Having failed rather miserably to make it as far as London for the Fabian AGM the other weekend, I found myself outside the White Hart in Lewes. This was the political base of Thomas Paine. As the plaque on the walls says: ‘here he expounded his revolutionary politics. This inn is regarded as a cradle of American independence which he helped to found with pen and sword.’

Paine is a figure so radical, so controversial, that he doesn’t get taught at school. As a leader of both the American, and French Revolutions, he helped found two great republics. His greatest regret was perhaps that he failed to found a third, in his own country. Paine’s views on monarchy were uncompromising. Identifying with the idea of a  ‘Norman Yoke’ that I’ve written about before in this column, Paine describes William ‘the Conqueror’ as

‘a French bastard, landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself as King of England against the consent of the natives is, in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.’

But Paine was more than a mere republican. He believed in equal rights for women. He was against slavery in the Empire and America, which pitted him against even the most progressive of the American ‘founding fathers’. He believed in democracy. Having seen the indigenous Iroquois peoples in America, with their communal society and democratic decision-making culture, he became an ever-more convinced democrat. At the heart of true democracy, of course, is the idea of equality between citizens. Paine made this leap of imagination too. In Common Sense, which appeared in America in 1776, six months before the Declaration of Independence, he wrote:

‘Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance…Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exulted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.’

If you pause to think about Paine’s question, surely it is the biggest political challenge since the Enlightenment? It certainly got me thinking as I worked my way through Eggs Benedict in Bill’s cafe. For Conservatives in Paine’s time, inequality was the result of God’s will. For Conservatives in our own times, it is the result of personal diligence or idleness. For the Marxists, the ‘subsequent circumstance’ to which Paine refers was the rise of capitalism, pure and simple.

But for democratic socialists, whose economic determinism has been tempered by ethical socialism, and the politics of race, gender and sexuality, the answers are not so simple. If you read Ken Livingstone’s new autobiography, you can see how his policies for lesbians and gay men in the early 1980s were as much ridiculed and derided by the left as the right. Funding an organisation to provide counsel to lesbians and gay men recently bereaved might seem obvious today, in a city the size of London. In 1981 it was proof of a Marxist take-over.

The main thing I take from Paine is his courage. He was willing to stand by his beliefs, whatever the personal cost and passing unpopularity with his new friends in the American and French governments. I came across a lovely quote from Barbara Castle in an out-of-print book a few years ago: ‘In politics, guts is all.’ That seems to be about right. We don’t remember the yes men and women. We don’t remember the ones who followed the tram-lines, and never stepped out of line. Hundreds of Labour ministers have come and gone since our first government in 1924. Only a tiny fraction leave any mark in the sand. It is the bold visionaries who stand out from the herd; the ones prepared to challenge the orthodoxy; the ones who speak out, regardless of personal cost. We venerate the little boy, not the naked Emperor.

Tony Benn, perhaps thinking about his own epitaph as much as Paine’s, wrote that ‘it is a great thing to be controversial 200 years after you are dead.’ In this year of the Arab Spring, Thomas Paine’s ideas are still with us, as inspiring, bold and contested as ever. If Paine were alive today, he would be surprised to see a Queen on the throne of England, a House of Lords in parliament, and deep scars of inequality. He would be proud to see a black man as president of the USA, but appalled at his policies. As for France, he would despair at the revolution betrayed.

You can be sure that his response to the world he found himself in would be to check into the White Hart, and start writing.

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Paul Richards is a former special adviser and writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics

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Picture: National Portrait Gallery