‘In 1649
To St George’s Hill
A ragged band they called the Diggers
Come to show the people’s will
They defied the landlords
They defied the law
They were the dispossessed
Reclaiming what was theirs
‘We come in peace’ they said
‘To dig and sow
We come to work the land in common
And to make the waste land grow
This earth divided
We will make whole
So it can be
A common treasury for all
‘The sin of property
We do disdain
No one has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain
By theft and murder
They took the land
Now everywhere the walls
Rise up at their command…
‘The World Turned Upside Down’
Billy Bragg
Words by Leon Rosselson.
On January 21 next year I’m heading back to my old stomping ground of Oxford to discuss the future of local news provision in this country.
Me, MyFootballWriter and Addiply will join A Rusbridger (GMG), S Bailey (TrinityMirror), H Boaden (BBC) and S Purvis (OfCom) at the Guardian Media Convention on a morning panel designed to talk ‘local’.
It will be some 25 years since I first made my ‘debut’ in Oxford; in 1985, I was the Modern History scholar at University College, Oxford; in the same year that a certain Nick Denton of Gawker-fame was the PPE scholar.
It’s a light that, by and large, I hide deep within the nearest bushel; it doesn’t impress a 17-year-old footballer much.
But every once in a while, you sift through your memories of those formative years and stumble upon something pertinent to these revolutionary times.
Because, for me, there is a revolution afoot; we just haven’t worked out whether we should be partying like its 1499 – or whether its more like 1649 when The Diggers came to town and, along with The Levellers, they tried to turn the world upside down.
Their fate was chronicled by the historian Christoper Hill in a seminal book duly entitled: ‘The World Turned Upside Down’.
The introduction, written in 1972, makes for fascinating reading in an age when what was once an enslaved audience of newspaper readers, TV viewers and record album listeners now make up their own rules on this new, technological landscape of ours… defying the landlords, defying the (copyright) law… to make a common treasury for all…
Hill writes: ‘Popular revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition and the middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain.
‘… This book deals with what, from one point of view, are subsidiary episodes… the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters…’
Order, of course, was restored; there was a Restoration before the century was out. Before then, Cromwell’s iron fist levelled The Levellers.
But as this particular decade ends with traditional media in such a state of unprecedented flux and flummox, you can’t help but wonder whether or not the Web and all its various mobile outriders is actually making the Diggers vision flesh – that the world is, indeed, turning upside down just at the very moment that Lord Rupert arrives to build his wall to once more try and enthrall us all.
Because the more I wander up and down this digital land – tools in one hand, blog in the other – the more I remain convinced that the answer is small, not big.
The answer is individual, not corporate; the solution will be participatory, not imposed.
None of us will do as we are told; we will do as we feel; our goal remains building a common treasury for all; to unite a divided-stroke-silo’d world into new, networked co-operatives.
We will go where our own, individual mood takes us; we will not be coralled into spaces of someone else’s making. And be charged for the privilege.
‘We will not bow to masters
Or pay rent to the lords
We are free men… etc, etc…
We will make – and consume – our own ‘news’; the news that really matters to me.
And Twitter – the rising star of 2009 – has only hastened that process; it is a tool by which we can defy our former masters ever more… make us ever less likely to pay rent to the lords…
It makes an individual’s ‘news’ ever more personal; ever more instant; ever more free, radical and levelling…
And what’s the most basic ‘news’ question that this common man asks of himself and his family every day?
‘So, how was your day at school…?’
That’s the news that really matters to me; day in, day out; year in, year out.
Now, chances are the answer will be a grunt; the barest hint of recognition or response. But it’s a start. From there you can build.
From the bottom up.
You can build a platform in which the Chairman of the School Governors can be brought to broadcast account over the latest OfSted – the same OfSted report that can be individually mined out of HM Government’s banks of data and given an individual life and importance of its own.
Because every free man, woman and child has the right to free data, right?
You can build a platform in which news of a school closure can be tweeted out to the parents that matter; you can build a platform on which a school carol concert can be broadcast to the grandparents that care….
It is a model that puts me centre-stage; puts me at the heart of my news; my media, my world… but it is a world in which I share common goals and purposes. We come in peace…
…To dig and sow
We come to work the land in common
And to make the waste land grow
This earth divided
We will make whole
So it can be
A common treasury for all
It is an intriguing prospect; that the revolution now afoot might finally see that dream of 1649 become a reality; that the world could, indeed, be turning upside down…
… that I am now the master of my own media fate; a free man, at last.
“I may peradventure to many seem guilty of that crime which was laid against the Apostle,” wrote one Henry Denne in 1645.
“To turn the world upside down, and to set that in the bottom which others made the top of the building and to set upon the roof which others lay for a foundation.”