"Total absence of any sense ..."

Tom Harris, a Labour MP, not too surprisingly, didn't like Dan Hannan's rather good speech made to the EU Parliament this week (via The Devil):

I can think of nothing more likely to turn moderate voters off than his strident, smug, arrogant neo-Thatcherism.

Far worse than smug, arrogant, "we know what's best for you" Labour statism. Either way, Tom has obviously forgotten that, well, people actually seem to like Thatcherism. The old girl was Britain's longest serving prime minister in modern times, after all.

But that's not what The Devil, or I, are getting annoyed about ...

What was truly repugnant about his speech was the total absence of any sense of patriotism.

Harris' argument is that Gordon Brown is the "leader" of the country and therefore everyone should, in effect, shut up and let him cock about with the economy and public finances and embarass us in front of Europe and the world. More precisely, he argues that Hannan was breaking the convention (first I've heard of it) that you do not criticise your head of government in front of other heads of governments in a foreign country.

The EU Parliament, though, is not like the UN General Assembly. It is an elected legislature, with legal authority over us. Hannan has been elected to that legislature by a constituency that he has a duty to represent. In the same way, Gordon Brown, in effect, is a part of the executive. What Hannan was doing, therefore, is no different to a MP in the British Parliament giving a speech against a secretary of state.

Secondly, as the Devil points out, Gordon Brown isn't our "leader", the Queen is. That's what the monarch provides, a (hypothetically) politically-neutral national figurehead. A point that handily leads on to my next gripe of the week, our very busy national leader taking time out of coping with little trivialities like dealing with the recession to deal with the issues everyone's really concerned about ...

Gordon Brown and Buckingham Palace have discussed plans to change the rules of succession to the throne, including giving royal women equal rights. Downing Street said the scrapping of the ban on heirs to the throne marrying Roman Catholics was also discussed.

I vainly quote myself:

Although advocates of its amendment or repealing argue that the 1701 Act of Settlement was a deliberate act of religious discrimination, it was actually a means of protecting the independence of England and the rest of Britain. Roman Catholics, as a rule, hold their highest loyalty to an external authority, i.e., the Pope. However, England, as has been argued for seven centuries, is of a separate imperium from Europe and the rest of the world, and the Crown-in-Parliament is the supreme temporal authority. It's a result of a succession of strong rulers and the English Channel, and has been crucial in the evolution of our liberties and our national identity. This idea, and this conflict between the authority of the papacy and the monarch, didn't begin with Henry VIII. Thomas Beckett, anyone?

To amend or repeal the Act of Settlement, then, would threaten the position of Parliament, by way of the crown being an integral part of it, as the ultimate source of sovereignty. It is precisely the same reason why the 1972 European Communities Act should have been thrown out at its first reading as illegal and unconstitutional.