The Monarchist 1.0
Defending the British Crown Commonwealth and the English-Speaking Peoples
[+] HONOURING OUR PATRON, SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, VICTOR OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
[+] HONOURING OUR QUEEN, ELIZABETH THE SECOND, ON THE 80TH YEAR OF HER BIRTH (1926 - 2006)
[+] HONOURING OUR KING, SAINT EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, ON THE 1000TH YEAR OF HIS BIRTH (1005 - 2005)
[+] HONOURING OUR HERO, LORD NELSON, ON THE BICENTENNIAL OF THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR (1805 - 2005)
[+] HONOURING OUR SONS, THE QUEEN'S COMMONWEALTH SOLDIERS KILLED IN THE 'WAR ON TERROR'
Chief Warrant Officer Robert Girouard, 46, Royal Canadian Regiment, Nov 27, 2006 (Afstan)
Staff Sergeant Sharron Elliott, 34, Intelligence Corps, Nov 12, 2006 (Iraq)
Private Jacob B. Kovco, 25, Royal Australian Regiment, April 21, 2006
[+] HONOURING OUR VETS ON THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE VICTORIA CROSS (1856 - 2006)
Monday, February 13, 2006
Britannia's genius: Vesting power in the powerless
Mark Steyn writes in Macleans Magazine that "there is simply nothing comparable in scale or endurance to the Britannic inheritance":
"Today, three-sevenths of the G7 major economies are nations of British descent. Of the 20 economies with the highest GDP per capita, no fewer than 11 are current or former realms of Her Britannic Majesty. And if you protest that most of those are pinprick colonial tax havens -- Bermuda, the Caymans -- well, okay, eliminate all territories with populations lower than 20 million and the Top Four is an Anglosphere sweep: the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. The key regional players in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived -- South Africa, India -- and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you're better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: try doing business in Indonesia rather than Malaysia, or Haiti rather than St. Lucia.
And of course the dominant power of the age derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. As for the allegedly inevitable hyper-power of the coming century, if China ever does achieve that status, it will be because the People's Republic learned more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong ever did from the Little Red Book."...
"Simone Weil, the Parisian author and sometime Jew/Marxist/anarchist pondered why, alone among the European powers, it was England that had maintained "a centuries-old tradition of liberty guaranteed by the authorities." She was struck "by the fact that in the British Constitution the chief power is vested in one who is all but powerless, the monarch."
I hadn't thought of it quite like that before. But it's true that most of the alternatives to the Westminster system are predicated on the visible agglomeration of active demonstrable power: Communism, Fascism, the Iranian mullahs, the French presidency. . . .There is something peculiarly British in the vesting of sovereignty and supreme authority in a person who cannot wield it in any practical sense...
Endowing the sovereignty of the nation in an absentee monarch -- as Canada, Barbados, Belize, Tuvalu et al. do -- is an even more exquisite variation on the Weil theory: vesting power in its literal rather than merely political absence. But the Westminster system depends on a Westminster disposition"...read the whole thing here.
POSTED BY: The Monarchist AT 5:23 p.m. | LINKS |
Mark Steyn writes in Macleans Magazine that "there is simply nothing comparable in scale or endurance to the Britannic inheritance":
"Today, three-sevenths of the G7 major economies are nations of British descent. Of the 20 economies with the highest GDP per capita, no fewer than 11 are current or former realms of Her Britannic Majesty. And if you protest that most of those are pinprick colonial tax havens -- Bermuda, the Caymans -- well, okay, eliminate all territories with populations lower than 20 million and the Top Four is an Anglosphere sweep: the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. The key regional players in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived -- South Africa, India -- and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you're better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: try doing business in Indonesia rather than Malaysia, or Haiti rather than St. Lucia.
And of course the dominant power of the age derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. As for the allegedly inevitable hyper-power of the coming century, if China ever does achieve that status, it will be because the People's Republic learned more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong ever did from the Little Red Book."...
"Simone Weil, the Parisian author and sometime Jew/Marxist/anarchist pondered why, alone among the European powers, it was England that had maintained "a centuries-old tradition of liberty guaranteed by the authorities." She was struck "by the fact that in the British Constitution the chief power is vested in one who is all but powerless, the monarch."
I hadn't thought of it quite like that before. But it's true that most of the alternatives to the Westminster system are predicated on the visible agglomeration of active demonstrable power: Communism, Fascism, the Iranian mullahs, the French presidency. . . .There is something peculiarly British in the vesting of sovereignty and supreme authority in a person who cannot wield it in any practical sense...
Endowing the sovereignty of the nation in an absentee monarch -- as Canada, Barbados, Belize, Tuvalu et al. do -- is an even more exquisite variation on the Weil theory: vesting power in its literal rather than merely political absence. But the Westminster system depends on a Westminster disposition"...read the whole thing here.
POSTED BY: The Monarchist AT 5:23 p.m. | LINKS |
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