Will the German embassy protest, one wonders? Hardly the spirit of reconciliation.
|
|||||
|
Most of our readers probably know Tony Robinson best as the much put-upon Baldrick at the bottom of the Blackadder pecking order. He has cunning plans, but they don’t work. However, last night I watched a Tony Robinson effort that was slightly more substantial than one of Baldrick’s plans, and an interesting sign of the times in this United Kingdom of ours, namely a couple of Channel 4 TV shows about the history of the British monarchy. I missed the early part of the first of the two hour-long shows that airedlast night, but my understanding is that in the first, Mr Robinson started out investigating Richard III and ended up by satisfying himself that the current official Royal Family is descended from a deception, in the form of Edward IV. Edward IV was born in 1442, having been conceived the regulation number of months before that in Rouen, France. Both the circumstances surrounding that birth, and the gossip which it immediately gave rise to say that Edward IV’s biological father wasn’t the King of England that he should have been, but was instead a French soldier whom the Queen had a brief fling with. Edward IV looked nothing like his official dad. More fuss was made when his younger brother was born than when he was. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Richard III alluding to the gossip to the effect that Richard III’s rival was a bastard. And so on. Robinson even had himself a bona fide historian on hand to back this up with some new documentary evidence which further proved that the king was nowhere near Rouen when he should have been to be Edward’s biological dad. It is possible – not likely but possible – that there will be an explosion of comments on this posting from people we don’t usually hear from, because believe it or not, the rights and wrongs of whether or not Richard III was or was not the Bad Thing that Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, and now Ian McKellen, have portrayed him as remains a live issue among a certain sort of rather eccentric English person. The argument goes that Richard had the Princes in the Tower killed, not because he was a swine and wanted the Real Monarchy out of the way, but because he considered it his painful but patriotic duty to put and end to a couple of nationally disruptive fakes. So, having satisfied himself that our actual monarchy isn’t our real monarchy, in the second of his two programmes, Robinson proceeded to chase down who our Real Monarch now is. To cut a long story short, this real King of England is a bloke called Mike Hastings, who left England to live in Australia in his teens, has had a great life there, and who actually voted for a Republic in the latest Aussie referendum on that subject. (I’m only making this up if Tony Robinson was too.) Mike and his disbelieving and frankly rather suspicious not to say rather contemptuous daughters were shown chuckling over it all, when Robinson arrived to visit him with a film crew. Although, it’s fair to add that Mike did take his ancestry seriously enough to possess his own chart, which luckily confirmed all of Robinson’s conclusions about his ancestry. It was a thoroughly enjoyable programme, and on the whole Robinson didn’t try to make too much of things. By their own rules, the monarchs of England aren’t as kosher as they would like. If those rules had worked out differently, things would have been different. That was what he was really saying. His main conclusion wasn’t that Queen Elizabeth II should now be knocked off her throne. It was that we live in a rum old world. → Continue reading: Baldrick’s revenge – Britain’s Real Monarch is an Australian bloke called Mike! January 4th, 2004 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Last night, while wandering through Soho to a dinner party, I encountered these posters, in Berwick Street. Luckily I have taken – Perry de Havilland style – to carrying my Canon A70 digital camera with me at all times, so I was able to snap them. (Some other snaps of the Oxford Street Christmas lights were not nearly so successful, unless you are heavily into abstract impressionism.)  I do not know who put them up. Searching for visuals on the net is a lot harder than searching for strings of words or for organisations. For example I could find no trace of this poster here. Still, a pleasing straw in the wind, I think. There is a huge irony happening here, I think. Like it or not, there is a widespread – not universal but widespread – opposition in Britain to the Iraq war, and now to the presence of victorious British troops staying out there to try to win the peace. The opponents of this effort have done a great deal to spread the idea that Mr Blair is a man not to be trusted, and a man who doesn’t listen to public opinion. True or not, this charge, it now seems to me, is getting around, and is spilling over into the EUrope debate. The sense that, in matters EUropean also as well as Middle Eastern, Blair is pushing a personal and misguided agenda in defiance of the opinions or interests of his fellow countrymen, is becoming more and more dug in. Iraq = Blair can not be trusted and won’t listen = Britain being in EUrope is dodgy too. The key to this series of public opinion dominoes, so to speak, is that there is a great non-political slab of people who, unlike the leftist opponents of the Iraq war and Iraq peace, are willing to apply the same thinking both to Iraq and to EUrope (and to everything else Mr Blair is doing or not doing), in sufficient numbers to make a difference. December 30th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
When it comes to anti-capitalist activism, the papier-mache puppet brigade are merely a bunch of blowhards and wannabes. The true professionals are the ones who are not just chanting about it, they are actually doing it for real:
Must be a reward for all their increased hard work and productivity.
For all those people who are at a loss to understand why the satellites of the former Soviet Union are so eager to sign up to the Belgian Empire, now you know the answer. The loyalty of their political classes is bought and paid for.
The moonbats may be a reliable source of comedy, but they are not the real threat. December 18th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Belmont Club has a couple of fascinating entries that mesh well with my last post on the tranzi menace. Collect the set! I was particularly struck by the Club’s take on the immediate post-9/11 tranzi reaction:
As always, Belmont Club’s full analysis of the prospects for the future shape of international order are worth pondering. The Club posits a bottom-up New World Order founded on common law that contrasts sharply with the top-down command-and-control vision of the transnational progressives. December 18th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The transnational progressives have a new power grab underway – their attempt to seize control of the trial of Saddam Hussein and move it to the ICC or some other “international court.” I think it would be a very serious mistake to indulge the tranzis on this issue, as it would serve to validate and legitimize the most noxious pillar of their ideology. The transnational progressive movement has a consistent theme: that governments should be answerable primarily to some overarching international authority, rather than to their own citizens. The pernicious (and unstated) part of this theme is that last phrase – the tranzis never state, and may not even recognize, that as governments become more accountable to outside authorities, they become less accountable to their own citizens. The EU project is certainly an attempt to implement this ideal, as was last year’s attempt by the UN to control US foreign policy and military apparatus in the Iraqi, campaign. Readers will, I’m sure, be able to multiply examples, as the tranzis are nothing if not consistent in their top-down approach to accountability and control. For the tranzis, the problem of rogue or abusive governments is not that such governments are too powerful and/or insufficiently accountable to their own citizen/subjects. After all, the source of legitimacy for this lot is not the consent of the governed; rather legitimacy can apparently only be conferred from above. Thus, the creation, from whole cloth, of international institutions such as the UN or International Criminal Court, so that there is a higher, transnational, authority to judge and confer legitimacy on the doings of national governments. Of course, being made answerable to the “international community” (read: other governments) comes at the cost of being accountable to your own citizenry. This is the reason that the whole tranzi project is fundamentally corrupt, and corrupting. In my book, consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy. Period. Discussion over. Turn out the lights as you leave. The tranzi project is corrosive of the consent of the governed, because it substitutes the consent of other governments for the consent of the governed. The whole meme/dynamic is on full display in Iraq right now. The tranzis and their project are the long-term enemies of liberty, my friends, as much as or more so than your penny-ante domestic politician. Many thanks to Tacitus for his rather more brutal assessment of the tranzi attempt to shove the Iraqis out of the way and seize control Saddam’s fate, which got the juices flowing this morning. December 17th, 2003 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
The French Government has reacted with fury to the news that Saddam Hussein has been captured by US forces. Speaking to reporters in Paris this evening, the Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, denounced the arrest of the former Iraqi leader as ‘an act of international piracy’:
His words were echoed at a meeting of EU Ministers in Brussels this evening. Speaking on behalf of the assembled ministers, Dutch Commissioner Willy Van Der Pimp issued a warning to the Americans not to ‘go it alone’:
The Council of Ministers will meet again tomorrow in emergency session to draw up an action plan. December 14th, 2003 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
But still under sentence of death. That is why I have such mixed feelings about the apparent breakdown of talks to finalise an EU Constitution:
The can play it up, down or any way they damn well please. This is not the end, merely a brief setback. There is far too much vested interest in this wretched process for it to be simply left at that. Nor has this impasse been brought about by anything as welcome as reflection or second thoughts. Assuming any of the participants have ever read this monstrous charter, it is probably a stretch to assume that they have even given it a first thought. No, the bandwagon has been brought to a grinding halt by an intractable bunfight over their respective
Glueing an entire continent into a permanent state of indenture will have them feverish to sign the dotted lines but fail to stroke their egos sufficiently in the process and they will make a brave stand. I have long since passed the point of expecting reason or common sense to prevail; there is not enough of either of those qualities among Europe’s political classes to fill a thimble. But at least their over-arching need to all get their snouts in the trough has worked in our favour (albeit for now). But, lest we forget, Mr Velveteen (and his huddle of Vichyites in the Foreign Office) is no better. He simply cannot wait to get this whole train back onto the tracks:
If Mr Blair gets his way this country will cease to exist in any meaningful or material sense. We will have been delivered up as a mere component of a big, despotic, inescapable dirigiste asset-stripping operation. This is what he wants and he wants it more than anything else. But why? Why does he want to assassinate this country? What is impelling him and this cadre of political fixers to want to drive a dagger through our hearts? If we can find the answers to those questions then maybe we have a means of turning this stay of execution into a true and lasting victory. December 14th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am reminded of an old, inscrutible Oriental saying: time is a slow but fair judge:
How long until George Bush scores a higher approval rating among Europeans than Brussels does? December 9th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just how long will the European Union last? Unarguably it is well dug in. Will it hang in there just long enough to condemn an entire continent to a painful and lingering death? Few people are prepared to confront such a possibility or even entertain any such notion. Fortunately, one of those few is Ruth Lea:
And, as if right on cue, yet another set of Brussels-mandated employment regulations comes into effect in the UK today. → Continue reading: Laughable December 2nd, 2003 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
The past is not another country, it is another world. Remember all that strutting triumphalism of the EU enthusiasts? Remember their blustering certitude and stainless steel non-stick bravura? The European Union was unstoppable, invincible and the wave of the future. It was an historically-inevitable behemoth gearing up to straddle the globe and lock all of mankind into its eternal Bonapartist embrace. Soon there would not be so much as a single molecule on the face of the earth that would not be regulated by Brussels. Resistance was futile and dissent was pointless. It was written in stone. The European union will conquer the known universe! That was then. This is now:
Victory is within sight. Just one, big, final push and we can send the whole rotten edifice crashing down. [My thanks to Peter Briffa for the link.] November 30th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Exactly a week ago, last Friday evening, I attended a discussion at the home of CNE boss Tim Evans, one of his Putney Debates. Alex Singleton spoke eloquently about what a fine thing free markets are and how difficult it is for the government to do as well. Also present at the discussion was a long-time friend of London libertarianism by the name of Bruce. Bruce has been living in Spain for the last decade or so, but is now back in London, and during the discussion he said something very interesting which stuck in my mind, and which I now realise deserves the attention of this blog. For as along as I can remember, whenever we’ve met up, Bruce has been telling me that the Spaniards have had a much more sensible attitude towards the EU than the British, which is that if they don’t like any particular EUro-regulation or EUro-imposition, they just ignore it. Why, he would ask, can’t the British just learn to do the same? That’s a sentiment I think we’ve heard here quite a lot also, whenever we’ve been arguing about the nuances of the EU. This time, however, he said something different. Apparently, in Spain, a class of pestilential busybodies who take EUro-stupidity seriously is starting to form and to make its pestilential presence felt, and the Spaniards are starting to notice this, and to get rather fidgety. To put it another way, instead of the sensible Spanish practice – of ignoring all this EUro-nonsense and just carrying on baking bread, fishing for fish, being a bit rude to the occasional ethnic minority, driving as they please, dodging VAT, and so on and so on, the way they always have – spreading to Britain, the British practice, of taking all such drivel seriously, on account of it being the law and all that, is now spreading to Spain. And my guess would be, this tendency isn’t confined to Spain. This official bEUrocratic infestation process, if it is indeed happening, strikes me as a lot more significant than the grumbling that is now occurring throughout the Euro area about inflation, because this ‘inflation’ could just be a one-off effect from the switch from the local currencies to the Euro. Yes, prices have gone up a gut-wrenching amount, and a lot more than is being officially admitted, but presumably that effect will calm down, and in due course be forgotten. But this hideous tribe of meddling EUro-despots look like being a permanent and ever-growing presence, and the hatred of them seems likely only to grow and grow. I don’t have any links to stories which might back up any of this, but of course commenters may well be able to correct that omission. November 21st, 2003 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||