Modern Britain doesn’t believe in punishment. It doesn’t believe in punishment (and this view is common even among supposed conservatives) because it doesn’t believe in personal responsibility. Otherwise intelligent people, for instance, accept concepts composed of baloney and bunkum, such as the almost universal belief in physical ‘addiction’ to various drugs and pleasures. Or they prose on about ‘rehabilitation’, a concept never defined and so impossible to disprove (but in fact non-existent). Then there are the widespread beliefs that people are fat, or have sexual or other tastes they can’t control, because of genetic determination.

As in so much of modern life, these absurdities flourish because of the almost total collapse of serious Christian belief and understanding, which has left a vast uncultivated wasteland in which all kinds of nonsense, from astrology to Trotskyism, flourish like mental bindweed.

I was going to say, Trotskyism... flourishing? Ooookay.

Before you accept this, it is worth wondering which is actually more barbaric - the lawful execution of a proven murderer after a fair trial before an independent jury, observed by a free Press, or the feeble surrender of authority in the face of violence and dishonesty. I think I know where the moral high ground is to be found

I have spent the past 18 months researching and writing a book (out later this year) on the unofficial but near-total legalisation of drugs in Britain since 1971.

Atheists make me laugh when they claim to be bold and courageous. That hasn’t been so for a century. It’s dis-believing in man-made global warming that is dangerous.

The fanatical Church of Global Warming is a hate-filled conventicle of intolerant zealots. Armed with righteous certainty, it hoses its critics with slime and demands ever-madder measures on the basis of unproven scientific claims.