Fathers and neocons

The fine blogger and political journalist Fraser Nelson makes a bizarre claim in his review of Barack Obama’s Mile High speech today.

Fraser, now of The Spectator and formerly of The Scotsman, was particularly struck by Obama’s views on the family.  ”He emphasised …. how government can never replace a role of a father (a point first made by the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, in the 1970s).”

So the idea that Dads can never be replaced by a government was first made by a neoconservative in the US in the 1970s. Really? Apart from Pol Pot and his ilk I can think of few people, ever, who have suggested that the State is better equipped to take on a parental role than a father.

The real issue is that too many of those on the right – usually living in comfortable circumstances and often with ”help” - seem to think it is somehow morally wrong for the government to support families with real challenges in life.  But there is a world of difference between that kind of assistance and the ludicrous notion of replacing fathers.

England’s finest hour?

Whether a nationalist or not, one thing that irritates virtually every Scot alive is the way that England and Britain are used interchangably to mean the same country. Gordon Brown of course is the master of this - he regularly goes weepy eyed at the idea of the Magna Carta and other pre-Union examples of “British” liberty – although funnily enough the Declaration of Arbroath never seems to get a mention. 

There’s a classic example of this  from The  Times’s usually excellent comment editor and blogger Danny Finkelstein, who asks in the headline on his Comment Central blog ”The most brilliant and heroic period in British history?” This introduces a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn which goes on about “England’s” heroism in the Second World War.  Danny then asks readers if they agree that the war was indeed “England’s” greatest period.

Subsequent contributions fail to recognise of course that countries in the UK other than England were involved in the fight against the Nazis.  In fact Scots, as usual, suffered a disproportionate number of casualties in the conflict.   This is not a trivial, chip on the shoulder point. It’s indicative of the way that much of the London media portrays Scotland - something either to be ignored, with no history of it own – or as an irritant country, wheeled out only when someone is complaining about subsidy junkies.