I hesitate to opine on a war involving Russia. I lived and worked there. I have Russian friends and am on record as admiring its culture (arguably the most artistically complete of any human civilisation) and its people. I am open to slurs that this translates into sympathy for its utterly despicable government. It really doesn’t. I wish — for what that’s worth — it would lose this war. The invasion of Ukraine was morally wrong. Ukraine’s defensive struggle is just and brave.

We’ve lived at peace for so long, thank God, that — outside military families — most Britons’ experience of war is limited to movies in which good guys win in the face (for dramatic effect) of overwhelming odds. The plucky and virtuous vanquish evil at the end of an elegant dramatic arc involving some maverick who defies the orders of idiot commanders to snatch a noble victory.

War just isn’t like that. Might is not right, but it prevails. Britain can be proud of plucky ancestors who, for a while, stood alone — just as Ukrainians do right now — against a superior enemy. The courage of the Few made ultimate victory possible but World War 2 would have been lost were it not for the intervention of allies (including Russians under the only contemporary leader viler than Hitler) prepared to fight and die at our side. Pluck was great. Moral superiority was noble. Greater force won.

So when I read that Ukrainian troops are outnumbered ten to one on parts of their frontline and when I recall the Russian military’s historic contempt for the value of its own soldiers’ lives, I sigh at the assumption that President Trump in suing for peace is siding with the monster Putin. Those attacking him never advocated allying with Ukraine in more than name. They would call him crazy if he despatched so much as one Cruise missile. What they’re demanding is more meaningless solidarity by gesture; the geopolitical equivalent of a Ukrainian flag on their country’s Facebook profile.

When Biden promised to stand by Ukraine, it was gesture politics of the most expensive kind. He commanded the most powerful armed forces the world has ever known but planned to send neither troops nor airstrikes nor missiles. He sent only taxpayer dollars to sustain Ukraine’s war effort to its inevitable end. He and his NATO allies praised Ukraine and raised its flags on their town halls while being prepared to watch that plucky nation fight to its last man.

I am not advocating World War 3 on Russia. I don’t think the democracies of the West have popular support for that. American and British mothers aren’t ready to see their sons die for a far off, corrupt nation of little economic significance. Even French and German mothers are not prepared to waste Anglo lives they might later need to defend their own borders. For that’s how — in truth — Continental Europe sees NATO. They’ve long avoided the full economic cost of defending themselves and grown fat and complacent under US protection, while failing even to meet the modest defence commitments they make. They sneer at the naïve, unsophisticated Yanks while relying on them for defence.

Germany under Merkel pursued a suicidally stupid energy policy of increasing dependence on Russia, without worrying about what that might mean for the future. Deep down lay the unspoken, perhaps subconscious assumption that Germany’s safety is for idiot Yanks and their inselaffen (island apes) sidekicks to die for. If making the crazy Green Party happy made that more likely or difficult, so be it. As a partner in a pan-European business, I experienced these attitudes first hand, I also, by the way, experienced visceral hatred of Russia from at least one Ukrainian colleague.

I was living and working in Warsaw when Poland applied to join NATO and I heard how my Polish colleagues viewed that. They wanted shelter under America’s nuclear umbrella from their historic foe to the East. I wasn’t sure it was wise to give it as I feared they didn’t grasp the “no first strike” defensive doctrine at the heart of the alliance. Asked by an official of our Foreign Office what I thought, I said I worried the Poles might bait the Russian bear once under American protection. She told me our then Foreign Secretary had the same concern, but that the US view would prevail. In fairness to Poland, it’s been a responsible and compliant member. It passed a key test when stray Russian missiles landed on its territory and it accepted it was an error. It has also always paid its dues.

Nonetheless the most cynical thing the West under the leadership of Biden did was holding out the hope of NATO membership to Ukraine when the present war is over. They never expected a Ukrainian victory and were not prepared to fight for one, so that was gesture politics of the most despicable kind. In the miraculous eventuality of Ukrainian victory, I would still counsel against introducing a poisonous historical enmity into a purely defensive alliance.

Until we admitted ex-Warsaw Pact countries into NATO it consisted entirely of nations who would welcome peace with a prosperous and successful Russia as a full member of the Free World. Admitting members with powerful historical grievances against Russia merely fuelled the paranoia of the military and intelligence elites there, of which Putin — an ex-KGB spy inside a NATO country — was a typical member. That paranoia was already inflamed after the collapse of the Soviet Union by the failure to wind NATO up. It was an anti-USSR alliance, they argued, so the need for it had ended. If history had ended in the triumph of democracy, why keep the West’s nukes pointed East?

I personally feel it was just another example, familiar to all libertarians, of a governmental (in this case multi-governmental) agency not accepting the need for its own dissolution and the consequent loss of tax-funded jobs. Create an agency against poverty and you ensure the constant redefinition of poverty so bureaucrats can keep on working against it. The less actual need for their jobs there is, the more attractive their jobs become! How perfectly wonderful then, from the point of view of the parasitical class, to be a well paid employee of a military alliance that not only never had to fight but now had no actual foe!

From the American public’s point of view, the end of the Cold War was bound to weaken support for the NATO alliance. It could rest on the laurels of its “victory” for a while but they were bound to question the cost of it while peace prevailed. Putin saved the asses of the NATO bureaucracy by invading Ukraine. He made Russia a threat again. Without his insanity, President Trump might now be calling for NATO’s dissolution, rather than just complaining about most of the other members hitching a free ride by failing to meet their commitments.

My sympathies are with the peoples of Ukraine and Russia, both of whom live under corrupt governments and political systems that — even more than elsewhere — gamify evil. No military outcome of this war will change that, alas. Only the Russian and Ukrainian peoples can sort out their oppressors and I hope one day that they do. For now, President Trump is morally right to seek peace, rather than keep extending the slaughter with pointless, expensive gestures. As for leaving the European nations out of the discussion, they have nothing to contribute. When you’re cowering uselessly behind your big friend, you don’t get to tell him how to fight. Sorry. Step up and do your bit or keep your annoying whimpering to a minimum.

I don’t know if President Trump will succeed in securing a decent peace or even if his tactics so far are the best. I know he’s right to try and I know the interests of the European members of NATO are best-served by somehow keeping the long-suffering American taxpayers he represents onside. Perhaps even by - quelle horreur — meeting their obligations?

A state is a regional monopoly of legal violence. It is a necessary evil and should therefore be constrained. If it is allowed to become too large, the resulting concentration of power will attract the worst members of society to work within it. These are not statements of political theory. This is written into the political history of the United Kingdom in recent decades. At its root, I would argue, is a failure of democracy itself. And not just a failure of politicians in power. A well-functioning democracy requires an effective opposition.

When I was a boy, there was a scandal going on in the children’s homes of North Wales where I grew up. It might as well have been Communist China for all the chance there was of any party but Labour ever winning an election there. North Wales was a one party state. If you know you’re always going to win, you also know there’s no chance of ever being held to account.

Paedophiles were able to take over the running of local children’s homes. Public sector workers are Labour’s favourite children (the party is pretty much the political wing of the public sector unions) and — as long as no one ever accused them of being bloody Tories (growing up there, I never heard the word  “Tories” without “bloody” or “fucking” in front of it) — they could use the children as they pleased. They could operate the homes as brothels, providing children for sex at will. And they did.

In the context of the current Muslim rape-gangs story, let’s make clear that this was a pre-immigration horror. The victims and criminals were almost all white. I’m not making a point about about race or religion here. The common factor is state power unchallenged by effective and informed opposition. Every community has monsters in its midst. It’s the job of government to protect vulnerable citizens from them. In both these cases, government prioritised its own reputation over the protection of innocent working-class children. Why?

What was done to those children in the North Wales children’s homes, and what has been done to the children in the rape gangs scandal across the country, was in each case a serious crime. The problem is not the law but that a corrupt and unchallenged state apparatus failed to enforce it. This time it’s happened, not just in Labour strongholds, but across the UK. Why?

I would argue the the apparatus of the British State is out of political control. The Deep State, Establishment or permanent staff of the state is its own thing — operating in the perceived interests — not of the citizens it’s supposed to serve — but of its own members. Therefore, even in areas of the country where opposition politicians might be expected to scrutinise the performance of their opponents, nothing can be done to oppose the state apparatus itself. 

Thanks to the unexpected intervention of a foreign billionaire, an issue the apparatchiks have successfully suppressed for decades has come unexpectedly to the forefront. Government is making concessions — authorising funds for piddling pretend enquiries. They will be staffed (as would a full national enquiry) by people who can expect future honours and benefits from the state if they take long years to bury the issues in Egyptian-scale pyramids of bullshit.

The only thing that should happen now is what should have happened in the first place. All offenders should be prosecuted without fear or favour and with zero regard to their culture or ethnicity. If I were PM, I would appoint a credible recently-retired police commissioner and allocate a budget of a billion quid or so to organise investigations and prosecutions nationwide to bring the offenders to justice. Including, by the way, the policemen, school teachers, social workers, council officials and other apparatchiks who were accessories after the fact to the offences of statutory rape. They didn’t rape the children themselves but, in assisting the rapists to escape justice, they became parties to the crime and should sit in the same dock with the alleged rapists as their co-defendants.

Nothing short of that will do. No number of enquiries, august pronouncements or— God help us — “lessons to be learned” will suffice. Justice must be done, must be seen to be done and must be seen to be possible even where the over privileged employees of an over mighty state are concerned.

Everyone who ever participated in the leftist orthodoxy of identity-politics is to blame for the near-total impunity of the Muslim rape gangs in Britain. As I reported here, when I was a young solicitor in Nottingham, a police sergeant told me I was "part of the problem." I had a choice between believing what he told me about "honour killings" in that city or preserving my good standing as an anti-racist liberal. I chose the latter. I feared my career prospects and social standing would be jeopardised (they would have been) if I accepted his honest account. I called a good man a racist (mentally equating him with the likes of Nick Griffin and recoiling in fear from the association) when he was just horrified (as any decent human should be) by young women being murdered.

In that moment, I very much was "part of the problem" and I am profoundly ashamed of that. It is fortunate that – unlike the politicians, local councillors, social-workers and police officers who should have brought the rape gangs or the "honour" killers to justice (or prevented both phenomenona altogether) – I had no occasion ever to make any real life choices on the matter. I believe – faced with actual evidence – I would have made better ones, but the way I failed the good sergeant's test that long-ago day in the early 1980s proves I would have wanted to look the other way, just as they actually did. 

I am not still playing the stupid rainbows and unicorns game of cultural moral equivalence (still less the foul Critical Race Theory game of cultural moral hierarchy) when I make the point that the young white working class girls in our cities have not been the only victims of multiculturalism. Those murdered Muslim girls who (so the sergeant told me) had paraffin poured over them and were burned to death were victims too. It was racist to refuse to consider that their Muslim dads, uncles and brothers might murder them because of their primitive religious and cultural notions. It was racist for our authorities to treat Muslim men who gang-raped white girls differently than they would have treated others. It was racist to cover up these horrors in order to protect the myth – shamefully repeated just days ago in his annual Christmas message by His Majesty the King – that multiculturalism has been an overall benefit to Britain.

Some of us have been making these points as best we can for a long time. Many of us had given up, if we're honest. It was clear that the official narrative that we were racists and that these stories were disinformation – a "moral panic" as Wikipedia puts it – was going to prevail. Until recently the key social media market of ideas – Twitter – was controlled by the Left and attempts to raise the issue were likely to be memory-holed by their private sector woke equivalent of Orwell's MiniTru.

Miraculously, Elon Musk – a modern Edison, with plenty to occupy him besides our concerns about free speech – bought Twitter and (in one of history's greatest acts of philanthropy) set it free at his own personal expense. He told advertisers who sought to maintain its old Newspeak regime to "go fuck themselves." Miraculously he got involved in the issue not just in America (where the Constitution gives him some basis for hope) but in Britain too.

My British Constitution textbook at law school illustrated the supremacy of our Parliament by jokingly saying that it could – in law – make a man into a woman. Little did its authors know that dimwit politicians would later prove the educational point of their joke by making it real. Our constitution – as a result of centuries of struggle with the monarchy, which Parliament decisively won – can be summarised in just three words – "Parliament is supreme"

Our Supreme Court's name is Blairite NewSpeak. It is not supreme at all. Any crap that Parliament chooses to inflict upon us is law – however destructive, immoral or vile it may be. The COVID-19 pandemic smashed the last romantic delusions of the likes of me, Lord Sumption and the long-dead authors of that textbook that customary constitutional checks and balances constrained Parliament. They just didn't. If some charlatan had convinced our MPs that executing gingers would stop the spread of the virus, they could have legislated a Ginger Shoah - and it would have been good law. I am horrified to admit – based on their conduct in recent decades – that I think the police constables I was brought up to respect and regard as my protectors would have rounded them up without moral pause.

While the rape gang horrors were partly the fault of legislators, who could and should have acted, they were not the fault of legislation. Our laws on this subject are good. What was done to those young girls was a crime. Just as the honour killings were crimes. The failure was not of the Law but of the apparatus of Britain's Deep State – its political and administrative Establishment. A blind eye was turned on political grounds. A system of two-tier justice arose – under the leadership of #TwoTierKier as the country's chief prosecutor – not because of the Law itself, but its wilful non-enforcement. Thousands of British girls have been raped and God knows how many have been murdered because thousands of our so-called servants wilfully failed in their duties. And they did so out of contempt for us. Our children didn't matter to them as much as their careers and their social standing. 

There is no hope for the nations of the UK or for British society if those Deep State apparatchiks cannot – now that the issue has been raised so forcefully by Mr Musk – finally be brought to justice. Nothing short of a massive relocation from the corridors of power to those of our prisons will suffice - to be followed by an even greater purge of our civil service.

There is also no hope for our future unless the underlying issue of mass immigration of undesirables can now be openly and honestly discussed and addressed. A recent poll conducted by the Muslim Council of Britain reveals that one third of Britain's Muslim residents are thinking of leaving. They clearly fear we are awaking from the moral slumber of "woke".

Let's prove them right. 

Labour appoints 200 ‘cronies’ to Civil Service.

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 hope you had a pleasant Christmas and that it's not too late to wish you a happy new year. I hardly feel able to call myself a blogger now, given how infrequently I post. I blogged because I thought it better to light a candle than curse the darkness, but public support for our state's response to COVID-19 now seems to suggest modern Britons love the dark. 

It's hard to know what to write of the present situation. In a democracy no wise elector expects perfectly-right choices. We try to select the least bad of those on offer but what are we to do, say or think when government is wrong and opposition only demands it should be more so?

I confidently believe that historians will one day bracket the story of COVID-19 with those of the South Sea Bubble, the Salem Witch trials, and Tulip Mania. That's not to say the virus is not real or serious. It is. There was a South Sea Company. There was a trade in tulips. There may even have been witches in Salem. It's not the fact of the virus that I dispute but the validity, efficacy and morality of our response to it.

We are now many months into the "two weeks to save the NHS" in Britain and still that powder puff of a hulking institution is not safe. Not, at least, according to the rent-seekers who live upon it or the political types for whom it is the most sacred of all cows. It's certainly not safe for its customers. Many of those who caught the virus did so in its hallowed halls or in the care homes to which its angels of death despatched them for said angels' convenience and/or protection. In a classic example of Bastiat's notion of the error of focussing on the seen versus the unseen, our entire funded-by-state-force medical system is concentrating (with a remarkable lack of success even by its own low standards) on one virus while paying the least possible attention to all other ills.

I must move in unusual circles. Only one couple in my group of contemporaries is in the "lock us up, we're scared" camp to which opinion polls suggest most Britons belong. My other friends and family my age and older agree with me. None of us think there's a conspiracy. None of us deny the virus is real and dangerous. None of us question the need for a public health policy response to COVID-19. But all of us agree that the British Establishment is drunk with power and gleefully revelling in its unconstrained exercise. All of us agree that terrible damage is being done, not to some abstraction called "the Economy", but to the life expectancy of cancer, heart disease and other patients, to the livelihoods and future employment prospects of business-people and their employees, to children's education, to the mental health of people (and especially young people) denied healthy social outlets, and to the liberties of us all. All of us agree that the legions of the state are using this epidemic to bolster their power, increase their funding (and their numbers) and in many cases to enjoy even more well-paid leisure than usual; to make sinecures of jobs that were scarcely onerous to begin with.

I have tried to follow my own advice to my elders frustrated by this situation. "You are not in charge here. These mistakes are not yours. Focus on the joys you still have and remember that you're well-off compared to people really suffering. Read a good book. Read some poetry. Phone a friend. This too will pass." It's good advice because if I think about the political situation, I tend to despair. I am saddened that the liberties I praised and defended were so chimerical. At the first plausible pretext, the men of power suspended them so comprehensively that it seems they never existed. They were mere indulgences permitted to us by our masters rather than (as I had always thought) our inalienable rights as humans.

The man whose name I hubristically usurped as my nom de blog spoke of "the times that try mens' souls" to rouse his contemporaries to action. So faint a shadow am I that I am close to admitting my own soul has been tried and found wanting. The best encouragement I can offer is this. When the truth emerges, as it must, and the consequences of policy responses to this pandemic become apparent to the meanest of intellects, there will be the best opportunity in modern history to expose both the evil effects of statism and the wicked, self-serving natures of many within the state apparatus.

Keep your powder dry, fellow-citizens, and repeat under your breath Tom's wish that “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” Let's strive to ensure that the gross misconduct of our authorities finally reveals to our young people (so sadly indoctrinated to the contrary by state-funded teachers and Marxist academics) Tom's truth that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

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. 

To call the Benn Act the “Surrender Act” is to incite violence against those who enacted it, according to Labour. The Act was designed (as its sponsors would tell you) to ensure the UK does not leave the EU without some variant of the “withdrawal agreement” previously “negotiated” by Mrs May and thrice rejected by this Zombie Parliament. That agreement was famously described by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis as;

”...a deal that a nation signs only after having been defeated at war”

So, if accurately describing an Act of Parliament is all it takes to provoke anger against you, perhaps that anger is righteous? If you are prepared to enact all sorts of radical policies on the basis of mere pluralities, but thwart the decision of an actual majority of the British People, then perhaps you have invited their wrath?

Neither the Conservative Party nor Labour has, since the War, ever secured a majority of the national vote. The Conservatives secured 55% in 1931.

Labour’s highest percentage post-war was 48% in 1951. The Conservatives’ highest share of the vote was 49.7% in 1955. Neither has achieved 52% post-war and no likely victory in the imminent General Election will give a popular mandate approaching that.

If the Liberal “Democrats” win a majority in Parliament and revoke the Article 50 notice, 40-something percent of the electorate will have thwarted 50-something percent. The anger then would be hard to contain and would be stoked to dangerous levels by the smug triumphalism of the Remain Ultras and the EU imperialists. You saw their sneering grins outside the Supreme Court this week. You saw Verhofstadt’s tweets. Imagine them if they win.

The Referendum was necessary precisely because the constitutional issue of EU membership cut across party lines. A big majority was secured for Remain in 1975 (including my very first vote) because the “Common Market” was seen as a benign liberalisation of international trade. Discontent was seething at the steady mutation of that Common Market into a proto-state. No government had ever asked the British People to approve that change. Most indications were that they wouldn’t have approved.  

Leavers ranged from libertarians like me, through patriotic statists of right, left and centre to the hard left of the Labour Party and indeed the Communist Party. Reasons for leaving ranged from principled objections to an over mighty state to a desire to escape EU restrictions on “state aid” that prevented an even mightier state. That’s why, when Remainers ask “...but what do Brexiteers want?” we can’t answer with a political programme. Our only honest answer is “...whatever the future political direction of the UK might be — it should be decided by people we can sack if they annoy us.”

Boy oh boy, are the people in charge in both Westminster and Brussels annoying us now! We want an election to sack as many of them as we can. For so long as they deny us that, they are relying on our decency and good manners to sleep easily in the beds we have feathered so lavishly for them. They’d better hope we are more decent than them and have far better manners than they have exhibited in their sneering, supercilious and dismissive campaigns against us. And far better manners than Labour’s Shadow Chancellor.

The violence of his discourse makes “humbug” seem rather gentle, no? But then it is always “one rule for us...” with them. 

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?

I thought taking part in the Leave march to Parliament Square might have been my last political act. As I wrote afterwards, it actually gave me hope again. 

The old political tribes in Britain are in trouble and deserve to be. They have long taken their members, supporters and voters for granted; becoming steadily more divorced from the everyday lives of most Brits. They were smugly secure that most of us would keep voting for one or the other of their parties regardless. So they could safely ignore us while they grew their power and enriched themselves by steadily growing the public payroll and the National Debt. They turned their backs on us and forgot we were here. 

I never deluded myself about the nature of democracy. Grandiosity about “government of the people, by the people and for the people” made me smile. I take Tony Benn’s more practical view as stated in the last of his famous "five questions"

“The House will forgive me for quoting five democratic questions that I have developed during my life. If one meets a powerful person--Rupert Murdoch, perhaps, or Joe Stalin or Hitler--one can ask five questions: what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system.”

Simply, if (and to the precise extent) that a majority of us can succeed in getting rid of any given set of people in power, we have a democracy. The political obsessives and/or moral degenerates who are attracted to the idea of running for office are very unlike the rest of us so the practical point of any democratic system is to keep them honest-ish by forcing them at intervals to appeal to us normals, on pain of peremptory dismissal.

Brexit has broken this model because it transcends the old left/right divide. It’s an issue that speaks to us normals at a very deep level. It goes to our sense of who we are as a set of British nations. These are near-mystical matters that the grasping, narcissistic rogues in office can’t grok. 

If they loved the peoples of Britain, they wouldn’t be feeding on us like so many plump fleas. If they gave the merest damn about our nations or their history or if they had the slightest respect for who we are, they wouldn't ever have wanted to lord it over us. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe dealt more comfortably with their counterparts across the Channel than with the serfs they saw as little more than cattle, so our political masters feel more at home with their parasitical brethren in the EU apparatus than with us. That hugger-muggery has not gone unremarked and has intensified our sense of being ignored at best (and despised at worst) by those elected to serve us. 

In the end, Brexit’s historical importance will have nothing to do with our membership of the EU. That dubious institution will pass in time, with or without us. We would find our way forward in or out of it. The true value of the attempt to leave has been the way it has exposed the terrible weakness of our native institutions. Whether they atrophied because of our EU membership or have just withered from long neglect scarcely matters now. They are rotten, need to be fixed and the people tasked with their maintenance and repair have been shown to be utterly useless.

It's a challenge, but our economy is stronger and our demographics are better than any European rival. Despite Brexit, our legal system and the strength of our financial institutions continues to attract foreign direct investment on a scale our neighbours can only dream of. Once this farce moves on to its next act, the peoples of Britain — armed with their new-found understanding of what fools our masters are — now expect our institutions to undergo as thoroughgoing a refurbishment as the one planned for the physical fabric of the Palace of Westminster.

There is much to be done and new people must be inspired to do it. And new political parties will be needed as all faith in the Conservatives has been destroyed and Labour is a disunited rabble of cowards or fanatics.

Our first chance to put the fear of the fierce God Demos back into the black hearts of our politicians is on Thursday. For us Brits at least, the usually entirely pointless elections to the EU’s ludicrous fig leaf of a pretendy Parliament have an important use this time. This, even though our MEPs are not expected to serve a full term and will certainly be ignored even more than usual until we finally leave the EU. Since the elections are literally about nothing else, we can use them to signal to our wretched government and opposition that our democracy is not to be swatted aside when they don't like what we say.

I have joined and donated to the Brexit Party and will attend its London rally at Olympia tonight. Whether you voted Leave or Remain (and there were respectable arguments each way that no longer need rehearsing) I would urge you to vote for us this week. If you think the vote to Leave was a mistake and you don't give a damn about democracy, then your choice is easy. You must vote LibDem. Otherwise, please vote for The Brexit Party. Not for Brexit but for British democracy itself. Let’s not give the dastard Tories or the fence-sitting Corbynites any room for manoeuvre when they interpret the outcome in planning their General Election campaigns. On Thursday please add your voice to a full-throated roar of righteous popular rage that will make the villains tremble.