Monday, 2 June 2008
The Right Fights Back?
Ann Widdecombe is to break the Tory Whip and support 42-day detention without charge (not trial, charge). Miss Widdecombe is wrong about this, as about hanging, the Iraq War, and, idiosyncratically, field sports. But she is no rabid capitalist, since no moral and social conservative (nor any orthodox Catholic) possibly can be. And it is a shame that a social conservative backlash against Cameron should begin with support for what is really so very unconservative a measure. But it is nevertheless notable that such a backlash is starting at all. We may only hope that it rapidly finds rather better causes around which to organise.
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Miss Widdecombe has stated quite clearly that one can be a Catholic and a capitalist - which is technically true, depending on how one defines the term "capitalist". Rather confusingly she was also pretty sure that you can be a Catholic and a Socialist. Presumably F. Michael Seed, who instructed her in the Faith, skated over the explicit condemnations of Socialism by numerous Popes.
ReplyDeleteBut then for all I know he might have mentioned the use of the death penalty (which is "wrong", supposedly) in the Papal States, where monthly executions on the Pope's authority carried on quite regularly right up until the abolition of the papal monarchy by the Italian nationalists in 1870.