Like Maria Miller before him, Jeremy Hunt has
said nothing more than that he himself would vote for a backbench amendment
lowering the abortion time limit, though not under the catch-all "special
circumstances" for which Margaret Thatcher legalised it up to birth. There
is no story here. Would that there were. But there isn't.
Speaking of Thatcher, the 12-week time limits on
abortion elsewhere in Western Europe (where there is not an outright ban, as there was in Great Britain for the first generation of our own National Health Service, and as there almost still is alongside the NHS in Northern Ireland) are due to the consensus between, upon and
around Christian Democracy and Social Democracy, once the twin pillars of One
Nation Toryism, and now once again, as historically, the twin pillars of One
Nation Labour.
What is essentially that consensus can still be said to unite the four or five major parties in Northern Ireland when it comes down to practical, day-to-day policy-making. Whereas post-Thatcher and post-Blair Britain is like the United States since the dismantlement of the New Deal: dependent on abortion, among other evils, for the maintenance of the underlying and overarching evil that is our economic system.
A system the superiority, or even the self-evidence, of which was disputed by no major party between the death of the staunchly pro-life John Smith and the election of Ed Miliband, who is no pro-lifer himself, but who is no sectarian enemy of such strands of Labourism, either. His relationship with, among others, his party's social conservatives is very much as Smith's relationship was with his party's economic Left and with its Eurosceptics, to neither of which he belonged, but neither of which he sought to alienate or exclude.
What is essentially that consensus can still be said to unite the four or five major parties in Northern Ireland when it comes down to practical, day-to-day policy-making. Whereas post-Thatcher and post-Blair Britain is like the United States since the dismantlement of the New Deal: dependent on abortion, among other evils, for the maintenance of the underlying and overarching evil that is our economic system.
A system the superiority, or even the self-evidence, of which was disputed by no major party between the death of the staunchly pro-life John Smith and the election of Ed Miliband, who is no pro-lifer himself, but who is no sectarian enemy of such strands of Labourism, either. His relationship with, among others, his party's social conservatives is very much as Smith's relationship was with his party's economic Left and with its Eurosceptics, to neither of which he belonged, but neither of which he sought to alienate or exclude.
Listen to
the silence from the Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, practising
Catholic, Hero of Hillsborough, working-class boy made good, and Yvette
Cooper's potential nemesis in any future Leadership Election that they might
still be young enough to contest.
I've just had the latest of my Guardian commenting accounts banned for simply espousing the tamest of Christian beliefs about abortion posted underneath one of their op-ed pieces.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why they bother opening up their articles to readers if they only remove and proscribe comments that aren't in accordance with extreme feminist views on the subject.
And I'm not being facetious here one bit; the vast majority of pro-choice posts over there are simply deranged, if not bloodthirsty. For my opinions to be worthy of censure is almost comical. Still, I keep trying - I imagine I'll have a couple more accounts set up tomorrow, and the cycle shall continue.....
I no longer both with Comment is Free. If someone sends me an article from it, or if someone like Neil Clark links to one, then I might put it up on here. But apart from that, why waste my time?
ReplyDeleteGenerally, health spokespersons do not offer a view on abortion because it is regarded as an issue of conscience. Because the dept of health deal with funding, they would not want to be seen as unduly influencing the process of availability of funding for terminations.
ReplyDeleteI don't think abortion has been debated since Ed Miliband entered parliament but to my knowledge he supports a pro-choice line, which coincides with his socially liberal stance (he has a 100% support for gay rights voting record, for example)