The Times is a leading member of the Benjamin Netanyahu fan club so its slightly surprising to find an Editorial (7th July) arguing that the ban on Palestine Action is something of an overreach on the Government’s part.
Perhaps the Editor Tony Gallagher (ex-Sun) is on holiday.
Nevertheless the support for the Freeborn Englishman is welcome and Yvette Cooper should know (but clearly does not) that the pursuance of rights in the 1820s and 1830s laid a framework which eventually allowed the Labour Party to come into existence (for comparison in the final quarter of the nineteenth century the German SPD was largely banned)
Below are what the Freeborn Englishman of the first decades of the nineteenth century thought were his rights (and with which Governments before the 1832 Reform Act tended to acquiesce)
Thompson notes them in the Making of the English Working Class (1963, 1968)
Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest
Equality before the Law
Trial by Jury
Limited liberty of thought, speech and conscience
Freedom to travel, trade and sell one’s labour
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