True Sovereignty - 28th August 2011

I have escaped for the bank holiday week to another national park –to the Pembrokeshire coast.  I can very rarely get a mobile phone signal, and I have only managed to send this column to the Journal by logging on to the St David’s Cathedral refectory wi/fi. So, I am cut off from my constituents and their emails. I have brought an amount of reading: a biography of Ed Milliband (always know –and never underestimate- your opponents); Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree; and a biography of Galileo.

A couple of emails which came before I left have also been occupying my mind. Readers may recall my column on capital punishment a couple of weeks ago. My correspondents, although they agreed with my conclusions, took issue with the way I reached them. Despite coming down in favour of the death penalty, I rehearsed a number of arguments for and against and I rejected popular support for capital punishment as an argument in favour, saying that part of the responsibility of representative government was to ‘civilise’ the people. My correspondents thought this sounded paternalistic, if not patronising or downright arrogant, and that I ought to remember that all power comes from the people -of whom I am one mere representative.

Are they right, does all power come from the people, if not, then where does sovereignty really lie?

The great Victorian constitutionalist Dicey insisted that Parliament was absolutely sovereign and could do whatever it pleased. Earlier this year we passed a law restating parliamentary sovereignty with respect to the EU. We rejected the opportunity to broaden the scope of the bill, offered in amendments tabled by Bill Cash MP, and to take on the judges too. Increasingly Judges have usurped the role of Parliament and government with judicial review and other devices. This is very frustrating for elected politicians but history teaches that we owe much of our liberty to the judiciary and, who knows, we may do so again in the future. The judges however, are not sovereign any more than the people might be. Rather, power is exercised by government, with the consent of Parliament, in the name of the sovereign –the Queen, but sovereignty doesn’t flow from the monarch, it is given to her, but if not by the people, then by whom?

The answer is on every coin in the realm in the letters ‘D.G.’ (Deo Gratia)-by the grace of God. The coronation service is equally clear: before being crowned the monarch must swear an oath to govern according, not to the will of the people, but to God’s law.

I find it reassuring that our nation state derives its legitimacy from a set of values and standards given, not by man, but by God -even if a significant proportion of our people, to put it mildly, have come to doubt his existence.

For those who lack an active faith in God, or don’t experience a relationship with his risen Son, the principal obstacle to belief is mostly put down to the advance of science, but there is not –nor has there ever been- any shortage of scientists who believe. Much more challenging, I think, is the realisation of the sheer vastness of the universe. The reassurance of belief is rooted in our confidence in our importance to our Creator –that we are his main effort. Yet if this is the case why then has he confined us to such a tiny part of his creation for such a very short period of its duration?

My only response to this question is awe and wonder at the magnificence of the creation, and surrender to its mystery. Of one thing I can be certain however, the Christian values that underpin our democracy, and which are acknowledged in the coinage, are better than anything we could have come up with ourselves.