With the Labour Government well behind the Tories in the polls, it is looking likely that they will no longer be in power come the next General Election either next year or in 2009.
As the party lies dying, its one last pathetic act is its attempt to destroy the monarchy - that great institution that has been at the heart of life in this country since Athelstan became the first king of all England in 927AD following the unification of the many Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to form England (each of these kingdoms also had their own monarch).
The only time Britain has ever been a republic was the Cromwellian Republic of 1649-1660 - a republic is something alien to the British people.
But now, Lefties in the Labour Government are saying they will bring out a law that enables Catholics to become monarch. Since 1701, it has been illegal for a Catholic (or anyone of any other religion other than Church of England) to become Monarch. Now Labour want to change that.
But the British Monarch is also Head of the Church of England. So how can the British Monarch be anything other than Church of England?
If a Catholic was to become Monarch, would we have the bizarre situation in which a Catholic is Head of the Church of England?
Surely having a Catholic British Monarch would be like having a Protestant Pope.
Hopefully, whatever happens, it won't lead to the destruction of the monarchy - a constitutional monarchy which has been a bulwark against the political storms that have engulfed much of Continental Europe.
The crowning insult: Labour's legacy will be its destruction of the monarchy
By A N Wilson
27th September 2008
Daily Mail
The only surprise is that it took New Labour so long. They have tinkered with so much else in this country.
But now, as the party lies dying before our eyes, in one pathetic final act they are planning to abolish the monarchy.
Perhaps you think that is a very distorted view of what has been proposed to the Prime Minister by Chris Bryant, the MP who was asked by Gordon Brown to review Britain's constitution (and the man, incidentally, who posed in his underpants on a gay internet site).
Icon: Labour must not be allowed to undermine the Queen's status
After all, he has suggested nothing more than a couple of tiny changes to the laws governing our monarch.
At present, we have the law of primogeniture - that is, that the eldest son of the monarch inherits the crown, regardless of his age. Chris Bryant suggests changing this to allow an elder sister to inherit before him.
At present, the Monarch must swear to uphold the Protestant religion and it is forbidden for anyone in the line of succession to marry a Catholic. Chris Bryant suggests that this rule should also be forsaken.
There have, of course, been cheers from all the predictable quarters. Geoffrey Robertson QC, the highly successful Left-wing barrister, an Australian and an avowed republican, has saluted New Labour's proposals as 'two small steps towards a more rational constitution'. The Guardian newspaper is beside itself with joy.
And on the face of it, don't Mr Bryant's proposals sound so very reasonable? Surely in today's world, where women have an equal place with men in the workplace, and where we deplore discrimination upon religious grounds, the laws surrounding the monarchy are downright indefensible?
Prince Charles himself even seemed to hint this back in 1994 when he said that, when he became king, he hoped to be Defender of Faith, rather than holding the traditional title of Defender of the Faith.
Only a small proportion of people in this country have their children christened in the Church of England. The majority of regular churchgoers are Roman Catholics.
Surely, in our modern age, the 'Church of England by Law Established' is an anachronism, which will inevitably fade away. There can be no 'rational' grounds - to use Geoffrey Robertson's beguiling word, to prevent a Hindu or a Jew or even a Whirling Dervish becoming Head of State.
It depends what you mean by rational. There is a strange paradox about the law as it stands at present. It was drawn up when Roman Catholicism (and with it the tyrannical French nationalism of the Bourbon dynasty) provided a deadly threat to our very national survival.
Back then, it was assumed that the majority of the population would conform to the National Church.
Although there were always Nonconformists and Catholics and Jews - who were viewed as honorary Protestants - the huge majority of Englishmen and women had their lives framed by the Book of Common Prayer.
Would you trust this man? Labour MP Chris Bryant is reviewing the British constitution
As infants, they were baptised according to its formularies. As adults, they were married with the time-honoured words: 'With this ring I thee wed, with my body, I thee worship.'
In death, the words of this book took them 'earth to earth, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope . . .'
That is no longer true. We live in Prince Charles's multi-faith world. And herein lies the paradox.
It is precisely because we are now multicultural, that to change this law would be so very dangerously divisive.
At present, many religious people - Jews, Muslims, and Catholics among them - are
pleased to live in a country in which faith is enshrined in the constitution.
They can see that our Head of State is in fact a deeply religious woman, and they would rather be ruled over by a seriously religious Protestant, than by a heedless secularist.
True, there are the bleeding heart atheists who are upset by the sight of a few bishops in the House of Lords where they can pass judgment on the framing of laws, and who worry that our Head of State should have any religion whatsoever.
I suspect that it is the opinion of these people who in fact are the driving force behind Chris Bryant's reforms, and they do not represent the majority.
The point is that, at present, the Queen's religion really isn't an issue for the people of this country.
Smiling assassins: Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have eroded the monarchy's standing in British society
Go round any pub or housing estate to collect opinion, and I would give you £10 for every person you met who was seriously upset by her being, not merely a Protestant of the Church of England, but one who had to be so by her job requirement.
Alter this law, however, and make it more 'rational' and what would you have? Then you really would have a situation in which the 'chosen' religion of some future Head of State would be potentially divisive.
Just how would non-Muslims feel if we had a Muslim King or Queen? How would Muslims feel if we had a Jew as our monarch? Tolerant as Christians are supposed to be nowadays, how cheerful would we be if the next King became a Catholic?
Whatever answer you give to this question would be more or less divisive. So, absurd as it must seem to the Chris Bryants and Geoffrey Robertsons on any rational grounds, it really would be a disaster to tinker with our constitutional monarchy, which has served this country miraculously well since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.
New Labour has a disastrous record of tinkering. If it had a strong agenda, an organised strategy by which it wished to change the world, we could at least see what this was, and decide whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.
But it doesn't. New Labour is an essentially superficial creed and, where the constitution of this country is concerned, it simply wants to knock down the established order without any thought as to the consequences or what to replace it with.
Look at its record in the House of Lords. Of course the 'rational' person could not defend the old system, which evolved over the years, of hereditary peers having a part of our legislature solely because they had inherited a title from their father.
The fact that the hereditary peers who actually turned up to the House of Lords were doing rather a good job did not influence New Labour thinking in the least.
They decided to do away with the hereditaries, leaving only the placemen and placewomen in their stead.
Since Victorian times, there have been a variety of schemes to reform or abolish the House of Lords.
You could hardly say that we had not had enough time to consider what reforms we should institute.
We could have had an elected Second Chamber, or a partially elected House, or one in which there were a number of 'ex officio' members: that is, we could have assembled many of the wise heads in the land by attaching a seat in the Lords to such appointments as Head of the Royal College of Surgeons, the CBI, the Headmaster's Conference, the TUC, and so on.
What did superficial New Labour in fact do? It abolished the (apparently absurd, but highly workable) old system and created more peers than at any time since the Middle Ages.
Were these noble lords and ladies such people as will bring sagacity and probity to our land, or had they merely managed to sign a cheque in slightly dodgy circumstances, and make friends with some notorious fixer?
We all know the answer to that question. New Labour has been a constitutional disaster.
It went ahead with devolution for Wales and Scotland, and it looks perilously as if the end of that road will be something which the majority of Scots and Welsh do not want - namely the break-up of the Union.
As if Labour have not wreaked enough damage to this country, they now, in their death throes, turn their attention to the Church of England.
Yes, the Church of England is an absurd organisation to which relatively few Britons belong.
Declining power: The Queen and Prince Charles face a battle to save the monarchy
And its absurdity was no more apparent than yesterday when, having attacked 'bank-robbing' market traders who took advantage of the economic crisis, its financial arm was shown to have indulged in the very same market dealing methods it was condemning.
In the 'rational' world of the republicans and Left-wingers, there can be no justification for this hang- over from the 17th century days of Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton.
But listen again to what Geoffrey Robertson said. The abolition of any need for the Queen to be C of E was 'a small step' towards a ' rational' constitution.
He deplored the fact that a Muslim, Hindu, Jew or Rastafarian were 'excluded' 'in favour of white Anglo-German Protestants', and candidly said that 'the next challenge will be to an hereditary head of state'.
In other words, the next challenge will be to the idea of having a monarchy at all.
For the past 50 years, we have been living in a country whose entire culture has been unravelling around us, little as many of us would have wished it to do so.
The people of Britain were never consulted, as they were dragged from one disaster to the next by a succession of woolly-minded, and candidly silly Governments, who undermined the whole character of British life.
At each stage, it was oh so very 'rational' - to surrender the national sovereignty to Europe; to give away its gold reserves to European central banks; to allow mass immigration on an unprecedented scale and limitless numbers of Islamic extremists to enter the country, who entertained views of outright hostility to Britain and its customary laws and beliefs. Yes, it was 'rational' to get rid of the House of Lords.
They even tried to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor (so old hat, so absurdly Gilbert and Sullivan) until it was pointed out to them that this was a step too far.
In the resultant anarchy, we stand perilously close to being a society which is so divided, so confused about its own identity, that we have no sense of belonging.
Even the Law, which was something to which we felt we could appeal under the Crown, seems confusingly to come from Brussels rather than the sovereign Houses of Parliament.
The monarchy is the one institution which has survived all these storms - the one focus we possess of national unity.
We are in the midst of a great financial turmoil. Such crises in world money markets have always, historically, led to political calamities.
Look at the history of Russia, or the history of Germany, or indeed of any of our European neighbours, and witness the terrible consequences of being what seemed at the time 'rational'.
Russia, in the financial ruin after the First World War, followed Lenin, tore down its historical institutions and crushed its religion in its perfectly 'rational' attempt to achieve equality for its people; and Germany, after the disastrous Wall Street Crash and the collapse of the Weimar economy, swooned before the rhetoric of Hitler and his 'rational' Darwinian theories.
Prince William: He may never become king as some politicians want to completely destroy the monarchy
We British are incredibly lucky, not just because we have a good Queen, but because we have a constitutional monarchy which has been a bulwark against the political storms of the European land mass.
Why did this country not go Communist, as Russia and Spain had done, or Fascist, as Italy, Germany - and then eventually Spain - were to do?
The answer to that is very largely because we had a monarchy which was embedded in a constitution which in some ways was irrational but had been shaped by the wisdom of the ages.
By abolishing the hereditary principle in Parliament, New Labour went a long way to abolishing it in the Monarchy as well.
The next silly little bit of tinkering looks so harmless - just allowing Prince Harry to marry a Catholic or his children to marry Copts.
But the unravelling of such frayed little threads will - not might, will - lead to the loss of the monarchy itself.
When that has happened then all that was left of old Britain - the decent old Britain in which everyone felt at home and the rights of all citizens were equally regarded - will have been heedlessly thrown away. The New Labour legacy would be complete.
But it need not happen, and let us hope to God that the Queen - who somewhat to her shame allowed the disgraceful wreckage of the Lords without even questioning what was happening - will at last put her foot down. Enough is enough.
dailymail.co.uk
As the party lies dying, its one last pathetic act is its attempt to destroy the monarchy - that great institution that has been at the heart of life in this country since Athelstan became the first king of all England in 927AD following the unification of the many Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to form England (each of these kingdoms also had their own monarch).
The only time Britain has ever been a republic was the Cromwellian Republic of 1649-1660 - a republic is something alien to the British people.
But now, Lefties in the Labour Government are saying they will bring out a law that enables Catholics to become monarch. Since 1701, it has been illegal for a Catholic (or anyone of any other religion other than Church of England) to become Monarch. Now Labour want to change that.
But the British Monarch is also Head of the Church of England. So how can the British Monarch be anything other than Church of England?
If a Catholic was to become Monarch, would we have the bizarre situation in which a Catholic is Head of the Church of England?
Surely having a Catholic British Monarch would be like having a Protestant Pope.
Hopefully, whatever happens, it won't lead to the destruction of the monarchy - a constitutional monarchy which has been a bulwark against the political storms that have engulfed much of Continental Europe.
The crowning insult: Labour's legacy will be its destruction of the monarchy
By A N Wilson
27th September 2008
Daily Mail
The only surprise is that it took New Labour so long. They have tinkered with so much else in this country.
But now, as the party lies dying before our eyes, in one pathetic final act they are planning to abolish the monarchy.
Perhaps you think that is a very distorted view of what has been proposed to the Prime Minister by Chris Bryant, the MP who was asked by Gordon Brown to review Britain's constitution (and the man, incidentally, who posed in his underpants on a gay internet site).
Icon: Labour must not be allowed to undermine the Queen's status
After all, he has suggested nothing more than a couple of tiny changes to the laws governing our monarch.
At present, we have the law of primogeniture - that is, that the eldest son of the monarch inherits the crown, regardless of his age. Chris Bryant suggests changing this to allow an elder sister to inherit before him.
At present, the Monarch must swear to uphold the Protestant religion and it is forbidden for anyone in the line of succession to marry a Catholic. Chris Bryant suggests that this rule should also be forsaken.
There have, of course, been cheers from all the predictable quarters. Geoffrey Robertson QC, the highly successful Left-wing barrister, an Australian and an avowed republican, has saluted New Labour's proposals as 'two small steps towards a more rational constitution'. The Guardian newspaper is beside itself with joy.
And on the face of it, don't Mr Bryant's proposals sound so very reasonable? Surely in today's world, where women have an equal place with men in the workplace, and where we deplore discrimination upon religious grounds, the laws surrounding the monarchy are downright indefensible?
Prince Charles himself even seemed to hint this back in 1994 when he said that, when he became king, he hoped to be Defender of Faith, rather than holding the traditional title of Defender of the Faith.
Only a small proportion of people in this country have their children christened in the Church of England. The majority of regular churchgoers are Roman Catholics.
Surely, in our modern age, the 'Church of England by Law Established' is an anachronism, which will inevitably fade away. There can be no 'rational' grounds - to use Geoffrey Robertson's beguiling word, to prevent a Hindu or a Jew or even a Whirling Dervish becoming Head of State.
It depends what you mean by rational. There is a strange paradox about the law as it stands at present. It was drawn up when Roman Catholicism (and with it the tyrannical French nationalism of the Bourbon dynasty) provided a deadly threat to our very national survival.
Back then, it was assumed that the majority of the population would conform to the National Church.
Although there were always Nonconformists and Catholics and Jews - who were viewed as honorary Protestants - the huge majority of Englishmen and women had their lives framed by the Book of Common Prayer.
Would you trust this man? Labour MP Chris Bryant is reviewing the British constitution
As infants, they were baptised according to its formularies. As adults, they were married with the time-honoured words: 'With this ring I thee wed, with my body, I thee worship.'
In death, the words of this book took them 'earth to earth, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope . . .'
That is no longer true. We live in Prince Charles's multi-faith world. And herein lies the paradox.
It is precisely because we are now multicultural, that to change this law would be so very dangerously divisive.
At present, many religious people - Jews, Muslims, and Catholics among them - are
pleased to live in a country in which faith is enshrined in the constitution.
They can see that our Head of State is in fact a deeply religious woman, and they would rather be ruled over by a seriously religious Protestant, than by a heedless secularist.
True, there are the bleeding heart atheists who are upset by the sight of a few bishops in the House of Lords where they can pass judgment on the framing of laws, and who worry that our Head of State should have any religion whatsoever.
I suspect that it is the opinion of these people who in fact are the driving force behind Chris Bryant's reforms, and they do not represent the majority.
The point is that, at present, the Queen's religion really isn't an issue for the people of this country.
Smiling assassins: Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have eroded the monarchy's standing in British society
Go round any pub or housing estate to collect opinion, and I would give you £10 for every person you met who was seriously upset by her being, not merely a Protestant of the Church of England, but one who had to be so by her job requirement.
Alter this law, however, and make it more 'rational' and what would you have? Then you really would have a situation in which the 'chosen' religion of some future Head of State would be potentially divisive.
Just how would non-Muslims feel if we had a Muslim King or Queen? How would Muslims feel if we had a Jew as our monarch? Tolerant as Christians are supposed to be nowadays, how cheerful would we be if the next King became a Catholic?
Whatever answer you give to this question would be more or less divisive. So, absurd as it must seem to the Chris Bryants and Geoffrey Robertsons on any rational grounds, it really would be a disaster to tinker with our constitutional monarchy, which has served this country miraculously well since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.
New Labour has a disastrous record of tinkering. If it had a strong agenda, an organised strategy by which it wished to change the world, we could at least see what this was, and decide whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.
But it doesn't. New Labour is an essentially superficial creed and, where the constitution of this country is concerned, it simply wants to knock down the established order without any thought as to the consequences or what to replace it with.
Look at its record in the House of Lords. Of course the 'rational' person could not defend the old system, which evolved over the years, of hereditary peers having a part of our legislature solely because they had inherited a title from their father.
The fact that the hereditary peers who actually turned up to the House of Lords were doing rather a good job did not influence New Labour thinking in the least.
They decided to do away with the hereditaries, leaving only the placemen and placewomen in their stead.
Since Victorian times, there have been a variety of schemes to reform or abolish the House of Lords.
You could hardly say that we had not had enough time to consider what reforms we should institute.
We could have had an elected Second Chamber, or a partially elected House, or one in which there were a number of 'ex officio' members: that is, we could have assembled many of the wise heads in the land by attaching a seat in the Lords to such appointments as Head of the Royal College of Surgeons, the CBI, the Headmaster's Conference, the TUC, and so on.
What did superficial New Labour in fact do? It abolished the (apparently absurd, but highly workable) old system and created more peers than at any time since the Middle Ages.
Were these noble lords and ladies such people as will bring sagacity and probity to our land, or had they merely managed to sign a cheque in slightly dodgy circumstances, and make friends with some notorious fixer?
We all know the answer to that question. New Labour has been a constitutional disaster.
It went ahead with devolution for Wales and Scotland, and it looks perilously as if the end of that road will be something which the majority of Scots and Welsh do not want - namely the break-up of the Union.
As if Labour have not wreaked enough damage to this country, they now, in their death throes, turn their attention to the Church of England.
Yes, the Church of England is an absurd organisation to which relatively few Britons belong.
Declining power: The Queen and Prince Charles face a battle to save the monarchy
And its absurdity was no more apparent than yesterday when, having attacked 'bank-robbing' market traders who took advantage of the economic crisis, its financial arm was shown to have indulged in the very same market dealing methods it was condemning.
In the 'rational' world of the republicans and Left-wingers, there can be no justification for this hang- over from the 17th century days of Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton.
But listen again to what Geoffrey Robertson said. The abolition of any need for the Queen to be C of E was 'a small step' towards a ' rational' constitution.
He deplored the fact that a Muslim, Hindu, Jew or Rastafarian were 'excluded' 'in favour of white Anglo-German Protestants', and candidly said that 'the next challenge will be to an hereditary head of state'.
In other words, the next challenge will be to the idea of having a monarchy at all.
For the past 50 years, we have been living in a country whose entire culture has been unravelling around us, little as many of us would have wished it to do so.
The people of Britain were never consulted, as they were dragged from one disaster to the next by a succession of woolly-minded, and candidly silly Governments, who undermined the whole character of British life.
At each stage, it was oh so very 'rational' - to surrender the national sovereignty to Europe; to give away its gold reserves to European central banks; to allow mass immigration on an unprecedented scale and limitless numbers of Islamic extremists to enter the country, who entertained views of outright hostility to Britain and its customary laws and beliefs. Yes, it was 'rational' to get rid of the House of Lords.
They even tried to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor (so old hat, so absurdly Gilbert and Sullivan) until it was pointed out to them that this was a step too far.
In the resultant anarchy, we stand perilously close to being a society which is so divided, so confused about its own identity, that we have no sense of belonging.
Even the Law, which was something to which we felt we could appeal under the Crown, seems confusingly to come from Brussels rather than the sovereign Houses of Parliament.
The monarchy is the one institution which has survived all these storms - the one focus we possess of national unity.
We are in the midst of a great financial turmoil. Such crises in world money markets have always, historically, led to political calamities.
Look at the history of Russia, or the history of Germany, or indeed of any of our European neighbours, and witness the terrible consequences of being what seemed at the time 'rational'.
Russia, in the financial ruin after the First World War, followed Lenin, tore down its historical institutions and crushed its religion in its perfectly 'rational' attempt to achieve equality for its people; and Germany, after the disastrous Wall Street Crash and the collapse of the Weimar economy, swooned before the rhetoric of Hitler and his 'rational' Darwinian theories.
Prince William: He may never become king as some politicians want to completely destroy the monarchy
We British are incredibly lucky, not just because we have a good Queen, but because we have a constitutional monarchy which has been a bulwark against the political storms of the European land mass.
Why did this country not go Communist, as Russia and Spain had done, or Fascist, as Italy, Germany - and then eventually Spain - were to do?
The answer to that is very largely because we had a monarchy which was embedded in a constitution which in some ways was irrational but had been shaped by the wisdom of the ages.
By abolishing the hereditary principle in Parliament, New Labour went a long way to abolishing it in the Monarchy as well.
The next silly little bit of tinkering looks so harmless - just allowing Prince Harry to marry a Catholic or his children to marry Copts.
But the unravelling of such frayed little threads will - not might, will - lead to the loss of the monarchy itself.
When that has happened then all that was left of old Britain - the decent old Britain in which everyone felt at home and the rights of all citizens were equally regarded - will have been heedlessly thrown away. The New Labour legacy would be complete.
But it need not happen, and let us hope to God that the Queen - who somewhat to her shame allowed the disgraceful wreckage of the Lords without even questioning what was happening - will at last put her foot down. Enough is enough.
dailymail.co.uk
