October 13, 2011
The Assault on Liberty
By David Davis - MP
Winston Churchill described the Magna Carta as “the foundation of principles and systems of government of which neither King John or his nobles dreamed”
Now in Politics we’re used to the law of unintended consequences. Normally it is the bad outcome of good intentions, that you set out to create a good law and it goes wrong, I don’t know, say the child support agency or the war on Iraq, whatever it might be, that went wrong and we’re normally afflicted with this. What we very rarely see, is something like Magna Carta, which must go down as the greatest example of the law of unintended consequences in British history, because here you had a deal, frankly a slightly squalid deal, between a bunch of robber barons, greedy, robber barons and an even greedier King. Yet out of that slightly squalid deal, we have got the underpinning of the greatest history of freedom in the history of the world. The underpinning of the greatest liberties in the history of the world. Not just ours, but America’s, all of the Commonwealth and much of the rest of the world, have copied what we’ve done from that. So a formidable, unintended consequence, but one of enormous benefit, for not just ourselves, but for the entire civilized world.
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The Assault on Liberty
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