Not a lot of people know that Douglas Alexander is the shadow foreign secretary, but his speech this week about the euro shows that Labour is at last thinking like an effective opposition. Mr Alexander has noticed the danger of being the status quo party. He wants Labour to hand that honour to the Conservatives. Support for Europe is ‘haemorrhaging’, he says, because people constantly feel they are not consulted. Mr Alexander’s new ‘lodestar’ by which any treaty change should be judged is that it must create more jobs and prosperity in the United Kingdom. He warns that non-euro EU members could easily be damaged by the eurozone’s efforts to change treaties in its favour. Nothing he says, of course, commits his party to any course from which it could not easily rat later. But the change of rhetoric shows that the opposition is dropping the idea that pro-Europeanism is essential to any ‘modern’ identity. It also shows that he is trying to create a position in which Labour, with rebel Tory votes, could defeat the government if it refuses a referendum on the coming treaty which will cede more powers to Brussels. The government could be trapped.
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As the Church of England keeps telling us how much it shares the aims of the St Paul’s protestors, I notice an advertisement it has placed in the Financial Times. The Church Commissioners need a chief operating officer. He will be paid ‘a six figure salary’, says the advertisement, to manage their ‘£5 billion multi-asset portfolio’. There is no mention of anything Christian, or even anything ethical. The language is all management-speak. The ideal candidate will have ‘a proven track record of driving continuous and consistent operational performance’. The job’s responsibilities include ‘to build and maintain internal controls and process and to lead a no-surprises culture’. Although it is pretty hard to reconcile a ‘no-surprises culture’ with the mystery of the Incarnation, one must admit that it might have come in useful in dealing with these various ‘occupations’. As well as St Paul’s, there is also one outside Bristol (see last week’s Notes), Exeter and Sheffield cathedrals. You have only to study the websites of the various Occupy groups across the country to see that they, too, stick to a no-surprises culture. Events include Palestine Solidarity Campaign rallies, performances by Billy Bragg, strikers’ benefit gigs, meetings of the Anti-Cuts Alliance. They are not forerunners of the Second Coming: they are the usual suspects. There is nothing unChristian about rounding them up (caringly, of course).
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A few years ago, Jon Snow complained about ‘poppy fascism’. Since I love the poppy, I probably attacked him at the time. But now I see Snow was right. The solemnity of remembrance is getting muddled up with the growing sentimentality about our armed forces, with the word ‘hero’ overused. Like department stores offering Christmas decorations in October, politicians ‘poppy up’ earlier and earlier, and everywhere. I recently went to a dinner party in the country. Since it was a purely private and informal occasion, no one wore a poppy, except for a government minister who was present, and his wife. Our poor elected representatives have been terrorised. Do they wear them on their pyjamas?
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I am just old enough to remember history in schools being a narrative of British success. This has long been banned, of course, and so a strong samizdat literature has grown up to give people information (dates, for instance) that they cannot learn in the classroom. I first noticed this some years ago when George Courtauld had such a huge success with his Pocket Book of Patriotism. Then I met his Essex neighbour Adrian Sykes, who impressed me by having with him at all times a list of the exact anniversary of every battle in which the British (or English) beat the French. There are roughly three a week, I think. He was also nursing a much bigger project, he told me — an idea for a book about the people of the British Isles who had changed the world. We kept in touch, and I did a little to interest publishers in the scheme. Now the fascinating result has appeared. Made in Britain (Adelphi) deals with its subject matter in traditional chronological terms, but its most beguiling pleasure is the way the author allows one thing to lead to another, sticking in little boxes of surprising related information. Thus the section on ‘The Armourers’, dealing with the Vickers family, Sir Hiram Maxim and Sir Basil Zaharoff, takes us to the Whitehead family, who designed the torpedo for the Austro-Hungarian navy (to the detriment of our merchant shipping). A Sykes box then states: ‘In 1912 [Robert] Whitehead’s daughter, Frances, launched an Austrian submarine. She fell in love with her captain, Georg von Trapp, and married him: their children were the von Trapp singers in the 1965 film The Sound of Music.’
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The Duchess of Cornwall also strikes a blow for cultural subversion this month. For Give A Book, the excellent charity set up in memory of the playwright Simon Gray, she has chosen the pre-war children’s classic Moorland Mousie by ‘Golden Gorse’, about a wild Exmoor pony. The tale is told in Mousie’s voice. The Duchess says the book ‘brings back happy memories of the many hours that my sister and I spent galloping over the moors with Moorland Mousie and his friends’. Thanks to her patronage, WHSmith will be stocking the book from next month. What the Duchess does not elucidate is that the book is a paean of praise to stag-hunting: ‘Hounds came into view on the far hill, running hard. Most of the riders were a mile behind. Two people only were close to the hounds. One was the huntsman, the other was Farmer. He was shouting out news of the stag, and thoroughly happy, and well he deserved to be.’ Mousie’s cousin Tinkerbell is deeply moved: ‘When I grow up,’ he said, ‘I shall be a hunter.’ Mousie forms the same ambition. Obviously any normal child reading his story would follow this role model, as the young Camilla Parker-Bowles did.
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