It plays very well into the European consciousness to imagine that Rome

fell because of a series of invasions by uncivilised and ignorant barbarians,

jealously invading a land of enlightenment and prosperity, thereby
extinguishing civilisation for a thousand years.

And perhaps we cradle this belief because we feel the same thing is
happening to us today. There is no shortage of people across the continent
who would seek to pin European decline on invading hordes of Muslim
'barbarians', taking 'our jobs' and 'our women' and giving nothing in return
but sharia law. That's certainly the sort of tripe you'll hear from the BNP in
my patch for the Barnsley Central by-election, anyway.

But the truth is that, just as Rome was not built in a day, it didn't fall so
quickly either. By AD 476 Roman society had already spent centuries
destroying itself from the inside. One of the most easily noticeable signs of
this is a steady erosion in the quality of the emperor's portrait on coinage.
This begins from the fourth century and, by the beginning of the fifth
century, the generic medieval blob style has already emerged.

Again, the Renaissance is often depicted as a 'return' to a Roman level of

civilisation, with portraits drawn in a realistic style for the first time in a
millenium. But these skills had already disappeared and Rome was also
haemorrhaging knowledge in the fields of science, philosophy, arts and
economics, too.

A trend away from the laissez faire policies of the past to repeated
debasement of the coinage, socialist prices and incomes policies and a
strangling bureaucracy caused widespread poverty and hyperinflation.
Cities were emptied as their citizens fled to the countryside seeking the
protection of large landowners, forming the beginnings of medieval
feudalism.

From this perspective, the final sacking of Ravella (Rome had ceased to be
the capital in AD 286) and the deposition of the last western emperor
Romulus Augustus in AD 476, was nothing more than the straw which
broke the camel's back - that final piece of the Jenga puzzle that brings the
whole tottering structure crashing into a heap of rubble.

Of course Gibbon blamed Christian meekness, dogma and stubborn

ignorance for this decline (also depicted in the highly recommendable film
Agora). And through disastrous statist policies putting equality,
redistribution and dumbing down above glory, prosperity and competition,
the Romans of Late Antiquity had already gone a long way towards laying
the foundations for medieval European society.

This is evidenced by the fact that, even after 476, the eastern Roman
Empire continued to evolve, uninterrupted, into a recognisable medieval
state until the Ottoman conquest of 1453. And, even in the west, the
historical record shows the Roman Senate continued to exist under
barbarian kingdoms until at least 603 - there was no sudden break from
enlightenment to dark ages.

But what is frightening is that this dumbing down of society appears to be

occurring in Britain today. And, most terrifying of all, it is doing so under a
Conservative Prime Minister.

I never bothered to renew my membership of the Conservative party after

the election and would be ashamed now to hold it. By some insanity we
have ended up with a Conservative government acting like Brezhnev
apparatchiks in making open threats to boardrooms over the percentage of
women that sit on them.

A society that puts such a bizarre abstract concept above the right, and
common sense, of private companies to make rational choices about who
they see as the most qualified to lead them is headed for disaster. Lord
Davies talks of 'a crisis in the boardroom of Britain.' What crisis? The only
crisis I can see is that of a government completely disregarding its
constitutional limitations.
Even if, as Hay Group MD Lesley Wilkin says, 'a diverse leadership team is
a more effective leadership team' surely that is for shareholders to decide?
The government has no more moral or constitutional right to enforce this
than it does, say, compulsory vitamin supplements or the banning of
chocolate. They may or may not have a beneficial effect but both are
entirely inappropriate fields for the government to be engaged in.

At the same time, useless teachers are 'recycled' by frustrated heads giving
good references to get rid of them, because workers' rights have now risen
in our priorities above that of our children's education. Naturally, if this is
allowed to continue, it will create a situation whereby the teaching stock
gets worse and worse with each generation, in turn creating successive
generations of children more feckless than the last. The not-unrelated
matter of exams being dumbed down for political reasons is another deadly
symptom of this decline in our civilisation.

It is worth keeping in mind that the imperial Indian Civil Service, which
had one of the most difficult entry exams in British history, was staffed by
approximately 1,000 people running an entire subcontinent. And at it's
peak, the Roman Empire employed about 150 civil servants.
Uncompromisingly high standards are important to any society because
they create the best kind of elitism - that from which no-one is barred but
for which only the very best gain entry (either through examination,
promotion, or off their own backs). Once standards drop - whether from
fevered notions of equality or otherwise - that society's decline is
guaranteed. And, as the 'dark ages' showed, that is bad news for absolutely
everyone.