Magna Carta

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my former Commons colleague the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. We worked together on a number of schemes, some including human rights, both overseas and in the UK. We, as MPs, came to know of his knowledge of and affection for the history of parliaments from ancient times and of his experience of reading and writing about those things. We are very grateful. This is an important occasion. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd; I was impressed that she was well under her time limit in her opening, which was commendable.

I share some of the noble Baroness’s anxieties and concerns about some things. Although they will be immensely important, the World War 1 commemoration period, over several years, will have far more government money attached to it than anything to do with the Magna Carta celebrations. That is a pity. In a historical context, Magna Carta is deeply inspiring.

We are grateful, too, for the excellent maiden speech from the main coalition party Benches of my noble friend Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth. His knowledge of this matter is profound, and I am sure that he will be heavily involved in a number of these activities. I am also grateful for the excellent historical analysis of the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and my noble friend Lord Addington. They gave the original background to it. We should not get carried away with the starry-eyed Mills and Boon version of Magna Carta which is not really true. The gradual development over hundreds of years of democracy as we now know it, as well as the importance of the rule of law, was opportunistic, episodic and accidental. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was one stage in that process, as were the United States’s declaration of independence and constitution. What a pity we did not pay more attention to the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen because we were afraid of it; it is a substantial document but little known in this country because of the intellectual and psychological gap between the political cultures of the continent and ourselves, with our Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American traditions.

I am also grateful—this is a time for mentioning gratitude, I think—to Sir Robert Worcester, that talented and noble son of Kansas as was, but now an English American, for leading the Magna Carta Trust committee and planning a number of events. I am particularly glad he sent me a helpful briefing memorandum about this debate. It reminded me that, speaking at the UN General Assembly in 1948, as she submitted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt argued that,

“we stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere”.

That is very telling in the way it rebounded around the world as more and more countries realised the importance of the various texts in the Magna Carta and the subsequent editions of it and what it meant for us.

Hundreds of events have been considered and planned with the hope, according to this memorandum, that in 2015 more than 100 countries will be commemorating the importance of what began on an open plain 800 years earlier to this generation and many generations to come. The danger is that it will not be noticed enough by the media unless there is real force and psychological strength behind that effort. That does need a lot of attention and organisation. It is amazing how quickly time goes when one is coming up to a deadline of that kind.

I note, too, that after the Second World War Germany and Japan were apprised, quite rightly, of the virtues of the Magna Carta, in its modernised form, the text, what it meant and the rule of law. What a model democracy Germany has become after the nightmare it went through with the Third Reich. It is a very impressive achievement, and we are proud to be friends with the great German people.

I believe, too, that even though one of our weaknesses—and it is a controversial point, so I apologise in advance for making it—is in not having a written constitution, there is a feeling of pride in many people that we are unusual and unique in not having one, although all the other Commonwealth countries which came from the Anglo-Saxon tradition directly with independence much earlier than the colonies do have commendable written constitutions. At least, though, we have access to the European treaties, which are an international kind of constitutional backcloth to the rule of law and human rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights. All those things started 800 years ago as gradualistic concepts in a very different context with very few people involved. The barons in those days were very exclusive indeed, unlike the huge, overlarge House of Lords Chamber we have now with far too many barons. Despite that reality all of us would like to be considered to be here validly, both the noble Barons and the noble Baronesses. The more noble Baronesses we have, the better.

There is a lot to be done. I think that if all those threads come together and the Government put a reasonable budget figure on the expenditure as well as other organisations and the private fundraising that will go on, this can be a great occasion for all of us to be proud with lessons for the future and particularly for the younger generation.