Taking Liberties

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.

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.

John who?

Today is a birthday: John Milton, the poet and polemicist, is 400.

Milton railed against the tyranny of the rhyme and the tyranny of wicked kings and, in Paradise Lost, created perhaps the supreme poetical achievement in the English language.

Today, his anniversary has been marked not so much by celebration as a series of questions about why he has rather dropped off the cultural map in modern Britain. Is his poetry too hard, was he too much of a grim misogynist, did TS Eliot and FR Leavis see him off, or was he simply on the wrong side of the Civil War?

When I showed the MP David Heath around the exhibition last week, his eyes were drawn to Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), the supreme and original defence of the freedom of the press and cradle of liberal thought. A copy, he remarked, had been passed from one Liberal leader to the next. This may explain why there were early calls for this to be in the exhibition at the LibDem conference.

There are other contemporary Miltonian influences, some of them rather indirect. We may have the poet to thank for brilliantly foul-mouthed political satire The Thick of It, since the writer Armando Iannucci’s post-graduate study of Paradise Lost drove him to a career in comedy. And there would be no His Dark Materials series without the poet.

Finally, those with an interest in psychogeography can visit the Taking Liberties web editor's excellent Google ‘Milton Map’.

Facebook 1776: America is no longer listed as being in a relationship

A friend kindly sent me a text at 5am this morning, so I woke up to hear the US President Elect's speech on the radio, making a mix of old and new media (SMS and, well, DAB).

But up to 2am, and then from 5am, the new, social media had been buzzing. It was nerve-racking fun to sip a drink and catch up with friends en masse via IM, forums, and email in the US and across the UK as we saw pictures of people voting from NYTimes.com, debated the merits of CNN and MSNBC stream, and wondered about what it meant.

This morning, Professor Sue Thomas posted an update on Facebook that the social media – things such as Facebook, blogs and twitter – had transformed the Democrats' election machine, something the Republicans had been unable to do. It certainly helped to achieve the record amount of campaign dollars that Obama has raised.

The exhibition's interactive (which you can also do online, now) points to the challenge posed by new forms of communications technology in terms of citizenship and politics. But I also like an older – and very rare – printed document on show: the Dunlap printing of the Declaration of Independence. There are 25 known copies of this revolutionary broadside (it was 24 until a couple of years ago, when a stray copy turned up at a flea market).

It includes some of the most famous lines of any historical text: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” The language and sentiments are of course indebted to the Englishman John Locke, whose thoughts on government are on display in the same case.

The Declaration was drafted at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R Livingston, with Jefferson providing most of the text. Late on 4 July, the revised text was approved, and the 'Representatives of the United States of America in General Congress Assembled' authorised copies to be printed and 'proclaimed in each of the United States & at the head of the army'.

John Dunlap, a young printer at nearby 48 High Street and Market Street, was charged with producing these copies. He ran off 200 copies that night (making the odd mistake in the text along the way), long before the final manuscript copy of the Declaration was formally signed. The copy on display at the Library was captured by British forces and sent back to London, where they assumed the government would be interested to read the news 'that the associated Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, free and independent States, and they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.'

I doubt they would be friends on Facebook.