The Queen Accepts Gordon Brown's Resignation

David Cameron is likely to be asked to form a government later.

Gordon Brown leaving Downing Street with his wife and children

Photo: ANTHONY DEVLIN / PA

Gordon Brown said it was 'a privilege to serve' as Prime Minister

Photo: AP

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, have agreed the terms of a coalition government

Photo: GETTY

The agreement follows an extraordinary week in politics, after the Tories took the most seats in the election and David Cameron attempted to come to a hasty deal with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to form a majority coalition government

Photo: REUTERS

On Monday this week, in a surprise turn, Gordon Brown announced that he would stand down as Prime Minister, as the Liberal Democrats agreed to coalition talks with Labour

Photo: GETTY

Gordon Brown announcing his resignation with wife Sarah Brown alongside

Photo: REUTERS

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Britain Sets May 6 Election

Britain will hold a national election May 6, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Tuesday.

The bitterly contested race will be dominated by a recession-wracked economy and a sense that 13 years of Labor rule may be coming to an end.

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UK Prime Minister Pledges to Force Gay Civil Union Recognition in Eastern Europe

From LifeSiteNews
By Hilary White

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to attempt to force Eastern European countries to accept as legally valid homosexual civil partnerships contracted in Britain. Brown told Attitude, one of the UK's leading homosexualist magazines, "I'm fighting to get all the countries in Europe to recognise civil partnerships carried out in Britain."

"We want countries where that hasn't been the case - especially in Eastern Europe - to recognise them. We're negotiating agreements with France and then with Spain."

"If we could show eastern Europe as well as western Europe, that this respect for gay people is due, that would be really important," said Brown. "Of course it will be tough, and will take many years, but that has never ever been a good reason not to fight."

He lauded civil partnership laws as a key achievement of the Labour party, saying it "showed our country is far more tolerant than people thought."

The Labour government's commitment to the homosexualist political agenda has been especially successful in schools where "sex education" has been made mandatory throughout all grades and opposition to homosexuality has been suppressed under the guise of combating "homophobic bullying."

Most recently, guidance issued by the Department of Education will see children as young as five taught in schools about "transsexual rights." Schools are recommended to use material produced by the government-funded homosexualist lobby group Stonewall to develop curriculum.

Homosexualist activists have made no secret of their intention to use various European Union bodies to force countries like Lithuania and Poland to accept homosexuality as a valid "sexual alternative." The proposal to force dissenting EU states to conform is a key project of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA-Europe). ILGA told the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs on Fundamental Rights that recognition of civil same-sex partnerings is one of the issues of "freedom of movement and mutual recognition of LGBT families relationships in the EU."

Some are calling for resistance to Brown's plan, saying it will threaten laws protecting the family across the EU. John Smeaton, the director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children pointed to various developments that threaten the family in Europe. In January, Spain's Supreme Court ruled that parents do not have the right to opt out of the government's pro-homosexual and anti-family schools program. In September, the European Parliament passed a resolution against a new Lithuanian law seeking to protect minors from sexualization by society, and last week, eight fathers were jailed in Germany after refusing to send their children to sex education classes.

Smeaton wrote, "It is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection."

Nothing Special About Britain? Britain!?

The following by Jonah Goldberg is a profound insight. Barack Hussein Obama's boorish treatment of the British Prime Minister and the return of the Churchill bust may reflect quite a bit more than just the bad manners of a Chicago community hustler. They reflect contempt for America's closest ally because that is the nation from which our language, culture, laws, literature and values come. How could one value the source of so much that is good in America, if one believes that America is deeply flawed and needs radical remaking?

As Tennyson wrote in his great narrative poem, Idylls of the King: "manners are not idle, but the fruit of loyal nature and of noble mind."

From National Review Online
By Jonah Goldberg

Re: the anonymous Obama administration dufus who said: "There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment."

As an unapologetic, full-throated Anglophile I find those comments idiotic, offensive, ahistorical, and in a certain sense anti-American.* I'm of course appalled.

But it's worth focusing on one aspect of this sentiment: It's idiocy. According to the liberal-realist school, some countries matter more than other countries because they are powerful and have the ability to adversely affect our national interest. According to the liberal-internationalist school, allies matter more than non-allies because grand international coalitions are the best way to do the wonderful things want to do on the world stage. So, China matters because it's a rising hegemon. Burkino Faso matters . . . eh, not so much. "Europe" matters because they are allies on security, global warming, human rights, etc. Well, Britain just happens to be our most important, reliable, and powerful ally.

So even if you take the pragmatist's razor to our shared history, culture, and all other romantic attachments to Great Britain, the bulldog still matters — a lot. In other words, to say that Britain isn't any more special than the other 190 countries in the world, you actually have to dislike Britain to the point where you're willing to suspend what are supposed to be your guiding principles and objectives about foreign policy.

* Just to be clear, what I mean by anti-American isn't a knee-jerk attack on anyone's patriotism. Rather, I simply mean that if you think the country that gave us our system of laws, our democratic tradition, our dominant culture, much of our greatest literature, and even our language is no more special than any backwater country which immiserates or brutalizes its people, then you must not think very much of America's culture, traditions, etc. either.

Please Accept My Apologies for the Boorish Behavior of Mr. Obama, My President.

From American Thinker
By Cliff Thier

To the people of Great Britain:

Please accept my apologies for the boorish behavior of Mr. Obama, my President.

His astonishingly downmarket gift to your Prime Minister is truly embarrassing. Mr. Obama should have treated Mr. Brown with far more respect than he did, not least because Mr. Brown represented the people of your nation.

Sadly -- for us -- it seems that no one ever taught Mr. Obama good manners or how to be a proper host. Worse, Mr. Obama apparently is ignorant of the history of your people and the lasting gifts that you have given to America.

Please let me thank you for those precious gifts.

Thank you for your gift of radical and dangerous ideas of freedom for which your people have fought and died.

Thank you for your gift of your navy's bringing to an end the Atlantic slave trade -- the first use of a nation's navy for a solely moral purpose.

Thank you for your gift of standing fast while standing alone against the terrible, murderous onslaught of the Nazis.

Thank you for your gift of standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States during the 70 years of costly -- but finally victorious -- war against the great sanguinary evil of Communism.

Thank you for your gift of comfort by standing first and strongest with us in the grim days after 9/11.

Thank you for your gift of sending real soldiers to fight and die alongside our men and women liberating the 45 million people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

And, thank you for your multitude of gifts of science, literature, art and music.

We will always be grateful for your friendship.

Thatcher Finds a Permanent Home at No 10: First Look at the £100,000 Portrait Brown Ordered as a Lasting Tribute

From The Mail on Sunday
By Simon Walters

A portrait of Margaret Thatcher, commissioned by Gordon Brown as his personal tribute to her achievements, is to be unveiled in Downing Street next month.

The stunning work by Richard Stone, one of the world’s leading portrait artists, is revealed for the first time today by The Mail on Sunday.

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Christianity 'Discriminated Against by Gordon Brown's Government'

Christianity is being discriminated against by the Government in favour of Islam and other minority faiths, according to a landmark Church of England report.

From The Daily Telegraph
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones

The Archbishop of Canterbury has endorsed the report.

The damning critique of Labour, which is endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, says ministers are only paying "lip service" to the Anglican Church while "focusing intently" on other religions.

It claims Gordon Brown's Government is failing society and lacks a moral vision for the country.

And in an end to decades of tension between the Church and the Conservatives, the comprehensive study praises the Tories for their "strident" approach to combating poverty.

Instead it says it is Labour which is failing to acknowledge the breakdown in society and excluding vital religious voices.

The report urges the Government to appoint a minister for religion, who would serve as the Prime Minister's faith envoy and utilise the untapped reserves of volunteers in churches and charities.

It states: "We encountered on the part of the Government a significant lack of understanding, or interest in, the Church of England's current or potential contribution in the public sphere.

"Indeed we were told that Government had consciously decided to focus...almost exclusively on minority religions."

The highly critical report, titled Moral, But No Compass - a twist on Mr Brown's claim to have a "moral compass" - carries significant weight as it has been endorsed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and expresses the views of three-quarters of the Church's bishops.

It echoes claims made by the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, last week that the decline of Christian values is destroying Britishness and has created a "moral vacuum" which radical Islam is filling.

The report, which has been seen by The Daily Telegraph, says that while the Government has tried to improve social cohesion, it has failed to appreciate the potential contribution of Christian groups to the "civic health and wellbeing" of society.

"We were told that while capacity studies had been undertaken by Government with regard to British Islam, similar studies had not been carried out for any of the UK's largest faith communities.

"If what we were told is correct, the churches simply do not register on the policy-making radar in serious terms.

"The Government has focused so intensely on minority faiths that it has failed to develop a coherent evidence base for the largest religious body in the UK, the Christian church."

The report adds: "The government is planning blind and failing parts of civil society. The government has good intentions, but is moral without a compass.

"Every participant in our study from the Church agreed that there was deep 'religious illiteracy' on the part of the Government."

A report published in 1985 damned Thatcherism for the growing spiritual and economic poverty in Britain.

But now, in a remarkable shift in the stance of the Church, the Conservatives are praised for their "genuine thirst to understand and combat poverty".

The new study, commissioned by the Church and written by academics based at the Von Hugel Institute at Cambridge University, states: "Despite many voices in the Church telling us, 'there is no difference between any of the parties on these issues,' the reality is otherwise.

"Of all our interviewees, Conservative advisors and politicians were among the most comfortable and enthusiastic regarding involving faith groups in this renewal of the third sector, and believed that Christian churches had something 'unique' to bring to the table as strong local leaders."

Eric Pickles, shadow secretary for communities and local government, said: "David Cameron's Conservatives recognise that we have to tackle a damaged society and that poverty can't be cured without the help of voluntary organisations, such as the Church which plays a vital part.

"The Church has not retreated from the difficult problems faced by many communities."

Lady Thatcher Would Win Election Today

Victory in the Falklands conflict and the end of the Cold War
ranked among Mrs Thatcher's greatest achievements.

A new Telegraph YouGov poll provides clear evidence that the British people are ready to throw off Labour Party socialism and its obeisance to EU totalitarians and return to the free market growth and opportunity unleashed by Margaret Thatcher.

When asked "who is or was Britain's greatest post-war prime minister," Lady Thatcher far exceeds every other leader of government, including the post-war premiership of Winston Churchill (1951-1955). Mrs. Thatcher was ranked first by 75% of all Conservative voters, 27% of Liberal Democrats, and even 11% of Labour voters ranked Thatcher ahead of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, and other Labour Prime Ministers. The poll also indicates that if voters could choose from an array of Tory and Labour politicians "at the peak of their powers to be Prime Minister today," Mrs. Thatcher would be easily elected.

The Telegraph's story about the poll is here.

The EU Lisbon Treaty: Gordon Brown Surrenders Britain's Sovereignty

From The Heritage Foundation

by Nile Gardiner, Ph.D. and Sally McNamara

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's decision to reject a referendum on the new European Union Reform Treaty (Treaty of Lisbon) should be viewed as one of the biggest acts of political betrayal in modern British history. Despite a rebellion by 29 of its own backbenchers, the Labour-led government defeated a Conservative proposal to hold a popular vote on the Lisbon Treaty by 311 votes to 248 in the House of Commons on March 5. Brown's refusal to support a referendum represented a stunning reversal of the government's 2005 manifesto pledge to hold a plebiscite on the European Constitution.

The Commons vote flew in the face of fierce public opposition to the Lisbon Treaty and mounting calls for the British public to have its say. In a series of unofficial mini-referenda held across several marginal seats in early March, 89 percent of the more than 150,000 voters who took part voted against the treaty, with just 8 percent in favor.[1] These votes reflected consistently high levels of opposition to the treaty in virtually all major polls on the issue in the U.K. in the past few months.

Most British voters have already concluded that the Lisbon Treaty is almost identical to the old European Constitution, which was emphatically rejected by electorates in France and Holland in 2005. If ratified in all European capitals, the treaty will come into force in January 2009, and the implications for the future of Europe are immense. So far, only the Irish government has been brave enough to stand up to Brussels and insist on a popular vote by its citizens.

The new Treaty poses the biggest threat to national sovereignty in Europe since the Second World War, would threaten the future of the Anglo-American Special Relationship, and would significantly weaken the transatlantic alliance.

A Blueprint for a European Superstate

Like the rejected constitution, the new Reform Treaty is also a blueprint for a European superstate dreamt up by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. This time around, however, most of Europe doesn't get to vote, as democracy is too dangerous a concept for the architects of this grand vision of an EU superpower.

Originally envisioned as a single market within Europe, the EU (formerly European Economic Community) is morphing into a gigantic political entity with ambitions of becoming the world's first supranational superstate. Already, major strides have been made in the development of a unified European foreign and security policy as well as a supranational legal structure. With the introduction of the euro in 1999, the European single currency and European Central Bank became a reality.

Drafted in 2004, the European Constitution was a huge step forward in the evolution of what is commonly known as the "European Project," or the drive toward "ever closer union." With its 448 articles, the constitution was a vast vanity project, conceived in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, that dramatically crashed to Earth three years ago. Since then, European Union apparatchiks have worked feverishly to resurrect the constitution, coming up with a cosmetic makeover that would make a plastic surgeon proud.

The new treaty contains all the main elements of the constitution, repackaged in flowery language. According to the European Scrutiny Committee, a British parliamentary body, only two of the treaty's 440 provisions were not contained in the original constitution.[2]

The Reform Treaty paves the way for the creation of a European Union foreign minister (high representative) at the head of an EU foreign service (with its own diplomatic corps) as well as a long-term EU president; both positions are trappings of a fledgling superstate. As European Parliament member Daniel Hannan has pointed out, the treaty will further erode the legal sovereignty of European nation-states, entrenching a pan-European magistracy ("Eurojust"), a European Public Prosecutor, a federal EU police force ("Europol"), and an EU criminal code ("corpus juris").[3] In addition, countries such as Britain will sacrifice their veto right over EU decision-making in 40 policy areas.

A Democratic Deficit

Europe doesn't need a constitution. The European Union is not the United States of Europe. The EU is a grouping of 27 independent nation-states, each with its own culture, language, heritage, and national interests. The EU works best as a single economic market that facilitates the free movement of goods, services, and people. It is far less successful as a political entity that tries to force its member states to conform to an artificial common identity.

The European Constitution and its successor treaty are all about the centralization of political power in the hands of a gilded ruling elite in Brussels, not the protection of individual liberty. They are also based on the principle that sovereignty should be pooled by nation-states for the "greater good" of Europe, a concept that goes against the grain of modern history, as witnessed with the break-up of the old Soviet Empire.

The notion that the people of Europe should not have a vote on a treaty with huge implications for the future of the continent demonstrates the utter contempt that the Brussels bureaucracy has for the average man or woman on the street. There is no doubt that if the treaty were put to a popular vote, the electorates of several countries would reject it. The whole "European Project" is fundamentally undemocratic, unaccountable, and opaque. If subjected to referenda across the EU, it would almost certainly be consigned to the dustbin of history.

A Threat to the Special Relationship

For both sides of the Atlantic, the Lisbon Treaty is bad news. The treaty poses a massive threat to the future of the Anglo-American Special Relationship as well as the broader transatlantic alliance. It will further entrench Europe's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), both major threats to the future of NATO, and will seriously impair the ability of America's allies in Europe to stand alongside the United States where and when they choose to do so.

An America without Britain alongside it would be far more isolated and friendless and significantly less able to project power on the world stage. For Washington, there is no real alternative to the Special Relationship. Its collapse would be damaging to America's standing as a global power and would significantly weaken her leadership of the war against Islamist terrorism.

A Future British Government Must Hold a Referendum

The next British government, which must be elected by 2010 at the latest, should listen to the growing calls of the British people for a vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The public should have the final say on an agreement that will dramatically undermine the U.K.'s ability to shape her own destiny. If, as is highly likely, the public rejects the treaty, Britain should withdraw from its provisions and seek a broader renegotiation of its relationship with the European Union.

The next Prime Minister, if Brown is replaced, should heed the words of Lady Thatcher, who wrote in her seminal book Statecraft: "That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era."[4] The Iron Lady's instincts are right: Common sense must prevail, and the British people should have the freedom to reject an Orwellian vision of Europe's future in favor of the principles of sovereignty and freedom.

Nile Gardiner, Ph.D., is the Director of, and Sally McNamara is Senior Policy Analyst in European Affairs in, the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation. Erica Munkwitz assisted with research for this paper.

---

[1]Toby Helm, "Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for EU Referendum," The Daily Telegraph, March 3, 2008, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/02/neu102.xml.

[2]"Q&A: EU Treaty," The Daily Telegraph, October 14, 2007, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/14/nbrown214.xml.

[3]Daniel Hannan, MEP, "Those Euro-Myths Exploded," The Daily Telegraph, October 19, 2007, at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/danielhannan/october/euromythsexploded.htm.

[4]Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 410.

WHAT POLITICAL ORATORY SHOULD BE!

It was, they kept telling us, "the President's last State of the Union Address," and as it droned on your scribe kept thinking "thanks be to God." How will the President ever carry on a conversation after he leaves office without millions and billions to promise in every sentence, for every cause, foreign and domestic?

In case you've forgotten, here's what a skilled orator (and a real conservative) sounds like. This is William Hague, the former Conservative Party Leader debating the Lisbon Treaty in Parliament last Monday. The Spectator has called it "the speech of 2008."

Even the Special Relationship is in Tatters

One is inclined to wonder if a President who has managed to bungle every aspect of American foreign relations isn't at least partly responsible for damaging the noble and historic alliance of the United States and Britain; a relationship that has endured since before the Second World War. But the situation described by Melanie Phillips will be mended by the good will and good sense of the British and American people when they replace the big government, big spending, socialists occupying Number 10 and the White House.

When Britain and America stand together, the world is a much safer place. The words of Longfellow, that Roosevelt sent to Churchill, are as true of today's crisis as they were then:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

No Longer So Special
By Melanie Phillips

You read it here first: Britain’s relationship with the US is no longer so special, and France and Germany are filling the gap. The Telegraph reports:

The White House no longer views Britain as its most loyal ally in Europe since Gordon Brown took office and is instead increasingly turning towards France and Germany, according to Bush administration sources. ‘There’s concern about Brown,’ a senior White House foreign policy official told The Daily Telegraph. ‘But this is compensated by the fact that Paris and Berlin are much less of a headache. The need to hinge everything on London as the guarantor of European security has gone’.

…Privately, White House aides accept that Mr Brown would not support military action against Iran. There is also disquiet about what US officials view as double dealing by special advisers briefing an anti-White House message in London and a more favourable one in Washington. ‘That sort of manoeuvring is not appreciated,’ said one diplomatic source.

Indeed; and it is not appreciated by the British electorate, either, which if it really believes that Gordon Brown has drawn a line under the era of manipulation and spin is in for a very rude shock indeed. Brown’s spinning makes Tony Blair look like a rank amateur, because Brown does sincerity so much better. However, scales fell off eyes only yesterday with the Prime Minister’s cynical stunt in Iraq, which committed the unforgiveable crime of using British troops in a theatre of war as mere election fodder – and also betrayed his promise to tell Parliament before anyone else about troop dispositions in Iraq.

Such cavalier disregard of the most critical issue of our time is all of a piece with Britain’s precipitate withdrawal from Basra, at the very time that the US is battling its own domestic quisling tendency in order to stay the course and win in Iraq, even if this takes many years (which it will). The consequences of America shouldering this burden without Britain will be very grave indeed — for Britain. In his deeply irresponsible attempt to buy off the baying British mob, incited by its media and intelligentsia to an unprecedented pitch of hysteria, prejudice and irrationality over Iraq, Gordon Brown is acting against British interests—as well as taking a shameful position on the most fateful issue facing the free world.

If Britain stands aside over Iran, leaving America to take alone the decision to use military force — surely inevitable, as John Bolton said in Blackpool this week, given the conspicuous failure of the vacuous diplomatic approach pursued by Britain and Europe which has only strengthened Iran and weakened the west — the consequences for Britain will be immeasurable. It will be marked for all time as having turned away from what needed to be done to defend the west; by its spinelessness it will have betrayed its own history and signalled the inescapable reality of its own cultural and moral decline; and it will achieve the lasting resentment of America, with an end to any British influence over its activities and the possible eclipse of Britain on the world stage.

Daily Telegraph On The Enduring Alliance

It was reassuring that in his first visit to America as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown invoked the words of Sir Winston Churchill:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Despite much battering in recent years ("Yo Blair" comes to mind), today's Daily Telegraph reflects on why the Anglo-American relationship remains important.