Drivel
I've just been reading Gordon Brown's verbal diorrhea to the Fabian Society. What a load of old cock.
"Yet as Jonathan Freedland has written in his 'Bring Home the Revolution', Britain is almost unique in that, unlike America and many other countries, we have no constitutional statement or declaration enshrining our objectives as a country; no mission statement defining purpose; and no explicitly stated vision of our future.
So I will suggest to you today that it is to our benefit to be more explicit about what we stand for and what are our objectives and that we will meet and master all challenges best by finding shared purpose as a country in our enduring British ideals that I would summarise as – in addition to our qualities of creativity, inventiveness, enterprise and our internationalism, our central beliefs are a commitment to – liberty for all, responsibility by all and fairness to all.
A mission statement? And why the buggery do we need a particular purpose? The purpose of any state is to provide mutual security to its members. The rest is a question of the purpose of humanity, if it has one. Why are we supposed to be going anywhere? As for British "internationalism", well, yes, we spent much of the 18th and 19th centuries being very internationalist over large chunks of the world, that's true. And, despite the occasional claims of the Scots to be victims of English imperialism, the British Empire was very much a joint endeavour of the British peoples.
Navel-gazing about "what are we for and where are we going" is pointless. We aren't going anywhere, we're staying right here, and what we are for is looking after one another. Now get on with it. Leave the rest for us to work out as a species and as individuals. If you're going to have a "mission statement", a term which makes me want to burn things at the best of times, it need be no more precise than "build Jerusalem on Britain's green and pleasant land, but don't bang on about it". Which misquote brings me to my more detailed problem with the speech, his sense of history, which seems a tad confused:
"So there is, as I have argued, a golden thread which runs through British history – that runs from that long ago day in Runnymede in 1215; on to the Bill of Rights in 1689 where Britain became the first country to successfully assert the power of Parliament over the King; to not just one but four great Reform Acts in less than a hundred years – of the individual standing firm against tyranny and then – an even more generous, expansive view of liberty – the idea of government accountable to the people, evolving into the exciting idea of empowering citizens to control their own lives."
The notion that a country called Britain (which doesn't exist even today, but I'll let that past as a loose term for the UK) was doing anything in 1688-9 is somewhat novel. That isn't simply a pedantic point: the Bill of Right does not, in fact, apply to Scotland, as Lord President Cooper sitting in the Court of Session made quite clear in 1953 in McCormick v. Lord Advocate. Indeed, the precise point he was making was that Parliament is not supreme in Scotland, that there was no reason why English ideas about Parliamentary sovereignty should have applied to the UK after 1707, though he didn't find that sufficient reason to overrule the Royal Titles Act (the case was ostensibly about whether ER should be QE2, under the rules set down in the Act, or QE1, as the first Queen of the United Kingdom of that name). The Law Lords sitting as the House of Lords Privileges Committee seemed to agree with him in Re: Lord Gray's Motion [2002] 1 AC 124. Since Brown's speech is quite explicitly about some idea of British identity, that's rather significant. His whole understanding of both Magna Carta (which as far as I am aware has never had anything to do with Scotland either, though it was applied to Ireland in 1216 at the request of the Irish) and the Bill of Rights seems a little romantic and misty-eyed too.