We have a unique idea of what is fair

IHAVE long been fascinated by language and the greatest of them all is ours. In Brussels Monsieur Juncker tells us it is fading in global use. He has been at the breakfast brandy again. It is now the lingua franca of the civilised world.

It can be used for so many things and English prevails in all the usages: imparting information, transferring erudition, barking orders, tender endearments. Deriving from old German on one side and Graeco-Roman on the other, it has a vast vocabulary, double most others. Flick through a dictionary to fill an idle hour and you will amaze yourself a dozen times.

And some of those words simply do not translate. You are walking past a school playground in a working class suburb. From inside the wire netting comes a voice highpitched with outrage: “’Ere, you can’t do that mate. That ain’t fair.”

He’s only knee-high to a grasshopper but he has a gut-feeling for what is and is not “fair”. I have travelled widely and never found its equivalent. The French call it “le fair-play”. The Germans invent a word: fäher, pronounced fair. The adjective doesn’t exist because the concept doesn’t exist.

THIS tiny word and its opposite “unfair” are at the root of the British judicial system. Others rely on interpretations by lawyers of abstruse texts. We prefer our system. It is, bluntly, more fair. And that concept has influenced all our history. The last battle on English soil was at Sedgemoor in 1685, the last on British soil at Culloden in 1746 – since then nearly 300 years of internal peace.

Across the Channel perfectly nice people have had three centuries of war, putsch, coup d’état, revolution, civil war and rebellion. Why did we escape all that? Were our aristocrats less arrogant, less harsh, less powerful than theirs?

No. But they wisely perceived that the patience of the British they governed had its limits and they were always shrewd enough to back off just in time and save their heads and fortunes. There were limits to governing us unfairly that we were not prepared to let them transgress. It still applies. Millions thought for years that government from Brussels was unfair. “No taxation without representation,” said the American insurrectionists in 1776. Last June a majority of the British said the same about government out of Brussels. It was unfair. We paid but got little back. It was the foolishness of prime minister Lord North that forced the Americans to rise in revolt. It was the arrogance of the overpaid, unelected bureaucrats of Brussels that persuaded the British to rebel via the ballot box.

The very British concept of fair-versus-unfair lives on. Good. It is a fine concept.