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Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
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You are in the company
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Roger Warren Evans |
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item0042C 724, 725 2 June 2003Blair's Poodle Bites… Blair’s spirits must have slumped when he read Lord Goldsmith’s 26 March Opinion on the illegality of the Coalition’s post-war occupation of Iraq. The text of that Opinion is published in full by the New Statesman this week. The reasoning is specious and facile, and illuminates the even greater fragility of Goldsmith’s professional “legitimation” of the War itself, three weeks’ earlier. His reliance upon the “authority” of a time-expired UN Resolution of 1990 was roundly rejected by all other lawyers who considered it (see Rabinder Singh QC’s reasoning). Indeed, I have not discovered one single lawyer who thinks his reasoning was sound. Not one. Goldsmith, owing everything to Downing Street patronage, had dutifully blessed the War, and paid the price of his preferment. But in this second Opinion he took his revenge, and clearly sought to retrieve his professional reputation, which was otherwise in tatters. He refuses to bless the peace. Indeed, given the post-war straitjacket he imposes on the Coalition, it is remarkable that he gave no prior warning of these constraints, at the time of his War Blessing. His effectively tells Blair that the Coalition will not be able to proceed lawfully to rebuild Iraq at all without a further Security Council resolution. True, the obliqueness of the language obscures the position – but Blair would have understood perfectly. Sadly for Goldsmith, his attempted redemption (as with Clare Short) came too late to retrieve his reputation. Timing is everything, in politics. He is now a lame duck Attorney, and will not recover his personal authority.
It would be good to have comments from other lawyers, on these two Opinions... Drop me a line
2 June 2003
Mediaeval history
Yet the details have embroiled us all in a truly mediaeval stand-off between Church and State, at local level. What should be the proper ordering of the symbolic relationship, between Church and State, where the Anglican Church has been disestablished, as it has in Wales (1913 Act, implemented in 1920)? It started with a Resolution of Mumbles Community Council, last Autumn, inviting the future Archbishop to accept the Freedom of the Community of Mumbles. As it was my idea, I was appointed to the "Honours Committee", to make the necessary arrangements. We wrote to Lambeth Palace suggesting a middle-of-the-day Civic Ceremony and Reception. And we suggested that the Church might wish to "top and tail" by Anglican services, at two of the principal churches in the town, All Saints and St Peters.
Then things started to go wrong. At a meeting of the Honours Committee which I could not attend, the senior Vicar attended and suggested that the Freedom of the Community should be awarded to the Archbishop during the initial Church Service. The Committee, clearly overawed by the Vicar, decided to recommend that process to the full Council. At a stroke, the distinctive role of the Council was reduced to paying for the lunch. Many Councillors were appalled at this error of judgment, and a Special Council meeting has been convened, for this coming Thursday 5 June 2003, to decide the matter.
I will argue for the Civic Ceremony to be held in the great grounds of Oystermouth Castle, and I will put these arguments -
Where do you stand, theologically? Drop me a line
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New
I
have reported that the Archbishop of Canterbury has accepted
the Freedom of the Community of Mumbles, and will be coming to my home-town
on Saturday 21 June.
The time has come to assert the primacy of the State, le pouvoir neutre,
the civic arm of a plural, open, multicultural state - the modern Wales,
which had the courage to remove its Established Church in 1913, long before
the benighted English...