Britain Etc.

tend to be ‘more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups’.

There are obvious links between the belief in a just world hypothesis and the German sociologist Max Weber’s concept of the Protestant work ethic (PWE). This defines the view of those who believe that hard work pays off and, unsurprisingly perhaps, such people tend to be highly judgemental of the poor. Recent research into British attitudes involved an experiment in which 109 working adults were divided up into those with high and low PWE. Volunteers were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements that included: ‘Most people who don’t succeed in life are just plain lazy’, ‘Life would have very little meaning if we never had to suffer’, and ‘I feel uneasy when there is little work for me to do’.

The psychologist behind the experiment, Professor Adrian Furnham at University College London, concluded that ‘a high PWE scorer is likely to explain poverty in terms of idleness and poor money management; wealth in terms of hard work, honesty and saving; unemployment in terms of laziness and lack of effort; and he or she is likely to be opposed to both taxation and social security.’ Max Weber’s influential ideas suggest the Reformation did not simply trigger an economic and political shift in attitudes to poverty and wealth — it also inspired a psychological change.

Catholic tradition stressed that individual thought, deviation from the status quo, might amount to heresy with all its unpleasant and painful consequences. Salvation was assured by the dutiful acceptance of church teaching and authority. Protestantism was based on the idea that each faithful Christian was responsible directly and immediately to God. It was a philosophy founded on individualism; no longer did the church determine piety — the decision lay with the common man or woman. They were free to judge the poor.

The difference in approach can still be seen today in people’s attitudes to begging. In Catholic countries, beggars are more likely to be tolerated, if not pitied and supported. In Protestant countries, begging is often an offence. In England and Wales, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 still applies: sleeping on the streets and begging is a criminal offence. By contrast, until recently there was no law against beggars in Italy. Venice became the first Italian city to make begging illegal in 2008, a response to the attitudes of tourists rather than Venetians. Ireland only introduced laws against aggressive begging in 2011 after its High Court had ruled that old British vagrancy laws were unconstitutional, conflicting with enshrined Irish rights on freedom of expression and communication.

British attitudes to poverty, shaped by our religious, political and economic history, appear paradoxical. Around 70 per cent of people think the gap between rich and poor in Britain is too wide, but there is no corresponding support for redistributive measures by government to reduce it. The British have led the way in ambitious campaigns to ‘Make Poverty History’ and to ‘Feed the World’, but government research recently found the public to be a long way from supporting an anti-poverty agenda in the UK.

When it comes to domestic poverty, the country is almost exactly split down the middle between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘sceptical’. Five hundred years of argument and uncertainty as to the duties of the state and the individual in supporting the needy still rage across Britain to this day.

Q is for Queen

My grubby taxi bounced through the streets of Old Tallinn, squeaking and complaining as its driver attempted to avoid puddles that might have hidden an axle-breaking pothole. The shower had cleared the air and a triumphant sun beamed onto the shiny cobbles, onyx-black stones twinkling as though encrusted with diamonds. It all made sense. I was on my way to meet a queen.

It was 1992 and I was indeed destined to shake hands with royalty — an assignment for BBC Newsnight had taken me to the Estonian capital, where we had arranged to interview Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. It seemed odd to have ended up on what was technically foreign soil for both of us, but while Tallinn would subsequently be invaded by countless British stag parties, my interviewee could claim that her ancestor had got the beers in first: King Valdemar II of Denmark had captured the place at the Battle of Lyndanisse in 1219. Indeed, it transpired the city’s very name meant Danish castle.

The cab door announced my arrival with a pained creak. Although I liked to imagine myself as a hard-bitten hack, blase about rank, unimpressed by pomp and immune to institutional sycophancy, I couldn’t prevent my heart missing a beat as I stepped from the taxi. It is not every day that one is introduced to a real live queen.

Back home in the UK, the British Royal Family appeared to be in turmoil: the tabloids were gorging on courtly scandal as princes and princesses queued up to heap humiliation and disgrace upon the House of Windsor. ‘Squidgygate’, ‘Camillagate’, ‘Fergiegate’ — the Palace walls had been multiply breached and squalid, intimate details of collapsing marriages and suspect morals were tumbling out into the public domain. Rumblings of republicanism were encouraging some to believe the kingdom itself was threatened, that we were witnessing something akin to the final chapter in the Wizard of Oz: the terriers of the British press pack had managed to enter the inner sanctum, rip the curtain aside and reveal the monarchy to be mundane.

The Danish queen breezed towards me with a matter-of-factness to her stride. She proffered a gloved hand, which I shook, grateful that I had not needed to commit myself to complying with deferential protocol. ‘Good morning,’ she said, in business-like tones.

The queen was charming and intelligent: her answers to my questions diplomatic and assured. Given the travails of her blood cousins in Britain and her own apparently unassailable popularity in Denmark, I asked what words of advice she had for her relatives. Her gracious reply revealed nothing unexpected, but the scoop was that she had agreed to be interrogated at all.

Something about the experience had left me troubled, though, and I couldn’t quite work out what. The interview had been fine, we had more than enough interesting material for our needs, but I was discomforted nevertheless. It was only as I sat back in London reviewing the tapes and writing my script that it dawned on me what was wrong.

In January 1776, a pamphlet simply signed ‘Written by an Englishman’ began to be passed around among the population of the colonies of the New World. Entitled Common Sense, the article’s radical ideas enjoyed an enthusiastic welcome: the paper sold more than 500,000 copies and was read aloud in taverns. The author, it emerged, was Thomas Paine, a former English taxman, tobacconist and radical who became, of course, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

As well as being a manifesto for independence from Britain, the pamphlet also offered a devastating critique of the English monarchy. ‘There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy,’ Paine declared, arguing that nature frequently ridicules royal succession by ‘giving mankind an ass for a lion’. He contrasted the common sense of his pamphlet’s title with the absurdity and superstition that inspired the English prejudice for monarchy, arising ‘as much or more from national pride than reason’.

Logic and proof were guiding principles of republican philosophy, a political theory that prided itself on its rationality. Paine was a child of the Enlightenment, inspired by the scientists and thinkers of what he would later describe as the Age of Reason. Monarchy just didn’t stack up: not only was it contrary to the laws of natural justice, he argued, it consistently failed to work that well. ‘Did it ensure a race of good and wise men it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens a door to the foolish, the wicked and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression.’ To this day, British republicans refer to Paine’s Common Sense almost as their sacred text. Its direct, accessible and witty prose was as powerful in its day as a thousand editions of the Sun packed with exclusive Squidgy-gate revelations.

But monarchists have their own sacred text. Written almost exactly a century afterwards, Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution was a belated but stirring response to the revolutionary arguments of a Founding Father. ‘In the American mind and in the colonial mind there is, as contrasted with the old English mind, a literalness, a tendency to say, “The facts are so-and-so, whatever may be thought or fancied about them.”’ Bagehot had decided not to fight reason with reason — but with magic. ‘We catch the Americans smiling at our Queen with her secret mystery,’ he wrote. There is a sneer in Bagehot’s prose. He presents Americans as shallow, worshipers of the visible and the obvious. They can’t help it, poor things. The colonists’ struggle with the wilderness marked their minds so that when they come to choose a government, ‘they must choose one in which all the institutions are of an obvious evident utility.’

Bagehot employs the trickery of the illusionist. He accepts, even builds upon, many of Paine’s criticisms: ‘An