The Spectator’s Notes | 28 May 2015

Amnesty International and others have placed a large newspaper advertisement telling Michael Gove ‘Don’t Scrap Our Human Rights’. The ad asserts that ‘A government cannot give human rights or take them away’, which, if true, makes one wonder how it can scrap them. Human rights are philosophically a confused idea; but their political power consists in the fact that anyone questioning them can be made to look nasty. People who love making new laws — particularly new laws that cost money — therefore like to present these laws as human rights. Article 29 of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, for example, says ‘Everyone has the right of access to a free placement service’. Such access may well be a good thing (though I confess to being vague about what a free placement service exactly is), but in what sense is it a human right? Whatever it is, it can only exist because governments legislate for it and pay for it. There is no state of nature in which people have the right to a free placement service. Rights, surely, have practical meaning only if they are justiciable. If they are justiciable, it is important under which jurisdiction justice should be done. Mr Gove, I think, would prefer British jurisdiction to a court in Strasbourg. No human right is ‘scrapped’ by taking this view.

Now that Ireland has voted Yes to same-sex marriage, it will be widely believed that this trend is unstoppable and those who oppose it will end up looking like people who supported the slave trade. It is possible. But in fact history has many examples of admired ideas which look like the future for a bit and then run out of steam — high-rise housing, nationalisation, asbestos, Esperanto, communism. The obsession with gay rights and identity, and especially with homosexual marriage, seems to be characteristic of societies with low birth rates and declining global importance.