It’s been pointed out to me that we have had an election (I had mine at 9.20 last Thursday, and a very fine election it was too), and that Britain now has a government.
This government was elected (mostly) freely and (mostly) honestly and its parliamentary members were elected by more than half the votes cast, so it’s actually as democratic as all get out.
The purpose of government is to govern for the common good rather than to glorify this party or that ideology, and this government is barely formed and hasn’t done anything yet in office to disapprove of. I (in common with Republicans in the USA who variously offer or are exhorted to wish any new Democrat President well especially throughout the fabulous 100-day honeymoon period) should show some good grace, accept both the polls and the resulting coalition, hope as some people of goodwill already hope that something positive may come of this, stop sulking and wish the new rulers well for the good of us all. Were all in this together, after all.
Being nothing if not full of benevolence and Christian charity for my fellow men and a true patriot who puts nation before ideology, I am more than happy to go along with this kindly advice.
Good luck Dave and Nick.
Wasn’t that fun? Now, back to business.
The Right in all its forms lost last Thursday, and there is little sign that anyone in the Tory Party above the level of Deputy Assistant Churchill Yearner is even thinking of the possibility of reversing its Leftwards gallop into the hands of the libtards who control almost all levels of state and society.
It doesn’t really matter now whether Cameron is simply a fool whose sincere campaign of compromising conservatism out of existence in the pursuit of office merely went wrong (with a lot of help from UKIP and, ahem, from Another Party that is never mentioned by our owners without spitting), or if he was and remains a thoroughgoing liberal who planned from the get-go to take the Conservative and Unionist Party to The Place Of The Two Half Bricks.
In the event, faced with the opportunity to form a minority government that depended upon ongoing LibDem support, Cameron looked Clegg in the eye and went for the more ambitious choice of a formal coalition. He could have discussed our country with Clegg and said ‘I’m going for this list of measures to save Britain, tell me which of them can you support and let’s do those first, and let battle commence when we’ve finished them.’
But no, he went for bringing the whole sandal-wearing, lentil-munching lot into a full share of government with him. Faced with remembering and cherishing true conservatism as one of the groupings within his own party and thus something to respect and offer hope to on the one hand and hopping aboard the ‘progressive bandwagon’ on the other, Cameron hopped without anyone having to say ‘frog’ at all loudly.
Which should surely mean that even the dimmest of hereditary inbred Right-wing Tory optimists must be able to look up from their banjos at this stage and realise that Cameron and Clegg have no intention of straying far from each other in any significant way, and thus the probability of Clark Cameron stepping out of his Daily Planet reporter’s suit and fighting for the Truth, Justice and British Values of true conservatism is as statistically probable as getting tickets for Satan’s Ice Extravaganza.
Those of us with more than one full set of grandparents spotted this problem years ago but it takes more than a skunk in the outhouse to get the backwoods True Blues off the porch and into the woods after those pesky Leftie varmints for a bit of payback.
More than one skunk is coming: never fear.
The official Liberal Democrats are now preparing to use the Conservative Party as a condom with which to treat the British people like unto our first Green MP’s electorate whilst Cameron clearly plans to use the Lib Dem MPs as a barrier to practice safe corporatism free from any risk of infection from the deadly Thatcher or Enoch viruses.
What went wrong for the Tory Right, or right for us Kippers, the EDs, and the BNP? (Let’s not quibble about their economic policies or leadership here: it’s a patriotic party at base if nothing else.) Well, obviously the Right is no longer unified and that’s in part down to Cameron and his pinko infiltrators. It’s also down to New Labour’s successful campaign of fracturing the common front of patriotism, trust in the leadership class, popular concerns about national security (where a common instinct in now ‘bring the boys home’ instead of ‘stand up to the enemy and keep him fighting overseas instead of on the beaches and in the streets’), and poisoning or deleting the unionist values that held around 40% of the working class to vote Tory in the Thatcher years.
It goes deeper than that as I have long been taught by my betters: it’s the culture. What the United Left including the Cameroons are growing on the agar jelly of Britain is nothing at all like love of country, freedom and tradition.
Conservatism and anything like it’s in the cellar mostly, however, because there simply aren’t enough of us capable of forming a governing party or coalition the way things are organised just now. I should know: I helped after all to divide the Right’s electorate with malice aforethought.
That is the least of our worries, and I did campaign for a result like this because the Tory party needs to be shriven if not irreparably split or destroyed: I’m not sure yet which.
I take it back.
Last Thursday wasn’t the defeat of the Right in Britain: it merely recognised the fact that we have long been beaten and the electorate tattooed it on our national backside for all the world to see.
There is hope, always hope, and I believe much we can do, and of that more soon, but right now my dartboard is showing a bit of pink around the hairline and one eye is still pretty much intact.
While the anti-clerical and anti-religious make hay about large chunks of the Catholic Church in Ireland’s complicity with child abusing priests by hiding or excusing them, I’d prefer to take a quick look today about how our very own Supreme Primate has recently been inadvertently encouraging some of God’s children to despise other of God’s children here in the balmy North West of England by hiding or excusing their crimes and misdemeanours.
Archbishop of Canterbury in plea to politicians: Don’t play race card
Archbishop Dr Rowan Williams said he had been “inspired” by his trip to Lancashire, where he met civic and religious leaders in Burnley, Blackburn and Preston.
Speaking to the Lancashire Telegraph, he insisted the Church was doing all it could to improve community relations and address far right political parties like the British National Party.
Yes. All those honour killings and separatism and, of course, the bankrupting of the State’s finances and indebting our children to the taxman and the inflationeer’s greed unto the umpteenth generation, that’s all the “far right’s” fault.
Dr Williams said Lancashire had “lots of challenges and diversity”.
Say, there can’t be any connection between this and all the violence, can there?
"But if it’s just about putting up the shutters it’s not going to work.”
But…Fisk. Fisk. Fisk. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Then, like a voice from Heaven, I remembered what EU Referendum had posted about recently: citing Nick Cohen, an honest Leftist of integrity and gracious good humour.
Indeed, the standard web author rarely sees the need to spell out what his or her side believes in and argue for it in the marketplace of ideas….
and …
In Britain, Guido Fawkes, a conservative blog that is so successful it has twice the readership of the New Statesman, does not argue for right-wing policies. Like most other conservative bloggers, he takes their inherent merit for granted and devotes his time to disparaging the Left. Instead of conducting a thorough debate on why its government has failed, Left-wing blogs imitate the Right and respond in kind.
(Thinks.)
Okay, so assuming that we all agree, or are prepared to stipulate for the moment, that the present A-B of C is a cultural Marxist, for whom all the complex problems and feelings involved are because “Divisions come about because of economics or a perceived sense of injustice” and who wishes to lead a hollowed-out dhimmmi church of moral relativists and the willfully blind… what then can we say that’s positive, that argues for something that conservatives can get alongside?
What would I (who am not a Christian) want to hear a confident and faithful Archbishop of Canterbury say about immigration, culture, and the Queen’s Peace?
What might a humble but determined heir of Saint Augustine; of Wulfred; of the great Thomases - Becket and Cranmer say about these matters today?
I think he’d start with something about his faith.
I believe in the words of Jesus Christ, as preached by my church down the generations:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
And from ancient Leviticus we have;“Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD,”and laterwe have The Great Commandment throughout the New Testament: “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
The Church has preached and taught these ideas for two thousand years as the core of what we believe. Whenever the Church ands the faithful have not acted according to these holy words, then we were in the wrong. When we have followed them as we were commanded, then we were at least seeking to be right.
For most every Sunday and Christmas, Lent and Easter for two thousand years the Church had based its teaching and has intended to act according to Christ’s commandment in the belief that people matter irrespective of: their usefulness to others; or their social rank; or their sex; or their relationship to those in power; or their nationality or; eventually, of their faith. Much of the morality by which British people live today is derived directly from Christian teachings.
I think that such a man might go on to say something about the history of Christianity and Christendom.
Christianity has waxed and waned in these islands of ours for 1,500 years and more, but as it survived and changed, it has grown to great power and influence over the minds of our people. The faith has had to face many grave problems and, on some occasions has been, or been present, at some of the gravest problems.
And yet, Christianity has proved to be a solution for many of life’s hardships and injustices.
The pagan religious cults that predated Christianity were in large measure a curse to their practitioners and their neighbours alike. Human and animal sacrifice; slave-raiding one’s neighbours; frequent rape and murderous oath-breaking; the belief in gods and local spirits who terrified those who dwelt amongst them; infanticide; widow-burning – all were held to be vile by the Church Fathers in these four countries of ours, and all were later suppressed by Christian princes and their servants so that some, at least, of those horrors were banished forever. Those Christian princes and their servants were not always gentle and often acted cruelly in their work, it is true. I do not excuse that, but I ask you also to think that when the MillenniumBridge’s foundations were laid down in the city of Lancaster, how many young girls were thrown into the concrete to appease the River Lune’s spirit?
And every Sunday, Christ’s message of universal love and peace was preached to the people throughout the Dark Ages.
It is also true that the Church made war on Islam during the Crusades, and though its atrocities against Muslims, Jews, and other Christians alike were inexcusable and remain so to this day, the Crusades themselves were wars against the descendants of the conquerors of formerly Christian lands. But we can choose to do things better today, as we now take Christ’s Great Commandment seriously.
Whilst the mediaeval Church and its agents often persecuted Jews as the result of parts of the gospel stories and also out of local hatreds and personal greed and the foul legend of the Blood Libel, and even as massacre and exile from England were crimes against the Jews, the Church still held that child sacrifice was wrong for Christians and some priests and bishops struggled against local recidivism. There was the notion, ever-present if often ignored by venial priests and corrupt magistrates that the lives of all the people were worth something - at least to God.
Then Christians warred on other Christians during the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, and long and terrible were the century and a half of Western Christendom’s civil wars. Brutality in larger-scale warfare than had been fought since the fall of Rome left Europe blood-soaked and exhausted, and yet the Europeans (Oh solemn pride in this European inheritance!) learned to partly separate the affairs of State from those of the Church, and in so doing took the sword from the hands of the men who should be working for peace, and left it in the hands of the nation-states, commonwealths and empires that made our modern world. These Wars of Religion also saw Jews settled quite deliberately in Britain once more; to our great profit, as a result of other, older and authentic Christian teachings about the Jews and their special place in God’s plan. And so love thy neighbour became a policy goal for those who wanted so much to live peacefully and profitably with other kinds of Christians.
But the Reformed Church and the Catholics alike warred on pagans once more as clerical orders and secular authorities and free enterprise alike exported African animists into the New World to work in its sweltering fields and awful mines and the sugar mills that were a material Hell on Earth. And every Sunday, love thy neighbour was preached to slave owners and slaves alike until some evangelicalAnglicans and Quakers chose to take those words literally and then, for the first time in four thousand years and more, slavery was abolished in Europe and some of its colonies as freedom began to spring from Christian musket muzzles and Christian cannon and Christian bayonets.
This is the faith and the world it has made that I stand for.
He might say something about the world that his faith has built.
So our nation, for all its faults, and the faults of the people living in it, is a place aflame with the idea that people matter; that they count for something here and now because God has taught us that we all matter to Him.
Our morality politics and are awash with the idea that law and power should serve an essentially Christian mission; to protect the meek, to search for justice, to aim for peace. And this is how the British describe themselves when they are feeling good about themselves; the height of approval is to say of a man ‘He’s a good chap,’ or of a woman ‘She’s very kind.’ Note that this riverbed Christianity does not praise worldly success such as fame and fortune, or the cleverness of mind, or beauty, or being at the height intellectual fashion, but rather the ability to fit in, to get along, to be a neighbour.
In these lands and amongst this country’s neighbours and its former colonies we extend the courtesy that is the everyday form and manifestation of Christian neighbourliness to our visitors and those who have settled amongst us…Or at least most of us try to though we often fail too; being fallible and weak.
Love thy neighbour is what happens when our diplomats agree that prisoners of war should be treated decently, and when soldiers are trained to do so, and when they do so under great stress and after cruel provocation. It’s also what happens when our soldiers fail to do so, and when other seek to redress that failure. Love thy neighbour is real when we give to charity, or are kind to strangers we meet, and when we choose to be polite to fools and unruly children who are not related to us. Love thy neighbour underlies the deepest motives of socialism and liberalism and much of conservatism – and even libertarianism in its respect for the individual (inherited and distant as that lineage is to the rationalist mind.) Love thy neighbour underpins much of patriotism and nationalism, too, by definition, and it need not imply and hate strangers, too.
Love thy neighbour is the foundation of the peaceful way we live because it has been put into a myriad of our laws to constrain the deeds and to control wherever possible the intentions of the sociable but often selfish or parochial species that we human beings are. Freedom itself can not be tolerated by those who fail to embrace the outer lesson of love thy neighbour which is that we are all here to lead our own lives and that this matters very much to God.
It’s not that Love thy neighbour or something very much like it is unique to Christianity: modern and mediaeval Judaism, some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, and the very earliest teachings of Islam contain similar notions. But Christianity has it at its core, and the history of this country for a millennium and a half has been coloured by that religion.
I wish that such a Primate might conclude.
The laws and customs that have grown up under centuries of imperfect striving to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ are part of an ecology that contains rightful thinking; teaching the Gospels; respecting when their message has been fulfilled; and regretting and hoping to improve when it has not.
All we ask of each other and of our neighbours old and new, no matter what they believe and Whom they worship, is to live according to those customs and laws so that they too will share in a national community that sees strangers and colleagues; children and women and foreigners; the rich and the poor alike as worthy of respect and continued life. That’s all that we should ask - though the Church offers more to those who will take it.
Christian society does not ask much of its inhabitants, and it cannot compel us to truly love our neighbours in our hearts because only God can demand that, but it is mightily entitled to insist that all people should act as if they did not hate one another.
So we demand that everyone here must live by those laws and customs and not put personal or sectarian aims above public morality.
Just in case you don't know about it yet, the Great Doctor has a new book out - a collection of his Spectator pieces.
Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims. They all pass through Theodore Dalrymple's surgery, and he uses the experience of treating them to examine life for those unfortunate enough to live at the bottom end of society. He writes with a combination of dry humour, compassion and, occasionally, anger - mostly at the inhuman bureaucracy of the system, which works against the doctors and nurses as they try to help their patients.
I haven't read it yet, obviously, but amidst the gloom of Labour's eugenics programme to breed the British, starting with the Right, out of existence or at least out of power in our own country if we don't choose to be Left Hand Path, plus David Cameron's apostasy ( or is it his time-delayed truthfulness?) that he won't hold a referendum to see which countries will govern Britain after the Lisbon Cosntitution is inserted into our body politic by Brown, Mandelson, & Co, it' still nice to know that someone's still providing us with much that we need to know about the bottoms-up Trahison des Clercs as the local and quango State has been destroying the people and their morality on an individual basis.
No doubt it will be presented in his familiar beautiful prose: full of wit and human understanding, and the dagger of his irony will be so much the sharper and more deadly, as always, to the snake-oil philosophies of the United Left for having its edge hidden in silk until it is too late.
Cancel the Space Hopper request please, Father Christmas - I want this one instead.
