Milton
Wilkes
Paine
Cobbett
Mill
Bright
Enoch Powell
Tony Benn

Some highlights:

In this, [Milton] started a tradition that carried on through Wilkes, Paine, Cobbett, Mill, Bright and, in our times, to Enoch Powell and Tony Benn. It is a strand of Englishness that … makes the crucial distinction between licence and liberty; and makes the simple demand that the state leave the individual alone to make his own mistakes and regulate his own existence. By the time of Milton’s death in 1674, his political creed seemed to have run aground in wholesale failure: yet he had sown the seeds of a wider movement towards liberty that would flower hundreds of years after him …

It is his later pamphlets, though, that set up the struggle for English liberty that we now, to our shock, appear after all to be losing. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates argued “that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose, and put him to death” … They established the general principle that the people were sovereign … and demolished the case for the divine right of kings in a way that only a religious zealot could do. His later argument for republicanism in The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth merely set the parameters for what became our constitutional monarchy.

Milton’s influence on our world has been immense. We use his words every day. We quote him … But, above all, we continue to imbibe his doctrine, and to believe in its rightfulness. In that sense, he does live at this hour, however much Mr Brown’s police state tries to deny him.

One of my heroes is Tim Edgar. He worked for ACLU and then went to work in our intelligence organization at the ODNI – in their privacy and civil liberties office. This takes guts. This is a form of cross-polination between intrl and privacy. and thus a good thing.

Hurrah. Hi Tim! Thanks Jeff.

Often, satire seems the only serious opposition to the current government: Makes most articles by “serious,” “expert” (fawning) journalists look like a joke.

Mr Jenkins is now Chairman of the National Trust.

What would Tony Blair or Gordon Brown give for that title? And how far they are from ever earning it!