Another great traditional institution is destined to fall due to another Labour victory.

An edited version of remarks delivered by Andrew Roberts at the House of Lords on July 23, 2024.

My Lords, it would be churlish not to congratulate the Labour Party on its stunning victory on the fourth of July and unpatriotic not to wish the Government luck and a fair wind. Since the abolition of the hereditary element in this House was in their manifesto, and of course they have the political power to enact it, all I want to do today is speak as an historian about the effect of breaking this living link that we presently have with Britain’s past.

Burke tells us, “Society is indeed a contract . . . it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The hereditary element in this place represents—I hope hereditary Peers in this debate will not mind this characterization—the “dead” part of that contract, for they do not merely represent themselves here; they also represent their ancestors, whose often glorious deeds have made Britain the country that she is today.

When we see the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, for example, as well as the good-natured and highly intelligent fellow who sits on the Labour Front Bench, we also see the shade of his great-great-great-grandfather, Major General Sir Frederick Ponsonby, whose charge of the twelfth Light Dragoons helped save the Union Brigade at a critical moment of the Battle of Waterloo—which, of course, was won by the ancestor of another of our present-day Members of this House, the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, who is speaking in this debate, holds a title that, for all that it went into abeyance for four hundred years, was created in 1375, six hundred fifty years ago next year—nearly two-thirds of a millennium.

We are surrounded by ghosts in this Chamber, but they are the ghosts of the great. One of the speakers in this debate from the Liberal Benches will be the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso. At a crucial moment for the continued existence of this country, in May 1940, his grandfather, Sir Archibald Sinclair, put party differences to one side to make his old comrade from the trenches, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister. He was Secretary of State for Air during the Battle of Britain. Then, only three months after he left that vital post, his place was taken by Viscount Stansgate, a decorated RAF officer and, of course, the grandfather of our own noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate.

Some of the families represented in this House go back to the very founding of our country. The first Duke of Montrose—and we heard that moving statement from the eighth Duke—played a central part in the Act of Union that created the United Kingdom.

The greatness and the drama of our national past finds a living embodiment here in this Chamber in a way that does not exist in other Parliaments around the world. Once that link is broken, it cannot be reconstituted. To quote Burke again, “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded.” My Lords, I hope that, when the time comes to say farewell to the hereditary Peers, we will do so full of genuine gratitude for the centuries of service that they and their families have given this House and this country.

All of which proves that the Lords in 1911 should have listened to Lord Willoughby de Broke and called out the Household Cavalry to disperse the Commons when Asquith’s government undertook to ram through the Parliament Bill stripping the House of Lords of most of its power of veto.

Victor Davis Hanson finds that the wisdom of the commentariat has changed. Via the News Junkie.

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Labour deliberately set out to alter the culture, character, ethnic composition, and consciousness of Britain. If they didn’t like it the way it was, couldn’t they just have moved?

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Phil Jones admits no significant Global Warming since 1995. His reference to the unknowability of the world-wide extent of Medieval Warming Period implicitly concedes that the science cannot possibly be regarded as settled.

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Bad habit. University of Alabama faculty shooter also fatally shot 18 year old brother in 1986. Better not make her angry.

Congressman Delahunt was the DA that did not press charges.

Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and other Labour panjandrums, revealed recently, in a column in the Evening Standard defending Labour immigration policies, that Labour ministers encouraged massive Third World immigration out of a desire to change the character of the British nation, as well as in order to insult the political right while enlarging its own constituency. Labour’s policy was deliberately concealed from its own supporters, because it was recognized that many core Labour voters would not approve.

SkyNews:

Labour ministers deliberately encouraged mass immigration to diversify Britain over the past decade, a former Downing Street adviser has claimed.

Andrew Neather said the mass influx of migrant workers seen in recent years was not the result of a mistake or miscalculation but rather a policy the party preferred not to reveal to its core voters.

He said the strategy was intended to fill gaps in the labour market and make the UK more multicultural, at the same time as scoring political points against the Opposition.

Mr Neather worked as a speechwriter for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

“Mass migration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural,” he wrote in in the London Evening Standard.

“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if it wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

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The Telegraph:

The “deliberate policy”, from late 2000 until “at least February last year”, when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

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It is difficult to read all this, which is obviously perfectly true, and grasp that changes in fashionable opinion mysteriously came to pass resulting in our living in a time in which it is only too probable that the people able to rise to the top leadership positions in Western societies are highly likely to have a deeply negative view of their own country’s history and institutions, and even of their own people. So negative a view that they would be committed not to the preservation of their own country’s values, institutions, and character, but to their elimination.

WorldNetDaily:

Just one week before Michael Savage was scheduled to debate via video link at the Cambridge Union in England, the co-presidents of the two-century-old society informed the top-rated radio host they have canceled the event.

…(T)he invitation from the Cambridge Union Society for the Oct. 15 debate was issued in July after Savage was banned from entering the United Kingdom by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government along with Muslim extremists and leaders of hate groups.

In an e-mail today to Savage producer Beowulf Rochlen, Cambridge Union leaders Julien Domercq and Jonathan Laurence wrote, “It is with great regret to inform you of the difficult decision we have taken to cancel the event.”

Domercq and Laurence pointed to problems with the cost and feasibility of setting up the necessary video link, but they also cited “legal issues.”

“We have reconsulted with our counsel, and been informed that there are numerous legal issues with Dr Savage speaking here,” they wrote, “and so because of all of the technical, financial and legal problems involved, we have come to the reluctant conclusion that the event cannot proceed.” …

The July 2 invitation to the debate said the Cambridge Union had been following his case “with great interest” and believed he was “more qualified than anyone to talk about the subject of political correctness in American and Britain.”

The student society at the University of Cambridge wanted Savage to speak for the opposition in a debate titled “This House Believes Political Correctness is Sane and Necessary.”

The society, founded in 1815, has hosted the likes of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American presidents Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt.

The cancellation of speaking appearance by controversial political figures on the right at student debating forums at elite universities as the result of pressure from on high has quite a long tradition.

I don’t think much of Michael Savage, née Weiner, myself, but this sort of thing only ever happens to controversial speakers from the political right. The most loathsome communist, the most extreme anti-humanity environmentalist, the noisiest representative of any kind of leftwing craziness can be allowed to speak on campus. Columbia can even host Mahmoud Ahmedinejad for a speech denouncing the United States.

An invitation to George Wallace to speak at the Yale Political Union was canceled by union officers under direct pressure from Yale President Kingman Brewster in the early 1960s. A decade later, the administration intervened again, forcing the YPU to rescind an invitation to speak to William Shockley. That second time, Yale conservatives determined to test free speech at Yale simply passed the responsibility for the invitation from one captive student organization to another, as the Yale administration continued to try forcing a cancellation. When the event actually was held, leftwing activists prevented Shockley from speaking at all. The embarrassment of a second public address at Yale (the left had also forcibly shut down a speech by General William Westmoreland a bit earlier) prevented from happening by force provoked a serious reexamination of Yale University’s commitment to free speech by the Woodward Committee, which issued a report strongly affirming the principle of Free Expression.

The Woodward Report resulted in Yale being one of relatively few major universities to escape the adoption of politically correct civility codes.

It sounds like the Cambridge Union caved in the face of pressure from the Labour Government rather than from the University. Free expression in Britain is clearly in trouble not merely at the university but at the national level.

Britain’s Navy no longer rules the waves. Decades of defense cuts have reduced the once proud fleet which commanded all the world’s seas to a modest NATO auxiliary force specializing in anti-submarine warfare.

Now, the Telegraph reports that Labour intends to reduce the Navy by more than half.

Ministers have drawn up confidential proposals to slash the number of ships in the Royal Navy, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

The Ministry of Defence has produced a plan to decommission five warships from next April, which would reduce the Navy’s capability to the level where it could carry out only “one small-scale operation”.

Separate documentation from inside the department suggests that the total number of ships in the Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary could fall from the present level of 103 to 76 in 2017 and only 50 in 2027 — a reduction of more than half. …

under the plan the Navy, once the pride of the Armed Forces, would be unable to provide anything like the 1982 Falklands task force.