Wednesday, 13 August 2008

A Prince Among Men

Over Christmas, David Starkey, whom I had always previously assumed to be the bad type of Tory, concluded his epic study of the monarchy with a splendid attack on the Thatcherite-cum-New-Labour privatisation of public services (he was a bit nostalgic for the private charity that preceded the Welfare State, but should consider that the latter would never have been deemed necessary if the former had worked), leading into the suggestion that the monarchy should embody the resistance to this in the name of "altruism, neighbourliness, the fruits of the spirit", which he contended that Prince Charles was already very much engaged in doing.

Quite right, too.

Prince Charles and his father might not be as pretty and telegenic, or as adept at pretending to be middle-class when not, as his late first wife was. But they have in any given of many long years done a hell of a lot more charity work than she ever did in her entire life, tastefully without the sort of publicity that she went in for as if she really had been one of the nouveaux riches that she affected to be, but in fact (like all the great noble houses of England and Scotland) despised the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas for being.

Today, His Royal Highness is spot on about food production, even if his way of putting it is a little over the top. A country which cannot, or refuses to, feed itself is not a sovereign state: importing, say, mangoes, is one thing; but importing green beans, which can be grown here, is quite another. How can our future sovereign not be concerned for our sovereignty?

And agriculture (not factory farming, but proper agriculture) is a bastion of real property held at family and household level as a bulwark against both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. It is characteristically the mainstay of very strong and close-knit families and communities, the building blocks of "altruism, neighbourliness, the fruits of the spirit". The same was true of coal, steel, and so much else. We miss them. If possible, we must bring them back. And we must defend our agriculture.

God Bless The Prince Of Wales.

2 comments:

  1. Perhaps you should call yourselves Carlists, adopt the red saltire of Burgandy as your emblem, and seek to avoid the split between the Socialists and the traditional Catholics in Spanish Carlism?

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  2. Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey - oh, yes, indeed.

    Most Catholics in this country are Socialists as understood in this country: "more to Methodism than to Marx", and all that; and a very great deal to Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism as well.

    It's a key difference with the Continent, both from a Catholic and from a Socialist point of view. But now that the cultural Marxists have taken over the Labour Party and destroyed it, some of us are starting again outside it, as you clearly know.

    I rather fancy the oak leaf, from Royal Oak Day, as our symbol. That, of course, also goes back to a King Charles.

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