Duke: Democracy protects both the extraordinary and the ordinary.

The early 1980s wave of neoliberalism that swept the world found one of its most powerful representatives in Thatcher, who fundamentally redefined Britain through her intense efforts to privatize public enterprises and weaken trade unions. After Thatcherism—built on Friedman’s economic theory and Hayek’s intellectual foundation—neither the world nor Britain was ever the same again, and any return to the past became impossible.

In the dialectic of history, the role of individuals should neither be exaggerated nor ignored entirely. This greatest representative of neoliberalism was, in terms of what she accomplished, both a product and a cause.

Our tendency to view history narrowly as taking sides, rather than seeing people within a broader flow, likely stems from the fact that we Turks acquired the practice of expressing independent opinions much later than the British.

On one side, the Magna Carta signed in 1276; on the other, the Sened-i İttifak of 1808, considered its rough equivalent. That 532-year gap in internalizing democracy, human rights, and the rule of law is no trivial delay.

The British prime minister far more famous than Thatcher, Churchill, once said, “Looking at the average Englishman is enough to make you hate democracy.” In our case, we’ve heard praises sung to “the wisdom of ignorance” from those who helped prepare the disastrous economic scenarios we’ve endured. Unlike Churchill’s complaint, leaning on the “average Turk” turned out to be the easiest path to take.

Even if the average British voter were as uneducated and politically apathetic as the AKP’s intellectual mentors enthusiastically applaud, what distinguishes Britain must lie in how those who deviate from the average are treated. The film The Duke illustrates this through a real-life story.

In the early 1960s, while Turkey was hastily hanging its elected prime minister, Britain was shaken by a bizarre theft. The portrait of the Duke of Wellington—Napoleon’s vanquisher and the figure who defined Britain’s “sun-never-sets” era—painted by Francisco Goya, was stolen from the museum. What’s more, the painting had only recently been acquired for the nation using public funds, at a cost of £140,000 at the time, from an American super-wealthy collector.

The thief was a 60-year-old (though looking 80 in the spirit of the times) resident of Newcastle upon Tyne who had never quite succeeded at any job. Kempton (named after the same famous racetrack) was born in the shadowy fringes of one of England’s well-known hippodromes, with an unknown father. He was somewhat half-witted and talkative, yet he carried on the stubborn tradition that forced King John to sign the Magna Carta.

He resisted the television license fee paid to the BBC—England’s equivalent of TRT—removed the BBC channel from his television set, and went to prison for it. With a campaign few took seriously, he took to the streets at least to demand that pensioners be exempt from the TV license fee. He was fired from his bakery job for defending a “Paki” worker who was given shorter breaks than everyone else. In memory of his daughter who died at 18 after falling from a bicycle, he wrote plays and sent them to TV stations, only to receive rejection after rejection. The backdrop is Newcastle’s gray, smoke-filled chimneys and streets filled with unemployment—20 years before Thatcher’s neoliberalism—where the wooden shipyards along the Tyne were emptying out, giving way to fiberglass yachts.

Helen Mirren plays the mother, a member of the “Greatest Generation” who married this madman and struggles to survive by cleaning wealthy homes, for her own survival and for the sake of the sons left behind after losing their daughter.

When Kempton travels to London to deliver his plays in person, with a clever plan and a stroke of luck, he steals the priceless portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the museum. (We later learn that it was actually his young boat-builder son who stole it, always standing by his father’s side.) The son thought the painting would serve his father’s ideals. Things go awry (thanks to his other wayward son), the ransom demanded for the painting falls through, and the dream of letting pensioners watch TV without paying the license fee collapses. To protect his son, Kempton turns himself in to the police.

In the trial scene of this film based on a true story, we see how English justice is rooted in a tradition of democracy and equality that began 532 years before ours.

After the painting remained in Kempton’s possession for a full four years, its eventual return—and the fact that he sought no personal gain from the theft—convinces the jury of his innocence. He is sentenced to three months in prison solely for the loss of the £80 frame (which was never returned), but the court rules that the painting itself was not lost, only temporarily “borrowed” to draw attention to an important issue. He is acquitted.

In Turkey, we continue to pay taxes to the public broadcaster, which has long functioned as a tool of power, no matter our age. Kempton’s dream, albeit belatedly, came true: since the 2000s, those over 75 no longer pay the BBC license fee.

To understand that democracy is a long-term struggle, and that what determines the quality of a democracy is not how the compliant ordinary citizen is treated by a system at peace with itself, but rather how the extraordinary citizen—who questions its assumptions—is treated before the law, watch The Duke.