Monday, 24 April 2006
Spooky
Since starting this blog and making its existence known, my home Internet account has given me no end of grief (no, I'm still not on broadband - it's a long story). This also happened when I had a letter published in a university-based newspaper in October 2001, opposing any attack on Afghanistan for all the reasons that, though I say so myself, have turned out to be correct. Anyway, an emailed letter to that newspaper stating this was never published, but the problem stopped almost immediately. So I trust that this post here will have the same happy effect. Honestly, you'd think that these people had better things to do, or could at least find some way of being subtle!
Thursday, 20 April 2006
My name is David Lindsay, and...
My name is David Lindsay, and I want to be a Labour MP. I joined the Labour Party when I was 17, have served on CLP GC and EC (and on DLP) since I was 18, chaired my Branch for several years from the age of 19, became a Parish Councillor (in an unusually large and busy Parish) at the legal minimum age of 21, became a primary school governor just short of my twenty-second birthday, and became a comprehensive school governor just short of my twenty-third birthday. I have since been re-elected as a Parish Councillor and re-appointed to both of my school governorships, having served as Vice-Chair of the primary Governing Body. At 19, I was a Ward Sub-Agent in the 1997 General Election, securing an overall majority of the total vote on a four-way split in a traditionally Tory ward. And at 25, I became DLP Secretary, having been a District Group Observer for three years before that. I have only just relinquished that office, aged 28.
Therefore, I should now appreciate the opportunity to make a further contribution, drawing and building upon those experiences, which include a great deal of committee work, of working to deadlines, and of hugely successful co-operation with a very wide range of individuals and bodies. Furthermore, I have always done all of the above while engaged in either or both of full-time paid work and various forms of academic work, as well as numerous other voluntary activities, thus demonstrating, I feel, both my commitment, and my ability to organise my time to optimal effect.
I am a One Nation politician, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. Therefore, I am a Socialist: I believe in the universal Welfare State and in the strong statutory (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.
I offer the possibility of many years of service in the future. My mixed ethnic background would also add an unusual, but increasingly important, dimension. I reject all talk of left and right within the Party, or of Old Labour and New Labour: I am simply Labour and proud of it.
I wish to be a workers’ MP on a worker’s wage, accepting only the national average salary for full-time work, and donating the rest to political and community causes, and thus rising with the British People rather than above the British People. I should campaign for election on what I firmly believe to be this hugely popular basis.
My email address is davidaslindsay@hotmail.com
Therefore, I should now appreciate the opportunity to make a further contribution, drawing and building upon those experiences, which include a great deal of committee work, of working to deadlines, and of hugely successful co-operation with a very wide range of individuals and bodies. Furthermore, I have always done all of the above while engaged in either or both of full-time paid work and various forms of academic work, as well as numerous other voluntary activities, thus demonstrating, I feel, both my commitment, and my ability to organise my time to optimal effect.
I am a One Nation politician, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. Therefore, I am a Socialist: I believe in the universal Welfare State and in the strong statutory (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.
I offer the possibility of many years of service in the future. My mixed ethnic background would also add an unusual, but increasingly important, dimension. I reject all talk of left and right within the Party, or of Old Labour and New Labour: I am simply Labour and proud of it.
I wish to be a workers’ MP on a worker’s wage, accepting only the national average salary for full-time work, and donating the rest to political and community causes, and thus rising with the British People rather than above the British People. I should campaign for election on what I firmly believe to be this hugely popular basis.
My email address is davidaslindsay@hotmail.com
Libert, Equality and Fraternity
Liberty, equality and fraternity depend on and lead to nationhood, family and property. The reverse also holds. These six principles may be placed in a circle, and one may begin at any point. Liberty (the freedom to be virtuous, and to do everything not specifically proscribed) depends on equality (which must never be confused with mechanical uniformity, to which it is antithetical), which depends on active expressions of fraternity (trade unions, co-operatives, and so on). Fraternity leads naturally to nationhood (a space in which to unselfish), which leads naturally to the family as the domestic nation-in-miniature, and thence to the urgent need for every family to enjoy real property as its security both against over-mighty commercial interests and against an over-mighty State, legitimate, and indeed necessary, though both commerce and the State are in themselves. And what is thus secured? Precisely liberty, as above defined.
Engels understood this, rightly regarding the family, property, and the State as having a common origin. After all, why bother having the State, if not to defend the family and property? Why bother having property, if not to defend the family and the State? And why bother having the family, if not to defend property and the State? Those who now advocate the withering away of the State undoubtedly know that it is a Marxist term for a Marxist aspiration. But do they know that it would also be the withering away of the family and of property? They ought to be able to work this out, but nevertheless it is time that someone told them, in no uncertain terms.
Engels understood this, rightly regarding the family, property, and the State as having a common origin. After all, why bother having the State, if not to defend the family and property? Why bother having property, if not to defend the family and the State? And why bother having the family, if not to defend property and the State? Those who now advocate the withering away of the State undoubtedly know that it is a Marxist term for a Marxist aspiration. But do they know that it would also be the withering away of the family and of property? They ought to be able to work this out, but nevertheless it is time that someone told them, in no uncertain terms.
A Workers' MP On A Worker's Wage
Could I live in London as a workers' MP on a worker's wage, claiming only the national average wage for full-time work, and donating the rest to political and community causes, in order to rise with the British People rather than above the British People? I don't see why not. After all, plenty of people in London have to survive on a great deal less. Yet I have never been there and seen a waitress, or a barman, or a shop assistant drop dead of starvation.
Since Charles Clarke has today declared the Labour Leadership Election to be an open contest after all, I very much hope that a candidate will emerge promising to be a workers' Prime Minister on a worker's wage, as well as to restore the supremacy of British over EU law, to pull out of Iraq and never again involve Britain in anything remotely like it, to allow only MPs for English seats to vote on purely English matters, to appoint only MPs for English seats as Ministers for purely English affairs, and to ballot the entire electorate as to whether they would like him to be Prime Minister on that basis (with the result to be made public just before internal Labour polls close).
Since Charles Clarke has today declared the Labour Leadership Election to be an open contest after all, I very much hope that a candidate will emerge promising to be a workers' Prime Minister on a worker's wage, as well as to restore the supremacy of British over EU law, to pull out of Iraq and never again involve Britain in anything remotely like it, to allow only MPs for English seats to vote on purely English matters, to appoint only MPs for English seats as Ministers for purely English affairs, and to ballot the entire electorate as to whether they would like him to be Prime Minister on that basis (with the result to be made public just before internal Labour polls close).
Left and Right must unite and fight
Left and Right must unite and fight, as Neil Clark so sagely puts it.
Britain’s Labour and Conservative traditions derives from a series of classically Christian critiques of Whiggery and Marxism, while Britain’s Liberal tradition derives largely from the Whigs’ acceptance of just such a series, although it has always wrestled with the rival tradition of Unitarianism, Radical Dissent, Utilitarianism, and so forth, all of which depend on the Whig (as also Jacobin and Marxist) fallacy of inevitable historical progress.
Each of the Labour and Conservative traditions, at least, therefore stands against the concept of “class war” by always including all social classes as a matter of principle, thus sparing this country the bloodshed and other problems experienced elsewhere. And each of them is wholly committed to the constitutional, democratic process, with the same happy effects.
Millions of Conservative, Labour and Liberal people are still like this, but there is now no way of voting for a party actually run by politicians in any of these closely related traditions. Yet we share those traditions, broadly speaking, with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as a counterweight, both to the thoroughly Whiggish liberal and conservative traditions in the US, and to European integration, with its underlying thought-systems either overtly Jacobin or Marxist or else accepting such a paradigm rather than critiquing it.
Instead, we are stuck with the doubly decadent, logically inevitable union of 1960s social libertinism and 1980s economic libertinism. The former is ridiculously presented as “left-wing, “liberal” or even “Socialist”, and the latter as “right-wing”, even “conservative”, and sometimes even “Tory”! A vulgarised combination of Whiggish and Marxian notions is simply presupposed. The Transcendent is refused, so that the whole is grounded in nothing, and therefore leads to nihilism. (One wonders what are now the situations in Canada, Australia and New Zealand?)
In economic (and thus also in social) matters, the Conservative Party adopted this approach under Margaret Thatcher. After the death of the old-style Christian Socialist John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes were larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Labour was always going to come back once the SDP was out of the way. And that was always going to happen once Trotskyist entryism had been purged, with the Conservative Party still controlled by the other of the alien extremes arising, ultimately, out of the unexpected Labour defeat in 1970.
Yet such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday in November 1992, with swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after John Smith’s death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.
Instead, they would have us believe that the 1997 “victory” was all the work of their own frontman, the embodiment of those who did best, ostensibly, out of both the 1960s and the 1980s. Allegedly, only one such as he could have won, or could win, a General Election. The Conservative Party’s ruling faction has bought into this nonsense, while the Liberal Democrats never bought out of it.
Supply teaching confirmed my view that comprehensive schools have hardly been tried. They were supposed to bring the benefits of grammar schools to all children, and at the same time tackle the persistent English failure to take technical education seriously. This would have closed most commercial schools within a decade, and it still would do.
Thus would be ended the restriction by parental income of access to, for example, three separate sciences, certain modern foreign languages, Classics, the broad sweep of British and European history, the great books of English Literature, and perhaps even A-levels themselves in the near future. And this, in turn, would raise standards overall. All pupils would be taught by those whose daily business was the teaching of academically rigorous subjects right up to Advanced Level.
We Real Labourites are at one with Real Tories in wanting this real education. As, in fact, we are at one on rather a lot.
For, dear Tory reader, do you really believe, with deadly seriousness, in the late Michael Young’s satirical “meritocracy”? That those with wealth and paper qualifications may alone determine merit, on the basis of wealth and paper qualifications? If so, then you would have to be a n antimonarchist. And do you really aspire to “classlessness”, closing down the gentlemen’s clubs along with the workingmen’s clubs, and disbanding the chambers of commerce along with the trade unions? Hardly!
In a “free” market, there would no agriculture in this country. Is that what you want? Or do you see the economy as the servant of social, cultural and environmental goods, as were coal, steel and shipbuilding? The latter, if the Countryside March was anything to go by. (The arguments for banning foxhunting are as detestably New Labour or New Tory as they come; but of that, another time.)
Making the same point more broadly, do you really wish to see the unrestricted movement of goods, services and capital throughout the world? If so, then (as all the academic advocates of such things would tell you), you must logically also believe in the unrestricted movement of labour, of people: no immigration controls whatever. Furthermore, you must either renounce common humanity entirely, or else prepare to pay both social security benefits at home and aid abroad on a scale previously unimagined. Globalisation brings this dark day ever closer, as did Thatcher’s Single European Act. Is not sovereignty seriously eroded when hardly anything is either made in this country, or when almost nothing of any real importance is owned by our own citizens, resident here for tax purposes, and actually paying our taxes accordingly?
Do you really despise the public services and everyone who works in them? Both front benches seem to have a pathological hatred of public sector workers, and no concept of them as voters and taxpayers in this country. But even now, vastly more people vote Conservative than have commercial health insurance, or send their children to commercial schools.
And do you genuinely support slavish adherence to the American neoconservative agenda in foreign policy? Is it Tory that a foreign country, simply by virtue of being that particular foreign country, might change the government of any other country in the world? Apparently not, since the ninety per cent public opposition to the Iraq War must, by definition, have included the majority of Conservative supporters.
Real Labourites are not soft on crime. Its effects are felt disproportionately by the poor, who come banging on the doors of their Labour councillors, begging to be re-housed. (Incidentally, for now, Real Tories do not share either the New Labour or the New Tory loathing of social housing or local government, or indeed of public transport.)
Real Labourites are not soft on Europe, either. We did not struggle so hard and for so long to get into power, only to hand over that power to people entirely beyond our control. Or rather, what little power was left after Heath’s Treaty of Rome (opposed by Labour), Thatcher’s Single European Act (opposed by Labour) and Major’s Maastricht Treaty (opposed by far more Labour MPs than Tories). Now there really is a whole other article in this. Suffice to say here, that the only Eurosceptical hope in contemporary British politics is the increasingly elusive prospect of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister.
Likewise, Real Labourites are Unionists. We see the United Kingdom as the means of bringing the benefits of social democracy to as many people as possible, the EU being far too large for this. We are sent periodical material by the Labour Party, listing the Government’s achievements, many of which are considerable. At the end, however, there are always extra bits on the far greater achievements in Scotland and Wales, the former without using its fiscal powers, the latter without even having any. This is playing straight into the hands of an English nationalism as nasty as that of the anti-English and anti-“Green” in Scotland, or of the anti-English and language-fascist in Wales.
The Union also safeguards Northern Ireland’s participation in a social democracy that simply could not be built on the sands of EU farm subsidies and film-making. The Callaghan Government was so pro-Union that it was brought down by two Irish Nationalist abstentions, even though two Ulster Unionists voted to save it.
And the Commonwealth is the extension of the Union’s inherent generosity of spirit. It has been scandalously under-used for decades in preference for a subservience to America and, accordingly, for Europe, the White Man’s Club. This is understandable, since the Commonwealth, with the Union from which it is inseparable, is one of the strongest monarchist arguments, to the horror of the “meritocratic” New Labour and New Tories.
Nor do Real Labourites welcome the torrent of filth in much of the media, still less the even more pernicious “dumbing down”, and the exaltation of rubbish as art. Just as the Labour Movement’s roots are in the sort of academic formation outlined above, so those roots are also in real art.
And no such scholarship or art could happen if the poor and the young were stoned out of their skulls. That is why the middle-class, middle-aged cannabis lobby wants what it wants, which also extends to the deregulation of alcohol, gambling, prostitution and pornography, and to the eventual legalisation of heroin and cocaine. The Fabian and Christian Socialist pioneers must be spinning in their graves.
Substantial differences still exist, of course. Unlike every Labour Leader ever, many Real Labourites are anti-monarchists. But this can be held in check by the more pressing economic and social needs, and by the “meritocratic” arguments usually advanced by professional anti-monarchists.
And most Real Tories are in favour of capital punishment, which almost all Real Labourites find abhorrent, as well as likely to have no impact whatever on the underlying problems.
Most Real Labourites find morally repugnant the ultimate violence that is the splitting of the very atom for belligerent purposes. And we all know that nuclear power was used as an excuse for the ostensibly economic, but in fact purely political, destruction of the coal industry and of the civilised communities, working-class in the true sense, thus sustained. But no other form of energy is hated because it might have an evil alternative use, even if no such use could be so evil as nuclear weapons. And nuclear power does in fact offer the possibility of recreating working-class communities, as cannot be said of, for example, wind farms.
Furthermore, nuclear power offers independence from the ghastly dynasty that bankrolls both the Bushes and bin Laden, as well as from the affairs of the Middle East tout court. The desire to remain so dependent is about as conservative as … well, as invading another country purely in order to change its government, as the end in itself.
Finally, Real Labour approves of ceremony. Like the Real Tories, we recognise that the dignity of the proceedings is the dignity of the electorate. We wanted the court service and the Legal Aid budget brought under a Cabinet Minister accountable to the elected house. But instead, we got the botched half-abolition of the position of Lord Chancellor, just because he wears a wig and tights, and sits on a woolsack. There is no more accountability than ever for the major front-line public service that is the court service, nor for the large annual sum of public money that is the Legal Aid budget.
One could go on. Clearly, the ideology of those who have now been running the country continuously for a generation has nothing to do with either the Tory or the Labour tradition. Nor has it anything to do with the views of any significant body of people in the country at large. Left and Right must indeed unite and fight.
Britain’s Labour and Conservative traditions derives from a series of classically Christian critiques of Whiggery and Marxism, while Britain’s Liberal tradition derives largely from the Whigs’ acceptance of just such a series, although it has always wrestled with the rival tradition of Unitarianism, Radical Dissent, Utilitarianism, and so forth, all of which depend on the Whig (as also Jacobin and Marxist) fallacy of inevitable historical progress.
Each of the Labour and Conservative traditions, at least, therefore stands against the concept of “class war” by always including all social classes as a matter of principle, thus sparing this country the bloodshed and other problems experienced elsewhere. And each of them is wholly committed to the constitutional, democratic process, with the same happy effects.
Millions of Conservative, Labour and Liberal people are still like this, but there is now no way of voting for a party actually run by politicians in any of these closely related traditions. Yet we share those traditions, broadly speaking, with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as a counterweight, both to the thoroughly Whiggish liberal and conservative traditions in the US, and to European integration, with its underlying thought-systems either overtly Jacobin or Marxist or else accepting such a paradigm rather than critiquing it.
Instead, we are stuck with the doubly decadent, logically inevitable union of 1960s social libertinism and 1980s economic libertinism. The former is ridiculously presented as “left-wing, “liberal” or even “Socialist”, and the latter as “right-wing”, even “conservative”, and sometimes even “Tory”! A vulgarised combination of Whiggish and Marxian notions is simply presupposed. The Transcendent is refused, so that the whole is grounded in nothing, and therefore leads to nihilism. (One wonders what are now the situations in Canada, Australia and New Zealand?)
In economic (and thus also in social) matters, the Conservative Party adopted this approach under Margaret Thatcher. After the death of the old-style Christian Socialist John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes were larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Labour was always going to come back once the SDP was out of the way. And that was always going to happen once Trotskyist entryism had been purged, with the Conservative Party still controlled by the other of the alien extremes arising, ultimately, out of the unexpected Labour defeat in 1970.
Yet such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday in November 1992, with swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after John Smith’s death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.
Instead, they would have us believe that the 1997 “victory” was all the work of their own frontman, the embodiment of those who did best, ostensibly, out of both the 1960s and the 1980s. Allegedly, only one such as he could have won, or could win, a General Election. The Conservative Party’s ruling faction has bought into this nonsense, while the Liberal Democrats never bought out of it.
Supply teaching confirmed my view that comprehensive schools have hardly been tried. They were supposed to bring the benefits of grammar schools to all children, and at the same time tackle the persistent English failure to take technical education seriously. This would have closed most commercial schools within a decade, and it still would do.
Thus would be ended the restriction by parental income of access to, for example, three separate sciences, certain modern foreign languages, Classics, the broad sweep of British and European history, the great books of English Literature, and perhaps even A-levels themselves in the near future. And this, in turn, would raise standards overall. All pupils would be taught by those whose daily business was the teaching of academically rigorous subjects right up to Advanced Level.
We Real Labourites are at one with Real Tories in wanting this real education. As, in fact, we are at one on rather a lot.
For, dear Tory reader, do you really believe, with deadly seriousness, in the late Michael Young’s satirical “meritocracy”? That those with wealth and paper qualifications may alone determine merit, on the basis of wealth and paper qualifications? If so, then you would have to be a n antimonarchist. And do you really aspire to “classlessness”, closing down the gentlemen’s clubs along with the workingmen’s clubs, and disbanding the chambers of commerce along with the trade unions? Hardly!
In a “free” market, there would no agriculture in this country. Is that what you want? Or do you see the economy as the servant of social, cultural and environmental goods, as were coal, steel and shipbuilding? The latter, if the Countryside March was anything to go by. (The arguments for banning foxhunting are as detestably New Labour or New Tory as they come; but of that, another time.)
Making the same point more broadly, do you really wish to see the unrestricted movement of goods, services and capital throughout the world? If so, then (as all the academic advocates of such things would tell you), you must logically also believe in the unrestricted movement of labour, of people: no immigration controls whatever. Furthermore, you must either renounce common humanity entirely, or else prepare to pay both social security benefits at home and aid abroad on a scale previously unimagined. Globalisation brings this dark day ever closer, as did Thatcher’s Single European Act. Is not sovereignty seriously eroded when hardly anything is either made in this country, or when almost nothing of any real importance is owned by our own citizens, resident here for tax purposes, and actually paying our taxes accordingly?
Do you really despise the public services and everyone who works in them? Both front benches seem to have a pathological hatred of public sector workers, and no concept of them as voters and taxpayers in this country. But even now, vastly more people vote Conservative than have commercial health insurance, or send their children to commercial schools.
And do you genuinely support slavish adherence to the American neoconservative agenda in foreign policy? Is it Tory that a foreign country, simply by virtue of being that particular foreign country, might change the government of any other country in the world? Apparently not, since the ninety per cent public opposition to the Iraq War must, by definition, have included the majority of Conservative supporters.
Real Labourites are not soft on crime. Its effects are felt disproportionately by the poor, who come banging on the doors of their Labour councillors, begging to be re-housed. (Incidentally, for now, Real Tories do not share either the New Labour or the New Tory loathing of social housing or local government, or indeed of public transport.)
Real Labourites are not soft on Europe, either. We did not struggle so hard and for so long to get into power, only to hand over that power to people entirely beyond our control. Or rather, what little power was left after Heath’s Treaty of Rome (opposed by Labour), Thatcher’s Single European Act (opposed by Labour) and Major’s Maastricht Treaty (opposed by far more Labour MPs than Tories). Now there really is a whole other article in this. Suffice to say here, that the only Eurosceptical hope in contemporary British politics is the increasingly elusive prospect of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister.
Likewise, Real Labourites are Unionists. We see the United Kingdom as the means of bringing the benefits of social democracy to as many people as possible, the EU being far too large for this. We are sent periodical material by the Labour Party, listing the Government’s achievements, many of which are considerable. At the end, however, there are always extra bits on the far greater achievements in Scotland and Wales, the former without using its fiscal powers, the latter without even having any. This is playing straight into the hands of an English nationalism as nasty as that of the anti-English and anti-“Green” in Scotland, or of the anti-English and language-fascist in Wales.
The Union also safeguards Northern Ireland’s participation in a social democracy that simply could not be built on the sands of EU farm subsidies and film-making. The Callaghan Government was so pro-Union that it was brought down by two Irish Nationalist abstentions, even though two Ulster Unionists voted to save it.
And the Commonwealth is the extension of the Union’s inherent generosity of spirit. It has been scandalously under-used for decades in preference for a subservience to America and, accordingly, for Europe, the White Man’s Club. This is understandable, since the Commonwealth, with the Union from which it is inseparable, is one of the strongest monarchist arguments, to the horror of the “meritocratic” New Labour and New Tories.
Nor do Real Labourites welcome the torrent of filth in much of the media, still less the even more pernicious “dumbing down”, and the exaltation of rubbish as art. Just as the Labour Movement’s roots are in the sort of academic formation outlined above, so those roots are also in real art.
And no such scholarship or art could happen if the poor and the young were stoned out of their skulls. That is why the middle-class, middle-aged cannabis lobby wants what it wants, which also extends to the deregulation of alcohol, gambling, prostitution and pornography, and to the eventual legalisation of heroin and cocaine. The Fabian and Christian Socialist pioneers must be spinning in their graves.
Substantial differences still exist, of course. Unlike every Labour Leader ever, many Real Labourites are anti-monarchists. But this can be held in check by the more pressing economic and social needs, and by the “meritocratic” arguments usually advanced by professional anti-monarchists.
And most Real Tories are in favour of capital punishment, which almost all Real Labourites find abhorrent, as well as likely to have no impact whatever on the underlying problems.
Most Real Labourites find morally repugnant the ultimate violence that is the splitting of the very atom for belligerent purposes. And we all know that nuclear power was used as an excuse for the ostensibly economic, but in fact purely political, destruction of the coal industry and of the civilised communities, working-class in the true sense, thus sustained. But no other form of energy is hated because it might have an evil alternative use, even if no such use could be so evil as nuclear weapons. And nuclear power does in fact offer the possibility of recreating working-class communities, as cannot be said of, for example, wind farms.
Furthermore, nuclear power offers independence from the ghastly dynasty that bankrolls both the Bushes and bin Laden, as well as from the affairs of the Middle East tout court. The desire to remain so dependent is about as conservative as … well, as invading another country purely in order to change its government, as the end in itself.
Finally, Real Labour approves of ceremony. Like the Real Tories, we recognise that the dignity of the proceedings is the dignity of the electorate. We wanted the court service and the Legal Aid budget brought under a Cabinet Minister accountable to the elected house. But instead, we got the botched half-abolition of the position of Lord Chancellor, just because he wears a wig and tights, and sits on a woolsack. There is no more accountability than ever for the major front-line public service that is the court service, nor for the large annual sum of public money that is the Legal Aid budget.
One could go on. Clearly, the ideology of those who have now been running the country continuously for a generation has nothing to do with either the Tory or the Labour tradition. Nor has it anything to do with the views of any significant body of people in the country at large. Left and Right must indeed unite and fight.
One Nation Labour
Should a Labourite call himself a One Nation politician, as I do, considering that that term was coined by Benjamin Disraeli, father of the modern Conservative Party? Yes, because British politics is still split between Gladstonians and Disraelians, a split within the parties rather than among them. All three parties struggle constantly to hold together these competing aspects of their respective heritages, if Gladstonianism can really be described as part of Labour's heritage at all, rather than as merely the position of the alien faction that has taken over much of our organisation.
The Gladstonians favour unregulated markets and the use of armed force to secure this global state of affairs, which they see as necessary for the emergence and defence of democratic institutions. By contrast, we Disraelians see such economic arrangements as corrosive both of those institutions and of the values which, among other good things, sustain them; accordingly, we are immensely cautious about adventures abroad.
The Conservative Party has been hoovering up disaffected Gladstonians for a very long time: Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, and so on. Alderman Alfred Roberts, Margaret Thatcher's father and the pre-eminent influence on such political philosophy as she ever had, was a text-book case of a Gladstonian Liberal shopkeeper and Methodist preacher who sat as an Independent Councillor while his party collapsed around him, and who never joined the Tories to his dying day, but whose offspring went on to be active in the Conservative Party. The late Arhur Selsdon, of the proto-"Thatcherite" Institute for Economic Affairs, always regarded himself as a Gladstonian Liberal, for so he was; while his co-founder of that Institute, Lord (Ralph) Harris of High Cross, although he eventually stood as a Conservative candidate in 1955, originally put up, even as late as 1951, as a Liberal Unionist, and has always sat as a Crossbencher since being ennobled in 1979.
Those who left the Liberals to help found the Labour Party were firmly in the Disraelian mould (whether or not they would have liked to have been told so), and in any case much of the new Party's base of support had previously been attached to the working-class Toryism invented by the combination of Disraeli's social reforms and his doubling of the electorate through the extension of the franchise.
It was a section of Labour's Disraelians, plus a very few Gladstonians (such as David Owen) who had somehow wandered into the Labour Party, who set off for the SDP; and this accounts for the difference in approach between the warmongering Gladstonian Paddy Ashdown (late of the Liberal Party) and the anti-war Disraelian Charles Kennnedy (late of the SDP), who had to overrule his very Liberal Foreign Affairs Spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell, in order to oppose the war in Iraq.
In the world of the Blairites, the Cameroons, the Henry Jackson Society, and the like, there seem to be some people who want to be Disraelians at home and Gladstonians abroad. Well, they can't be. This simply isn't possible or even desirable, just as the reverse would not be possible or even desirable.
The Gladstonians favour unregulated markets and the use of armed force to secure this global state of affairs, which they see as necessary for the emergence and defence of democratic institutions. By contrast, we Disraelians see such economic arrangements as corrosive both of those institutions and of the values which, among other good things, sustain them; accordingly, we are immensely cautious about adventures abroad.
The Conservative Party has been hoovering up disaffected Gladstonians for a very long time: Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, and so on. Alderman Alfred Roberts, Margaret Thatcher's father and the pre-eminent influence on such political philosophy as she ever had, was a text-book case of a Gladstonian Liberal shopkeeper and Methodist preacher who sat as an Independent Councillor while his party collapsed around him, and who never joined the Tories to his dying day, but whose offspring went on to be active in the Conservative Party. The late Arhur Selsdon, of the proto-"Thatcherite" Institute for Economic Affairs, always regarded himself as a Gladstonian Liberal, for so he was; while his co-founder of that Institute, Lord (Ralph) Harris of High Cross, although he eventually stood as a Conservative candidate in 1955, originally put up, even as late as 1951, as a Liberal Unionist, and has always sat as a Crossbencher since being ennobled in 1979.
Those who left the Liberals to help found the Labour Party were firmly in the Disraelian mould (whether or not they would have liked to have been told so), and in any case much of the new Party's base of support had previously been attached to the working-class Toryism invented by the combination of Disraeli's social reforms and his doubling of the electorate through the extension of the franchise.
It was a section of Labour's Disraelians, plus a very few Gladstonians (such as David Owen) who had somehow wandered into the Labour Party, who set off for the SDP; and this accounts for the difference in approach between the warmongering Gladstonian Paddy Ashdown (late of the Liberal Party) and the anti-war Disraelian Charles Kennnedy (late of the SDP), who had to overrule his very Liberal Foreign Affairs Spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell, in order to oppose the war in Iraq.
In the world of the Blairites, the Cameroons, the Henry Jackson Society, and the like, there seem to be some people who want to be Disraelians at home and Gladstonians abroad. Well, they can't be. This simply isn't possible or even desirable, just as the reverse would not be possible or even desirable.
Who are the middle classes?
Who are the middle classes? The national average wage for full-time work is around £22,000 per annum. Yet we are nightly assailed by television programmes in which “ordinary” people with decidedly extraordinary incomes cook, garden, travel, and purchase and renovate houses far beyond the means of most viewers.
Hard-working, tax-paying people who might define themselves, or be defined by others, as middle-class are constantly encouraged, on pain of losing their often hard-won bourgeois status, to identify with super-rich tax-dodgers rather than with hard-working, tax-paying people who might define themselves, or be defined by others, as working-class, a term used to mean people who professionally do not work, just as “middle-class” is used to mean people who are not actually in the middle of anything. Meaningfully defined, “middle-class” and “working-class” now arguably refer to the same people, more or less.
The day that this is generally realised, with enormous beneficial ramifications, cannot possibly come too soon.
Hard-working, tax-paying people who might define themselves, or be defined by others, as middle-class are constantly encouraged, on pain of losing their often hard-won bourgeois status, to identify with super-rich tax-dodgers rather than with hard-working, tax-paying people who might define themselves, or be defined by others, as working-class, a term used to mean people who professionally do not work, just as “middle-class” is used to mean people who are not actually in the middle of anything. Meaningfully defined, “middle-class” and “working-class” now arguably refer to the same people, more or less.
The day that this is generally realised, with enormous beneficial ramifications, cannot possibly come too soon.
The demonisation of the white working class
The demonisation of the white working class continues apace. George Orwell, Christopher Hill and E P Thompson sought to rescue from what the last called “the enormous condescension of posterity” the rich and vibrant culture of miners’ lodge libraries, pitmen poets and painters, brass and silver bands, the Workers’ Educational Association, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, the Labour Party, and much else besides. That culture’s products filled the universities at one time, and thence provided generations of, in particular, teachers in excellent state schools.
But the Marxism of Hill or Thompson ultimately could not rescue this, since serious Marxists are seldom, if ever, working-class people, who instead cling tenaciously to entirely non-Marxist, but empirically based and commonsensical, political beliefs of their own. Furthermore, the Anglo-Marxist “People’s History” reaction against “Kings and Queens”, while a necessary corrective in many ways (so long as this is recognised as a constant two-way process), ultimately negated Marxism itself by encouraging identification with Anglo-Saxon communes, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Diggers, the Levellers, and so on, all long before the rise of the industrial proletariat.
Since 1979, the only Marxist governments that this country has ever had, with only the ending changed so that the bourgeoisie wins, have effected the ruination of the civilised and civilising working-class communities by destroying the patterns of employment and service-provision (not least in housing) from which those communities’ leading figures (trade union officials, local councillors) derived their authority.
If anyone might have succeeded in rescuing working-class culture from condescension, then it might have been, as my previous post on him explains, Graham Greene, with his taking seriously of the thriller and the cinema. And his framework for this was not Marxism, with its little or no working-class following, but something with an enormous working-class following, namely Catholicism. But that, I fear, was why he never had the impact that he ought to have had in this area.
But the Marxism of Hill or Thompson ultimately could not rescue this, since serious Marxists are seldom, if ever, working-class people, who instead cling tenaciously to entirely non-Marxist, but empirically based and commonsensical, political beliefs of their own. Furthermore, the Anglo-Marxist “People’s History” reaction against “Kings and Queens”, while a necessary corrective in many ways (so long as this is recognised as a constant two-way process), ultimately negated Marxism itself by encouraging identification with Anglo-Saxon communes, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Diggers, the Levellers, and so on, all long before the rise of the industrial proletariat.
Since 1979, the only Marxist governments that this country has ever had, with only the ending changed so that the bourgeoisie wins, have effected the ruination of the civilised and civilising working-class communities by destroying the patterns of employment and service-provision (not least in housing) from which those communities’ leading figures (trade union officials, local councillors) derived their authority.
If anyone might have succeeded in rescuing working-class culture from condescension, then it might have been, as my previous post on him explains, Graham Greene, with his taking seriously of the thriller and the cinema. And his framework for this was not Marxism, with its little or no working-class following, but something with an enormous working-class following, namely Catholicism. But that, I fear, was why he never had the impact that he ought to have had in this area.
The Act of Settlement
The Act of Settlement has been mentioned to me as a contradiction between my Catholicism and my monarchism, but I have been here before.
I question the viability of a Catholic community that devotes any great energy to the question of ascending the throne while the born sleep in cardboard boxes on the streets and the pre-born are ripped from their mothers’ wombs to be discarded as surgical waste. Far from being a term of abuse, the word “Papist” is in fact the name under which the English Martyrs gave their lives, and expresses the cause for which they did so, making it a badge of honour, to be worn with pride.
And yet, and yet, and yet…
The Established status of the Church of England was already a century and a half old at the time of the Act of Settlement, and is wholly unconnected to it. Anyway, in the 1990s, the Courts ruled that that status entailed what everyone had always known to be the case: that the doctrine of the Church of England – “the reformed Protestant religion as by law established in the Realm of England” – is whatever Parliament says it is at any given time, be that the ordination of women (as was the matter in question), or reincarnation, or the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, or anything else at all. All that it is necessary for a monarch to do in order to uphold this “religion” is to grant Royal Assent to Ecclesiastical Measures just as if they were any other Bills passed by Parliament.
Those who would most resist any change to the Act of Settlement are those who insist that the Church of England is confessionally Calvinistic as a first principle rather than, as is in fact the case, only until such time as Parliament sees fit to repeal or replace the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and not a moment longer. Such people are mostly not in England (where they are mostly not members of the Church of England), but in Scotland (where the monarch is required, in ecclesiastical terms, to do nothing more than preserve a Presbyterian pattern of polity) and in Northern Ireland (where, as in Wales, the monarch has no formal ecclesiastical function whatever).
However, it is in Northern Ireland that a large Catholic community, by far the single largest religious body (as the Catholic Church also is, narrowly or otherwise, in each of England, Scotland and Wales), is crying out to be bound more closely to the British State, with which certainly a very large proportion of its members, and probably the majority, identifies very strongly. In view of what the Coronation Oath actually means, then let the Act of Settlement be repealed if that would help that binding, long complete and unthought about everywhere else in the United Kingdom (even, it seems, on Merseyside and in the West of Scotland).
What was established in 1688, with strong Papal support (see my previous post on Northern Ireland), was in fact the Catholic principle previously given practical effect in 1399 in England, and even more ingrained in Scotland, as against both Gallican princely absolutism and its metamorphosis into the theory whereby the new gentry-cum-mercantile republic was sovereign even over the Prince.
English Jacobitism, in particular, was what would now be called an Anglican, rather than a Catholic, phenomenon, when it was not just a ragbag of everyone (Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, smugglers, the lot) opposed to the Whig hegemony. Catholics hardly featured, since they simply did not share the underlying philosophical and theological assumptions; rather, they fully accepted Parliament’s right to determine the succession to the throne, even when it was inconvenient to themselves.
Each of the Commonwealth Realms is a linear inheritor of that age-old tradition, which is the peaceable alternative both to the bloodletting anti-republican pseudo-monarchism coming down from Buridan through the French Counter-Revolution, and to the bloodletting anti-monarchist pseudo-republicanism against which it came to react, historical aberrations both.
The Parliament of each Commonwealth Realm therefore has the absolute right to determine the succession to its own throne; but they mercifully choose to exercise this right in unison, and may that ever remain the case. (It is perfectly illiterate to suggest that the repeal of the Act of Settlement would revive any Stuart claim to the throne.) So, again, if the repeal of the Act of Settlement helped to keep even one country in this family, then, in view of the above, by all means let it be repealed, though only by unanimous consent among all the Commonwealth Realms, since its continuation would also be a price well worth paying in order to preserve the unity of that family.
I question the viability of a Catholic community that devotes any great energy to the question of ascending the throne while the born sleep in cardboard boxes on the streets and the pre-born are ripped from their mothers’ wombs to be discarded as surgical waste. Far from being a term of abuse, the word “Papist” is in fact the name under which the English Martyrs gave their lives, and expresses the cause for which they did so, making it a badge of honour, to be worn with pride.
And yet, and yet, and yet…
The Established status of the Church of England was already a century and a half old at the time of the Act of Settlement, and is wholly unconnected to it. Anyway, in the 1990s, the Courts ruled that that status entailed what everyone had always known to be the case: that the doctrine of the Church of England – “the reformed Protestant religion as by law established in the Realm of England” – is whatever Parliament says it is at any given time, be that the ordination of women (as was the matter in question), or reincarnation, or the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, or anything else at all. All that it is necessary for a monarch to do in order to uphold this “religion” is to grant Royal Assent to Ecclesiastical Measures just as if they were any other Bills passed by Parliament.
Those who would most resist any change to the Act of Settlement are those who insist that the Church of England is confessionally Calvinistic as a first principle rather than, as is in fact the case, only until such time as Parliament sees fit to repeal or replace the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and not a moment longer. Such people are mostly not in England (where they are mostly not members of the Church of England), but in Scotland (where the monarch is required, in ecclesiastical terms, to do nothing more than preserve a Presbyterian pattern of polity) and in Northern Ireland (where, as in Wales, the monarch has no formal ecclesiastical function whatever).
However, it is in Northern Ireland that a large Catholic community, by far the single largest religious body (as the Catholic Church also is, narrowly or otherwise, in each of England, Scotland and Wales), is crying out to be bound more closely to the British State, with which certainly a very large proportion of its members, and probably the majority, identifies very strongly. In view of what the Coronation Oath actually means, then let the Act of Settlement be repealed if that would help that binding, long complete and unthought about everywhere else in the United Kingdom (even, it seems, on Merseyside and in the West of Scotland).
What was established in 1688, with strong Papal support (see my previous post on Northern Ireland), was in fact the Catholic principle previously given practical effect in 1399 in England, and even more ingrained in Scotland, as against both Gallican princely absolutism and its metamorphosis into the theory whereby the new gentry-cum-mercantile republic was sovereign even over the Prince.
English Jacobitism, in particular, was what would now be called an Anglican, rather than a Catholic, phenomenon, when it was not just a ragbag of everyone (Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, smugglers, the lot) opposed to the Whig hegemony. Catholics hardly featured, since they simply did not share the underlying philosophical and theological assumptions; rather, they fully accepted Parliament’s right to determine the succession to the throne, even when it was inconvenient to themselves.
Each of the Commonwealth Realms is a linear inheritor of that age-old tradition, which is the peaceable alternative both to the bloodletting anti-republican pseudo-monarchism coming down from Buridan through the French Counter-Revolution, and to the bloodletting anti-monarchist pseudo-republicanism against which it came to react, historical aberrations both.
The Parliament of each Commonwealth Realm therefore has the absolute right to determine the succession to its own throne; but they mercifully choose to exercise this right in unison, and may that ever remain the case. (It is perfectly illiterate to suggest that the repeal of the Act of Settlement would revive any Stuart claim to the throne.) So, again, if the repeal of the Act of Settlement helped to keep even one country in this family, then, in view of the above, by all means let it be repealed, though only by unanimous consent among all the Commonwealth Realms, since its continuation would also be a price well worth paying in order to preserve the unity of that family.
Belarus and Ukraine
Belarus might well have a nasty government, just as the Ukrainian elections might well have been rigged. But no one objects to the ghastly governments of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, nor to the highly questionable President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia, whose ninety-seven per cent of the vote is presented as wholly credible while Lukashenko’s mere eighty-three per cent in Belarus is presented as wholly incredible.
The problem is simply with a Belarussian, or a Ukrainian, government unconvinced of the case for, in the case of countries located where these are, accession to NATO and the EU. Were they prepared to pay such tribute (or its equivalent elsewhere in the world), then they could do what they liked, and would actually be sustained in power by Western military force against their own people if necessary.
Anyone who still doubts, denies, or pretends not to notice that European economic and political unification has been a key American aim since the 1940s need look no further than Belarus or Ukraine, the former certainly, and the latter very probably, to be bombed into EU membership by the Americans.
The problem is simply with a Belarussian, or a Ukrainian, government unconvinced of the case for, in the case of countries located where these are, accession to NATO and the EU. Were they prepared to pay such tribute (or its equivalent elsewhere in the world), then they could do what they liked, and would actually be sustained in power by Western military force against their own people if necessary.
Anyone who still doubts, denies, or pretends not to notice that European economic and political unification has been a key American aim since the 1940s need look no further than Belarus or Ukraine, the former certainly, and the latter very probably, to be bombed into EU membership by the Americans.
The Name and Date of Easter
England is not where Easter was first kept, so the aberrant pagan root of the English word “Easter” (the words in many other languages refer to the Passover) is neither here nor there: Easter is not in any sense a continuation of pagan fertility festivals. In fact, there is little or (almost certainly) no continuation of pagan practice anywhere in these islands, and little, if anything, is known about pre-Christian religion here; most, if not all, allegations to the contrary derive from Protestant polemic against practices originating in the Middle Ages, and usually the Late Middle Ages at that. (The modern religion known as Paganism is an invention from scratch, the very earliest roots of which are in the late nineteenth century.)
The latest thinking on this can be found in the various publications over the last decade or so of the social historian Ronald Hutton, himself raised a neopagan:
The Pagan Religions of the British Isles;
The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 1400-1700;
The Stations of the Sun: the Origins of the Ritual Year in Britain; and
The Triumph of the Moon (on modern neopaganism)
About the only thing for which Hutton can establish a probable pre-Christian origin is the entirely transposable custom of lighting fires on the quarter days. But all of this passes largely uncommented on in everyday opinion; Professor Hutton should be on the BBC, with a major television series plus tie-in newspaper articles. Which is why he isn't.
As for the date of Easter, the last census found that seventy-two per cent of Britons voluntarily described ourselves as Christians; I should be most surprised if any more than one or two per cent belonged to Eastern churches, with their different liturgical calendar. The formula for calculating the date of Easter is not complicated, and has in any case already been applied in relation to years long into the future. The results of these calculations may easily be, and are, consulted by schools, businesses, the National Secular Society, or anybody else.
Of course, the NSS really wants to abolish the Easter Holiday because it is a reminder of this country’s Western Christian roots, to which the population overwhelmingly continues to adhere, which are the constitutional basis of the British State, from which derive both of our principal political traditions, and which has also contributed hugely to our third political tradition. If anything, we need an ecumenical counter-campaign to restore Whit Monday properly so called, and possibly also to make Ascension Day a public holiday, in line with Europe Catholic and Protestant, EU and non-EU.
The latest thinking on this can be found in the various publications over the last decade or so of the social historian Ronald Hutton, himself raised a neopagan:
The Pagan Religions of the British Isles;
The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 1400-1700;
The Stations of the Sun: the Origins of the Ritual Year in Britain; and
The Triumph of the Moon (on modern neopaganism)
About the only thing for which Hutton can establish a probable pre-Christian origin is the entirely transposable custom of lighting fires on the quarter days. But all of this passes largely uncommented on in everyday opinion; Professor Hutton should be on the BBC, with a major television series plus tie-in newspaper articles. Which is why he isn't.
As for the date of Easter, the last census found that seventy-two per cent of Britons voluntarily described ourselves as Christians; I should be most surprised if any more than one or two per cent belonged to Eastern churches, with their different liturgical calendar. The formula for calculating the date of Easter is not complicated, and has in any case already been applied in relation to years long into the future. The results of these calculations may easily be, and are, consulted by schools, businesses, the National Secular Society, or anybody else.
Of course, the NSS really wants to abolish the Easter Holiday because it is a reminder of this country’s Western Christian roots, to which the population overwhelmingly continues to adhere, which are the constitutional basis of the British State, from which derive both of our principal political traditions, and which has also contributed hugely to our third political tradition. If anything, we need an ecumenical counter-campaign to restore Whit Monday properly so called, and possibly also to make Ascension Day a public holiday, in line with Europe Catholic and Protestant, EU and non-EU.
Richard Dawkins
What is the view of Richard Dawkins among serious atheist philosophers such as, say, A C Grayling? Do they not resent the attention that he receives, as theologians used to (and sometimes still do) resent the attention received by C S Lewis? To be fair, Lewis was a much better theologian than Dawkins is a philosopher.
Yet the cult of Dawkins is the most fanatical in Britain today. Just try pointing out that a gene can no more be selfish than it can be envious, or empathetic, or altruistic. Or that memes are a ridiculous concept, as evidenced by (to use only the example of religion) the fact that people regularly change religions, or become religious having been atheistic and secular, or become atheistic and secular having been religious. The Dawkinsolaters believe, as Dawkins himself shows signs of believing, that whatever he says is by definition science, so that anyone who questions or denies it is by definition anti-scientific.
But then, try pointing out that the theory of the survival of the fittest is tautologous, since the only way to spot the fittest is that they are the ones that survive. Or that the hugely popular drawings of an ape slowly moving upright until it becomes a man are dishonest on every conceivable level. Or that nothing at all is proved by the fact that one species inhabited a place later than another to which it was, in whatever way, relatively similar, there being no ground whatever for supposing on this basis that the later species was descended from the earlier one.
And never, ever ask about irreducible complexity. Or, since all cells come from cells, about where the first cell came from, and why this can never be repeated. Or why, for example, Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould agreed with each other about practically nothing in any specific way, except their shared disagreement with Darwin about practically everything specific. Or whether some “races” must be more evolved than others, as recently insisted upon by “Dr Phil Edwards” (whose real name is Dr Stuart Russell) of the BNP in correspondence with a horrified Stephen Green of Christian Voice. It is forbidden to ask these questions at all.
And now we have the tiktaalik, “the fish with shoulders”. For what imaginable reason might a limbless organism need shoulders, literally to hang about for who knows how many generations while they waited to grow the limbs that were their only conceivable purpose in the first place? There is no suggestion that these shoulders were any sort of remnant limbs. Rather, the shoulders came first. Apparently. Do we observe today any species in any comparable transitional stage? And how would this whole process be reversible, as it would have to be if exactly the opposite circumstances applied?
The suspicion grows and grows that it is the atheism that comes first, and that everything else must be constructed to fit that atheism.
Finally, to return to Dawkins, given how time-consuming experimental science is, how much, if any, does he actually do? When, if ever, did he last publish a strictly scientific book, or even a strictly scientific paper? I only ask.
Yet the cult of Dawkins is the most fanatical in Britain today. Just try pointing out that a gene can no more be selfish than it can be envious, or empathetic, or altruistic. Or that memes are a ridiculous concept, as evidenced by (to use only the example of religion) the fact that people regularly change religions, or become religious having been atheistic and secular, or become atheistic and secular having been religious. The Dawkinsolaters believe, as Dawkins himself shows signs of believing, that whatever he says is by definition science, so that anyone who questions or denies it is by definition anti-scientific.
But then, try pointing out that the theory of the survival of the fittest is tautologous, since the only way to spot the fittest is that they are the ones that survive. Or that the hugely popular drawings of an ape slowly moving upright until it becomes a man are dishonest on every conceivable level. Or that nothing at all is proved by the fact that one species inhabited a place later than another to which it was, in whatever way, relatively similar, there being no ground whatever for supposing on this basis that the later species was descended from the earlier one.
And never, ever ask about irreducible complexity. Or, since all cells come from cells, about where the first cell came from, and why this can never be repeated. Or why, for example, Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould agreed with each other about practically nothing in any specific way, except their shared disagreement with Darwin about practically everything specific. Or whether some “races” must be more evolved than others, as recently insisted upon by “Dr Phil Edwards” (whose real name is Dr Stuart Russell) of the BNP in correspondence with a horrified Stephen Green of Christian Voice. It is forbidden to ask these questions at all.
And now we have the tiktaalik, “the fish with shoulders”. For what imaginable reason might a limbless organism need shoulders, literally to hang about for who knows how many generations while they waited to grow the limbs that were their only conceivable purpose in the first place? There is no suggestion that these shoulders were any sort of remnant limbs. Rather, the shoulders came first. Apparently. Do we observe today any species in any comparable transitional stage? And how would this whole process be reversible, as it would have to be if exactly the opposite circumstances applied?
The suspicion grows and grows that it is the atheism that comes first, and that everything else must be constructed to fit that atheism.
Finally, to return to Dawkins, given how time-consuming experimental science is, how much, if any, does he actually do? When, if ever, did he last publish a strictly scientific book, or even a strictly scientific paper? I only ask.
Whatever happened to British satire?
Whatever happened to British satire? From ten years ago, when it became clear that Major was going for a full five-year Parliament, he and his “government” were subjected to a nightly torrent of the most hysterical abuse as prime-time, mainstream entertainment. This was the culmination of something that had been building up ever since the unexpected Labour defeat in 1992 had made both the real Left and the pseudo-Left as aggrieved as the pseudo-Right had felt since the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Like many of my generation, the mention of Major’s name still calls to mind the all-grey Spitting Image puppet rather than the man himself. It is not necessarily that all, most or even much of this was very good, or even any good. It might not have been funny, but it was certainly, shall we say, memorable and affecting. By contrast, today’s efforts are just drivel.
Thursday, 13 April 2006
The Inquisition
Does no one expect the Spanish Inquisition? I certainly do, and I am never disappointed.
The same people who regard The Life of Brian as the last word on Jesus declare their general intellectual dependence on Monty Python's Flying Circus by bring up the Spanish Inquisition in relation to the Catholic Church, and especially in relation to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "formerly known as the Inquistion".
The CDF was in fact the Roman, not the Spanish, Inquisition; but neither ever claimed or exercised any jurisdiction over non-Catholics. The Roman Inquisition granted the accused rights far in excess of those prevalent at the time, such as the right to legal representation (paid for by the Inquisition if necessary), a right not formerly recognised in England until 1836. Only people whose activities were a threat to the State (a tiny percentage) were ever handed over to it for execution or anything else, a severity far less than that of the Protestant governments of the time.
And what of the infamous Spanish Inquisition? It was staffed by clerics, but it was established, and they served, strictly at the pleasure of the Spanish Crown (perhaps it is difficult for people used to the Church of England to understand this distinction?), which had it approved on false pretences by Pope Sixtus IV. He was a repeated but unsuccessful opponent of its severity, an opposition, moreover, which has to be seen in the light of the below in order to appreciate it fully. From 1558, it imprisoned the Spanish Primate, Archbishop Caranza of Toledo, for eight years, despite repeated Papal attempts to secure his release. Furthermore, the Spanish Inquisition enjoyed popular as well as royal, but not Papal, support.
As a civil body, the Spanish Inquisition has to be compared to other civil bodies of the time; and it actually compares rather well, using torture in only two per cent of cases (and then for no longer than fifteen minutes), with only one per cent experiencing torture more than once. Of 49,092 cases between 1550 and 1700, fully 1,485 (not even three per cent) ended with the death sentence, and only 776 were actually put to death by this agency, not of the Church, but of the State. On average during that century and a half, the Spanish Inquisition executed five people per year. And yet the Popes considered it unacceptably severe even in that day and age, when the English were executing anyone who damaged a shrub in a public garden, the Germans were gouging out the eyes of those who returned from banishment, and the French were disembowelling sheep-stealers.
The Spanish Inquisition dismissed anyone who broke its clearly set out Instructiones, and people before the secular courts in Barcelona would sometimes blaspheme in order to be sent to one of the much more humane prisons maintained by the Inquisition.
All of the above may be verified from the works of serious scholars such as Professor Henry Kamen (an English Jew) of the Barcelona Higher Council for Scientific Research and Professor Stephen Haliczer of the Northern University of Illinois. Who is to be believed? Scholars such as they? Or Monty Python's Flying Circus?
The same people who regard The Life of Brian as the last word on Jesus declare their general intellectual dependence on Monty Python's Flying Circus by bring up the Spanish Inquisition in relation to the Catholic Church, and especially in relation to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "formerly known as the Inquistion".
The CDF was in fact the Roman, not the Spanish, Inquisition; but neither ever claimed or exercised any jurisdiction over non-Catholics. The Roman Inquisition granted the accused rights far in excess of those prevalent at the time, such as the right to legal representation (paid for by the Inquisition if necessary), a right not formerly recognised in England until 1836. Only people whose activities were a threat to the State (a tiny percentage) were ever handed over to it for execution or anything else, a severity far less than that of the Protestant governments of the time.
And what of the infamous Spanish Inquisition? It was staffed by clerics, but it was established, and they served, strictly at the pleasure of the Spanish Crown (perhaps it is difficult for people used to the Church of England to understand this distinction?), which had it approved on false pretences by Pope Sixtus IV. He was a repeated but unsuccessful opponent of its severity, an opposition, moreover, which has to be seen in the light of the below in order to appreciate it fully. From 1558, it imprisoned the Spanish Primate, Archbishop Caranza of Toledo, for eight years, despite repeated Papal attempts to secure his release. Furthermore, the Spanish Inquisition enjoyed popular as well as royal, but not Papal, support.
As a civil body, the Spanish Inquisition has to be compared to other civil bodies of the time; and it actually compares rather well, using torture in only two per cent of cases (and then for no longer than fifteen minutes), with only one per cent experiencing torture more than once. Of 49,092 cases between 1550 and 1700, fully 1,485 (not even three per cent) ended with the death sentence, and only 776 were actually put to death by this agency, not of the Church, but of the State. On average during that century and a half, the Spanish Inquisition executed five people per year. And yet the Popes considered it unacceptably severe even in that day and age, when the English were executing anyone who damaged a shrub in a public garden, the Germans were gouging out the eyes of those who returned from banishment, and the French were disembowelling sheep-stealers.
The Spanish Inquisition dismissed anyone who broke its clearly set out Instructiones, and people before the secular courts in Barcelona would sometimes blaspheme in order to be sent to one of the much more humane prisons maintained by the Inquisition.
All of the above may be verified from the works of serious scholars such as Professor Henry Kamen (an English Jew) of the Barcelona Higher Council for Scientific Research and Professor Stephen Haliczer of the Northern University of Illinois. Who is to be believed? Scholars such as they? Or Monty Python's Flying Circus?
Neoconservatism
What is "neoconservatism"?
Tony Blair and George Bush are both surrounded by utterly unrepentant old Communists and (especially) Trotskyists, with enormous power wielded by those who venerate the memory of the American Trotskyist godfather Max Shachtman. (Leo Strauss is almost red herring: his influence is almost minimal.)
Their "neoconservativism", of which "New Labour" is a textbook case, is in fact a Marxism which has merely changed its ending so that the bourgeoisie (and thus the most bourgeois of countries, which is not Britain) wins, but which retains intact its Marxist dialectical materialism, its Leninist vanguard elitism, its Trotskyist entryism and belief in the permanent revolution, and yet also its Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class should be built in a superstate and exported (including by force of arms) thoughout the world while vanguard elites owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countiries. Such treasonable vanguard elites include the New Labour Project, the Tory Notting Hill set, the Liberal Democrat 'Orange Book' tendency, Likud, Forza Italia, the Partido Popolar, the Irish Progressive Democrats, the new governing faction in Canada, and the renaissance of the Australian Liberal Party under John Howard, to name but a few.
The present President of the European Commission was just such a figure when he was Prime Minister of Portugal: a rabidly free-marketeering supporter of Bush foreign policy who had previously been a Maoist (yes, a Maoist!). Indeed, he is still just such a figure today.
But such figures have not come any closer to any conservative tradition, properly so called, in the US or elsewhere. On the contrary, the Whig, Jacobin and Marxist fallacy of human perfectabilty by its own efforts and in this life alone (explicitly denied by, in and as the foundation of at least the two largest political traditions in Britain) reaches in "neoconservatism" the nightmare point at which people believe that that perfection has actually come to pass, with, in this case, the bell-curve of American wealth distribution (and of wealth distribution in other countries in so far as it conforms to that in the US) corresponding exactly to intelligence, talent, "merit", human worth. So, for example, no aristocratic social conscience for them.
The charge that "neocon" is just an acceptable way of saying "Jew" in a derogatory way is widely heard, but stands up to no analysis, especially since this latter-day N-word is so often directed towards people who are not Jewish, including those (such as Condoleeza Rice, and indeed George Bush) to whom it does not properly apply. However, it is worth asking why Jews, such as several leading "neoconservatives" are, are ostensibly so nostalgic for a society in America (or indeed in Britain, among other places) of which they could not have been fully part.
Tony Blair and George Bush are both surrounded by utterly unrepentant old Communists and (especially) Trotskyists, with enormous power wielded by those who venerate the memory of the American Trotskyist godfather Max Shachtman. (Leo Strauss is almost red herring: his influence is almost minimal.)
Their "neoconservativism", of which "New Labour" is a textbook case, is in fact a Marxism which has merely changed its ending so that the bourgeoisie (and thus the most bourgeois of countries, which is not Britain) wins, but which retains intact its Marxist dialectical materialism, its Leninist vanguard elitism, its Trotskyist entryism and belief in the permanent revolution, and yet also its Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class should be built in a superstate and exported (including by force of arms) thoughout the world while vanguard elites owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countiries. Such treasonable vanguard elites include the New Labour Project, the Tory Notting Hill set, the Liberal Democrat 'Orange Book' tendency, Likud, Forza Italia, the Partido Popolar, the Irish Progressive Democrats, the new governing faction in Canada, and the renaissance of the Australian Liberal Party under John Howard, to name but a few.
The present President of the European Commission was just such a figure when he was Prime Minister of Portugal: a rabidly free-marketeering supporter of Bush foreign policy who had previously been a Maoist (yes, a Maoist!). Indeed, he is still just such a figure today.
But such figures have not come any closer to any conservative tradition, properly so called, in the US or elsewhere. On the contrary, the Whig, Jacobin and Marxist fallacy of human perfectabilty by its own efforts and in this life alone (explicitly denied by, in and as the foundation of at least the two largest political traditions in Britain) reaches in "neoconservatism" the nightmare point at which people believe that that perfection has actually come to pass, with, in this case, the bell-curve of American wealth distribution (and of wealth distribution in other countries in so far as it conforms to that in the US) corresponding exactly to intelligence, talent, "merit", human worth. So, for example, no aristocratic social conscience for them.
The charge that "neocon" is just an acceptable way of saying "Jew" in a derogatory way is widely heard, but stands up to no analysis, especially since this latter-day N-word is so often directed towards people who are not Jewish, including those (such as Condoleeza Rice, and indeed George Bush) to whom it does not properly apply. However, it is worth asking why Jews, such as several leading "neoconservatives" are, are ostensibly so nostalgic for a society in America (or indeed in Britain, among other places) of which they could not have been fully part.
Where MPs come from
Who is currently allowed to become an MP? Who can navigate the circuit of putative parliamentary candidates in any of the parties? Only people already employed within the political process (mostly by MPs, or by the parties themselves and their semi-official thinktanks) could possibly secure the necessary paid, or even unpaid, time off. So, as things stand, only they, and people so rich that they do not need any sort of job at all, can ever become MPs.
This is another reason to introduce a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom. The first part of this would activley favour, in a way with a knock-on effect on the second part, people with real-world experience, and espcially such people who are already well-known locally.
This is another reason to introduce a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom. The first part of this would activley favour, in a way with a knock-on effect on the second part, people with real-world experience, and espcially such people who are already well-known locally.
Tuesday, 11 April 2006
Rape
The specific offence of rape should be abolished, since it serves only to keep on the streets people who ought to be behind bars. Instead, the sexual element should be made an aggravating factor in offences against the person generally, enabling the maximum sentence to be doubled. That way, a few silly cases that currently come to court would not do so, while many serious cases that currently either never make it to court or end in an acquital would at least end in a conviction for something. My jaw drops when I hear or read reports (no doubt truthful) of women with serious injuries whose assailants were never charged with anything because there was considered little or no chance of a conviction for rape. Why were they not charged with, say, GBH? This way, they would be.
Furthermore, this would be achieved without compromising fundamental principles such as trial by jury and the burden of proof on the part of the prosecution, both of which have already been eroded far too much (i.e., particularly in the latter case, at all).
Furthermore, this would be achieved without compromising fundamental principles such as trial by jury and the burden of proof on the part of the prosecution, both of which have already been eroded far too much (i.e., particularly in the latter case, at all).
The Monarchy
"The monarchy as embodying our fundamental values," I wrote. What do I mean by "our fundamental values"? I mean such (closely connected) good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, religion, family life, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, mass political participation within a constitutional framework, and the sanctity of ecah individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death, all of which free market capitalism corrodes to nought, whether directly or by driving despairing millions into the arms of the equally corrosive Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism.
By embodying these conservative values, mortally endangered by that most anti-conservative force which is capitalism, the monarchy (like the hereditary peerage, which I sould also have so embody) compels the universal Welfare State and the strong statutory (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government: in a word, Socialism. Correspondingly, Socialism compels adherence to the above conservative values. Or else why bother with it? Why would anyone want or need Socialism, if not to conserve those goods both against capitalism and against the evils to which capitalism drives its victims?
This is what the monarchy properly embodies by compelling and compels by embodying in all 16 Commonwealth Realms (each of which, including Britain, remains so entirely by choice), in each of the 10 British Overseas Territories with permanent populations (which remain British entirely by choice), in each of the three Crown Dependencies (which remain so entirely by choice), in each of the three inhabited territories (voluntarily) dependent on Australia, in the one inhabited territory (voluntarily) dependent on New Zealand, and in each of the two states in free association with New Zealand, as well as in relation to the Melanesian half of the people of Fiji (the other half being descended from Indian indentured labour), whose Great Council of Chiefs (which elects the President) continues to acknowledge the Queen as Paramount Chief even though Fiji became a republic following two coups in 1987 (and has not exactly had a happy history since). This gives the minimum, if admittedly quaint, figure of thirty-five and a half countries (although Saint Helena's Dependencies of Ascension Island and, especially, Tristan da Cunha are also very distinct), every one of them now an elective democracy, with the only weak link in the country (Fiji) with the weakest link to the Crown. Not to mention that the Crown binds together the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom, of which inherent generosity of spirit all the rest is a natural and beautiful extension.
We are one family, even though any member is free to leave at any time; indeed, we are if anything even stronger by virtue of that freedom. What our unifying institution represents has never been more important than in today's world. If a member of my family were put in danger, then I should do everything in my power to rescue him or her. Today, a member of this family is in danger: the Commonwealth Realm that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland faces the impending enactment of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (which is just the sort of thing that my proposed Grand Committe of Hereditary Peers would ensure was blocked by a referendum). The other thirty-four governments in our family, and the Great Council of Chiefs of Fiji, must be called upon to petition each of the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William, to give the assurance, at least of always dissolving the British Parliament after five years.
After all, if such a threat faced the democracy of the Commonwealth Realm that is Saint Lucia, or Jamaica, or Papua New Guinea, or Tuvalu, is it conceivable that there would be no intervention by, from and on behalf of the family as a whole? It is not. So what is the difference? There is no difference.
Finally, the constitutional monarchies on the Continent might define themselves in the above terms: conservative by being Socialist, Socialist in order to be conservative. At least implicitly, if not explictly, they already do. The African monarchies of Swaziland and Lesotho (Commonwealth countries both) might also come to do so, as might the (Commonwealth) monarchy of Tonga. And in Asia? Or is it all too bound up with Christianity for that?
By embodying these conservative values, mortally endangered by that most anti-conservative force which is capitalism, the monarchy (like the hereditary peerage, which I sould also have so embody) compels the universal Welfare State and the strong statutory (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government: in a word, Socialism. Correspondingly, Socialism compels adherence to the above conservative values. Or else why bother with it? Why would anyone want or need Socialism, if not to conserve those goods both against capitalism and against the evils to which capitalism drives its victims?
This is what the monarchy properly embodies by compelling and compels by embodying in all 16 Commonwealth Realms (each of which, including Britain, remains so entirely by choice), in each of the 10 British Overseas Territories with permanent populations (which remain British entirely by choice), in each of the three Crown Dependencies (which remain so entirely by choice), in each of the three inhabited territories (voluntarily) dependent on Australia, in the one inhabited territory (voluntarily) dependent on New Zealand, and in each of the two states in free association with New Zealand, as well as in relation to the Melanesian half of the people of Fiji (the other half being descended from Indian indentured labour), whose Great Council of Chiefs (which elects the President) continues to acknowledge the Queen as Paramount Chief even though Fiji became a republic following two coups in 1987 (and has not exactly had a happy history since). This gives the minimum, if admittedly quaint, figure of thirty-five and a half countries (although Saint Helena's Dependencies of Ascension Island and, especially, Tristan da Cunha are also very distinct), every one of them now an elective democracy, with the only weak link in the country (Fiji) with the weakest link to the Crown. Not to mention that the Crown binds together the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom, of which inherent generosity of spirit all the rest is a natural and beautiful extension.
We are one family, even though any member is free to leave at any time; indeed, we are if anything even stronger by virtue of that freedom. What our unifying institution represents has never been more important than in today's world. If a member of my family were put in danger, then I should do everything in my power to rescue him or her. Today, a member of this family is in danger: the Commonwealth Realm that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland faces the impending enactment of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (which is just the sort of thing that my proposed Grand Committe of Hereditary Peers would ensure was blocked by a referendum). The other thirty-four governments in our family, and the Great Council of Chiefs of Fiji, must be called upon to petition each of the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William, to give the assurance, at least of always dissolving the British Parliament after five years.
After all, if such a threat faced the democracy of the Commonwealth Realm that is Saint Lucia, or Jamaica, or Papua New Guinea, or Tuvalu, is it conceivable that there would be no intervention by, from and on behalf of the family as a whole? It is not. So what is the difference? There is no difference.
Finally, the constitutional monarchies on the Continent might define themselves in the above terms: conservative by being Socialist, Socialist in order to be conservative. At least implicitly, if not explictly, they already do. The African monarchies of Swaziland and Lesotho (Commonwealth countries both) might also come to do so, as might the (Commonwealth) monarchy of Tonga. And in Asia? Or is it all too bound up with Christianity for that?
Monday, 10 April 2006
First Past The Post
First Past The Post is not the British eccentricity that its detractors claim; and so what if it were? It is in fact the single most used electoral system in the democractic world, according to which fully forty-nine per cent of free electors go to the polls. "Proportional Representation", by contrast, is merely the generic term for any other electoral system whatever, of which there must be hundreds, if not thousands if one includes those which are no longer in use, or have only ever been proposed but never implemented.
Contrary to what is often asserted, Britain has had several revolutions. What we have not had, at least for a very long time, is blood in the streets. This is because FPTP enabled those revolutions to take place within the constitutional, parliamentary, eventually democractic process, within which anything is in principle reversible, since no Parliament can bind its successors. Without FPTP, there would be no constitutional way of either bringing about or preventing radical chnage, so unconstitutional, anti-constitutional, anti-parliamentary means would be employed instead.
The end of FPTP for the House of Commons would be its end for local government, too. Any other system would create enormous difficulties at the former level, and be wholly impractical at the latter level, in rural areas. County Councillors and many District Councillors would never really do anything except drive around their vast, unwieldy, multimember wards. Faced with such a prospect, next to no one would seek election. (The mania for unitary local government expresses the same urban tunnel vision.)
Far from being a weakness, the fact that FPTP requires all political parties to be coalitions in order to make any electoral progress is one of the very strongest arguments in its favour. Anyone who has been active in such a party is used to the coalition-building that is the stuff of democractic, constitutional politics; to those who have made it to the very top, this must surely be more first than second nature. Yet this would not be, and is not, the case where ideologically purist and fanatical factions are guaranteed at least some seats, and might even hold the balance of power in a true tyranny of the minority.
Therefore, among other reasons, I propose the introduction, by agreement among the parties if possible, of a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom. Among other good things, this would help to defend FPTP at both national and (therefore) local level. In fact, if one party adopted it, then the other two would in practice have to do so as well.
Contrary to what is often asserted, Britain has had several revolutions. What we have not had, at least for a very long time, is blood in the streets. This is because FPTP enabled those revolutions to take place within the constitutional, parliamentary, eventually democractic process, within which anything is in principle reversible, since no Parliament can bind its successors. Without FPTP, there would be no constitutional way of either bringing about or preventing radical chnage, so unconstitutional, anti-constitutional, anti-parliamentary means would be employed instead.
The end of FPTP for the House of Commons would be its end for local government, too. Any other system would create enormous difficulties at the former level, and be wholly impractical at the latter level, in rural areas. County Councillors and many District Councillors would never really do anything except drive around their vast, unwieldy, multimember wards. Faced with such a prospect, next to no one would seek election. (The mania for unitary local government expresses the same urban tunnel vision.)
Far from being a weakness, the fact that FPTP requires all political parties to be coalitions in order to make any electoral progress is one of the very strongest arguments in its favour. Anyone who has been active in such a party is used to the coalition-building that is the stuff of democractic, constitutional politics; to those who have made it to the very top, this must surely be more first than second nature. Yet this would not be, and is not, the case where ideologically purist and fanatical factions are guaranteed at least some seats, and might even hold the balance of power in a true tyranny of the minority.
Therefore, among other reasons, I propose the introduction, by agreement among the parties if possible, of a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom. Among other good things, this would help to defend FPTP at both national and (therefore) local level. In fact, if one party adopted it, then the other two would in practice have to do so as well.
"The Gospel of Judas"
"The Gospel of Judas", like The Da Vinci Code, is an irrelevance. Like anyone else, Jesus exists in relation to, even without being restricted to, the stories told about Him, and the community defining and defined by those stories; in His case, these are respectively the Four Canonical Gospels, and the Church that discerned their canonicity (and that of the whole Bible) at much greater historical and geographical proximity to the events in question. No Jesus exists without the stories or the community, just as no Elizabeth I, or Tony Blair, or David Lindsay exists without the stories or the community. Such it is to be human.
However, contrary to The Da Vinci Code's aficianados, a fully human life does not necesasrily entail either romantic attachment of sexual activity; those who seek to improve on the Bible (Joseph Smith, for example) regularly make this mistake. Jesus was never old as we now understand the term (although his society contained plenty of people who were). Was He less human for that? If not, then why for this?
Of course, we have been here before: fifty or fifty-five years ago, some people claimed that the then newly-discovered Dead Sea Scrolls would devastate Christianity. No one says that now.
However, contrary to The Da Vinci Code's aficianados, a fully human life does not necesasrily entail either romantic attachment of sexual activity; those who seek to improve on the Bible (Joseph Smith, for example) regularly make this mistake. Jesus was never old as we now understand the term (although his society contained plenty of people who were). Was He less human for that? If not, then why for this?
Of course, we have been here before: fifty or fifty-five years ago, some people claimed that the then newly-discovered Dead Sea Scrolls would devastate Christianity. No one says that now.
Whither Israel?
The future of the State of Israel hangs in the balance. Israel can no longer sustain her inherent ambivalence. Is she a Zionist state, a homeland for "the Jews"? Or is she the Middle Eastern outpost of liberal democracy, in which the large Arab minority enjoys equal citizenship? She cannot be both, and has tried for far too long to do this impossible thing.
Half the world's Jews already live in Israel, but the other half could move there any time it liked, and could only be accommodated by displacing the Israeli Arabs (including members of the Knesset, a Supreme Court judge, and even several members of the national football team). While the Law of Return remains in place, the Arabs can never be equal citizens (which is to say, true citizens at all), and so Israel remains, to that extent, not a democracy, but an ethnocracy.
The Law of Return is based on the Nuremburg Laws, but the Zionist project was several decades old by the time of the Second World War, and its pioneers, by fighting the British, effectively fought for Hitler, in the process inventing much of modern terrorism. It is high time to draw a line under Zionism, and, by repealing the Law of Return, to bolster Israeli resistance to the impractical, but until that point unanswerable, Palestinian demand for a comparable right even in relation to Israel's pre-1967 borders.
An Israel which thus really did grant genuinely equal citizenship to all her people really would be democracy's standard-bearer in the region. But an Israel in which the ethnic majority (for now - it might not even be that for much longer) carries on reserving the right to displace some of its fellow-citizens, on grounds of ethnicity, in favour of its own ethnic group cannot be any such thing.
Half the world's Jews already live in Israel, but the other half could move there any time it liked, and could only be accommodated by displacing the Israeli Arabs (including members of the Knesset, a Supreme Court judge, and even several members of the national football team). While the Law of Return remains in place, the Arabs can never be equal citizens (which is to say, true citizens at all), and so Israel remains, to that extent, not a democracy, but an ethnocracy.
The Law of Return is based on the Nuremburg Laws, but the Zionist project was several decades old by the time of the Second World War, and its pioneers, by fighting the British, effectively fought for Hitler, in the process inventing much of modern terrorism. It is high time to draw a line under Zionism, and, by repealing the Law of Return, to bolster Israeli resistance to the impractical, but until that point unanswerable, Palestinian demand for a comparable right even in relation to Israel's pre-1967 borders.
An Israel which thus really did grant genuinely equal citizenship to all her people really would be democracy's standard-bearer in the region. But an Israel in which the ethnic majority (for now - it might not even be that for much longer) carries on reserving the right to displace some of its fellow-citizens, on grounds of ethnicity, in favour of its own ethnic group cannot be any such thing.
Saturday, 8 April 2006
My name is David Lindsay, and...
My name is David Lindsay, and I want to be a Labour MP.
I joined the Labour Party when I was 17, have served on CLP GC and EC (and on DLP) since I was 18, chaired my Branch for several years from the age of 19, became a Parish Councillor (in an unusually large and busy Parish) at the legal minimum age of 21, became a primary school governor just short of my twenty-second birthday, and became a comprehensive school governor just short of my twenty-third birthday. I have since been re-elected as a Parish Councillor and re-appointed to both of my school governorships, having served as Vice-Chair of the primary Governing Body. At 19, I was a Ward Sub-Agent in the 1997 General Election, securing an overall majority of the total vote on a four-way split in a traditionally Tory ward. And at 25, I became DLP Secretary, having been a District Group Observer for three years before that. I have only just relinquished that office, aged 28.
Therefore, I should now appreciate the opportunity to make a further contribution, drawing and building upon those experiences, which include a great deal of committee work, of working to deadlines, and of hugely successful co-operation with a very wide range of individuals and bodies. Furthermore, I have always done all of the above while engaged in either or both of full-time paid work and various forms of academic work, as well as numerous other voluntary activities, thus demonstrating, I feel, both my commitment, and my ability to organise my time to optimal effect.
I am a Socialist: I believe in the universal Welfare State and in the strong statutory (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. I am a One Nation politician, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.
I offer the possibility of many years of service in the future. My mixed ethnic background would also add an unusual, but increasingly important, dimension. I reject all talk of left and right within the Party, or of Old Labour and New Labour: I am simply Labour and proud of it.
I wish to be a workers’ MP on a worker’s wage, accepting only the national average salary for full-time work, and donating the rest to political and community causes, and thus rising with the British People rather than above the British People. I should campaign for election on what I firmly believe to be this hugely popular basis.
I joined the Labour Party when I was 17, have served on CLP GC and EC (and on DLP) since I was 18, chaired my Branch for several years from the age of 19, became a Parish Councillor (in an unusually large and busy Parish) at the legal minimum age of 21, became a primary school governor just short of my twenty-second birthday, and became a comprehensive school governor just short of my twenty-third birthday. I have since been re-elected as a Parish Councillor and re-appointed to both of my school governorships, having served as Vice-Chair of the primary Governing Body. At 19, I was a Ward Sub-Agent in the 1997 General Election, securing an overall majority of the total vote on a four-way split in a traditionally Tory ward. And at 25, I became DLP Secretary, having been a District Group Observer for three years before that. I have only just relinquished that office, aged 28.
Therefore, I should now appreciate the opportunity to make a further contribution, drawing and building upon those experiences, which include a great deal of committee work, of working to deadlines, and of hugely successful co-operation with a very wide range of individuals and bodies. Furthermore, I have always done all of the above while engaged in either or both of full-time paid work and various forms of academic work, as well as numerous other voluntary activities, thus demonstrating, I feel, both my commitment, and my ability to organise my time to optimal effect.
I am a Socialist: I believe in the universal Welfare State and in the strong statutory (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. I am a One Nation politician, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.
I offer the possibility of many years of service in the future. My mixed ethnic background would also add an unusual, but increasingly important, dimension. I reject all talk of left and right within the Party, or of Old Labour and New Labour: I am simply Labour and proud of it.
I wish to be a workers’ MP on a worker’s wage, accepting only the national average salary for full-time work, and donating the rest to political and community causes, and thus rising with the British People rather than above the British People. I should campaign for election on what I firmly believe to be this hugely popular basis.
In circulation on the Left
In circulation on the Left, the crossover with the material in circulation on the Old Right being in itself an important point:
1. The conservation or restoration (as the overwhelming majority of Britons wishes) of such good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, family life, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, and mass political participation within a constitutional framework, all of which free market capitalism corrodes to nought;
2. The restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, the use of this to restore Britain's historic fishing rights, the British adoption of a show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, and the election of Britain's European Commissioner by the whole electorate from a shortlist of two submitted following a ballot of all MPs;
3. A much higher threshold for income tax (national median earnings) and corporation tax (the amount needed to pay every employee a minimum wage of half median male earnings per hour), with a flat rate thereafter, so that the working poor are taken out of tax, while genuinely middle-earners and small or medium-sized businesses pay far less than at present, because the richest individuals and the biggest corporations pay their fair share for the first time ever;
4. A unified benefits, pensions, student funding, and minimum wage system, so that no one's income falls below half national median earnings;
5. A one hundred per cent tax at source on all income from rent, with a Social Security payment to those thus taxed equal to national average earnings (or sufficient to maintain the legitimate activities of religious or educational institutions), as a step towards giving every household a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State;
6. A permanently higher rate of corporation tax on the banks and the privatised utilities, with the money spent on reimbursing the employers' National Insurance contributions for workers aged 25 or under and 55 or over, and with strict regulation to ensure that no cost is passed on to workers, consumers, communities or the environment;
7. A ban on any company paying any employee more than ten times what it pays any other employee, with the whole public sector (including MPs and Ministers) functioning as one for this purpose, its median wage pegged permanently at the median wage in the private sector;
8. Every public limited company to have one non-executive director appointed by the Secretary of State for a fixed term equivalent to that of other directors, and responsible for protecting the interests of workers, small shareholders, consumers, communities and the environment;
9. Restoration of democratic political control over monetary policy;
10. The renationalisation of the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of thier privatisation, as the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures going back to the 1950s;
11. Building on the statutory right of every worker to join a trade union and to have that trade union recognised for collective bargaining purposes by giving every trade unionist so recognised the statutory right to take industrial action in pursuit of a legitimate grievance, including strike action, and including solidarity action of a clearly secondary character (such as a work to rule in support of a strike) within a single industry or corporation;
12. Abolition of all remaining vestiges of Compulsory Competitive Tendering, of the capping of councils, and of the power of central government to rule local services ultra vires;
13. Continual exposure of the ruling class's pathological hatred of local government as in fact an undisguised hatred of people other than themselves, and as expressing itself in the ridiculous view that councils ought to be "commissioners rather than providers" of services, as if efficiency or accountability had somehow been increased by a village primary school's no longer even employing its own caretaker, or by giving private companies unconditional licenses to print public money in return for risk-free "investments" in, say, emptying the bins, or preparing school food, so that the sooner that this whole process of the last 25 years is halted and reversed, the better;
14. Local authorities to be able to set precepts on top of the flat-rate income tax and corporation tax outlined above, so that Council Tax and National Non-Domestic Rates could both be abolished;
15. No return to the 11-plus, working instead to overcome this country's crippling cultural division between arts and sciences, and between academic and technical education;
16. Defence and restoration of Special Needs Education, and total opposition to the idea of abolishing, or greatly reducing the responsibilities of, Local Education Authorities, not least since the real reason for wanting this is a desire to abolish counties, as would follow very rapidly on the abolition of LEAs, there being no comparable country in which anyone would ever even suggest abolishing whole tiers of local government, never mind in which such a thing might actually happen;
17. Freezing of prescription charges, and restoration of free eye and dental check-ups;
18. Repeal of the Civil Contingencies Act, no identity cards, and no control orders;
19. Repeal of existing erosions of trial by jury and of the right to silence, of existing reversals of the burden of proof, and of the Official Secrets Acts;
20. Police forces at least no larger than at present, and be subject to local democratic accountability, most obviously though Police Authorities;
21. Removal of all nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons from British soil and waters, and a total ban on the sale of arms abroad;
22. Removal of foreign forces from British soil and waters, and restoration of British overall control of our defence capability, with no more participation in "neoconservative" wars;
23. Strong defence (including the restoration where necessary) of Labour's trade union links as constituting the Party's grounding in the lives and practical concerns of millions of working people and their families throughout this country and beyond;
24. A powerful role for co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies and mutual building societies, including legislation to protect the remaining mutual building societies, and the implementation of the Co-operative Party's recent Manifesto other than in relation to foundation hospitals and European integration;
25. An undertaking to go to prison rather than carry an identity card, and likewise to go to prison rather than pay taxes for the sake of state funding of political parties, which would necessitate state involvement, no doubt through some ghastly commission of the ruling class, both in policy formulation and in candidate selection, which is why those who advocate such funding do so, since they expect that they or their mates will be appointed to such a commission, and will thus be able to dictate, even more than at present, both what may be discussed, and by whom, with no role for trade unions, i.e., no role for large numbers of working, tax-paying people and their families, the length and breadth of this country;
26. The introduction, by agreement among the parties, of a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom, not least because this would help to protect the First Past The Post electoral system at both national and (therefore) local level;
27. Everywhere to be covered by a Parish or Town Council, or an urban or suburban equivalent, with greatly increased powers and resources;
28. Total opposition to the further deregulation of drinking or gambling;
29. Election of the BBC Governors for a fixed term of five years from among those licence-payers in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and each of the nine English regions who are politically independent (sufficient to be eligible in principle for membership of the remuneration panels of local councils), with each licence-payer (including members of political parties) voting for one candidate, the top two per area being elected at the end, and the Chairman being appointed by the Secretary of State with the approval of the relevant Select Committee;
30. Britain at least ordinarily to use her UN Security Council seat to veto any proposal not approved by the majority of the world's elective democracies (other than those with permanent seats of their own), making her the true leader of the democratic world, in contrast to any country that might arrogate to itself such a title while acting out of selfishness rather than self-interest;
31. No one to be permitted to own or control more than one national daily newspaper, more than one national weekly newspaper, more than one television station (including any of the ITV regional stations), or interests in both sectors, a move which, if made at the start of a Parliament, would just be a fact of life by the time that another General Election came round;
32. The obscenely misnamed "Social Democrats, USA" (the main Shachtmanite faction, with close links to the Bush Administration, just as it had to the Reagan Administration) to be expelled from the Socialist International; and
33. The Henry Jackson Society to be proscribed within the Labour Party in the same way, and essentially on the same grounds, as was the Militant Tendency.
1. The conservation or restoration (as the overwhelming majority of Britons wishes) of such good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, family life, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, and mass political participation within a constitutional framework, all of which free market capitalism corrodes to nought;
2. The restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, the use of this to restore Britain's historic fishing rights, the British adoption of a show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, and the election of Britain's European Commissioner by the whole electorate from a shortlist of two submitted following a ballot of all MPs;
3. A much higher threshold for income tax (national median earnings) and corporation tax (the amount needed to pay every employee a minimum wage of half median male earnings per hour), with a flat rate thereafter, so that the working poor are taken out of tax, while genuinely middle-earners and small or medium-sized businesses pay far less than at present, because the richest individuals and the biggest corporations pay their fair share for the first time ever;
4. A unified benefits, pensions, student funding, and minimum wage system, so that no one's income falls below half national median earnings;
5. A one hundred per cent tax at source on all income from rent, with a Social Security payment to those thus taxed equal to national average earnings (or sufficient to maintain the legitimate activities of religious or educational institutions), as a step towards giving every household a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State;
6. A permanently higher rate of corporation tax on the banks and the privatised utilities, with the money spent on reimbursing the employers' National Insurance contributions for workers aged 25 or under and 55 or over, and with strict regulation to ensure that no cost is passed on to workers, consumers, communities or the environment;
7. A ban on any company paying any employee more than ten times what it pays any other employee, with the whole public sector (including MPs and Ministers) functioning as one for this purpose, its median wage pegged permanently at the median wage in the private sector;
8. Every public limited company to have one non-executive director appointed by the Secretary of State for a fixed term equivalent to that of other directors, and responsible for protecting the interests of workers, small shareholders, consumers, communities and the environment;
9. Restoration of democratic political control over monetary policy;
10. The renationalisation of the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of thier privatisation, as the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures going back to the 1950s;
11. Building on the statutory right of every worker to join a trade union and to have that trade union recognised for collective bargaining purposes by giving every trade unionist so recognised the statutory right to take industrial action in pursuit of a legitimate grievance, including strike action, and including solidarity action of a clearly secondary character (such as a work to rule in support of a strike) within a single industry or corporation;
12. Abolition of all remaining vestiges of Compulsory Competitive Tendering, of the capping of councils, and of the power of central government to rule local services ultra vires;
13. Continual exposure of the ruling class's pathological hatred of local government as in fact an undisguised hatred of people other than themselves, and as expressing itself in the ridiculous view that councils ought to be "commissioners rather than providers" of services, as if efficiency or accountability had somehow been increased by a village primary school's no longer even employing its own caretaker, or by giving private companies unconditional licenses to print public money in return for risk-free "investments" in, say, emptying the bins, or preparing school food, so that the sooner that this whole process of the last 25 years is halted and reversed, the better;
14. Local authorities to be able to set precepts on top of the flat-rate income tax and corporation tax outlined above, so that Council Tax and National Non-Domestic Rates could both be abolished;
15. No return to the 11-plus, working instead to overcome this country's crippling cultural division between arts and sciences, and between academic and technical education;
16. Defence and restoration of Special Needs Education, and total opposition to the idea of abolishing, or greatly reducing the responsibilities of, Local Education Authorities, not least since the real reason for wanting this is a desire to abolish counties, as would follow very rapidly on the abolition of LEAs, there being no comparable country in which anyone would ever even suggest abolishing whole tiers of local government, never mind in which such a thing might actually happen;
17. Freezing of prescription charges, and restoration of free eye and dental check-ups;
18. Repeal of the Civil Contingencies Act, no identity cards, and no control orders;
19. Repeal of existing erosions of trial by jury and of the right to silence, of existing reversals of the burden of proof, and of the Official Secrets Acts;
20. Police forces at least no larger than at present, and be subject to local democratic accountability, most obviously though Police Authorities;
21. Removal of all nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons from British soil and waters, and a total ban on the sale of arms abroad;
22. Removal of foreign forces from British soil and waters, and restoration of British overall control of our defence capability, with no more participation in "neoconservative" wars;
23. Strong defence (including the restoration where necessary) of Labour's trade union links as constituting the Party's grounding in the lives and practical concerns of millions of working people and their families throughout this country and beyond;
24. A powerful role for co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies and mutual building societies, including legislation to protect the remaining mutual building societies, and the implementation of the Co-operative Party's recent Manifesto other than in relation to foundation hospitals and European integration;
25. An undertaking to go to prison rather than carry an identity card, and likewise to go to prison rather than pay taxes for the sake of state funding of political parties, which would necessitate state involvement, no doubt through some ghastly commission of the ruling class, both in policy formulation and in candidate selection, which is why those who advocate such funding do so, since they expect that they or their mates will be appointed to such a commission, and will thus be able to dictate, even more than at present, both what may be discussed, and by whom, with no role for trade unions, i.e., no role for large numbers of working, tax-paying people and their families, the length and breadth of this country;
26. The introduction, by agreement among the parties, of a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom, not least because this would help to protect the First Past The Post electoral system at both national and (therefore) local level;
27. Everywhere to be covered by a Parish or Town Council, or an urban or suburban equivalent, with greatly increased powers and resources;
28. Total opposition to the further deregulation of drinking or gambling;
29. Election of the BBC Governors for a fixed term of five years from among those licence-payers in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and each of the nine English regions who are politically independent (sufficient to be eligible in principle for membership of the remuneration panels of local councils), with each licence-payer (including members of political parties) voting for one candidate, the top two per area being elected at the end, and the Chairman being appointed by the Secretary of State with the approval of the relevant Select Committee;
30. Britain at least ordinarily to use her UN Security Council seat to veto any proposal not approved by the majority of the world's elective democracies (other than those with permanent seats of their own), making her the true leader of the democratic world, in contrast to any country that might arrogate to itself such a title while acting out of selfishness rather than self-interest;
31. No one to be permitted to own or control more than one national daily newspaper, more than one national weekly newspaper, more than one television station (including any of the ITV regional stations), or interests in both sectors, a move which, if made at the start of a Parliament, would just be a fact of life by the time that another General Election came round;
32. The obscenely misnamed "Social Democrats, USA" (the main Shachtmanite faction, with close links to the Bush Administration, just as it had to the Reagan Administration) to be expelled from the Socialist International; and
33. The Henry Jackson Society to be proscribed within the Labour Party in the same way, and essentially on the same grounds, as was the Militant Tendency.
In circulation on the Old Right
In circulation on the Old Right, the crossover with the material in circulation on the Left being in itself an important point:
1. The restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, the use of this to restore Britain's historic fishing rights, the adoption of the showstopping Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, and the election of Britain's European Commissioner by the whole electorate from a shortlist of two submitted by a secret ballot of MPs;
2. The government of Northern Ireland precisely as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom (not least including the restoration of proper local government there, and organisation there by the British political parties), and the adoption of the Irish Republic's attitude of contempt towards terrorist political parties (views that I hold not least because I am a practising Catholic);
3. The monarchy as embodying our fundamental values, and the duty to hold the Royal Family to account as that embodiment which enables then to enjoy enormous privileges, always having in mind that the succession to the throne is determined by Parliament in our 'res publica' (the reason why there must be no change to the Oath of Allegiance, which, when understood historically and grammatically, expresses this fact);
4. British Standard English to be the only official language of every public body in the United Kingdom, except where another language indigenous to these islands has a high concentration of native speakers, in which case that language should have parity (though no more than that) with British Standard English;
5. Saint George's Day, Saint Andrew's Day, Saint David's Day and Saint Patrick's Day all to be public holidays throughout the United Kingdom, with the flag of the relevant part of the United Kingdom should be displayed alongside the Union Flag in or on all public buildings at all times, to be joined by the appropriate flag, on the other side of the Union Flag, on each of the aforesaid Saints' Days;
6. Total opposition to any lowering of the voting age to 16, as this would threaten our democracy since no one seriously suggests that the political opinion of a 16-year-old is equal to that of, say, his Head Teacher, so, sooner or later, someone would suggest, unanswerably, that people like the latter ought to have more votes than the former;
7. A much higher threshold for income tax and corporation tax, with a flat rate thereafter, so that the working poor are taken out of tax, while genuine middle-earners and small or medium-sized businesses pay far less than at present, because the richest individuals and the biggest corporations pay their fair share for the first time ever;
8. Serious consideration of the restoration of grammar schools on the German Gymnasium model, thus avoiding the 11-plus while working to overcome this country's crippling cultural division between arts and sciences, and between academic and technical education;
9. Continuation of my ongoing work in trying to set up on a co-operative basis an Examination Board drawn from independent schools while making its services available to all schools, in trying to persuade public schools and Oxbridge colleges (run as these are by professional educationalists) to sponsor City Academies (if we must have them at all), and in trying to create a new educational charity which would elect to Associateship those pupils in all schools who, on leaving the Sixth Form at 18, had attained since beginning Year 10 examination results at or above the average in the remaining state grammar schools, both in terms of the marks themselves, and in terms of the range of subjects studied (as well as electing to Fellowship those teachers whose pupils attained such results over 10 consecutive years), including with a view to contacting the most prestigious universities in order to make the Associateship (which would be automatic) an admission requirement, and in the hope that this charity will be called after a Labour politician who fought to defend the grammar schools as the ladder of working-class advancement;
10. The defence and restoration of schooling at the highest academic level for those to whom it is appropriate as intimately related to an emphatic dedication to the defence and restoration of Special Needs Education;
11. Total opposition to the idea of abolishing, or greatly reducing the responsibilities of, Local Education Authorities, since the real reasons for wanting this are a desire to abolish counties (as would follow very rapidly on the abolition of LEAs) and a determination to ensure that bipartite or tripartite secondary schooling can never be restored (as this would be logistically impossible without very powerful and well-resourced LEAs), which former would entail the abolition of Lords Lieutenants, this anti-monarchist cause being a key part of the anti-LEA, inescapably anti-county agenda, and there being no comparable country in which anyone would ever even suggest abolishing whole tiers of local government, never mind in which such a thing might actually happen;
12. Continual exposure of the metropolitan liberal elite's pathological hatred of local government as in fact an undisguised hatred of people other than themselves, and as expressing itself in the ridiculous view that councils ought to be "commissioners rather than providers" of services, as if efficiency or accountability had somehow been increased by a village primary school's no longer even employing its own caretaker, or by giving private companies unconditional licenses to print public money in return for risk-free "investments" in, say, emptying the bins, or preparing school food, so that the sooner that this whole process of the last 25 years is halted and reversed, the better;
13. Local authorities to be able to set precepts on top of the flat-rate income tax and corporation tax outlined above, so that Council Tax and National Non-Domestic Rates could both be abolished;
14. The abolition, as soon as practicable, of Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax;
15. The imperial and metric systems (both of which, it must be said, are of foreign origin but have long histories of use in this country) to be taught and used side by side (my generation is in the ridiculous position of having been taught no system except the one used only for certain specialist purposes), except where metrication has not already taken place, as in the case of road signs;
16. University funding per student, regardless of parental income, on a sliding scale of the A-level or equivalent grades required by the course (up to three As) and those obtained by the student (up to three As), with full fees paid for, and generous maintenance grants awarded to, those at the higher end;
17. Defence of rural services, leading in particular to the systematic reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures, as well as of the erosion of local schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on;
18. The development of a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures going back to the 1950s;
19. Defence of real agriculture as the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food), as against American-style 'factory farming';
20. The supermarkets to be made to fund investment in agriculture and small business (investment to be determined in close consultation with the National Farmers' Union and the Federation of Small Businesses) by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax, in either case with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this are not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment;
21. Repeal of the ban on hunting with dogs, and defence of the remaining field sports;
22. Everywhere to be covered by a Parish or Town Council, or an urban or suburban equivalent, with greatly increased powers and resources;
23. The removal of foreign forces from British soil and waters, the restoration of British overall control over our defence capability, no more participation in "neoconservative" (i.e., anti-conservative) wars, and the retention of the historic regiments as the framework for the Army's future efficiency;
24. Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council to be used in consultation with the other 15 Commonwealth Realms (i.e., Commonwealth countries retaining the monarchy), vetoing any resolution not approved by the majority of them, and seeking a similar arrangement with regard to the British and Canadian seats at the G8, all the while with a view to binding the Commonwealth Realms to each other through the monarchy, and on the basis of the shared values and history embodied by that institution, with their citizens having at least the same rights of access to this country as are enjoyed by EU citizens, and with every step made to ensure at least the same level of cultural contact (twinning, exchanges, and so on) with the other Commonwealth Realms as with the other EU member-states (which must never include Turkey);
25. Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council to be used at least ordinarily to veto any proposal not approved by the majority of those countries (other than those with permanent seats of their own) which, like seventy-two per cent Christian Britain, have Christian majority populations, which, among other good things, would gain Britain enormous influence in the increasing important regions of Africa and Latin America (it would be constitutionally impossible for the United States to adopt a similar policy);
26. Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council to be used at least ordinarily to veto any proposal not approved by the majority of the world's elective democracies (other than those with permanent seats of their own), making her the true leader of the democratic world, in contrast to any country that might otherwise arrogate to itself such a title;
27. The closest possible ties (not least by this medium, and especially in schools) with those British Overseas Territories with permanent populations (I myself am half Saint Helenian, and I was in fact born in Saint Helena), and the National Days of all the Commonwealth Realms and Overseas Territories to be marked in our public institutions, including by the display of their flags alongside the permanent display of the Union Flag;
28. This country to have at least equal cultural ties with those Western European countries (primarily Norway, Iceland and Switzerland) outside the EU as with those inside it;
29. Scholars working at least part-time right inside the Palace of Westminster publicly interpreting contemporary events in the light of Classics and the Bible, including their respective traditions of reception and interpretation (not least by reference of each other);
30. Programmes of internships, conferences, publications, and so forth, on social questions which those employed at public expense to research these things refuse to research as a matter of principle. Examples might include: beyond multiculturalism to integration; the economic, social, cultural and political consequences of substance liberalisation, of gambling liberalisation, and of prostitution and pornography; the economic, social, cultural and political importance of fatherhood, and of marriage as traditionally understood; domestic and non-domestic violence by women; domestic violence against men; female sexual abuse of children; female sexual abuse and exploitation of men; and the effects on the poor of each of penal policy, education policy, health policy, policing policy and housing policy;
31. A legal presumption of equal parenting, and the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is still being paid to mothers;
32. Raising of the age of consent to 18, and total opposition to the further deregulation of drinking or gambling, with strong support for calls to criminalise the buying of sex at least above the age of consent (raised to 18) provided that this is accompanied by the equal criminalisation (including in sentencing terms) of the selling of sex above that age;
33. Reclassification of cannabis as a Class A drug, with a clampdown on possession as well as on supply;
34. Repeal of the Civil Contingencies Act, no identity cards, no control orders, repeal of existing erosions of trial by jury and of the right to silence, repeal of existing reversals of the burden of proof, repeal of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, and a return to preventative policing based on foot patrols;
35. Police forces at least be no larger than at present, and subject to local democratic accountability, most obviously though Police Authorities, although my mind is by no means closed to the idea of elected sheriffs;
36. Every offence to carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or fifteen years in prison where the maximum sentence is life imprisonment;
37. Gypsies and Travellers to be made to obey the same planning laws as the rest of us;
38. Practical recognition that just as one cannot logically oppose the decadent social libertinism deriving from the 1960s without also opposing the decadent economic libertinism deriving from the 1980s (or vice versa), and just as one cannot logically oppose the European Union's erosion of our self-government without also opposing that by global capital and by American hegemony (or vice versa), so likewise one cannot logically oppose the unrestricted movement of people (i.e., migrants) without also opposing that of goods, services and capital (or vice versa);
39. The development of nuclear power as at least the core around which other things (wind, wave, solar, &c) may operate, since it offers both the re-creation of strong working-class communities based on high-wage and high-skilled employment (as previously provided by pits, steelworks, shipyards, and so on), and independence from the affairs of the Middle East, as well as from Russian gas;
40. Election of the BBC Governors for a fixed term of five years from among those licence-payers in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and each of the nine English regions who are politically independent (sufficient to be eligible in principle for membership of the remuneration panels of local councils), with each licence-payer (including members of political parties) voting for one candidate, the top two per area being elected at the end, and the Chairman being appointed by the Secretary of State with the approval of the relevant Select Committee, as well as the election in the same manner, though by the whole electorate, of Ofcom, of the Press Complaints Commission, and of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, just for a start;
41. An undertaking to go to prison rather than carry an identity card, and likewise to go to prison rather than pay taxes for the sake of state funding of political parties, which would necessitate state involvement, no doubt through some ghastly commission of the metropolitan liberal elite, both in policy formulation and in candidate selection, this being why those who advocate such funding do so, since they expect that they or their mates will be appointed to such a commission, and will thus be able to dictate, even more than at present, both what may be discussed, and by whom; and
42. The introduction, by agreement among the parties, of a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom, not least because this would help to protect the First Past The Post electoral system at both national and (therefore) local level.
1. The restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, the use of this to restore Britain's historic fishing rights, the adoption of the showstopping Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, and the election of Britain's European Commissioner by the whole electorate from a shortlist of two submitted by a secret ballot of MPs;
2. The government of Northern Ireland precisely as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom (not least including the restoration of proper local government there, and organisation there by the British political parties), and the adoption of the Irish Republic's attitude of contempt towards terrorist political parties (views that I hold not least because I am a practising Catholic);
3. The monarchy as embodying our fundamental values, and the duty to hold the Royal Family to account as that embodiment which enables then to enjoy enormous privileges, always having in mind that the succession to the throne is determined by Parliament in our 'res publica' (the reason why there must be no change to the Oath of Allegiance, which, when understood historically and grammatically, expresses this fact);
4. British Standard English to be the only official language of every public body in the United Kingdom, except where another language indigenous to these islands has a high concentration of native speakers, in which case that language should have parity (though no more than that) with British Standard English;
5. Saint George's Day, Saint Andrew's Day, Saint David's Day and Saint Patrick's Day all to be public holidays throughout the United Kingdom, with the flag of the relevant part of the United Kingdom should be displayed alongside the Union Flag in or on all public buildings at all times, to be joined by the appropriate flag, on the other side of the Union Flag, on each of the aforesaid Saints' Days;
6. Total opposition to any lowering of the voting age to 16, as this would threaten our democracy since no one seriously suggests that the political opinion of a 16-year-old is equal to that of, say, his Head Teacher, so, sooner or later, someone would suggest, unanswerably, that people like the latter ought to have more votes than the former;
7. A much higher threshold for income tax and corporation tax, with a flat rate thereafter, so that the working poor are taken out of tax, while genuine middle-earners and small or medium-sized businesses pay far less than at present, because the richest individuals and the biggest corporations pay their fair share for the first time ever;
8. Serious consideration of the restoration of grammar schools on the German Gymnasium model, thus avoiding the 11-plus while working to overcome this country's crippling cultural division between arts and sciences, and between academic and technical education;
9. Continuation of my ongoing work in trying to set up on a co-operative basis an Examination Board drawn from independent schools while making its services available to all schools, in trying to persuade public schools and Oxbridge colleges (run as these are by professional educationalists) to sponsor City Academies (if we must have them at all), and in trying to create a new educational charity which would elect to Associateship those pupils in all schools who, on leaving the Sixth Form at 18, had attained since beginning Year 10 examination results at or above the average in the remaining state grammar schools, both in terms of the marks themselves, and in terms of the range of subjects studied (as well as electing to Fellowship those teachers whose pupils attained such results over 10 consecutive years), including with a view to contacting the most prestigious universities in order to make the Associateship (which would be automatic) an admission requirement, and in the hope that this charity will be called after a Labour politician who fought to defend the grammar schools as the ladder of working-class advancement;
10. The defence and restoration of schooling at the highest academic level for those to whom it is appropriate as intimately related to an emphatic dedication to the defence and restoration of Special Needs Education;
11. Total opposition to the idea of abolishing, or greatly reducing the responsibilities of, Local Education Authorities, since the real reasons for wanting this are a desire to abolish counties (as would follow very rapidly on the abolition of LEAs) and a determination to ensure that bipartite or tripartite secondary schooling can never be restored (as this would be logistically impossible without very powerful and well-resourced LEAs), which former would entail the abolition of Lords Lieutenants, this anti-monarchist cause being a key part of the anti-LEA, inescapably anti-county agenda, and there being no comparable country in which anyone would ever even suggest abolishing whole tiers of local government, never mind in which such a thing might actually happen;
12. Continual exposure of the metropolitan liberal elite's pathological hatred of local government as in fact an undisguised hatred of people other than themselves, and as expressing itself in the ridiculous view that councils ought to be "commissioners rather than providers" of services, as if efficiency or accountability had somehow been increased by a village primary school's no longer even employing its own caretaker, or by giving private companies unconditional licenses to print public money in return for risk-free "investments" in, say, emptying the bins, or preparing school food, so that the sooner that this whole process of the last 25 years is halted and reversed, the better;
13. Local authorities to be able to set precepts on top of the flat-rate income tax and corporation tax outlined above, so that Council Tax and National Non-Domestic Rates could both be abolished;
14. The abolition, as soon as practicable, of Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax;
15. The imperial and metric systems (both of which, it must be said, are of foreign origin but have long histories of use in this country) to be taught and used side by side (my generation is in the ridiculous position of having been taught no system except the one used only for certain specialist purposes), except where metrication has not already taken place, as in the case of road signs;
16. University funding per student, regardless of parental income, on a sliding scale of the A-level or equivalent grades required by the course (up to three As) and those obtained by the student (up to three As), with full fees paid for, and generous maintenance grants awarded to, those at the higher end;
17. Defence of rural services, leading in particular to the systematic reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures, as well as of the erosion of local schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on;
18. The development of a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures going back to the 1950s;
19. Defence of real agriculture as the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food), as against American-style 'factory farming';
20. The supermarkets to be made to fund investment in agriculture and small business (investment to be determined in close consultation with the National Farmers' Union and the Federation of Small Businesses) by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax, in either case with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this are not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment;
21. Repeal of the ban on hunting with dogs, and defence of the remaining field sports;
22. Everywhere to be covered by a Parish or Town Council, or an urban or suburban equivalent, with greatly increased powers and resources;
23. The removal of foreign forces from British soil and waters, the restoration of British overall control over our defence capability, no more participation in "neoconservative" (i.e., anti-conservative) wars, and the retention of the historic regiments as the framework for the Army's future efficiency;
24. Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council to be used in consultation with the other 15 Commonwealth Realms (i.e., Commonwealth countries retaining the monarchy), vetoing any resolution not approved by the majority of them, and seeking a similar arrangement with regard to the British and Canadian seats at the G8, all the while with a view to binding the Commonwealth Realms to each other through the monarchy, and on the basis of the shared values and history embodied by that institution, with their citizens having at least the same rights of access to this country as are enjoyed by EU citizens, and with every step made to ensure at least the same level of cultural contact (twinning, exchanges, and so on) with the other Commonwealth Realms as with the other EU member-states (which must never include Turkey);
25. Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council to be used at least ordinarily to veto any proposal not approved by the majority of those countries (other than those with permanent seats of their own) which, like seventy-two per cent Christian Britain, have Christian majority populations, which, among other good things, would gain Britain enormous influence in the increasing important regions of Africa and Latin America (it would be constitutionally impossible for the United States to adopt a similar policy);
26. Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council to be used at least ordinarily to veto any proposal not approved by the majority of the world's elective democracies (other than those with permanent seats of their own), making her the true leader of the democratic world, in contrast to any country that might otherwise arrogate to itself such a title;
27. The closest possible ties (not least by this medium, and especially in schools) with those British Overseas Territories with permanent populations (I myself am half Saint Helenian, and I was in fact born in Saint Helena), and the National Days of all the Commonwealth Realms and Overseas Territories to be marked in our public institutions, including by the display of their flags alongside the permanent display of the Union Flag;
28. This country to have at least equal cultural ties with those Western European countries (primarily Norway, Iceland and Switzerland) outside the EU as with those inside it;
29. Scholars working at least part-time right inside the Palace of Westminster publicly interpreting contemporary events in the light of Classics and the Bible, including their respective traditions of reception and interpretation (not least by reference of each other);
30. Programmes of internships, conferences, publications, and so forth, on social questions which those employed at public expense to research these things refuse to research as a matter of principle. Examples might include: beyond multiculturalism to integration; the economic, social, cultural and political consequences of substance liberalisation, of gambling liberalisation, and of prostitution and pornography; the economic, social, cultural and political importance of fatherhood, and of marriage as traditionally understood; domestic and non-domestic violence by women; domestic violence against men; female sexual abuse of children; female sexual abuse and exploitation of men; and the effects on the poor of each of penal policy, education policy, health policy, policing policy and housing policy;
31. A legal presumption of equal parenting, and the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is still being paid to mothers;
32. Raising of the age of consent to 18, and total opposition to the further deregulation of drinking or gambling, with strong support for calls to criminalise the buying of sex at least above the age of consent (raised to 18) provided that this is accompanied by the equal criminalisation (including in sentencing terms) of the selling of sex above that age;
33. Reclassification of cannabis as a Class A drug, with a clampdown on possession as well as on supply;
34. Repeal of the Civil Contingencies Act, no identity cards, no control orders, repeal of existing erosions of trial by jury and of the right to silence, repeal of existing reversals of the burden of proof, repeal of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, and a return to preventative policing based on foot patrols;
35. Police forces at least be no larger than at present, and subject to local democratic accountability, most obviously though Police Authorities, although my mind is by no means closed to the idea of elected sheriffs;
36. Every offence to carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or fifteen years in prison where the maximum sentence is life imprisonment;
37. Gypsies and Travellers to be made to obey the same planning laws as the rest of us;
38. Practical recognition that just as one cannot logically oppose the decadent social libertinism deriving from the 1960s without also opposing the decadent economic libertinism deriving from the 1980s (or vice versa), and just as one cannot logically oppose the European Union's erosion of our self-government without also opposing that by global capital and by American hegemony (or vice versa), so likewise one cannot logically oppose the unrestricted movement of people (i.e., migrants) without also opposing that of goods, services and capital (or vice versa);
39. The development of nuclear power as at least the core around which other things (wind, wave, solar, &c) may operate, since it offers both the re-creation of strong working-class communities based on high-wage and high-skilled employment (as previously provided by pits, steelworks, shipyards, and so on), and independence from the affairs of the Middle East, as well as from Russian gas;
40. Election of the BBC Governors for a fixed term of five years from among those licence-payers in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and each of the nine English regions who are politically independent (sufficient to be eligible in principle for membership of the remuneration panels of local councils), with each licence-payer (including members of political parties) voting for one candidate, the top two per area being elected at the end, and the Chairman being appointed by the Secretary of State with the approval of the relevant Select Committee, as well as the election in the same manner, though by the whole electorate, of Ofcom, of the Press Complaints Commission, and of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, just for a start;
41. An undertaking to go to prison rather than carry an identity card, and likewise to go to prison rather than pay taxes for the sake of state funding of political parties, which would necessitate state involvement, no doubt through some ghastly commission of the metropolitan liberal elite, both in policy formulation and in candidate selection, this being why those who advocate such funding do so, since they expect that they or their mates will be appointed to such a commission, and will thus be able to dictate, even more than at present, both what may be discussed, and by whom; and
42. The introduction, by agreement among the parties, of a system whereby each constituency party submitted a shortlist of two potential parliamentary candidates to a binding ballot of all registered electors in that constituency, and each party at national level submitted a shortlist of two potential Leaders (i.e., putative Prime Ministers) to a binding ballot of all registered electors throughout the United Kingdom, not least because this would help to protect the First Past The Post electoral system at both national and (therefore) local level.
Further to ongoing scandal
[In circulation throughout the trade union movement]
In view of recent and ongoing scandal, I am writing to ask each of the TUC's affiliates to nominate an individual for a peerage. Ideally, due to some other work that I am also doing in this area, I should like to have the forty names by 30th April, so that I can release the complete list to the media on 1st May, thus challenging the Government to ennoble everyone nominated, or else explain in each case why he or she was less acceptable than Jeffrey Archer or Mike Watson.
Furthermore, since the monstrosity that is state funding of political parties is now back on the agenda, I am writing to suggest a scheme whereby each MP (and each elected member of a future elected second chamber) was given a voucher (for want of a better term) worth £100,000 and transferable to the registered political party of his or her choice, provided that he or she also managed to raise at least £50,000 from one or more membership organisations by means of a ballot of members.
At least on the Labour side, if not at all, only the unions would be able meet this condition; and no Labour MP would be able to spend his or her hundred thousand on the Party unless one or more unions pledged a further fifty thousand, a failure which he or she would have to explain to his or her CLP, with all the implications for selection and reselection (or not).
[My only regret here is not also mentioning that the loans business between the Blair Slush Fund and the Capita boss would make an excellent basis for a really uncompromising campaign to reverse the inefficient, corrupting and anti-democratic farming out of public services.]
In view of recent and ongoing scandal, I am writing to ask each of the TUC's affiliates to nominate an individual for a peerage. Ideally, due to some other work that I am also doing in this area, I should like to have the forty names by 30th April, so that I can release the complete list to the media on 1st May, thus challenging the Government to ennoble everyone nominated, or else explain in each case why he or she was less acceptable than Jeffrey Archer or Mike Watson.
Furthermore, since the monstrosity that is state funding of political parties is now back on the agenda, I am writing to suggest a scheme whereby each MP (and each elected member of a future elected second chamber) was given a voucher (for want of a better term) worth £100,000 and transferable to the registered political party of his or her choice, provided that he or she also managed to raise at least £50,000 from one or more membership organisations by means of a ballot of members.
At least on the Labour side, if not at all, only the unions would be able meet this condition; and no Labour MP would be able to spend his or her hundred thousand on the Party unless one or more unions pledged a further fifty thousand, a failure which he or she would have to explain to his or her CLP, with all the implications for selection and reselection (or not).
[My only regret here is not also mentioning that the loans business between the Blair Slush Fund and the Capita boss would make an excellent basis for a really uncompromising campaign to reverse the inefficient, corrupting and anti-democratic farming out of public services.]
Hereditary Peers
[In circulation on Left and Right]
I had always opposed an elected second chamber, since I believed that, with both (and it must be both) an American-style committee system and an Australian-style caucus system, the House of Commons would be compelled to do its very well-paid job properly, and there would thus be no need of a second chamber (although the chamber itself could continue to be used for ceremonial purposes). I still believe that both committees and caucuses of this kind should be introduced.
However, I have come to see the wisdom of the Old Labour view that the House of Lords should either be left as it is (doing "no harm, and occasionally some good"), or else replaced with a proper Senate, an elected second chamber, not previously high on any list of priorities, but now rendered necessary, both by those scandals, and by the ill-thought-out dismemberment of the House of Lords in order to give the illusion (as with the hunting ban, for example) of a Labour Government doing Labour things, when in fact such a measure had no impact whatever on the fight against poverty, ignorance, ill-health, squalor and homelessness, unemployment, crime, and war, since anything having such an impact would cost money.
Not least because the scandals have come from the BBC-defined "centre" (which in fact has little or no popular following), it is to be hoped that a common scheme will be produced by those seeking a prelude to further co-operation on, for a start, the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, and opposition to further "neoconservative" wars.
To that end, I suggest that registered voters in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and each of the nine English regions elect from among their own number 15 Senators per area (180 in all), for a six-year term: three from each of List A, List B, List C, List D and List E. List A would be the top five candidates in a ballot of all members of the Labour Party (or its designated sister-party in Northern Ireland) in the area, List B the same for the Conservatives (likewise), and List C for the Liberal Democrats (likewise). List D would be the five members of other political parties who secured the most nominations by registered voters in the area, and List E would be the five members of no political party who so secured.
The five lists would be put to the whole electorate in the area, and each voter would vote (by mean of an X) for up to one candidate from each list, with the top three from each list declared elected at the end. I predict 11 members or supporters of the Campaign Group from List A, 11 members or supporters of the Cornerstone Group from List B, 11 or more people from List D who thought of themselves as Marxists but would really work very well with the Labour Left and sections of the Liberal Democrats, 11 or more paleoconservatives from List D, and no members of the BNP from anywhere.
List C would yield 11 Liberal Democrats who (like Faith, Flag and Family Tories) were profoundly uneasy about the effects of capitalism on agriculture, small business, family life, and so on; and another 11 who (like the Labour Left) opposed the "free" market precisely because it corroded to nought everything that true conservatives sought to conserve, and in so doing drove despairing millions into the arms of equally corrosive Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism. Both List B (probably) and List C (certainly) would produce at least one Catholic Unionist from Northern Ireland.
The rules for disqualification would be the same as for MPs, and the rate of pay would probably have to be, although I should personally prefer to fix it at the national average wage for full-time work, in order to keep Senators in touch with life as most people in Britain live it (I should like to do the same for MPs). Senators could vote in elections to the House of Commons, so the post-1911 taxation of peers without their representation would be ended. No Bill to apply only in England would be submitted for Royal Assent unless approved by a joint session of all MPs and Senators with English seats. The Senate would also have both the committee system and the caucus system.
What, then, of the hereditary peers? Quite frankly (as Tony Blair would say), recent events have created potentially a very popular case (at least if it were presented as part of something like the above scheme) for a renewed and restored role for Their Lordships. They seem decidedly preferable, even to one as solidly Labour as I, to those who have effected a sort of coup by heavily indebting my party (if not all three)without reference to the Party Treasurer, thus securing for themselves lifetime seats in the Mother of Parliaments (plus, in at least one case, Ministerial office).
So I suggest, as part of the above, that the hereditary peerage be closed by statute, and that the remaining elements of sex discrimination be abolished (as also for the Crown, before Prince William produces an eldest daughter – it is inconceivable that any of the other Commonwealth Realms would object to this), so that those hereditary peers who would not be disqualified from membership of the House of Commons and the Senate, and who were not members of or donors to (including creditors of) any political party, might sit, unpaid in any way, as a Grand Committee of Hereditary Peers, with the power to require a referendum on any Constitutional Bill as identified by the Speaker of the House of Commons for the purposes of that House's procedures, and exercising the current powers of the House of Lords in relation to Ecclesiastical Measures.
Hereditary peers would continue to participate, as at present, in ceremonial occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament; and they would have the right to vote and stand in elections to the House of Commons and the Senate (though not to participate in the Grand Committee while sitting in either of those bodies), so the present provision for disclaiming could be repealed.
I had always opposed an elected second chamber, since I believed that, with both (and it must be both) an American-style committee system and an Australian-style caucus system, the House of Commons would be compelled to do its very well-paid job properly, and there would thus be no need of a second chamber (although the chamber itself could continue to be used for ceremonial purposes). I still believe that both committees and caucuses of this kind should be introduced.
However, I have come to see the wisdom of the Old Labour view that the House of Lords should either be left as it is (doing "no harm, and occasionally some good"), or else replaced with a proper Senate, an elected second chamber, not previously high on any list of priorities, but now rendered necessary, both by those scandals, and by the ill-thought-out dismemberment of the House of Lords in order to give the illusion (as with the hunting ban, for example) of a Labour Government doing Labour things, when in fact such a measure had no impact whatever on the fight against poverty, ignorance, ill-health, squalor and homelessness, unemployment, crime, and war, since anything having such an impact would cost money.
Not least because the scandals have come from the BBC-defined "centre" (which in fact has little or no popular following), it is to be hoped that a common scheme will be produced by those seeking a prelude to further co-operation on, for a start, the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, and opposition to further "neoconservative" wars.
To that end, I suggest that registered voters in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and each of the nine English regions elect from among their own number 15 Senators per area (180 in all), for a six-year term: three from each of List A, List B, List C, List D and List E. List A would be the top five candidates in a ballot of all members of the Labour Party (or its designated sister-party in Northern Ireland) in the area, List B the same for the Conservatives (likewise), and List C for the Liberal Democrats (likewise). List D would be the five members of other political parties who secured the most nominations by registered voters in the area, and List E would be the five members of no political party who so secured.
The five lists would be put to the whole electorate in the area, and each voter would vote (by mean of an X) for up to one candidate from each list, with the top three from each list declared elected at the end. I predict 11 members or supporters of the Campaign Group from List A, 11 members or supporters of the Cornerstone Group from List B, 11 or more people from List D who thought of themselves as Marxists but would really work very well with the Labour Left and sections of the Liberal Democrats, 11 or more paleoconservatives from List D, and no members of the BNP from anywhere.
List C would yield 11 Liberal Democrats who (like Faith, Flag and Family Tories) were profoundly uneasy about the effects of capitalism on agriculture, small business, family life, and so on; and another 11 who (like the Labour Left) opposed the "free" market precisely because it corroded to nought everything that true conservatives sought to conserve, and in so doing drove despairing millions into the arms of equally corrosive Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism. Both List B (probably) and List C (certainly) would produce at least one Catholic Unionist from Northern Ireland.
The rules for disqualification would be the same as for MPs, and the rate of pay would probably have to be, although I should personally prefer to fix it at the national average wage for full-time work, in order to keep Senators in touch with life as most people in Britain live it (I should like to do the same for MPs). Senators could vote in elections to the House of Commons, so the post-1911 taxation of peers without their representation would be ended. No Bill to apply only in England would be submitted for Royal Assent unless approved by a joint session of all MPs and Senators with English seats. The Senate would also have both the committee system and the caucus system.
What, then, of the hereditary peers? Quite frankly (as Tony Blair would say), recent events have created potentially a very popular case (at least if it were presented as part of something like the above scheme) for a renewed and restored role for Their Lordships. They seem decidedly preferable, even to one as solidly Labour as I, to those who have effected a sort of coup by heavily indebting my party (if not all three)without reference to the Party Treasurer, thus securing for themselves lifetime seats in the Mother of Parliaments (plus, in at least one case, Ministerial office).
So I suggest, as part of the above, that the hereditary peerage be closed by statute, and that the remaining elements of sex discrimination be abolished (as also for the Crown, before Prince William produces an eldest daughter – it is inconceivable that any of the other Commonwealth Realms would object to this), so that those hereditary peers who would not be disqualified from membership of the House of Commons and the Senate, and who were not members of or donors to (including creditors of) any political party, might sit, unpaid in any way, as a Grand Committee of Hereditary Peers, with the power to require a referendum on any Constitutional Bill as identified by the Speaker of the House of Commons for the purposes of that House's procedures, and exercising the current powers of the House of Lords in relation to Ecclesiastical Measures.
Hereditary peers would continue to participate, as at present, in ceremonial occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament; and they would have the right to vote and stand in elections to the House of Commons and the Senate (though not to participate in the Grand Committee while sitting in either of those bodies), so the present provision for disclaiming could be repealed.
Nuclear Weapons
The Labour Movement was founded to conserve such good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, family life, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, and mass political participation within a constitutional framework. All of these were and are corroded to nought by free market capitalism, both in itself, and because it drives despairing millions into equally corrosive Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism.
Marx himself saw Britain, with Germany, as one of the two countries most likely to have a revolution such as he predicted and advocated; it was thanks to Labour that no such disaster ever befell this country, as the sectarian Left's hatred of Labour demonstrates. We are proud to be the objects of such hatred: they hate us because they hate the Welfare State, and the strong statutory and other protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. In a word, they hate Socialism.
However, in recent years, much of Labour's central apparatus has been hijacked by people with sectarian Left backgrounds, who have only changed their Marxism's ending so that the bourgeoisie (and thus the most bourgeois of countries, which is not Britain) wins. These people remain Marxist in their dialectical materialism; Leninist in their vanguard elitism, in their "democratic centralism", and in their use of various religious and other interests as "Useful Idiots"; Trotskyist in their entryism, and in their belief in the permanent revolution; and yet also Stalinist in their desire to create the dictatorship of the victorious class in a superstate, from which to export it (including by force of arms) while vanguard elites around the world owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countries. Contrary to their origins, and to the wishes of almost all of their members and supporters, all three parties have largely been turned, by means of such neo-Trotskyist entryism, into vanguard elites of this Marxist-Leninist (specifically bourgeois-triumphalist) kind. Thus has been largely overturned Labour's spectacular achievement in preventing a Marxist takeover of Britain.
That overturning, and thus the new Marxist hegemony itself, would become complete if another nuclear weapons programme were to be commissioned in succession to Trident. Trident was at least useless only in its own ostensibly defensive terms, whereas any new programme would be useless in any terms whatever, in addition to the fact that nuclear weapons (like radiological, chemical and biological weapons) are morally repugnant simply in themselves. They offer not the slightest defence against a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, terrorist organisations pursuing a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, aims in relation to a range of countries while actually governing no state. Where would any such organisation keep nuclear weapons in the first place?
Furthermore, the possession of nuclear weapons, in addition to offending against Islamic (and much other) theological opinion, serves to convey to terrorists and their supporters that Britain wishes to "play with the big boys", thereby contributing to making Britain a target for the terrorist activity against which such weapons are defensively useless. It is high time for Britain to grow up.
Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council could not be taken away without British consent, and so does not depend in any way on her possession of nuclear weapons; on the contrary, the world needs and deserves a non-nuclear permanent member of that Council.
Most European countries do not have nuclear weapons, and nor does Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Are these therefore in greater danger? On the contrary, the London bombings of 7th July 2005 were attacks on a country with nuclear weapons, while the attacks of 11th September 2001 were against a country with by far the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The only "nuclear power" in the Middle East is Israel; is Israel the most secure state in the Middle East?
A new nuclear weapons programme could only be commissioned on grounds purely ideological in the most irrational and doctrinaire sense of the word, and the ideology in question would be an utterly uncritical Marxism. For a Labour Government to do such a thing would be the Labour Movement's greatest ever failure, and the greatest threat to everything for which it has ever fought with a phenomenal success of benefit to the entire world.
Nor would any such programme represent or effect national pride or independence, but rather the wholesale subjugation of Britain's defence capability to a foreign power (however friendly) precisely in the service of that Marxist ideology. That power maintains at least no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, of which almost none have nuclear weapons. Diverting enormous sums of money towards public services, and towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.
Therefore, by not later than the 2006 Labour Party Conference (and preferably well before then), the office of Prime Minister must be held by a person who has specifically, publicly and unambiguously ruled out any such programme, or at least specifically, publicly and unambiguously guaranteed that no such programme will be commissioned without the support of a division of the House of Commons, including a free vote of all Labour MPs, with the majority both of the whole House and of Labour MPs voting in favour. Otherwise, the Labour Party will have ceased to exist, and in its place there will be nothing but a Marxist sect, compelling all of us Labour people to act accordingly.
Marx himself saw Britain, with Germany, as one of the two countries most likely to have a revolution such as he predicted and advocated; it was thanks to Labour that no such disaster ever befell this country, as the sectarian Left's hatred of Labour demonstrates. We are proud to be the objects of such hatred: they hate us because they hate the Welfare State, and the strong statutory and other protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. In a word, they hate Socialism.
However, in recent years, much of Labour's central apparatus has been hijacked by people with sectarian Left backgrounds, who have only changed their Marxism's ending so that the bourgeoisie (and thus the most bourgeois of countries, which is not Britain) wins. These people remain Marxist in their dialectical materialism; Leninist in their vanguard elitism, in their "democratic centralism", and in their use of various religious and other interests as "Useful Idiots"; Trotskyist in their entryism, and in their belief in the permanent revolution; and yet also Stalinist in their desire to create the dictatorship of the victorious class in a superstate, from which to export it (including by force of arms) while vanguard elites around the world owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countries. Contrary to their origins, and to the wishes of almost all of their members and supporters, all three parties have largely been turned, by means of such neo-Trotskyist entryism, into vanguard elites of this Marxist-Leninist (specifically bourgeois-triumphalist) kind. Thus has been largely overturned Labour's spectacular achievement in preventing a Marxist takeover of Britain.
That overturning, and thus the new Marxist hegemony itself, would become complete if another nuclear weapons programme were to be commissioned in succession to Trident. Trident was at least useless only in its own ostensibly defensive terms, whereas any new programme would be useless in any terms whatever, in addition to the fact that nuclear weapons (like radiological, chemical and biological weapons) are morally repugnant simply in themselves. They offer not the slightest defence against a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, terrorist organisations pursuing a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, aims in relation to a range of countries while actually governing no state. Where would any such organisation keep nuclear weapons in the first place?
Furthermore, the possession of nuclear weapons, in addition to offending against Islamic (and much other) theological opinion, serves to convey to terrorists and their supporters that Britain wishes to "play with the big boys", thereby contributing to making Britain a target for the terrorist activity against which such weapons are defensively useless. It is high time for Britain to grow up.
Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council could not be taken away without British consent, and so does not depend in any way on her possession of nuclear weapons; on the contrary, the world needs and deserves a non-nuclear permanent member of that Council.
Most European countries do not have nuclear weapons, and nor does Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Are these therefore in greater danger? On the contrary, the London bombings of 7th July 2005 were attacks on a country with nuclear weapons, while the attacks of 11th September 2001 were against a country with by far the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The only "nuclear power" in the Middle East is Israel; is Israel the most secure state in the Middle East?
A new nuclear weapons programme could only be commissioned on grounds purely ideological in the most irrational and doctrinaire sense of the word, and the ideology in question would be an utterly uncritical Marxism. For a Labour Government to do such a thing would be the Labour Movement's greatest ever failure, and the greatest threat to everything for which it has ever fought with a phenomenal success of benefit to the entire world.
Nor would any such programme represent or effect national pride or independence, but rather the wholesale subjugation of Britain's defence capability to a foreign power (however friendly) precisely in the service of that Marxist ideology. That power maintains at least no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, of which almost none have nuclear weapons. Diverting enormous sums of money towards public services, and towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.
Therefore, by not later than the 2006 Labour Party Conference (and preferably well before then), the office of Prime Minister must be held by a person who has specifically, publicly and unambiguously ruled out any such programme, or at least specifically, publicly and unambiguously guaranteed that no such programme will be commissioned without the support of a division of the House of Commons, including a free vote of all Labour MPs, with the majority both of the whole House and of Labour MPs voting in favour. Otherwise, the Labour Party will have ceased to exist, and in its place there will be nothing but a Marxist sect, compelling all of us Labour people to act accordingly.
Cuba, Cricket and the Caribbean
[Published last month in the Daily Mail, with the parts in sqaure brackets cut.]
It is easy to mock Fidel Castro's desire for Cubans to play cricket in order to emphasise that they are West Indians and distinct from the United States. However, he has a point[, and good luck to him]. Furthermore, something else unites the nine West Indian countries among the 16 independent Commonwealth Realms (Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), and the six among the 10 permanently inhabited British Overseas Territories (Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands), namely their shared monarchy[, which also distinguishes them from the United States].
The monarchy unites them to each other and to all the other Commonwealth Realms (including Britain) and British Overseas Territories (including Saint Helena, where I was born). [All of these 26 countries around the world fought in both World Wars from Day One of each, while the Commonwealth Realms retain the Crown entirely by choice, and the British Overseas Territories remain British entirely by choice. It is high time that citizens of all of them enjoyed at least the same rights of access to this country as are enjoyed by EU citizens, who might have been SS officers or, as late as 1989, high-ranking Soviet officials in Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia. Furthermore, their respective National Days ought to be observed in some way in our public institutions, especially schools.
It is notable that none of the Commonwealth Realms except Britain is mentioned anywhere on the website of the Henry Jackson Society, and that none at all is mentioned anywhere on the website of the Project for the New American Century: this is the true face of "neoconservatism", actually a direct threat to the territorial, political, economic and cultural integrity, certainly of all the above West Indies and of Canada, and at least arguably of all the Commonwealth Realms (including Britain) and all the British Overseas Territories.]
If Cuba wants to emphasise that she is West Indian and not American, then, in addition to playing cricket, she ought to provide for Castro to be succeeded upon his death by the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, capped and safeguarded by the Crown.
It is easy to mock Fidel Castro's desire for Cubans to play cricket in order to emphasise that they are West Indians and distinct from the United States. However, he has a point[, and good luck to him]. Furthermore, something else unites the nine West Indian countries among the 16 independent Commonwealth Realms (Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), and the six among the 10 permanently inhabited British Overseas Territories (Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands), namely their shared monarchy[, which also distinguishes them from the United States].
The monarchy unites them to each other and to all the other Commonwealth Realms (including Britain) and British Overseas Territories (including Saint Helena, where I was born). [All of these 26 countries around the world fought in both World Wars from Day One of each, while the Commonwealth Realms retain the Crown entirely by choice, and the British Overseas Territories remain British entirely by choice. It is high time that citizens of all of them enjoyed at least the same rights of access to this country as are enjoyed by EU citizens, who might have been SS officers or, as late as 1989, high-ranking Soviet officials in Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia. Furthermore, their respective National Days ought to be observed in some way in our public institutions, especially schools.
It is notable that none of the Commonwealth Realms except Britain is mentioned anywhere on the website of the Henry Jackson Society, and that none at all is mentioned anywhere on the website of the Project for the New American Century: this is the true face of "neoconservatism", actually a direct threat to the territorial, political, economic and cultural integrity, certainly of all the above West Indies and of Canada, and at least arguably of all the Commonwealth Realms (including Britain) and all the British Overseas Territories.]
If Cuba wants to emphasise that she is West Indian and not American, then, in addition to playing cricket, she ought to provide for Castro to be succeeded upon his death by the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, capped and safeguarded by the Crown.
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