Gunpowder plots

The collectivisation of the blogosphere (or, as righties might prefer, its rationalization in response to market forces) continues, with two new group-blogs, “Open Source Politics”:http://www.ospolitics.org/ and “A Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/. I’m especially pleased about the latter- European politics doesn’t get enough attention in the blogosphere, and when it does get mentioned, it’s usually filtered through intra-American arguments (prime example: right-trolls who defend Berlusconi because he’s friends with W.). Iain Coleman gets the ball rolling with an especially nice “take”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000006.html#more on a quite bizarre “article”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-08-30&id=3450 by Adrian Hilton, in the British _Spectator_, which claims that the EU is a Catholic plot to subjugate Protestant Britain. Iain, not surprisingly, thinks that Hilton is barking mad. I disagree – Hilton’s just very _old fashioned_. He’s harking back to a political tradition that’s nearly dead in the mainland UK – equating British national identity with Protestantism,so that the Queen is defender both of the faith and of Britishness.

Linda Colley discusses how this tradition was invented in her magisterial study, “Britons”:http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/reviewhampton_colley_britons.html. Her thesis is that British national identity was forged around a very specific core of anti-Catholicism in response to the threat posed by Catholic France. Colley advances fairly convincing evidence to show that Britishness and Protestantism became so closely entwined as to be virtually inseparable. The Continent – Catholic and threatening – was seen as the enemy, out to subjugate loyal Britons, and impose their nasty, foreign practices on England’s green and pleasant land. This tradition began to lose force in the early Victorian era, with Catholic emancipation. It’s now more or less moribund, except in Northern Ireland, where bowler-hatted loyalists still hold true to the faith (and embarrass folks on the mainland with the fervidness of their Britishness).

Hilton’s article is an extraordinary throwback to this earlier era – his political analysis wouldn’t be out of place in an eighteenth century Calvinist tract. Choice quotes:

bq. … entry in 1973 to the ‘European Economic Community’ brought England back into the Catholic fold, and exactly 460 years after the English monarch was declared sovereign, the present Queen was reduced to vassal status under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, which rendered her a European citizen and thereby subject to ‘foreign princes and potentates’ …

bq. …The issue of European religious union is one that has been concealed even deeper than the plans for political union, but the ratchet towards a Catholic Europe is just as real. …

bq. …Such a destiny can be foisted upon recalcitrant nations only when they are weakened. The Roman principle of divide and rule is resurrected in the ‘Europe of Regions’ strategy, which encourages each ‘region’ of Europe to look directly to Brussels for policy and funding, bypassing national parliaments in the process. This is a recreation of a mediaeval Europe of small, ineffectual states which can be easily dominated. The ecumenically minded Church of England has been complicit in the fracturing of England, with its bishops chairing regional conventions, but the Ecumenical Movement is in reality a parallel front to Rome’s divide-and-rule strategy. …

And the extraordinary thing is that Hilton is an “approved candidate” of the British Conservative party. Although, in fairness, this doesn’t mean that he’ll get the chance to run as an MP as far as I know; he still has to convince a local constituency organization to select him.

As I say, I don’t think that Hilton is mad, quite, but he is utterly out of touch with the modern world. If Hilton represents state-of-the-art UK Euroscepticism (and the _Spectator_ is quite close to the heart of the Conservative party), Blair may actually win his perpetually-deferred referendum on entry into the Euro. Even the Murdoch tabloids would have difficulty in resisting the temptation to ridicule this prime-grade nonsense, while the BBC would only be too delighted to interview Hilton and his ilk. A couple of frothing-at-the-mouth prognostications about Catholic plots on the telly would do wonders for the pro-Europe movement. The eurosceptic right may yet turn out to be Tony Blair’s greatest ally.