Taking Liberties

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.

The Cabinet

A running theme of this blog could be things that we couldn't include for one reason or another. One item that we considered requesting as a loan was a document signed by all members of Lloyd George's cabinet in Inverness in 1921. The PM called the meeting during his holiday in Gairloch to respond to the declaration of the Irish republic. Until recently, it was the one confirmed occasion that the cabinet had met outside of London.

The signatures would have been interesting to display in the section on 'The United Kingdom?', but it would have also been something around which we could have discussed the idea of cabinet government. Traditionally, discussions in the cabinet are private - allowing, in theory, frank debate. Members are expected to present a united front afterwards. The need for a space for untrammelled debate within government is at the crux of the current decision not to make public the debate about decision on the Iraq War.

In the end, we decided not concentrate on the nuts and bolts of how the UK is governed (Parliamentary committees, how bills are scrutinised and legislated, the relationship between local and national government, and so on), but to try and bring out some of the crucial, central issues, such as where does power lie, what does sovereignty mean, and where did the idea of political 'rights' come from.

I suspect the final question will come up at a lecture taking place at Royal Holloway on 3 March, when Peter Linebaugh will be talking about the Magna Carta Manifesto. And, while I'm plugging, Will Kaufman will be playing and talking about the songs of Woody Guthrie at the BL this evening. Or, if you're staying in, find out more about Magna Carta on the One Show at 7pm.

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.

Web Editor's note: Where do you stand on today's issues? Take our interactive journey now and find out

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?

Blowing the trumpet for whistle-blowers

Deep Throat has died. Mark Felt, a former FBI official, ‘slipped away’ in his sleep last night. In 2005 he admitted that he was ‘the guy they used to call Deep Throat’: the man who gave reporters from the Washington Post the inside information about President Nixon’s abuse of presidential powers which led to his resignation in August 1974.

Mr Felt, it is reported, struggled for years with the feeling that he had betrayed the FBI with his leak, and was called a traitor by many for ‘betraying’ his Commander-in-Chief. For others, he was a hero, blowing the whistle on corruption at the highest level.

Leaks and whistle-blowing are not limited to the continental USA – and the English Civil War might be said to have begun because of an abuse of executive authority. The penultimate case in the exhibition – the section on Freedom of Speech and Belief – has several British 20th-century examples: Compton Mackenzie’s memories of the secret service during World War I, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (a Danish edition), and Spies for Peace’s uncovering of post-nuclear attack military government.

Freedom of Information and the Human Rights Act has changed the balance of power somewhat in the UK. But there are other ideas out there, some vastly more radical, some possibly unworkable. Open Source Government, for example, is based on the idea of radical transparency.

In the current absence of such neo-liberal, technocratic utopias, we can thank people like Mr Felt – and wonder if, locally, we are lacking the same responsible, but acutely scrutinising Fourth Estate that broke the Watergate scandal.

Facebook democracy: a group worth joining?

A couple of weeks ago, I had to select and pull some items from the Library’s Americas Collections for a Radio 4 programme, The Long View. The show compared the problems facing the president-elect, Barack Obama, to those confronting Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.

The programme was hosted by Jonathan Freedland, whose book Bring Home the Revolution made a something of an impression around Westminster – and garnered some envious reviews – when it was published in 1998.

In essence, Freedland's book made the case for the US’s political culture, arguing that democracy was more rooted from the ground up, and that voting on everything, from the school board and local fire chief, to the congress and president, was a good thing, and should be brought back to the UK.

It could be argued that it made an impression on government as well, and plans for regional assemblies, local consultations and elections to police authority were laid. Most of these have been abandoned, rejected, or (as MPs are fond of saying) 'kicked into the long grass'. (However e-petitions seem to be reasonably vital – even if they have been dominated by causes, such as changing the national anthem to a Human League song, that seem to have wandered in from Facebook by mistake.)

Today we read that the Home Office has dropped police election plans], for reasons that are not entirely clear. There is, no doubt, a certain amount of politics involved, and also a desire for some groups, such as the existing police authorities and local councillors, to protect their own interests. There have also been fears that far-right groups might garner undue influence.

I wonder if this says something wider about the political culture in the UK. The exhibition has lots of examples of mass, local involvement in politics, such as the Chartists and the suffragettes; and we had no room to include a section on the importance of local government, such as Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham, or the various London authorities which have, at times, been an alternative nexus of power to the Home Office.

Has this tradition died out, or has another habit, that of deference and delegation of power upwards, which admittedly has always also been present, come to dominate?

Finally, there is a wonderful picture of a policeman in the exhibition, which almost makes a visit worthwhile by itself: Olive Wharry’s prison scrapbook from the 1910s. A suffragette, she had been convicted of the very Edwardian crime of burning down the Kew Refreshment Pavilion. She carefully cut out a newspaper photograph, and labelled it as a policeman ‘carrying our bags’ as they were taken to prison, as though he was a porter.

Charter flight

The exhibition contains at least four charters – Magna Carta; the Charter of the Forests; the People’s Charter; and Charter 88. There are probably more that I’ve missed out.

A statement of agreed principles is a common, and often powerful, way of making political change (and, of course, for resisting it). A curatorial colleague passed me this link from the New York Review of Books: along with Charter 77 (Czechoslovakia) and the local Charter 88, there is now ‘Charter 08’.

Signed by hundreds of Chinese intellectuals, Charter 08 calls for the introduction of democracy and human rights in China. It was published on 10 December, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.