Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy.net.

A social entrepreneur of wide experience, Anthony helped launch Charter 88 in 1988 and was its first Director. Generating widespread support he turned it into a movement for the democratic reform of Britain (at the end of the 90s the Telegraph described it as the UK's "most influential pressure group of the decade"). Anthony is also a writer and journalist. He is the author of Iron Britannia; Soviet Freedom and This Time; and co-author and editor of among other books, Aftermath: the Struggle of Vietnam and Cambodia; Power and the Throne, Town and Country and a considerable range of articles and pamphlets covering politics and culture, such as (with Peter Carty), The Athenian Option – radical reform for the House of Lords (Demos, 1998) and the television film, England's Henry Moore. He writes regularly for openDemocracy and contributes to many of its debates.

Recent articles

Bonfire of the Constitution

The following has been published in The Guardian's brilliant Comment is Free I was impatient for it to go up and having not heard from them ran it here. But it is their credit. So now it is in quotes. Thank you Cif.

Two developments yesterday have finally blown up Britain's uncodified constitution, symbolically just before the anniversary of Guy Fawke's early efforts (which thankfully did not succeed!).

The publication of the Kelly report on MPs expenses makes it certain that members of parliament will no longer be in charge of their own pay and remuneration. Their exceptional sovereignty as the supreme body, one which therefore had in its nature to be self-regulating, is now universally derided as a clubland hangover. They still call  each other honourable members. But who regards them as such, or trusts them to be so? Now, not even they do!  However, the legitimacy of the uncodified constitution rested on their being different from members of the assemblies of other, lesser countries. The normalisation of MPs, which turns them into employees, breaks the spiritual basis of Britain's unique form of rule.

At the same time David Cameron's commitment to pass a United Kingdom Sovereignty Bill is explicitly designed to bind all future parliaments, breaking the larger, external mechanism of parliamentary sovereignty. Indeed, his proposal is justified by him has having the effect of a written constitution. He says, in his speech, which is well worth reading in full, that his proposal will "simply put Britain on a par with Germany, where the German Constitutional Court has consistently upheld - including most recently on the Lisbon treaty - that ultimate authority lies with the bodies established by the German Constitution".

"Never Again" is his slogan. But "never say never" is the genetic code of traditional British sovereignty. Cameron's proposes to formally recognise the termination of the formal uniqueness of the UK's unwritten constitution.

In practice it was already shredded. First by membership of the EU, then by the creation of Scottish and Welsh parliaments which Westminster cannot now undo on its own, third by the Human Rights Act. In effect, Cameron is recognising parliament's new constitutional status, that it is no longer sovereign. Previously, those who passed these laws always denied their transformative status. Now it is undeniable.

The old constitution is over, bust, no more, a dead parrot.

You might ask, does this make Cameron a constitutional radical? Or a democrat? Alas, it seems not. He has the better democratic argument on his sde with respect to the EU, though he has surrendered much of it by failing to call for a referendum of any kind. But he is playing the inheritance he hopes for in exacty the fashion of his role model Tony Blair: updating the centralisation it offers those who win office with a winner-takes-all system.

Helena on Blair - his candidacy may not be dead yet

I missed this letter by Helena in Sunday's Observer. It exactly sums up my views (assuming that his proposed role as a TV presenter is a joke - it made me laugh - but Helena is generous by nature and always looking for ways people might redeem themselves). I fear that Blair will try and sneek in under the radar now he is no longer a leading candidate and every effort should be made to prevent this. One of the other reasons he'd be very bad is the lowering effect he has on everyone's judgement. The number of cliches his supporters trot out are enough to sink the political class. Miliband especially excelled himself. Nonesense about Europe needing a 'big hitter' was perhaps the most frequent. Blair was a big misser. he couldn't even arouse 25 per cent of the electorate to support him in the 2005 election.

The presidency of Europe will be highly symbolic and Tony Blair is a wholly inappropriate person to hold the role. He misled our country – to secure support for a decision he had already made to join George Bush in the Iraq war. In doing so, he showed total disrespect for international law, the United Nations and the views of his European partners; he destabilised the world and was naively cavalier as to the cost in human lives.

Domestically,he was disrespectful of the rule of law and civil liberties, hollowed out the Labour party and deepened the divide between rich and poor. He cravenly bowed to the demands of Rupert Murdoch, the neoconservatives in America, the extreme pro-Israeli lobby and his friends in the City. He showed poor judgment in his choice of associates. His freeloading was shameful. Indeed, his lifestyle epitomises the worst values of a materialistic age. He does not have the qualities of a leader, but would be an excellent television presenter.

Helena Kennedy

 

Bye Bye Winston?

Just watched the BBC's Into the Storm on Churchill's - and Britain's - two Finest Hours. The first being May 1940 and the birth of Churchillism when the country and its Empire stood alone against Nazism and the country rallied to his standard, the second being April 1945 when the old brute was voted out and Labour given its Churchillist mandate to build a land for all.

There was compelling period detail and good performances. But overall I feel that finally Churchill may be slipping into history. The story was told as if it was a middle class marriage crisis: here were three in the marriage, Winston, Clementine and the damn war. It got into bed with him, wore him out, made him rude, but the good woman kept going, saved him - and the marriage - from himself and was generally speaking the grownup to his childish impetuosity. Hmmm.

While there was always endless fascination with Churchill the man and he played to the gallery in person and in his language, it was more than a matter of personality. The film ran him as a celebrity, looking behind the public figure to ask about the 'real' person. But what mattered was the way he triggered immense identification with the struggle and the war, from stoicism to sacrifice, from all classes and parties. Once this was created in 1940, it crystallised around him and carried him forward, he was shaped by the popular determination more than he shaped it, after the initial stand and appeal. 

Now, with shallow exploitation by the BNP and sentimental personification by the BBC, this unifying force is waning. His appeal to 'the British race' with the fall of Singapore a signal of his coming anachronism.

There were some inaccuracies that went beyond artistic license. At the start, Halifax's attempt to seek negotiation as Hitler's armies swept into France was much closer run and, again, not as personal as Into The Storm makes it. Read John Lukacs' short, gripping account, Five Days in London if you want to know what happened in May 1940 and how close it was. He gives an account of the tiny war cabinet. The meeting where the full Cabinet applauded was the aftermath. There had been a real battle for influence not just a him-or-me showdown.

Our normal revolutions: 1989 and change in our time

Old-fashioned revolutions of the mass against the oppressors are out. History now delivers revolutionary normalisations

(This article was first published on 29 October 2009)

The Revolution We Need

On Thursday I published an article in openDemocracy on the revolutions of 1989. I argue that they were a new kind of peaceful insurrection by people who want their societies to become normal. I also argue that this is what happened in Britain in the same year with the support for Charter 88, thought this was just about our political system. It still has to happen - the difference now is that everyone knows it. I think it is going to be an important essay for me. I wrote it on impulse and learnt what I thought as I wrote it. It opens up a fresh way of seeing the impulse for change that is all around us. I had a long standing committment to speak at the Battle of Ideas that I just blogged and I road-tested the argument from the oD article. Here's the text of what I said on Saturday. (PS: an audio recording of the whole session is here)

"Thank you for inviting me to talk to the Battle of Ideas at this session on Freedom, there is a very welcome, intense and serious atmosphere.

Twenty years ago Stuart Weir launched Charter 88 from the New Statesman. Its opening words were

WE have been brought up in Britain to believe that we are free: that our Parliament is the mother of democracy; that our liberty is the envy of the world; that our system of justice is always fair; that the guardians of our safety, the police and security services, are subject to democratic, legal control; that our civil service is impartial; that our cities and communities maintain a proud identity; that our press is brave and honest. Today such beliefs are increasingly implausible.

Protecting liberty from arbitrary power was also included in the 1,500 word manifesto that followed. But Charter 88 was a call for reforms that would have made the UK a normal European polity. Its theme and battle cry was for constitutional democracy.

There were two old-fashioned assumptions: that we knew what liberty was and that it would be protected by a classical constitution.

I know members of the Institute of Ideas are not keen on writing down our constitution and I still am - so that it belongs to us, the people. Perhaps we should have another discussion about this some other time.

I’d also defend the far-sighted radicalism of Charter 88 in the British context, where (as I have just argued in openDemocracy) it would have been this country’s equivalent of the revolutions of 1989. Not delivered on the streets in the same way. It was only a political not a social and economic revolution. But delivered eventually by Labour in alliance with the Lib Dems had Blair embraced the “new constitutional settlement” that John Smith (his predecessor) called for. We would then have seen holistic or (to use the cant phrase of New Labour ‘joined up’) constitutional reform. Instead New Labour implemented a far-reaching but disintegrative programme whose consequences we confront today.

So I want to talk about the need to move on from Charter 88. For a start we now need to call for modern liberty – where I think there is a lot of agreement between us. And I want to say why ‘modern’.

The assumption two decades ago was that we could renew a classic inheritance of liberty by means of turning the UK into a normal, constitutional state. Now it may be that if we had had a new settlement after 1997 this would have transformed the relationship between state and citizen, openly refounding our politics to create a confident government – as has happened in Scotland.

Instead, we got the worst of two worlds in which the strengths of each undermined the other to create a chronically fraught, hysteric and dangerous polity. A transformative programme of constitutional reforms – parliaments, human rights acts, FoI, abolishing hereditary peerage – all went though with no attempt at a coherent settlement. Instead, the old state fought back against the threat of its decomposition with the modernisation of centralisation. This was compounded by New Labour’s “corporate populism”, a term I came up in 1999 to describe the way it modelled itself on corporate methods with its central control, marketing and spin, rather than democracy.

Take just one example of the consequence as I have to be brief. We had a system of parliamentary sovereignty in which the proud honourable members of the Commons and their Lordships exercised supreme uncodified power expressed in a Cabinet system. Clearly this was old-fashioned and unsuitable for the globalised world. Blair and company drew on the tradition to concentrate all sovereignty on…. the sofa. They celebrated the strong government that resulted. Its underside was parliamentary weakness, often bought, as we now know, for a song.

Fine, you might say, as they did, that shows the old system really worked. But at the same time Freedom of Information was introduced which is part of a codified, plural system. The result was a toxic explosion we are still choking under today.

While much of what is happening is born of weakness. It is the weakness of incoherence, of clashing wills each in their own way determined and experienced (see for example the battles between politicians and the judiciary). Above all the drive to remain a power - a world player - grips the British state. In its cause advanced methods have been adopted even when inappropriate. Hence the pioneering application of database technology and surveillance the dangers of which I don’t need to point out to this audience.

In these circumstances what should we look for?

At the end of his wonderful novel – if you have to read it already you should, and its an ideal Xmas present - The Dying Light, Henry Porter has an exchange between two characters in their battle with the database society. One welcomes what he calls “a revolution”. The other, a Henry hero corrects him, “no a restoration: the restoration of our rights and privacies, nothing more”.

My argument is that we cannot look to just a restoration, but nor are we seeking a classic, revolution.

The normal itself has been transformed. I was thinking we might express this with a campaign called “YES to ID”. Not its management by the state on our behalf, as the government aspires to, to which we should certainly say ‘NO”. But to its recognition, ownership and control by ourselves.

For what we are has changed. It is changing with digitalisation: our society, economy and politics are all being fundamentally remade. In these circumstances we can no longer assume that liberty remains the same. Certainly democracy can no longer rest upon the rules of representation – even when these are reformed in the UK to be fair in terms of voting, open in terms of primaries, and democratic in terms of an elected upper chamber. For a start the relationship of necessary trust no longer holds as corporate and media power has become so much the equal of political power.

What we need is modern liberty. What this means has yet to be fully formulated, but here is a start to listing its essential elements, please add yours: transparency, Yes to ID, participation and deliberation (in addition to representation), informed consent, free speech, openness, and human rights especially the international dimension has to be added to citizen politics in an age of accelerated migration.

To reverse the terms of the subtitle to this session, we should not seek to celebrate liberty and secure rights: we need to secure liberty and celebrate rights.

But for liberty to be secured it has to be renewed, hence modern liberty."