How will you vote in the forthcoming referendum on whether or not Britain leaves the European Union? It could be a close-run thing, and it’s interesting that it is being described as “a matter of conscience”.
For myself, I think the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, articulates an intelligent analysis. He says he would like a much reformed EU, but if that isn’t possible, then the United Kingdom could thrive perfectly well alone.
The Irish in Britain – as well as the Irish in Ireland, most emphatically – are, like the Scots, keen for Britain to remain within the Club of Rome. They believe Ireland would be damaged (and the Irish border reinforced) if there were to be a change of status.
Catholics in general have historically been more favourable towards the European Union, and its roots – in the European Economic Community – were linked to the Catholic consciences of its founding fathers, Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer. These were men who believed that Europe – they might even have called it Christendom – should never again engage in an internal war. Fine ideals, indeed.
The Rev Ian Paisley used to claim, only half in jest, that it was no coincidence the EU was based on the “Club of Rome” – a Catholic foundation – and it was probably all a Popish plot. And yet, some of the most outspoken British political critics of the EU are Catholic parliamentarians, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Bill Cash, Liam Fox, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Sir Edward Leigh. The commentator and former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore once declared this tendency of English eurosceptic Catholics as arising from a tradition of not conforming to the mainstream: in other words, thinking for themselves, rather than accepting the status quo.
However, it’s going to be a difficult conscience vote. I imagine that the Bishops in England and Wales will suggest that it’s in the common good to remain within the EU. Yet when I learn, for example, of how the EU has ravaged the fishing industry in this country – Grimsby reduced to a hulk of what it once was, importing Norwegian and Icelandic cod – I wonder how well the common good has been served by our membership.
Whether the EU really can be reformed is another difficult question. As for the heritage of Christendom, the EU institutions seem to have divested themselves of all trace of it. Still, to vote with an informed conscience is always the right path. One can also conscientiously abstain.
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The subject of manners has been a January preoccupation at BBC Radio 4, which ran two programmes recently on this theme – one with Ann Widdecombe on etiquette, and the other with the comedian David Mitchell.
Mr Mitchell (who thinks it bad manners when people address him as “Dave”) was concerned that the internet had ushered in an age of bad manners. Some people consult their mobile phones or other screen devices up to 40 times an hour, even when in company. Screen addicts have even been known to consult them while at a funeral service – “because there are boring bits during funerals”. Where’s the respect? asked Mr Mitchell.
Yet while the obsession with screen time might be a sign of ill manners, perhaps it’s also an indication of a yearning for communication and interaction. The mobile phone generation needs to be in touch, at all times, and suffers separation anxiety if bored or alone.
Eventually, one hopes, protocols for the mobile and iPad generation will work themselves out. Everyone has their own pet dislike about modern manners: many older people loathe being addressed by their Christian names by perfect strangers. A protocol will have to be worked out for that one, too.
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I thought James Norton was a handsome hunk when he played the vicar detective in Grantchester. Now the Ampleforth boy is being turned into a matinee idol with his leading role in War and Peace. He could have his head turned by all this adulation, but one hopes the monks in North Yorkshire taught him that worldly success can be a snare and a delusion, and his theology studies in Cambridge taught him to see things sub specie aeternitatis. He seems canny enough, anyway, to disclose little about his private life.
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