Reawake Britain's Patriotism
Prince Harry was a dysfunctional younger son born into a dysfunctional family, with his father's looks and his mother's brains. Until recently, his only achievement was notoriety, as the kid brother who dressed up in a Nazi uniform for a fancy dress party and brawled with paparazzi outside nightclubs.
Then, unexpectedly, he had heroism thrust upon him.
Until the Drudge Report last week broke the strict press embargo on reporting his presence on the front line — a breach which doubtless boosted traffic on the Drudge Web site but also, I regret to report, anti-American feeling in Britain — the prince had never been as happy as he was fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, Cornet Harry Windsor could be just another soldier — "I think this is as normal as I'm ever going to get," he mused with unaccustomed perceptiveness.
He was, by all accounts, a decent junior officer, and the mere sight of him mucking in with the rest of his men has worked wonders, not just for his own self-esteem, but for that of his demoralized country, too.
An American friend living here told me that his grown-up daughter had remarked, apropos the blanket coverage given to Harry's tour of duty, "I never even knew we were fighting a war in Afghanistan."
So if he has done nothing else, Prince Harry has reminded his own generation that, yes, there is a war on, actually. He has reawakened their patriotism just in time to prevent Great Britain from turning itself into another Belgium.
Last evening the House of Commons voted by 311 to 248 against holding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which is the European Constitution under another name.
By breaking the promise of a referendum they had given at the time of the 2005 election, Gordon Brown's Labour government and its liberal allies, in effect, voted to hand over another large chunk of British sovereignty to the European Union.
Fortunately there is still a backstop: the House of Lords. Strange that the unelected upper chamber should find itself the guardian of British democracy, but although it can ultimately only delay the passage of the treaty, woe betide the government if it should invoke the rarely-used Parliament Act to overrule the Lords. A constitutional crisis could result, because this act only was intended to be used if the unelected chamber tried to thwart the wishes of the electorate.
It is true that the House of Lords never blocks laws for which the government of the day has a direct mandate from the electorate. But that does not apply in this case: all three parties promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
The upper house can legitimately vote according to conscience, safe in the knowledge that it is more in tune with popular feeling than the supposedly more representative Commons. As France and the Netherlands showed when they rejected the European Constitution in 2005, a referendum is a sure-fire way of finding out just how democratic an elected parliament really is.
Now that all the members of the E.U. have been denied a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (except for Ireland), citizens are demanding that their representatives should indeed represent the views of those who elected them.
In Britain, 15 electoral districts voted on whether a referendum should be held; 89% said yes, they did want to be consulted. Still Prime Minister Brown took no notice.
What has the Lisbon Treaty got to do with patriotism? It will create a new legal entity called the European Union, with its own president and foreign minister, which will be able to act on the international stage independently of its member states.
I don't know how this new and untested structure can be made to work, especially in the absence of consent, of allegiance, of loyalty to the new Europe — the kind of feelings aroused by Prince Harry's unexpected discovery that he was made of sterner stuff than we — or he — had thought.
There is a great yearning for a new patriotism, for a country worthy of a nation's pride. But there is no yearning for a new country, a new focus for patriotic feeling, called Europe.
The solution to the lack of loyalty to Western values that has been exposed by the war against jihadist terror is not to create divided loyalties.
Indeed, unless we British bend all our efforts to strengthening our national identity; unless we defend the civilization we inherited from the ancient world, from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; and unless we champion our Judaeo-Christian morality, with its respect for the dignity of the individual and the sanctity of life, we shall not be able to prevent Britain dividing along ethno-religious lines.
Today's Britain is a society where the Jewish community has no choice but to maintain a private organization, the Community Security Trust, to protect its members from attack. No synagogue or cemetery, no Jewish school or institution is safe; Jews are advised not to gather in a public place.
It is a society where an Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali, lives in fear of his life because he warned against the emergence of "no-go areas" in the mainly-Muslim quarters of some cities.
The last time that a bishop lost his head for his beliefs was in the English Civil War, nearly four centuries ago. Let us hope that we do not need another civil war to reunify and reintegrate our society. Europe is not part of the solution; it is part of the problem.
