Majorityrights Central > Category: British Politics

Today that pixie-faced, shallow actor - a man of moderate intellect and faultless political instinct - will make a speech setting out his and his government’s position, one week and two days on from the London attacks.  It will concentrate, I think, in three areas: security, community action and “big politics”.

The police response thusfar has been quite amazing.  Scotland Yard and MI5 have barged through the investigation at a pace I, for one, have never witnessed in a major investigation.  Equally impressive, the world’s press has been apprised of every new lead, every breakthrough with remarkable and commendable speed.  That, I suppose, has more to do with the nature of a case in which the prime suspects are not going to face trial.  But it has allowed the public focus to shift very early on in the course of events to the wider issues of Islamic fundamentalism and multiculturalism.  That positively encourages a holistic, political approach to be taken.  It is pretty clear that Blair’s will be characteristically opportunistic and two-fold:-

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Should British conservatives continue to give their allegiance to the British Conservative Party? Peter Hitchens has decided the answer is no. In a recent Spectator column, Hitchens deplores the failure of the Conservative Party to stand up to the “progressive consensus.”

Hitchens believes that the Conservative Party has been rendered ineffective, in part, by the existence of “contradictory wings”. He writes,

“The Tories’ position is hopeless. No man living could conceivably unify the party’s contradictory wings. Europhile or Eurosceptic, pro- or anti-marriage, market enthusiast or moralist – each of these quarrels is fundamental and cannot be settled by compromise. To refuse to resolve them is to ask to be dragged, by events beyond our control, into places we never decided to go.”

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Today the Monarch read out probably the densest but by no means most radical Queen’s Speech for years.  The programme stretches to forty-five bills and a host of somewhat predictably worthy international intentions.

The government will now feel entitled to make a great song and dance about New Labour vigour in a third term while Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition tries to find something, amid all its leadership woes, to which it really objects.

Here are a few objectionable high-lights that might possibly help:-

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There is no law which says that families must weaken, crime must increase, and societies must decay.

David Willetts, timely as ever, having his four-penneth in the Sunday Times about the future of Conservatism.

But is he right?  Of course not.  The “law”, in this case, is advanced liberalism.  And that absolutely decrees that families must weaken, crime must increase and societies must indeed decay.

Willetts cranks out a quote about old Dizzy and lovingly romanticises Compassionate Conservatism.  But he doesn’t use either of his fabled brains to really look through the surface ripples and down into the silent depths of our political history.  I suppose he has no need of such rigour.  His purpose does not justify the effort, and we do not get it:-

A country with too many broken lives and fragmented families is going to depend on public services more. As well as a strong economy, we need a strong society. How do we disentangle the catastrophic mixture of poor social housing, rigid school catchment areas and long term welfare dependency which disfigure Britain?

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OK, we’ve emerged from behind the net curtains, dropped the last unread circular in the bin, removed the shotgun from beside the front door … we are safe.  The politicians have gone away.  Tomorrow we vote.  Or not, as appears likely in a heck of a lot of cases.

But what happens then?

Well, the next day the headlines are sheer bliss for all poodles and poodle owners.  The next, they ask how much longer Gordon will have to wait.  Ain’t life a gas?

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So, after all the deceit and obfuscation we get this:-

Secret documents revealed yesterday show that, almost a year before the Iraq invasion, Tony Blair was privately preparing to commit Britain to war and topple Saddam, despite warnings from his closest advisers that it was unjustified.

They also show how Mr Blair was planning to justify regime change as an objective, despite warnings from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, that the “desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action”.

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Tory leader Michael Howard recently proclaimed “We are all British, we are one nation.” Which, unfortunately, isn’t true anymore, as left-wing Guardian journalist Peter Preston was quick to point out. Preston used the example of the Old Kent Road, a place now so multicultural that Preston happily labels it “omnicultural”.

Of course, as a left-wing journo Preston sings the praises of the “naturally polyglot” Old Kent Road, writing that it represents “A Britain future, not Britain past.”

The best response I’ve seen to Preston is over at Faute de Mieux. The article there seems to suggest voting Tory might improve things - something which I am deeply sceptical about - but I like the concluding paragraph:

“Should Preston get his way, we shall have just as little love for our transient neighbourhoods, cities, regions and countries as his immigrants have for the Old Kent Road. With this crucial difference: his immigrants will always have a place called home.”

Reading about the fate of the Old Kent Road makes me feel fortunate that I live in a very Anglo suburb of Melbourne which still does feel like home for me. But I’ve observed enough about the transformation of much of Melbourne to know exactly what the writer at Faute de Mieux is talking about. We can’t assume that we’ll always find such places where we are something more than just outside observers.

Today, former Home Secretary David Blunkett made his return to UK political life.  He chose as his subject English identity – an indefinable quantity which, by dint of its indefinability, we purportedly lack.

His objective, according to Madeleine Bunting, writing in the Guardian, is to formulate a progressive definition of Englishness.  She omits to tell us why English identity cannot be left alone but must be formulated – or engineered – to meet the progressive agenda.  I suppose now, a few weeks before the election, is a good time to lay down the Labour marker for Englishness - to make it safe for the Multi-cult, to make the English confident and welcoming multiculturalists.  No matter that the left has spent forty years denigrating us as racist sinners, delegitimising our views, twisting our history, poisoning our language, denying the veracity of our ties of blood and our claims to this land, lauding strangers and silencing our dissent … nothing must be left un-engineered.

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