Taking Liberties

Declaration of Independence

It's the tenth anniversary of the Scottish Parliament this week (1 July) and most opinion polls seem to suggest that while devolution has been popular, the desire for independence from the Union seems to have waned. If anything, the anniversary has been rather understated, with any hand wringing about national identity, Britishness, etc. relegated to water-cooler and discussions of events in SW19.  

There may be more sports-related remarks on this blog following 4 July. That date - and discussion of independence - also brings to mind a recent discovery in The National Archives, according to PhiloBiblos.  An unknown copy of the first printing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (called the 'Dunlap Declaration' after its printer) has been uncovered by a New Jersey rare book dealer.  The dealer also paid a visit to the BL (which at the time was displaying one of TNA's copies of the Declaration in the exhibition), but as far as I know didn't make any similar discoveries here...

Still, issues of national identity still abound: according to the blog account of the discovery, "The whole thing was really very English. No cause for excitement. You find a new D of I, you have a cup of tea, and you move on."

People and Parliament

Want to have your say about the relationship between people and parliament (and a chance to see Lord Renton on YouTube?). Visit http://lordsoftheblog.net/2009/06/12/people-and-parliament-an-update/ before 16 June (there's a debate in the House of Lords that evening).

Constitutional Renewal

Watching this space...

Bart and Citizenship

Twitter revealed today that there's a citizenship conference taking place at the BL today, organised by the association of citizenship teachers.  There's an 'event wiki' as well; it also links in with the Learning team's Campaign! Make an Impact project, which brings together lots of materials on historical campaigns with ideas for how young people can campaign - and learn - today.

Running out of the flat this morning, I caught the start of Harvard Professor of Government, Michael Sandel's Reith Lectures, which as it happens are "about the prospects of a new politics of the common good". The 'commonweal' looks like one of those concepts that is making a come-back (interestingly, it was also used to define ancien regime France as well as Cromwellian England or U.S. States). 

I was delighted to discover that there's an urban myth that Professor Sandel provided the model for the Simpson's villainous Montgomery Burns.  (Several of the writers are Harvard alums).  It seems to me that 'make an impact' has the potential to combine the studious and mischievous characteristics of Lisa and Bart quite nicely.

Paine, Bones and Podcasts

Today marks the anniversary of one of the guiding lights of the exhibition, Thomas Paine, who died 200 years ago.  You can hear me being startled by my first confrontation with a digital recorder, if you wish, when I tried to talk about the Rights of Man as part of the exhibition's podcast programme.  Even better, the audio for the Taking Liberties Study Day is now live, and includes contributions from Miles Taylor, Peter Tatchell, Lord Lester, Barbara Taylor, Catherine Hall and Salil Tripathi on everything from Wollstonecraft, freedom of speech, Britishness, and whether there's a need for a new Bill of Rights.  I'm sure that if Paine, the great pamphleteer, was around today, he would seize the opportunities presented by podcasting, audioboos, and the rest.  (For that matter, I can see Edmund Burke on This Week.) 

There's also another link between the show and this great radical figure.  Unlike Paine's bones, which William Cobbett managed to misplace during their transit from the U.S. to Liverpool, the physical remains of the Taking Liberties exhibition are in safe hands: the panel texts have been sent to Lewes Town Hall Corn Exchange, as part of this summer's Paine festival: Revolution and Reason.

Uncoverings...

There have been a lot of discoveries in the archives recently.  Poirot is set to emerge in two short-stories uncovered among Agatha Christie's papers, and my colleague, Jamie Andrews, has been busy with the recovered John Osborne plays from the Lord Chamberlain's Collection.  We are all now very familiar with some records previously held in Westminster, and it looks like there is more than literary implications to follow.

The political implications of archival discoveries has a long history, of course.  The ferment of the Civil Wars was impart stoked by the claims of antiquaries to have found constitutional precedents, and the history of Magna Carta is one of continual recovery and interpretation, not least during the agitation for political reform in the 1790s and 1810s.  We displayed The Black Dwarf, an early nineteenth-century radical publication that was very much part of the reform movement, but didn't show The Black Book (1819), but it's been 'digitalized' on Google Books.  Perhaps 50,000 copies of this title were sold at the time, against the backdrop of the Peterloo Massacre, the US-originating financial crisis and the repressive Six Acts.  Would Poirot make any connections, I wonder?

These texts are provisional...

It is perhaps a good thing that the physical exhibition is no longer with us, given that the government and the opposition seem to have agreed to have talks about constitutional reform.  Curators hate it when their labels are wrong, so this may have caused all sorts of upset.

Live From Westminster

I think I may have been a little too dismissive or understated in my last post, as the expenses row has now mutated into a full-blown political conversation about constitutional reform, elections and even 'revolution'.  Precedents from the past have been sought - the Norway Debate, the Civil Wars ('In the name of God, go!'), and obscure cases of City sleaze from 1695 - and on this morning's Today programme one sensed the political parties also had their eye on a soon to be redrawn future.   No-one has mentioned the Self-Denying Ordinance yet, as far as I know, either from the Civil Wars or the transition between the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies in the French Revolution (1791).  You read it here first.

This said, I still think this is a matter that is consuming the political classes rather than the rest of us.  Everyone else is quietly satisfied that their views of politicians matched their assumption that The New Statesman got it about right.  But match all this with the backdrop of the financial crisis, and suddenly the notion that history was 'then' (and safely explored, say, in exhibitions at national institutions), and that things will tick along as they are, seems less a safe bet than it did a few months ago.

Expenses

One of the Chartists' "six points" called for the:

4. Payment of members, thus enabling an honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests of the country

No mention of trouser presses, moats, moles, or artex removal, I note. On the other hand, there's still a barrier to entry, as the modern-day 'honest tradesperson' seeking a parliamentary seat will probably have to make several attempts at selection and take a couple of runs at an election before they finally get the keys to their office in Portcullis House and their hands on the expenses forms. Doing this requires a lot of unpaid time off work, trips across the country, nights in hotels and, as a friend-of-a-friend quoted one current MP, a fortune spent at every tombola, raffle and dinner that you're expected to attend during the campaign (and, of course, the year or two before that when you've been selected for your constituency). These are not sums that most us of could meet lightly.

There may also be something to be said about the performative aspect of Parliament: part of us wants them to look succesful, important, and somehow different from us. That's why they're making up the rules, not us. When their cover is blown and expenses reveal an all-too-human side, we get annoyed, perhaps more by that than because of the amounts involved.

We had some election expenses on display, dating from the 1780s, which included the joyous fact that a mob cost one guinea to rent during the election season. Of course, these were expenses met out of the MP's own pocket, not the public purse.

1215 and all that

We may be living in the last days of the South Bank Show, but Melvyn Bragg is still going strong on Radio 4.  Today's 'In Our Time' was all about Magna Carta - that medieval ragbag of baronial strong-arming.  The show tries to answer what the following words meant and mean:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land”.

As regular readers will know, this is clause 39 of the Great Charter.  Nicholas Vincent, one of the participants, also kindly gave a great talk at the BL on this very subject.