When Tony Benn was a Member of Parliament, he would go around with homemade plaques celebrating heroes of democracy, such as suffragette* Emily Wilding Davison, and illegally screw them to the walls. He copped to this during a sitting of Parliament in 2001, saying, "I have put up several plaques—quite illegally, without permission; I screwed them up myself. One was in the broom cupboard to commemorate Emily Wilding Davison, and another celebrated the people who fought for democracy and those who run the House. If one walks around this place, one sees statues of people, not one of whom believed in democracy, votes for women or anything else. We have to be sure that we are a workshop and not a museum."
*The term "suffragette" is considered pejorative (or at least diminutive) in Canada and the USA, where the preferred term is "Suffragist." The British movement for women's suffrage adopted the name and bore it proudly, sometimes pronouncing it with a hard "G," as in "SuffraGETte the vote."
(via Retronaut)
