The greatest edit in history

logdon

The gif or tif or jpeg whatever it is, needs sizing down. About 70% should then fit.

Sorry to be a pedant.

Fifteen years at the Mac coalface I'm afraid.

Verity

It is, after all, a document that is, philosophically and intellectually, a product of British ways of thinking.

Oh, yes. I'm sure Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Blairite Heirite Cameron and other members of the Nomenklatura would subscribe to this fully.

Dirty Euro

Thomas Jefferson changed the constitution to remove passages against slavery the guy was very nasty and not a hero in my book. But like many tyrants he has been greeted through out history by his own people as a hero. He was as bad as Stalin or Hitler. Just far better at the BS side of politics. He said he was against slavery one minute the next was keeping his own slaves.

Jeremy

I think that America, Americans and American celebrity are featuring far too heavily at The Spectator - which is, after all, a British journal - at the moment. I don't share your enthusiasm for all things American, and far from agreeing with you about "the greatest edit in history" (sounds like an overstated tag-line for a bad Hollywood film) I find myself rather more inclined to agree with Freud who said that "America is a mistake".

chris

Yes we are eternally thankful for those early Anglo+Arish Americans, and of course Thomas Paine whose 200th anniversary of his death we celebrated on 8th June, a crucial founding father.

Pete, Scotland

Brown is playing these word games day in day out.

Investment will rise with a 0% increase?

He provides finesse to all the lies told by all other politicians throughout the world though all of time.

What a plonker.

Boudicca

The British need a similar Declaration of Independence - from the EU. Instead we've got the deliberately unintelligible LisbonConTreaty and an anti-Democratic Superstate in the making.

Where is OUR Thomas Jefferson when we need him?

Derek

Yes,very nice,but still no thread on either (2) Honduras and the support for Zelaya by Ombama, or (2)Alan Johnson's unilateral decision to scrap the government's ID card policy??

Craig Strachan

British ways of thinking before socialism, perhaps.

mouse1

"Thomas Jefferson changed the constitution to remove passages against slavery"

Not true. Jefferson put the anti-slavery passages in there, which were later removed on the floor of Congress for political reasons (as well as the fact that blaming King George for slavery was clearly pretty silly). However, it is true that Jefferson owned slaves, but then so did most Virginia gentlemen of the day.

TomTom

The British need a similar Declaration of Independence - from the EU.

How do you do that if your Parliament has repeatedly passed integrationist legislation - most notably by M Thatcher and J Major ?

It would require the overthrow of Parliament and a New Revolutionary Regime to force a break with the past. The English Civil War made Parliament Sovereign not the Citizen by transferring Royal Powers to the Parliament.

As such it is not possible for Britain to claim No Taxation without Representation as American Colonists did when refusing to pay for Superpower Defence from The British Empire

Susan Hill

Derek.. you could be right but surely nobody here is obliged to write about any one subject - though admittedly if Brown resigned today it would be hard to imagine they would not have something to say.

Denis Cooper

TomTom -

"How do you do that if your Parliament has repeatedly passed integrationist legislation?"

In principle it's very straightforward: you elect a majority of MPs who will vote for a Bill to repeal the previous legislation, and if the Lords refuse to pass it you invoke the Parliament Act.

In practice, we now have three main political parties who will do everything they can to prevent the British people voting in MPs who would vote for withdrawal.

In fact, I sometimes think that the main purpose of these three parties is to prevent the people electing the kind of MPs they would prefer, which they can do by ensuring that in each constituency the parliamentary election becomes a contest between their officially approved candidates - in England, at least.

There is a British Declaration of Independence here:

http://www.bdicampaign.org/

At previous general elections, all three main parties instructed their candidates not to sign it.

Derek

Susan,no, of course not, and I felt a bit naughty posting here as we are being invited to celebrate the Englishmen who gave us the American document - but as Mr. Forsyth's is a thread with a constitutional theme. there would seem to be no more appropriate place for me to express my surprise that the constitutional implications of Obama's support for Zelaya and of Alan Johnson's apparently acting outside a decision of Brown's cabinet have not yet been seen as serious enough to warrant a dedicated thread. The general Coffee House thread - for which alternative I have to scroll back, and I am a lazy dog, is in any event shortly to be replaced by a new one.

Derek

In particular, I ask myself whether it is Mr. Alan Johnson or Mr. Grown's cabinet in the one case or the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court or Mr. Zelaya (supported curioysly by Mr. Obama) in the other which best responds to the statement in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence that the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.