A green hill in the Irish Sea has stood for 1,045 years. It has seen plagues, wars, invasions, kings, and empires. It has survived every human folly.
It is called Tynwald Hill, and it is the world’s oldest continuous parliament.
Once, it was simple: laws read aloud in the open air, petitions handed in by anyone who cared to show up, and every free person on the island hearing and judging in the same wind.
A parliament of the people, by the people, under the sky.
From Grassroots to Clicks
In 979 AD, the Manx gathered on a four-tier mound built from the soil of every parish. Every free man and woman heard the laws.
They listened. They judged. They held leaders accountable with their voices alone.
Every 5th of July the procession still comes: the Lieutenant Governor with the Sword of State, the 24 Keys, the Legislative Council. Laws are read in English and in Manx Gaelic.
But then came the modern spectacle - pomp, horses, cameras, and carefully choreographed ceremonies. The raw, open-air accountability was buried beneath performance for viewers.
Citizens can technically still hand in petitions. But the essence - the ordinary people confronting power in real time – is almost invisible now, replaced by pageantry.
Even the oldest parliament in the world can be seduced by spectacle.
The Disease of Indoor Politics
Meanwhile, the rest of the world plods deeper into secrecy:
- In Australia, scandals vanish into redacted documents and closed committee rooms while the public shouts at TV screens.
- In America, the government can grind to a halt because a handful of people refuse to negotiate in daylight.
- In Britain, decisions affecting millions are stitched together in WhatsApp groups and smoky back rooms, then performed for cameras like bad theatre.
Modern parliaments look like fortresses, because somewhere along the way, power decided it needed protection from the people it serves.
If the people can’t see you governing, they’ll stop believing you govern for them.
The AudacityThat Kept an Island Free
Every conqueror who ever claimed the Isle of Man - Vikings, Scots, English kings, the Stanleys, the British Crown - was told the same thing:
“Take the land if you must. But you’ll rule it on our hill, in our open air, or not at all.”
They tried. All of them tried to move the meeting indoors. None succeeded.
Today, the island still taxes itself. It still controls its borders. It still tells London, “thanks, but no thanks” when overreach looms.
Population: 85,000. Smaller than most Australian country towns.
Yet in the art of keeping power accountable, it runs rings around nations thirty times its size.
Tynwald Hill Teaches the Core Lesson
Democracy is not about ceremony. It’s about substance, proximity, and visibility.
Step back. Watch what we’ve done:
- We have cameras but no accountability.
- We have speeches but no listening.
- We have Instagram posts but no petitions.
Trust dies in darkness. Scandals flourish in choreography. Authenticity gets filtered for viewing engagement online.
Maybe the Future Is the Past
Imagine forcing modern leaders to do what the Manx never stopped doing:
- Stand on open ground.
- Read the laws aloud.
- Take questions from whoever turns up.
- No script. No autocue. No spin doctors.
Half the scandals would die in daylight. The other half wouldn’t survive the walk up the hill to face the voters.
Yet if even the oldest, most resilient, most open parliament can be seduced by spectacle and how popular it appears online, what can we do?
The people - the ones who once stood on the hill, faced the leaders, and made themselves heard - start to drift away. Maybe it’s Netflix. Maybe it’s fear of crowds. Maybe it’s the slow normalisation of media-managed appearances instead of real engagement. Maybe it is the taunts from the mob at the bottom of the path, or the cops ready to arrest people for speaking our minds and hearts.
And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? When the audience stops noticing, when people stop valuing direct accountability, even the strongest traditions decay quietly. The Manx may technically still have the hill and the petitions, but if nobody climbs it in spirit or reality, the essence is gone.
We are no different. In most modern democracies, people watch the spectacle from their sofas, glued to screens, content to let politicians perform while we cheer, gasp, or scroll past. The responsibility isn’t just with the lawmakers - it’s with us too. We stop noticing, and in doing so, we allow the pageantry to replace substance.
But but but...
In 2023, nineteen petitioners climbed those steps. Nineteen ordinary Manx men and women handed their grievances across the table while the cameras rolled and the swords gleamed. More petitions in one morning than Westminster receives in most years. Assisted dying, electricity prices, bus routes, cannabis laws; real people forcing real concessions under the same open sky their ancestors used.
The feathers and horses are still ridiculous. The Lieutenant-Governor still looks like he’s late for a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. None of that has changed in two centuries.
What has changed is the reach: more islanders now watch the ceremony live than physically attended it in the 19th century. The audience didn’t vanish; it multiplied.
The tragedy is not that the oldest parliament sold its soul for spectacle. The quiet miracle is that it kept the one tradition the rest of us quietly killed: the right of any citizen, on one guaranteed day, to walk straight up to power and be heard; no appointment, no lobbyist, no e-petition that vanishes into the void.
The Manx still climb the hill. We stopped climbing ours.
So maybe the future isn’t the past. Maybe the future is a tiny island that accidentally preserved the antidote while the rest of us were busy calling democracy a spectator sport.
Tynwald Hill is still taking petitions. The question is no longer whether the hill remembers how to listen. It’s whether we remember how to speak.
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