News for Monday: January 22nd, 2001

Causeway opened by Prince lets raiders strike at island shop(Electronic Telegraph)
By Tara Womersley

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.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To January News
To News Archive