Thrown and Alter?

Peter Hitchens bemoans last month's Supreme Court ruling that even in Northern Ireland, the state school RE and collective worship arrangements were going to have to be completely rewritten to meet the needs of the third, third, of children from non-Christian homes. If the Democratic Unionist Party, whose organisational even if no longer necessarily its electoral base is not even in the three transferor churches, thinks that it can retain any democratic right to the Education portfolio, then it had better start importing its brethren, whom it has always struck me never did move to Northern Ireland.

In England and Wales, compulsory Christian RE and collective worship in state schools date only from the 1944 Butler Act's vision of a renewed Christian society for which it was widely held that the War was being fought, a vision to which it was fundamental that the Britain of the 1930s had not been very Christian at all. And how did that vision turn out? But if these things are a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, then not only would that have come as news to Winston Churchill and David Maxwell Fyfe, but to this day you would need the best of British luck if you felt like telling it to the Germans.

As Wales has been since 1920, what is now Northern Ireland has been constitutionally secular since 1871, creating the space for an Ulster Plantation from the ends of the Earth by those who held, either that the King had lately apostatised by praying with the Pope, by being a Green, by indulging Islam, or by all of the foregoing, or that the Revolution of 1688 had betrayed the Solemn League and Covenant. Hitchens concludes this week's column with a dig at the King, so perhaps he will be making the move? He has called on people to "leave Britain", but he knows the difference between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Then again, there may soon be no need. In one week, Zarah Sultana has moved from calling for the monarchy to be abolished, to calling for a referendum on the monarchy. What would she have instead? 16 people chosen by sortition? She has made it clear today that she did not really want that in Your Party. She wants to be its "Parliamentary Spokesperson", and as the only MP listed on Parliament's website as a member of it, then she already is. She also wants to be President. Might Hitchens give her a run for her money? Start calling him Marshal of Hitchens, after those monarchist founding Presidents, Marshal de MacMahon and Marshal von Hindenburg. And work for a better fate than befell either the Third Republic or the Weimar Republic.