Although it was sad for Brown, if anything the Royal Family displayed its True Labour credentials by refusing to have Blair at what was, after all, the wedding of a man whose mother's death the old monster had tried to hijack for his own political advancement. "Royal" and "Wedding" are the only two words as Old Labour as each other. In any case, the Queen could never have afforded Blair's appearance fee.
I was tickled by the sight of the Spencers in their paddock, apparently forbidden to mix with civilised people, although their presence did in fact serve as a reminder that the Hanoverians are most certainly not at the top of the class system in the view of the handful of dynasties that brought them over as an unfortunate political necessity and which continue to view them as such. "The People's Princess"? The root of the whole trouble was that she had married down and she knew it.
George Osborne was as wide-eyed and twitchy as ever. Just say no, kids. Just say no. Was the bride's train so long because she had left the stickers saying SALE on the soles of her shoes? And notice that as soon as it was given an audience of two billion, the Church of England reverted to the Book of Common Prayer, even if it was "with the additions and deviations proposed in 1928", squeamishly omitting the 1662 reference to marriage as "a remedy against fornication".
But Chris Huhne was thoroughly dishonest on Any Questions, claiming that no Lib Dem conference had ever debated the abolition of the monarchy. In fact, whereas Labour only ever did so for 20 minutes flat in 1923, there was at least one major Lib Dem conference debate on abolition in the 1990s, the prime mover being one Liz Truss, now tipped to fight out the next Conservative Leadership election but one against the then New Labour activist Louise Bagshawe, who no doubt still venerates no Queen except Queen Cherie.
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A Jacobite at heart, aren't you?
ReplyDeleteIn the sense that I trace the roots of the American Republic, of the campaign against the slave trade, of Radical action against social evils, of the extension of the franchise, of the creation of the Labour Movement, and of opposition to the Boer and First World Wars, back to Catholic, High Church (and thus first Methodist and then also Anglo-Catholic), Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker and other disaffection with the Whig Revolution of 1688.
ReplyDeleteWithin those communities, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, there remained a sense that the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate, a sense which had startlingly radical consequences.
Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.
Oh, and note the uniform in which the new Duke was married.
It was good to see every last remaining member of the armed forces in uniform for this event.
ReplyDeleteThe Lib Dem conference is a policy making organ and members can bring proposals to be debated, it isn't a stage-mangaged show, so if abolition of the monarchy has ever been debated it just shows that abolitionists exist in the Lib Dems (as in all parties). If you want to make the point that the Lib Dems have a particularly large number of them you would have to say what proportion of votes the proposal actually got.
ReplyDeleteTell that to Chris Huhne. And Liz Truss is no longer (officially) a Lib Dem, anyway.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the Lib Dem Conference is no longer "a policy-making organ" in anything more than name, any more than the Labour one is. Welcome to the Big League. How you react to the events of tomorrow night will indicate whether or not you really deserve to be there.