The Great Plural of Referendum Debate continues. A couple of weeks ago, as a service to the party, House Points made a conclusive case for preferring referendums. But here is Paul Tyler speaking in the debate on adjournment of the House last Thursday:
"The hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale talked about referenda. I hate the word referendums; it does not sound right."
This ingratitude spoilt the whole debate for us. But before we go off for the summer to farm gerundives in the Leicestershire countryside, we shall do our best to report it fairly.
Mark Tami (Alyn & Deeside, Lab.) talked about greyhound racing. When he said he had been put on to the subject by the League Against Cruel Sports you feared he was worried about cruelty to the hare. “Mr Speaker, electric animals have rights too.”
He turned out to believe that the industry does not do enough for the dogs’ welfare. A serious concern, but he was soon calling for registration and micro-chipping all round. A very New Labour assumption, that: the people who breed and race greyhounds don't really care for them, but civil servants will.
Bob Spink (Castle Point, Con.) was worried about bad odours in South Essex. If you had to go to school every day with a name like Spink the subject would be close to your heart too. But he had a serious case, talking about pollution from a major landfill site at Pitsea and British Petroleum's Coryton refinery.
It sounds the sort of place you wouldn't make a gerundive live. But it forms part of John Prescott's Thames Gateway, where he hopes to solve the problem of the overheating economy in the South East by spending lots of government money there. (John Maynard Keynes writes: Can you run that by me one more time?)
And then there was Alistair Burt (North-East Bedfordshire, Con.). He told the House that 2002 had been the International Year of the Mountain. Better late than never, and after all, the mountains are still there.
Yes, somewhere high above the tree line where the melting snow feeds the crystal streams the gerundives are leaping from rock to rock. I find that a comforting thought.
If you were writing a constitution from scratch, you would never come up with the Lord Chancellor. A cabinet minister who appoints all the judges and sits as a judge himself? Unsupportable. Whatever happened to the separation of powers?
But then you would never invent the House of Lords either. And it has just struck a blow for liberty by refusing to pass Government plans to curb trial by jury. So logic isn’t everything.
And in a thoughtful Independent column this week, Donald Macintyre argued that the last two Lord Chancellors have acted as a brake on illiberal politicians. Lord Mackay of Clashfern was one of the few good things about John Major’s premiership. And, for all his difficulties with wallpaper, Lord Irvine was a radical voice in a conformist cabinet and one of the few people Tony Blair listened to.
Now we have Charlie Falconer, Blair’s former flatmate. No one listens to him. Doubtless he always washed up the scrambled egg saucepan and never finished Tony’s milk, but making him Lord Chancellor is too great a reward. We do need reform.
Who were the titans who debated this reform on Monday? For Labour, Christopher Leslie. He may appear in Hansard as “The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs,” but at Westminster he will always be the lad who used to do Gordon Brown’s photocopying. (In 1997 he achieved one of Labour’s more surprising gains, unseating Marcus Fox in Shipley.)
For the Conservatives, Bill Cash. His family fortune rests on the name tapes sown into a million grey pullovers. As a true Tory it wasn’t the finer constitutional points that exercised him. It was the Government’s intention to widen the pool of talent from which judges are drawn.
At present, 67 per cent of judges went to public school and 60 per cent to Oxford or Cambridge. Only 8 per cent are women, and fewer than one per cent come from an ethnic minority.
Most would see these figures as proof that change is needed. Not Cash. “Is diversity another word for political correctness?” he asked, apparently in all seriousness.
I don’t often feel sorry for my local MP, but Edward Garnier must still be wondering what he did to be replaced as shadow Attorney General by this bizarre figure.
Clement Attlee called referendums “a device for dictators and demagogues”, and Margaret Thatcher later quoted him with approval. Roy Jenkins said they were “a more powerful weapon against progressive legislation than anything we have known in this country since the curbing of the absolute powers of the House of Lords”.
The grandees’ pessimism may not have been borne out, but referendums still have their dangers. The promise of an eventual vote on the Euro has largely removed the subject of Europe from British politics. What debate we still have mirrors the black-and-white, yes-or-no thinking that referendums encourage. Either we should leave the European Union or it can do no wrong.
But there is a more important question to settle. Is the plural of referendum referendums or referenda?
When it was raised in the House back in June 1998, the late Alan Clark insisted ‘referenda’ was correct. He asked the Speaker to strike “a blow for classical revivalism” by expressing a preference for that form.
In reply Betty Boothroyd, for it was she in those days, relied on native Yorkshire common sense. ‘Referendum’ had been used in English for 150 years, and when forming the plural she preferred English forms to Latin ones.
Her instinct was right. James Gray (still Tory MP for North Wiltshire, despite our best efforts) provided chapter and verse. In Latin ‘referendum’ is not a noun but a gerundive (meaning ‘requiring to be discussed’), and thus has no plural. So it is an English noun, and in English we generally form plurals by adding an s.
‘Referenda’ is cod Latin. Impressive, even flashy, on first hearing, there is something not quite right about it. No wonder it appealed to Alan Clark. He was always a little too keen for people to notice his aristocratic airs.
Perhaps he was bullied at Eton because his father had bought the family castle not inherited it. Saltwood, such a presence in Clark’s diaries, belonged for centuries to the ancestors of Bill Deedes, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Whatever happened in his schooldays, you didn't need to be a Latin scholar to have doubts when Clark cited Michael Fabricant as an authority.
Still, as James Gray would no doubt put it, de mortuis nil nisi bonum.
This week’s prestigious Daft Question Award goes to Chorley’s Lindsay Hoyle. On Monday he urged Richard Caborn, the Minister for Sport, to ensure that schools in outposts in Lancashire benefited from London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics.
House Points has long wanted to abolish the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (I have great hopes of David Laws’ review of government spending.) Even so, the Commons gets particularly silly when it talks about the Olympics. It’s not just Hoyle: Angela Smith hoped the bid would lead to an upgrading of school facilities in “in outer London boroughs such as Havering”.
I am glad London is bidding for the Olympics. I hope it is successful. There would be lots of enjoyable sport on television and Britain would win more medals than usual. Some run-down parts of London would get serious money spent on them. But after that, the arguments for hosting the games get questionable.
As the reply to Smith’s question established, the Olympics would make a sizeable hole in National Lottery funds. And there is no guarantee it would stop there. Euro ’96 and the Manchester Commonwealth Games were successes, but Great Britain will never win medals for completing major public projects on budget.
In 1991 Labour-run Sheffield hosted the World Student Games and lost £15m. (Things got off to a bad start. They spent a fortune on their bid, only to find that no other city was interested in staging the event.) The resulting spending cuts helped the Liberal Democrats take control eight years later.
And the social effects of the London games? Caborn spoke of a commitment to give every child two hours of school sport a week and claimed the Olympics would help this. But there is more sport on television than ever before, and we are fatter than ever before too. It would be more honest to call them the ‘Olumpics’.
Caborn’s games might enthuse some to take up sport – remember last year’s curling boom? But I suspect that if children have the drive that makes champions the problem will be to get them to do anything else.
Meanwhile, let’s hope New Labour will one day realise that here, as so often, the National Curriculum is not the cure, it is part of the disease.