Ed Miliband wants to get rid of ceremonial dress. He is badly wrong. Such dress emphasises the office, not the holder. A lot more of that emphasis is exactly what we need. In the words of Peter Hitchens in The Broken Compass:
“It is not a coincidence that the country with a Gold State Coach, Erskine May, a Lord Chancellor and a Black Rod is also a country without a secret police force or torture chambers, where the police cannot stop you and demand your papers. Or so it was.”
So it was, when the Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment were delivered by a political movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services. That movement proudly provided a high proportion of peers, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour. And those worthies had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of the Queen’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver those goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony.
So it was.
And so it can be again.
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"It is not a coincidence that the country with a Gold State Coach, Erskine May, a Lord Chancellor and a Black Rod is also a country without a secret police force or torture chambers, where the police cannot stop you and demand your papers. Or so it was"
ReplyDeleteWell it might be. Or these things might just not be related to each other. I can, after all, think of several countries which have neither Erskine May nor torture chambers.
How long have they been like that? Other than countries whose arrangements reflect and effect close historic ties to Britain, not very long at all. And we therefore have no reason to assume that they will stay that way for very long, either.
ReplyDeleteThat statement is completely logically inconsistent
ReplyDeleteIt is that old-fashioned thing called a fact: we have no reason to assume the stability of liberal democracy in the countries that you have in mind. They might stay that way for ever. But we cannot assume so.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, we can have no real or reasonable doubts about the countries that I have in mind. And we all know why.