What has Magna Carta to do with me?

Someone wrote to me last year complaining about all the fuss being made about Magna Carta; surely there are more important things? It makes you wonder.

In 1213 it was a group of wealthy barons, not top of most people’s list for sympathy, who were crying ‘unfair’; the remainder of the population might well have been too, but no-one heard them, or bothered to write down what they said. The barons’ many complaints were legitimate; we would recoil at the thought of a widow being at the mercy of the king. The core of the complaint was as it so often has been over the centuries: money; the king needed it and the barons had it, and the king used, or rather abused his power to obtain it. Was King John then a uniquely bad king? Opinions differ, the issue was rather more what kingship meant and this is where Lincolnshire’s Archbishop Stephen Langton comes onto the stage. 

It seems that Langton had thought long and hard about kingship. He had a huge resource to inform his thinking: the biblical book of Kings and a particular commentary on it which is still among the Cathedral medieval manuscripts. The ancient Jews had agonised for generations over whether or not to have a king and, if they had one, just how would he fit between them and God? The thinking set the ground rules and from the start the king was not an absolute ruler. Langton took this thinking and brought it into a debate with a family of kings who clearly saw their power as absolute. It is many years since monarchs saw their power as absolute, or is it?

21^st century ‘monarchs’ tend not to be kings; most are individuals or groups who wield power given to them through a demographic process or taken by them through all kinds of violence. There others: organs of government, some of those who control the media and digital technologies, those who take massive risks in banking; the list goes on. The Magna Carta question is about the boundaries to be placed on their power. Power is a fact of life, but power must be exercised responsibly, fairly and within the rule of law.

Parliamentary democracy followed on quite quickly after Magna Carta with the De Montfort parliament in 1265, itself greatly influenced by another man of Lincolnshire Robert Grosseteste. It is and always has been Parliament that wrestles with the boundaries of power and all too often it is a complex and uneven fight. The whole question of surveillance is a very clear illustration.

So does Magna Carta matter? You bet is does. What child has never said, ‘it’s unfair’? How often is it truly unfair? How often do the powerful simply get away with it? Magna Carta is the weapon; society simply needs the bravery and determination of the barons to give it true voice.  

Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth

This book is a celebration in plotting. Dickens would have been proud. It takes the reader through half forgotten streets of the political stresses of the seventies. The three day week, Northern Ireland and Heath v Wilson. It takes us close to the literary world almost mixing history with fiction. His characters condemn nihilist writing and then he gives us a nihilist ending.
He just gets better

Magna Carta - The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015

Third Millennium are publishing a quite excellent book on Magna Carta edited by Professor Nicholas Vincent. It has a special Lincoln edition which highlights the particular role of this city in the Magna Carta story.

There is currently the opportunity to subscribe to this edition. Here is the link http://tmiltd.com/products/magna-carta-lincoln

I have had a sneak preview and find something totally absorbing. This ranges from the nature of law to the detail of just what the pressures were that brought it all together. But there is much more, it is the legacy of Magna Carta that truly matters. This is seen clearly in the constitution of the United States, but it is much wider. It is almost the legal air we breath, in much the same way as the christian heritage of 1000 years is the air we in the western world breath. It may not have detailed application but its influence in unmistakeable.

12 Years a Slave

This is a film you watch with an sense of reverence. The fully deserved plaudits for its makers are one reason, the gravity of the subject matter the other. Throughout the film the sound in my ear was 'Gott' the first word uttered by Florestan at the start of his aria in Beethoven's masterpiece, Fidelio. Florestan was imprisoned as a result of an abuse of power and it was only the love of his wife that saved him. But it is the parallel of abuse that struck me most strongly. Let no one say that Magna Carta is irrelevant. Power is abused each and every day and this only happens because ordinary people like you and me do nothing.

On Green Dolphin Street - Sebastian Faulks

I had avoided this book, having loved both Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, but then Engleby won my wholehearted respect. I took both On Green Dolphin Street and Ian McEwan's Enduring Love on holiday and started both. I am going to commit heresy. I found McEwan so well researched it was contrived, but Faulks, surely equally well researched, came to me natural from the page. It had more flavour, smell and touch.

Children of the sun

Simon Head offers an illuminating critique of the evolution of English elite to take full advantage of the extraordinary phenomenon of London as the global financial powerhouse.
Societies will always have their elites, but in England in the final third of the twentieth century, it looked as if the elite was broadening and becoming more porous. Head shows how the elite evolved from being simply the aristocracy to include leaders of the professions and financiers. Many of the elite families survived the transition and reinvented themselves. The public schools and Oxbridge  all serve to perpetuate this evolving elite.
What emerges is a society much closer in division to eighteenth century England, with an elite holding the majority of the wealth served by the remainder.
The banking collapse might have been seen as an end to this; in the event the elite not only survived but gained yet more strength.

Stop bashing bankers' bonuses

Today's Guardian reported Lord Turner running to the defence of those whom he had previously termed socially useless. This is all in the context of Vince Cable's speech to the LibDem conference where he stated his intention to shine a 'harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour.'
Turner rightly calls for policy changes to bring in the tight regulation which is vital if these massive institutions are to act in the interests of the customers and economies they serve.
It is a stark comparison to suggest that a bank might be bigger than the economy of the country in which it resides.
This is more than the anxieties over complex financial instruments about which I am writing in Broken Bonds, and much closer to Edward Heath's condemnation of the unacceptable face of capitalism which I recall was directed at Lonrho.