Archive for the ‘Conservatives’ Category
Holland, Republicans Speak as Monarchy Celebrates .
In Holland Not Everybody Waves Back.
This morning the media is full of the ascension to the Dutch Throne of the new King.
It was suggested this morning on the Belgium French-speaking radio le Première (which as a neighbouring country, takes a keen intrest in this) that opponents of the House of Orange were isolated cranks, even right-wing homophobes (???).
e Christian Science Monitor reports on another side of today jamboree in Holland,
Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange, will be inaugurated as the new king. It’s expected to be a major event that will be celebrated across the country by a supportive public.
But just a few days ago, some 500 yards away from the Dam Square in central Amsterdam where the abdication and inauguration will take place, a small group of Dutch republicans met to discuss how best to call for the abolition of the country’s 200-year-old monarchy and instate a true republic.
The workshop was organized by the movement #HetIs2013 – Dutch for “It’s 2013″ – which was started in February when a student protester named Joanna was forcibly removed by police from an event in Utrecht that the queen attended.
Joanna had been holding up a sign that read “Away with the monarchy, it’s 2013″ – which the policemen took to be a violation of the Netherlands‘ lese majeste law, which still prohibits insulting the royal family despite the country’s general support of freedom of speech.
Willem-Alexander later said during a TV interview that the policemen had made “a mistake” by removing her.
The plucky Dutch republicans are organised in the Nieuw Republikeins Genootschap.
Wikipedia has an English entry on them.
Their main demand is to reduce the King’s salary and have launched a petition to this end.
With around 1,200 members the republicans are small but determined.
Polls, cited on the Belgium radio, indicate around 10% of the Dutch agree with them.
Anti-Gay Marriage Movement in France, “May 68 in Reverse”.
May 68 in Reverse?
French religious and right-wing agitation against legislation for gay marriage (‘le marriage pour tous’) is reaching a new pitch as the law is due to be voted in.
Last night France’s Parliament, l’Assemblée Nationale, nearly descended into violence.
The debate lasted all night, only finishing just before 8 o’clock this morning.
In a scene described on France-Inter today as worthy of the Russian Duma, right-wing deputies approached the government seats screaming and ready for a fight.
Libération reports this morning,
Scène surréaliste : l’hémicycle avait échappé de peu à une bagarre. Dans la confusion et sous le regard interloqué des journalistes en tribune de presse, des députés UMP, excédés par une mimique d’un collaborateur du ministre de la Justice - ils l’ont expliqué ensuite - se sont précipités au bas de l’hémicycle. Aux cris de «dehors, dehors», ils se sont approchés des bancs du gouvernement. Des huissiers et le ministre chargé des Relations avec le Parlement Alain Vidalies se sont interposés pendant plusieurs minutes.
A surrealist scene: the chamber nearly descended into fist fights. In a confused state, and journalists looking askance from the press box, UMP MPs, enraged by being made fun of by an associate of the Justice Minister, (that is, their version) – rushed to the lower half of the room. Shouting “Out, Out, Out!”, they approached the Government benches. Ushers and Alain Vidalies, the Minister in Charge of Parliamentary procedures, stood in their way for some minutes.
According to the Libération report blows were exchanged.
Outside around 3,000 demonstrators, many from the extreme-right “Printemps français” vociferously voiced their opposition to gay rights.
This movement believes the time has come for a “May 68 in reverse” (see La jeunesse prête pour un Mai 68 à l’envers !).
French President Francois Hollande hit out at “homophobic” acts by opponents of a same-sex marriage bill following violent protests that included an attack on a gay bar.
The interior minister asked protest organisers to throw out members of far-right organisations who have been involved in the violence, as opposition intensifies ahead of the bill’s expected final approval.
On Wednesday, a several-thousand-strong protest in the streets of Paris turned ugly with cars and public property vandalised and police officers and journalists attacked. Several people were detained for questioning.
In Lille, three employees of a gay bar were injured late Wednesday in an attack by four men who smashed the building’s windows. The owner linked the incident to “tensions” over the parliament vote.
After Thatcher: The Movement to Destroy the Legacy of Thatcherism.
George Osborne Weeps: Will Thatcherism Now Die as well?
With that funeral Class Hatred came back yesterday.
David Cameron boasted that “We all Thatcherites now”.
He can say it three times but it will still not be true.
The ceremony was said to be truly moving magnificent .
But Jonathan Freedland could not be more wrong when he comments in the Guardian,
For all the grandeur, they claimed a simple purpose. They had come, they said, not to bury a political figure or an “-ism”, but a woman of flesh and blood, a mortal who was “one of us”. And yet there were moments when it seemed they had come to bury an entire era, to conclude at last that dizzying, turbulent decade where she reigned supreme. The ceremony that hushed central London on Wednesday morning was a farewell to Margaret Thatcher – but also to the 1980s.
The sight of so many grasping, grudging, gruesome, mean-spirited, mean-minded, and mean-intentioned mourners stirred up great feelings of class loathing across the country.
Sharp divisions sprang up again, as if they had never gone away.
Thatcher was “one of them“.
The Liberal-Tory Coalition is trying to complete the ‘Thatcher Revolution’ by destroying everything that remains of social democracy, equality and care for others.
Instead of collective pride in our common wealth, they promote the private richess of the few.
Instead of joyful unity between people they bring hatred and fear of the many, the poor and migrants,
On the television a succession of admirers of Thatcher have paraded their own merits.
They have done down the efforts of those who have not benefited from the market.
This is a different picture that will remain seared on our minds,
An Effigy of Margaret Thatcher (‘Thatcher the Scab’) is burnt in the former Mining Village of Goldthorpe.
Against fear and hatred the left can build something new.
Sisters, Brothers, Comrades – there’s a place for you: in the People’s Assembly Against Austerity!
Thatcher and Enoch Powell.
And never satisfies.
Yesterday on Question Time Charles Moore, the author of the soon-to-be published updated biography of Margaret Thatcher, spoke vociferously in defence of her memory and legacy.
He practically foamed with anger at those who ‘disrespected’ her with protests and Death Parties.
Charles Moore combines a boundless admiration for Thatcher with warm feelings towards one of Thatcher’s major influences, Enoch Powell.
Writing of the later Moore said last year,
Powell’s passion was a virtue as well, because political leaders should be able to feel and to dramatise the history that makes a nation what it is.
His commitment to the British nation state, and above all to the Parliament which embodied it, made him pay relentless attention to the visceral issues which lay behind the questions of the day. “Enoch was right”, taxi drivers always used to say 25 years ago.
They meant, right about the dangers of mass immigration. Some of them were racists, but I don’t think most were. They had a pride in the identity of their nation and a fear when they felt it threatened. Powell spoke to these feelings, and although his language was inflammatory, he was right to raise the subject.
If you were around in the 1970s it was not necessary to see the connection between Thatcher and Powell, even after Powell had been forced out of the Conservative Party.
One could simply feel the strong bond.
But if proof were needed Thatcher later said this – on Powell’s views on immigration.
In an interview for Today shortly after her departure from office in 1991, Margaret Thatcher said that Powell had “made a valid argument, if in sometimes regrettable terms.” (Wikipedia)
In more detailed terms the connection is described as follows.
“The former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, based many of her defining policies along the lines of Enoch Powell’s rhetoric. There are not a great many differences; although Margaret Thatcher did make attempts to curtail immigration, it was not to the extent that Powell had proposed in 1968. Thatcher also intended to greatly reduce the power of the welfare state and national assistance, which Powell had not been so enthusiastic about.”
Andrew Gamble was to call Thatcherism the politics of the “Free Market and the Strong State” .
It was this ideological debt to Powell as well as the New Right that he referred to.
People were forced to be free on the market, and if they didn’t like it they would be stamped on.
Richard Seymour’s Obituary of Thatcher is well worth reading on these links.
When admirers of Thatcher talk of how ‘vicious’ the 1970s left was, and had tasteless and hateful those holding Thatcher death parties are, look at the poem of her hero above.
Its stench is hard to forget.
Ex-Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher dies, aged 87, a Nation Mourns.
British Mourning for Thatcher (Photo courtesy of the Daily Mail).
No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
The BBC has just reported,
Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has died “peacefully” at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family has announced.
David Cameron called her a “great Briton” and the Queen spoke of her sadness at the death.
