His prose was as egalitarian as his politics, his style sparkling in its simplicity. Yet Thomas Paine is nearly forgotten in his own land. There is a statue in his Norfolk hometown of Thetford - located, inappropriately enough, on King Street. But the great Briton's face adorns no banknotes, his name lines few streets. Paine is honoured in America and France, but in Britain his standing has not much improved since the chilly day in December 1792 when he was convicted in absentia of seditious libel, and banned from ever coming home.
Nobody knows and nobody cares.
In a bid to end the amnesia, Britain's republicans will gather on Friday to drink Paine's health and to launch in earnest the Common Sense movement, dedicated to heeding his call two centuries on. Instead his ideas should be enshrined in today's politics. For progressives who have given up on the old Marxist canon, Paine offers an alternative - a rebuttal to those who say the age if ideology is over. His ideas, formed in the dusk of the 18th century, stand as a coherent creed for the dawn of the 21st. He is almost irresistibly right-on.