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2013
Annual letter from the WPCT Chairman to friends and subscribers
Dear Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust supporter
First I have to introduce myself. I
am a long-time Council member and Trustee of the WPCT, coming originally
from its Charlemagne component. When,
because of pressure of work, Canon Guy Wilkinson felt he had to resign as
Chairman earlier this year, I was elected in his place – with Keith
Best, a new Council member, as Vice-Chairman.
The change at the top was accompanied by a number of resignations from
other Council members who had given the Trust many hours of their time
over quite a number of years. The
resignations include those of Richard Balfe, Tony Colman, Zaki Cooper,
Patricia Feltham, Robin O’Neill, Charles Reed and Imam Sajid – as well
as that of Sir Michael Franklin who in fact first recruited me.
I want to thank all of them, as well as Guy (who I am happy to say,
remains on the Council), very much indeed for their support and friendship
over the years. I have also
sadly to record the death of our previous Vice-Chairman, Lord Peter
Archer.
We will be looking to strengthen the Council in the course of the coming
year. In the meantime,
however, I would like to welcome onto the Council the following new
members: Judge Laurence Brass
of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; Jonathan Scheele, who until
recently ran the European Commission office here in London after long
years of service in the European Commission in Brussels and elsewhere;
Graham Avery who has also recently retired from a long career in
the Commission in Brussels and is currently, as is Jonathan, attached to
the European Studies department at St Antony’s College in Oxford; and of
course Keith Best, our new Vice-Chairman, who is CEO of Freedom from
Torture and is also heavily involved in the Electoral Reform Society.
Because of all these changes we have thought it wise to mount a smaller
programme than usual in 2013, and to give some consideration to the future
shape and role of the Trust. On
this score, we shall in the course of the year be consulting our
subscribing members, possibly holding an event of some kind for them.
We will therefore be concentrating on the Charlemagne and
Corbishley Lectures, the former – we hope – in the first half of the
year, the second towards its end. The
current debate on the UK’s position in Europe will give us much to
discuss, but we wish to take a specifically WPCT approach, giving thought
to European values and to the ethical issues involved in the UK’s
membership of the European Union. Paid-up
subscribers will naturally continue to receive our secretary Win
Burton’s “Euro-gazing” weekly email, with its round-up of European
news largely from a faith(s) perspective.
One event which is already fixed is the Europe Day evensong at
Westminster Abbey, which will be held this year on 14th May.
To these you are all very welcome.
Please keep an eye on our website (www.wpct.org)
for the latest news.
In 2012 there was a well-attended Europe Day evensong, and our Charlemagne
and Corbishley lecturers for 2012 (Sir Stephen Wall and Frank Field MP
respectively) both spoke to packed audiences – reports of these lectures
and the subsequent discussion among members and supporters can also be
found on the website. There
was a joint meeting with Faith in Europe on the view from
Poland
, and a joint conference organized with the International Affairs
Department of the LSE on the European External
Action Service: the full report on the latter will be out very soon.
Quarterly “conversations” were also held at St Ethelburga’s
on a variety of interesting subjects of topical concern.
Giving this account of our stewardship of the Trust for 2012, I am
conscious that our programme for the coming year looks modest in
comparison, but I do hope that you will continue to support WPCT: only
thanks to the relatively modest annual subscription can the secretariat
and activities be maintained, and this is hugely appreciated – the
relevant forms are attached.
I look forward to meeting you at one or other (or indeed all) of the
events we have so far planned, and very much encourage you to become
involved in the survey we are about to embark on
of what should be the focus and style of the Trust in the future in
this very unique niche in Britain’s civil society.
With every good wish
Michael J. Walsh
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Much else is also being written to feed
the debate on the EU and Britain's place in it - but you may find some
interesting thoughts in this paper from WPCT Patron Freiherr Helmut von
Verschuer click
here
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As
an alternative - antedote? - to reading the Prime Minister's recent
speech on Europe, we commend to you the following lecture which Sir
Michael Franklin (founding Council member of the WPCT) delivered to
Faith in Europe on 17 January 2013. Your comments are welcome to
contribute to the debate - and please feel you can circulate it
widely.
Where
do we think the EU might be going; and will Britain go there too?
Forty
Years on: Britain in the EU
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Dear
Readers and Friends,
I
attach the text of an article appearing in the current issue of The
Round Table,
the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. In mitigation of
its length, it is preceded by an Abstract and a list of “Key
Words”. The latter can profitably be learned by heart, as a
preliminary to the detailed study of the text as a whole .
My
purpose was to offer a background analysis to the growing debate
on how we should manage our
involvement in the EU. In particular I recall the far-sighted and
outward-looking Declarations of Nice and Laeken, adopted by the
European Council at the turn of the century and on the threshold of
major enlargement. They received very little attention at the time
of their adoption, and have been virtually ignored ever since. Yet
had they been followed up, instead of being brushed aside by the
single-minded pursuit of a constitution under the banner of
President Giscard, the EU would not now be in this sorry state.
However,
the dramatic developments of the last three weeks have cast a new,
and highly positive, light on the situation. The prospects are
correspondingly brighter for a distinctive and substantial UK input
into the joint effort so obviously required to secure a beneficial
outcome from our present toils. Specifically:
(1)
while reaction and comment on the Prime Minister’s speech of
January 23 understandably concentrated at the outset on the
referendum undertaking, and what might go wrong, there is a growing
understanding of the EU-wide validity of the analysis David Cameron
made of the EU’s current woes. There has been a notable absence of
any challenge to it. Overall, reaction on the Continent to the
speech seemed almost more favourable than in this country;
(2)
the mould-breaking outcome of the European Council meeting in
Brussels on February 7/8 on the Multiannual Financial Framework, is
another nail in the coffin of what I describe in the article as the
Anglo-Brussels
Orthodoxy. The Prime
Minister was received with something near adulation as he made his
statement on the meeting in the House of Commons; .
(3)
the full significance of the situation can be grasped more easily by
comparing what we see today with the panic-stricken reaction to the
Prime Minster’s “veto” of the fiscal compact at the December,
2011, meeting of the European Council. Hands then were freely wrung,
and denunciations were plentiful of our self-inflicted
“isolation” and “marginalisation” The panic died down in the
months that followed. There was a very different son
de cloche
by the time the Prime Minister reported to the House on the
December, 2012, meeting. It was a harbinger of a more balanced
appreciation of our EU involvement.
(4) in
combination with the Prime Minister’s speech, the Foreign
Secretary’s Balance of Competences exercise, conducted with both
the breadth of perspective and emphasis on detail set out so
imaginatively in the the Foreign Secretary’s White Paper of July,
2012 (Cm 8415), will go far to recreate the opportunity for a
general re-think of the EU, as called for in the Declarations of
Nice and Laeken. And Britain will be at the centre of the process;
(5)
the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, after their final
evidence session with William Hague on February 6, will probably
publish their report in the spring. The Committee are exceptionally
well placed to appreciate how much our situation in the EU has
changed for the better since they launched their inquiry last March.
(6) as
a schoolboy I remember vividly seeing newsreel pictures of a speech
by Winston Churchill at the Mansion House on November 10, 1942,
after the Battle of El Alamein. “This is not the end”, he said.
“It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the
end of the beginning.” A fitting comment on where we are today.
The
decisiveness, and the incisiveness, of these developments in our
position in the EU prompt the question how it was that we laboured
long under a dreary, defeatist orthodoxy, which went so much against
our national grain on the one hand, and which was so
anti-democratic, and so inadequate analytically on the other. In the
article I suggest an answer from Julius
Caesar: “the fault,
dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are
underlings”.
Comment
would be welcome.
Yours
Peter
Marshall,
February 15, 2013
click
here to read
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NOTE
that comments and discussion like this - and much more - are
published in the WEEKLY newsletter sent out by email from the WPCT
secretariat to all paid up subscribing members! (see
subscriptions page for a form if your subscription is not up to date
for the current year)
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