Monday, 4 June 2007
Wheels Within Wheels, Parties Within Parties
On BBC News 24's Head 2 Head, David Aaronovitch described how he had recently chaired a Labour Deputy Leadership hustings in Sheffield. But Aaronovitch has never been a member of the Labour Party, although he was for many years a very, very active member of the Communist Party. He is, however (and as that background suggests), a leading neoconservative. So, that's all right, then...
Sunday, 3 June 2007
How Is This News? - Part One
A Cardinal is against abortion, because the Catholic Church is against abortion, believing it to be murder, so that Catholic politicians who vote for it or who fail to vote against it are held to be in mortal sin, and therefore cannot (except in proximate danger of death) receive Communion without having been to Confession and received sacramental Absolution, which latter cannot be given if the priest knows that the penitent intends to commit the same sin again. How is any of this news? The opposite of any part of it would be news, but this isn't.
How come "being elected to represent the whole constituency", as that principle in being interpreted in this case, never applies to anything else, nor ever to any other category of MP? And notice how the principle that no Parliament can bind its successors apparently does not apply to this 40-year-old Act, just as it apparently does not apply to legislation giving effect to the (Tory) Treaty of Rome, the (Tory, indeed Thatcherite) Single European Act or the (Tory) Maastricht Treaty, and just as it apparently does not apply to any of Blair's dramatic constitutional changes.
Everyone should read Ann Farmer's Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002; ISBN 1 901157 62 8). Ann is yet another of us homeless asylum-seekers from New Labour.
On Any Questions, we were treated to Tony McNulty banging on about "the separation of Church and State", which simply does not exist in this country. Indeed, any exclusion from political life of religion in general (insofar as there is any such thing as "religion in general"), and of a very robust Christianity in particular, would have precluded the emergence of all three political traditions.
After all, what else does anyone imagine gave rise to them? It certainly wasn't class. Disraeli's doubling of the franchise created working-class Toryism (and thus the modern Conservative Party) long before the Labour Party existed. It was that former phenomenon, which never dropped below forty per cent of the working-class vote before 1997, which enabled the Tories to win any election in the twentieth century, never mind most of them. Of the only three working-class Prime Ministers ever, two have been Tories, and the third was Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's only ever working-class Leader. And so one could go on.
All three British political traditions are strictly class-inclusive (and, very closely relatedly, strictly constitutional) as a first principle, a first principle derived, like all of them, from a decidedly pre-liberal Christianity. Alas that no party now properly, if at all, embodies any of those traditions, so that a Home Office Minister can speak of "the separation of Church and State", and a whole Any Questions panel can condemn a Cardinal for urging Catholic politicians either to oppose abortion or to refrain from Communion.
How come "being elected to represent the whole constituency", as that principle in being interpreted in this case, never applies to anything else, nor ever to any other category of MP? And notice how the principle that no Parliament can bind its successors apparently does not apply to this 40-year-old Act, just as it apparently does not apply to legislation giving effect to the (Tory) Treaty of Rome, the (Tory, indeed Thatcherite) Single European Act or the (Tory) Maastricht Treaty, and just as it apparently does not apply to any of Blair's dramatic constitutional changes.
Everyone should read Ann Farmer's Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002; ISBN 1 901157 62 8). Ann is yet another of us homeless asylum-seekers from New Labour.
On Any Questions, we were treated to Tony McNulty banging on about "the separation of Church and State", which simply does not exist in this country. Indeed, any exclusion from political life of religion in general (insofar as there is any such thing as "religion in general"), and of a very robust Christianity in particular, would have precluded the emergence of all three political traditions.
After all, what else does anyone imagine gave rise to them? It certainly wasn't class. Disraeli's doubling of the franchise created working-class Toryism (and thus the modern Conservative Party) long before the Labour Party existed. It was that former phenomenon, which never dropped below forty per cent of the working-class vote before 1997, which enabled the Tories to win any election in the twentieth century, never mind most of them. Of the only three working-class Prime Ministers ever, two have been Tories, and the third was Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's only ever working-class Leader. And so one could go on.
All three British political traditions are strictly class-inclusive (and, very closely relatedly, strictly constitutional) as a first principle, a first principle derived, like all of them, from a decidedly pre-liberal Christianity. Alas that no party now properly, if at all, embodies any of those traditions, so that a Home Office Minister can speak of "the separation of Church and State", and a whole Any Questions panel can condemn a Cardinal for urging Catholic politicians either to oppose abortion or to refrain from Communion.
How Is This News? - Part Two
It is perfectly possible to be convicted of possessing child pornography (indeed, by some quirk of computing, of "creating" the image or images) merely for having received a never-opened spam email containing it. It is also possible to be convicted of possessing it merely for having received it as unsolicited material through the post. Such convictions do in fact happen, because that is the law. Is anyone seriously suggesting that a person so convicted should be sent to prison? Or sent for "treatment" of any other kind, come to that? Yet they can be, and sometimes are. Again, that is the law.
Furthermore, the figures being cited as the number of "paedophiles" in this country include even those convicted of or cautioned for the slightest sexual contact with people who are actually older than they are, but who also happen to be under 16. It has always been possible for boys to be so convicted, although the extension of this law to girls a couple of years ago caused all hell to break loose in the feminist press, as if any such provision were unheard of.
But then, to those who were writing, the very existence of the male sex was and is little more than a rumour, with heterosexual activity actually unthinkable. Most unfortunately, that lobby has controlled great tracts of social policy continuously since the (Tory) early 1970s, and not least under Margaret Thatcher, who presided over a massive increase in that lobby's already very considerable power.
It should be made a criminal offence to commit any sort of sexual activity with any person under 18 who is more than three years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence of imprisonment for twice the number of years difference in age, or for life where that difference is five years or more, and/or where the younger party is under 12. Across the board, every crime should carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of five years where that maximum sentence is life.
Meanwhile, it is high time to re-examine the links between the old Paedophile Information Exchange and the old National Council of Civil Liberties in its Hatty and Patty days, now that Hatty is trying to become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party while Patty's responsibilities include every social worker in England.
Such a re-examination would lead deep into the lobby described above, which has created the situation in which the only people (apart from the trophy of a faded celebrity like Jonathan King) who stand any realistic chance of being prosecuted for sex with underage post-pubescent boys are Catholic priests, providing the excuse for the wholly mendacious depiction of the world's pre-eminent pro-life, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist, anti-war institution as involved in the rape of babies, and (as if it mattered) baby girls at that. In fact, the thoroughly reprehensible, and rightly criminal, behaviour in question is exactly the sort that the people who have run most things in this country for nearly forty years, and who now run pretty much everything, have been campaigning to make legally and socially acceptable throughout that period, conducting their own affairs (so to speak) exactly as if it already were.
Almost certainly, then, there will be no such re-examination. Will there?
Furthermore, the figures being cited as the number of "paedophiles" in this country include even those convicted of or cautioned for the slightest sexual contact with people who are actually older than they are, but who also happen to be under 16. It has always been possible for boys to be so convicted, although the extension of this law to girls a couple of years ago caused all hell to break loose in the feminist press, as if any such provision were unheard of.
But then, to those who were writing, the very existence of the male sex was and is little more than a rumour, with heterosexual activity actually unthinkable. Most unfortunately, that lobby has controlled great tracts of social policy continuously since the (Tory) early 1970s, and not least under Margaret Thatcher, who presided over a massive increase in that lobby's already very considerable power.
It should be made a criminal offence to commit any sort of sexual activity with any person under 18 who is more than three years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence of imprisonment for twice the number of years difference in age, or for life where that difference is five years or more, and/or where the younger party is under 12. Across the board, every crime should carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of five years where that maximum sentence is life.
Meanwhile, it is high time to re-examine the links between the old Paedophile Information Exchange and the old National Council of Civil Liberties in its Hatty and Patty days, now that Hatty is trying to become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party while Patty's responsibilities include every social worker in England.
Such a re-examination would lead deep into the lobby described above, which has created the situation in which the only people (apart from the trophy of a faded celebrity like Jonathan King) who stand any realistic chance of being prosecuted for sex with underage post-pubescent boys are Catholic priests, providing the excuse for the wholly mendacious depiction of the world's pre-eminent pro-life, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist, anti-war institution as involved in the rape of babies, and (as if it mattered) baby girls at that. In fact, the thoroughly reprehensible, and rightly criminal, behaviour in question is exactly the sort that the people who have run most things in this country for nearly forty years, and who now run pretty much everything, have been campaigning to make legally and socially acceptable throughout that period, conducting their own affairs (so to speak) exactly as if it already were.
Almost certainly, then, there will be no such re-examination. Will there?
It Was Forty Years Ago Today
The best album ever? Well, the best of it really is that good. And there is plenty of that. But try the following lines:
She's leaving home,
After living alone
For some many years.
Sixth Form drivel. And there is plenty of that, as well.
She's leaving home,
After living alone
For some many years.
Sixth Form drivel. And there is plenty of that, as well.
Putin In A Good Word
Rumour has it that Russia will veto any UN Security Council resolution recognising the eye-poppingly ridiculous theory that Kosovo is a sovereign state, a recognition which would mark a stomach-wrenching victory for Wahhabi, Mafia-connected heroin-traffickers who insist on wearing black shirts in deference to their SS fathers and grandfathers. (I might return in a future post to the scandalously little-known story of how Hitler liked Islam, and how Europe's and the USSR's Muslims liked him, as did key Islamic leaders in the Middle East; there are even more modern echoes than you might think...)
Vladimir Putin certainly has his faults, although his main critic based in this country must be the only asylum-seeker allowed to use the pages of the right-wing press to demand the forcible overthrow of an elected government. But Putin was right about Iraq. And he would be right about this, too.
Vladimir Putin certainly has his faults, although his main critic based in this country must be the only asylum-seeker allowed to use the pages of the right-wing press to demand the forcible overthrow of an elected government. But Putin was right about Iraq. And he would be right about this, too.
Arise, Sir David Beckham?
For what? Yes, he is the most famous Englishman ever, a household name to small Kalahari or Amazonian children who have never heard of, say, Shakespeare or Churchill. But even Bobby Moore, who actually captained a World Cup-winning side, was never knighted. One might argue that, had a lived a couple more years, then he would have been, like Geoff Hurst or the Charltons. And one might be right. But there is no way of knowing. Anyway, Geoff Hurst and the Charltons were knighted well into middle age, having been doing charity work and such like for decades.
Sir David Beckham in 25 years time, perhaps. But not yet.
Sir David Beckham in 25 years time, perhaps. But not yet.
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