D.J. Webb
Everything about this country tells you it is time for a change. I have blogged before about the Church of England, and how we probably need to accept that things will never be the same—maybe the churches should become community centres for the English. I would prefer this to a long embezzlement of remaining funds by female bishops and clergymen preaching from the pulpits a doctrine that sounds remarkably similar to state propaganda on egalitarianism.
It’s the same thing when it comes to the Royal family. Sean Gabb blogged on the Queen’s Christmas Day address to the Commonwealth, and it is probably true that the Queen maintains an air of public decorum that doesn’t attach to elected politicians. But the Royals are a great disappointment too. I was struck by the Countess of Wessex’s comments in the newspaper yesterday that women wearing the Islamic burqa are probably concealing some very sexy clothes underneath. A stupid attempt to cosy up to an immigrant demographic leads this “Countess” to make approving noises about whatever is worn under a burqa in a way that Queen Victoria would never have done. Who cares if a woman wearing a burqa is actually sporting a Victoria’s Secret brassière underneath?
This brings me to the Honours System. I expect the honours would be handed out in a more rational way if the Palace alone apportioned them. But instead the whole thing is handled like a game show, possibly with one eye on what would go down well with the uneducated chavs. Look at these.
- Joan Collins: a dame for “services to charity”. Yet her services to charity are not her defining feature. To the extent she has performed services to charity, she has managed to defend the large pensions and expense accounts of charity bosses.
- Esther Rantzen: a dame for “services to children”. However, it seems to me that she has worked tirelessly to promote a moral panic surrounding children. Her real services are to the technocracy.
- Fiona Wolf: the Lord Mayor of London forced to step down from a paedophilia enquiry becomes a dame.
- Paddy Ashdown: already a “lord” and now a “companion of honour”. A failed politician, whose main “achievement” was to become NATO-imposed ruler of part of Yugoslavia.
- Catherine Ashton, former EU foreign affairs chief, becomes a Dame Grand Cross.
- Cressida Dick, the senior policewoman involved in the unwarranted killing of De Menezes on the Tube, gets a CBE (De Menezes’ family were shown short shrift at the time).
A bit of entertainment was provided by the decision of the rugby player, Jonny Wilkinson, to tweet his acceptance of a knighthood he hadn’t received. Some of the people receiving the honours are not famous, including a former director of Cheltenham racecourse. A Network Rail manager received an OBE: why are these people even considered for awards? The mother of one of the men killed at Hillsborough in 1989 received a CBE: it is much easier for the state to acknowledge the concerns of the Hillsborough families in this way than it was to prosecute the police officers responsible at a time when they were all still a live and in their jobs.
I was rubbing my eyes in disbelief when I read that an MBE had been awarded to Chris Bates, a man who represented the British possession Tristan da Cunha for seven years from his bedroom.
I’m sure everyone has identified further absurdities in the list. While I was once a monarchist, I’m tiring of the stupidity of the whole thing now. It’s time to scrap the honours system—and we will eventually have to reconsider the House of Windsor too.
The honours system is a disgrace. I can myself envisage a system of offering some national honour to doers of great deeds- be it the person who saved children from a burning building or some tireless charitable powerhouse, but very few of those who receive honours are of that type, and actual doers of good deeds tend to get the low honours for plebs anyway.
It reminds me of my primary school. It was actually an extremely old fashioned school run by older ladies, but it had this curiously communist approach to prizgiving. Everybody got a prize at the summer concert, and at the Christmas concert, and what it was for was arbitrary. Rather than getting a prize in English for being better than others at English, you instead got a prize in English if that was your best subject, if you see what I mean, so everyone got a prize for something. I got a Noggin the Nog book at one prizegiving, and another time a book of tedious children’s poetry. By the age of eight I was having fantasies of strangling Walter De La Mare. So the whole prizegiving went on forever as every child in the school trouped up to the headmistress, got a cheap book, and then the next. And so on.
Anyway, the point being that “Prize for English” in the front of “More Drivel By Walter De La Mare” didn’t mean that you’d done anything of merit in English. It meant that you were going to get a prize regardless, and “English” was the arbitrary thing it was awarded for. And that’s what this “services to…” rubbish is with gongs. Beatrix Campbell’s infamous gong was for “services to diversity”. If a country has reached the point of handing out honours for “services to diversity”, it’s safe to say that the country is entirely around the U-bend. The only thing that woman has ever deserved is a prison sentence for Shieldfield.
Anyway, yes, we really ought to get rid of the whole system.
Yes, I’ve noticed that really great people just get OBEs. People who have scrounged all their lives in six-figure-salary jobs in the state get knighthoods.
I suppose this will be the year when even I give up on using conservative as a term of self-description.
Well, yes – if you use the word “conservative”, you link yourself to institutions that no longer stand for what they originally did. I would rather describe myself as a traditionalist, albeit one who recognises the Establishment are not about to set about recovering traditional values. Still, it could be worse – 2015 may see a big vote for UKIP, which could lead to various concessions?
It may then buy us a little time.
The problem with classical-liberal-minimal-statists like us is that we stand about in really civilised poses, on forums, discussing ad-nauseam “what is the greatest good?” when we should perhaps, if we were what /Unlce Jow Stalin/ called “serious”, be doing stuff I can’t mention on here. I can’t of course, or else the blog will get shut down at 4 am tomorrow, and our children will get “taken in to care” along with our computers and mobiles and bank accounts. You just have to remember what happened to “nightjack” and his blog, about 6 or 7 years ago, when he told interesting stuff about what goes on inside the p*l!c£, in a “County Force” I cannot now mention, and someone grassed him up.
Unfortunately, the society-altering-tactics allowed to be used freely by the EnemyClass’s shock-battalions work, and what they do and how they do it pays always and everywhere, and ours do not. The side of “traditionalism”, to use DJW’s good word here, sometimes, now and then, is allowed to gain a few small tactical victories. This is of course all for show. It’s like the “National Association For Freedom”, later “the Freedom Association”, which was allowed to pretend – even allowed to, slightly, in public, sometimes – that it had successfully delayed or reversed some minor bits of “Closed Shop” legislation in the mid-late 1970s.
The other side knows and has know since 1884, that “It’s Not The Taking Part, It’s The Winning, That Counts”. (Terrible bad film, Chariots of Fire, that I was forced to watch about 30 years ago by some collectivist yuppie sloane chums.)
They are prepared to do anything to win, and we are not. We are civilised people, and therefore in the end I am sorry to have to state that we shall go down. In the 20th century, we were up against amateurs: in this one, the White Ethnic Socialist Political-Enemy-Classes have learned how to hurt slowly and painlessly through the media, and kill entire civilisations in a few years, and we have not paid attention.
They win because they occupy the perceived moral high ground. Hence the importance of us analysing the moral structure of society in order to develop strategies for knocking those who are currently on the moral high ground off it. It’s not just that the enemy are ruthless. It is that they are perceived to be Doing Good when they do their ruthless things. For instance, when they hound some minor political upstart out of the running because he said Chinky, that ruthless act is imbedded in a halo of Moral Goodness.
So, that’s the problem. The heart of the problem is that we are up against raw sanctimony.
A Church is a Church – and that is the end of the matter. A lot more people believe than might be thought by following the words of those who worship the Volk (the “v” is deliberate) rather than God. However, it is true that Church attendance has greatly declined – the failure of the Church of England to connect with the people of this country is indeed a scandal. I remember on Remembrance Sunday the behaviour of the Rector of St Peter and Paul and Kettering was vile (it always is vile – but this year, last year now, it was specially vile), he did not even go out to the stone (just stayed in the Church) leaving boys and girls to faint (because they had been standing so long) before another clergyman stepped in and conducted the service. The Rector was making one his “gestures” (without telling anyone in advice) – and as for the service inside the Church (when we eventually went in) there was not a world about the nobility of the sacrifice of the people of this country in two World Wars, Korea and so on – the armed forces were addressed as at best victims, but more likely criminals (it was sickening – I have to agree with Mr Webb about the nature of many modern clergymen).
Belief has not declined nearly as much as Church attendance – but the Church has forgotten how to talk to people. We are not interested in egalitarian politics (especially speeches about it from people who do not even know much about the political ideology they are pushing). What people want is some glimpse (however imperfect it is) of the great mystery of the universe – through words, and through music and in every other way. Put into the context of a living tradition – that links people with the past and with the future.
On “the English” a mark (indeed the mark) of a an Englishman or Englishwoman is loyalty to the Crown – and that includes not expecting the Queen to act like some sort of dictator, ignoring the elected Parliament (i.e. whom the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland actually elect).
On the Countess of Wessex – I would have hoped that anyone could see how subversive (in the best sense of the word) those comments were – I think Ian can guess the intent….
Lastly on Queen Victoria – not a prude at all actually (it is a myth).
On Queen Victoria visiting Napoleon III the French Emperor busied himself having the “private parts” on various paintings and statues covered up, by potted plants and so on….
The Queen laughed at his efforts – “do you know how many children I have?” was her comment.
There really was not a word about the struggle for freedom in the service that was, supposedly, to honour the fallen. Not one word about freedom – and the supreme sacrifice for freedom that the people in the military had made.
Not in relation to the First World War (the effort to prevent Imperial Germany taking over Europe as a preparation for crushing Britain herself), not in relation to the Second World War (normally even the left have a nice word to say about the struggle against the National Socialists), or the Cold War – in spite of a sapper from Kettering dying in Berlin in the early 1960s.
It was almost unbelievably bad. Why does anyone go to Church when one is confronted by stuff like this?
I mooted the idea in passing on Tim Worstall’s blog but we need a Dark Honours list.
The Order of Lucifer and Judas for the biggest euuuuww-sucking traitor.
Biggest lying self-serving sack of shit, biggest Islamic ass-kisser etc etc.
It would be an intellectual exercise (or perhaps an intellectual treat as Professor Moriarty put it ) to see who could fit the most insulting Dark Honours titles into the already existing acronyms–MBE/OBE–etc,etc).
“Lord” – = “Lickspittle of Running-Dogs”… (or “Lackey of Running-Dogs” – the Maoists will know that one fully.)
“OM” = “Over-the-top-Moocher”
“CH” = “Cheapskate Hanger-on”
“GCMG” = “Grasping Cheating Moocher and GramscoFabiaNazi”
You can think of others.
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