After 800 Years, the Barons Are Back in Control of
Britain

By George Monbiot
Guardian (UK)
July 17, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/barons-in-control-of-britain

    The Magna Carta forced King John to give away
    powers. But big business now exerts a chilling
    grip on the workforce

Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever
they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They
had walked out of London to occupy disused
farmland on the Queen's estates surrounding
Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn't
work out very well. But after several days of pursuit,
they landed two fields away from the place where
modern democracy is commonly supposed to have
been born.

At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed
people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries)
call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old
rugby pitch of Brunel University's Runnymede
campus. It's a weed-choked complex of grand old
buildings and modern halls of residence, whose
mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open
windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by
a plague or a neutron bomb.

The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the
hill into the woods behind the campus - pressed, as
if by the ineluctable force of history, ever closer to
the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they
have built and their cluster of tents, you can see
across the meadows to where the Magna Carta was
sealed almost 800 years ago.

Their aim is simple: to remove themselves from the
corporate economy, to house themselves, grow food
and build a community on abandoned land.
Implementation is less simple. Soon after I arrived,
on a sodden day last week, an enforcer working for
the company which now owns the land came
slithering through the mud in his suit and patent
leather shoes with a posse of police, to serve papers.

Already the crops the settlers had planted had been
destroyed once; the day after my visit they were
destroyed again. But the repeated destruction,
removals and arrests have not deterred them. As
one of their number, Gareth Newnham, told me: "If
we go to prison we'll just come back . I'm not
saying that this is the only way. But at least we're
creating an opportunity for young people to step out
of the system."

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is
to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed
by preceding generations; excluded from jobs;
excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded
from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before
they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked
off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only
those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been
sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless
repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are
interchangeable. Through globalisation and
standardisation, through unemployment and the
erosion of collective bargaining and employment
laws, big business now asserts a control over its
workforce almost unprecedented in the age of
universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a
lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity. A rentier class
holds the nation's children to ransom. Faced with
these conditions, who can blame people for seeking
an alternative?

But the alternatives have also been shut down: you
are excluded yet you cannot opt out. The land - even
disused land - is guarded as fiercely as the rest of
the economy. Its ownership is scarcely less
concentrated than it was when the Magna Carta was
written. But today there is no Charter of the Forest
(the document appended to the Magna Carta in
1217, granting the common people rights to use the
royal estates). As Simon Moore, an articulate, well-
read 27-year-old, explained, "those who control the
land have enjoyed massive economic and political
privileges. The relationship between land and
democracy is a strong one, which is not widely
understood."

As we sat in the wooden house the diggers have
built, listening to the rain dripping from the eaves,
the latest attempt to reform the House of Lords was
collapsing in parliament. Almost 800 years after the
Magna Carta was approved, unrepresentative power
of the kind familiar to King John and his barons
still holds sway. Even in the House of Commons,
most seats are pocket boroughs, controlled by those
who fund the major parties and establish the limits
of political action.

Through such ancient powers, our illegitimate rulers
sustain a system of ancient injustices, which curtail
alternatives and lock the poor into rent and debt.
This spring, the government dropped a clause into
an unrelated bill so late that it could not be properly
scrutinised by the House of Commons, criminalising
the squatting of abandoned residential buildings.

The House of Lords, among whom the landowning
class is still well-represented, approved the
measure. Thousands of people who have solved
their own housing crises will now be evicted, just as
housing benefit payments are being cut back. I
remember a political postcard from the early 1990s
titled "Britain in 2020", which depicted the police
rounding up some scruffy-looking people with the
words, "you're under arrest for not owning or renting
property". It was funny then; it's less funny today.

The young men and women camping at Runnymede
are trying to revive a different tradition, largely
forgotten in the new age of robber barons. They are
seeking, in the words of the Diggers of 1649, to
make "the Earth a common treasury for all . not
one lording over another, but all looking upon each
other as equals in the creation". The tradition of
resistance, the assertion of independence from the
laws devised to protect the landlords' ill-gotten
property, long predate and long post-date the
Magna Carta. But today they scarcely feature in
national consciousness.

I set off in lashing rain to catch a train home from
Egham, on the other side of the hill. As I walked into
the town, I found the pavements packed with
people. The rain bounced off their umbrellas,
forming a silver mist. The front passed and the sun
came out, and a few minutes later everyone began to
cheer and wave their flags as the Olympic torch was
carried down the road. The sense of common
purpose was tangible, the readiness for sacrifice (in
the form of a thorough soaking) just as evident. Half
of what we need is here already. Now how do we
recruit it to the fight for democracy?

___________________________________________

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