A Verdict on Thatcher

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I first linked to this a few years ago but it is well worth watching.

 

War

Compared to the other moral disasters of the last fifty years, there is something qualitatively different about ‘Gay Marriage’. If this Bill receives Royal Ascent then the nature of the State in this country will change. It is well to recall the doctrine of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum

“A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, ‘at least equal rights’; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.”

This Bill will effectively remove from the family the recognition of the State and constitute a claim by the State to be the author of marriage and the family. It is therefore a declaration of war against the family. Everyone belongs to a State and a family but their membership of a family is prior and therefore, in this war of the State against the family, the individual cannot be neutral. Any State which legalises ‘Gay marriage’ declares war against its own constituent parts and so dissolves itself.

What are the real consequences of this (other than making driving on the right a sin against prudence rather than justice)? I should say that it means that the Conservative, Labour, SNP, Green and Liberal parties have declared war on each one of us. Effectively it means that UKIP and the DUP are the only remaining parties (that have any chance of parliamentary representation) for which anyone should vote.

 

Hilarious Hypocrisy

 

Three Realms United and on one bestowed an emblem of their Mystic Union showed…

Charles I

“Propositions Made by Both Houses of Parliament … with His Majesties Answer Thereunto”

 18th June 1642

“There being three kindes of Government amongst men, Absolute Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy, and all these having their particular conveniencies and inconveniencies. The experience and wisdom of your Ancestors hath so moulded this out of a mixture of these, as to give to this Kingdom (as far as human prudence can provide) the conveniencies of all three, without the inconveniencies of any one, as long as the Balance hangs even between the three Estates, and they run jointly on in their proper Chanell (begetting Verdure and Fertilitie in the Meadows on both sides) and the overflowing of either on either side raise no deluge or Inundation.The ill of absolute Monarchy is Tyrannie, the ill of Aristocracy is Faction and Division, the ills of Democracy are Tumults, Violence and Licentiousnesse. The good of Monarchy is the uniting a Nation under one Head to resist Invasion from abroad, and Insurrection at home.The good of Aristocracie is the Conjuncion of Counsell in the ablest Persons of a State for the publike benefit.The good of Democracy is Liberty, and the Courage and Industrie which Libertie begets.”

 

Anglicans in all their glory

I am not sure what to think about the failed introduction of women ‘bishops’ by the ‘General Synod’. A student announced it to me  the morning after as a wonderful event. My first reaction was to reject this interpretation. I am generally of the view that the more intense the Gadarene enthusiasm of the Anglicans the better. This best exposes the absurdity of the entire institution to its inmates.

I find that most ordinary Englishmen are quite unperturbedly conscious of of the absurdity of the ‘Church’ of England. It is generally assumed (quite correctly) that it is designed to be absurd. Adherence to the ‘Church’ of England is a way of saying ‘I think it is good for a society to have a religion but one shouldn’t take it too seriously or allow it to get in the way of the good things in life’. It has to be absurd in order to allow its adherents to affirm through their membership of the ‘church’ the  unimportance of truth in their religious choices.

St Augustine teaches us “two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” Just as the Catholic Church is the gateway to the City of God on this earth so the ‘Church’ of England is the Englishman’s way of expressing the love of self even to the contempt of God. It is important that it is ‘to the point of…’. So long as God does not obstruct more important concerns a good Anglican has no intention of directly expressing or acting upon his contempt for God. By adhering to the ‘Church’ of England he gives notice that – if pushed – he will stand by his principles and wash his hands of the Almighty.

Hence my general view that women ‘bishops’ etc. are good for us all. They underline the basic distinctions in national life and remind us what its all about and who stands for what. Occasionally, however, one thinks that it might be nice if the national hara kiri were postponed a few decades and the exploits of the Anglicans reined in in the hope of delaying  compulsory sodomy and euthanasia etc. until the next half of this century. On reflexion though I think this is a misplaced feeling. It really is kill or cure now. The sooner the swine hurtle off the cliff the faster the patient can recover and sit once more at the feet of Jesus.

Bring on the women ‘bishops’ therefore and may more Vicars have the courage of this fine gentleman to profess their creed before the world!

 

Are the British a single ethnic group?

Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer maintains that the population of the British Isles are overwhelmingly a single ethnic group: the Basques. This group migrated from the Iberian Peninsular to the British Isles prior to recorded history and were conquered and linguistically colonised by Celtic and Germanic groups in the first millennium BC. These conquests by establishing the main Anglo-Celtic linguistic distinction between the inhabitants of the British Isles and obliterating the linguistic unity of this people have concealed the original ethnic unity of the Britons. Not an insignificant claim in the present context.

 

Happy and Glorious

 

The most poignant clause in all British Law

Ireland Act 1949

§2 (1) It is hereby declared that, notwithstanding that the Republic of Ireland is not part of His Majesty’s dominions, the Republic of Ireland is not a foreign country for the purposes of any law in force in any part of the United Kingdom or in any colony, protectorate or United Kingdom trust territory, whether by virtue of a rule of law or of an Act of Parliament or any other enactment or instrument whatsoever, whether passed or made before or after the passing of this Act, and references in any Act of Parliament, other enactment or instrument whatsoever, whether passed or made before or after the passing of this Act, to foreigners, aliens, foreign countries, and foreign or foreign-built ships or aircraft shall be construed accordingly.

 

Save Us!

The New Labour model consisted in running the entire economy off the City of London and then redistributing the tax revenues through a bloated public sector to the rest of the country. This model was destroyed by the financial crisis. There have now emerged two new models. The New New Labour plan is to borrow enough to ride out the financial crisis (and its after-shocks) and then restore the New Labour model. This requires either sufficient borrowing that we loose our ability to borrow cheaply and have to raise taxes to such a point that the City cannot support a recovery or sufficiently high taxes that the City cannot support a recovery. In short, it’s bollocks.

The Tory plan is to restore the industrial base of the British economy through tax cuts and preserve our cheap credit through spending cuts so that redistribution through the public sector will become less and less necessary (but they probably don’t have the balls to push through this programme consistently). The problem is that, when the people who run the City are among the richest people on the planet and people in Indonesia are willing to work for a dollar a day, there is no prospect of restoring the industrial base of the British economy unless the technological development of Britain is unimaginably greater than that of most of the rest of the planet. That goal cannot be achieved. It is scarcely being approximated now and it will only slip further and further out of sight.

Only one alternative exists, the Old Old Labour alternative: to encourage, through the tax system, the ownership of the means of production by the workers themselves. That is, to encourage the proliferation of producer cooperatives. Producer cooperatives are far more successful than private or public companies and they do not, of their very nature, relocate to distant shores. They embody the original aspirations of the founders of the Labour movement. They present a genuine alternative to the plan the Tories believe in but are too scared to pursue, but they are anathema to the ideals of the bourgeois statist hijackers of the Labour movement. The first generation of hijackers wrote the following summary of that movement’s goals. It came to be read as a charter for mass nationalisation but it was intended (by its duplicitous authors) to be capable of referring to cooperative ownership instead. Read in that light it is an inspiring document capable of inspiring a noble and unstoppable popular movement.

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

Briton of the Year

Idiot of the Year

 

A sad and tedious German story

Business matters recently led me to the University of  Göttingen, highest ranked university in Germany (Times Higher Education ranking place 43 in 2010/11), and only University in Germany named after a British monarch (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, after George II of Great Britain). I whiled away a lengthy train trip by reading up on the history of Göttingen in Wikipedia (to which I can add some original research pursued during a bicycle trip of 800 km from south to north of Germany, just so you can admire me). What I found was a tale of glory mixed with abounding bitterness.

Stemming both from a little Saxonian village and an Ottonian Imperial Palace, the city apparently tried very hard to achieve the independency of a free imperial city, yet failed. This might have served it better than it thought, for, initially impervious to the Lutheran revolt, its ‘new wool weavers’, a progressive lot, coupled political strivings with adherence to Lutheranism and brought down a longer-ranging wrangle in their favour, protestant preaching being allowed in the Göttingen churches at last. Still, this might not have been a sustainable development, for Eric I, Prince of Calenberg, while dependent on the wealth of the city, was an adherent of the Old Faith. Unfortunately, he was also very tolerant (one feels tempted to say: ptui!) of the conversion to Lutheranism of his 25-year junior wife, Elizabeth of Brandenburg. This spirited lady managed to pretty much hold the reins during the regency of her son, Eric II, 12 years old when his father died. Apparently really convinced of the truth of Protestantism, she seems not to have been motivated by greed, because – quite uniquely, poor little historically illiterate me thinks – she put all monastery wealth into a trust that still exists today, serving the upkeep of churches and caritative purposes only. As a result, a number of Lutheran monasteries exist up to this date in Lower Saxony. *

Yet, everything might have turned out well. Eric II, in a way quite a failure of maternal expectations, went abroad, broadened his mind, and returned a Catholic. In his attempts to reverse his mother’s reformatory exertions, he was unfortunately, again, hampered by financial considerations. Hindsight teaches that the Göttingen Bürgerschaft quite lost power afterwards, what with the pest, and the Thirty-Years-War, and all that, so that a Duke might have brought the thing round to Catholicism after all.  However, Eric II.’s decendents failed to reproduce sufficiently, so that the whole area fell to Protestant Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

The Thirty-Years-War, however atrocious, might still have helped Göttingen in the end. Conquered by Tilly for the Catholics in 1626, it was re-conquered by the Protestants in 1631, and remained thus (alas for anyone on a business trip looking for weekday Mass). The Principality rose to an Electorate in 1692; in 1714 the Prince-Elector became King of Great Britain;  his son, George II., decided that it was a bit pathetic for his Hannoverian lands not to have a single university, and founded that of Göttingen in 1737, into which three of his grandsons were immatriculated. The university was an immediate European success, but suffered somewhat form successive restrictive governments, against which it put up some spirited protest. A duel between students on 22. April 1766, resulting in the death of one combatant, became the cause of the technical re-organisation of the whole student duelling business in Central Europe (little hint towards a continuation of the Bodis Riper, at the behest of my inner child).

Bla, bla, revolutions, decline; being fed up with the Hanoverians and quite placidly welcoming the news of becoming Prussians, and an extremely bad chapter of history: a university town with a total of 40 Nobel Price winners – had an absolute majority for the National Socialists in the July 1932 (not! 1933 elections) , and an apparently pretty enthusiastic burning of ‘un-German’ books headed by the Rector. Only to a small extent justice has been done, as the university has shot itself quite in the own foot, for the most renowned scientists were Jewish, and found better places abroad.

* I visited one of those ‘Lutheran Monestaries’, in Marienberg. Originally following the Cistercian rule, its observance had quite declined by the beginning of the 16^th century, or so. By a bitter irony, reform, in the true sense of the word, seems to have succeeded there shortly after, the Liturgy of the Hours and common meals, plus other stuff, being restored. Comes Elizabeth with her pious Protestantism, abolishing all and sundry on evangelical grounds, but not those two items. A hundred years or so, both are gone. What remains are noble women, or rich bourgeoise ones, living on state expanses in a comfortable life style together with their mothers and sisters, reading the odd devotional book, going to church together on Sunday, and that’s it.