The English were quite proud of the amount of freedom their citizens already possessed in 1776. There were a number of voices in the government that were against harsh treatment of the colonists, were dubious that imposed taxes were fair. Isaac Barré and John Wilkes were great supporters of the colonists. Barré actually had been in the Seven Years War in America, knew the colonists, and warned Parliament that they would be willing to fight. They would of course be called radical, even seditious, but none were jailed, prosecuted, etc. for taking those positions.

William Pit the Elder had joined the radicals in opposing the Stamp Act in 1766. His response to Minister Grenville's attack on him for the opposition is pretty indicative:

I have been charged with giving birth to sedition in America. They have spoken their sentiments with freedom against this unhappy act, and that freedom has become their crime.

Sorry I am to hear the liberty of speech in this House, imputed as a crime. No gentleman ought to be afraid to exercise it. It is a liberty by which the gentleman who calumniates it might have profited, by which he ought to have profited. He ought to have desisted from this project.

The gentleman tells us, America is obstinate; America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. Three million of people so dead to all feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.