Remember, remember it’s all about sovereignty
night, they flamed in patriotic celebration.
Few doubted that our way of life had been preserved: our Crown, our Parliament, our liberty. King James, with his trademark coarse bonhomie, told MPs that, had the plotters succeeded, “it should never have been spoken or written in ages succeeding that I had died ingloriously in an Ale-house, a Stews or such vile place, but mine end should have been with the best and most honourable company, in the fittest and most honourable place”.
The MPs, delighted to find their sovereign and themselves in one piece, did not stop to ask why he might have been in a pub or a brothel. They cheered their Scottish monarch lustily and voted him a handsome subsidy, oblivious to the quarrels that would later arise between them.
We keep being told to “remember, remember”, but few of us think of what it is that we commemorate on the Fifth of November.
Last year, at my village bonfire in Hampshire, I conducted a rough poll. Around half the people I asked were simply enjoying the fireworks, and had no idea what they marked. Nearly a quarter thought that we were honouring Guy Fawkes, rather than celebrating his defeat.
Of the handful who mentioned the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot, all believed (correctly) that we were celebrating the primacy of Parliament; none mentioned the implicit sectarianism of the event which, during the 18th and 19th centuries, was its chief theme.
The Gunpowder Plot was a catastrophe for English Catholics, most of whom were horrified when they learnt what had happened. The penal laws that had until then been enforced perfunctorily and fitfully began to be applied in earnest. More than 200 years passed before Catholics were deemed, in the phrase of the time, to have “proved their loyalty”.
Guy Fawkes Night’s sectarian motif is still preserved in parts of my constituency, not least East Sussex, traditionally a radical county that was strong for Puritanism in the 16th century and for Parliament in the 17th. But the English are an ecumenical people, who nowadays don’t like to be reminded that they are engaging in what used to be a macabre orgy of popular anti-Popery.
Though we have, I’m glad to say, largely overcome religious bigotry, we still retain, somewhere at the back of our mind, a sense that our parliamentary tradition sets us apart.
Robert Catesby and his plotters had intended to destroy Parliament and create an autocratic monarchy, like those in France and Spain. The English, and later the British, defined themselves to some extent in opposition to these neighbouring states, as a free people who made their own laws. “Parliament,” as Enoch Powell once put it, “is a word of magic and power in this country.”
Parliament was sovereign between 1689 and 1973, when the European Communities Act came into effect, establishing the supremacy of EU law. After 2019 it will be sovereign again, its sovereignty serving as a shorthand for our sovereignty. We shall once again be captains of our own destiny.
How do we intend to use that sovereignty? What destiny do we envisage? These questions risk being lost in the procedural rows that accompany the Brexit talks.
While money, citizenship rights and the like matter, we shouldn’t make the mistake of treating success in the talks as our supreme goal. Leaving the European Union was never an end in itself; rather, it was a means to an end – the end being a freer, more democratic and more global Britain.
We need to keep our sense of perspective. We are a large economy, with a commensurately important home market. When, for example, you buy The Sunday Telegraph, you are adding to our economic activity, but not to our overseas trade.
In 2016, exports accounted for 28 per cent of our GDP, and EU exports for 12.6 per cent. Last month, the World Bank published a study showing that, in the event of no deal and WTO rules, British trade with the EU might fall by 2 per cent. That’s 2 per cent of the 12.6per cent, or a quarter of 1 per cent of our overall GDP.
While every pound matters, the impact on our economy is far less than that of, say, cutting taxes, streamlining regulation or improving schools.
These are the things we ought to be discussing. Brexit is an opportunity to devolve, diffuse and democratise decision-making at home, to scrap quangos, to pass powers directly from Brussels to the devolved assemblies and from Whitehall to town and county halls.
It is an opportunity to have lower, flatter and simpler taxes, to remove non-tariff barriers against Commonwealth and other exporters, to recover our ancient vocation as the leader of global free trade.
Having such conversations is the privilege of an independent democracy – the privilege that those drunken, quarrelsome, patriotic MPs were cheering in 1605. We are on the brink of becoming a self-governing people once again. Let’s not squander the opportunities.
‘Parliament,’ as Enoch Powell once put it, ‘is a word of magic and power in this country’
AEuropean Arrest Warrant (EAW) has been issued against Carles Puigdemont, the President of Catalonia who has fled to Belgium. Eight Catalan leaders have already been arrested on the rather Ruritanian charge of sedition. When the EAW was introduced in 2004, it was presented as an anti-terrorist measure. Yet here it is being used against a politician for no crime other than organising a referendum.
The EAW is the most powerful weapon in the extradition arsenal: the authorities in the country concerned are required only to check the identity of the person named and that he has not already been tried for the offence.
Unsurprisingly, the police soon took to using it routinely. A teenager from Enfield, Andrew Symeou, had to spend several years in confinement in Greece because of an obvious case of mistaken identity. The parents of Ashya King, who had removed him from Southampton Hospital to seek alternative treatment in the Czech Republic, found themselves detained by it. Now this.
The EAW is an example of how the EU’s power grows without the need for further treaties. Think of Brexit as stepping off a conveyor-belt: you have to move in order to stay where you are. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion