Thursday May 13, 2010
Commentary: Take me to Your Lizard – Britain Votes for None of the Above
Commentary by Hilary White
ROME, May 13, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The dust has settled a bit from last week’s British general election and taking a look about, one finds that the landscape has been changed in strange and subtle ways that many outside the Islands have trouble understanding. Yes, David Cameron has become the new Prime Minister. Yes, the Conservatives won the largest share of the votes. Yes, Britain, the “cradle of democracy” still has a government. But that’s about as clear as it gets.
While the Tories increased their seats in the House of Commons, they fell short of the 326 seats needed to have an overall majority. This, in British parliament-speak, is called a “hung parliament,” which hasn’t happened for a long time. In Canada and other places with the British Parliamentary system, we’re more used to minority or coalition governments, but the love-to-be-ruled British haven’t had an ambiguous government since 1974.
The pundits on May 7 seemed a bit stunned, but I’ve been talking to people, and the short but strange answer seems to be: Nobody won. Certainly not Britain. Not, at least, my grandmother’s Britain of common sense, private life, fair play, personal liberty, the rule of law, true tolerance, decency and the stoic manly virtues. That Britain has been besieged under Labour, and it seems it will remain so.
This week, Cameron announced that a coalition is being formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg. Together they will be putting legislation forward to propose fixed terms for Parliament, which means it is unlikely there will be another election soon. For the foreseeable future, Britain will be ruled by a coalition of “socially liberal” Conservatives, and “fiscally liberal” Lib-Dems, a situation that appears to cancel out any hope of putting Old Britain’s broken Humpty Dumpty back together again.
For better or for worse, what we’ve got now will be around for a while: a Britain in which the leftist cult of political correctness, whatever party is promoting it, is the real king.
But there may be a tiny silver lining. It seems clear that this has not been a significant victory for David Cameron, who lost the very considerable polling lead he held only a year ago, or his program of “modernisation.” It has been said that Cameron lost the majority government he could have had by planting his party’s feet firmly on the shifting sands of the European “centre-rightism” – a non-position that left the actual voters unable to figure out what he stood for.
Cameron’s position on abortion is possibly the best bellwether of his focus-group-led policies. He has said he wants to lower the gestational age limit for legal abortions, from 24 to 20 weeks. Far from establishing any kind of principled stand against the killing of innocent children, however, in 2008 he told a gathering of voters that he would not do anything to change the law on abortion for eugenic reasons. With apparently no consciousness of the incongruity, he bizarrely offered his own beloved disabled son Ivan as an example of why women should be allowed to kill defective children. In Britain, there is no time limit on abortion for disabled unborn children. He followed this by saying that he wants to see abortion made more available in general.
He tried to establish his pro-family cred, talking about “defending the family” as the cornerstone of a stable society, while re-defining it out of existence and courting the homosexualist lobby. His lieutenants were allowed to say that the party would establish “gay marriage” as part of its pro-family program. A few days before the election, the party published a manifesto on “equalities” that maintains the Labour status quo and includes a confirmation of the party’s “commitment to sexual equality and gay rights.”
Watching the rise of David Cameron over the last couple of years, I am not alone in wondering at his amazing aptitude for mimicry. He has imitated with his modernizing program the direction taken by “conservative” parties of nearly every western democracy, systematically abandoning true comprehensive conservatism in all areas of importance, and adopting instead economic liberalism and social libertarianism as a substitute. This is the modern “liberal conservatism,” the New Conservatism, that has spread all over the west. And it has no place for such as us.
It happened in Canada, where the old Conservatives started sliding leftwards decades ago, eventually becoming the increasingly politically irrelevant “Progressive Conservative” party, an aptly self-contradictory name that got its share of mockery in the press. The result was the defection of large numbers of small-c conservatives to the Canadian Alliance and then the “merger” (really a take-over) of the Alliance by the Tories under Stephen Harper.
I remember at that time talking to a staunch Alliance supporter who had campaigned for Harper to lead the new party. He argued that the only way for the new party to get elected was to have Harper and his New Conservative ideas in the driver’s seat. I agreed that it would help the party, but asked my friend how it would help the country to gut the conservative alternative of any traces of actual conservatism. He had no answer.
The Cameron/Brown election in Britain seems hauntingly familiar.
In a way, the weird outcome of this election gives me a little hope for the real Britain, and bolsters my own experience of living in northwest England and talking to regular people, people on buses and in shops and in bank queues. I came to believe that the strange Wonderland of London’s latte-sipping elitism, in which the real differences between the three main parties are moot, is a kind of narcissistic bubble zone that as nothing to do with the real British people. While moral ambiguity, style-over-substance and the invasive nanny state may fly with the Eurocrats in Brussels, it looks like the British electorate was having none of it.
From the point of view of an outsider with a keen interest, the thing that popped into my mind on May 7 was, “They’ve voted in another lizard.”
In exchange in one of Douglas Adams’s science fiction comedy Hitchhiker’s Guide books, “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish,” Adams gives us a succinct description of modern democracy. Our heroes, Ford and Arthur, discuss politics after a robot steps out of a spaceship and demands, “Take me to your lizard.”
The robot, said Ford, “comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
The impenetrably English Arthur Dent asks, “You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, … “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”