Trafalgar, 200 Years On...

As the United Kingdom celebrates the Bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar, Tom Utley argues that Lord Nelson must be turning in his grave:

One of the new regime's first acts, apart from sending any organisers of resistance to the guillotine, would have been to sweep away the Common Law, and to establish in its place the Napoleonic Code. Like so many dictators - from the Roman emperors to Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot - Napoleon was a tidy-minded rationalist who believed in universal laws, applicable to all mankind. From a dictator's point of view, the trouble with Britain's common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

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Unlike the earlier French revolutionaries, who thought that Italy should be governed by Italians and Spain by Spaniards, Napoleon was never a believer in nation states. He believed in centralised European government - one law and one authority for the whole of his empire. This was the fate from which Nelson and Collingwood saved the peoples of Britain, 200 years ago today.

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If Nelson had lost at Trafalgar, Britain would have been locked into a centralised, protectionist Europe. Instead, his victory opened up the markets of the whole wide world to British enterprise. Two hundred years on, we could do with another Nelson.