For God and the Empire

Events in the UK and Vanuatu have both troubled my conscience in the last week.

Here the cause was Mothering Sunday, an event I had gladly filed in the dustbin of personal history after my mother died in 1992.

But then along came children, very late in life, and a sense of expectation in the household that they, unguided, were never likely to fulfil. So I ended up once again buying flowers and cards, and organising jolly lunch parties.

The five-year-old endeared himself to me on Friday evening when I outlined my plans for the weekend, and he sighed: “Why is it never Daddy’s day?”

Bringing him up to par with his three-year-old brother, who had played an absolute blinder that morning by escorting his mother to the checkout in Next yelling: “Put that back, Mummy! You don’t need another handbag!”

So naturally it was chocolate treats all round when I took them to buy their Mother’s Day cards and gifts on Saturday, as a step towards phasing myself out of the whole process.

The woman on the till fell into my clutches like a dozy bluebottle landing in a Venus flytrap. “Ooh, aren’t you lucky to have such an indulgent Grandpa!” she purred.

“I’m not their Grandpa,” I replied, inserting a sinister pause to savour the rising panic in her eyes before adding, “I’m their Dad.”

This always elicits a flood of apologies and explanations that can only make things worse, like trying to extricate yourself from the hole of asking a fat woman “When’s it due?”

I enjoyed it all immensely. But as I struggled to cook our Sunday roast (not too bad, but not as good as Mummy’s, which is surely how it should be) I did reflect on how much I take for granted.

So much so that I went back to my wedding vows and checked how I was doing. We had the 1662 full Monty, avoidance of fornication and all. My results were surprisingly good.

I may be falling a bit short on the “honour her” front, and will try to do better in future, but nothing like as short as Mrs Hann has consistently fallen in the small matter of “obey”.

A vow she was foolishly induced to make, along with “serve”, by the vicar’s assurance that the words had different meanings in 1662 and 2009. I think he probably had his fingers crossed at the time.

Anyway, what has all this got to do with Vanuatu? A place of which you had almost certainly never heard until it was flattened by Cyclone Pam.

Until 1980 Vanuatu was known as the New Hebrides, despite bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the Scottish originals, and was that rarest of colonial hybrids: an Anglo-French condominium (no, not an apartment) with two sets of administrators, speaking two different languages, and a similar choice of laws.

They didn’t go quite as far as driving on opposite sides of the road on alternate days, but everything else about the set-up seems to have been as absurd as you might imagine.

I know this because 39 years ago I started a PhD on British imperial history. Not long afterwards I was awarded a scholarship restricted to students “who intend to go on to devote their lives to the service of the British Empire”.

Reader, I have plainly failed in that duty. Though I can cite the reasonably good excuse that the British Empire had largely disappeared before I could get around to devoting myself to it.

What makes it worse is that one of my contemporaries did fulfil what should have been my mission. He joined the colonial service at its last gasp in the New Hebrides and was killed there when a camping stove exploded.

But for the subsequent Falklands War, I might have been able to cite him as the last person to lay down his life for the Empire on which the sun never set.

I can find no trace on the internet of his sacrifice, but if anyone ever deserved an MBE (Motto: For God and the Empire) it was surely he. Sadly, there is probably an equal chance of me getting one for cooking Sunday lunch.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Give us a vote on who makes our laws

I couldn’t get very excited about last week’s Barnsley by-election. Nor, judging by the feeble 35% turnout, could the electors of Barnsley themselves, who obediently placed their usual signatures against the name of the Labour candidate, as they have done since time immemorial.

Notwithstanding the apparently inconvenient fact that the Labour candidate they had elected only last May subsequently turned out to be an expenses-fiddling crook.

What did get me very exercised last week were the astonishing statements made by two previously unheard-of judges at Nottingham Crown Court who, in the course of barring a Christian couple from fostering children because of their unfashionable views on homosexuality, proclaimed “We sit as secular judges serving a multi-cultural community of many faiths” and “the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form. The aphorism that ‘Christianity is part of the common law of England’ is mere rhetoric.”

And there was I fooled into thinking that I lived in a Christian country because we have a head of state anointed in an ancient religious ceremony, two established churches, bishops sitting in the House of Lords – oh, and because nearly 80% of the population of England and Wales defined themselves as Christian, when asked in the 2001 census.

The judges themselves presumably delivered their shocking words in a court adorned with the royal coat of arms, and in which the proceedings usually kick off with participants being invited to swear an oath on the Bible. So how could they so easily conclude that Christian beliefs count for no more in Britain today than those of the islanders of Vanuatu who worship the Duke of Edinburgh as a god?

Memo to judges: the bit at the bottom means 'God and my right'. Quiz: Why might Peter Cook be turning in his grave?

In fact the Vanuatans would almost certainly be accorded more respect by the English courts, because it seems axiomatic that we must pander to the views of every religious minority for fear of causing offence. Hence the widespread sale of unlabelled halal meat to unsuspecting supermarket customers, and the official efforts to excise Christianity from our traditional public holidays, even though worshippers of other faiths keep asserting that they don’t mind in the least. My Muslim in-laws certainly celebrate Christmas far more enthusiastically than I have ever done.

The really important issue here, however, is not the content of the judgement, but the fact that power seems to be leaching constantly from those we have elected, however reluctantly, to judges who are forever beyond our reach. That applies whether they sit in the British courts or in the ever more powerful European ones, which came up with last week’s infuriating judgement on the illegality of taking account of the fact that men are more dangerous drivers than women, and die sooner (two facts which might just be tangentially connected).

In May we are being granted a referendum on a change to the voting system that absolutely no one wants, because even those campaigning for the Alternative Vote would really prefer proportional representation, which AV certainly isn’t. You only have to look at the estimates of how much it would have increased the number of Labour MPs in 1997, 2001 and 2005, when they were hardly in short supply, to realise that.

It would also have made not a blind bit of difference in Barnsley, where Labour’s Dan Jarvis scooped over 60% of the vote.

We are apparently so strapped for cash that we must sack soldiers returning from the front line of Afghanistan, yet we can afford to invest millions holding a pointless referendum to appease the doomed Nick Clegg. Well, here’s a radical idea. Why not hold a referendum on something that matters, like who actually makes our laws: MPs, British judges, Brussels bureaucrats or the European courts?

Until we are allowed a vote on that, my career advice to my son will be unequivocal: become a lawyer.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.