Category Archives: freedom

The right of self-defence in England

Robert Henderson

If there is such a thing as a natural right it is surely the right to self-defence, for any
organism will defend itself when attacked. To deny a man the right to defend
himself when attacked would be literally inhuman and , of course, in England we
have that right in law. We may defend ourselves even to the extent of killing
another if it is to save ourselves or another who is threatened. The problem is
that our law has become so hemmed about by conditions and restrictions, that most
people are both confused about what is permitted in practice and fearful of the
consequences of using force in their defence. This is scarcely surprising when cases
where burglars have been killed, such as that of Tony Martin, have resulted in the
victim of burglary going to prison (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/oct/30/tonymartin.ukcrime2),
while lesser cases which have resulted in non-fatal struggles all too
frequently seem to result in the person who was attacked being punished.

At the same time as this confusion over the law exists, the British state is growing ever more paranoid about the private citizen owning and carrying weapons. Guns are so
severely restricted that few people will go to the trouble of applying for a licence for anything other than a shotgun and there is a law against carrying a knife of any sort, even a pocket knife, with a blade of more than 3″ in a public place without good cause, for example, for the purposes of work.

The third piece in the jigsaw of our uncertainty is the increasing failure of the police to
provide protection to the private citizen, especially in country districts. This was the prime cause of Tony Martin’s action in illegally arming himself with a pump action shotgun to defend himself in his remote farmhouse. (Martin knew from past experience that he regularly was subject to intruders which the police could not or would not do anything to prevent.)

The failure of the police to adequately protect people breaches the implicit contract between the state and the individual in relation to personal safety: the individual
gives up his right to absolutely control his personal security on the understanding that they state will provide both physical security and meaningful redress for injuries which the individual may suffer from others. Small wonder that people take things into their own hands on occasion. The police failure to protect also makes the need for weapons more necessary to the individual for self-defence.

The right to self-defence in English law

The law on reasonable force as it is presently interpreted goes something like this: if you are attacked with a knife you may defend yourself with a knife: if you are attacked with bare fists you may defend yourself likewise. Do more in either instance and you will be in danger of being charged with an offence against the person, anything from common assault to murder. Pedantic proportionality is all. If you carry on assaulting your assailant after he is disabled, you will most likely face charges. If you have the opportunity to run away but do not, that may count against you in any assessment of whether you should be prosecuted. All this is demonstrably absurd. It assumes that people under attack can reasonably be expected to make judgements in the heat of the moment which in reality require calm consideration.

What is reasonable force?

Consider a few of the variables in assessing what is “reasonable force”. Women, the disabled, children and older men cannot reasonably be expected to defend themselves from a simple physical assault from a fit, strong assailant. Other things being equal, a small man cannot be expected to fight a large man; an older man a younger man, a fit man an unfit man. But, of course, other things are often not equal. Many men who are physically capable of fighting are absolutely hopeless at it. I have known a man of six and a half feet allow himself to be beaten by a man a foot smaller. Fighting is a matter of heart above all else. But it is also a matter of practice. Most men throwing a punch at someone’s face would be more likely to harm their fists than their opponent because they have
never been taught to punch correctly. (For those without any experience of fighting, I would recommend the knee in the groin or a good-old fashioned headbutt.) More importantly, those who are not used to fighting (and middleclass men generally fall into this category) are not psychologically prepared for a fight. This will mean one of two things: the person either capitulates utterly or goes into a berserk rage and keeps on damaging their opponent until the rage passes.

To these disparities of size, sex, age and mental and physical competence, we may add others. Someone who is assaulted does not know whether an assailant is going to restrict themselves to simple assault without a weapon. They may be armed for all the victim knows. Nor need this be obvious. To take a well-publicised case, that of Kenneth Noye who was convicted of murder in a road-rage incident http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/noye-admits-stabbing-on-the-m25-but-insists-that-he-killed-in-selfdefence-724180.html.

Noye carried a knife when he got out his car to confront his victim, but he only produced and used the knife when he began to get the worse of things as the two fought. (Noye
is also a good example of the effect of age on the ability to fight. He was 48 at the time of the murder. His victim was in his twenties. Noye was a career criminal with a reputation as hard man. Yet until he produced a knife, he got the worst of a fight he might reasonably have expected to win. Age had caught up with him). It is also true that even if an assailant does not have a weapon, the victim cannot know how far the assailant is likely to go. Will he restrict himself to punching? Or is the assailant the sort to put the boot in when
someone is on the floor? No one can know, Perhaps even the assailant does not know.

The obviously armed assailant presents a particular problem in judging what constitutes
proportionality of response. If someone comes at you with a knife, is it in order to use a gun? If the assailant has a club, may one use a knife? The law as it stands gives no clear guidance. It is all “every case has to be judged on its merits”.

Then there is the question of what happens should you disable your opponent. Suppose that a small man fells a much larger man with a lucky blow of, shall we say, a candlestick.
The smaller man is then left with the problem of what to do next. If he allows the more powerful man to recover, the smaller man will in all probability end up being badly hurt. The smaller man might be able to avoid that fate simply by running away (this is what the law would want you to do), yet he may be unable to reasonably do this even if he wishes to. That would be the case if the temporarily disabled man was a burglar and the smaller man’s wife and children were in the house where the fight took place. Let us further assume that there is no phone and the house is isolated as was the case with Tony Martin. In such circumstances, it could be argued with some force that it was reasonable to
deliberately disable the burglar by a further assault while he was unconscious to prevent the chance of violence from the burglar when he recovered consciousness.

Behind all these circumstantial problems stand the very human emotions of panic and rage. When one is attacked, the only desire is to ensure one’s safety. Adrenaline flows
and to say that any human being is in control of themselves in such circumstances is patent nonsense. The law does in practice take into account panic, but again it is all very hit-and-miss. Rage on the other hand is no excuse for what is judged a disproportionate assault.

The law as it presently stands effectively ignores human nature. It says that someone who is attacked must exercise truly marvellous self-control. In defending himself, the victim must not lose his temper and carry on attacking the attacker after the attacker has been disabled. This is utterly unrealistic. Someone in a blind rage or panic is manifestly not in control of their actions. There are good evolutionary reasons for that. When someone is responding to an attack, an uncontrolled response is the best way of responding to protect oneself. The evolutionary bottom line is: dead attacker equals safety.

What is a reasonable law of self-defence?

What then is a reasonable law of self-defence? The great bugbear at present is proportionality of response. In drafting a new law, I would start from the premise that an attacker forfeits his right to the protection of the law, that he literally takes his life into his hands. If the attacker is seriously wounded or even killed, that should be seen simply as a reasonable consequence of the attack. The test of “reasonable force” would become defunct. All that would have to investigated after an assault was whether there was evidence which suggested that the claimed attacker was in fact not the attacker. Provided such evidence did not exist, the person assaulted would have no case to answer. I would also remove from an attacker who suffers injury any opportunity to take civil action against his victim.

The great danger with such a law is that murder could take place under the guise of
self-defence. I would make two responses to that. Firstly, murder is very rare in Britain. It has been rare historically. The Canadian criminologist, Leyton Elliott who made a study of murder in Britain (Men of Blood) concluded that homicide in England was astonishingly rare and had been, relatively speaking, since the middle ages. In other words, there good sociological reasons to believe that few murders would take place under such an amended law. Approximately 800 homicides take place in England and Wales each year (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/4273125/Murder-and-manslaughter-rate-increasing.html).

My second point is that a claim of self-defence would still have to conform to the facts of the death. It would be no use, for example, claiming that a fight had taken place at on the morning of May 3 if the forensic evidence clearly showed that the body had been dead before that time.

I would introduce one further criterion to determine whether self-defence was proved, namely was the threat offered by the assailant credible. For example, most people have encountered the mad old lady who suddenly for no apparent reason sets about people in the street with a newspaper or some other equally inoffensive instrument. Clearly such a person would not present a credible threat to anyone other than another old lady or a young child. It would be ridiculous for a fit, younger adult to be able to claim self-defence against such an assailant. If on the other hand that same old lady entered someone’s house uninvited in the middle of the night and was struck down and killed by the householder in the dark under the apprehension that she was a burglar, that would be self-defence.

A law on the lines I have suggested would not be perfect. There would still be problems about establishing who was the assailant and who the victim. But that problem already exists under the present law. What such a law would definitely do is prevent the prosecution of householders such as Tony Martin who surprise those within their homes.

My proposal would also accommodate perhaps the most contentious part of self-defence, namely pre-emptive action. An assault which results in physical action against someone is clear cut. But the law does not say that to commit assault physical violence has to be used. A person may believe themselves to be in imminent danger of being assaulted – someone may be making threatening statements or carrying a weapon or coming rapidly towards someone else. In such circumstances, the law gives the person who fears he or she is about to be assaulted the right to defend themselves before they are assaulted. However, a person who engaged in such behaviour as things presently stand would have the greatest difficulty in sustaining such a claim if reliable witnesses were not present at the time. And if such witnesses were present, a prosecution might well result on the grounds that the presence of witnesses made an assault unlikely or one that could have been resisted. It is
a ticklish problem to say the least. But one could use one of the main criteria for determining whether a physical assault had taken place to decide whether an assault was like to take place, namely the credibility of the witnesses.

In short, all my law would require someone to do would be to show that they had been assaulted by an assailant in circumstances where a credible threat existed. If that was proved, no prosecution would take place. There might be some rough justice in that, but less than there is at the moment. Moreover, what rough justice there was would most probably be at the expense of the wrongdoer rather than the law-abiding citizen.

The Levellers: the first English radicals

Radical has a special meaning in English political history. It describes those whose instincts were democratic although they did not espouse the idea of a full male adult suffrage let alone a suffrage which included women until very late in their existence. But what they all had was a desire to see political power taken from the few and given to many more. Their means of doing this was not to overthrow Parliament but to make it responsive to the interests and needs of the general population, something which was to be achieved by devices such as broadening the franchise, ending rotten boroughs, annual parliaments. As for the monarchy, this might be allowed or not, but if it was to continue the powers of the crown had be emasculated. With few exception such as Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers, they were not socialists or egalitarian in a general sense. The sort of people who became radicals were typically men with some material independence and education such as tradesmen and those educated at non-conformist colleges. Constitutional reform – in which they had a naive trust as a panacea for all the ills they wished to mend – was what they sought, not social revolution.

The English radical emerged in the struggle between Charles I and Parliament. The group which gave the strongest voice and effect to the new radical was the Levellers. They were a disparate and ever shifting crew, drawing their support primarily from the ranks of the Parliamentary armed forces (especially after the New Model Army was formed in 1645), small tradesmen, journeymen and apprentices. However, they also included those from higher social classes, their most famous leader, John Lilburne, being the child of minor gentry.

What the Levellers were most certainly not, were the thorough going democrats and proto-socialists portrayed by the likes of Tony Benn and Bill Bragg. Rather they were men who would have fitted much more comfortably into the ideological sleeve of Margaret Thatcher than that of social democracy.

Their opponents attempted to portray the Levellers as social revolutionaries who would take the property of the rich, most particularly their land, and give it to the poor. Hence the epithet of Leveller which originated as a term of abuse. But the Levellers consistently denied that they had any such programme and were staunch defenders of the right to property. They might best be characterised as radical democrats with a very strong libertarian streak. Indeed, so far were they from being proto-communists that they had an almost sacramental belief in the individual’s right to personal property.

Intellectually, they started from the view that all Englishmen had a birthright which entitled them to have a say in who should govern them, although at times they accepted that the birthright might be breached through dependence on a master or by receiving alms. More importantly, their ideology contained the germ of the idea of a social contract between the people and those who held power, an idea which was to come to dominate English political thinking for the next century or so through the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

The Levellers were, with one or two exceptions such as Richard Overton, who was a deist at best and an atheist at worst, or John Wildman, who was a libertine and chancer, religious. But their belief had a strong vein of rationalism in it. They saw God not as the often cantankerous and domineering supernatural being of traditional Christianity, but as a rational intelligence who entered every man and allowed him to see what was naturally just and reasonable. For the Levellers, it seemed a natural right – a rational right – for a man to have a say in who should hold power and what they should do with the power.

The Levellers were happy to use historical props such as Magna Carta and the legend of Norman oppression when it suited them, but their rationality led them to question how men were governed from first principles. One of the Leveller leaders Richard Overton actually called Magna Carta a ”beggarly thing” and went on to comment:

Ye [Parliament] were chosen to work our deliverance, and to estate us in natural and just liberty, agreeable to reason and common equity, for whatever our forefathers were, we are the men of the present age, and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitancies, molestations or arbitrary power. (A Remonstrance. Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution)

More balanced was his fellow Leveller William Walwyn:

Magna Carta (you must observe) is but a part of the people’s rights and liberties, being no more but what with much striving and fighting, was wrested from the paws of those kings , who by force had conquered the nation, changed the laws and by strong hand held them in bondage. (England’s Lamentable Slaverie, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution.)

To call the Levellers a political party in the modern sense would be misleading. Yet they were the closest thing to it both then and, arguably, for several centuries. Their tactics and organisation were modern – the use of pamphletering and newspapers, the ability to get large number of supporters onto the streets (especially in London) at the drop of a hat, the creation of local associations. Much of this was the work of Lilburne, a man of preternatural obstinacy, courage and general unreasonableness. It says much for the restraint of the English elite of the day and respect for the law that he was not killed out of hand. It is difficult to imagine such behaviour being tolerated anywhere in Europe in the seventeenth century.

Lilburne by every account of him was a most difficult man – it was said that his nature was so combative that he would seek a quarrel with himself if he were alone – ‘Jack would fight with John’. Yet this man, who came from a very modest gentry background, remained alive despite challenging the authority of first the king and then during and after the civil war, Parliament, Cromwell and the Commonwealth. He thus carried on this mortally dangerous behaviour for almost a generation. To the end of his life in 1657, he was thought dangerous enough to imprison.

Lilburne first came to notice for seditious speeches and writings in the 1630s. For that he was whipped from the Fleet to the Palace Yard where he was stood in the stocks. Whilst in the stocks, he removed copies of the pamphlets which had caused his punishment and threw them to the crowd. That little episode will give a good idea of the Lilburne’s general mentality. He was an extreme example one of those necessary unreasonable men without whom nothing great gets done.

From the time of his flogging onwards, Lilburne’s career was one of studied defiance of authority. He was one of the most potent pamphleteers England has ever seen. For more than a decade, he produced a flood of writings guaranteed to inflame virtually anyone in public authority in the land. He faced down judges in the most powerful courts in the land. He controlled the London mob consummately. He treated the greatest men in the land as equals. In any other place on the planet at that time, he would have been dead meat before his career as an agitator began. But not in England. He might be flogged. He might be put in the stocks. He might be imprisoned. He might be tried twice for his life. But what 17th century England would not do was unreservedly murder him.

The Levellers developed an increasingly sophisticated political programme in a series of documents known as The Agreements of the People. These Agreements dealt extensively with political representation and structure. They were also very successful in creating a sense of historic grievance and an enemy. They did this by portraying 1640s England as having declined from a golden age of freedom to an oppressed land and people under the heel of the Normans and their French successors.

The Levellers time was brief. They were a serious political force for, at most, the years 1646 to 1649 and that is probably being a mite too generous. They failed utterly in the end, not least because they were unable to carry the army, especially the junior officers, with them. But they were important both for giving voice to the ideas and creating many of the practices on which modern politics is founded.

English liberty and the weakness of state power

There were two great sources of general authority in mediaeval England. The Church was one, the other was the Crown. The mediaeval English man and woman had no great regard for either. This robust contempt for authority and the inability of either priest or king to exercise enough power to quell it allowed the English to develop a mentality which was not customarily subordinate.

The English who people the pages of Langland and Chaucer show a mediaeval England where commoners would not as a matter of course willingly touch their forelock or allow their lives to be circumscribed by those with social status. Later, Shakespeare’s lowlifes and the characters in Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew Fair often show a rumbustious lack of deference for their social betters. It is improbable in the extreme that the worlds depicted by these authors would not have reflected the societies in which they lived. Traits were exaggerated for dramatic effect doubtless, but the cultural story they told was fundamentally rooted in the England in which they wrote.

Langland’s Piers Ploughman is especially interesting because the work begins with a catalogue of the people who inhabited the world he knew (Prologue – The plain full of people). Here are the worldly and the devout, the high and the low. The cleric and the noble jostle with minstrels, tramps, beggars, merchants, tradesmen, and the honest ploughman who tills “the soil for the common good”. Langland’s clerics are often corrupt, the nobles capricious, the merchants avaricious, the workmen shoddy and cheating in their work, the beggars dishonest and the minstrels bawdy, but they are balanced by honest men in their various callings. In other words, it is a world not so different in terms of human personality to that we inhabit.

Before the Reformation the English were renowned throughout Europe for their anticlericism – a good example of this attitude was the response to Sudbury’s warning to Wat Tyler’s rebels that England would be put under an interdict by the Pope if he was harmed. This was met by hearty laughter followed by the grisly dispatch of the unfortunate cleric soon afterwards, whose head did not part from his shoulders until a goodly number of blows had been struck.

The contempt in which many of the servants of the Church were held can be seen in both John Wycliffe’s complaints against clerical abuse in the latter half of the 14th century and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Langland’s Piers Plowman, both written in the same century in which the Peasants’ Revolt took place. Both works are full of jibes at fat illiterate priests and cheating pardoners who peddled absolution from sins with their indulgences sold for money.

Wycliffe’s doctrine contained the fundamental ideas which were later realised internationally in the Reformation. He questioned the reality of transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that the bread and wine at Communion turn literally into the body and blood of Christ), he attacked the authority of the pope, he railed against the abuses of simony and indulgences. He advocated a bible in English and either he or his followers, the Lollards, produced a complete translation before the end of the fourteenth century.

Implicit within Wycliffe’s thought was the democratic spirit, because it is a short intellectual step from the belief that each man could be his own mediator with God to the idea that he should have a say in his earthly life. The Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries both promoted this individualist mentality in matters both sacred and profane and weakened the power of the Church as a source of authority in competition with the monarchy.

If the English were derisive of their priests, they were, as the Peasants Revolt showed, even less enamoured of the Crown with its tax collectors and the widespread existence of serfdom. But in truth the hand of the mediaeval state as embodied by the monarch was remarkably light by modern standards, especially so during the century long struggle of the houses of Lancaster and York and partly because mediaeval kingship was of necessity very limited in what it could do administratively because of a lack of funds, the power of the peerage, primitive technology, poor communications, administrative naivety and a radically different view of what government and society should be – apart from looking after his own privileges and estates, kings were expected to defend the land, put down rebellions, provide legal redress through the royal courts, maintain the position of the church and lead in war against other rulers. And that was about it.

But there was also a further check on the monarch. Perhaps the most important practical adjunct of this desire for freedom, has been that the English long hated and mistrusted the idea of a standing army as the creature of tyrants. The English were eventually content to have the strongest navy in the world because it could not be used against them, but a substantial army was not accepted as reasonable until the experiences of the Great War accustomed men to the idea. Soldiers were held in contempt before then. “Gone for a soldier” was little better than “taken for a thief”. The needs of Empire produced more ambivalence into the English view of soldiers as Kipling’s poem “Tommy” shows: “Oh, it’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, and chuck him out the brute! But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.” But the old resentment, fear and contempt remained until the stark democracy of experience in the trenches during the Great War tempered the English mind to tolerance of the soldier.

Because of a lack of a large standing army, English kings were ever dependent on the will of others, be it their nobles, parliament or the gentry. Even the most practically tyrannical of English kings, Henry VIII, was most careful to use Parliament to sanction his acts.

The consequences of this weakness was that power was localised. Incredible as it may see today, the practical governance of day-to-day life in England until well into the nineteenth century lay largely in the hands of private gentlemen occupying the post of JP, whose powers were much greater than they are today. Indeed, the central state impinged very little on the ordinary Englishman before 1914. George Bowling, the hero of George Orwell’s “Coming up for air” reflecting on how the arms of the state touched an honest citizen before the Great War could think only of the registration of births, deaths and marriages and the General Post Office.

By keeping the king dependent upon the will of others, the English ensured that a despot such as Louis X1V could not arise in England and in so doing underwrote their general liberties. Without that, it is improbable that parliamentary government (as opposed to a parliament) would have arisen. England would almost certainly have been involved in many debilitating wars for the aggrandisement of the king. In those circumstances it is unlikely that England as a modern state would have arisen.

The inability of English monarchs to create an absolute monarchy on the lines of Louis XIX’s France is a reflection of the independent spirit of the English and their natural instinct for liberty.

The Free-Born Englishman

It may have taken until 1928 for full adult suffrage of English men and women to arrive, but the essential sentiments which feed the idea of democracy – that human beings are morally equal and enjoy autonomy as individuals and a natural resentment of privilege and inequality – are ancient in England.

If there is one outstanding trait in English political history it is probably the desire for personal freedom. This might seem odd to the modern Englishman who sees the large majority of his country men and women consistently welcoming the idea of the most intrusive forms of ID cards and who stand by dumbly as many of the age-old and ineffably hard-won rights which protect the individual, such as the abridgement of jury trial and the right to silence, being swept away by modern governments. But it was not always so and that “always so” was not so long ago. The great Austrian political and economic thinker Friedrich Hayek put it forcefully during the Second World War:

“It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that only in English society, and those societies deriving from it, is the notion of individual liberty built into the social fabric. The English have been free not primarily because of legal rights, but because it is their evolved social nature. They accept liberty because it seems natural to them.” (The road to Serfdom – chapter Material conditions and ideal ends)

In short, individual liberty has been and is part of being English and part of England. It would be going too far to claim that the English masses have ever had any highly developed sense of liberal with a small ‘l’ sentiments, but throughout English history there has been both a widespread resentment of interference, either public or private, in the private life of English men and women and an acute awareness that privilege was more often than not unearned and frequently cruelly used to oppress the poor.

Most importantly, over the centuries the elite gradually adopted the ideal of personal freedom into their ideology. Here is the elder Pitt speaking on the notion that the idea that an Englishman’s home:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow though it – the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter! – All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! (Quoted in Lord Brougham’s Statesmen in the time of George III)

The desire for liberty and a freeman’s due is seen in the constant demand by mediaeval towns for charters which would free them from aspects of royal control, most particularly taxation. In some respects it helped fuel the barons’ demand for Magna Carta. It drove the Peasant’s Revolt. It provided the emotional engine for the decline of serfdom once circumstances were propitious after the Black Death.

The Levellers made it their ideological centrepiece in the 1640s, their leader, John Lilburne, revelling in the name of “Freeborn John”. “Wilkes and Liberty” was the mob’s popular cry in that most aristocratic of centuries, the eighteenth. The Chartists held tight to the ideal in the nineteenth.

The idea that liberty was part of the birthright of the English survived until after the Second World war. Indeed, the English remained in their daily lives, once the wartime social controls such as rationing were removed, very free from until the 1960s. Apart from the laws of libel, slander, obscenity and the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of the theatre, there were no legal bars to what might be said or written. The concept of “hate crimes” was unknown. Employers might employ who they chose; those providing goods and services whom they would serve. The ideas which we now call political correctness had no hold on any but small groups of people who were at best considered eccentric and at worst fanatics.

That precious natural liberty began to be eroded in the 1960s. The mass immigration of the post-war years provided the excuse to pass Race Relations Acts (RRAs) of increasing severity in 1965, the second in 1968 and the third in 1976. The passing of 1965 RRA provided the breach in the dyke of English liberty. Through it climbed the gays and feminists to obtain, sooner or later, legal protections from equal opportunities legislation. From that has grown the immense state apparatus – all public bodies have to by law preach the political correct gospel – of enforced “equality” (in reality the granting of privileges to those approved of by the politically correct) which binds us today.

In 1972 a further lance was driven into the side of English liberty with the Heath Government’s abduction of British sovereignty as he happily gave it to what is today the European Union (EU). This has destroyed the ability of electors to hold governments to account because the British mainstream political class overwhelmingly supports British membership of the EU. That institution constantly thrusts on Britain ideas which are wholly at odds with England’s traditions of freedom, for example the judicial abomination which is the European Arrest Warrant, a legal device which allows any person to be extradited from Britain to another EU state without any meaningful test of the evidence against them.

Come the 1980s and a more diffuse and slippery weapon to undermine English freedom was introduced by Margaret Thatcher. This was a fanatic ideological commitment to laissez fair economics at home and abroad which lingers to this day. What became known as globalisation destroyed employment in Britain, especially mining and manufacturing, and provided the excuse for another great flood of immigrants from the third world. The institutionalisation of mass unemployment (the real figure has been in the millions since the late seventies, much of it disguised as long-term sickness, a device instituted by Thatcher when the employment figure soared to over three million and cynically continued by all governments since). The mass unemployment made people dependent on the state at a level never previously seen and the increase in immigration both increased the competition for work and drove the social fracture already made in the priceless homogeneity of the country massively wider.

The final nail (to date) in the coffin of English freedom is the devolution settlement which granted power to parliaments or assemblies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales whilst denying England any such privilege. The English were left with no political voice , while watching vast amounts of English taxpayers’ money being shipped to the Celtic Fringe (around £16 billion pa at present) and MPs from non-English seats making laws for England which would not apply in their own constituencies.

The upshot of sixty years of gradual squeezing of English freedoms is that an English man or woman may no longer say what they thing about race, immigration, sexual equality or sexual predilection without at least risking the loss of their employment and quite possibly being subject to criminal prosecution; employers live in fear of any member of an ethnic minority, woman or gay suing for sexual or racial discrimination; political correctness is the watchword of anyone in public life and history has become next to dead as a meaningful subject in English schools because all the parts which would embarrass immigrants or make them feel excluded from “our island story” have been excised from the curriculum.

That is the sad state of the once free-born Englishman. Is he gone for ever? Not yet, but in another generation or two he probably will be lost forever. We can revive the mentality provided we act now. The first necessity is to leave the EU and throw off any other treaty restraints which undermine democratic control. After that the stripping out of political correctness from our legal system and institutions can begin; mass immigration be ended; a judicious protection for vital industries introduced and the pandering to minorities cease. That will provide the soil in which English freedom can revive.

English Speaking Union debate: ‘This house believes that an English Parliament is the last hope for a United Kingdom’

Report and commentary on the Campaign for an English Parliament English Speaking Union debate 24 November 2010

Proposition: ‘This house believes that an English Parliament is the last hope for a United Kingdom’

Chair: Louisa Preston (BBC Presenter)

For: Scilla Cullen (CEP), David Wildgoose ( (English Democrats)

Against: Prof. Hugo de Burgh (Ex-journalist and now a Director, China Media Studies at Westminster U, Eddie Bone (CEP)

NB Eddie Bone was playing devil’s advocate (see below) as he is a supporter of an English Parliament

The proposition for debate was lightly worn as both the platform speakers and comments and questions from the floor tended to circle around the questions of a federal UK and the practicality of an English parliament. Nonetheless, it was an interesting evening with a healthy turnout.

Scilla Cullen

Mrs Cullen’s main thrust was directed at what she claimed were breaches of the 1707 Act of Union. She illustrated this by pointing to the fact that we now have at two Parliaments – at Westminster and Edinburgh – in the UK ( four if the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies are treated as parliaments) whereas the Act says there will be but one Parliament for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and different tax and regulatory regimes for trade between the four home countries, something which she claimed was forbidden by the Act.

There are two objections to Mrs Cullen’s argument. The Act of Union is simply an ordinary Act of Parliament. It has no superior status as constitutional law. This means that it can be amended or repealed overtly by an Act of Parliament or by the application of the English legal doctrine of implied repeal, viz:

“As a general rule, if an Act is partially or wholly inconsistent with a previous Act, then the previous Act is repealed to the extent of the inconsistency. It does not matter that the later Act contains no express words to affect the repeal or alteration. This is known as the doctrine of implied repeal. (page 3 – http://cseng.aw.com/catalog/uploads/Carroll_C05.pdf – there is a good presentation of the history and development of the doctrine at this url )”

There have been attempts since Britain’s entry into the EU (EEC at the time of entry) – most notably in the ‘Metric Martyrs’ case – to establish that some statutes have a de facto constitutional status and should not be subject to implied repeal – but no higher court has sustained the claim. (This failure to create a superior constitutional law status underpins David Cameron’s recent claim that Parliament is supreme and consequently Britain could leave the EU simply by an Act of Parliament. Cameron is incorrect because of the Lisbon Treaty – see below under Wildgoose). It is worth adding, that even if some ordinary Acts of Parliament were retrospectively given a superior constitutional law status and were not subject to implied repeal, the constitutional position would remain unclear because the Acts with constitutional law status would contradict one another.

The existence of implied repeal means that any complaint that the original Act of Union has been breached by later law has no legal force.

As for the claim that the original Act required equality of tax and trade regulations throughout Great Britain, this is simply wrong because there are exceptions such those in clause VI (the full text of the Act can be found at http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/the-act-of-union-1707/ ). Most notable is clause IX, viz:

“THAT whenever the sum of One million nine hundred ninety seven thousand seven hundred and sixty three pounds eight shillings and four pence half penny, shall be enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain to be raised in that part of the United Kingdom now called England, on Land and other Things usually charged in Acts of Parliament there, for granting an Aid to the Crown by a Land Tax; that part of the United Kingdom now called Scotland, shall be charged by the same Act, with a further Sum of forty-eight thousand Pounds, free of all Charges, as the Quota of Scotland, to such Tax, and to proportionably for any greater or lesser Sum raised in England by any Tax on Land, and other Things usually charged together with the Land; and that such Quota for Scotland, in the Cases aforesaid, be raised and collected in the same Manner as the Cess now is in Scotland, but subject to such Regulations in the manner of collecting, as shall be made by the Parliament of Great Britain.”

At the time of Union England had a population in the region of 5 million and Scotland a population of approximately 1 million. If Scotland had been taxed at the same rate as England under that clause they would have been paying not £48,000 but nearer to £400,000. Hence, from the very beginning Scotland was treated much more favourably than England when it came to taxation.

Mrs Cullen was on firmer ground when she pressed the fact that we had a de facto federal system which could only be equitable by the creation of an English Parliament . She illustrated the point by mentioning that we currently have the absurdity of the SNP’s Richard Lochhead, a domestic Scottish politician without any electoral base in UK politics, negotiating on behalf of the UK with the EU over fishing policy.

David Wildgoose

Mr Wildgoose wanted a federal UK but it would not have been one which I think most English men and women would welcome. His idea of a federal government was one in which 55 seats at Westminster were taken from the Celts and given to the English, with “English votes for English laws” and the federal issues decided by the entire Parliament. The problem was he was not envisaging a situation in which the English subsidy to the Celts ended, for example, he assumed welfare benefits would continue to be funded from Westminster . This sat uncomfortably with his claim that he wanted “The English to be equal citizens with equal rights”.

During the Q and A session afterwards I detailed what a stable and long lasting federal UK should involve – four national parliaments with home rule including fiscal responsibility and one assembly to deal with federal matters such as foreign affairs, defence and the servicing of the national debt. Oddly, Mr Wildgoose claimed this was not a federation but a confederation. I pointed out, sadly without success, that a confederation is a loose league of states without any overarching government, for example, the confederation which arose immediately after the end of the American War of Independence , while a federation has an overarching government such as that which was formed when the United States was established. Clearly what I was proposing was a federal system while Mr Wildgoose was suggesting no more than a procedurally amended House of Commons.

Mr Wildgoose also recited the oft made claim that because Parliament is supreme Britain can leave the EU simply by passing an Act of Parliament repealing all the Treaties which enshrine our EU membership in law. This is no longer true. The Lisbon Treaty contains for the first time a mechanism for any EU state wishing to withdraw from the Union, viz:

“Article 50 of the Treaty runs:

“1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.

3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it. A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.”

Apart from requiring a qualified majority of the other EU states (QMV means in practice the support of most of the large EU nations), the state which wishes to withdraw would be excluded from any discussions on the conditions for withdrawal. Then there is the delay before withdrawal can be effected. It is probable that the minimum period of waiting before secession would be two years, because it would be extraordinary if the EU did not try to make withdrawal as difficult as possible, while the provision in paragraph 2 that departure must be by negotiation “setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union” means that it will necessarily be a protracted process.

During the time before Britain left she would be bound by EU laws and the EU could adopt directives which could do Britain a good deal of damage, for example, directives which severely interfered with the City. These would not even have to be directives deliberately designed to harm Britain, but simply decisions advantageous to the remaining members which would take no account of any damage that might be done to Britain. Britain would take no part in discussions or votes on EU legislation introduced during the period between asking to withdraw and actually withdrawing. There would almost certainly be significant conditions for withdrawal which impinged upon British sovereignty including agreement to ‘voluntarily’ adopt much EU legislation, both existing and future. With the Treaty unsigned Britain could have simply stated that it was withdrawing. Such a declaration would raise the question of whether Article 56(1) of the Vienna Convention on the Law on Treaties, to which our political elite have also promiscuously bound Britain, would sanction withdrawal. The Article runs:

“1. A treaty which contains no provision regarding its termination and which does not provide for denunciation or withdrawal is not subject to denunciation or withdrawal unless:

a) it is established that the parties intended to admit the possibility of denunciation or withdrawal; or

b) a right of denunciation or withdrawal may be implied by the nature of the treaty.”

Whether the various treaties which encumber the EU before the Lisbon Treaty is in force could be said to imply a right of withdrawal is a matter of legal debate, although the fact that the Lisbon Treaty itself makes provision for withdrawal is a tacit admission that withdrawal was always implied. But legal or not, a situation where the right of withdrawal was claimed where no treaty sanctioned, forbade or laid down conditions for withdrawal would be a vastly more fluid and, consequently, Britain would be in a much stronger bargaining situation than that which would exist after the Lisbon Treaty becomes law. After implementation of the Treaty, Article 54 of the Vienna Convention on the Law on Treaties would apply to the EU. That Article runs:

“The termination of a treaty or the withdrawal of a party may

take place:

(a) in conformity with the provisions of the treaty; or

(b) at any time by consent of all the parties after consultation with the other contracting States.”

This is in conformity with the withdrawal Article in the Lisbon Treaty and the EU’s legal position would be greatly strengthened by the Treaty‘s implementation. That is one of the reasons why the EU is so desperate to get the Treaty ratified before the next British general election.

But legality in international matters is not the same as legality within a nation state. This is both because there is no democratic legitimacy for international law and for the entirely practical reason that there is no means of enforcing such law, short of blockade or war. Hence, international law is all too often observed in its breach by powerful nations and enforced by the powerful on the weak. Its unreality is shown in Article 42 of the Vienna Convention on the Law on Treaties:

“Validity and continuance in force of treaties

1. The validity of a treaty or of the consent of a State or an international organization to be bound by a treaty may be impeached only through the application of the present Convention.

2. The termination of a treaty, its denunciation or the withdrawal of a party, may take place only as a result of the application of the provisions of the treaty or of the present Convention. The same rule applies to suspension of the operation of a treaty.”

This means that for Britain to legally withdraw from the Vienna Convention all Britain’s co-signatories would have to agree to the withdrawal, a truly fantastic hope.” (Extract from my recent Quarterly Review article Life after Lisbon: freedom or servitude?)

Hugo de Burgh

Prof de Burgh served up a very rum political dish. On the one hand he was wont to make comments such as the EU is “Germany’s Fourth Reich” and a claim that the best governments in the world were all to be found in the Anglosphere as well as constantly extolling the culture and traditions of England. He was also roundly contemptuous of modern politicians, whom he sees as largely corrupt and self serving, and the centralising tendencies of recent British governments. On the other hand he was adamant that that there should be no English Parliament.

There are two contradictions here. First, if English culture and traditions are so valuable, it follows that they are worth preserving and like everything else worth preserving this is best done by those with the most direct interest, in this instance the England. Second, if Prof de Burgh wants less centralisation, what could be a better place to start than by removing English spending from the bonds of UK policy? It was noticeable that while advocating a devolution of powers generally to the local levels, the Professor did not feel it necessary to suggest that the Celtic Fringe assemblies be abolished. Astute readers will see that Prof de Burgh’s ideal UK is not a million miles from that of the Blair government with England balkanised and the Celts left politically intact.

How did Prof de Burgh justify his opposition to an English parliament? Apart from his localism argument, he conjured up a vision of a new world dominated by China with the Anglosphere replaced as top political world dog by the Asiansphere and argued from this that it made no sense for England to assert her nationhood because England would be too small and insignificant to have a significant voice. Why this would be a significantly smaller or significant voice than that of the UK – England having five sixths of UK population – he did not attempt to explain.

The Professor eventually let the cat out of the bag by saying that England (and the rest of the Anglosphere) should exercise its influence by simply continuing as before which would set an example to nations without a tradition of the type of values he most admired in the Anglosphere such as representative democracy (note: England invented representative government not democracy) and equality before the law. This is the modern liberal internationalist version of the late imperial ideal of bringing civilisation to “lesser breeds without the law”.

Prof de Burgh told a fascinating story about a recent encounter he had with a rising member of the Chinese elite who was already an important administrator. Most Chinese the professor meets love to show off their English. Not this one. In fact, he did not speak at all and was proud of the fact. The Chinese official explained that he had made a conscious decision not to learn English because he wanted to remain untouched by foreign culture as this would allow him to fully understand and appreciate the people he would be effectively governing. That is precisely the mentality which Lord Macartney encountered on the first official British embassy to China in 1794 (His journal is available from the Folio Society in their publication An Embassy to China. ) The liberal idea that China will become a model of Liberal democracy rigid with political correctness is so far removed from the Chinese mentality as to be comical were it not for the threat China potentially pose to the West. (Those who wish to understand the immense ambition of the Chinese should read Parag Khanna’s “The second world”.)

Prof de Burgh disavowed this mentality but clearly admired it. In fact, it is a classic expression of the natural human desire to guard the security of the tribe. I applaud that, but seek the same privilege for the English and any other nation.

Eddie Bone

Mr Bone’s contribution I found unreservedly fascinating. He has amassed a positive treasury of quotes of Anglophobic politicians from all the major parties and used these to put the anti-English Parliament government case. There was Jack Straw claiming the English were dangerous because they were violent, David Cameron recoiling with horror at the idea of being Prime Minister of merely England , George Robertson rubbing his hands at the idea of regional governments in England, John Prescott bizarrely claiming he is a “proud Welshman” and William Hague insisting he is a Briton first and foremost.

Mr Bone has promised to send me a copy of his quotes which I shall post on the England calling blog (he has agreed to this).

Questions and comments from the floor

There was a good array of questions including important issues which had gone largely or wholly unmentioned by the speakers such as the complication of the EU and the dire economic situation of the Celtic Fringe.

The mood of the meeting was overwhelmingly one of anger at the way England was being treated.

The vote on the proposition was carried overwhelmingly.

My general observations

Those who want an English Parliament must ensure they:

1. understand the legal position before making claims. It is not enough to think that something is so or to rely on a quote. It is imperative to go and look at the full Act or Treaty to properly understand the situation and quite probably to read an expert commentary on the Act or Treaty.

2. realise the importance of economics to this debate because the Celtic Fringe countries are all economic basket cases, for example, the public service proportion of their GDP is approximately 70% Northern Ireland, 65% Wales and 58% Scotland. They survive at their present level of expenditure simply because of the English subsidy which is probably in the region of £25 billion a year once the higher per capita Treasury funding to the Celtic Fringe (£15 billion), the lower tax take in the Celtic Fringe than in England and the higher per capita benefits bill (which is paid by Westminster) in the Celtic Fringe than England . None of the speakers raised the issue and I was the only one to do so in the Q and A.

3. understand that unless each home nation has full autonomy for domestic issues and has to raise all the tax they use to fund domestic and their share of federal funding, the odds are that England would still end up subsidizing the Celts.

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States. The nonexistence of the United States would have made a colossal difference to the history of the past two centuries and to the present day, not least because it is and has been for a century or more responsible for a tremendous proportion of global scientific discovery and technological development.

At this point I can hear the cry of many: why the English not the British? Was not the United States formed as much by the Scots and Irish as by the English? There will even be those who will press the claims of the Germans. A little careful thought will show that no one but the English could have been responsible, although many peoples and cultures have subsequently added to the considerable variety of American life.

The English were the numerically dominant settlers from the Jamestown settlement in 1607 until the Revolution. Moreover, and this is the vital matter, they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for the first one hundred years. Even in 1776 English descended settlers formed, according to the historical section of the American Bureau of Census, nearly sixty percent of the population and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain. This English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the immense non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp the earlier simply because of its greater scale? The answer is no – at least until the relaxation of immigration rules in the sixties – because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA.

When immigrants enter a country their descendants will generally adopt the social and cultural colouring of the native population. The only general exception to this well attested sociological fact is in a situation of conquest, although even there the invader if few in number will become integrated through intermarriage and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. Thus at any time in the development of the USA the bulk of the population were practisers of a general culture which strongly reflected that of the original colonisers, namely the English. Immigrants were therefore inclined to adopt the same culture.

America’s English origins spread throughout her culture. Her law is founded on English common law. The most famous of American law officers is the English office of sheriff. Congress imitates the eighteenth century British Constitution (President = King; Senate = Lords; House of Representatives = The House of Commons) with, of course, the difference of a codified constitution. (It would incidentally be truer to describe the British Constitution as uncodified rather than unwritten). It is an irony that their system of government has retained a large degree of the monarchical and aristocratic principles whilst that of Britain has removed power remorselessly from King and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in the hands of elected representatives who have no formal mandate beyond the representation of their constituents.

The Declaration of Independence is full of phrases and sentiments redolent of English liberty. The prime political texts of the American revolution were those of the Englishmen John Locke and Tom Paine. The American Constitution is designed to alleviate faults in the British Constitution not to abrogate it utterly. The first ten amendments which form the American Bill of Rights draw their inspiration from the English Bill of Rights granted by William of Orange. The American Revolution was conducted by men whose whole thought was in the English political tradition.

The English influence is written deeply into the American landscape. Take a map of the States and see how many of the place names are English, even outside the original thirteen colonies which formed the USA. Note that they are divided into parishes and counties.

Above all other cultural influences stands the English language. Bismarck thought that the fact that America spoke English was the most significant political fact of his time. I am inclined to agree with him. But at a more fundamental level, the simple fact that English is spoken by Americans as their first language means that their thought processes will be broadly similar to that of the English. Language is the ultimate colonisation of a people.

Moreover, the English spoken by the majority of Americans is still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for example, far less mutated than the English spoken in India. The English have little difficulty in understanding USA-born white Americans whatever their regional origin. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to many Americans that the average Englishman probably finds it easier to understand most American forms of often affect not to understand English accents, but it is amazing how well they understand them when they need something. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “America and England are two countries divided by a common language” was witty but, as with so much of what he said, utterly at variance with reality.

There is a special relationship between England and America but it is not the one beloved of politicians. The special relationship is one of history and culture. American culture is an evolved Englishness, much added to superficially but still remarkably and recognisably English.

When you go to the cinema think of how often English legends such as Robin Hood are used by Americans. Reflect on how, until recently at least, American universities would give as a matter of course considerable time to the study of writers such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen. These things happen naturally and without self-consciousness because English culture and history is part of American history.

The English and the rule of law

The English desire for freedom and their rights is given practical expression in their attitude towards the law throughout England’s history: it was respected out of all proportion to the justice it commonly delivered. It predated the Conquest. It survived Norman rule. When the jurist Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the laws of England” were published in the 1760′s they were immensely popular amongst the chattering classes of the day. It is difficult to imagine heavy works on the law being acclaimed by educated Englishmen and women of our own time, but for their eighteenth century counterparts it was not merely a work of law but a statement of English liberty and, indeed, of English superiority over foreigners. Were they wrong to so respect a very flawed system of justice? To answer that question one need only look at the alternatives. A system of justice as opposed to law is one of the most difficult of social plants to cultivate. Human beings have a natural inclination to act according to custom within the prevailing social hierarchy rather than according to an intellectual construct such as the concept of natural justice. Moreover, a system of law requires within it the need to apply the law equally to equals. This does not imply a general equality before the law, because a system of law which differentiated between people, for example on the grounds of social class, would be perfectly rational. However, it does mean that anyone who fell into a designated class would be treated equally.

What applies to a group based system of law applies with vastly greater force than where general equality before the law is concerned, ie where every person within a jurisdiction is equally subject to the law.

The difficulty in establishing meaningful systems of law can be all too readily seen in the present. Most of the world’s people live now as they have always done in societies which do not have legal systems worthy of the name of justice. The most unfortunate live in circumstances where they are at the mercy of competing warlords. There nothing better than the will of the warlord exists. Other people live in states where there is a formal system of law made worthless by political interference. Many societies have legal systems which lack any meaningful protection for the accused through an absence of forensic examination or concepts such as Due Process.

It is against this background that the English legal development must be seen. The English legal system is as fair as any in the world and arguably the fairest. It has an ancient unbroken tradition, formal equality before the law, habeous corpus, sub judice, well established principles of due process, widespread use of the jury, substantial provision for legal aid and above all the presumption of innocence. The whole is underpinned by the potent concept of natural justice.

These legal goods stand on the platform of an immensely strong strain of personal freedom in English history which has produced a general principle utterly at odds with continental systems of law, namely the idea that an Englishman may do anything legally which is not forbidden by law. Continental systems do the reverse: citizens are permitted to do what the law says and not what it doesn’t. That in itself makes those operating under continental law much more liable to prosecution simply because the variety of offences is multiplied.

This is not to say that the English justice system is perfect. Indeed, it is far from that. Its most general failure is the fact that it is tainted with money. The quality of legal advice and representation a man receives in either civil or criminal proceedings is largely determined by his wallet. In civil suits the size of his wallet frequently determines whether he may even go to court. Some laws, most notably that of libel, are only available in practice to the very rich or those backed by a rich patron or organisation. Patently, while law is not open equally to all, equality one may add the political involvement of the parliamentary law officers, the secrecy and incompetence of the prosecuting authorities and the overly restrictive rules of evidence.

But despite its many practical weaknesses, the English legal system does and has provided for centuries the basis for the sane and reasonable delivery of justice. The English have long recognised that a flawed system of law applicable to all is vastly preferable to a partial law which distinguishes between nobles and commoners or no meaningful law at all. Indeed, it is this attachment to the English Common law which is one of the primary themes of English history. It has had profound consequences, because those who respect the law are likely to be less violent in their personal lives (the idea of vendetta was never part of English custom). Men who can be sure of keeping their property will build for the future. Political chaos is made less likely where men believe there is a chance of perceived royal wrongs being ighted through parliament.

The case of the leveller leader, John Lilburne, shows how much part of English life respect for the law was even three and a half centuries ago. Lilburne by every account of him was a most difficult man – it was said that his nature was so combative that he would seek a quarrel with himself if he were alone – ‘Jack would fight with John’. Yet this man, who came from a very modest gentry background, remained alive despite challenging the authority of first the king and then during and after the civil war, Parliament, Cromwell and the Commonwealth. He thus carried on this mortally dangerous behaviour for almost a generation. To the end of his life in 1657, he was thought dangerous enough to imprison.

From the time of his flogging onwards, Lilburne’s career was one of studied defiance of authority. He was one of the most potent pamphleteers England has ever seen. For more than a decade. He produced a flood of writings guaranteed to inflame virtually anyone in public authority in the land. He faced down judges in the most powerful courts in the land. He controlled the London mob consummately. He treated the greatest men in the land as equals. In any other place on the planet at that time, he would have been dead meat before his career as an agitator began. But not in England. He might be flogged. He might be put in the stocks. He might be imprisoned. He might be tried twice for his life. But what England would not do was unreservedly murder him.

Perhaps one act from history epitomises the advanced legal state of England. In 1760 Earl Ferrers was found guilty and hanged for the murder of a servant, his steward. One cannot be sure, but I suspect that this was the first time an aristocrat was executed for the murder of a servant anywhere in the world. Two and half centuries ago, the ideal of equality before the law in England had become more than a pious hope.