Flickr/etee. Some rights reserved. In the run up to the election, the Shadow Education Secretary, Tristram Hunt, recently announced that if Labour were returned every school would be required to teach the history of Magna Carta. He was keen to ensure that ‘every school child is taught the medieval past and modern power of this heroic charter’.
Unsurprisingly, this declaration caused a variety of responses from those within his own party and those on the left more generally. For a number, Magna Carta should not be celebrated in this way, for it was nothing more than a tool of oppression, which merely entrenched an elitist system that cared little for the people. Others have supported the initiative, often arguing that what it did is not important; it is what it stands for that is significant. As such, Magna Carta should be seen as a potent symbol of the long struggle for the rights and freedoms of the British people.
Clearly, for those on the left today, the charter’s legacy is a highly contested one. The Charter has thus come to mean many different things to many different people, embodying a wide spectrum of beliefs and ideas (see Peter Linebaugh’s review of the new Penguin edition of Magna Carta in this series for a contemporary example of this). Moreover, this debate is not new, with the nascent labour and socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries contesting both the legacy and the contemporary relevance of this historic charter.
