conservative Government is to the left of reality itself. The Deep State in Britain (the permanent establishment that is merely fronted by elected politicians) is to the left of the Chinese Communist Party. It doesn't care who the Prime Minister is. It doesn't need to. 

So no, I can't get excited about a change of PM. It's as interesting and important as changing the figurehead on a tall ship. The UK Ship of (Deep) State will sail on serenely to the nation's doom. Liz Truss might be slightly more aerodynamic than Bunter Johnson, but not enough to make a difference to a ship so vast, clumsy and barnacled.

Nothing has changed and I see no reason to hope that anything will until it's too late.

Firstly, some sad news. Some of you will  – like me – have once followed JMB's Blog Nobody Important. It's open only to invited readers now but back in the heyday of blogging (when we all thought citizen journalism was going to change the world) you will remember her often mentioning her husband, whom she dubbed "The Old Scientist". I am sorry to report that he has passed away at the age of 89. I had the pleasure to meet him just once, when I stayed at their home in Vancouver on my North American road trip in 2013. He was a decent man who lived his life well and I feel for my friend in her loss.

Secondly, as I seem to have exposed more of my personal life than usual of late, just a brief report that – though my situation is as sad as before – I am getting on with my life and feeling better. I had a good run in Speranza to visit my parents last weekend. There are not many Ferraris in the world with over 91,000 miles on the clock, but (touch wood) she's in fine fettle and running well. I don't know why I don't drive her more. Call me shallow and materialistic, but she lifts my spirits every time. It is hard to feel sorry for yourself on the open road at the wheel of a bella macchina. I can't wait for borders to be properly re-opened so I can visit my friends on the Continent. 

Thirdly, a brief "state of the nation" summary from my point of view. If you think I am wrong, please tell me. Trust me; I would love to be wrong. 

It is gradually dawning on the British public that they've been had over COVID. They still don't tell the pollsters so but it's becoming an object lesson in the difference between stated preferences (which often signal "virtue" or seek to give the questioner what s/he wants) and revealed preferences (shown by how we behave in practice). For example, when out and about in London it's clear that only state fanatics and submissives are still wearing masks. I dutifully obeyed when on public transport in London for most of the Scare, but now I just carry one to wear if challenged by an official. Most travellers are not wearing them and the submissives now dare to do no more than cast a stink-eye. I hope the divisive hatreds stirred up by Government propaganda will now die down but I fear that many friendships have been irremediably broken. 

Most of the West panicked in a very similar fashion, though Florida has thankfully provided a control group for an experiment that would otherwise have lacked one. As data reveals the ineffectiveness of non-medical interventions (the use of state force) we can therefore expect a united front from the global establishment and its lickspittles in the media. Data will be spun. Evidence will be bought, paid for and rigged. Every government will point at all the others and say "we followed global best practice based on the data we had at the time." That may have been true for a month or two at the beginning but it's clear now that the British Government, for example, knew damned well that its tyrannical measures were not necessary. The real scandal of "partygate" is not that Downing Street civil servants at the heart of the state apparatus ignored the law. It is that their conduct reveals they knew their propaganda was false and/or wildly exaggerated. 

If they believed what they told us, the law would have been irrelevant because they would have been too scared not to comply. 

The British Establishment is safe however. Not least because, as it metaphorically thrashed the British public, HM Opposition's only complaint was that the whip was not thick enough, was not applied soon enough and was wielded with insufficient vigour. The Labour Party is not going to hold HM Government's feet to the fire for forgetting our every liberal tradition because HMG's ripostes will all be examples of Labour's demands for more, more, more state violence. 

It's hard to say now (as I have believed my whole life) that Labour cares less about Liberty than the Conservatives. I am not sure the latter has left any space at the authoritarian end of the political spectrum for Labour to occupy. The "Conservative" knee-jerk reaction to a perceived threat was to boss us all about in excruciating detail, while borrowing on a colossal scale to throw public money at the problem. If a Labour manifesto were ever to be written in plain English, that's pretty much what it would say. As "Conservative" support for government tyranny weakened, Boris Johnson, in effect, became the Leader of the Labour Party – herding its lobby-fodder to vote for his measures. Every time he wrote about Liberty (and he has done so many times in his career as a journalist) he lied. He may be the cleverest PM we've ever had, but he's also (and I recognise this is a huge claim) the least principled.

Intelligence without principles is more dangerous than the politicians' usual dozy uselessness. I see no better replacement from either side of the House, but he must go. 

I cannot imagine ever bringing myself to vote again. I have always voted (as I remember explaining to my Polish teacher as she prepared to vote for the first time in the immediate post-Communist era) in the cynical manner of an intelligent citizen of a long-standing democracy. I know them all for rogues. Their aspiring to have power over their fellows while living on them parasitically reveals them as such. So I have always voted for the robbers who would steal – and the thugs who would bully – less. I never saw my vote (except perhaps during the Thatcher years) as anything more than a damage-limitation excercise. When push came to shove, however, it seems – even in my world-weary cynicism – I was deluding myself.

Can we hope for any useful lessons to be learned from the pan-panic? When the butcher's bill is received for the non-COVID patients killed by state action, will it give politicians pause for the next emergency? We can hope so. I fear what they have mostly learned, however, is that if they deploy their psychological-warfare "nudge" units effectively enough, they can get us to put up with far more than they'd previously dreamed of. Buckle up, friends. I suspect you're going to see more of your governing classes than you previously feared.

In an interesting article in today’s Sunday Telegraph, Dan Hannan (arguably the British politician I least despise) makes some sensible points, which you can read yourself here. 

In the course of that he says indignation about #PartyGate is misplaced because, amongst other reasons, no-one strictly complied with last years COVID rules. Of the critics condemning the alleged “gathering” he says;

My point is not that they are hypocrites; it is that the rules are wrong. Laws that no one follows are, by definition, asinine laws. By all means blame politicians. But blame them for imposing these absurd prohibitions in the first place rather than for behaving like everyone else.

Hannan has a decent mind and sound instincts, but here he strikes me as naive. We tend to think of laws as rules proscribing bad behaviour or (less often) mandating good behaviour. Practising law for a few decades as I did will make a cynic of the best of us but even a politician should know there’s another use of law — to absolve a rule-maker of responsibility.

In the private sphere, if more of us read the “standard terms and conditions” we sign up to blind (often these days on a “click through” basis) when contracting for goods and services, we’d find rules the suppliers never plan to enforce. Their lawyers put them there to ensure that in myriad circumstances — foreseen and otherwise — where a problem might occur, their clients won’t be legally at fault.

If your child finds a website that encourages her to commit suicide for example, the company hosting it will point to a rule forbidding such use of its services. It didn’t make the rule so that it could enforce it. It has no employees combing its servers for breaches. It made the rule so it could point to it when your child dies. That’s a dramatic example, but there are millions of others to which you would probably say “fair enough.” Businesses couldn’t sell many goods and services economically if they were expected to take the blame for any wicked use of them.

The fact is that in the public sphere government uses law in similar ways to address what spin doctors call “the optics” of a situation. It feels that “something must be done” about a perceived harm and will often promote new legislation without even considering whether existing law covers the matter. How many of the thousands of new crimes created during and since the Blair years can you name? If it’s any consolation, I bet your MP can’t name any more than you.

The government didn’t make it illegal to visit your gran, hug your mum at your dad’s funeral or have sex with your new girlfriend with any expectation that you’d be so servile as to comply. It did it so that, if any of those ladies contracted COVID, it would be your fault. That’s why Number 10 staff partied, Cummings conducted motorised eye tests and Hancock and Ferguson shagged.

The intent of the law was neither proscriptive nor prescriptive but exculpatory. It was one rule for everyone, but no one was seriously (in those circles in the know) expected actually to comply. This is a subtler complaint than the angry “one rule for us and another for them” beloved of bar room ranters, but in its way it’s actually worse.

I have used this quote from Montesquieu so often that regular readers will be able to sing along in the original French;

If it is not necessary to make a law, it is necessary not to make a law.

He also said — and how this still resonates today;

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice

You’d expect a libertarian to be cynical about laws, but anyone should be able to see the damage that such “click through” criminalisation does to respect for Law itself. I suspect the British government was as surprised by the servility of its citizens as I was disgusted. I tremble to think of our future now that it realises how weak we mostly are.

That said, I hope the mishandling of the pandemic by democratic governments almost everywhere will lead even the most servile to an understanding that Law is a dangerous tool that is lethal when misused. Make too much of it too lightly and you make criminals of us all — with criminal attitudes to compliance rather like Captain Sparrow’s approach to the Pirate Code — or Dan Hannan’s approach to the Highway Code!

No-one escapes the consequences of the government's response to the COVID pandemic, but the Paine Family has escaped unscathed from the virus itself  – so far. My elderly parents were vulnerable because of their age and health but have managed to steer clear of those hubs of infection - care homes and hospitals. Until this week.

I am currently staying with my frail, elderly mother while my frail, elderly father is in hospital. He collapsed when he attempted to get up on Sunday morning. He was retrieved from the floor and returned to his bed by kindly neighbours. He was eventually hospitalised on Sunday evening after a grandson had spent hours on the phone to medically-unqualified, algorithm-driven NHS gatekeepers in call-centres.

I say hospitalised but gurney-ised would be more accurate. He was not diagnosed until Monday morning when he was finally taken off his trolley, admitted to a ward and given antibiotics. Too late, it seems because he had developed sepsis (one of the most common agents of death in emergency care). Crowds of medics materialised and his life seems to have been saved from the threat their previous absence had quite possibly caused.

This sob story has, I promise, a point. The experience has exposed us directly to the interesting way in which the government health service in Britain has responded to the pandemic. My mother, my sisters and I faced a situation in which Dad seemed likely to be lost to us, but we were forbidden to visit him or be at hand. In normal times, we would have had opportunities to speak to his consultant. Instead we have a number to call. Sometimes a recorded message tells us all staff are busy. Sometimes an anonymous voice summons a staff nurse to give us an update. Sometimes she comes. Sometimes another anonymous voice tells us she's too busy.

After forty-eight hours of that, I asked if it was possible to speak to the consultant. This seemed to be considered a radical request. However I was given a name and told to call the main switchboard and ask for his secretary. I did so and left a message on her answering machine. I called again the next morning and left another. I then got a call saying my message has been passed on and "he knows you want to speak to him". I am still waiting. Despite her careful choice of words, I take some hope from the fact that his secretary did not seem to think it lese-majesté on my behalf to ask.

It's quite shocking how normal this all now seems to NHS staff. They seem actively to prefer not having to deal with the families of patients. Assuming (as I think is reasonable given the staff nurse's response to my request) that most families don't ask to speak to consultants, they at least must have a more relaxed life than usual. I suppose it's up for debate whether the time staff nurses spend on the phone to families is more or less than the time they used to spend dealing with them in person. 

I find it hard to imagine a socialised service untrammelled by market mechanisms will ever return to its old standard now the public has meekly accepted this kind of service. One of my sisters said that "someone will have to give them a rocket" but who, pray, is likely to do that? The Labour Party is the political wing of the public sector unions and the "Conservative Party" is now – at best – New Labour reborn.

Every stage of life has its joys, sorrows and consolations. Looking back, I smile at how stressful I found it to be young. I was so afraid of failure; so anxious to get things right. In middle age, with those anxieties largely allayed, I found myself burdened with responsibility for others; a responsibility I had campaigned earnestly to assume, by the way. As I approach old age, those responsibilities are gone too. No-one depends on me. My children are independent. I have no employees to worry about providing with work. I can even glory in the triumphs of the young people I mentored, who are now achieving their own successes. I could shuffle off this mortal coil today with no sense of a task left undone. 

Before COVID, I was enjoying that. I was as carefree as in my youth. In fact, more so as I was without the burden of parental, societal or –most onerous of all – personal hopes and expectations. I could reflect on my life and that of my nation or even species. I could read, think, visit museums and galleries, travel and engage in my photographic hobby. I could meet with my friends and smile during our conversations at the truth of the old joke that "the older we get, the better we were." Looking back on lives lived so anxiously at the time, our triumphs seem inevitable and perhaps even (after a few good drinks) deserved.

Post-COVID, things are different. I have not personally been directly affected by the disease itself. Only one friend contracted it and he, thank goodness, survived. Actually I should not thank goodness as he lives in a corrupt post-Soviet state and crimes had to be committed to save his life. He survived a seven hour wait for an ambulance by virtue dint of another friend paying a bribe for oxygen to be brought to his home. Best not to ask from where that was procured. Let's just hope it was not from the bedside of someone who still needed it. Then he avoided admission to a lethally-unhygienic state hospital that would have killed him by bribing the ambulance-driver to take him to a private facility. There even cash would not have secured treatment were it not for luck. He happened to have been the lawyer for the oligarch who owned that facility in connection with its financing and still had his phone number. Calling him and then handing the phone to the doctor denying admission finally saved the day – and his life. His story tells more about statism and the corruption it brings than it does about disease. 

At a micro level then, I continue to be blessed. I have a comfortable home in which to be confined. I have a loving wife with whom to be confined. I have every technical facility to stay in communication (I first wrote "touch" but that of course is forbidden) with friends and family. The only real cost to me has been the death of my last illusions. 

COVID has been a wet dream for every statist, apparatchik and thug. I have long said that an over-mighty state is a magnet for the worst in society. COVID has proved it. 

My nostalgic vision of the British Bobby protecting honest citizens from crime has long been out of date, I know. Yet it was hard to shake the feeling for the boys in blue my parents instilled in me. My mum would make a point of stopping and talking to the local policeman whenever we encountered him when I was a child. She would tell me this was the person I should go to if I were lost, in trouble or just needed to know the time. He was my protector and friend. Sorry Mum, but he isn't and never was. His true nature has been revealed as he has gleefully leapt on the chance presented by COVID to bully and swagger.

I was taught to revere teachers too. There is, I always used to say, no more valuable profession in any civilisation. A society could be judged by the value it placed on its teachers. COVID has exposed that as sentimental tosh too as the teaching unions have used the opportunity to dodge work and to hell with the education and welfare of the children in their members charge. All other public sector unions have done the same. Our public "servants" are our actual deep state masters and their contempt for us has been revealed beyond all reasonable doubt.

This is not COVID related, but has happened during the same period. The Court of Appeal destroyed my faith in the judiciary. I personally witnessed the Shrewsbury pickets in action. I know the truth, but to write it again would now be actionable – so I won't. All I can say here is that the law is an ass. 

Though I remember well how upset they were by the death of President Kennedy and how they grieved the death of Winston Churchill, my parents never taught me to love and trust politicians, thank God. So that disillusionment has not been so severe. In fact COVID has not made me think any worse of them. In fact, I have some sympathy with HM Government's plight as a panicked population has cried out for ever-more-tyrannical measures and HM Opposition has only ever opposed them for not acting harshly enough.

I have repeatedly said in the run up to elections that, this time, I will not vote. I have always gone on to do it. I was brought up to treasure democracy as something my ancestors fought for. I felt a duty to their memory to exercise my right. This time I didn't. Perhaps I would have done if I lived in Hartlepool; not from any affection for the party that won but to enjoy the discomfiture of the entitled villains who have so long believed they own the Northern working class among whom I grew up.

In London, there was no point. Khan was a nailed-on winner. There were no credible candidates running on a platform of more liberty and less state. It was – as all elections now seem to be – a menu of different poisons. None of the thugs, bandits and rent-seeking hoodlums in power can say this time that I supported them. Not that they care, but it gives me some small satisfaction.

The wisdom of age is the realisation of how little we can know and the humility that comes with that. It seems I am finally wise but I was happier being foolish.

I don't normally go for podcasts, as I can take in information faster by reading and don't spend much time in traffic these days. This however, is worth your time.

My last post was, I confess, a bit defeatist. I certainly felt defeated. Douglas Murray does not. On the contrary he is optimistic that the forces of evil are vulnerable and makes convincing arguments for going on the offensive. Rather than bemoan "cancel culture" he thinks it's overstated and urges the "silent majority" to speak up.

Referring to Kay Burley's ludicrous smears in relation to former Aussie PM, Tony Abbott, he is hilarious. He points out that she once grabbed a female fellow journalist by the throat in anger, squeezing so hard that she left a bruise. Playing her own game, therefore, it's possible to say that Kay Burley once grabbed a woman by the throat and injured her. Anyone who appears on her show is condoning the strangulation of women. By her own logic, she should be cancelled!

No right-thinking person wants Kay Burley silenced of course. Her bluster turns people off every argument she tries to advance and she serves a useful function in exposing the weakness of Tory ministers, but it takes Douglas to pierce the pompous veil so elegantly. I commend him to you.