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.

“Breakfast near me” typed into Google Maps this morning yielded several better prospects than yesterday’s mediocre fare in my hotel. I was delighted with my choice — a brunch spot favoured by young French families. The only disadvantage was it made me feel old! Polite young children sang along quietly to the English pop music in the background and were generally delightful. I’m pretty sure they’d no idea what they were singing, but then neither did their parents so only I got to be amused. I’d have been delighted to be a grandad at any of their tables.

The late Mrs P. and I braved disapproving fellow diners on many occasions in England by taking the Misses P to restaurants when they were little. They learned how to behave and never once showed us up. One proud parenting moment was at the old River Room at the Savoy. If daggers looks involved real daggers we’d have been acupunctured to death as we were shown to our table. Our girls behaved with perfect decorum however (just like the young French children this morning, who brought the story to mind) and we had a lovely family meal.

Before we called for the bill the Italian leader of the band providing live background music came over to chat to the girls He was surprised to find we were English. He said we looked just like a family in Italy and that it was “lovely to see” — for the first time in all the years he'd played at The Savoy. I still think it's a mistake for parents (and society in general) to assume young children are too barbaric for polite society. They don't have to be. 

I adjourned to a nearby park to take photos, catch up on messaging and read the Sunday Telegraph and my usual blogs on my iPad. I sighed to see there was a children’s playground. In London a lone elderly man (especially one with a camera) would trigger suspicious gazes. The French families today were stereotypically insouciant as I sat on a bench nearby.

French privacy laws make street photography (ironically pioneered by their greatest photographer, Cartier-Bresson; whose most famous photos would now be forbidden) illegal. I was careful to respect a law I despise by ensuring any human subjects were unidentifiable figures in the frame.

I think my desire to obey laws is one of the reasons I’m a libertarian. People with looser attitudes to compliance may worry less about 3,000+ crimes per Parliament being created (as happened under New Labour).

I used to ask people how many of those new crimes they could name. No one ever knew more than one; hunting with hounds. Others included entering a nursery school without prior appointment, which must be broken regularly by grandparents stepping in when a parent is delayed. However well intended those new crimes were (and most were just pointless propaganda to make the government seem "active" and “caring”), it’s not good to make the perfect knowledge of law assumed by our courts even more of a legal fiction.

Not least because it undermines respect for Law itself. A few laws based on commonly-accepted moral principles and rigorously and reliably enforced are the way to build respect for Law. The alternative makes lawyers rich but I can see no other benefit.

That said, I note the current British election campaign turns once again on the stupidest question of all — "what can government do for me?" The answer, if you’re not an apparatchik or on benefits, is “***k you and take most of your earnings.” That, however, is a lesson not yet learned.

Keir Starmer is keen to add 1.5 million new voters aged 16 and 17 to the electorate, precisely because they'll have learned no economic lessons at all. One wonders why anyone ever thought it a good idea to put our children's education in the hands of parasites who profit from voter ignorance. It would certainly account for why Starmer is also keen to drive more future voters into state education.

Not one party in this election proposes less government and fewer laws. Not one. Unless something changes (I hope it does because both my grandads volunteered to defend my right to do so) I shall for the first time in my life not vote. Even when I lived abroad I voted every time by proxy until I lost the right to do so. The Conservatives are authoritarian statist socialists with no respect for individual freedom. So of course are Labour, but at least they're honest about it. Given a choice between thieves and lying thieves, I'm not inclined to express an opinion.

After being brought down by such political reflections while reading my newspaper and blogs, I set off again in holiday mood to take photographs. I headed to the plan d'eau de Metz, a kind of leisure-boating marina. I'd forgotten about my intermittent fasting regime and found myself not having lunched with minutes to go. The few restaurants that were open on a Sunday had closed by 2.30pm, so I grabbed a beer and an ice-cream at a place which – it transpired – sadly lacked a loo. Like many gents of my age, this is now a matter of more concern than it used to be. I swiftly followed the directions given by the ice-cream vendeuse and found myself in a queue. A clever automated public WC performed an impressive cleansing so thorough each time that it took longer than the typical visitor! Fortunately, I was spared embarrassment and continued my waterside walk in happier mood.

I'd planned to call an Uber to return as I did yesterday. When I checked the distance however, I realised I'd walked in something of a circle and was less than half a mile from my hotel. In consequence, though I'd planned to walk a little less than yesterday, I ended up covering the same modest distance. I enjoyed the walk more today. Partly because I'd left my tripod and lighting gear in the hotel to lighten my load. Mainly because I was more confident I could handle it. 

My album of photos has been updated if you’re interested.

Some optimism must have been revived in my cynical old heart yesterday, as I actually joined the Academy of Ideas — the organisation that stages these festivals. I rose early and headed off to Church House for yet another day of debate.

The first session I chose to attend today was on “Gender Ideology and Criminal Justice,” which I accept was asking for the opposite of a chilled Sunday morning. I did not expect to be reduced to tears however.

The discussion was not about criminalising mis-gendering. It was about the practical effects of trans ideology on criminals and in the prison estates in particular. The fastest growing element in the female estate comprises biological males identifying as women. Are they genuine? Gender dysphoria is a thing, right? Well consider this fact. There are no trans-men in the male prison estate. It seems safe to infer that the “trans-women” inmates at best want access to safer female prisons and at worst want access to female prisoners. 

It seems trans ideology was trialled in the prison system well before it reached wider society. Why? Kate Coleman suggested it was because no one cares what happens to prisoners (especially, in her view, female prisoners) so the ideas met less resistance than could have been expected in schools or hospitals. Once established in the Prison Service and Ministry of Justice, it was easier to roll the ideas out into other parts of the public sector.

This was shocking but not tear-inducing. It was Ceri-Lee Galvin who turned on my waterworks with her account of her tragic life. The father who abused her sexually decided in prison to transition legally and has been able to leave his history behind him on release, while retaining both his paedophile proclivities and his male genitalia. Her courage in refusing to be a victim and insisting on coming forward (under constant and vicious attack for transphobia from trans activists) to protect other young women is as inspiring as her story is terrifying.

Horrifyingly we were told that trans rights transcend child safeguarding in that one need not “deadname” oneself in a DBS report required before working with children.

In search of light relief my next session was “Why do comedians keep siding with the Establishment” featuring Miriam Elia, Dominic Frisby and Graham Linehan. 

Dominic spoke of the history of the Edinburgh Fringe from the uninvited eight to the present day when the only event selling more tickets than the Fringe is the Olympic Games. He made an interesting comparison of the main (curated) festival vs the (uncurated) fringe to today’s BBC and YouTube. Cat videos would never have been commissioned by BBC Light Entertainment!

Another interesting insight was triggered by a question from the floor about where working class comedians had gone. Dominic said they were early victims of cancel culture driven by the sneering of the likes of Ben Elton.

Miriam had a successful time at the BBB until she wrote a surreal Gardeners Question Time sketch in which militant Muslim vegetables rose up and attacked the other plants on behalf of ISIS. She was told to change it to fundamentalist Christians and refused on the grounds that it wouldn’t then be funny. She left, became independent and has succeeded. She sounded disappointed not to have been cancelled but as Peter Boghossian had advocated yesterday for academia, she’d effectively set up her own parallel institution where she couldn’t be cancelled.

I am a huge fan of Father Ted and was delighted to be in the presence of Graham Linehan. Naively, he feels that our woke censors are imaginary. I pointed out to him from the floor that the Equity Diversity and Inclusion concerns expressed by a BBC producer in rejecting his latest sitcom were not just a fad on Twitter. There were real ESG rules as discussed in the session I attended here yesterday, which could get employees of corporations and institutions fired for any satirisation of protected minorities.

I suggested comedians gave up on the established outlets and went the Boghossian/Elia route of establishing parallel spaces to work in. The chair, Andy Shaw, said that was all well and good up to a point but shows needed venues and when his comedy show featuring Graham had been cancelled at the last Fringe, no one else would offer space.

Linehan has a theory that spell checkers would end the world. It used to be that people complaining to the BBC wrote misspelled letters in green ink that made it obvious they were crazy. Now spellcheckers and Grammarly allowed them to appear serious enough to be listened to.

Miriam has found an outlet for her satirical artworks in Eastern Europe. She found it funny that a British Jew whose ancestors fled that part of the world to find liberty now had to go there to find freedom of artistic expression. As someone who lived and worked in Eastern Europe for 11 years, I could have told her they all recognise what’s happening to us from their recent experience of Communism. They are both inoculated against Soviet thinking and horrified that the West is falling back into it in a slightly different guise.

After lunch I listened to Peter Hitchens in conversation with Austin Williams on the topic “A Revolution Betrayed.”  He has written a book about the destruction of selective education in Britain. I can’t say there was a debate. To the evident frustration of his interlocutor, all contributions from the floor were supportive of his view that this had been a massive mistake and that British state education is a disgrace. Asked how to fix it, he said “that’s up to you, I’ll be dead soon.”  In his view it can’t be fixed without overturning the leftist cultural revolution that has transformed the country since the 1960s and given us an Establishment that rumbles leftwards regardless of how we vote.

My next session was “I dissent! Challenging the Culture of Conformism”, featuring Peter Boghossian, Jennie Bristow, Abbot Jamison, Helen Joyce and Lord Moylan. This was one of the most interesting discussions. It seems to me that the radical progressivism of what Frank Furedi calls “the pronoun elite” has done civilisation one favour. In refusing to engage with people who believe in free speech, they’ve pushed us together to have more discussions than we might have had without them. This weekend, old-style Labour, traditional Conservatives and classical liberals like me have engaged in polite but forthright discussions of the issues of the day.

My final session was chaired by Claire Fox. The title was “Against Fatalism: How can we create a new Enlightenment?” 

Professor Jonathan I. Israel set out the characteristics of the original Enlightenment.

Munira Mirza of Civic Future told a story of dining with a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who is involved with creating a new town in California. He told her that if you say to someone in the Valley you’re working on general AI they’ll assume it’s possible and will congratulate you. Tell them you’re building a new city however and they’ll say “you’re crazy! You’ll never get permission!” That illustrates the failure of our political system. Our politics are broken, our young are in despair and people are looking for scapegoats. Our universities are place of conformism and you can’t have a new enlightenment if you’re not thinking. 

She said we’re a society that gives a lot of status to the “sneering professions” who deconstruct and criticise, rather than people who build.

Frank Furedi said that the original Enlightenment was as good as it gets in terms of the progress of ideas, but was subject to a shared anti democratic idea, which favoured aristocracy.

Guest speaker Coleman Hughes (of podcast Conversations with Coleman) said when we really need to apply Enlightenment values was when the issue under discussion raised our blood pressure. When the subject makes us uncomfortable is precisely the moment to lean in and have courage.  

Coleman also said that in Pirates of the Caribbean there’s a scene where Captain Jack Sparrow sails by a gallows with pirates left swinging as a warning to others. In truth, very few pirates were caught so the warning was hollow. In a similar way, if someone is cancelled we all sail past the horror show of their punishment on Twitter or other social media. That’s meant as a warning too, to discourage us from speaking our minds. We need to remind ourselves that most people are not cancelled and steel ourselves to be brave and speak out.

That’s as good a summary of the message of the weekend as any!

Back in 2012 I attended an earlier version of this event at the Barbican. It was depressing and things have not improved on the liberty front since then. In fact our “Conservative” government has made things considerably worse. This year's festival is at Church House in Westminster. 


Ben Delo opened the keynote by commending Claire Fox of the Academy of Ideas for staging these festivals. He then depressed me by citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the beginning (rather than as seems to me more likely, the eventual end) of the right to free speech. It doesn’t help if the advocates of fundamental freedoms believe they are in the gift of governments, rather than being the inalienable natural right of every human. Where those rights are denied, it is governments that do so.

He and Claire Fox both referenced The Westminster Declaration, which may perhaps be a beginning in the fight back for free speech.  

In her keynote address, Fox spoke of the dark cloud over this event from the recent pogrom in Israel.

The first session I attended went straight to the point of my current despair by asking the question “who really rules today?”  Matt Goodwin author of “Values, Voice and Virtue” said there is a crisis of morality and authority among our ruling elites. Our old establishment was not really ideological. However from the 1970s we’ve seen its authority drain away. The new British Establishment that has replaced it is highly ideological. It is searching desperately for moral legitimacy after 40 years of failure on every front. Only 20% of the British public shares its values so we’ve now entered a post-democratic era in which voters feel both unrepresented and disrespected.

Pamela Dow, of Civic Future, an ex civil servant, said we might tolerate the elite more if they were elite. But they’re not. They’re hopeless. Her organisation was founded to change that;

Our goal is to identify and empower a wide range of talented young people with the tools to be effective in public service, in all its forms. We will host a range of events and activities to broaden and deepen the understanding and capabilities of all those in, or considering, public life. For example, we will convene informed debates on the defining political and philosophical issues of the day, and practical sessions on effective politics and government. 

Anand Manon was not convinced. He said talk about "elites" is an excuse for the incompetence of a very powerful government that prefers to do "soundbite politics" rather than govern competently. 

Harry Lambert of New Statesman said the problem wasn’t the cultural left but the economic right. He trotted out the old Labour line on redistribution of wealth by taxation as if it was just after the war. To listen to his naive nonsense, you'd never have believed that our oppressed productive minority is already taxed so heavily to fund a massive state that many are shrugging their shoulders and giving up. The poorest US State is now richer per capita than the UK.

My later question from the floor was to ask him where the time machine was parked that had brought him from 1948. Claire Fox, in the chair, accidentally revealed her idea of what taxes are for when she responded to my observation that I’d been taxed to death and my money given to people I detest by saying “I was with you until you said that - I’ve been on the dole a few times.” Of course it’s not benefit claimants I resent my earnings being given to, but such parasites as woke civil servants and state-funded social science  professors intent on destroying our civilisation!

Frank Furedi challenged Lambert's daft idea that the economic world was unaffected by the elites' culture wars by referring to the Harvard Business Review, which these days reads like it was written by a Marxist sociology lecturer. The “pronoun elite” is completely in charge. They seek cultural hegemony by demoting us from citizens to passive "stakeholders" in various neat categories, which (rather than reason or intellect) govern our every thought. The real question, he said, is how do we get our voice back so we can decide the future of our society.

All I really gained from the first session was that I need to read Matt Goodwin’s book.

There was some degree of agreement (except from the young idiot from the New Statesman) that we’d gone too far in suppressing speech. Even he, in fairness, said he didn’t defend the radical progressive extremists (though I suspect he just wanted to change the subject back to his pet theme of increased redistribution of wealth from "the rich" who will of course just sit still as the percentage of their earnings taken from them by state force is even further increased). I really wished I could introduce him to my many friends from Poland with whom I worked on reconstruction of their nation's economy after growing up under state socialism. Not that I think Lambert would learn anything from them, but just because they would find him hilarious!

The second session was about privacy. It was interesting but, as always, there was no clear plan as to how to solve the various problems. My impression was simply that I trusted no one on the panel to “solve” anything on this subject without creating much worse problems in terms of increased state power. We don't need government, from whom we really need privacy, to "protect" us from corporations who merely want to target us more accurately with advertisements for stuff we might (unlike most state "services") actually want.

After lunch, I changed to the economy strand to listen to discussion about ESG and whether it’s bad for business. I was able to offer an anecdote from my own business life on the subject. This was a more heartening discussion. Only one of the panelists made any attempt to justify ESG as a way to help business make better decisions. Most accepted (as did every questioner from the floor) that it was a burden on business, which tended to make everything more expensive to no measurable good effect. The general view seemed to be that ESG investing was a luxury that had thrived while money was cheap. As the cost of capital is now rising faster than at any time in history, it seems likely that this nonsense on stilts will be cut down. There is pressure on government to reform it. 

I was a business lawyer for decades and I literally don’t care what’s “good for business.” Businesses only exist to serve their customers well in order to deliver a return to shareholders on their investment. History shows us what’s best for those customers is for business to have as much competition (and therefore as many difficulties) as possible. What customers don't need is government adding to that burden by creating bullshit rules to make it look as though they're helping. That's what ESG is.

Just as most HR employees are, in truth, enforcement officials for labour laws and most Finance Department employees are tax collectors for VAT and PAYE income tax, ESG staff are – whether employees or consultants – state officials that companies are forced to pay for. If this hidden cadre of employees who do not serve businesses' customers, employees or owners in any productive way and exist only to exert control on behalf of the state was counted as part of the civil service, the true scope of state power would be horrifyingly apparent. 

I observed in this discussion that governments seem mostly to have given up on the traditional socialist goal of owning the means of production. They're happy to leave businesses in private hands as long as they are entirely directed towards the state's goals. There's a name for that corporatist approach and it's "fascism".

I spent the rest of the afternoon watching a recording of "Free Speech Nation" for GB News, presented by Andrew Doyle of Titiana McGrath fame. That will be televised this Sunday at 7pm apparently. It included a shocking interview with Australian MP Moira Deeming about her experience of being expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party there, after being denounced by the party leadership as a Nazi. She plans to sue them for defamation and I hope she wins. 

Another interesting interview was with Melissa Chen and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar of Ideas Beyond Borders an organisation "founded by two immigrants to the United States from Iraq and Singapore who made their life mission to make critical thinking, liberty and science accessible to people worldwide". Apparently more books are translated into Spanish every year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years and in Iraq (where Faisal was born) there are more books banned than are read. They seek to translate key censored texts to make them available to readers in countries where they are forbidden. Even in somewhere like Iran, people are able to use VPN to get around tech restrictions to access forbidden information.

Faisal offered the interesting perspective that he preferred to deal with open, strict censorship where he knew what ideas would get him into trouble than with the current cancel culture in the West where the boundaries are constantly shifting. 

My favourite part of the day was the interview with US philosopher (and cancelled academic) Peter Boghossian. In September 2021, he resigned from Portland State University, citing harassment and a lack of intellectual freedom. He explained to us that the university had simply made it impossible for him to do his job. He gave a harrowing account of process as punishment, explaining that repeated "investigations" into his alleged breaches had wasted huge chunks of his life. He didn't believe (though Governor DeSantis in Florida, among others, is trying) that it would be possible to regain control of the old universities in the States from radical "progressives". He thought it was going to be necessary to establish new institutions in parallel.

The lady sitting next to me had left her seat just before shooting began saying she'd be back in a moment and asking me to look after her bag. She seemed innocent enough but when she failed to return, I became concerned. Reluctantly, as I didn't want to disrupt the event, I spoke quietly to one of the GB News staff. I must say I was very impressed with how the matter was then handled. A few minutes later, two security guys showed up and discreetly asked me to identify the package I was concerned about. They then thanked me for my vigilance and quietly took it away. I don't think even the people immediately around me were aware that there'd been any kind of security problem. I stayed right to the end and the lady never did return. If I was mistaken about her, I hope she got her bag and coat back!

The tedious process of shooting and re-shooting the segments of the show caused a time over-run of more than an hour so I was late home tonight and exhausted. Still I managed to finish this blog– although it was after midnight before I posted it.

I plan to return for the second day and report my experience. 

I am attending the Freedom Association's conference on this subject at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster today. I am here in the hope of recovering some optimism on this subject. As I wait for proceedings to begin I frankly despair.

It’s not a good sign that TFA had to conceal the location of the event until the last moment. Nor is the fact that, at 66 years old, I’m one of the younger people in the audience. It looks like a nostalgia-fest for what we’ve lost, rather than a rally to fight the good fight.

The usual suspects are here. David Campbell-Bannerman, TFA chair. Mark Littlewood, outgoing Director-General of the IEA. Baroness Fox of my home town in Wales, Director of the Academy of Ideas. Nigel Farage. Dr David Starkey. I’ve heard them all speak before. Their hearts are good, no doubt, but they (and I, in my tiny way) are the very people who — I fear — lost this battle before we even knew we were fighting it.

Hope springs eternal of course. I have never more desperately wanted to be wrong. Let’s hope I can report something to lift the spirits of the would-be free. Watch this cyberspace.

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!

Two svelte American ladies of a certain age were having coffee today at my West London health club. They were in the next "pod" to me outdoors as I had a post-swim coffee before heading home. Perhaps it's those wide-open prairies but Americans, bless them, always speak a little more loudly than us so I didn't really have a choice but to listen to their conversation.

The topic was their mothers. Both moms back in the States are apparently unsure of the wisdom of being vaccinated. One cost of parenthood no-one tells you about beforehand is that one day you will be judged and found wanting by humans you could not love more; your children for whom you would cheerfully die. I confess their mothers immediately had my sympathy, regardless of the correctness of their views.

There was a good deal of sneering about conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. I found it surprising that both errant moms believed 5G was involved, but having listened quietly for another few minutes discovered that neither had ever said so. Their daughters were simply assuming that if they doubted government advice on vaccines, they believed all the other stuff too. One of the mothers is apparently a 9/11 "truther" and her daughter's observation that no government is capable of keeping such a dark secret struck me as fair. 

I have read all I can about the vaccines. As a lawyer I was uneasy that – whereas normally pharmaceutical companies complain of the time taken by regulators to license new medicines – in this case they were only prepared to release them so quickly if governments indemnified them against claims for adverse side effects. They were not prepared to stand behind their products and that concerned me. I was also concerned that, while I am sure regulatory regimes in America and the UK involve much pointless bureaucracy, delay and legal overkill, they were being swept aside so casually. I have no medical expertise, but my legal training made me uneasy.

Britain has been pretty quick in vaccinating its population, but (fortunately or otherwise – only time will tell) it was not the quickest. I read what I could about the effects of the vaccines in Israel and, based on that data, made a risk assessment in favour of being vaccinated. My concerns are still there, but I made a choice. I could easily have chosen the other way and I respect the opinions of those (like my fellow health club members' mothers) who did.

There are available facts and facts that will only become available in the future. People must make their choices based on their own risk assessment today. That useless truism is not the point of this post. The truly significant thing I overheard was this. Having sneered at her mother's belief that "we can't trust government", one of the ladies said;

I thought to myself – Mom, I don't want to believe what you believe because if it's true I can't have any of the things I believe in.

There, I thought, was a moment of insight; a moment (almost) of self-awareness. If government can't be trusted, then the societal change she wants isn't possible. Therefore, whatever the evidence, government must be trusted. That pretty much sums up the statist mindset. 

I don't know whether these mothers or daughters are right about this issue. I do know that one of the daughters (and her companion seemed to agree) is allowing her desires to displace her reason. In consequence, sadly, her mind will only ever be changed by a catastrophe I would never wish upon her.

I suspect many such earnest, well-meaning souls as Goneril and Regan (as I christened them) felt they needed to believe the state could be trusted at key points in the deadly history of the 20th Century. If the brave new world of Communism was to happen, for example, government had to be trusted with enormous power to make immense change.

Many Gonerils and Regans must have ruefully reflected on that in the Gulag.

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 was brought up to respect policemen. I still do. Even a libertarian state would ask good people to put themselves in harm’s way to enforce its few laws. The harm they do is rarely the fault of the (mostly) good policemen enforcing our current monstrous state’s thousands of bad laws. 

The same can be said for judges. They have an honest, important and necessary job to do that is foundational for civilisation but also apply and interpret thousands of laws that should simply not be. Their hands are dirty but it’s not their fault. Our soldiers too and perhaps (though here it gets murkier) even some of our civil servants.  

Though my conscience might still (just) handle being a judge (and relish the chance to lean hard toward Liberty in interpreting our laws) I couldn’t be a civil servant, soldier or policeman in modern Britain any more than I could be a politician for a mainstream statist party. I could not serve a gangster state that interfered with the citizenry’s freedom while violently extorting from it the money to pay me and hope to sleep at nights. 

Which raises the awkward question, who can? Being a judge, a soldier or a policeman is noble enough (and a civil servant harmless enough) in principle but to choose such a career serving the states we have now is morally questionable at least. Watch the French police currently beating up the gilets jaunes, for example. You’ll need to scour YouTube as the MSM is oddly reticent on the subject. These thugs are not conscripts. Each studied, applied, trained and freely signed a contract. Why would a decent human choose to do that job?

We have been watching Kiefer Sutherland’s Netflix show “Designated Survivor” and enjoying it well enough. I view it as the entertaining  tosh it is intended to be but wince at its po-faced portrayal of its heroes. They are cynical foes of Liberty and (literally) murderous enemies of the Rule of Law but we are expected to see them as paragons of selfless virtue. Given the boundless power of modern Western states, and the extent of their control over our personal lives, just who else would we expect to work for them but narcissists and sociopaths?

A children’s home (or church trusted by parents with their children) needs to be particularly alert to the possibility of child abusers wanting to work there. A powerful state should be similarly so about sociopaths. Neither our children’s homes, churches nor governments seem to have shown any such concern. I fear the abusers are now in charge of recruitment. 

This at least partly accounts for the relentless “mission creep” of the modern state. It certainly accounts for “Conservative” ministers, surfing smug tides of Liberty-minded rhetoric, interfering in the minutiae of our lives indistinguishably from openly authoritarian Labourites. There was a time when a moral man like this would become a civil servant but the people who staff our state now lack — almost by definition — any moral scruples about its rôle.

Please tell me I am wrong in this pessimistic analysis. If not, how can we hope peacefully and democratically to roll back the power of the state? If we can’t, then how does the story of our civilisation end?