Liberty’s ‘Human Rights’ campaign uses luvvies to spread misinformation

Does anybody else remember life in Britain before the year 2000?  Despite the distressing increase in the number of walking, talking human beings one meets who were born since the millennium, there must be some other people who remember those times.  Yet what a picture of that era is now being painted.

Take the incredibly glitzy and celeb-driven campaign currently running thanks to the campaign group ‘Liberty’.  No less a site than The Spectator has run the ads. And understandably so. For they are not only well-funded but feature the icons of our time.  Each video consists of a star like Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon Callow or Vanessa Redgrave reading out someone else’s account of a terrible thing which happened to them or a relative followed by the claim that ‘Liberty gave me a voice.’  This is all well and good, I suppose.  Liberty have a right to boast about their successes.  But then we get the inevitable sign-off from the group’s director, Shami Chakrabarti:

‘Stories like this one could end so differently if we let the government scrap our human rights act.  Don’t let them get away with it.’

And here is the problem.  It is exacerbated in Shami’s solo video where she says:

‘Free speech and personal privacy. The right to life and not to be tortured.  The right to a fair trial.  Which of these freedoms would you be willing to lose? Because that’s the threat we face. This government wants to scrap our human rights act.’

Elsewhere the director of Liberty has described the possibility of the replacement of the present Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights as ‘the gravest threat to freedom in Britain since the Second World War.’  Now I am sure, like me, that you burst out laughing when you first heard this hysterical claim.