Britain Turns Its Back on Australia, by Philip Benwell

Just because British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has been outmanoeuvred by Angela Merkel, François Hollande and other European Union leaders from introducing reforms on migration from Europe into Britain, it shouldn’t mean that he can now take it out on Commonwealth countries like Australia.

Despite having to go through the ‘Aliens’ channel upon arrival, Australians have hitherto always found a friendly welcome in what used to be termed ‘the mother country’, but no longer.

Whilst the British government blathers on about establishing closer trade ties with Commonwealth countries, and particularly Australia, it seems to be extraordinary that it is to impose stricter visa requirements upon our citizens working in the United Kingdom.

According to journalist Simon Kent: “Australians fear new “discriminatory” UK working visa and migration policies will see thousands of workers forced home with little hope of return.

At the same time Britain is welcoming record numbers of European Union (EU) arrivals who face no restrictions on starting a new life in this country.” 

It doesn’t make sense, unless the true nature of the beast is not to build up Commonwealth trade to replace its current pacts with the European Union but, in a Machiavellian manner, to annoy Commonwealth countries and thus hamper ties so that the only alternative left is for Britain to continue to be within Europe. 

However, I very much fear that the British people will revolt against this. They feel much closer to countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada than they do to Eastern European countries from which most migrants are now arriving. 

There is also the great fear of the huge wave of refugees from Muslim countries moving across into the United Kingdom. That alone would probably be the greatest incentive for the British people to leave the Union and barricade their borders with Europe. 

Of course, our republicans will point to the British visa restrictions and say that this means that we should be a republic.

That is because they do not understand that Australia is a free and sovereign nation with no legal ties or constitutional links whatsoever to the British government or parliament.

According to a High Court decision in 1999, Britain is considered to be a ‘foreign power’. Whilst we share the Queen with sixteen other Commonwealth Realms, this does not mean to say that we are not our own country, for we are.

That is why it was necessary for the people themselves - and not our politicians and certainly not the British, had to vote at the 1999 republic referendum.

A referendum in which the electorate nation-wide and in all six States voted overwhelmingly to reject a republic and retain the Crown.

Our Christian Coronation, by Philip Benwell

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)