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. 

Why the French are so pessimistic | The Spectator.

The most striking thing is the skilled and marvellous way France maintains the public realm. From pavements to lighting, to high streets and motorways and serious infrastructure, France gleams. Frankly, given the choice, I’d rather live in a French roundabout than the average redbrick Barratt Home new-build, with its three-inch-wide windows. The former, the French roundabout, is likely to be prettier, and better designed, and it’s guaranteed to have superior stonework.

Just as I noted here during my recent road trip!

French taxes are as high as ours, but more of them get spent on things French people need. Their elections are showing however, that good infrastructure, housing and lifestyle are not enough. The French are not becoming politically more extreme in search of a better material life. They are doing it to ditch a treacherous establishment that does not respect them. The Énarques have strutted and preened long enough, while filling France's cities with enemies who openly despise her in order to prop up their state-sponsored Ponzi scheme.

We all care (pause here for leftists to call us racist) about our culture and our way of life and want to see it preserved. In the final analysis we will all – even the relatively pampered French - rise up and fight for it. The French people are saying "non!" at the moment and I wish them luck. Vive la France!

As I recently watched Tucker Carlson tell an Australian journalist,

Happy people have children and a functioning economy allows them to do that.

Rather than import new citizens to prop up the numbers, perhaps our governments should try to make it so young people can both afford to have children and believe enough in the future to want to? If, for example, housing costs and high taxes mean it mostly takes two incomes for young people to afford a home, it's hard to sacrifice some or all of an income to have a child. Importing low-income households while restricting housing supply with planning laws, will never make that easier. So maybe let's not, eh?

Sadly the betrayal of everything they should hold dear by the so-called "Conservative" Party is about to give Labour a five to ten year untrammelled chance to build a massive demonstration – a sort of Leftist theme park – of every vice and folly that has been dragging down the West for decades. I am afraid we're going to be late to your party, mes amis. Do your best without us for now.

When our time comes, however, watch out! By the time Labour has further impoverished us while robbing us blind, denigrating our way of life, rubbishing our values, castrating and mastectomising our healthy children and rewriting our history to make us the world's monsters, we'll be ready.

This is not what I personally want, of course. I'd love a thoughtful national review of the scale and role of the state followed by a slow, gentle move towards liberty. My whole ethic is based on the non-aggression principle, and I despise social division and violence. However it's clear our Deep State parasites will no more remove their blood-sucking proboscises than will France's without weaponising some version of Le Pen against them. The Left's culture wars also dangerously shift focus from rational issues to defending our way of life. Resisting that is more obviously a task for a Le Pen or (God help us) worse than an economics professor like Javier Milei in Argentina.

The Leftist shit-show and inevitable economic car crash we're facing without even an adequate Opposition to resist, makes it sadly more likely that when our Le Pen materialises, she is likely to make cuddly old Nigel Farage seem milquetoast.

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.

Reader Ian emailed me a question and was kind enough to hope it would provoke a post. It has. His email was long but the crux of it was this;

Why do you think commentators are so keen to present the "anti-vax" side as deranged?

 

The entire public debate seems to be "they work" so "you should take it" and if not you are an idiot who wishes harm on others.

I am reading an excellent book at the moment, "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling. I remember enjoying this, his  first, fantastic TED talk in which he turned statistics into entertainment to great effect.

I am enjoying the book and recommend it to you. I have already taken two graphs from it and put them on my smartphone so that I can produce them at a moment's notice. They are updated versions of the amazing "bubble graph" with which he opened that famous talk. They refute most of the assumptions of my friends when they talk about the world and what should be done to make it better.

Here is global life expectancy in 1965. The developing world has "big families and many children die".

Here is the same graph from the latest figures, in 2017. All Rosling's statistics are from sources (the UN, the WHO, national statistical agencies) that people on the Left usually choose to believe. He was an expert in his field and I trust him, even if I don't always trust them.

It's a different world, but our public policy on such matters as overseas aid is still based on the first graph. Why? because the "facts" most deeply seated in our minds are the ones passed on to us by our parents and teachers. We in "the West" (a concept with which Rosling has a lot of fun in the book) behave, with squirearchical condescension, as if the world was still that way. Worse, we cling to the binary; us vs them, black vs white, rich vs poor, views of the world that the first of the graphs coloured, but which the two of them – taken together - disprove.

We cling to our familiar world-view not just because we don't see new data but because we like simple patterns; ideally with binary choices. We survived in the wild as early humans by making – and instantly acting upon – rapid and necessarily crude evaluations of our surroundings. Fight or flight depended upon an immediate decision based on imperfect data often acquired from peripheral vision. That's why we like our action movies, with unblemished heroes and irredeemable villains. Simple binary choices are what we are comfortable with – and the more important and frightening the choice – the more we crave them. That may be the reason for the appeal of political ideologies based on struggles between opposing forces. It may be why in the present pandemic we have formed into two rival factions between freedom and safety. That kind of dialectic appeals to us.

On that same theme, to the extent it doesn't confirm our ideological stances, we tend to ignore new data This is the lethal "confirmation bias" that prevents intelligent discussion and makes us cling to the apron strings of the familiar ideas we grew up with. I have changed my mind a few times in my life. I have been a member of left, centre, right and liberal parties before I reached my present view that they're all parasites on the make and to be avoided like lepers. That may suggest more open-mindedness than the average, but I don't delude myself. It only involves a few extraordinary moments of my life. Most of the time, I cherry-picked the available data to support my current thinking just like most people. If I am honest, when my mind did change, it was not as a result of study or academic debate. It happened because of personal experiences that so shook me up as to cause me to read different books and listen to different experts. The change of heart came before the change of mind. The new reading then came in search of academic underpinnings for my new view. I may worship at Reason's altar, but I am as unworthy as any.

Child mortality and life expectancy are good, reliable indices of human progress. Judged by those indices, the world is unarguably a better place than it was in 1965. The old West got richer during this period but that didn't stop the Developing World from living up to a name originally given to it, let's be honest, as a euphemism. In fact, it has advanced relatively faster. Given the low base from which its people started, those advances have also meant much more to them than ours have to us. Conversely the pie-slicing, economic illiterates among us like President Trump are wrong to believe that the developing world could only get richer by impoverishing us. All those newly-rich Chinese did not pick our pockets and we don't need to pick theirs. We can all get richer by delivering the goods and services to each other that we are best-placed to supply. Adam Smith is still right.

We get richer either by having more money with which to buy more things, leisure or experiences or by them becoming cheaper so that the same money buys more. We can also get richer by having stuff that our predecessors couldn't have at any price. If (God forbid) forced to choose between them, my smartphone is now probably more valuable to me than my beloved car. Yet my grandfather never heard of such a thing and my father still doesn't value it at all. To go further back, King Henry VIII considered himself one of the wealthiest men in the world, despite having fewer material goods, leisure, healthcare facilities, cultural opportunities and scope for travel than a poor person on benefits in his Kingdom today.

We are all getting richer by combinations of all those things and more but the point is we are getting richer and our world is getting better. The dark, Guardian- or NYT-reader narrative in which the world is becoming a steadily nastier and more divided place is both stupid and malicious. At some level they must know their narrative is false. They advance it not for the noble reasons they state but because it justifies political changes that will give them more power.

We must therefore try to get past what people say they want politically and judge them by the fruits of what they actually do. Calling yourself "anti-fascist", for example, counts for nothing. It's how you would behave that counts. Asking me to support "antifa" because of what they named their movement is like calling a bullet "nourishment" and asking me to expect a tasty meal when you shoot me. Handsome is as handsome does and all else is what a late Polish friend called – when faced with biz-speak – "piramidalna bzdura!" (a great pyramid of shit).

I miss Hans Rosling and I am glad he left us this book. I don't know what his politics were and I don't need to care because, whatever they were, he did good science well. He dedicated his last years to writing this book in an attempt to finish his life's work, which was "...to show more people, more convincingly, that their opinions were no more than unsubstantiated feelings." If we can all read it, and then wrench ourselves away from exchanging those "unsubstantiated feelings" nastily with each other on Twitter and elsewhere, perhaps we can help Humanity do even better?

I have not blogged about Coronavirus. Why? Because I have no relevant scientific knowledge or skill and this is a scientific problem, right? Everyone says so. Epidemiology is certainly not my subject and humility (not always my strong suit, to be honest) is definitely in order. So I have been all ears and no mouth. Thank goodness there are people who don't find epidemiology as boring as I do. I doubt I'd enjoy their company, to be honest, but right now I am ready and willing to love them. 

From the outset, I worried that the governments of the world were caught up in a kind of mass hysteria. Leaving aside the totalitarian states (including the one whose vicious incompetence has probably given the world this learning opportunity) the response of the world's democracies has been fascinating. Firstly, our leaders played it down. It was just another flu. Then they realised they faced something that might kill voters on a scale comparable to Spanish flu, leaving grieving relatives disinclined to vote for them again. They acted on scientific advice to implement some sensible control measures. So far, so reasonable.

Then the press asked (as is its job) if the measures were enough. Discussion about how far the measures should go became a pissing contest and hysteria mounted. Opposition parties everywhere suggested they would (of course) do more and better. Popular pressure built until the current draconian measures were implemented. Even libertarians like me can't just blame the vicious statists here – our fellow-citizens cried out to be roughly dominated like the submissives they apparently are.

Governments anxious to be seen to "do something" (the curse of democratic politicians everywhere) made grand dramatic gestures – building hospitals in days that would normally have taken years. To hell with whether they were needed or not (the much bruited London Nightingale reportedly has just 19 patients) Look! We are doing stuff. Stuff you could never do yourselves!! The State and its hordes are heroes.

Now we face the risk of the worst economic crisis in centuries. Even citizens of those countries whose leaders did not stampede with the global panicked herd of brute beasts (h/t Sweden, Iceland and Portugal) will be badly affected by what is happening now. Those of us retired and living on our investments face ruin. Those earning a living by selling their labour face it too.

I have read what I can on the subject, noted the conflicting opinions, been amused by the fact that they are coloured by personal animosities between the scientists, and tweeted links to those writings on the subject that made sense to me. So what have I learned? Not much science, to be honest. Just that the laws of economics – a science every bit as imperfect as epidemiology – don't go away and nor do political divisions.

Even that learning is doubtful, affected as it no doubt is by my confirmation bias. The internet is awash with people (at times including me) using the greatest information resource in human history to prospect for nuggets of information that "prove" their opinions to be true. I try to be alert to that bias, but I must acknowledge that it exists. It draws my eye to every example of entrepreneurs developing solutions to the threat of the virus and every state agent behaving like a thug. The confirmation biases of Leftists, on the other hand, draw their eyes to noble agents of the heroic state solving problems and grasping capitalists profiting from tragedy.

Human knowledge in science advances, it seems, along as crazy a zigzag path as in other fields. Every new fact is seized upon to confirm views that are hard to shift. Extremely powerful forces are required to change human minds. The mind of Professor Neil Ferguson, for example, does not appear to have been much changed by his own scientific failures. In 2005 The Guardian ran this story;

Last month Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, told Guardian Unlimited that up to 200 million people could be killed. "Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak," said Prof Ferguson. "There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably."

Actually fewer than 500 people worldwide died. Amazingly the experience of being so bone-crushingly wrong does not seem to have impacted Professor Ferguson's self-esteem at all. There is something admirable in that. Being wrong once, doesn't mean you always will be any more than winning one bet guarantees you'll win the next. That it hasn't disinclined HM Government to take his prophecies of doom with a pinch of salt however, is not admirable at all.

What have have learned is that, as Bastiat told us long ago, problems arise when people prioritise the seen over the unseen. Professor Ferguson and his clients in government are not setting out to hurt anyone. I accept their sincere attempt to try to save lives. Their extreme focus on one seen epidemiological issue however may well cost more lives than they save when all the unseen issues they are ignoring emerge. As a commenter on this article at the Ludwig von Mises Centre's site said;

“If we want to stop traffic fatalities, we could ban cars. That’s a solution that would ‘work’. But it only ‘works’ if our sole benchmark is the number of traffic fatalities. What about liberty, moral agency and economic rights?”

Exactly. Stay safe, gentle readers, as no doubt everyone is advising you, but also stay calm. This too will pass and when one day we are looking back at it, I predict only that it will prove to have been a very different story than it seems at present. In the meantime, I commend you to this blog for a different perspective.

My conventional-thinking, main-stream media reliant friends sneer at the blogosphere; dismissing it all as "fake news". Yet at present they are furiously emailing, Facebooking, Whatsapping and Tweeting coronavirus disinformation by the shedload. Clicking on and deleting all this "fake news" from them affords me some amusement in a dark time. I do worry about the effect on the nation's morale however.

Humans didn't survive to become this planet's dominant species for lack of risk-aversion. We take in our stride the risks we are used to (e.g. driving) without worrying about the death rate but our instinctive response to novel risks is to over-react. Ex abundenti cautela, as lawyers like to say when lawyering an issue to death at great expense. 

What scientific knowledge I have is – at best – that of a dilettante. It was gleaned from the basics I learned at school before dropping every science I could at the first opportunity. That has been supplemented by casual reading of science articles in generalist newspapers and magazines. Quite a lot of it came from my boyhood reading of super hero and sci-fi comics, so I can tell you more about the properties of Kryptonite than of any virus. So, unlike my friends on social media, I shall not be commenting on the medical risk. I have nothing to add and anything I do say will change nothing, so mum's the word.  Actually, those theorising without data or expertise would do better (if they're lucky enough still to have her) to use that time to call their mum.

The only observations I have in the context of the present pandemic are to do with economics and political history.

Most economics errors (like the "broken window fallacy" first explained by Frederic Bastiat) stem from prioritising a seen effect over the unseen ones. In an emergency like the present one, governments – eager to be seen to "do something" – are likely to act forcefully on the seen economic effects of the crisis, while ignoring the unseen. Keeping their heads while all around are losing theirs and blaming it on them is hard for politicians at the best of times. Tending to narcissism or sociopathy anyway, they have less difficulty than the rest of us in seeing themselves as saviours. 

There is danger here. This article by Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute explains the danger well and I commend it to you.

Classical Liberals and the dryer kinds of Conservative feel threatened in such crises because we seem to lack the bold answers offered by authoritarian statists. Even Britain's classically-liberal Prime Minister, who is otherwise acquitting himself quite well in the circumstances, has promised state intervention on a scale and at a cost that might give Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders pause for thought. I predict that ten years from now it will be clear in retrospect that government actions to "save" the economy did more harm than good – even without taking into account the way such measures are bound to be gamed. Were I still practising law, I would be strategically positioning my clients under every tap of government aid that is about to be turned on. The lawyers, accountants and lobbyists of the big corporations will be doing just that.

As to political history, it teaches us that authoritarians love the opportunities presented by a crisis. I scoff at the conspiracy theories poisoning minds on the internet. No government (not even the monstrous Chinese regime) would cause such a pandemic on purpose, but all of them will seize the opportunity it presents to expand their power. Income Tax in Britain was introduced as an emergency measure to fund the Napoleonic War. Napoleon is no longer a threat, but still the tax bills keep on coming.

Any emergency measure should expire. If it doesn't, it's a fraud. Emergency laws (actually, I would argue all statute laws) should have "sunset clauses" so they expire unless specifically renewed. Parliamentary scrutiny is essential and any reader who has the ear of his or her MP should press these points home. As for the rest of us, let's just listen to the credible advice on offer, take what precautions we can and be kind to each other – especially the elderly and other vulnerable people who are most at risk. I hope all my gentle readers will come out of this pandemic unscathed. Here's wishing us all luck.

It was formed as a Three Musketeers style mutual defence alliance. An attack on one was to be treated as an attack on all. The anticipated attack was from the Soviet Union. NATO, with its US led military command based in Brussels, was the key international infrastructure on the Western side of the Cold War — mirrored orcishly by the Warsaw Pact. 

The Warsaw Pact is gone. So is the Soviet Union. The Cold War, pace the traitors of our academia — is won. The Berlin Wall fell and the question Sir Keith Joseph asked my student union long ago has been answered;

if the Berlin Wall were to be taken down, which way would the human tide flow?

The world changed — unexpectedly and very much for the better — and my delightful career helping clients to rebuild post-socialist Eastern Europe was made possible. To what would have been the amazement of my young self, most of my friends are citizens of Warsaw Pact countries. 

So why does NATO still exist?

The dismal science teaches us to distinguish between peoples’ stated preferences (often virtue-signalling lies) and their revealed preferences (how they spend their money). All NATO members say they believe in the alliance. Only four — the USA, the UK, Poland and Greece — meet their obligation to contribute more than 2% of their GDP. If you’re wondering, Greece has only accidentally met that target because of the catastrophic fall in its GDP. 

Opinion polls and my own experience of the bitter, sneering anti-Americanism of my otherwise delightful continental chums suggest that as usual the revealed preference is the truth. The Germans and French would not go to war in defence of America or Britain if we were attacked. Britain was attacked, when the Falklands were invaded, and our “allies” and “friends” sold arms to our enemies and gave them all kinds of moral support. Remember the Welsh Guards (my grandfather’s old regiment) massacred by Exocets fired from Mirages? The USA has often gone to war since the alliance was formed and mostly only British warriors fought, died or were injured alongside theirs.

Germany, France and their freeloading friends have quite simply been taking the piss from the outset. They take the Americans (and us Inselaffen and rosbifs) for mugs. They plot to form an EU Army and regret that Brexit means they won’t be able to continue to rely on English-speakers as their cannon-fodder.   

The continued existence of NATO has fuelled the epic paranoia of Russia’s military/intelligence apparatus. Desperate not to be decommissioned the generals and chekists have claimed that “the West” they grew up opposing is intrinsically hostile — rather than, in truth, insultingly indifferent — to Mother Russia. Their only “proof“ of this nonsense was NATO  

During my 7 years living and working in Moscow I heard well-educated, cultured, principled Russians ask again and again what the hell we were up to in keeping it. I answered airily that all bureaucracies were self-serving and that NATO’s staff (like the chekists) naturally preferred repurposing to redundancy. I was probably right but morally not nearly right enough. Our useless political class had a duty to look past such rent-seeking and — for once — to do the right thing.

They are Dr Frankenstein to Putin’s monster.

NATO is yet another of many examples of the truism that, once a bureaucracy acquires a competence, it will never disband. It continues because it can. The political and economic ills that drove the creation of what is now called the EU have long since faded into history. But the plump parasites of its apparatus have repeatedly repurposed it. Britain is a paradise of social, ethnic and sexual equality compared to the days when the precursors of the Equalities Commission were formed but its staff will find imaginary evils by the thousand before they’ll return to productive labour. Marx would gasp at the generosity of Britain’s welfare state and marvel at the lifestyle of even the poorest Brit and yet trivial micro aggressions are enough to sustain the revolutionary fervour of Marxist academics desperate to live as idly and unproductively as the man himself. 

NATO and these other examples remind me of the pre-reformation medieval church. Their stated objectives sound Godly and noble but their true purpose is to keep a bloated priesthood in luxury. Am I wrong? As always, please put me right, gentles all. 

I spent today at this seminar co-hosted by the Ayn Rand Institute and the Ayn Rand Centre UK. I am not myself an objectivist but the speakers and the subjects were appealing. It was an interesting afternoon beginning with Yaron Brook’s presentation on the long-standing historic links between anti-capitalism and anti-semitism, going all the way back to Marx himself. 

There followed a panel session on The Nanny State: Could Labour Outdo the Tories? featuring Douglas Carswell, Chris Snowdon, Lucy Harris and the indefatigable Dr Brook (who contributed at length to every session except the last).

Chris Snowden said he wished, as someone who opposed both Socialism and the Nanny State, that he could simply link the two. He then presented a sadly convincing case that, whatever other damage a Labour government might do, it was unlikely to be worse than the “Conservatives” in terms of interfering in our personal lifestyle and health choices. There is even a chance that it may be genuinely more liberal on the issue of soft drugs.

Lucy Harris, MEP for The Brexit Party and founder of Leavers of Britain said that to call the phenomenon "Nanny" statism is too kind. It’s not a nanny it’s a boss. Dr Brook said that the world needed bosses and that such people are actually tyrants. Lucy thought that the real problem in both the EU and the UK in this respect is Quangoism. I think she's right. Far too many nanny staters are not driven by genuine concern for our welfare. They are rent-seekers making a good living from creating jobs for themselves telling us all how to live. Lucy said she regularly re-reads Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, which perfectly sums up the attitude – veering between "sniggering superiority" and contempt – of middle class socialists for the working people they profess to serve. I confess I haven't read that since my schooldays. I must do so again!

Douglas Carswell was the most optimistic member of the panel. He believes that Brexit has been a game changer in that voters will never take our incompetent rulers seriously again. He thinks social media has also made it permanently impossible for them to set the national agenda and steer debate as they always have. I think he underestimates the kind of sociopath attracted to the political life, but I hope I am wrong. 

The next panel was called Can We Disagree? Cultural and Legal attacks on Diversity of Speech and the speakers were Toby Young, Yaron Brook, young Twitter sensation,  Soutiam Goodarzi — @Soutiam21 — and Dr Brook again. 

Toby Young spoke of a friend's experience in appearing on the BBC's "Question Time" show in Birmingham at the time Muslim parents were protesting outside a school about the "sex education" programme which contradicted their conservative beliefs. An audience member had asked the panelists simply to state whether they sided with the parents or the school authorities. All but his friend said emphatically they sided with the school. At dinner afterwards, all admitted to his friend that they did sympathise with the parents but had been afraid to say so for fear of being "monstered" by the "woke" lobby. He also spoke about the dishonest way in which the "no platform" types allege the risk of physical harm (e.g. "hate crimes") and psychological harm from mere speech. He pointed out that the much-bruited claims of a rise in hate crimes after the Brexit Referendum didn't show up in the statistics and that there was simply no evidence of psychological harm from speech.

He is planning to launch a Free Speech Union to support students, academics and others facing sanctions for speech and invited anyone interested in helping out in its formation to email him at [email protected]. 

Dr Brook said that successive governments have failed in their key duty to protect free speech against violence. The problem began with Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses. Governments did nothing to defend him. Then no newspaper in the US was prepared to publish the Mohammed cartoons from a Danish newspaper that triggered Islamist violence. He didn't blame the press because it was very clear the US Government wouldn’t defend them against the violent reactions they very reasonably feared. The current US Government, for all its bluster, won’t defend people against antifa violence either. He described the "woke" extremists against free speech as having a "Pre-enlightenment attitude". In those days the medieval church defined the range of acceptable truths that could be discussed. Now it is leftist academics who define it, but the outcome is the same. 

All panelists agreed that it was necessary to fight back if freedom of speech is not to be lost. Soutiam’s youthful confidence was remarkable. She says the behaviour of Britain's university authorities in relation to suppression of free speech is more dangerous that that of government but she’s prepared to take them on. I am not sure if she's fearless or naive and I hope her prospects are not damaged by her courage. I weighed in during Q&A with a couple of examples from my own experience of just how lost Britain's universities are to liberty.

The final session was on People and Profits: Who Would Benefit From the End of the City? The speakers were George Grigoropoulos and Andrew Boff. George pointed out that Conservatives have, since Thatcher (whose tenure he described as “a blip in the history of regulation”) been responsible for a massive increase in financial sector regulation. Labour is not blameless but has not been historically any worse.

He said the only real difference has been in “the intensity of application of the same principles and assumptions” —namely,  that risk can be regulated away (it can’t) and that regulators are inherently wise (they're not). He pointed out that it takes 200 full time employees per bank to comply just with the Basel III regime. For the whole EU that’s over 75,000 expensive staff taken out of production to collect and submit data to regulators he doubts are even capable of analysing it. He highlighted the moral jeopardy inherent in such detailed risk management regimes. Instead of actually assessing risk, banks are “ticking regulatory boxes”. When (inevitably) some unforeseen risk causes a crisis, they will line up to be bailed out, saying “we did what you said this isn’t our fault”.

Andrew’s presentation was more party political. He accepted that his party’s Theresa May had been the worst PM in living memory but said Corbyn and McDonnell were “lost to reason” and would make her seem good by comparison.

It’s always good to be reminded that the routine idiocies of our political class are neither unnoticed nor unopposed. The rest of the audience members were mostly very young reminding me that, despite what one hears, not all our young people are submissive to the busybody state.

I have left instructions that Paul Simon’s song “the Boxer” should be played at my funeral. Apart from the bit about “the whores on Seventh Avenue” I think it’s a good broad brush account of how my life has felt to me. It contains remarkable wisdom in the line;

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. 

That a 16 year old Jewish kid from Queens was wise enough to know that still surprises me. I first heard the line when I was about that age myself and it should have been a helpful gift, but I was never able to internalise it usefully. I only ever remembered it too late; when my desire to believe something had led me astray.

One of my daughters once told someone “People have Dad wrong. He’s not a cynic. He’s a disappointed idealist.”  Time after time I have trusted when I shouldn’t and ventured where angels fear to tread because I was not as wise as young Mr. Simon. The will-o-the-wisps of my hopes and dreams led me through Life's swamp. I’ve been lucky and have no complaints. My regrets, such as they are. are actually about my more cautious moments. Inspirational hopes and dreams lead men where dry calculation never would and – up to a point – that may be a good thing.

in my brief career in student politics, I heard wise old sorts in the Conservative Party say things like “the facts of life are Tory” and “Tory at 20, you have no heart. Labour at 30, you have no brain.” Slightly advanced by Ricky Tomlinson*, my own trajectory confirmed the latter at least. My career as a business lawyer certainly confirmed the former — at least when the Tory Party was still Conservative and based its policies on the facts of economic life. 

So it’s not surprising that wave after wave of youngsters falls naively for the puffery of the snake oil salesmen of the left. Why, however, are there mature individuals who can’t see what poison Socialism is?

Partly it can be accounted for by the wisdom of the young Paul Simon. No-one wants to hear that the "facts of life are Tory" – especially if life is not going well for them personally. If the market values your labour less than you do yourself, it's obviously easier to believe that the market is wrong than to do something about improving your value to it. If you've trained for a dead industry, it's easier to demand that the state keeps it moving – zombie like – than to accept your mistake and retrain. Yet there is so much evidence that Socialism doesn't work. More than half of mankind lived under Socialist planned economies in the 20th Century. The empirical results of this monstrous experiment were uniformly terrible. Tens of millions died. Billions were impoverished economically, morally and in terms of liberty. 

This is recent history. Many of the people who lived through it are still alive. As this article shows, (behind a pay-wall but you can still read a couple of articles a month for free) young people who listened to their family's experiences learned the ideological lessons. They did so even when they belonged to identity groups courted by the left in its attempt to foment divisions and hatreds to be "resolved" by their panacea;  state violence to constrain free choice and free expression.

My childhood was awash with my family’s forlorn recollections about the hardships they endured under communism in Poland: the chronic scarcity of food, medicine and other basic necessities; outright hostility to basic liberties. And if we didn’t like it, too bad: they killed anyone who tried to leave.

Yet there are leftists in Poland today. Indeed there are statist authoritarians of both right and left who believe (though their grandparents are there to tell them otherwise) that an inexplicably virtuous state directing the masses will make them more moral, more patriotic and more productive than they would choose to be themselves. It would be funny if it were not so damned tragic. I lived in Poland from 1992 to 2003 and delighted in the fact that I met no-one, ever, who was inclined to believe such nonsense. In what is, perhaps, another example of my "hearing what I wanted to hear and disregarding the rest", I told myself the Polish nation was inoculated forever against the virus of statism. I was wrong. The ideological hog cycle may be even shorter than the economic one. 

Confirmation bias is another explanation of people's ability to ignore evidence. We are seeing it daily in the never-ending national shouting match over Brexit. Every twist and turn just leads each side to exclaim "See! I told you so!!" It is all (even for someone so enthusiastically anti-EU that his late wife once demanded he make a New Year's resolution to shut up about it for 12 months) so damned boring that I have stopped watching the news or reading my daily newspaper.

Not too long ago, we saw the British Left praise Hugo Chavez's socialist experiment in Venezuela as an example to us all. Now it has ended, as all previous experiments did, in shortages, hardship and oppression, the very same people "hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest". It wasn't socialism after all. Mistakes were made. There was external interference by agents of capitalism. There was sabotage. All the excuses, in fact, that the Stalinists used to explain the stubborn divergence of tractor production statistics from reality. 

It seems that every fact is Janus-faced to those informed by ideology or faith. The closest the left has come to acknowledging this was in developing the doctrine of post-modernism, This denies the very existence of truth and argues that all "facts" are mere social "constructs" shaped by the class, ethnic or other identity of the people positing them. How that can be true, when there is no "truth" is a question for longer-lived humans than I expect to be. I need time to have some more fun before I die, thank you very much.

Jeremy Bentham, perhaps the most pragmatic of all English philosophers, is said to have died regretting the great error of his life. which was to assume that it was only necessary to show Man what was right in order for him to embrace it. We who aspire to be rational must learn not to despair when Man cleaves to the irrational. In winning people over to the cause of Reason we must work with, and not merely scorn, their foibles. Were any religious people persuaded to renounce their faith by the late, great Christopher Hitchens' (probably correct) characterisation of their views as the product of "wishful thinking" for example? I have a close friend who is religious and, when I fear he is making a mistake, I rack my brain for the teachings of my long-ago Sunday school to construct a theological argument for him to act differently. Sometimes it works – at least a little better than telling him his faith is "wishful thinking" would! I care about him enough to shape my arguments to his beliefs when I want to help him. Perhaps I should extend that courtesy to others? How far though can I extend a courtesy that costs little when dealing with a kind and (mostly) rational man before I am respecting the monstrous views of barbarians?

If there is no Truth, life is just a pointless frolic. Yet, as Professor Peterson tells us convincingly in his books and videos, all the research suggests that the search for meaning is what makes us happy, not (pace the Founding Fathers) "the pursuit of happiness" per se. We don't need there to be Truth or Meaning to be happy, but we do need to be looking for both. Post-modernism is quite literally a counsel of despair and I suspect is only meant to dispirit most of us into inactivity while its hypocritical proponents get on with their quest to rule the world. 

Where, gentle reader, do you stand? Is there truth? Should it be sought? Can it be found? To the extent that it requires others to accept it in order to improve the world, how best can one persuade them?

^{*In the linked post, I said I couldn't be sure that it was Tomlinson. My father has since read that post and confirmed that it was.}