Lockesley Hall.

'For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bails;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind whistling warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.'

Alfred Tennyson wrote 'Lockesley Hall', the poem from which those lines are taken, in 1835, the year he turned 24. The first two lines quoted here appear on the dedicatory plaque of the Starship Voyager in the American TV Science Fiction series, Star Trek: Voyager. The phrase 'Parliament of man' inspired the title of Paul Kennedy's 2006 history of the UN, The Parliament of Man: the Past, Present and Future of the United Nations. I owe these facts to the anonymous author of the Wikipedia entry.

Was Tennyson a prophetic visionary? Nassim Nicholas Taleb rightly warns us about what he calls 'Black Swan' events, and his hero Sir Karl Popper rightly poured scorn on the idea of 'iron laws of history' in The Poverty of Historicism. (There is one iron law of history, at least, if no other - and that is that, sooner or later, all Empires - and all Civilisations - decline and fall.) Predictions, projections and forecasts are generally bunk. But maybe, just maybe Tennyson got it right here. It would be nice to think so.

I see nothing to be afraid of in a World Government or New World Order (NWO), and everything to be welcomed. That's why I'm in favour of the EU, and new security and co-operation agreements in Europe and Asia that would include the Russians, the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Chinese - all nuclear armed countries, with Pakistan having severe internal problems with Islamic extremist terrorism.

So the NWO isn't a conspiracy of Blacks, Jews, Freemasons, Catholics and Communists, or Knights Templars, Rosicrucians and Illuminati, or Little Green Men from Outer Space, or Demons and Antichrists, or the UN, the US Government, US Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. It's a good thing, and it can't happen too soon for me. Of course, being Catholic, disabled and gay, I'm probably in on the conspiracy, aren't I?