The Ghost of Tom Paine

Looking for truth and justice in an age of lies

The humble market town of Thetford isn’t the most obvious place to look for political inspiration in these politically-depraved times. Years ago I spent a few hours there with a ghosthunter and his equipment, in the supposedly haunted honeymoon suite at the Bell Inn, waiting for ghosts and poltergeists that never appeared. It wasn’t as wild a night as it might sound. I was recording a radio documentary on ghosts for the BBC World Service, and the honeymoon suite has a reputation for rattling beds, which may not entirely surprise you, were it not for the fact that some couples claimed to hear noises that they had not caused.

That night I arrived after dark, and left before midnight, bored with waiting for ghosts and listening to my companion’s melancholy explanations for their absence, and so I never saw the town itself. This time I stopped to have lunch on my way to visit a friend in Norwich. As we walked into the pretty but nearly-deserted King Street in search of a café, I saw the golden statue standing on a plinth with a quill in one hand, and a book in the other, and I remembered that this was the birthplace of Thomas Paine (1737-1809).

The gilt veneer is a somewhat garish and outlandish tribute to a revolutionary thinker who devoted his life to the pursuit of truth and justice, rather than financial gain, and it reminded me of the spray-painted living statues of the Ramblas. But it makes a kind of sense if you consider that Napoleon once called for a golden statue of Paine to be erected in every city in the world.

Paine was less enamoured with Napoleon, who he once described as ‘the completest charlatan that ever existed.’ But there he was, Thetford’s most famous son, recently re-gilded, holding an upside-down copy of The Rights of Man in front of the former palace of King James.

The quotations on the plinth testify to the astonishing life of a man who challenged kings and empires, campaigned against slavery, pioneered the concept of universal human rights, universal education, and state support for the poor, and who was hounded out of his own country for his radical views.

No mean achievement at for the son of a tenant farmer and corset-maker, who was educated at the grammar school which still stands just a few yards away from his statue. And it’s even more astonishing to think that Paine’s impact on his times was due, almost entirely, to his writings. Paine wrote with fearsome logic, with fierce and lucid eloquence, and unyielding moral courage that made him as many enemies as friends, and often led him to fall out with people who had been his friends.

It’s not surprising that a local Tory once opposed the monument back in 1964, because he considered Paine to be a traitor and ‘anarchist.’ Come closer to the statue and you can see some of the reasons why Paine would not have appealed to Tories in 1964, or at any other time. There is the definition of Paine as an ‘Englishman by birth/ American by adoption/Frenchman by decree,’ and the sash wrapped round a winged globe proclaiming ‘My country is the world/My religion is to do good.’

Facing the King’s House, a striking quotation from The Rights of Man declares

Justice is due to everyman. I seek no recompense. I fear no consequences,. Fortified with that proud integrity that disdain’s triumph or to yield, I will advocate the rights of man. It is an affront to truth to treat falsehood with complaisance.

I felt moved to read these words in 2024, in an age dominated by hysterical and paranoid hyper-nationalism that constantly seeks to curtail any notion of universal rights, where integrity is so often absent, where many politicians seek continual recompense, and not only treat falsehood with complaisance, but actively promote it.

Paine was the product of a very different world, where truth, reason and the pursuit of virtue were considered to be the highest Enlightenment values, and integrity was something not lightly abandoned. Nevertheless, he would have recognized the charlatans and would-be tyrants of our own era, and the persistent lying that so many them have adopted as a strategy to divide and rule. ‘To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture,’ he wrote in The American Crisis.

Today, reason has become an increasingly disposable commodity in an anti-Enlightenment culture that wilfully promotes ignorance, stupidity, unsubstantiated opinions, and the most insane conspiracy theories. The democratic American republic that Paine helped bring into being is facing political implosion, and the triumph of a corrupt and vicious demagogue who holds humanity in contempt, and whose followers have long since renounced the pursuit of virtue.

Project Hope

It’s a dangerous moral and intellectual vacuum into which so many democracies are sliding. The day after visiting Thetford, I caught extracts of Keir Starmer’s insipid ‘Project Hope’ speech on the World at One, in which he exhorted voters to ‘hold on to the flickering hope in your heart that things can be better, because they can.’

I have nothing against flickering hope, provided there’s something credible and realisable attached to it, but there was nothing in Starmer’s anaemic bromides to give any reason whatsoever to believe that he was capable of fulfilling such expectations. Like so many Labour speeches - or speeches by any British political party for that matter - it read like a collection of soundbites and advertising slogans stitched together.

One minute Starmer was invoking ‘the potential for national renewal. The chance, finally, to turn the page, lift the weight off our shoulders, unite as a country, and get our future back’. In the next breath he was arguing that ‘To truly defeat this miserabilist Tory project, we must crush their politics of divide and decline with a new “Project Hope”. Not a grandiose utopian hope. Not the hope of the easy answer, the quick fix, or the miracle cure.’

Translation: little or no money for public services. More austerity. More cap-in-hand burnt offerings to the gods of fiscal responsibility. That is the substance of Starmer’s ‘credible hope, a frank hope, a hope that levels with you about the hard road ahead, but which shows you a way through, a light at the end of the tunnel. The hope of a certain destination.’

Perhaps he should borrow from Hope Not Hate, and adopt the slogan ‘Hope Not Hope’ as Labour’s rallying cry. Because who, exactly, is asking for quick fixes and miracle cures? And who, beyond the Tory ‘Five Families’ and the Tufton Street mafia, seriously believes that the reason this country is in the mess it’s in, is because ‘government in this country is too centralised and controlling’ or ‘content just to mop up problems, after the fact, armed only with a big state cheque-book?’

This turgid flow of soundbites and mind-killing clichés was delivered in Starmer’s earnest, nasal whine, interspersed with common or garden paeans to ‘a politics that aspires to national unity, bringing people together, the common good.’

Tom Paine would not have opposed a focus on the common good as the rallying cry for a new left-of-centre politics. Like Starmer, he might have recognized the difficulty of getting such messages out to an electorate roused to perpetual anger by artificial culture wars, or sunk apathy and despair.

But Paine was not afraid to fight the fights that need to be fought. He knew who he wanted to represent and who he wanted to oppose. He had principles that never wavered. He stood up to the powerful, the dishonest, and the downright corrupt, and he inspired others to do the same. And as I listened to Starmer’s cowardly ‘hopey changey thing’, as Sara Palin once described the politics of a far more impressive politician, I couldn’t noticing the absence of any willingness to fight anybody, beyond a clapped-out government that has already proven itself to be so useless that even Tories are abandoning it in droves.

That same afternoon I listened to an an-depth interview from Evan Davies with Peter Kyle, the Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology that revealed the lack of depth of its interviewee and his partner. It was excruciating to listen to this would-be minister twisting and turning away from Davies’s questioning, while paying repeated homage to his leader’s vision, and no doubt to his own job prospects.

Kyle sounded like an encyclopaedia salesman with an empty suitcase he didn’t want to open. He was as pedestrian, unconvincing and evasive as his leader, and it is genuinely terrifying to consider that we may soon be led by politicians like this in a year fraught with political perils, none of which Labour seems to even recognize, let alone dare to confront.

I’m not pursuing any political vendetta here. I recognise that elections must be won by reaching out beyond your party’s natural constituency. I long for the obliteration of this government and the party that foisted it upon us. I don’t ask for a ‘grandiose utopian hope’, but I do want to see a political opposition that doesn’t bow at the neo-liberal altar to make itself seem ‘credible’.

I want an opposition that has something to offer that goes beyond not being the Tories; that can think it terms of fairness, social justice, and helping the exploited and the vulnerable rather than ‘growing the economy’ and public sector ‘reform’; that doesn’t fold its arms when genocide is taking place in Gaza; that doesn’t tiptoe towards power like the contestants in Squid Game, relying on the government to make mistakes and freezing whenever the doll of the rightwing press turns its head.

I want politicians who don’t hide their intentions in hazy soundbites; who aren’t afraid to say what they mean and mean what they say; who stand up for the powerless even if it upsets the powerful.; who recognize, as Paine once did, that ‘he who dares not offend cannot be honest' and that ‘moderation in temper is a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.’

I want politicians who recognize that the world is their country, that want their country to be good, not great. And I just don’t see them, precisely when we need them most.

And that is why, when I drove back to the North, I wasn’t looking back at the absent ghosts from the honeymoon suite. I was thinking about the farmer’s son from Thetford, who helped destroy kings and empires with his pen, and I wished that his gold statue could climb down from the plinth, and remind this country and the Labour Party, that both of them could be so much better than they are, and aim for so much higher than they do.