Monday 12 September 2022

Whereas

At the start of the first full working week of the Truss Age, the fundraising page for my next parliamentary candidacy was supposed to have gone live today. See you next Tuesday, indeed.

The Prime Minister's proposed tour with the King is an invitation to protest against her, while making such demonstration look as if it were against him. In any case, has she nothing else to do? But protest against either of them would now be illegal.

A mourning event, and that in the very presence of the coffin, is no time to protest, but if the Proclamation of the new monarch had not been the time for those minded to do so against the monarchy to have made their point, then when might have been? Proclamations of new monarchs have been booed, jeered and heckled in the past.

At least in the case of Symon Hill in Oxford, however, that was now a breach of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. But that is not the King's fault. He was not even the monarch who gave it Royal Assent. Blame lies with the "libertarians" by whom we are governed, with their hated of "cancel culture", with their ferocity in the cause of free speech, and with their enthusiasm for a small State against which they sometimes even claim to see the Crown as a bulwark, despite the fact that in Britain the State and the Crown are exactly the same thing.

The paid Official Opposition had had every intention of voting for the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill until the murder of Sarah Everard, who was no Chris Kaba. There is still no Labour Party policy of repealing it. Control of that party is back in the hands of the people who are clutching their pearls at the reaction of many of its members to its official tweet and Facebook post of "God Save The King".

The religiosity of things like the text of the Proclamation will have driven the pearl-clutchers to distraction, but they cannot object to God, because they will acknowledge no legitimate Prime Minister but Tony Blair even, in the Thatcherite fashion, when he is dead. It might have been different if Blair had been succeeded by someone other than Gordon Brown, but here we are.

But some of us have known them for a very long time, and whatever they may affect for factional reasons now, they have always been fanatical opponents of the monarchy. Whereas John Wheatley saw "no point in substituting a bourgeois President for a bourgeois King", every one of them has always thought that it self-evident that he or she, or perhaps Blair, ought to be the bourgeois President.

George Lansbury, of whom the Blairites have never heard any more than they have heard of Wheatley, pointed out that our people were impoverished by capitalism, not by the King. Yet if you echoed the words of Clement Attlee that capitalism, not monarchy, was the enemy of Labour's programme, then you would be expelled from the Labour Party, and you would be factually incorrect as to the nature of any Labour programme that there might any longer be.

You would probably now be expelled from the Labour Party if you called for the abolition of the monarchy. Yet Keir Starmer is not alone in having made that call in his time, and I am not only talking about Liz Truss. Entirely typically of the Blairites in their pomp, psychotic hatred of the monarchy, of the then Queen, and of the then Prince Charles, used to be spat regularly in my presence, and sometimes at me, by someone who has since been named in the Forde Report. Later, I knew people at the heart of the Corbyn Leadership, and while all but one of them was an avowed republican on the rare occasions that the matter was ever raised, I never heard any of them talk remotely like that.

Also of note is that yesterday marked the end of the campaign for Scottish independence, at least while the present King was alive. He is 73, but his father lived to be 99. Who is now the leader of that campaign? Nicola Sturgeon, Alex Salmond and Ian Blackford all signed the document proclaiming Charles III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Sturgeon also signed as a witness to the King's oath to maintain and preserve the Church of Scotland explicitly pursuant to "the Acts passed in the Parliament of both Kingdoms for Union of the two Kingdoms". It's over.

2 comments:

  1. Making republicanism expulsionable might be Starmer's way of clearing out both the Blairites and the Left.

    ReplyDelete