Don’t cheer for Rachel Treweek as she takes up her unelected, theocratic position in the House of Lords. Chase her – and all of her fellow Lords Spiritual – out of Parliament and back to the pulpits where they belong
So let’s get this straight: Scottish National Party MPs are scolded and warned by the Speaker when they spontaneously applaud what they believe to be a good speech in the Commons chamber, because clapping is wrong and unbecoming. But today, peers give a standing ovation to the first female bishop to take her seat in the House of Lords, and that is A-OK?
The appointment of Rachel Treweek, Lord Bishop of Gloucester, to the red benches is nothing to celebrate. Don’t misunderstand – it’s great that the Church of England now allows women bishops, and some of the first female candidates appear to be excellent theologians and pastoral leaders.
But in every other respect, the enoblement of Rachel Treweek is just another case of the British theocracy doing what it always does – appointing clerics of the favoured national church to unelected positions of power and influence in the heart of our political system. Don’t expect us to cheer on this occasion just because the Lord Bishop in question is a woman. Our belief in equal rights and opportunities for women should not be so glib and superficial.
Student union-supported “Sexual Consent Classes” are pointless, infantilising, highly offensive to men and a distraction from the core purpose of academia and university life
When you reach the age of eighteen, you become an adult. You can drink, smoke, serve on a jury or fight for your country in the Armed Forces. You are no longer a child.
It should not be necessary to state something so mind-numbingly obvious in modern Britain, but that is exactly where we now find ourselves, somehow forgetting that at a certain point – the age of eighteen, in this case – it comes time for people to put away childish things and take their first solo steps in the world, unsupported by parents, schools or institutions.
This regression is not happening by chance. There are certain groups of people – student union activists and the virtue signalling Left in general – who are determined to roll back the whole idea of adulthood, to infantilise almost the entire population and create a nation of wobbly-lipped current or future victims who must be coddled and protected at all times by the self-appointed Defenders of the Vulnerable.
We see it with the increasing demands for professors to slap “Trigger Warnings” on texts that some may find offensive or distressing. We see it in the deadly serious attempts to ban clapping in favour of jazz hands at student meetings. And we see it with the insidious growth of so-called “safe spaces” or free speech black spots, spreading over campuses like a cancer. It is no longer a strange new phenomenon.
But one of the most troubling manifestations of this regression to childhood is the new fad for universities (in collaboration with – or at the gunpoint of – student unions) to run mandatory “sexual consent classes” for students, organised on the assumption that young men are wild and dangerous creatures who need to be tamed and taught how to behave properly in polite society before being unleashed on campuses.
Hipsters can be irritating, yes, but launching a pogrom against them is more than a little bit fascistic
One of the unintended new side-effects of gentrification in London seems to be roving bands of self-entitled class warriors, presuming to speak for the whole city when really they represent only themselves, carrying out Kristallnacht style pogroms against businesses that are insufficiently tatty, cheap or “authentically” working class.
The latest victim is the Cereal Killer Cafe in Brick Lane, a quirky and charming (if thoroughly Hipster-like) establishment selling international breakfast cereals in weird combinations, which I happened to visit for the first time only last weekend.
Hundreds of protesters attacked a cereal cafe in east London on Saturday night, daubing the word “scum” on the shop window and setting fire to an effigy of a police officer.
Riot police were called in to defend the Cereal Killer Cafe in Shoreditch after it was targeted by a large crowd of anti-gentrification activists carrying pigs’ heads and torches.
The owners of the cafe, which has been seen by some as a symbol of inequality in east London, said on Sunday that the attack left customers including children “terrified for their lives”.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that hipsters and their fashions can be annoying, pretentious, infuriating even. But marauding up and down the streets at night wearing masks, carrying flaming torches and breaking windows in response? That goes too far. And yet it is precisely the sort of behaviour we encourage when we indulge in intellectually lazy talk about the supposed “evils” of gentrification – or “social cleansing” as some are now calling it, in an attempt to fill us with the same horror we might feel about ethnic cleansing.
“You are part of the fabric of my life. The mother of our country. At age five I remember watching your wedding procession driving past with my family all eagerly leaning out of the window of a family friend’s flat. Of course our big celebration was our street party in West Drayton. I am the same age as Prince Charles and I remember from early on pictures and newsreels of Charles and Anne being shown to me as they grew. Through these I followed your travels around the world. As a 1960’s fashion model I modeled hats outside Buckingham Palace the newspapers imagined Princess Anne would wear. Your travels, events and duties have been threads that have run throughout my life” – Sandra Vigon
Every British person born over the past six decades has known no other monarch, seen no other figure represented on their currency, celebrated no Christmas without the Queen’s annual message to her people. In hundreds of small ways, the Queen is part of the fabric of both our individual lives and also our shared national life.
Presented with a blank sheet of paper, nobody would design a hereditary monarchy as the preferred mechanism for producing a ceremonial head of state. And yet it has worked tolerably well for Britain, particularly these past couple of centuries.
The head says that a federal system with an elected head of state would make far more sense – fairer, logical, more egalitarian and less of an anachronism than the curiosity which is the British monarchy. The head says that pledging allegiance to a person rather than a flag or a constitution is quaint at best, and downright dangerous at worst. The head clamours for a constitutional convention and the bold re-imagining of the twenty-first century state. But not so the heart.
The heart is glad for what we have, odd though it is by modern standards: the capsuled history of our country represented by a single person of flesh and blood. The heart looks with pride and gratitude on the lifetime of service dutifully performed by Queen Elizabeth II – a role never democratically bestowed, but fulfilled far more faithfully and proficiently than can be said of many an elected official. And the heart shudders to think what would become of Britain if our head of state was drawn from the same pool of glib, superficial careerists as many of our politicians.
The day will come – not, we pray, for some years yet – when we will have to face these issues and reshape our country for a new age, looking the future square in the eye. But not today. Today, we can be thankful for a duty faithfully discharged for 63 years and counting. An anachronism, yes, but still an example to us all.
Semi-Partisan Politics 