Tuesday 18 August 2009

The BDJ Challenge

It has been a while, so, not least in view of his comment of a previous post, here is another BDJ Challenge.

BDJ, tell us all you know about:

1. The trade unionists and activists who dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist;
2. The Order of the Garter;
3. The Order of Merit;
4. The Order of Companions of Honour;
5. The Lord Privy Seal;
6. The Comptroller of Her Majesty’s Household;
7. Peter Shore, including with reference to the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and the dispute between Canadian against Spanish fishermen;
8. The Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party;
9. The European Coal and Steel Community;
10. Gaitskell;
11. The Treaty of Rome;
12. The Single European Act;
13. The Maastricht Treaty;
14. Bryan Gould;
15. The No2EU – Yes To Democracy list at the 2009 European Elections;
16. The Liberal Party, as it still exists;
17. Bevan;
18. Those Labour MPs who in the 1970s successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of its ruinous effects on the North of England;
19. Those Labour activists in the Scottish Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, who accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution;
20. The Parliamentary Labour Party that voted against the partition of the United Kingdom;
21. The Attlee Government’s first ever acceptance of the principle of consent with regard to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland;
22. The Wilson Government’s deployment of British troops to protect Northern Ireland’s grateful Catholics precisely as British subjects;
23. The Callaghan Government’s administration of Northern Ireland exactly as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom;
24. The two Ulster Unionist MPs who voted to save the Callaghan Government (both the fact that they did so and the reason why) when both Irish Nationalists abstained;
25. Robert McCartney (ex-MP);
26. The theory of two nations in Ireland;
27. Resistance to enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day;
28. Organisation of farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others in order to secure radical reforms;
29. The county divisions that predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s;
30. The working farmers who sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently;
31. The creation of the Green Belt and the National Parks;
32. The English ceremonial counties;
33. The Scottish lieutenancy areas;
34. The Welsh preserved counties;
35. The Northern Irish counties;
36. Distributism;
37. “Red Ellen” Wilkinson;
38. The Jarrow Crusade;
29. George Tomlinson;
40. Sidney Webb;
41. R H Tawney;
42. Eric Hammond;
43. The restoration of the grammar schools by popular demand, as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, in what is still the very left-wing former East Germany;
44. The successful popular defence of the grammar schools in the Social Democratic heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia;
45. The Labour MPs who defended Catholic schools, and thus all church-based state schools, over several successive decades;
46. The support by national leaders of the Social Democrats for Christian religious instruction in the schools of Berlin;
47. The early Labour activists who resisted schemes to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence;
48. The Catholic and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce;
49. Thatcher’s introduction of abortion up to birth;
50. Major’s introduction of divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract;
51. The Methodist and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling;
52. Those, including John Smith, who successfully organised (especially through USDAW) against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day;
53. The only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership;
54. Trade union banners depicting Biblical scenes and characters;
55. The action taken by past Labour Governments to arrest the importation of a new working class;
56. The Lindsey oil refinery workers;
57. Attlee’s successful dissuasion of Truman from dropping an atom bomb on Korea;
58. Wilson’s refusal to send British forces to Vietnam;
59. Wilson’s use of military force to safeguard the right of the people of Anguilla to be British;
60. Callaghan’s successful prevention of an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands;
61. The eventually victorious trade union-based opposition to Communism in the Eastern Bloc (especially Poland) and elsewhere;
62. The eventually victorious non-racial, non-violent, non-Marxist, pro-Commonwealth opposition to apartheid, exemplified by Helen Suzman;
63. Th inclusion of a commitment to the National Health Service in all three manifestos in 1945;
64. Economically populist and pro-manufacturing, morally and socially conservative, staunchly Unionist and pro-military, strongly church-based Toryism;
65. Unyieldingly constitutionalist and civil libertarian Toryism;
66. Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth, anti-neoconservative Toryism;
67. Conservationist, agrarian, anti-nuclear Toryism;
68. Anthony Head (not the actor);
69. Peter Thorneycroft;
70. Nigel Birch;
71. Aubrey Jones;
72. George Jellicoe;
73. Enoch Powell on nuclear weapons;
74. Gaullists;
75. Christian Democrats; and
76. Conservative Democrats.

Remember, we know a Wiki when we see one.

Over to you, BDJ.

8 comments:

  1. The onset of middle age is turning you soft. You should have listed things from your three posts on Radical Orthodoxy.

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  2. It's sad really. He would be the golden boy if you weren't there. National Labour can kick you out but local Labour still prefers you over him politically and personally.

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  3. do you not think its a little bit sad to be obsessed with one person? Especially given most of your small number of readers (like me) haven't a clue who he / she is, and don't really care.

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  4. Break Dancing Jesus19 August 2009 at 10:35

    You are truely priceless.

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  5. Pard, take it up with him. And note that I have never speculated about his identity. I leave that to those who post comments.

    BDJ, I asked you to "tell us all that you know" about these things. Now, you have done so.

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  6. Pard.....The sad thing is that David pretends that BDJ is a fellow councillor so that he can insult him without being taken back to the Standards Board, or so he mistakenly assumes. Or maybe BDJ is fabricated by him - you can never tell knowing David's past history. I am just waiting for the petty response...which of his limited stock will he bring this time....sixthformer? Rich Daddy's girl from London.....

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  7. Good luck with that Anonymous. One of his closest friends, got him his tutorship, sits next to him in church, still smarting about not being given that job because David wasn't there to fix it for him. You know what I mean.

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  8. Unless BDJ is going to meet the challenge, this thread is closed.

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