Rehna Azim writes in the Guardian about the tabloid furore over ‘banning Christmas’. Summary: just say Merry Christmas and get over it.

Fred Clark, the slacktivist, has an excellent post on the monarchical tendencies of the Bush administration.

A poster in the comments, called Scott, remarks:

If enough of your “fellow citizens” are OK with King George the Fourth (The Third being the one we originally rebelled against), then hasn’t society decided, and isn’t that ‘accountability’?

How can I put this? Er…

No!

The citizens of a republic cannot be allowed to vote themselves out of political power on a permanent basis, and cannot be allowed to alienate their basic rights, no matter what the circumstances.

The dictatorships of Sulla, Caesar and others in Rome were achieved by Senatorial decrees ‘that the Consuls should take any action necessary for the salvation of the Republic’; similarly, the Reichstag decrees were Hitler’s path to sole rule. We are a long way from that today, but the wedge principle applies.

This is because the citizens are not the state. The State, Commonwealth, Rzeczpospolita, whatever is not just the assembly of interests of its current members, it is a trust held by all the current citizens on behalf of all the citizens present and future. Not Hobbesian per se, but something similar about sharing individual sovereignty:

In the same way that the trustees of a university can’t buy themselves BMWs on their trust’s tag, we can’t be so irresponsible as to surrender the responsibility for government to any king, no matter how good.

(Image from UNESCO server Dadalos)

The Fabian Society has published a new pamphlet about Britishness. A couple of articles from it are online at the link above.

One interesting view is that the history of the Empire should be taught more in schools, as an aid to understanding Britain’s multicultural heritage. The BBC reports.

Salon (subscription or click-through advert required, sorry) has an interesting article by former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal. In the first discussion of David Cameron I’ve seen in the US press, he compares the messages that Cameron is giving out to the compassionate conservatism upbeat of one Gov. George W Bush in 2000. Cameron is saying, says Blumenthal, “I’m not New Labour, I’m just New”.

The hinted-at question in Blumenthal’s piece is whether Cameron will, as Bush did once in office, revert to party-faithful type. It’s obviously too early to tell, but one straw in the wind is the crazy decision by Cameron to pull the Tories out of the EPP – the fuzzily centre-right grouping in the European Parliament. Continuing membership of the EPP has no political price (in the country at least), and membership brings benefits, including committee chairmanships. Does this move show an ideology-driven Euroscepticism under the friendly surface? If so, are we to expect more of the same?