Programming note: Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll be back for my weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. On Sunday, we shall have a different kind of audio diversion.

~I regret the downfall of the soi-disant Ginger Growler. As corrupt and talentless as she was, the Deputy Prime Minister was, in a certain sense, real - in a way that Sir Keir never can be, except perhaps to favoured Ukrainian rent-boys. And her boast that she threw Boris Johnson off his stroke at Prime Minister's Questions by "flashing me ginger growler" was, by the standards of the age, a harmless jest that added to the gaiety of the nation.

However, politicians only matter if politics matters. And the consistent message from the courts, the cops, the press and the permanent democracy is that it no longer does. The Uniparty gins up Growlergate, as it did Cakegate, to keep you playing along: more circuses, but less and less bread. Meanwhile, in America the Leader of the Opposition has to put up a half-billion bucks for the right to appeal a political prosecution; his equivalents in France and Romania are removed from the ballot; in the Netherlands the winning party gets backroomed into irrelevance; in Germany parties of "left", "right" and "centre" sign an agreement pledging to talk only positively about mass migration, and the sole hold-outs finds the odds of their candidates in North Rhine-Westphalia making it to Election Day lessen with every twenty-four hours.

Whatever the above is it isn't politics. Indeed, at any other time, these would be pre-revolutionary conditions. Yet we are assured, at least with respect to the UK, that that is not how mature, settled, highly evolved democracies do things.

Oh, yeah? Sez who? The English held their civil war two centuries before the Yanks; they decapitated their king a century-and-a-half before the French. The borders of the United Kingdom have shrunk, significantly, as recently as 1922. That's to say the present iteration of the nation is barely a century old.

Lest you were in any doubt as to the political class's contempt for the citizenry, the Leader of Peterborough Council, a slug called Dennis Jones, usefully distilled it, in his characterisation of our friend Sammy Woodhouse and thousands of other girls in Rotherham alone who were doubly assailed - violated first by their rapists and then by the entirety of the English establishment, which as the vile Jones notes was not above getting itself a piece of the action:

They despise you, and your pain is a great big laugh to them. That should be a bigger story than the Ginger Growler.

The only spark of revolution currently missing is what civil-warmonger David Betz calls "elite defection". That's to say, there are still people who own paid-off homes, have what the British call "lanyard" jobs and/or secure pensions, and live in the dwindling number of comparatively non-migrant-afflicted parts of the country. If you're in the few remaining economic growth sectors - such as "migrant hotel billionaire" Graham King - you have no reason to defect this side of total economic collapse. On the other hand, newspaper headlines now routinely warn that the UK is heading for an IMF bailout, and France is heading for an IMF bailout, and Your Country Here is heading for an IMF bailout. By any sane measure, most of the G7 are broke and engage in ever less primary economic activity. If elite defection is not yet a thing, the likelihood of anyone not already in it ever joining the elite shrinks day by day. The economic correspondents' back-to-the-Seventies warnings understate where Europe's headed: Britain in the Seventies was still a reasonably coherent polity rather than a filthy seething craphole of self-segregating tribes in which armies of young male predators have a privileged claim over shivering grannies and single mums to housing, healthcare and the other spoils of the obsolescent mid-twentieth-century nanny state. Demographic displacement plus economic collapse will be a difficult juggling act even for such highly skilled circus acts as Macron, Merz and Starmer.

There is one more aspect to consider. I was struck by this opening paragraph in The Spectator:

It seems that people would rather fight for a death cult than a democracy. At most, 15,000 foreigners have fought in Ukraine over the past three years. By contrast, an estimated 35,000 foreign fighters joined Islamic State, despite the risk of prosecution when they returned home.

That's more basic than a choice between a death cult and a democracy: it's the difference between those who mean it and those who don't. Isis and the like draw from a talent pool that enjoys the thought of cutting your head off, preferably with a rusty machete; conversely, the Ukraine International Legion draw from a talentless pool of tilty-headed attitude-strikers whose commitment to the cause goes no further than swapping out their Twitter avatars.

Well, the Ukraine is the quintessential Neville Chamberlain faraway country of which we know little. What about jurisdictions rather closer to home? The authorities have bet that, likewise, you'll get a new hashtag and some amusing memes, and then go back to sleep. Yet the scenes on the streets suggest, in the face of outrageous thuggery by the self-delegitimising Brit Wanker Coppers, extraordinary self-discipline by the Pink Ladies and their compatriots.

Any self-respecting constable still in these corrupt police forces should resign immediately so that the remnants can be seen for what they truly are - an army of quislings on the side of the enemy invader. So quit now - unless, of course, your particular kink is that you enjoy pepper-spraying septuagenarian ladies:

It is interesting to watch the emerging preference on the streets for the flag of England over the Union Jack. "Britishness" was invented by the English, but their descendants appear to be concluding that, in contemporary terms, it is simply a convenient cover for demographic dispossession - which is more advanced in England than in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland (Ireland south of the border is a different matter). I have been, generally, a Unionist, but I have said for decades that the English have less to lose from abandoning the Union than Irish "nationalists" or the pseudo-secessionists of Scotland and Wales. In fact, Peter Hitchens and I discussed that very topic on The Mark Steyn Show over three sodding years ago (about forty-five minutes in).

But, whether or not the hideous current "Yookay" is no longer (in Britspeak) fit for purpose, in the context of recent events the deployment of a long unseen (outside footie) and generally disapproved flag portends, as in Ireland, not just a spasmodic protest that will fade as the autumn weather settles in but a long-term movement.

One final thought that I touched on in Wednesday's Clubland Q&A: As longtime readers know, the late Martin Amis did me the honour of taking the demographic thesis of America Alone seriously, and raised it with the then Prime Minister:

When I interviewed Tony Blair earlier this year I asked him if continental demographics had yet become 'a European conversation'. He said: 'It's a subterranean conversation.' And we know what that means. The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.

That was perhaps a reasonable point to make a couple of decades back. But, as with the Ukraine/Isis comparison above, from the perspective of 2025 I think there's a more basic point. The then PM appears to be saying that he's aware of "the demographic question" and that he and his Euro-counterparts discuss it sotto voce. If you're having difficulty remembering who they were, that would be Jacques Chirac, Angela Merkel, Romano Prodi and the other Eurobigwigs of the day before yesterday.

They knew it was happening - twenty sod-bollocking years ago.

And yet here we are, in conditions that would have been inconceivable to any prudent society outside conquest in war.

Which suggests that, as Neil Oliver likes to say, what has happened has happened because they wanted it to happen, way back when. We'll take that up in the coming week.

Have a fabulous weekend. History is on the march.

~The most important, critical element of The Mark Steyn Club is its members - and I'm very touched by all those who signed up in our first month and who are still with us in our ninth year. It means an awful lot to me to know you value what we do here, whether Deep State machinations, transient politics, big-picture civilisational collapse, audio fiction, video poetry, or live music. If you've become a bit jaded by all that and want something new for Year Nine, well, I hope to see many of you on our sixth annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise from Quebec City to New York. For more information on the Steyn Club, see here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership.