Politics & Power Quote by Mark Thomas

The line lands like a gentle nudge, but it’s really a warning delivered in a comedian’s plain clothes. Mark Thomas isn’t praising “political freedoms” as some abstract civic trophy; he’s framing them as a perishable resource. “Quite lucky” is doing sly work here: it undercuts the entitlement that democracies often cultivate, reminding a comfortable audience that rights aren’t the natural state of things. They’re contingent, reversible, and globally uneven.

The second sentence is the twist of the knife. “We should be using them” treats freedom less like a belief and more like a muscle. The subtext is impatience with a politics of spectatorship: tweeting instead of organizing, doomscrolling instead of showing up, treating elections as the only acceptable form of participation. It’s also a rebuke to the performative cynicism that passes for sophistication. If you have the right to speak, protest, vote, investigate, and agitate, choosing not to exercise it isn’t neutrality; it’s consent-by-default.

As a comedian-activist, Thomas’s intent isn’t to sound lofty. It’s to make complacency feel faintly ridiculous. The humor is implicit: imagine bragging about owning a fire extinguisher while the kitchen fills with smoke. The context is Britain’s long post-Iraq, post-austerity drift toward managed outrage and tightened protest rules, where “freedom” is often celebrated ceremonially and constrained administratively. Thomas is arguing that liberties only stay real when they’re practiced loudly enough to be inconvenient.