Conservatism As An Internationalist And Regionalist Conspiracy

Nationalism is a liberal idea. It is not the same thing as patriotism. A patria can mean all sorts of things. A patria does mean all sorts of things.

The Whigs created the United Kingdom, the United States, federated Canada and federated Australia. Even so conservative a figure as Bismarck relied on the National Liberals, often against forces with which he had far more in common. We all know about Garibaldi. There are many other examples. When Germany reunified, the Bloc Party founded by and for former Nazis integrated into the Free Democratic Party as easily as the Liberal Democratic Party did.

It took conservatives, whether in these Islands or anywhere else, a very  long time to reconcile themselves to nationalism, and even then they long kept up, as in most countries they still do, a sharp critique of the liberal opposition to the protection of the agriculture and manufacturing of the nation that the liberals profess to love so much.

They have said, as they still do say, that there is no patriotism without, among other things, economic patriotism. For that among other reasons,  therefore, liberal nationalism is not patriotic at all. Quite so.

The creation of the liberal nation has only ever been brought about by often rather brutal action on the part of the central State, eliminating numerous more local allegiances and customs. In the New World, those have always existed throughout living memory. In Europe, they have routinely been of extreme antiquity.

Mass resistance to such action has been fierce, and fiercely repressed, often over prolonged periods: the English Reformation, the hundred years and more that it took Revolutionary France to make people speak French in half of the country while the monarchists exalted the patois, the corresponding Carlist emphasis on Fueros in general and on Spain's many regional languages in particular, and so on.

The Risorgimento sought to enforce the Florentine dialect, the language of Dante, which it dubbed "Italian". But majority comprehension of it, never mind majority day-to-day use if that exists even now, is a post-War phenomenon, largely attributable to television. At the time of Unification, it was spoken by all of one fifth of the population.

Into the 1960s, the Tories dominated the North of Scotland, where Gaelic was then still spoken far more widely than it is today. As recently as 1979, Margaret Thatcher had to make a General Election manifesto commitment to create a Welsh-language television station, as did Jim Callaghan.

It hardly seems real now, a mere 34 years later, that Welsh Wales was then that important a battleground between the Conservative and Labour Parties, with that many Tory voters speaking Welsh as their language of daily life. By contrast, the attitude to the Celtic languages among today's Tories is pure, tumbrilling Jacobinism.

Catholics, the remnant of the immemorial England, were always regarded as having an allegiance to the international power that had defined the unmentionable Old Order. In fact, Catholics were so regarded in every Protestant State.

Most Catholic States did not contain many, if any, Protestants. But when they did, as most notably in France for a time, those Protestants were regarded in exactly the same way. The Kings of France saw Calvinism precisely as the Kings of Scotland, by then resident in England, saw Catholicism, or indeed saw full-blown Calvinism in their Southern, and soon enough in their Western, rather than in their Northern Kingdom.

Jews have always been so regarded. These days, so are Muslims.

Monstrous calumnies? Not at all. Statements of the obvious, and proper sources of pride and of political organisation. In defence of the ancient indigenous Christians of Syria, for example. Or for the Living Wage, a term and concept of Papal origin; for the full social inclusion of the disabled; and thus against the bioethical terrorist consequences of their absence.

The Church of England has ostensibly stood alone, its very doctrine determined by Act of Parliament, and its organisation only dimly aware of  the existence of an Anglican Communion created almost entirely by its Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic dissidents, with whom that Communion remains in close contact while having hardly any with the central body in England. Next to no one in the Church of England has any concept of belonging to something the beating heart of which is in Africa, where it beats to a very African rhythm indeed.

But the redefinition of legal marriage in England so as to encompass same-sex couples has changed all of that, or it will do so very soon. Deep in the heartlands of the Middling C of E, and for that matter right at the heart of Lambeth Palace, they are waking up to the fact that, since this is now the Law of England, it is now the doctrine of the Church of England.

In 25 or 30 years time, if Prince George wished to contract such a legal marriage, then what would be the reaction from the creature of Henry VIII and of his daughter by Anne Boleyn? That question answers itself. Or if it is not that, then it will be something like that. It may come much sooner. There is talk of cases before the Courts of Law, the rulings of which are doctrinal for the Established Church.

In reply, those who hold to the Biblical principle, the huge majority of the clergy and of the active laity, will and do invoke the Anglican Communion, which will be exactly where it is on this issue in 25 or 30 years time as it is now.

At that point, possibly around 2040 or possibly next year, the huge majority of the Church of England's clergy and active laity will be in the same position as Recusants in England and Huguenots in France, as Jews in the Europe of the eighteenth century and Muslims in the Europe in the twenty-first century.

I hope that they will be very proud of that, and that they will make full use of its myriad opportunities.