I don’t think it would sound terribly controversial to say that England wasn’t born yesterday. It has been lovingly nurtured over two millennia by sage men expressing their affection for this ‘green and pleasant land’ by building up institutions that don’t just help England thrive — they enable her to survive as England; they are England.
Destroy those institutions one by one, and England becomes less. Continue this attrition, and it won’t take long for England to become something else. To stop being England in other words. Do you wish this to happen? I know I don’t.
Yet that is precisely what’s under way at present, and the demolition is presided over by a government that has the gall to call itself conservative. By way of illustration, I’ll cite just three examples, of many — these are work in progress, so perhaps an outside chance exists that the ‘progress’ will be nipped in the bud. (This is more in the nature of hope than expectation.)
One is the plan to turn the House of Lords into a fully elected chamber, to be called Senate or some such. We already have a Supreme Court, so why not restyle the Queen as Governor, the Commons as legislature and be done with it? Then we can apply for statehood within the USA — provided they agree to pay the EU off.
This displays such a barbaric ignorance of England’s constitution that no such savage ignoramus ought to be allowed to leave school, never mind enter politics. It has been known since Plato and Aristotle that the most just and viable government is one that keeps various political systems in fine balance. Practically the only Western country that has historically achieved such a balance to resounding success is England.
The demos had its interests represented in a democratically elected Commons, an unelected monarch provided the overall authority, and an aristocratic House of Lords made sure that the power of neither the monarch nor the people would become tyrannical. In practice, the dominant power has been vested in the Commons since 1688 — but it was securely checked by the other two branches, none of which was held hostage to political pressures, as elected officials inevitably are.
It was also assumed that the peers, who owned so much land in England for generations, had umbilical links with the country and would therefore do their utmost to protect it against either royal tyranny or mob rule. Hence having an elected upper chamber is a travesty — the house built brick by brick over centuries will collapse, and our assorted spivocrats will lord over the ruins. Which is why they, regardless of their party affiliation, are pushing for this obscenity to become a fact soon. Never mind bono publico. Their own bono is all that matters.
Another institution that lies at the heart of England is the Anglican Church, of which the Queen is Supreme Governor. Yet speaking the other day at Lambeth Palace to leaders of various faiths, Her Majesty saw fit to declare that, ‘[The Church’s] role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.’ Someone forgot to tell that to Richard Hooker.
In all humility, the Queen got it wrong. The role of the Church is precisely ‘to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions’ — as it is the role of the Supreme Governor of the Church to act as Defender of the Faith. The faith, Your Majesty, not any old ‘faith’ — Jack of all faiths, Supreme Governor of none. As Supreme Governor of the Church, it isn’t the monarch’s role, and nor is it the Church’s, to protect the freedom of any kind of worship. This may be her role as head of state, but that’s another hat, or rather crown, that she wears.
May I humbly remind Her Majesty of this exchange that took place on 2 June, 1953.‘Archbishop. Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them? Queen. All this I promise to do.’
The Coronation Oath didn’t mention any commitment to even-handed multiculturalism. However, as you can see, it did mention other commitments that sound as if they just may be at odds with Her Majesty’s statement the other day. Score another one for our spivocrats in all three major parties.
The third institution that’s currently under attack is marriage, and therefore family. Neither Plato nor Aristotle would have recognised its critical significance. They were champions of agora politics, where men expressed themselves not as individuals but as citizens. Home for them was but a bedroom and a dining room, and they — and their wives — easily floated from marriage to marriage, and, in every possible combination of sexes, from one lover to the next. If a heterosexual dalliance or marriage produced children, then Plato advocated their becoming wards of the state, so that every citizen could assume that someone roughly his own age could be his biological sibling.
Christianity changed all that by privatising the spirit and internalising man. People would now express themselves not by arguing in the public square, but by contemplating and praying at home or church. The Western world that reflected this seismic shift, the most revolutionary one in history, abandoned the overarching polis and began to rely instead on small, tight, familial bodies: guild, parish, village, township. And of course family was by far the most important of all familial institutions — the building block of Western society.
And it’s this building block that’s in the process of being knocked out of the house and smashed to smithereens. All three parties — and many clergymen — are pushing for ‘same-sex’, which is to say homosexual, marriage to gain equal status with what any sane Westerner would recognise as proper marriage. Family is of course the major competitor to the congenital megalomania of the modern state, and so it has to be destroyed for our spivocrats to reign supreme. It has already been largely deprived of any religious significance — now its social value will be discounted to practically zero. Since Abraham, marriage has been understood as a union between a man and a woman, with the propagation of our race being its social function. That’s why all three Abrahamic religions treat marriage as a sacrament and hold it in high esteem.
But of course such arguments don’t work for either our spivocrats or their flock. According to them, the dial is reset in every generation, and each subsequent generation is so much more advanced than any of its predecessors. So those anomic creatures in Westminster feel perfectly justified in destroying institutions that have proved their paramount value over millennia.
Do you love England? So reach for a handkerchief. And, once your eyes are dry, do something about it while England is still there. What’s left of it.