WHEN the Prince of Wales opened a causeway to the remote island where
he learnt to croft he never thought that it would lead to an upsurge in crime.
But thieves have struck for the second time
in the Outer Hebridean island of Berneray,
which until nine months ago was
considered a crime-free zone. Police
believe that the culprits used a stolen fish
farm pick-up truck to drive over from the
neighbouring island of Benbecula, via the
£7 million causeway.
The thieves took £1,200 worth of
cigarettes and alcohol from Armadee Stores, one of two shops serving the
island's community of 145. The same shop was raided last April when a small
quantity of goods was taken.
The Prince opened the causeway in 1999, linking Berneray to North Uist,
which is then linked to Benbecula by another causeway. Residents of
Berneray, however, do not resent it for bringing unsavoury elements into their
lives.
Donald McKillop, a retired fisherman, said: "People are dismayed and
disgusted that such a thing has happened. If the causeway hadn't been there
no such thing would have happened, but it's still a good thing and I wouldn't
take it away just because of this."
The Prince has stayed on the island twice for five days at a time, lifting
potatoes, planting trees and helping with the sheep. Insp Ian Bryce, of
Western Isles Police, said they had spent the week following lines of inquiry.
"People on the island are very shocked by what has happened. They are not
used to crime. There is not even a burglar alarm - there's never been a need
for one. If you were looking for a model community for anywhere in Britain it
would be Berneray."
~*~
An exceptional monarch who cast a
mighty shadow(Electronic Telegraph)
By Vernon Bogdanor
ONE hundred years ago today, on January 22, 1901,
Queen Victoria, Britain's longest-reigning sovereign,
died. The symbol of her age, she had become head of
the nation as well as its head of state. "I have always
felt," declared Lord Salisbury, her last prime minister,
"that when I knew what the Queen thought, I knew
pretty certainly what view her subjects would take, and
especially the middle class of her subjects."
Victoria, however, had in a sense outlived her age, and
her presence was coming to seem oppressive to many
of those in the innermost circle of public life. Sir
Charles Dilke, the elderly radical, attending Edward
VII's Accession Council, together with others who had
reached power under Victoria, found it "a meeting of
men with a load off them".
In his still unsurpassed sketch, Victorian England:
Portrait of an Age, first published in 1936, G M Young
felt that the changes in the Victorian era were greater
than anything that had been seen since. "I am
speaking of changes in men's minds, and I cannot in
my own time observe anything of greater consequence
than the dethronement of ancient faith by natural
science and historical criticism, and the transition from
oligarchic to democratic representation." This evolution
to democratic representation was to involve a wholly
new conception of monarchy.
Queen Victoria was a sovereign of a new type. "If we
look at history," Walter Bagehot declared in The
English Constitution, published in 1867, "we shall find
that it is only during the period of the present reign that
in England the duties of a constitutional sovereign have
ever been well performed." Victoria's reign coincided
with a fundamental change in monarchy by which, its
power having declined, its influence came to increase.
Such a change would have seemed highly unlikely
when Victoria came to the throne in 1837. The three
previous sovereigns had been, in the words of Sir
Sidney Lee, official biographer of Edward VII, "an
imbecile (George III), a profligate (George IV), and a
buffoon (William IV)". In 1830, Sir Robert Peel thought
the monarchy so unpopular that only a miracle could
save it. During the agitation over the Great Reform Act
in 1832, William IV felt the crown "tottering" on his
head.
Crowned at the age of 18, Victoria entered an uncertain
inheritance. Nevertheless, years later, she told Sir
Theodore Martin, in words that foreshadowed the spirit
of the age: "The Queen was not overwhelmed on her
accession - rather - full of courage, she may say. She
took things as they came, as she knew they must be."
She retained to the end of her reign - more than 63
years later - what Lord Salisbury called an "inborn and
inextinguishable consciousness of Queenship".
When Victoria came to the throne, the role of the
sovereign was very different from what it is today. She
was regarded as being personally responsible for all the
measures of her government, which needed her
confidence to survive. A defeat for the government,
therefore, was also a defeat for the sovereign, and a
dissolution of Parliament was a weapon by which the
sovereign could aid her government. Indeed, between
1715 and 1835, no government had been defeated in a
general election. The general election of 1841, when Sir
Robert Peel came to power, was to be the first in which
the voters chose a prime minister in defiance of the
sovereign.
Even before Victoria came to the throne, however, there
were signs that the position of the sovereign as an
independent estate of the realm was under threat. In
1829, George IV had been forced, much against his
inclinations, to accept Catholic emancipation. This
marked the end of the sovereign's role as an
independent power. The 1832 Reform Act further limited
royal power, while Lord Aberdeen's government of 1852
was to prove the last, except for the emergency
National Government of 1931, to be formed as a result
of royal influence.
After the second Reform Act in 1867, the growth of
tightly organised political parties left little scope for
direct royal intervention. It was only when party lines
became fluid again, or when it fell to the sovereign to
choose a new prime minister in the absence of a party
mechanism for electing a leader - as in 1957, when
Elizabeth appointed Macmillan, or 1963, when she
appointed Lord Home - that the sovereign would be able
to act without ministerial advice.
Perhaps the Queen's constitutional role would change if
we came to elect the House of Commons by
proportional representation, for then nearly every
election would yield a hung parliament, and it would be
by no means obvious who ought to be appointed prime
minister. It might become a matter, in Tony Benn's
cynical words, not so much of first past the post as
first past the palace.
Many felt that the decline of monarchical power under
Victoria would render the sovereign a mere cipher, that
she would become, in the words of Baron Stockmar, an
adviser to the Prince Consort, "nothing but a mandarin
figure which has to nod its head in assent, or shake it
in denial, as his minister pleases". Victoria, however,
showed that the decline in power need not reduce the
monarchy to a mere piece of constitutional machinery.
Power could be replaced by influence.
There was, however, no easy road to influence. For the
detail of political affairs, was, in Bagehot's words, "vast,
disagreeable, complicated and miscellaneous. A king,
to be the equal of his ministers in discussion, must
work as they work; he must be a man of business as
they are men of business." Victoria was the first
sovereign prepared to master the endless boxes of
state papers sent to her with such monotonous
regularity by her Private Secretary. She showed that an
assiduous sovereign could exert an influence no less
important for being exercised within the framework of
constitutional rules which constrained her power.
The Queen was sceptical of, if not downright hostile to,
the new political ideas of the Victorian era - liberalism
and popular government. Yet the prestige of the
monarchy at the end of her reign owed much to its
association with parliamentary government, the idea of
an executive responsible to parliament in which the
sovereign was required to act on the advice of her
ministers. It is a paradox that constitutional monarchy
arose as a result of political forces of which Victoria,
the first constitutional monarch, disapproved.
Today, constitutional monarchy survives, not only in
Britain, but in a few other democracies, primarily in
Western Europe and in the Commonwealth. It rests on
popular consent, since, deprived of power, sovereigns
must rely on opinion. "I think it is a complete
misconception," the Duke of Edinburgh declared in
Canada in 1969, "to imagine that the monarchy exists
in the interests of the monarch. It doesn't. It exists in
the interests of the people. If at any stage any nation
decides that the system is unacceptable, then it is up
to them to change it."
In modern times, however, constitutional monarchy has
come to sustain democracy, not to threaten it; and, if
the conjunction of monarchy and democracy seems
contradictory, it would be well to remember Freud's
aphorism - it is only in logic that contradictions cannot
exist.