Magna Carta: we can all celebrate the anniversary, even if we don't all understand it the same way

Anniversaries are the moment when the present chooses to reinterpret the past to suit its purposes.

800 years ago, on 15 June 1215, England’s leading landowners met at Runnymede, on the Thames, to the West of London. To hold land was, at that time, to hold huge power – it was, indeed, the only road to power. Land produced rent and, out of that rent, the owners could fund small armies, personally loyal to themselves.

The Magna Carta Monument at Runnymede

On that day, they met to cut down to size one of their number. They had all accepted that it was important that one should have authority over all of them but, though he might hold the title of King, they didn’t feel that was something he ought to let go to his head. He had to remember that he was ultimately just one of them, and he maintained his pre-eminence only with their consent.

The holder of that position in 1215, King John, was weak, and his peers, the barons, took advantage to extract concessions from him about just what a King might or might not do. They wanted rights guaranteed in writing, over his signature. In particular, they denied him the right to act against them at will, and they insisted that any of their number only be convicted of a crime if tried by a jury of his peers.

No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised [dispossessed], outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.

The words “his” and “peers” are important in this context. The barons weren’t concerned with the rights of women. And they weren’t interested in “the people” – they were interested in their peers. 

But the present imposes its own interpretation on the past. What happens if you extend the meaning of “free man” beyond the narrow ranks of the barons? Then the Great Charter (literally Magna Carta) becomes a statement of basic rights of all Englishmen (and possibly Englishwomen).

By the seventeenth century, the view was taking hold that the English had always enjoyed certain liberties, but they’d been trampled on by foreigners forcing their way into the country (echoes of our own times). In this case, the foreigners were the Normans who conquered the place in 1066. This is a view which conveniently ignores the fact that the English – Anglo-Saxons – had themselves been invaders only a few centuries earlier, when they’d usurped the lands of the Celts.

In this view, what the barons obtained from John was a restatement, or reinstatement, of those primordial English rights. And Englishmen everywhere began to demand that they be recognised, including those fine Englishmen who set up the colonies in North America. When their representatives met in Congress in 1766 to protest a new tax imposed on them from Britain, the Stamp Act, they called on the authority of the Great Charter:

The invaluable rights or taxing ourselves, and of trial by our peers, of which we implore your Majesty’s protection are not, we most humbly conceive unconstitutional; but confirmed by the Great Charter of English Liberty.

Sadly, George III took a more jaundiced view of the Great Charter, and refused his loyal subjects in the thirteen American colonies the protection they required, losing their loyalty in consequence, and, after a disastrous war, the colonies too.

The tradition, however, persisted. Nearly 750 years after the signature of the Charter, Franklin Delano Roosevelt assured us in his 1941 inaugural:

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the middle ages. It was written in Magna Carta.

Five years later, in his “Iron Curtain” speech, Winston Churchill declared:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

The Great Charter itself

And then we get to David Cameron. He told the anniversary celebration at Runnymede:

Why do people set such store by Magna Carta? Because they look to history. They see how the great charter shaped the world, for the best part of a millennium, helping to promote arguments for justice and for freedom.

Sadly, he also declared that “here in Britain ironically, the place where those ideas were first set out, the good name of human rights has sometimes been distorted or devalued.” This is his justification for trying to repeal the Human Rights Act, which guarantees the Charter’s rights, and others besides, for every one of us.

The view that this is the spirit of the Charter may be ahistorical, but quite a few of us rather like it. As did Roosevelt and Churchill.

Cameron, it seems, disagrees.

As I said. Anniversaries are moments when we respect not the contemporary significance of events, but the significance that we draw from them today. Cameron, I suppose, has a right to his own. It’s just sad that it has to be so idiosyncratic.

Not to say more than a little worrying.

Tax, tea, tolls and small government

It’s a commonplace, but no less true for all that, that there are two way of thinking of the American Revolution.

The first is the most obvious: the Americans rose in defence of fundamental human rights. It’s all about Thomas Jefferson’s thinking in those wonderful phrases of his about the equal creation of all men and the unalienable rights that flow from it.

Of course, it really was men who were treated as being created equal at the time, not women, and it was white men to boot. The Jeffersonian programme was really more of a work in progress than an achievement. A bloody civil war, the women’s suffrage movement at the start of the twentieth century and the civil rights movement in the sixties, has extended human rights far further than in Jefferson’s own days. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that, say, Michael Bloomberg is the equal of the Hispanic waiter serving him his meal, is badly in need of having a naivety gland excised.

The other way of interpreting the American Revolution is as an uprising of white middle class men who loved their guns and hated taxes. The revolutionary cry ‘No taxation without representation’ wasn’t just about representation, the concern of the democrats, but also about avoiding taxation. This all came to a head when a group dressed up as Native Americans – or, as they would have said, Indians – tipped a shipload of tea into Boston harbour.

Incidentally, to this day, if you order a cup of tea in the States, you’re likely to be served a cup of water which once was boiling and a teabag. Now one forgives that in France or Germany, coffee-drinking nations which know nothing about the need for boiling water to have tea infuse properly, but the US must once have known better. I wonder whether this seminal moment in 1773, the famous Boston Tea Party, when they committed the sacrilege of putting tea into cold water, killed their tea-making skills forever?

Just as the Jeffersonian current of the revolution has continued to this day, so the other tax-averse current still looms large. Indeed, it has taken new form in the tea party movement, consciously named after the Boston incident, and which held its first convention in Nashville last weekend.

My father used to tell an anecdote about the States which deserves to be true even if it isn’t. It seems that John F. Kennedy once held a dinner for Nobel Prize winners in the White House.

‘Never has this room seen so much intellectual power gathered together,’ he told them, ‘since Thomas Jefferson last dined here alone.’

Given that the keynote speaker at the tea party convention was Sarah Palin, we probably have a pretty neat measure of the intellectual difference between the Jeffersonian and tax-and-guns trends of the American Revolution.

Not that the two trends are incompatible. The tea party types want small government, and the great libertarian Henry Thoreau wrote words that are often, and understandably, attributed to Jefferson or even Thomas Paine: ‘That government is best which governs least’. It’s a view I share: the intrusive state that wants to know what I do in my home, on the internet, or even on the street while peacefully minding my own business, gets deeply on my nerves.

But you have to draw the line somewhere. Surely shrinking government has gone too far when things get to the pass reached in Colorado Springs, as detailed in a great news item sent me by my old friend Alasdhair Campbell.

It describes how falling tax revenues and the refusal of the citizens to pay any more, are leading to library closures, parks being left to go to seed and, if the rains fail, turn brown, while even the fire and police services are cut back.

Alasdhair is equally irritated by the proliferation of toll roads in his own home state of Texas. The truth is that you can be as opposed to taxes as you wish, and none of us actually wants to pay more taxes, but if you want the services you have to pay for them some way or another. If not through tax, then you’ll pay for them some other way, for instance in tolls, or you’ll do without them.

The two trends that inspired the Revolution are still in full force today. But just at the moment, the popularity of the tea party crowd suggests that the tax-haters are on a bit of a high. Which make the Colorado Springs and Texas toll road cases pretty topical, as cautionary tales.

The irony is that this thinking doesn’t even deliver small government. Preventing healthcare becoming public has left one in eight US citizens without cover, inside the most expensive system in the world.

And guess which government around the world costs most per head of its population?

Too obvious, is it?



PS The legacy of Jefferson, the great revolutionary, lives on in the States. In Britain, the Court of Appeal this week ordered the disclosure of information about the torture, under CIA supervision and allegedly with the complicity of British intelligence, of a British resident suspected of terrorism. The judges ordered the publication though the information came from the CIA under conditions of strict confidentiality.

The comment from Washington – and from Obama’s White House, no less? If a British court can order the publication of confidential US documents, then that puts the intelligence relationship between the two countries under strain.

Get this right: a court of law orders the publication of information about a criminal act committed by the British and US governments.

And it’s the court that’s in the wrong?