Levellers

This is a talk given by Melissa Lane at the session on Liberty, sovereignty and republicanism - Can the Leveller tradition be revived in the 21st century? at the Convention on Modern Liberty

Melissa Lane (King's College, Cambridge): The panel has already brought to light many of the major themes connected with the Levellers: freedom of religion and toleration; liberty from oppression, which is viewed as tyranny and slavery; popular sovereignty, or government as based on the ever-revocable consent of the people interpreted broadly, including the ordinary poor.  Indeed, against longstanding assumptions that the Levellers were little educated or more saintly than followers of Machiavelli, the humanist, radical, popular nature of Leveller republicanism has been well established by S.D. Glover.   To what has been said so far, focusing on the control of the executive, I would add the important Leveller preoccupation with the control also of the legislative or, in their terms, the ‘Representative’:  a Commons (parliament) which is free from the negative veto of Crown and Lords, but which is also controlled in its exercise of power by annual or biennial elections and a quiver of classical devices such as the rotation of offices, term limits, removal and scrutiny, designed to check ‘corrupt interests’.  Not only the fact of control by elected representatives, but the nature of that control, is a major Leveller concern which has clear ramifications for politics today.

Geoffrey Bindman (London, BIHR): My old school in Newcastle, founded in 1545, was proud of famous former pupils. Several of them were mentioned in the school song. Eldon was the procrastinating judge caricatured by Dickens in Bleak House, Armstrong an armament manufacturer, Collingwood was Nelson’s second-in–command at Trafalgar. Absent was John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers at the time of the English Civil War, who I discovered years later had been at the school in the early 17th century.

Lilburne is only now coming to be recognised as a fundamentally important figure in our political and constitutional history. He was also a man of extraordinary personal courage and determination. Cromwell thought highly of him and made him a colonel in his army but he became disillusioned with Cromwell when he abandoned the democratic programme which Lilburne passionately advocated.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Just returned from speaking at the Levellers Day festivities in Burford. On this day - 17 May - in 1649 three Levellers, Cornet Thompson, Corporal Perkins and Private Church, were executed as an example to the rest, as Cromwell crushed a rebellion amongst the early democrats in the rank and file of his army.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Just back from Washington DC and awake to the end of the Today programme with Geoffrey Robertson QC and Jack Straw on the Putney Debates. Geoffrey drives home their radicalism as the early but contemporary origins of modern liberty and trial by jury, Jack throws in the peasants revolt, Geoffrey just manages to squeeze in that we are debating principles and welcomes the Prime Minister and Straw for doing the same and the programme is quickly drawn to a close. Debating principles is for another day!

Dan Leighton (London, Power Inquiry): In last Thursday's Times Peter Riddell posed an important if poorly formulated question: Does 'power to the people' mean democracy or just direct participation?

Gordon Brown has called for some new participatory processes. This raises the crucial question of the balance of decision making between citizens, representatives and government. Well done Riddell for highlighting a shift in political discourse, for the way we talk about politics. It raises all manner of questions about the the old and the new. Yet the way he poses it is wrong. It puts the argument in a straight-jacket if, as he does, you define ‘democracy’ as what happens inside representative institutions and counterpose it to ‘direct participation’, meaning citizens having decision making power.