Magna Carta

Today marks 800 years since the signing of the first iteration of Magna Carta. This event is being celebrated by the Queen and the government David Cameron has promised that our British Bill of Rights (proposed to replace the European Convention on Human Rights, for some insane reason) will safeguard the legacy of Magna Carta. Let us hope he means it will safeguard the legacy of statute law and human rights, rather than Magna Carta, because a very brief overview of the MC's content shows that it's hardly the sterling and quintessentially English work of freedom we are being led to believe.

So, 1215, Bad King John has pissed off his barons. Bad King John was always pissing off someone, but the barons had come to expect certain privilege and honour over the last century or so of Norman rule. So, the barons insisted on having a charter to maintain their baronly rights. King John, needing the support of his barons to properly run the country, gave them their historic charter at Runnymede.
It lasted literally two months.
We are celebrating a charter that meant so much to the people that made it that they all ignored their side of the bargain, and went to war two months later. We may as well celebrate the 2011 riots in several hundred years time, for all the difference it made to anything. Only King John's death, from dysentry caught in King's Lynn, just over a year later put an end to this vicious civil war.
Magna Carta was reissued in 1216, and again in revised form in 1217. In 1225, it was issued as a propaganda exercise by Henry II to get some taxation approved, and finally in 1297, it became part of statute law. We are a bit premature with the celebrations, to be honest.

Now, society in 13th century England was not exactly hot on fairness or equality. Individuals were either owned in a type of indentured slavery called serfdom, or beholden to their immediate superiors for food, land and work. At the top of the hierarchy was the king, and just underneath him were the barons. The barons held an enormous amount of power. And Magna Carta was all about THEIR rights. If David Cameron's Bill of British Rights only gives rights to those sitting in the Houses of Parliament, then it will be very similar to the original Magna Carta.

As it is, three clauses of Magna Carta remain in statute law. One of them is the freedom of the English church. Another is the freedom of London. Then there is the law of due process and forbidding the sale, delay or denial of justice. I would argue the erosion of legal aid under the last government has pretty much broken that particular statute, but I'm no lawyer.
Some of the clauses of Magna Carta simply make no sense in the modern world. I don't think any knights need a knight's fief in this day and age, or that Jewish moneylenders need to be regulated more than other moneylenders. I don't think it would be fair for barons to set the level of fine placed on another baron for law breaking, and I'm fairly sure castle guards are now employed through the army rather than from a pool of knights. We don't generally have horses and carts to relinquish to royal officials when demanded, or timber.
Some clauses were repealed bizarrely recently, like the clause forbidding fish weirs, repealed in 1969. Barons were permitted to take responsibility for monastries in the absence of an abbot until 1847. Men could not be arrested or tried on the testimony of a woman until 1863 (unless her husband had been murdered).

In short, Magna Carta is no template for fair society or law, unless you're a 13th century baron. Compare it to the tenets of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to life (including preventing forseeable death), and the right to equality,  prohibits torture, prohibits slavery, protects individual liberty and security, provides the right to free trial, protects individuals from being tried for offences that have become illegal since committed, protects the individual right to privacy and family life, and protects freedom of thought and expression. It also protects the right to form trade unions, to marry freely, and for countries to derogate these rights in times of war. Magna Carta promises none of this, the vast majority of it is no longer statute law, and as a document, was never legally enforceable. Hence, war.

I can see why we're making a big deal out of Magna Carta. It's a form of living history and tradition that British people thrive upon. However, to act like it has any bearing whatsoever on modern law or living ignores the centuries of change that have fallen since, in favour of a sycophantic romanticised daydream.

We all like to think we would have been lords, ladies, knights and barons in the olden days of chivalric lore, but if you're reading this, believe me you would have been little more than a serf. And Magna Carta was not written for the likes of us.