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. But there is something in it which should be taken seriously.
Because the Liberty campaign is one of those campaigns which instead of trying to inform the public seems intent on misleading us. It reminds me of those posters that have been up on the UK transport system in recent months with a nice photo and a story of someone who has saved lives in the NHS or looks after elderly people and is emblazoned with the caption ‘I am an immigrant’. I notice that campaign failed to give a more rounded picture by portraying, say, less successful stories. For instance they failed to include a picture of Pavlo Lapshyn, the Ukrainian immigrant who murdered Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham a few weeks after he arrived in this country and proceeded to try to blow up several British mosques. The ‘I am an immigrant’ campaign is propaganda, not public information. And the same is sadly true of this new Liberty campaign.
Because contra Shami and co, it simply was not the case that until the 1998 Human Rights Act came into force that we British people had no rights. Until the year 2000 the British people were not denied the right of free speech, let alone the right to life, as Shami implies above. It just was not the case in pre-millenial Britain that we were able to all rape, murder and pillage one another with impunity. I remember those days well. Saturday nights could get quite raucous, but the police didn’t just stand back and let us all stab each other before finishing us off. Anymore than before the year 2000 the people of Britain had no right to a fair trial. That particular right may well – like a number of others – be said to have been invented in these islands. So why pretend that such a thing was alien to these shores until a Labour government brought in the Human Rights Act?
Liberty have a very particular view of human rights, and it is also a highly contestable view. And although Liberty like to pretend that they speak for Human Rights as a whole, their view of such rights are in fact highly partisan. There is an important discussion to be had over the nature of rights, their origin and their future. It is a debate which matters to us all. But it cannot be furthered by scare tactics and a public misinformation campaign like this.
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