From the heights of our self-imposed ordinance of “No politics”, you might be led to believe that there’s very little else to write about.

I’ll admit the air is very thin up here on the moral high ground, but there really is something to get worked up about apart from the dismal state of the nation. What, you may ask?

Why, the Archbishop of Canterbury, of course.

I’ve written a few pieces recently on the state of the Church and of Christianity (see the footer of this article), suggesting that the Gospels are allegories of a process used by early mystics with a universal truth for us in our scientific age.

The texts suffered the indignity of being converted into quasi-historical documents for the political purposes of the Roman Empire.

Rowan Williams, the current incumbent at Lambeth Palace, often gives the impression of being a thoroughly wet liberal who takes the soft option on every issue of our age. His undoubted intellect is seen as a barrier to both truth and communication — Gordon Brown in a cassock.

But wait, who is this speaking from the pages of Friday’s Daily Telegraph?

Addressing the Hay Festival of Literature on author Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the Archbishop says, “First of all he takes the Christian myth, or a version of it, seriously enough to want to disagree passionately about it.”

Leaving aside the impression of clutching at straws, look at the words: Christian myth. Slip of the tongue, perhaps? Or the realization that a modern audience simply won’t take the infantilized story presented to us as fact any more?

I believe many theologians in the Church, whether of England or Rome, know this to be true. One historical Cardinal is said to have remarked, “The Jesus myth has served us well down the years”. Is Rowan Williams echoing that sentiment, but in a less cynical way?

Williams continues, “It’s not just dull or remote, it’s dangerous. You’ve got to tussle with it. It’s still alive.” The words of a mystic indeed.

But he’s not a pushover. He disagrees with Pullman’s atheism, but likes his “search for some way of talking about human value, human depth and three-dimensionality, that doesn’t depend on God.” By this he means Blake’s and Michaelangelo’s depiction of the Creator as an old bearded man looking down on us from a very great height. Inner resources can carry us much farther than a rigid anthropomorphism.

Then, something very intriguing: religious authorities shouldn’t “silence the demons” that people carry with them, the essential internal conversation between good and evil. C.G. Jung could not have put it better.

“The threat in Pullman’s novels,” he goes on, “is the Authority — people like me in his imagination — which wants to divide the human spirit and cut off and silence that demonic voice, that voice of the imagination.” Or even that voice of experience, he might have said.

I think this is a very significant moment for the old Church of England. Coming close to pantheism, or at least panentheism — where everything is God, even our enemies — the Archbishop speaks with the real voice of mysticism.

In these dark times, the inalienable lightness of darkness does need to be explained. Rowan Williams may well be its establishment prophet.

Who would have thought it?

John Evans

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I’ve decided to give up writing about politics on this site. The reason is that, with a new business to run, there simply isn’t time.

Writing about politics is an all-consuming activity. It glues you to 24-hour news almost 24/7. It entices you to read all the serious newspapers and political magazines every day of the year. Add to that, time spent trawling the internet, Googling for clarifications and chasing up leads, plus the background research and fact-checking.

Instead, Syntagma will revert to type and concentrate on a melange of finance, philosophy and technology as in days of yore.

I know I shall be tempted to dip inky fingers into the increasingly murky waters as the British General Election gets near, but be assured Reader, my resolve will hold.

Except, of course, to raise a hearty cheer, and glass, when David Cameron walks into 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.

The rest is silence …

John Evans

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Belief seems to be essential to all peoples, even if it comes in the form of unbelief. Modern religions, like secularism and scientism, are belief-systems too because their supporters believe in their own views, contrary to other people’s experience.

The problem we have in our scientific age is that our brains have become so big we mistake them for our minds.

The brain is a fantastic tool, like a hammer, a wheel or a knife. Since the European Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to identify with it completely. The result is that most developed humans are trapped in their own heads. Their worldview is limited by what the brain can do and what it perceives.

Thus everything perceptible beyond the brainview is dismissed as “myth”, fantasy and primitive. Richard Dawkins, riding on a reluctant Darwin, is the high priest of this message.

The alternative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, writes about “extended mind”, showing us the obvious fact that our minds extend well beyond our heads. It doesn’t take much introspection to arrive at that result.

We call explorers of our extended mind “mystics” — folk with their heads in the clouds. It’s a term of abuse to scientists. Yet mystics are scientists too, working in areas designated untouchable by the materialists.

Religion is man’s response to the mystical message — that which lies beyond the cage of our brainview. Religion, like philosophy, has followed science slavishly down its tubular path. It has become an artificial construct, dependent on a narrow slice of experience and much wishful thinking. A dramatist’s creation, not a God’s.

The mystic knows “God” as the sea of awareness that lies at the heart of everybody’s consciousness. We all rise and fall within it, and share its characteristics — even its immortality.

We can be made to believe anything, but only through direct experience can we “know” the truth.

Organized religions have caused more violence than almost any other aspect of human life. They are the economic and political exploitation of who we really are.

True mystics are always peaceable, because they “know”, not just “believe”.

Easter symbolizes the rebirth of life in the northern hemisphere. It’s not a subject to squabble over, but to “know”.

John Evans

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

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On this morning’s Today Programme there was a good-natured discussion about Confucius. The Master would have been pleased.

It seems the old Sage is enjoying a comeback in his native China, where the Communist ruling elite is considering changing its name to the Confucian Party. Have they actually read his words, I’m tempted to ask?

Here’s a little flavour in the form of a quiz:

1. Which British Prime Minister does this saying suggest?

The Master said, “It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent.”

Clue: Initials, TB.

2. To which British Prime Minister could this saying be directed?

The Master said, “In guiding a State of a thousand chariots, … be trustworthy in what you say; avoid excesses in expenditure and love your fellow men; employ the labour of the common people only in the right seasons.”

Clue: Initials, GB.

And a lesson for the Labour party when in office:

The Master said, “If you insist on guiding them by edicts, keeping them in line with punishments, the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. On the other hand, if you guide them by virtue, keeping them in line with long-held conventions, they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”

Now that’s a good principle for a new Conservative Government — remember the Common Law?

Finally, another ancient Chinese saying that Brussels would be wise to heed:

Create ten thousand regulations and you lose all respect for the law.

Where is the modern Confucius? We could do with him now.

John Evans

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I’m not a practising economist, but I did read an economics course at university, along with psychology. Because of it, I’m probably slightly better equipped to understand what’s going on now than the average Jo(e).

The word “slightly” is important here because it means just what it says.

The difference between books on standard economics and what goes on at the windows in Central Banks is enormous, especially as the “windows” aren’t windows at all.

When you also take into account modern investment banks — what we used to call merchant banks when we British were British and not Americans — the difference becomes profounder still.

The business of moving money around has become so arcane and global that hardly anyone understands it now, not even bankers, and especially not politicians. This means we can either attempt to follow the bizarre mathematical models of Harvard MBAs and, if tales are to be believed, rocket scientists from NASA, or we fall back on practical psychology to make sense of it. That’s what I do.

This leads directly both to my successes in forecasting and my failures. Looking back I detect, from a low base of hands-on experience, that I’ve done about as well as the average expert commentator, and occasionally much better — Anatole Kaletsky leaps to mind.

How much will you pay for my method? Here it is free of charge:

Do not trust Gordon Brown to get anything right from the medium short-term going forward.

That is my Golden Rule. It produces tier upon tier of successful forecasting.

Distrust any proposal that would lower the democratic input into policy.

It’s not that democratic decisionmaking is necessarily superior to any other, just that non-democratic forces are often catastrophically wrong, and usually pernicious in their effects.

The more global they are, the less competent they become. This accords with the principles of Superdemocracy.

Beware those who persistently use the word “global”.

These strange beings fantasise themselves as rulers of the world. I’m convinced Gordon Brown dreams of those old Soviet posters of Lenin being carried into Moscow beneath a huge red flag. Archetypes of the Great Leader are never to be trusted or encouraged.

Does anyone know if Brown has Photoshop on his computer?

Stick with minimum, obvious solutions in economics.

Confronting someone in a car accident, with blood pouring from an artery, you wouldn’t offer them an iron tablet. Neither would you send for an aromatherapist, however fashionable. The poor chap needs the medical equivalent of Joe the Plumber to deal with a major overflow problem. Monetarists are financial plumbers, the emergency services.

Keynesians, and others who prefer not to bear any label, are the naturopaths of economics. They should only enter the arena to deal with delicate matters like balancing supply and demand and use deficit financing sparingly over a cycle. A scented candle here, a relaxing massage there.

Used sensitively, as they should, these arms of political economy can be made to produce a “cocktail of measures”, as Kenneth Clarke described it from the stage of the Ken and Eddie Show — an entertainment that is, alas, no longer with us.

Treat anything emanating from Brussels as you would a red-hot brick.

This is built on decades of experience and is not disputed by anyone who can see further than the end of their street. Unfortunately, that does not include most politicians.

Services run by the public sector cost twice as much in the end as private provision.

The old saying that a pound in your pocket loses half its value when it lands in the government’s bank account, probably underestimates the losses in Labour’s public sector. Many of these costs are disguised as something else, or appear off balance sheet.

View all opinions from international regulatory bodies as suspect.

This is the Holy Grail for us Democratic Minimalists. International and supranational sherpas are rootless individuals holding no philosophy other than seizing the agendas of national and local democratic forces, whom they regard as village idiots. Always stick with the idiots — at least you can understand them, and whip them when they’re wrong.

So there you have it. My methodology. If in future I get anything wrong, you will at least know I have the best of intentions and no ambitions to rule the world.

Are you listening, Gordon?

John Evans

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Gordon Brown’s new back-to-the-future idea is to introduce “old fashioned banking” again to the High Street. After all, banks lend out other people’s money, so should be careful where they put it.

He will “ban” 100 percent mortgages, make borrowers save up their deposits, and force them to meet “old fashioned” bank managers, who will get to know them like GPs did in the days of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook. Ahh, the past is so reassuring, isn’t it?

But Chancellors of the Exchequer also spend and allocate other people’s money. Shouldn’t they be tightening up their rules of tax and spend in the vast public sector? And shouldn’t State benefits be handed out sparingly to those who truly need them? Isn’t it also imperative that no-one should be given a public job unless they are urgently needed on the front line and well qualified for the task?

Brown didn’t begin to address that problem. Bankers will be sent for re-education by Captain Mainwaring characters, but the good old “public realm” will just carry on as before, squandering other people’s money.

Isn’t this just another sneaky way of blaming the banks rather than himself?

Labour MP, Chris Mullin, in a new book* writes: “The trail leads back to Gordon — but if it all goes wrong he’ll be nowhere to be seen.”

* A View From The Foothills

Do you ever have “There is a God!” moments? I had one last week.

I was walking down a narrow pavement alongside a completely empty road, when the tinkling of a bicycle bell assailed my ears from behind. One of those aggressive two-wheel types was attempting to force me to stand aside on a pedestrian walkway.

I won’t go into how irritating these people are, fury is not a pleasant subject to write about. However, whatever allows these oiks to ride along pavements should be repealed by the next Conservative Government.

Naturally, I ignored him — it’s always a he. He rang the bell again. I sauntered on. Again he tried, before snorting and turning onto the road. As he passed he gave me a backward glance of total exasperation.

My returned stare must have unsettled him. He wobbled, desperately corrected his trajectory, hit the curb, and fell off.

I walked past with a beatific smile of satisfaction.

There is a God!

Like everyone else I’ve been trying to make sense of the causes of this world depression. I’ve pieced together bits that have appeared here over the past few months in the hope they make a coherent and plausible case for what went wrong.

In the beginning
1. In 1977, President Carter pushed through an Act forcing banks to give mortgages to sub-prime borrowers.
2. In 1999, President Clinton signed off the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from investment banking.
3. Clinton also encouraged the securitization of morgage debts into Collateralized Debt Obligations by Bears Stearns. Astonishingly, they were given Triple A investment status by the involvement of government-backed Freddie Mac. Thus, potentially toxic assets were bundled up and sold off to the world’s banking system.

Note: these are both Presidents of the left.

Reinforcing causes
Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan kept interest rates too low for too long because he believed “downturns will happen and can be cleaned up afterwards”. Meanwhile, just enjoy the white-knuckle ride.

In the benign conditions created by Greenspan and his student Gordon “No more boom and bust” Brown, high leverage (debt) was seen as a one-way bet for financiers and private-equity outfits, some of dubious provenance.

A system of shadow banking was set up outside the regulatory framework which passed debt around between different institutions, hedge funds and capital markets, creating more money than the original debt. The normal effect of a burgeoning money supply is inflation, which eventually squeezes out any asset bubbles that form along the way.

However China simultaneously introduced a massive deflationary element into the mix. Trillions of dollars of very cheap goods poured out of the country to soak up the growing money mountains of the developed world.

The deflationary effect masked the inflation embedded in the Western economic boom, allowing it to last much longer than normal and storing up more problems as time passed.

On the ground, it seemed as if the good times would go on forever. A classic psychological contagion set in among politicians, financial markets and the ordinary public. No-one could lose was the signal, everyone was a winner, even the poorest with no income, no job and no assets.

The Endgame
When sub-prime borrowers in America started defaulting on their loans, as they were bound to at some point, bankers found it impossible to trace the indebtedness through the system because of the sliced and diced nature of the securities that now concealed them.

These assets were effectively worthless as they could not be valued. The whole planet was suddenly stripped of value. There were no hooks left to store capital and savings, except gold and flighty commodity markets. Meltdown time had arrived.

The growing realization that banks all over the world held these poisonous assets, effectively closed down the inter-bank lending markets. Banks no longer trusted any other not to fail and default on their loans. The Credit Crunch was born.

The rule of Up-To-A-Pointism suggests: “If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences. Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.”

Let us hope that the new financial system that emerges takes note of this simple rule.

Prediction
The world will now skate helter-skelter in the opposite direction. The pendulum of opinion will overshoot the mark and overregulate financial markets, thus breaching the Up-To-A-Pointism rule.

Something akin to a 1970s situation will be created as legislators try to close off all exits. The result will be a stifling, sealed commercial environment with few incentives for innovation and hard work.

It will take another “liberalization” package of measures a few decades down the line to set off another period of prosperity, leading to another bust.

Plus ca change …

I’ve just watched the seventh of eight episodes of Channel 4’s patchy series, Christianity. It was presented by Professor Colin Blakemore of Oxford University, a colleague of Richard Dawkins — author of The God Delusion — and a fellow believer in the new religion of Scientism.

So far, only three of the programmes have stood out: Howard Jacobson’s, Michael Portillo’s, and Rageh Omaar’s thoughtfully fair view of the relationship between the West’s religion and Islam.

As an Idealist in philosophical terms, I’ve not got a lot in common with Blakemore’s viewpoint, however, he put his case engagingly and intelligently.

One highlight for me was the comparison of a cathedral with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the Swiss/French border. This chilling aggregation of metal, electric wiring and brutalist architecture seemed straight out of the Nazi manual of “How To Subdue Human Values By Gigantism and Intimidation”.

Next up: Cherie Blair. What are we to make of that?

Quote of the Week

This is rather a good description of New Labour philosophy:

“The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own.
W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado

John Evans

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It’s not that I’m green in any political way, but I do hate seeing plastic carrier bags blowing down the street like tumbleweed, or hanging from trees like Tibetan prayer offerings.

In our house, we refuse to use them, entering supermarkets with rucksacks and other suitable containers, and feeling very virtuous in a dreary sort of way.

The trouble is, the world won’t allow us to dispense with them. Various charities that should know better put large, white plastic bags through the letterbox inviting us to donate items we don’t want.

Yesterday, it was the PDSA, an animal charity. Note to PDSA: wildlife is harmed by plastic bags!

Today it was a “mental health” organization, bleating “You’ll improve your mental health by donating your unwanted items.” Self-serving, or what?

This got me thinking about the whole business of mental health. For a start, what exactly is it?

When I was in my teens (duck out now or take the consequences), I developed an unhealthy taste for the novels of Dostoyevsky. The first one I laid my hands on was A Raw Youth, in the exquisite translation of Constance Garnett.

The work is an extended essay on frenzy. The youth in question stumbles around 19th-century Russia in an advanced stage of frenzied excitement. He clearly mirrors the psychological state of its author.

Callow youth that I was, I lapped it up, reading through the night in a frenzy of anticipation. This was the life for me: a frenzied one. What a pain I must have been in those days.

It’s easy to look back and gasp at the foolishness of young life, but we can’t relive it now. Too late, old chum.

My conundrum is, did Dostoyevsky have “mental health”? Would he even have recognized the pastel, slightly perfumed phrase? He simply got on with writing some of the world’s best political and psychological literature, and inspired countless teenagers with nothing better to do into the joys of a frenzied existence. It explains a lot, doesn’t it?

But would we actually want everyone to have mental health? Wouldn’t it be rather tedius?

In fairness, I’ve always been a laid back sort of fellow, frenzy never came easily, and I soon lost interest.

I’m beginning to think that my concern about plastic bags is the first sign of late-onset mental health.

Now where did I put my copy of Crime and Punishment?

John Evans

It is Christmas still, officially at least, so a few words on Christianity may be appropriate now. Since I am the one writing this, my own view of it will have to do.

Which proposition would you prefer?:

1. The Ineffable (name it as you will) enters every person at birth and is directly available to each, especially if the individual focuses upon it and requests access, or
2. The Ineffable entered one man 2000 years ago and his representatives on Earth today will negotiate your place in the afterlife, as long as you comply with a set of unbending principles and practices.

The first proposition is the “perennial wisdom of mankind”. The second is the view of the Christian church that arose within the last days of the Roman Empire.

In the 4th century AD the Emperor Constantine had an ulterior motive for his religious masterplan — the retention of political power at the centre. His church was therefore materialistic and authoritarian.

This is not to disparage the present-day Roman Catholic Church, or even the lacklustre Anglican version, into which I was baptized as an infant. On an individual level, many immensely spiritual people have made great contributions to human understanding from within the cupolas of their Catholic beliefs. I’ll cite just a few who appeal to me: Thomas Merton, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross.

They do, though, have one thing in common. Each got into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities because they were perceived as “mystics”. Even the saintly Francis of Assisi’s Franciscans fell foul of the stern central authority.

What is a mystic? Someone who believes … no, “knows” … that the Ineffable is available to everyone. These are “Gnostics” — knowers rather than believers. Mysticism is really the universal religion of mankind, because when a person scales its heights there is no longer any need for the simplistic stories and precepts of evangelistic religion.

As Dr Johnson put it: “Example is more efficacious than precept.”

Let’s go back then to the early Roman church, which we now know took the uncomplicated Jewish version of the many Mystery schools around the Mediterranean and as far afield as Persia, and created the Western world as we know it. It’s useful to examine what Christianity was like before Emperor Constantine made it the prevailing faith of the Empire.

Christianity — and it was certainly not called that then — began a long time before the suggested birth of Jesus around 7BC. We know this from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other recently discovered sources.

It seems to have had Egyptian origins and arose among Jews in Alexandria from a Gnostic soup of practical teachings on how to have a direct, personal relationship with the Source of all things. It’s believed to have spread into the Hebrew lands through groups like the Essenes at Qumran — a sect that had at its centre a “Teacher of Righteousness”.

The Mystery schools of the Mediterranean region, including Greece, were mystical programmes of initiation, leading up to the all-encompassing Great Death Contemplation, in which a neophyte underwent a transformation of consciousness, directly experiencing the after-death state and stripping away the tyranny of the body (the cross we all bear in life).

In our terms, Near Death Experiences, reported in many hospitals, are quite close. They are, however, essentially different from the controlled, fully-alive, glimpse of what it’s like to be totally out of the body, while conscious of everything.

The early Gnostic Gospels, such as The Gospel of Thomas give a very different version from the later compilations bolted together by bishops into the New Testament. For example, the female has an equal part to play — there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene and links to Sophia, or wisdom. The chapter in Luke which covers the visit of Jesus to Mary of Bethany is strangely cut off, and the passage where Jesus says she has a higher calling than Martha — contemplative rather than “active” — doesn’t read like the Christianity that comes down to us via Rome at all.

What began as a Jewish allegory depicting the life of Everyman (Jesus), was turned by a French bishop into an ersatz historical record of a real person. Anyone who has studied spiritual literature around the world will immediately recognize the allegorical intent of the Gospels, despite the extensive editing job.

The main aim was to attract a large, popular audience and wipe out the Gnostics, the early Christians. That suppression continued well into the medieval period. The massacre of possibly millions of Cathars in southern France, simply because they were different and were descended from an earlier version of Christianity, still resonates blackly in Church history to this day. St Bernard of Clairveaux, founder of the Catholic Cistercian movement, commented on the Cathars, “They are better Christians than we are.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his deeply religious book The Brothers Karamazov, has a chapter called The Grand Inquisitor in which he depicts Catholicism as the very opposite of the church Jesus would have created.

A good illustration of the process of historicizing allegory is to take John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and imagine Christian as a real man and the story a true one. Nothing else quite explains why the Vatican goes to such lengths to suppress any archeological find that may cast doubt on its version of events. The postwar history of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals an extraordinary attempt at censorship. The Nag Hammadi Gnostic discoveries in Egypt faced similar interference.

So where is Christianity in the 21st century? The main thrust of the churches seems aimed at keeping people adhered to a faith based on a misreading of an old allegory. The allegory itself, by contrast, offers precisely what it says on the box: “gospel” — good news.

The good news is that everyone can receive proof of their own immortality if they really want it: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within and without … seek and you shall find.” The most enlightening version of that saying appears in The Gospel of Thomas, inexplicably banned by the Church. If people don’t want direct proof, no matter, immortality is theirs anyway.

That mystical interpretation of the familiar Christian message was the original one before Rome politicized it. In reality Constantine was no saint but an early version of Mao Tse Tung.

In our democratic age we are more susceptible to the view that Christianity is available to us directly, not just through the intercession of men in robes.

Today, the Church is faltering, even dying, precisely because it won’t give up the rewriting of history that took place in its early days. Moreover, it should ask itself why so many popular books depict it as a dark, evil institution that will stop at nothing to retain its power, wealth and influence. Surely, self-preservation isn’t everything.

A return to so-called “primitive” Christianity that encouraged personal experience, not conformity, is the only way it can save itself from becoming a minor sect for a few diehards — which would be very sad given the power Christianity has for good.

The world is crying out for genuine expressions of spirituality now. Young people are embracing New Age sects in large numbers. Ominously, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world.

Christians should stand against the decline of the religion and recognize it is based upon a massive untruth, especially as the original flowering of Christianity is just what the jaded West needs in these times of economic hardship and doubt.

John Evans

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What’s the best definition of a scientist? Someone who joins up two dots on a graph and, if they point up, shouts “fire”, if they go down, shrieks, “ice-age”.

It seems we are now on the cusp of a rapid about-face from the former to the latter.

According to an article in the respected, learned journal Nature, global warming is off the agenda, at least for a few hundred-thousand years. The real menace is a vicious ice-age that will cover the eastern side of the British Isles with 6000ft of ice and snow. Even those of us in the warmer west can expect 3000ft of the white stuff.

If you’ve already thrown out your thermal underwear in anticipation of Mediterranean temperatures all year round, well … you should read Syntagma more often. We have been ridiculing the man-made global warmers for a couple of years at least.

Mind you, I doubt the global freeze-up picture too. Mankind has recently demonstrated a very destructive tendency to imagine that if something happens twice in a row it will go on forever, despite a million years’ experience to the contrary.

It comes from an over-reliance on a narrow concept of the intellect. Paranoia is a disease of rationality extended beyond its natural reach. Many people who should know better convince themselves that bad events must be set to continue and, naturally, get much worse. They react by building massive defences and shelters against “the coming storm”.

In reality, things usually switch over to the opposite well before crisis conditions set in — see my piece, Up-To-A-Pointism.

That is, unless a large enough group convince themselves of the worst and, by their actions, prevent the normal turnaround setting in. Almost all economic crises are made worse by economists and politicians. Now, it seems, actions to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere against supposed global warming could precipitate a sudden global cooling of unstoppable proportions.

When eventually the worst doesn’t happen, the “activists” will just find something else to scare the pants off themselves and the rest of us. It’s their nature. Fear is also a bankable commodity these days, especially for the bright sparks seeking government research grants.

Western administrations in the U.S., Europe and Britain, have been frantically creating siege conditions against jihadist terrorism since 9/11, even kicking away the basic freedoms that distinguish our societies from the supposed insurgents’ dismal autocracies. They lose the “war” before firing a shot.

In the UK, politicians mimicking beached sardines, are plotting a kind of Stasi-state right out of Eric Honecker’s East Germany. Individuals you wouldn’t normally trust with assembling a flat-pack whelk stall are building vast databases of the personal data of every individual in the country, backed up by draconian laws. And this is being done “for our own protection”.

Did anyone give them permission to do this? Alas, if it’s not global warming or an ice age coming to get us, it’s a new form of “white slavery”. And the slave masters are materializing from our own political class.

So here’s a word to the scientists. Stop building flummeries in the air from tiny samples of data. Desist from imagining that the 3lb lump of fat and gristle in your skulls knows all there is about everything.

In the meantime we could always redefine mental illness:

Thy name is SCIENCE.

John Evans

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