Tom Griffin (London, OK): Monday was the 200th anniversary anniversary of the death of Tom Paine, the man who, in Mike Marqusee's words, "inspired and guided revolutions in north America and France, and equally important, the revolution that did not happen in Britain."
As both Brendan O'Neill and Edward Vallance note, Paine's writings retain remarkable relevance to today's political crisis, not least because on his own terms, the British revolution he sought remains unfinished business.
Here is Paine's verdict on the House of Commons in The Rights of Man:
With respect to the house of commons, it is elected but by a small part of the nation; but were the the election as universal as taxation, which it ought to be, it would still be only the organ of the nation, and cannot possess inherent rights. When the national assembly of France resolves a matter, the resolve is made in right of the nation; but Mr. Pitt on all national questions, so far as they refer to the house of commons, absorbs the right of the nation into the organ, and makes the organ into a nation, and the nation itself into a cipher.
So Paine would not have been surprised by the expenses saga. He understood that even a parliament elected by universal suffrage would remain a gentlemen's club without constitutional reform.
His view of parliamentary sovereignty remains as applicable today as it was in 1791:
Constitution is now the cant word of parliament, turning itself to the ear of the nation. Formerly it was the universal supremacy and the omnipotence of parliament. But since the progress of liberty in France, those phrases have a despotic harshness in their note; and the English parliament has caught the fashion from the National Assembly, but without the substance, of speaking of a constitution.
Two centuries after his death, Paine's demand in The Rights of Man for a written constitution enshrining the sovereignty of the people remains the yardstick for any serious measure of democratic reform.
