You may have heard government ministers — Conservative ones anyway — saying that their current EU Bill ensures referendums on further transfers of power from Britain to the European Union and puts parliamentary sovereignty on the statute book.
You may have heard government ministers — Conservative ones anyway — saying that their current EU Bill ensures referendums on further transfers of power from Britain to the European Union and puts parliamentary sovereignty on the statute book. It does neither of these things. A separate Bill would be required for a referendum actually to take place. As for sovereignty, this is allegedly rescued by Clause 18, which says that ‘It is only by virtue of an Act of Parliament that directly applicable or directly effective EU law (that is, the rights, powers, liabilities, obligations, restrictions, remedies and procedures referred to in Section 2 (1) of the European Communities Act 1972) falls to be recognised and available in law in the United Kingdom’. This is no more than a statement of the historical fact that we went into what is now the European Union because Parliament voted that we should do so. It says nothing about what happens when the European Court decides to develop existing law to extend Community ‘competence’ without the bother of more legislation. In the explanatory notes to the Bill, we are told that parliamentary sovereignty is ‘a common law principle’. Surely, it is almost the opposite: parliamentary sovereignty is the formal recognition of the late-17th-century political fact that Parliament had gained supremacy. When anti-sovereignty judges, now dominant in our Supreme Court (the very name illustrates the problem), see this piddling clause, they will enjoy running rings round it.
There could be no clearer reminder that Europe is a richly diverse continent than the news that thousands turned out on a freezing night in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, for a New Year concert to celebrate their country joining the euro. One cannot see the equivalent happening in Trafalgar Square.
Because my father and I both went to Trinity College, Cambridge, the Trinity Annual Record has arrived in our house every year of my life. Until now, its cover has always been the same. A weak black-and-white drawing has depicted the fountain in Great Court, with two unidentifiable, etiolated, begowned male undergraduates standing beside it. I have always loved this picture because it speaks of an age when great institutions felt no compulsion to make themselves interesting. No one, even at the time (1950?), can have felt that the drawing was excitingly contemporary or outstandingly beautiful or remarkable in any way. But few would have seen such drabness as a bad thing. For about 40 years, I have been wondering why no bright new editor has got round to changing it, and prayed that none would. But now my former tutor, John Lonsdale, has taken over the editorship. He has been a Fellow since 1964, popular and respected, but it turns out that all this time he has been harbouring projects of restless innovation. The Annual Record 2010, just arrived, has replaced the drawing with a colour photograph in which the Great Gate of Trinity is refracted and reflected in three windows of Great Court. Whenever I have edited anything, it has been on the open market, and therefore the front page has had to sell the publication, so the design has to change from time to time to get attention on the news-stands. But the Annual Record goes out free to all alumni. Can’t we have a few corners of our high culture which refuse to be ‘user-friendly’?
The recent obituaries of Ned Ryan, the Irish friend of Princess Margaret, surprised me by omitting the story of his day shooting with the Queen at Windsor, even though Ryan happily told it against himself. In one drive, Ryan found the Queen standing beside him, watching. He missed every pheasant which came over, but at last he saw a bird flying unusually slowly. Then the horn, which ends the drive, went, but Ryan was so excited by his chance that he shot anyway and brought the bird down. The Queen said, ‘Mr Ryan, we don’t shoot after the horn has blown. And we never shoot owls.’
Thanks to the recommendation of Humphry Wakefield, the father, among other distinctions, of the deputy editor, I have just finished the best book I have ever read about what it is like to be a dog. Called My Talks with Dean Spanley, and written by Lord Dunsany. The author suspects that a dry old clergyman called Dean Spanley has a secret. By means of getting him to drink plenty of Imperial Tokay, he discovers that the Dean was, in a former life, a dog called Wag. Under the influence, the Dean becomes, in reminiscence, a dog once more. Wag/Spanley reports so well what it is like to be ruled by smell, and how dogs, because they worship human beings — ‘the Wise Ones, the Great Ones’ — feel the need to protect them by barking fiercely at risks they don’t appreciate enough, such as traction engines. Here is how the Dean conveys the wonderful pointlessness of canine pleasure: ‘So we [he and another dog] came to the pig’s house and looked in through his door at him and shouted, “Pig”. He didn’t like that. He looked just like a pig; he was a pig; and he knew it. He came towards his door saying silly surly things in a deep voice. You know the kind of talk. And we just shouted, “Pig. Pig. Pig.” Both of us, for nearly half an hour. It was perfectly splendid and we enjoyed it immensely.’ Eventually, the author discovers the whole secret of the transmigration of souls, but I shall reveal nothing further.
Contemplating our own dog, who has suddenly become disobedient, I also recognise the way Wag/Spanley describes a dog’s attitude to punishment. He recalls coming home at night after being out with a friend without permission: ‘…the door opened, and the Great One appeared. And I said that I had been hunting and would never hunt again, and that the shame of my sin was so great that I could not enter the house, and would only crawl into it. So I crawled in and had a beating, and shook myself, and it was a splendid evening.’
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