Our Nation’s Archive

"I came across Our Nation’s Archive on holiday in America a few years ago. I wandered into a bookshop and found this huge, 800-page A4-format book and brought it home in my hand luggage. The reason I fell in love with it is because it contains the story of the United States in documents. That sounds very dry but it isn’t. Because, as well as the obvious things – the Gettysburg address, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, John F Kennedy’s speeches and those of Martin Luther King – it has a load of other elements, such as the words to ‘Brother can you spare a dime’ and ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. It has Atticus’s speech to the jury from To Kill a Mockingbird. It is done chronologically with a little introduction to each item so that you can see it in context. Rather like a good encyclopaedia, you open it to look at something and then your eye wanders to the next item and you can be very taken with that. I thought there must be a British equivalent but there was none so I decided to write it myself – but to narrow it down to avoid giving people a hernia. Democracy is substantial but it’s not going to break your back. And I’ve tried to follow the same idea, so, as well as the Magna Carta, Gladstone and Churchill, there is Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and George Orwell in there, along with Yes Minister and That Was The Week That Was. We included speeches from some of the opponents of reform, such as those arguing against giving women and working-class men the vote. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the speeches I wanted is so often misquoted – when people say that ‘Westminster is the mother of parliaments’. The Victorian radical Liberal MP John Bright actually said that ‘England is the mother of parliaments’. Far from being complacent, he was making an angry point that England, which had so often led the way, was falling behind other countries in extending the franchise. I found the speech on microfiche in The Times and the real bonus was seeing the newspaper’s introduction, which said it was the text of Mr Bright’s speech ‘on his annual visit to his constituency in Birmingham’. So you suddenly see – his annual visit! – it was a different world. We do forget and they were real battles. The debates themselves often have a very modern feel or modern resonance. For example, George Canning, who was briefly prime minister in the 1820s, gave a speech defending rotten boroughs. One of his points was that rotten boroughs like Old Sarum, which had two MPs and no residents, produced some of the finest parliamentarians of the late 18th and early 19th century: people like William Wilberforce and William Pitt. Canning argued that if you did away with the rotten boroughs you would lower the quality of the House of Commons. Of course, this is an exact parallel to the arguments about the reform of the House of Lords today. And in a way he had a real point: so it demonstrates why, if one is a democrat, it is important to stick to the principle of democracy. Because if you get into the functionality, if you say the principle is to get the best people or the best government, you might well end up arguing against democracy, which has to be defended as a good in itself."