Taking Liberties

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?