• The seventeenth century

In the media discussions we’ve been reading a lot about the 1640s, when Charles I fought and lost two civil wars against Parliament and was tried and executed and the monarchy itself abolished. This is known as the English Revolution: although, if pressed, most English people would not be able to date it.

The reason is that the experiment was some way ahead of its time. Certainly it was not a success. Various expedients to replace the status quo were tried and failed. Almost in desperation, Parliament offered Cromwell the crown in 1657. In a typically ponderous speech, he turned it down. Three years later, Charles II was invited back pretty much on his own terms. Aside from some blanket legislation and a few reprisals, life proceeded as if the clock had been wound back to 1640.

In 1688 there was another crisis, handled with less bloodshed. This was a reaction to the concern that James II, Charles II’s brother and successor, would establish an absolutist Roman Catholic monarchy in emulation of what was then common in Europe, particularly in his cousin Louis XIV’s France. The fact that this was a serious possibility less than thirty years after the Restoration showed how badly the dream of Puritan Republicanism had failed.

James was eventually deposed and replaced by his daughter, Mary II, and her cousin and husband, the Dutch William III: both Protestants. In the process, readjustments were made to the power of Parliament and its relationship with the monarch. It’s known as the Glorious Revolution, though “Pragmatic Revolution” seems a better name.

• “Consequential and damaging…”

Andrew M-W’s arrest was, as The Guardian described it, “the most consequential and damaging day for the family firm in centuries, perhaps since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the capture of King Charles I in 1647 and his execution two years later.”

While true on one level, it misses the point. The two seventeenth-century revolutions bear no similarity to the current crisis, and not as many similarities to each other as some are suggesting.

First of all, there’s that word “revolution”. The period from 1649 to 1660 witnessed one although, like the one in Animal Farm, it failed. The events of 1688 have been called a revolution in retrospect because the constitutional changes, more pragmatic than the earlier ones, stuck. It was otherwise the replacement of one ruler, who for whatever reason was proving objectionable, by another member of the same family. This had previously happened, in various different ways, in 1154, 1327, 1399, 1461 and 1485.

Secondly, there’s the question of the view of the institution. Although individual medieval and early-modern monarchs might have been unpopular with the very small number of people who had any dealings with them, in the mid-seventeenth century aside, this wasn’t extended to the institution. In the same way, anti-clericalism was a recurring feature of life before and after the Reformation but this didn’t lead to a commensurate level of atheism.

George IV and, for a decade or so, Victoria, were regarded as unpopular, in so far as the term means anything by modern standards. The monarchy also survived the abdication of 1936, largely because George VI proved himself to be such a good replacement, particularly after 1939.

Finally, there’s no suggestion that Andrew has tried to undermine Parliament, establish absolutism or impose an unwelcome religious settlement. These were factors in both the 1640s and 1688. Both of Charles I’s sons lost faith with and tried to ignore Parliament in the last years of their reigns. Charles I, however, had ruled without it for eleven years from 1629 and was only forced to re-summon it in 1640 because of his decision to take military action against the Scots over a question of religion.

• Assertion

Parliament was not slow to assert itself. The tradition that it had the power to grant the monarch funds for war dated back three hundred years when Edward III had used it for this purpose in the early days of the Hundred Years War.

More importantly, it had been given a huge boost of self-confidence by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s when it was used to assert the supremacy of the English monarch over the Pope of Rome: “This realm of England is an Empire,” was one of the sonorous phrases from the Restraint of Appeals Act of 1532 and set the tone of other acts that followed. The power which Parliament accrued as a result was jealously guarded.

The way that the revolution of 1688 was handled would have been impossible without the one that had preceded it. It enabled England to arrive at an accommodation with the monarch that has, in its essentials, largely survived. The fact that this era of constitutional monarchy also saw the start of agricultural and industrial revolutions and a long-lived empire has cemented in the minds of many an association of the general benefits of constitutional monarchy that will be hard to break.

• Extra males

What we’re dealing with in the case of Andrew is something that has nothing to do with constitutional conflict or nationalistic gloire but the far more basic question of what you do with your younger male children. (Charles III is probably wondering what to do about his own one.)

In a society where land and power pass from father to son, there’s a dilemma. If you have too few sons, your blood-line is vulnerable: if too many, then they’re at each others’ throats. William I, Henry II and Edward III had too many sons; Henry I, Henry V and Henry VIII too few; and Richard I, Richard II, Elizabeth I and Charles II none at all (or no legitimate ones).

The consequences influenced policy during the reigns in question and had consequences during the ones that followed. The Anarchy of the 1140s, Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the break with Rome, the union of Scotland and England and the Glorious Revolution all had some of their roots in these biological accidents.

Extra princes were a problem. They could be packed off to fight wars or develop dynastic ambitions elsewhere. More often they stayed at home, lording it over their tenants, seducing the local women, reminding everyone that they were extra important and plotting against their eldest brother.

• Direct action

Few kings have had to take direct action. One who did was Edward IV who, in 1478, lost patience with the machinations of his brother George of Clarence and arranged for him to be convicted of treason by an Act of Attainder and executed, allegedly by the unusual method of having him drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine.

This, more than the examples quoted by The Guardian, is the real precedent for what’s going on with the awful Andrew. There was no constitutional or political threat he posed, merely the very human problem of having too much entitlement, too little intelligence and too few limitations on the realisation of his desires. Edward IV dealt with his dubious brother in a direct way. Charles III obviously has no ability to do likewise – more’s the pity, many might say.

• Language

There are a number of people in this country who don’t speak English. I can think of few countries in the world where not being able to speak the national language puts you at such a disadvantage.

This is not because there’s something inherently stupid about us that we can’t learn foreign languages. There are perhaps two reasons for our comparative lack of linguistic diversity.

The first is that English has long been, and remains, the closest thing to a global language we have, as every source (including French ones) would agree. Even in Europe it’s the most widely spoken language (260m people, according to Berlitz) even though only three countries speak it as a first language. According to the EU itself, nearly half of all Europeans can have a conversation in English. Being able to chat in the next most popular, French, is something only 11% of people claim to be able to do.

In this article (admittedly from 2014, though things may not have changed that much since), The Guardian claimed that while pretty much everyone in Luxembourg, Sweden and the Netherlands is able to speak another language, about 60% of people in the UK and Ireland cannot (Hungarians and Italians fare even worse on this score – but Hungarian is so extraordinary and Italian so beautiful that perhaps the natives feel that this is the hardest or best thing they’ll ever have to learn and there’s no point in adding to it).

It’s a bit like the metric/imperial system. We have to understand the metric system, and use it often grudgingly, because it’s the global measuring system. However, there’s no reason why someone in Italy or Bolivia should bother to learn the imperial system.

The second reason why Brits might not be so great at the various lingos flows from the above points. Every time an English person goes to a non-English speaking country and opens their mouth, they suddenly get treated like a free English conversation teacher. When I’m in, say, Italy, Spain or Germany, of whose languages I have only a tiny smattering, this is quite welcome.

When in France, however, a country whose language I have made efforts to try to learn, it pisses me off. I have to make determined efforts to assert myself. Often, conversations proceed with each person adopting the other’s language. Unless the French person’s English is clearly superior to my French, I refuse to buckle. This, as my family will testify, has led to some interesting encounters in hotels, shops and restaurants. English’s popularity shows no sign of waning so this is likely to continue.

• Stick and carrot

This combination of the huge carrot of English being a global language, and the corresponding stick, that most non-English speakers will not you let you speak their language, creates a problem for those who live here who don’t speak English. Our society is exclusively monolingual, except for when you visit various public buildings and see that translations of documents into (sometimes many) other languages are available, these vary depending on where you are.

There’s an argument that says that these translations aren’t doing anyone any favours and that English classes would be a more profitable way forward. The problem, perhaps, is reaching the people who need them. Picking my words with care, it seems that, for some, having household members who don’t speak English is a good way of controlling them and that they’re therefore very unlikely to be allowed to come forward to volunteer for classes.

Some people just have no grasp for languages or arrange their lives so they don’t need to learn. I briefly had a Spanish girlfriend in Vauxhall, where a lot of Spaniards lived. One day she took me to meet a Spanish man she was translating a document for who’d lived there for about twenty years and could hardly say “good afternoon” in English, never mind understand a tax demand. I also know of a couple who moved to France. She was badly dyslexic and so couldn’t pick the language up as easily as he could. They got divorced.

Whatever the reason, anyone who lives here who doesn’t speak English is cut off from many aspects of life as completely as if they were deaf or illiterate. To what extent this is a problem for anyone other than them and – for the reasons suggested – what can be done about it is moot. It’s certainly not the case that people who don’t speak English are somehow enemies of the state or plotting against the rest of us. In any case, people who speak English fluently are surely far more dangerous.

• Mr Farage

Mr Farage, however, appears to believe that this is a huge, huge problem. Full Fact recently reported that he “recently claimed in a video shared thousands of times that looking at the last census, ‘there’s a million living in Britain don’t speak English. There’s four million don’t speak very good English’.” Having seen the video, the inference wasn’t complimentary and the conclusion was that these people were all somehow undermining everything and making us poorer into the bargain.

Leaving aside whether he might have a point, let’s look at the facts on which his assertion is predicated. I trust Full Fact more than Farage and it says this:

“This is not what the last census showed…as far as we can tell from the official data, Mr Farage’s numbers are much too high. In the 2021 Census, only 161,000 people in England and Wales said they couldn’t speak any English, while an additional 880,000 people said they could not speak English well.

“And while those figures are five years old and the true number may have risen since, they’re very unlikely to have risen by as much as Mr Farage’s comments suggested, as we explain below.” See the link above for the background on that.

The main part of the article concludes with the remark that “We’ve asked Reform UK several times about Mr Farage’s claim but haven’t received a response.” I suspect we’re going to be reading this many more times, on many more different matters, over the next few years. Come to your own conclusions about the silence.

• And finally…

• If ever there was a good argument not to eat chicken, certainly in restaurants, it can be found in this recent article on the BBC website that tells us that “major restaurant chains, including KFC, have ditched a commitment to improve chicken sourcing standards in the UK as poultry demand soars.”

• And still with the BBC, Greenland’s Prime Minister has asked Trump to engage with him instead of making “random outbursts on social media” – good luck with that – after Trump said he was sending a US hospital boat to “take care” of people on the island. PotUS alleged that a lot of people on the island were sick and not being helped. Jens-Frederik Nielsen responded by pointing out that Greenland “provides free healthcare for all citizens, unlike the US”.

• After a fulminating retort by Mandelson’s lawyers that the disgraced peer had not – as the Police suggested to explain why he’s been arrested – been about to do an overseas flit, it emerged, as The Guardian reports here, that the source of this information was none other than the speaker of the House of Commons.

• I remain constantly amazed at how much the government has failed to live up to the various promises that it made: or, indeed, to the basic idea of what a Labour government should be seeking to do. These comments from various publications including the Daily Mail, The Guardian and The New Statesman, as reported in The Week, show that Starmer is equally unpopular with the right and the left.

There’s a difficult by-election taking place now as I write, followed by some equally difficult council elections in May. Governments normally do badly in such things. Starmer’s banning of Andy Burnham in the first of these and his attempted postponement of some of the second – though for reasons that had some logistical if not political merit – won’t help his cause. I suspect he’s written both off. Then, we go again with another re-set: and all the while with Reform UK casting its dark shadow across the political landscape…

Across the area

• A money meeting

West Berkshire Council will be voting on (and, one imagines, approving) its budget on 26 February at a Full Council meeting. We’ll bring you any thoughts from the participants, and us, next week. You can see the papers for this and watch the livestream of the meeting by clicking here.

WBC was dealt two good cards in advance of the meeting.

The first was the widely publicised news that the government is finally serious about tackling the question of SEND. This is emotive because many families now rely upon it. It’s also fantastically expensive, doesn’t really focus on the most needy, doesn’t have enough qualified staff to support its aspirations and has a financing system which has for several years only worked because the costs have been kept in a kind of limbo between the balance sheets of the government and those of of the local education authorities.

The other is the recent agreement in principle of the exceptional financial support (EFS) which WBC had requested (were it to have been refused, this meeting would have been pointless). This would seem to stave off the threat of a S114 notice (a declaration of effective bankruptcy) for the foreseeable future. The government has made it clear that EFS rather than S114s is its preferred route.

This is perhaps because there’s a limit to how many suitable commissars Whitehall has to send out to the shires and boroughs to take over affairs there.

• Food waste

This BBC article claims that “more than a quarter of English councils will miss an official deadline to introduce weekly food waste collections to all homes. This seems odd given that the date’s been known about for years. Our own West Berkshire introduced these collections as far back as October 2022.

I asked a member of WBC’s waste team why she thought this was, accepting that she couldn’t speak for other authorities. Very generously, she suggested that WBC had been in a particularly fortunate situation with the arrangements that it already had in place and so was able to implement well in advance of the deadline.

None the less, one might imagine that three to four years is long enough to make the necessary arrangements, even considering that waste-management contracts typically run for a long time and many probably didn’t anticipate the need for such a service to be added.

The background to this is that if food waste is put in the general bins, and if this is added to landfill, then the decomposition produces methane. This is even more environmentally damaging than CO2. Treating food-waste separately enables these emissions to be managed and also produces high-quality soil conditioner that’s then available to residents.

The change to three-weekly collections also seems to have helped. In the three months following the change, over 20% more food was recycled compared to the same period the year before. This is probably in part because people were less willing to have food waste in their black bins for that long and so people used the food-waste service more, or for the first time.

I accept, as I think does WBC, that both these changes – indeed, all the recycling arrangements – are a lot easier to follow if you have the space and the time to store and sort your rubbish. However, help is available for households who find the three-weekly collection impossible to live with. More information can be found here. If you can’t find or get an answer to your problem, your next best course of action is to contact your local district councillor/s.

• Ask the Leader

West Berkshire Council Leader Jeff Brooks is going live to answer your questions in the next Ask the Leader event streamed across YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn for up to an hour from 6pm on Wednesday 11 March.

You can send your questions in advance by emailing: asktheleader@westberks.gov.uk before 4pm on Wednesday 4 March. You can also ask questions during the event using the comment feature on your chosen platform. You’ll be able to view the scheduled livestream and set a reminder on your preferred platform a few days before the event. More information can be found here.

• The case for Ridgeway

West Berkshire (WBC), the Vale and South Oxfordshire have put out statements making the case for the proposed amalgamation of the three authorities as a new Ridgeway unitary (single-tier) authority. This is in response to the governments local government reorganisation which (rightly) wants to abolish the two-tier system that currently prevails in Oxfordshire, though not in Berkshire.

WBC, although already a unitary, has got involved in this process because it sees this union as being in its best interests (other views exist). It would also satisfy another government objective, that all unitary authorities have a population of at least about 500,000. WBC is currently about 170,000 and the three together (assuming the current boundaries are retained) would be about 470,000.

There are currently three proposals: the two-unitary with the above-mentioned Ridgeway and the rest of of the Oxfordshire councils combining to form a second unitary; the three-unitary, which is as this but with an enlarged Oxford City Council remaining separate; and a single unitary council for the whole of Oxfordshire, which would leave WBC unchanged. The first is favoured by all the districts except Oxford City and WBC; the second by Oxford City; and the third by Oxfordshire CC.

The above-mentioned statement looks at how certain key services would be changed and provided (or, as the municipal language puts it, reimagined and delivered). The assumption that runs through all of these is that Ridgeway would small enough to be responsive but large enough to be efficient – it would, in short, represent another example of the Goldilocks effect.

• Getting on-site

The Western Area Planning Committee met on 18 February to consider three applications, two in Newbury and one in West Woodhay. Planning committees are quite arduous things – typically about three hours discussing the issues in the chamber and with a lot of reading to do beforehand.

Another important aspect is the site visit which generally takes place about a week before. These are not to engage in a discussion of the issues with the applicant or any members of the public who might be there but to see the site first-hand and listen to any points that might be raised by anyone else who attends. The number of people who do attend is completely beyond the power of the committee to influence and is more a measure of how controversial the application is.

These are essentially fact-finding and not decision-making exercises. They’re quite important: after all, how would you feel if a major planning decision had been taken by people who hadn’t even bothered to go there?

For this to happen, it’s obviously important that the committee members and anyone else who has reasonable cause to be there is allowed onto the site. In all three of these visits, it seems that for different reasons, some or all of the attendees (including on two occasions the committee members) were, let us say, not made to feel particularly welcome.

I’m not sure what laws govern such site visits and whether committee members and others have an automatic legal right to enter a site at this time and for this reason, even though other people might not be above to enter. Nor do I know if someone who has, for whatever reason, been legally barred from going onto a site can have this lifted if they’re there as part of such a site visit. Both might be worth finding out.

I’m told that this does happen from time to time but very rarely three times in one day. Western Area has loads more cases on its waiting list so we’ll soon see if this is just a co-incidence or part of a trend.

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