In defence of unicorns

Jan 17, 2019 by

by Charles Moore, Spectator:

[..] In the many hours on Tuesday when the media had little to say because we were waiting for the vote, Radio 4’s PM programme invited Tim Garton Ash and me to come on and talk about the history of Britain’s relations with Europe. We had been primed to pick one historical incident which we thought had been key in these relations. I chose the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, through which Henry VIII’s parliament asserted that England is ‘governed by one supreme head and king’ whose measures cannot be appealed against to the Pope in Rome. For Rome then, read Brussels now, and you see the long genealogy of the idea, and its huge effect on our history.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, recently chided us all for failing to ‘disagree well’ over Brexit, an important point which he then rather marred by telling the House of Lords that no deal would involve a lorry queue stretching from Leicester to Dover. It is hard to disagree well with him over this obviously absurd claim which really has nothing whatever to do with the office he holds. I do feel that the Archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After all, if it had not been passed, his church would not exist and he would not be living in Lambeth Palace and making speeches in the Lords. Our polity is still shaped by Henry’s reformation of church and state and its eventual effects on our form of government, our foreign relations and the nature of our liberties. Our path was quite different from that of continental Europe. It still is. Already the period from 1973 to today begins to look like quite a short, strange aberration in our long story.

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