A Lovely Prince — and Conservative Cons on the Dead Isle
July 26, 2013
HENRY McCULLOCH writes:
Two cheers for Prince George Alexander Louis! Hip, Hip …
I should give three if Prince George were intended to become a Catholic monarch one day. But Great Britain’s last Catholic sovereign, James II of England and VII of Scotland, was driven illegally from his dual throne in 1688 in “The [in]Glorious Revolution,” undoing such good as the Stuart Restoration had accomplished. Might that eruption and its aftermath – the generally dismal sequence of Germanic Protestants on the throne since – have anything to do with the morally moribund state of no-longer-Great Britain? Speculation, and no doubt idle.
Which leads to an update from what our late and greatly missed comrade, Lawrence Auster, was wont to call the Dead Island. David Cameron, the contemptible chancer now squatting in No. 10 Downing Street, has embarked on a crusade (The Telegraph‘s term, not mine) against children’s seeing pornography on the Internet. Well, bully for him. Can anyone imagine an easier political target for some cost-free grandstanding? Cameron is a member of the Conservative Party, but is no more conservative than “New” Labour’s odious Tony Blair. Indeed, the estimable Gerald Warner, a real conservative (small and large C), has dubbed Dave the “Heir of Blair,” with good reason. Cameron, committed as he is to bringing Islam and homosexualism to the very forefront of British life, is a Cultural Marxist of the worst sort, worse even than Blair and his henchman Gordon Brown, who at least were openly Leftist (it’s not possible to be Labour without being Left).
But in case any of us were still labouring under the delusion that the Conservatives stand for anything conservative, Tory (Conservative, that is) Member of Parliament “Nick” Boles – a “planning minister,” no less, in Dave’s mash-up of a Conservative/Liberal coalition government – sets us straight, no doubt unintentionally, about that. Nick endorses Dave’s attack on porno for the kiddies, as well he should, but reassures the Tory faithful that “Conservatism” doesn’t mean to meddle with the grown-ups’ harmless little vices:
As a Conservative, my starting point is that people should be free to live their lives as they choose. And I am not going to start lecturing consenting adults about their private enjoyment of legal pornography.
So wrote Nick in his parliamentary constituency newspaper, the Grantham Journal. “Private enjoyment of legal pornography”? Such a phrasing does not suggest a conservative turn of mind, to say nothing of a Christian one. And to think that Grantham is the hometown of Margaret Thatcher. Whatever the trajectory of today’s Conservative Party may be, it’s not up.
If Nick and Dave are the best conservatism has to offer in Britain, I’m afraid the Island is going to remain Dead for a while yet. Citizens of the post-American United States should resist the temptation to gloat, though: is America’s situation really so much better?