Ecce Agnus Dei

Dogma datur christianis,
quod in carnem transit panis,
et vinum in sanguinem.
Quod non capis, quod non vides,
animosa firmat fides,
praeter rerum ordinem.

Sub diversis speciebus,
signis tantum, et non rebus,
latent res eximiae.
Caro cibus, sanguis potus:
manet tamen Christus totus
sub utraque specie.

A sumente non concisus,
non confractus, non divisus:
integer accipitur.
Sumit unus, sumunt mille:
quantum isti, tantum ille:
nec sumptus consumitur.

"Every Child A Wanted Child"

Remember that one? Yet a child in Birmingham seems to have been starved to death out of sheer neglect. Like "no more gymslip mothers", or the claim that abortions would decline as contraceptives became universally available (the exact opposite of what has happened in every society where abortion and contraception have been implemented - every single one), it was at best a fantasy, and really just a lie.

Tory Landslide? As If!

Oh, get a grip!

They might win, but it would make absolutely no political difference if they did. In any case, there are two years to go yet. And that's before even mentioning the constituency map. Landslide, indeed!

Why do you care which of these identical parties wins a General Election? Why?

ITV Is Now London-Obsessed

Who'd have thought it?

ITV urgently needs to be re-regionalised under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership. Central government (with very tight parliamentary scrutiny) should replace local government in the application of this model to Channel Four.

Trials and Errors

Yet more trouble for the Crown Prosecution Service, which either acquits in secret (notably, flagrantly guilty peerage salesmen) or convicts in secret, in which latter case the trial in open court is nothing more than a very expensive and time-consuming sentencing hearing.

Acquittal without trial is as bad as conviction without trial.

If there was insufficient evidence, then the accused should never have been charged.

Give back the Police their powers of prosecution, and let firms of solicitors build prosecution work into their normal caseloads, as they always used to do.

In League With The Devil

Last night's Newsnight was disgraced by the presence of Robert Kagan, a thoroughly undesirable alien inexplicably allowed into this country. He was on to talk about his donkey-daft idea for a "League of Democracies" excluding anywhere with a government not palatable to him and his neocon mates. Thank God that Israel no longer makes this cut, and that the United States will also very soon fail to do so.

Is Auntie Surrendering?

"Myanmar" now, and even "Yangon". Though, bizarrely, "Yangon, Burma".

Won't You Tell Me How To Get

Tom Lehrer gave up after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger. He said that the world had become beyond satire. But now we have military recruitment on Sesame Street. What is the world beyond after this?

The Unions Round On Brown

But what masochism ever motivated them to fund New Labour in the first place?

Boozed Up Britain

The Fabian and Christian Socialist pioneers must be spinning in their graves.

The Fundamental Problem

We don't want those crazy Christian groups having access to Westminster. They encourage mad mavericks like that Wilberforce, who wants to abolish slavery. Have you ever heard the like?

That Ye Be Not Deceived

Nadine Dorries, on the Today programme this morning, suggested that the time limit for abortion would come down if the Tories won the next General Election.

The American Republican Party has been keeping itself in existence like that for forty years: promising to ban or at least restrict abortion, but never doing the slightest thing about it, because those on whose votes it has come to depend would then declare "Mission Accomplished" and go home to the Democratic Party, whence they came and where their economic interest actually lies.

But the Tories could never pull off that trick here. Just as by far the most socialised sector would still never vote Labour in a million years, so the Catholics and the black-majority churches would never vote Tory in a million years. That's just the way it is.

Instead, common cause begins elsewhere.

By-Elections

Although I don't agree with him about Peter Tatchell, Peter Hitchens writes:

Long ago it was my job to write about by-elections. Two stick in my memory, because they - sort of - changed history. We used to have many more in those days - the mid-1980s - because MPs in general were older and had often come into Parliament after doing real jobs. So they died in office more often.

They were also, in that time of Thatcherite triumph which followed the Royal Navy's recapture of the Falklands, rare opportunities for political protest. They were also completely misleading because they got so much coverage that people stopped behaving normally. Something similar has just happened in the London mayoral election. I'll come back to it. The Tories would almost always be flattened, usually by the Liberals or the SDP. The Tories would then go on to win the next general election with a crushing majority.

Most political reporters and commentators in those days were used to this because there were so many such elections. And even if they weren't used to it, there was enough evidence around to rub in the point. But alas, not now. There have been so few important by-elections in the New Labour era that people inside and outside politics have forgotten all about them.

I suppose I'd better not identify the Labour shadow cabinet member who once confessed to me and a couple of others that he and almost all his colleagues had been hoping like mad for their party to lose the Darlington by-election back in 1983. The plan was that, devastated by the defeat, they would then go in a body to poor old Michael Foot, the party's endearing but hopeless leader, and tell him that in all conscience it was now his duty to step down. The idea was then to stampede the party into electing Denis Healey instead, so transforming Labour's hopes in the coming general election.

"And then" snarled the Shadow minister "our candidate went and won the bleeping by-election, and saved Michael Foot for the nation." Even funnier, in a way, Labour then lost the seat a few weeks later in the General Election.

I wonder if similar thoughts are circulating in the Cabinet, though of course it's far harder to unseat a Prime Minister, who has kissed hands with the Queen, than it is to get rid of a mere Opposition Leader who has none of the powers which office provides.

What happened, as I recall, was this. The SDP fielded a highly telegenic candidate in the shape of a popular local TV presenter. It seemed, from the start, as if this man was destined to ride the wave of mild anti-Thatcher disquiet that was then abroad. But - because it was a key by-election - he came under too much scrutiny, and made a public fool of himself in a televised debate which would never have happened in a normal contest.

People in a mainly Labour seat like Darlington weren't ready to vote Tory, so they switched back to the Labour man, who was commendably bland and safe, and might easily have been an SDP candidate himself. Kaboom. What did it mean for the 1983 general election? Nothing. Would it have happened without the harsh light of coverage? No. Did it have an effect? yes, but not the one intended by anybody, or discussed at the time by the commentators, none of them ( so far as I recall) got a hint of the plot t get rid of Michael Foot.

The other memorable contest was at Bermondsey where the old monster of the London Labour machine, Bob Mellish had stepped down and was determined to sabotage Peter Tatchell, the engaging and naive young Australian chosen to replace him by a party that had (like most urban Labour Parties) been taken over by dedicated far leftists as the old trade unionists had weakened or disappeared.

Amazing as it may now seem, Peter Tatchell was not in those days openly homosexual. He (quite reasonably) dodged questions on the subject which people asked him when they had no business to do so. He stuck to the main plank of his campaign which was an excellent one for Bermondsey "Houses with Gardens". I suspect the sheer nastiness of the experience changed Mr Tatchell's life. Looking back, I think his quiet dignity and guts under an unending hosing of innuendo are one of the most moving political performances I've ever seen. And Parliament is the poorer for his never having got there. He is a principled defender of freedom of speech, amongst other laudable things. I've publicly apologised to him for any part I may have played in the campaign against him, in anything I wrote at the time. Those of us who were there now mostly realise that the man we portrayed as the villain was in fact the hero of the occasion.

It was quite clear from early on that the anti-Tatchell campaign had worked, and that he was unlikely to win. Mellish himself had sponsored an alternative candidate(the first time the expression 'Real Labour' was used, I think), and made one or two ugly appearances. Things were further complicated by the fact that two of the other candidates were called Hughes.It may have been three. Quite how the disaffected Labour vote concentrated itself behind the Liberal Simon Hughes I have no idea. But somehow it did. And in the way of Liberals (whose professionalism at detailed street politics is unmatched) he has held it ever since.

What did it mean? In terms of national politics, nothing. Some might say that Peter Tatchell's defeat contributed to the creation of New Labour. If so, it's hard to see exactly how. Alas, the one Labour Party policy of those days which has genuinely been abandoned (instead of being dressed up or obscured or approached crabwise to avoid being spotted) is the only one that was any good, namely withdrawal from the European Monster. And Labour (and the Tories) are now wholly committed to a sexual radicalism unthinkable when Peter Tatchell stood for parliament.

This, I think, help to show that politics is often not what it seems to be, and also that the main direction of British politics in the last 25 years has been to adopt and pursue policies that politicians knew were unpopular, but somehow managed to persist with anyway.

Israel Is Simply Facing Reality

Within Israel's pre-1967 borders, the most popular name for new baby boys is now Muhammad. There is now a Russian-language television station for the ever-growing number of devourers of pork products, many of whom insist on taking their Israeli soldiers’ oaths on the New Testament alone (emphatically not a Russian Orthodox position, but there we are), and some of whom have been found to be distributing anti-Semitic literature in Russian, up to and including the members of an Israeli neo-Nazi gang.

These Russians are the beneficiaries of the Law of Return, not least because Israeli Jews, other than ultra-Orthodox who are either fully anti-Zionist or at least deeply unhappy about the State of Israel that exists, exhibit that unmistakable societal death wish which is a birth rate well below replacement level (and still falling).

Israel should seize this opportunity, not only to present her non-Jewish Arabs (more than half of Israeli Jews being Arabs) as the best-off in the Middle East, but to make them enjoy, and make the world know that they enjoy, the same standard of living as the rest of her citizenry.

But put together the little Muhammads (who will one day be big Muhammads), the sausage-munching Russian Christians, the non-Jewish Arab birth rate, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish birth rate, the contrastingly low and declining birth rate among other Israeli Jews, and the fact that Israel’s international credibility now requires that she deliver on her much-vaunted claim that her Gentile citizens are equal.

All in all, in 50 or even 30 years time, we will all marvel that there was ever an attempt to re-create some romanticised version of Wilhelmine or Weimar Germany in the Levant, and the magazines that come with the Saturday or Sunday newspapers will occasionally feature articles about the tiny outposts of those aged souls still trying to live the dream.

But, my Zionist interlocutors, the dream is over. Give it up. After all, which would you rather have? Full re-integration into the linguistically and culturally Arab Levant of Christians, Muslims, Jews and Druze, with its de facto capital at Damascus? Or a statelet dominated demographically and politically by Russian Nazis, the statelet busily being created by the continuing application of the Law of Return? Those are the only two options available. In which would Jews be safer?

Paving Over England

Penny Cole writes:

England is disappearing rapidly as New Labour presides over the concreting over of the countryside. Since 1997, over 1,100 hectares of Green Belt have been lost each year and at least 45,240 homes – equivalent to a city the size of Bath - have been built on Green Belt land.

The purpose of the Green Belt, introduced in the 1955, was to give local authorities not only a means, but also an incentive to halt urban sprawl and leave a clear definition between communities. Green Belt land was formerly viewed as sacrosanct, but these crucial “green lungs” – and the contribution they make to ecology and environment - are being rapidly eroded.

The Council for the Protection of Rural England reports that the Government’s own planning inspectors are undermining Green Belt policy, with statements that suggest they no longer view it as a permanent designation, but subject instead to shifts in market demand, for example for housing and air travel.

At present, local authorities are preparing their regional plans, and so far 10,000 hectares of Green Belt have been put forward for development. A key reason for seeking to lift Green Belt controls is to deliver to developers the kinds of green field sites they find cheap and attractive for house building.

The CPRE reports: “Speculators are dividing up dozens of areas of Green Belt land with stakes and fences, and marketing them in small plots to people, often overseas, who want to make money from building on them. When time passes with no prospect of the land being developed, the land often becomes overgrown and blighted by fly-tipping – thus increasing the pressure to develop the land in order to tidy it up.” Since 2004 the total Green Belt area has shrunk in East Anglia, and in the East and West Midlands.

Paul Miner, CPRE’s senior planning campaigner, says despite minister’s pledges, “in reality the Green Belt is being seriously eroded”. He warns: “Too much development has already been permitted, and some Government Inspectors appear to be interpreting Green Belt policy in their own way. This is making a mockery of the permanence which Green Belts are supposed to have.”

Whilst paying lip service to protecting the Green Belt, the Government is sending local authorities a different message. For example a Treasury-sponsored review of land use planning called for more frequent reviews of Green Belt policy. And, the CPRE reports, between May 1997 and March 2004, 162 planning applications referred to central government for decision, were permitted.

In addition, the Aviation White Paper supports airport expansions that would take place on 700 hectares of Green Belt. This month the government agreed a development plan for the East of England aimed at delivering a minimum of 508,000 additional dwellings up to 2021 and Green Belt reviews will be held throughout Hertfordshire, much of it designed to facilitate expansion at Luton and Stansted airports.

The hypocrisy of the government knows no bounds. In April, ministers announced their shortlist of proposed “eco-towns”. Of these, CPRE has found that two are likely to involve significant development in designated Green Belt: Rossington (in South Yorkshire); and Weston Otmoor (near Oxford). No wonder local people are up in arms about these far from ecologically-sound proposals.

Silly Milly Again

"Yangon"? I ask you!

Good Egg Of The Day

The Reverend Tim Jones of York.

The Ties That Bind

Sir Paul Beresford was right to use today's PMQs to defend the current visa scheme for British-descended people from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa . But it is also true that that scheme discriminates in favour of white people.

Instead, let all subjects of the Crown, including the people of almost all the English-speaking West Indies and several parts of the Pacific, have at least the same rights of entry to the United Kingdom as are enjoyed by EU citizens. If the South Africans want to enjoy this benefit, then they know what they have to do. Compared to their impending choice of President, they should jump at the chance.

The Dalai Show Comes To London

A warm welcome to the man who wants to hive off a vast tract of immemorial China and return life expectancy there to half what it is now, as it was the last time that the Chinese authorities allowed it to be run as a feudal theocracy. The man, moreover, who wants to purge it of well over half its population to that end.

Rowan Williams knows how to pick them. Later this summer, he will also be playing host to the racist fanatics who run the Episcopal Church in the United States, and who believe that Asians, Latin Americans, Oceanians and (above all) Africans are not entitled to an opinion on anything. Is it too late to have these people served with Exclusion Orders, like their indistinguishable compatriot, David Duke?

Undiplomatic

Of course hardly anybody wants to do the Government's silly diplomas. Alongside very highly academic education for those suited to it and (although there was never anything approaching enough of this) very highly technical education for those suited to it, there used to be, and there should be again, institutions providing both exactly as much academic knowledge and exactly as much technical knowledge as most people really need. They were called Secondary Modern schools.

But we don't want to go back to them, do we? Well, at least they had the wit to teach some people (as it happened, girls) how to cook, and to teach some people (as it happened, boys) how to do odd jobs around the house. Both sexes could and should be taught these things.

Think of Jade Goody, who would have attended a Secondary Modern if there has still been any. I have never met a former Secondary Modern pupil who was unable to understand the word "wedlock", or who imagined there to be a foreign country called "East Angular", or who wondered why Eskimos' eyes did not freeze over, or who was worried about being made an "escape goat".

Mortality and Morality

Of course a lot of very premature babies die. They were ill in the first place. That is why they were premature. Where the morality of abortion is concerned, so what?

Police Strike

The Police tend to forget this, but they are civilians, paid to do full-time what, should the circumstances arise, we would all do, and be entitled to do, for free.

So they have a moral right to strike, which they voluntarily forgo in return for certain other arrangements, including the traditional pay deal that the Government is denying them this year. If they all call in sick on the same day, or whatever, then they should enjoy the full support of the labour movement, however magnanimous that would require some sections of it to be.

No one has been more loyal to New Labour than the Police, yet look how they are being repaid. I hope that they will hit back as hard as they can, and that their doing so will finally spur those in the unions who have remained loyal to Labour in return for nothing but scorn and abuse to start hitting back too, without fear of the Police response.

Brown: Whose Agent?

John Smith (who would certainly have voted against the HFEB), to whom Brown is allegedly the rightful heir who has been restored following the overthrow of the Blairian Usurpation, promised that workers' rights would apply to all, from day one of employment, and regardless of the number of hours worked. Yet even that has not come to pass, and is not being proposed.

There is simply no remaining point to the Labour Party. None whatever.

Fishy

According to The World At One, the Labour leaflets at Crewe and Nantwich show Timson's silver fish knives. Fish knives? Fish knives! I think we can safely say that Miss Dunwoody does not have fish knives.

Trotskyism On The Vine

Yet another Trot on Jeremy Vine today. This one praised the NHS and its founder, both of which the sectarian Left used to despise, and probably still do behind closed doors. She also called for a revived Old Labour party. I couldn't agree more.

We need to revive the party of the Attlee Government's refusal to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was "the blueprint for a federal state". Of Gaitskell's rejection of European federalism as "the end of a thousand years of history" and liable to destroy the Commonwealth.

The party of the trade unionists and Labour activists who in the early twentieth century peremptorily dismissed an attempt to make the Labour Party anti-monarchist (as it now is), and resisted schemes to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence (as is now very well under way).

The party of Bevan's ridicule of the first parliamentary Welsh Day on the grounds that "Welsh coal is the same as English coal and Welsh sheep are the same as English sheep". Of those Labour MPs who in the 1970s successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of the ruinous effects that it would have had (and is now having) on the North of England. And of those Labour activists in the Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, who accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution.

The party of the Attlee Government's first ever acceptance of the principle of consent in relation to Northern Ireland, of the Wilson Government's deployment of British troops in order to defend the grateful Catholics there precisely as British subjects, and of the Callaghan Government's administration of Northern Ireland exactly as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom.

The party of the Catholic and other Labour MPs who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce, of the Methodist and other Labour MPs who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling, and of those in the Labour Movement who defeated Thatcher's and Major's attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day.

The party of Attlee's dissuasion of Truman from dropping an atom bomb on Korea, of Wilson's refusal to send British forces to Vietnam, and of his use of military force in order to safeguard the right of the people of Anguilla to be British.

And so on.

That party gave the United Kingdom the universal and comprehensive Welfare State (including, for example, farm subsidies), and the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all those good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.

And it did so precisely because it believed in national self-government, the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts. In local variation, historical consciousness, and family life. In the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West. In agriculture, manufacturing, and small business. In close-knit communities, law and order, and civil liberties. In academic standards, and in all forms of art. In mass political participation within a constitutional framework. And in the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death.

All these are corroded to nought by the "free" market, both directly and because it drives its despairing victims by the million into the arms of Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism and Fascism, all four of which feed into neoconservatism.

Turnout in the traditional strongholds of the above political movement was in some cases as low as one in three at the 2005 General Election. And now this. The votes are there to be had, if we can get onto the ballot paper and secure even a small amount of publicity in the right outlets.

You know how to start making it happen. With absolutely no room for Trotskyism.

Brown Opposes Ban On Cluster Bombs

Unlike nine British generals and the Pope.

Is There No Escape?

The television schedules are still going to be butchered, for a football tournament in which these islands literally have no interest.

It is within my recollection that the media decided that a complete obsession with football should replace the actual culture of this country, to the ruin of both. Uneducated, drunken, drug-addled, obscenely overpaid wife-beaters and gang-rapists are now held up as national heroes, despite not even being any good at their "jobs", as the failure to qualify for this competition amply demonstrates.

And did you see that extraordinary event in Portsmouth yesterday? At least half of the people there looked like they had decided to spend a nice Sunday afternoon at the park, and were somewhere between thoroughly disconcerted and simply bored stiff to find this thing going on instead. The compere kept trying to get the crowd to engage in football chanting, but almost nobody joined in.

Television schedulers (among others), take note.

What Is Cheshire Coming To?

They could have a proper dynast, but instead seem on course to pick some noov with a cobbler's shop.

They Know Their Own

Nick Clegg's Lib Dems will back the Tories in a hung Parliament. This Eurofanatical, anti-family, pro-crime, pro-drugs party now rightly recognises the Tories as indistinguishable from itself.

Kirkcaldy No More

Someone I know who used to teach at the beleaguered Kirkcaldy High School (alma mater of Gordon Brown and Adam Smith, and of which Thomas Carlyle was once Head Master) says that it only looks that bad because there has not yet been an inspection of the school down the road.

But he adds that it is still pretty awful, and that horizons are now so limited that once, when he was organising a trip to Holyrood for his Higher class, one of them asked if it would entail an overnight stay. You can actually see Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy.

The Real Armed Forces Day

We already have an Armed Forces Day. It is on 11th November, and the whole point of it is that it is not a public holiday. Rather, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the ordinary routine of daily life is interrupted. Or, at least, it used to be. And it should be again.

As for improving relations between the general public and the Armed Forces, the latter should be brought home from Afghanistan and Iraq. If they are not, then they should simply bring themselves home, thus causing our rancid Political Class to collapse without so much as a shot's needing to be fired. Now that really would be doing their duty in the defence of the Realm.

Category D

A very interesting programme on Radio Four this morning about the old Category D here in County Durham.

Whereas today, it is the "reservations" that a Labour Government is tearing down, just as a Labour Council once tore down the inhabitants' original villages. And then what? Where are they now supposed to go?

She Who Started The Abolition Of Fatherhood

It was, of course, Margaret Thatcher who destroyed the economic base of paternal authority, initially in working-class families and communities, but very rapidly throughout society once that dam had been breached. She also introduced the practice of mothers effectively married to the State, which was unheard of before the 1980s.

"Bias" Hardly Begins To Describe It

Most of The World At One was given over to an argument in favour of spare parts babies by not only a doctor (unnamed, naturally), but a Catholic doctor. They even managed to find one with an Irish accent, just to ram the point home.

Those Irish actors who used to do Sinn Fein voiceovers for the Beeb have been a bit down on their luck in recent years. But not any more, it seems.

Counting The Cost

We can't have babies born prematurely. They cost a fortune to look after. And we need that money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Year One, Or Year Zero?

According to the Government, what matters is how many children born at a certain point's gestation go on to see their first birthdays. So you don't really count until you are one year out of the womb. Remember that.

They Can't Help Themselves

Now they want to invade Burma.

Just after it's been hit by a cyclone.

In that case, where else should we invade, and why?

Gordon Brown On The HFEB

Dishonest from start to finish.

Still, it’s good to see him rattled on this.

The Balancing Act

Just imagine if, in the run-up to a by-election or whatever, the BBC, in particular, ever actually did what it is supposed to do and gave every candidate equal air time.

In other words, just imagine why it will never happen.

What A Comedown

“It may come down to this,” The World This Weekend warned us, “candidates going door to door, asking for votes.”

Imagine!

Britain's Secret Trials

Peter Hitchens writes:

Amy Winehouse is the latest famous person to be acquitted without trial after claims of drug abuse.

I think this is quite wrong. It is bad for us all that these charges have not been aired in a proper court under the rules of evidence.

Miss Winehouse should have the right to speak in her own defence and to confront the witnesses against her.

The Crown Prosecution Service was not set up to conduct secret bureaucratic trials.

People will not willingly accept its verdicts if they don't know how they were reached. One of the purposes of a justice system is to give people the chance to dismiss, once and for all, persistent but unproven allegations against them.

Quite.

The CPS either acquits in secret or it convicts in secret, in which latter case the trial in open court is nothing more than a very expensive and time-consuming sentencing hearing.

Instead, give back the Police their powers of prosecution, and let firms of solicitors build prosecution work into their normal caseloads, as they always used to do.

Evolution Beyond Homo Sapiens?

No. Any such evolution would by definition be a regression to animality rather than a progression, entirely regardless of any specific detail.

Creationism Is Scientism

Scientism is the belief that the only objectively true knowledge is that derived from the application of the natural-scientific method. It is ruinous of science, since that method can only function on certain presuppositions which it cannot prove, but rather must (and, historically, happily did) accept on higher authority. Creationism is a form of scientism, which has accepted the scientistic argument and then applied it to Genesis. Creationists may seem to be the polar opposites of Stephen Hawking, Peter Atkins and Richard Dawkins. But, in fact, they are all of a piece.

Faith and Reason, Science and Art

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) two hundred and nineteen propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism (the belief that the universe has always existed), animism (that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being), pantheism (that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God), astrology (that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars) and cyclicism (that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum).

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan (Rector of the Sorbonne), of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics (and thus of “science”), Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it. This discovery was developed by Buridan’s pupil Nicole Oresme (afterwards Bishop of Lisieux), vigorously and in detail, around 1360.

The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, Portuguese Coimbra, and the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano (now the Gregorian University). They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation (apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church), human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness (whether or not it can be identified in the work itself) to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides.

This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism. And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and of (to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age) common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic (and not least literary) merit. Meanwhile aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

The Eastbourne of The North?

No, of course not. Eastbourne in 1990 was something like the twentieth safest Tory seat. The Labour majority at Crewe and Nantwich is only seven thousand.

Have Tories gleefully predicting the fall of Gordon Brown not realised that the Cameron-loving media pack would quickly transfer its affections from a mere Postmodern, hypercapitalist, meterosexual, warmongering, Oxonian Leader of the Opposition to an actual Postmodern, hypercapitalist, meterosexual, warmongering, Oxonian Prime Minister, should there suddenly be such a thing?

Settled

Autumn Kelly did not leave the Catholic Church in order to marry into the Royal Family (these days, the Church of England would not have received her on that basis), and the normally very anti-Catholic Today programe's apparent campiagn on this issue is laughable.

The Act of Settlement is good for us Catholics. It reminds us that we are different, and it does us the courtesy of taking our beliefs seriously by identifying them as a real challenge.

I question the viability of a Catholic community which devotes any great energy to the question of ascending the throne while the born sleep in cardboard boxes on the streets and the pre-born are ripped from their mothers’ wombs to be discarded as surgical waste. Far from being a term of abuse, the word “Papist” is in fact the name under which the English Martyrs gave their lives, and expresses the cause for which they did so, making it a badge of honour, to be worn with pride.

And yet, and yet, and yet...

The Established status of the Church of England was already a century and a half old at the time of the Act of Settlement, and is wholly unconnected to it. Anyway, in the 1990s, the Courts ruled that that status entailed what everyone had always known to be the case: that the doctrine of the Church of England – “the reformed Protestant religion as by law established in the Realm of England” – is whatever Parliament says it is at any given time, be that the ordination of women (as was the matter in question), or reincarnation, or the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, or anything else at all. All that it is necessary for a monarch to do in order to uphold this “religion” is to grant Royal Assent to Ecclesiastical Measures just as if they were any other Bills passed by Parliament.

Those who would most resist any change to the Act of Settlement are those who insist that the Church of England is confessionally Calvinistic as a first principle rather than, as is in fact the case, only until such time as Parliament sees fit to repeal or replace the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and not a moment longer. Such people are mostly not in England (where they are mostly not members of the Church of England), but in Scotland (where the monarch is required, in ecclesiastical terms, to do nothing more than preserve a Presbyterian pattern of polity) and in Northern Ireland (where, as in Wales, the monarch has no formal ecclesiastical function whatever).

However, it is in Northern Ireland that a large Catholic community, by far the single largest religious body (as the Catholic Church also is, narrowly or otherwise, in each of England, Scotland and Wales), is crying out to be bound more closely to the British State, with which certainly a very large proportion of its members, and possibly the majority, identifies very strongly. In view of what the Coronation Oath actually means, then let the Act of Settlement be repealed if that would help that binding, long complete and unthought about everywhere else in the United Kingdom (even, it seems, on Merseyside and in the West of Scotland).

What was established in 1688, with strong Papal support, was in fact the Catholic principle previously given practical effect in 1399 in England, and even more ingrained in Scotland, as against both Gallican princely absolutism and its metamorphosis into the theory whereby the new gentry-cum-mercantile republic was sovereign even over the Prince.

English Jacobitism, in particular, was what would now be called an Anglican, rather than a Catholic, phenomenon, when it was not just a ragbag of everyone (Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, smugglers, the lot) opposed to the Whig hegemony. Catholics hardly featured, since they simply did not share the underlying philosophical and theological assumptions; rather, they fully accepted Parliament’s right to determine the succession to the throne, even when it was inconvenient to themselves.

Each of the Commonwealth Realms is a linear inheritor of that age-old tradition, which is the peaceable alternative both to the bloodletting anti-republican pseudo-monarchism coming down from Buridan through the French Counter-Revolution, and to the bloodletting anti-monarchist pseudo-republicanism against which it came to react, historical aberrations both.

The Parliament of each Commonwealth Realm therefore has the absolute right to determine the succession to its own throne; but they mercifully choose to exercise this right in unison, and may that ever remain the case. (It is perfectly illiterate to suggest that the repeal of the Act of Settlement would revive any Stuart claim to the throne.) So, again, if the repeal of the Act of Settlement helped to keep even one country in this family, then, in view of the above, by all means let it be repealed, though only by unanimous consent among all the Commonwealth Realms, since its continuation would also be a price well worth paying in order to preserve the unity of our family.

Bush Rebuffed By The Saudis

Well, one can do that to one's hired help.

Fresh from his rabble-rousing in Israel, Bush his paying court in the Gulf. Like Hillary Clinton, he prefers countries that Jews may not enter and where women may not drive to a country in which there is a reserved Jewish seat in Parliament and women outnumber men at university.

Race To The White House

Ron Parsley cannot say that if you give a sum of money, then God will make it up to you, as money, many times over (I'd love to know where Jesus or anyone else in the Bible ever said that, by the way), presumably because he is white. After all, Reverend Icke (who I assume must still be alive) used to say that. But he was (and no doubt still is) black.

Whereas Jeremiah Wright cannot say that 9/11 might have had anything to do with American foreign policy, presumably because he is black. After all, Pat Robertson rather more improbably says that it was caused by American domestic policy. But he is white.

And Hillary Clinton can remain a candidate only for the sake of poor whites who won't vote for a black, whereas Al Sharpton was vilified for being the candidate of poor blacks who wouldn't vote for a white.

School Biology

Those who have been most vocal in denouncing me as a creationist for publishing here the self-evident, and academically commonplace, fact that "the survival of the fittest" has nothing to do with science, but is in reality a tautologous philosophical proposition and the creation myth of all the nastiest Western movements from Darwin's day to this, are themselves outspoken devotees of Tony Blair, who flogged off parts of the state school sector to a genuinely creationist organisation bankrolled by his prep school classmate, Sir Peter Vardy.

Right of Birth

Imagine if the law were to be changed so that mothers could be omitted from their children's birth certificates. You can't imagine it? Well, there you are, then.

Once the issuing of simply false and impossible birth certificates has been established by this means, then it will be extended to the issuing of transsexuals with new birth certificates. Don't we already have enough State lying?

Brown's Sermon On The Mound

What should he say? Something about the Iraq War and the HFEB?

As for Thatcher's infamous effort, to this day her "Jesus was a great moral teacher [not that she seems to have paid too much attention, but there we are] and churches do a lot of good [though not in any way of which she actually approved], but" school of agnosticism is held up as the height of devotion, whereas Neil Kinnock's practically identical views are reviled as godlessness of the lowest order.

The Forger's Lament

Times are hard at the forgers' den that is Michael Gove's hobby. They'd be better off in America, apparently. Well, why don't they move there, then?

42 Days

Victory in sight.

Especially since the Lib Dems have said that they will back this amendment if their own is not called.

Beware Of False Promises

Neil Scolding on the HFEB.

The Heirs To Blair, Indeed

In setting out the programme for a Cameron Government, Michael Gove heaps extravagant praise on the Blairites, the baby-boomer undergraduate Marxists gone middle-aged and rich.

That, and that alone, is what the Cameroons offer. Only even richer. And harking back, not even to the real but relatively restricted moral chaos of the Sixties, but to the culture-wide moral chaos of the Eighties.

Intelligent Design?

It seems to be a sort of Deism, and an example of the arrogant streak among lawyers and scientists. Rather than ask the clergy assigned to the sorts of parishes or congregations that contain lots of lawyers and scientists, they have instead concocted this for themselves. But it's not really any better than "the survival of the fittest".

Our Social Democratic Commonwealth

New Zealand, which pioneered the Welfare State, has renationalised her railways. We should follow suit, not for the first time taking our lead from that, one of the countries on earth with which we have most in common, not least including a Head of State.

God Save The Queen!

Some People Never Learn

Privatise the Post Office? What a good idea! After all, privatisation has worked so well for the railways and the utilities.

That the "free" marketeers would seriously propose privatising something nationalised (to use the word anachronistically, I admit) by Charles II in 1660, and representing the most significant direct link between the monarchy and every household, business, organisation and institution in the land, indicates just how utterly unconservative the "free" market ideology really is.

Five Million People Waiting For Council Houses

Which nobody wants.

Do they?

The Evolution Of An Idea

Insofar as biologists agree about anything to do with the specifics of evolution, they could have gleaned much of it from reading a few select passages of Saint Augustine. Why, Genesis itself depicts the plants preceding the animals preceding Man, which is by no means obvious, and which accordingly does not occur in many a creation story elsewhere.

No, the original thing about Darwinism was not, and is not, evolution itself. It was, and is, the tautologous philosophical proposition, unrelated to science as such, that is "the survival of the fittest", the creation myth of secular liberals, Marxists, eugenicists, Fascists and Nazis. These differ, to the extent that they do on this point, only in their respective definitions of "the fittest". "Fittest" for what? "Fittest" to do whatever it is that they do, or want to do. And who identifies the "fittest" in those terms? They do. Of course.

Thus, in our own culture, we have the "meritocrats", embodying how the late Michael Young was subjected to the worst fate that can befall a satirist, that of being taken entirely seriously. Those with wealth and paper qualifications determine "merit", on the basis of wealth and paper qualifications. To object to this is to question "the survival of the fittest". And we can't have that, can we? After all, "the survival of the fittest" is a scientific fact. Isn't it?

Er, no, actually, it isn't. It isn't a fact at all. And it isn't scientific at all.

"The Poorest People In Society"?

People who previously paid the 10p tax rate? They are certainly poor, and they have certainly been grievously wronged. But "the poorest people in society"? Hardly! Unless anyone poorer isn't in "society" at all. I have a feeling that that is what is really being said.