Right! It’s time this column got a few things off its chest.

First up, this week saw the annual celebration that is bonfire night, where Guy Fawkes is ritually burned in effigy.

The fifth of November is indelibly ingrained in the national psyche, as is the phrase “gunpowder, treason and plot.”

We are brainwashed from childhood to “celebrate” the hanging, drawing and quartering of those involved in the gunpowder plot and in particular Guy/Guido Fawkes as if they were somehow demonic, rather than failed rebels who sought to overthrow the ruling classes.

You have to wonder about our notion of a civilised society when one of the big events each year is to take our children to watch a replica of a man being burned on a sodding big fire while stuffing their faces with toffee apples and other sickly confections.

Now, this column is certainly NOT advocating or attempting to justify assassination but — and it’s a very big “but” — the definitions of treason and terrorism are being distorted and manipulated as surely as is the definition of democracy.

Those who claim we live in such a utopian state are fooling no-one but themselves. You have the right to vote for who you are told to — that’s what it amounts to. And that is not democracy.

Likewise, the US and Britain are very keen on labelling opponents as terrorists while conveniently ignoring the fact that between them they have brought more terror to the world than anyone.

Death squads and overthrowing elected governments in Latin America, collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the carpet bombing of civilians in too many countries to count.

That’s pretty much the dictionary definition of terrorism.

Similarly, treason is very much in the eye of the beholder. Guy Fawkes, Catesby et al tried to kill a king to end the persecution of Catholics and have been reviled as “cowardly” traitors ever since.

Cromwell, the butcher of Drogheda, did kill a king and made himself Lord Protector (basically Emperor) and persecuted the Digger, Leveller and Ranter dissenters savagely and there’s a statue of him outside Parliament hailing him as a father of British democracy.
It’s difficult not to see a very simple truth at work here. Unless you win you are a
traitor.

Incidentally, Cromwell was actually convicted of treason — after his death — and became one of only a handful of people to be posthumously executed, which, even by British legal standards, is a bit mental.

He got off a lot lighter than Fawkes though.

Whatever your opinion of Fawkes, he was not a coward. He risked his life in a bid to end persecution, held out under appalling torture and never betrayed his beliefs or his co-conspirators.

In more recent times Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged for treason in 1916 after seeking to gain German support for the overthrow of British rule.

Casement had been knighted for his heroic work in exposing the appalling human rights abuses in the Congo, which Belgian King Leopold II ran as his own private fiefdom using violence, murder and torture against men, women and children to force them to gather rubber to line his coffers.

Casement’s report was one of the most powerful and damning ever written at that time and still makes compelling and horrifying reading today.

He also did sterling work in Latin America again exposing barbaric abuses against the indigenous population.

His “act of treason” was to travel to Germany in 1914, having resigned from his government position the previous year, obtain a statement of support for Irish independence and seek to recruit Irish prisoners of war to join the cause.

Now, you can see why that made him rather unpopular with the British state but it is probable that, as he had done throughout his life, he saw this as an attempt to correct a grave injustice.

The fact that he was homosexual didn’t help his case and was ruthlessly exploited to smear his reputation.

Again not exactly your “cowardly traitor.”

In fact this column would argue that he was a true hero.

The definition of treason includes regicide but other treasonable offences, many of which remain on the statute books, include:
Calling for the overthrow of the monarchy, and publishing that the sovereign is a heretic, tyrant, infidel or usurper of the Crown.
Whoops! I’ll get my coat.

More bizarrely having sexual intercourse with “the King’s companion, or the King’s eldest daughter unmarried, or the wife of the King’s eldest son and heir” is also classed as treasonable.
James Hewitt must be looking over his shoulder...

Earlier this year Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called for British nationals travelling to Syria to fight to be tried for high treason.

A bit rich for a member of a party that is up to its neck in illegal wars and is trying to tear up the Magna Carta and scrap habeas corpus. But then it has always been a case of “one rule for them…”

This coalition has betrayed the electorate, brutalised the poor and disabled, run the economy into the ground and lied through its teeth at every turn. If that’s not the epitome of craven treachery I don’t know what is.