Police force way into Quaker Meeting House & arrest campaigners. Historian E P Thompson on the right of ‘freedom from arbitrary arrest’
Novara Media has reported that police broke into the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster on 27th March and arrested six campaigners were meeting to discuss climate change and Palestine.
The Quakers noted that it was the first time in living memory that anyone had been arrested in a Quaker Meeting House.
The late socialist historian E P Thompson would surely have provided an urgent riposte about the rights of the nineteenth century ‘Freeborn Englishman’. Democratic rights were limited but there was a tacit understanding between the State and the population about civil liberties and where the State should not be going.
The action of the police on 27th March reflected the dangerous drift to authoritarianism in 2020s Britain and certainly would have stirred the Freeborn Englishman to revolt
E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class writes extensively on the matter but also provided a summary:
Freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, equality before the law, liberty of thought, speech and conscience, the vicarious participation in liberty afforded by the right of parliamentary opposition and by elections and election tumults.. the right to parade, huzza and jeer on the hustings..
Note ‘freedom from arbitrary arrest’
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