Catalonia’s poll is very different to our Brexit vote

The case of Catalonia creates a problem of loyalty – and not only in Spain. The BBC, for example, forgetting its statutory neutrality, is rooting for the Catalan nationalists. It would not dream of doing the same for the Alternative für Deutschland, or Italy’s Lega Nord. It took the BBC days to explain that not everyone in Catalonia itself – let alone in Spain – wants UDI. Viewers must have been perplexed, after such reporting, by the gigantic anti-independence crowds in Barcelona yesterday.

Some of my fellow Brexiteers are getting in a similar muddle. Because they wish to assert the value of referendums for self-determination, they want to support every one that comes along. It shouldn’t be like that.

First, all votes in referendums should be conducted under agreed rules, otherwise they cannot be fair. This one was a coup d’etat by militant minority, and was illegal under the constitution of a well-recognised democratic monarchy (Spain). In Britain, the Brexit side won in a referendum which the Government had called under law – and in which all the main party leaders had campaigned for the opposite result. That shows how authentic and strong our vote was.

Second, Brexit is not an act of “nationalism”. Britain is not an entity which lends itself to nationalism, because it is itself a Union of three nations, plus Northern Ireland. We don’t want self-government because we believe in ethnic purity or doing down rival ethnicities, though a minority of Ukip supporters may feel that way. We want it because we know we can do it successfully (as we did for centuries), and because we have learnt that the European Union cannot provide us with genuine representative government.

Movements like Catalan separatism and the SNP in Scotland in effect reinforce the argument for European integration, though some are anti-eu. They seek to break up the countries of which they are a part into hostile, ungovernable units. Fearing this, people turn to the EU for succour.

There is much – too much – about the Conservative Party in the news. But no one asks: “What is the Conservative Party?” As a massmembership organisation truly rooted across the land, it is a shadow of its former self, having lost perhaps four-fifths of its membership over 30 years.

For years now, many in the leadership have made it their business to let the grassroots wither. It seems easier, in Westminster, to invent your own agenda without having to pay attention to the views of hundreds of thousands of supporters. Only too late do you discover that you are cut off from common sense.

It is true that many voluntary organisations have trouble winning members in modern times, but counter-examples such as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour should give the Tories pause. After the Brexit referendum, sizeable numbers of new people, enthused by the result, applied to join the Conservative Party. It offered them virtually nothing, however, and I gather that 80 per cent of them have not renewed.

Melvyn Bragg is sticking up for the King James Bible. He says removing it from the pews and replacing it with modern versions was like rewriting Shakespeare.

He is right to emphasise the importance – as with Shakespeare – of public performance. Although it reads very well in private too, the King James version was intended to be read out in church, thus fixing one luminous English translation of the original in the minds of the greatest number possible. This achievement deepened our language and political identity, became loved and recognised wherever English was spoken and was the basis of our understanding of the Jewish and Christian story.

Of course it is important that scholars offer new translations, because new understandings and new expressions always arise, but it was a tragic mistake to chuck out the one great beautiful thing that everyone knew. St Paul’s once-famous words “Now we see through a glass darkly” became “puzzling reflections in a mirror” – not a good trade-off.

Getting rid of the Authorised Version (as the King James Bible is also known) happened at much the same time in the last century as the Roman Catholic Church ended the compulsory use of Latin in the liturgy. In both cases, the intention was to bring people in. The effect was to drive people out.

The practice of Islam drives the opposite lesson home. In that faith, the Koran may be read out in the mosque only in the original classical Arabic. This is the case even in the countries with the largest Muslim populations – such as Pakistan, Indonesia, India, Iran and Turkey – which are not Arab. Muslims, whatever their nationality, are proud to learn the Arabic necessary to study the Koran, and recruitment is not a problem at all.

At this season, I wonder about waste. We cannot keep up with the abundant apples in our own little orchard. Even in commercial ones, I notice large numbers lie rotting on the ground, creating a lovely smell. It can be impossible to store all that mellow fruitfulness.

Because we are a consumer society, we have become neurotic about our own waste. It is true that some things we throw away are noxious or hideous. But the idea that we are automatically damaging the earth when we fail to consume something we have produced is wrong. The earth is much more prodigal than we are. Nature would appear to intend it that way.