Read the original contributions here from Melvyn Bragg, Helena Kennedy, Owen Jones, Jesse Norman and Tom Holland. We are crossposting Anthony’s piece, “From King John to Baron Bragg: celebrating Magna Carta”, with the kind permission of openDemocracy.
The New Statesman’s recent cover feature on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta is, in every meaning of the word, hopeless. If this is the best the official magazine of Britain’s left can do in the form of critical engagement with the country’s official history then bunker down for another century of lost opportunities, if not eight of them. It is particularly telling because the magazine’s editor, Jason Cowley, is encouraging long-form journalism, reportage and reviewing, without the usual Labourist contempt for ideas or Conservative scoffing at being serious. Also, with his exemplary Scottish coverage, the weekly glimmered with some genuine interest in democracy in Britain, rather than its ghastly Westminster simulacrum. But cometh the constitutional symbol of our system as a whole, cometh the ghosts of clichés past. Cowley’s predecessor Anthony Howard would be proud – the mental decline he presided over at the paper’s home Great Turnstile and which he later sought to inflict on the rest of the country as the official steward of the celebrations of 1688, dribbles on.
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