You want to know where we go from here? We need a new Magna Carta. Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy recently said he wanted “an insurgency to take our rights back from the state”. This now includes our right to honest government, though I think we always knew that. The emphasis needs to be on achieving this.
In February the Convention on Modern Liberty in London and across the UK showed a clear public concern with the threat of authoritarian power and a hunger to debate and confront it in an intelligent and democratic way. Guy Aitchison, Clare Coatman and Tom Ash are, from today, launching Magna Carta 2.0 with the aim of taking the spirit and intelligence of the day to the country.
They have a post setting out the idea here on OurKingdom. I’m joining them. We need you to as well if you have a moment – on your own terms and in your own way and whatever your political affiliations if you are a democrat concerned with how we’re governed.
Here are six problems they set out:
1. The corruption and suborning of parliament as a check on the executive, which accelerated after the Iraq invasion.
2. The rise of a surveillance society: from the blanket logging of all our electronic communications to CCTV to travel scrutiny
3. The sharing of personal information on official and commercial databases: the rise of the so-called database state.
4. Growing police autonomy, both nationally – the Association of Chief Police Officers, for example, is an independent corporate entity not a public body – and internationally, especially within the EU.
5. Exploitation of the threats of crime and terrorism to excessively enhance state power and undermine our fundamental rights often accompanied by encouraging populist fears and alarms
6. The exercise of arbitrary and unaccountable power by government agencies and quangos.
Here is what we want to do about it: launch Magna Carta 2.0 on Sunday 14 June at Runnymede, or at a place near you, on the anniversary of its signing. Then, take the issues to candidates everywhere and draw up a Parties and Candidates Audit across the whole civil liberties and human rights agenda before the end of the year, not by questionnaire but by meetings, public and private, in pubs, tea rooms and bars. Then, hold a convention of some kind in June 2010, face to face with the incoming government.
And then? The point is to start as we need to carry on: in an open, cooperative fashion, sharing concerns, building energy, learning not lecturing, facing the big issues, being cross-party not tribalist, confronting the big picture.
I want to emphasise two things. From climate change to the digitalisation of our identities we are facing huge changes. These create inadvertent as well as deliberate dangers. It is right to be very suspicious of who is doing what. But not to be totally paranoid.
Indeed a big part of the problem is the weakness of government, as a civil culture of honest public service and public values has vaporised. We need to research, investigate, debate and map what is happening. As Calvino once said, we need an open frame of reference as there is no longer a well-proven system or working tradition we can link to. Also this is not just about government. Corporate power, including big media, gain as parliament crumbles.
MC2 is about what we do now and how we govern ourselves. But it goes wider than the political system as we have known it. It isn’t exclusive, on the contrary it’s about linking up organisations, campaigns and blogs.
It’s a chance to make a little history the way you’d like it to be. We’ll launch on June 14th. Add your sword!
Cross-posted on Liberal Conspiracy
What worries me, besides the databasse state, CCTV and intrusion into my private life. Is the return to serfdom we are slowly going towards.
Since the adoption of the minimum wage (which is not a liveable wage), all companies are slowly taking the general workers pittance towards it. Their is now NO overtime rate, NO weeke-end allowance. What incentive to work more hours? To make a decent wage I would have to work an 80 hour week on flat rate. As I am 62 and have had various operations, this is too tiring.
Companies wonder why sales are going down, when they keep raising prices to see what they can get away with, then they tell us they can’t afford a raise for us because sales have gone down. If someone complains then the companies take their production and call centres abroad to get slave wage labour abroad! It might be a good rate in a foreign Country, but it is ruining our economy. Also successive Governments have imported foreign labour to get jobs done cheaper. 70 years and we have seen Italians, Jamaicans, Indians, Irish, Chinese, Poles etc. come and do work for poor pay by our standards, but excellent by their homeland economies. I have nothing against these foreign workers, just successive Governments, who encourage them in to threaten our home boys and girls job security and liveable wage.
The Government lies about the rate of inflation, being only 1 or 2 percent, whereas us on low incomes see our bills go up between 12 and 20%, if not more. The only rich are now company directors, shareholders (who companies are afraid of), Banks (central), and thieving Politicians (who should be afraid of losing power, but are not).
I have never before had to go cap in hand begging for help with my Rent, Tax, food etc. paying everything by direct debit, then with nothing left over to eat.
ACT QUICKLY before these B’s fleece the next level of citizens totally, those who have had to cut back, but can still pay their way. The barons of today need holding in check, because ultimately it is about the control of every penny of the minions (all of us) money. I always thought that Politicians and the Police were public servants? Not dictators of our every move and penny spent! The Politicians laugh at us minions, thinking us powerless. We can vote in a different political party, only to have more of the same if slightly watered down version.
As a poorly paid worker, I wonder how I will survive when I retire? All my saving have gone. I have no Pension. I am Totally at the mercy of the State (what they want for all citizens). They should fear us, not us them. If nothing is done we will all be literally held at machine gun point if we dissent. Freedom not Serfdom NOW.
Graham
I think in the meantime it would be good to get the politicians to adopt the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which was designed to specifically protect a nation and its people against totalitarism.
If you read this simple and beautiful documentation, you will see the protections it would offer us immediately and we are in dire need of that protection now.
There is no reason for the politicians of all parties to immediately sign up to this document. By doing so, they will signal to us that they do in fact believe in democracy and freedom.
If you people, with your media contacts could get a campaign going to this end in the media and make this happen, you will have protected us at a time when we are in grave danger.
Guys, you might want to read and support this, found at: https://www.thebcgroup.org.uk/
Reclaiming Our Sovereignty
Once again, we have reached a crossroads in our history. We are confronted with an enemy that would destroy our nation and its people. We have some hard decisions to make – each of us, individually. Are you prepared to make them?
The British Constitution Group’s call for Lawful Rebellion now moves up a notch and our campaign ‘Wanted – 1 million rebellious Britons’ has commenced, to be formally declared at our conference in London on the 13th June.
If you share our ambition to take back control of our country, then we need your commitment and attendance at this conference, at which we will outline our strategy to build our campaign into a force to be reckoned with.
Read more of this article written by Roger Hayes.
I fully support the aims and objectives of Magna Carta 2.0. However, I am concerned that there has been so little coverage of it in the media. Many people know little, or next to nothing about your worthy campaign. Surely, further efforts should be made to change this?
Petition on Democratic Reform
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Our-Democracy/
`We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure before he starts reforming our democracy that we are allowed to vote in a referendum on his
proposals.
Submitted by Paul Hopkinson – Deadline to sign up by: 10 June 2010`
The PM can certainly ignore this petition, but I suggest that, if we match or exceed the number of signatures that are in the petition to ask him to resign, that it’s going to be a lot harder to claim that his own proposals are all done for our best interests.
This petition is a very useful tool to support and to publicise the extensive work that has been undertaken for many years by those organisations that support the Convention for Modern Liberty, and is a means to wrest back control of the debate on political reform from the political parties and their hangers-on.
Today, i learned that my friends sister has had her
fingerprints taken by her school. Since when have
lunchtime monitors lost the use of their eyesight.
This has left me severly unnerved. We are
fingerprinting ‘children’ in a democracy, “are we really
still, in a free country”; by the looks of it, not for much
longer, if at all.
Whats wrong with the original Magna carta? Why Magna carta 2.0? We need all are traditional freedoms that where lost and or forgoten about.
The following comment on the title “Magna Carta 2.0″ may seem, I acknowledge, both pedantic and rather trivial but I want to argue that the adoption of this title has the unintended effect of undermining and making fragile what should be a fundamental and lasting claim.
The adoption of the software development classification of “2.0″, on the assumption that the Magna Carta of 1215 is version 1.0, simply invites the view that “2.0″ is not fundamental but transitory. The corollary of this is that an update of 2.1, 2.2, 2.2.1, etc will be required. The necessity of such updates is a function of either the ill-thought out 2.0 or the post hoc discovery of some basic error.
I would have thought that the essential characteristic of any charter or bill of rights or equivalent would be its clarity, its robustness and its longevity. After all is this not why we constantly refer, even today, to Magna Carta : there is something enduring.
“Magna Carta 2.0″ suggests to me not something inherently worthy, reliable and enduring but something ersatz, ephemeral and contingent. I appreciate that “2.0″ has something of our times about it – but that is precisely its problem since it is precisely to secure freedoms from the unfreedoms of our times that we are trying to organise.