 As the British people currently wrestle with the reality that they do not have the power to choose the governing executive, and that their representation is naturality in name only and renders little political control, it's fitting that we celebrate the 375th anniversary of one of the significant events of English history. Across political history, the Putney debates are significant because they represent one of the first instances where the representatives of ordinary people discuss the fundamental nature of the state which govern them. As with many other such significant events in our history, these debates, as you would expect given the patrician nature of the British state, are rarely discussed, but the substance of those discussions still dominates the political situation in Britain today. The debates took place over two weeks in St Mary's Church in Putney, from Monday the 28th of October to Friday the 8th of November 1647. There is a permanent exhibition in the church. The point about being in a church wasn't simply that it was a space for a meeting. In the character of debates at this time, those involved would spend time in silent reflection and prayer while they considered what was being said. An ancient form of spiritual discernment still preserved today in the cognitive of quaking meetings. The ideas at the heart of that debate were presented in the Levenner Manifesto, the agreement of the people. The grandees representing the landed gentry who held power in Parliament didn't like what was proposed one bit, precisely because it would open up the cognitive government to a representative body of all people, not just the aristocracy and the land of the elite who had stacked Parliament until that point. This is why the political backdrop to the Putney debates has resonance today. Right now, with rising inequality and the collapse of the post-war economic consensus, we are facing, in a very real sense, the emergence of a form of technologically enabled neo-feudalism. An asset-rich minority increasingly extracts wealth from the vast majority of the population and that landless population has very little direct control or voice in terms of that economic arrangement. This was the case 375 years ago and one of the motivations of the English Civil War was the promise that this situation might be reformed in the aftermath of the conflict. It didn't happen. 18 months after the debates, the core of the group calling for this change, the levelers, will be broken up by quomrel. Their ideas will be suppressed, not resurfacing until the rise of political radicalism and the chartists two centuries later. There was no contemporary record of the Putney debates. A transcript was made by the Secretary to the Army, William Clark, which largely covered the discussions on the 29th of October after the presentation of the Agreement of the People. It was not published at the time and was lost until 1990 when the transcription was discovered in the Library of Worcester College, Oxford. The text of the Putney debates is available in book form or were PDF online. It is a debate between about a dozen men at the heart of quomrel's new model army. It's very long and there seems to be little point in reproducing it here, if only because in the modern context it requires a deeper analysis to understand the perspectives involved. I first read the modern text, rewritten in modern English and the shorthand notes transcribed by William Clark when it was published in 1998. At that time what I found the most compelling were the contributions from Thomas Rainsborough, one of the leading levelers and one of the main contributors to the debate who spoke in opposition to the Army Grandi Henry Ayrton. What follows then is an edited form of Thomas Rainsborough's speeches during the Putney debates, edited to give a sense of the political consciousness of the levelers at that time, so that we may contrast what progress has been made over the last 375 years. At that time what Rainsborough said was revolutionary, the notion of taking political power from unmodern economic elite is, today, equally revolutionary. Extracts from Thomas Rainsborough's speeches to the Putney debates, 29th of October 1647. I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he, and therefore truly sir I think it clear that every man that is to live under a government awed first by his own consent to put himself under that government and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under. I do hear nothing at all that can convince me why any man that is born in England ought not to have his voice in the election of burgesses. It is said that if a man have not a permanent interest he can have no claim and that we must be no freer than the laws will let us be and that there is no law in any chronicle will let us be freer than that we now enjoy. Truly I think that there is not this day reigning in England a greater fruit or effect of tyranny than that this very thing would produce. Truly I think that the people of England have little freedom. I am a poor man therefore I must be oppressed. If I have no interest in the kingdom I must suffer by all their laws be they right or wrong. To the thing itself property in the franchise I would know how it comes to be the property of some men and not of others. If it be a property it is a property by a law because I think that the law of the land in that thing is the most tyrannical law under heaven. This is the old law of England and that which enslaves the people of England that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all. I desire to know how this comes to be a property in some men and not in others. How it comes about that there is such a property in some freeborn Englishmen and not in others. What has the soldier fought for all this while? He has fought in slave himself to give power to men of riches men of estates to make him a perpetual slave. If these men must be advanced and other men set under foot I am not satisfied. If their rules must be observed and other men that are not an authority be silenced I do not know how this can stand together of the idea of a free debate. I wonder how that should be fought willfulness in one man that is reasoned in another. And therefore till I see that I shall use all means I can and I think that there is no fault in any man to refuse to sell that which is his birthright.