According to Wikipedia ...

On this day ... 1781 – The crew of the overcrowded British slave ship Zong killed 133 African slaves by dumping them into the sea in order to claim insurance.

Any excuse to show this painting, Turner's "Slave Ship":

International Democracy

Telegraph: The Iraq war was not “legitimate” because Britain and the US failed to win international support for the 2003 invasion, Sir Jeremy Greenstock has told the official inquiry into the war.

Sir Jeremy, who was Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations between 1998 and 2003, believed the war was legal under the terms of successive UN resolutions, but did not have “democratic backing”, he told the Iraq Inquiry.

Well, what on earth does that mean?

“I regarded our invasion of Iraq as legal but of questionable legitimacy, in that it didn’t have the democratically observable backing of the great majority of member states or even, perhaps, of a majority of people inside the UK."

I get the last part. But what is democratic about the UN? Nothing, and thank the Lord for it too. As we know through our experience of the European Union, once an assembly is popularly elected, it can begin claiming it draws its sovereignty and authority from its electors, the people. In the UN's case, as in the case of the EU, this would then render it superior to our own national legislature. Which is not what you want to do with an organisation that gives responsibility to safeguarding human rights to the likes of Cuba and China.

The nation-state is the highest political reality; there is nothing above or beyond it. Whether the UN's collection of "member-states" agreed with the invasion of Iraq is an irrelevant and dangerous question. It distracts from other, more important questions, like whether it was in the national interest in the first place.

God forbid

Times Online: Gordon Brown today sparked controversy on the eve of the Commonwealth summit by suggesting he backs the sweeping away of 300-year-old laws that prevent Roman Catholics ascending to the Throne.

... Mr Brown, anxious to enhance his reputation for constitutional reform, seems determined to push the issue.

And there you go. A three century old law is to be thrown out the window, regardless of why it was created in the first place, because a joyless, uninspiring Scot wants to try and save his ruined reputation.

Why is he so keen for that particular reputation, anyway? There are plenty of other things more people get more annoyed about. Is it something discussed hotly at ex-prime minister dinner parties? Or is it because he's cocked everything else up so terribly?Clearly he's forgotten he's already urinated on the constitution.

Our ancestors created this law because of the religious settlement of this country, and because it's illogical for the sovereign of our nation to be bound to the directives of an external authority, to hold his highest loyalty to a foreign earthly body. God forbid one day we'd have a prime minister who actually understood the constitution of the country he governed.

Without Consultation

The new Supreme Court has ruled on its first 'big' case. This should have been a landmark in UK law, the first time the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, that cost a staggering £56.9 million, had been forced to step up to make a big decision.

But no, it's role was purely to interpret a law created by an unelected and unaccountable assembly in Brussels. That's quite fitting, actually, considering the main reason the Court exists, the only reason our tried-and-tested constitutional settlement has been pulled apart, is because of our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights.

There's always something repugnant about the destruction of a constitutional settlement that has grown and evolved in this country through the centuries around the monarchy and the unlimited supremacy of the Crown-in-Parliament, for the sake of what is deemed by modern political scientists to be 'correct' and 'democratic'.

But it's even worse when it is done because of interpretation by lawyers of a document which our Government had little or no influence over, created by another group of foreign lawyers, and which we have been offered no say. Perhaps the worst thing about it is that an initiative intended to make us more 'democratic' was done without consultation with the British people.

Regulation of Airguns

BBC News: The UK government has announced a list of new powers it wants to transfer from Westminster to the Scottish Parliament, under its response to the Calman Commission review of devolution.

We have to assume that this is Labour's response to the fact that they know longer 'hold' Scotland and to the SNP. Personally, I believe the SNP's electoral fortunes had little to do with a spirit for Scottish independence, and more to do with the fact that everyone hates Labour.

Nevertheless, we still have these proposals. And apart from a small increase in the amount the Scottish Executive can vary income tax, they're a very trivial bunch, like regulation of airguns and suchlike.

What's more, there's still no hint from Labour, or anybody else for that matter, that they wish to solve the constitutional nightmare that they've created with regards to the position of the United Kingdom Parliament. At the moment, we have three devolved assemblies, all with completely degrees of power and influence. We have a situation where MPs from the devolved regions still have a say on matters that don't effect their own constituencies. And all the solutions that would keep these assemblies are unsatisfactory and abhorrent.

Just get rid of them.

Community of Communities

I read in the local paper that my old high school had a "culture workshop" the other day, where students got "the opportunity to learn about other cultures".

Funny, considering they know sod all about their own.

Working More Closely

Today, we learned that "Irish republican terrorists tried to blow up a police building in Belfast and murder police officers in an ambush in Fermanagh last night", both attacks part of what police say is "growing terrorist activity".

Last week a mortar bomb was discovered hidden on a roadside in Armagh. Police said it was designed to kill officers.

Earlier this month, the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) reported that the republican terrorist threat in Northern Ireland was at its highest level for almost six years.

The IMC, which collates information provided to it by all the security services, said that the two main republican groups, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, were working more closely together to increase the threat posed to security forces.

This is the same weekend that the Northern Ireland First Minister, DUP leader Peter Robinson has to deliver a pledge that he "would not be walking away" from power-sharing with Sinn Fein, although he could no longer guarantee the future of the assembly.

Terrorist violence, of course, feeds upon the hope of success. The Good Friday Agreement was a surrender to terrorism, from which comes that hope of success for the 'dissident' republican groups. So long as the faintest hope exists that Ulster can be removed from the United Kingdom and attached to a foreign country by force, terrorism in the province, however 'small', shall persist. And in forcing the unionist majority to share power with former advocates of republican violence, the Government is doing nothing but fueling that activity.

At European Level

There were some commentators earlier this week who, when it was announced that Van Rompuy was to be the President "of Europe", said that this was a victory for the European Commission. And so it is. The Council of Ministers is powerless as well as the European Parliament, and now the new executive figure is, to all intents and purposes, the EC's puppet.

Hence his words this week all replicate what Barroso and his ilk have said at some time or another. For patriots across the Continent, they're devastating:

"The financing of the welfare state, irrespective of the social reform we implement, will require new resources ... The possibility of financial levies at European level needs to be seriously reviewed."

We can see, then, that Van Rompuy is pushing for the full implementation of the governing apparatus and functions of a nation-state. And thus we begin to see the formation of a very bureaucratic, very wasteful, very European state structure.

She-Ogre Rising

Last week, I was unfortunate enough to have to listen to Carol Ann Duffy's The Last Post as I watched the Armistice Day service at Westminster Abbey. It was like throwing up and seeing the pizza you'd eaten six hours previous wallowing in the vomit, for I had to endure the cliche-filled whining of this enter-button crazed cantankerous cretin for three years prior to this.

For she - who looks like a fatter, manlier Eric Idle (sorry, Eric) - is the darling of the left-wing elite: female, bisexual, vegetarian, Marxist to the core, who has developed a seething resentment of all men thanks to growing up in a household dominated by her father and four brothers, and because of a failed relationship with a much older man in her youth. You can see, then, why them what run things are so eager to brush Keats, Tennyson and Wordsworth from the curriculum in favour of this egotistically and physically bloated she-ogre:

Fortunately, Sean Gabb has already taken it apart (as hard as it is):

Where is the exalted language? Where is the known rhythmical pattern? ... What we have here is not poetry. Its lack of rhythmical structure aside, there is nothing beautiful or memorable about it ... I say that Last Post is not poetry and is mediocre as prose ...

Go and read the whole thing. For some of us it's even educational.

The answer, I think, to Miss Duffy’s popularity and official endorsement is the democratisation of the arts. The modern movement was motivated in part by a snobbish elite that wanted things to praise that ordinary people could not appreciate. Since then, however, the idea has taken hold that anything that everyone cannot do should be shunned. When the Victorians spoke of bringing the arts to the people, what they had in mind was Beethoven at sixpence a head in the Crystal Palace. What it means today is praising stuff that anyone could have created.

The Way We Live Now

Cranmer writes today again on the Pope's invitation for Anglo-Catholics to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury's rebuke and converse invitation for more reformist Catholics to defect to the Anglican Communion. However, Cranmer does note that he feels too much "fuss" is being made of it, and, in a previous post, "wonders if the arrival of the Catholic-Anglicans might not be a Trojan horse of unintended reformation within the Roman Catholic Church".

But I think it does matter. The Church of England has never been a strict, uniform religious institution. What it was, and is, though, is the nation. The Reformation was not so much a religious event than a political one. It was an affirmation of the principle that the crown of England was subject to no other earthly authority, and that no law made for England should be made outside England. Crucial to it was a rejection of papal authority. With this, the national church became the nation.

Defectors to the new wing of the Roman Catholic Church must, then, not consider themselves 'Anglicans'. It would be a nonsense.

But we're not going to attack the 'defectors' here. Abandoning the church of your family and your country cannot be an easy decision, after all. Instead, questions need to be asked, and it is not whether "more orthodox-minded Roman Catholics may be as delighted to see the back of the pro-Vatican II liberals, progressives and ‘trendies’ as some in the Church of England may be delighted by the departure of the ‘closet-Catholics’". To me, because of the historical nature of the Church, that seems irrelevant. They should be questions like, why a church designed to be a 'via media', to be as all-encompassing as possible, is now splitting so tragically? How has a church that was once seen to be a symbol of the nation and its unity become so fractured?

The buck stops with the church leadership, and a succession of politicians who underestimated the value of a national church. They have let yet another proud and historical national institution fall into great disrepair. And what are such institutions if they are not the nation itself?

Remembrance

"They died in vain", says Dr North today. A similar point is made in a few papers, including The Telegraph. As much as today we want to be able to forget about such things as the EU Constitution, and focus solely on remembrance, how can we?

Don't forget that it's in their name that this is being done. For decades, politicians across Europe have used the scale of death in both of the wars that devastated the continent as an excuse to destroy the nations for which they fought. They have perverted our memory of the fallen.

Because the young men who went out to fight and die in 1914 and 1939 did not do so for some faceless, bureaucratic supranational construct, nor for abstract nonsense like human rights or 'tolerance'. They did it to defend their country and their way of life.

And right now, both are under siege.

Juvenile Incapacity

A terrific post by The Heresiarch on continuing calls to lower the voting age to 16 (via DK):

... in other ways, at sixteen many youngsters are much less "adult" than they were even a generation ago.

That's certainly the message that is coming from the government. New restrictions on the freedom and capacity of teenagers have been brought in continually under New Labour. The age at which it is legal to purchase cigarettes, knives or fireworks has been raised from 16 to 18, as has the age at which one can obtain a licence for such firearms as are still legal for anyone. The age for purchasing alcohol is still 18, but there's a growing campaign in some quarters for Britain to follow the repugnant American policy of raising it to 21 - and, in any case, the severity with which the law is now being enforced has effectively raised it, in practice if not in theory.

And this legal extension of juvenile incapacity in many areas has gone along with an ever more protracted adolescence. By the time they reached the voting age of 21, many people in the past would have experienced several years effective social adulthood. Leaving school at fifteen or sixteen, they would have been working, paying taxes, and, in many cases, marrying and starting a family (and, provided it was done in that order, with less disquiet about teen pregnancy than would be caused today). Many died for their country before reaching the age at which they could vote for its government. Today, it is expected that young people remain financially dependent at least until they finish university at 22 or thereabouts. The government that is contemplating a reduction in the voting age is also in the process of raising the school leaving age to eighteen. So whereas in the past many 16 year-olds had no say over the politicians who were deciding their tax rates, in the future they may have a say, but have much less moral claim to it than their predecessors. A paradox indeed. But is a quinquennial ballot really much compensation for the loss of the independence and trust they once enjoyed? Or, to put it another way, if adolescents can be trusted with a vote, why should they not be trusted with a penknife?