CHAPTER TEN - THE ASSOCIATION OF THE COMMONWEALTH REALMS

CHAPTER TEN -
THE ASSOCIATION OF THE COMMONWEALTH REALMS
(Delivered a meeting at the House o f Lords in November 2006⁵³⁸)

Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge cry
God for England and Saint George

Shakespeare - King Henry V

My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Commonwealth Realms⁴⁹²… those former Dominions of Empire, which, although now sovereign in their own right, have retained the Crown, not as a mere symbol, but as the fundamental core upon which their constitutions are reliant.

Although the Crown was originally the gift of the United Kingdom and even though the constitutionality of the Crown is vested in the parliament of the United Kingdom, it is not within the prerogative of that parliament to either control it, influence it or take it back. But that, ladies and gentlemen is what is potentially occurring with the several treaties the British parliament is entering into with the European Union.

The motto chosen for the weekend conference just passed was taken from Shakespeare’s rallying cry in Henry V⁷⁹⁷: Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge cry God for England and Saint George. ⁵⁵⁰  

The ‘spirit’ Shakespeare¹⁶ talked about was, of course, the spirit of the British peoples. A spirit which seems to be peculiar to the peoples of this island whatever their original ethnicity. It was a spirit that met Caesar, ferocious conqueror of Gaul, and blocked his further advance. It was a spirit which lived through the subsequent conquests by Rome, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and the Normans, and although adapted and sometimes improved, was nevertheless that same spirit of fierce determination and patriotism.

There was only one thing that conquered and remained supreme over this spirit and that, of course, was the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, for the spirit of the British peoples became, from the very time of Christ, a beacon even through the pagan eras of the European overlords.

Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge

cry God for England and Saint George

My lords, ladies and gentlemen, some of you in this room will well remember the plaintive pleas of Winston Churchill¹⁵⁵, more than sixty years ago, invoking this spirit to come to the fore and defeat the enemy at the gate. The time has once again come for that spirit to be summoned, for the very essence of this great nation is in grave danger; but this time it is not the enemy at the gate, but, I am afraid, the many enemies within, seeking to tear asunder the very fabric of our Christian, our democratic and our free society. A society itself moulded over many years of trial and tribulation, of tyrants and of patriots and of evil but where good has always triumphed.

This time it is not simply this island kingdom that is in danger, but also the settlements of the British peoples in far away lands. Although we of the former Dominions, now Realms, are our own masters, we are nevertheless, despite our protestations of secularism, Christian and British societies in every sense, for even though we may not go to church, even though we may not pray or even though we may deny the very existence of God, the entire fabric of our being is based on the teachings of the Bible and the practices of Christ, whether we may admit to it or not.

In times past we absorbed the rituals of the Druids⁵⁵¹ and other pagans but never lost sight of the laws of God. Certainly from the times of Alfred the Great, and most probably before, our society has been based on the Ten Commandments²⁵⁵ laid down by God before Moses. For a thousand years or more, peoples from other lands and faiths, including the Moslem, have been welcomed into our society, but provided always that they respect our Christian laws and our Christian traditions.

In days gone by no one was able to assail the walls of the fabric of our being because that being was based on faith, integrity and honour. Those who seek to tear down our society can do so only because we ourselves, the British peoples have lost our faith and have replaced our integrity and our honour with naked ambition and greed.

It was during the campaign to defend our constitutional heritage in Australia¹⁷⁵ that I realised that whilst the attacks we faced were specifically directed at the Crown in my country, they were in fact a part of a far greater campaign which seemed to commence in earnest some forty years before  to destabilise and erode the entire basis of our British culture and our British heritage. I also realised that these attempts to tear down what we are and replace it with what we are not, was also occurring in Canada, New Zealand and even in the United Kingdom itself.

In Australia, people were browbeaten by the media into being ashamed to admit of their British heritage. They were frightened to publicly admit of their support for the Queen and the Crown. It was Fabian inspired political correctness gone mad. A madness not only tolerated by the authorities but, worse still, encouraged! Until and unless our authorities and indeed the people themselves stand up for our values and for our heritage, we will be submerged in a tide of chaos and become strangers in our own lands.

As far back as 1948, our greatest Australian statesman, Sir Robert Menzies,³⁰⁰ spoke in this very City of London, warning that the British Nationality Act of that year⁵⁵² would, by the:

very unnecessary Act of separation performed by British Parliaments and States bring new hope to those who would destroy us and new confusions in the minds of our friends⁵⁵³.

At the same time, he also made a very appropriate comment most pertinent to the situation in which we find ourselves today. He said We cannot hack away at the foundations and then express surprise when some day the house falls. It was, of course, the 1948 British Nationality Act which eliminated the hitherto accepted convention that all persons born under the Crown were subjects of the Queen and thereby British.

Within 20 years of that speech, Britain was to renege on its commitments to the Old Commonwealth nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. As far as Harold Macmillan was concerned, there was no future with us. To him, the future for the Commonwealth lay in the non-white nations of Africa⁴⁶⁷.

Two years earlier, fearing what was evolving in Macmillan’s mind, the Australian Prime Minister Sir (then Mr) Robert Menzies wrote in May 1961 to say:

Your European partners would require obligations of you in respect of world political and strategic problems and in respect of United Kingdom decisions on these matters. What, in these circumstances, would be the United Kingdom outlook towards Australia, towards Canada, towards the Commonwealth collectively?

Macmillan responded with an assurance that no approach to Europe would be made until satisfactory arrangements to protect Commonwealth interests had been found⁵⁵⁴.

Earlier in 1955 the then Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden⁴⁵² had advised Commonwealth nations, including Australia and Canada that Britain would not join a project that would so substantially weaken the Commonwealth relationship, both economically and politically⁵⁵⁵.

These assurances and these promises have been treated with the same utter disregard for the truth as those who swear allegiance to the Queen and then work to undermine Her Majesty’s authority: authority which is, of course, always the authority of the people. At sometime or other, they must have studied Byron’s⁵⁵⁶ unusual definition of dissembling: And after all what is a lie? T’is but the truth in masquerade.⁵⁵⁷

The 1960 Cape Town ‘winds of change’ speech⁴⁵⁴ of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan⁴⁴⁶ wrought radical changes to the then existing ‘Old’ Commonwealth to enable it to absorb many of the former colonies which had become republics. No one can possibly criticize the way in which the Commonwealth has developed over the years. That development is due not to the politicking of Macmillan, but rather to the dedication of Her Majesty our Queen, whose wisdom and perseverance have seen translated the sometime rebellious colonies of Empire into a voluntary association of sovereign nations who, miraculously freely meet as equals.

We applaud the Commonwealth and recognize it as the greatest peacemaker of modern times; but what we do not applaud is that Macmillan ensured that it was created at the expense of the close association once enjoyed by the British nations of what was then termed ‘the White Commonwealth’ for the purpose of ensuring that Britain would be free to enter Europe without the baggage of its commitment to us in the Realms. A house divided against itself cannot stand. The Realms are today a divided House under the Crown and are as separate and apart as the most dysfunctional family could possibly be.

Lord Rosebery⁵⁵⁸, when visiting Adelaide with Lady Rosebery⁵⁵⁹, during a nine week visit of Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia spoke at the Adelaide Town Hall on the 18^th of January 1884 in which he described the Australian colonies as ‘a nation’ and the empire itself as a 'Commonwealth of Nations'.

Such was his interest in Australia that he bought real estate in Sydney but lost it in the 1892 economic crash. However, he never lost his deep interest in Australia. He was the first modern British statesman to envisage a European Union and a Commonwealth, but would never have tolerated any sort of separation of the British peoples.

There was a time when people in Britain, in Australia and in the other English Speaking Realms⁵⁶³ were proud to call themselves ‘British’. A time when they gloried in the pageantry of the history and the cultures that made up our monarchical system. A time when we valued our laws and traditions and readily paid homage to God, King and Country.

It was a time, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, which I am afraid no longer exists, except in books and in the minds of those who can remember what things used to be.

Those of my grandparents’ generation would never have considered ceding even one iota of British sovereignty to anyone let alone to those in Europe who, over the centuries, have tried but failed time and time again to destroy our nation. In the 1940s, when Britain was on its knees, facing extinction, there was no cry of surrender, only of grit and determination.

Things move on, and things change, but must they change so much for the worse, for it is tragically only the worse that I see existent in this once great nation today.

It is a great tragedy that in recent times, it has only been in periods of war, of stress and of trauma that the spirit of the British peoples has been awakened as though from a ‘Rip Van Winkle⁵⁶⁰’ sleep to march ahead and defeat whatever foe dared disturb its peaceful way of life, often proclaiming: Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge cry God for England and Saint George!

In years gone by there has always been a Churchill crying in the wilderness - or a Wellington⁵⁶¹ or Marlborough⁵⁶² waiting in the wings, but today as Britain is in greater jeopardy than ever before with the absorption of this nation into Europe, there seems to be no Churchill, no Wellington or Marlborough, only us, the little people of this country and those of our cousins, the little people in the English -Speaking Realms⁵⁶³. As such, it is up to us all to do what we can, each in our own way, to defeat the threat that places our great civilisation in danger.

Political correctness and multi-culturalism - which originated in the think-tanks of the Fabian Movement¹⁰⁷ and via its London School of Economics²⁰⁸ - indoctrinated the educated elite and has been like a cancer eating away at the foundations of our national identities.

Not far from this place at the Cenotaph in St James’s Park I have read the words Feel with them in the fight for the World's Freedom, but today people in the streets walk idly by without a care that their parliament is daily eroding their own liberty and their own freedoms and even worse, their national identity. They do not care because their stomachs are full and their minds empty.

Whilst our system in the United Kingdom has placed the power and authority of the nation in the parliament, I am afraid, due to the massive majorities the Labour Party has been able to secure, that power and that authority is daily abused and the integrity of the Crown undermined; and the position of the Queen made untenable.

Our entire system is one based on the respect of our conventions and traditions. It cannot function when there are politicians and, dare I say Prime Ministers, who seem to have no regard whatsoever for such conventions and traditions. It puts me in mind of US President John Adams⁵⁶⁴ who could not have spoken truer words when he said: Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the Government of any other. ⁵⁶⁵

The problems we face with those who govern us are the fault of no one other than the people in whose hands our democracy is based. The Crown is the People. It cannot act if the people do not wish it to. The entire system is atrophying because of the pathetic apathy of the people. The old saying, feed their stomachs and you have their minds is, I am afraid, only too true.

But there are those who care. We are in this august room today, because we care. There are others like us throughout the nation and indeed the Realms, who care.

The apathy of the people will not be extinguished overnight. It is somewhat diminished due to the very real dangers of extremist fundamental Islam. This is something that they can see. The fear is something they can taste. The threat to their comfortable existence is something that is fast becoming so very real.

The danger that the European Union is to the integrity of the Crown is to most people not so real mainly because they simply cannot understand the implications of the many treaties entered into by the Parliament of this nation.

During the weekend conference⁵³⁸ we have heard from young people, including one in the parliament who says there are ten others like him, but in this the Mother of all Parliaments, should there not have been a hundred! However, his comments and those of others like him do give a tremendous hope for the future in this country.

But what, may I ask, is the hope for mine, for Canada’s and for New Zealand’s - those nations of Britain settled during the course of Empire which are now sovereign but remaining under the Crown, when the British Parliament itself cares nothing for the consequences of sovereignty, ‘the very keystone’, according to Dicey⁷¹, ‘of our constitution⁵⁶⁷’, in its pursuit of the illusionary pot of gold held out to Britain as the benefit of its pacts with Europe?

The pacts have done untold damage not simply to the trading and other physical relationships with us, but by debasing the integrity of the Crown of the United Kingdom and making it subject to Europe has the potential to completely undermine the integrity of our own constitutions, which like yours are totally reliant upon the same Crown.

But, you will say, ‘we all have our own Crowns’ and I am afraid that there are jurists in all our countries who do actually say this. However, whilst the functions of the Crown are independent one from another, it is nevertheless the same Crown.

Whilst the Queen acts on the independent advice of Her Australian Ministers when dealing with Australian matters, she is nevertheless the same person. A person the British Parliament has made a Citizen of Europe is therefore subject to Europe, whatever flimsy words may be used to camouflage the actual fact. It is this Parliament which has done this, and far worse.

The Queen’s Prerogatives, which are the powers vested in the Crown in trust for the people and exercised by Her Majesty and often on Her Majesty’s behalf, has been eroded in favour of the now political prerogative of the Prime Minister!

The Common Law of England, evolved over a thousand years and upon which not just your constitutional system is based, but also ours, is no more in this country, for how can you have a Common Law when it is not common to the people but subject to the Roman code of Europe: a code that is quite alien to everything upon which the United Kingdom - and its law - was founded?

What you have done is to hand to those in countries of the Commonwealth Realms who seek to undermine the systems of checks and balances through the Crown, (which have ensured true democracy in our lands for over a century), a gold-plated ticket for themselves to do what you have done in this country - and that is to remove the authority of the Queen and replace it with that of the politicians.

There was a time when we had judges who valued and, indeed, honoured our conventions. Today there are those who seek to destroy the fabric of our Christian society, flouting the Ten Commandments as they wish in their personal lives. How can we expect them to honour the Common Law which we in the Realms, have inherited from this once great nation, when you yourselves have relegated it to oblivion in favour of the Napoleonic dictates of the State? Do you not realise that the Crown of the United Kingdom and the Common Law of England are the hub upon which, together the constitutions of fifteen other separate and sovereign nations rely? Weaken that centre and the entire wheel faces collapse.

It was forty-three years ago, in August 1963, that the American negro leader Dr. Martin Luther King, ⁵⁶⁸ stirred the world with an audacious plea calling for the freedom of his people. His lengthy speech is forgotten, other than a few so very meaningful words:

I say to you today, my friends, that even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.⁸¹⁰

Dreams and visions for the future are wonderful things, provided always there are people who will not just listen, but actually act on them.

For some seven years now, my dream - indeed my vision - has been to bring together the peoples of the old Dominions, for we in Australia and New Zealand should be like brother and sister to those in Canada and the United Kingdom itself. We should not be forced to walk through the ‘aliens’ or ‘others’ gate when entering this country. Sir Robert Menzies once proclaimed vehemently to the British Government:

Recognise that our common destiny is not just pounds, shillings and pence. Do not treat us Australians of British birth simply as strangers with whom you will be perfectly friendly. Friendship is not enough. Warren Hastings is my Hastings, not merely yours; England is my England, not merely yours⁷⁹⁰

It must be of regret to you all in this room tonight that it is this very Parliament which has been the cause of the breaking of the close links that once bound us. Indeed these very hallowed halls that experienced the great oratory of Churchill are fast becoming the tomb of democracy.

The people who have split us asunder are now nearly all gone to be judged by their maker, and cruel though it may seem we can only hope that they will be judged harshly.

But my dream, ladies and gentlemen, is to work to undo that which they have done and, with the new generations now rising, to create new links amongst the British Peoples and to make us all proud of what we were and must be once again.

The Association of the Commonwealth Realms, which I hereby launch tonight, will not achieve miracles. It will not be able to do everything, but let it be a start. It is not our intent to tread on the toes of others and become engaged in the political debates of the European Union or the republican challenges, but rather to encourage all to work to protect the integrity of the Crown. G. K. Chesterton⁵⁷⁰ describes our motives very well when he wrote: We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.⁵⁷¹

Indeed, were we to have sufficient financial backing, I would like to see established a research institute the purpose of which would be to educate those members of the parliaments of the Realms, especially that of the United Kingdom, on the links through the Crown that bind us.

Very few people - even in this, the Mother of our Parliaments - know anything about the meaning and the intent of the Statute of Westminster that was constructed to ensure the security of all our constitutions under the Crown. It did not go far enough. It left unsaid what should have been said. It depended too much on the honour and the integrity of the members of the parliament. They could never have envisaged an Edward Heath - let alone a Tony Blair!

We can do nothing about this. The time has passed for talking about what Macmillan said or what Heath did. Indeed, it is of no avail talking about what should have been, but only what must be in the future. What we can do is to inform and to educate and to work towards creating a new mindset.

Above all, our main purpose must always be the protection of the Crown, which is our constitutional lifeblood. We cannot do the impossible, but we must achieve the possible as in the words of Longfellow,⁵⁷² who wrote: something attempted something done.⁵⁷³

Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you all to join the ‘Association of the Commonwealth Realms’ which will over time draw members from throughout the United Kingdom, together with the old Dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand and, indeed, from all those others who value and honour the British heritage which became theirs. We set a nominal membership fee of ten pounds, for our purpose is not to make money from our members, but rather to create an awareness of our shared heritage.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my dream. I invite you all to share in it.