Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [44]
The Corporation has existed since what tour guides and historians call time immemorial, a term taken to mean that its origins extend beyond the reach of memory, record, or tradition. There is no direct evidence, Corporation officials note, of it coming into being: They say, only half in jest, that it dates its “modern period” from the year 1067. This is the world’s oldest continuous municipal democracy, predating the British parliament and rooted in what the Corporation calls “the ancient rights and privileges enjoyed by citizens before the Norman Conquest in 1066.” This, notes the City of London expert Maurice Glasman, means that the City is effectively outside the normal legislative remit.
The City’s special privileges stem ultimately from the power of financial capital. Britain’s rulers have needed the City’s money and have given the City what it wants in exchange. Over the centuries the City has used this magic formula to carve out for itself privilege after privilege, exempting itself from laws it dislikes and turning itself into a state within a state: a true offshore island partly separate from Britain and protected from tides of history that have swept the British nation-state over the centuries.27 Monarchs, firebrands, and demagogues who tried to roll back the City’s special rights and privileges had occasional successes, but most came to a sticky end, and the City vigorously reasserted its rights. It was, one nineteenth-century reformer said, “like some prehistoric monster which had mysteriously survived into the modern world.”
In 1937, Britain’s then prime minister Clement Attlee became one of few politicians to have raised the issue. “Over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster [the parliament]. The City of London, a convenient term for a collection of financial interests, is able to assert itself against the Government of the country. Those who control money can pursue a policy at home and abroad contrary to that which has been decided by the people.”28 In 1957 an official commission, which sparked a big shake-up of local government across Britain, opened with the memorable words: “Logic has its limits and the position of the City lies outside them.”29
The carve-out from Britain’s rules and laws has a truly ancient pedigree. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, the rest of England disarmed and gave up its rights—but the City kept its freehold property, ancient liberties,30 and its own self-organizing militias: Even the King had to disarm in the City. When William commissioned the Domesday Book, a survey of the kingdom’s assets and revenues that determined taxation, the City was excluded.31 In the momentous changes that followed—the Protestant Reformation five hundred years later when the English Church became subject to the Crown, the subsequent civil wars that broke the power of the monarchy, and the broadening of suffrage to include almost all adults—the City held on to its privileges and strengths. The Statute of William and Mary from 1690, “confirming the Privileges of the Corporation,” and following a challenge to the City’s authority by the late King Charles II, illustrates the scale of the City’s different status:
All the charters, grants, letters patents, and commissions touching or concerning any of their liberties or franchises, or the liberties, privileges, franchises, immunities, lands, tenements and hereditaments, rights, titles, or estates of the mayor and commonalty and citizens of the City of London, made or granted to any person or persons whatsoever . . . be and are hereby declared and adjudged null and void to all intents.
In other words, those claims that infringe the City’s ancient liberties are worthless. Earlier that century, the British crown had asked the Corporation to extend its ancient legal protections and privileges to new areas of London, outside the City, that were receiving tens of thousands of refugees