Tom Paine alone deserves much greater recognition for his 'Rights of Man' than he has yet received, and Mary Wolstonecraft's feminist response 'The Vindication of the Rights of Woman' makes her also a candidate for commemoration.
John Barrell wrote recently in The London Review of Books that "... Bill Rammell, the intrepid [British Government] minister for higher education, ... has set up a review which is apparently likely to recommend that citizenship classes should deal with the 'core British values' of democracy, freedom of speech, fairness and responsibility, and how they have developed in Britain's 'cultural and social history'... It will be interesting to see how his constituency feels at the next election about a government minister proposing to make schoolchildren learn a history which the government itself would surely rather ignore. If he loses his seat, as he surely will, he will have had fair warning."
Barrell has convincingly argued in a series of reviews for the LRB that a number of the freedoms which were won at some costs by radicals such as John Wilkes, William Hone, Joseph Johnson and Francis Place are being systematically destroyed by today's Labour Government in the name of freedom itself.
In failing to honour the achievements of these radicals we are in some danger of losing the very liberties and rights which they fought for.