Monday, 25 July 2011
Saturday, 9 July 2011
Finding quality in dress shirts
http://parisiangentleman.co.uk/2011/01/25/anatomy-of-a-quality-shirt-guidelines/
Monday, 19 July 2010
Monday, 12 July 2010
'The problem isn't beef, bananas, cultural diversity or the patenting of life. The problem is the WTO'
Leading development analyst Susan George on why the world trade talks in Seattle next week won't help the great majority of people or the environment
The ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks, which open next Tuesday in Seattle, is being blandly presented as a straightforward negotiation on international trade in which everyone will have to make a few concessions. The WTO message, however, is not getting through, and mass demonstrations are planned to greet the delegates and the lobbyists from the multinationals.
Europe has already had to contend with bananas, hormone-fed beef and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), all of which have helped to mobilise opinion against the tyranny of any international organisation that thinks it is a cut above everyone else. But how have things come to such a pass?
Since 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) had been working discreetly to get customs duties on all kinds of goods reduced. Following the eighth round of talks in Uruguay (1986-93), that came to fruition. In March 1994, ministers gathered in Marrakesh to sign the document that created the WTO. Its 800 pages gave world trade a framework far more constraining than the feeble Gatt.
The lobbyists of transnational corporations, who had long had the ear of official negotiators, rubbed their hands with glee: the WTO gave them the ideal tool to complete their globalisation and impose their own rules on all human activities now defined as objects of "trade".
The WTO, which, unlike Gatt, has the status of an international organisation, has 134 member states and 30 observers. Its headquarters in Geneva are home to Gatt, which is still responsible for liberalising trade in goods, and a dozen other agreements. Among the most important of these are those on agriculture and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats), which covers more than 160 sectors and sub-sectors, including education, health and the environment. The agreement known as Trips governs intellectual property - including biotechnology and the patenting of micro-organisms and microbiological processes - while the Trims agreement is concerned with "trade-related" investments.
One of the WTO's tasks, the elimination of non-tariff barriers to trade, is performed in part through two other agreements. The agreement on technical barriers to trade and the one on sanitary and phytosanitary measures each claim to "harmonise" standards and rules for the protection of the environment, public health and consumers. In practice, "harmonisation" imposes ceilings that effectively reduce national laws to the lowest common denominator and dispenses with the precautionary principle. Anyone who refuses to import a product on the grounds that it may be hazardous to health or destructive to the environment must provide scientific proof. One of the battles between WTO countries will be over the principle of on whom the burden of proof lies.
Formerly, when Gatt wanted to penalise a country that was not playing by the rules, every member had to agree, even the one that was to suffer the penalties. As a result, Gatt carried little authority. The WTO, with its implacable discipline, is the opposite. If its dispute settlement body orders sanctions, the members - including the plaintiff - must be unanimous if the sanctions are not to apply. Hence the undeniable right of the US to penalise roquefort cheese, foie gras and Dijon mustards by imposing prohibitive customs duties. If the Europeans refuse to import hormone-fed beef, despite the WTO ruling, no matter. They must then compensate the US and Canada every year for their lost earnings.
The conditions under which the WTO's panels, which have settled more than 170 disputes, are appointed are obscure. The names of the "experts", who meet behind closed doors and who hear no outside witnesses, are not made public. This impenetrable procedure is astonishingly quick: disputes are generally settled in 12 months, 18 at the most. Canada, the world's biggest asbestos producer, hoped to take advantage of this to force Europe to import the carcinogen again.
Without warning, the WTO has created an international court of "justice" that is making law and establishing case law in which exist ing national laws are all "barriers" to trade, and is sweeping aside all environmental, social or public health considerations.
In so doing, it is merely following the principles that govern all its activities. For example, the "most favoured nation" clause demands equality of treatment for similar products from different member countries. With the banana decision, the WTO was able to deny the EU the right to have a foreign policy. In the WTO's eyes, a banana is only a banana, be it from Ecuador or the former European colonies.
The national treatment clause prohibits any discrimination affecting products of foreign origin, especially on the basis of the human or ecological conditions under which they were produced. In other words, no account may be taken of the "processes and methods of production". No reference may be made either to sustainable development or to human rights, and trading partners may not be rewarded or punished on the basis of their respect for those ideas. The article on "eliminating quantitative restrictions" penalises quotas and the refusal to import or export. This provision could invalidate many multilateral environmental agreements and some social conventions.
How, then, are we to prevent trade in endangered species or toxic waste? How can we limit exports of cereals when there is a national food shortage, or of tree trunks when the forests are being laid waste? The agreements on technical barriers and sanitary and phytosanitary measures reinforce this legal arsenal. An incalculable number of national standards, rules or laws could easily be classed as "barriers to trade".
These are just a few of the pitfalls along the road to the meeting of the WTO's supreme body, the ministerial conference in Seattle. The previous conferences have set the agenda: to review the agreements on agriculture, services and intellectual property. Seattle will decide the precise content of what Sir Leon Brittan has pompously termed the "Millennium Round".
It is planned to conclude the round with a global agreement in three years' time. The talks will move liberalisation forward and prevent any backtracking; that is how the WTO does things. And the US is reluctant to see the Trips agreement and GMO controversy re-opened, especially as the African countries have declared their opposition to the patenting of life.
A battle to the death is looming between the Cairns group of major agricultural exporting countries (Argentina, Australia and Brazil) and the US on one side, and Europe and Japan, which are considered too protective of their farmers, on the other. The Cairns group simply wants agricultural products to be allowed to compete like any other merchandise. Under pressure from France, the EU stresses the "multi-functionality" of agriculture as protecting diversity, the environment and rural life. Producers in the US, though, are urging their government "to resist any attempt to introduce the concept of multifunctionality".
We do not yet know the order in which the fields covered by the agreement on services will be tackled. If the word "horizontal" is heard, however, it is time to show one's claws: in WTO parlance, it means that a liberalisation measure accepted in one field must be extended to all. A liberalisation applied to banks or insurance, for example, would also have to be applied to education and health.
If governments have their priorities, business has its own. The US Coalition of Service Industries stresses distribution, finance, information technologies, telecommunications, tourism and health. The European Service Leaders' Group, presided over by the chairman of Barclays Bank, is concerned with 21 sectors.
The US Coalition of Energy Services is calling on the US special trade representative and chief negotiator, Charlene Barshevsky, to get their activities added to the agreement on services. The coalition - whose 27 members represent hundreds of billions of dollars - looks as if it will get its way. Brazil, France and Norway, which still regard these areas as public services, have been identified as "possible opponents".
Nobody knows what other sectors might be added to the agenda. The Europeans want the list to be as long as possible. For them, anything is useful in establishing a better balance of power with Washington.
The US negotiators prefer not to include investment, lest they reawaken the citizens' movement that scuppered the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in October last year. In any case, agreement on services would open up many advantages for investors. Neither do the Americans want to include electronic commerce: they want this virgin sector to remain a green pasture of zero customs tariffs. Public contracts, which account for 15% of most countries' gross national product, are clearly a juicy target that the US would like to see included.
The Americans, however, will be adamant that the so-called accelerated tariff liberalisation initiative (ATL) be placed on the agenda, defining as it does eight disparate fields in which zero tariffs should quickly become the norm. Alongside jewellery, toys or medical equipment, we find forestry and fishery products - fields in which zero tariffs would accelerate the destruction of these non-renewable resources. In this, Washington has the support of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, whose member countries account for 60% of world trade.
Where are the countries of the southern hemisphere in all this? The EU says that they deserve special care. Many of them have no ambassador to the WTO, and complain that they have made concessions without getting anything in return - especially in the field of textiles and clothing. Their priority is to see the commitments given to them in the Uruguay Round enacted. They are also suspicious of the European and North American desire to discuss ecological or social clauses. They see this as protectionism in disguise.
The movement that brought down the MAI has quickly mobilised itself again, this time against a WTO that is anti-democratic and destroys freedom and the environment. Accused by the partisans of free trade of wanting to take the world back to the 1930s and the trade wars, the movement replies that international trade needs rules, but not those of the WTO. There is another international law - that of human rights, multilateral environmental agreements and labour law, to which trade should be subordinate. The economy should serve the people and their natural environment, not the other way round. Too much liberalisation spells death to freedom.
The protesters, who will be many in Seattle, are united around one certainty: the need to fight for each other - failing which all will be defeated.
The problem isn't beef, bananas, cultural diversity or the patenting of life: the problem is the WTO.
• Susan George is president of the Observatoire de la mondialisation (Globalisation Observatory) and associate director of the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam).This is an edited extract of an article in the November edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. To subscribe to the English version, published jointly with the Guardian Weekly, phone 0161-832 7200 x 8712, or email gwsubs@guardian.co.uk
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
The ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks, which open next Tuesday in Seattle, is being blandly presented as a straightforward negotiation on international trade in which everyone will have to make a few concessions. The WTO message, however, is not getting through, and mass demonstrations are planned to greet the delegates and the lobbyists from the multinationals.
Europe has already had to contend with bananas, hormone-fed beef and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), all of which have helped to mobilise opinion against the tyranny of any international organisation that thinks it is a cut above everyone else. But how have things come to such a pass?
Since 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) had been working discreetly to get customs duties on all kinds of goods reduced. Following the eighth round of talks in Uruguay (1986-93), that came to fruition. In March 1994, ministers gathered in Marrakesh to sign the document that created the WTO. Its 800 pages gave world trade a framework far more constraining than the feeble Gatt.
The lobbyists of transnational corporations, who had long had the ear of official negotiators, rubbed their hands with glee: the WTO gave them the ideal tool to complete their globalisation and impose their own rules on all human activities now defined as objects of "trade".
The WTO, which, unlike Gatt, has the status of an international organisation, has 134 member states and 30 observers. Its headquarters in Geneva are home to Gatt, which is still responsible for liberalising trade in goods, and a dozen other agreements. Among the most important of these are those on agriculture and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats), which covers more than 160 sectors and sub-sectors, including education, health and the environment. The agreement known as Trips governs intellectual property - including biotechnology and the patenting of micro-organisms and microbiological processes - while the Trims agreement is concerned with "trade-related" investments.
One of the WTO's tasks, the elimination of non-tariff barriers to trade, is performed in part through two other agreements. The agreement on technical barriers to trade and the one on sanitary and phytosanitary measures each claim to "harmonise" standards and rules for the protection of the environment, public health and consumers. In practice, "harmonisation" imposes ceilings that effectively reduce national laws to the lowest common denominator and dispenses with the precautionary principle. Anyone who refuses to import a product on the grounds that it may be hazardous to health or destructive to the environment must provide scientific proof. One of the battles between WTO countries will be over the principle of on whom the burden of proof lies.
Formerly, when Gatt wanted to penalise a country that was not playing by the rules, every member had to agree, even the one that was to suffer the penalties. As a result, Gatt carried little authority. The WTO, with its implacable discipline, is the opposite. If its dispute settlement body orders sanctions, the members - including the plaintiff - must be unanimous if the sanctions are not to apply. Hence the undeniable right of the US to penalise roquefort cheese, foie gras and Dijon mustards by imposing prohibitive customs duties. If the Europeans refuse to import hormone-fed beef, despite the WTO ruling, no matter. They must then compensate the US and Canada every year for their lost earnings.
The conditions under which the WTO's panels, which have settled more than 170 disputes, are appointed are obscure. The names of the "experts", who meet behind closed doors and who hear no outside witnesses, are not made public. This impenetrable procedure is astonishingly quick: disputes are generally settled in 12 months, 18 at the most. Canada, the world's biggest asbestos producer, hoped to take advantage of this to force Europe to import the carcinogen again.
Without warning, the WTO has created an international court of "justice" that is making law and establishing case law in which exist ing national laws are all "barriers" to trade, and is sweeping aside all environmental, social or public health considerations.
In so doing, it is merely following the principles that govern all its activities. For example, the "most favoured nation" clause demands equality of treatment for similar products from different member countries. With the banana decision, the WTO was able to deny the EU the right to have a foreign policy. In the WTO's eyes, a banana is only a banana, be it from Ecuador or the former European colonies.
The national treatment clause prohibits any discrimination affecting products of foreign origin, especially on the basis of the human or ecological conditions under which they were produced. In other words, no account may be taken of the "processes and methods of production". No reference may be made either to sustainable development or to human rights, and trading partners may not be rewarded or punished on the basis of their respect for those ideas. The article on "eliminating quantitative restrictions" penalises quotas and the refusal to import or export. This provision could invalidate many multilateral environmental agreements and some social conventions.
How, then, are we to prevent trade in endangered species or toxic waste? How can we limit exports of cereals when there is a national food shortage, or of tree trunks when the forests are being laid waste? The agreements on technical barriers and sanitary and phytosanitary measures reinforce this legal arsenal. An incalculable number of national standards, rules or laws could easily be classed as "barriers to trade".
These are just a few of the pitfalls along the road to the meeting of the WTO's supreme body, the ministerial conference in Seattle. The previous conferences have set the agenda: to review the agreements on agriculture, services and intellectual property. Seattle will decide the precise content of what Sir Leon Brittan has pompously termed the "Millennium Round".
It is planned to conclude the round with a global agreement in three years' time. The talks will move liberalisation forward and prevent any backtracking; that is how the WTO does things. And the US is reluctant to see the Trips agreement and GMO controversy re-opened, especially as the African countries have declared their opposition to the patenting of life.
A battle to the death is looming between the Cairns group of major agricultural exporting countries (Argentina, Australia and Brazil) and the US on one side, and Europe and Japan, which are considered too protective of their farmers, on the other. The Cairns group simply wants agricultural products to be allowed to compete like any other merchandise. Under pressure from France, the EU stresses the "multi-functionality" of agriculture as protecting diversity, the environment and rural life. Producers in the US, though, are urging their government "to resist any attempt to introduce the concept of multifunctionality".
We do not yet know the order in which the fields covered by the agreement on services will be tackled. If the word "horizontal" is heard, however, it is time to show one's claws: in WTO parlance, it means that a liberalisation measure accepted in one field must be extended to all. A liberalisation applied to banks or insurance, for example, would also have to be applied to education and health.
If governments have their priorities, business has its own. The US Coalition of Service Industries stresses distribution, finance, information technologies, telecommunications, tourism and health. The European Service Leaders' Group, presided over by the chairman of Barclays Bank, is concerned with 21 sectors.
The US Coalition of Energy Services is calling on the US special trade representative and chief negotiator, Charlene Barshevsky, to get their activities added to the agreement on services. The coalition - whose 27 members represent hundreds of billions of dollars - looks as if it will get its way. Brazil, France and Norway, which still regard these areas as public services, have been identified as "possible opponents".
Nobody knows what other sectors might be added to the agenda. The Europeans want the list to be as long as possible. For them, anything is useful in establishing a better balance of power with Washington.
The US negotiators prefer not to include investment, lest they reawaken the citizens' movement that scuppered the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in October last year. In any case, agreement on services would open up many advantages for investors. Neither do the Americans want to include electronic commerce: they want this virgin sector to remain a green pasture of zero customs tariffs. Public contracts, which account for 15% of most countries' gross national product, are clearly a juicy target that the US would like to see included.
The Americans, however, will be adamant that the so-called accelerated tariff liberalisation initiative (ATL) be placed on the agenda, defining as it does eight disparate fields in which zero tariffs should quickly become the norm. Alongside jewellery, toys or medical equipment, we find forestry and fishery products - fields in which zero tariffs would accelerate the destruction of these non-renewable resources. In this, Washington has the support of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, whose member countries account for 60% of world trade.
Where are the countries of the southern hemisphere in all this? The EU says that they deserve special care. Many of them have no ambassador to the WTO, and complain that they have made concessions without getting anything in return - especially in the field of textiles and clothing. Their priority is to see the commitments given to them in the Uruguay Round enacted. They are also suspicious of the European and North American desire to discuss ecological or social clauses. They see this as protectionism in disguise.
The movement that brought down the MAI has quickly mobilised itself again, this time against a WTO that is anti-democratic and destroys freedom and the environment. Accused by the partisans of free trade of wanting to take the world back to the 1930s and the trade wars, the movement replies that international trade needs rules, but not those of the WTO. There is another international law - that of human rights, multilateral environmental agreements and labour law, to which trade should be subordinate. The economy should serve the people and their natural environment, not the other way round. Too much liberalisation spells death to freedom.
The protesters, who will be many in Seattle, are united around one certainty: the need to fight for each other - failing which all will be defeated.
The problem isn't beef, bananas, cultural diversity or the patenting of life: the problem is the WTO.
• Susan George is president of the Observatoire de la mondialisation (Globalisation Observatory) and associate director of the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam).This is an edited extract of an article in the November edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. To subscribe to the English version, published jointly with the Guardian Weekly, phone 0161-832 7200 x 8712, or email gwsubs@guardian.co.uk
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Saturday, 10 July 2010
RACHEL CORRIE: A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIBERATOR
Dr. James J. Zogby ©
President
Arab American
A very different kind of American liberator was tragically killed last week, days before the Iraq war began.
Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old student from the state of Washington, was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver in Gaza. She was part of a courageous group of activists who have come to Palestine from all over the world to provide non-violent assistance to the Palestinian people.
During the past few years, these peace activists have: placed themselves between Israeli tanks and Palestinian demonstrators; worked to stop Israeli bulldozers from destroying Palestinian homes; and provided eye-witness testimony to Israeli behavior at checkpoints and other human rights violations.
Without any official support and often times ignored even by the international media, this band of civilian liberators has bravely risked their lives to support the Palestinian people's struggle for freedom.
Last week, Rachel, who had taken six months off from her college work to go to Gaza, became the first of these international peace activists to be the victim of what appears to be a cold-blooded murder. The Israeli bulldozers had arrived in Rafah to demolish the home of the Samir family. After a two-hour argument and standoff between Rachel and the vehicle's driver, Rachel sat down refusing to allow the bulldozer to move on the house. The driver drove right over Rachel and then reversed and drove over her again. Her body was crushed and though rescued by her colleagues-she died from massive injuries a short while later.
The story of Rachel spread like a wildfire throughout the United States. Newspapers featured the story and websites of dozens of organizations showed pictures of this young woman's courageous standoff with the machine that ended her life.
Many of these websites have carried Rachel's extensive writings about her experiences in Gaza and her growing understanding of the Palestinian situation. She was an extraordinarily, perceptive young woman and gifted writer. In one of her letters from Gaza she wrote:
February 7
No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it - and even then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and the fact, of course, that I have the option of leaving. Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown. I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean. When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting...
February 27
Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the evening or at night it just hits me again - a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. Yesterday, I watched a father lead his two tiny children, holding his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to be exploded.
...If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours - do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed - just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labor of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could.
...This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities - but in focusing on them I'm terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here - even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon's possible goals), can't leave. Because they can't even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won't let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can't get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide.
On March 16, Rachel's pen stopped writing. Her parents in their horror and pain reacted bravely. In a statement they issued after visiting members of Congress who promised to work for an investigation into the cause of their daughter's death they said:
We are speaking out today because of Rachel's fears about the impact of a war with Iraq on the people in the Occupied Territories. She reported to us that her Palestinian friends were afraid that with all eyes on Iraq, the Israeli Defense Forces would escalate activity in the Occupied Territories. Rachel wanted to be in Gaza if that happened.
...In the last six weeks, Rachel became our eyes and ears for Rafah, a city at the southern tip of Gaza. Now that she's no longer there, we are asking members of Congress and, truly, all the world to watch and listen.
...We are asking members of Congress to bring the U.S. government's attention back to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and to recognize that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is an overwhelming and continuous act of collective violence against the Palestinian people.
...Rachel would not want her death to overshadow that of others. In barely glancing at headlines since word came of Rachel's death, I note that many have died this week in the Occupied Territories - one a four-year-old child. I would like to be able to hold the mother of that child and to have her hold me.
Rachel and her parents make me proud to be an American. They represent a uniquely American spirit. Rachel should not be forgotten, as the war with Iraq steals the world's headlines and attention. Many Americans have come together to support Rachel's parents' call to Congress to: provide protection both for international volunteers who are in Palestine to promote human rights and justice and for the Palestinian people as a whole during these difficult times.
We are also calling for a complete investigation into Rachel's murder. Finally, we are working to establish a scholarship in Rachel's name so that her memory and her commitment to human service and liberation lives on.
Washington Watch
March 24, 2003
Thursday, 8 July 2010
How the Church of England became the Church of State
A dispute between Henry VIII and the Pope over the legitimacy over divorce led to a new church under the monarch
The Church of England's position as the country's established church dates back to the upheavals of the 16th century Reformation.
The disagreement between the English monarch and the Vatican saw the church gradually emerge out of Henry VIII's dispute with the papacy over his right to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
The king used the split from the Catholic church to divorce his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, too, having seen his second beheaded, and third die.
The monarch became the supreme governor of the state church and its doctrine was officially defined through the 39 Articles in the reign of Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I.
The church's continuing privileged position gives 26 of its bishops seats as a right in the House of Lords, gives institutional rights on state occasions, including the coronation of the sovereign, and protects it through a complex and ancient web of legislation.
Among the historic legacies are such archaic hangovers as the Act of Settlement, preventing the monarch from being – or marrying – a Catholic: a 300 year-old piece of legislation that some bishops still defend to this day.
As part of the modern constitutional tie-in, the church's synod can create legislation determining its affairs. The resulting legislation then has to be approved, but cannot be amended, by parliament.
In return, the Church of England maintains a presence in every parish in the country, runs a network of state-funded schools, claims to be available to all and insists that it speaks on behalf of faith communities on spiritual and religious matters.
It also maintains the upkeep of many of the country's most historic buildings.
Senior church appointments are still nominally made by the sovereign on the advice of the prime minister based on recommendations by the church.
Nominations can be vetoed or altered at the behest of Downing Street.
Critics allege that the church can no longer claim public influence and authority because only about half the population identify themselves as Anglicans, and very few go to church. Unravelling the church's established status would be complex and time-consuming: it took parliament 70 years to disestablish the much smaller church in Wales.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
The Church of England's position as the country's established church dates back to the upheavals of the 16th century Reformation.
The disagreement between the English monarch and the Vatican saw the church gradually emerge out of Henry VIII's dispute with the papacy over his right to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
The king used the split from the Catholic church to divorce his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, too, having seen his second beheaded, and third die.
The monarch became the supreme governor of the state church and its doctrine was officially defined through the 39 Articles in the reign of Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I.
The church's continuing privileged position gives 26 of its bishops seats as a right in the House of Lords, gives institutional rights on state occasions, including the coronation of the sovereign, and protects it through a complex and ancient web of legislation.
Among the historic legacies are such archaic hangovers as the Act of Settlement, preventing the monarch from being – or marrying – a Catholic: a 300 year-old piece of legislation that some bishops still defend to this day.
As part of the modern constitutional tie-in, the church's synod can create legislation determining its affairs. The resulting legislation then has to be approved, but cannot be amended, by parliament.
In return, the Church of England maintains a presence in every parish in the country, runs a network of state-funded schools, claims to be available to all and insists that it speaks on behalf of faith communities on spiritual and religious matters.
It also maintains the upkeep of many of the country's most historic buildings.
Senior church appointments are still nominally made by the sovereign on the advice of the prime minister based on recommendations by the church.
Nominations can be vetoed or altered at the behest of Downing Street.
Critics allege that the church can no longer claim public influence and authority because only about half the population identify themselves as Anglicans, and very few go to church. Unravelling the church's established status would be complex and time-consuming: it took parliament 70 years to disestablish the much smaller church in Wales.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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