Quotulatiousness

May 16, 2024

The Canadian Senate is an anti-democratic fossil … that might totally frustrate a future Conservative government

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper considers the constitutional weirdness of Canada’s upper house, an appointed body that has the power to block a popularly elected House of Commons:

“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the [King and Queen], or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament. The senators themselves sit in the chamber, arranged so that those belonging to the governing party are to the right of the Speaker of the Senate and the opposition to the speaker’s left. The overall colour in the Senate chamber is red, seen in the upholstery, carpeting, and draperies, and reflecting the colour scheme of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom; red was a more royal colour, associated with the Crown and hereditary peers. Capping the room is a gilt ceiling with deep octagonal coffers, each filled with heraldic symbols, including maple leafs, fleur-de-lis, lions rampant, clàrsach, Welsh Dragons, and lions passant. On the east and west walls of the chamber are eight murals depicting scenes from the First World War; painted in between 1916 and 1920”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.

By the anticipated date of the 2025 federal election, only 10 to 15 members of the 105-seat Senate will be either Conservative or Conservative appointees. The rest will be Liberal appointees. As of this writing, 70 senators have been personally appointed by Trudeau, and he’ll likely have the opportunity to appoint another 12 before his term ends.

What this means is that no matter how strong the mandate of any future Conservative government, the Tory caucus will face a Liberal supermajority in the Senate with the power to gut or block any legislation sent their way.

“If a majority of the Senate chose to block or severely delay a Conservative government’s legislative agenda, it would plunge the country into a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not seen in more than a century,” reads an analysis published Tuesday in The Hub.

Constitutional scholars Howard Anglin and Ray Pennings envisioned a potential nightmare scenario in which the Senate casts themselves as “resisting” a Conservative government. Given that senators are all permanently appointed until their mandatory retirement at age 75, it would take at least 10 years until a Conservative government could rack up enough Senate appointments to overcome the Liberal-appointed majority.

“Canadian politics would grind to the kind of impasse that is only broken by the kind of extraordinary force whose political and social repercussions are unpredictable,” they wrote.

The piece even makes a passing reference to 1849, when mobs burned down Canada’s pre-Confederation parliament.

The prospect of an all-powerful Senate able to block the mandate of an elected government is a legislative situation almost entirely unique to Canada.

New Zealand abolished its Senate and is now governed by a unicameral legislature. Australia and the United States both employ term-limited elected senates. The U.K. House of Lords – on which the Canadian Senate is closely modelled – is severely constrained in how far it can check the actions of the House of Commons.

But in Canada, the Senate essentially retains the power of a second House of Commons; it can do whatever it wants to legislation that has passed the House of Commons, including spike it entirely.

April 22, 2024

Canada’s Governor General is supposed to be above politics, not immersed in it

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh says — quite correctly — that the issue with the Governor General indulging in partisan politics isn’t that people noticed and objected:

Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada on a visit to London in June, 2022.
Detail of a New Zealand Government official photo via Wikimedia Commons.

All week I’ve been thinking about the sheer number of people who must have known about this event and who apparently didn’t anticipate a potential constitutional problem. Hey, what could go wrong? Surely no Liberal cabinet minister would show up, press the flesh all day, head back to the office, and plunge moronically into auto-campaign mode, sharing snapshots of how “we discussed … our Online Harms Act“ at the palace over oolong and scones.

The GG’s own materials describing the event are careful to characterize it as a fundamentally sociable get-together with no relationship whatsoever to a government agenda. Attendees to the event insist that legislation now before the House of Commons wasn’t explicitly discussed by any of the speakers.

As Colleague Sarkonak pointed out in her hair-raising Tuesday column on the scandal, the symposium included a panel discussing “Emerging Solutions for a Safer Digital World”. In any other setting it would be weird and surprising to have such a discussion without involving any “solutions” that are legislative in nature. But maybe the attendees were careful to talk exclusively about technological and social solutions to online abuse: such a thing is certainly possible. Those of us whose invitations were lost in the mail are left to make maximally charitable assumptions.

It’s just that, logically, we can’t be charitable to both the Governor General and Justice Minister Arif Virani in this case. Their stories conflict, in a direct and consequential way.

Anyway, none of the excuses being made really cut much ice. It’s true that a governor general has some freedom to engage in philanthropy, oratory and social organizing that have no visible partisan aspect. It’s also true that if a GG’s social agenda coincides awkwardly with the House of Commons order paper, you’re playing Russian roulette with the Constitution. On Tuesday the government introduces a bill outlawing soda pop; by the end of the week the Gov-Gen is inviting diabetics and nutritionists to chat about their “lived experience” of Mr. Pibb addiction. And, most likely, when anyone at all objects, you get a familiar barrage of “conservatives pounce” stories.

April 19, 2024

Humza Yousuf, the “Thug King of Scotland”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I don’t know what Scotland did to deserve Humza Yousuf as their first minister, but it must have been really bad:

Not what you were hoping for.

Assuming he doesn’t get removed by a leadership coup before voters sink the leaking Tory battleship, Sunak will be gone by January of 2025 at the latest. That just leaves Humza Yousuf, characterized by Morgoth as The Thug King of Scotland: a post-ideological, apolitical opportunist interested purely in power for its own sake and quite happy to use the absurd public morality of the despised rubes that he rules over to keep the wretches in their place.

And boy, does he despise them.

Yousuf first came to the Internet’s attention in 2020, when he was filmed ranting in the Scottish parliament about how disgustingly racist it was that most of the high public offices in a country with an overwhelmingly White population were occupied by presumptively racist White cavebeasts:

    The Lord President is white, the Lord Justice Clerk is white, every High Court judge is white, the Lord Advocate is white, the Solicitor General is white, the chief constable is white, every deputy chief constable is white, every assistant chief constable is white, the head of the Law Society is white, the head of the Faculty of Advocates is white and every prison governor is white.

    That is not the case only in justice. The chief medical officer is white, the chief nursing officer is white, the chief veterinary officer is white, the chief social work adviser is whiteand almost every trade union in the country is headed by white people. In the Scottish Government, every director general is white. Every chair of every public body is white. That is not good enough.

If you haven’t watched the video, you should. You need to hear the contempt dripping off of his tongue, the way he spits out the awful word “White” like bitter venom.

In the immediate aftermath of this angry foreigner’s tirade, a sane country would have immediately marched their ill-mannered guest out of parliament, stripped him of office and citizenship, thrown him on a rusty fishing vessel, hauled him up north of the Orkneys, tossed him into the North Sea wearing nothing but a life preserver, and sent him on his way with a cheery wave and a reminder to mind the orcas.

Instead, they gave him the keys to the kingdom.

But while the infamous White Speech might not have prevented his elevation to the highest office in the land – indeed, given the derangement of our elites, if anything it smoothed his ascent – it has come back to haunt him. Thin-skinned and insecure as he is, Yousuf’s first priority on taking office was to ram through a new hate speech law with which to prevent the contemptible White worms from critiquing him or his noble tribe of vape-shop owners, cabbies, and grooming gang pimps. The law was ridiculously broad and invasive: one could be reported for the criminal offence of hate speech merely for making a remark in the privacy of one’s home, around the dinner table, with no one present but one’s kith and kin.

The day that the bill was finally forced through the Scottish parliament, and predictably enough for anyone who glanced at the law and had a passing understanding of the Scottish national character, the Scottish people responded by DDoSing the police with a deluge of hate crime reports, a very large number of which were reporting Yousuf’s rant as a hate crime … which, apparently, under the strict interpretation of the new law, it certainly was, with the only thing standing between Yousuf and indictment under his own half-baked law being that his ill-considered harangue took place prior to the law being passed. Which hasn’t stopped the Scots from taking the piss and continuing to report him.

It turns out that the Scots really do not like a ban on bantz, not one bit, and respond to demands that they cease the bantz by cranking up the bantz. Yousuf, being a humourless Pakistani who is confused and angered by this entirely foreseeable reaction, has risen to the occasion with all the grace, poise, and wit you would expect. In an attempt to stem the savage tide of mockery, Yousuf has tried claiming that reporting his hate speech is hate speech (lulz); has ordered Scottish police to read verbatim a prewritten transcript defending him each time his hate speech is thrown back at him (because that doesn’t look ridiculous); and faked a hate crime against himself by having his house sprayed with graffiti (did anyone fall for this?).

The next Scottish general election is two years away. Whether Humza survives the interim as First Minister, and if so whether he is able to guide the “Scottish” “National” Party to victory, remains to be seen. I don’t fancy his chances. He is a cunning and ruthless brute, to be sure. But he is also clumsy, clueless, and very stupid. Yousuf’s popularity has already plummeted. I’m sure he can find ways to plummet further. I believe in you, Yousuf. You can do it!

March 4, 2024

Japan’s Meiji Restoration, 1868-1912

Filed under: Government, History, Japan — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lawrence W. Reed outlines the end of Japan’s Shogunate Period and the start of the reign of Emperor Mutsuhito, known as the Meiji Period:

The Imperial Household Agency chose Uchida Kuichi, one of the most renowned photographers in Japan at the time, as the only artist permitted to photograph the Meiji Emperor in 1872 and again in 1873. Up to this point, no emperor had ever been photographed. Uchida established his reputation making portraits of samurai loyal to the ruling Tokugawa shogunate.
Wikimedia Commons.

In the 15 years that followed [American Commodore Matthew] Perry’s venture, the grip of the military dictatorship in Tokyo declined. Civil war erupted. When the smoke cleared in the first few days of January 1868, the shogunate was gone and a coup d’etat ushered in a new era of dramatic change. We call it the Reform Period, or the era of the Meiji Restoration.

That seminal event brought 14-year-old Mutsuhito to the throne, known as Emperor Meiji (a term meaning “enlightened rule”). He reigned for the next 44 years. His tenure proved to be perhaps the most consequential of Japan’s 122 emperors to that time. The country transformed itself from feudal isolation to a freer economy: engaged with the world and more tolerant at home.

In 1867, Japan was a closed country with both feet firmly planted in the past. A half-century later, it was a major world power. This remarkable transition begins with the Meiji Restoration. Let’s look at its reforms that remade the nation.

For centuries, Japan’s emperor possessed little power. His was a largely ceremonial post, with real authority resting in the hands of a shogun or, before that, multiple warlords. The immediate effect of the Meiji Restoration was to put the emperor back on the throne as the nation’s supreme governor.

In April 1868, the new regime issued the “Charter Oath,” outlining the ways Japan’s political and economic life would be reformed. It called for representative assemblies, an end to “evil” practices of the past such as class discrimination and restrictions on choice of employment, and an openness to foreign cultures and technologies.

After mopping up the rebellious remnants of the old shogunate, Emperor Meiji settled into his role as supreme spiritual leader of the Japanese, leaving his ministers to govern the country in his name. One of them, Mori Arinori, played a key role in liberalizing Japan. I regard Arinori as “the Tocqueville of Japan” for his extensive travels and keen observations about America.

The Meiji administration inherited the immediate challenge of a raging price inflation brought on by the previous government’s debasement of coinage. The oval-shaped koban, once almost pure gold, was so debauched that merchants preferred to use old counterfeits of it instead of the newer, debased issues. In 1871, the New Currency Act was passed which introduced the yen as the country’s medium of exchange and tied it firmly to gold. Silver served as subsidiary coinage.

A sounder currency brought stability to the monetary system and helped build the foundation for remarkable economic progress. Other important reforms also boosted growth and confidence in a new Japan. Bureaucratic barriers to commerce were streamlined, and an independent judiciary established. Citizens were granted freedom of movement within the country.

The new openness to the world resulted in Japanese studying abroad and foreigners investing in Japan. British capital, for instance, helped the Japanese build important railway lines between Tokyo and Kyoto and from those cities to major ports in the 1870s. The new environment encouraged the Japanese people themselves to save and invest as well.

For centuries, the warrior class (the samurai) were renowned for their skill, discipline, and courage in battle. They could also be brutal and loyal to powerful, local landowners. Numbering nearly two million by the late 1860s, the samurai represented competing power centers to the Meiji government. To ensure that the country wouldn’t disintegrate into chaos or military rule, the emperor took the extraordinary step of abolishing the samurai by edict. Some were incorporated into the new national army, while others found employment in business and various professions. Carrying a samurai sword was officially banned in 1876.

In 1889, the Meiji Constitution took effect. It created a legislature called the Imperial Diet, consisting of a House of Representatives and a House of Peers (similar to Britain’s House of Lords). Political parties emerged, though the ultimate supremacy of the emperor, at least on paper, was not seriously questioned. This nonetheless was Japan’s first experience with popularly elected representatives. The Constitution lasted until 1947, when American occupation led to a new one devised under the supervision of General Douglas MacArthur.

February 18, 2024

“Please, sir, can we have some more Roads?”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Every week, Tristin Hopper helps us understand an element of the week’s news by “imagining” the diary entries of the people or organizations involved. This week, it’s the turn of federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who had a hell of a week even by Trudeaupian standards:

Monday
There was a time when I was naïve enough to think that the climate crisis could be solved with mere emissions reductions or alternative energy. But it becomes more clear every day that Canada can never hope to meet its climate goals unless we’re prepared to remove redundancies from our economic system.

Do we really need to produce any more music? I feel humanity has pretty well covered what a guitar or a trumpet can do; why waste scarce energy to continue heating concert halls or power tour buses? We have a food system that irresponsibly makes no distinction between the carbon footprint of certain foods: We cannot hope to be a climate leader if Canadians continue to eat prawns when a few strips of jicama could suffice.

And above all, this country is positively drowning in unnecessary roads. When the average Albertan starts up his masculinity-compensating coal-rolling monster truck and drives it for hours on a rural Canadian highway without seeing a soul, does it not cross his mind that some resources have been wasted? That man would be fitter, happier and richer if he’d instead been able to make the trip by the eminently more efficient method of bicycle, gondola or monorail.

Tuesday
“Steven Guilbeault wants to ban roads,” they say. But this is not a road ban. Provinces and municipalities can still build all the roads they want. If you and your buddies pool your money for some asphalt and graders — and I decide that it meets all necessary requirements for environmental mitigation, reconciliation and gender-based impacts — then pave away.

We’ve merely correctly decided that roads are a wholly inappropriate concern for a Canadian federal government. The task of government is to focus on the fundamentals such as inclusion initiatives for federally regulated industries and means-tested dental subsidies. Things that could not exist if not done by the state.

Anybody can build a few hundred kilometres of glorified driveway.

Wednesday
I’m honestly appalled at the road-worship exhibited in recent days by my Conservative colleagues. I knew they had a regressive fixation on guns, trucks and plastic straws, but even I did not suspect a mass-genuflection for mere strips of asphalt, gravel and whatever else roads are made out of.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Where else but on a road can one pursue the right-wing fantasies of unfettered resource extraction or colonialist subjugation? Where is their law-and-order militarism without latticeworks of slick, black tarmac to survey and control the citizenry? When armed capitalistic thugs violently crushed the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, how did they get there? That’s right; roads.

February 14, 2024

“… one of the most contemptible pieces of legislation since the introduction of the Indian Act in 1876″

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Stephen Buffalo explains why many Canadian First Nations people are angry with NDP MP Charlie Angus for his recently introduced Private Member’s Bill in Parliament:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

First Nations people used to consider NDP MP Charlie Angus an ally, as he has been outspoken on issues of Indigenous poverty and government mismanagement. Canadians do not want to know what many Indigenous people are calling him these days.

Last week, Angus tabled a private member’s bill, C-372, that is one of the most contemptible pieces of legislation since the introduction of the Indian Act in 1876. Angus’ proposed fossil fuel advertising act would outlaw oil and gas advertising and the “promotion” of fossil fuels, even by some private citizens. If passed, this would be the most egregious attack on civil liberties in recent Canadian history.

It is astonishing that an experienced parliamentarian like Angus could bring such nonsense forward. All Canadians, of all political stripes, should be outraged at this attempt to stifle public discussion.

Through actions like this, Angus and his environmental supporters — like the Sierra Club, Suzuki Foundation, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, 350.org and others — have shown themselves to be no fans of Indigenous peoples. These single-minded environmentalist organizations ignore the interests of First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities, except when they want to impose their will on them.

Angus has thrown his lot in with the wrong people. They are happy to tell us what to do on energy and environmental matters. But they are never around to fix our water issues, health-care problems, housing crises and rampant drug challenges. They clearly want Indigenous people to stay silent and follow their lead. No wonder many Indigenous folk describe environmentalists as the “new missionaries”.

While some of our members share the views of Angus and his ilk, most First Nations people support carefully managed resource and infrastructure development. We need our own resource revenue to break free from our dependence on government and to chart our own futures. Indigenous communities finally have prosperity and independence in sight.

People like Charlie Angus may agonize over our hardships, but they are content to maintain the Indian Act-style paternalism that created so much of the pain we endure. They must back off. First Nations, Metis and Inuit folk will not accept being shut up and will not tolerate people trying to tell us how to use our land and our resources.

February 11, 2024

Charlie Angus, Canada’s one-man campaign for struggle sessions, re-education, and prison for people who say things he doesn’t like

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines the inside thoughts of NDP MP Charlie Angus, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week to criminalize speech that even hints at not being fully onboard with Team Climate Catastrophe, especially anything supporting the use of fossil fuels:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Monday
It’s an odd thing to work in the House of Commons; a place where the country’s most cynical, power-mad misanthropes are gathered together into one distilled mass of treachery.

This is why I aligned myself with the only true bastion of moral rectitude in this wretched, faithless town. The NDP does not court power, and thus remains untainted by it. Only by insulating ourselves against the corrupting lure of ambition can we truly know we are on the right side of history.

And today, more than ever, I know the only true moral course is to introduce a federal program of jailing any Canadian who expresses positive opinions of a non-renewable fuel source. Not every Canadian, mind you, just those who can’t provide evidence that an oil company doesn’t indirectly benefit them in some way.

Tuesday
As predicted, the usual agents of disinformation have libelled my bill as “illiberal” or “fascistic”. We’ll prescribe appropriate criminal consequences for this kind of mendacity in due course, but for now I would only ask these deceit-merchants to consider what we’re up against.

Oil companies are, quite literally, the knowing architects of the complete destruction of the human race. If the so-called “market” had been left to its own devices, the world would currently be a utopia of bottomless green energy. But instead, the oil and gas industry has tricked humanity into believing that fossil fuels are bringers of anything except slavery.

Against this kind of perfidy, I was forced to devise legislation that was broad enough to eliminate any conceivable loophole. If we banned pro-oil commercials, they would simply pour their advertising dollars into billboards. If we banned billboards, they would start embedding secret pro-gasoline messages in popular music. If we banned that, they would train armies of crows to attack e-cyclists while cawing the words “Suncor” and “pipelines”.

And you know what they would say when I tabled a bill to ban the attack crows? They would call it “illiberal”.

January 30, 2024

How did Justice Mosley manage to avoid mentioning the huge pachyderm in the room?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Donna LaFramboise on the amazing ability of people in power here in Canada to avoid noticing or acknowledging the most salient facts of a situation:

“The Elephant in the Room” by BitBoy is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

In the recent court ruling against Justin Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act, the elephant in the room was once again ignored.

Justice Richard Mosley is well aware that the Act is intended to be “a tool of last resort.” He says so twice in his decision, on pages 78 and 86. He also does a conscientious job of describing the arguments each side presented during various stages of the court battle.

Yet there is no indication, not even the slightest hint, that the bloody obvious received five minutes of the court’s attention: No government can claim to have exhausted all other avenues if it hasn’t even had a conversation with protesters.

It doesn’t matter who is doing the protesting, or what their cause happens to be. If you haven’t arranged a meeting, if you haven’t sat down and listened to people’s concerns, if you haven’t even tried to negotiate a resolution, it is not OK to reach for a last resort, nuclear option. That is beyond unreasonable. It is absurd.

In India, between November 2020 and November 2021, farmers protested three new pieces of agricultural legislation that were eventually repealed. Justin Trudeau publicly criticized the Indian government during that time. So let us compare and contrast.

According to the Indian Express, farmers unions called for a march to Delhi, the national capital, on November 26th and 27th. Delhi police said protesters wouldn’t be permitted to enter the city due to COVID restrictions, but the farmers came anyway. Water cannon and tear gas were used against them, but they eventually arrived in the north-west part of the capital.

On November 28th a cabinet minister “offered to hold talks with the farmers as soon as they vacate Delhi borders”. The farmers didn’t budge. The first round of talks with government took place, nonetheless, on December 3rd — a week after the Delhi protest began. Two days later, more talks took place. By December 30th, six rounds of negotiations had taken place.

In Canada, the government treated the truckers like mangy dogs rather than citizens. Not a single cabinet minister pursued dialogue. Not a single representative of the federal government met with the truckers between the time they began arriving in Ottawa on January 28th, 2022 and when police violently shut down the protest on February 18th and 19th. Get lost, peasants! was the government’s official position.

January 10, 2024

“[T]he prime minister is either three spins into a profound self-destructive spiral: or he really just does not care”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Line returns from the holidays with a solid betting pool on what the hell Prime Minstrel Justin Trudeau is thinking:

We at The Line have two theories, each championed by its respective editor; the prime minister is either three spins into a profound self-destructive spiral: or he really just does not care.

Theory 1: Trudeau is constitutionally incapable of stepping away from his current role. There are no viable leadership alternatives, and his party has been so centralized into a cult of personality that the Liberals may not not be able to recover from his departure.

At the same time, Trudeau is neither particularly capable as a prime minister, nor does he actually enjoy the role very much. After almost a decade in power, he’s been unable to champion a real vision for the country and he struggles to get anything done — long gone are the days of bold promises, replaced now by time extensions granted by the epically borked NDP. This has left him grasping for legacy policy changes that are largely superficial (and sometimes unconstitutional), if well meaning.

Most of Trudeau’s term has been reactionary, in the value-neutral sense that he has been forced to react to events and crises beyond his control or making, from the election of Trump and COVID, to the Trucker Convoy. Clearly, this job has taken a toll on him and his family and, at least subconsciously, he doesn’t actually want to do it anymore. But he just can’t bring himself to step aside and appear the coward before Pierre Poilievre.

So, essentially, this theory goes — he’s engaging in self sabotage. Consciously or otherwise, he’s replaying his previous poor judgment and ethical lapses because, deep in his heart, he wants to be fired.

If that’s a little too much pop psych for you all, the second theory is that Trudeau simply DGAF. He got away with all of those previous fancy holidays. Why not get away with this one? The usual partisans will scream and whine for a few days and we’ll all move on. He’ll get a nice vacation, and if it pleases the ex and makes the kids happy, well, all the better. Trudeau doesn’t care about optics or ethics because he doesn’t have to care; his critics don’t matter, and his supporters have clearly signalled that they are along for the ride no matter what he does.

Both of these theories may be true or wrong, but it will be interesting to ponder as 2024 plays out whether Trudeau’s greatest bane proves to be self-sabotage or indifference.

Your Line editors are opening the betting table now.

December 29, 2023

QotD: The Hanoverian “reverse takeover of the British monarchy by the Germans”

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Why, though, did Germans feel such a special affinity with “die Königin“? The most obvious reason is that the Royal Family is, to a great extent, of German extraction. The connections go back more than a thousand years to the Anglo-Saxons, but in modern times they begin with George I and the House of Hanover. This reverse takeover of the British monarchy by the Germans transformed the institution in countless ways. They may be summarised in four words: music, the military, the constitution and Christmas.

Music was a language that united the English and the Germans. The key figure was, of course, Handel — the first and pre-eminent but by no means the last Anglo-German composer. Born in Halle, Georg Friedrich Händel had briefly been George I’s Kapellmeister in Hanover yet had already established himself in England before the Prince Elector of Hanover inherited the British throne in 1714.

In London — then in the process of overtaking Paris and Amsterdam to become the commercial capital of Europe — he discovered hitherto undreamt-of possibilities. There he founded three opera companies, for which he supplied more than 40 operas, and adapted a baroque Italian art form, the oratorio, to suit English Protestant tastes.

His coronation music, such as the anthem, “Zadok the Priest”, imbued the Hanoverian dynasty with a new and splendid kind of sacral majesty. But he also added to its lustre by providing the musical accompaniment for new kinds of public entertainment, such as his Music for the Royal Fireworks: 12,000 people came to the first performance.

Along with music, the Germans brought a focus on military life. Whereas for the British Isles, the Civil War and the subsequent conflicts in Scotland and Ireland had been something of an aberration, war was second nature to German princes. Among them, George II was not unusual in leading his men into battle, although he was the last British monarch to do so.

Still, the legacy of such Teutonic martial prowess was visible in the late Queen’s obsequies: uniforms and decorations, pomp and circumstance, accompanied by funeral marches composed by a German, Ludwig van Beethoven. Ironically, the German state now avoids any public spectacle that could be construed as militaristic, yet most Germans harbour boundless admiration for the way that the British monarchy enlists the ceremonial genius of the armed services.

Even more important was the German contribution to the uniquely British creation of constitutional monarchy.

Each successive dynasty has left its mark on the monarchy’s evolution: from the Anglo-Saxons and Normans (the common law) to the Plantagenets (Magna Carta and Parliament) and Tudors (the Reformation). Only the Stuarts failed this test, at least until 1688. Even after the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights and other laws that conferred statutory control over the royal prerogative, the constitutional settlement still hung in the balance when Queen Anne, the last Stuart ruler, died in 1714.

Coming from a region dominated by the theory and practice of absolute monarchy, the Hanoverians had no choice but to adapt immediately and seamlessly to the realities of politics in Britain, where their role was strictly limited. Robert Walpole and the long Whig ascendancy, during which the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty embedded itself irrevocably, could not have taken place without the acquiescence and active support of the new dynasty.

George III has been accused of attempting to reverse this process. The charge is unjust. Rather, as Andrew Roberts demonstrates in his new biography, he was “a monarch who understood his extensive rights and duties under the constitution”. He still had the right to refuse royal assent to parliamentary bills, but in half a century he never once exercised his veto (the last monarch to do so was the Stuart, Queen Anne in 1708).

At a time when enlightened despotism was de rigueur on the Continent, the Hanoverians were content to participate in an unprecedented constitutional experiment in their newly acquired United Kingdom. It was neither the first Brexit, nor the last, but it happened courtesy of a Royal Family that was still very German.

Daniel Johnson, “Why Germany mourned our Queen”, The Critic, 2022-10-30.

December 19, 2023

Henry Dundas, cancelled because he didn’t do even more, sooner to abolish slavery in the British Empire

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Toronto’s usual progressive suspects are still eager to rename Dundas Street because (they claim) Henry Dundas was involved in the slave trade. Which is true, if you torture the words enough. His involvement was to ensure the passage of the first successful abolitionist motion through Parliament by working out a compromise between the hard abolitionists (who wanted slavery ended immediately) and the anti-abolitionists. This is enough, in the views of the very, very progressive activists of today to merit our modern version of damnatio memoriae:

Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.
Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Dundas never travelled to British North America and likely spent very little of his 69 years ever thinking about it. He was an influential Scottish career politician whose name adorns the street purely because he happened to be British Home Secretary when it was surveyed in 1793.

But after 230 years, activists led an ultimately successful a push for the Dundas name to be excised from the 23-kilometre street. As Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said in deliberations over the name change, Dundas’s actions in relation to the Atlantic slave trade were “horrific“.

Was Dundas a slaveholder? Did he profit from the slave trade? Did he use his influence to advance or exacerbate the business of slavery?

No; Dundas was a key figure in the push to abolish slavery across the British Empire. The reason activists want his name stripped from Dundas Street is because he didn’t do it fast enough.

[…]

The petition was piggybacking off a similar anti-Dundas movement in the U.K. – which itself seems to have been inspired by Dundas’s portrayal as a villain in the 2006 film Amazing Grace, a fictionalized portrayal of the British anti-slavery movement.

Dundas was responsible for inserting the word “gradually” into an iconic 1792 Parliamentary motion calling for the end of the Atlantic slave trade. A legislated end to the trade wouldn’t come until 1807, followed by an 1833 bill mandating the total abolition of slavery across the British Empire.

The accusation is that – if not for Dundas – the unamended motion would have passed and the British slave trade would have ended 15 years earlier.

But according to the 18th century historians who have been brought out of the woodwork by the Cancel Dundas movement, Henry Dundas was a man working within the political realities of a Britain that wasn’t yet altogether convinced that slavery was a bad thing.

The year before Dundas’ “gradual” amendment secured passage for the motion, the House of Commons had rejected a similar motion for immediate abolition.

“Dundas’s amendment at least got an anti-slavery statement adopted — the first,” wrote Lynn McDonald, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in August. McDonald added that, in any case, it was just a non-binding motion; any actual law wouldn’t have gotten past the House of Lords.

The parliamentary record from this time survives, and Dundas was open about the fact that he “entertained the same opinion” on slavery as the famed abolitionist William Wilberforce, but favoured a more practical means of stamping it out.

“Allegations … that abolition would have been achieved sooner than 1807 without his opposition, are fundamentally mistaken,” reads one lengthy Dundas defence in the journal Scottish Affairs.

“Historical realities were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates of the 1790s and early 1800s than a focus on the role and significance of one politician suggests,” wrote the paper, adding that although Wilberforce opposed Dundas’ insertion of the word “gradually,” the iconic anti-slavery figure “later admitted that abolition had no chance of gaining approval in the House of Lords and that Dundas’s gradual insertion had no effect on the voting outcome.”

Meanwhile, the British abolition of slavery actually has some indirect ties to the road that bears Dundas’s name.

The road’s construction was overseen by John Graves Simcoe, the British Army general that Dundas had picked to be Lieutenant Governor of the colony of Upper Canada.

The same year he started building Dundas Street, Simcoe signed into law an act banning the importation of slaves to Upper Canada – and setting out a timeline for the emancipation of the colony’s existing slaves. It was the first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire, and it was partially intended as a middle finger to the Americans’ first Fugitive Slave Act, passed that same year.

December 17, 2023

QotD: When “factions” coalesce into “parties”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Madison, Hamilton, and Jay got it wrong. If you recall your high school civics class from back when that was a thing, you’ll remember that the authors of The Federalist Papers thought that geographic expansion would be a check on what they called “faction”, which meant something like “proto political party”. Back in Britain, the “Whigs” and the “Tories” weren’t parties in the modern sense; they were groups of men of a similar outlook that coalesced around a dominant personality, a kind of bastard feudalism for the parliamentary age. But since there are always more clever, ambitious men than there are places for them in such a system, Britain’s “party” system was always tearing itself apart — that’s a big reason the rebellion started in the first place, and one reason the Colonials won the war.

Geographic expansion keeps that in check, the Federalist guys thought, because clever, ambitious men who feel themselves blocked by the Old Boys’ Network can always head west, to try their luck in one of the burgeoning frontier communities. Which worked — that’s the part the Federalist guys got right — but enough clever, ambitious men stayed back East that “factions” transformed into something much worse: Actual political parties.

Severian, “Real Federalism Has Never Been Tried”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-03.

December 11, 2023

QotD: The Palace of Westminster

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Work outwards from this change and you will begin to have some idea of how much Britain has altered. The bits you don’t or can’t see are as unsettlingly different as those tattoos. Look up instead at the Houses of Parliament, all pinnacles, leaded windows, Gothic courtyards and cloisters, which look to the uninitiated as if they are a medieval survival. In fact they were completed in 1860, and are newer than the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The only genuinely ancient part — not used for any governing purpose — is the astonishing chilly space of Westminster Hall, faintly redolent of the horrible show trial of King Charles I, still an awkward moment in the national family album. But those who chose the faintly unhinged design wanted to make a point about the sort of country Britain then was, and they were very successful. Gothic meant monarchy, Christianity, and conservatism. Classical meant republican, pagan, and revolutionary, and mid-Victorian Britain was thoroughly wary of such things, so Gothic was chosen and the Roman Catholic genius Augustus Welby Pugin let loose upon the design. Wherever you are in the building, it is hard to escape the feeling of being either in a church, or in a country house just next to a church. The very chimes of the bell tower were based upon part of Handel’s great air from The Messiah: “I know that my Redeemer liveth”.

I worked for some years in this odd place. It is by law a Royal Palace, so nobody was ever officially allowed to die on the premises, in case the death had to be inquired into by some fearsome, forgotten tribunal, perhaps a branch of Star Chamber. Those who appeared to have deceased were deemed to be still alive and hurried to a nearby hospital where life could be pronounced extinct and an ordinary inquest held. We were also exempt from the alcohol laws that used in those days to keep most bars shut for a lot of the time, and if the drinks were not free they were certainly amazingly cheap.

In my years of wandering its corridors and lobbies, of hanging about for late-night votes and dozing in committee rooms, I came to loathe British politics and to mistrust the special regiment of journalists (far too close to their sources) who write about it. I had hoped for a kingdom of the mind and found a squalid pantry in which greasy, unprincipled deals were made by people who were no better than they ought to be.

But I came to love the building. Once you had got past the police sentinels, who knew who everyone was, you could go everywhere, even the thrilling ministerial corridor behind the Speaker’s chair, from which Prime Ministers emerged to face what was then the genuine ordeal of Parliamentary questions, twice a week. There was a rifle range beneath the House of Lords, set up during World War I to make sure honorable members of both Houses would be able to shoot Germans accurately if they ever met any. There was a room where they did nothing but prepare vast quantities of cut flowers, and which perfumed the flagstone corridor in which it lay. There was a convivial staff bar (known to few) where the beer was the best in the building and politicians in trouble would hide from their colleagues. The Lords had a whole half of the Palace, with lovely murals illustrating noble moments of our history, and the Chief Whip’s cosy, panelled office where reporters would be summoned once a week for dangerous gossip and perilously large glasses of whisky or very dry sherry, generously refilled. And high up in the roof, looking down over the murky Thames, was the room where the government briefed us, in meetings whose existence we were sworn never to reveal. Now they are pretty much public, so the real briefings must happen somewhere else, I suppose.

Peter Hitchens, “An Empty Parliament”, First Things, 2017-10-03.

November 14, 2023

Australian voters rejected “The Voice”, fearing “they were being sold a pig in a poke”

Filed under: Australia, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the recent failure of the Austrialian government to install a nebulous and ill-defined advisory body for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation to Parliament:

Uluru Dialogue co-chair Pat Anderson in an early ad for “The Voice” referendum.
Screen capture from YouTube.

Among my wife’s family papers dating from the Occupation of France are a couple of certificates of aryanité issued to her forebears, that they might continue to be employed and not deported. In Australia, people apply for certificates of aboriginality, in order that they might receive various advantages, subventions, etc.

The former is bad racism, the latter good, at least for those who believe in positive racial discrimination. Unfortunately, it is logically impossible to believe in positive racial discrimination without also believing in the negative kind, irrespective of one’s supposed good intentions.

Australia recently held a referendum on a proposed race-based amendment to the constitution. The amendment proposed something called “The Voice” to be inscribed in the constitution: an advisory body composed of Aborigines who would advise parliament on matters specifically affecting Aborigines. The details of the proposed body — how it was to be chosen or appointed, its purpose, its powers, its duties, its emoluments — were not specified, and those in favour of it, up to and including the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, were either unwilling or unable to specify further, relying entirely on the Australian emotional equivalent of Noel Coward’s famous song, “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans”. The latter was not much of a policy.

Australian voters, initially favourable to the proposal, rejected it by a large majority, suspecting, rightly in my view, that they were being sold a pig in a poke. They also suspected, I surmise, that what was being proposed was a corrupt and corrupting bureaucratic pork barrel that would reward a small class of Aboriginal Al Sharptons. Far from improving the situation of Australian Aborigines, which is sometimes but not always tragic, the Voice would permanently raise the ideological temperature and prevent measured debate about practical improvements. Benefits would be received without gratitude and, would never, virtually by definition, be sufficient. And of course, the Voice would be the end of the ideal of racial equality. Australia would join the old South Africa in its inscription of race in its constitution.

The abysmal intellectual level of the proponents of the Voice was very well instantiated in an article by Thomas Keneally, the famous Australian novelist, in the Guardian newspaper. It began as follows:

    Last Sunday, many in Australia profoundly mourned the loss of the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, the greatest kindly Amendment ever to be proposed for the Australian constitution, those dreary old articles of association by which our states and territories rub along together in far-flung federation.

I will overlook the use of the word profoundly in this context: I think the words superficially, self-satisfactorily, and exhibitionistically would have been better. But note that, even if the loss were deeply mourned, only the grossest of sentimentalists would claim that such mourning would have any bearing on the rightness or otherwise of the loss that was mourned. Many Nazis and many communists mourned the loss of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia far more deeply than any Australian mourned the loss of the referendum, but no one, I think, would sympathise with them because of the depth of their sorrow.

November 13, 2023

Lessons for Canada from the Australian referendum on “The Voice”

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Conrad Black contrasts the experiences of First Nations in Australia and Canada after contact with European explorers and settlers and the recent attempt to create a formal role for Aboriginal representation in the Australian Parliament.

Uluru Dialogue co-chair Pat Anderson in an early ad for “The Voice” referendum.
Screen capture from YouTube.

Canadians should perhaps pay more attention than we have to the referendum in Australia on Oct. 14 on the subject of the Aboriginal peoples. There are just under one million designated Aboriginals in Australia, slightly below four per cent of Australia’s 25 million people. The roughly corresponding figures in Canada are that Indigenous Canadians, including in both countries a good number of mixed ancestry, are slightly under five per cent — just, at under two million in a population of 40 million. The issue in the referendum was a proposed amendment to the Australian Constitution by which a federal advisory body comprised of native people would be set up which would have only a consultative role. How this body would be selected and its recommendations presented would be dealt with later. The idea was just to give Aboriginal people, in the wording of the referendum, a “voice” in the politics of the country.

The history of the white settlers of Australia and the natives whom they encountered there is fairly parallel to the Canadian experience. Initial contact was friendly enough, but there was a native vulnerability to certain diseases to which the Australian natives had had no occasion to develop an immunity. Their lands were gradually encroached upon although the inconvenience to them was for a time not as great as it was in Canada where the conversion of huge tracts of arable land on the prairies into immensely productive grain producing farms made it steadily more difficult for our native people to maintain that part of their diet based on the buffalo. Australian Aboriginals had less difficulty, at least for some time, retreating to places that did not especially attract the settlers, and where it was comparatively possible to maintain a traditional life.

However, there was soon inevitably interaction, some of it successful intermarriage, and some of it outright racial friction with not infrequent outbursts of violence, though nothing on the scale of the Riel rebellions in this country, let alone the outright warfare of the American Indian Wars. But eventually, reservations were created for some Australian Aboriginals. In contrast to this country, there was practically no attempt to help formally educate them or to assist them in integrating into the larger Australian society. They were gradually pushed to the nether regions of the immense country, almost as large as Canada and with a greater habitable area, and the provision of health and education services to the natives was greatly less generous in the amounts of money and numbers of personnel involved than the corresponding efforts in Canada.

Gradually the theory developed and took hold in Australia that perhaps the early settlers and the autonomous government of Australia created by the British in 1901, could have been more generous and thoughtful. As these matters tend to do, the issue gnawed somewhat at the conscience of white Australia and finally in 2008, the government of Australia passed through both houses of its Parliament an apology and expression of regret for past injustices. There was nothing remotely like the orgy of self-defamatory penitence backed by stupefying amounts of money that has flowed in this country like the Niagara River onto the native people.

Shortly after the new Labor government in Australia was elected in 2022, it proceeded with its declared intention to hold a referendum on the issue of giving the Aboriginal peoples a “voice”. And soon after this campaign began, it became clear that the proposed measure was going to have a rocky ride with the country. The predominant opinion among Australians above the age of 45 was that the native had the opportunity to participate fully in Australian life and that there were some substantial gestures of assistance made to them that the more purposeful native people took up.

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