The British Library’s new Taking Liberties exhibition is an often inspiring tour of Britain’s “1,000-year struggle for our freedoms and rights”. At least, it is once you get past the patronising promotional quotes outside. One lectures us: “In some countries you would not have the right to visit this exhibition about your rights.” Err, right.

The guilt-tripping message appears to be: “Come inside and be grateful for what you’ve been given.” Whereas the real message of Taking Liberties seems to me that freedom has advanced in Britain when people have refused to do any such thing and instead have stood up and demanded more.

Taking Liberties is a tour of historic struggles told through more than 200 “iconic” documents and objects. Some are world-famous but no less fascinating for that — see the Magna Carta of 1215, and the 1649 death warrant of King Charles I. Others are more personal yet still powerful: the purse found on Emily Davison, the suffragette martyr who threw herself under the hoofs of the King’s horse in the 1913 Derby, containing her return rail ticket; or the prison drawings of the jailed Chartist Ernest Jones, depicting an idealised Greek democracy alongside a grim English town, where the factories have names such as Bonegrinder & Co.

Some of the most affecting give a potent sense of time and place, such as the hand-written minutes of the Putney debates, recorded by scribes as the leaders of Cromwell’s New Model Army argued with the radical Levellers about the limits to change. They lie open at the page on which the Leveller sympathiser Colonel Thomas Rainsborough declared that every man must be governed by consent, since “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”.

Taking Liberties celebrates not only historic figures such as John Stuart Mill and Tom Paine, but also “the forgotten pioneers” such as Francis Burdett, MP, sent to the Tower as late as 1810 for “publishing his speech where he objected to the House of Commons imprisoning a man for protesting against the exclusion of reporters during a debate”. Lord knows what they would have done to our parliamentary sketch-writers.

Or Olive Wharry, the suffragette hunger striker jailed for her part in such protests as “the Kew Refreshment Pavilion Outrage”, whose prison diaries include a clipping of an embarrassed policeman carrying the protesters’ handbags.

The exhibition is a reminder that the fight for liberty in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland has been a hard and dirty struggle (they are not showing the more “sexually charged” anti-suffragette propaganda), often involving repression and riots. Although British ideas of freedom helped to inspire popular revolutions in America and France, the British authorities responded to demands for reform at home with an iron fist, as for a time “liberty” in Britain became defined as John Bull’s freedom from such alien ideas as the universal rights of man. There is a Chartist’s truncheon in the exhibition, although they are not entirely sure which side might have swung it.

It is a reminder too of the role of religion in the battle for liberty. Some of my fellow atheists talk as if religion has always been the root of all evil. They forget that rights were long seen as God-given, and that the fight for free speech began with demands for the freedom to print and read the Bible as believers saw fit.

Indeed one can infer from the exhibition that the very notion of a “1,000-year struggle” is too ahistorical. It shows how ideas of liberty have changed over time, and how the more the masses became involved, the farther freedom advanced. Yet the final sections of the exhibition also hint, however unwittingly, that this process is in danger of being reversed. Issues of liberty are once again becoming an internal debate among elites — not the barons and kings of 1215, but the human-rights lawyers, lobbyists and lords who argued over the Government’s proposal to extend detention without charge for terror suspects to 42 days.

They may have celebrated retaining the 28-day limit as an historic triumph, but I don’t recall seeing the demand for “only” four weeks detention without charge being made by the Levellers or Chartists or Mill or Paine.

Taking Liberties asks us to cast interactive votes, to “put the visitor in the centre of current debates about rights and freedoms”. That makes a change. Back in the real world of politics, most people are now too often sidelined as passive spectators to those debates. The exhibition points out that these men and woman who changed history “more often than not stirred civil unrest”. Not much sign of that lately. There seems something quietly symbolic about the fact that the oldest photograph of a crowd, showing a great Chartist demonstration from 1848 — year of Europe’s anti-monarchical revolutions — is on loan to this exhibition from the Queen.

Go and see Taking Liberties, but not as a guilt trip about how we take hard-won freedoms for granted. Maybe we’ll be inspired to start a debate about taking more liberties ourselves.

Taking Liberties: the struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights is at the British Library, NW1, from Fri to March 1 (www.bl.uk; 0870 4441500)

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