If failure to be elected at the General Election meant a peerage this time, then where is Rod Liddle's? And what about George Galloway, who once said live on air that he would take one if I did? The King knows where we all are. His late mother was my most recent landlady, and he himself was made £500 better off by Rod in July.
The King delivers his Christmas message as Head of the Commonwealth, so if you say "woke", then yes, it will be woke. Likewise, if the old Queen thought that Orange marches were "silly", then she spoke for almost everyone in Great Britain, to whom that is one of the least comprehensible cultures on Earth. Correspondingly, never underestimate the identification of its overwhelming liberal majority, and entirely liberal elite, with what they regard as the achievements of the 26 County State, the most liberal-capitalist in the world. To them, that is what it means to be Irish. They have spent 100 years doing nothing for the people who, to them, were not.
They would not accept a different flag, or a different anthem, or, therefore, different borders. By any future federation, as there would have to be, that flag and that anthem could not conceivably be used internationally; at most, they would still be seen and heard at international football matches if the two sides retained separate teams. As the 2024 result showed, Sinn Féin's near miss in 2020 had scared the living daylights even out of a lot of people who had voted for it. Those who thought like the late Queen may be in for a long wait before anyone else would relieve them of "that silly marching business".
The Queen's view of the Orange Order was shared by most Protestants in Northern Ireland, middle-class Belfast goes on holiday abroad to avoid the Twelfth and Orangemen are always old because any working age man known to be one would be unemployable. The Queen never entered an Orange Hall anywhere in the Commonwealth but she did go to Catholic churches and the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association.
ReplyDeleteHas any member of the Royal Family ever attended an Orange event? By having entered Catholic churches, the King has made himself ineligible for membership.
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