Taking Liberties

New broom with a few old bristles

Many of the documents in the exhibition have had an afterlife around the world, not just in the United Kingdom. Magna Carta is one obvious beacon, used as a comparison for other documents of fundamental liberties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Another is the Bill of Rights (1689). In an executive order, the new US president has banned torture by all official personnel. As a constitutional scholar, Mr Obama will be well aware of the eighth amendment (1787) of the US Constitution, a ‘Bill of Rights’ that outlaws ‘cruel and unusual punishments’, a phrase taken from the 1689 bill.

A similar right can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948, article five) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). An echo of the past has just become louder.

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Yes we can, 19th-century style

The exhibition contains many of the central documents of British history, such as Magna Carta, which I mentioned yesterday, the Bill of Rights, the Pennal Letter, the Treaty of Union, to list just some.

But there are also examples of a range of political campaign material: petitions from the Civil War, a Scottish pamphlet supporting the Great Reform Act, early trade union posters, gay rights posters and suffragette paraphernalia, such as the ‘Panko’ card game.

One of these always brings a bit of smile: ‘No Plumpers!’ proclaims a large poster in the Freedom of Belief and Speech section. It dates from the 1868 Greenwich election (Greenwich having gained its two MPs from the 1832 Reform Act) and the poster has probably been edited in pencil by William Gladstone and is aimed at those who appreciated his ‘cheap teas, cheap tea, cheap books’, platform.

The constituency, like many in the 19th century, also had two MPs, and the other candidate on the poster was David Salomons, the first Jewish lord mayor of London and the first Jewish MP to take his seat in the Commons (in 1851, after omitting the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ from the oath; he was later ejected from the Commons and fined £500).

The poster is thus partly about political equality, regardless of religion, or as we may well reflect on this day, race. But it is also about political language and the rhetoric of politics. As slogans go, you can’t beat ‘No Plumpers!’, which asks for a vote for both candidates, rather than ‘plumping’ for one.

It was also slang for landing a heavy blow on someone, or telling a whopper. Not quite a swear word, but certainly colloquial. I wonder if there’s a touch of the shock about this poster, with its language selected for the radical constituents of Greenwich. In its day it may have been as emotionally charged as ‘Hope’ or ‘Change’.

Language shifts, of course, and politicians have to adept at using it, bending the rhetoric to fit their own purposes. Reading Obama’s well-crafted Dreams From My Father, you also realise that as a younger man he had a great talent for swearing, perhaps up there with Presidents Nixon and Johnson. Today, however, one suspects that the oratory will be more high-flying (as well as grounded in the reality of the problems facing us today).

Sir John Mortimer: I rest my case

Sir John Mortimer, the barrister, writer and playwright, has died, at the age of 85.

It doesn’t seem that long since I saw him enjoying a drink in a north London pub after he had been performing ‘Mortimer’s Miscellany’. As well as creating the immortal ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, Sir John was a resolute campaigner for liberty, particularly against literary censorship.

Initially, however, his legal practice flourished on the back of his talent for winning divorce cases. But following divorce law reform, he reinvented himself as a criminal barrister, with a great ability to undermine ‘expert’ witnesses, particularly when it came to the macabre evidence of blood stains.

This could not have prepared him for the furore of the Oz trial in 1971. He defended the three editors of the satirical hippy magazine who had allowed a lewdly adulterated comic strip of Rupert Bear to appear in their pages. Recordings of the trial and campaign material are on display in the exhibition.

In this, and other cases, such as his defence of the Sex Pistols, he was a great defender of free speech, and of the idea that lawyers should act as guardians of freedom.

While being interviewed about ‘Mortimer’s Miscellany’, Sir John worried that our civil liberties had been ‘eroded to about 20 years before Magna Carta’. Again, something else that’s on display...

And what exactly is a commonwealth?

“Be it Declared and Enacted by this present Parliament, and by the authority of the same, That the People of England and of all the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging are, and shall be, and are hereby Constituted, Made, Established, and Confirmed to be a Commonwealth and Free State; and shall henceforward be Governed as a Commonwealth and Free State by the Supreme Authority of this Nation, the Representatives of the People in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as Officers and Ministers for the good of the People, and that without any King or House of Lords.”
Act of Parliament, 19 May 1649

I went to a seminar at the start of the week which looked at the historical development of the terms ‘state’ and ‘commonwealth’ in early modern France. (There was a lot about Jean Bodin.)

Coincidentally, the meaning of the latter term has come up during two of the breakfast tours of the gallery this week, as the section ‘Parliament and People’ is stuffed with documents talking about the Commonwealth – that is, the name for the republican government in England following the execution of Charles I in 1649, rather than the modern-day association of former dominions, colonies and dependencies.

It’s one of those words that have a long history, with subtle and important shifts. It originated in the medieval period as a term for the ‘common good’, meaning a body politic or community whose ultimate purpose is the creation of the conditions that lead to a life of virtue.

In such an environment, private interests are secondary to those of the wider public – but if people are virtuous then they will happily coincide. Under the Tudors, dissent could be suppressed as running counter to the ‘commonwealth’. By the end of the 16th century, the term also implied a society made up of freemen, as Sir Thomas Smith suggested in 1577: ‘A common-wealth is called a society... of a multitude of free men, collected together, and vnited by common accord and couenants among themselues.’

Around this time, the term could also suggest a community that was governed by the consent of the people, or, as Walter Ralegh put it, ‘Government of the whole Multitude of the base and poorer Sort’. The people were sovereign.

With these ideas in mind, the victors of the Civil Wars declared England to be a Commonwealth in 1649 (the original of the text quoted above is on display in the exhibition).

It is perhaps easy to understand why the term carried on in the North American colonies, as in the Commonwealths of Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where ‘sturdy commonwealths… sprung from the seed of the Mayflower’ (James Russell Lowell), but following the Restoration in 1660, you’d have thought the term would have been retired from public use given its regicide associations. Instead, it was adopted by various groups, particularly thinkers and writers who were inspired by classical republican virtues (if not republican government), and participated in what they imagined as a ‘commonwealth of letters’.

In the 19th century, constitutional theorists write about the United Kingdom’s ‘kingly commonwealth’ and Lord Roseberry is happily talking about the British Empire as a ‘commonwealth of nations’ during a speech in Adelaide. It was found to be a handy term during the First World War for the relationship between Britain and the self-governing dominions (with their potential recruits to the field of battle). By 1940, Churchill is working the term into his ‘This was their finest hour’ speech.

Finally, and on a different note, the artwork Entropa has caused some embarrassment in Prague. One of our exhibition's interactive questions asks what sculpture should be placed on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. I wonder what David Černý would propose?

Politicians engage with the man in the Clapham internet cafe

I received an email from Anthony Barnett, who kindly loaned to the exhibition the first printing of Charter 88, reminding me that the ‘Convention on Modern Liberty’ is not far away (28 February to be exact).

This has no formal connection with the exhibition, but it is clearly dealing with many of the issues it considers, not least what are our ‘fundamental freedoms’, and where do we stand on them today.

I note that the challenges listed on their website include not only counter-terrorism and the ‘database state’, but also ‘financial breakdown’, surely something that wasn’t on the convention’s planners’ minds at the start of the process.

It’s also an interesting website, with lots of Web 2.0 elements that are integrated quite elegantly (and also include a YouTube clip of Hancock’s famous Magna Carta ‘did she die in vain?’ clip – something I wanted in the show, but copyright and costs prevailed).

The relationship between the web and politics was something that we thought about including in the exhibition, but space and time ruled out. And, of course, the web makes a better home for that sort of discussion. It has come up during tours, though, and the petitions from the Civil War have led several visitors to remark on the current version, the Number 10 e-petition site.

Politicians such as David Cameron and political parties seem to be getting better at making decent-looking sites, and campaign groups and citizen journalists have also been using them to turn politics, if not on its head, then at least to glance in a different direction.

None have proved as web-savvy as the Obama campaign, and it will be interesting to see how the president-elect uses the web once he is actually president. It even looks like he may get to hold onto his Blackberry (‘They’re going to pry it out of my hands’).

Hearteningly, I was speaking to Jacob in the press office today, and he mentioned that the Taking Liberties interactive has had over 100,000 responses, the majority of which have been online, rather than in the St Pancras exhibition alone.

The fundamental human right to call table tennis any name you like

Happy New Year. A friend has reminded me of my responsibilities to this blog, so here is the first post of 2009.

I helped on a tour of the exhibition this morning by groups from the Home Office and the Mayor of London’s office. On the way round I point out the horrible suffragette doll, which was apparently shoved through a Welsh suffragette’s door by an anti-suffrage protester in the 1910s.

I wondered if we should now think of it as constructed not from a ping-pong ball but a ‘whiff-whaff’ ball – although this Johnsonian name for table tennis has been contested.

As the tour ended, a discussion about rights and responsibilities – two current political buzzwords – began. Should the two be linked, or are rights inalienable? Some, such as those staked out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act are certainly not contingent on good behaviour, but are qualities inherent in being human.

But other aspects seem more contractual, especially those that relate to the social contracts set out by Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others. John Stuart Mill has another, more practical, view altogether.

I had planned to talk for 30 minutes, but the tour had lasted an hour, and I worried that I had bored for England. But as it was only just 9.30 in the morning, perhaps this was a sign that the exhibition had sparked our interest?