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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Thatcher famously quoted Kipling's Norman and Saxon to President Mitterand of France in an EU meeting;

The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, 'This isn't fair dealing,' my son, leave the Saxon alone.

She was trying, perhaps not as delicately as her diplomats would have wished, to explain how the apparently calm British will react – eventually – to being wronged. 

I spent twenty years in three other countries and worked closely in business with people from many more. I have often smiled to myself since returning when I hear British people speak of our unique sense of fair play. It's not unique at all. Everyone has it. We do not own fairness. We do not own tolerance.

We do, however, traditionally pride ourselves on both and the way we see ourselves has shaped our reactions over the last twenty-five years as we welcomed more immigrants than in the previous two millennia. A few years ago I listened quietly to a Bangladeshi friend – a would-be human rights lawyer – talk about racism in our country. I asked her where in the world was a better place to live as a member of an ethnic minority. On reflection, she agreed with me that there is nowhere.

I am not saying we couldn't treat each other better. Of course we could and should try. But let's take a moment, as our streets burn and our elites condemn us as far-right racists, to be proud of how we've behaved in general towards so many new arrivals in such a short time.

Britain, like Europe's other social democracies, was, when this process began, not producing enough children to maintain our population. That wasn't intrinsically a problem. Depopulation would mean cheaper land and housing, more room for nature and a cleaner environment for example. It was however a major problem for our political elites because of what Nye Bevan called "the big dirty secret about the National Insurance Fund." Which is, there is no f***ing fund.

The "from the cradle to the grave" welfare state was a mis-sold insurance product. We and our employers paid something called National Insurance on our salaries, which was supposed to fund benefits when we were sick, unemployed or too old to work. However, none of that money was ever actually set aside and invested. Politicians spent it in ways they thought would win votes. They counted – like the founders of a Ponzi scheme – on future contributors. When they realised those contributors weren't coming in sufficient numbers, they knew their scheme would collapse. The demographic crisis was theirs.

One day history may reveal which politician in the capital of an old European empire realised there was a ready supply of workers in the former colonies. People who spoke our languages and were familiar with our systems of government – because both had been forced on their ancestors. It was a perilous idea that may yet prove to be the end of European civilisation but he must have looked like a genius to his peers.

The doors were opened and cheap labour flooded in. From the lofty heights where the elites survey us, it looked like a perfect solution. On the ground, not always so much. Mostly we've been welcoming, accepting and tolerant. We've sometimes even gone beyond tolerance and flattered our new arrivals that they've enhanced our magnificent old culture with their jerk chicken and curries. 

Yet already when I was a youngster practising criminal law problems had begun to emerge. A custody sergeant with whom I used to chat when waiting to see clients in the cells told me suicide rates among Muslim girls in our Midlands city were disturbingly high. Asked why that was, he said they were not suicides, but honour killings – the first time I'd heard that phrase. No-one, he said, commits suicide by pouring paraffin over themselves and setting themselves alight. It's just too painful.  Muslim men were killing their daughters and sisters. Asked why there were no prosecutions, he said senior police officers made it clear to their subordinates that it was "racist" to suggest the dead girls' families' stories of suicide were untrue.

Fresh out of my university law faculty, I sneered that his bosses were right and he was a racist. I will never forget the last words he said to me;

Young man, then you're part of the problem.

And I was. In that moment, I'd turned away from murdered women to preserve my smug world view. Just as, decades later, council staff and police officers in cities all over Britain turned away from young girls groomed and raped by Muslim men, for fear of being called bad names.

Decades later, our elites are still sneering. Yes, skin colour is irrelevant to moral worth. Yes, other religions can and should be tolerated. Yes, immigration can be a good thing – if managed properly. Our island story is peppered with immigrants who made this a better place. But flooding the country with people who don't even aspire to share our values and doing so at a speed that gives no chance – even if we were trying – to assimilate them into our society, was always crazy.

We've long been cowed into submission. We watched as our present PM "took the knee" in solidarity with one black American thug who sadly died an unlawful death, when he'd said not a word about myriad British victims of grooming gangs or honour killings. We watched swastika-bearing pro-Hamas protestors be protected by police from "obviously Jewish" passers-by who might upset them. We watched police run meekly from violent ethnic minority protests against children being taken into care and heard our elites make excuses. We watched our authorities cave into that violence and hand those children back.

Then, when three innocent girls were recently murdered by a second-generation immigrant, we watched the ferocity of the police response to protests. We thought they'd gone soft. We thought they didn't know how to respond to illegal violence. We were wrong. They know how to do it but only to those who challenge the state's political narrative.

It's been called "two tier policing." That is a mild term indeed for open, shameless injustice. Call it what you like, to come back to Kipling, it isn't fair dealing. That's why anger – simmering quietly for so long – is boiling over now. Terrible things may be done, which I will not support or excuse. I am not going to stoop to our elites' disgusting level by excusing wickedness on identarian grounds. I will just say the British State created this dangerous situation.

Our country didn't become the best place to be in an ethnic minority because we are bad people. Calling us bad names and unleashing the state's thugs on us for crimes so readily excused in others is unjust. The government never shuts up about equality, but the most important equality of all is equality before the law. When that fails, as it is failing, there is good reason to ask once again what it really means to be British – and this time get the answer right. 

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.

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!

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.

The Football Association was asked to light up the iconic arch at Wembley Stadium in the colours of the Israeli flag. They refused. This has been widely condemned. In my view sport should never "do" politics. When a friend asked me to write to the FA in support of the request to light up the arch, I politely refused on those grounds. So, in a sense, I think the FA is right. However, having virtue-signalled relentlessly on other non-sporting issues for years, there is something sinister about the fact that it won't in this case.

The FA had footballers kneel in solidarity with a single foreign criminal who was unlawfully killed, but won't express sympathy with more than a thousand murdered innocents. After the terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, the FA's officials lit up the arch in French colours. They were happy to express the support many of us felt for a nation that, if presented with a big red magic button that would erase England from history, would lose lives in the stampede to press it. Yet they choose to remain neutral between the vicious, anti-semitic, baby-butcherers of Hamas and their victims. 

It was undoubtedly a mistake ever to mix sport with politics. I should not be put into a position at Craven Cottage where the nice young asian guy who sits next to me has to wonder if I am a racist when I don't stand when our players "take the knee." My refusal to acquiesce in virtue-signalling at the behest of the Marxist monsters of BLM isn't racist at all but I am not at the Cottage for a political discussion. I'm there for the joy of sport and an escape from the tedium of my politically-polluted life. I deeply resent the Premier League, Football Association and indeed the club putting me in an awkward political position at a football match.

The truth is that the FA's inconsistency arises from cowardice. On the day of the Hamas invasion, its supporters were dancing for joy (as captured on video by Countdown's Rachel Riley and published on her Twitter feed) on a street 0.6 miles from where I live in West London. According to the 2021 census, our city's cultural diversity is enriched by the presence of 1.3 million adherents of "the religion of peace." Quite a few – it seems from such celebrations – take pleasure in Hamas barbarism. The FA is unsure of how many fall into that category and – given their history of violent response to perceived slights - is afraid to annoy them.

The FA might also be justified in worrying that The Metropolitan Police force service is so afraid of offending British Muslims that – if they did kick off at Wembley in the non-football sense – it wouldn't hold them to the same legal standards as other Londoners. I wouldn't personally be surprised to see the Met – firmly a part of Britain's Leftist Establishment – side with them.

I don't agree with those calling for the police to suppress pro-Hamas celebrations or demonstrations. Hamas is legally designated as a terrorist group in the UK and it is a crime to support them, but I think that's a legal mistake. They are no more revolutionary, violent or bloodthirsty than many social science lecturers in our universities and no-one is calling (nor should they) for their vile Marxist ideology to be suppressed. Besides, I welcome their free speech. As a practical matter, I need to know who are the murderous sorts among my neighbours. I need that knowledge to inform my decisions about my socialising, my shopping and indeed whether I choose to keep living where I do.

I have every confidence in the Israel Defence Force's ability to respond appropriately to Hamas. I am on Israel's side – as every civilised human should now be – and simply wish them (as they would wish themselves) a speedy victory with minimum bloodshed. I am more interested in what I have learned in the past week about the state of my own nation and its capital city. Evil is among us and our response to it is – as evidenced by the FA's pusillanimity – far too naive, timid and weak. I fear we are going to pay a price for that before too long.

The key battle of ideas is (and in modern times has always been) between collectivism and individualism. Gentle reader, you know which side I favour.

We have a problem though. Humans are pack animals, hard-wired to approve of those who sacrifice for the greater good of family, friends or nation. I am as thorough an individualist as you could hope to meet, yet everything in my own life that I am proud of involved serving the interests of others.

It's all too easy to denigrate individualism as selfishness.

Collectivists play on those instincts with their constant talk of "community" but their collectivism is not about kindness and willing self-sacrifice. It may have always taken a village to raise a child, but only willing villagers of whom the parents approved were involved. When that homely expression is used by those seeking to disempower parents and force state intervention, it should be seen for the cynical propaganda it is.

Some people are brown, black or white. Some people are gay, some straight and some trans. Humans espouse a wide range of religious faiths and some have none. Within those groups there is such a range of morality, productiveness and creativity that they simply don't – except in rare cases where they face a common threat – function as communities. They don't think or act as one unit. There is no reason why they should.

To use the modern jargon, their identities as member of one or other group intersect with all the other ways they think of themselves (and others think of them). Those intersections are not only on the lines approved by woke academia. They also intersect with all their other – far more important – characteristics; such as their kindness, generosity, morality, prudence, wisdom, industry and knowledge.

It's all far more complicated than collectivists would have us believe. So complicated that the only sensible way to treat everyone we meet – whatever their visible or claimed attributes – is as someone who might turn out to be anything (or nothing) to us – i.e. as an individual. The only rational way to deal with a new human is quietly to assess what Dr King called "the content of their character" and then behave accordingly.

Collectivists simplify hatefully in order to justify their love of force. Collectivists pioneered the concept of the hate crime and constantly accuse opponents of hatred. Given their constant attempt to set group against group, it's hard not to think the whole concept is largely projection.

A gay criminal should be (and I am sure, is) no less a criminal to another gay person. If you're black you don't (and should not be able to) expect the unconditional approval of other black people. The only reason these "communities" are spoken of so constantly is that collectivists want to move them as pawns on the political chessboard.

There are undoubted political efficiencies in this. On average black and brown Britons are more socially conservative than white ones. Judging by the number of small businesses run by ethnic minorities, I'd venture to guess that more of them are economically conservative too. Yet the Labour Party has played the race card so effectively that it's caught in unguarded racist moments saying someone was only "superficially black", because he'd left their political reservation. All over the Western World, collectivist parties behave as if the votes of ethnic minorities are their property. Indeed as if the members of those minorities are themselves their property. 

In the end, the serious danger of collectivism and its "identity politics" is that it leads to demands for collective punishment. No-one uses that dreadful expression because it brings to mind totalitarians in history punishing kulaks, Jews or others deemed enemies of their cause indiscriminately. The favoured euphemism for collective punishment now is "social justice", which is always – without exception and by definition– unjust.

True justice looks at the actions and intentions of individuals and decides on their individual guilt or innocence. Social justice says "Group A hurt Group B and all members of Group A must pay" – even the descendants of the alleged wrong-doers who could not – rightly understood – be any more innocent. 

If you follow an ideology that justifies the punishment of innocents among a class, race or creed just because of their membership of that group, you have gone morally astray. Your ideology is – in your own terms– a hate crime.

If, gentle reader, you had hopes of more posts this week I must disappoint you. With great haste, to spare the taxpayer the cost of today’s lunch and half the minimal loss of earnings allowance for today, the clerks just discharged everyone not currently serving on a jury. Those of us in our second week were discharged without thanks. Those, like me, in our first week are required back at court next Monday to have our lives devalued further at the hands of our surly masters. 

So, maybe next week …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© William Morris Agency (management)

I am listening to this song today and remembering how I used to make my daughters (and any other children who found themselves in the back of my car) sing along to it on road trips. 

I probably first heard it – played to me by an uncle who took informal responsibility for my musical education – not too long after it came out in 1961. I'd have just started infants school. I heard it a lot over the years that followed.

Given the size of said uncle (and all the other men in my family) I knew that one day I'd grow up to be the size of the song's hero.

The boy Tom was a serious, thoughtful little chap and thought that one day he'd have to aspire to be that way – metaphorically.

It was a daunting prospect and good reason to enjoy the rest of a carefree boyhood while it lasted.

The only mine I ever went down didn't collapse on me. I never faced such a test of courage. Who knows how I would have fared? I might well have been one of the other miners: praying, my heart beating fast and fearing I'd breathed my last. Still, the song embodies for me the ideal of what it means to be a "proper man".

Today, that's "toxic masculinity" and is to be despised. "Courage" is now used as a word to describe public whingeing about one's first world problems – real or imagined.

Mr Paine the elder, a wiser gentleman than he knows, has often told me over the years that we have to die in the end, because the world changes until we no longer fit in it. Perhaps, when your highest ideals are looked down upon, it is time to move on?

Maybe so but I still love the song. YouTube does not permit it to be presented here, but follow this link to hear it. If your woke education permits, enjoy!