Commonwealth News I

Radical Royalist writes:

The Australian Monarchist League's National Conference on 7th and 8th November in Sydney.

Kevin Rudd had sent a message to the Conference, which is full of surprises. See for yourself [RR has the facsimile, which I can't seem to copy].

"I congratulate the Australian Monarchist League for its achievements over the last 17 years."

Well, well, Prime Minister, that includes the defeat of the republicans in 1999. Did you forget?

By the way, neither Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull nor the leader of the NSW Liberal Party Barry O'Farrell bothered to send messages. Kevin Rudd must be a closeted Monarchist.

"Closeted"? Why so? Bernie Grant was "closeted when he strong defended the monarchy because of its role in the Commonwealth. Lucky Australians, that they can still vote for a party in the inherited tradition of, here in the Motherland, the trade unionists and activists who dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist.

Of the delivery of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment by a political movement replete (both here and in Australia, among other places) with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services; a movement which proudly provided a high proportion of Peers of the Realm, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour, who had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of Her Majesty’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver those goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony.

Of Peter Shore’s denunciation of the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and his support for Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State. And of the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party, founded out of the trade union movement specifically in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers.

Some of us would wish to vote for such candidates. Whom we are therefore going to have to be.