Daniel Hannan: The Magna Carta — The Text That Makes Us Who We Are

From left, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, Britain's Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prince William and Princess Anne attend an event marking the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in Runymede on June 15, 2015. /Reuters

The centenaries follow one another thick and fast. We are about to mark the 800th anniversary of the greatest bargain ever struck: Magna Carta, sealed on June 15, 1215, the first document ever to raise the rules over the ruler. But, before we turn to that miracle, let’s bow our heads for a moment at a centenary just past: that of the first major action by Canadian soldiers in the First World War.

The Second Battle of Ypres, fought in April and May 1915, was monstrous even by the standards of the Western Front. It was the first time that the Germans used chlorine gas. The men of the 2nd Canadian Brigade alone held their position as the yellow-green clouds engulfed the troops around them. It did not take long for the venom to dissolve the Allied line, leaving heaps of dead and dying men, their faces mottled, froth on their tortured lips. Later, the Canadians were hit by a second gas attack; their casualty rate was one in three.

Few Britons can talk of the Canadian war effort without a catch in their voice. The thought of those young men, every one a volunteer, crossing half the world to defend our country makes us emotional even a century later. Despite almost unimaginable fatalities — 67,000 Canadians killed and 250,000 wounded out of a total population of 7 million — the children of those veterans rushed to volunteer in the Second World War: a million men and women in all.

What made them do it? Was it simply affinity of blood and speech, a determination to stand by a kindred people? Obviously that was part of the explanation. But I can’t believe it was the whole story — that the First and Second World Wars were ethnic conflicts, different only in scale from, say, the breakup of Yugoslavia or the Hutu-Tutsi massacres. Read the letters that those volunteers sent home, listen to contemporary accounts of the conflict, and you find a clear sense that people were fighting “for freedom.” The values of the English-speaking peoples were repeatedly contrasted against the enemy’s authoritarianism. We were better than the Prussians and the Nazis, we told ourselves, because we elevated the law above the government, the individual above the collective, fair dealing over raison d’état.

Read more at National Post >>

 

Magna Carta: Queen and Prime Minister Mark 800th Anniversary

Trooping the Colour 2015

Ralph Vaughn Williams - "All People That On Earth Do Dwell"

Magna Carta: Myth and Meaning

June 2015 will see the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the ‘Great Charter’ which was signed at Runnymede by King John to resolve a political crisis he faced with his barons. Buried within its 69 clauses is one of immeasurable importance. This is the idea that no one should be deprived of their freedom without just cause, and that people are entitled to fair trial by their peers according to the law of the land.

At the time Magna Carta did nothing to improve the lot of the vast majority of English people, and all but three of its provisions have been repealed. Yet Magna Carta has come to be seen as the cornerstone of English liberty and an international rallying cry against the arbitrary use of power. It was invoked by opponents of Charles I’s overbearing rule in the 17th century and embodied in the 1791 Bill of Rights in America, where it is still held to have special constitutional status.

Where does Magna Carta stand today? In a time of secret courts in Britain and the Guantanamo gulag, the threat to rights from terror laws and state surveillance of our online activities, do we need to reaffirm its basic principles? Should we take things even further, as Tim Berners-Lee has suggested, and create a new Magna Carta for the worldwide web to protect our liberty online?

Lindsey Graham: Socialist Ratcheteer

Hannity interview illustrates GOP’s real problem.

It all began so innocently.

Senator Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and newly minted if long-shot 2016 presidential candidate, sat down with NBC’s Chuck Todd for an interview. Riding along in the back seat of (presumably) an SUV, the two discuss Graham’s presidential ambition. Todd poses a question wondering about what Graham thinks of the country’s current state of polarization. In a bit of a windy answer Graham blames talk radio, cable TV, and money. Then he tosses the kind of political flare that rarely gets tossed in today’s carefully restrained and tailored-for-public-consumption politics.

To illustrate his point, Graham conjures a scene of modern media covering the Constitutional Convention in 1787 Philadelphia, replete with satellite trucks surrounding Independence Hall and Ben Franklin exiting the building only to be besieged by Fox’s Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Translation: the two hosts are polarizing.

Hannity picked up on this, inviting Graham on his television show to discuss. Fatefully, Graham agreed. And in the doing (seen here) Graham quickly proceeded to illustrate exactly the problem that faces the Republican Party and the nation.

Read more at The American Spectator >>

 

The Church’s Central Role in Magna Carta Has Been Airbrushed Out of History

From Catholic Herald
By Ed West 

The freedoms contained in the 1215 document originate 'with the Christian Church and Christian theology'

This Monday coming marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, a peace treaty between a comically cowardly drunken king and his leading barons. It mainly focused on financial disputes but it nonetheless came to become ‘the Bible of the English Constitution’, in William Pitt the Elder put it.

Although there is some understandable scepticism about the way that Magna Carta was romanticized by 17th century opponents of the Stuart monarchs, and the motives of the barons were almost entirely selfish, its four surviving clauses (sometimes counted as 3, as 39 and 40 were merged into one in the definitive 1297 reissue) still hold enormous weight, legally, culturally and emotionally.

But though Clause 39 – “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” – is well-known to educated people, it is less commonly recalled that Clause 1 states “that the English Church is to be free, and to have its full rights and its liberties intact”.

More importantly, the Christian origins and influence of the Great Charter are mostly ignored, a point raised in a new Theos report by Thomas Andrew, The Church and the Charter: Christianity and the Forgotten Roots of Magna Carta.