Saturday 7 June 2008

Catholics, Anglicans, The BPA And The EU

I know that the British People's Alliance is being viewed very favourably at or near the top of the Catholic Church in this country; I arranged that myself. I am frequently told by people whom I trust that Rome itself is keeping a benevolent eye on us. And I am also now informed that the great and the good of the Church of England are doing likewise. I am delighted to hear it. "Pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war" is of course exactly where all these people are, even if the Anglicans tend to be a bit quieter about the first two parts (although that is now very visibly changing).

But on both sides of the Tiber in this country (I don't know about the city through which the Tiber flows), there is apparently concern at our opposition to the EU. I cannot imagine why. There is nothing forward-looking about the EU. It is now far too large, and on the brink of collapse. No one would vote for us if we supported it.

More to the point, I know of no seriously Catholic (or seriously Socialist) political movement which is in favour of it; on the contrary, suddenly becoming pro-EU is always a key part of pulling up a movement's Catholic (or Socialist) roots. The institutions of the Jacobin Republic of Europe subject us to the legislative will of Stalinists, Trotskyists, neo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, and various other undesirables. The President of the Commission is a classic neocon: a rabidly "free"-marketeering and pro-Bush product of the Maoist insurrection that brought down Lusotropicalism and the Encyclicist Estado Novo, a hugely successful, if sometimes (though necessarily) heavy-handed, Catholic bulwark against Communism, Fascism, and civil war between the two.

Mention of Lusotropicalism brings me to the vitally important fact that our patriotism is Commonwealth patriotism. Support for the Commonwealth, and therefore opposition to the EU as threatening to break it up (and as, from its inception, an integral part of military-based American hegemony and of what has become globalisation), is absolutely key to the Christian-based Old Labour tradition of which the BPA is now the expression.

Our concern for white working-class ties to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and for Afro-Caribbean ties to the Queen's Realms and the British Overseas Territories in the West Indies, strikes me as of rather more obvious interest to the Anglican hierarchy than support for an arrangement which, among other things, threatens pro-life and pro-family provision in Ireland, Poland and elsewhere, as well as pro-worker provision everywhere, with talk of a standing army (under overall American command) into the bargain.

Yes to the Commonwealth. No to Chiantishire and Cape Cod elitism.

Yes to Christendom. No to the EU.

15 comments:

  1. Endorsement from the Holy See? As you would say, "dream on, on every possible level".

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  2. They don't endorse these things. That's not how the operate. They are far clever than that...

    I've had some extraordinary emails based on this post. The feeling across the churches is, entirely unsurprisingly, that voting for any of the current crop is virtually, if virtually, sinful.

    Of course, articles in the ecclesiastical press have been saying that about the Lib Dems for years, as have letters thereto variously about Labour and the Tories (who needn't imagine that established pro-life activism in this country has any time at all for them - it spent 18 years campaigning against them).

    But the mood really is heating up, that New Labour is an explicity ant-Christian project whereas Old Labour certainly wasn't, and that we now have three New Labour parties out of three. This is, of course, entirely accurate.

    And to the author of the utterly unpublishable but splendidly informative comment (you know who you are, and so do I), yes, I realy must actually get myself over to Rome soon enough. But the very cheap flights are like that because they have no unions, you know.

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  3. That will be our mutual friend, then. Since you and that person have several mutual friends, see if you can guess who I am.

    With your links both to Radical Orthodoxy and to the Evangelical movement, I'm not suprised that the Church of England bishops are interested in you. Most of them now come from one or the other. A few, like John Sentamu, have much in common with both.

    And I'm not surprised that Rome is interested in you, either. Other than Spain, the only country where there is a statistically recordable chance of sitting next to an Opus Dei member on a park bench, where else but Britain could there be Opus Dei in the Cabinet? It certainly couldn't happen in Ireland, for example.

    I know you are not Opus Dei, but it illustrates the point. Nobody much notices the Catholic Church in England and Wales, so the possibilities for infiltration are endless. Rome knows that.

    As an Aussie (have you guessed who I am yet?), you remind me very much of Bob Santamaria, one of the most influential Australians of the post-War decades. And you have one up on him: he refused to join the Democratic Labor Party despite running it, whereas you are right at the front and centre of the BPA.

    Bob was the main reason why there was never a Communist takeover of Australia, and you could be the main reason why the New Labour lot, in all three parties, never gain complete and permanent control of the UK.

    The real surprise is that the English Catholic Bishops take any interest in you. I pray to John Paul II every day, but no Saint was perfect in this life. His appointments in England and a few other places were dreadful. Are they finally coming round after the SORs and the HFE Bill? I pray so.

    Finally, I greatly appreciate what you are saying about Salazar. Even his Wikipedia entry has to admit that he wasn't a Fascist, and in fact banned Fascist parties. If it had not been for him, Portugal would have had a Spanish-style Civil War between Communists and Fascists. Salazar was also an important ally of Britain's Attlee Government.

    Lusotropicalism was indeed very close to the Commonwealth ethos, that Portugal had been a trascontinental and multiracial country since the fifteenth century, as an expression of the Faith. The mixed contingent of European and African uniformed youth at Salazar's funeral beautifully illustrated the point. Maybe there will be something similar at the Queen's funeral, not for many years yet please God.

    Keep the Faith. And keep up the fight.

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  4. "As an Aussie (have you guessed who I am yet?)"

    Rolf Harris?

    But thank you very much indeed. Your wise words are greatly appreciated.

    On the Salazar point, while it is true that we are addressed to people who couldn't care less what my anti-life, anti-family, anti-worker, pro-war, and therefore (among so much else) Eurofederalist critics might say, I would still be interested to know how they could find a way of attacking me or us on this one, as they would undoubtedly want to do.

    The only good bit in Oliver Kamm's otherwise horrendous book on neoconservatism takes the "even Franco was preferable to the alternative" line (although not, of course, in those words) on the Spanish Civil War. So how could he or his say that they would have preferred a Portuguese Civil War which either the Communists or the Fascists would have had to have won? Only Salazar prevented that from happening.

    Are traditional Catholics holding the monarchist line in Australia? Here in Britain, anti-monarchists think that they are onto a sure thing with Catholics.

    We need to (re-)educate our people that the Catholic Church and the British Crown have been allies at least ever since they both lined up against the Jacobin Terror, at least since when the Catholic Church has greatly disliked republics and much preferred monarchies, even to the extent of requiring that the former be organised along the lines of the respective rival monarchist traditions with regard to everything except the formal Headship of State, and in America even to the extent of inventing a version of such a tradition of monarchism-without-the-monarchy in aspects in paleoconservatism.

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  5. The EU is a threat to the United Kingdom. It would be totally contrary to the Catholic Church's interests for Scotland to become independent and the SNP abolish Catholic schools. The same if Northern Ireland became part of now the extremely secular Irish Republic. The EU wants both.

    If you want to see a whole microsmic society of "economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriots," it is in Gibraltar, an intensely Catholic place. The EU is very, very much a threat to Gibraltar.

    You cannot have a secular monarchy, even if you have a Protestant one. As David says, the Popes made peace with the Protestant monarchs after the French Revolution. The EU is a threat to the monarchy, too. Because the EU is of course a pure product of the French Revolution.

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  6. Pope Benedict XVI rejects the offer of extreme free-market liberalism in return for increased Church power in the spheres of welfare, education and medicine.

    He is committed to world peace, opposition to the Iraq war, nuclear weapons and the armaments trade, plus a determination to end global economic injustice and an insistence that the market must be regulated – though not wholly controlled – in terms of a hierarchy of truly human ends (a stance which implicitly condemns most modern 'economics').

    As the American Catholic neoconservative Jody Bottum laments, he is essentially a German social democrat, if anything to the left of his predecessor.

    His famed criticisms of Liberation Theology arose in part from a perfectly correct perception that it failed to derive its Catholic social radicalism from the heart of the gospel (rather than secular 'scientific' diagnosis) and so in consequence distorted it.

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  7. I've done a bit of research - did you know that you are the first major political party leader ever to use the words "Mention of Lusotropicalism brings me to the vitally important fact..."

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  8. All the more reason why our new party is so urgently necessary.

    It is rather difficult to imagine Blair, Cameron or Clegg saying, or even writing, "Lusotropicalism", isn't it? Brown, on the other hand...

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  9. How many party election broadcasts can you recall that even use the word "Lusotropicalism"? At last we have a real prospect of seeing one. David, don't let us down.

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  10. I'll see what I can do.

    Although what about Dr Brown? And doesn't Cameron have a First in PPE? Might it be that nobody watches PPBs because they are an insult to everybody's intelligence? Yes, let's do something about that.

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  11. Why on earth would either of them, or any serious political party leader, mention Lusotropicalism? Hardly anyone knows what it is. They'd just get ridiculed, or misunderstood, or both.

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  12. No, they'd "get" (if you must) educated.

    Why do you assume that the electorate is thick? I think that we know the answer to that one.

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  13. David, in Anonymous 8:19, you have one of those "my posh school sent me to what was once a great university, so I must be clever" people who don't like coming across words they don't know or people they've never heard of, because it reminds them how thick they are underneath it all.

    So it's just as well that they hardly read anything. After all, they can hardly read.

    Anonymous 8:19, this blog is for your betters. You don't belong here. Have you tried the Tory front bench?

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  14. More on Lusotropicalism, please. I have nothing but contempt for people who don't know what it is. And so should you.

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  15. I reserve my contempt for those who are determined not to find out what such things are.

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