Congratulations to Hilary Armstrong on her peerage, especially as she now says that she was against the Iraq War all along. Dianne Hayter is also rewarded at last. Her Fightback! is as invaluable as Clare V.J. Griffiths's Labour and the Countryside, and Martin Pugh's Speak for Britain!
Don Touhig, the Opus Dei-connected hammer of Welsh separatism and of Welsh-language supremacism (a form of class oppression within South Wales, and nothing to do with Welsh-speaking areas), also remains inside the parliamentary process.
Those of us of a certain age can only be delighted that the Lib Dems have caused the ennoblement of Floella Benjamin. But the absence of the anti-war Douglas Hogg is nothing more than spite; not a penny was ever paid for his moat, and he certainly bears comparison with many of those raised to the ermine in the Blair years.
The omission of Sir Patrick Cormack and of Ann Widdecombe should serve as yet another signal to the Old Right to wipe the dust of the Conservative Party from their feet as they take up Proportional Representation and run with it.
As for the drivelling nonsense that John Prescott is some sort of hypocrite for taking his due like a good trade unionist, Labour's only commitment to abolish the House of Lords was in its first ever manifesto, several decades before even Prescott was born. The early Labour Party also peremptorily dismissed a proposal to make it anti-monarchist, something repeated at the founding conference of Respect.
And there has never, ever been a Labour Party policy to abolish private schools. Nor was sending one's children to them any bar to advancement before the rise of their product, the second Viscount Stansgate, and before the embourgoisement of the activist base, a process in which teachers were, and are, highly prominent.
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Douglas Hogg is a peer anyway, in my eyes. Only the vandalism of our traditional constitution prevents his taking his seat, at the moment.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally my word verification is "Patten": is this some kind of sign?
Didn't you used to say that supporters of trade union barons should support hereditary barons and vice versa?
ReplyDeleteI still do.
ReplyDeleteIt is as wrong to silence the voice of the aristocratic social conscience by abolishing hereditary barons as to silence the voice of organised labour by abolishing trade union barons.
One way or another, both of those voices must be heard again, just as the economic safeguards of national sovereignty, of the Union and of paternal authority must be restored.
For a domestic manufacturing base, a largely domestic food supply, and ownership of our own industries and resources by our own citizens, are all integral to national sovereignty.
Nothing has weakened the Union more than the dismantlement of the nationalised industries, which created communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, and many of which had the word “British” in their names.
Quite possibly the most important of all the State’s duties is to guarantee the economic basis of paternal authority. Few things, if any, did this better than the digging of coal to power a country largely standing on it. The same can be said of nuclear power.
And requiring a union card is no different from requiring a British passport or a work permit.