It's pleasing that the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta is getting the publicity it deserves. The teaching of British history might have all but disappeared from our schools, but on all the evidence the Australian public's interest in the story of the country that gave us parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of speech is undiminished. Australian bookshops stock half-a-dozen new and significant books on King John and the Magna Carta.
It might be that it's precisely because Australians learn so little British and European history now that the subject is so popular. A similar phenomenon can be seen with the commemoration of Anzac Day. In the 1970s and 1980s it was close to becoming merely a public holiday, as commentators and historians mocked as war-mongering the remembrance of what happened a century ago. Yet the public resisted and Anzac Day has a status now that 20 years ago would have been almost inconceivable. Les Carlyon's 600-page tome Gallipoli has sold more than 160,000 copies. Anzac Day has become this country's authentic "national day".
Of the many reasons the Magna Carta is significant, three stand out.
First, it established the "rule of law", which basically means that the king — and later what we came to call "the government" — must obey the law. There was much debate about what was the content of "the law", but nonetheless the recognition of the principle that the king must obey the law, just as his subjects must, was hugely important.
Second, the Magna Carta made it clear that individuals could not be punished at the whim of the king. If a punishment was to be imposed, it could be done only according to the law.
These two principles didn't guarantee England would never again have a bad king but they did ensure that England didn't suffer from the sort of autocratic despotism that existed for centuries in continental Europe.
DEGREE OF CONSENT
Third, the Magna Carta confirmed that before the king could levy tax, he must have a degree of consent from those who were going to pay the tax.
What's often not appreciated about the Magna Carta is that it was the product of a tax revolt. King John doubled and tripled the rates of some of the taxes he imposed on England's population. And nearly as bad as John's extortionate taxes was the fact that the money he raised he wasted on wars in France that he kept losing. Most of the 63 chapters of the Magna Carta are about tax. The most famous, chapter 39, which provides that "No free man" will be punished "save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land" had its origins in the barons attempting to protect themselves from King John's arbitrary fines and penalties.
In 2011 protesters claimed that the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta prevented them from being evicted from a camp they had established in the yard of London's St Paul's Cathedral. The protesters were from the so-called Occupy movement. The protesters lost their court case and they were evicted. One of the things they were complaining about was the capitalist system — and of course the basis of capitalism is the concept of the private ownership of property. There is a rich irony in Occupy protesters relying on the Magna Carta to secure their right to complain about the existence of private property, given the reason the Magna Carta exists in the first place is because the barons were attempting to protect their private property from the king's excessive taxes.
As we debate the condition of the human rights derived from what happened at Runnymede in June 1215 we shouldn't forget the Magna Carta was a product of the desire of the barons to protect one of the most basic of human rights — the right to own private property. The Magna Carta recognises that when private property is threatened by oppressive taxation the right to private property comes close to ceasing to exist.
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