History Today March 2009 | Volume: 59 Issue: 3 | Page 8-8 | Words: 997 | Author: Marquand, David
How Free are We? Liberty in Britain
As a major conference on the nature of liberty opens, David Marquand questions the free and democratic legacy that British history has bequeathed to the country and citizens of today.
Scottish and English identities. In the wars of the early-19th century, Britain claimed she was fighting to free Europe from the ‘Corsican tyrant’; 100 years later, she fought against the Prussian jackboot. Margaret Thatcher sent a task force to the Falkland Islands in the name of British freedom, and denounced the Brussels Commission for seeking to smother freeborn Britons in a corporatist embrace.
In recent years, the theme has surfaced again – only this time, in a largely left-wing guise. At the start of his prime ministership, Gordon Brown devoted a long and closely argued speech to ‘British liberty’; now New Labour’s critics fulminate against the Government’s contempt for the liberties which the present generation of Britons is supposed to have inherited from its forebears.
All this makes for rousing perorations. Unfortunately, the truth is less uplifting. There is a long-standing democratic republican tradition in Britain’s political culture. John Milton, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, G.D.H. Cole, R.H. Tawney and (in some of his moods) George Orwell are only some of its luminaries. But it is a minority tradition – one of outsiders, not of insiders; of losers not of winners. After the Restoration in 1660, Milton went in fear of his life; the ‘British Jacobins’ who followed Paine were suppressed; Mill’s vision of active self-government on the local level is further from realisation today than when he wrote; Cole’s vision of industrial democracy has had no more influence on Labour governments than on Conservative ones.
No one should be surprised by this. The British state has been – and in a host of ways still is – an imperial state. In its 18th-century adolescence, it was the most ruthless imperial predator in Europe; in its 19th-century maturity it presided urbanely over the greatest empire the world had ever seen. But it was urbane only because it was strong enough to be: because the predations of its earlier years had been spectacularly more successful than those of its rivals. The relaxed and tolerant governing class that ruled it liked to think it embodied a Whig tradition of ordered freedom and evolutionary progress, whose blessings would spread to all the varied races it embraced. But in the last resort the empire rested on force, as was shown by the savagery with which the great Indian uprising of 1857 was put down. The alleged British tradition of liberty was confined to whites of British descent; it did not extend to blacks or browns.
In Britain’s possessions in Africa and Asia, Hilaire Belloc’s lines vividly caught the essence of empire:
"Whatever happens,
We have got
The Maxim gun,
And they have not"
During the Atlantic revolutions of the 18th century, Britain was on the wrong side. The American revolution was directed against British rule; the allegedly freedom-loving British elite sought to prevent the American colonists from enjoying the blessings of liberty. It was the same story during the French revolution. To the frightened British elite, it seemed that France had plunged into an abyss of anarchy, spoliation and atheism. The British state, backed by a wave of anti-revolutionary popular patriotism, became the lynch-pin of a Europe-wide counter-revolutionary alliance, bent on restoring the ancien régime and snuffing out the subversive dream of liberty, equality and fraternity.
In truth, the freeborn Briton is a myth. British freedoms have always rested on custom and convention, not on any fundamental law: on the transient goodwill of a mostly generous political elite, not on the sovereignty of the people. They have always been at risk from the all-powerful, inalienably sovereign Crown-in-Parliament. The charge against the surveillance state of the 21st century is not that it is eroding ancient liberties, which the British never fully possessed. It is that an over-mighty and panicky state is using a constitution which has always been essentially monarchical rather than republican to extend its reach ever-more deeply into the marrow of civil 
society. The task for today’s democratic republicans is not to fight a backward-looking battle in defence of the mythical freeborn Briton. It is to mobilise our fellow-citizens in a forward-looking campaign for a democratic constitution based on the principles of inalienable human rights and popular sovereignty: to make British liberty a reality instead of a comforting fiction.
The Convention on Modern Liberty is an all-day event taking place on Saturday February 28th at the Institute of Education, London WC1.
See www.modernliberty.net
The exhibition ‘Taking Liberties: the Struggle for Britain’s Freedoms and Rights’ runs at the British Library until March 1st. See www.bl.uk
