Aside from their industriousness, Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown might seem to share little in common. Yet in his recent speech on Britishness, the chancellor revealed a mutual affection for Magna Carta as a cornerstone of our national identity. Famously, it was Mrs Thatcher who told François Mitterrand at the 1989 bicentenary of the French revolution that "we, of course, had the Magna Carta".
For, 800 years on, the messy constitutional compromise hammered out at Runnymede between King John and the barons manages to retain a profound emotional pull on the Anglo-American political psyche. But even as it is honoured in name, the principles of 1215 have rarely been more widely breached.
All of which makes the current judicial rough-riding of Magna Carta in Guatánamo Bay and elsewhere all the more startling. The much celebrated clauses 39 and 40, let alone the US fifth amendment, appear to have become redundant as habeas corpus and the rule of law are quietly abrogated under the Patriot Act. To the horror of Magna Carta-conscious lawyers, President Bush, like Charles I, has pleaded the exigencies of wartime to suspend the charter's terms. And the great virtue of the "war on terror" is that it is a war without end.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1268208,00.html