One nation: high and low profiles

"Commander Jones said because so many high profile people would be attending, including the Queen and the prime minister, areas of central London would be kept "sterile", with the public and any protesters banned from entering."

Death and glory

It is repeatedly said at present that, although the only British prime minister in this or the last century to be accorded a state funeral has been Winston Churchill, in recognition as his role as leader during the second world war (the simple description 'war leader' is no longer particularly distinguishing amongst modern British prime ministers), nineteenth-century prime ministers such as Disraeli and Gladstone were given state funerals.

It appears to be a mistaken belief and that they also were given not state but public funerals:

"A public funeral was one paid for by Parliament through a resolution to the monarch. It was, and remains, a very rare event. In the nineteenth century only Nelson, Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox, R. B. Sheridan, George Canning, the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, and Napier of Magdala had been so buried (several had been offered and declined, for example Beaconsfield and Russell). Palmerston was the best precedent (and he had made the same requirement about his wife), but he had died in the Parliamentary recess and the procedures had had to be short-circuited. The Wellington funeral had been a lavish but rather chaotic affair; the catafalque being too heavy for the road which gave way under it in St James’ and too large to get through the gates of St Paul’s (where both Nelson and Wellington were buried) and the congregation was thus kept waiting for over an hour. Gladstone’s funeral was to be the first public funeral with a recognisedly modern aspect – worldwide press coverage via telegraph and the procession filmed."  

Moreover, the records of Glastone's funeral show it as, by current standards, a rather subdued affair without pomp and bombast. It was also the custom that the monarch, or members of the royal family, did not attend and Victoria had no intention of doing so (having ensured that news of Gladstone's death was entirely omitted from the court circular by means of an 'oversight', in contrast with the effusive mention of Disraeli's death, which she had herself written - Victoria, for all her popular reputation, was not the model of propriety that is our present queen). However, the prince of Wales defied her and acted as one of the pall bearers.

Gladstone left the rather ambivalent instruction in his will that his burial was "‘to be very simple unless they [his Executors] shall consider that there are conclusive reasons to the contrary’. Of course there are other ways of arranging one's own funeral.

Justice delayed is justice denied

In the High Court in London the other day Mr Justice Tugendhat observed that “It is a further requirement of justice that the court should not make a finding adverse to a person in circumstances where that person has been given no warning of the case which is advanced against him or her.”

Was he rebuking the government over their application of anti-terrorist ‘control orders’ or whatever they are now termed?

No, he was commenting on tabloid newspapers’ recent attempt to have the privacy injunction on the former head of Royal Bank of Scotland lifted: "Sir Frederick Goodwin and the lady had had no opportunity to respond to the case in court."

My heading is usually attributed to William Ewart Gladstone, British Prime Minister and bane of Queen Victoria’s life, but this and other legal principles are equally honoured, in the breach if not the observance, in both this country and the United States:

"A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe the law - in the larger sense - cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets." Burger, What's Wrong With the Courts: The Chief Justice Speaks Out, U.S. News & World Report (vol. 69, No. 8, Aug. 24, 1970)

Sir Fred, and all other anonymous citizens, may take comfort that they will be spared the law's delay, even if not the proud man's contumely.

A modest proposal

An article in one of our ‘serious’ newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, in the past few days has apparently proposed that voting in national elections here should be restricted to those who pay a minimum level of income tax. In that way voting would be confined to those who actually ‘make a contribution’ to society. How, other than financially, could anyone contribute to society?

Progressive though this suggestion is as a welcome partial re-introduction of the property qualification which we somehow lost in the nineteenth century, I have a much better one. Voting eligibility should be maintained as it now is, but all votes should be weighted according to the positive or negative contribution by the voter to the national exchequer. So the vote of someone who paid, for example, £50,000 income tax in the preceding year, would count as fifty positive votes, whilst that of someone who received £2000 in state benefits would count as two negative votes.

This idea has many advantages. It preserves the strangely hallowed twentieth-century shibboleth of ‘universal suffrage’. It reflects precisely the voter’s contribution to society across the entire range. It penalises tax exiles. It gives an incentive to governments both to increase marginal rates of taxation and to maintain state benefits for the poor: that would make mine truly a ‘one nation’ proposal, very likely to appeal to a Daily Mail readership, let alone the Daily Telegraph.

(I should explain for my North American readers that ‘one nation’, though always without the suffix ‘under god’, is a term that historically resonates in my country also, usually attached to our ‘natural party of government’ as ‘one-nation conservatism’, as embraced originally by Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister 1868 and 1874-1880, as opposed to that dreadfully hectoring Liberal, William Gladstone. Could this nation today choose so conspicuously Jewish a figure as Disraeli as Prime Minister, or indeed so stern a moralist as Gladstone?)

Finally, my proposal has also the indirect advantage of surely bringing about a massive boost in tax receipts in the year preceding an election, to be emphatically utilised by the incumbent party to dispense largesse to the voters, and vice versa.

I rest my case.

For the avoidance of doubt, as they say, I should perhaps point out that this post takes its title from Jonathan Swift's 'Modest Proposal...' and the whole thing is intended ironically. Except, that is, for the reflections on prime ministers, where I do think that the Victorians, whom we tend to regard as somewhat hidebound and prejudiced, were perhaps more tolerant and publicly adventurous than we are today. Or maybe they were just tolerant of different things.