Teachers no longer wear robes and mortar boards. Doctors no longer wear white coats. And you will be unastonished to learn that the lead for both these moves came from the trade union movement and NHS management respectively. It can only be a matter of time before policemen on the beat do so in plain clothes so as not to offend ethnic minorities.

In the odd world of the Progressives (elected or not, usually not) all respect must be eradicated, all experience levelled, and everyone’s opinion made equal. As an older student of socio-political engineering, the process puts me in mind of Chinese peasants doing brain surgery during Mad Mao’s Cultural Revolution. We seem these days to be terrified of giving people the respect they deserve – perhaps for fear that they might abuse it.

Along with me, you no doubt read of the latest attempt by the education Progressives to call teachers and lecturers ‘senior learners’, and thus make them somehow more ‘in tune’ with their students – or as they were called in my day, pupils. Take away the rank, and hey presto! We are all equal.

The Fluffies and bureaucrats will not be happy until every decision taken by everyone in authority is open to 24/7 approval on an internet instant-voting system. Nobody will be exempt from this ultimate democracy aka mob rule except…civil servants and politicians.

There is nothing wrong with earned respect: the problem is with unearned privilege. In contemporary Britain, those with the latter are trying to eradicate the former. Having no uniform, specialist skills or followers, they are relaxed about this erosion of power-derived-from-respect, because clearly it isn’t going to affect them. And their own untrammeled power being based on nothing beyond that they have voted themselves, they can feel safe in their deadly invisibility.

Speaking as an increasingly wrinkly bloke with a great deal of wisdom and painfully learned lessons to offer, I wouldn’t want to be in tune with my charges. I could never be a teacher in any shape or form today, because at the first sign of arrogant ignorance I’d be inclined to let fly with some home truths. Also, I’ve known too many good but broken teachers give the whole thing up out of sheer frustration: with the indiscipline, the monitoring, the needless paperwork, and the lack of any appreciation of why they really do know better.

The beauty of being a bollocks deconstructor is that I can expose bollocks for the unpleasantly scrotal nonsense it is – and then ignore the odd grey drone who turns up to argue in the comment thread. The tough part for an overworked hospital doctor (being told by the EU that he must only do a 37-hour week) is that he or she must smile benignly as the person with big hair, padded shoulders and no brain stands watching their medical procedures for evidence of incorrectness.

I once – many years ago – met an older German who had been on U-Boat duties for much of the Second World War. On board as always was the useless but fanatical Nazi, checking they all heil-Hitlered at the right time and reported anyone suspected of impure thoughts about their glorious Fuhrer. He told me that, as word came through from Admiral Doenitz that Hitler was dead and the war was over, the SS man was summarily dispatched into the ocean via a makeshift torpedo tube.

It would be nice to think that all those creepy functionaries who insist these days on calling one ‘colleague’ might one day meet a similar fate. If nothing else, it would be a blow struck for genuine (as opposed to ersatz) equality.