Carol Thatcher didn't apologise

Rightly or wrongly, Carol Thatcher didn't apologise; but if she did, we would have to ask what she was apologising for. The comment against her at the time that gave me the most pause for thought was from a black listener to Radio 4's Today programme, who stated that "gollywog" was a term of abuse shouted by white bullies at her across the street in the 70's, something she found very frightening. That comment has validity as it stands.

There is a clear difference, however, between shouting an abusive word at a stranger in the street and using the same word about someone you are watching on the Television screen. The first could be taken as a preliminary to violence, it will be humiliating to the person shouted at; the tennis player referred to by Thatcher would not have experienced this. He would never even have known about it, if the comment had not been reported to the authorities by the BBC employees who overheard it. Snitching with a possible view to ingratiate yourself to the authorities is pretty repulsive too.

In any case, the two speech acts have different contexts and intentions. So would Carol Thatcher be apologising for racially aggravated abuse or a slightly boorish comment?

She didn't apologise though; and I salute her courage. She stood up for herself rather than publicly recant at the behest of her politically correct inquisitors.

Give the police their due?

Further to my previous post on the police at the G20, is it too glib or naïve to criticise the police for their policing of G20? Let's look at it from the police's side.

We might say that environmentalists are not just peaceful protestors, but provocative agitators, using violent tactics;

Footage of police actions is edited by the environmentalists for their own ends, and gullible journalists fall for that, as does the public when it sees the footage; moreover the very act of filming changes the situation on the ground: there is something aggressive in the very act of filming, especially if they stick the camera close to the police officer's face - police accountability might even be personal vulnerability to attack outside of the job;

You might also say that the sheer nervous tension of a day-long police operation means individual police officers will sometimes lash out in “inappropriate” ways.

But in fairness to the protestors, another way of seeing the filming is to say that having been duffed up the police, the protestors are filming for their own protection; after all, the state are filming them. Defensive and offensive filming look the same. Also, police officers should be disciplined enough not to lash out: it would be understandable if someone is actually hitting the police officer, so he needs to defend himself; but there were no pitched battles going on.

Again in favour of the police, you might say that on the previous G7/8 days, these people wrecked City centres and we should be thankful that the police kept order and preserved property. This is the only objection that carries much weight with me. But there is a controversy going on about tactics and separating the anarchist thugs from the peaceful protestors.

I'll finish with the horror stories told by George Monbiot in Tuesday's guardian. You don't have to sympathise with Monbiot's politics to agree that he has a right not to be duffed up by the people he pays his taxes to protect him. He mentions that the countryside alliance got the same treatment. The use of counter-terrorism powers is also disturbing. I am linking to the article at Monbiot.com rather than the Guardian because there Monbiot provides some links to press and parliamentary comment.

The point about my previous post was to say that good policing is about protecting and respecting the liberty of all subjects of the crown, not just using the law to rectify the supposed injustices suffered by “designated oppressed groups” (see latest from Theodore Dalrymple for that phrase). I had begun to wonder if I was fitting the facts around the G20 demo to this general observation; but actually it could be you or me protesting next time, so police restraint is good.

Police Service brutality

Ironic that after the struggle against "institutional racism", a change of name from the "police force" to "police service", initiatives on community policing, softly-softly, the PC police chief, Ian Blair running the Met, etc, after all this we have policemen assaulting peaceful demonstrators: for me the shield in the face against one young demonstrator was the conclusive incident; but the truncheon on the back of the legs of a woman doesn't look good, nor does the death of a frail bystander after an unnecessary push by a police officer, even if we say that the policemen involved is not responsible for Mr Tomlinson's poor state of health before the push. Then the unprecedented arrest of an opposition MP, Damien Green and the searching of parliamentary offices. So liberty and good policing are not about ticking the politically correct boxes, we can now all agree.

Meanwhile the real criminals can rob and murder with impunity or ridiculously light sentences. I recommend Peter Hitchens' book, the Abolition of Liberty, which argues that security and liberty are not in opposition; that everyday public order is essential to liberty and protactive (bobbies on the beat) policing is essential to safeguard these; that the police have become agents of the state rather than the people, politically correct policing being part of this development.

Greens and morality

As mentioned on EU Referendum today, the Daily Mail describes Caroline Lucas saying air travellers are killing people just as surely as someone stabbing a person in the street. Ridiculous of course unless you believe in global warming, and extreme even if you do - but "extreme" only in the language used.

Because what Lucas says is perfectly logical within the theory of global warming and other internationalist, one-world movements; it is how the left destroy morality: cultivate an exaggerated sense of global responsibility and blunt the appetite for fighting injustice close to home.

Why care about 200,000 aborted foetuses in this country when there are starving children in Africa? why care that working people in the UK can't afford to set up a family when there is much worse poverty in the third world? Instead we should have a global perspective. Better to campaign against human rights violations abroad while allowing the state in Britain to abnegate its responsibility to protect its own people. These grandiose moral agendas allow people to pontificate on what they cannot change or can't properly understand from a distance, while allowing people to be as callous as they like about social justice in their own country.

The Green party are really part of the life-hating cultural revolution, an offshoot of the extreme left. People who vote for the Greens do so as a protest vote against cynical politics, or to help the environment: but also (instead) they get state control, pro-EU dogma and dedicated liberal-left trendiness; plus fake environmentalism like Global warming.

See their website to find a smattering of policies an enviromentalist might half-agree with, plus a lot of cultural Marxism - i.e., liberal and progressive social policies. Give me Robin Page any day.

Obama and his honorary degree from Notre Dame

Let me add to the criticism by Pat Buchanan of Notre Dame university's decision to give Obama an honorary degree. This hollowing out of Christian faith is not new, and is highlighted in the English context by "Secularisation", Edward Norman's critique of humanist ideas within Anglicanism.

But we need to ask what is the crack that has allowed this evil in. The answer is the way in which the evils of progressive ideology masquerade as good. The Catholic Church's commitment to social justice is interpreted by many as commitment to progressive ideas and politicians, who in the process of (supposedly) helping the poor, promote their own gospel of Rosseau, Voltaire, Marx and Marcuse. And no-one reads the St. John's gospel anymore, they prefer the Jesus-as-very-good-man picture, as selectively gleaned by liberal theologians from the synoptics.

Catholics in the US and UK have traditionally voted for the left due to their economic profile; but the left have betrayed the poor. There is nothing about Obama that makes him particularly just: he supports open immigration, eroding the wages of poorer Americans; he gives tax-payer billions to the bankers, just like the Bush administration, and has filled his economic team with Clinton administration stalwarts; he foists abortion on Africans; he intends to override the constitutional rights of the states to enforce liberal abortion laws on conservative communities, much like the government here wants to do in Northern Ireland. In fact George W. Bush would be more deserving of an honorary degree because of additional expenditure he approved for humanitarian causes in Africa. But that wouldn't fit the script that some Social action Catholics seem to like better than the Bible. They hear the anti-Capitalism and ignore the anti-Catholicism.

Anyone who reads the Catholic papers will know there is a rather naive, anti-capitalist bias. There are many examples, but I shall cite Paul Donovan, who writes weekly for the Universe. In an article straplined "Church's roles is more than administering sacraments" he says that the "Church has withdrawn into itself", partly due to "society's hostility to Catholics", which is fair enough taken at face value, but one senses that the underlying picture he sees is one where "catholics are an excluded minority", rather than seeing anti-catholicism as an ideological hostility, part of the battle of ideas. Authentic Catholicism for him is adherence to the social programmes of the left.

His solution, therefore, is entirely in the realm of social action, which seems to be indistinguishable from what the state or a secular leftist organisation would do. He calls for housing justice, regularisation of undocumented workers, credit unions, churches as bases for the post office. In short, "Churches need to be looking to the needs of their parishioners byond simply delivering the sacraments every week." Donovan doesn't say the sacraments are a waste of time, but by implication he downgrades them.

Even a great theologian like Rowan Williams robustly criticises the failures of the economic system, while being more cautious about the evils of abortion.

Cross-posted on Christianity in the West.