Paul Robinson

‘Unbelievable,’ the professor told me. It was hard to disagree. We had just laid flowers on the grave of the anti-communist Russian philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Il’in. Just a short time ago, mere possession of one of Il’in’s books would have brought six years in prison. Now the Russian state has reburied the philosopher in Moscow with all the pomp and ceremony it could muster. Earlier this month the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexei II, presided over a service of reburial at the Donskoi monastery in Moscow for not only Il’in but also his far more famous contemporary General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White forces in southern Russia during the Russian civil war.

Bossy-boots Blunkett’s plans must be resisted, says Paul Robinson, who has acquired five new cards in recent months, and it’s been a pain in the pocket for him I recently had my fingerprints taken for an identity card. If our autocratic Home Secretary, David Blunkett, gets his way, this will in the next decade or so become a universal rite of passage. Mr Blunkett has made it clear that he considers the issue of ID cards a ‘defining moment’ in Britain’s future. I agree, for his plans will define a new Britain which has turned its back on its traditional freedoms and adopted a new persona entirely out of keeping with that we have always held dear.

The influential American journalist Robert Kaplan recently commented that the real shapers of his country's foreign policy are junior and middle-ranking military officers. When an engineer captain in Afghanistan mobilises his men to de-mine a road, or a major in Baghdad oversees the training of competent new policemen, the 'Global War on Terror' (GWOT) moves one step further towards a successful conclusion. But when their colleagues violently raid houses and carry off the wrong Afghans to detention, or gun down innocent civilians in Iraq, Osama bin Laden and his kind garner another handful of followers. Much depends on what individual American officers in the field consider to be acceptable behaviour.

If you are looking for some fun, and have a research grant to spend, try this. Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one 'asshole'. Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan. The results were most interesting. Students from the southern part of the United States reacted far more violently and aggressively than those from the North, were shown to have much higher levels of cortisone and testosterone, and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems.

Paul Robinson says we can learn a lot about decency and independence from plucky Canada You've probably heard that story about the Inuit having 50 words for snow? Well, the sign of a genuine Canadian is that he has 50 words for doughnut. When a glacial wind is howling through Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat and it has been dark for five months in Tuktoyaktuk, Canadians head for Tim Horton's, Dunkin' Donuts, Robin's Donuts, Country Style, Coffee Time, Baker's Dozen, and all the rest of them. When it comes to the perfect doughnut, Canada is the unquestioned world leader. In the less important matters of world politics and military strategy, Canada is rarely seen as a leader. Indeed, Canada-bashing is now very much in vogue, especially in right-wing circles in Britain and America.

In 1825 Russian Decembrist revolutionaries in St Petersburg tried to inspire the peasant masses with the slogan 'Constantine i constitutsia' (Constantine and a constitution) as they pressed for Tsar Nicholas I to abdicate in favour of his brother Constantine. Unfortunately, their pre-spin audience simply assumed that Constitutsia was Constantine's wife, and failed to see the advantage of a different Romanov and his lady over the one already reigning. Here today, Britain is about to get its first ever written constitution, drafted by the obliging Eurocrats of the Convention on the Future of Europe, and binding on us all. Yet 'we the people' in whose name this document is being produced have not been asked for the slightest whisper of a comment.

I once heard of an Ivy League professor who had written 50 constitutions. All of them collapsed, including the one for the college boat club. If that gentleman is not now advising the Convention on the Future of Europe, someone very like him surely is. On the opening day of the convention in March 2002, its president, ValZry Giscard d'Estaing, bravely compared the congress to the Philadelphia Convention, which wrote the US constitution in 1787. One might equally make a comparison with the conferences which created the Dominion of Canada. Unlike the constitutions of the Ivy League professor, the products of those meetings have stood the test of time.