Arrest of Leeds man for holding up a Private Eye cartoon on Palestine protest & the Freeborn Englishman
The police have decided to take no action against a man that arrested at the weekend under the Terrorirism Act for displaying a Private Eye cartoon on Palestine demonstration.
Private Eye Editor Ian Hislop has now spoken out
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/private-eye-cartoon-arrest-ian-hislop-protest
The socialist historian E P Thompson wrote about the history of the Freeborn Englishman in this introduction he wrote to the Secret State (1978):
By the end of the eighteenth century, this was an all-pervasive Whiggish rhetoric, shared by Tories, Whigs and Radicals alike. Moreover, it was a rhetoric taken over and applied to greatly more democratic ends, by the rising popular reform movement. The parliamentary oligarchs wished to contain their debates within the privacy of the walls of parliament; they did not wish the British people to overhear how their governors talked, in private, about them. Wilkes and the printers defied ‘the law’ and breached this privacy; we owe Hansard to this defiance. In area after area, the ‘common people’ insisted that the civil rights of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ were not the privileges of an elite but were the common inheritance of all: freedom of press, speech and conscience, rights of assembly, inhibitions upon the actions of military or police against crowds, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment or unwarranted arrest and entry upon private premises. The insurgent British working-class movement took over for its own the old Whiggish bloody-mindedness of the citizen in the face of the pretentions of power. Even when labouring under the manifest class discrimination of the Combination Acts, the secretary of an illegal trade union branch of framework knitters in Mansfield in 1812 was able to protest against a clause in a Bill proposed by the workers’ representatives themselves, which authorized the search for shoddy goods in the houses of manufacturers : ‘if iver that bullwark is broke down of every english mans hous being his Castil then that strong barrer is for iver broke that so many of our ancesters have bled for and in vain.’ The workers had appropriated the democratic precedents and practices of past generations for their own; the ancestors were not ’theirs’ but ’ours’.
Leave a Reply