Three cheers for Lord Donoughue, for having had the courage to tell The Week In Westminster, both that if the media keep telling MPs that they are a lowlife then they will start to behave like lowlife, and that tougher sentencing for MPs than for anyone else is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of equality before the law.
As surely as does his involvement with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, thus speaks the arguable political executor of Harold Wilson and the fairly unchallenged one of the underrated Jim Callaghan; the author of The People Into Parliament with the not always right, but nevertheless underrated, Bill Rodgers.
Thank goodness that there is still some part of our parliamentary system from which it remains possible to speak from outside the nasty but inevitable union between, on the one hand, what has always been the anti-parliamentary New Left and, on the other hand, the sociologically indistinguishable New Right's arrival at hatred of Parliament as the natural conclusion of its hatred of the State.
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Spot on.
ReplyDeleteYou probably regard Rodgers as the best of the Gang of Four, in that he is not the embodiment of "decadent social libertinism" like Roy Jenkins, of "comprehensive schools mania" like Shirley Williams, or of support for the disintegration of Yugoslavia leading to support for the invasion of Iraq like David Owen.
ReplyDeleteA pro-European in the terms of the time, but probably not a Jenkinsite federalist. Possibly even worth approaching with your ideas about requiring parliamentary procedure, openness and the exclusion of extremism. The causes the CDS fought for in the 50s and the SDP set up for in the 80s.
An opponent of CND when there was a Cold War on, being fought out in miniature inside the Labour Party and the unions. But pro-Trident today? Worth asking.
For yourself, Mr Lindsay, keep it up about the ancient and true role of us Croats and about the parlous condition of our Croat brothers and sisters in Herzog-Bosnia.
Yes, and I will. But I draw the line at Boban. "The Serbs are our brothers in Christ," he rightly said. Before ruining it with, "but the Muslims are nothing to us, apart from the fact that for hundreds of years they raped our mothers and sisters." He ended up having to be removed at the instigation of John Paul the Great.
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