Until a short while ago Shepherd, now Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, was a senior fellow at The Royal Institute of International Affairs -- commonly known as Chatham House -- in charge of its European programme. After two years he left in bitter circumstances, claiming he had been forced out principally because of his publicly expressed support for Israel – a version of events that Chatham House contests. The fact remains, however, that his attitude towards Israel is one that is indeed unsayable within Britain’s foreign policy... I wonder whether the directors of Britain’s well-regarded Channel 4 television, or the program-makers, have read — or even care about — the European Union’s working definition of antisemitism, part of whichreads: 'Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective – such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.' The program — which may leave many viewers with the impression that Britain’s 290,000 Jews somehow control the rest of the British population of 62,000,000 — has been widely plugged by neo-Nazi and left-wing antisemitic groups. Do the program-makers care? Apparently not. Presumably they won’t care either about the hatred... Daily Mail, 16 November 2009 Before I start, please let me apologise. For… oooh, I don’t know, just about everything including what follows below, along with anything I might have done in the past which might conceivably have damaged or offended anyone. Or while I’m about it, anything I might do in the future. There! Now I feel so much better. Absurd? Of course. But we seem to be living in the Age of Apology. No political or public career appears to be possible without just such a display of public breast-beating. The latest example is Gordon Brown’s expected apology today for the UK’s role during the last century in sending thousands of British children without their parents’ knowledge to lives of great hardship in former colonies such as Australia or Canada. To which one has to ask — why in heaven’s name is the Prime Minister apologising now for this, of all things? For sure, it was a terrible episode in British and Australian history. Under the Child Migrants Programme, between 1930 and 1970 some 500,000 children from British orphanages or children’s homes were sent to a ‘better life’ in Australia, Canada and elsewhere. As they were shipped out of Britain, many of these children were told wrongly that their parents were dead. Many parents were totally unaware that their children had been sent to the Dominions. In many cases, far from having a ‘better life’, they were educated only for farm work and were treated with great cruelty involving physical, psychological and sexual abuse. So, undoubtedly a shameful episode. But what has it got to do with Gordon Brown, who wasn’t even alive when it began and certainly was never in a position to do anything about it? He says ‘the time is now right’ for the Government to apologise for the actions of previous governments. Accordingly, it appears he is co-ordinating his apology with a simultaneous act of contrition by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. But this is absurd. Governments don’t pass down their sins to their successors. A country cannot be held responsible for a policy introduced by a government some eight decades previously. At this rate, it surely can’t be long before Mr Brown feels obliged to apologise to the farming community for the 19th-century Corn Laws or to the Queen for the execution of Charles I. What is the reason he has suddenly felt moved to apologise for the ‘forgotten children’? Is Britain perhaps teetering on the brink of some gigantic deal vital to the national interest involving trade in kangaroo hide or maple syrup, for which such an act of abasement to Australia or Canada is a required precondition? Given that the Prime Minister appears to be in confessional mode, however, what a missed opportunity this is. With all due respect to the sensitivities of Australia, there are many, many things for which the British people would rather like an apology from their Prime Minister. He could have started, for example, with his ruination of the British economy. He could then have said he was sorry for flogging off our gold reserves at a knockdown price, bankrupting the country with the largest public debt in its history and allowing the banking system to be brought to its knees on his watch. He could have said he was sorry to have changed the culture of this country by stealth through a policy of mass immigration, to have destroyed Britain’s ability to govern itself by ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, and to have broken his manifesto promise to the British people in doing so. He could then have gone on to apologise for ripping the heart out of the professions, along with our once-peerless Civil Service and police force, not to mention the emasculation of Parliament and the British constitution. And while he was about it, he could have gone down on his knees and begged forgiveness for enslaving ever greater numbers of the British people through the dependency culture, and for destroying the life chances of millions of British children through the onslaught against marriage and the twoparent family along with the destruction of the British education system. His litany of offences could have ended with the act for which no apology can suffice — the heinous crime of committing British soldiers to a war in Afghanistan without a coherent strategy or adequate equipment to safeguard both military and mission. But there has been not one syllable of apology for any of these things for which he and his government are responsible. Instead, he chooses to issue an apology for a policy in which he had no involvement whatsoever. As a result, such a declaration is both meaningless and offensive. By expressing contrition for other people’s behaviour, it makes a mockery of the very notion of apology. Indeed, such apologies-at-a-distance act as a kind of decoy, trying to deflect public anger away from the actions for which such leaders really should be apologising. Moreover, apologising for the actions of others is a device to gain a metaphorical halo by denouncing the dubious actions of the past. It is a trick pulled by leaders who are trying to gain popularity by distancing themselves from institutions or ideas that have become unpopular or unfashionable — regardless of whether or not such unpopularity is justified. So they will cynically throw their own institution, culture or country under the proverbial bus. The result has been a veritable epidemic of political apologies. Two years ago, on the 200th anniversary of William Wilberforce’s Bill to abolish the slave trade, there was fierce competition to denounce Britain’s role in this trade — even though the whole point was that Britain was the country that led the drive to abolish it. That egregious grandstander Peter Hain, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Wales, even fatuously apologised for the role Wales and Northern Ireland had played in international slavery. Comically, such ‘gesture politics’ apologies are often made to people who are dead. Thus Gordon Brown’s abject apology to Alan Turing — the brilliant wartime Bletchley Park code-breaker, who was also a homosexual and who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for an act of gross indecency. Similarly grovelling to the grave, the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England issued an apology addressed to Charles Darwin — 126 years after his death — for ‘misunderstanding’ his Theory of Evolution. But then, the Church of England seems to spend all its time apologising for everything ever associated with it, including slavery, the offensiveness to Muslims of Christian doctrine and missionary activity in the Third World. Indeed, the Church appears to be apologising for the very existence of Christianity itself. And this surely is the most troubling aspect of this mania for acts of abasement. It is that these meaningless apologies for the past tend to be made by those who are busily destroying the present. While political or church leaders wear their consciences on their sleeves by apologising on behalf of (or even to) the dead, the damage they themselves have caused to the present- day condition of Britain or to the Church is incalculable. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that such leaders are actually ashamed of the country itself for which these past misdeeds stand proxy. It is for that treacherous attitude that they really should be apologising.
Tuesday, 17th November 2009
The still strong voice of a vanishing Britain
11:48pm
I have not had a moment until now to post up a comment on Robin Shepherd’s new book about the relationship between Israel and Europe, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).It is a remarkable book by an author with a remarkable history.This sceptred isle
11:30pm
Reflecting on that Dispatches programme, Tom Gross writes:
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
November 18, 2009
An apology for a Prime Minister
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