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We are constantly told that the now deep frozen EU Constitution is far to complicated for the ordinary man in the street to understand, and that we should of course leave the decision to our elected representatives. They have the time the knowledge and the ability, apparently, to understand the ins and outs of this very complicated document, if they were to allow us mere mortals a voice, we would without doubt misinterpret and misunderstand and therefore vote on the wrong things and come to the wrong conclusions. It is heart warming to realise that our minister have their finger on the control button and really do understand what the Constitution means, as these two letters in the Telegraph clarify.

Tessa out of touch

Sir - Tessa Jowell claims that the proposed EU constitution “wasn’t about a vision of Europe, it was about how to manage the process”. Rather than criticising others for not reading the full text, she should have taken the time to read just the preamble.

Purple passages such as “the peoples of Europe are determined to transcend their former divisions and, united ever more closely, to forge a common destiny” might have struck her as rather more visionary than managerial. The fatal flaw is that the peoples of Europe do not, in fact, share that grandiose vision - when they are asked, it usually turns out that they would prefer to keep, and run, their own countries.

(Dr) D R Cooper, Maidenhead, Berkshire

Sir - Tessa Jowell’s musings on her contacts with hoi polloi were interesting, if only in highlighting how out of touch our politicians are, and remain, from the real feelings of the people. I particularly liked her view that aggressive interviews on the Today programme are “a complete turn-off for most people”. I suggest she compares its listening figures to Today in Parliament and she will soon understand where the turn-off occurs - and, with a little reflection, why.

Gerry Morrow, Hong Kong

I often hear and read things from our leaders! that that a few years ago would have been laughed out of court as Marxist claptrap, everyone intuitively knew what was real and what was dangerous propaganda. To briefly remind my reader shortly after the election the home sectary said that NULabour were going to reinvent respect for parliament as an important institution of the state.

So it was that bells started to ring when I read in The Guardian this week that the Archbishop of Canterbury launched a wide-ranging attack on the media, accusing journalists of distorting debate, contributing to a climate of national cynicism, and unjustly attacking institutions over their secretiveness. Dr Rowan Williams appeared to take in tabloids, broadsheets, weblogs and broadcasters with equal vehemence.

He charged all with conspiring against public understanding.

Dr Williams claimed that some aspects of current journalistic practice are “lethally damaging”, contributing to the “embarrassingly low level of trust” in the profession.

The archbishop said: “We need to deflate some of the rhetoric about the media as guardians and nurturers of democracy simply by virtue of the constant exposure of ‘information’ and we need to be cautious about a use of ‘public interest’ language that ignores the complexity and, often, artificiality of our ideas of ‘the public’. ”

He accused the media of manipulating fear, exhibiting violent conflict between people for entertainment, and living off internal feuds: “Corrupt speech, inflaming unexamined emotion, reinforcing division, wrapped up in its own performance, leaves us less human: fewer things are possible for us. Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.” His attack encompassed national newspapers which “communicate as if every reader … shared the same fundamental values, preferences and anxieties”, broadcasters for their obsession with breaking news, and weblogs which indulge in “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry”.

ROD LIDDLE takes the archbishop and his argument to task in a comment in the Times this morning “Our holy Soviet archbishop”

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been taking a few swipes at the media and has been disparaging the internet. He has criticised it for dissembling “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry” — an accusation that could equally be said to apply to much of mainstream religion. He also derided the web as a “free for all” that was “close to that of unpoliced conversation”. To which we might reply well, yes — that’s the point, isn’t it? Not content with missing the entire purpose of the internet, Williams then went on to miss the entire point about the British press. Journalists distorted debate and contributed to a climate of “national cynicism”, unjustly attacking institutions for their secretiveness. So far, so New Statesman. This has become the mantra au courant of new Labour’s fellow travellers, a whine continually heard from the op ed pages of left of centre publications.

The argument goes that the cynicism into which we journalists lapse is not a reaction to the perfidies of government, but a sort of institutionalised personal weakness like drunkenness or sodomy.

It is a whine that we hear sometimes from the prime minister himself, in order to excuse himself from some catastrophe or debacle, such as the war against Iraq. Look, he says, I was honestly mistaken. Criticise me for that, but don’t say I lied to you all. But it is the profound and, to my mind, almost irrefutable evidence that we were lied to that causes the anger and cynicism — not the war itself or the failure of our intelligence services.

It was the centrepiece of Williams’s argument that most interested me, though. The press is here, the archbishop said, to nourish the public good. Not to inform or entertain — but to nourish the public good. Now, where have I heard this before? It was an argument eloquently advanced by Georgi Plekhanov, the proto-Soviet theorist, the first Russian Marxist and the man whom we have to thank for, among other things, dreary socialist realism in art and, for daily reading matter, Pravda. The writer Maxim Gorky said of Plekhanov suggestively that he “resembles a Protestant pastor.”

Williams’s belief that the purpose of the press is to “nourish public good” underpins every sentence of Plekhanov’s polemic, Art and Social Life, first delivered as a lecture in 1912. It also underpins the ideology of pretty much every totalitarian state that sprang up during the 20th century: there is a commonly agreed public good that we are beholden to preserve and advance.

The bourgeois or decadent notions of disinterested investigation, scepticism, art for art’s sake and so on, had no place in Soviet Russia or, for that matter, Nazi Germany. It is a beguiling but truly repulsive creed and one that I thought had dissolved when the first brick of the Berlin Wall was hacked away by those brave and jubilant East Germans in 1989. But apparently it is still alive and well in the dear old C of E.

There is something naive and hopeless about Williams, qualities which you may or may not feel are also exemplified by the Church of England. Recently he turned his attention to African debt repayments and, in urging us to write off the lot, asked rhetorically if we wished to live in a world where we all trusted each other regardless of whether that trust was reciprocated. But we trust and believe in each other because we learn to trust through experience, not on a whim or through an article of faith.

Now he has assumed that we all share a common belief in what constitutes public good and yet quite clearly — from his own descriptions of the worldwide web — this is not so. And nor should it be so.

Heaven knows, the British press is far from perfect. If the Lord had met Piers Morgan I suspect he would have formed a disaffection for our newspapers every bit as strong as Williams’s. But arguably the most valuable thing we in the liberal West possess is a fervent disagreement about what is good for us as a society.
As David Mannion, editor-in-chief of ITV News, put it, the archbishop’s argument could easily be seized on by those who wish to control the news agenda for their own ends.

Yes we used to know dangerous bigotry when we heard it from far left wing Marxists, nowadays even the leaders of the states institutions spew out this garbage as if it is normally acceptable opinion.

I do not move in exalted circles, most of my time is spent either in my kitchen at the computer or visiting local shops or travelling from farm to farm collecting the produce for my menu. And this last week trying unsuccessfully to shoot the few rabbits that are making alarming inroads into the lettuce, beetroot, rocket, leeks and beans my wife is growing for the kitchen, which is why I am writing this at the crack of dawn this morning.

So it is a bit of a shock this morning to read in the Booker column that about half of some very good French restaurateurs, all within an hour of the Mediterranean. Have become “Tired of paying 40-50 per cent of employees’ gross earnings in tax to the state, fed up with the 35-hour week, sickened by the eager willingness of employees to seek rewarding benefits like sick pay, angered at having to give staff up to six weeks holiday and 20 public holidays a year on full pay, five of the chef patrons had decided enough was enough.”
Three Michelin-starred owners had given up that coveted status, sacked all their staff and were now cooking themselves, serving only limited choice menus, with wives or family running the “front of house”.

A fourth patron had stopped serving lunches except on Sunday. A fifth had sacked everyone except his young chef and, doing everything else with his wife, was now content to accept fewer bookings.

And the reporter of all this culinary mayhem is none other than the mild mannered food and travel critic, Richard Binns who apart from writing the odd article for the Sundays also produces useful little gastronomic guides to rural France and Britain. I first met Richard several years ago when he visited Ludlow on a fact finding mission in preparation for an article on what was soon to become the major foodie town outside of London.

For this mild mannered English gent to say “If Chirac thinks he can devise a successful strategy based on the French social model,” “he is living in cloud-cuckoo land.” Is something of a shock to the system, this is no media hack looking for today’s headline but a serious travel writer who abhors the headline grabbing antics of some food writers I won’t mention.

But his observations are very true, and it is not just in France where this is happening here. On the borders of Wales we are already winding down our operation, and simply do not open unless we have bookings. By this time next year we hope to have completed our plans, to reduce our takings and our overheads and our exposure to the mores of the government’s apparatchiks to impose ever increasing social burdens on business. Small business people all over the country are consciously making the decision to down size rather than face the impossible task of meeting the regulations, this is not because we want to turn away trade or do not think employees deserve a decent wage or holidays or sick pay, but that the blanket rules take no account of the facts. We have sat down and worked out that we would actually be a lot better off if we did not have any staff and brought our takings down below the Vat rate. So in the end instead of razing the standards of living throughout the country with its new social rules on business, the EU and government are going to be increasing the unemployment rate and decreasing its tax take.

Was it not old Labour who proudly announced that they were going to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak, but in the event found the rich simply were not prepared to be squeezed, and took themselves and their taxes out of the country. By the same token it is all very well for the EU left wing social policy pushers to insist that we follow their road to the promised land of milk and honey for all, but to paraphrases Mr Binns they are living in cloud-cuckoo land.