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As he arrives, a woman (white, apparently a typical New Yorker) has just finished writing in chalk on the paving stones: "The American flag propagates violence." An agitated man in a cap, Jewish one would guess, is calling upon another bystander, watching with his dog, "Have your dog piss on that, OK, have your dog piss on that. Let your dog defecate on that garbage..." A black lady moves in and tries to erase the writing by scuffing it with her feet and sprinkling it with water. "We're grieving and its a tragedy that happened and this is unacceptable," she says; and when another bystander declares "That's the First Amendment you're trampling on" she adds "People who think like this can go home. This is the United States." (Unspoken premise: everyone who lives in New York has another place they came from and if they don't like what's on offer they can go back...)
There then ensues a solid hours' heated argument among the bystanders, about America, about freedom, about sudden death, and above all about fear and grief. Several voices are foreign, and no one race predominates. People who would never normally exchange the time of day with each other are locked in a spontaneous bout of group therapy, which makes it a dramatic and intense piece of street theatre.
New York is one of the most culturally and racially diverse societies in the world, which is where it differs from the rest of the United States. The cameraman - himself black - catches most of it, and we can watch the result at www.cameraplanet.com/7days/. There are off-the-wall moments, not least when one young man heatedly proclaims "This European pantheism has got to go!" God gave them America, he declares - only to be interrupted equally forcefully by someone who shouts that God has nothing to do with it. "There were people here before us."
The end of the video is extraordinarily moving. The arguers begin to sense they are angry with each other even when they agree. One young man tries to hold forth, is interrupted by a woman if his own age, tells her to "shut the f... up", and adds "I'm in f... pain..." He had taken part in the early stages of the World Trade Centre rescue and looks as if he had not slept since. "I was pulling out body part. I have seen body parts... heads ..." But his interrupter had also been on the scene the first day. She had seen what he had seen. They start to cry together, and hold each other up, shoulder to shoulder. "I don't know how to process this," he sobs. "What do we do with it?" she asks him, also weeping. "We have so much rage inside ourselves. So much emotion needs to be channelled somewhere or we are going to kill each other." As they stand leaning together someone starts to clap, to show approval. Two other disputants also embrace, and one says to the camera "First we argue, then we hug, argue..., hug..." The tension is broken and the group starts to drift away. This also was New York, September 2001.
One thing that distinguishes American talk about September 11 from elsewhere, including England, is its easy resort to the language of psychotherapy. It is probably not true that at any one time half of New York is paying the other half to listen to its troubles, but their common acceptance of psycho-analytical perspectives must surely make Freudianism and its offshoots a candidate to be the real New York religion. It does after all offer to perform the most difficult social role that characterises religion: dealing with death.
One result of this psychotherapeutic fixation is that Americans sometimes seem not only to be having emotions, but at the same time watching themselves having emotions. Hence the search for "closure", meaning not only the point at which grief has been worked through and normal life may resume, but also the point at which this inner running commentary says that that is what has happened. It is as if somewhere there has to be a script which says "It's OK to cry", and then you can cry; "It's OK to stop" and then you stop.
Many Americans, post-September 11, have internalised the language of post-traumatic stress counselling. Whether they have yet given themselves permission to "move on" is not so sure: the website with the video clip also has an internet forum alongside, in which New Yorkers (and the whole world, it seems) show themselves not quite ready, even a year on, to leave that sidewalk in Union Square. The "What does it mean?" question still hangs over them like that infamous smoke and dust cloud. Freud cannot solve everything.
If this is still the state of the American soul, bewildered and angry, hurt and afraid, then it is not unkind to ask to what extent it might influence the way people so affected are thinking about, say, the prospect of war with Iraq. Those who suffer great loss need an emotional cordon sanitaire around them while they work it out. They may try to act themselves, but the decisions they make are not always the decisions they would have made ordinarily.
Americans are still angry. As the lady said: "So much emotion needs to be channelled somewhere or we are going to kill each other." Channelled where? If not each other, then whom?
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American Exceptionalism is the doctrine that the United States of America is not just the fitting object of legitimate national pride by its citizens, but unique among the nations. Thus generalisations which may apply to every other nation do not apply to it. This is not just a uniqueness achieved by America's place at the top of whatever league table you care to mention, from gross domestic product to military resources, average expenditure on science to medals won in the Olympic Games. All those are reasons for American pride, but not for American Exceptionalism. But the latter may indeed be caused by the former. Nothing gives a nation and its citizens confidence quite like the deep conviction that God has singled it out for special favours, albeit if those favours go with special duties. Hitler thought so too.
The British would understand American Exceptionalism better if they had not been busy forgetting so much of their own history, for a kind of English (later British) Exceptionalism was what drove the British Empire "wider still and wider" (to quote Land of Hope and Glory). One could describe the last 50 years of post-imperial readjustment as the process of coming to terms with the humbling truth that Britain has not been given some unique place among the nations. Not just "no longer", but "never was."
The existence of these two brands of Exceptionalism side by side, or one superseding the other, is no coincidence. Both were founded on a particular Protestant Biblical theology called typology, by which events in ancient Israel and even the identity of ancient Israel itself could be regarded as prefiguring events and identities in the contemporary world. Thus England emerged from the 16th century Reformation wearing the mantle of New Israel, God's Chosen People. Whether this divine blessing flowed upwards from the common people, or downwards from their anointed kings and bishops, became a major ideological theme of the English Civil War. Those of the former view colonised New England and the latter colonised Virginia, thereby sewing the seeds of their own civil war two centuries later. The America War of Independence was understood at the time in Biblical terms as another Exodus, the New Israel escaping from the tyranny of the (British) pharaoh, George III.
No historical treatment of American Exceptionalism can ignore its origins in Protestant typology, and those with an ear for it can still detect it in present-day American discourse. Thus President Ronald Reagan regularly spoke of America as a "city on a hill", (Matthew 5:14) and at his inauguration last year President Bush remarked of America's history "We are not this story's author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose... An angel still rides in this whirlwind and directs this storm." (Psalm 35:5). The British, not believing any longer in the chosenness of nations at all, (partly because they scarcely believe in religion at all) tend to filter out such messages. There may be an element of British sour grapes here - if we can't be chosen, no-one can; or if God isn't an Englishman, maybe he does not exist...
Given that the Republicans are closer to this ideology of Protestant nationalism than the Democrats, it is hardly surprising that the Bush administration has been following an Exceptionalist agenda to the letter. Non-participation in and withdrawal from all sorts of international agreements and arrangements - from breaking the anti-missile treaty to sabotaging the Kyoto treaty on global warming, undermining the setting up of an international criminal court because it could affect American soldiers, and so on - is the logical consequence. America's hostility to the goals of the Johannesburg summit now taking place is merely the latest example.
It would not be wise to look at America's intentions towards Iraq without bearing this ideological and historical background in mind. In the first place it increases the chance that America might go it alone. It is easily persuaded that it can see things that others can't. Secondly, the doctrine of Exceptionalism links the interests of America to God's purposes in the world. The national ideology of "Americanism" can almost be described as a variety of Christian heresy, in that it gives that country a salvific role which, to a more Catholic or Orthodox way of thinking, only the visible church can fulfil. It is not insignificant that the Vatican has banned the display of the American flag in Catholic churches there, recognising that the veneration of such symbols of America in a religious way could run the risk of idolatry.
Perhaps the world is fortunate that, faced with Saddam Hussein, the Al Qaeda terrorist network and the Soviet bloc before it collapsed, there is one nation that regards it as its divine mission in the world to take them on and sort them out. But we have to fear, on the other hand, that any nation which claims to be a law unto itself to this degree is a source of danger to the world as much as a source of strength.
Clifford Longley's book Chosen People, the big idea that shaped England and America, was published by Hodder and Stoughton last week.
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It is a pity this crisis in the commission's affairs has coincided with high summer - Mr Singh's particular offence involved an altercation with police officers after a Test Match at Lord's - because these are serious issues needing careful debate, which they are unlikely to get in the middle of the silly season. The public relations blow for the CRE was made worse by the impression that Mr Singh had profited from his crime: though he was fined £500 he walked away with a contractual pay-off worth more than 200 times that. And before any of this happened, the Government was canvassing opinion on whether to merge the CRE with two similar bodies, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission, to produce one portmanteau Anti-Discrimination Commission. This only added to the sense that perhaps the end of an era was approaching.
The most serious critics of the CRE on the left have complained that it had become too much under the influence of one racial minority, the Afro-Caribbean (West Indian) one, and an increasingly dated view of what race relations were all about, based on the American model. This marginalised the experience of the one group on Britain which is actually having the hardest time, Muslim communities originally from the Indian sub-continent. In their own understanding, Muslim people see prejudice and discrimination against them as much in religious as in racial terms, hence their coining of the expression Islamophobia. But discrimination on the basis of religion is not unlawful, whereas discrimination on the basis of race certainly is; nor is religious hatred a statutory aggravating factor in crimes of violence or harassment, as racial hatred is.
What Muslims have been saying is that they are not happy being defined as part of an amorphous "Black community", and even the term "back and Asian" does not do them justice. In a typically white liberal fuzzy way such talk glibly assumes that Muslims of Pakistani origin are more or less the same as Hindus of Indian origin, whereas not long ago the two originating countries actually came to the brink of nuclear war.
The Home Secretary's ill-conceived attempt earlier this year to make incitement to religious hatred an offence, in line with the existing offence of incitement to racial hatred, ran into a barrage of complaints that it would infringe the legitimate right to criticise other people's beliefs. This has probably pushed the whole issue to the bottom of the agenda, even though anti-discrimination legislation, as distinct from ant-hate crime legislation, works through the civil, not the criminal, courts. But that leaves Muslims as very unsatisfied clients of the CRE, when they ought, by every reckoning, to have been its first priority.
If the CRE's model of race relations is worn out, what should replace it? One possibility is supplied the report two years ago by the Runnymede Trust, called The Future of Multi-racial Britain, which, despite its faults did break new ground. It urged great caution with expressions like "ethnic" and "minority", and proposed a model of British society made up of a "community of communities" balanced by emphasis on the rights of individuals in a "community of citizens". This move away from defining people strictly by skin-colour is helpful. In any event, the people we are talking about are almost as unkeen to be defined exclusively by race and skin colour as they are by national origin. It means they are expected to take their core identity from that characteristic which is most often used to damage them; and it leaves the defining to their enemies.
As the commentator Darcus Howe, who emigrated from the West Indies in the 1950s, recently remarked, "We are less and less given to the solidarity of skin." Once again, the vocabulary with which we have to discuss race, lacking any other, is part of the problem, and with vocabulary comes ideology. Recognising that there is some merit to the usually overdone politically correct fussiness over language, it would be useful at least to agree to use words like black, Asian and Muslim as adjectives, not nouns. Just as "the disabled" quite rightly insist on being called "disabled people", so we should let the humanity of other groups shine through by referring to them as black people, Asian people, Muslim people. After all it is because they are people that they enjoy human rights, not because they are black or Asian.
This is where a merger into an Anti-Discrimination Commission might be just what is needed to provoke new thinking in all three areas, those concerned with sex and disability as well as with race. In all three cases laws exist to compensate people who have been disadvantaged by unlawful discrimination, and in all three, statutory bodies have been given pro-active responsibilities to inform and educate the public, as well as the duty to support people claiming compensation through the courts. Each has a different theoretical approach; and while feminism, say, has something in common with anti-racism, it has important points of difference. In other words it is time for cross-fertilisation, time to share best practice in all three areas, and time to concentrate on what works rather than on abstract theorising. And time also to stop seeing the world through one narrow-focus set of ideological lenses.
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Thus is national opinion divided into two camps, which roughly correspond to the old division in English culture between disapproving Roundheads and what-the-hell Cavaliers. Roundheads, needless to say, instinctively find Big Brother immoral but they are curiously uncertain exactly why. It also has its high-minded defenders who see the programme as "reality tv", bringing viewers not the tired fantasy of soap opera but actual life, before your very eyes. Who knows, they seem to be saying, the public might learn something.
All over the dark fantasy world of Orwell's novel were large public signs announcing "Big Brother is Watching You". The all-knowing almost god-like presence of the dictator was everywhere: he saw everything, and punished whatever did not fit within his strict and arbitrary rules. In the tv series, a diverse group of young people are confined together for a period of a few weeks in a building inside which there is virtually no escape from closed circuit television cameras, wired for sound, 24 hours a day. The invisible production team, a sort of corporate impersonal Big Brother presence, watch, record, impose rules and set tasks. Television viewers are invited to follow the inmates interacting intimately (which seems to mean largely grumbling, quarrelling or flirting, though there was just a suspicion of oral sex) and then to vote which of them should be thrown off the set. The last one left behind, after all the others have been voted off, wins a substantial sum of money and a great deal of short-term fame.
There is no doubt the players are real people, selected from tens of thousands of applicants. And when they say they are becoming browned off with one or other of their companions with whom they share this strange hot house of emotion, they really mean it. And when they drink too much, they really do. The copious supplies of alcohol are a serious provocation to bad behaviour, not to mention a thoroughly bad example. But as every producer knows, bad behaviour makes good tv.
This was its third year, and by every measurement - column inches, viewing figures, even crowds gathering outside the building in the hope of a chance to jeer at their least favourite characters - it was a fantastic media success. Tabloid papers devoted acres to discussing the merits of the various players, as we probably have to call them, which set up a growing resonating symbiosis between press and television as the days went by. On the internet, there was even more. Indeed, the idea at the heart of Big Brother, continuous live broadcasting, is borrowed from the obsessively voyeuristic world of the web-cam (where people set up video cameras in their homes which are connected continuously to the internet, so complete strangers can log on and watch them doing whatever they do.)
What is unhealthy about the world inside Big Brother is exactly what is wrong with the world depicted by Orwell in 1984. It is a controlled, artificial and menacing world in which people are trying to live a short period of their own real lives, every second of which is watched and dissected by millions of viewers as if it were entertainment. They do not sign off and go home at the end of the day. If they fall in love, it is real; if they hurt each other's feelings, it is real. If they lost their tempers and killed each other, that would be real too. The most perspicacious commentators have likened it to the famous lunatic asylum known as Bedlam, a visit to which, in order to laugh at the behaviour of the inmates, was a favourite outing of the 18th century London gentry. Watching Big Brother is just as heartless.
It completely breaks down the barrier between what is real and what is "on television". The television industry is full of people who ardently want the rest of us to believe that whatever is on television is real; but what keeps television-saturated societies sane is the common knowledge that of course it isn't. You see a horrible murder on television, and if it bores you, you reach for the remote control. You know it is all done by actors. The same crime actually committed before your eyes in your own living room, with real blood, real fear, real pain, real death, would scar you for life. We have to preserve these distinctions. They are part of the implicit terms and conditions under which television broadcasting is allowed to operate.
The vice Big Brother invites the nation to indulge in is prurience. There is good reason why Peeping Tom conduct has always been regarded as wrong, just as there is good reason for the social taboo against reading other people's private correspondence or eaves-dropping other people private conversations or even prying on people undressing or doing their toilet. Privacy is more than a human right: it is a human necessity. These "privacy" taboos are often apparently set aside on television, as in the theatre or in films or novels, but the real force of the prohibition is preserved because such displays are fictional and we all know it. Big Brother is a frontal assault on those taboos - not just on television but in real life. This time the Roundheads are right. It is not good.
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The new Archbishop will have to be prepared to inflict a certain amount of pain. There is a high degree of ecclesiastical complacency for it to be shaken out of. There is the increasingly secure hold of the Evangelical tradition on the mind and heart of Anglicanism, with all the distortions of Christianity that that can gradually lead to. There is a growing tendency to rely on the apparatus of establishment to make good the church's loss of membership and influence. Above all there is the mindset of establishmentarianism, a habitual attitude which assumes that the Church of England's privileged status in English society somehow especially commends the church to the people, when in fact it is especially good at alienating them from it.
The church's performance under George Carey has exacerbated that tendency. Its approach to the prospect of constitutional change has been along the lines of "what we have, we hold." It wants to keep the link with the Crown, it wants to keep the link with Parliament (particularly the seats for 26 bishops in the Lords), and it will do nothing to rock any constitutional boat. As a result there has been little critical or creative thinking about the present church-state relationship, little imagination about its future. It is impossible to say what an Anglican vision for England would look like, unless it would be the return to some imagined (but imaginary) golden age circa 1920 or 1950.
The assumption is hardly questioned that the relationship should remain more or less the same even while the church drops below, say, half or a third of its present membership, as it may well do. And really all there is to justify this confidence is the traditional Evangelical illusion that if only they were preached at hard enough, the people would flock back to it. It is a church without any other strategy, a church waiting for a missionary quick-fix.
It has long been my observation that people are turned off by establishment. It is not so much the legal theory of it as the voice of it, the feel and mindset of it, the mental parameters and the invisible limits it sets on what is or is not permissible. Establishment relies upon a historical connection with the English people. In other areas the English are rapidly ceasing to respect claims to privilege based on historical connections. That is why they were happy to see the departure of the inherited peers from the House of Lords, and why the British royal family is having to reinvent itself as an "inherited presidency" (whose position rests on the popular will, not on privilege of birth.) The idea that England has to be Anglican now because it was Anglican 50 years ago no longer sells. It repels.
All this seems to have passed the Church of England by. The point was once well made by Dr Colin Morris, former President of the Methodist Conference, that the Gospel cannot be preached by the strong to the weak. What he meant, I think, was that even if the words and deeds are Gospel words and deeds, their force is maybe neutralised, and perhaps even contradicted, by the fact that they come from someone standing by the side of power, not by the side of weakness. If this is true, and it certainly convinces me, then churches ought to want to be weak. Clinging to status and power is the last thing they should be seen to do. It is only when they relinquish them that they become spiritually strong, and then the Gospel they preach becomes real again. What Dr Morris was pointing to was the lesson of St Francis of Assisi.
The Church of England's established status has recently been defended by Dr Carey on the grounds that it brings him ready access to the ear of the Prime Minister. Would it not have been better for the Church of England if a deputation of its leaders had arrived at the door of 10 Downing Street and had it slammed in their faces? Would it not have improved the church's standing if it were, for once, to breath a hint of criticism in public concerning the matrimonial dispositions of the Prince of Wales - about which it is entirely uncomfortable in private - rather than pretending it does not know what we all know? Some evidence that the church is prepared to allow a distance to open between itself and the powers that be, whether political or royal, would do it more good than 20 archiepiscopal sermons on the virtues of establishment. And win it more friends and admirers in English society than it knew it had.
The new archbishop does not have make the Church of England give up establishment, just like that. He has to educate it how to see and use it differently. That means sitting lose to it, learning to regard it as dispensable, contingent and unnecessary, and getting used to the idea that one day it might not be there. In short, to stop loving it as a kind of ultimate worldly possession, the ecclesiastical equivalent of the wealth that stopped the rich young man from entering the kingdom of heaven. Rather than protecting the church's establishment status from harm at all cost, which seems to have been the recent style, it has to be risked.
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The simple answer is all too cynical. When crime figures are really falling, politicians rush to claim the credit. So by implication we can blame them when the figures start climbing. But would it not be better to reject both sides of the argument, and ask why the debate about crime has become so politicised? Are we trying to hide something from ourselves?
The fact is we have dropped most of the vocabulary we would need if we were to discuss it in any other terms. A hundred years ago the public debate about crime would have assumed that criminals were sinful people, and what we needed to do to them, or to be more exact, what they needed to do to themselves, was to reform their morals. Both the criminal justice system and the prison system still bear the strong imprint of that approach. They assume that people have been faced with the choice between right and wrong, and chosen to do wrong. But words like sin, right and wrong, blame and guilt etc are just too rude for the airwaves these days. Modern philosophers tell us that belief in free will is a category mistake - we are what our genes make us.
A hundred years ago nobody would have thought of blaming the government for the state of people's morals - as pointless as blaming it for the weather. If there was a rise in the crime figures, that was because there was a rise in the sin figures. And if there was one public institution we would have looked to to repair the public's morals, it was the church. A hundred years ago we would have placed the blame for a rise in the crime figures at the door of the Archbishop of Canterbury rather than the Home Secretary.
So the politicisation of crime is an aspect of secularism. One thing that secularism does is to weed from the language of public discourse all the words and ideas that have any connection with religion, even quite tenuous connections. Sin sounds like it is vaguely to do with religion, so sin has to go: not just the word but the concept. Ditto morality. We can still use them privately, behind closed doors with the curtains drawn. But out here in the public arena, crime is now just a political problem for the Home Office and a managerial problem for the police.
I am not saying we should go back to the terms of public debate of a hundred years ago: they got things wrong too. But let us not fall into the trap of sounding as if we thought that putting more police on the beat or whatever will somehow make us better - and more moral - people. Of course it won't.
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You would think that theology and the Bible would have had a lot to do with it. And you would be quite wrong. It has been discussed exactly as if we were discussing how to appoint a new chairman of the BBC. How worldly-wise the Church of England has become!
The theology is actually quite simple. Bishops are supposed to be successors of the apostles, and according to the Bible the first apostles were chosen by Jesus Christ. After the Crucifixion and the suicide of Judas, the vacancy was filled by the apostles drawing lots between two suitable candidates. They acted in the name of Christ, and assumed that their final choice, Matthias, was his choice.
Ever since, some variation on that tradition has survived. From early days, the most important bishop in Christendom was the bishop of Rome. He was elected by the senior priests of Rome. But they always claimed to act in the name of Christ. And the appointment of every new bishop in the Western church had to be endorsed by the Bishop of Rome, again in the name of Christ. When Henry VIII took over the Pope's powers to appoint bishops in 1535, he kept this papal veto for himself. And he too claimed to be acting in the name of God.
You can probably guess where this is leading. When Tony Blair chooses the new man for Canterbury, will he be doing so in the name of God? But not even Private Eye has thought of naming Mr Blair as the new Vicar of Christ! I am not asking whether he will do the job conscientiously and prayerfully, and even rather enjoy doing it (as some of his predecessors have admitted), because I am sure the answer is yes.
But that does not make the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom an ex officio part of the church, with authority to act as the representative of Christ. James Callaghan made it clear to the House of Commons in 1976 that the only reason you couldn't have the established church appointing its own bishops was because 26 of them could sit in the House of Lords. He insisted that only the Prime Minister could select new members of the upper House. In other words the principle was constitutional and political, not theological. And by now it has been completely undermined by House of Lords reform.
Maybe it is a good arrangement with many advantages, though of course there are two opinions about that. But a method of appointing bishops that has no basis in Christian theology or Scripture is going to be a source of unease for many, and acute dismay for some. Unless the problem is one day resolved for good, it will nag the church's conscience like a theological toothache. Until it's cured, then as they used to say in Fleet Street - this story will run and run.
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So no-one cannot quarrel in general with the timely warning given in last week's Tablet by Brendan O'Friel, a former senior prison governor and trustee of the Prison Reform Trust. More prisoners than the prison system can cope with means serious overcrowding, he said, which in turn means that the therapeutic and rehabilitative objectives of penal policy have to give way to the mere mechanics of containment.
Two prisoners have to be housed in cells designed for one, three in cells designed for two. Measures designed to improve their education or low self-esteem, both of which seem to lie behind a lot of offending, are inevitably neglected. These are among the evils of an ever-increasing prison population. It is therefore natural that many professionals working in the penal system are urgently seeking ways to relieve the pressure.
But one target of their attack - reducing the sentencing powers of the courts - is no panacea. It may be partly true that the system is being clogged up by prisoners serving short sentences. They are not inside long enough for any real changes in their attitudes or behaviour to be achieved. And being among the less serious offenders, at least measured by length of sentence, they would seem to be the ones most easily dealt with by alternatives to prison such as fines, or community rehabilitation and community punishment orders (the new names for probation and community service orders). So the plea is simultaneously both for longer and for shorter sentences, or the abolition of short sentences altogether.
The spotlight is inevitably turned, therefore, on the sentencing powers of magistrates, who do most of the short sentencing. Some have proposed that they lose the power - already limited to six months - to sentence criminals to prison altogether. Given that prisoners only serve half their term, being released on licence for the remainder, that effectively means three months. If they plead guilty in good time they are entitled to a further reduction of up to a third, so the theoretical six months maximum shrinks to two. Is that power really worth keeping?
But it is has been my observation as a lay magistrate (of relatively modest experience) that prison is almost always used only as a last resort. Prison for a first offence is rare, the circumstances exceptional. Lay magistrates, in particular, do not like sending people to prison. It is well known that in comparison for instance with Crown Court judges, their instincts are lenient. But until someone comes up with an alternative more radical than anything suggested so far, the power to deprive someone of their liberty will remain an indispensable back-up to other penalties.
How else do you persuade a reluctant and possibly very disorganised shoplifter-cum-drug abuser that they must keep their appointments with a probation officer? How else do you oblige someone given community service as an alternative to prison not to shirk that irksome duty? How else do you persuade someone with an electronic tag under the new curfew sentencing scheme - again, an excellent alternative to prison - not to ignore its irritating presence? How else do you discourage a reckless young man who has been caught driving under the influence from driving again soon after, whilst disqualified? What do you do with someone repeatedly harassing a neighbour or ex-partner with threats of violence, say, who ignores every effort to get them to stop ?
In every case you can only do so by the threat of a short period in prison. This judicial reasoning accounts for a large number of prison sentences passed by magistrates. In other words the very alternatives to custody penal reformers want to see will only work if the sanction of custody is available to enforce them. It is that singular point which such reformers, seeking the further curtailment or abolition of magistrates' custody sentencing powers as an instant solution to prison overcrowding, are failing to grasp. It would be better to adapt the penal system to the reality that some short sentences will always be necessary as a back-up, for instance by having specialist institutions where short sentences can be served away from the majority of longer-term prisoners.
It is of course true that if a criminal does serve a short prison sentence after all else has failed, there is little chance that the prison system could work miracles of moral rehabilitation in the time available. It is also true that the law of diminishing returns soon sets in, and once someone has been jailed the first time they are less likely to be deterred by the threat of it a second time. That is one of the reasons why sentences tend to get longer each time an individual is returned to court.
But the very leniency of lay magistrates compared with full time judges, already referred to, may suggest an alternative way forward, even if it sounds paradoxical. Instead of reducing or doing away with their sentencing powers, why not increase them? Magistrates could then deal with many of the cases they at present refer upwards to the Crown Courts because of their seriousness and lack of adequate sentencing powers. I suspect many cases now receiving 18 months or two years from a Crown Court judge might be given 12 months or less if left to the magistrates, with similar adjustments to other sentences. That is not a reason for increasing magistrates' powers that the government would find easy to put over to the public, but it could nevertheless provide a simple, cheap and elegant solution to prison overcrowding - which is what we all want to see.
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Not undeserved. He was a leading figure behind the unexpected appointment of George Basil Hume as Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster in 1976, which was later to transform the standing of the Catholic Church in English society, and then of Cormac Murphy O'Connor as his successor three years ago, which continued the trend. And it was an earlier Duke of Norfolk who secured a Cardinal's hat for John Henry Newman in the late 19th century, despite him being regarded at the time as dangerously ecumenical.
The Howard dynasty really does go back to 1066 and all that. Its founder, the first Earl of Arundel, was a mate of William the Conqueror. Somewhere along the line the family picked up the title Earl Marshal of England, which made them responsible for organising royal coronations and state funerals. Yet numerous of his distant relatives suffered exile or execution at the hands of English monarchs for religious reasons at the time of the Reformation, and there is even a 16th century saint in the family.
It is a delightful ecumenical coincidence that the premier Catholic nobleman in England has had the job of enthroning and installing new Sovereigns, including making sure that he or she swore the Protestant oaths required by law. That duty now passes to the 18th Duke, Miles's son Eddie.
For all that, the late Duke was never a crusty old gent far removed from the rest of us. He was one of the chief citizens of the United Kingdom - about the only hereditary peer left with the right to sit in the Lords. But he never forgot that what really mattered was being a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, where blue blood counts for nothing.
Some of his favourite funny stories were about sergeant majors he had known in the Grenadier Guards. When the pope announced in 1967 that only natural birth control methods should be used by Catholics, one Catholic sergeant major remarked to him: "The only trouble, sir, is that they don't bloody well work." This soldierly phrase found its way into the papers when Miles Norfolk repeated it at a conference soon after, and led to attempts to get him sacked as President of the Catholic Union.
He survived. And with his twinkle intact. It was the undefinable things about Miles Norfolk that made him such a memorable person to meet. He was humble and gentle, warm and witty. He had a generous word for everyone. There was an amazing revolution in ecumenical relations during his lifetime, and history will record that he and his family played no small part behind the scenes in bringing it about.
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They do not like equality and meritocracy, nor are they sold on democracy. They hate New Labour with passionate zeal. Tories are basically in love with the idea of Anglican England, at its highest point in the 1950s, in which altar and crown were fused and everyone knew their place. The jubilee has gladdened their hearts as few things since the Coronation of 1953, for they see the public turning back to Toryism, albeit unknowingly, as they flooded out in their hundreds of thousands to watch and applaud the royal celebrations.
Toryism places great faith in the continuity that comes through monarchy and aristocracy. That arch-Tory philosopher. Roger Scruton, in this recent book England, an Elegy, (Chatto and Windus 2000) expressed the role of the monarch as "the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere. Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot be understood as representing the interests only of the present generation... The monarch is in a real sense the voice of history, and the very accidental way in which the office is acquired emphasises the grounds of the monarch's legitimacy, in the history of a place and culture..."
As a politician. Tony Blair could almost have been designed to drive these ideological Tories to apoplexy. His dismantling of the hereditary element in the House of Lords was just as repellent to them as his articulation of the national mood at the time of the death of Princess Diana. She was, after all, a great threat to Tory institutions and ideals.
It is in this context that one begins to see what is behind the otherwise comprehensively silly row over whether or not Mr Blair tried to raise the level of his public participation in the Queen Mother's funeral this spring. It is a calculated attempt to drive Mr Blair out of the space in the national imagination that royalty occupies, not just to deprive him of any political advantage but because, to a true Tory, New Labour's linkage with royalty rubs together what they love most with what they loathe most.
What else could lie behind the Daily Telegraph's extraordinarily venomous question in an editorial last week? "What manner of man is it who tries to rush out in front of the head of state and her grieving family so that the nation can see how he, too, feels her pain?" the leader asked. It suggests the question, in reply, what manner of man is it who writes such a sentence? A true Tory who feels utter contempt for Tony Blair and all he stands for is surely the only possible answer. To such ultra-monarchist minds, his mere presence at a royal event is enough to sully the air; so the less he does, and the less he is seen to do, the better. The allegation in the right-wing press that he attempted to hijack the funeral is in fact an attempt by the right-wing press itself to hijack the jubilee and the monarchy.
Could it succeed? In its favour is the mood of national disillusionment with politics and a rise in what might be termed the right-wing agenda across Europe, from which Britain is not immune. The royal bounce-back in popular esteem is partly due to good royal marketing, but also to the way the monarchy is perceived as something we can all believe in, now that whatever New Labour was supposed to be about has lost its shine.
But there are two factors which are likely, in the medium term, to defeat the resurgence of Toryism. The first is the deliberate policy of the royal family to widen its appeal far beyond the Tory boundaries of what constitutes the English (or British) nation-state, by seeking to bring into the big royal tent every shade of opinion and every dimension of national culture from Roman Catholics to Hell's Angels, Hinduism to pop music. It is a liberal and multi-cultural social agenda, very New Labour and a very unTory mixture. There is an unspoken assumption in traditional Toryism that England is really for white people, white in religion and culture as well as in colour. The Queen, to her great credit, has publicly adopted the opposite agenda.
The second factor is the poor performance of the Conservative party itself, so much the natural home of Tories that they provided its alternative name. They may travel a little faster in the slipstream of a populist revival of Toryism as a monarchical and nationalist ideology. But as a ruling class about to seize back power the party is just not credible. We are seeing Toryism manifested as a cultural force but not yet as a political one. For that, it would be necessary first to drive New Labour off the high ground of British politics, and Mr Blair, like him or loathe him, is far too good a politician to let that happen. But my guess is that the new Toryism sees not the next general election but the probably soon forthcoming European single-currency referendum as the battle it is really interested in. Win that, they think, and Britain is safe for a Tory revival whenever it happens. Lose it, and most of what Tories believe about Britain will start to disappear into history.
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As an argument against republicanism, this has its draw-backs. Economists, practitioners of what Carlyle called "the dismal science", can't measure happiness. Therefore they can't set the rate of return to the public benefit against the cost of the Civil List and various royal tax breaks. Nor can politicians make such measurements. Feeling good after meeting the Queen has very little to do with "being proud to be British", and hence disinclined, say, to join the euro-zone. She is, after all, partly German. It is more to do with a subliminal process of mutual affirmation. The State generally acknowledges one's existence in the form of an income tax demand or a summons for speeding. It is always bad news: the State never troubles to tell us it is glad we exist. To it, we were merely an object of taxation or rebuke. But that is what meeting the Queen supplies. And we tell her in return - to do otherwise would be impolite - that we are glad she exists too. Our legal status as citizen and subject is personalised into a human relationship of mutual validation - and if anyone complains about the use of the word "subject", just remind them it is better to be that than an object.
For this magic to work, economists and politicians need to stay well clear. The Queen's role has been positively enhanced, for instance, by the withdrawal of the automatic right of the inherited peerage to sit in the House of Lords. It did away with the notion that the aristocracy (headed by the royal family) was somehow still "the governing class", and instead left them parked in a safe cultural museum of country houses and London clubs. They became irrelevant: now we can even start to grow fond of them. The power of snobbery (and the snobbery of power) was greatly lessened by this Blairite constitutional change, and the decline of snobbery can only help the Queen as she and her advisers remodel the institution of monarchy to suit the modern age. A death blow to the class system probably was not what Mr Blair had in mind, but he still deserves the credit for it.
The role of monarch cannot be discussed without also discussing the role of her prime minister. A shrewd monarchist like Tony Blair ought to be able to see that one of the strongest cards left to republicanism is its principled objection to the Royal Prerogative, an obscure but vital part of - and flaw in - the British constitution. It exists because the sovereign still in theory holds total sway in certain areas, but in theory can do nothing to use this authority without being advised how to do so by the prime minister. In effect, therefore, the prerogative belongs to the Prime Minister.
The power covered by the Royal Prerogative include not just technical conveniences like the making of treaties with foreign countries. Far more significant is the power to declare war (which would include, therefore, Britain's use of nuclear weapons). The Royal Prerogative also extends to making various public appointments, like Anglican bishops, ambassadors, senior judges, and even the board of governors of the BBC. In other words a vast part of the human infrastructure of British public life is not decided by the operation of statutory powers given by Parliament, and is not routinely under Parliament's scrutiny. The Royal Prerogative is neither transparent nor democratically accountable, except in the crudest sense that a Prime Minister could be turned out of office by a vote of no confidence in the Commons or defeat in a general election. If he had unwisely declared nuclear war, it would be too late.
The existence of the Royal Prerogative also serves as a veil behind which the political and legal establishment can conceal its inner workings from the inquiring gaze of journalist or man in the street. Why did this High Court judge, and not that one, make it to the Court of Appeal? Such powers of appointment are exercised in the name of the Crown by an unelected Lord Chancellor able to hide behind the mysteries of the Royal Prerogative. It is an offence against the separation of powers, which leading lawyers and judges are becoming increasingly in favour of.
It is obviously fanciful to imagine that the Queen is somehow herself making good the accountability deficit, for instance requiring her ministers to justify what they do in her name. She has neither the knowledge nor the research resources to do what is in fact a proper job for a well-armed Select Committee. So the "royal" part is a right royal fiction, and I hope this misuse of language irritates the hell out of her. Let us start, at least, by absolving her of a responsibility she cannot exercise, by renaming it the Prime Ministerial Prerogative. Then see how long it lasts. And let "royal" henceforth be to do with the cultivation of human happiness, not the secret use of state power.
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What every single-issue campaigner quickly learns is that it is hard cases that drive the campaign forward the fastest. Never mind that they "make bad law", as the old saw has it. The public, relying for its information and attitudes on the mass media, likes to see or imagine an actual victim or easily identifiable category of victims suffering from the supposed injustice or hardship. That is why Diane Pretty's plight was a god-send to the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, for she represented in the flesh all the abstract theoretical arguments in favour of people being allowed help in killing themselves. She was dying from motor-neurone disease, but was unable to take her own life without her husband's help, which, as the law stood, would have made him guilty of murder. Never mind that they could have gone across to Holland at any time, where his assisting in her death would have been legal. With the Society's backing, she took her high profile campaign to the House of Lords and then to the European Court of Human Rights. She may have wanted to die, but the Society wanted the law changed. It was a brilliant example of single-issue campaigning, which may yet succeed.
It is also typical in other ways. Time and again single-issue campaigners give little heed to the unintended wider consequences of what they are campaigning for. Back in the 1960s, homosexual law reform was aimed largely (so the public was told) at removing the possibility of gay judges being blackmailed. People may have had little sympathy for homosexuals, but did not want the criminal justice system undermined. By the end of that decade the case for divorce law reform was urged on the basis that unnamed thousands of people were "trapped in loveless marriages". Divorce was still widely stigmatised, but these were "victims of the law" who needed relief. Abortion law reform - again, abortion was highly disapproved of at the time - was urged as a remedy for back-street abortionists, shady characters profiting from the misery of overburdened and desperate women.
In each case the reform was advocated as a way of removing a specific evil to make society that little better, not as the start of an earthquake in social and moral behaviour. When the divorce and abortion figures shot up, it was said we were merely dealing with the back-log. By the time it was clear a far higher divorce or abortion rate was here to stay, the campaigners had moved on. They had fought and won; and they washed their hands of the consequences. Those who had warned beforehand of the likely evils being unleashed were made to look as if they wanted judges to be blackmailed, backstreet abortionists to flourish, wives and children to languish in loveless marriages, (and lately, people like Diane Pretty to die in agony) and so on.
In the case of euthanasia, just as over abortion, divorce or homosexual equality, campaigners always wave aside the "slippery slope" argument as freely as they disregard the law of unintended consequences (a branch of Murphy's Law, perhaps): every remedy for a social evil will in turn produce other evils. And they get away with it, because public opinion quickly comes to terms with both the intended and the unintended consequences. MPs certainly did not vote for a fourfold increase in divorce in 1969, but nor would they subsequently have supported a measure designed to reverse the trend once started. The same is true of abortion law reform.
Non-party single issue campaigns have a respectable history. Catholic emancipation was an early example, as was the Clapham Sect's campaign against the slave trade. The abolition of capital punishment in Britain owed a great deal to such single-minded campaigning outside Parliament, and deployed all the tricks of the trade in manipulating public opinion - seizing on dramatic "hard cases" and pushing them for all they were worth - that made Diane Pretty the centre of attention this year. But because these campaigns happened outside the normal ebb and flow of British politics, usually going through Parliament on free (ie non-whipped) votes, nobody can be held accountable for the overall result. None of the reforms mentioned above has been a live issue in any general election in Britain this last half century. These processes are, in a sense, mindless.
The Catholic Church, along with other religious bodies, ought to give this wild and anarchic side of the British democratic system at least as much attention as it gives to official mainstream politics. If it does not want its principles to be trampled over again and again, it has to think about how to organise its involvement more systematically and effectively.
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Dr Carey gave an address on St George's Day (April 23) which was devoted entirely to a discussion of establishment. And he never once touched on this aspect. Yet his defence of establishment in England automatically presupposes that there is something profoundly wrong with the 37 countries that contain those other provinces of the Anglican Communion, and indeed with all the other countries of the Western world that seem to manage perfectly well without such an arrangement. He declared, for instance: "Without honesty, trust, faithfulness to an obligation, respect for the rights and interests of others and love of neighbour, civilised society falls apart. I believe that process would become all the more pronounced in a society that abandoned its historic spiritual framework in favour of an avowedly secular one." In other words, ending the establishment of the Church of England would be the beginning of the end of English civilisation. This deserves G K Chesterton's famous response to similar arguments against Welsh disestablishment - which F E Smith (later Lord Birkenhead) said had "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe."
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the Cash that goes therewith!
But the souls of Christian peoples...
Chuck it, Smith!
Dr Carey did not seem to be aware that by any measure, from teenage pregnancy and births out of wedlock to weekly church-going and levels of religious belief in the population, England was already one of the most secular countries in the world. Establishment has obviously not retarded secularisation. If anything it has accelerated it.
But if he ignored this objection to establishment, he dealt fully and at length with another: that establishing one religious institution by law automatically disadvantages, or assigns a second class status to, all others. It is this argument that led to the ending of establishment over the last 200 years in most of the countries where it once existed. First he categorically denied that the special constitutional position of the Church of England did it any favours. If anything, it existed to do favours to others. "We are committed, he went on, "to what I would call a 'hospitable establishment'. Hospitality requires a host. So, it is part of our role, I believe, to seek to provide space and access, opportunity and the right atmosphere for the many dealings and interactions between faith communities and the wider society... As, I said, we seek to do this as a servant not as a master. There is nothing worse than a condescending host or one who seeks to hog the limelight incessantly."
This means it is the job of the Church of England - which alone is truly rooted and at home in England - to play host to all other faiths and religions, who come to stay here, so to speak, as welcome visitors. Sad to say, Dr Carey has no understanding of how utterly objectionable that doctrine is. It is profoundly chauvinistic. It tells any Catholic, Methodist, Jew, Muslim or atheist, born in England with full legal citizenship, that still they do not really belong to it. They are merely the guests of their hospitable host, the Church of England. Dr Carey may seek to avoid condescending language, but this is condescension in principle, big time. It is difficult not to take this personally. Is George Carey trying to tell me that because I am not a member of the Church of England, I am not quite at home, not quite English, not quite part of the "We"? Is that what establishment is really all about?
Who are the 'We', and who are the 'They'? It is the biggest political question of the age. The rise of the far right across Europe, dramatised by the participation of Le Pen in the French Presidential election, the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in Holland, and in a much smaller way, the recent electoral advance of the British National Party in Britain, all express one kind of answer. "France is for the French," says Le Pen, and we know what he means. His definition of what constitutes authentic Frenchness would include Catholicism and would therefore exclude Jews, Muslims and Protestants - including members of Dr Carey's flock, if there are any. It is misleading simply to call Le Pen and his ilk racists. The definition of the "We" they seek to foster is more complex than that, and includes various other elements of cultural identity including religion.
Obviously this kind of nationalist ideology can come in benign or malignant versions, and Dr Carey's is as much the former as Le Pen's is the latter. But both work by creating ranks and divisions within society, setting up a first class "We" against a second class "They". The point is not how nice "We" are to "Them". The point is that we should all be "We". Dr Carey's address has made it clearer to me than ever that unless the establishment of the Church of England is ended, that ideal will never be fully realised.
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The Pilgrim Fathers who settled in New England in the early 17th century identified themselves strongly with the people of the Old Testament. Like the ancient Israelites who followed Moses out of Egypt, they had escaped from what they thought of as a state tyranny. They had found their Promised Land: they were indeed the New Israel, the chosen ones, henceforth to be under a unique covenant with God.
Their method of reading the Bible was not so much literal as typological - actual characters and events in the Old Testament prefigured characters and events in this new dispensation. So the fact that the land they felt they had been led to was already populated was no barrier. With God's permission, the old Israelites had been free to clear out the Canaanites, the original occupants of the Promised Land, as necessary. And the new Israelites set about clearing out the new Canaanites - in this case the Native Americans.
This is not what it would have seemed like on the ground at the time. It would have seemed like a genuine attempt on the part of the settlers to get along with their somewhat primitive neighbours. Gradually they encroached, observing civilised legalities as much as possible. They made settlements in Indian land, promising time and again that each incursion would be the last; they farmed in burial grounds and they disturbed game in hunting areas. The settlers were hard-working families, men, women and children. The planted law, Christianity and commerce as they planted wheat. But few of the natives welcomed them. Most were surly, and a minority of hot-heads wanted to drive the white man away by force. Only with difficulty, and only sometimes, did tribal elders succeed in reining in the passions of their young men.
And so there arose a series of armed conflicts - often called Indian wars - in which the settlers were, naturally enough, defended by the armed forces of the state. While the insurrectionists were put down brutally, their own methods of fighting were ghastly by European standards (confirming, to Western onlookers, that they stood lower in the moral order than the newcomers). The wars were usually ended by peace treaties, in which the Indians conceded yet more land in return for promises that this would be their last concession. And though that may well have been what the rulers sincerely intended, the white people's appetite to inhabit more and more of their Promised Land was insatiable. They loved their beautiful land as they loved the God who gave it to them.
And so this painful process went on throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, until there was no more land left to take, and no more Indians left to take it from. It was a tragedy which some have even labelled genocide, but it is hard to blame individual settlers, who wanted merely to farm in peace, or soldiers, who wanted to protect them from barbaric attacks, or even politicians, who were not so much driving events as being driven along by them.
This, broadly, is what many Americans see happening again. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians invokes all their knowledge of themselves as descended from a new Chosen People in a new Promised Land, as they see the old Chosen People returning to the original Promised Land. The Jewish settlements, such a bone of contention, are (as before) inhabited by hard working families who want to live in peace and prosperity with their non-Jewish neighbours, who in turn feel the constant pressure of gradual encroachment. So Arab young men start to run wild, conjuring impossible schemes to drive the Americans - sorry, the Israelis - back into the sea. The Indian - sorry, Palestinian - methods of fighting are savage in the extreme. Is scalping alive an innocent family better or worse than blowing them up with suicide bombs?
Peace agreements are made, and then broken (indeed, they seem to break by themselves). The government promises to stop the settlements and draw a line; but it cannot, and in its heart of hearts, it lacks the will. So the encroachments go on, the wild men on the Arab side take ever wilder action, and in turn are suppressed by ever stronger Israeli force. Sooner or later - need we be surprised? - this force oversteps the mark and an atrocity occurs.
The only good India is a dead Indian, said General Philip Sheridan, Custer's commander. Perhaps no Israeli general has said as much of the Palestinians, but we should not be too shocked if some of them have thought it. Whether by burning an Indian village or by levelling a Palestinian camp, at some level of violence, figures the soldier, those resisting must surely realise they cannot win. Yet the resisters too are driven by a logic outside their control: pride, fear, anger, humiliation on the one hand, manliness, courage, self-sacrifice on the other.
The rest of the world need not share America's version of the Middle East conflict, at least not the moral justification it imparts to any and every Israeli action. The near annihilation of the Native American people was not inevitable. Nor is a similar fate certain for the Palestinians. But the rest of the world ought to be a little more cautious when it insists the Americans are the only ones who can sort out the Middle East. In so far as the Americans have a game plan, conscious or subconscious, it may not be one we much care for.
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Such events reveal the nation to itself in a way nothing else can. Two displays of superb and faultless military ceremonial, for instance, show a level of competence in such matters that few other nations could hope for. That surely points to a continued sense of order and discipline in the British character, rather contrary to the way they increasingly see themselves. The ability to form an orderly and patient queue is still a characteristic national trait. And while there was plenty of pride in those queuing, it was patriotism without a put-down, a demonstration that the exaltation of one's native country does not require the denigration of others.
The American sociologist Benedict Anderson coined the idea that a nation was an "imagined community" - a community that, unlike a country in the geographical sense, is first created in the imagination of its people. The theory that a nation comes into being by a collective mental act does not by any means reduce the force of the idea thus created. It is for that idea that people will fight or die. But mental acts come in different shapes. The act of "imagining the community" that produced the United States of America, for instance, was an act of will. The Founding Fathers imagined - and then enshrined in writing in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution - what they wanted America to be like (which was not what it actually was at the time of writing).
In the English case, the act of imagining the community into existence is far more an act of memory than an act of will. Americans are who they are because of what they want themselves to be. The English are who they are because of who they were. It is for such reasons that the English are able to be far more relaxed about being English than Americans usually are about being American. Acts of will involve striving in a way acts of memory do not. But there are dangers in this, not least of defining who is English by, for instance, who was English when the Queen Mother was born. It is high time that the definition of national identity contained an unequivocal avowal that the term "English" does not denote a race or skin-colour, but simply membership of a nation called England. The "imagined community" that is England includes the black newsreader Sir Trevor Macdonald, commentating so mellifluously on the Queen Mother's funeral, no less than it includes the pretty blond sitting in the studio by his side.
So if the English nation is to be defined by an act of memory, the sort of act repeated this week, the process needs to include a careful scrutiny of that memory. Otherwise the nation is just reliving the past, and the second time round could be a lot less comfortable than the first. But one senses that the nation already realises that. Nothing was more symbolic in a week of symbols than the sight of the gorgeous imperial crown first worn by the consort of King George VI in 1936, atop her coffin as it moved through the streets of London in 2002. What was being said good-bye to was more than a person. It was a memory of imperial glory, when Britain was the head of the largest empire ever seen, the world's first super-power, and she was the last empress. That was the almost universal note struck in all the television "vox pops" throughout the week. She belonged to an age that had passed. The message from the public was both a "thank you" and a "farewell".
Being American, Anderson did not understand the role of royalty in the process of imagining a national community into existence. Compared with the Americans and their veneration of documents, we prefer to venerate people. They supply humanity and continuity, which in turn supplies a criterion of consistency, which then enables us to say "that is not how we do things here". This process of allowing the past to contribute to the present is peculiarly British. It is one reason, I believe, why Margaret Thatcher was eventually expelled from office. She wanted to do things the way the British do not do them, a way that was unBritish. Tony Blair has an instinctive understanding of this, which is why he has been able to redefine British politics as once more a battle for the centre-ground. He is an instinctive monarchist.
The other lesson the British might have learned about themselves this week was that while the popularity of the royals goes up and down in the opinion polls, the long-term picture underneath is much steadier than it seemed. The royal family needs to go on adapting, and may even sometimes make itself look ridiculous, but the British are not about to send it packing. In a mysterious way, its job is to hold the whole national show together. It is still doing that job - and, the public seems to think, doing it rather well.
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My drive was through some of the most Tory parts of one of the most Tory boroughs in outer London. The houses were large and magnificent, the gardens - grounds would be a better word - invariably beautiful. A million pounds ready cash would hardly get you through the local estate agent's door. This is where some of the wealthiest people of Britain live. I would be astonished if they were anything but 95 per cent Tory. They know which party is on their side. This, to the rest of us, is what Mr Duncan Smith's party really looks like.
It is a truism that Labour governments do more for the poor, Tory governments do more for the rich. The present Labour government is unusual in that, while it is doing very well in combating both child poverty and the poverty of old age, it likes to pretend it isn't. It wants to be seen as business-friendly and on the side of the middle classes. At the same time, however, a culture of cynical greed seems to have taken over the boardrooms of the City of London, with fat-cat pay packets (or "remuneration packages") outstripping the rate of inflation, company performance, the stock exchange and the pay of lesser employees, far beyond the bounds of human decency.
This Labour government has done nothing to curb these excesses nor even to tax them. Tony Blair continues to act as if British managers were the best in the world, whereas most of them range from the average to the indifferent. Mr Duncan Smith's problem is that he is unlikely to do more than Labour about this scandal - he could hardly do less - yet he is unlikely to emulate Labour's solid if unsung achievements in the war against real poverty. So the leafy suburbs of South London have little to fear from him. He may even cut their taxes a little, putting thousands of extra pounds into their bank accounts. But what can Glasgow council estates expect from a Tory Government?
The nub of his problem is that the Conservative party cut itself adrift from all notions of social justice some time early in the Margaret Thatcher years. The distance has gradually widened to the point where the return journey is almost inconceivable. Plenty of right-wing economists, including those she most liked listening to, disputed whether social justice even existed. They enshrined at the heart of Tory thinking Adam Smith's famous principle that we should all pursue our own interests, and fate or God or providence could be relied on to see to it that everyone benefited. There was indeed "no such thing as society." There was only profit and loss.
The average age of the Conservative party membership is around 65. They are old enough to remember Harold Macmillan, who continued the social revolution started by Clement Attlee to the point where the people "had never had it so good." They remember when greed was bad, and Toryism meant Disraeli's One Nation - incarnate, more or less, in the British Army that fought World War II. Harold Macmillan's care for the vulnerable was never in doubt - he was the minister who delivered 300,000 new houses a year. Slum clearance was a high Tory priority, higher even than Labour's. His generation remembered the 1930s, and vowed never to let it happen again.
That Tory party eventually disappeared. Mrs Thatcher invented another one, more or less on the hoof (privatisation, her most characteristic policy, was not even mentioned in the 1979 Tory Party manifesto). Mr Duncan Smith now has to reinvent it again. He can either seek to recapture the patrician idealism of Macmillan's Tory party, in effect trying to recreate the comfortable consensus of mid-1950s Anglican England when most of his members were young, or he can come up with something new. William Hague tried the first, and it did not work.
Above all Mr Duncan Smith needs a critique of capitalism. If we are to trust the Tories ever again with power, we have to be convinced they have turned their back on laissez faire economics for good, and are no longer just the party of the haves. Here he possesses one enormous advantage. He is a practising Catholic, and can draw on the church's teaching. In constructing New Toryism, he has an excellent moral guide to modern economics in the encyclical Centesimus Annus, which, thanks to the lobbying of Pope John Paul II by certain Catholic neo-conservatives from America, is surprisingly sympathetic to the modern business economy - wealth creation - and its problems. If he wants to know about his duty to the vulnerable, of Glasgow or wherever, then there it is, spelt out eloquently in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis; if he wants a profound insight into the moral complexity of the labour market, he can turn to the Pope's unsung masterpiece, Laborem Exercens.
Why bother with a think-tank, when you could have the pope himself at your elbow? Indeed, why not trump Tony Blair in what ought to have been his strongest suit?
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Catholicism is a religion with a lot to say about politics. This may partly explain where Mr Duncan Smith was coming from, in his weekend speech repositioning the Conservative party as the friend of the poor and vulnerable. The 1996 statement of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, which attacked the over-reliance on market forces, was undoubtedly a nail in the coffin of the Major government. That is obviously not a situation Mr Duncan Smith wants to see repeated.
Catholic Social Teaching speaks of a "preferential option for the poor". It does not like centralised socialism, any more than it likes laissez faire capitalism. That's why some have seen it as a fore-runner of the Blair-Clinton Third Way. It suggests to workers and employers that they should not see each other as class enemies, but as partners, with a shared interest in productivity and profitability, and shared responsibility to the customer. It says to businessmen that what matters most is not the company's bottom line, and certainly not the size of the directors' "remuneration package", but the common good.
This idea stands on its head Adam Smith's famous remark. He said if each individual pursues his own private interest, an "invisible guiding hand" will automatically guarantee that the interests of all will prosper. This idea came to bear the label of Thatcherism, the notion that "there is no such thing as society" which was the creed of the free market right-wing. The concept of the common good says, on the contrary, that if we serve the interests of society then we also automatically serve our own interests. But this does not necessarily work in reverse.
The common good does not belong to the government or public sector. It can equally be advanced by the private sector, or by voluntary effort. It is a moral, rather than an economic, imperative. For instance, if someone driving along sees an obstacle on the road, and stops and removes it before someone else runs into it, that is a service to the common good - though nowhere does it show up in the gross domestic product!
Now that two and a half Catholics are in charge of our national politics, the principle of the common good - a concept which they tell me is equally understood by Christians of other churches as well as Jews, Muslims and other world religions - may be an idea whose time has come.
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He was a creature of his age and its prejudices, but he was also one of the great Christian missionaries of all time. What drove him was a deep hatred of slavery, which he called the "open sore of Africa". The trade was largely in the hands of Arabs, usually with the connivance of African rulers, despite Britain's abolition of the slave trade across the Atlantic, and of slave ownership throughout the British Empire.
Livingstone was surprisingly modern in seeing that the local African economy had become dependent on slavery, whose hold could only be broken by reforms. He called his remedy the three Cs - Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation. Considering what has happened in Zimbabwe recently, it is a natural question to ask: how do Europeans come to be there at all? And part of the answer must be: because of David Livingstone and his example, which fired the imagination of generations of Englishmen with a desire to go and do good in what they called the Dark Continent. And perhaps make a penny or two while they were there.
Livingstone was pro-African, and they loved him in return. He learned their languages and followed their customs, except - like slavery - when they collided with the values of his faith. So his missionary style was in many ways more modern than those who came after him. Because of his respect for African dignity, some have even seen him as a precursor of African nationalism. Sadly, other white Christians thought they had a divine right to rule in Africa, and to seize whatever land they wanted.
The impact of Christianity on other cultures has often been like that. Once the triumphalism stops, we surely have to admit that, in the short term at least, it was a mixed blessing. But one image this week does justify our honouring Dr Livingstone's name. Those long lines of voters waiting patiently in the sun to cast their ballots were demanding for themselves one of the enduring political gifts that Western civilisation has given the rest of the world - the right to choose one's rulers by election. It is the absolute opposite of slavery. Though this time they were thwarted, they seem to value democracy rather more than we do in the West. Dr Livingstone, I presume, would have been proud of them.
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He was followed by that ultimately anti-prophetic figure Geoffrey Fisher. There is no doubt, with historical hindsight, that he ought to have been followed by the one true Anglican prophet of our age, George Bell of Chichester. So as the process starts to find a successor to George Carey, let's hear it for prophecy. We need some. Let them look for someone whom history could put the word "great" in front of "Archbishop of Canterbury" for the first time since whenever.
I see no evidence of anything especially great or prophetic about two of the main contenders, Michael Nazir Ali of Rochester or Richard Chartres of London. Indeed, to appoint the former because he is a non-white Pakistani might appeal to 10 Downing Street or the Crown Appointments Commission as making them look prophetic, but it won't make him that. Content and delivery are what counts, prophetwise, not the spin surrounding the appointment. I am not sure Chartres even aspires to prophecy. He is altogether too Gothic: there is a touch of the Couve de Murville about him. Nor do I see anyone else on the Anglican bench who will score more than, say, Robert Runcie modestly did in the prophecy stakes. He would have been the first to admit he was not another George Bell.
That leaves Rowan Williams, Archbishop of the (disestablished) Church In Wales, who has been hailed as a prophet in some quarters because he favours disestablishment and the ordination of practising homosexuals. If those are anywhere near the top of his agenda then prophetic he is not. As for the first, a Welsh Anglican can hardly repudiate the polity of his own national church. Nor is he particularly out of step with opinion in England. Runcie once asked me if I thought the establishment could last another 20 years, and when I said I doubted it he wholeheartedly agreed. (We were both wrong). Michael Ramsey, who himself had prophetic tendencies, once told me that he had "changed his mind totally" about establishment in the light of what had happened - I never found out exactly what - in the church-state machinations to find his successor in 1974. Bishop Mark Santer of Birmingham has now once more articulated his own belief that church and state need to be unscrambled. Certainly a new church-state settlement is overdue, for the good of both of them, and the Scottish model has something to commend it. For what it is worth, Williams is the man to carry that forward. It is a second order question nevertheless.
As for homosexuals, he would be wise to confine his role to renewing the debate, which has gone rather stale, about whether the Church of England's present position is logical or sustainable. That position is that lay practising homosexuals can be regarded as in good standing, may hold church office or senior employment, receive Communion, live openly with partners, be absolved in confession (if that is their churchmanship) etc - everything in fact except be ordained to the clergy. This double standard between clergy and laity is not only anomalous but doctrinally questionable. It is not only the ordained among us who are told to "seek first the kingdom of God". If it is true that what is good for the clergy is good for the laity, it is equally true that what is good for the laity should be good for the clergy. But not good enough. Anglicanism needs to rid itself of the ideology of good enough. Don't we all?
Sexuality is a side show. The voice of real prophecy is to be found in the demand that the Anglican laity should have set before it the goal of real sanctity, not the second-class citizenship of the church that they have been allowed to settle for. Such a prophetic call would immediately leap church boundaries. Just as Cardinal Hume inspired Anglicans and others to raise their sights, so Catholics and others are capable of responding to the ministry of an Archbishop of Canterbury in similar terms. That is what the spiritual leadership of the country means, not purple posturing in the House of Lords (Catholic bishops please note).
A serious call to a devout and holy life also means a willingness to be a serious nuisance to politicians, as George Bell was to Winston Churchill. He had criticised the area bombing of German cities, and he explored peace overtures from German anti-Nazis (contrary to Churchill's policy of unconditional surrender). He may have been right or wrong about both of these, but his convictions leapt from the pages of the Gospel while Fisher's leapt from the pages of canon law. I would not say Archbishop Williams has already proved himself the prophet the times call for and the nation needs, but he is the only one to have given evidence that he could be.
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The 13th century Italian Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas was the first to organise the so-called just war theory into a tidy scheme, though there were Jewish and Islamic traditions to build on. To go to war legitimately you had to have a just cause, war had to be declared by a proper authority, you had to have the right intentions and a reasonable chance of success, and the end had to be proportional to the means. And once you were in a just war, you still had to behave justly.
And it was the 17th century Dutch Protestant philosopher Hugo Grotius who turned this into a system of international law, the ancestor of the system we have today. Grotius in particular stuck out for the principle that "reasons of state" are never a sufficient justification for going to war.
Politicians, lawyers and generals of various persuasions have sometimes looked at the rules of just war and declared them unworkable, or irrelevant to modern conditions, or simplistic and idealistic, or too easily manipulated. What they are really saying is that if our cause is good - and we will be the judges of that - then all that matters is that we should win.
Even less honourable is the argument that we can behave badly because our enemies have already behaved badly. And on the left, there is a tradition that says war is so horrible, any notion of regulating it by rules is absurd.
Yet public opinion insists, as Aquinas and Grotius insisted long ago, that, for instance, there really is a great moral difference between killing enemy soldiers and killing innocent civilians, one of the just war principles. This is surely at the root of the world's disgust at events in New York six months ago today. It is the same moral instinct - or natural law, if you like - that made the killing of civilians in Bosnia, Kosovo or Serbia so abhorrent, whoever was responsible, and this is also what upsets us most about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Military forces, whether regular or irregular, must not kill civilians. If they do, they must be made to answer for it, and convince us that they took all reasonable steps to avoid causing civilian casualties by accident. Whatever happens next in this turbulent world we desperately need the just war theory to stop us sliding back into the stone age. We need to know and apply it, to keep it up to date, and above all to defend it when they try to snatch it away from us.