A talk given at the House of Lords on Wednesday 23rd July 2014, by courtesy of The Lord Stoddart of Swindon:
Late last year
an organisation called the National Secular Society announced that, through lawyers,
it was petitioning the European Court of Human Rights to rule that the next
Coronation to be held in the United Kingdom be, in effect, a state investiture
so as to be more in harmony with Europe.
In a November
2013 statement to the media they said: “Britain’s
current investiture of a monarch with such overt religious associations is an
anomaly within the context of the rest of Europe.”
However, the coronation
of British kings is not at all like the secular state installations of European
monarchs because its thousand year old Christian Coronations are not merely a
formal appointment but a Christian consecration of the monarch creating a
communion between the Monarch and God and between the Monarch and the People.
The words of Dr
Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of York at the coronation of King George V, expresses
this sentiment very clearly.
He said
"The King comes not alone to his hallowing.
He bears his people with him. For the national life, as well as for its
representative, this is a day of consecration ....”
The Coronation
is a time when all subjects of the Queen, whatever their country of
citizenship, are brought together, united in a common purpose, to welcome the
crowning of their King.
It is something that belongs not only to Britain but to
all those countries who have as their sovereign the monarch of the United
Kingdom.
The anointing is
the central act of the religious ceremony and includes the Blessing and
Consecration.
In the twenty-six monarchies left in the world today (other than possibly
the Vatican), only the British monarchs are anointed and consecrated with
sacred oil at their coronation.
What Europhile secularists
fail to appreciate is that Britain is a Christian nation with a Christian
monarchy which is sanctified before God and the people with a Christian
Coronation.
Indeed, the British peoples are, despite our materialism, Christian
and British societies in every sense, for even though we may not go to church,
even though we may not pray or even though some may deny the very existence of
God, the entire fabric of our being is based on the teachings of the Bible and
the practices of Christ, whether we may admit to it or not.
In times past we
absorbed the rituals of the Druids and other pagans but never lost sight of the
laws of God.
For a thousand years or more, peoples from other lands and faiths,
including the Moslem, have been welcomed into our society.
We do not demand
that they be Christian, but we do expect them to respect our Christian laws and
our Christian traditions.
Whilst so many
may tend to dismiss the European Human Rights action as something that would
never happen, I point to the words of the British High Court judge who recently
said he believed that even though Britain had signed a special protocol as part
of the Lisbon Treaty which was to ensure that the EU Charter of Rights would
not be enforceable in Britain, the EU law had unintentionally been incorporated
into British law anyway due to years of European interference in the law-making
functions of the British Parliament.
Supreme Court
Justice Lord Sumption, has recently warned that the European Court of Human
Rights exceeds its legitimate powers, usurps the role of politicians and
undermines the democratic process and Court of Appeal judge, Lord Justice Laws,
had said that the UK Supreme Court has accorded “overriding force to the notion that only Strasbourg’s rulings on the
convention are “definitive” or “authoritative'.”
In any event, it
is accepted that the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, which
enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, is compulsory and binding for
all 47 member states of the Council of Europe.
Did not Aesop
wisely say so very long ago “We often
give our enemies the means for our own destruction?”
Therefore,
whatever happens as far as this challenge is concerned, it is an indication
that there are people out there who want to destroy our way of life; who want
to eradicate forever our Christian and biblical heritage; who want to take our
kings away from God and make our shared monarchy a secular institution which
would be more acceptable to the European Union, and thus to bring it one step
away from oblivion.
I therefore travelled
to the UK from the other side of the world as a person bloodied in the fight to
protect our shared Crown to bring a warning that you must never ever take any
movement against the monarchy lightly.
A warning never to be complacent
whenever our shared Throne is under attack.
A warning never to allow complacency,
to dismiss out of hand anything that has the potential to grow, to nurture and
then to become a threat.
Philip Benwell
MBE
(National Chair
– Australian Monarchist League)
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