Lessons from Abroad

The British House of Commons has something like 650 members. So far, about 325 of them, Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat, have been found to have attempted to cheat the taxpayers of their country by claiming on expenses things that have nothing whatever to do with parliamentary life, and, on a far bigger scale, by “flipping” first and second homes to avoid taxes. If some of them have not broken the letter of the law, they have certainly broken and then spat upon the fragments of the spirit and ideals which made parliamentary democracy possible.

One Tory grandee, the son of one of the most respected men in British politics, put in to have his moat dredged at taxpayer expense, as vital for his parliamentary duties. Another charged to have a floating island, stylishly decorated as a Chinese pagoda, built on his lake where his ducks might find refuge from foxes. Then there was the Labour chieftain who gave “champagne socialist” a whole new meaning by charging the taxpayer for champagne flutes, and the very senior Labour minister who charged the taxpayer for her husband’s hire of pornographic videos. But much of the corruption over real-estate portfolios runs into five-figure sums, or perhaps more. The Prime Minister himself has shamefacedly agreed to pay back about $27,000 improperly obtained. However, many members of the mother of parliaments, having been exposed, instead of exhibiting shame or contrition, are fighting tooth and nail to hang on to their ill-gotten gains.

And yet, oddly, enough, I derive some hope from the present situation. Britain must have a general election in the next few weeks. It seems likely that at that election the thieves and criminals, from back bench and ministry alike, will find their political careers obliterated under a tidal wave of public fury. Many in the Commons, and perhaps in the new ministry, will be fresh and new and, one hopes and prays, imbued with a different ethic.

Plainly the House of Commons has become saturated with a culture of immorality. Whether or not this is the fault of the culture the government has imposed on Britain for the last thirteen years is hard to prove, but I think it is much more than probable. The decline of Christian values and the various official and quasi-official political and cultural attacks on Christianity have also, I am sure, more than a little to do with it. This, like the eccentric and risible pronouncements of certain clergymen, must have some effect of public life, and not only in parliament.

But what of the new people who will be entering parliament this year? One certainly does not want too much idealism in politics (think of Cromwell or Robespierre, to say nothing of even more egregious examples). They are bound to be, in some cases at least, callow and with impractical ideas or ideals. But at least it looks certain that there will be enough of them to mean the real possibility of a break with the present culture of amorality and shamelessness that has become so widespread among Britain’s law-makers and people’s representatives.

I have written on Britain a great deal because I believe it is the crucial point (the schwerpunkt, as the German General Staff used to say) of the great culture war between Christian civilisation and nihilism and moral relativism raging around the world today. It is there that that culture war is being fought with the greatest intensity, and what happens there will affect us. It might do no harm to pray for those new MPs.

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African prelates have recently been denouncing modern Western values as toxic and poisonous and as things to be rejected by Africa.

To a large extent I agree with them: I have no desire to mingle with Madonna, Paris Hilton or Boy George. If I were facing a lion on the savannah I would much rather do so in the company of a Masai warrior than with Gary Glitter. Like the prelates, I consider the creeping spread of euthanasia and the rest of the death-cult an anti-human abomination. Western governments, and many non-government organisations, are deeply culpable for having poured literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of “aid” into the pockets, and thence into the Swiss bank accounts, of African leaders who include some of the most revolting tyrants the world has ever seen, when all the time a major part of the solution of Africa’s economic problems was potentially at hand in the simple mechanism of permitting free trade of agricultural products with Europe, plus possibly a bit of discreet regime change to get rid of the Amins, the Bokassas, the Mugabes and the Bongos.

But having said that, the fact remains that the prelates, as well as emphasising the importance of African culture and values, might have said a little something about Africa putting its own house in order. Africa has been independent for decades. It can no longer blame the West for its plight.

In 2007, the former Secretary General of the Catholic charitable organisation Caritas, Duncan MacLaren, spoke in Australia of the organisation’s work in Nairobi: “We bought cats for people suffering from leprosy … because at night rats were gnawing their limbs. So we bought cats to chase the rats away.” Say what you like, that doesn’t happen in the West.

Mark Steyn has noted that Liberia only took up large-scale cannibalism towards the end of the twentieth century. He pointed out that Liberia was not a “victim” of European colonisation:

In the seventies, before nude warlords came a-rampaging, Monrovian bigwigs didn’t merely pull their pants on … they favoured morning dress of an anachronistic gentility reminiscent of the antebellum South. In other words, Liberia went backwards.

Among a litany of countless wars, atrocities and tyranny, in Kenya, which had been doing relatively well in the post-colonial period, auto-immolation broke out again in 2007. Journalist Aidan Hartley visited the country and reported that huge gangs of youths destroyed schools, clinics and fields of crops as if to prove that if they were left behind, then they would destroy life for everybody else, too. It was reminiscent of Hitler’s final “Scorched Earth” policy, but was apparently spontaneous, without needing a Hitler to initiate it.

In the book An Imperfect Offering (2008), James Orbinski, a Canadian doctor and former president of Medecins Sans Frontieres recalls, among scores of other vignettes of his experiences, how in Rwanda in 1994 people were “bussed or marched to pit latrines or mass graves where they were not shot but had their hands and feet cut off and were left to bleed to death, unable to climb out of the graves. People often begged—and paid—to have their children shot rather than suffer this particular terror.”

The few instances I have quoted here could be multiplied a thousandfold.

Yes, the prelates are quite right to condemn much of Western culture. But let them look closer to home as well.

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A bill of rights—an idea now being floated in Australia—should be absolutely opposed by all Christians.

We have seen appalling cases in Britain, and now increasingly in the USA (in the latter instance largely driven by the so-called American Civil Liberties Union), of how “rights” legislation has been used to trample on liberties including to a great extent freedom of religion.

A bill now before committees of the British parlia-ment would, if passed, enshrine the “rights” of, say, atheists or pagans to be hired by Catholic institutions in a large number of capacities. These institutions would not have the “right” not to hire them. Compulsorily-hired atheist or pagan cleaners or dinner-ladies in Catholic hospitals or churches would have, if the recommendations of this report become law, the “right” to have holy pictures or icons removed which offend their own beliefs. If a “right” to so-called “death with dignity” is enshrined, this would deprive doctors of the right not to carry out euthanasia.

The ACLU has brought actions to have crosses on public ground demolished and prayers and other Christian observances eliminated from the Boy Scouts lest the rights of atheists not to have their feelings offended be hurt. Various private institutions have been told they are not allowed to offend the “rights” of applicants to join them by refusing them membership—even private clubs, thanks to “rights” legislation, cannot control their own membership. We have seen shocking cases in which “rights” legislation has protected heinous criminals but has penalised their victims, if those victims have made even mild attempts to defend themselves.

It is one of the ironies of a so-called bill of rights that it may in practice pose a major threat to free speech. It may, for example, become illegal to criticise another religion. This has already reached a stage of grotesque confusion in Britain, where it is now more-or-less illegal to criticise homosexuality, but also to criticise Islam which believes in capital punishment for homosexuality! Already in Victoria we have seen evangelical clergymen prosecuted, at ruinous cost to themselves, simply for reading passages from the Koran in a critical context.

Obviously in practice all this “rights” legislation, written and administered by members of the adversary culture who seek to destroy existing traditions and values, particularly Christian ones, works only one way. We can already see aspects of this happening in Australia before a bill of rights entrenches it even further.

Our present rights derive from English common law. It is not a perfect system, but it is the best we know. Hundreds of years of precedents have established a system of checks and balances on competing rights which could still do with improvement but which is the envy of much of the rest of the world, including many countries with high-sounding constitutions and bills of rights of their own. Protection from, say, environmental pollution—one of the potent potential sources of new “rights” and laws—is already covered in case-law centuries old. So is the right to life. Let it be noted that without a bill of rights in the sense we are talking about, Britain, the USA and related Anglophone countries have, at least until recently, preserved freedom and civil liberties better than virtually any other societies in the world. A bill of rights is a can of worms, some of them very toxic. We don’t need to open it.

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Shortly before the Second World War an over-the-hill British politician, out of office and washed up, began to write a history of the English-speaking peoples. Of the ninth century, the dark heart of the Dark Ages, when every English kingdom but Wessex alone had been conquered by the Vikings and dragged into their barbaric empire of emptiness, he wrote that the fact that, miraculously (perhaps literally miraculously!), Wessex did not succumb was due: “as almost every critical turn of historic fortune has been due, to the sudden appearance in an era of confusion and decay of one of the great figures of history”.

Later generations might find in these words a strange resonance. The man who Winston Churchill was writing about was, of course, Alfred the Great. More than a thousand years of scholarship and revisionism has failed to find evidence that might threaten to topple Alfred from what Churchill called his “pinnacle of deathless glory”.

Noblest of all English kings, he beat back the Vikings, not only winning final victory after countless shattering defeats, and from a low point as a hunted fugitive in the marshes of Athelnay, but persuaded the leader of the Great Viking Army, Guthrum, later known as Athelstan, not only to accept Christianity but to follow it in truth. It was of this victory that Chesterton wrote: “You and I were saved from being savages forever.”       

Throughout England, Alfred restored learning which he had found dead, restored the decayed monastic life and monasteries shattered by the Viking raids, introduced new and better laws, translated important works of literature and moral philosophy into English for the first time, reformed weights and measures and founded the British Navy. All this was in spite of a debilitating chronic illness, possibly malaria. Unusually for a great man, he left sons and grandsons of a strength, generosity and wisdom comparable to his own. Though I am ill-qualified to pronounce on such matters, I believe the case for his canonisation could be strong.

Recently, however, the forces of political correctness have begun chipping at Alfred’s memory, at least in his capital of Winchester. It has been reported that Alfred was considered out of date, and “focus groups” have been set up to find a more up-to-date image for the town. Ms Eloise Appleby of the Winchester Tourist Board was quoted as saying: “King Alfred represents the past. His image is not forward-looking enough for today’s cut-throat commercial market place. Winchester is a town with many creative artists and new buildings and Alfred doesn’t tell the whole story.” Cut-throat? It was Alfred who saw throats cut, in a very literal sense, as he fought for years against armies led by gentry rejoicing in names like Eric Bloodaxe, Thorfinn Raven-Feeder (not to be confused with his professional colleague Thorfinn Skullsplitter) and Sigurd Worm-in-the-Eye. There was, to be fair, one particularly gentle Viking known as “the children’s man”, for his eccentric habit of allowing children to live.

Many people come to Winchester precisely because of its associations with Alfred, Arthur, and other figures of high and heroic nobility, chivalry and romance, whose memory may still inspire and uplift. It might well be argued that the nobility, piety, valour, goodness, and love of learning and science which Alfred epitomised were qualities in which we stand in special need today.

Hal G.P. Colebatch’s books include Blair’s Britain.