Tory plans to axe human rights laws will remove obligation on state to protect its citizens, says Keir Starmer - Telegraph.
Keir Starmer illustrates, all unwittingly, exactly what has gone wrong in Britain. Take his hilarious statement that:
In the pre-Human Rights Act days, a civil liberties approach and the common law (sic) struggled to achieve this.
Were Britons in any way at a disadvantage to those citizens of civil law countries whose "positive rights" were in the gift of their rulers? I think not. I don't think our grandfathers thought so. They would have regarded such a notion as both stupid and unpatriotic. I agree with them, unfashionable as patriotism now is. Stupidity, of course, is always in fashion.
Our rights as humans derive from our being human. They are not the gift of any state or inter-state agency. Particularly not the United Nations, which routinely has dictators and thugs chairing its "human rights" committees. As soon as they are shaped by politicians rather than moralists they will become instruments of control.
As a side light on this subject, I looked up the etymology of the word politics to reinforce my point and found this wonderful quote;
Historically speaking, all political communities of the modern type owe their existence to successful warfare.[6]
So much for the moral inferiority of private property rights to those of the state, eh? The statists who seek to control more and more of our rights are the organisational heirs of our conquerors. Their whole argument - for all their camouflage of "social contracts" (show me a copy) and the "consent of the governed" (take away the state monopoly of violence and see if behaviours change) comes down to "might is right". Love the boot, even as it stamps on your face.
Our human rights are ours to defend. If anyone interferes with them, we are entitled to act. That right of self-defence is itself a moral human right. The only reason we have so many "victims" in our society for Starmer's fantastically benevolent state to "protect", is because that same state has removed that human right.
In general, our rights as free men and women should be to do anything to anyone or anything not specifically prohibited by a clear and unequivocal law of universal application (including, by virtue of the Rule of Law, of application to the State and its agents). All other laws are morally wrong.
In the sick minds of Starmer and Britain's other state-lovers they are not our servants but our masters. Like good little slaves we should look to the massas to keep us safe. The more power they have to do that, the more content we should be and the safer we should feel. To the extent that we think about it at all, of course. We shouldn't really trouble our little heads as it's a distraction from our working to keep them in style in the big house.
Even more insulting is his stupid observation that
Around the world, citizens have fought for years for basic rights from their governments. In the UK, having now got them, some want to hand them back.
We can't hand back what was never theirs. They have no rights to give us. They exist at our sufferance.
All we want (from a state so small and weak as to present no threat in itself) is a clear set of laws with broad agreement from all. Not laws that tell us who to be or how to think, but laws that leave us free men and women with full rights of thought, speech and self-defence. We don't want them by the thousand so that even a lawyer can't know them all. We want only necessary, obvious laws that derive from clear moral principle. If we can't find a nexus between a new law and the non-aggression principle then to hell with it and to hell with the deceivers who propose it.
Mr Starmer's vision of us as children in the arms of Mother State is insulting, demeaning and - most of all - immoral. The state's imagined "duty" to protect us has already transformed, predictably, into a raft of laws designed to shape us to its aims. Such a state will attract to the ranks of its thugs, cronies and - most of all - leaders, the lowest, most exploitative type of bully.
Good article
Posted by: tomsmith | Tuesday, February 25, 2014 at 11:18 PM
Whoa! touchy! If that's what I meant I would have said it. Bear in mind that, though trained as a Common Lawyer, I practised law for 20 out of 30 years in Civil Law countries. It sometimes felt a little as you describe in Poland and Russia, where nervous lawyers first instincts in the absence of clear Code was to ask the relevant Ministry for guidance. That drove me nuts at times but I am experienced enough to know the old canard that the difference between Common and Civil Law is that in the former everything is permitted that is not forbidden and in the latter it's the opposite is just that; a canard.
I was referring to the notion of rights deriving from law; of constitutions that set out a citizens rights and responsibilities, versus the Common Law vision of anarchy modified by law. To me, a citizens rights are what's left after all negative restrictions imposed by the legislature (or whatever bodies - eg the EU Commission - to which it has delegated legislative power). The state can give nothing. It can only take.
Posted by: Tom | Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 11:37 PM
XX Were Britons in any way at a disadvantage to those citizens of civil law countries whose "positive rights" were in the gift of their rulers? XX
If you mean, "if it is not allowed it is illegal," it never existed. And when you think about it logically, you can NEVER run a legal system in this way.
Prove otherwise. Give an example of a country that DOES run in such a way.
I am waiting.....
Posted by: Furor Teutonicus | Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 11:03 PM