In the wake of today's announcements on the Referendum on European Union membership, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, the Rt Hon Michael Gove, MP, writes:

 https://www.facebook.com/voteleave/posts/555378651305730:

We are the world’s fifth largest economy, with the best armed forces of any nation, more Nobel Prizes than any European country and more world-leading universities than any European country. Our economy is more dynamic than the Eurozone, we have the most attractive capital city on the globe, the greatest “soft power” and global influence of any state and a leadership role in NATO and the UN. Are we really too small, too weak and too powerless to make a success of self-rule? On the contrary, the reason the EU’s bureaucrats oppose us leaving is they fear that our success outside will only underline the scale of their failure.

Exactly. He could have added that the only way to have any influence in Europe is to leave, and give courage to the others to step out from under the German shadow.

Standing on Ipswich station this morning, a long curving platform, I looked up towards the tunnel end, from coach B (Quiet) to J (First), just as Giles occasionally did for his commuter cartoons. However, there are today no bowlers, no pepper-and-salt trousers, no waistcoats, no watch chains, hardly an umbrella, never mind a properly furled one, and for every briefcase a mass of backpacks (mine included). Yet one thing has stayed constant, or rather has been recently reborn. Black is the colour, in all its tedious shades of grey. The British provincial middle-classes are now almost uniformly dressing in monochrome, males and females alike, and those who don't do so, stand out, in their modest blues, like peacocks amongst a murder of crows. The London young, as always, are a bit different, with their light, tight suits and tan shoes (lively, yes, but Brummel it is not), and the explosively striking and infinitely variable self-expression of young women continues as before. – But in respectable suburban and extra-urban England the lights have gone out. Why? If I were Prime Minister I might be rather worried. These people are fitting in with the background, a background that no healthy country should wish to have.

A comet does not fall to us,
A bolt towards a sacrificial bull;
It cannot know our up and down.

Nor does it see this accidental clay;
But let us grant it feels the pull
Of the planet and inclines our way,
As we, by a smaller length, lean to it.

So each man or stone exudes a charm,
And draws a blind disaster here,
The passive agent of a self-destructive fate,
For that insidious fifth column
Not only dooms but forms our state.

I've often been puzzled by the fact that dogs were very early adopted by human beings as companion animals. The present state of affairs, of course, hardly needs comment; dogs are clearly adapted to our society, and mimic the behaviour and even the appearance of children. But how did this come to be?

The wolf is a truly terrifying animal, and anyone who has been face to face with the mini-version, the fox, will know that these are some of the coldest, cleverest eyes on the planet, aside from our own. How would such predatory animals ever form a stable physical relationship with human groups so as to co-evolve with them?

A clue to the answer is found in Cottrell's Energy and Society (1955), 19: Early dogs were used as energy storage systems. Canines accompanied human hunters, shared in the kill, and were themselves later eaten at times of hardship.

In essence,then, they were drawn into a relation with man by self-interest, but also functioned as a self-shepherding flock of emergency food animals, with both parties benefitting from the association. However, the relationship was not stable. Those dogs that were able to best resemble human beings in character were least likely to be eaten, with the results that we see around us today, where almost none are actually consumed.

Does decentralisation of power really matter? Will it deliver a state of affairs agreeable to the general public, or will it be a disappointment?

Strangely enough, and in spite of what might seem to be obvious, decentralisation will be deeply unsatisfactory so long as authority is only parcelled out to subsidiary executives, rather than completely dissolved into the hands of individuals and thus so atomised that it ceases to be power and simply becomes self-determining capability.

Of course, and as a matter of fact, only decentralisation is on offer, not dissolution. Indeed, to the degree that decentralisation will bring coercive responsibility closer to those coerced, it will actually be more unpopular, and the unpopularity will be more accurately focused on those responsible, local councillors and officers, leading to a deep reluctance to serve on such councils because of the exposure to criticism.

In essence, the point made here is that only an unintrusive and distant government can address the irritation currently expressed by the population through various means such as voting for fringe parties, annoyance at the land use planning system, routine neglect of the law, and general disenchantment with politics.

However, there remain important questions over the policing and the administration of justice that are difficult to untangle. Would we prefer that the police were run out of a local county office, rather than a Ministry of Love in some London bunker? And what of the fire service? It's tempting to think that the RNLI might be a useful model, but on closer examination it is no reliable guide since its services are provided to people who are by and large not the donors who support its work; in other words, the private provision of lifeboats is a very special case.

Perhaps we could agree that:

Police administration should be at a medium level, for practical reasons related to local knowledge, and because a central police force has worrying implications for general liberty.

Justice should be administered as it is at present, through local magistrates for minor offences, and Crown judges for other cases.

Indeed, if power were localized through the Crown in both these cases it would become relatively free of political distortion, and thus less likely to provoke resentment. In other words, if the police and magistrates were selected by the Crown, in some sense distinguished from the political state, this would permit a degree of localisation, essential in any case for many practical reasons, while at the same time minimising, perhaps even avoiding altogether, any degree of resentment. This is a compromise, and not so very different from the situation that emerged piecemeal from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

Anti-establishment subversives and some anti-collectivists have long had it in for uniformed toys. The following snatch of conversation overheard in London between two reminiscing ancients suggests that they are, perhaps, on to something.

Z. "I used to collect lead soldiers. I had over a thousand, and I used to enjoy putting them all out in my own trooping of the colour.

Y. "For my part, I played with trains, and used to enact the procession of the King's corpse to London..."

Miniaturisation of the coercive powers of state certainly permits identification and involvement with and a sense of control over the ceremonies and powers of a people. Whether that is healthy or not is a matter of opinion. However one can be certain that where it is common and accepted then that state enjoys considerable support; where it wanes, the state is unpopular.

Quite incidentally, it occurs to me that it might be a useful clarification of matters to require state employees of all grades and characters to wear a uniform, much like roadsweepers and dustbin men. At least this would enable us to distinguish at a glance Permanent Secretaries from the citizens they serve. (There is no risk, I think, of even the most enthusiastic supporter of large government collecting entire lead Departments of such people, much less marshalling them in carpet versions of any of the great ceremonies that punctuate such lives, for example the short 'long march' to the 16.45 at Waterloo.)

Playing 'spot the novel' in a train I reflect that the informational density and order that gives fiction away even in a sentence is the outcome of simultaneously employing more perspectives than are possible for the author of non-fiction, who must forever be confessing lacunae of knowledge.

But it goes further than this: when a character in a fiction makes an observation even within a single perspective it contains information of a kind that is not available to a living mind. Characters in fiction know what they are doing and why to a much greater extent than we actually do in the flesh.

This super-rich perspectival vision permits the writer of fiction to create a microscopic texture of interconnection that supports the macroscopic level of interlinkage that we observe in the plot itself. There is less waste, more meaning, at every level, including that of self-knowledge. Hence the remarkable paradox that fictional characters seem as we read to possess a degree of present reality that exceeds that in our own minds.

We are one of the first periods in human history to have turned our backs all but completely on the wisdom of the old. I write this surrounded by the splendid, learned and now marginalised coffee-drinking remnants or many powerless lunches in the Diogenes Club, who are my Exhibit A.

The causes of this are simply that in an age of cheap energy the complex mental states of the old are of relatively little value, since we suppose that it is possible to supply what they offer from more recently created sources and without inordinate difficulty. But if the price of this advice has fallen, perhaps it is a bargain; and moreover, perhaps it is radically undervalued. Perhaps, indeed, our supposition is mistaken, and in fact this wisdom offers complexity resulting from informational accumulation and winnowing over very long periods of time, and which we cannot reproduce in short order without the consumption exceptional energy resources, if at all.

Then again, perhaps I have simply noted that the Middle Aged are next on the list for isolation, and am making a pre-emptive strike.

In spite of our spontaneous feelings of horror, we care little if 'one of those little dots stops moving', as Harry Lime put it, and admitting this to ourselves is painful only in part because it cuts across those feelings. In large measure the cold child comes from the recognition that others care no more for us than we do for them, and that our warm protestations of altruistic intent, and theirs, are supported only by feelings which we can so easily reason in nothingness, and by the less impressive, though very sound, policy of doing as you would be done by.

And if ever there were pointless knowledge of no utility, then this is it. After the outrage to our emotion and psychological frostbite of reaching this moral absolute zero, we find that our behaviour does not and cannot change at all; our selfish beset interests are best served not by a diabolical nihilism, but by carrying on as before. There are no ethical foundations any more than there are epistemological foundations; what of it?

Tax is harmful to the economy in that it, firstly, reduces capital accumulation of all kinds, public and private, and, secondly, misallocates or encourages the misallocation of capital throughout the economic sphere. The latter of these points is reasonably well understood, but the former is increasingly obscure. Indeed, it is a commonplace of casual left-leaning and popular discourse that private businesses under-invest because they are only interested in profit. This is a bizarre position, and not, I think, held by many economists, but it is a widespread and substantial part of public opinion. However, and notwithstanding its general currency, nothing could be further from the truth; it is the state that does not invest; it is the state that spends only for very short term gain (electoral popularity), and leaves the economy undercapitalised in the sense that complexity has not been created with a view to the creation of further complexity but only for consumption and immediate gratification.

Emphatically, the state does not invest for a return. Why? Because it need not do so. The tax base struggles autonomously and without encouragement to survive, so the state can leave all concern for the future to the will to live of these private individuals, and freely spend tax on the workforce on the public payroll, who in truth constitute the real body of the state, and on the electorate, so many of which, almost all, are in some degree state clients.

When the state appears to invest it is usually spending on a client sector of the population. And it is these clients who are the source of complaints of underinvestment from private wealth; private money does not expend largesse on the client, but truly invests for a return, in other words it deploys complexity in order to serve a requirement over the longer term, and thus secure a) a commitment of resources to reconstitute the investment and to add a thin layer of profit, which is a lien on the grown condition of the future economy (profit is truthfully one of the oddest phenomenon in commerce; debt undertaken by one party but to be paid by another).