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Taking Liberties. The Struggle for Britain’s Freedoms and Rights
by Mike Ashley, 2008
A review by Lucy Sackville
Produced as a tie-in with the Taking Liberties exhibition, this book examines the processes and conflicts by which the liberties of modern Britain were won and secured. There are six principal chapters with a rough correspondence to the themes of the exhibition space, covering The Roots of Liberty, National Liberties, Freedom of Worship and Conscience, The Rights of the Individual, The Right to Vote, The Right to Welfare. These ideas are explored throughout the book in series of chapters that focus on a different document or set of documents.
Outline
As in the exhibition, Magna Carta is once again the touchstone here, the foundation and reference point, which Ashley introduces through its rehabilitation and magnification by Coke in the seventeenth century, before talking about what it really was, and how it acquired the resonance that it now has. As an interesting corrective to this hero-worship, Ashley offers the idea that, for people previous to the seventeenth century, we should look to Domesday for the document that fulfilled this role in people’s minds, in as much as the rights and territory enshrined by Domesday were seen to represent, however mistakenly, an ancient status quo that could be called upon by anybody.
From Magna Carta we are led through the development of parliament, and the gradual realization and extension of Edward I’s declaration that ‘what touches all should be agreed by all.’(p.26) Ashley takes us through the execution Charles I (the death warrant is one of the more striking items in the exhibit, and is one of the many high quality images reproduced here) to the rise of Parliament, the drafting of a constitution that was later discarded in the Restoration, and the entrenching of the ‘United Kingdom’ in the same period. The movement here is from Magna Carta to United Kingdom, and the development of a rule of law through the history of these centuries.
Ashley’s treatment of Freedom of Worship and Conscience, which deals with religious persecution and freedom of the press, takes us farther back than the exhibition, as far back as the anti-Semitic actions of 1190 onwards. He also includes a discussion of the impact of Wyclif in the development of an English Bible, which sets up the connection between religious conflict and political unrest that is a major theme of this section, though Wyclif’s work is an interesting omission from the exhibition itself. The move towards an English Bible is connected to, of course, the invention of printing, and this brings with it issues of freedom of speech and control, and the fight to secure freedom for the press and of speech, a journey via Wilkes to recent immigration. That move to modern issues then elicits a return to religious intolerance as manifested in recent years, namely in Northern Ireland.
The concept that rights could be attached to individuals begins to emerge from the currents of debate over freedom of worship, equality under law, and the possibility of a constitution, as outlined in the previous chapters. Ashley’s treatment of the Rights of the Individual opens with the wonderful cover illustration of Leviathan, and traces the emergence of the social contract from Hobbes onwards, taking in the parallel developments across the Atlantic under the influence of Sidney and Locke, and exploring the fertile reflexivity and exchange between the US, the UK and revolutionary France, via Thomas Paine.
In real terms the influence of these ideas is explored in a discussion of the abolition of Slavery, and its impact on the nature of Parliament - which required to be reformed before slavery could be undone - as well as modern continuations of slavery. A brief examination of the rise of the women’s movement and the campaign for gay rights takes us up to International Human Rights, which then follows the 1998 Human Rights Act backwards to 1953, and further back, to HG Wells and Churchill’s speeches.
Connected with the rise of the individual as a bearer of rights, The Right to Vote starts in the 1790s, and the 1793 suspension of Habeas corpus in the wake of yet another war with France. From here we move through the holding back of reform, the rise of the Whigs and the 1832 Reform act, the People’s Charter, and women’s suffrage movements. Here the past as lens on the present is most clearly stated, and the perspective of the long struggle is brought to bear on the fact of low voter turnout in our own period.
The discussion of the Right to Welfare gives similar prominence to contemporary resonances, again, beginning in the late-eighteenth century with Bentham, and continuing through the care of children, and of the elderly, to arrive at care for those with disabilities. This section also includes a discussion of workers’ rights and strike action, all of which feeds into the treatment of poverty and the development of the Welfare State.
Analysis
Ashley has more space here to elaborate on historical themes than does the exhibition, and can also bring in other material, but like the exhibition, the book’s emphasis is on struggle, and the introduction presents a series of ‘basic paradoxes’ that are to inform our reading of the material, in the first place that there is no single location of British rights. The ‘constitution’, insofar as there is one, is instead a cumulative, varied thing that exists in a number of places and texts, a theme that the exhibition space reproduces – a multi-limbed, gestalt sort of constitution.
Also like the exhibition is the concern underlying this book that we don’t perhaps value our rights to the degree that we ought. ‘Do we take advantage of the freedoms past generations have fought for?’ asks the author, and the examination of the scope and length of the struggle is offered to encourage reflection on this, our inheritance and privilege. Each section of Ashley’s book reflects the concern of the exhibition to connect the past to more recent history, and to understand the ramifications of events.
The conclusion of the book is a focussed contemplation of all these rights in a contemporary context, and is essentially an attempt to answer this question – are we properly alive to the difficulties and struggles that have been undertaken by our predecessors in order that we can enjoy the rights we now take for granted, and do we have a responsibility to understand and inhabit those rights with more respect?
The boundary between protection and control, that is, at what point does the protection of freedom require a restriction of freedom, another paradox generated by the idea of liberty, also highlights the difficulties of navigating the line between protection and enforcement. Now that we have these rights, do we know where to draw the line? Ashley’s discussion of ideas such as the right to privacy (enshrined in the Human Rights Act, but not in English Law) the prevalence of CCTV, the amount of private data stored, including the storage of DNA (currently 7% of England’s population), and freedom of speech shows how difficult that boundary is to negotiate.
However, Ashley presents us with some worrying food for thought. He quotes a statistic from Liberty that 60 acts of parliament, passed since 1997, have between them created 3,000 new offences. He points out that the 2003 Criminal Justice Act included the option to dispense with Trial by Jury, and the Counter Terrorism Bill suggests 42 days without trial, ‘a major infringement of habeas corpus’.(p.137) He ends with an appeal for caution: even though, he says, surveys have shown broad support for these measures if they protect our safety, they are at the same time undermining our oldest freedoms. An invocation of Magna Carta, this time in his own voice, brings us neatly full circle.