The gang of idiot ministers who form the current government, and the braying donkeys in the media who support them, are now working to destroy the hard won liberties of the British people. There are calls to ban the pro-Palestine march on Saturday 11 November; there are plans being drawn up to further restrict liberty of thought and expression; and there is no end in sight to their hysterical denunciations of those members of the public who find Israel’s conduct in Gaza revolting and depraved.
Charles James Fox, one of the great English statesmen of the eighteenth century, knew a thing or two about defending liberty. In the years after the French Revolution, the British government, in its fear of radical agitation, tried to revoke the people’s rights. This was Fox’s response to one such attempt; and what he said then is equally appropriate now:
I am not friendly to anything that will produce violence. Those who know me will not impute to me any such desire; but I do hope that this bill will produce an alarm; that while we have the power of assembling, the people will assemble; that while they have the power, they will not surrender it, but come forward and state their abhorrence of the principle of this proceeding; and those who do not, I pronounce to be traitors to their country. Good God, Sir, what frenzy, what infatuation has overtaken the authors of this measure! … that they should have proceeded upon a plan which has no regard for the liberty of the people, no regard for their maxims, no esteem for the principles and the conduct which have made us what we are, or rather, if this bill be countenanced, what we were, is to me astonishing! … I know that peace and quiet are the greatest of all blessings, but I know also, that rational liberty is the only security for their enjoyment.
Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox, Treason and Sedition Bills, 10 November 1795.
Notes in the Margins of the Days 