Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Eternal Verities

If you are to have a popular government - if you are to have a Parliamentary Administration the conditions antecedent are that you should have a Government which declares the principles upon which its policy is founded, and then you can have the wholesome check of a constitutional Opposition. What have we got instead? Something has risen up in this country as fatal in the political world as it has been in the landed world of Ireland - we have a great Parliamentary middleman. It is well known what a middleman is; he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other, till, having obtained a position to which he is not entitled, he cries our, "Let us have no party questions, but fixity of tenure." [...] What dreary pages of interminable talk, what predictions falsified, what pledges broken, what calculations that must have gone wrong, what budgets that have blown up! And all this too, not relieved by a single original thought, a single generous impulse, or a single happy expression! Why, Hansard, instead of being the Delphi of Downing Street is but the Dunciad of politics.


Disraeli, speaking not of Gordon Brown, or Tony Blair, or even the prospect of David Cameron, but against the Maynooth Grant in 1845.

Monday, August 18, 2008

"The English Reformation was a Crime Against Humanity"

A facebook group to which I have been invited...

The so-called English Reformation, and Acts of Supremacy and Settlement, were the original disasters that have resulted in the current calamitous state of decay and degradation suffered by the British nation. It was one of the great calamities of western civilisation and the errors of the English Reformation have infected the whole of the formerly Christian world.
Beware of anyone who seeks to blame anything on something which happened nearly 500 years ago. It's bad history.


England was known as one of the most devoutly Catholic nations on earth, Mary's Dowry, the home of one of the four great pilgrimage shrines of Christendom, Walsingham and her Catholicism was the reason she was called "merrie".
I have never, ever, seen any evidence that this is why England was called "merrie". In any case, it is predominantly a post-reformation description, often used by the Anglican establishment, so it seems rather unlikely. Further, I would be intrigued to see any evidence that England "was known as one of the most devoutly Catholic nations on earth" (by which I assume that the author means "Roman Catholic"). So vague as to be meaningless.


Henry and his usurper, tyrant, bastard daughter destroyed the native English religion and the entire social order.

Elizabeth was neither bastard, nor tyrant, nor usurper. Indeed, her reign compares favourably to both Mary's and Henry's in term of the role of Parliament in the affairs of state. Quite what is meant by the "native English religion" is unclear. I suppose that it means something like unreformed Roman Catholicism, in which case destruction is an odd word. Henry certainly didn't - he was consistently middle-of-the-road on the whole issue of religion. Elizabeth also was never one to favour the newly-emergent Puritan movement - as the persistence of the Cathedral tradition (among other things) makes clear. Perhaps the author should read some Hooker.

Moving on to the "social order". Definitely a revolution, of sorts, and it certainly destroyed some things. However, its prime victim was feudalism (a system which was maintained in much of continental Europe for at least another 100 years). I rather think that the increasing industrialisation, wealth, individual emancipation, etc. were rather good things. Stop me if I'm wrong...

They replaced it, out of greed and demonic lust for power, with a state-sponsored tyranny and state theft on an unprecedented scale. They installed a totalitarian police state in which the common people were bullied, priests and devout laymen murdered, the welfare of the people abandoned by the destruction of the monastic system and the robber barons fattened on the lacerated backs of Christ's poor.
Certainly there was greed involved on Henry's part. Slightly less than the scale of selling enough indulgences to build St Peter's, but yes, guilty as charged. Demonic lust for power? Not really. The greatest long- or medium-term effect of the Reformation was the establishment of a wealthy and powerful middle-class (to use a slightly anachronistic phrase). This new source of power solidified the political structure in England as one that would not tolerate arbitrary government along the lines of French absolutism, and which stopped taxation without representation.

Totalitarian police states, now and then, don't get more repressive than those of Catholic Europe. Try to pick better examples.

The greatest privatisation in English history did, of course, leave some without the support that they had previously enjoyed. But one of the remarkable things about the English Reformation is just how little iniquity lasted more than 20-30 years. True rural (or urban) poverty leads to revolution and uprisings - as it did in Edward's reign when crops failed and inflation got out of control (take note Gordon Brown). But by Elizabeth's reign, England was more prosperous than she had ever been before, a trend which continued. The influx of countryside dwellers made unemployed by enclosure led to one of the most successful urbanised economies in Western Europe.

And again, the biggest winners in the process weren't the "robber barons", but the newly emerging bourgeouisie, who, as sketched above, were crucial to England's stability and prosperity while Spain, France, and swathes of Italy stagnated for the next 3-400 years.

What has replaced it has been five hundred years of denial and a tea-party quasi religion that has finally collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions and self-deceptions.
I get the impression that there's not much point debating theology here. Suffice it to say that every Church has its tensions, and ours are being rather badly handled just at the moment.

Thanks to Henry and Elizabeth, England has been a state of denial for centuries in which none dare to love God or ask questions about Truth.
You see, that's just sily. Go away...

Restoration of the Catholic Faith is the only choice now between total social collapse and a new tyranny of relativistic secularist dictatorship.
Hmmm...

Free the English people: Bring Back the True English Faith.

Pray to Our Lady of Walsingham, Queen of our islands.
The True English Faith which Rome muzzled at the Synod of Whitby?!

Of course, the worst part of this whole travesty is that it completely misses out the most important leader of the English Refomation, "England's Josiah", King Edward VI. Which makes me very cross because I am writing a thesis about the wee bugger...

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat

So that no-one ever asks again, this is where the name of my late moggy comes from. We used to live next to a disused railway line, and I love the TS Eliot poems ("Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats"), which my father gave me to read long before the dreaded Andrew Lloyd Webber desecrated them...

Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, by T.S. Eliot:

Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, the Cat of the Railway Train
There's a whisper down the line at eleven thirty-nine
When the Night Mail's ready to depart
Saying, "Skimble, where is Skimble?
Has he gone to hunt the thimble?
We must find him or the train can't start"

All the guards and all the porters
And the station master's daughters
Would be searching high and low
Saying "Skimble where is Skimble for unless he's very nimble
Then the night mail just can't go."

At eleven forty-two with the signal overdue
And the passengers all frantic to a man
That's when I would appear and I'd saunter to the rear
I'd been busy in the luggage van!

Then he gave one flash of his glass-green eyes
And the signal went "All Clear!"
They'd be off at last to the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere!

Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat
The Cat of the Railway Train
You might say that by and large it was me who was in charge
Of the Sleeping Car Express
From the driver and the guards to the bagmen playing cards
I would supervise them all more or less

Down the corridor he paces and examines all the faces
Of the travellers in the first and the third
He established control by a regular patrol
And he'd know at once if anything occurred

He would watch you without winking and he saw what you were thinking
And it's certain that he didn't approve
Of hilarity and riot so that folk were very quiet
When Skimble was about and on the move

You could play no pranks with Skimbleshanks!
He's a cat that couldn't be ignored
So nothing went wrong on the Northern Mail
When Skimbleshanks was aboard

It was very pleasant when they'd found their little den
With their name written up on the door
And the berth was very neat with a newly folded sheet
And not a speck of dust upon the floor

There was every sort of light
You could make it dark or bright
And a button you could turn to make a breeze
And a funny little basin you're supposed to wash your face in
And a crank to shut the window should you sneeze

Then the guard looked in politely and would ask you very brightly,
"Do you like your morning tea weak or strong?"
But I was just behind him and was ready to remind him
For Skimble won't let anything go wrong

When they crept into their cosy berth and pulled up the counterpane
They all could reflect that it was very nice
To know that they wouldn't be bothered by mice
They can leave all that to the Railway Cat
The Cat of the Railway Train

Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat
The Cat of the Railway Train
In the watches of the night I was always fresh and bright
Every now and then I'd have a cup of tea
With perhaps a drop of scotch while I was keeping on the watch
Only stopping here and there to catch a flea

They were fast asleep at Crewe and so they never knew
That I was walking up and down the station
They were sleeping all the while I was busy at Carlisle
Where I met the station master with elation

They might see me at Dumfries if I summoned the police
If there was anything they ought to know about

When they got to Gallowgate there they did not have to wait
For Skimbleshanks would help them to get out!

And he gives a wave of his long brown tail
Which says "I'll see you again!
You'll meet without fail on the Midnight Mail
The Cat of the Railway Train!"