So, David Cameron, do you believe in national sovereignty? In rural communities? In age-old features of our national life? In the monarchy’s direct link to every address in the Kingdom? Well, the essentially or entirely foreign forces of global capitalism and the EU are marching in with a view to destroying the Royal Mail. An EU directive requires full competition in postal services by 2012, so that the Royal Mail must deliver its competitors’ letters as if they were its own First Class ones, yet for less than the price of First Class post. This necessitates cuts, both in postmen’s pay and in Post Offices.
Meanwhile, the “free” marketeers seriously propose privatising something that has never been in the private sector, having been in what would now be called public ownership ever since it was created 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. Nothing could better indicate how utterly unconservative the “free” market ideology really is. Neoliberal economics, a total disregard for our heritage and institutions, and European federalism: all of a piece, of course.
Yet even Margaret Thatcher, a fanatical if incoherent heritage-destroyer and European federalist in accordance with her barely understood economic ideology, specifically ruled out privatising the Royal Mail, “because it’s Royal”. Just for once, she was right. Not merely foreign companies, but companies actually owned by foreign states as such, are now circling our postal service.
If this is not a conservative and Tory cause, then what is? It echoes the cry of “King and People” against the Whig magnates. It even expresses loyalty to the legacy of the Royal House of Stuart. Those who believe in publicly owned public services, in strong unions, and in rural communities must unite with those, very largely the same people, who believe in national sovereignty (both as against the EU and as against the foreign acquisition of a key national asset), in the monarchy’s direct link to every address, and in rural communities. Public ownership and strong unions are in fact safeguards of national sovereignty and of the countryside, and thus of that other such safeguard, the Crown.
Together, we can save our Post Office. Mandelson or no Mandelson, Gordon Brown seems to be on side after all. But David Cameron, what say you?
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"It even expresses loyalty to the legacy of the Royal House of Stuart."
ReplyDeleteYes, but if there's one thing there's far too much of in modern politics, it's politicians falling over themselves to express loyalty to the Royal House of Stuart. I'm as loyal to the legacy of the Royal House of Stuart as the next man, but you can have too much of a good thing.
If there is one thing of which there is far too little.
ReplyDeleteThe exiled Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much new science and technology to their host-countries. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India. And very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or, crucially for the present purpose, in North America.
The Highlanders in North Carolina spoke Gaelic into the 1890s, but it must be said that in vain had the rebellious legislature there issued a Manifesto in that language a century earlier: like many people of directly Scots rather than of Scots-Irish origin or descent, they remained resolutely loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War.
There were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688. There was of course that Catholic enclave, the Maryland colony. And there was Pennsylvania: the Quakers were almost, if almost, all at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691.
Many Baptists were also Jacobites. Early Methodists were regularly accused of Jacobitism. And the name, episcopal succession and several other features of their own Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached. Add in that John Wesley himself had been a High Church missionary in America, and that Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship rather than of Evangelicalism, hence the above allegations. All sorts of, so to speak, connections start to spring to mind.
Not least, it almost impossible to overstate the impact of Catholicism, of the Anglo-Catholicism that High Churchmanship almost entirely became at least to some extent, of the Baptist and Reformed (including Congregational) traditions, and, above all, of Methodism, to the emergence and development of our own Labour Movement, with its successful righting of numerous socio-economic wrongs and its consequent successful prevention of a Communist revolution in this, one of the two countries that Marx himself held most likely to have one.
Quakerism and Methodism (especially the Primitive and Independent varieties) were in the forefront of opposition to the First World War, which also produced the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, and had a following among Anglo-Catholics of either of what were then the more extreme kinds, “English Use” and “Western Use”, each of which included Jacobites among, admittedly, its many eccentrics. Above all in Wales, where Catholic sentiment was still widely expressed in the old tongue well into the eighteenth century, Quakers and Methodists had very recently stood shoulder to shoulder with Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists against the Boer War. Those Baptists had included one David Lloyd George.
Behind these great movements for social justice and for peace was still a sense that the present British State (not any, but the one then in existence) was itself still somehow less than fully legitimate; that there was ultimately something profoundly wrong about this country and her policies, both domestic and foreign: distant echoes of an ancestral Jacobitism.
But that's my point. Watch Newsnight, The Politics Show or even Question Time and it's all "North Carolina Highlanders" this and "Quaker antipathy to the Whig view of history" that. We can't keep beating a dead horse - we need to move on to more vital issues, like the continuing Merovingian influence in the EU.
ReplyDeleteYou are confusing your Merovingians with your Carolingians.
ReplyDeleteI certainly am not. Don't blame yourself - the Carolingian influence in the EU is so obvious, it makes it easy to overlook the subtler, but more inimical, Merovingian influence. But it's there, for those who have the wit to spot it.
ReplyDelete