Whipped

Many Christian Democrats in post-War Italy, and Jakob Kaiser in post-War Germany, looked to the Attlee Government as the practical example of the implementation of Catholic Social Teaching, although, for all the right-wing hysteria from Churchill and others, that Government was very largely continuing where the Inter-War Tories had left off when they had created the most comprehensive Welfare State in the world at the time while nationalising electricity and the BBC. (Churchill had of course been an opponent, indeed an enemy, of those Tory Governments.) Although it bears little resemblance to his performance on Any Questions last night, Iain Duncan Smith is to be commended for his defence of those principles.

But he has also declared his intention to vote in favour of the legal redefinition of marriage so as to include same-sex couples. Well, of course that is what he is going to do. It is not arrogance or hubris for a Cabinet Minister to believe that he has been invited to take his position because he has a special contribution to make to that area of policy at that very highest level, making him most disinclined to resign. If that were not so, then the offer ought never to have been made by the Prime Minister. See the cases of George Osborne, Liam Fox, Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt, and so forth. Iain Duncan Smith has spent a good many years working on the policies that he now seeks to implement, having said in the past that he did care which party implemented them so long as they got done. And, which is the present point, the vote on marriage is going to be a whipped vote. Any Minister or PPS who wanted to vote to defend traditional marriage would have to resign. The free vote will be on the Labour side.

Yesterday's post on the Netherlands has invited a barrage of unprintable "comments". It is good to see that they are so rattled. The Dutch are not, by and large, "reactionary" Catholics or "fundamentalist" Protestants. Theirs is generally the Catholicism of Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany, or, without going into historic confessional differences, the Protestantism of Britain, Germany and Scandinavia. As with the opposition of Dr Rowan Williams to the redefinition of marriage, when the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll lot have lost those, then they really have lost, with profound implications for everything from the economic system designed to deliver that social and cultural model, to the foreign policies designed to spread both that means and those ends even at the barrel of a gun.

And they know it.