Father's Day, by David Lindsay

Only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today.

This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened.

But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.

If fathers matter, then they must face up to their responsibilities, with every assistance, including censure where necessary, from the wider society, including when it acts politically as the State.

A legal presumption of equal parenting. Restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers.

Restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father.

Repeal of the ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed.

And for paternity leave to be made available at any time until the child was 18 or left school, thereby reasserting paternal authority, and thus requiring paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence.

Of course a new baby needs her mother. But a 15-year-old might very well need her father, and that bit of paternity leave that he has been owed these last 15 years.

That authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver.

That basis is high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment. All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need.

Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community.

So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole.

Moreover, paternal authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars.

Especially, though not exclusively, since those sent to war tend to come from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens earlier than has lately become the norm.

Think of those very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children.

You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle.

You cannot do both.

China After Twenty-Five Years, by David Lindsay

There has been surprisingly little comment on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Dare we hope that someone might finally have looked into exactly who those demonstrators were? I for one would love to know.

Statue of Liberty or no Statue of Liberty, they sang The Internationale in Tiananmen Square.

After all, one certainly does not need to be an advocate of liberal democracy to be an opponent of the regime in China. And various other types of such opponent are decidedly more numerous and long-established in China even today, never mind 25 years ago.

There is the Kuomintang. There are the Xinjiang Islamists, and the people who want to restore life expectancy in Tibet to half its current level by bringing back theocratic feudalism, and a number of equally unpleasant separatist tendencies elsewhere.

There are the Trotskyists, and those Stalinists who are not Maoists. There are now, and up to a point there were even in 1989, those who hold to the old, old Maoist faith against China’s transformation into the giant standing contradiction of the theory that capitalism and freedom go hand in hand. And many more besides.

It is impossible to overstate the absolute imperative to remain out of these things, which is no small part of the absolute imperative to have no part in any pretence that that thing holed up on Taiwan is the Government of China, or that Taiwan is a country (those two are in any case mutually exclusive propositions), any more than something holed up on the Isle of Wight at the end of a British Civil War would be the Government of Britain, or would make the Isle of Wight a country, likewise mutually exclusive propositions.

The self-styled Republic of China has had extremely few Western partisans since Nixon and the UN faced up to reality, but it had friends among the Crazies around Bush the Younger, and it would have them in and around any Administration headed by Hillary Clinton. Michael Gove and Liam Fox are probably fans.

It has no aspiration to Taiwanese independence, which is an absurd idea. Nor does it claim jurisdiction only over China as she now exists. Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese Government to resolve territorial disputes, it lays claim to all of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Burma.

We must have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it.

In addition to backing China in her territorial dispute with Japan, a dispute in which no other country ought to take any part, David Cameron is seeking a “Free Trade” Agreement between China and the European Union, so as to do to European workers what Most Favored Nation Status for China has done for American workers.

Labour has already made as clear as need be that it intends to vote against the “Free Trade” Agreement between the US and the EU, so this is just another one to add.

In both cases, there might have to be um-ing and ah-ing about how some other Agreement would have been acceptable, but regrettably not the only one on offer. So what, though? The effect would be exactly the same.

We are told that the only alternative to this approach, an approach which old hippies actively prefer, is sucking up to the Dalai Lama. Rubbish. The present Dalai Lama was born hundreds of miles outside Tibet. The Tibetans themselves migrated to what is now Tibet from further east in China, but huge numbers of them never did and never have done. The Dalai Lama comes from one such family.

Before 1959, Tibet was not an independent state ruled benignly by the Dalai Lama and given over almost entirely to the pursuit of spirituality. Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the lamas were drawn. “Dalai” is a family name; only a member of the House of Dalai can become the Dalai Lama.

Well over 90 per cent of the population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers of Tibet are drawn. That system was unique in China, and existed only because successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the “autonomy” for which it still campaigns from “exile”. Life expectancy in Tibet was half what it is today.

There has never been an independent state of Tibet. Likewise, the presence of large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense) and other Chinese ethnic groups in Tibet is nothing remotely new. The one-child policy does not apply in Tibet, so the Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans’ own fault, if they even see it as a problem.

It is totally false to describe the Dalai Lama baldly as “their spiritual leader”. Relatively few would view him as such. In particular, Google “Dorje Shugden” for, to put at its mildest, some balance to the media portrayal of the present Dalai Lama. We never hear from Dorje Shugden practitioners, just as we never hear from the loyally Chinese Hui Muslims.

Moreover, the Dalai Lama has never condemned either the invasion of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq. For more on Buddhism as no more a religion of peace than Islam is, see Sri Lanka, Burma, Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, and beyond.

In fact, an examination of the relevant texts shows that violence in general and war in particular are fundamental to Buddhism. Tibet is particularly striking for this.

A rare balanced treatment of Buddhism and violence was broadcast in August last year. The subject is addressed in great detail here.

Not for nothing is it Christianity that is fashionable among the Bangkok hipsters who are among the victims of the ongoing military coup in Thailand. Something similar was no small part of the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, and then, through the court influence of Anglo-Saxon kings’ Frankish brides, to that of what was thus turned into England.

Just as pre-Communist Russia always remained the country’s true character, so very pre-Communist China remains the country’s true character.

That character reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, is now thoroughly Classical and Patristic in taking Africa seriously, and has barely started an external war since China became China five thousand years ago. It is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical, historic, mainstream Christianity.

China has already moved from Maoism to the equal repressiveness of unbridled capitalism.

While economic, or any other, dependence on a foreign power remains totally unacceptable, a further shift, the reassertion of her own culture, is to be encouraged by every means of the “soft” power that, in reality, is truly hard power.

The Red Beret and The Red Flag, by David Lindsay

The thing Facebook declares, to those of us who are around them but not of them, the enthusiasm of the Latin Mass boys for the coming King Philip VI of Spain. How so? Are they not Carlists?

Juan Carlos was not even the senior Alfonsist heir. That was his father. The abdicator was picked for his political acceptability as surely as Louis Philippe was, or as surely as William of Orange was, and in very much the same interests as either of those, by figures standing in a continuous tradition from them and from the executioners of Charles I.

Yes, that is where Fascism comes from. It was not by chance that the influence of Maurras in Spain was on, over and through the Alfonsists, not the Carlists.

Had the supremacist forces of bourgeois liberal capitalism not swept away the little local kings, princes and grand dukes (and republican city-states) of German-speaking Europe and of the Italian Peninsula, then there would have been no gap for Hitler and Mussolini to fill in the vigorous defence of that same supremacy and supremacism.

And so on. But of that, another time.

National Catholicism is also an old and egregious error. The belief in some right to an autonomous “Catholic” church baptising the morality of the politically dominant class, and effectively subject to the State, has arisen in eleventh-century Byzantium, in sixteenth-century England, in seventeenth-century France and the Netherlands, in eighteenth-century Austria, in nineteenth-century Germany and Switzerland, among the Croats at least since the early 1990s, and in today’s China, as well as defining both the “liberal” and the “conservative” wings of the Catholic Church in the contemporary United States.

None of those histories is a happy one. Munich laymen who imagined that their financial contributions entitled them to run the Church through quasi-parliamentary institutions gave much succour to early Nazism, although that went on to become absolutely peculiar to the Protestant areas of Germany and to the anticlerical Third Lager in Austria.

If the Spanish did declare the Tercera República, then what would Real Madrid be renamed, and why? Or would Atlético just be declared to have won everything from the Civil War onwards, once and for all?

But at least since 1971, there have been Carlists on both sides. For a section of Carlism has swung firmly to the Left in observing how capitalism corrodes to nought all four of Dios, Patria, Fueros and Rey.

The difference between them is fundamentally strategic, about how best to adhere and attend to the Classical, Biblical, Medieval and Early Modern heritages that define the traditions deriving from disaffection with the events of 1688, 1776 and 1789.

Those traditions emphasise the indispensable role of the State in protecting against the market everything that conservatives seek to conserve. They offer perennial critiques of individualism, capitalism, imperialism, militarism, bourgeois triumphalism, and the fallacy of inevitable historical progress.

They uphold the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

Among the expressions of those traditions are the trade union, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Guild Socialist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and many other roots of the British, Irish and Commonwealth Labour Movements.

Variously, those roots have been embedded in, have been fed and watered by, and have grown into economic and wider patriotism locally and nationally, proud provincialism, worker-intellectualism, and organic working-class culture and self-organisation in town and country.

Don Carlos Hugo and the Carlist Left had to look to Tito’s Yugoslavia, a much-mourned entity with no shortage of good points among the bad, for the Libertad, Socialismo, Federalismo, Autogestión necessary in order to safeguard, and be safeguarded by, Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey.

In Britain, we also had and have much to learn from the past achievements of workers’ ownership, self-management and profit-sharing within a multinational state which pursued a strongly multilateral and pro-peace foreign policy while eschewing weapons of mass destruction and transnational military power blocs, and which included both culturally Christian and culturally Muslim places and peoples.

Not for nothing did the words “As a Croat and as a Catholic” have to be excised from the official record Tito’s words when, in March 1971, Pope Paul VI received him in audience.

But we never entirely needed the Yugoslav witness in quite the same way, staunchly Anglophile though it was, and perhaps for that very reason: rather, Yugoslavia needed, and knew that she needed, the British witness.

Just as we have never needed Gramsci. The insistence on the unity of theory and practice, the rejection of economic determinism and of metaphysical materialism, the celebration of the “national-popular”, an organic working-class culture and self-organisation including worker-intellectuals: we already had them all before he was born.

Set within many overlapping contexts in which they were at once moderated and moderating. Like our own Libertad, Socialismo, Federalismo, Autogestión. Not to say, our own Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey.

Since Soviet archives were opened up, all sorts of information has come to light. It is invaluably set out in Stanley G. Payne’s The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

The entire Republican cause was Comintern-directed, and the Soviet intervention was in no sense parasitic as has traditionally been supposed or asserted. For example, far from being commanded by a Canadian volunteer, the International Brigade was in fact commanded by Manfred Stern, a Soviet Commissar.

Or take Francisco Largo Cabellero, Socialist Party Leader and Popular Front Prime Minister. Entirely typically of his party, he defined it as a revolutionary force wholly distinct from British Labour or the French Socialists, and differing “only in words” from the Communists.

The Socialist Party’s 10-point programme of 1934 was wholly Leninist in form and substance, calling, among other things, for the replacement of the Army and the Civil Guard with a workers’ militia, and for the dissolution of the religious orders and the expropriation of their property. One could go on, and on, and on.

Stalin only loosened his grip once the Civil War was clearly lost, long after the Republicans themselves had given up what little commitment to democracy that they might ever have had.

Never was there a war more deserving of Henry Kissinger’s observation relating to the conflict between Iran and Iraq: “It’s a pity that only one of them can lose.”

But in the midst of all of that were the Carlists, a mass movement for Catholic Social Teaching expressed in forms including the foundation of trade unions, and for the local autonomy and distinctiveness of rural and urban working communities.

Every aspect of that was opposed by the Falangists into alliance with whom they had felt compelled by the Soviet-directed Republic, but who exiled their leaders. After the Civil War, Franco barely included the Carlists in his regime, his forces opened fire on them at least once, and he ended up giving the Throne to an Alfonsist whose tiny elite following the Carlists had understandably dismissed as, “a general staff without an army.”

And in the midst of all of that is an almost completely forgotten short chapter of British history, namely the tale of the first of our people to take up arms against Fascism. At Barcelona in 1937, they were murdered by the agents of Stalinism.

It suits certain interests to ignore the Independent Labour Party in general; its attempt to commandeer the entire Opposition benches for its three MPs in 1940 raises rather a lot of uncomfortable questions across the political spectrum.

And it suits certain interests to suppress the fact there was ever an anti-Stalinist and anti-Trotskyist Left with deep rural roots and a highly inclusive attitude, active from Britain to Catalonia via the France of Marceau Pivert and many other places besides.

There is a small plaque to the ILP Contingent in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. But nothing to compare with the Soviet-directed International Brigade’s considerable monument, at which an annual ceremony is held on London’s South Bank, together with at least four more memorials in England, three in Scotland, two in Northern Ireland, two in the Irish Republic, and one in Wales.

Watch this space.

That may also involve watching, or more than watching, a Requiem Mass for those into whose Carlist rally the Falangists hurled grenades at Bilbao on 16th August 1942. So be it.

An Atheist’s Prayer On Assisted Dying, by Kevin Yuill

Much of the discussion on Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying for the Terminally-Ill Bill seems to take place between self-professed conservatives those who hold that life is a sacred gift from God and those – normally secular liberals – who reject such religious tenets and support legalized assisted dying.

But it is possible to be an atheist, strongly support abortion rights, and feel oneself to be reasonably libertarian and entirely reject the Falconer Bill.

As a card-carrying atheist (OK – I have no card but…), I want to convince my fellow liberal minded atheists to reconsider their support for legalized assisted dying.

Why? Let us strip down the argument, first getting rid of the Orwellian term “assisted dying”.

What is happening in Oregon now and what is proposed in the Falconer Bill (which is based on the Oregon legislation), to use plain English, is suicide – and that is what this is all about.

The chief sponsoring agency (Dignity in Dying) lamely differentiates between the dying (those with six months or less to live) and those with more time.

If the latter ingest poison in a room by themselves – well, that’s suicide. But if those with less than six months take poison with the intent to end their lives, that is not suicide at all but <ahem> assisted dying. Nope, me neither.

Then, let’s look at the safeguards to prevent assisted suicide from being abused. Of course, smoke is blown from both sides of the debate.

There is little evidence that, in Oregon, vulnerable people are dragged or pressured into assisted suicides, as is sometimes alleged by opponents of assisted suicide.

But Oregon is not where to look if you want to see what an entire country – not a small part of it – looks like when voluntary death is accepted as a principle.

Instead, try Belgium, where the desire to die of two 45-year old twins who feared going blind, of a 43-year old transsexual who did not like the results of his operation, and now of terminally-ill children, are honoured. 

Or try the Netherlands, where safeguards originally allowed euthanasia only for patients who were terminally ill and suffering untreatable physical pain.

Now, euthanasia is allowed for those who are bereft, or simply lonely.

A recent campaign that gathered 133,000 signatures asked that all Dutch over 70 and “tired of life” be allowed euthanasia.

In Switzerland, which allows assisted suicide but not euthanasia, the elderly are now included as an eligible category at Exit, one of the clinics providing death on demand.

Once death is prescribed for suffering, the safeguards will be swept aside as new groups are identified for “help” for their suffering.

Then consider autonomy. “People ought to be able to control their own deaths”.

This sounds reasonable – until you think it through. Anyone, on the basis of autonomy, ought to be able to end it at any time with our help and approval.

The 22-year old lovelorn man or the 86-year old with terminal cancer have equal cases for an assisted suicide on the basis of autonomy.

The much vaunted majority of Britons supporting a change in the law dries up as only 15 per cent support assisted suicide for anyone.

What about compassion?

Doctors should continue to despatch the few (and getting fewer as pain control improves) who suffer needlessly in the last hours or days of life. But compassion is not honouring, as this law will force us to do, suicidal wishes.

The truly compassionate do not hand the suicidal patient a gun and say “you have my blessings!”

Instead, they respond to the suicidal with assurances that their lives – no matter how wretched they feel them to be and no matter how much time is left – continue to have value.

Anyone thinking hard enough about this issue will come to a mature decision that neither Britain nor humanity in general can give in to these death wishes.

You really don’t have to be a Christian.

Dr Kevin Yuill teaches American History at the University of Sunderland and is author of Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalization (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

On This Oak Apple Day, by David Lindsay

The Whig Revolution of 1688 led to very deep and very wide disaffection among Catholics, High Churchmen, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others.

 

Within those subcultures, long after the death of the Stuart cause as such with Cardinal York in 1807, there persisted a feeling that Hanoverian Britain, her Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology, imported and at least initially controlled from William of Orange’s Netherlands, were less than fully legitimate.

 

This was to have startlingly radical consequences.

 

First in seventeenth-century England and then in the eighteenth-century France that looked to that precedent, gentry-cum-mercantile republican absolutism was an inversion of Jean Bodin’s princely absolutism, itself an Early Modern aberration.

 

But what of the creation of a gentry-cum-mercantile republic in the former American Colonies? Did it, too, ultimately derive from reaction against the Stuarts, inverting their newfangled ideology against them?

 

No, it ultimately derived from loyalty to them, a loyalty which regarded the Hanoverian monarchy as illegitimate.

 

Since 1776 predates 1789, the American Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but nevertheless sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought.

 

On the Catholic side, that is perhaps Venetian. On the Protestant side, it is perhaps Dutch. On both sides, it is perhaps to be found at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.

 

There simply were Protestant Dutch Republics before the Revolution. There simply was a Catholic Venetian Republic before the Revolution. There simply were, and there simply are, Protestant and Catholic cantons in Switzerland, predating the Revolution. The literature must be there, for those who can read the languages sufficiently well.

 

Furthermore, there is no shortage of Americans whose ancestors came from the Netherlands or from Italy, and there may well be many who assume from their surnames that their bloodline is German or Italian (or possibly French) when in fact it is Swiss.

 

It is time for a few of them to go looking for these things, with a view to applying them as the radically orthodox theological critique of that pre-Revolutionary creation, the American Republic.

 

Within that wider context, far more Jacobites went into exile from these Islands than Huguenots sought refuge here.

 

The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much new science and technology to their host countries. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India.

 

And very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or in North America. New York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II.

 

The Highlanders in North Carolina spoke Gaelic into the 1890s, but in vain had the rebellious legislature there issued a manifesto in that language a century earlier: like many people of directly Scots rather than of Scots-Irish origin or descent, they remained loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War.

 

However, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688. There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland.

 

And there was Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691.

 

Many Baptists were also Jacobites, and the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the American Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.

 

Early Methodists were regularly accused of Jacobitism. John Wesley himself had been a High Church missionary in America, and Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship. Very many people conformed to the Established Church but either refused to take the Oath or declared that they would so refuse if called upon to take it.

 

With its anti-Calvinist soteriology, it high sacramentalism and Eucharistic theology, and its hymnody based on the liturgical year, early Methodism appealed to them. Wesley also supported, and corresponded with, William Wilberforce, even refusing tea because it was slave-grown; indeed, Wesley’s last letter was to Wilberforce. They wrote as one High Tory to another.

 

Wilberforce was later a friend of Blessed John Henry Newman, whose Letter to the Duke of Norfolk constitutes the supreme Catholic contribution to the old Tory tradition of the English Confessional State, in the same era as Henry Edward Manning’s Catholic social activism, and the beginning of Catholic Social Teaching’s strong critique of both capitalism and Marxism.

 

Whiggery, by contrast, had produced a “free trade” even in “goods” that were human beings. The coalition against the slave trade contained no shortage of Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists or Quakers.

 

Yet the slave trade was integral to the Whig Empire’s capitalist ideology. If slavery were wrong, then something was wrong at a far deeper level. James Edward Oglethorpe, a Jacobite, opposed slavery in Georgia. Anti-slavery Southerners during the American Civil War were called “Tories”.

 

Radical Liberals were anti-capitalist in their opposition to opium dens, to unregulated drinking and gambling, and to the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, all of which have returned as features of the British scene.

 

Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers fought as one for the extension of the franchise and for other political reforms.

 

It was Disraeli, a Tory, who doubled the franchise in response to that agitation. To demand or deliver such change called seriously into question the legitimacy of the preceding Whig oligarchy.

 

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of Catholicism, of the Anglo-Catholicism that High Churchmanship mostly became at least to some extent, of the Baptist and Reformed (including Congregational) traditions, and, above all, of Methodism, to the emergence and development of the Labour Movement.

 

Quakerism and Methodism, especially the Primitive and Independent varieties, were in the forefront of opposition to the First World War, which also produced the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, and which had a following among Anglo-Catholics of either of what were then the more extreme kinds, “English Use” and “Western Use”. Each of those included Jacobites among, admittedly, its many eccentrics.

 

Above all in Wales, where Catholic sentiment was still widely expressed in the old tongue well into the eighteenth century, Quakers and Methodists had very recently stood shoulder to shoulder with Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists, including Lloyd George, against the Boer War.

 

Paleoconservatives who would rightly locate the great American experiment within a wider British tradition need to recognise that that tradition encompasses the campaign against the slave trade, the Radical and Tory use of State action against social evils, the extension of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars.

 

All of those arose out of disaffection with Whiggery, with the Whigs’ imported capitalist system, with their imported dynasty, and with that system’s and that dynasty’s Empire.

 

A disaffection on the part of Catholics, High Churchmen (and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish and therefore also American Episcopalians), Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others.

 

Behind these great movements for social justice and for peace was still a sense that the present British State (not any, but the one then in existence) was itself somehow less than fully legitimate.

 

In other words, the view that there was ultimately something profoundly wrong about this country and her policies, both domestic and foreign, was a distant echo of an ancestral Jacobitism.

 

Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy.

 

It still does.

The Front National Could Destroy France, by David Lindsay

Like the UMP and its numerous Gaullist and Giscardien predecessor formations, the Front National, rather than individuals, factions and tendencies within it, is not immediately easy to locate within René Rémond’s theory of the three French right wings, les trois droites.

Both the UMP and, to a lesser extent, the FN now exhibit, far more than they used to, Orléanism as the bourgeois and economically liberal Franco-Whiggery against which stand both the populist traditionalism of the Legitimists and the populist authoritarianism of the Bonapartists.

There is a certain continuation of Legitimism in the more-or-less Lefebvrist wing of the FN and its electorate, but also in the Social Catholicism of a section of the old UDF and of those who look to the Gaullist conception of the strong French State with a strong Head to deliver the goods.

Not for nothing did Philippe de Villiers withdraw from the UDF over Maastricht as surely as Charles Pasqua withdrew first internally and then externally from the RPR.

Although Gaullism does have obvious Bonapartist roots, just as Boulangism did, yet the popular followings for either and both were and are at least as much Legitimist, especially deep in the countryside.

Especially there, the anti-Gaullist Right is not entirely Orléanist, either; not for nothing did it most recently rally to a man whose name was not merely Giscard, but Giscard d’Estaing.

And from where does anyone think that the popular constituency for an anti-Marxist Socialist Party first came from, or very largely still does come?

Mitterrand could never decide whether he wanted to be Louis XIV or Napoleon. But he certainly wanted to be one or the other.

Deep down, at least, one or the other was what huge numbers of his voters wanted him to be, too. Otherwise, he would never have won.

When he did win, he gave a job to Poujade, in whom the Legitimist and Bonapartist populisms of the Right met, who had endorsed him and who did so again.

To all of which, what says François Hollande, who was endorsed, after all, both by François Bayrou and by Jacques Chirac?

But more, what says the UMP?

The Legitimists celebrated patois (it was more than a century after the Revolution before anything more than half the population of France spoke French), local festivals and folk-customs, the ancient provincial boundaries, and everything else that Jacobins, Whigs, and their imitators or collaborators would wish to iron out, to put it at its very mildest, in the name of progress.

At present, the FN has a thoroughly républicain approach, not only to regional peculiarities, but also and increasingly to secularism.

However, if a new movement is indeed arising out of much or most of it and much or most of the UMP to give voice to those who would thus rise in electoral revolt against an increasingly Islamised, or at least to their mind no longer recognisably French, Île-de-France, then such a movement is likely to be most popular the further from Paris one travelled both geographically and culturally.

It is likely to be a movement very largely conducted in Breton and Corsican, in Provençal and West Flemish, in Occitan and Franconian, in Catalan and Alsatian (already spoken by a goodly number of FN supporters), even in Basque.

And even in places not quite as different as that, the call will be for ever-greater rural, traditional, Catholic, even French-speaking autonomy from a centre actually or apparently less and less characterised by such features, or even tolerant of them.

Thus, a movement sincerely intended to save France might very well end up destroying her.

Orthodox Jews and the State of Israel, by Yirmiyahu Cohen

Pope Francis’s current visit to the State of Israel, like the visits of his predecessors, represents the diplomatic relations that exist between the Vatican and the Zionist state.

We are a large community of Orthodox Jews who do not have relations with the State of Israel and who do not support its existence. Let’s take a few minutes to understand the reasons for that.

We are living in tumultuous times.

In the twentieth century, the Jewish people suffered the great tragedy of the Holocaust, and then what seemed to be a miraculous rebirth in their original homeland, the Holy Land.

Why would Orthodox Jews be against a Jewish state? Some think it is because the State of Israel is a secular state.

But that is not a complete answer, because if someone is doing something good (such as a volunteer ambulance service or an organization to feed the poor) we support it regardless of whether the activists are religious, secular or non-Jewish.

We praise the good that people do, and at the same time we reach out to our brethren who are not religious and try to show them the beauty of Torah.

So if having a state with an army were a good thing according to all, no one would be against it just because the leaders are irreligious. We would just try to make it more religious.

The best way to understand the real reason why Orthodox Jews oppose the state is by looking at Jewish history.

The Jewish people once had a state, in the time of the First and Second Temples. That state was destroyed and we were driven into exile two thousand years ago.

The Jewish belief has always been that “because of our sins we were exiled from our land,” in the words of the Prayerbook.

The exile did not come because we were weaker than our enemies; it came because it was G-d’s plan to atone for our sins. Furthermore, it was G-d’s will that the Torah should be spread all over the world.

It was always clear to the Jews that just as their exile did not come about due to their own weakness, it could not end with their own strength, only through repentance and the coming of the messiah.

Because G-d wanted us to stay in exile, He forbade us with an oath not to gather ourselves together and take over the Holy Land, and not to fight wars against the other nations.

This oath are written in the book of the Song of Songs and explained in the Talmud.

Because of this, when the Zionist idea was proposed by Herzl about a hundred years ago, almost all the rabbis in the world were opposed.

Even the rabbis who supported colonization in the Holy Land said clearly that they did not intend to fight wars and take over the land.

Moreover, the rabbis feared that a Jewish state would arouse the anger of the Arabs, who constituted 95% of the population of the Holy Land at the time the British took over during World War One. Wars would have to be waged, resulting in thousands of Jewish casualties.

After the state was founded, prominent rabbis continued to oppose it.

For example, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), was the most vocal opponent of Zionism at this time. He spoke for all his life on the subject of Zionism and published two scholarly books on the subject, proving that the existence of the state violated Jewish law.

Another vocal critic of Zionism was Rabbi Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik, who never ceased to cry over the destruction and danger brought upon the Jewish people by the State of Israel.

Today there are large groups of Jews – about half of the Orthodox world, in fact - who are opposed to the state on principle and will not wave its flag or recite prayers for it.

It is often claimed that Jews who oppose Zionism do not love the Holy Land, or do not care about the millions of Jews living there. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jews who oppose Zionism love the Holy Land so much and yearn so much for the redemption that they cannot stand to see the Holy Land turned into a mockery of the redemption by people who could not wait for G-d to fulfil His promises.

Jews who oppose Zionism love their fellow Jews in the Holy Land so much that they cannot stand to see even one life lost for the sake of a state.

Zionists, on the other hand, hear about Israeli army casualties and say, “This is the price we must pay to have a state.”

One issue in which our opposition to Zionism comes to the fore is the current effort by the Israeli government to draft the Orthodox into its army, and the Orthodox refusal to comply.

People ask: shouldn’t we do our share? The answer is that it is not only us Orthodox Jews – no Jews should serve in the Israeli army. There should not be an Israeli army or a state.

It would be like asking why Orthodox Jews do not work on Saturday – shouldn’t they do their share of the work?

The answer is, obviously, that no Jews are allowed to work on the Sabbath. It is just that the Orthodox are the only Jews who actually follow Judaism and care what the Torah has to say.

And while we cannot convince the Israelis to give up their state at the present time, we must still maintain our own adherence to the Torah, and we believe that in the end, the truth will prevail.

Being Israeli and Being Palestinian Are Twin Identities, by David Lindsay

When Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas kneel in prayer in Rome alongside Pope Francis, in what capacity will each regard the other as being there?

Being Israeli, as distinct from being Jewish, and being Palestinian, as distinct from being Arab in general and Greater Syrian in particular, are twin identities, created by exactly the same events at exactly the same time, a time which is still within living memory.

Zionism and the modern concept of Filastin (which, like Arab nationalism in general, was and is an expression among the oldest inhabitants of the Land of popular Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican Christianity as it organised itself politically among students at American “mainline” Protestant missionary universities) were both new at the time, and each had very few adherents, although of course those believed that huge numbers of other people ought to agree and identify with them.

Now, in both cases, they do. By definition, there were no Israelis before the creation of the State of Israel. But there are now, quite distinct from Jews at large, and not all Jews in any case.

Even leaving aside the large and growing Arab population, which is the majority in half of the land area within the 1948 borders, there are Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, the Russian Nazis, the East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, and the Peruvian Indians, with even the Pashtun are now classified as a Lost Tribe with a view to airlifting them to Israel in future, since at least they are not Arabs.

If Israel does not want to become a haven for Russian Nazis, then she needs to repeal the Law of Return, declaring that she is now a settled culture and society in her own right, and precluding any wildly impracticable demand for a corresponding right on the part of Palestinian refugees or their descendants.

The people who will do anything for Israel except live there, and who throw their weight around in demanding policies that suit their prejudices expressed from comfortable berths thousands of miles away, could thus be told where to go, or not to bother trying to go.

In any case, Theodor Herzl denied the possibility, once the Zionist State had been founded, that Jews, as such, could then continue to exist anywhere else. They would have lost the right to call themselves Jews, according to the founding father of Zionism.

If Hamas really can never come to terms with the existence of the State of Israel, simply as a fact of life, then with what did it imagine itself to have been negotiating, thereby scoring the significant public relations victory that was the release of hundreds of detainees in 2011?

For that matter, if Israel can never deal with Hamas, then what was she doing in the case of Gilad Shalit, and would she rather that he had been left to rot?

If there cannot be a Palestinian State, contrary to the position of the last Republican President of the United States, then with whom and with what have the Israelis ever been negotiating?

Those interlocutors do not seek recognition of a Muslim state; on the contrary, the Palestinian Authority already operates a Christian quota without parallel in Israel, though corresponding to similar arrangements in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. They do not even seek recognition of an Arab state.

Ever since 1993, they have recognised Israel within her borders before 1967, and, although they ought also to claim the territory to the east that a Palestinian State would rapidly come to include, they seek nothing more than recognition of Palestine within the territory captured in that year, the home of everyone who lives there, and if anything an emerging or emerged Orthodox Jewish refuge from godless Zionism.

The only problem is with recognising Israel as “a Jewish State”, condemning a fifth of the population, including the world's most ancient Christian communities, to the second class citizenship from which the Israeli Constitution theoretically protects them, however different the practice may be.

As things stand, Israel already deals with what can only realistically be described as a Palestinian State on so regular basis and so successful a basis that the President of that entity is openly opposed to the strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

AN Independence from Europe, by Mike Nattrass MEP

AN Independence from Europe tops your ballot paper.

It is led by Mike Nattrass MEP, who has stood at elections against the EU takeover since 1994. A vote here is a vote to leave the EU. The party currently has two MEPs and eight Councillors.

AN INDEPENDENCE FROM EUROPE rejects EU domination, as laws must be made at Westminster.

Currently, EU pressure for its members to "privatise" services causes concern. This fashion leads to threats of the privatisation of the NHS privatisation, which already struggles with debt due to excessive interest charges from private funding.

The NHS does not need privatisation of parts of the service, providing yet more costs and loss of coordination.

The global trading UK is restricted by EU domination and regulation. Leaving the EU will provide better trade with the world, including our Commonwealth and the EU.

Liberation from the EU will close “open borders.” The UK will control the influx of people by work permits and scrutiny, easing pressure on housing, schools, hospitals and local authority services, whilst helping to employ unskilled workers and the young.

The cost of EU membership (more than £55m a day) is wasted money, which should be invested in the UK.

The EU, having failed its accounts for 19 years, shows no sign of stopping massive levels of fraud.

The party say that back in the 1970s, Edward Heath assured voters that “The Common Market” was about trade and would not affect sovereignty.

The status changed to European Union (note the word Union), and the President of the Commission now states, “This is the new European Empire into which you have pooled your sovereignty.”

The fraud of our entry and surrender into the hands of the EU is well-known, and the people of the UK should repudiate any illegal agreement seeking to take power from Westminster.

Regulations, many unsuitable for the UK, are set into concrete by the EU. Changes, approved by all 28 countries of the Union, make alterations next to impossible.

Thus, privatisation of our postal service and post offices was lead by EU regulations stopping subsidy and opening up the “monopoly”.

The Lib/Lab/Con Party voted for these regulations with apparent glee. The subsequent result has been increases in stamp costs, more junk mail, and Post Office closures.

Both party MEPs voted against these EU measures.

An Independence from Europe says that Westminster is the place where UK law and regulations must be made, not Brussels where “one size fits all” and bureaucracy rules to the extent of insanity.

A vote for An Independence from Europe is a vote to leave the EU.

At the top of your ballot paper is your option to vote clearly against EU membership.

The National Health Action Party, by Deborah Harrington

The National Health Action Party was launched 18 months ago by doctors and health workers seriously concerned at the impact of the government’s massive top down NHS reorganisation.

This has wasted billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. It has also led to the closure of A&E departments and local hospitals, massive understaffing of doctors and nurses, harmful rationing of care and the NHS 111 shambles.

One of the co-founders is the former Independent MP and physician Dr Richard Taylor, who won at two general elections campaigning against the closure of his local hospital at Kidderminster.

The other is cancer specialist Clive Peedell, who has announced he will be challenging David Cameron in Witney in 2015.

Their vision is to create a party which will put the health of the nation back at the heart of the nation and the heart of our national politics.

We believe that the NHS means more than a system of healthcare. Its creation as a social institution reflected national solidarity, expressed the values of equity and universalism, and institutionalised the duty of government to care for all in society.

The NHS marked out a space where the dictates of commerce were held in check.

Those values are under attack from increasing commercialisation and the Coalition’s Health & Social Care Act (2012), which removed the duty of government to provide a health care service for all.

There is clear evidence that the privatisation of the NHS is accelerating under this government.

On just one day recently, £1.2bn of contracts were put out to tender. Since last April 70% of all contracts put out to tender have gone to non NHS commercial companies.

We are standing a full slate of candidates in London in the Euro elections.

Our principal candidates are healthcare professionals who have been involved in the fight to save our services.

Our focus is on the NHS, which faces having the privatisation irretrievably locked in by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement currently being negotiated between the EU and US.

We are calling for the NHS to be exempted from this deal.

Our policies are founded on the relationship between health and all other aspects of our national economy. 

Health care provision is fundamental to addressing issues of housing, education, poverty, food standards and employment.

Dr Louise Irvine is standing in London as one of our candidates for the European election. Dr Irvine is Chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign and led a successful court action against Jeremy Hunt in both the High and Appeal Court in defence of her hospital. She has this to say about the importance of your vote:

“Our key challenge in defending the NHS is that most people don’t know what is happening to it – it is being privatised and starved of funds. They have been kept deliberately in the dark. So anything which helps get the word out and gains much needed attention on the issue is worth doing.

Winning a Euro seat on a single NHS issue would have a huge impact. It would show people were waking up to what was happening and were angry. It would put the NHS on the political agenda. A recent poll showed that 1 in 4 people think the NHS is the most important political issue yet this is not reflected in media coverage.”

We are also standing a small number of candidates at local council level, in Cheltenham (St Paul’s ward), Rotherham (Sitwell ward), Plymouth (Plympton St Mary ward), Liverpool (Anfield & Wavertree wards), Enfield (Town ward) and Fulham (Munster ward).

Vote for the NHS, or lose the NHS. The choice really is that clear.

Why Vote in the European Elections?, by Alan Sked

Last time about a third of the British electorate voted in the European elections. Two thirds did not bother. Most Europeans did not bother. Why should they have?

The European Parliament cannot change anything. It rarely knows what is going on. The unelected European Commission initiates policy, agrees with the Council in secret how to shape legislation and gets the federalists in Parliament to rubber stamp almost everything whether they are aware of what is happening or not.

The European Court of Justice will always paper over any cracks with legal approval later.

There is no official opposition in the Parliament. There would be no point of having one. It might conceivably vote out the Commission (this happened once) but most Commissioners would just return (they did last time) and the same politicians and bureaucrats would run things.

Party manifestoes in European elections cannot therefore make promises that can be implemented. There is no democratically elected government to change or toss out of office.

The EU is anti-democratic. It is run by people who failed at politics in their own states (Brittan, Kinnock, Patten, Mandleson etc.). Baroness Ashton, the Labour Party’s former quango queen, who heads foreign affairs, has never been elected to anything in her life.

When small states vote down treaties in referendums, they are forced to vote again till they get it right. The Constitutional Treaty which was voted down by the French and Dutch was, of course, altered by 5% and pushed through parliaments as the Lisbon Treaty.

Since these treaties are all technically amendments to the Treaty of Rome, they should all fail if they do not achieve the necessary unanimous vote. They should never be resurrected. People who oppose them cannot ask for new votes in states that vote yes.

Yet what Brussels wants, Brussels gets.

Recently that has included imposing technocratic governments to replace elected ones in Greece and Italy, and ordering these governments and others to pass precise legislation according to a precise timetable designed in Brussels and Berlin.

In any case, according to the Interior Ministry in Berlin, 80% of all European domestic legislation now originates in Brussels anyway. The leader of the EU Liberals, Graham Watson, put the figure at 75%.

The EU is also corrupt. Its expenses, salaries, perks and pensions are an affront to the European unemployed created by its failed single currency experiment.

Its accounts have not been signed off by the European Court of Auditors for at least eighteen years. If it were a  trading company it would have to cease trading.

Membership costs a bomb. According to independent cost-benefit analyses the annual cost of EU membership to Britain is about 4% of GDP –10% if opportunity costs are factored in. That is £40 billion or £100 billion.

But is the EU really necessary?

It represents a rapidly declining share of world GDP; has no defence or security profile; has no influence in foreign affairs; and is in demographic decline. Once Germany’s population goes down by 20% over the next few decades, its leading economy will be sunk.

So why keep this useless bureaucratic monstrosity? To stop war in Europe? The only threat to Europeans after 1945 was posed by the USSR.  That was deterred by NATO and the USA’s nuclear arsenal, not the EU.

To raise living standards? It doesn’t do that anymore. No, we need a post-EU Europe.

Please do not vote in the forthcoming European elections. The mainstream parties are peddling lies about the EU and its benefits.

UKIP, which I founded, has no reason to be there. Its previous MEPs have mostly been incompetents or charlatans, who play no constructive part in the parliament and have been corrupted by expenses.

Every true democrat should stay at home.

The View from Durham Roundabout, by Godfrey Bloom MEP

We shall soon be asked to cast our vote on the Euro Elections, a mysterious organisation to most people who are largely bewildered as to membership implications.

Can they be blamed? Public sector broadcasting and the press, both extremely partisan never seem to bother to outline how it works or how it affects their lives.

Over 70% of our law now comes from Brussels. The only serious in depth study on Brussels and National Law was by the German Government who came to the figure of 80%. These estimates are broadly unchallenged by the Commission or Bureaucracy.

At election time some politicians try to spin it is 10% because the House of Commons only logs community law via a rather arcane assessment procedure. This is too absurd to go into here.

English Law is based on common law and statute law and can be traced, as a system, back to the time of Alfred the Great. Well before Magna Carta.

European Law, Corpus Juris or Napoleonic Code if you prefer is prescriptive. It tells you that which you may do rather than that which you may not. This means since joining the EU our system has been overtaken by the highly legalistic approach to government.

We now have had more law passed since 1997 than the entire period from the Bill of Rights of 1688/9 to the election of the Blair government. In the last 10 years I have seen about 2000 pieces of legislation a year go through the ‘parliament’ which is the amending chamber. Most of it is trivial.

Or is it? A few examples, novelty food ingredients, bottle shapes and sizes, tractor seats, tail gate lights and light filaments, the list is endless. Energy, food labelling, fishery, agriculture, employment policy all come from Brussels.

My desk in the last 10 years has been swamped with pleas from small businesses to vote against some piece of legislation. The effect of which would be to put them out of business. Three packaging companies, a bottling plant and a vending machine company to mention just a few.

The lawyer, regulator and civil servant love all this. Jobs for the boys.

Big businesses dislikes it but know that the unholy political alliance works in their favour. Small and medium size businesses account for nearly 80% of the UK economy and they are in despair.

The political rhetoric is less than helpful. Almost impossible to discern the truth and then translate it into the sound bite land of television.

‘3 million jobs depend on our membership’, an absurdity of infinite and obvious stupidity. The proposition that political union is essential to trade is economically illiterate on an awesome scale.

Over 40 countries now have completely free trade agreements with the EU without the baggage of petty regulation that spews forth from it.

Stand at the roundabout in Durham City and watch Hyundai’s, Kia’s, Subaru’s and Jeep’s shoot past. Our shops are stuffed with Chinese goods. Your vacuum cleaner was probably made in Malaysia.

The argument is to frighten the factory workers whose company has a European export market. Is it likely they will impose tariffs when we are massive net importers from Europe?

Will BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen stand for tariffs? Of course not. Our trade grows exponentially with North America and the Far East. It continues to shrink with the EU.

Demographically and economically the EU is in decline. Addicted to welfarism, statism, bureaucracy and crony capitalism we are already entering the end game.

Youth unemployment is 50% in Greece, Southern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. Averages 30% everywhere else with the exception of Germany (9%). This is unsustainable in any society.

Even Germany who bankrolls the EU has a debt ratio of 80% of GDP. It is owed £900 billion by the shadow banking system.

Like the rest of the world, government debt is beyond any hope of repayment and default or hyperinflation is the inevitable outcome. No it is not different this time.

So, whom do you vote for in the election?

The fiat currency debt Tsunami will actually make it irrelevant as the EU in five years time will not exist as it does now.

If you believe in the European dream, which is not incidentally an ignoble one, the honest vote is Liberal Democrat.

If you want self-government, or indeed even self-misgovernment, vote UKIP.