While the preservation of civil liberties is an ongoing struggle (the government's ID database plan is one I think is definitely worth challenging), we've still come a long way in the last 100 years.
Back then in the days of empire, Britain might have straddled the world but women had no voting rights and it was only thanks to a group of determined women waging a persistent (and sometimes violent) campaign of direct action that, in 1928, the government finally passed a bill granting equal voting rights to both sexes.
