Tuesday 22 January 2013

A Letter To The Dean



Westminster Abbey is to honour two 20th century Prime Ministers with memorials. The 'chosen' are Edward Heath (1970-74) and James Callaghan (1976-79).

The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, said:



‘The men and women who have contributed most to our island story and our nation's international influence are memorialised in the Abbey, including most Prime Ministers of the 19th century and of the first half of the 20th century.
‘And yet no Prime Minister since 1956 has a memorial in the Abbey.' 

Edward Spalton took to his keyboard to contact the Dean with his objections.



The Very Revd. Dr. John Hall
The Chapter Office
20 Dean's Yard
Westminster Abbey
London
SW1P 3 AA

Dear Mr. Dean, 

MEMORIAL TO THE LATE SIR EDWARD HEATH

As far as I know, there is no tradition of all Prime Ministers being memorialised in the abbey. So I cannot understand why Sir Edward Heath's memory has been selected for such a distinction.

I recall him as the Prime Minister who ran away from Arthur Scargill during a coal miners' strike and as the “elder statesman” who stoutly defended the Chinese government at the time of the Tienanmen Square massacre when he said “How can you have democracy in a country of one thousand million?”

So I can only assume that the distinction which motivates this proposed memorial is that he managed to scrape a small parliamentary majority to take this country into what is now the European Union. He had previously said that he would not do this “without the full hearted consent of the British people”. The MPs who voted for this proposal had neither had the opportunity to read the treaty to which they were acceding nor to know the institution to which they were outsourcing many of their functions. Sir Edward had known since 1963 when Lord Kilmuir advised him.

Whilst he assured us that “no essential loss of sovereignty” was involved, he was fully aware that he was telling a bare-faced lie, as documents now available from the Public Record Office clearly show. I was one of those taken in by him. Doing business in mainland Europe and speaking German, I was quite keen on European cooperation – but it was never about that.

As Sir Edward himself admitted to Peter Sissons in a television interview much later, his aim all along had been a “United States of Europe” - in other words, the reduction of his country to a province or collection of provinces in an alien state and his sovereign and her people to the same subjection. This intention was clearly incompatible with the oath which Sir Edward swore as a Privy Counsellor.

From treachery and faith breaking, he proceeded to a long career of deceit of Parliament and people, distinguished only by the fact that he was not properly disgraced and unmasked during his lifetime.

If this is the sort of man to be honoured in the abbey, I fear you are setting the bar very low and giving encouragement to further betrayals by future politicians of even lesser integrity and lower morals and principles.

Yours sincerely

Edward Spalton


Well said Edward! I hope, in an independent Scotland, the people will be consulted before public money is spent on memorials to politicians.  The unseemly haste with which a statue was erected - commissioned by the Labour-led Glasgow Council - to Donald Dewar in 2002 was thought by many to be premature.

Also Edward has ask me to mention the Campaign for an Independent Britain as it has a section called 'Heath's Corner'.

7 comments:

JRB said...

Whilst agreeing with Mr Spalton on his comments re Edward Heath, let us not forget the other proposed recipient of this honour - James Callaghan.

That is the same James Callaghan whose intransigent political stance led to the notorious “Winter of Discontent”. Whose only comment as mountains of rubbish piled high on the streets of Britain and the dead were stacked in empty factories was - “Crisis? What crisis?”
That is the same James Callaghan who in 1979 despite a majority of Scottish people voting ‘Yes’ in the Scottish Referendum, he implemented the questionable 40% rule which quashed the democratic result and the will of the majority of the Scottish people.
Thankfully this led to a vote of ‘no confidence’ which he lost, but which subsequently led to the election of Thatcher.

The Dean would do well to step outside his Westminster bubble and speak to the people. He might then realise that the two candidates he proposes are not universally popular throughout this land of ours.

dognamedblue said...

er... that the same Ted Heath, the "rumoured" boy buggerer & child killer [MI5] of Haut de la Garenne & Savile, on his morning cloud?

ouch

Joe Public said...

It's worse than you think, Rosie.

The first link is to a press release dated 27 Mar 2012.

Since then, a second press release dated 31 Dec 2012 publicises the intention to honour suspected Soviet Agent Harold Wilson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories

JRB said...

@JoeP Thanks for that update.
I was horrified on reading Dean Hall’s reasoning on why he was honouring Mr Wilson, he says he was doing so -
“As part of our continuing commitment to our neighbours in the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall”

Why, in the name of God, is the Church cosying-up to the political establishment?

With such logic, why does the Church not erect a memorial stone to Herod for his work on population control in the first century?

Demetrius said...

The miner's strike in Heath's time was led by Gormley. It was this failure that helped trigger the disastrous wage inflation spiral of the 1970's. Scargill was still brooding in his bungalow in Worsbrough then. It has always baffled me why on earth the Tories picked Heath, an evident wrong 'un. They should have stuck with Douglas-Home.

subrosa said...

Thank you for your comments gentlemen. I'm sure Edward will respond.

Edward Spalton said...

Thank you for the comments. We have "Heath's Corner" on the website for the Campaign for an Independent Britain
www.freebritain.org.uk

JRB - The first I heard of Edward Heath was from a very active Young Conservative around 1961. I was told he was definitely the coming man of the party - a free market Conservative ( very much in the style of what was later called Thatcherism). One of his aims (later achieved) was the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance. It was many years later when I discovered that one of Harold MacMillan's objectives in applying for EEC membership was to tame the trade unions by throwing British industry open to unrestricted European competition. He did not dare go the direct route of reforming trade union law. He was frightened that the country was "ungovernable" and the EEC was his indirect route to undercut the arbitrary power which more or less total legal immunity gave to the union barons.

Heath, of course, reversed himself completely with the Prices & Incomes Policy etc. The inflation of the Seventies also arose from a huge disruption in commodity prices which spread from oil outwards and (not least) the inflationary effect on food prices of the European Common Agricultural Policy. I later found that this policy, the EU's biggest project and budget item by far, was exactly based on the ideas of Hitler's Economics Minister, Walther Funk. My translation of his lead paper "European Economic Community" is on the website
www.freenations.freeuk.com under the title "The EU's Evil pedigree".

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