The Straight Talk interview with Kate Hoey was very good indeed. We almost never hear that the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland was not initially anything to do with Irish Nationalism (the old Nationalist Party, never mind Sinn Fein, had no part in its initial structures), but rather a campaign for the things that the British Labour tradition defines as among the essentials of Britishness and of British citizenship.
Although Hoey did not mention it, it was the Parliamentary Labour Party that voted against the partition of the United Kingdom, the only entire party to do so. It was the Attlee Government that first ever accepted the principle of consent with regard to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. It was the Wilson Government that deployed British troops to protect Northern Ireland’s grateful Catholics precisely as British subjects. And it was the Callaghan Government that administered Northern Ireland exactly as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom.
Hoey did, however, speak powerfully of the disenfranchisement of the people of Northern Ireland by the failure of the main British parties to organise there, thus making the constitutional question the point of elections, even though very few (and very rich) must ever have been those who woke up every day worrying about it.
The Tories’ little-known organisation in Northern Ireland was, and is, meaningless in the absence of that of the others, and constitutes the ridiculous spectacle of an integrationist secession from the UUP under the aegis of what is itself the party of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
Although there is much of the unsung prophet about Robert McCartney, it is nevertheless hard not to chuckle at the thought of an integrationist party which existed only in Northern Ireland; Trotskyist parliamentary candidates, and anarchist parties, do rather spring to mind. But then again, what alternative did he have? (Although what stopped him, once an MP, from joining Labour at the address of the flat that he presumably kept in London, and then applying for the Labour Whip?)
Westminster politicians and their approved pundits may and do bemoan the carve-up of Northern Ireland’s government between the most grotesquely exaggerated expressions of the two “sides”. But, going at least all the way back to the creation of Stormont, they have only themselves to blame.
Sunday, 23 November 2008
Stand Up, Charles
Although he is perhaps a bit hard on the Queen, Peter Hitchens writes:
Prince Charles will be right to speak out once he becomes King. It is true that by doing so he will risk the future of the Crown. But, if he fails to rock the Royal boat, the Monarchy will in any case be finished soon.
The present Queen is undoubtedly very nice. But she has badly damaged the throne by failing to speak out when she might have done – especially against the surrender of our independence to the European Union, which undermined her own position.
And it is a myth that she has remained carefully neutral. Far from it.
In 1998 she went out of her way to endorse the Blair Government’s abject surrender to the terrorist godfathers of the IRA.
Her stance on this contentious issue helped Mr Blair to bamboozle Northern Ireland’s Protestants into voting ‘yes’ in the rigged referendum that will eventually place them under Dublin rule, so that they cease to be the Queen’s subjects.
In her 2004 Christmas broadcast she proclaimed ‘diversity is indeed a strength’ – a Royal endorsement of the multiculturalism many oppose and dislike.
Just imagine what would have happened if she had taken the opposite side on these issues, and then you will see just how powerful these statements were.
Charles, unlike his mother, has some strong conservative instincts – not Tory, by the way, which is in many ways the opposite of conservative these days.
And that is exactly the point. When a rigged, whipped Parliament is dominated by teenage social liberals who know little and care nothing of the national heritage, an outspoken King could upset this unhealthy arrangement, speaking for the voiceless millions who share his sense of loss and of isolation.
By doing so he would create a crisis. And the attitude of the media in such a crisis could decide if he succeeds or fails. But I think that crisis is necessary. The major political parties are closed clubs kept alive by State funding and dodgy millionaires, speaking only for themselves.
Thwey, not the House of Lords, the Monarchy or the judiciary, are the things that need reforming and replacing. Charles could justify his entire life if he helps to make that happen, and I hope he will.
If he doesn’t, his fate is sealed. New Labour’s Michael Wills, a close associate of Gordon Brown, has already drawn up plans to humiliate and marginalise the Monarchy. The next lot of Royal children will be ordered to attend State schools, to keep up the pretence that the State system is working.
The Coronation will be turned into a multi-culti panto. And Mr Wills thinks Charles cannot be trusted to be impartial if there is a hung Parliament – the implication being that he will lose his role in forming a new government.
You think the Useless Tories will protect the throne against this sort of salami-slicing? Forget it. Faced with the choice between defending the old independent House of Lords and caving in, what did they do?
They caved in, in their unending quest for a quiet life in preference to principles. Somebody has to stand in the way and say ‘enough’. It won’t be David Cameron. Let it be Charles. Everyone may be surprised by how much support he gets.
He would certainly get mine.
Prince Charles will be right to speak out once he becomes King. It is true that by doing so he will risk the future of the Crown. But, if he fails to rock the Royal boat, the Monarchy will in any case be finished soon.
The present Queen is undoubtedly very nice. But she has badly damaged the throne by failing to speak out when she might have done – especially against the surrender of our independence to the European Union, which undermined her own position.
And it is a myth that she has remained carefully neutral. Far from it.
In 1998 she went out of her way to endorse the Blair Government’s abject surrender to the terrorist godfathers of the IRA.
Her stance on this contentious issue helped Mr Blair to bamboozle Northern Ireland’s Protestants into voting ‘yes’ in the rigged referendum that will eventually place them under Dublin rule, so that they cease to be the Queen’s subjects.
In her 2004 Christmas broadcast she proclaimed ‘diversity is indeed a strength’ – a Royal endorsement of the multiculturalism many oppose and dislike.
Just imagine what would have happened if she had taken the opposite side on these issues, and then you will see just how powerful these statements were.
Charles, unlike his mother, has some strong conservative instincts – not Tory, by the way, which is in many ways the opposite of conservative these days.
And that is exactly the point. When a rigged, whipped Parliament is dominated by teenage social liberals who know little and care nothing of the national heritage, an outspoken King could upset this unhealthy arrangement, speaking for the voiceless millions who share his sense of loss and of isolation.
By doing so he would create a crisis. And the attitude of the media in such a crisis could decide if he succeeds or fails. But I think that crisis is necessary. The major political parties are closed clubs kept alive by State funding and dodgy millionaires, speaking only for themselves.
Thwey, not the House of Lords, the Monarchy or the judiciary, are the things that need reforming and replacing. Charles could justify his entire life if he helps to make that happen, and I hope he will.
If he doesn’t, his fate is sealed. New Labour’s Michael Wills, a close associate of Gordon Brown, has already drawn up plans to humiliate and marginalise the Monarchy. The next lot of Royal children will be ordered to attend State schools, to keep up the pretence that the State system is working.
The Coronation will be turned into a multi-culti panto. And Mr Wills thinks Charles cannot be trusted to be impartial if there is a hung Parliament – the implication being that he will lose his role in forming a new government.
You think the Useless Tories will protect the throne against this sort of salami-slicing? Forget it. Faced with the choice between defending the old independent House of Lords and caving in, what did they do?
They caved in, in their unending quest for a quiet life in preference to principles. Somebody has to stand in the way and say ‘enough’. It won’t be David Cameron. Let it be Charles. Everyone may be surprised by how much support he gets.
He would certainly get mine.
Unraked Muck
In the run-up to the 2005 Election, The Observer alone made anything of the fact that, as Home Secretary, Michael Howard had arranged Royal Pardons for his violent, drug-dealing cousins in Swansea. The whole of the mainstream media knew about it, but we were treated, on things like Today, to columnists from the right-wing papers denouncing “muckraking” over “Mr Howard’s family”. No one was so uncouth as to drop so much as a hint to the voting, license-paying public as to what that “muck” might be.
So this morning’s revelation, also in The Observer, that Howard did much the same thing for rather similar low-life in Liverpool will probably also be kept for ever out of the consciousness of the public at large. No one must ever realise that Howard’s reputation bears absolutely no resemblance to his record, not least because any such realisation would expose the true character of the coup against Iain Duncan Smith (now, I am not at all surprised to learn, apparently a weekly columnist on The Big Issue).
And then there is the identity of Howard’s Special Adviser at the time, and the ultimate beneficiary of the anti-IDS putsch. In case you have not guessed, his name is David Cameron.
So this morning’s revelation, also in The Observer, that Howard did much the same thing for rather similar low-life in Liverpool will probably also be kept for ever out of the consciousness of the public at large. No one must ever realise that Howard’s reputation bears absolutely no resemblance to his record, not least because any such realisation would expose the true character of the coup against Iain Duncan Smith (now, I am not at all surprised to learn, apparently a weekly columnist on The Big Issue).
And then there is the identity of Howard’s Special Adviser at the time, and the ultimate beneficiary of the anti-IDS putsch. In case you have not guessed, his name is David Cameron.
Pax Romana
A fascinating article in the latest edition of Recusant History on the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, founded to campaign for the implementation of the call in 1915, by the hugely prescient and underrated Pope Benedict XV, for a negotiated peace based, as it would have had to have been, on a reversion the status quo ante bellum.
Had that happened, of course, then there would have been neither any Soviet Union nor, since there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, any Nazi Germany. Disasters from Iraq, to Yugoslavia, to Palestine would have been averted: the last would never have been a distinct territory, and the other two would never have been created at all.
The Prussia that created the first Welfare State, held in unity Teutons and Slavs, and was a union of Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe, would still exist. Whereas a Turkey in which the only political forces were violently secular ultra-nationalism, violent Islamism, and violent Kurdish separatism of a Marxist persuasion, would never have existed.
And what of Britain? The Catholic hierarchy on this island was scandalously hostile to the Guild (which had no formal connection to pacifism, and sought only the implementation of admittedly non-infallible Papal Teaching), and that position, which enjoyed very overwhelming support in the presbyteries and in the pews, is described as “patriotic” and “imperialist”. But was it in fact any such thing?
The Pope’s proposal would have left intact the British Empire, and almost certainly also the United Kingdom as it existed in 1915 – there not only would, but could, have been no rising in Dublin at Easter 1916 if the War had already been over by then. That Empire would then have been free to develop into the Commonwealth, as was already very well underway, but at a natural and sensible pace. America would never have entered the War, and global primacy would never have begun to pass to a power utterly determined to dismantle our Empire with total disregard for the consequences on the ground, a power stridently hostile to former colonies’ preservation of their ties to Britain.
From 2003 onwards, the Papal Teaching (I nearly wrote “admittedly non-infallible”, but neither the just war tradition nor the Christian pacifist tradition, the only positions admitted by the Magisterium, admits of the Iraq War in any way at all) on the Iraq War has been received almost universally in the palaces, presbyteries and pews of the whole Catholic world outside the United States, and even, in view of Obama’s convincing victory among Catholics, within the United States. And that Teaching, too, is the position that truly accords with British and Commonwealth patriotism.
How tragic that too little heed was paid in 2003.
And how tragic that no heed whatever was paid in 1915.
Had that happened, of course, then there would have been neither any Soviet Union nor, since there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, any Nazi Germany. Disasters from Iraq, to Yugoslavia, to Palestine would have been averted: the last would never have been a distinct territory, and the other two would never have been created at all.
The Prussia that created the first Welfare State, held in unity Teutons and Slavs, and was a union of Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe, would still exist. Whereas a Turkey in which the only political forces were violently secular ultra-nationalism, violent Islamism, and violent Kurdish separatism of a Marxist persuasion, would never have existed.
And what of Britain? The Catholic hierarchy on this island was scandalously hostile to the Guild (which had no formal connection to pacifism, and sought only the implementation of admittedly non-infallible Papal Teaching), and that position, which enjoyed very overwhelming support in the presbyteries and in the pews, is described as “patriotic” and “imperialist”. But was it in fact any such thing?
The Pope’s proposal would have left intact the British Empire, and almost certainly also the United Kingdom as it existed in 1915 – there not only would, but could, have been no rising in Dublin at Easter 1916 if the War had already been over by then. That Empire would then have been free to develop into the Commonwealth, as was already very well underway, but at a natural and sensible pace. America would never have entered the War, and global primacy would never have begun to pass to a power utterly determined to dismantle our Empire with total disregard for the consequences on the ground, a power stridently hostile to former colonies’ preservation of their ties to Britain.
From 2003 onwards, the Papal Teaching (I nearly wrote “admittedly non-infallible”, but neither the just war tradition nor the Christian pacifist tradition, the only positions admitted by the Magisterium, admits of the Iraq War in any way at all) on the Iraq War has been received almost universally in the palaces, presbyteries and pews of the whole Catholic world outside the United States, and even, in view of Obama’s convincing victory among Catholics, within the United States. And that Teaching, too, is the position that truly accords with British and Commonwealth patriotism.
How tragic that too little heed was paid in 2003.
And how tragic that no heed whatever was paid in 1915.
Primary Considerations
Who elected Barack Obama? People who also voted to re-affirm traditional marriage in California and Florida. People who also voted to end legal discrimination against working-class white men in Colorado. People who also voted not to liberalise the gambling laws in Missouri and Ohio. Almost everyone in the black church. The clear majority of Catholics.
In a word, moral and social conservatives.
So why did they vote for him?
For reasons of economic populism and foreign policy realism. Which are, of course, the right reasons.
No one deserves a free run against nothing more than Sarah Palin. And someone elected by morally and socially conservative economic populists and foreign policy realists, but who pays them back by giving the position of Secretary of State to Hillary Clinton, deserves a very serious challenge indeed in the 2012 primaries. The foundations of that challenge should already be being laid. Are they being? If not, why not?
Still, at least this is an opportunity to fill a vacant Senate seat (not the only one about to become vacant, of course) with a morally and socially conservative economic populist and foreign policy realist. Nothing could better befit the state named after the last Catholic King of England, Scotland and Ireland (indeed, the only ever Catholic King of all three for anything more than a matter of minutes), whose title at the time of its foundation was taken from the birthplace of Christendom.
In a word, moral and social conservatives.
So why did they vote for him?
For reasons of economic populism and foreign policy realism. Which are, of course, the right reasons.
No one deserves a free run against nothing more than Sarah Palin. And someone elected by morally and socially conservative economic populists and foreign policy realists, but who pays them back by giving the position of Secretary of State to Hillary Clinton, deserves a very serious challenge indeed in the 2012 primaries. The foundations of that challenge should already be being laid. Are they being? If not, why not?
Still, at least this is an opportunity to fill a vacant Senate seat (not the only one about to become vacant, of course) with a morally and socially conservative economic populist and foreign policy realist. Nothing could better befit the state named after the last Catholic King of England, Scotland and Ireland (indeed, the only ever Catholic King of all three for anything more than a matter of minutes), whose title at the time of its foundation was taken from the birthplace of Christendom.
The C In APEC Stands For Clinton
No wonder that APEC cheered George Bush.
Even now, he is still bemoaning the failure of his schemes to send high-wage, high-skilled, high-status American jobs to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops in Colombia, Panama and South Korea, joining all the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status American jobs that have already been sent to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops elsewhere.
Not that Bush started all of this, of course. Its great pioneer, and therefore also that of launching insane wars all over the place (and on the wrong side anyway), was his predecessor.
Who, by happy coincidence, had the same surname as Obama’s choice for Secretary of State. Could they by any chance be related? I think we should be told.
Even now, he is still bemoaning the failure of his schemes to send high-wage, high-skilled, high-status American jobs to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops in Colombia, Panama and South Korea, joining all the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status American jobs that have already been sent to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops elsewhere.
Not that Bush started all of this, of course. Its great pioneer, and therefore also that of launching insane wars all over the place (and on the wrong side anyway), was his predecessor.
Who, by happy coincidence, had the same surname as Obama’s choice for Secretary of State. Could they by any chance be related? I think we should be told.
"Now A Labour Government In The United States"?
So says Professor Peter Morici, who also has a very interesting article reprinted over on Right Democrat. What say we?
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