Tuesday 25 September 2012

A Maple Leaf Is Not A Fig Leaf

Anyone worried that that gimmick involving embassies might subvert Canadian independence has reckoned without the extreme anti-Commonwealth anti-monarchism of every generation of the Conservative Party from that of David Cameron and William Hague onwards.

The general antipathy towards the Commonwealth goes all the way back to the 1950s. But the real high point of it, at least up to now, was under the Prime Minister who, accordingly, both signed the Single European Act, and sought to supplant in her own person the monarchical and Royal roles on the national and international stages.

This time last year, Iran condemned Canada for violating the hunting, fishing and other rights of various Aboriginal peoples. Those rights used to be guaranteed by the British (not the Canadian) Crown, which was why a body of Labour MPs voted against Thatcher’s legislation to pre-empt impending courtroom defeats on both sides of the Atlantic by cutting Canada’s last constitutional ties to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, thereby removing those guarantees.

But without the Queen in principle and a body of Labour MPs, Old Left and Old Labour Right, in practice, on whom can those Aboriginal peoples now call? Like the Christians of Lebanon in the face of another New Right favourite cause, they can now call only on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Thank you, Maggie. Thank you for acting in very literal contempt of court, and against the most plangent Aboriginal and French-Canadian entreaties, in order to renounce the British Parliament’s role in the amendment of the Canadian Constitution.

As well as to abolish the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to legislate for individual Australian states, to end the British Government’s consultative role in Australian state-level affairs, and to deprive the Queen’s Australian subjects of their right of appeal to Her Majesty in Council. On the instructions of Rupert Murdoch. Of course. Whose titles she was using to vilify the monarchy and the Royal Family. Of course.

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