"Labour commentator Dan Hodges [no, me neither] said: ‘Some of these advisers are clever and have something to offer. But their input has to be managed and filtered, and walls need to be built between them and Ed Miliband. At the moment it looks as if every political crank, conjuror and snake-oil salesman in Westminster has a direct line to the leader of the Labour Party’."
He must think that he is still living in the Blair years. Or is he confused as to which Miliband won? This same article describes Lord Glasman as "eccentric". For believing in a socially conservative, patriotic social democracy. Has even the Mail on Sunday accepted the definition of "the centre ground" as the point at which what was once 1970s sectarian Leftism meets what was once 1980s sectarian Rightism?
The monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, and an unhysterical approach to climate change: these things can only be conserved and restored by means of the Welfare State, workers' rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.
The Welfare State, workers' rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State: these things can only be delivered by means, or at the very least in the context, of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, and an unhysterical approach to climate change.
Both social conservatism and patriotism can now come only from the Left; from the historic, totally non-Marxist Labour Movement with its roots in trade unionism, mutualism, Radical Liberalism, Tory populism, Christian Socialism, and Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism. It alone still defends and would extend the things that make one proud to be British, and which, properly presented, would make every part of this country wish to remain British. It was not ever thus. It need not ever be thus. I for one hope that it is not. But it is at the moment. And, frankly, it will remain so for anything like the foreseeable future.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
732 And All That
I seem to have quite a few readers in France, and more than one has been in touch to say that they were wondering when I might notice the striking trend there towards defending both the French bulwark of Christian civilisation and the bourgeois bulwark of French civilisation by deliberately and systematically out-breeding both the Muslims and the semi-feral underclass.
That latter exists in France to nothing like the extent that it does in the "Anglo-Saxon" economies, because the French do not deny the obvious point that if you believe, as you should, in the economic, social, cultural and political benefits of a large and thriving middle class, then you need to will the means in the form of direct and indirect central and local government action; the same is also true of agriculture, of rural communities, of a manufacturing base, of family life, of national sovereignty, of cultural distinctiveness, and of so many other things that true conservatives exist precisely in order to conserve. Such action also sustains a working class properly so called, rather than an underclass. But even what they have is enough to frighten them into both prevention and retaliation, not least demographically. And that in itself says a very great deal in France's favour.
Not only is France the land of Charles Martel, whose spirit is clearly still abroad there, but she is also a country which well into living memory was actually dismembered in the service of Islamic expansion. Three départements - not colonies, but integral parts of France - were lopped off as recently as 1962, and their large communities of Latin Catholics speaking a Romance language, than whom no one could have been more Western, were violently expelled, recalling the violent expulsions of large Christian populations further east in order to create two states especially favoured by those who are now noisiest in professing to be the defenders of the West. For what was once Christendom on Three Continents, covering every inch of the Mediterranean's every coast, 1962 was the biggest catastrophe since 1948, and the biggest catastrophe until 2003.
When France opposed the catastrophe of 2003, she did so from that perspective. It is a shame that Lebanon was never constituted as one or more départements, with the same requirement as in coastal Algeria when it came to civic participation: renunciation of the Sharia as public law. If France had been conscious of herself as the restoration of a Christendom on all three Mediterranean shores, then she would never have given up that status. But it was as a nation and state mutilated by Islamic expansionism only 40 years before that she took her stand on Iraq, and we ought to have listened to her. If she says much the same about Syria, a country of which she has vast experience, then we should listen as we should have done before. Or, at any rate, we should do so if Sarkozy does not take this opportunity to manifest the fact that he is scarcely, if at all, a figure of la France éternelle. In any event, we should pay heed to those who are.
As the demographic war restores more and more of la France éternelle, we should pay more and more such heed. Not least by joining in the fight. Once again, let battle be joined for Christendom on at least three continents. But in this case, on the three continents of Europe, North America and Australasia. At least.
That latter exists in France to nothing like the extent that it does in the "Anglo-Saxon" economies, because the French do not deny the obvious point that if you believe, as you should, in the economic, social, cultural and political benefits of a large and thriving middle class, then you need to will the means in the form of direct and indirect central and local government action; the same is also true of agriculture, of rural communities, of a manufacturing base, of family life, of national sovereignty, of cultural distinctiveness, and of so many other things that true conservatives exist precisely in order to conserve. Such action also sustains a working class properly so called, rather than an underclass. But even what they have is enough to frighten them into both prevention and retaliation, not least demographically. And that in itself says a very great deal in France's favour.
Not only is France the land of Charles Martel, whose spirit is clearly still abroad there, but she is also a country which well into living memory was actually dismembered in the service of Islamic expansion. Three départements - not colonies, but integral parts of France - were lopped off as recently as 1962, and their large communities of Latin Catholics speaking a Romance language, than whom no one could have been more Western, were violently expelled, recalling the violent expulsions of large Christian populations further east in order to create two states especially favoured by those who are now noisiest in professing to be the defenders of the West. For what was once Christendom on Three Continents, covering every inch of the Mediterranean's every coast, 1962 was the biggest catastrophe since 1948, and the biggest catastrophe until 2003.
When France opposed the catastrophe of 2003, she did so from that perspective. It is a shame that Lebanon was never constituted as one or more départements, with the same requirement as in coastal Algeria when it came to civic participation: renunciation of the Sharia as public law. If France had been conscious of herself as the restoration of a Christendom on all three Mediterranean shores, then she would never have given up that status. But it was as a nation and state mutilated by Islamic expansionism only 40 years before that she took her stand on Iraq, and we ought to have listened to her. If she says much the same about Syria, a country of which she has vast experience, then we should listen as we should have done before. Or, at any rate, we should do so if Sarkozy does not take this opportunity to manifest the fact that he is scarcely, if at all, a figure of la France éternelle. In any event, we should pay heed to those who are.
As the demographic war restores more and more of la France éternelle, we should pay more and more such heed. Not least by joining in the fight. Once again, let battle be joined for Christendom on at least three continents. But in this case, on the three continents of Europe, North America and Australasia. At least.
Christian America vs Secular Europe?
What is the largest city in Europe where two persons of the same sex can legally marry each other?
Not contract a civil union, which pointedly does not need to be consummated, and which therefore ought not to be restricted to unrelated same-sex couples?
But contract a legal marriage, which presumably does have to be consummated, thus requiring, in order to receive some legal benefit or privilege, engagement in sexual relations other than those between one man and one woman in marriage according to the traditional definition upheld by, among other people, Barack Obama?
I do not know which city it is. But I am prepared to guess that it is not the largest city in Europe, nor is it Europe's showcase to the world.
Not contract a civil union, which pointedly does not need to be consummated, and which therefore ought not to be restricted to unrelated same-sex couples?
But contract a legal marriage, which presumably does have to be consummated, thus requiring, in order to receive some legal benefit or privilege, engagement in sexual relations other than those between one man and one woman in marriage according to the traditional definition upheld by, among other people, Barack Obama?
I do not know which city it is. But I am prepared to guess that it is not the largest city in Europe, nor is it Europe's showcase to the world.
No Friends In The North
Andrew Rawnsley writes:
What do David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have in common? One thing shared between them is the way in which they pronounce class. They rhyme it with arse, rather than ass. Whenever they open their mouths, all three party leaders announce that they are from southern England.
The Prime Minister is an Oxfordshire Tory. The Lib Dem and Labour leaders have Yorkshire seats, but neither possesses the matching accent. Mr Miliband was born and largely bred in London. Mr Clegg came into the world in the not so gritty streets of Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. To a true northerner, they are no less southern than David Cameron.
The great majority of the decision-makers at Westminster have their roots in the south. When Oliver Letwin was trying to persuade Boris Johnson of the case for green taxes on aviation, the cabinet minister told his fellow Old Etonian: "We don't want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays." He could have made his point by referencing Southampton or Salisbury. It tells us something that it was the folk of a northern city that came to Mr Letwin's mind when he wanted to deny discount travel to the less well-off.
With the exception of William Hague, Eric Pickles and two Lib Dem Scots, the cabinet is a very southern English affair. This may not have been much noticed by the south, but it is very evident if you look through the other end of the telescope. Viewed from Leeds or Manchester or Newcastle, Westminster is more remote than ever. It also seems increasingly hostile. Northern England has a growing – and often legitimate – grievance that it is getting a raw deal compared with the rest of the United Kingdom. There is the historic complaint, sharpened by public spending cuts which will bite hardest in the north, that they are discriminated against by power brokers concentrated in the south. To that is now added a creeping realisation that they are also losing out in money and influence to the devolved governments in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland – particularly the latter.
That's the new dimension to an old tension. Elizabeth Gaskell published North and South back in 1855. There's some crudity to dissecting England like that. It's not all grim up north – far from it. Leeds is a place transformed compared with the city in which I was born. The skylines of Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield gleam with concert halls, art galleries, university buildings, shopping malls, and other citadels of steel and glass that helped to restore the self-confidence of northern cities in the Nineties and Noughties . The Labour years appeared to soften the north/south divide, but maybe they just masked it by using public spending which has left northern England proportionally much more dependent on public sector jobs and state-financed contracts. The spending cuts are bound to be felt most severely here. That is a brutal truth that can't be sugar-coated by rhetoric about everyone being in this together.
In coalition theory, those losing jobs in the public sector will join those being levered off welfare in finding employment in a resurgent private sector. Nowhere more than the north does this need to come true if there is to be a re-balancing of the economy and an end to the squandering of human talent. The grey economic clouds are occasionally pierced by a ray of sunshine. A Thai company has investment plans which promise to more than double the number of steelworkers employed at Teeside Cast Products. Newcastle, home to pioneering work on stem cell research, has ambitious ideas about becoming the world's first "biotech city". The BBC, to squeals from some of its staff, is shifting a lot of production to Salford.
Some of the cabinet do appreciate that the north/south divide hurts the country's economic performance. Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, remarked the other day: "It is not possible for Britain to maintain its prosperity in the 21st century in an increasingly competitive global economy unless we can close the growth gap between the north and the south." He was defending – against much southern dissent in his own party – the construction of the high-speed rail link between London and points north. I'm a fan of high-speed rail, but too much expectation is being invested in one very long-term infrastructure project. The first phase is not due to connect London with Birmingham until 2026. It may reach Leeds and Manchester sometime around 2033.
In the here and now, the north feels the fight for future prosperity is unfair with the rules rigged by a coalition that appears to favour its chums in the south. Regional development agencies, one of Labour's imperfect attempts to address the north/south divide, are being wound up. These agencies own many millions of pounds' worth of land, buildings and other assets, some of which are crucial to regeneration projects that might help drive future growth. Boris Johnson has been handed control of the assets of the London Development Agency. What they'll do for the capital's Tory mayor, the government won't do for northern city halls. They have been told that they must pay market value if they want to get their hands on the assets of the agencies that are being axed.
That contrast is a source of grievance to politicians in the north across parties. Another and growing resentment is that the north of England is getting very short-changed compared with the devolved governments in Belfast, Cardiff and especially Edinburgh. The Scots, the Welsh and the people of Northern Ireland have done rather handsomely out of devolution. There are cash flows from the Treasury to buy things for their citizens not available in England, and the powers to shape their own destinies. Tyneside feels just as far from decision-making in Westminster as do Scotland or Wales, and Geordies have a sense of identity every bit as strong as Celts. But they do not have the political clout to make their voice heard in London.
Compare and contrast with Alex Salmond. To his recent election victory and accompanying proclamation that there will be a referendum on independence, the coalition has responded with soft words towards Scotland and hard cash for its Nationalist government. In terms of crude Tory electoral interest, they would be better off if the Scots said farewell. But David Cameron is desperate not to be remembered as the Conservative prime minister who lost the Union. The Scotland Bill, which completed its passage through the Commons last week, adds to the heap of advantages that the Edinburgh parliament enjoys over its neighbours in the north of England. The legislation will allow Mr Salmond to issue bonds and borrow against future business rates. That will give the Nationalist government an additional £2.7 billion of borrowing power with which to protect itself from public spending cuts or fund building projects – a power denied to English councils. The Edinburgh government's overall spending is to be boosted to £12bn.
Looked at from the north of England – or indeed by any fair-minded observer – this is grossly unfair. Income per head in Scotland is 99% of the average for the UK. Income per head in the poorer north-east of England is less than 80% of the national average. Yet Scots receive £507 per person more in government spending. Crunched between well-favoured Scottish Nationalists in Edinburgh and a southern coalition in London, the north of England has sound grounds for feeling aggrieved.
Politics is deepening the division. Labour is bouncing back in the north, but remains unconvincing to voters in the south. The Conservatives look resilient in the south, but have never managed to sell David Cameron to the north. At last year's general election and this year's local elections, the Conservatives made their strides in southern England while performing much more weakly the further you drove up the M1 or M6. There is not a single Tory councillor in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield. Some of Mr Cameron's strategists worry about this and they are correct to do so. A divided country mocks the prime minister's claim to be a One Nation Tory. It will be very difficult for the Conservatives to secure a decent parliamentary majority on their own if they cannot win in more parts of northern England.
The disappearance of the Tories from much of the north turned the Lib Dems into Labour's main competition. The Lib Dems' northern councillors were obliterated at the local elections. Nick Clegg has confided to friends that he was slow to realise how much visceral hostility towards the Tories there was in the north, nor had he foreseen how it would be displaced on to his own party through guilt by association. It is reasonable to suppose that this trend is going to continue into the future, splitting the country between a Labour north and a Tory/Lib Dem-supporting south. This is not a happy prospect, this future for England in which it becomes ever more starkly divided into two political nations.
If General Elections were won and lost in the South East, then Michael Howard would have become Prime Minister in 2005. But the South East is in fact the least conservative part of the country, and precisely for that reason the part most supportive of the party that, as a party and regardless of who might be Leader at any given time, has come to be most committed to neoliberalism, which is the use of economics to entrench social liberalism. Having said that, not even there would there have been any popular support for, say, the recently abandoned lunatic scheme to flog off the Health Service.
The Conservative Party, which once dominated Scotland and which did quite well both there and in the North until by no means all that long ago, has decided that the presuppositions of the Southern middle classes simply are conservatism and Toryism. Considering what those presuppositions have come to be, that decision is completely absurd. Furthermore, it serves to restrict that party's appeal to that least conservative corner of this island.
Something similar, though even more bizarre, applies in the United States. There are all sorts of conservatisms in disparate parts of that vast continental empire. They share certain family resemblances, but no more than those, and often not very much of those. If there is to be an explicitly conservative party, rather than two extremely broad-based parties such as America has had historically, then, although it needs to express the local conservatism in each place, at federal level it needs to emphasise the features common to as many of them as possible.
The Republican Party has decided to be America's conservative party. But it has decided to define American conservatism in one very specific way, as the culture of blue-collar whites in the rural South. Not only blue-collar, white and rural, but also Protestant, specifically Evangelical Protestant (which all that that entails for hostility to forms of religion that matter enormously elsewhere, such as Catholicism in the North and Mormonism in the West), highly conscious of the Scots-Irish heritage rather than of any other, and devoted to the memory and symbols of the Lost Cause. Several parts of England have been at war with each other in their time. But no widow of an erstwhile soldier in any such war was still alive into the twenty-first century.
What do David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have in common? One thing shared between them is the way in which they pronounce class. They rhyme it with arse, rather than ass. Whenever they open their mouths, all three party leaders announce that they are from southern England.
The Prime Minister is an Oxfordshire Tory. The Lib Dem and Labour leaders have Yorkshire seats, but neither possesses the matching accent. Mr Miliband was born and largely bred in London. Mr Clegg came into the world in the not so gritty streets of Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. To a true northerner, they are no less southern than David Cameron.
The great majority of the decision-makers at Westminster have their roots in the south. When Oliver Letwin was trying to persuade Boris Johnson of the case for green taxes on aviation, the cabinet minister told his fellow Old Etonian: "We don't want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays." He could have made his point by referencing Southampton or Salisbury. It tells us something that it was the folk of a northern city that came to Mr Letwin's mind when he wanted to deny discount travel to the less well-off.
With the exception of William Hague, Eric Pickles and two Lib Dem Scots, the cabinet is a very southern English affair. This may not have been much noticed by the south, but it is very evident if you look through the other end of the telescope. Viewed from Leeds or Manchester or Newcastle, Westminster is more remote than ever. It also seems increasingly hostile. Northern England has a growing – and often legitimate – grievance that it is getting a raw deal compared with the rest of the United Kingdom. There is the historic complaint, sharpened by public spending cuts which will bite hardest in the north, that they are discriminated against by power brokers concentrated in the south. To that is now added a creeping realisation that they are also losing out in money and influence to the devolved governments in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland – particularly the latter.
That's the new dimension to an old tension. Elizabeth Gaskell published North and South back in 1855. There's some crudity to dissecting England like that. It's not all grim up north – far from it. Leeds is a place transformed compared with the city in which I was born. The skylines of Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield gleam with concert halls, art galleries, university buildings, shopping malls, and other citadels of steel and glass that helped to restore the self-confidence of northern cities in the Nineties and Noughties . The Labour years appeared to soften the north/south divide, but maybe they just masked it by using public spending which has left northern England proportionally much more dependent on public sector jobs and state-financed contracts. The spending cuts are bound to be felt most severely here. That is a brutal truth that can't be sugar-coated by rhetoric about everyone being in this together.
In coalition theory, those losing jobs in the public sector will join those being levered off welfare in finding employment in a resurgent private sector. Nowhere more than the north does this need to come true if there is to be a re-balancing of the economy and an end to the squandering of human talent. The grey economic clouds are occasionally pierced by a ray of sunshine. A Thai company has investment plans which promise to more than double the number of steelworkers employed at Teeside Cast Products. Newcastle, home to pioneering work on stem cell research, has ambitious ideas about becoming the world's first "biotech city". The BBC, to squeals from some of its staff, is shifting a lot of production to Salford.
Some of the cabinet do appreciate that the north/south divide hurts the country's economic performance. Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, remarked the other day: "It is not possible for Britain to maintain its prosperity in the 21st century in an increasingly competitive global economy unless we can close the growth gap between the north and the south." He was defending – against much southern dissent in his own party – the construction of the high-speed rail link between London and points north. I'm a fan of high-speed rail, but too much expectation is being invested in one very long-term infrastructure project. The first phase is not due to connect London with Birmingham until 2026. It may reach Leeds and Manchester sometime around 2033.
In the here and now, the north feels the fight for future prosperity is unfair with the rules rigged by a coalition that appears to favour its chums in the south. Regional development agencies, one of Labour's imperfect attempts to address the north/south divide, are being wound up. These agencies own many millions of pounds' worth of land, buildings and other assets, some of which are crucial to regeneration projects that might help drive future growth. Boris Johnson has been handed control of the assets of the London Development Agency. What they'll do for the capital's Tory mayor, the government won't do for northern city halls. They have been told that they must pay market value if they want to get their hands on the assets of the agencies that are being axed.
That contrast is a source of grievance to politicians in the north across parties. Another and growing resentment is that the north of England is getting very short-changed compared with the devolved governments in Belfast, Cardiff and especially Edinburgh. The Scots, the Welsh and the people of Northern Ireland have done rather handsomely out of devolution. There are cash flows from the Treasury to buy things for their citizens not available in England, and the powers to shape their own destinies. Tyneside feels just as far from decision-making in Westminster as do Scotland or Wales, and Geordies have a sense of identity every bit as strong as Celts. But they do not have the political clout to make their voice heard in London.
Compare and contrast with Alex Salmond. To his recent election victory and accompanying proclamation that there will be a referendum on independence, the coalition has responded with soft words towards Scotland and hard cash for its Nationalist government. In terms of crude Tory electoral interest, they would be better off if the Scots said farewell. But David Cameron is desperate not to be remembered as the Conservative prime minister who lost the Union. The Scotland Bill, which completed its passage through the Commons last week, adds to the heap of advantages that the Edinburgh parliament enjoys over its neighbours in the north of England. The legislation will allow Mr Salmond to issue bonds and borrow against future business rates. That will give the Nationalist government an additional £2.7 billion of borrowing power with which to protect itself from public spending cuts or fund building projects – a power denied to English councils. The Edinburgh government's overall spending is to be boosted to £12bn.
Looked at from the north of England – or indeed by any fair-minded observer – this is grossly unfair. Income per head in Scotland is 99% of the average for the UK. Income per head in the poorer north-east of England is less than 80% of the national average. Yet Scots receive £507 per person more in government spending. Crunched between well-favoured Scottish Nationalists in Edinburgh and a southern coalition in London, the north of England has sound grounds for feeling aggrieved.
Politics is deepening the division. Labour is bouncing back in the north, but remains unconvincing to voters in the south. The Conservatives look resilient in the south, but have never managed to sell David Cameron to the north. At last year's general election and this year's local elections, the Conservatives made their strides in southern England while performing much more weakly the further you drove up the M1 or M6. There is not a single Tory councillor in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield. Some of Mr Cameron's strategists worry about this and they are correct to do so. A divided country mocks the prime minister's claim to be a One Nation Tory. It will be very difficult for the Conservatives to secure a decent parliamentary majority on their own if they cannot win in more parts of northern England.
The disappearance of the Tories from much of the north turned the Lib Dems into Labour's main competition. The Lib Dems' northern councillors were obliterated at the local elections. Nick Clegg has confided to friends that he was slow to realise how much visceral hostility towards the Tories there was in the north, nor had he foreseen how it would be displaced on to his own party through guilt by association. It is reasonable to suppose that this trend is going to continue into the future, splitting the country between a Labour north and a Tory/Lib Dem-supporting south. This is not a happy prospect, this future for England in which it becomes ever more starkly divided into two political nations.
If General Elections were won and lost in the South East, then Michael Howard would have become Prime Minister in 2005. But the South East is in fact the least conservative part of the country, and precisely for that reason the part most supportive of the party that, as a party and regardless of who might be Leader at any given time, has come to be most committed to neoliberalism, which is the use of economics to entrench social liberalism. Having said that, not even there would there have been any popular support for, say, the recently abandoned lunatic scheme to flog off the Health Service.
The Conservative Party, which once dominated Scotland and which did quite well both there and in the North until by no means all that long ago, has decided that the presuppositions of the Southern middle classes simply are conservatism and Toryism. Considering what those presuppositions have come to be, that decision is completely absurd. Furthermore, it serves to restrict that party's appeal to that least conservative corner of this island.
Something similar, though even more bizarre, applies in the United States. There are all sorts of conservatisms in disparate parts of that vast continental empire. They share certain family resemblances, but no more than those, and often not very much of those. If there is to be an explicitly conservative party, rather than two extremely broad-based parties such as America has had historically, then, although it needs to express the local conservatism in each place, at federal level it needs to emphasise the features common to as many of them as possible.
The Republican Party has decided to be America's conservative party. But it has decided to define American conservatism in one very specific way, as the culture of blue-collar whites in the rural South. Not only blue-collar, white and rural, but also Protestant, specifically Evangelical Protestant (which all that that entails for hostility to forms of religion that matter enormously elsewhere, such as Catholicism in the North and Mormonism in the West), highly conscious of the Scots-Irish heritage rather than of any other, and devoted to the memory and symbols of the Lost Cause. Several parts of England have been at war with each other in their time. But no widow of an erstwhile soldier in any such war was still alive into the twenty-first century.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
The Real Armed Forces Day
It is not today. It is on 11th November, and the whole point of it is that it is not a public holiday. Rather, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the ordinary routine of daily life is interrupted. Or, at least, it used to be. It should be again.
Priti Stupid
Priti Patel and two others of the Conservatives' 2010 intake were interviewed on Radio Four this morning, banging on about how "Eurosceptical" David Cameron was. Where do they find these people? In fact, the mildly sceptical view of the EU was the only aspect of The Orange Book that did not appeal to David Cameron.
Fearing that he might win an overall majority, Cameron publicly announced that Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, James Purnell and Andrew Adonis would all be in his Cabinet, Adonis in the job that he had always wanted, Purnell in the job that he was already doing under Gordon Brown; before his little spot of bother, Stephen Byers's membership had also been made clear. So at least four, and initially five, New Labour figures in a Cameron Cabinet, all in the Lords, but all nevertheless receiving the Labour Whip there without, apparently, anyone's thinking that this was at all amiss.
But while Cameron is many things, he is not stupid. He knew that a hung Parliament was quite likely, and that permitting the media's three-way televised debates would make it practically certain. So he agreed to those debates, with a view to discarding both parties and their manifestos in order to stage a coup based on The Orange Book. And it all went according to plan. That coup has been staged.
What did not go according to plan, however, was the installation, in either of the above events, of David Miliband as Leader of the "Opposition". There would have been few or no parliamentary votes, as in the Blair years. And when the Leader of the "Opposition" had objected to anything, then it would only ever have been to the slow pace of slash-and-burn domestic policy or blow-up-the-world foreign policy. Accelerating those could then have been presented as "bipartisan", a sign of "a listening government", and, moreover, "progressive", since it had been demanded by the person holding the office of Leader of the Labour Party.
If Ed Miliband were to be removed as Labour Leader, or if he were not to become Prime Minister at the next General Election, then the transformation of this country into that one-party state for neoliberalism and neoconservatism would be complete. Do not allow that to happen.
Fearing that he might win an overall majority, Cameron publicly announced that Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, James Purnell and Andrew Adonis would all be in his Cabinet, Adonis in the job that he had always wanted, Purnell in the job that he was already doing under Gordon Brown; before his little spot of bother, Stephen Byers's membership had also been made clear. So at least four, and initially five, New Labour figures in a Cameron Cabinet, all in the Lords, but all nevertheless receiving the Labour Whip there without, apparently, anyone's thinking that this was at all amiss.
But while Cameron is many things, he is not stupid. He knew that a hung Parliament was quite likely, and that permitting the media's three-way televised debates would make it practically certain. So he agreed to those debates, with a view to discarding both parties and their manifestos in order to stage a coup based on The Orange Book. And it all went according to plan. That coup has been staged.
What did not go according to plan, however, was the installation, in either of the above events, of David Miliband as Leader of the "Opposition". There would have been few or no parliamentary votes, as in the Blair years. And when the Leader of the "Opposition" had objected to anything, then it would only ever have been to the slow pace of slash-and-burn domestic policy or blow-up-the-world foreign policy. Accelerating those could then have been presented as "bipartisan", a sign of "a listening government", and, moreover, "progressive", since it had been demanded by the person holding the office of Leader of the Labour Party.
If Ed Miliband were to be removed as Labour Leader, or if he were not to become Prime Minister at the next General Election, then the transformation of this country into that one-party state for neoliberalism and neoconservatism would be complete. Do not allow that to happen.
Twenty Years On
How is Croatia celebrating this twentieth anniversary of her UDI? By preparing to join the EU.
It is almost comical. The Germans' unilateral recognition of the independence of the old Hapsburg provinces of Slovenia and Croatia proved as catastrophic as any previous intervention in East European affairs in the cause of Greater Germany. With Slovenia already in, Croatia's accession would have brought the wretched process to its conclusion. But just when Croatia wants in, Germany wants out.
Could the EU benefit from the witness of Antemurale Christianitatis? In principle, of course. But that would be an extremely difficult witness to bear, even if natural allies are more and more strident from Poland to the Vendée via Bavaria. It would much better have been borne within and through what the world had insisted was a preserved Yugoslavia, perhaps with the monarchy restored, and certainly drawing on an historical identity as a bulwark against all of Stalinism, decadent pseudo-Western capitalism, Nazism, and that last's Islamist and ethno-separatist allies.
As much as anything else, that would have been an awful lot better for those who are now the extremely beleaguered Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The largest act of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav Wars would never have happened, that of the Serbs from Croatia, where the Constitution had previously recognised them as one of the two constituent peoples. The Holocaust-denying, Gypsy-baiting old monster, Franjo Tudjman, would never have been able to recreate in the 1990s the full panoply of Fascism on the borders of Austria and Italy. Nor could he have engaged in the supremely crooked privatisations that ruined the Croatian economy and set the tone for Croatia's endemic corruption. And the blasphemous cult of Medjugorje would never have taken off.
It is almost comical. The Germans' unilateral recognition of the independence of the old Hapsburg provinces of Slovenia and Croatia proved as catastrophic as any previous intervention in East European affairs in the cause of Greater Germany. With Slovenia already in, Croatia's accession would have brought the wretched process to its conclusion. But just when Croatia wants in, Germany wants out.
Could the EU benefit from the witness of Antemurale Christianitatis? In principle, of course. But that would be an extremely difficult witness to bear, even if natural allies are more and more strident from Poland to the Vendée via Bavaria. It would much better have been borne within and through what the world had insisted was a preserved Yugoslavia, perhaps with the monarchy restored, and certainly drawing on an historical identity as a bulwark against all of Stalinism, decadent pseudo-Western capitalism, Nazism, and that last's Islamist and ethno-separatist allies.
As much as anything else, that would have been an awful lot better for those who are now the extremely beleaguered Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The largest act of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav Wars would never have happened, that of the Serbs from Croatia, where the Constitution had previously recognised them as one of the two constituent peoples. The Holocaust-denying, Gypsy-baiting old monster, Franjo Tudjman, would never have been able to recreate in the 1990s the full panoply of Fascism on the borders of Austria and Italy. Nor could he have engaged in the supremely crooked privatisations that ruined the Croatian economy and set the tone for Croatia's endemic corruption. And the blasphemous cult of Medjugorje would never have taken off.
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