Will EU face a Pole-axing this time?

BEFORE the UK finally voted on Brexit and decided by a narrow but clear margin to go for it, an issue of major concern was our national sovereignty. This hinged on a clear alternative: whose law was finally supreme? Ours via our Supreme Court or Brussels’ via the European Court of Justice? The two were mutually incompatible.

No nation whose constitutional decisions can be overruled by a foreign court is sovereign. We chose to claw back our legal sovereignty. Now Poland faces the same quandary. Its Supreme Court has just decreed that its decisions are supreme in matters controlling Poland and its citizens. Brussels has responded without delay in declaring the reverse.

There is no half-way house here. It is one or the other and it cannot be avoided or long delayed. Now voices are declaring that Poland might have to consider withdrawing as we did and for the same reason. And in Hungary, PM Viktor Orban is saying much the same thing. Troubled times.

I’VE said it before. Permit me again because it is now being confirmed in high places. During the Covid crisis the Sage committee did more damage to this country than anything since the Luftwaffe. Their members are being showered with honours.

ON A merrier note, few of us love insurance companies but Aviva has opened its archives on some of the stranger claims. In 1875, a vicar was awarded the then huge recompense of £120 for hurting himself while playing leapfrog.

In 1878, a hotelier collected £25 for firing a champagne cork into his eye. About then a man collected damages when his finger was damaged after becoming caught in a woman’s corset.

Like them or not, one has to take one’s hat off to an insurer who paid out to a claimant whose finger got stuck in a lady’s underwear. A modern claims assessor might ask what it was doing there.

Perhaps the Victorians were not so prudish after all.