Today’s The Day – The Convention on Modern Liberty
February 28, 2009
Today, all around Britain, people are meeting for the first Convention on Modern Liberty (CoML) in an attempt to highlight and counter the ongoing erosion of our basic human rights. With infringements like the abandonment of Habeas corpus, privately owned central databases and the introduction of ID cards we are facing very real threats to our basic liberties, as the CoML website says…
We are entering a dangerous period in our country. Economic turmoil threatens profound hardship and disharmony. Disenchantment with politics is growing and even legitimate protest is threatened by an unprecedented programme of challenges to our rights, freedoms and democracy. Sixty years ago Britain was a proud co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Now it is increasingly centralized, abandoning its historic principles some of which date back to the Magna Carta.
Magna Carta may be 800 years old, but it remains central to our understanding of human liberties and it heavily influenced the Levellers during the English Revolution. And there’s good reason to believe that Magna Carta will soon play it’s part once again. Find out more about the the Convention here.
Commoners One And All…
February 17, 2009
The Sea-Green Society believes that Levelling is very much a work in progress. If we are to reach the socio-economic goals of the historical Levellers then protection and development of ‘the commons’ must be central to our cause. Luckily there’s a lot of work being done to promote the commons around the world…
Benn 10 – What Would The Levellers Do Today?
February 15, 2009
Tony Benn is a regular speaker at the annual Levellers Day event in Burford, Oxfordshire. The following is taken from the speech he made on 15th May, 1976. As ’10 Point Plans’ go we think it’s a pretty good one 
For my part, I think the Levellers would have much to say about the issues which concern us here in England today – and I have selected 10 issues which I believe would concern them.
1 The Levellers would surely concentrate their attention on the huge accumulation of financial power in our society; and the continued exclusion of working people from effective democratic power over it. They would link the present maldistribution of wealth – here and worldwide – to the maldistribution of power. They would champion all those in Britain and throughout the world who experience poverty.
2 The Levellers would view with deep suspicion the power of the military establishments to be found worldwide. These sometimes incorporate political police forces which seem to believe that they have a divine right to secrecy served by a network of spies and agents, using bribery and corruption to serve their purposes without regard to moral principles.
3 The Levellers would immediately see the relevance of industrial democracy – by workers’ control or self-management – as a natural extension of the political franchise to replace the power of the new industrial feudalism which has long established itself through the growth of giant companies.
4 The Levellers might see in the immense influence of the educational establishment, under the titular leadership of the universities, a new class of rulers in a self-perpetuating hierarchy, aiming to establish a claim to the ‘private ownership of knowledge’ which, by rights, is part of ‘the common store house’ belonging to us all.
5 The Levellers might see in the mass media a modern secular church seeking to control the minds of the people by standard sermons from television pulpits, day after day and night after night, keeping out dissenters or spokesmen for the common people, imposing a technical monopoly censorship that frustrates the right to free speech because it denies the equally important right to be heard.
6 The Levellers would uphold the rights of constituents to recall and replace their parliamentary candidates – on the same basis and for the same reason as dissenting chapels claimed the right to appoint and dismiss their ministers, and because of the inalienable sovereignty of the people which no Parliament has any right to usurp.
I imagine that, for the same reason, they would deeply suspect the law-making powers of the Brussels commissioners who are not accountable to electors with power to remove them.
7 The Levellers, and still more the Diggers, would add a new and moral dimension to the movement for conserving the earth’s limited resources by reminding man of his duty to his fellow citizens and his descendants not to squander the earth’s ‘common treasury’ because it is God’s gift to each generation in turn – a powerful argument for common ownership and a classless society.
8 The Levellers would demand a far greater public accountability by all those who exercise centralised civil, political, scientific, technical, educational and mass media power through the great bureaucracies of the world, and would call for the democratic control of it all.
9 The Levellers would warn against looking for deliverance to any elite group, whatever its origins, even if it came from the Labour movement, who might claim some special ability to carry through reforms by proxy, free from the discipline of recall or re-election. They would argue that all real reform comes from below, and that the self-confidence of the common people in organising for themselves – in their unions, trades, crafts, local communities and civil and human rights groups, enlarging their own horizons by their own efforts, distilling their own wisdom from their own experience, and breeding their own collective leadership in the process – offers the only real guarantee of advance.
10 The Levellers would argue passionately for free speech and make common cause, worldwide, with those who fight for human rights against tyrants and dictators of all political colours, not sparing Stalinists who falsely seek to justify uniformity as a necessary defence for socialism.
‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne: A hero for our time
February 13, 2009
The following text was lifted from OpenDemocracy.net, we think it bears repeating…
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.
In his early twenties Lilburne was brought before the Star Chamber accused of “sending of factious and seditious libels out of Holland into England.” When questioned he refused to answer, saying “I know it is warrantable by the law of God, and I think by the law of the land, that I may stand on my just defence, and not answer your interrogatories, and that my accusers ought to be brought face to face, to justify what they accuse me of”. Lilburne was whipped and pilloried but his claims to the right of silence and to hear and challenge the evidence against him foreshadowed the safeguards later built in to our criminal justice process.
In 1641 he was vindicated by the House of Commons which resolved “that the sentence of the Star Chamber given against John Lilburne is illegal and against the liberty of the subject: and also bloody, cruel, barbarous, and tyrannical.” Later however, he accused the Commons of reviving the practices of the Star Chamber when he was arrested for publishing pamphlets advocating religious toleration and attacking suppression of dissent. Again he refused to answer incriminating questions, condemned the secrecy of the proceedings, and cited the authority of Magna Carta. Later he refused to kneel before the House of Lords. He was the first to reject this humiliating practice.
Lilburne described the Levellers as “the middle sort of people” and “the hobnails, clouted shoes, the private soldiers, the leather and woollen aprons and the laborious and industrious people of England.” They had massive support among Cromwell’s New Model Army. They produced the first draft of a written constitution – the “Agreement of the People”.Their ideas were debated in Putney Church in 1647 when Cromwell himself presided. It was at one of the debates that the Leveller Colonel Rainborough uttered the memorable words:”For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore, truly, Sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government.” Two years later King Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall.
The Levellers have almost been airbrushed out of history but their ideas have much relevance to-day. And the contribution of Lilburne to our democracy and our law has never been properly recognised. Channel Four recently screened a four-part drama, “The Devil’s Whore” based on the events of this period. Anything that highlights the Levellers is all to the good. It is time they were taken seriously and given their proper place in history.
From the original piece written by Geoffrey Bindman
BAIL OUT THE BANKS or END CHILD POVERTY – You Decide…
February 11, 2009
We’ve been handing out the following flyer outside some of the banks that recieved a share of the government’s 500 billion pound bail-out scheme.
If you can’t read the image on your PC the text says…
BAIL OUT THE BANKS? or END CHILD POVERTY? – The choice is YOURS!
Dear friend,
We’ve passed on this leaflet because we’ve noticed that you’re about to go into one of the banks that received a share of the 500 billion pounds of public money which the government used to bail them out of their own greedy mess.
According to the Joseph Rowntree Trust just one hundredth of the bank-bail-out money, five billion pounds, could end child poverty in the UK by 2020. A child’s socio-economic status (the wealth and class of their family) is still the best predictor of how that child will fare at school and throughout the rest of their life, which means ending child poverty is the only way to ensure equality and social justice for all.
The banks – our banks – will give out more than 5 billion in staff bonuses alone. May we respectfully ask that you raise this issue with your bank.
And if you are overdrawn at this bank and the bank-charges are making it difficult for you to pay the rent or the really important bills, did you know that you could close down the bank account, open a new one and make an offer to repay at an amount you can actually afford?
Yours truly,
The Children Yet to Come
If you’d like a pdf of the flyer to hand out at your local banks email us at the.seagreens@gmail.com
A big ‘Thank You’ to Stuffit for the ‘handbill’ idea and for the fonts
A Levelling We Shall Go…
February 8, 2009
Welcome to The Sea-Green Society’s blog.
The Sea-Green Society are inspired by the philosophies and working class radicalism born of the English Revolution (elsewhere referred to as the ‘English Civil War’). Although some have confined the Levellers to history we see the Leveller cause as an ongoing ‘work in progress’. Many of the Levellers demands have been realised over the years, others have yet to be won – and then there are some, like the right to remain silent, which have been won, but are now under threat thanks to new government legislation.
This period in English history has left a wealth of ideas that we have barely begun to realise – anyone with an interest in English radicalism should read Christopher Hill’s ‘The World Turned Upside Down‘. But it is the Levellers who came the closest to realising their goals [if they had succeeded we would have seen a proto-soviet state 300 years before the Russian revolution and the world would have been an altogether different place - dare we say it would have been a world turned upside down]. Their philosophies can be found in their manifesto, An Agreement of the People.
The Agreement of the People was drawn up several times before the Levellers’ were finally crushed by Cromwell. The third and final version was written in 1649 by John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince and Richard Overton whilst they were prisoners in the Tower of London, among other things they asked for:
· Power to be vested in the people
· One year Parliaments, elected by equal numbers of voters per seat. The right to vote for all men
· Recall of any or all of their MPs by their electors at any time
· Abolition of the House of Lords
· Democratic election of army officers
· Complete religious toleration and the abolition of tithes and tolls
· Justices to be elected; law courts to be local and proceedings to be in plain English
· Redistribution of seized land to the common people
The Levellers are of crucial importance to the development of working class history, they offer real hope and guidance to all those who wish to challenge the ruling orthodoxy. Like the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists of a later period, the Levellers posed a serious threat to the ruling class; their direct appeals to the poor and dispossessed resonate throughout the centuries – whilst the language and mode of expression may have changed, the essential demands of these radicals remain as vibrant and necessary today as they were when they were first put. As H.N. Brailsford said in ‘The Levellers and the English Revolution‘…
“[T]here had never been anything like such a spontaneous outbreak of democracy in any English or Continental Army before this year of 1647, nor was there anything like it thereafter till Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils met in 1917 in Russia.”
The Sea-Green Society believes in living history and, more importantly, that history should live through us. As the global depression makes life harder for the working class the fight for justice and equality becomes even more important – so get off your computer, there’s some levelling to be done!
